We Share 92 Diseases With Cows

Or so I learned this evening at a talk on diseases and plagues in Antiquity, where the speaker mused that the domestication of animals was almost certainly the greatest error in human history.

Our speaker speculated on the contribution of the Antonine Plague -- whatever its cause -- to the decline of the Roman Empire in the west and of the Justinian Plague to the decline on the Byzantine Empire and the Rise of Islam. The last point was particularly intriguing, essentially coming down to a simple proposition: a huge plague, perhaps a precursor of the Black Death of the Fourteenth Century, devastated the Byzantine and Persian empires in the sixth centuries; the nomads of the Arabian peninsula were largely preserved from this plague by their lifestyle, ensuring them of a numerical superiority when the Muslim fire caught hold a hundred years later.

Along the way there was a passing mention of eleven popes having died of syphilis. No, I have no idea who they were, though I'm inclined to doubt the figure; having done a cursory trawl online, I've turned up only three popes thought to have died of said disease. It seems entirely plausible that Alexander VI and Julius II indeed died of syphilis, but Clement III died in 1191, more than three hundred years before the disease is thought to have reached Europe from the New World.

There have been only 51 Papal deaths in the last five hundred years, and I can't help but find it unlikely that syphilis claimed the lives of more than a fifth of Peter's successors in that time.

Granted, there are people who argue that syphilis didn't originate in the New World, but tonight's speaker clearly took the traditional view, so presumably wouldn't count Clement III among his eleven. Hmmm.

I may have to ask him directly. Time to hunt for his e-mail address, methinks.

If it's Irish, you spell it W-H-I-S-K-E-Y

Yes, with an 'e'. It's from the Gaelic word uisce, pronounced 'ish-keh' and meaning 'water'. Strictly speaking, it's derived from uisce, which is itself an abbreviated form of uisce beatha, which was simply a straight Irish translation of aqua vitae, literally meaning 'water of life', and being a generic term for spirits during the Middle Ages.

Anyway, that's only a minor quibble with an otherwise amusing article in today's Guardian describing a meeting with Irish rugby legend Keith Wood at a Bushmills promotion in London. The part of it I found most interesting was when Wood was asked what he would change about rugby, if could change any one thing.

"Subs," he replies, without hesitation. "I hate them. I think you should have a full front row on the bench and a utility back, all of whom are only allowed to go on if they absolutely need to go on. I used to give the analogy of a boxing match."

He points at me.

"Say it's a 10-round fight and I'm boxing this fella here because he's from Offaly and I don't like him."

Like that's going to go 10 rounds.

"So anyway, we're punching away and I have him exactly where I want him after eight rounds and then he sends in a replacement for the ninth. Obviously that's a ridiculous proposition but it's what happens in rugby. Say you're playing France who always have an unbelievable front row; they're moulded, they're stocky, they're 5ft 10in, they've no neck and 55 to 60 minutes into the game it's like the trumpets sound, they take those three off and put another three on. I just think that's unsporting. That's my view, I just don't like it."

In effect what he's saying that he prefers rugby to be a team game rather than a squad game; I'm inclined to agree, because -- taking international rugby, for example -- the current system definitely favours countries with bigger player bases, which in the Northern hemisphere means England and France. Most rugby-playing nations can probably field a decent enough first fifteen, but for real strength in depth you need a hefty playing base, something the so-called 'Celtic' nations all lack.

Granted, you might counter that tactical substitition reduces injuries, as it allows players to be taken off when they're tired or slightly hurt, preventing them from being more seriously injured, but I'd be curious as to whether there's any data to support that idea.

It's a valid enough point with other sports too, I think, and I can't help but frown at the thought of Everton's chances against Tottenham this evening. David Moyes seems to have drawn on fewer players this season than any other premiership manager, largely because with no money in the bank over the past few years he's opted for slow but steady progress by doing his best to buy quality rather quantity. It's paying dividends, but with Yakubu, Yobo, and Pienaar in Africa, Osman and Gravesen injured, and Cahill and Hibbert suspended he's going to be hard pressed to fill his subs' bench.

You never see the likes of Chelsea in that situation.

You Can't Imagine the Rapture in Store

I must be getting old. I'm missing puns, and bad jokes are drifting past me without me even noticing. I went to see Sweeney Todd a couple of days back, arranging to go for drinks beforehand. A couple of hours before I left the house I got a text from Dublin's most shameless immigrant punster:

'I'll just have a quick shave and a pie for my tea, then I'll be making my way in.'

Bizarre English people with their pie obsessions, I thought. Why on earth is he telling me what he's having for dinner? Or even that he's going to shave? Weird.

