There is controversy in the UK at the moment about the BBC's decision to invite British National Party leader Nick Griffin to contribute to the panel discussion on its long-running political debating programme Question Time. One of the most vociferous critics of the BBC's decision has the been Welsh Secretary, Peter Hain. He bases his anger at the decision on the fact that there has been an overnight rise from 2% to 3% support in a YouGov poll of voter intentions. But such a rise is as spurious as the spike every mainstream party gets in polls after a conference. It will not last, and it will not translate into domestic electoral success.

I sympathise with his anger, but it should be directed at the BNP's poisonous political ideas, not at the BBC's decision to give them a platform. For a start, there is no constitutional justification for arbitrarily excluding from broadcast media what is, after all, a legal political party with two sitting Members of the European Parliament. More importantly, inviting people like Mr Griffin to participate in shows like Question Time is an ideal opportunity for his many opponents to lay into him in front of the whole electorate. And this is exactly what happened last night, and he looked thoroughly like the misguided fool that he is.

Mr Hain's mode of opposition to the BNP, while no doubt sincere, is nevertheless misguided. Whatever small social benefits are yielded by denying the BNP a platform are few compared to the costs. To allow Mr Griffin to show himself publicly for what he is, and to allow him to be openly challenged on live television, is preferable to suppressing him, which just panders to the party's victim mentality (which is its historic identity, and the basis of its entire political message's threadbare legitimacy). Look: shaken by the fact he was challenged, he even plays the victim after being given this platform. What is more, when these arguments are had publicly amongst politicians, those in wider society who hold the same views are also challenged. There is a taboo in the UK about confronting racist views when we encounter them in day-to-day life. Seeing them confronted on the BBC may help to shake us out of our unseemly acquiescence to these views as individuals.

Even if the BBC's approach does result in short-term electoral gains for the BNP, that is probably just the price we pay for free speech. So long as Mr Griffin and his idiotic followers do not incite violence, I say bring it on. We will witness their demise soon enough.

Labels: politics, racism

"You shouldn't believe that!"

Is this not a paradoxical sentiment — the paradox, in fact, which gives rise to modern political society? The non-violent (but also non-pacific) clash of directly contradictory beliefs has arisen by the elevation of Respect or Tolerance to conditions of citizenship — that is to say, conditions of freedom. Freedom is invested in the suspension and not the resolution of hostility. Freedom still presupposes bondage; peace would be something entirely other.

But more than this: it is a twofold paradox. The reason we must posit the liberal's supererogatory commitment to Respect or Tolerance is that our declaration "You shouldn't believe that!" implies an egoic control over our beliefs; it invites us to change our beliefs by an act of will. But think about it. Have you ever changed a belief by an act of will? No. Is it not, rather, our beliefs that act upon us, that in-form the will we pretend to exercise?

Some have encountered this conundrum and phrased the question culturally: "What makes a belief believable?" But to put the question like this is to enter into the same paradoxical economy of belief and scepticism. The real question is, "How do my beliefs change?" And here we might see that the essence of belief is not in volition, not in the ration-al work of a thinking already in-formed by its sceptical method, but rather in undergoing, in being persuaded. My beliefs are changed by the experience to which I am subjected.

In this way we cast belief in a different light — no longer a confessional belief which effervesces, but an introverted belief, a receptivity. Belief would not be the will to convert a soul to my ways. Instead belief would throb within me as the need to serve a need. A belief that tyrannizes would not be a belief, since it would refuse all subjection. It would not undergo the supererogatory command of Respect or Tolerance. Such a belief, which is no belief, would reject justice: it would be Violence itself.

Labels: belief, philosophy, politics

If you had known how little

you would have had to give

to drum into this brittle

hope the desire to live

would you have changed the venue,

your greeting or your tone

or planned things better when you

knew we'd have hours alone

and if you heard a hollow

voice spit these ill-advised

questions, would nothing follow?

I wouldn't be surprised.

