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This is, fundamentally, for the Left to adopt the position that used to be associated with the Right – a switch that Paul Berman has written about. The isolationist Right used to assent to a form of multi-culturalism, with the proviso that our culture was clearly better than their culture, but frankly they’d never get it, so best leave them alone. The Left now embraces multi-culturalism, but with a different proviso: that all cultures are of equal worth. Except that a couple of further corollaries have crept in: first, that there are no supra-cultural criteria by which we can compare cultures, so we are in no position to judge or criticise, and second (in direct contradiction), our culture is actually worse, because it seeks to impose itself on others, is ruining the planet, etc..

There is clearly an element of post-colonial guilt in all this, but is that enough to explain the widespread feeling that a crime is only a crime if perpetrated by the West?

The origins of moral thinking lie in our sense of injustice done to us – “that’s not fair, why is he getting more sweets than me?” We reach true morality when we come to see others’ points of view as of equal value as our own. We may not like it, but we accept it. There comes a further stage for some when we go beyond that and sacrifice our desire for the sake of others – “no, that’s fine, I really don’t want any sweets, you have them all.” But by this point the allure of morality itself is taking over: by which I mean, there’s an undeniable cachet in appearing to be more moral, holier-than-thou.

The application of this to the political/cultural level is clear. The starting point is the unthinking attitude that automatically assumes your culture is superior to others, in whom you have no interest. One step up and you appreciate that other people think their cultures are clearly superior, and you take account of that. Plus with more and faster intercommunication between cultures you get a chance to appreciate the arts of other cultures. The third step, the holier-than-thou step, is to laud other cultures at the expense of your own.

But I acknowledge this is a bit glib. I think it’s nearer the truth to say that for a large number of people in the West now, that’s all politics is: just an occasion to curse our own politicians.

have publicly agreed to a “two-state” solution, but never abandoned their goal of destroying Israel. As long as the Israelis refused to be destroyed, the war between the Palestinians and Israelis would continue.

The only way that war could end would be if external support for the Palestinian struggle dried up, and if the Palestinians themselves became so miserable and pessimistic that they would abandon the ambition of destroying Israel. Once that happened, peace would become possible. But as long as they still retained their ambition to implement a one-state solution (which would be a Palestinian state), then peace was impossible, since the Israelis would never accept their own destruction. So peace in Israel would only come about as a side effect of the larger effort to straighten out that entire region, and conquest of Iraq was the essential step in that process. Trying to solve the Palestinian problem first was futile and pointless.

Meanwhile (via Instapundit) Syrians are calling for political and economic reforms. There’s a feeling that a log jam has been cleared in the Middle East, and things are starting to move again.

The whole farrago over “Absolute Power”, the BBC Radio 4 comedy series featuring lying politicians which was first pulled then reinstated, reflects very nicely to the BBC’s credit. First the directors decide to withdraw it, in line with the new post-Hutton world where journalists supposedly have to be careful what they say about politicians. There follows an outcry, with much talk of censorship, and eventually the brave Beeb make the right decision, and refuse to be cowed. The show must go on, because the Beeb is independent, and will speak its mind in the teeth of government opposition.

For the Beeb then, it’s a result all round. They reinforce the idea that Hutton was really about the government threatening the independence of journalists; they come out of it looking brave and principled; and their new comedy show gets loads of free publicity.

The new show, appropriately, is about a PR firm.

At this time of trouble down at the Beeb, it’s surely time to kick them while they’re down and point out how much better Coronation Street is than EastEnders. The problem with EastEnders: it takes itself too bloody seriously.

The point of soaps: you sit down after supper, you really don’t want anything too heavy or too worthy. You want to be entertained. You want some decent plot lines so you can make guesses as to what’s going to happen next, you want a bit of injustice – give the old moral-outrage a bit of a tickle, but nothing too heavy – and you want a few chuckles. With Eastenders the chuckles are virtually non-existent. Jim Branning and Dot used to be amusing, but now they’re just going through the motions.

All that Kray-style East End heaviness with the Mitchells and the Watts: it’s tedious. Alfie Cheeky Cockney Moon – give me a break! Little Mo – thank God she’s gone (for good one hopes).

