Category: Media

Tearing down statues

Statues have an enduring symbolism, as the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, and the fuss over each new occupant, frequently reminds us.

In this case we’re talking about removing a statue.

There’s a Telegraph headline Saturday 19th December, ‘Politically-correct universities are killing free speech.’ An exaggeration, but it focuses attention on a real issue. ‘Universities’ are not killing free speech, but an increasing number of students are attempting to limit debate by, for example, banning speakers who do not share their views. A dangerous development, and I’m with the Telegraph all the way on this.

Students are now taking exception to statues, to the dead as well as the living. They’re symbols of an oppressive past and we’ve recently seen the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes (arch-imperialist) at the University of Cape Town. Pressure is now being put on an Oxford college, Oriel, to remove a statue of Rhodes on a building (funded by a legacy from Rhodes) which fronts the High Street. The fact that most of Oxford was until very recently completely unaware of the statue’s existence is incidental.

There are arguments against the statue – Rhodes is indeed a symbol of colonial past, but there’s a powerful counter-argument that symbols, whether oppressive, controversial, militaristic, pacifist – whether statues, paintings, buildings – are important. We don’t want to sanitise our past, or interpret it according to the dictates of the present. (A friend of mine suggests another argument for its removal  – it is very ugly.)

Oriel are well aware of the arguments on both sides, and will be launching a listening exercise before deciding the statue’s fate.

They will have been surprised to read Saturday’s Telegraph leaders which asserted: ‘Shockingly college dons back the idea.’ (Maybe some do but the leader implies it is college policy.) The Telegraph’s front-page story also asserts that the college’s ‘plans’ have been ‘derailed’ by the realisation that the statue is on a listed building, and its removal requires planning permission. That the college was well aware of the planning issue is clear from the statement it issued last Thursday: the Telegraph article is the Saturday morning following.

There’s also an article on the leader page by Daniel Hannan, who read history at the college, as indeed I did a few years before him. He writes: ‘Oriel has rushed out a statement to the effect that it is talking to planning authorities about removing the effigy because ‘it can be seen as an uncritical celebration of…colonialism and the oppression of black communities he represents’.

The college’s statement was carefully considered, and in contrast to Hannan’s article which reads as if it was rushed out to meet a deadline. Oriel we must remember is in the real world, attracting and extending a welcome to students from all corners of the globe.  As it argues in its statement, [the actions] ‘we are announcing today demonstrate our continuing commitment to being at the forefront of the drive to make Oxford more diverse and inclusive of people from all backgrounds, and to address directly the complex history of colonialism and its consequences.’

All terribly politically correct, but it’s risky territory these days, when it’s all about attracting students and funding, if you don’t listen to the clamour on streets and social media.

West in best

Which of course it is, but we must get real…

The West continues to exist in its own cocoon, still thinking within that post-Berlin Wall world frame of mind, where history (as God once had been) was on our side, if it hadn’t actually come to an end.

Two examples:

1) Charles Krauthammer (a serial offender) in the Washington Post exercises himself over the failure of America to take a lead, a moral lead, in the Middle East. He fails to recognise the simple truth that America has very limited moral force in that part of the world. And even the pro-Western countries don’t want its leadership. Obama is wisely steering a course more subtle than the American right which still inhabits a neo-liberal world can grasp.

2) The Economist had an in many ways excellent piece on Russia earlier this month (February). We have the statement ‘[Russia] is an unconstrained state that can sacrifice its citizens’ interests to further its destiny and satisfy its rulers’ greed. Both under communism and before it the Russian state acquired religious attributes.’ As a statement this recognises the old and deep rooted sense of ‘Holy Russia,’ but doesn’t engage with it as a reality. The ‘state’ and its ‘citizens’ are much closer than the Economist would have us believe.

There’s always been a battle in Russia between traditional and Westernising influences – going back to Peter the Great. That sense of Russia as a place apart, with a sentiment attached to it that you have to be Russian to understand, is woven into Russian life. Russians doesn’t want to be subsumed into a broader Western identity. If we get our heads round that we’ll better understand who we’re dealing with, and how to find agreement. Not least we’ll understand that the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine really do instinctively look east, and while we want to preserve Ukraine as one country we have to see it at the very least as federated, with western and central Ukraine looking to the EC, and the south-east looking to Russia. From that starting-point we might just find a solution, given time and patience.

