Category: Uncategorized

This is from an advance version of the ‘Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’ on the conflict in Gaza last November. The paragraphs I excerpt are the report’s summary findings [pdf]:

47. The IDF, the DFA and Palestinian armed groups, in relation to numerous incidents that took place during the crisis as described above, failed in many instances to respect international law. In some cases, more information would be required to make a more specific assessment. Based on the information available to OHCHR, the IDF did not consistently uphold the basic principles of conduct of hostilities, namely, the principles [of] distinction, proportionality and precautions. Further, the effectiveness, sufficiency and adequacy of precautions taken remains questionable in several cases.

48. Palestinian armed groups continuously violated international humanitarian law, by launching indiscriminate attacks on Israel and by attacking civilians, thereby disregarding the principle of distinction. The armed groups failed to take all feasible precautions in attacks, in particular by launching rockets from populated areas, which put the population at grave risk. Furthermore, several Palestinians were killed by rockets launched by the armed groups that fell short and landed in the Gaza Strip. In addition, seven alleged collaborators held in DFA detention facilities were summarily executed, constituting a violation of their right to life and of international humanitarian law.

Whether or not these paragraphs are an attempt to show the two sides as on all fours in failing to respect international law I do not know. There is a notable difference, however. With respect to the IDF, it is: ‘did not consistently uphold’ and the adequacy of its precautions ‘remains questionable’. For the Palestinian armed groups, on the other hand, there is both more consistency and less questionableness; here the findings are – just head-on – ‘continuously violated international humanitarian law’, ‘indiscriminate attacks’ targeting civilians, ‘launching rockets from populated areas’, and summary executions.

This is definitely going to shock Hamas’s Western supporters: out-and-out criminality, who knew? Or, then again, perhaps not. As I have observed before, Hamas has a different terminology for describing war crimes and crimes against humanity. They call them resistance, and doubtless so do their ‘humanitarian’ supporters.

While I’m in that area: I don’t know if there’s anyone left on the left who still has a soft spot for the Chinese regime – well, let’s forget about Martin Jacques for the moment, shall we? – but here’s a brief glimpse, courtesy of the Economist [free registration] of how things can be for people in China:

As a rule, the Majialou Relief and Assistance Centre [in Beijing] offers neither relief nor assistance. An imposing complex of red seven-storey buildings, it stands next to an expanse of rubble and a few derelict houses on the south-western fringe of the capital. Few visit unless escorted by police. Few leave except in the custody of officials or their hired thugs. It is a clearing house for Beijing’s undesirables.

Majialou and another nearby centre, Jiujingzhuang, are at the hub of a network of extra-judicial detention facilities, authorised by the central government. Their aim is to keep the capital free of “petitioners” who come to Beijing to protest. The city also has many informal detention centres, known as “black jails”, run illegally at the behest of local governments, but to which the central government usually turns a blind eye. The network has been accused of dealing with the symptoms of anger in the provinces rather than its causes.

Tens of thousands of people arrive in Beijing every year to petition the central government, seeking redress for local injustices ranging from land seizures to police brutality. In the capital they are often detained by police and beaten. Once back in their hometowns some are sent without trial to labour camps as a warning not to try again.

Optimists, however, see signs that the central government is waking up to their plight. On February 5th a court in Beijing sentenced ten people to prison terms of up to two years for running a black jail. They had taken a group of petitioners, who had arrived in Beijing last April from the central province of Henan, from Jiujingzhuang relief centre to two black jails on the city’s edge. China Youth News, a Beijing newspaper, reported that some of the protesters were driven back to their hometown a day later. But they soon returned to Beijing where they told the police, who (remarkably) helped secure the release of the others. The sentences were not the first handed down to black jailers. But the unusual publicity the state-owned media gave to the case suggested a new determination by the central government to clamp down on the flourishing business.

Even if leaders are intent on a crack down, progress is likely to be slow. Black jails serve the interests of every level of government. Central officials want to keep complainants from coming to the capital and possibly forming a large and dangerous protest movement. The career prospects of lower-level leaders can be ruined by the appearance in Beijing of petitioners from their localities.

What a depressing kind of optimism: on the one hand, the central government may try to curb this black jail stuff; on the other hand, it’s not in their interests to move too fast. Thousands detained, beaten, sent to labour camps… but ‘the Chinese state enjoys greater legitimacy than any Western state’.

