Here’s a charming image of the American soldier from an Indymedia site. Whoever is responsible for it might benefit from some education in what those who fought under the Nazi swastika did on the Eastern Front. (Hat tip: Ric Locke.)

Mick Hartley, who has been a regular reader of normblog since I started it and has sent me occasional emails, has started his own blog. It bears his name: Mick Hartley. I warmly recommend it. It is clear from Mick’s early posts that this will be a site of thoughtful analysis and clear prose. Mick has kicked off with pieces on the Benny Morris interview, the London Review of Books and Alan Bennett, Noam Chomsky, thoughts prompted by the sighting of a fox in central London, and the enquiry into the death of Princess Diana. On Bennett, Mick writes:

Every January the LRB publishes Bennett’s diary for the previous year. Unfortunately it’s not on line, but you can see the title of this year’s piece in the contents page. “A Shameful Year”. No surprise about what according to Bennett is so shameful, but it strikes me as very odd. I can think of many shameful things: Munich and Chamberlain was shameful. The behaviour of the Major government, refusing to allow arms to the Bosnians while Milosevic carried out his ethnic cleansing and the UN stood by, that was shameful. The total inaction of the UN while Hutus slew Tutsis in Rwanda, until they set up camps over the border in Zaire (as it then was) which were taken over by those same Hutus: that was shameful. But getting rid of one of the most despicable tyrants in modern history and freeing the Iraqis from their decades-long nightmare…shameful?? Clearly we live on different planets.

Mick’s analysis of Chomsky is long, interesting and difficult to summarize with a handy quote or two. It relates Chomsky’s political stance to aspects of his work. Give it a read. A big welcome for Mick Hartley’s blog!

Yes, it’s the final countdown now, towards Sunday’s deadline for the normblog all-time favourite movies poll. My appeal of last week has paid off handsomely, and whereas I then said that we were just over half way towards the target I had mentally set, we are now comfortably past it. ‘We’, my friends, is not the royal singular. It is all of us, you and me. This will be the biggest normblog poll to date. Is there room for complacency? Yes and no. Yes, for all who have already entered; no, for those who’ve been thinking of entering, but haven’t yet got round to it. What about those who simply don’t want to enter? Peace to them. This is a humane and tolerant poll.

A final push then, please, from anyone leaning in the relevant direction. You might like to read this article about lists by Sarah Crompton, which I found via Dave Weeden round at Backword. She writes:

No one should take them [lists] too seriously. They represent a walking of the wits, not a serious intellectual debate.

Don’t listen to that bit. You never know; this could turn out to be an exception to her judgement, generating intensely serious debate everywhere. Well, it might.

On Friday I posted an item consisting largely of two excerpts of translations – made by Douglas at Last of the famous international playboys – from pieces in Le Monde. The first excerpt concerned recent attacks on Jews in France and there is nothing I wish to add to, subtract from, or amend in, that part of my post.

The second part of it was an excerpt from Serge Klarsfeld which begins by quoting a brief statement that comes from a speech to the National Assembly by Clermont-Tonnerre in 1789. The context in Klarsfeld’s argument is to show a line of opposition on France’s part to Jewish nationhood, starting that long ago and stretching to the present. Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber traced Clermont-Tonnerre’s statement back to its source in his speech as a whole – available online – as I had not. Read within the whole speech, the statement does not mean what it appears to mean in the context of Klarsfeld’s argument. Clermont-Tonnerre is evidently making a point about the meaning of civil and legal equality, and not any statement against Jewish nationhood.

This and the comments thread that has arisen at Crooked Timber prompts the following observations on my part. First, I make no apology for not having followed the quoted statement from Clermont-Tonnerre to its source. It would have been better had I done so, but the citing of material from others is a standard practice in blogging, one cannot check absolutely everything, and one takes a certain amount on trust. All of it is open to scrutiny and correction by others – as this has indeed been corrected by Chris Bertram’s efforts, a correction I am more than happy to repeat on my own behalf, as I just have in the paragraph above. I do want to add a second correction, however.

