It's been a long time coming

Signing off at the end of the week with this Sam Cooke classic. Mainly because my son was playing it non-stop yesterday (he's got his dad's good taste in music). But it's also dedicated to the long-suffering people of Iran.

Today in Tehran

It's not over.

Superb hour-by-hour coverage of today's events in Tehran can be found at Huffington Post, Raye Man Kojast?, Azarmehr's blog, and even the good old Guardian, which just this morning (print edition only) was being dismissive about 'Mousavi's green revolution that never was'.

On a darker note, and of relevance to this post about the misogyny and sexual violence of the Iranian regime: Shirin Sadeghi discusses unconfirmed reports that at least one young female protestor may have been brutally raped while in custody.

Meanwhile, Norm writes about rumours that western governments have given the green light to Israel for a military strike against Iran, in return for concessions on settlement policy. Whilst understanding the threat posed to Israel by a nuclear-armed Iran, I can't think of any action better designed to unite the divided Iranian people, bolster its reactionary regime, and turn the hostility of the world away from the ayatollahs and towards Israel and the west. May wiser counsels prevail.

Thou shalt join in

This is the kind of thing that sends me running for cover:

Imagine a summer's day on which millions of us, throughout the UK, sit down to have lunch together, with our neighbours in the middle of our streets, around our tower blocks and on every patch of common ground. The food, entertainment and decorations we will have either grown, cooked, or created ourselves. This will be a day to break bread with our neighbours, to put a smile on Britain's face.

Ever since I heard about The Big Lunch, I've been nervously dreading the knock at the door, announcing that some enterprising individual has organised an event in our street. And from time to time, I've checked the website, where you can find out if there's a lunch near you. Oh, the relief of reading that 'there are currently no lunches on your street'. It's just a couple of days away now: I think I can probably relax.

What's wrong with me? Am I some kind of misanthrope, or are my introverted tendencies coming to the fore again? Maybe I'm just reacting against growing up in a Methodist church where 'Thou shalt join in' was the eleventh commandment. (One of the things that attracted me to Catholicism in my early twenties was the opportunity to slip anonymously into a back pew, then slip out again at the end without being asked earnestly if I was new to the area, or besieged with invitations to stay for coffee, or come along to the sports and social club on Thursday night). It's probably a combination of my Nonconformist upbringing and socialist politics that make me feel I ought to join in with community activities of this kind, and guilty that I'd rather stay at home and read a good book.

But recently I've discovered a more elevated way of rationalising my reaction to this kind of thing. I've been reading Jane Jacobs' 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which argues for the virtues of organic city life against both contemporary urban planning and modern suburbia. One of the characteristics of the 'good' city, according to Jacobs, is that it enables social interaction without everyone knowing your business:

Cities are full of people with whom, from your viewpoint, or mine, or any other individual's, a certain degree of contact is useful or enjoyable; but you do not want them in your hair. And they do not want you in theirs either.

Jacobs lays great emphasis on the value of privacy:

Privacy is precious in cities. It is indispensable. Perhaps it is precious and indispensable everywhere, but most places you cannot get it. In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not – only those you choose to tell will know much about you. This is one of the attributes of cities that is precious to most city people…and it is a gift of great-city life deeply cherished and jealously guarded.

This isn't to argue for the net curtain culture of suburbia. In Jacobs' view, what's remarkable about the city is its ability to combine a respect for privacy with enjoyable social contact:

A good city street neighbourhood achieves a marvel of balance between its people’s determination to have essential privacy and their simultaneous wishes for differing degrees of contact, enjoyment or help from the people around. This balance is largely made up of small, sensitively managed details, practiced and accepted so casually that they are normally taken for granted.

The important thing to stress here is the informal and voluntary nature of these social interactions - Jacobs gives many examples, drawn from the experience of her own street in Greenwich Village. But she is emphatically against any attempts to stage-manage a sense of community:

‘Togetherness’ is a fittingly nauseating name for an old ideal in planning theory. This ideal is that if anything is shared among people, much should be shared. ‘Togetherness’…works destructively in cities. The requirement that much shall be shared drives city people apart.

