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Yesterday’s ruling by the US Supreme Court that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional, discriminating against gay couples, is a most welcome one indeed. Andrew Sullivan has some pertinent observations about it here. As someone who has been highlighting the feebleness of arguments against gay marriage regularly since 2005, I suppose I should have expected an extreme response to the Supreme Court’s decision in some quarters. But I must say I’m rather surprised by one element of the reaction to it contained in Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion. As is said here, Scalia ‘deploys the cries of victimhood’. He does so, in particular, in the following paragraph:

But to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution. In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to “disparage,” “injure,” “degrade,” “demean,” and “humiliate” our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homosexual. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence – indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race.

First of all, it is not only the purpose of the statute but the effect of it that matters, but let that pass. Not everyone will be familiar with the full legal resonance of the phrase hostes humani generis (enemies of the human race), though Justice Scalia himself ought to be. In international law, having been applied initially to those guilty of the crime of piracy, it later came to be extended to those involved in the slave trade, and in due course to individuals responsible for crimes against humanity more generally. So, whether wittingly or not, Scalia is taking on by association here the victimhood burden of a charge of that gravity – that he and the others in the minority on the Court are being treated as if they were criminals against humanity. Which would be severe on them if it were true, but it isn’t.

I think I’ve found it: the worst book I’ve ever read. (I’m only talking about novels here, by the way.) In general, there are books one likes or loves, others one dislikes, and then many that are ranged across the space in between; but a single best-loved book or a single least-liked – those are harder to fix on. My own best? Maybe Anna Karenina or Crime and Punishment or Jane Eyre or Emma. To settle for just one is a challenge.

Yet I now have just one most detested novel. The odd thing is that it’s by a writer I really like: Tom Franklin. He’s the author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which I recommended here. Because I liked it so much, I went on to read Franklin’s Hell at the Breech and his collection of stories Poachers; the latter has behind it the word of Philip Roth, no less, but anyway I was disappointed by neither.

Then, however, I read Smonk. Far be it from me to be too categorical about this, but Smonk is a relentless catalogue – and by ‘relentless’ I mean page by page by page – of graphic violence, incest, murder, rape, cruelty, faecal episodes of one kind and another, one’s guy’s glass eye carried around in someone else’s mouth, and on and on and on. Normally I would have abandoned a book I was disliking so much, but I had to see if it added up to something that made this all worthwhile. It doesn’t. It’s the vilest book I’ve read.

I have learned from the publishers of Contemporary Politics, in which my paper on Jerry Cohen’s camping-trip argument appears, that the paper can now be freely accessed for a period. I have put the link under ‘Garage’ on my sidebar at ‘Socialism like a camping trip?’

I can’t imagine what has come over Matthew Parris, a journalist I generally enjoy reading. After a visit to the grave of Cecil John Rhodes (a place I know well, incidentally, its location in the Matopos – as was – being not far from the several sites of picnics taken by my family when I was a boy), Parris indulges the conceit that in due course Robert Mugabe might come to be buried next to Rhodes (£):

When the time comes, even as a sort-of white Rhodesian, I should like to see Mugabe’s memorial alongside Rhodes in that sacred place. I know the President is from the Mashona people, historic foes of the Matabele. I know Rhodes did many cruel things, dispossessed and killed many people and cheated Chief Lobengula unforgivably. But still, for his restless and unbounded energy, for his vast achievements and for his almost limitless vision, I would call Rhodes’s a great life.

Exit half my readers. Now to alienate the other half. I know Robert Mugabe has made some terrible mistakes, brought his country for a while close to ruin and been associated with the murder of many Matabele people. But still, for his tremendous ambition, his long fight against overwhelming odds, and his deliverance of his people from submission to another race, he deserves the name of both warrior and leader, and I would call his a great life.

Great men may do brutal things. History is shaped by complicated people, their greatness seldom uncompromised, their nobility tangled with infamy, their wisdom with folly. For good or ill and usually both, they stamp indelibly their age and their country, and we can respect without always approving. I should one day like to see Cecil John Rhodes and Robert Gabriel Mugabe side by side in that awesome place.

In Rhodes’s case, the man is beyond the reach of justice, and one may, I suppose, form whatever view one wants of his stature and his life. Mugabe, however, is still with us, and some of the things he has presided over were not just ‘mistakes’. In the Gukurahundi in the early 1980s Zimbabwe’s North-Korean-trained Fifth Brigade massacred some 20,000 civilians. That is a plain crime against humanity and even if one does think, as Parris appears to, that Mugabe is a ‘great man’, it is no longer legally permitted to great men to ‘do brutal things’ on such a scale. Then, more recently, there’s the open violence, as well as various other electoral malpractices, used by Mugabe’s supporters to maintain Mugabe and ZANU-PF in power.