For my own purpose in quoting the Klarsfeld excerpt had not specifically to do with the meaning of the Clermont-Tonnerre statement. It was to associate myself with the view Klarsfeld was expressing that, but for the period 1946-1967, French foreign policy hasn’t been even-handed as between Israel and the Arab countries – a view which much of the discussion on the CT thread has bypassed. It is an impression in any case which I myself have formed, and this is why I excerpted the Klarsfeld piece. But it turns out to have been an incautious thing to do because I do not have the historical knowledge to back that Klarsfeld view. Whether it’s true or not, I’m not at present in a position to argue for it persuasively. This is therefore the correction I wish to add for my own part, more important to me than the one about the sense of Clermont-Tonnerre’s words: I withdraw the association which my post implied with Klarsfeld’s view – for the time being at any rate.

As those led for the first time to the Crooked Timber thread I refer to will discover, there is another aspect to some of the discussion there than the substantive matters I’ve dealt with here, but I disdain to comment on this publicly other than to register its existence.

I leave my original post on the topic standing, for the record, but will add a link from it to these corrections.

I am perplexed by the logic of these two responses to Tony Blair’s now saying that he does not know whether WMD will be found in Iraq.

Paul Keetch, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesman:

Intelligence is not an exact science. But if he is now saying he’s unsure whether there were WMD or not, one would have assumed that uncertainty would have been apparent at the time.

Labour backbencher Jeremy Corbyn:

Ten months ago, he told us that he was absolutely certain there were weapons of mass destruction. He’s now saying … they might not find them. This is ridiculous. We were taken to war on the basis there was a real threat.

If he was certain then, he has still to be certain now; or if he’s uncertain now, he should have been uncertain then. Well, I can think of other combinations – and reasonable combinations.

Anthony at Black Triangle links to reactions, in the BMJ, to the public airing of Saddam’s medical examination. David at City Comforts Blog is disturbed by this snatch of radio discussion and the satirical book it’s about, ‘Where’s Saddam?’ You can listen to the item here.

[Today, Eve Garrard begins a three-parter on the concept of evil, to be completed over the course of this week. It is in the series of guest posts she is kindly contributing to normblog. Her previous posts here have been: What’s wrong with capturing vile tyrants?; Double standards (old site, December 9); and Root causes (ditto, November 28). The ‘vile tyrants’ post aroused a lot of interest on other blogs, but rather disconcertingly it was taken by a few people who commented on it to have been written by me – despite the fact of having been clearly marked as by Eve Garrard. Let me therefore emphasize that Eve is a real person; and the real person she is is a quite separate one from the real person I am, or at least aspire to be.]

Evil is a concept which is very widely used, but it is also very widely criticized as illegitimate in some way, and it’s these criticisms which I want to examine. But we might reasonably start by looking at what’s right with the idea of evil, at why we might find it useful to deploy such a concept. The world is full of terrible things, but some acts strike us as peculiarly dreadful, strangely chilling, horrifying, alien in some way (which is not of course to say alien in all ways, or necessarily incomprehensible to us, or even very unusual.) Forcing live human beings into industrial shredders, feet first so as to increase the suffering, is a current example which can stand in for all such nightmare actions. These are the kind of acts which we’re inclined to call evil.

