A brief interlude

With Easter weekend looming, and then a short holiday, there won't be much happening around here for a week or two.

Happy bloggerversary

On Easter Sunday it will be exactly a year since I started this blog. Quite appropriate, really, given that my first ever post (and quite a few after it) was about the betrayal of liberal principles by supposedly 'liberal' Christian commentators. Since then, I've found myself blogging regularly about religion and secularism, fundamentalism and terrorism, freedom of expression, human rights, the arts, travel, national identity and (more recently) the US presidential election.

I started blogging because I'd become a keen reader of political blogs and wanted to be part of the conversation. Unlike some bloggers, I didn't come to blogging with fixed beliefs that I was desperate to share with the world. My own thinking on a number of important issues - Iraq and Israel to name but two - had changed as a result of reading bloggers like Norman Geras, and through them coming across resources such as the Euston Manifesto, Democratiya and Engage. But I was at a stage in my life when my opinions on a whole range of things were shifting - and I thought that blogging would help me to work out where I stood.

And so it has proved. After a year of blogging, I'm a little more confident about describing my political/philosophical position: as a liberal, pro-feminist, cosmopolitan, social-democratic secularist (phew!). But still with those nagging spiritual tendencies.

Happy Easter.

On being a Eustonian Obama supporter

Norm has come out as an Obama supporter - 'in a quiet sort of way.' But among the blogs that I read regularly and tend to agree with - those that can be characterised very broadly as liberal, anti-totalitarian and centrist (or 'decently' to the left or right of centre) - opinion is divided about the Democratic Senator from Illinois. 

Andrew Sullivan, of course, has long been a cheerleader for Barack. Roland at 'But, I am a Liberal!' tends to favour McCain, Snarksmith is ambivalent, and The Contentious Centrist is among those who are wary of Obama, particularly with regard to his positions on the Middle East.

Regular visitors to this blog will be aware that I'm rooting for Obama. But I've often asked myself how somebody with my Eustonian beliefs can be so enthusiastic about a candidate who has adopted foreign policy positions that I've opposed when voiced by others: specifically, advocating dialogue with the Iranian regime and immediate withdrawal from Iraq.

It's partly that these positions of Obama's appear to have been arrived at after thoughtful reflection on what's best for America and the world, rather than being the usual sloganising of the anti-war movement. And far from being naive, they seem balanced by a tough-minded awareness of the threat we're up against: hence his repeated criticism of the Iraq war as a distraction from fighting the real enemy - al Qaeda, in Afghanistan.

I do wish, however, that he would begin to move beyond his stump-speech condemnation of a war that should 'never have been approved and never have been waged', important though it has been in contrasting his powers of judgement with those of Clinton and McCain. We are where we are, and anyone hoping to take over the reins of office in November will need to have a more nuanced plan for Iraq than simply getting out as soon as possible. McCain's support for continuing with a troop surge that appears to be having some success may be viewed as the more responsible position come the autumn. If I were Barack's advisors, I'd be planning some set-piece speeches about his detailed foreign policy plans fairly soon - just as I'd be recommending that he demonstrates an understanding of the current economic crisis and what needs to be done to remedy it (an area in which McCain seems less surefooted). 

Perhaps one reason why Eustonians like me warm to Barack, despite disagreement on some of the details, is that we tend to be strongly pro-American and Obama seems to embody much of what's best in America and in its progressive tradition. What's more, he offers the possibility of restoring America's image in the world, after a period in which the inept Bush-Cheney regime has dragged that image through the mud. Electing Barack Obama as president would send a powerful signal to a world that has fallen out of love with the US, and do much to dampen the sneering anti-Americanism that is such a poison in Europe and elsewhere.

Obamaddiction? Primary-itis?

For the last few weeks, I’ve left the blue-sheathed national edition of the New York Times out in the yard, where it’s tossed over the gate at 3 a.m. each morning, and gone straight to the paper’s website, because news printed nine or ten hours ago is too old to keep up with the fast-moving course of the Democratic nomination battle. As an Obama supporter, I tremble for him as one trembles for the changing fortunes of the hero of an intensely gripping picaresque novel. What does the latest poll say? Has his campaign, usually sure-footed, stumbled into some damaging foolishness? Has another skeleton been uncovered in his closet?


That's Jonathan Raban, writing in the London Review of Books. I know the feeling. As a long-distance Obama supporter, my day doesn't really get started until I've checked the overnight news from across the Atlantic via the internet. And it's not just the New York Times website: I can't rest easy until I've caught up with Andrew Sullivan's latest posts, or glanced at what's being said at the Huffington Post. I'm afraid the Today programme and the Guardian don't get much of a look-in these days.

As for the evenings: since January we've abandoned our nightly appointment with Channel 4 News. Instead, we're hunched over the laptop, catching up with the latest video extracts on the MSNBC website. Thanks to the wonders of wireless broadband, Tim Russert and Chuck Todd have become as familiar to us as Jon Snow and Jeremy Paxman.

How will we fill our time when this prolonged Democratic primary campaign is finally over? More immediately: how am I going to manage next week, when we're away on holiday and deprived of regular internet access?

Obama gives major speech on race

'One of the great, magnificent and moving speeches in the American political tradition' - Orlando Patterson.

'a speech whose frankness about race...could be likened only to speeches by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson. John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln' - New York Times.

'the most honest speech on race in America in my adult lifetime' - Andrew Sullivan.

That's Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia yesterday. I thought it was a brave, thoughtful and honest speech, of a kind we're not used to hearing from politicians in the middle of a campaign, and one in which Obama seemed already to be assuming the presidential mantle as unifier of the nation.

