Oliver Kamm

Shakespeare again

Despite their professed radical sympathies, the "cultural materialists" who believe the notion of literature is illusory have little in common with an older tradition of left-wing thought. This is from the only full-length biography of the Trinidadian Marxist thinker, inspiration for 'black consciousness' and author of the finest book on cricket ever written, C.L.R. James, C.L.R. James: Cricket, the Caribbean and World Revolution, by Farrukh Dondy (2001, p. 102):

One of the persistent myths thrown up by the Black Power movement and by a particularly pernicious and ignorant stream of 'black studies' was that Shakespeare, being one of the iconic white male figures of literature, was a racist, an anti-semite, and various other things. In Britain this reactionary ideology took the form of patois poetry in the sixties and seventies, offered nor simply as developments in pop but as political challenges to Shakespeare or Keats.

The idea of 'relevance' was taken up by a section of school teachers and editors who argued for the poets of the English canon to be replaced with the verse of Maya Angelou and with other poets who wrote in West Indian dialects, the Jamaican or Trinidadian patois.

This was a view from which CLR profoundly dissented. To him Shakespeare and Keats stood for the expression of civilising value, the centre of the cultural endeavour of humanity to which he belonged.

Dhondy illustrates his point with an account of a meeting he attended at James's flat in Brixton, in south London. A young poet from Jamaica called Michael Smith is being followed by a television crew for an arts programme, and Smith ('Mikey') expounds his grass-roots revolutionary stance ("the illiterate, suffering genius who knows no language but the spontaneous revelations of his verse") to James:

CLR... seems determined to extract some clarity from Mikey and refuses to bolster the falsehood he believes him to be creating. The game is blown wide open when, with a sneer, Mikey alludes to "Shak-uss-peeree. Or whatever he is called." A sneer too far. The old man calls him to order.

"Now hold on. I have lived most of my life in the Caribbean. I know Jamaica and Jamaican people, and I have never heard Shakespeare's name pronounced like that."

He refuses to let Mikey wear ignorance on his sleeve as a badge of rebellion. It's the wrong kind of rebellion.

The lesson still needs expounding. If you look at the Amazon page I have linked to, you find this comment (taken from the book's dust-jacket) in the synopsis (emphasis added):

CLR James was a Marxist philosopher, intent on paper at least on world revolution. But later in life, he rejected the incendiary rhetoric of his youth. He was an unabashed elitist, but at the same time fought discrimination of any sort.

The invocation of 'elitism' refers, and can only refer, to James's belief in the civilising value of art. That is not elitism; it is a recognition of objective standards of aesthetic excellence. Elitism, on the contrary, is the denigration of art and its consequent maintenance as the preserve of an affluent and educated minority. Elitism is, in fact, the characteristic of those supposedly radical theorists who elevate 'cultural studies' over art, music and literature.

What is . . . the "battle of Will"?

This column appears in The Times today.

LAST week The Times Higher Education Supplement published a scathing attack on the state of Shakespearean appreciation. Tom McAlindon, a professor of English literature at Hull University, noted that a battle had long been fought over Shakespeare’s soul. The protagonists were “politicised, theory-driven radicals” and those they dubbed liberal humanist critics. What concerns McAlindon is that the radicals have become the Shakespeare establishment.

McAlindon cited the case of Kate McLuskie, the new director of Birmingham University’s Shakespeare Institute. Professor McLuskie has never published a book on Shakespeare; her best-known work is an essay called "The Patriarchal Bard", which dissects Shakespeare’s alleged misogyny.

The radicals see criticism as a vehicle of social change. McAlindon is contemptuous. He accuses them of “frequently showing an astonishing disregard for the basic principles of scholarly inquiry and textual analysis”.

Henry Kissinger once observed that the bitterness of academic politics is inversely related to the importance of the issues at stake. The “Battle of Will for the Bard’s Soul”, as the THES headlined it, refutes him. The invective is intense because the issues matter. They concern not only the role in our culture of the pre-eminent figure of English literature, but what it is to read books at all.