I find it one-sided, to put it no more strongly, that Parris should be wondering about how to honour this man on his death, without any complementary reflection on whether he shouldn’t first be made to stand up in some court somewhere for his crimes.

My goodness, I did enjoy this. You might too:

“Stupid, stupid. Americans are stupid. America is stupid. A stupid, stupid country made stupid by stupid, stupid people.” I particularly remember that because of the nine stupids. It was said over a dinner table by a professional woman, a clever, clever, clever woman. Hardback-educated, bespokely traveled, liberally humane, worked in the arts. I can’t remember specifically why she said it, what evidence of New World idiocy triggered the trope. Nor do I remember what the reaction was, but I don’t need to remember. It would have been a nodded and muttered agreement. Even from me. I’ve heard this cock crow so often I don’t even feel guilt for not wringing its neck.

Among the educated, enlightened, expensive middle classes of Europe, this is a received wisdom. A given. Stronger in some countries like France, less so somewhere like Germany, but overall the Old World patronizes America for being a big, dumb, fat, belligerent child. The intellectuals, the movers and the makers and the creators, the dinner-party establishments of people who count, are united in the belief – no, the knowledge – that Americans are stupid, crass, ignorant, soul-less, naïve oafs without attention, irony, or intellect. These same people will use every comforting, clever, and ingenious American invention, will demand America’s medicine, wear its clothes, eat its food, drink its drink, go to its cinema, love its music, thank God for its expertise in a hundred disciplines, and will all adore New York. More than that, more shaming and hypocritical than that, these are people who collectively owe their nations’ and their personal freedom to American intervention and protection in wars, both hot and cold. Who, whether they credit it or not, also owe their concepts of freedom, equality, and civil rights in no small part to America. Of course, they will also sign collective letters accusing America of being a Fascist, totalitarian, racist state.

Enough. Enough, enough, enough of this convivial rant, this collectively confirming bigotry. The nasty laugh of little togetherness, or Euro-liberal insecurity. It’s embarrassing, infectious, and belittling. Look at that European snapshot of America. It is so unlike the country I have known for 30 years. Not just a caricature but a travesty, an invention. Even on the most cursory observation, the intellectual European view of the New World is a homemade, Old World effigy that suits some internal purpose. The belittling, the discounting, the mocking of Americans is not about them at all. It’s about us, back here on the ancient, classical, civilized Continent. Well, how stupid can America actually be? On the international list of the world’s best universities, 14 of the top 20 are American. Four are British. Of the top 100, only 4 are French, and Heidelberg is one of 4 that creeps in for the Germans. America has won 338 Nobel Prizes. The U.K., 119. France, 59. America has more Nobel Prizes than Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia combined. Of course, Nobel Prizes aren’t everything, and America’s aren’t all for inventing Prozac or refining oil. It has 22 Peace Prizes, 12 for literature. (T. S. Eliot is shared with the Brits.)

And are Americans emotionally dim, naïve, irony-free? Do you imagine the society that produced Dorothy Parker and Lenny Bruce doesn’t understand irony? It was an American who said that political satire died when they awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger. It’s not irony that America lacks; it’s cynicism. In Europe, that arid sneer out of which nothing is grown or made is often mistaken for the creative scalpel of irony.

This is A.A. Gill on ‘America the Marvelous‘ – and there’s more. I particularly commend to your attention the anecdote involving Salman Rushdie in the third-last paragraph. It’s a beauty; it drives home the point in the best way possible.

Two excerpts from a long piece by Robert Worth in the New York Times on the sectarian dynamic unfolding in that country powerfully convey it:

[T]here is another reason for the unpolished face of the Syrian rebellion, a crueler one. One night in Damascus, I met a 33-year-old computer programmer named Amir who had been part of the nonviolent protest movement from the beginning. “We started the protests with three principles: nonviolence, no foreign interference and no sectarianism,” Amir said in English as we strolled in the cool night air. “The regime targeted the protesters until they were forced to abandon all three of them.”

