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Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, writes to express his concern that ‘respect for the rights of individuals and the rule of law’ ought to be a feature of the polity now in process of formation in Egypt, and part of the thinking in preparation for a successor government to Assad’s in Syria. This is a very necessary concern; I take it there is no need to argue for the point here. But Roth prefaces what he has to say with the following rather odd first paragraph:

It has been two years since the Arab uprisings began, and those early, heady days of euphoria seem a thing of the distant past. Since then, we have seen the rise of Islamist political forces that many fear will cite religion to threaten the rights of women, minorities and dissidents. Security forces continue to overreach, as in Egypt’s response to recent rioting. It turns out that, difficult as it is to end abusive rule, it is perhaps still harder to build a rights-respecting democracy on a legacy of repression.

It turns out that?! I don’t know, maybe Roth prepared this in a hurry. The response to the early days of the Arab spring was surely bound to be one mixing hope (for progressive political developments) with caution (lest things should not go well). However, that it might be hard to build ‘a rights-respecting democracy on a legacy of repression’, indeed after decades of abusive rule, I wouldn’t have thought could confound the expectations of any thoughtful student of human affairs. Weighty political forces in play whose ideas about democracy, liberal freedoms, the rights of women and a certain amount more didn’t and don’t closely resemble those of John Stuart Mill; much well-known history of how revolutions end badly; the prize of political power – always coveted – to be contested by groups with radically opposed outlooks. What could possibly go wrong?

If you want a reasoned argument against legalizing same-sex marriage, er… forget it. You won’t find it. As I’ve taken the trouble to document in earlier posts, what purports to be argument is of the flimsiest: marriage means a union between a man and a woman, or this is the kind of union hallowed by tradition, or marriage is for procreative purposes, and such; with the facts that the meaning of words can change, and that traditions can be altered when there’s no (longer) justification for them, and that many marriages are without issue, seemingly overlooked.

The new Archbishop of Canterbury is reported to be going to say that ‘marriage is between a man and a woman, and always has been’. No change on that front then.

One should hardly ever abandon attempts at reasoned argument; but in so far as reasoned argument sometimes doesn’t work and people continue to appeal to continuity with the past even when they’re short of ways of justifying the particular past under discussion, let me remind opponents of same-sex marriage of a couple of other cases in which adult human beings were unfree to marry whomever they wanted to (the other only consenting) and as they pleased. Ante-bellum slaves in the US could not marry legally without the permission of their owners. Under the Nuremberg laws in Hitler’s Germany, Jews were prohibited from marrying persons of ‘German or related blood’.

These were vile ‘traditions’ which opponents of gay marriage today would, doubtless, not want to invoke, and rightly not. Just one of the reasons they were vile is that mature adult couples should be free to marry one another, both parties consenting, and not subject to constraint in this by interfering others.

What more is there to be said about Bob Dylan? A lot, for sure. But I said my bit when Dylan turned 70, and I’m here now just to choose ten of his songs. This is categorically not a top ten. I don’t want to reel out a list which might look like the result of a poll. No, it’s ten Dylan songs that I love and that remind me of various times in my life. Here goes…

That’s me talking, in a gig run by CultureKicks. If you want to see the Dylan tracks I chose, follow this link. You can visit CultureKicks itself here – a new venture – and find out more about them here.

I have received the following comment from Peter Wicks of Villanova University. I post it here with his permission.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of assuming that just because you didn’t mention something in a blog post that means that you must not know about it, but are you aware of Gilbert Ryle’s essay ‘Jane Austen and the Moralists’? Ryle published it in the Oxford Review in 1966 and while Ryle’s love of Jane Austen is well-known (an oft-repeated anecdote tells that when he was asked if he ever read novels Ryle replied ‘Oh, yes. All six, every year.’) my impression is that his essay about her is not, either amongst philosophers who are familiar with Ryle’s influential work in the philosophy of mind or amongst philosophers who write on literature. Alasdair MacIntyre alludes to Ryle’s views on Austen in After Virtue, but without naming the essay in which Ryle expressed them.