The radical critics, who style themselves cultural materialists, seek to reveal the ways in which Shakespeare has been used politically (or as two of them put it, “to explore the ideological functions of texts at various historical junctures” – cultural materialists tend to talk like this). They maintain that Shakespeare has been taught in schools to “adjust young people to an unjust social order”. Having exposed those assumptions, they are free to present their own readings mercifully shorn of oppressive ideologies. One example is an article entitled “How to read The Merchant of Venice without being heterosexist”.

By such means, the radicals argue, readers of Shakespeare can experience “the transgressive pleasure of critique” — which I think means the satisfaction gained from smuggling political certitudes into the messy business of making aesthetic judgements. The problem is that the transgressive pleasure of critique is not most people’s idea of fun, and is not the pleasure that most lovers of literature gain from reading.

Literature provides insights into the human condition in a way that no political treatise can match. Shakespeare’s greatness lies not in a gift for memorable phrase but in his matchless exploration of enduring human concerns that are not tied to a particular era or social system. A literary establishment that fails to convey that, fails altogether.

UPDATE: Tom McAlindon has recently published a fine collection of essays on Shakespeare (and one on Christopher Marlowe) with the equally-splendid title Shakespeare Minus 'Theory'. His case is that:

The assumptions and intentions of radical criticism have led inevitably and demonstrably to a deterioration in standards of analysis, investigation, and interpretation in Shakespeare studies.

Unfortunately this is true, and unlike his antagonists McAlindon argues the point with a close attention to Shakespeare's text. Also much to be recommended is his Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos, in which he expounds the exploration in the tragedies of "a transhistorical model of human and universal nature".

Kate McLuskie's essay 'The Patriarchal Bard' is included in the collection Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985), edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. The book is in effect a manifesto for the tendencies McAlindon attacks. Sinfield is also the author of 'How to read The Merchant of Venice without being heterosexist', cited above; it is included in the collection Alternative Shakespeares: Volume 2, edited by Terence Hawkes (1996).

More broadly than on Shakespeare alone, Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (1982) has become an astonishingly popular manifesto of radical theory (known generically as Cultural Studies). Eagleton maintains that the concept of literature divorced from other social and cultural phenomena is illusory. He argues this case on the basis of a complete misunderstanding of a point made by John M. Ellis, a scholar of German literature, in his Theory of Literary Criticism: A Logical Analysis (1974). Ellis observes, with an understatement that makes his exasperation all the more evident, in his magificent lament on Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of Humanities (1997, pp. 43-4):

[Eagleton] begins by citing and building upon someone else's analysis of how literature should be defined, citing it with evident approval, but he misunderstands that analysis and its conclusions. What he then erects upon this foundation shows that he has not grasped the nature of the issues that arise in a definition. I make this judgment with some confidence, for the analysis Eagleton makes the basis of his argument was my own.

Between them, Ellis and McAlindon make the most powerful defence to have been published in recent years of literature, the humanities and indeed the very notion of Western civilisation.

The state of Israel

I have resumed the blog again in earnest, having been away for much of December. I was particularly glad to spend a week in Israel (only my second visit), attending a conference for which I know of no counterpart in other democracies.

Whereas political commentators in Europe frequently speak of a 'democratic deficit' in EU governance, Israel has quite a different problem: a political system in which the centre (by which I mean the insititutions of state, not the ideological centre) finds it difficult to hold. It is frequently implicity assumed by outsiders that Israel is a homogeneous force (this must be the assumption, because otherwise the ubiquitous complaint that the Bush administration is not pressuring Israel enough would make no sense). In reality she is one of the most highly-stratified societies in the world - ethnically, religiously and economically - and has one of the least suitable political systems for a country that badly needs an effective executive. Israel's purist form of proportional representation makes the business of forming - and maintaining - coalition government painful. Bizarrely, the country even tried a system of direct election for prime minister that merely made it more difficult to form a stable government, by divorcing the PM from the party system.

A political system like this isn't easy to reconcile with long-term strategic thinking about policy, especially given the urgency of defending Israeli civilians from terrorist attack. An Israeli university, the InterDisciplinary Centre at Herzliya, established a conference five years ago which has turned into an annual and extremely important event in the Israeli political calendar, to address this need. The equivalent in the UK would be an event where Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Jack Straw, Michael Howard and the Queen all vented their views about everything. And even though Blair is widely criticised for bypassing parliament, nothing like this could ever happen here. The Herzliya Conference is in effect a means of bypassing a sclerotic political system in order to gain a clearer view of national and regional affairs, and it works. In 2003 it was the forum in which Ariel Sharon announced his disengagement plan from Gaza. This year the conference comprised around 1700 Israeli and other delegates, all of them invited rather than self-selected.