Why we respond in this way is a very interesting question. Do we regard these acts as evil because they all produce this horrified response in us, or do we respond with horror to them because we recognise that they all share some feature which makes them evil? Such questions, and others like them, are ones addressed by those interested in the nature of evil, or of morality in general, but even people who don’t have this theoretical interest can find it valuable to use a term which marks out just these specially horrifying acts. If we want our language to capture the more terrible of our moral possibilities, and to help us think about them, then the term ‘evil’ is going to find a place in our moral discourse. It marks off a qualitative difference from those acts which are merely wrong, or even very wrong. Not all very wrong acts are evil, as the example of murder shows: killing people, by and large, is very wrong, but not all murders, still less all murderers, are evil. Just what it takes for an act to be evil is a difficult and interesting question, and not one I’m going to address right now. What I’m interested in are the objections to the word ‘evil’, the claims that there’s something wrong with the whole concept, and hence that we shouldn’t use it. It seems to me that the idea of evil marks a significant distinction within morality, and without it our moral awareness is simpler, blander, and more impoverished than it needs to be. So it’s worthwhile trying to see if objections to the concept are really convincing. For the fact is that people with no theoretical interest at all in these matters do regularly appeal to the idea of evil in the face of certain kinds of dreadful acts, and this suggests that the concept may be doing some useful work.

However, there’s no doubt at all that other people do have very serious reservations about the use of this concept. They think (or at least they say they think, though their actual practice doesn’t always bear this out) that we should abjure it altogether. The reasons they offer for saying this vary, but on closer investigation, as I hope to show, the objections all seem to collapse: each proffered reason turns out either not to apply to evil at all, or where it does apply, it also applies to other concepts as well, concepts which we don’t normally regard as suspect. The concept of evil seems in fact to be robust enough to survive all the usual charges that are levelled at it.

Over this series of posts, I’m going to look at four main objections to the use of the concept of evil: that it’s too religious; that it’s not explanatory; that it’s too explanatory; and that it’s too judgemental. I’ll consider each of these in turn.

Firstly, it’s too religious. It assumes the existence of a personal Devil, and very few of us believe in that any more.

Right enough, not so many of us in the liberal West believe in a personal (or any other kind of) Devil – this is part of the general decline in religious belief of all kinds. And there’s no doubt that the concept of evil had its original home in a theocentric view of the universe. But then, so did several other moral concepts – forgiveness is one example, and we seem to have made a satisfactory transition to a secular use of that important moral concept. We’ve done the same with the concept of evil: entirely secular people reach for it when they want to describe something for which the usual moral terms of condemnation – bad, wrong, very wrong – just seem too weak. We feel that there’s something bathetic about saying that the Holocaust was wrong, or that amputating the arms of the little children of your enemies is a bad thing to do. We reach for the term evil to express our sense of special horror at certain human propensities and activities. And we understand each other when we deploy this concept – we may disagree about its precise application, but everyone knows that the plastic shredders are at least candidates for being evil, and dropping litter isn’t. The concept’s religious origins have been outstripped, and it has found a place in a secular understanding of our moral experience. That it’s needed for reflection on that experience is strongly suggested by contemplation of the last century’s bloody horrors, and no doubt for this one’s too.

In the next post in this series, I’ll look at a different kind of objection to the concept of evil: the interesting and sophisticated claim that what’s wrong with it is that it isn’t explanatory. And alongside that, I’ll look at the mirror image of that objection – the claim that what makes at least some uses of the concept of evil objectionable is precisely that they are explanatory. (Eve Garrard)

Many years ago, when time hung differently than it seems to now and we both had fewer commitments, WotN (Adèle as was and indeed even now is) and I would sometimes do a cinethon, taking in two, or sometimes three, movies in a day and all of them in your actual cinema, not on TV or vid or DVD. There was on one occasion a difficulty in getting across London – from Curzon Street, as I recall, to Notting Hill – between the end of one movie and the beginning of the next, but the thing was accomplished. Anyway, yesterday we decided it was time to do the same thing again in a small way, not having done so in an aeon or two. True, it only involved stepping out of one cinema and into another within the same multiplex. But it was good.

First we saw Lost in Translation, then we followed up with Touching the Void. I recommend both.