Elsewhere, she elaborates on this paradox - that official initiatives (or semi-official ones, like The Big Lunch) to 'organise' togetherness often have the unintended consequence of driving people back inside their little boxes:

The…common outcome in cities, where people are faced with the choice of sharing much or nothing, is nothing….If mere contact with your neighbous threatens to entangle you in their private lives, or entangle them in yours….the logical solution is absolutely to avoid friendliness or casual offers of help. Better to say thoroughly distant.

Although she is writing about a particular inner city environment, I would argue that Jacobs' arguments have universal validity.

Lest you still think I'm a curmudgeonly misanthrope, let me enter in my defence the fact that I do, actually, belong to a number of communities: my family, first and foremost, then various overlapping communities of interest associated my work, not to mention the virtual communities of like-minded bloggers and fellow family historians. And I am a member of some local, geographically-based communities - based around our children's schools and my musical interests, for example. But the crucial thing is that these, too, are voluntary and purposive, rather than arising from the accident of living on the same street.

Attempts to recreate a chimeric sense of local community, like The Big Lunch, are misguided and backward-looking. They are of a piece with Gordon Brown's paternalist-communitarian version of New Labourism, in which 'community' is offered as a means of creating social cohesion and mediating social inequalities and differences. As an adult educator working on disadvantaged estates in the 1980s, I resented the way in which 'community' seemed to be offered as a sop or compensation for poverty and unemployment. The middle classes had education, resources, mobility, but the poor were expected to stay put and be satisfied with a 'sense of community'.

So when I hear the word 'community', particularly when some government agency or social entrepreneur is seeking to impose it on the rest of us, I reach for my (metaphorical) net curtains and double-bolted front door.

Incidentally, the BBC coverage of The Big Lunch includes this 'then and now' look at a street that last held a street party in 1977, for the Silver Jubilee. The reporter's questions are of the leading, 'Do you think things are worse now than they were then?' kind, but the clips of the original party are fascinating - they look like they come from another age. To people who don't remember the Seventies, they must seem as ancient as my parents' photos of their VE Day street parties did to me when I was growing up. Watching the video, I suddenly felt rather old:

More anon

Brett at Harry's Place has been having a bit of a ding-dong with Mehdi Hasan, the new Senior Editor (Politics) at the New Statesman. The substance of their disagreement needn't detain us, fascinating though it is: if you want to follow their argument, you can start here and work backwards.

What interested me was the attitude to bloggers and blogging that emerged in Hasan's reply to Brett, which begins like this:

Dear 'Brett' (do you have a surname? Or do you all of you 'bloggers' hide behind first-name-only, cowardly, online identities?)

It continues in similar vein. A couple of choice quotes:

My favourite bits from your 'post' is 1) when you try and cite your own random, unread blogging as evidence...

If you were a proper journalist, and not a self-appointed rumour-monger...

And Hasan signs off: 'Thanks for your time and for your lies'.

We might note in passing the evidence displayed here of the continuing decline of a once-great journal of the democratic left. A senior editor at the New Statesman indulging in cheap shots and bitchy ad hominem insults, not to mention grammatical errors ('my favourite bits...is'?): this person is the replacement for Martin Bright?

But notice above all the sneering condescension towards the blogosphere that oozes from every line: the superior quote marks around 'blogger' and 'post' as if these were the newly-minted jargon of some inconsequential johnny-come-lately activity; the assumption that blogging can't be compared to 'proper' journalism (like the pseudo-leftish whining of the kind served up by the NS these days?); and the dismissal of bloggers as 'self-appointed' commentators (as if Hasan and the Pilgers and Alis who fill his pages are not).

As an anonymous blogger myself, I was particularly interested in Hasan's claim that not signing your full name to a blog post is inherently 'cowardly'. It put me in mind of a similar assertion by Conor Gearty in last week's Tablet (only accessible with a subscription, unfortunately). Writing in support of the court decision that police blogger 'Night Jack' has no right to maintain his anonymity, Gearty states:

Whatever the rationale, the consequence of such anonymity is often the abandonment of restraint: there are few more depressing activities than to read the spleen vented under such cover in the blogosphere, a world full of quaintly named experts on everything whose certainty is invariably matched by their anger and in whose mind known figures in the real world are (through stupidity, corruption or venality) always falling far short of what is required of them - a mistake/failure which (it is implied) the bloggers would certainly not make themselves if they were to turn their talented selves to the matter in hand.