Put simply, Ryle’s view is that Austen’s moral vision is fundamentally Aristotelian in so far as her focus is on where the golden mean is to be found with regard to various qualities of character, and on the different ways in which we can deviate from the mean. Ryle contrasts this with a moral sensibility that he refers to as ‘Calvinist’ and associates with writers like Samuel Johnson. The Calvinist sensibility divides people into good and bad, white and black, saved and damned – ‘arctic paragons’ as Ryle puts it. I don’t think Ryle was suggesting that Austen’s characters were ‘moral rather than psychological constructs’ as Thomas Rodham claims in the article that you wrote about today. On the contrary, I think that Ryle is suggesting that it is part of Austen’s achievement to explore in a realistic way what virtues and vices actually look like in the complexity of human character and human life. Or, to put it another way, while her characters are intended to illustrate certain virtues and vices, they could not succeed in doing so if they were not psychologically rich constructions, characters who live (although Ryle does allow that not all of Austen’s characters are successful creations in that sense).

I don’t know if I’ve ever registered my liking for Cajun music here. In case I haven’t, I’ll make good the omission this fine Saturday morning by posting a number by the Balfa Brothers.

One thing I like about much Cajun music, though I’m not sure I can convey it adequately, is the way it ‘presses on’. It’s a bit like parts of life – one thing, then another, then another, then still more, but in a good way.

Australia’s prime minister, Julia Gillard, has called the national election for September 14, which coincides this year with the Jewish day of atonement, Yom Kippur. Voting in Australia is compulsory, though there is proper provision for voting early and by post. Some members of the Australian Jewish community aren’t troubled by the date of the election, but others are.

There is, in fact, a reasonable complaint. Though observant Jewish voters have not been disenfranchised, they are denied two other benefits of participating in election day activities. The first is because they are unable to canvass and otherwise help get out the vote. The second is a more nebulous thing perhaps, but important nonetheless. It is feeling part of a symbolic (as well as instrumental) national event, in which the democratic will of the country is being expressed.

An Australian Jewish reader – whose email I quote here with permission – has written to me to say, ‘My decision is not to vote in the alternative ways and to treat this decision as an act of civil disobedience. Consequently, I will not pay fines and [will] defend my decision at the point when the fines constitute a legal debt’.

Wole Soyinka writes in the Guardian today for the special benefit of naive liberals with a wholly benign view of human motivation and wilfully unseeing members of the left:

[I]n the end, it took a former colonial power to seize the leadership. Humiliating? Not quite. This invasion was not just a Malian affair, or even an African one: it was a global challenge. It had become clear that a few more weeks of inaction would have empowered Mali’s invaders and, by extension, the murderous campaign of Nigeria’s own Boko Haram.

Unlike most commentators, I confess that I find it impossible to regard these al-Qaida clones as either political or religious movements, even of the extremist kind. That their ability to recruit footsoldiers is a reflection on society’s failures is not in doubt; nonetheless, it is naive to attribute this solely to unemployment, marginalisation and other social inequities. The world is facing viral mutations of the human psyche. Take Joseph Kony, the Christian warrior of Uganda whose idea of “resistance” is child conscription, abduction and rape, spiced with the slicing off of lips, ears and noses of unbelievers. People such as he belong to a special category that is part-criminal, part-psychopathic…
…..
The truth, alas, is that the science fiction archetype of the mad scientist who craves to dominate the world has been replaced by the mad cleric who can only conceive of the world in his own image…

The rest is here. Soyinka understands what is all too evident not only from the world stage but also in smaller – domestic and professional – environments: that people are moved by ideas as well as by root causes and that they sometimes behave in ways that the reasonable think of as semi-crazed or even fully crazed, but in any case with evil intent.

When I got to New York City last May, first thing I did after checking into my hotel was to walk up Park Avenue to Grand Central Station. Why? Because Grand Central is cool, that’s why. Here’s a cool Grand Central happening…

Did you know this?

Alfred Hitchcock was one of the most prominent fans of the terminal. Apparently he always worked to make Grand Central look grand, shooting it in Technicolor where possible.