I was glad to be able to attend as a delegate, and also to take part in the press briefings and visits to, among other places, the Foreign Ministry and the security fence in the north of the country. My thanks go particularly to the Israelis - Safra, Mitchell, Jonathan, David and others - who gave me their impressions. (Disclosure: while in Israel, I was a guest of the Foreign Ministry, which paid for my hotel accommodation; I paid for my own flights to and from Israel.) I was also rather touched that a number of the readers of this site introduced themselves; I shall consider carefully the helpful suggestion of Professor Fred Siegel, whose lucidly-advocated position on the American Left is very similar to where I stand on the British Left, that perhaps the appeal of this blog might be made broader for non-UK readers if the Liberal Democrats were to make fewer appearances in it.

These are the main conclusions I would make as an outsider, having spent admittedly little time in Israel but committed both to the nation's security and to a durable, peaceful two-state accommodation with the Palestinians.

First, the approach taken by the present Israeli government has been far more effective than its foreign critics claim. I wrote a column last summer arguing that the dual strategy of building the security fence and attacking terrorist organisations directly was a prerequisite of a lasting peace, and was working. That still appears to be the case. One of my interlocutors, a senior official at the Foreign Ministry who had been a member of Israel's negotiating team at Oslo and who clearly identified with the Barak wing of Israeli politics rather than the Sharon wing, was adamant on this point. The fence has allowed Israelis a breathing space from the terrible carnage and demoralisation suffered by her civilians at the height of the Intifada. My interlocutor had himself known no fewer than six people killed in suicide attacks - civilians travelling by bus or eating in a restaurant.

(I should reiterate too that the fence really is a fence, made of chain-linked wire, and not a wall, as its critics maintain. There is a small section of it that is a wall, looking something like the type of barriers that you see at the verges of motorways in this country. The resemblance is not accidental, because that's exactly what that part of the security fence is: a barrier alongside a main road where sniper fire had been directed at motorists, and which a fence would be powerless to stop.)

In addition, these security measures have reinforced an overwhelming consensus in Israeli society for a strategy of defensive deterrence, withdrawal from strategically and politically indefensible settlements in Gaza, and direct negotiations for a Palestinian state. The worst speech I heard during the whole conference was not from an Israeli speaker but from an American: a former Reagan administration official, Frank Gaffney, who maintained that any conceivable Palestinian state would be a terrorist threat. This is a counsel of despair at what is the most promising moment for political accommodation I can recall.

One of the reasons for that hopefulness is something that, so far as I can see, Israel finds difficult to say publicly for domestic political reasons. Israeli politics has shifted on both wings, but it has done so particularly markedly on the Right.

More than 20 years ago Israeli society was sharply divided over the Lebanon War - the first and only war Israel has fought that has not been forced upon her (and yes, I know Israel technically struck first in the Six-Day War, but my point still holds). Identifying with the Labour Zionist tradition, I at that time favoured the emerging Israeli peace movement, Peace Now. I still conclude that the war did no lasting good and significant damage. The PLO's expulsion from southern Lebanon created a vacuum that Hizbollah filled, with no net gain to Israeli security and with substantial loss of life. I remain more sympathetic to the Israeli peace movement than those who are commonly known outside Israel as neoconservatives (of whom I am not one, though I frequently receive correspondence, not all of it unfriendly, mistakenly claiming otherwise); unlike, say, the British anti-war movement, which explicitly favours the victory of fascism in Iraq, or the International Solidarity Movement, which serves as an ideological apologist for terrorism, the Israeli peace movement associated with such figures as the novelist Amos Oz has valid aims and democratic politcs. I am not any longer a supporter of it, however, as I believe the very name 'Peace Now' gives an unfortunate and false impression that it is within Israel's power unilaterally to create peace. At the same time as the parties of the Left have had to acknowledge the heroic failure of Oslo, the parties of the Right have been won to the cause of direct negotiation with the Palestinians. When I hear people such as Gaffney draw, from the unquestionable fact of Yassir Arafat's duplicity and brutality, the inference that Israel must abandon the search for a serious negotiating partner, I wonder why very few Israelis have taken that view despite the demonstrable failure of the Palestinian Authority to discharge its treaty obligations over the past dozen years to crack down on terrorist groups.