In the months before he died I had begun to wonder whether the enthusiasm within the international left for the hero of Camden might have begun to subside. The reaction to his death has certainly disabused me of that notion. The enthusiasm seems to have been as strong as ever right until the end. In the circumstances, I draw your attention to a column by James Bloodworth for the important argument encapsulated in its title: ‘These eulogies for Chavez give the Left a bad name’. Don’t they just! James writes:

During the Cold War, the old argument we on the Left used to confront was that while the Communist regimes in the East had achieved a degree of social equality, they had done so with a heavy price attached – the loss of the most basic freedoms. Honest Western Communists would admit as much, and would say that they really viewed things like freedom of the press and the right to strike as a bourgeois irrelevance to the workers of Russia and Eastern Europe. Much more important to the toilers of the East was the fulfilment of material equality and the alleviation of extreme poverty.

Today’s version of this sinister argument is phrased differently but its implications are not much better. How dare we in the West lecture those on a dollar or two a day about human rights? People in faraway lands are not worried about things like freedom of speech and the right to vote; they simply want food on the table, so the argument goes.

Yet even a short stay in Raul Castro’s Cuba – Hugo Chavez’s closest political ally and one of the few remaining states that still follows the failed model of state Socialism Chavez hoped to emulate – refutes the fallacy of redistribution without liberty. On that beleaguered island (which I have visited half a dozen times, before you ask), corruption is endemic and double-think is a way of life…
…..
Under Chavez’s rule in Venezuela, it is true, as his Western fans enjoy repeating, that wealth was redistributed and the living standards of the poorest were raised to an extent previously unknown. But that came at the cost of an emaciated judiciary, a terrified press and a compliant trade union movement. If there is anything Socialists should have learnt from the 20th century, it is this: leaders who promise prosperity at the expense of freedom rarely deliver either.

The apologists’ theme that has popped up round and about over the last few days is that regrettable as were some of Chavez’s anti-democratic misdemeanours, those of others have been as bad or worse. Why should anyone on the left be commending a leader on the grounds that there are equally bad or worse examples than his? What about a leader of the left who would be a better example? And a thoroughgoing democrat? The eulogies for Chavez in face of his evident shortcomings as a democrat are further testimony to the persistent failing of that part of the left that still hasn’t learned from its own past: the failing of treating equality and/or anti-capitalism as more important than democratic rights and liberties. Fortunately, this part of the left isn’t the whole of it. But what James says is true: they give the left a bad name.

I first got to know the song in a version by Hugh Masekela. This one by Dorothy Masuka, who wrote it, is wonderful.

You can also find it on YouTube as done by Masekela, but the must-have version is the one on his album Live at the Market Theatre (a great album quite apart from that). It has lifted my spirits and would lift anybody’s. There’s a Bulawayo–Manchester connection here but that’s altogether incidental.

Today being World Book Day but the world being a very big place indeed, I shall endeavour to shrink the focus somewhat by linking to an interview in the Irish Times with one writer – she being Sophie Hannah:

In a sense, she embodies the apparent contradiction of a poet who also writes bestselling psychological thrillers. Friendly and bubbly before we sit down in the crypt-like surroundings of the Merrion Hotel’s vaults to talk about her current novel, The Carrier, she is icily precise in her diction and choice of words once the interview begins. It’s a matter of respect for the tools of her trade.

I’m not sure about ‘icily’ but ‘precise’ is precise, as is ‘bubbly’. More here.

It is a common state of affairs for issues occasioning political disagreement to involve more than one moral value. It is also common for two parties to a political disagreement to share an attachment to some of the values involved but to come down on opposite sides. This could be because they assign different weights to the relevant values, or because they have made different assessments of the consequences of giving one or other value priority, or because of other differences of judgement between them about the real world. Reasoning about values and their political implications in given circumstances can be a messy business.

One area of disagreement which fits the picture rapidly sketched above is that concerning the wearing by women of the burqa (or other face or head coverings) and whether or not this should be forbidden by law. There is a constituency of left-liberal opinion for which (a) the burqa is an oppressive cultural artefact inimical to the interests of women, but which (b) is concerned at the same time about the rights of individuals to do as they please uncoerced by others, including the state, so long as they are not harming anyone else. Some within this broad constituency favour a legal ban since, of the two considerations, they see (a) as decisive to the case; whereas others within the same constituency oppose a legal ban since they see (b) as decisive to the case.