— Sophie Hannah

Labels: poetry

The disgraced ambassador, the civil service chief forced into retirement, the man about town given a chilly reception, the lover shown the door sometimes spend months examining the event which destroyed their hopes; they turn it over and over like a bullet fired they do not know from where nor by whom, almost like a meteorite. They want to know what the strange device is made of that struck them down so suddenly, whose ill-will it embodies. At least chemists can turn to analysis; sufferers from an unknown disease can call in a doctor. And criminal cases are more or less clarified by the examining magistrate. But the disconcerting actions of our fellow-men rarely reveal their motives.

Labels: love, proust, readingproust, relationships

Tonight was High Tea at Selwyn College, the place I have been living and working for the past nine months. This annual event brought together all the present residents of the College, as well as Fellows, board members, representatives from our rival Knox College, the Bishop of Dunedin, and the Mayor, Peter Chin — a very messy bunch. It is also a day when the retiring student committee hand over to their newly elected replacements. We celebrate the year that has gone, and look forward to the promise of a new community still to be formed. It is a day which blurs the old and the new, mingles continuity with change — a very messy day.

On a night when the year seems to be drawing to a close, I feel privileged to have been invited to be a part of it all; but I also find myself pondering the meaning of a community like this. How can it be that such a special corner of the world, which I have gradually come to understand and appreciate as time has gone one, is also a place in which I have struggled to feel at home?

A community of mutual friendship

To explain a place like Selwyn to an outsider is a difficult task. It combines a genuine spirit of community with an openness to individuals who break the mould; it mixes exceptional hard work with real humility; and above all, it embodies a Christian ideal of mutual friendship in a way I have experienced nowhere else. It is not the kind of elective, reciprocal relationship we usually mean by the word "friendship", but rather a latent awareness that I am responsible for the least of my neighbours, whether I like him or not. I have no doubt that, in one way or another, all Selwynites take this ideal of serving others into the wider world and into their future lives. Of this the College is rightly proud.

Selwyn, then, is a strong and healthy community. But strong group identities come with their dark side. When groups of people form tight networks of trust and care, they become exclusive by definition; paradoxically, the more intimately a group shares in its life together, the bigger the risk of alienating others. I suppose this is really the biggest thing I have struggled to make sense of this year — how could such a tight community ever exclude the need for conformity? In the first weeks here my sense of disorientation was extreme: I saw a succession of bizarre rituals, and I had no matrix of experience into which I could integrate them. The only advantage of being thrown into this situation is that I could empathise absolutely with newcomers to the College. Yet those early events ultimately bound the community together and enabled its members to flourish as individuals. When residents repeat the Selwyn motto, "vitai lampada tradunt", they are not passing on a torch of empty initiations, hollow ceremonies, and cold formalities. Instead, Selwyn's torch represents its core value of mutual friendship, and it is this which is passed on to a new year. College traditions are valuable only insofar as they serve this purpose.

Messy Communities

If this year has made me realise one thing, it is the inherent messiness of community life, in all its manifestations. I came to Dunedin having worked for seven years in a different kind of Christian community, a tightly-knit network of about a hundred people who attend a church in Blackley, Manchester. I think back to that place now and recognise that the key to its success is its total embrace of messiness. The church has a busy schedule of events which nourish relationships between businesses, schools, other churches, and the local residents that the church ultimately exists to serve. Being a church should be an avowedly messy experience; there is always something going on, and you try to do your bit without ever having all the information; you take on small tasks which you know will make some bigger thing possible, without yourself ever truly catching sight of the whole picture. Similarly, conversations with fellow church members are fragmentary, messy affairs; interrupted snippets by which we know and care for one another. So for me church in Manchester was a mess of activity; an unfathomable dis-order that can only come from an organism that grows, vibrates, bears fruit.

At Selwyn my job brief is essentially to care for students and to keep them in line. Both of these aspects encourage you to think in terms of systems and rules: What problem is this person having? What rule is this person breaking? I had to learn new skills quickly; in particular I rapidly discovered that discipline is an important part of pastoral care, and is not set at odds with it. I learned that, so long as discipline does not creep into the realms of outright control, it is a legitimate, indeed a necessary, feature of friendship. Good friends hold each other to account; true friendship is judgemental, not just affirmative.

