What would Franco and Salazar say?

New genetic research has revealed that as many as 20 per cent of Spanish and Portuguese men have Sephardic Jewish ancestry, while 11 per cent have DNA that indicates Moorish forebears. These findings are interesting for a number of reasons. They suggest that the extent of forced conversions to Catholicism in the 15th and 16th centuries was far greater than previously imagined. They are also a reminder that we are all, to some extent, and to borrow Barack Obama's expressive term, 'mutts', and are thus a boost to pluralistic and cosmopolitan approaches to matters of personal identity. And they are a massive and welcome rebuff to the racial purism and exclusivism, cloaked in right-wing Catholicism, that has often plagued the Iberian peninsula. Franco and Salazar must be spinning in their graves.

R.I.P. Oliver Postgate

So farewell then, Oliver Postgate, creator of the Clangers, Pogles Wood and Ivor the Engine, and the sound of whose voice is inseparable from memories of childhood tea-times in far-off, gentler days:

Education as therapy

My internal alarm bells were set ringing and personal hackles made to rise by this news item:

Traditional lessons in history, geography and science should be removed from the primary curriculum and children taught their essential content through cross-curricular themes classes, the biggest enquiry into primary schooling in a generation will report today.

It seems that Sir Jim Rose, the government's chief advisor on primary education, wants to remove 'rigid subject areas' and replace them with project work that encompasses a range of skills. 

My blood pressure lowered a little as I read on, and saw that the six 'areas of understanding' which Rose wants to introduce are more or less the present range of subjects grouped under different headings. So perhaps there was nothing to worry about after all.

But then I saw that Rose wants government to impose a 'central requirement on teachers to encourage children's social and emotional well-being in an explicit recognition that schools must help cure some of the 'social ills' facing society'. Oh dear, here we go again.

So while private schools continue to impart the knowledge and understanding that will enable middle-class children to rise effortlessly to the top of the pile, state education is increasingly reduced to therapy for working-class kids, to compensate for rather than eradicate social divisions. The bright vision of radical and socialist educators down the years - of liberating children through knowledge, and giving all children a share in our common cultural heritage - seems to have got lost along the way.

Just a bit of empty symbolism?

Today's double-page spread in the Guardian was this photo of yesterday's State Opening of Parliament:


You really need to see an enlarged view to get the full effect. The paper helpfully provided a key, so you could work out where everyone was sitting during the Queen's Speech (she's the lonely white figure in the distance). The Commonwealth guests of the Lord Chamberlain are in the gallery behind the throne; ambassadors to the left of the monarch; bewigged judges immediately in front of her; clerks of the Lords and bishops just behind and to the left of them; peers (that sea of red with white bits) filling up the stalls, so to speak; peers' spouses and partners (very modish) in the kind of choir stalls either side; VIP guests in the raised gallery around the edge; and the media in the cheap seats at the back, nearest the camera.

Did you notice anyone missing from that list? It may be an editorial oversight, but I couldn't find any mention of members of the House of Commons, unless it's that huddle of figures standing in the bottom left hand corner, with the rest possibly below the press box, out of sight. OK, so it's only a picture, and I know it's a bit of ritualistic rigmarole which doesn't have anything to do with the 'real' business of running the country. But doesn't the symbolism of the picture speak volumes about our creaking constitution and our outmoded sense of who we are as a nation?

Here we have the spectacle of a hereditary head of state, setting out 'her' government's plans for the coming session, primarily to an audience of unelected legislators, with the only elected officials present - the only representatives of us, 'the people' - squeezed in at the back as if they (and by extension we) were an afterthought. The symbolism is the complete opposite of what it would be in any real democracy, in which government is truly by the people, for the people, and not loaned out to us as a favour by our betters.

End of rant.

Funding homophobia

A.C.Grayling has fun in this piece with attempts to show that religious belief is 'hardwired' into human nature. The research is funded by the Templeton Foundation - 'an organisation keen to find, or to insert, religion into science and to promote belief in their compatibility'. I'm as hostile as Grayling to this kind of misguided and reductive abuse of neuroscience. But I sometimes think that Grayling, like his fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, is a little harsh on the Foundation. If a rich man wants to spend his money trying to find scientific evidence for his religious beliefs, then that's up to him - and other, more sceptical scientists are free to refute the resulting findings.

On the other hand, I don't think that John Templeton (son of the Foundation's founder and its current president) has any business using his financial resources to influence democratic elections, especially those that affect people's civil rights. It emerged recently that Templeton (acting in a personal capacity, not on behalf of his Foundation) was one of the biggest funders (after the Mormon church) of the successful Proposition 8 campaign. I'm still at a loss to understand why these homophobic religious types are so keen to stop gay people marrying, when it would have no impact whatever on their own practices or beliefs. There seems to be a certain failure to understand the separation of church and state - the churches don't own civil marriage, and they are perfectly free to carry on restricting church marriages to heterosexual couples, if that's their wish.

Supporters of gay marriage may have lost the battle - for now - but they can still laugh at their opponents. I liked this response from some of Hollywood's finest (The West Wing's Alison Janney does a good impersonation of an uptight religious matron):

(Via)

N.B.Having received advice from the Templeton Foundation since writing this (see comment below) I've amended the above post to make it clear that John Templeton Jr's donation to the Prop 8 cause was made in a private capacity and had nothing to do with the Foundation.