It’s just one of a hundred facts about the place that you can find here as Grand Central reaches its centenary. Oh, and this is Cary Grant right there in Hitch’s North By Northwest. (Watch out for Ned Glass.)

Here’s an item on the ways and byways of symbolic meaning:

The city of Volgograd will be temporarily renamed Stalingrad to commemorate the Soviet Union’s victory in the bloody 1943 battle that broke the power of the Nazi invasion, thanks to a decision passed by the city administration.

The famous city on the Volga River is this year marking the 70th anniversary of the end of the definitive World War II battle of Stalingrad. Celebrations on Thursday included a re-enactment of the moment when General von Paulus, who commanded the German forces, emerged from his bunker to surrender.

Volgograd will now be referred to as Stalingrad at official events on Feb. 2, the day on which the last of the Axis forces surrendered; on May 9, Victory Day; on June 22, Day of Mourning and Memory; Sept. 2, marking the end of World War II; on Aug. 23, which commemorates those killed in Nazi bombing raids in Stalingrad; and Nov. 19, the start of Operation Uranus, during which the Nazis in the city were encircled, according to a statement posted on the Volgograd City Duma’s website Wednesday.

Known as Tsaritsyn under the tsars, the city was re-named Stalingrad in 1925. It was changed again, to Volgograd, in 1961, eight years after Stalin’s death.

The column from The Moscow Times goes on to say that the decision to revert to the name ‘Stalingrad’ for these commemorative purposes was taken in response to pressure from veterans. It seems right to me. To go on calling the city by that name would be to continue to honour a man responsible for the most terrible crimes and sufferings. But to those who fought in it as well as others, the battle will forever be the Battle of Stalingrad. This honours, not Stalin, but all those who died in contributing decisively in that place to the defeat of Nazism. (Via.)

Thomas Rodham is commending Jane Austen as a brilliant moral philosopher and, more particularly, virtue ethicist. For him as for so many other of her readers, she is ‘wise as well as clever’. His case for Austen falls into two parts.

In the first part, though he gives her proper credit for her role in inventing the modern novel, her focus on ordinary lives, indeed her literary genius, Rodham argues that Austen no longer measures up to the demands of the ‘subtle psychological realism’ of contemporary fiction. Her characters, he thinks, are ‘complexes of particular moral dispositions rather than plausible people’; they ‘do not have the psychological completeness we would now expect’.

He goes on, in the second part of what he says, to try to show how what is ‘timelessly brilliant about Austen’s novels’ is their content as ‘deeply serious morality plays’. They attempt to educate their readers morally, ‘analyse and teach a virtue ethics’; and he illustrates the way they do this with examples from the books themselves.

I have two problems with Rodham’s argument. First, I flatly disagree with his judgement that Austen’s characters aren’t plausible people or that her fiction is lacking by some modern standard of subtle psychological realism. I can’t really argue for this other than by saying that, by and large, I haven’t found, in reading her novels and those of contemporary writers, that she falls short in psychological acuity or the construction of realistically interesting and complicated people. If I think of the episode on Box Hill when Emma hurts Miss Bates’s feelings, or the very particular and surprising way she is made aware of the nature of her own feelings for Mr Knightley; if I think of Mrs Norris who ‘disliked Fanny, because she [that is, Mrs Norris] had neglected her’; and of dozens more episodes, thoughts, developments, in the six novels, I am impressed by Austen’s richness of perception, as well as by her wit and the beauty of her writing.

Second, while Austen’s novels indubitably do carry a freight of moral teaching, were it true that they did so in the way Rodham suggests, she would not be the towering figure of English literature that she is. If it were really the case that her characters are, as he claims, ‘moral rather than psychological constructs’, or that her novels are so driven by her desire to impart the moral lessons as to fall short in emotional plausibility, they would likely be much more dreary than they are. The trick, which Jane Austen understood as well as anybody, is to embody moral ‘commentary’ in complex human characters behaving in ways that make sense given the characters they are. Otherwise the effects can be wooden and unconvincing.

Rodham’s praise of Austen, though this is not intended by him, is diminishing of her real literary stature.