What it took me longer to recognise is that Selwyn, too, is a place governed not just by systems and rules, but by messiness. Holding each other to account, caring for one another, is as much a creative as a procedural act. What makes this community is not its ability to impose commands on itself, but rather its capacity to change, its flexibility. Traditions are a kind of command from history; but we are not in this world to take orders. Traditions challenge us to change them, to make them suit our purposes, to improve them. This is messy work; and it is lived out in the unplanned conversation, the uninvited guest, the unexpected embrace.

Integrity and disintegration

The community of Selwyn College 2009 will, over the next few weeks, disintegrate. Its energy will dissipate into an inconceivable network of new relationships. It will not be possible ever to reassemble the pieces of this community's identity, which is bound to this place, at this moment of time. The meaning of tonight's events at High Tea is in their very contingency, their transience. The messiness of this community's disintegration mirrors the messiness of its formation. And for me, the meaning I take from a difficult year is this: embrace the mess. A community obsessed with the integrity of its own heritage forgets that the outsider is always there, just out of sight. The stranger, the newcomer, is the real test of our heritage's hospitality.

May Selwyn College 2010 be not just a tidy home, but also a hospitable mess.

Labels: collegiatelife, dunedin, newzealand

In the Republic [412-421c] Plato says that, qua leader, no leader proposes or orders what is useful for himself, but what is useful for the one he commands. To command is then to do the will of the one who obeys [...] A will can accept the order of another will only because it finds that order in itself. The exteriority of the command is but inwardness. If the order is contrary to reason, it will come up against the absolute resistance of reason.

— Levinas, Freedom and Command

Labels: levinas, philosophy, politics

The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

— Nietzsche (emphasis added)

Stay away from me everybody cos I'm in my sin
If this joint is raided somebody give my gin
Don't try me nobody cos you will never win
I'll fight the Army and Navy, somebody give me my gin!

— "Gin House Blues" as performed by Nina Simone

Alcohol in our lives

Today (14th September) I went, with several colleagues, to an open lecture at the University in which members of New Zealand's Law Commission presented a brief summary of their recent report "Alcohol In Our Lives". It must be conceded that any government facing the problem of widespread alcohol abuse, and repeated public demands to do something about it, is in an unenviable position. To do nothing makes a government look weak or in denial; to restrict alcohol by legislating makes it look authoritarian; and to further liberalise alcohol makes it look irresponsible.

I will lay my cards on the table first: I have strong libertarian views, which judging by the authoritarian and pragmatistic inclinations of the entire post-war political settlement, seem to be very unfashionable. The common accusation levelled at libertarians, particularly us that adopt more extreme positions, is that we are deeply individualistic, obsessed with the freedom of the ego at the expense of everyone else — in other words, that our beliefs about liberty cannot be translated into a political order without endorsing injustice. For certain this is a danger in libertarianism. Previous political versions of its ideas have certainly created or endorsed injustice: apologists for laissez-faire capitalism in the nineteenth century asserted individuals' property rights on the basis of their justice without considering the possibility of inequality in the distribution of these rights (which Nozick later, inadequately, addresses. But that is another topic for another time).

Harm

Self-harm

Much of today's discussion focused on the dimension of harm, and by implication, a concern for the health of those who drink. This is where libertarianism has something important to add to the current debate. Libertarians hold that it is not the business of any branches of the state to prevent someone causing harm to themselves. This is an idea that has become so alien to the public that it is usually greeted with confusion. But it is an important principle.

The libertarian argument goes like this. The state exists solely to provide justice, that is, to uphold rights and adjudicate between conflicting rights. All rights in the true sense are derived from the right I assert to the integrity of my own body. Harm done by one person's body to another person's body (or, by derivation, the infringement of one person's rights by another person's liberty) is defined as injustice. Now, the remit of such a state need not be very narrow, though it certainly needs to be narrower than the models that presently dominate the West. For instance, let us suppose that healthcare is a right (notwithstanding the fact that this is not an easy argument, technically speaking, either to make or to deny — hence the current debate in the USA). On this view, to guarantee the provision of health insurance is squarely the business of government. Indeed, it is its duty.