Judge for yourself:

Free Tibet?

Bob has a confession to make about his former dismissiveness towards the Free Tibet campaign, attributing it to youthful secularist zeal and a 'Stalinophilia' that saw the Chinese communist regime as a bulwark against the 'real' enemy of western capitalism.

The history of my own attitude towards Tibet has been somewhat different. As a teenager I had a deep interest in eastern spirituality and a romantic attraction to the countries on the old hippy trail - Tibet, Nepal, Ladakh. More recently, I went through a phase in which I was seriously interested in Buddhist philosophy, and it was the Tibetan variety that appealed to me most strongly.

However, despite the benefits that I gained from Buddhist practice, I eventually decided that the philosophy was not for me. Without going into detail, I suppose I concluded that the individualism and otherworldliness of Buddhism were incompatible with my interest in culture, politics and history. I also began to feel that westerners (including me) tended to see Buddhism refracted through their own religious history and were really looking for a version of Christianity with the difficult bits left out. At the same time, the credulity of western Tibetophiles began to worry me: people who had rejected the 'myths' of their own religious traditions swallowed whole stories of reincarnation, levitation and so on.

During my Buddhist phase I warmly supported the Tibetan protest movement and was angry with western leftists like Clare Short who dismissed it as a fashionable Hollywood cause. Now that I've recovered my sceptical secularist bearings, my feelings are more conflicted.

I realise now that Tibet before the Chinese invasion was hardly the idyllic, spiritual and peace-loving paradise portrayed in films such as Martin Scorsese's emotionally powerful but hagiographic Kundun. Revelations about the sexual antics of supposedly saintly lamas have also taken some of the gloss off the Tibetan myth. And practices that to the devotee suggest a sacred spiritual tradition - such as lamas engaging in tantric rituals with young girls, or boys being taken from their families and raised in monasteries - in another light can be seen as clear examples of abuse.

I'm also aware of a double standard in myself, hostile as I am to the residual political power of religion in the Middle East and supportive of forces that seek to advance secular modernity in the Arab and Muslim world - but at the same time critical of Chinese attempts to modernise Tibet. I'm aware of the contradiction, but I'd defend myself by arguing that modernity can't be imposed by force, and that introducing the obvious benefits of modern communications, medicine and so on shouldn't be at the cost of annhilating a centuries-old culture. 

And the form of modernity that China seeks to impose on Tibet is itself regressive: based on mass industrialisation, cultural homogeneity and political conformity. Western critics of China's policy in Tibet somehow need to find a way of opposing its harsh authoritarianism without idealising Tibetan culture or preventing it from evolving - and without seeing the East through the lens of their own post-industrial disillusionment with modernity and longing for an 'authentic' spiritual culture.

So yes, - 'Free Tibet' - but free it so that it can develop and modernise in its own way, not according to the centralised prescriptions of a discredited Maoist totalitarianism.

Do we need shared national values?

A propos of last week's debate about oaths of allegiance and shared British values...I've been reading Kwame Anthony Appiah's book on cosmopolitanism and he has this to say about the American context:

Americans share a willingness to be governed by the system set out in the U.S. Constitution. But that does not require anyone to agree to any particular claims or values. The Bill of Rights tells us, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." Yet we don't need to agree on what values underlie our acceptance of the First Amendment's treatment of religion. Is it religious toleration as an end in itself? Or is it a Protestant commitment to the sovereignty of the individual conscience? Is it prudence, which recognizes that trying to force religious conformity on people only leads to civil discord? Or is it skepticism that any religion has it right? Is it to protect the government from religion? Or religion from the government? Or is it some combination of these, or other, aims?

(...)

There is no agreed-upon answer - and the point is there doesn't need to be. We can live together without agreeing on what the values are that make it good together; we can agree about what to do in most cases, without agreeing why it is right.

I don't want to overstate the claim. No doubt there are widely shared values that help Americans live together in amity. But they certainly don't live together successfully because they have a shared theory of value or a shared story as to how to bring "their" values to bear in each case. They each have a pattern of life that they are used to; and neighbours who are, by and large, used to them. So long as this settled pattern is not seriously disrupted, they do not worry over-much about whether their fellow citizens agree with them or their theories about how to live. Americans tend to have, in sum, a broadly liberal reaction when they do hear about their fellow citizens' doing something that they would not do themselves: they mostly think it is not their business and not the government's business either. And, as a general rule, their shared American-ness matters to them, although many of their fellow Americans are remarkably unlike themselves. It's just that what they do share can be less substantial than we're inclined to believe.

Not being American, I can't judge whether or not Appiah's 'weak' version of shared American-ness is a fair reflection of how most US citizens see things. But my instinctive response is to prefer this minimal version of national identity to the heavily prescriptive model seemingly preferred by Gordon Brown's government. In my view, a written constitution which provides a loose framework of 'the way we do things here' is more appropriate to a modern liberal democracy than trying to come up with a list of 'British values' that everyone is supposed to share - whether we are progressive or conservative, monarchist or republican, religious or secular.

On the other hand, Appiah's argument can be questioned at key points. What happens, for example, when the 'settled pattern' is 'seriously disturbed', for example by a major terrorist attack perpetrated by citizens of your own country, as in the case of the 7/7 bombings? Or when the 'something that they would not do themselves' is something that threatens the basic freedoms of the majority, as in the case of violent demonstrations calling for the beheading of non-believers? In such cases, are most people still content to think that their fellow-citizens' values and actions are 'not their business and not the government's business either'?