'Nother Solent

Samuel Vimes and the Libertarian Subtext, Correction Make That Straight Down The Line Anti-Gun Control Propaganda.

I have just been reading Night Watch, Terry Pratchett's twenty-somethingth Discword Novel. (It has Rembrant's painting on the back and a Discworld parody of it on the front.) I found this on page 125. Vimes is the hero, yer basic battered, cynical but still honest copper. Swing is a baddy in authority.

Swing, though, started in the wrong place. He didn't look around, and watch and learn, and then say. This is how people are, how do we deal with it?' No, he sat and thought: This is how the people ought to be, how do we change them?' And that was a good enough thought for a priest but not for a copper because Swing's patient, pedantic way of operating had turned policing on its head.

There had been that Weapons Law, for a start. Weapons were involved in so many crimes that. Swing reasoned, reducing the number of weapons had to reduce the crime rate.

Vimes wondered if he'd sat up in bed in the middle of the night and hugged himself when he'd dreamed that one up. Confiscate all weapons, and crime would go down. It made sense. It would have worked, too, if only there had been enough coppers - say, three per citizen.

Amazingly, quite a few weapons were handed in. The flaw though, was one that had somehow managed to escape Swing' and it was this: criminals don't obey the law. It's more or less a requirement for the job. They had no particular interest in making the streets safer for anyone except themselves. And they couldn't believe what was happening. It was like Hogswatch every day.

Some citizens took the not unreasonable view that something had gone a bit askew if only naughty people were carrying arms. And they got arrested in large numbers. The average copper, when he's been kicked in the nadgers once too often and has reason to believe that his bosses don't much care, has an understandable tendency to prefer to arrest those people who won't instantly try to stab him, especially if they act a bit snotty and more expensive clothes than he personally can afford. The rate of arrests shot right up, and Swing had been very pleased about that.

Admittedly some of the arrests had been for possessing weaponry after dark, but quite a few had been for assaults on the Watch by irate citizens. That was Assault on a City Official, a very heinous and despicable crime and, as such, far more important than all these thefts that were going on everywhere.

It wasn’t that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn’t offer many opportunities not to break them. Swing didn’t seem to have grasped the idea that the system was supposed to take criminals and, in some rough and ready fashion, force them into becoming honest men. Instead he’d taken honest men and turned them into criminals. And the Watch, by and large, into just another gang.

I've heard Terry Pratchett speak at SF conventions, and exchanged a few words with him. He always struck me as a pleasant and approachable person but politically I always had him down as a Guardian reader, albeit the sort of Guardian reader I can get along with. An earlier book, "Men At Arms" seemed to me to be saying that guns have a sort of power to make people who are not yet very bad become bad; though my husband says he didn't read it as being guns generally, just the particular and singular "gonne" in the story. Anyway, whatever interpretation one places on the earlier book, it is very striking that in this one Pratchett has put this admirable summary of the pragmatic case against gun control, weapons amnesties and the like, in the mouth of Samuel Vimes. I suppose Pratchett might say that Vimes' opinons are not his own, but, even so, Vimes is not just a one-off hero but a much loved character who stars in several books: this shows at the very least that Britain's best selling living novelist sees where we're coming from.

The internet was being bothersome today,

so I went away and did something else.

Wot, no SF?

Colin MacLeod of The Whole Thing asks, why isn't there more science fiction? Well, I do have little bursts, but the fact is that truth is stranger than fiction. When I told my daughter that I had spent most of the day gardening she said, "the mum I used to have has been abducted by aliens." Note to controller: possible latent telepathy in immature zygotes of target species.

Two contrasting

views of Spanish/Catholic treatment of the Indians in the New World. Can they be reconciled? Possibly - firstly there might be a gap between the humane pronouncements of the Church and what people, including Church people, did in the field, and secondly the transport difficulties of the time must have meant mores and customs did not even out to the extent they do now.

ARC writes:

I've heard it too but it's not true. There were admirable Spaniards as well as cruel: the film, 'The Mission' is based on one historical incident demonstrating both in considerable degree, and the famous penitent letter of 'the last of the conquistadores' to the king is also fact (and Spain's monarchs sometimes attempted to pass good laws). However 'the black legend' as some revisionist historians have dubbed the idea of Spain's greater cruelty, remains far more fact than legend. The English had less to keep quiet about.