It was only during the film that I got the joke.

Predictably enough I loved the film, though I'm not sure that it edges out Ed Wood as my favourite Tim Burton film, as it did for Neil Gaiman. I think it probably pushes Big Fish into third place, mind.

It looked fantastic, and I found Depp truly compelling as London's favourite butchering barber. Helena Bonham Carter's take on Mrs Lovett was refreshing, to say the least -- in the show she comes across as utterly amoral, whereas here she's amoral, yes, but more than that she seems damaged. From her first appearance on screen she appears to be barely holding herself together.

Alan Rickman oozed refined menace as Judge Turpin, Timothy Spall was obsequiously brutal as Beadle Bamford, and Sacha Baron Cohen was hilarious as Pirelli, though I rather wondered why his non-Italian alter-ego wasn't Irish as he is in the show. The younger members of the cast were all fine too, and I was particularly impressed by having Anthony played by someone so young; making him obviously as young as Johanna lent their romance a Romeo and Juliet element, and also explained much of his naivety.

On the other hand, I missed quite a few songs -- I could understand their being removed on the grounds that they slowed the story down and made little cinematic sense, but Sondheim's songs aren't gratuitous, and it felt as though the characters were being slimmed down just to speed the plot up. Oddly, I couldn't help but feel that what the film really missed was an interval.

I know, that sounds a bit odd, but think how the first half ends with 'A Little Priest' as the showstopper. First Sondheim takes us through the great anti-climax of the Judge's visit to Todd's parlour, drags us down to the abyss of 'Epiphany', where Todd resolves to turn his rage on all London, and lead us laughing out of the theatre to the puntastic strains of the horrifically hilarious promise by Todd and Mrs Lovett that their partnership will serve anyone -- and to anyone -- at all.

There's no real sense of time at the start of the play's second half. Sure, in a sense 'Johanna' does follow on from 'God, that's good!', but it doesn't really need to. Essentially, what Sondheim does is to hurl us some time into the future -- we've no idea how far, but certainly Todd now has a thriving barbershop and Mrs Lovett has a thriving pie shop. Time has passed, that's the main thing, and that makes sense, because we've left their world for twenty minutes after 'A Little Priest', laughing and gasping about the first half over coffee or gin or ice-cream.

The film doesn't manage that. Instead we go straight from Todd and Lovett's murderously musical contract to Toby calling for our attention, singing the praises of Mrs Lovett's pies. Sure, time has passed, but it doesn't feel that way.

It's only a small gripe, really. When I watch it on DVD, I'll make sure to stop the film and make tea, or maybe have a pie, at the appropriate spot.

Money Doesn't Mind if we Say it's Evil

Today's Telegraph is carrying a fascinating story of how Martin Amis is apparently earning nearly £3,000 an hour for teaching at the University of Manchester. Okay, that's a little disingenuous; in reality what's happening is that Manchester is paying him £80,000 a year as Professor of Creative Writing, and that he's expected to teach twelve seminars, each of ninety minutes, over the year, as well as making four public appearances of about two hours each, and teaching one two-hour session in the summer Writing School.

So basically, if you divide £80,000 by 28 you'll get £2857.14, and will be able to see where the Manchester Evening News, which broke the story the other day, got its figures from. Granted, such a crude sum doesn't do justice to the fact that preparation and research aren't included in the contractual 28 hours, but then, this is the case with all the other lecturers too, you know, the ones who earn on average £39,000 a year. A regular lecturer is generally thought to work just under 60 hours a week, on average; I wonder if Amis works quite so hard.

Ah yes, the University might counter, but Amis is an iconic scholar, the kind of person who can attract world-class students and staff to Manchester. I'm not sure what he scholarly record actually consists of, but it does appear that since he's taken up his position, the number of students applying for the course on which he teaches has risen from 100 to 150, making him value for money in the University's eyes. Maybe there's something to this, then, but I can't help but wonder how many of these applicants get to sit at the master's feet. If he's only teaching a dozen seminars over the year, how many people really benefit from his supposed expertise?

The MEN ran with the story by pointing out that Amis's incredible salary matched those of premiership footballers, something Amis has responded to with scorn when talking to the Times.

“It’s very much Manchester University’s decision to make and I abide by it. This is really an invidious conversation. Who’s to say I wouldn’t earn less money anywhere else? Why aren’t you having this conversation with Wayne Rooney? Some footballers earn huge amounts. Not every footballer gets a hundred thousand a week like Rooney. And that’s all I want to say on the matter."