I asked if he was still active in the rebellion. “They put me in prison for two days,” he said. “I was not tortured, no one even said a bad word to me. But for me it was – ” He stumbled for words, then turned toward me. “You know how Dante went to hell and was allowed to return? This cell was 10 meters square, with 152 people in it. It was two stories underground. There is no air, you feel constantly that you will choke. They had an undeclared system: for the first week, you stand, all day and all night. Then you get to lean against the wall for a few days. Then you get to sit. When you are standing, you are terrified to fall asleep, because you may never get up. Some people were there for only a few hours, some for days or weeks, and some had been tortured in ways I never imagined. For food, you get a bit of bread and some water, but that does not matter. You get about 30 seconds, once a day, in the bathroom, but trust me, you are not even worried about that. Because there are people in there who are literally asking for death.” He stopped talking, and after a pause, I asked him why he had been arrested.

“I lit a candle at a funeral vigil,” he said.

And:

Amer Ali had gathered them to tell their stories of relatives or spouses lost to the war. I listened to them, one by one. They were working-class people: soldiers, construction workers, police officers. All were Alawites, as far as I could tell. Some were probably shabiha, though none of them would have used that word. One of them, a middle-aged construction worker named Adib Sulayman, pulled out his cellphone and showed me the message he received after his son Yamin was kidnapped by rebels: “We have executed God’s will and killed your son. If you are still fighting with Bashar, we will come to your houses and cut you into pieces. Never fight against us.”

A 20-year-old man who had been shot twice in the head and had lost some of his memory and half his hearing told me he would go back to the front as soon as his wounds healed. His father stared at me and said: “I would be proud to have my son become a martyr. I am in my 50s, but I am ready to sacrifice my life, too. They thought we would be weak in this crisis, but we are strong.”

After lunch, Aliaa’s uncle showed me around the house. On the wall was a Sword of Ali, an important symbol for Alawites, with verses engraved on the blade. There were old farming tools, a stick for catching snakes, hunting knives and a century-old carbine – a kind of visual history of the Alawite people. There were ancient Phoenician amphorae and a framed photograph of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.

Later, Amer Ali led me to the roof, where we gazed out at the town where his family has lived for hundreds of years. The hills were lovely in the golden afternoon sunlight. You could see an ancient spring with a stone arch over it, and a mosque that was built by one of his ancestors 240 years ago. Aliaa stood next to me on the terrace, looking out at the town with an expression of rapturous pride. I asked her how it made her feel to know that Western human rights groups had documented repeated atrocities by the Syrian regime – some, perhaps, by people like the ones we had just talked to. Aliaa glanced downward. “Yes, there have been atrocities,” she said. “You can never deny that there have been atrocities. But you have to ask yourself: What will happen if Bashar falls? That’s why I believe victory is the only option. If Bashar falls, Syria falls. And then we, here, will all be in the niqab” – the full veil worn in conservative Muslim societies – “or we will be dead.”

(Via Jeff.)

As well as being a poet, Sophie Hannah is now well known as a writer of crime fiction. Her books featuring Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer have become a regular feature of the publishing year. Sophie – or Soph, as she is known in these parts – has lately added a different sort of book to her repertoire; with The Orphan Choir she has tried her hand at a ghost story. The book is reviewed here by Daneet Steffens:

The Orphan Choir is her first foray into ghost-story territory, and gradually, almost imperceptively, it sneaks into that chilling arena, a creepy, tension-filled surprise. Part of a line of horror novellas produced by the Hammer/Arrow Books partnership, The Orphan Choir reveals a new aspect to Hannah’s writing: she has proven her innovative skills in the form of psychological suspense multiple times; turns out she’s no slouch when it comes to conjuring up ghostly presences either.

You can find this question discussed in an article in The Atlantic by Karen Swallow Prior, professor of English at Liberty University. In fact, it isn’t entirely clear whether Prior is arguing that reading – and this means reading good literature – just makes us human, or that it makes us more human. But, in any case, discussed along the way is also the question of whether reading makes us better people morally, more able to connect to others, to feel empathy, and so on.

I am a big fan of reading and wouldn’t want to appear to be casting doubt on its many potential benefits. But both of the above claims should be treated with extreme caution.

(1) Whether or not it is true as a general thesis that reading makes people morally better I have no idea. It may be the case statistically, for all I know, that avid and careful readers of good or great fiction become better people on the whole than they would otherwise be if they were not readers. But this isn’t the same thing as the claim that readers are invariably better people than non-readers are. We know from ordinary experience that that isn’t true, since there are plenty of people who don’t do much reading and are kind, helpful, compassionate and possessed of many other ordinary virtues, while at the same time there are some very well-read selfish bastards or worse than selfish bastards.