One reason for the difference was the different societies from which the colonists came. Christine Wdgewood has a throwaway line in her history 'The King's Peace' that in early 17th century England, if the daughter of a great house ran off with the footmen, she might be cast off by the family 'but it would be inconceivable for the family to seek their lives as a matter of honour, unlike the situation in contemporary Spain'. It was a different society and this was reflected in its colonial behaviour.

Another partial reason may have been that many of the natives the Spaniards encountered were themselves startlingly cruel beyond all European experience and this must have affected the latter. However the same point applies to many of the more northern tribes the English encountered. when were less organised in their cruelties but of whom Burke remarks that their habits of warfare 'are such as to disgust all civilised persons'; read Parkman to see what he means.

Jack Swartz writes:

... Your Tuesday October 14th article on Father Fransisco de Vitoria struck a resonant note. While doing research for a project, I came across this interesting information that the Catholic Church argued the same thing.

Pope Paul III writing in , Sublimus Dei, affirmed that the Indians in the new world were not dumb brutes but are "truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it."

He then goes on to state "We define and declare by these Our letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, to which the same credit shall be given as to the originals, that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ;

The Pope also stated that those who proposed and advocated the debasement and enslavement were working with "the enemy of the human race, who opposes all good deeds in order to bring men to destruction, beholding and envying this, invented a means never before heard of, by which he might hinder the preaching of God's word of Salvation to the people: he inspired his satellites who, to please him, have not hesitated to publish abroad that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom We have recent knowledge should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable of receiving the Catholic Faith."

If this is true, and I have no reason to believe it is not, the Catholic Church was on the right side in the matters concerning the rights and priviliges of the indiginous peoples.

Thanks to both correspondents for their insights into an area of history that is, for me, almost virgin territory.

Steven Chapman is back.

Spanish enlightenment.

I confess I had never heard of Father Francisco de Vitoria, a sixteenth century Spanish priest who argued that the Paganism of the American Indians was no bar to their possessing natural rights. However I had heard that the widespread view that the English in America were much more humane than the Spanish came in no small part from the fact that many Spaniards expressed remorse for deeds that the English did without regret.

UPDATE: Val Dorta sent me this astounding article on Christianity's free market tradition. The author, Stephen W Carson, is reviewing a book by Alejandro A. Chafuen on the pre-Enlightenment Scholastics, and doesn't hesitate to make some startling assertions:

"In fact, they cannot be fairly considered by economists as "only moralists". Their brilliant economic analysis earns them a place as founders of economics. One might be tempted to call them the true "Adam Smiths" except that their economic analysis was superior to the confused Adam Smith of The Wealth of Nations."

Yes, Mr President! Under your wise guidance our scientists have built mighty weapons with which to deal death to the infidel!

ARC writes:

Re recent analyses of what WMD's Saddam had, should we assume that it's a comment on a bureaucratic state? They had all manner of administrative effort related to creating WMDs, consuming much time and money of the regime, but the actual production was not proportionate. Could it be that, like other command regimes that have no real understanding of what their grand initiatives are like at the sharp end, Saddam simply did not know that he didn't have that much to hide?

Anne Cunningham

is an American of Northern Irish Catholic ancestry. Read her thoughts on Macaulay, Imperialism and the Immaculate Conception Theory of History at One Sided Wonder

What German children are hearing.

Davids Medienkritik has up a post about a toe-curlingly propagandist German childrens' radio programme. I have once or twice had some fairly strong criticisms of editorial comment disguised as reporting in Children's BBC programmes, but nothing as bad as this. The typical flaw of the BBC is to assume that everybody except a few cartoon nutters thinks the way BBC people do. (What Sean Gabb, quoting Gramsci, calls in this essay "hegemonic discourse".) In contrast, this German programme, "Lilipuz", gives the impression of conscious political manipulation.

Matthew Turner

has made his latest move in our ongoing blog war here.

Here's my reply to his reply.

On “will” – the point was “will” is used as an indicator of customary or habitual behaviour as opposed to universal behaviour. So a statement that group X will do Y does not necessarily mean that all X’s will do Y on all occasions, only that they often will.