The first is fine in many ways: as someone who isn’t one of the world’s greatest travellers, I felt a particular comradeship with Bob (Bill Murray), in his hotel room and more generally, with his obvious sense of ‘what the hell am I doing in this place?’ Scarlett Johansson, the other principal, was also excellent, and the look of Tokyo was made apt to the sense of lonely alienation of these two as they find a passing friendship, and more, with each other. I have a couple of reservations about the film which I won’t share here, not wanting to throw a spoiler; but there is one I can share, one discovered way back then with some passages in the movies of Michelangelo Antonioni. Watching someone else’s alienation – you know, Monica Vitti’s – can get dull. But all in all, Lost in Translation isn’t dull; it just verges on being so once or twice.

Touching the Void is something to see, period. It is… touching the void – a staggering tale, and a terrifying beauty.

A great night out, no worries.

Susan Hill is the author of The Woman in Black and I’m the King of the Castle , among many other works. She’s also a friend of WotN’s and mine, and a Manchester Red in her affiliations. Susan has a long and interesting piece about personal diaries in yesterday’s Guardian. She discusses half a dozen famous diarists. Towards the end of the article, she writes:

Does anyone now keep a diary? Of course they do. Thousands of people. They just call them blogs and put them up on the web instead of down on paper.

By coincidence – or maybe not entirely – Susan has just started her own blog. You’ll find it here. Susan promises:

[a] journal of comment on matters not suitable for articles people might pay me for, not especially relevant to my author website.. maybe matters on which I am totally unqualified to comment but on which I feel the need, now I have my bus pass, to have my two pennyworth.

She also says that her blog ‘may be about current affairs, news items, literature and writing, charities…’ A particular emphasis will be on ‘small-is-still-beautiful charities’, and Susan sets out a four-point definition of what she means by this phrase. Do go and take a look.

It’s time for the results of the gathering no moss survey. There was a modest return, and I didn’t feel like pestering people to boost it; it’s not in my nature. My reason for posing the question was an old difference of opinion in the Geras family, the interpretation of the proverb obviously turning on whether moss is bad and to be avoided or good and to be gathered. Naturally, I had both these interpretations amongst the entries.

Moss bad:

It’s good to keep moving… A recommendation to avoid stasis, entanglements, stagnation.
…..
Somewhat Millian: the need for constant testing of what one believes and of development and growth through new experiments in living.

Moss good:

Condemning people who don’t stay in one place, who are spatially impermanent, drifters. It expresses the judgement that drifters don’t pick up lasting connections, permanent social relationships, and are therefore rootless…

Or another – from Joel White – which I quote at length with his permission, as the most detailed and interesting received:

I immediately think of the tempting Temptations because of my African American-ness. I loved, as a kid, their song Papa Was A Rolling Stone. It had such deep resonance in the black community and as a child coming of age in the 1970s and trying to come to grips with who I was, who I am, and who I could be – this was one of the songs that haunted me, although that may be too strong a statement.

“My Papa was a rolling stone, wherever he laid his hat was his home.” That was the line. “And when he died, all he left us was alone.”

It spoke to me of a lack of permanence in my community although my “Papa” was a permanent rock for his family. More importantly, it spoke to me as a black man-to-be. I remember wondering as a kid who was something of a know-it-all, instead of “alone” did they really mean “a loan” so that Papa (as symbolic of the black man) left us (the black family) indebted, with an obligation to pay that which he had incurred but could not settle.
…..
But back to your question re the moral saying; my wife brought home another moral saying one day which resonated with both of us. “Bloom where you’re planted.” That’s what your moral saying means. There is something to be said for permanence and something of a risk in movement. I’m a Florida boy surrounded by beautiful, mysterious moss. Left alone, it seemingly grows out of thin air and hangs from the canopy of trees.

And the result? Of the 25 entries, one was for there being no moral point to the proverb at all – just an empirical observation. 11 were for the second interpretation here, moss good and to be gathered. And 13 were for the first interpretation, moss bad, so keep moving along. Decisive or what?

Just so as you don’t get too cocky, you moss-bad people (for I myself am of the moss-good party), let me point out to you that according to The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy ours is ‘the original meaning’. It seems right that we should have tradition on our side.