Cue the alcohol debate. One of the arguments most often made in favour of arbitrary restrictions on alcohol consumption is the "cost to the health service". Now, I do not deny that this is an important issue, and ways to deal with it need to be addressed. But one way it should not be addressed is by using the health service as a justification for restricting the rights of an entire population, or, indeed, a single individual. A moment ago I suggested that governments provide universal healthcare because it is perceived to be a right. To use the health service as a political tool to expedite the reduction of liberties (which some would call liberty-rights) is to morph into a source of tyranny a healthcare ideal which once promoted freedom. The tendency towards this argument in grown-up social democracies is in my view one of the strongest objections to strictly socialised healthcare (which is not, incidentally, the same as an objection to the principle of universal health insurance).

A disturbing number of the people lobbying for further restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol do not see a problem with effectively intervening to prevent an individual harming him/herself. I am told by a reader in the UK that a medic being interviewed on TV seriously suggested the other week that alcoholics should be prohibited by law from consuming alcohol in their own homes. If you cannot see why such a proposition is deeply wrong, then libertarianism can help you. As I have said, the state, and the law as an arm of the state, exists to uphold rights. And all rights are rights to be free from interference, even when I am using my rights to do something that you think is wrong, or which is harmful to myself. This is the very essence of a right as a political concept.

Of course, this is not the end of the matter. Libertarianism — in its rehabilitated, redistributive form — is not an apology for inaction, selfishness, or blindness to the sufferings of others. It simply asserts that where individual suffering is self-inflicted, it is not the business of government to act, since the situation does not raise any issues about justice. In our capacity as friends, families, private citizens, churches, charities, lovers, etc., we are, of course (thanks to the concept of rights) free to offer advice, support, and make solicited interventions. Yet, unlike government restrictions, none of these options need violate an individual's rights.

Harm to others

Harm occasioned by one person upon another is a violation of a right. Therefore this is a matter of justice — the direct business of the state. However, I think it is wrong to see violence occurring after alcohol consumption and therefore to assume that the alcohol as a substance is to blame. After all, the vast majority of us consume alcohol without beating anyone up on the way home. What should be addressed culturally is the attitude to alcohol which makes people behave violently, or to drink so much that they lose all self-control. But what must be targeted by the law is the act of violence, not the act of drinking, since it is the former which constitutes a violation of another's rights and an offence in law. To target the act of drinking sends at least two messages: 1) it is not possible to consume alcohol responsibly; 2) alcohol is a mitigating factor in criminal acts committed under the influence, ie, if you punch someone when you're drunk, it's not as bad as if you punch them when you're sober.

In response to this admittedly more difficult matter, I think two simple legal changes would make a big difference: 1) Liberalise alcohol availability in supervised public houses to those aged fourteen and above, thereby enabling parents to introduce their children to alcohol in a normalised and responsible way which avoids establishing the enormous taboo that currently engulfs the topic. 2) Explicitly establish in law that the presence of alcohol as a factor in criminal acts will be treated as an aggravating and not a mitigating factor, and adjust sentencing guidelines accordingly.

Unfortunately, I don't think the Law Commission has been listening to many libertarians.

Labels: alcohol, newzealand, politics

I sat all morning in the college sick bay

Counting bells knelling classes to a close.

At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying —

He had always taken funerals in his stride —

And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram

When I came in, and I was embarrassed

By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"

Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,

Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived

With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops

And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him

For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.

No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

— Seamus Heaney

Labels: poetry

a humility a girl and a smile is a place next to a car, some other route, unstuck and untaken who there is and where would they play where since the surface was uneven, an uneven bounce and an anger, an anger that is a circle and a block a remedy became the problem and that was the end of that. A run and a glow a look in the mirror which is long gone, broken now I hope bringing luck bad luck to some other place a translucent intention unlined untended untacked broken and drawn drawn back touched and closed. First too high then too low an overbearing independence a freedom looking inwards a substitute and inversion of rage a sleeping watchfulness an insomnia Would it be a question if we Is not a question a rebellion? rebellious question, an opposition, a resistance to the given Rationality a volition and yes I'll cry I wanted to so badly but this is what's left and do you still feel it like it was yesterday it was not yesterday any more my love