On affirmative action you say that I am going to have to explain more what I mean by "half consciously believe."

On a micro level Solen'ts argument doesn't work either. When she blathers on about 'The point is that they think or, what is harder to cure, they half-consciously feel, that it won't make much difference what they do', then she really needs to explain this 'half-consciously' thing a little more -- I cannot believe half-consciously or other young black men believe society rejects or refuses to reward their talents because of affirmative action.

You can picture it now, in Solent-land a young, black man aged 25 enviously watching his similarly-aged white neighbour who went to private school, Oxford and now works in the City, thinking 'If only affirmative action hadn't half-consciously flattened the incentives to my being successful I could be like him'.

You imply, scornfully, that I think this is what regularly happens. But I think it is as unlikely as you do. I cannot see why your pouring scorn on the idea that a black youth is likely to make that particular conscious political analysis of his own situation is even relevant to my beliefs about unconscious or half-conscious assumptions.

In fact, I am astonished that my assertion that there are half-conscious obstacles to success presents such a stumbling block to a left-winger. (For those new to Matthew Turner’s blog, all that stuff about him being a Tory is a joke. He joined the Conservative party to point up what he saw as the absurdity of pro free-market types like Stephen Pollard and Oliver Kamm describing themselves as socialists.) The harm done by an attitude of fatalism has been a standard, and broadly correct, part of the standard left- wing analysis of inequality for the last seventy or eighty years – no, make that a hundred years; it’s in George Bernard Shaw and Chesterton.*

But if it does need more explanation, let me do so by looking at the history of feminism. Fighting for the vote and against laws that denied women political rights was only half the battle. Feminists saw early on that they also had to disprove the assumption, held by both men and women, that women were delicate creatures who had to be protected from the harsh male world. This task was all the harder in that the belief in female incapacity was only held half-consciously or unconsciously. That is why feminists talked about “raising the consciousness” of women: once you got to the stage of explict political argument, the battle was half won.

In a similar way, socialists sought to replace the age old vague resentments of the poor with a thought-out political analysis that included criticisms of working class passivity and explanations of how it came about. I don’t agree with their analysis of what we should do about either poverty or poverty-reinforcing attitudes but I do agree that one was needed.

I also agree with the socialist view that the inequalities within a society don’t just happen. They have causes and cures, complex though they may be.

Looking at the progress of blacks in the US or UK over the last half century three phenomena need to be explained. (a) There was great progress after WWII as colonialism fell away and the apartheid of the old US South was dismantled. (b) Then black progress began to sputter out in the 70s. Now there is a black middle class that does OK but for great swathes of the black poor things seem not much better, if at all. In terms of violence and education things are worse. (c) Other minorities, such as ethnic Koreans in the US or Indians here, have overtaken blacks and often whites, too.

I think there is a very good case that what went wrong was in part the imposition of affirmative action with its associated model of black incapacity and permanent victimhood. (Welfare also had a huge role, but I won’t deal with it here.) Simple race prejudice doesn’t explain (b) or (c) but the rise of an anti-achievement attitude among blacks does. I can think of nothing more likely to create such an attitude than to ensure by law and practice that achievement really does matter less. Even within the black middle class the educational achievements of parents don’t replicate themselves in the children as much as they do for whites.

That’s my explanation for the stagnation in black progress over the last few decades. What’s yours?

(Incidentally a correspondent called “Guessedworker” wrote me a an email saying that the explanation was that blacks were less intelligent and quoting various studies and figures that, he says, proves this is so. I have been meaning to reply for a long time, but haven’t got round to it yet. My regrets to Guessedworker, but I haven’t got the energy to fight a war on two fronts now.)

You assert that I am just making it up when I say that crimes committed by Muslims are downplayed in the press.

