The Golden Strawberry

If you get the chance this weeks Book of the Week on radio 4 is Gore Vidal's memoir 'Point to Point Navigation'.

Its wonderful, give it a listen.

-posted by Adam

Quick plug for the premiere English-Language intellectual journal.

www.nybooks.com

The finest journalism in the English speaking world, I guarantee it.

I'll make a real post at the weekend, I promise.

-posted by Adam

Oh dear. I'm wrecking my degree and my body clock by keeping up to date with the Ashes score, at 2.30am. No doubt I'll be up for another hour or two. Though God knows why...

The only positive I can think of, is that it's like being back at primary school again! The good old days...Australia 602-9 declared, England 118-5 at lunch. Sigh.

Cory

Adam is 20 today. Happy Birthday mate, have a good one!

Cory

Despite the spin and hysteria conjured by the Daily Mail and various pro-life groups, the Nuffield Council on Bio-ethics report entitled ‘Critical Care decisions in fetal and neonatal medicine’ is not a primer for the euthanasia of newborns; nor can it be described as ‘nothing short of eugenics’. It is instead a well-researched and sensible set of recommendations designed to aid parents, as well as Doctors, in making an informed decision about this most emotional of issues.

            Due to considerable advances in neonatal technology in the past twenty years, the survival rate of babies considered ‘extremely premature’ (i.e birth at 25 weeks) has steadily increased. However, most babies born this early still die and those that survive are very likely to have severe disabilities. This report was commissioned in an attempt to update medical ethics and practice with our rapidly advancing knowledge of medical science.

            The report advises that babies born before 23 weeks should not be resuscitated, as only 1% of them survive and a high proportion are born with disabilities. Between 23 and 24 weeks the outlook is poor – two thirds of those very few that survive end up disabled – but the final decision to give treatment should be with parents, provided they have been properly briefed by an experienced doctor on the chances and future their child has. After the baby reaches 25 weeks, invasive intensive care should be given but ‘the healthcare team should make it clear that statistics indicate that most babies born below 25 weeks of gestation will die.’

            Here we reach the crux of the matter. The report recognizes that there is a multiplicity of opinion regarding what constitutes ‘intolerable’. This topic has been the subject of much earnest and bitter public debate over the past few decades; do we opt for ‘quality’ or ‘sanctity’ of life when making decisions such as these?

            Doctors cannot be asked to end life, because that would be a contravention of what the medical professions exists for; but it is quite another thing to know when to give up on treatment. Pro-life organizations, many of them religious in nature, often oppose any attempt to limit suffering through humane decisions to withdraw treatment. Their position is ironic, because it is only in recent years that we have been able to keep babies (and terminally ill people of other age groups) alive when all hope of recovery has been lost. In a sense, man is already playing God – to say that removing treatment is a form of Godhood is a false inference; the treatment itself has defied Nature and taken away Her powers of life and death.

            At this point, before we get too bogged down in the enormous minefield of bioethics, it would be illustrative to remember the case of Charlotte Wyatt. She was born in October 2003 at 26 weeks with serious heart and lung problems, and has confounded doctors by living as long as she has. She has never left hospital and needs a constant supply of oxygen. She has no prospect of living beyond infancy.

            Her doctors and parents have been involved in a High Court battle over whether she should be revived if she stops breathing. The doctors say no, as her quality of life would be so poor and she would be in constant pain. Her parents, both committed Christians, believe she is developing and want her to be revived at all costs. Considering her condition and prospects, however, surely the more humane position and the one more responsive to the child’s distress would be to withdraw treatment if she stopped breathing? Would this be a life well saved?

            Importantly, the report also considers the costs (both to parents and the NHS) of caring for a disabled child. Intensive care treatment is very expensive, and whilst obviously this fact alone is no reason to deny treatment to anybody, it must be considered within the context of a cash-strapped health service with finite resources. It also takes into consideration what would happen after the baby and family walked out of the doors of the hospital – very few families can afford the kind of care that is provided within the infirmary at home.

            This report represents one of the best of British civic traditions. It is even-handed, measured and reasoned. Whilst it does not exclude emotion from its calculations, it balances them with a good dose of rationality – thus ensuring that the parents and the doctors both have space to offer their opinions and neither party is drowned out by the sheer emotiveness of the issue. It is unlikely that it will become public policy, but it represents a welcome new addition to a debate in dire need of the cool balm of reason.

-posted by Adam

The English version of Al Jazeera, the television news channel, launched this week. Apparently in an interview with Sir David Frost, Tony Blair says that peace in the Middle East would be a good thing.

Let's hope for more similar revelations from them in the coming years...

Cory

A great advocate of freedom has passed on. Milton Friedman has died, aged 94.