The Baltic states are of course another matter. Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, is also at the heart of the history and mythology of mother Russia. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are countries with more recent Russian populations, the result of Russian occupations. Their integrity should be absolute, something it now seems that NATO has taken fully on board. We must be vigilant, even more so reading today of Boris Nemtsov’s murder.

 

From another mountain top

Looking out from the mountain top – another person’s, not your own. What’s the view like from there?

I call this blog zenpolitics. That has a certain ring to it. But I’m drawing on other Buddhist traditions. Compassion, which is there in all traditions, has a special place within the Mahayana, where it’s wisdom and compassion that chart the path to enlightenment.

Non-self is a key tenet, in all traditions, and it ties in closely with compassion. It’s easy to treat it as theory, separate from daily life, but it has a direct and eye-opening implication. If you downplay the notion of self, then it’s easier to put yourself in the place of others. You’re less obsessed with self, more aware that there are other points of view, as valid as your own. This is not to deny the importance of making  judgements, criticising, campaigning, often being personal. It’s a pretty hostile world out there and you won’t get anywhere by letting it walk all over you.

But don’t overlook the other point of view. What you say or write will be that much more valid if you’ve taken the time to understand the other’s position first.

Screamingly obvious you say. But also, it doesn’t make for good journalism, and party politics isn’t about understanding the other side’s arguments.

I’ll go along with that, but there are too many egregious examples, where it does matter.

In blogs that follow I mention the Middle East, Russia and that appalling false polarity between strivers and scroungers which seems to have infected popular discourse.

 

 

‘A form of fraud on its readers.’

Commercial interests came before good journalism, that’s Peter Oborne’s argument.

His resignation from the Daily Telegraph will get limited coverage. [And indeed, nine months on, the story is long forgotten.] Not least, newspapers could be worried that similar accusations could be made against them. Oborne has accused the paper of  a ‘form of fraud on its readers’ for its coverage of HSBC and its Swiss tax-dodging scandal. He’s claimed the paper did not give due prominence to the HSBC story because of commercial interests. The OpenDemocracy website is where his full statement is to be found.

Oborne told Channel 4 News he believed he spoke ‘for the vast majority of Telegraph staff’ in saying he had no confidence in Murdoch McLennan, the paper’s chief executive, and the Barclay brothers who own the paper. (I’m quoting from the BBC website.)

For my part I’ve never trusted the Barclay brothers, the Telegraph’s owners. I remember how disparaging Bill Deedes, long-time Telegraph editor, was about them. In an age when circulations are falling rapidly it’s people with big money and personal bandwagons to ride who can afford to handle the risk and live with the losses. The Telegraph’s most famous bandwagon was the 2009 expenses scandal, which they milked to do maximum damage. I will desist from saying more here – but it was a disreputable piece of journalism.

The sad thing is that in many ways the Telegraph is a great paper – for features and review coverage and sport. I don’t trust its political coverage, but I allow for that when I read a story. And I now know the way advertisers can influence the paper: some stories will hardly get a look in, some (I assume) may not even be reported…

The truth can be bent in so many ways. Is withholding, so we can’t even make a judgement, worse than telling lies? We are of course, all of us, economical with the truth in our daily lives. We all withhold. But newspapers are by definition public. A different standard applies.

The world is rubbish

On a feedback programme on Radio 4 last Friday afternoon, a youngish (31?) man arguing against changes to the Today programme, commented ‘I know that the world is rubbish’. That was his argument against change. If the world is rubbish, the radio must reflect this. We don’t want radio programmes which give us too benign a view of the world.

Endlessly focusing on a world we cannot influence, and on the violence in the world, overlooks all the remarkable unsung actions of our day-to-day lives. Don’t change the Today programme too much, but we could indeed do with less of the repetition, less misery, reinforcing the sense we may have that the world is a terrible place.

We do need to look on the world in a different way, not hiding, but taking in a bigger picture – a less jaundiced view  – of human behaviour. And thinking about it, getting away from the news, Radio 4 isn’t too bad at that!

Where silence and art almost touch…

Blaise Pascal: ‘All of humanity’s problem stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’ Jolyon Connell in The Week is my starting-point here. He also quotes Steve Taylor: ‘The urge to immerse our attention in external things is so instinctive we’re scarcely aware of it.’ E-mails, tweet and texts only feed our longing to be distracted.