I get the impression that, with a successful security policy that I have strongly supported in the press and elsewhere, Israel has done what it is within her power to do unilaterally. She has created - in the dreadful cliche of 1970s arms control - a window of opportunity, with a firm indication of good and peaceful intent. Now that the Palestinians have lost a corrupt and destructive leader, I am hopeful that for the first time for years a genuine political dialogue can take place that involves give-and-take, and not merely one side giving and the other taking. The proper course for diplomats and politicians outside the region is to cease attacking Israel for not being able to create peace by fiat, and to allow the parties to negotiate directly without benefit of meddling outsiders.

Music and its discontents

My friend Stephen Pollard has written a fine as well as news-making biography of David Blunkett. He has followed it, in The Independent, with an article that is wrong on a grand operatic scale. He is lamenting the state of musical appreciation:

This year is the centenary of the birth of Michael Tippett and Karl Amadeus Hartmann. Both were gifted composers, one British, one German. Both composed some pieces which repay repeated listening. But both also composed a string of pieces which had already outlived their worth on first hearing. None of that matters, however, since the simple fact of their centenary appears of itself to have attached an undue reverence to their name. Programme planners, devoid of imagination, have latched on to – as they do every year – this year’s anniversaries and themed entire seasons around their work, irrespective of the worth of their compositions.

It is unfashionable to make judgements about the relative – and absolute – merit of composers. (The same is, of course, also true of other artists). Plainly, almost all strive to give of their best. They can endure anguish as they go through the process of composition. Perhaps it is the simple generosity of the human spirit which prevents us writing off the result as barely worth bothering with, let alone dismissing the produce of an entire life as a waste of time.

Certainly, discrimination is essential in criticism, and the ability to exercise it – to tell good art from bad, and art from mere entertainment – is a neglected part of public discourse. But from this unexceptionable principle Stephen builds an incredible conclusion, using the conceit of a musical festival to celebrate the work of light composers such as Burt Bacharach in order to mock similar efforts for classical composers.

The problem is not that there is anything wrong in the lack of a serious retrospective of either Tony Hatch or Burt Bacharach. Light music is light music, whatever the level of skill in its composition. The problem is that far more frivolous composers, with far less skill, are accorded unmerited stature by dint only of having lived a long time ago, or written in a genre – classical music – which lends itself to pretension and unmerited acclamation.

If I understand this properly – and the problem is not that Stephen’s prose is unclear but that his argument is extraordinary – the proposition is that minor classical composers are unwarrantedly celebrated because the musical language they used is regarded today with, respectively, snobbery and deference. The only evidence Stephen presents is that the South Bank in London is shortly to present an eleven-concert festival devoted to Felix Mendelssohn, whom Stephen terms “the very archetype of the hack composer”.

The least that is wrong with this argument is the musical judgement, but that judgement is nonetheless highly eccentric. Mendelssohn is a minor composer, but it is not true that:

Mendelssohn’s great achievement was to compose a series of middle brow pieces – above all, his Violin Concerto, his Octet and his oratorio, Elijah – which do precisely what compositions by the likes of Tony Hatch, Richard Carpenter and Burt Bacharach manage: give the listener an easy fix.

The Octet for strings is a fugal masterpiece, written when Mendelssohn was just 16; his failing as a composer was never to reach this height again, but to be content with much Romantic sentimentality (such as the Songs Without Words). Whereas great composers have sublimated personal tragedy in their art, Mendelssohn was incapable of doing this on his own great bereavement, the death of his sister Fanny. Nonetheless the Violin Concerto in E minor is one of the most technically perfect pieces in the Romantic repertoire; the solo violin is present through almost the entire work, yet the orchestra is a full partner alongside it.