His book Capitalism and Freedom was an excellent primer in favour of the market and against overarching soclaiism. Whilst I did not agree with him about the affects of managed government intrusion into the market economy, I respect him as a man who maintained the libertarian critique of government when almost all the reigning assumptions were statist.

-posted by Adam

I recently read two thoughtful and important books which deal specifically with the issue of Faith and religon. The first was written by Richard Dawkins, the celebrated populariser of evolutionary biology. It is called 'The God Delusion'. Snappy title, no? Dawkins is one of the best non-fiction writers working today; the quality of his prose and the lucidity of his written thought processes make the complex topics which he often deals with relatively easy to digest. Dawkins states his purpose in the preface:

My purpose in this book is to convert people. I hope a theist who picks this book up will put it down an atheist.

I do not find this elitist or arrogant. As an atheist myself, I would obviously welcome more apostates and infidels to the heathen fold, and Dawkins is just the man for the job. A professor in evolutionary biology, he holds strongly (and correctly) to the Darwinian line and offers a convincing explanation for the occurance of religion within a Darwinian context. Dawkins effortlessly flattens all the intellectual pretensions offered by the various 'great' monotheisms for their God. He joyfully and ruthlessly exposes the bible for the vile piece of bronze age mysogny and bigotry that it is; the Abrahamic God of the holy texts is revealed to be a wilful, jealous and vicious monster; anyone who comes into this book believing the Juedo-Christian tradition to be the source of what decent people would consider the good parts of our moral code will leave it free of illusions. We are good despite of any faith we might possess, not because of it.

There is one glaring problem with Dawkins' book however, one that is exposed very well by another book called 'The Conservative Soul' by an always readable Anglo-American political philosopher and blogger called Andrew Sullivan. This book is not solely about religion; it is about the Anglo-American Conservative tradition. It is one writer's attempt to reclaim it from the disgusting theocrats who have hijacked it for short term party political gain and in so doing unleashed a the terrible monster cocktail of reliigon combined with politics upon America and the world. Essentially, this book can be boiled down to the following phrase: skepticism is the only possible position to take with regards your own abilities to interpret the world; this skepticism therefore must inspire a separation of religion and politics , and that this skeptical mindset was best crystallized in the American constitution.

Sullivan devotes a good portion of his new book to faith, because faith has always concerned itself with politics. Sullivan is a Roman Catholic despite being a gay man and refuses (perplexingly)  to abandon the church which has done so much to hold back the movement for gay liberation throughout the centuries.

So, here we have a thoughtful, gay, obviously sane and secularist political philosopher who also happens to be a practicing Roman Catholic. The nature of this contradiction tears a hole a mile wide in Dawkins' book:

There are lots of sane religious people.

Dawkins seems to miss this. So focused is he on the intellectual lunacy of organised superstition that he misses the rather blatant fact that a good proportion of religious people are sensible whilst still clinging to their delusions. They set aside the contradictions and fallacies endemic to their chosen faith and live their lives according to the (few and far between) good bits. Sullivan is an excellent example of a very clever man who has made peace between his faith and his intellect. Now, do not misunderstand me here, I am a resolute anti-theist and would love to see religion disappear from the human consciousness, but I can also appreciate Freud here and accept that it is a curse our species will probably always have to deal with. And, whilst it is with us, I would prefer to see the liberal tradition triumph over the fundementalist one.

Dawkins takes a very positivist view of the prospects for the human race; he is pretty damn confident that one day we shall be able to explain everything through our application of the scientific method. One day, we shall create a 'crane' for the creation of the Universe, just like Darwin provided us with a 'crane' for the proliferation of species on our planet with his theory (now proven to be fact) of natural selection. I am not so sure. Obviously I would not be arrogant enough to claim I know how the Universe was created (like religious people). The blatant stench of untruth that surrounds the holy texts and the unbelievable sight of people still acquiescing to them in this day and age removes them from contention; but I do not share Dawkins optimism about our prospects. The sheer fact that he has had to write a book called 'The God Delusion' in a desperate attempt to shake people out of their fantasies in the year 2006 is a testament to the weakness and stupidity of the human race. We are all tailless mammels after all.

I suppose this could qualify as a book review. So here are the scores:

The God Delusion - 4 Golden Strawberries out of 5 ****

An excellent primer for any atheist. Slightly optimistic, and without any social explanation for why people cling to their delusions today, it is nevertheless an excellent read. Buy copies for all your theist friends.

The Conservative Soul - 4 Golden Strawberries out of 5 ****

A very well written and deeply personal account of one mans political philosophy. Shows the liberal and humble side of Conservatism which is so conspicuously absent from modern day American politics.

-posted by Adam

No, I'm not referring to George Galloway.

Apparently, as well as being a genocidal maniac, Comrade Stalin tried to create a race of half human half monkey super troopers for his socialist paradise.