Unrepentant Jacobin – or, as I shall call him for short in what fellows, UJ – is of the first group; I am of the second. In a long post last week UJ set out an argument for the view he supports, making some criticisms of Nick Cohen, Kenan Malik and me along the way. Nick and Kenan are more than capable of looking after themselves, and so I won’t be attempting to speak for either of them here. What I go on to say is strictly on my own behalf.

Since I have written much on this topic, I don’t feel the need either to review all the arguments again or to say in detail why I disagree with UJ. Those interested may like to follow some of the links I shall now give to earlier normblog posts on this and related questions, or they may not. Here in any case are 54 such links:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54.

I cannot guarantee that that’s everything, but I’m pretty sure it’s most of it: posts directly on the question of banning the burqa; other posts relating to the issue more tangentially (being about religious freedom or the right to affirm one’s identity through what one wears, etc); yet others drawing attention to and/or excerpting expressions of opinion that I broadly endorsed at the time.

In responding to UJ on this occasion, I shall limit myself to two exercises: first, I note a weak point in the way he makes his case, and I emphasize in doing so a contrasting feature of my own view; I then defend myself against an imputation to me, by UJ, for which there is no basis.

(1) On some level UJ is certainly aware of the competing considerations – (a) and (b) – that I have set out above. For while the oppressiveness of the burqa for many Muslim women is at the centre of his case, he clearly also knows that for some women wearing the burqa is a choice they make uncoerced by others. I say he knows this, because it slips out, so to say between the lines, that he must do. Thus, for example, when he says that ‘some Muslim women [my emphasis] are being coerced’ in spite of laws protecting the citizens of a democracy against coercion, that’s a plain acknowledgement that not all of them are being coerced, since if they were it would strengthen his case and he would therefore say ‘all’. Equally, in quoting Ophelia Benson to the effect that she chooses to help women and girls who don’t want to wear the burqa but are forced to, rather than women and girls who do want to wear it, UJ registers Ophelia’s recognition that the latter category is not an empty one, and I believe it is a fair inference from his not dissenting from Ophelia on this point that he knows what she says to be true.

And yet in the broad lines of his advocacy for a legal ban on the burqa, this awareness of UJ’s gets lost. It is lost in the opposition he repeatedly sets up between two different sources of coercion: that of the state, on the one hand, and that of religious forces or ethnic communities imposing on Muslim women the necessity to hide themselves and their faces from view, on the other. The following excerpts from UJ’s post reflect the simple opposition I’m talking about:

The confinement of the niqab to women – and only women – in austere Salafist sects is persuasive evidence, not of free and independent choice, but of conformity to the untestable demands of misogynistic – and invariably male – religious and cultural authorities.
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For Muslims in this situation, dress codes are not remotely a matter of free choice, but of conditioning and enforcement by families, communities and religious leaders.
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The decision to adopt the niqab is not so much a matter of exercising free choice as renouncing it.
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[Geras accepts] that the debate over the burqa ban is a straightforward quarrel between the State and the freedom-loving individual. It is in fact a quarrel between the secular State and an Islamist ideology that seeks to usurp its authority.

Naturally, once the issue is presented in this way – a straight choice between, on one side, the authority and law of (roughly) secular governments in protecting women from male oppression and, on the other, the authority of male-dominated sects and communities confining women in ways that men aren’t confined – then most members of the humanist, secular-minded, Enlightenment-valuing liberal left (including me) are going to choose the way UJ does. But only because a whole dimension of the problem has now been pressed to the margins and out of sight. This is, however, not just a matter of authority against authority, democratic law against theocratic male dominance. You cannot omit from the picture that there are Muslim women who want to wear the burqa and that a legal ban on their doing so would therefore restrict their liberty. If you do omit this from the picture, you make life easier for yourself in presenting the case for a ban, but your picture is no longer accurate, because it is one, too simply, of force versus force. The whole aspect of state interference with individual liberty has been obscured.