In particular, it is far more true in Mendelssohn’s case than in Sir Michael Tippett’s that there are “some pieces which repay repeated listening”. Tippett’s operas are not merely hack works but literally laughable – it’s a constant struggle when listening to his portentous librettos not to burst out laughing. The problem is not with the earnest and misguided pacifist politics – Benjamin Britten held similar views, but managed to set them movingly to music and to be one of the half-dozen greatest composers of the last century – but that, in the words of the critic Kenneth McLeish (writing about The Knot Garden), “the gibberish of the libretto … disables the music, making the piece a garbled and baffling charade”.

What is still odder about Stephen’s animus is that the theme of the festival he derides is, as he tells us, ‘Mendelssohn the Musician’. What is wrong with that? There is no question but that Mendelssohn the musician is an important historical figure. This is not confined to – in Stephen’s words – “promoting someone else’s music… a famous performance of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion (albeit in his own butchered version) which revived interest in the music of a real genius”. As conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Mendelssohn made it the greatest orchestra in Europe; he popularised both modern works and what were then unfashionably early works. As a composer and musician, he influenced numerous other composers, who themselves influenced others. (The excellent Niels Gade, known as the ‘Danish Mendelssohn’, is becoming increasingly-known in the English-speaking world. He influenced the later Danish symphonist Carl Nielsen, truly one of the outstanding 20th-century composers.) All that Stephen’s criticisms amount to is that concert promoters are doing their job properly: alerting audiences to minor figures in the repertoire, and putting those composers in their proper context.

But, as I say, it’s Stephen’s conclusion that astonishes. What age is he living in, to suppose that classical music is regarded with indiscriminate reverence because of us snobs who urge its value? The problem is the opposite: classical music is almost everywhere seen as a taste rather than an achievement. And because classical music is complex, it is inevitably a minority taste. Whereas popular music relies almost entirely on melody, classical music has development and argument. Classical music isn’t literally a language, but it has a formal structure that can be thought of as a metaphorical language. Musical appreciation requires a knowledge of that language, not necessarily in the sense even of being able to read music (though it helps), but of being able to recognise the shifting relations between melody and harmony. What effect does Stephen suppose his strictures about ‘pretension’ will have? That they will encourage musical appreciation, or instead the denigration of serious music as - in that dismal catch-all term of abuse - ‘elitist’?

Learning to listen to Beethoven is no more elitist than learning German in order to understand his opera Fidelio, but on the other hand it is no less arduous a task. When I read that Stephen believes a mark of the worth of musical compositions is that they should “come close to meeting the aspirations of their listeners”, I wonder just what he has heard in those many, many hours he has spent in the concert hall. Artistic appreciation is not about what is inside us: it is about how we respond to what is outside us, namely a work that mediates the artist’s subjective impressions to us by means of that metaphorical ‘language’. Come back, Stephen, to its defence.

The Tories and the pensioners

A Times columnist, Carol Midgley, began her piece in Saturday’s paper:

I CAN think of only three occasions when the Tory party got a warm reception in our house. The first was when Edward Heath brought in the pensioners’ Christmas bonus….

This is quite a neat metaphor for the current travails of the Conservative Party. I have never voted Tory, but I recognise that the party did things in government in the 1980s and even the 1990s that were important, and whose merits the Left was very late in recognising: industrial relations reform, thereby making trade unions accountable to their members and bringing them under the rule of law; inflation targeting, introduced by the much-derided Norman Lamont (a better Chancellor than he was given credit for, who was succeeded by a greatly-overestimated one, Kenneth Clarke); and maintaining the solidarity of Nato by agreeing to the deployment of euromissiles on British soil.

The pensioners’ Christmas bonus is, by contrast, a model of bad public policy. When introduced in 1972, it was intended as a temporary measure to stimulate demand in the recession. The story of the Heath-Barber ‘dash for growth’ is well-known and deservedly excoriated. A huge expansion of demand over a short period proved unsustainable. It rapidly generated bottlenecks, and shortages of skilled labour and raw material, and caused severe inflationary problems.

The pensioners’ Christmas bonus, was, in that overall scheme, an insignificant measure that amounted to a token of the government’s intent. That, paradoxically, is what’s destructive about it: being a token, it’s never been abolished. It involves no great distortion of public spending priorities but it does perpetuate a damaging notion, which the Financial Times economics columnist Sir Samuel Brittan described some years ago (in his book The Role and Limits of Government: Essays in Political Economy, 1983) as ‘the Wenceslas Myth’.