Read Hitchens and Mehta on Mumbai, avoid Dalrymple

Must-reads on Mumbai:

This column which, with its revelation that hostages were tortured before being shot, confirms the sheer inhumanity of the terrorists, and with its indication that Jews were singled out for particularly horrific treatment, is further evidence that the attackers weren't responding to some local 'grievance' but were motivated by an all-too-familiar transnational ideology of which antisemitism is a consistent feature.

Christopher Hitchens on what the terrorists thought they were attacking:

What's at stake is the whole concept of a cosmopolitan city open to its own citizens and to the world - a city on the model of Sarajevo or London or Beirut or Manhattan. There is, of course, a reason they attract the ire and loathing of the religious fanatics. To the pure and godly, the very existence of such places is a profanity.

Along similar lines, Suketu Mehta (author of Maximum City, a paeon to Mumbai) celebrating his home city, which he loves for all the reasons that the fundamentalists hate it:

Why do they go after Mumbai? There's something  about this island-state that appalls religious extremists, Hindus and Muslims alike. Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness.

Best avoided:

This inevitable and predictable attempt to pin the blame on anybody (America, Britain, India, even Israel) but the perpetrators, by the always reliable William Dalrymple, devastatingly deconstructed by Eamonn McDonagh.

Update

More must-reads:

This from David Aaronovitch, wondering why, if the terrorists were motivated by local, communal grievances, they went out of their way to target 'the small headquarters of a small outreach sect of a small religion, which far from being a big symbol of anything, you would almost certainly need a detailed map and inside knowledge even to find'.

As he says, the treatment of the hostages at Nariman House gives the lie to root cause 'explanetics'. And Aaronovitch wonders if it's coincidental that the area that gave birth to some of the Mumbai murderers (the south Punjab) has one of the highest levels of acid attacks on women anywhere in the world. The terrorists, he concludes, represent 'a political-religious movement of men espousing violent self-righteousness, impossible purity and hatred of human complexity. No wonder the target was cosmopolitan Mumbai, with its foreigners, minorities, its maddening mix of people and moralities, all of them diluting the one, true, narrow way.'

And although I don't agree with its author's conservative and anti-secularist politics, this piece by Dennis Prager, on the centrality of antisemitism to the Islamist mindset, is also required reading:

Why would a terrorist group of Islamists from Pakistan whose primary goal is to have Pakistan gain control of the third of Kashmir that belongs to India and therefore aimed to destabilize India's major city devote so much of its efforts - 20 per cent of its force of 10 gunmen whose stated goal was to kill 5,000 - to killing a rabbi and any Jews with him?

The question echoes one from World War II: Why did Hitler devote so much time, money, and manpower in order to murder every Jewish man, woman, and child in every country the Nazis occupied? [...]

From the perspective of political scientists, historians, and contemporary journalists, the answer to these questions is not rational. But the non-rationality of an answer is not synonymous with its non-validity

For the Islamists, as for the Nazis, the destruction of the Jews - and since 1948, the Jewish state - is central to their worldview.

If anyone has a better explanation for why Pakistani terrorists, preoccupied with destabilizing India, would expend so much effort at finding the one Jewish center in a country that is essentially devoid of Jews, I would like to hear it.

Gramsci: secret Catholic humanist?

The story about Antonio Gramsci's deathbed conversion (or reversion) to Catholicism is fascinating, even if it turns out to be untrue. At least, it's fascinating to those of us (admittedly a tiny minority) who have found ourselves attracted at some time in our lives to both Catholicism and Euro-communism. 

The sceptics point to the absence of any mention of a return to faith in Gramsci's final letters, and to the fact that he is buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, traditional resting-place of unbelievers (the graves of Keats and Shelley can also be found there) as counter-evidence. And, on the face of it, a reconciliation between the greatest Marxist theorist of the twentieth-century, and the faith that he spent his life seeking to replace, does seem rather unlikely.

On the other hand, I've often felt that there are parallels between Gramsci's revisionist Marxism and the more sacramental, incarnational forms of Christianity. Just as Catholic theology views humanity as fundamentally good, and (at least in theory) seeks to 'go with the grain' of human culture and society - so Gramsci's Marxist humanism attempts to identify the 'good sense' in everyday 'common sense', and to build on existing social structures. And Gramsci had a great respect for tradition, believing that the new social order would incorporate the best of the old (see these posts). By contrast, you could argue that there are distinct similarities between extreme Calvinist Protestantism, with its negative vision of humanity and profound suspicion of culture, and the slash-and-burn revolutionism of the Leninist far left. So, whether or not the deathbed conversion story turns out to be true, perhaps Antonio was more Catholic (in a broad sense) than he, or his more secular supporters, would likely to admit.

I must confess to not having read any Gramsci for years. But there was a period in my life when the Prison Notebooks were my main political and intellectual reference-point. It's enough, now, to open the tattered pages of my Lawrence and Wishart edition, for me to be transported back, Proust-like, to the heady days of the mid-1980s, and I'm standing again in the Centerprise Bookshop on Stoke Newington High Street, leafing through the latest issue of Marxism Today or Red Letters, the smell of vegetarian food wafting through from the cafe, my 'Coal not Dole' badge proudly displayed on my donkey-jacket. Ah, memories...

(Via Dolphinarium, now added to my blogroll)