Crazy.

-posted by Adam

Long article here in the New York Review of Books about terrorism; its aims, tactics and capabilities. The author agrees with the theses of the books he is reviewing. Suicide terrorism does not represent insanity, nor does it constitute a grave threat to the West. Instead, it is a shrewd and calculated method of warfare used by the weak to strike at the strong. The author claims that Iran, a country currently in the grip of Islamic theocrats and holocaust deniers represents no great threat to the United States:

Compared, say, to the threat of atomic obliteration posed by the Soviet Union between 1949 and 1989, the possibility of an Iranian attack on the United States does not seem very large. Even a nuclear-armed Iran would never dare strike the superpower because it would risk annihilation in response. Obviously America poses a far greater threat to Iran than Iran does to the United States. And perversely, it is this threat, more than anything else right now, that bolsters Iran's oppressive and unpopular government.

Yet the Cold War was between two relatively stable power blocs with each bloc run by a group of people who had no interest in suicide. Iran and the terrorists of Al Qaeda are of a fundementally different mindset. The USSR was run by atheists who maintained no belief in an afterlife and, therefore, had no wish to see a mushroom cloud outside the window of the Kremlin because a good chunk of the world rejected the tenents of Marxism-Leninism. Do we give Osama Bin Laden or the Mullahs of Iran the benefit of the doubt and believe that they love life just as much as we do?  Seeing that Bin Laden has expressed his desire for a universal Caliphate that would wage war against the infidel West countless times, we would be foolish to do so. Or, instead, do we look at their operational record and apocalyptic rhetoric and decide to face the threat rather than try to contain it?

The article constantly scorns the Bush Administration's use of the phrase 'War on Terror':

"The declaration of a global war on terrorism," says Richardson bluntly, "has been a terrible mistake and is doomed to failure." In declaring such a war, she says, the Bush administration chose to mirror its adversary:

Americans opted to accept al-Qaeda's language of cosmic warfare at face value and respond accordingly, rather than respond to al-Qaeda based on an objective assessment of its resources and capabilities.

In essence, America's actions radically upgraded Osama bin Laden's organization from a ragtag network of plotters to a great enemy worthy of a superpower's undivided attention. Even as it successfully shattered the group's core through the invasion of Afghanistan, America empowered al-Qaeda politically by its loud triumphalism, whose very excess encouraged others to try the same terror tactics.

But this is a war, one that the West did not start and one that the United States had no material or ethical interest in pursuing before it was declared. The Cold War was a period of foreign policy realism; it was perfectly acceptable for the US to back brutal dictators in the third world as long as they made anti-Soviet noises. The containment of Bolshevism overrode all other foreign policy factors. This cynicism and realpolitik, with men in suits in the West deciding which mass murderer would rule over which poor country, gave birth to the Horrorisms we now live with today.

And a proper analysis of the actual ideology professed by Bin Laden and his ilk is precisely what is missing from the NY Books article. Martin Amis does a good job of it here, in his Observer essay:

Savouring that last phrase, we realise that any voyage taken with Sayyid Qutb is doomed to a leaden-witted circularity. The emptiness, the mere iteration, at the heart of his philosophy is steadily colonised by a vast entanglement of bitternesses; and here, too, we detect the presence of that peculiarly Islamist triumvirate (codified early on by Christopher Hitchens) of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred - the self-righteousness dating from the seventh century, the self-pity from the 13th (when the 'last' Caliph was kicked to death in Baghdad by the Mongol warlord Hulagu), and the self-hatred from the 20th. And most astounding of all, in Qutb, is the level of self-awareness, which is less than zero. It is as if the very act of self-examination were something unmanly or profane: something unrighteous, in a word.

For Rodenbeck (the author of the NY Books piece), Islamist terrorism is something to be beaten by methods more familiar to the police than to the military. He is right to an extent, but he tends to underestimate the capabilities of worldwide terrorist networks. Proof of their determination, their savagry and their callousness can be seen in any of their works. Indeed, one needs only to look at the cataclysm of Iraq, encouraged as it was by the fools in Washington, to see what happens when large numbers of Islamists engage in terrorist activities in concentrate. Ethnic strife it may be, but it is fueled by religious zealotry.

The declaration of a war on terror has not been the problem, nor has the use of the military and armed force. The problem has been the hubristic and imperial over-application of these assets in a manner not conductive to the destruction of such a slippery foe. More caution, more skepticism and less charging about like a bull in a china shop with regards the US army and the Arab world would perhaps prove to be a more fruitful long term strategy. But make no mistake, this is a war and we must prosecute it. The Theocratic wing of Islam must be destroyed. Not 'by any means' but by the right means. Backing Muslim liberals and ensuring that the zealots have no place to hide are two wings of the same strategy.

-posted by Adam