The Wenceslas myth depicts as an act of generosity on the part of government what is in fact a straight transfer from the taxpayer, involving no personal sacrifice on the part of ministers. The pensioners’ Christmas bonus persists because it is easier to maintain a benefit for a vocal interest group where that benefit is concentrated and the cost is dispersed (and therefore not noticed by those who pay it). A Chancellor who abolished it would be condemned for the rest of his career as ‘mean’, though he might in his personal life be unstintingly benevolent. As Brittan remarks:

It is the discussion of the Chancellor’s bonus as if it were the generosity of Good King Wenceslas which epitomises the myth of government that penetrates nearly all political discussion today. According to the myth there exist tiny handfuls of people known as ‘governments’ who could so act as to increase the supply of satisfactions enjoyed by the population if only they chose to do so, but through malevolence or inefficiency do not.

The myth makes it more difficult for a political democracy to come to a sensible discussion about costs. The reason I began by citing the pensioners’ Christmas bonus as a metaphor for today’s Conservative Party is that a sensible discussion about costs is precisely what that party is not engaged in. Instead it has adopted the approach of appealing to interest groups as if the Wenceslas myth is in fact an accurate characterisation of government spending decisions. The two most striking examples are the party’s opposition to tuition fees and its advocacy of concessions on fuel duty. These have a common theme, being fairly shameless populist appeals to sectional interests (middle-class families and motorists) at the expense of a less well-organised constituency, namely the public good. I hope that in 2005 the Tories’ strategy will receive the electoral rebuff it deserves, but in the meantime it does little to enhance the quality of British political debate.

Tsunami and faith

Another odd response is given on successive days by the Chief Rabbi in The Times and the Archbishop of Canterbury in The Telegraph. They discuss what theologians call theodicy, or an explanation for the existence of evil that would reconcile it with the existence of a benevolent deity.

I never normally comment on religion, except insofar as it affects the subjects I do write about and that are the sub-title of this blog. I make an exception here because I find it a peculiarity that these responses by religious leaders are a standard part of our culture.

The Chief Rabbi and the Archbishop are wise and good men, and I intend no disrespect to them, or to Orthodox Jews and Anglicans, in being incredulous at what they say. The Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, begins:

IT IS THE question of questions for religious belief. How does God permit a tragedy such as the Indian Ocean tidal wave? How does he allow the innocent to suffer and the guiltless to die?

I accept that it is impossible for the religious believer to avoid the question Dr Sacks raises. Yet I still find it a disconcertingly self-referential approach. It amounts to asking, from the standpoint of the religious believer, how such great suffering affects me, and how may it be assimilated in my personal credo.

The problem of immense and random suffering is indeed a huge (I would say insuperable) objection to religious faith, but theological agonising is a personal or institutional, not a civic, matter. Unlike many non-believers, I regard religion as a valuable cultural resource in a heterogeneous modern democracy. It is so, however, in the sense of reminding us of the doubt and contingency that must accompany our deliberations on public policy. Religious apologetic – the justification of faith to counter objections to it – is another matter; I can see no civic role for it, because it really is just a matter of faith rather than guidance.

Trying to reconcile more than 100,000 deaths from a natural disaster with his belief in a benevolent God, Dr Sacks writes:

The simplest explanation is that of the 12th-century sage, Moses Maimonides. Natural disasters, he said, have no explanation other than that God, by placing us in a physical world, set life within the parameters of the physical. Planets are formed, tectonic plates shift, earthquakes occur, and sometimes innocent people die. To wish it were otherwise is in essence to wish that we were not physical beings at all. Then we would not know pleasure, desire, achievement, freedom, virtue, creativity, vulnerability and love. We would be angels — God’s computers, programmed to sing His praise.

You either find this convincing or you don’t. Being no philosopher, I should be rash to try to refute it by citing Hume, whose treatment of natural religion I have long found utterly convincing despite the doubtless numerous philosophical objections to them. It merely strikes me as implausible to suppose that the effect Dr Sacks describes requires anything like the superfluity of suffering that our world exhibits, especially in the past week.