First off, it’s not as if the media downplaying crimes comitted by groups they feel are oppressed is unprecedented behaviour. This report by Walter Williams describes, quoting evidence, how hate crimes by blacks against whites are downplayed in the US relative to hate crimes by whites against blacks. This account by Armstrong Williams tells a similar story. This report from the Washington Times compares the much greater coverage of the murder of a homosexual student, Matthew Shephard, than of the murder of a boy called Jesse Dirkhising by two homosexuals. Andrew Sullivan writing in the New Republic described the discrepancy between the coverage of the two stories as "staggering" (subscription only). I have cited reports by black (Williams and Williams) and gay (Sullivan) writers particularly to make the point that some members of the downplayed groups acknowledge there is skewed reporting, and want it to stop.

Both these examples are from America rather than Britain, but why should it work any differently in Britain? The media culture is similar.

I think this habit of downplaying is extremely short-sighted. Quite apart from the intrinsic virtue of the truth, nothing breeds a climate of paranoia and hostility quicker than the belief that they are lying to us. History shows that countries where the media is censored are rife with rumour, including racist rumour. (I haven’t backed this assertion up either, but presumably I don’t have to.) Such rumours, typically about rape or poisoning, are often the flashpoints for riots. Once trust in the press is lost, it will be to no avail that the media repeat calming statements that the rumoured crime did not happen, or if it did, that justice will be done.

We are not quite at that stage yet. The media are not usually deliberately lying to us, but they are misleading us through suppressio veri. It would be good to break the habit while it is still breakable.

OK, on to crimes by Muslims. Are they downplayed or no? Here’s an example involving two news stories that happened within a few miles and a few months of each other. Both involved themes of descecration. Both must have been very traumatic to those who witnessed them but undeniably evoked the sort of ghoulish interest that, you would think, editors would jump at. Yet one story was reported in all the British newspapers and many others round the world while the other, so far as I can tell, was fastidiously ignored in the quality press, and only briefly covered in two tabloids.

Story 1: In January 2003 a British Muslim woman, Habiba Mohammed, died of cancer. Her body was laid in the mortuary of Hillingdon Hospital. When her grieving family came to view the body they discovered to their horror that someone had laid slices of bacon (considered unclean by Muslims) all over the body. Two mortuary workers have been arrested and bailed.

Story 2: On 8 April 2003 a group of primary schoolchildren from St Andrew’s primary school were attending a service at St Margaret’s Church, Uxbridge. A man burst in, carrying his one year old son. He laid the child on the altar and attempted to kill him with a knife. Before he could do so he was disarmed by bystanders. The man has been identified only by his age, 41 and his religion, Muslim.

Story 1 was reported worldwide. A Google search for any combination of “Hillingdon” - “mortuary” - “bacon” will give hundreds of results.

Story 2 was reported in the Sun (“Fiend’s bid to sacrifice baby on school altar – kids scream in horror at knife ordeal”) and the Daily Mail on 10 April. The story can be found in the Sun archive for that date but you'll have to subscribe. It also appeared as an in brief item in the Fortean Times. I can’t find any other mentions.

I don’t understand why not, unless it’s that many journalists and editors separately made the decision that the story was a hot potato due to the religion of the attempted killer. It's certainly not that tales of child sacrifice are uninteresting or humdrum. It can’t be that the case is sub judice; the man was sectioned under the Mental Health Act rather than coming before a court at all. It could be argued that 10 April was a busy day for news being the day after Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed, but the papers that day did cover other things than Iraq.

For comparison a similar story about a sword-wielding madman invading St Andrew’s RC Church in Thornton back in 1999 was reported worldwide.

I was left wanting to know more – for instance, why, if the man was a Muslim, did he go into a Christian church to sacrifice his child? It would be ironic if all the delicacy of the editors was unecessary in their own terms, but the statement of his religion in the Sun story might have the effect of depressing repetition of the story even if the Sun was wrong and he was a Christian wacko.

*Added later - Clarification: Chesterton was no socialist. He was a distributivist who wanted a chicken in every peasant's pot with emphasis on the "peasant", and said that he admired the cheerfully unprogressive attitudes of the poor. But he talks about the idea of self-defeating attitudes as if he were quite familiar with it, so his writings do furnish evidence of it having been around a long time.

UPDATE & CORRECTION: the Telegraph did have that child-sacrifice story, also on 10 April. I don't know why I didn't find it first time; probably something daft like mis-spelling one of the search terms. No mention of the would-be killer's religion though. So rather than the tabloid/quality split I mentioned before we have a left/right split.