The contrast I want to note between UJ’s way of arguing his case and my way of arguing mine is this. Despite his suggestion that I see the burqa issue as ‘a straightforward quarrel between the State and the freedom-loving individual’, I don’t. In fact, in several of those 54 posts that directly or indirectly deal with the question, I make explicit my awareness of the fact that there is undue coercion and pressure upon Muslim women in this matter. Readers who care to verify that for themselves can click through the links above at 4, 19, 24, 28, 35, 38 and 40. For me this debate is not simply one about the laws of the state versus the liberty of the individual. It is about this, but it is about it as well. No doubt my viewpoint has its limitations; most viewpoints on difficult questions do. But I have tried not to simplify the issue by representing the choices of Muslim women about what they wear as simply uncoerced, never made under duress. It would be just as wrong to do that as it is wrong to suggest that a burqa ban is merely a choice between two different types of authority over the individual and to elide the dimension of legal curbs on individual freedom.

What is more, by acknowledging that there is coercion and duress exercised against Muslim women regarding how they dress I indicate my awareness that opposing a legal ban is not without its costs or (put differently) that leaving women free to wear the burqa, or not, is not an unmixed blessing.

(2) This is where UJ’s imputation to me, of opinions I do not hold, comes in. For he ascribes to me a view according to which the burqa is not to be judged too harshly. The evidence for this? I don’t know. He quotes me, accurately, as saying (see link 36 above), ‘I have no quarrel with the claim that the ideology in question diminishes women and the interests of women’, but styles this as my ‘politely allow[ing]’ what Mona Eltahawy contends; and he goes on to discern a reluctance on my part ‘to acknowledge that the burqa causes anyone any suffering at all’. With reference to Nick Cohen and Kenan Malik as well as to me, UJ also says that ‘Moral judgment [on the issue] ends up, if not suspended entirely, then reduced to throat-clearing’; and he adds further, ‘It is, after all, difficult to criticise the burqa too vehemently without fortifying the case for the State ban.’ But, so far as this concerns me, he is askew here on every count.

First, when I say I have no quarrel with the claim that the ideology in question diminishes women and the interests of women, I mean that I have no quarrel with it – because I believe that that is what it does. I’m not obliged to be either impolite or raucous about this. Making the point briefly and quietly is also OK.

Second, as for throat-clearing, the suggestion would have some bite if UJ could produce evidence of ambivalence on my part about the burqa – some sentiment of approval towards it. I doubt he can. He simply confuses an argument in favour of someone’s having a freedom to do something, on the one hand, with an attitude of approval or indulgence towards their doing it, on the other. But there are plenty of freedoms one supports while knowing that bad uses may be made of them; it is indeed part and parcel of support for individal liberty.

And what is my real attitude in this matter? Well, let’s see.

Apart from saying, at 36, that I have no quarrel with the claim that the ideology in question diminishes women and the interests of women, at 8 and 12 I cite reports from, respectively, Iraq and Afghanistan of intimidation of female students for failing to wear the hijab, and public punishments of women for wearing burqas that were too short. I give these as examples of (not to put too fine a point on it) badness. At 9 I acknowledge an observation of Mick Hartley’s that being veiled is ‘an affront to an unspoken understanding that in public places, where people interact, you should be able to read their faces’; and at 10 I say that there are benefits to be derived from Muslim women not wearing the veil, among them the promotion of gender equality. At 23 I take issue with Gabriella Coslovich for failing to consider how far the decisions of women in Muslim countries about what to wear are imposed on them. At 26 I quote from a Times leader, as follows: ‘The fourth paragraph says – rightly – that the burka is a symbol of female subservience and runs counter to other crucial values: “openness, transparency, equality and opportunity”.’ I didn’t italicize ‘rightly’ there, but you may consider it italicized now. I then quote these words from the same leader, ‘civic education and religious debate… are the best way to consign to the dark ages this symbol of darkness’, and I add for my own part, ‘Exactly so’. At 29 I say that showing an open face in the company of others is a good cultural norm, and at 43, in a generally supportive link to a post of his, I quote Kenan Malik saying: ‘There is certainly something medieval about the burqa and the niqab. The idea that in the 21st century women should be hidden from view for reasons of modesty or religious belief is both troubling and astonishing.’ At 47 I say on my own behalf, ‘I have no love for the burqa or what it does for either women or social interaction.’ At 48 I express my opposition to religious dress codes being mandatory at a public venue. For good measure, at 7 and 13 I give excerpts from columns by the late Pamela Bone that are not friendly to the burqa and the veil. Is that enough? I reject the suggestion that it constitutes mere throat-clearing.