There’s also a pragmatic objection I have to this way of reasoning. Dr Sacks writes:

It was just such a disaster — the Lisbon tragedy of All Souls’ Day 1755, in which 60,000 people died as a result of tsunamis produced by an earthquake — that led Voltaire to write Candide, satirising religious faith…. What incensed Voltaire was that there were religious believers at the time who thought that the earthquake represented God’s anger at Lisbon’s “sinful” ways. After all, didn’t the Old Testament speak of divine anger? Were catastrophes not interpreted as punishment against sinful nations? Is there not justice in history? Yet in the end the interpretation was unsustainable. Why Lisbon and not other cities? Why were the young, the frail, the saintly among the casualties? Even the most dogmatic found it hard to answer these questions. In any case, the suggestion is morally unacceptable. It blames the victims for their fate. After the Holocaust, such thoughts ought to be unthinkable.

Certainly, they ought. Yet there is, as a matter of fact if not doctrine, an inherent tendency in religious apologetic to suppose that redemption emerges from suffering. This is obviously true in Christianity, which maintains that God became flesh (the Incarnation), died for our sins (the Atonement) and rose again (the Resurrection). It is quite a short step from holding that doctrinal belief to seeking signs of redemption in circumstances where patently none, but only suffering, exists. There are examples too among Jewish theologians, as of course Dr Sacks knows better than anyone. The Reform Rabbi and theologian Ignaz Maybaum, who left Germany for Great Britain in 1939 and served as lecturer in theology at the Leo Baeck College for many years, argued forcefully (e.g. Ignaz Maybaum: A Reader, 2001) that there was rebirth out of destruction (churban): the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem allowed the Diaspora to form; and in the Holocaust, God’s redemptive purpose was served by the miraculous survival of two-thirds of world Jewry.

I do not share this way of thinking (which I hope I have not misrepresented). I believe in neither heavenly nor earthly redemption, but only in the ability of human intelligence to secure piecemeal improvement of our condition for the benefit of ourselves, and of future generations when we are dead. The reason I am interested in public policy is primarily that I think we have some limited scope in each generation to advance that end and almost unlimited capacity to retard it.

The inference I draw – the only political principle I believe in passionately – is that the Western Enlightenment tradition needs to be militant in its self-defence against the forces of barbarism, such as secular and theocratic variants of totalitarianism, yet aware of its own capacity for sin. I am with theologians who urge that position. The Protestant Reinhold Niebuhr brilliantly criticised the pacifism of the Christian Churches in the 1930s in the face of the Nazi threat. Emil Fackenheim, a Rabbi who escaped Nazi Germany and became Professor of Philosophy at Toronto University, perceived (of course in an entirely non-triumphalist way) that “except among the theologically or humanly perverse, Zionism – the commitment to the safety and genuine sovereignty of the State of Israel – is not negotiable” (To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought, 1982, pp. 284-5).

Of great suffering produced by human agency, that is the best – and entirely secular – response I can make. Of great suffering produced by natural disaster, I can make no sense whatever, and wouldn’t try.

Tsunami

Of course, I struggle for anything sensible to say on the awfulness of the deaths – their scarcely-conceivable number and manner – in South-East Asia. But some things are more obviously insensible than others.

One point made in The Times on Friday by Rosemary Righter does strike me as ominously reminiscent of earlier catastrophes and worth stressing. She noted that the British relief agencies – Oxfam specifically – were calling for aid to be channelled through the United Nations. Obviously the best arrangement is for the speediest disbursement of aid consistent with its being done effectively; I can see no particular reason that the UN is the natural vehicle for that, and quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. As Ms Righter says:

[I]t is worse that mindless piety for Oxfam to insist on the UN’s leading role. It is dangerous twaddle because manifestly this massively complex disaster is beyond it.