How absurd it all is. And need it be this way? We’re so locked into our culture we don’t give ourselves a chance. Television long ago took over the quiet of the sitting room. 24-hour news only dates back maybe only ten years, but it seems longer. Once upon a time there was  the 9 o’clock news when we’d sit and listen expectantly to the radio. Go back a few generations and we’d be waiting for the peddler selling chapbooks or for the town crier…

There is no greater joy an immersing yourself in the quiet. Or total immersion in art or music, and I’m thinking of Beethoven’s 9th as I write, having just emerged (literally it seems) from listening (on the radio) to an extraordinary performance by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra at the Proms. The mind no longer wanders or diverts.

In the one case it rejoices in silence, in the other in the supreme patterning of sound.

Ordinary life is so full of static, of the irregular, confusing, the half- or unfinished. If we achieve anything we do so while fending off endless irrelevancies. There is another way, as the Buddha taught 2,500 years ago. Life doesn’t have to be a reckless pursuit of the never achieved. (For do we ever actually achieve, in any permanent sense?) In silence and a quiet mind there is all you need, and if you require a reckless pursuit take joy in those final moments of the Choral Symphony, when joy is all-consuming and lifts your concentration and your mind to another level.

Come the final chord all I had to do was turn the radio off before the Proms audience exploded into cheers. I failed. But their joy was mine also. Silence had to wait a little longer.

Which newspaper to read?

Which paper to read? Does it even matter these days when so much news is online, and we can switch (firewalls permitting) at will, and link to sites and sources around the world.

Let’s assume it does, for some of us anyway.

Compassion and a natural liberal instinct dictate the Guardian but I’m almost too much at home there. I am from Manchester after all. As it’s too easy for the opposite reason to read the Daily Mail: every article makes the hackles rise, apoplexy only just contained.

But I must be objective…

Middle ground, campaigning on key issues … maybe the Independent. Neo-liberal, small state… the Telegraph or Mail. Respectable, establishment, with several fine columnists… The Times.  But The Times is the tame face of Murdoch,  the not so fantastic  Mr Fox.

Social welfare, social justice, yes, we need a big state, and a spending state. And yet, the welfare budget is too big, and benefits can act as a big disincentive to finding work. I accept both arguments. And so…

Read everything, or dip into everything. Try the Huffington Post online. Specialise a little and read Foreign Policy magazine. Go weekly and read the New Statesman, the Spectator or the Economist. Read The Week and be bombarded from every point of view.

Be brave and watch Fox TV. Restore your faith in humanity and watch Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. Try out salon.com   My true colours show I’m afraid – but don’t dismiss the arguments of the other side. Avoid easy answers. Capitalism and compassion can and must exist side by side.

Follow the middle way, as the Buddha taught.  Wisdom does not inhabit the extremes, it seeks to balance them.

Read often, read widely, read wisely. That is the zenpolitics way.

Data geeks rule OK

Buzzards mew (see last post) and data geeks buzzz….

The Economist’s Lexington column talks about the surfeit of data and data geeks buzzing around Washington DC. Data it seems is the truth, or truths, because data can be made to say a lot of things, depending on which way you twist it. Unless you’re Nate Silver, who wishes to be judged on his outcomes. That would and should be the real test for data geeks.

CP Scott: ‘facts are sacred, opinion is free.’ But if facts are merely data then – is nothing sacred?

‘Washington’s passion…for data does not signal the start of a new Socratic age, in which political classes jointly search for truth.’ (Lexington) Each of us brings his or her own ‘tribal instinct’ to weighing the facts. So maybe that’s another rider to CP Scott’s dictum. Keep your tribal instincts in check, and when judging facts put your mind in neutral…

Over here we’ve had the Civitas report, arguing there has been no insider advantage from joining the Common Market all those years ago. Our trade with the EU represents no greater percentage than it did in 1973. The government’s response: ‘the EU’s share of UK trade has remained consistent because of the huge growth in other markets in the same period.’ Now I’d need to re-read Richard Lambert’s article in Prospect a few months back, check out the recent CBI report arguing a different case from Civitas, and the Civitas report itself. Then form my own view. My tribal instinct backs the CBI. Civitas are a right-of-centre think tank, so we’d expect their instinct to be more critical of the EU. Surprise surprise, that’s just what they are.

Damned hard being neutral, and a whole lot less fun.