Third, and finally, I also don’t accept UJ’s contention that forthright criticism of the burqa would be difficult ‘without fortifying the case for the State ban’. To repeat a point: you can defend a person’s freedom to engage in activities which you oppose. To offer a pertinent analogy: I regard Holocaust-denial as one of the more hateful forms of contemporary anti-Semitism, but I am against a legal ban on it. I would have no difficulty whatever in spelling out why it is a loathsome practice, but if I’m writing a short blogpost explaining my reasons for being against its legal proscription, the emphasis will more likely fall on those reasons. This is also about my own practices as a blogger, if I may say so. I don’t feel any obligation, or even temptation, to try to say everything in a single blogpost. I especially don’t feel it necessary to repeat something I’ve already said when I’m blogging a second, ninth or thirty-third time about a given topic. I’m happy for my view to be assessed over the relevant series of posts.

So, in conclusion: UJ is Unrepentant as a Jacobin; and on the burqa I, too, am unrepentant. I am grateful to him, all the same, for the space he thought it worth devoting to my views.

Dr David Grylls is a University Lecturer in Literature at Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education, and Director of Studies of the Department’s literature and creative writing programmes. He is also the Director of the Oxford/Duke Summer School, a six-week programme for undergraduates from Duke University in Durham, NC, held annually at New College, Oxford. In addition to numerous articles in academic and popular journals, he is the author of Guardians and Angels: Parents and Children in Nineteenth-Century Literature, The Paradox of Gissing, and What the Dickens: A Guide to Martin Chuzzlewit and Hard Times – the last written to accompany two television serializations. David regularly reviews new fiction for The Sunday Times, for which he has co-authored The Sunday Times/Faber Literary Quiz. In this post, he discusses Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.

David Grylls on The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

First published in book form in 1860, The Woman in White is normally regarded as the first mystery and suspense novel in English. Serialized in Dickens’s All the Year Round, it created a sensation, and in fact gave rise to a new sub-genre – the Sensation Novel. Applauded, denounced and parodied, the book became a best-seller, and soon there were Woman in White cloaks and bonnets, Woman in White waltzes and quadrilles. At the core of the novel’s plot – which Collins took from an old case-book of French crimes – is the story of how a wealthy heiress is captured, drugged and incarcerated in an asylum, her property stolen, her identity erased. Around this core Collins builds a sinister structure that might, at first sight, seem purely melodramatic, a heap of clichés from Gothic fiction. The novel overflows with mislaid letters, midnight meetings and portentous dreams. It contains domestic spies and murderous foreign agents, a gloomy mansion with hidden apartments, a Secret with a capital ‘S’. Above all, it enacts a clash between Good and Evil, as the virtuous young drawing-master Walter Hartright – locked in combat with the formidable Count Fosco, a veritable Napoleon of Crime – struggles to restore the heroine’s identity.

Pure hokum, potentially – yet in Collins’s hands these stale ingredients are subtly transformed. For a start, the traditional Gothic elements are lifted from their exotic locations (castles in the Apennines, ruined cities in Arabia) to a solid, respectable, middle-class England teeming with contemporary detail. The Sensation Novel specialized, as Henry James put it, in ‘the mysteries… at our own doors’, mysteries ‘infinitely the more terrible’. In placid country houses and crowded streets, nameless terrors assail the protagonists. Hartright finds himself employing jungle stratagems ‘in the heart of civilized London!’

Nor, on inspection, do the exponents of good and evil turn out to be mere stereotypes. It gets difficult, in fact, to be quite sure what good and evil are. The book’s greatest character, Count Fosco, is both ruthlessly evil and irresistibly attractive. Immensely fat, with a smooth face and mellifluous voice, he is nearly sixty but moves like a cat, and can subdue any animal at a glance. Any human too, apparently: his wife invariably quails before him despite his caressing manner. Among creatures he has tamed are a vicious-looking cockatoo which ‘claws its way up his great big body’ and a family of white mice which crawl over his shoulders. Cultured and cosmopolitan, Fosco is a fearless speculator (his various inventions include a ‘means of petrifying the body after death’) who derides the moralizing ‘claptrap’ of the English and talks of ‘wise’ and ‘foolish’ murders. Despite his cruelty and deviousness, Collins patently admires him. So have thousands of the novel’s readers. ‘No villain of the century,’ declared Collins’s fellow-novelist Mrs Oliphant, ‘comes within a hundred miles of him’.