Like Hasan's reply to Brett, Gearty's piece drips with condescension, and I would maintain, displays a similar ignorance of that against which it rails. To be blunt, as someone who reads a wide range of blogs on a daily basis, I simply fail to recognise the caricature presented here. If you glance to the right of this column, you'll see about 45 blogs listed in my blogroll, of which around one third are anonymous or semi-anonymous. I'd challenge Gearty to find one recent post from among them that displays the kind of unrestrained anger that he assumes is in the nature of blogging. On the contrary, I'd wager you won't come across a more fair-minded, well-informed and thoughtful bunch of commentators. Of course, none of us is perfect, and we all have our moments of spleen-venting, but then that's true of journalists and other print commentators too. It's like judging newspaper journalism on the basis of the Sun, or assuming that all TV political commentary is like Fox. ('A world full of quaintly named experts on everything whose certainty is invariably matched by their anger': sounds like the average tabloid or cable TV newsroom.) And as both Gearty and Hasan themselves demonstrate, sweeping generalisations on the basis of minimal evidence are hardly the preserve of bloggers.

As for the issue of anonymity, it's one that I've thought about a great deal. I've often toyed with revealing my identity but, like a number of others in this corner of the blogosphere, I've decided that being anonymous gives me the freedom to explore ideas, particularly about controversial political issues, without alienating myself from my 'real life' friends and colleagues. This is not to make elevated claims about threats to free speech, but it remains true (as I've often suggested on this blog) that a certain kind of pseudo-left consensus dominates academia and the public services, and it can be hard for those of us who work there to publicly step outside it, even tentatively.

Having said that, I would agree with Gearty that bloggers who want to cast aspersions on the reputation of public figures should declare their identity, in order to level the playing field. The irony of the Harry's Place / New Statesman dust-up is that it was the semi-anonymous blogger Brett who put forward a fair and reasonable argument, while the high-profile print journalist Hasan was the one who responded with exactly the kind of unrestrained, personalised venom of which he and others accuse anonymous bloggers.

Perhaps one day I'll reveal my secret identity to the world: I've already told a couple of trusted fellow-bloggers. But I doubt I'll go as far as the blessed Norm, who recently posted photos of himself in the very act of blogging.

Aux armes, citoyens!

Like Modernity, I forgot to mark Bastille Day yesterday (though, lowbrow that I am, I did take a peek at the photos of the Sarkozys getting frisky at the official celebrations). And like Mod, I'm a sucker for the Marseillaise, especially this version from Casablanca. (Thought for the day: All men secretly wish they were Victor Laszlo, are lucky if they have the odd moment of nobility like Rick, but most of the time end up behaving like Captain Renault.)

Normal service will be resumed

Apologies for light posting at the moment. Felt a bit off colour at the start of the week, and everything I want to post about requires more mental energy than I have right now. Hope to have more verve, and time, later in the week.

In the meantime, here are a few recommendations with a Middle Eastern flavour:

Raye Man Kojast? on the funeral of Sohrab Aarabi, murdered by the Iranian government

Kellie's latest round-up of other news from Iran

Michael Totten on the future of Iraq, with stories and photos from his recent visit

and The Plump on Peter Preston on Afghanistan.

Something soulful for the weekend

Some Solomon Burke to see in the weekend. No particular reason, except that it's Friday afternoon, and this track has been going round in my head, ever since we watched the final episode of Season 3 of The Wire last week. It's played over a terrific montage of scenes that ties together the various narrative threads of the series.

We're now deeply into the boxed set of Season 4, which in my humble opinion is the best so far. So as not to spoil things for those of you watching the programme on BBC2, where Season 3 isn't due to end until next week, this particular video features a static backdrop. If you want to watch the original season finale, you can find it here.