These actors who can’t make a living outside of EastEnders and end up making much-publicised returns: “Dirty Den” Watts, for Chrissake! The guy can’t act! Being wooden isn’t the same as being hard. And talking of bad acting, daughter Sharon’s not much better. Or Paul Trueman. Or the Ferreira dad. Or Ricky Butcher – another returnee who couldn’t make it anywhere else.

At least with Corrie they have their priorities right: they’re out to entertain you. No preaching on social ills, no long whole-episode tete-a-tetes, and a regular dose of chuckles every episode (well OK, most episodes). And what a cast of characters – Jack and Vera Duckworth, Fred Elliott, Norris, Kirk and Tyrone….

I rest my case.

A couple of good articles on the reaction to Hutton – and one of them in the Guardian! Martin Kettle (via Andrew Sullivan) has this to say:

The reporting of Lord Hutton’s conclusions and of the reactions to them has been meticulous. The same cannot be said of large tracts of the commentary and editorialising – nor of much of the equally kneejerk newspaper correspondence. Much of this comment has been sullied by scorn, prejudice and petulance. The more you read it, the more you get the sense that the modern journalist is prone to behaving like a child throwing its rattle out of the pram because it has not got what it wanted.

Since in some quarters it has become almost obligatory to dismiss Hutton out of hand, it is necessary to reassert that the law lord did an excellent job in conducting his inquiry so briskly and transparently, and to stress that his report is overwhelmingly consistent with the evidence he received. This is especially true of what became the crux of the inquiry: the alleged sexing up of the Iraq dossier, Andrew Gilligan’s reporting and the dispute over the naming of David Kelly.

From the start, though, too many newspapers invested too heavily in a particular preferred outcome on these key points. They wanted the government found guilty on the dossier and on the naming, and they wanted Gilligan’s reporting vindicated. When Hutton drew opposite conclusions, they damned his findings as perverse and his report as a whitewash. But the report’s weakness was its narrowness, and to some extent its unworldliness, not the accuracy of its verdicts.

He goes on to be nasty to Rod Liddle, which is fine by me.

Michael Gove in the Times is also worth reading. On Saddam:

The truth about pre-emption, which should hardly need restating, is that you deal with the bad guys before they get their hands on the finished weapons they’ve spent their life straining to acquire. That’s why nuclear-armed North Korea is such a knotty problem. And that’s why we were better off tackling Iraq before France and Russia succeeded in their aim of getting sanctions lifted so Saddam could accelerate his mass murder business.

Is this the start of the Hutton backlash backlash?

Having referred to Hitchens on Hutton in my previous post, I happened on this article by the man, published in The Atlantic online, occasioned by the release of a new translation of Swann’s Way by Lydia Davis. It’s not so much a review as an opportunity to reflect on Proust in general, and the various English translations in particular. The whole article is well worth a read.

I was moved to write something by Hitchens’ claim early on that:

[…] one does well to postpone a complete reading until one is in the middle of life, and has shared some of the disillusionments and fears, as well as the delights, that come with this mediocre actuarial accomplishment.

– and I thought, no, I don’t agree. I read it in my twenties, and loved it. You don’t need to be world-weary. In fact being world-weary is a positive hindrance, not least when it comes to having the energy to get involved in such a massive enterprise as reading Proust, when a lapse of concentration half-way through a paragraph-long sentence ruins the whole chain of thought.

I know of no other book which has quite the same effect on finishing it. You immediately want to restart: you feel that somehow the next time through you’ll be reading the book one level up, with an added layer of understanding, as art rather than life – which is the magic that Proust works, turning his life into art.

Well I didn’t start again straight away. I waited fifteen years or so, and took the publication of a new translation by Terence Kilmartin as my opportunity. The problem I had with re-reading turned out to have nothing to do with concerns about a new translation: my memory of my original reading was already quite faded. The problem rather was that I now had children of my own, and was, as it were, a man of the world, a man with responsibilities. Reading Proust requires an identification with the emotional extremes of childhood and adolescence, and the self-absorption which that entails. Not that all Proust’s characters are emotionally immature: Swann himself, a mature man, suffers the agonies of jealousy which Proust so relentlessly describes. But there’s that self-centredness which in some respects you lose, partly in growing older but more specifically in having children.