(2) The thesis that reading makes us either human or more human – because it is ‘the most spiritual of all human activities’ – is more dubious still. What is one to say, then, about people who can’t read or can read but don’t? That they aren’t human, or aren’t fully human, or aren’t as human as (we) readers are? It isn’t a good way of talking. One method of defining human nature is – more or less empirically – as constituted by those characteristics which human beings share in common. On this basis, reading good fiction can’t be one of the constituents of human nature, given how many members of the human species haven’t read Proust, Tolstoy, F. Scott Fitzgerald or whoever else it might be.

A conception of human nature can, on the other hand, be an openly normative one, containing an ideal of how to live well. As part of such a conception one might commend reading as making us human or more human. But it is important to note, then, that this is precisely an ideal, held by some people and not by others. It doesn’t oblige anybody. For my own part, I think the locution is regrettable that suggests that non-readers aren’t as human as readers.

After England’s defeat yesterday at the hands of India for the ICC Champions Trophy, the Times reports (£) Alastair Cook as saying:

It is a tough pill to swallow… We are a bit devastated. We got close and from the position we got ourselves into we would back ourselves to win more times tha[n] we lose. As a batting unit we will be looking at ourselves.

I don’t think you can be a bit devastated, since ‘devastated’ in its very nature is more ‘a lot’ than ‘a bit’ sort of thing. But my question to those who know is: is there a name for this particular linguistic combination?

Gary Younge considers the charge of critics that Barack Obama is now worse than George W Bush. My interest in Younge’s handling of the question is not the comparison as such but what it shows about his conception of political representation and the nature of the democratic state. On the charge itself Younge says that it is ‘not unreasonable’ but that it ‘also misses the point’. Why it misses the point is:

It should go without saying that Obama the individual is responsible for all that he says and does. It should also go without saying that once he ascends to the Oval office he is no longer simply talking for himself, but, as commander-in-chief, for the state of which he is the head.

Just as one head of a chamber of commerce may be more or less hostile than another to the labor movement, but is ultimately charged with representing the interests of the business community, so Obama’s room for maneuver is constrained by the institutions in which he is now embedded.

A fairly routine observation about structure and agency perhaps: as an individual Obama is responsible for his choices, but these choices are limited by the institutional context, and in this particular case the institutional context makes him an agent of the US state. Notice, however, that in saying this, Younge also seems to be saying that in that role the president speaks for a state with interests distinct from those of the people who elected him. Younge also quotes himself as having said before:

He [Obama] has been elected to represent the interests of the most powerful country in the world. Those will not be the same interests as those of the powerless.

But then it turns out, again, that Obama’s role isn’t the role of a complete captive to the institution – the US state – by which he is constrained. For:

None of this is inevitable. But changing it cannot be entrusted to a single person at the top. It will change because there is a demand from Americans that is both large in number [sic], deep in commitment and active in pursuit, to enable a fundamental change in America’s role in the world.

In Younge’s vision, in other words, the US state appears in two different guises. According to one, it is the guardian of the interests of the powerful; according to the other, it could be a vehicle for the popular demands of the American electorate. Instrument of capital or framework for expressing the democratic will? Younge isn’t too sure. But he concludes in any case with a final twist:

When given the choice of representing the interests of those who voted for him and the interests of American military and economic hegemony, he chose the latter.

Well, well, well – Obama could have freed himself from the constraints by which Younge earlier said he was bound, and there is already a popular will among the voters for what Younge thinks ought to be happening.

You will find, as it so happens, some similar material in a column today by John Harris. Cutting this one shorter, I will just say that the modern liberal-democratic state is presented by Harris in the guise of an instrument of capital. He speaks of ‘closed networks of power that tie together corporations and government’, and says that ‘[p]ower… is ever more vertical, sealed off from daily life, and guarded by hardened cliques’. He disparages ‘a worldview little changed since the early 20th century, whereby the top-down state can supposedly be captured, and used to tame an inhuman market.’

Yet we know, according to Harris, from the protest movements around the world, that there is – already – a popular will in favour of progressive change. How we can know this accurately when the existing democracies are not what they seem but closed circles of power, and Harris offers for his part no other index of the state of democratic opinion, is a mystery to me. Anyway:

It is in the nature of protests that people are impatient for change. But all this is so huge that it will take decades to work itself out.

I’d say he was probably on to something with ‘decades’, but the old, old question returns in Harris’s case as it does in Younge’s. How come these guys just know, in advance of any reliable democratic expression of it, what the popular will really is? Have they ever thought to ask themselves why their own version of a progressive politics cannot secure large voting majorities, or indeed majorities of any kind? They should develop the humility to understand that until people are persuaded of what they (the critics of power) would favour, they (the critics of power) have no basis for assuming that deep down people at large think politically just like they themselves do.