Collins’s treatment of the book’s heroines is further evidence of his originality. There are two, and they form a classic contrast. Laura Fairlie, the heiress, is a blue-eyed doll, hapless, headachy, simperingly feminine, who is plucked from her ‘pretty little white bed’ by the predatory clutches of a plotting husband. Her half-sister, Marian Halcombe, is a swarthy-skinned, resolute proto-feminist. Though Marian’s figure is ‘comely and well-developed’, her big jaw and incipient moustache shock Hartright. When he first claps eyes on her, he reflects in horror: ‘The lady is ugly!’ Ugly heroines were not acceptable to the majority of Victorians (nor to us: in TV versions of the novel, Diana Quick and Tara Fitzgerald have been cast as Marian). But as the book goes on, the resourceful Marian rapidly eclipses the wilting Laura. Even Fosco falls in love with her.

Realistic settings and convincing characters are part of what makes The Woman in White the most compelling mystery novel in English, but its essential power resides in its plot, an intricate masterpiece of menace and suspense of which Collins was justly proud. Here too he showed his originality, for the narrative method was startlingly fresh. Collins pioneered the technique of multiple narration by different characters, who testify as in a court case. Fosco, Hartright, Marian – all have their revealing say, as do minor characters like Laura’s uncle, a grotesquely spiteful aesthetic poseur (though not, interestingly, Laura herself: perhaps she was too colourless to deserve a narration, or perhaps Collins wished to evade the matter of her post-marital experiences). The result is a wonderfully ingenious mosaic and a virtually unputdownable book. Thackeray read it ‘from morning till sunset’, Gladstone missed a theatre engagement to finish it. Modern readers coming to it for the first time should be warned to clear the weekend.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

A quick update on this and this: Parliament has now ‘unanimously recognised the Kurdish genocide in Iraq‘. In thanking those involved Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of Kurdistan, said:

The British parliament’s recognition of the genocide follows similar acknowledgements by the Norwegian and Swedish parliaments last year. We thank them all and hope that this will inspire our friends and friends of human rights and freedom in other countries to do the same. We must all stand together against tyranny, wherever it may appear.

(Thanks: GK.)

Not all of it is, since the lower parts will be close to the ground. But if you look at the pics for the Bosco Verticale project in Milan, you’ll see two towers raising their trees right up there.

In addition to being pleasant to behold, the two towers will help purify the city air, increase bio-diversity and protect residents from the sun and noise pollution, [say the designers].

That doesn’t answer the really important question, which is: will the Magic Faraway Tree be in amongst all those others?

The Guardian has a short editorial today in praise of outrage. It calls it ‘a perennial requirement’. The praise is not unqualified: the paper allows that outrage can have destructive as well as creative effects and that it can be ‘simplistic, fraudulent or… misplaced’. Still, outrage, it concludes, is indispensable if there are to be ‘new beginnings in human life‘.

There is a sound point in this: certain things should not be countenanced without passionate and forceful protest. However, I would want to enter a stronger qualification of the point than the Guardian does. For outrage, these days, is both cheap and abundantly relevant.

Cheap. You don’t have to spend very long on the internet to get a vivid sense of just how cheap it is. At any given minute someone somewhere is outraged about something or other, and usually a lot of people are. On a quiet day on Twitter, when no one seems to be fuming much, you have the feeling nonetheless that many are just waiting patiently for an opportunity: ‘Hey, someone, say something we can condemn!’ So it’s not only that outrage can be simplistic, fraudulent or misplaced, it’s that there’s now so much of it about, and a lot of that shifts nothing and dies down as quickly as it flares up.

Abundantly relevant. But the more serious problem is that there’s so much in the world to be outraged about – and here I don’t mean artificially outraged or outraged for no good reason. My list may differ from your list and both from someone else’s, but legitimate causes of outrage could be: that there are people going hungry; that in South Africa police just dragged a man along the streets tied to the back of their van, and to his death; that women are still the victims of cruel oppression in many parts of the world; that torture is used as an instrument of political rule; female genital mutilation; human trafficking; racism of every stripe; attempts to curb what people may think and say; and so forth. As anyone can see, this list could easily be lengthened. Outrage, quite justified outrage, could be almost without limit. And what would it achieve unless harnessed to other contrasting attributes?

Among these I would want to highlight calm and controlled anger (brother or sister of outrage and probably more fruitful), focused determination, patient thought and work, careful advocacy, analytical clarity, and respect for the facts of the real world and its complexities.