I made it through Swann’s Way, then started on In a Budding Grove, when the young Marcel has Swann’s daughter Gilberte as his playmate. The author is exquisitely, agonisingly, aware of every change in their relationship. When she says this, what exactly does she mean? When she does that, what’s the real reason? How special is he to her?

At one point, the young Marcel can’t bring himself to eat any lunch; he’s too wound up. The father, driven to distraction by his son’s hyper-sensitivity, cries out, “Oh for goodness sake what is wrong with the boy?” Fatally, at that point I found myself in profound sympathy with the father. I knew just how he felt. The magic had gone. I couldn’t get back into it.

I always thought that someday when I had the time I’d read it again. But writing this now makes me wonder if I’m not perhaps kidding myself.

Christopher Hitchens has a few thoughts on David Kay, and then on Hutton:

If you want another free laugh, or another glimpse of the tiny-minded literalism of the neutralists and isolationists, take a look at the other “scandal” that has just been exploded by Lord Hutton’s inquiry in London. One of Tony Blair’s advisers, Jonathan Powell, changed the wording of a report in the following way. It had originally read: “Saddam Hussein is willing to use chemical and biological weapons if he believes his regime is under threat.” The Blairite alteration removed the last eight words. Since everything was a threat in Saddam’s disordered mind, and since he had used such weapons in the past as weapons of aggression inside and outside his own borders, the only “politicization of intelligence” would have occurred if the eight words had been left in, to give the impression that he would only fight in self-defense. The excised phrase lingers on, as a reminder that the opponents of regime change also believed in the existence of the weapons.

The British government’s claim that such weaponry was deployable within “45” minutes is irrelevant from both sides, since if the weapons weren’t there they couldn’t be used at all, and if they were there they presumably existed in some condition of readiness. Many newspapers in London sold extra copies on the bannered “45 Minutes” headline and have been in a vengeful state ever since over their own credulity. That can’t be helped. In this ontological argument, nobody claimed that there was no WMD problem to begin with. (German intelligence reported to Gerhard Schröder that Saddam was within measurable distance of getting a nuke: That didn’t deter the chancellor in the least from adopting an utterly complacent approach.)

I don’t know, but for me it left a sour taste at the end of an important and compelling programme.

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So there it is: the end of the world as we know it. “Elected dictatorship”;”The damage of trust to such an institution as the BBC, is damage to the fabric of trust in Britain.” It can’t be long before we hear the marching jackboots in our high streets, then the loud knock on the door in the middle of the night. Will there be no more Antiques Roadshow? Animal Hospital? What about Eastenders?? I imagine doctors will be prescribing more and more anti-depressants to the middle classes, and suicide rates will soar.

vators I use don’t have a close-the-door button: they have an open-the-door button, which you use (and yes it works) when you see someone coming who’s not going to make it otherwise. But oh dear how tiresomely literal of me. Clearly the wonderful aptness of the metaphor for our miserable “postmodern” society should forestall any such minor quibbles. So let’s carry on: Lenin has the answer to this apparently, in his distinction between “formal” and “actual” freedom. But just what is this “actual” freedom?

“formal” freedom is the freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while “actual” freedom designates the site of an intervention which undermines these very coordinates. In short, Lenin’s point is not to limit freedom of choice, but to maintain the fundamental Choice—when Lenin asks about the role of a freedom within the class struggle, what he is asking is precisely: “Does this freedom contribute to or constrain the fundamental revolutionary Choice?”

Which is pretty much where we came in. “Actual” freedom is the freedom to contribute (or not) to the “fundamental revolutionary choice”. Whatever that “fundamental revolutionary choice” may be, you can be sure that there’ll be a Lenin around to tell you if you’ve made the right fundamental revolutionary choice. And if you haven’t, well, no pathetic liberal freedom is going to stop you getting what’s coming to you.

Zizek’s conclusion:

This is why we tend to avoid Lenin today: not because he was an “enemy of freedom,” but because he reminds us of the fatal limitation of our freedoms; not because he offers us no choice, but because he reminds us that our “society of choices” precludes any true choice.

To which one can only say: rubbish. How is it that you can come out with the most complete nonsense and be assumed to be making profound points if you write incomprehensibly enough and have a middle-European name?