This isn’t specifically a criticism of the UN, much of whose humanitarian work has managed to escape the more general strictures and scandals of recent years regarding its parent. It is to worry about whether Oxfam has learnt from its failures in the 1980s, most obviously in the Ethiopian famine. Famine, a man-made disaster, is of course not comparable to natural disasters such as storms and earthquakes, but the immediate humanitarian needs of its victims are: sustenance, shelter and the prevention of disease. Oxfam had long taken the position that development was more important than relief, and that position did appreciable harm to its relief efforts in Ethiopia. That isn’t just my view; Tony Vaux, who was the co-ordinator of Oxfam’s global emergency programmes in the 1980s, states:

The idea was revolution through development. This extraordinarily optimistic ideology … became so strong that aid agencies did not turn away from their developmentalist beliefs, even when poor people were suffering from the effects of famine.

The quotation comes from a salutary study of the role of humanitarian organisations A Bed for the Night by David Rieff (son of the critic Susan Sontag, who died last week and was better than you might assume from her well-known absurdities about 9/11, immortalised by Andrew Sullivan's 'Sontag Awards'). Rieff makes a strong case that humanitarian organisations have to remain independent if they are to succeed in what they are uniquely fitted to do, namely alleviating suffering. His argument is politically disinterested and in my view apt. It applies both to cases where humanitarian organisations generally favour military intervention and those where they generally oppose it. Their political judgement may be right or it may be wrong, but it is outside any specialist knowledge that they have and detrimental to the role that they ought to be playing. A particularly dispiriting example of agencies’ promoting a political judgement as a humanitarian one was their call for a bombing pause during the war in Afghanistan, an outcome that would have merely prolonged the rule of a theocratic tyranny that had for years expropriated western aid from its intended beneficiaries. They also issued warnings of a refugee crisis in the event of war in Iraq that were explicitly assimilated into an anti-war case and turned out to be entirely mistaken.

Tony Blair has also called, in his first public statement on the tsunami, for the leading role in aid to be taken by the UN, but Tony Blair is a politician and is thus entitled to play politics. The aid agencies have a different remit and one that they perform on the whole very well: they work much better as emergency relief agencies, operating on a more local and intimate scale than government or international institutions can reach, than they do as development agencies.

What is... Rapturism?

This column appears in The Times today.

A NEW YEAR inspires reflections on the fin de siècle. In some circles the fin is interpreted with unnerving literalness. As The Economist noted last week: “Apocalyptic belief renews itself in ingenious ways.”

Christianity has always had its apocalyptic literature. Rapturism (more properly, Dispensational Premillennialism) is a distinctive modern exposition. It derives from a 19th-century British evangelist, John Nelson Darby. He believed that human history was divided into seven divine phases, or “dispensations”. History would end with a seven-year tribulation, followed by Armageddon and the millennial reign of Christ, all of which were imminent.

Darby’s influence in Britain has been limited by the sectarianism of his followers, the Exclusive Brethren. In America, however, his scheme is astonishingly popular among evangelical Christians. It is closely identified with the doctrine of Rapture. In the Rapture, the elect will literally be lifted up before Christ’s return, and thereby be spared the tribulation.

Rapturists expend great ingenuity in deriving the chronology of the end of the world. One recent effort perceives divine significance in the number 14,000; the End is therefore predicted for October 4, 2005, or 14,000 days after Israel’s capture of the Old City of Jerusalem in the Six-Day War.

Popular culture has been thoroughly imbued with the Rapture. The vehicle for this is a bestselling series of novels called Left Behind, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. To call the novels didactic would be like calling The Ring cycle long. Wooden in structure and nugatory in characterisation, their sole purpose is to dramatise what will happen in an electronic age when the saved are lifted heavenward, there to observe the seven years of torment visited upon those left behind.

Those who believe that all affairs of state will shortly come to an end are, for obvious reasons, inclined to political quietism. But there is one aspect of Rapturism that is potentially significant. Darby believed that the prophetic plan had been disrupted by the Jews’ rejection of Christ. Likewise, today’s Rapturists maintain that the Jews’ return to the Promised Land is essential to the fulfilment of God’s will, and that the modern state of Israel is a sign of Christ’s return. The usually tacit, but sometimes overt, message is that the Jews are wrong and must convert.

Rapturists thus count among the strongest supporters of Israel, while holding to a theology that undermines Israel's entire raison d’être. Israeli politicians, being pragmatists, tend not to worry too much about this, or at least not publicly. As one who values Israel precisely because it represents liberal, secular Enlightenment principles in a region where they are scarce, I hope that the politicians are right.