Which is all very well, but it rather ignores the fact that Manchester United PLC, Rooney's employer, is, after all, a privately-owned company, not really answerable to anyone other than its shareholders. The University of Manchester, on the other hand, is a publicly-owned institution, answerable to the British taxpayer. In other words, it's surely a matter of public interest if exorbitant sums are being paid to celebrity lecturers, especially at a time when hundreds of staff have been encouraged to take voluntary redundancy so the University can make ends meet.

In fact, it's only because the University is a publicly-owned organisation that this come to light, as the Manchester Evening News only gained access to details of Amis's salary under Freedom of Information legislation.

Having said that, it's worth pointing out that today is Data Privacy Day. It's worth finding out your rights, wherever you are. In the UK you'll find that the Information Commissioner's Office is very helpful indeed.

Very helpful.

Come Under My Roof

There was depressing news last week over at the blog of Monsignor Mark Langham, the administrator of Westminster Cathedral. It seems that parts of the building are in danger of collapsing if repairs aren't made. It seems that three of the four domes and the supporting arches are in serious trouble. I know, you might think this is bad form, considering that the Cathedral was only dedicated in 1903, barely a hundred years ago, but I've a feeling that John Bentley didn't have German bombing raids in mind when he designed his neo-Byzantine marvel.

It looks as though three million pounds will be needed if the repairs are to be made, and though it might seem a bit cheeky for the Church to seek such an amount of money, it's probably worth bearing in mind that unlike plenty of Anglican cathedrals, Westminster Abbey and Yorkminster being perfect examples, you don't have to pay to enter Westminster Cathedral, which depends for its upkeep entirely on vulntary contributions. Despite its remarkable beauty, it's not a tourist church. It's a real, living, working house of God, where mass is held several times every day, and a place which, as Ruth Gledhill says, 'offers a rare chance for a moment's peace, to light a candle and say a prayer.'

In as hectic a city as London, that's something to treasure.

Messy and Slow

There's a troubling story in the Washington Post a week or so back, detailing how it seems that young up-and-coming officers are leaving the American army in droves. It's not hard to see what this'll lead to, as gifted officers leave and less able officers are promoted in their stead. Armies might march on their stomachs, but they still think with their brains, and if their brains aren't as good as they could be then they'll be in trouble.

It seems to me that whatever your views on the American army, American foreign policy in general, or the current mess in the Middle East, it's not in anybody's real interest for the world's most powerful army to be led by people who aren't absolutely at the top of their game, whether morally or intellectually.

Linked with that piece is a feature on John Nagl, who commanded a tank platoon in the first Gulf war, served as an operations officer in Iraq in 2003-4, worked closely with General Petraeus on the army's new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and has since been commanding a battalion at Fort Riley in Kansas, teaching American soldiers how to train the Iraqi security forces. John has handed in his resignation papers, and is moving to Washington where he'll be working at a new think tank there.

In truth, it'll surely be an exciting opportunity for him and I'm sure he'll find a serious way to contribute to his country in his new role, but it's a loss to the army. I met John at a very strange conference a few years ago, nattering about Churchill, Wellington, and the upcoming Bush-Gore election, and was genuinely impressed by him -- and that impression has only been deepened by having read Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, his outstanding study on counterinsurgency warfare, and pretty much the only credible response to The War of the Flea that I've read.

I'm just hoping that he keeps contributing to Small Wars Journal.

Make Money. Make More Money. Make Other People Make Money.

I've not had a letter from the Scientology crowd on Abbey Street in months. They used to pester me all the time, sending me leaflets about becoming 'clear' and such nonsense. I was easy prey, to be fair, back in the day, scurrying past them to get my bus, a worried-looking teenager clutching a Forbidden Planet bag. Would I like a free personality test? Well, okay, I suppose...

Did I know who L. Ron Hubbard* was? Well, of course, I'd read Fear, which was brilliant, and Battlefield Earth, which wasn't, and had been working my way through Mission Earth, which I was enjoying massively in a way that makes very little sense in retrospect. Well, I was told, L. Ron had written other stuff too -- more serious stuff. And so I was introduced to Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.

The whole thing struck me as peculiar. Were these people renting a whole floor on a city centre building just to sell a book? Really? Still, I was curious, so I did the test, and I bought the book, and I went home and read it, and then I was called back. I needed auditing, apparently, and I needed it like I needed air.

All very well, but with me not being able even to afford one session, and not being comfortable in any case with the form I'd have had to fill out, I mumbled my excuses and went and got my bus. I got a few letters from them that year, and a few the following one, but they've kind of tailed off since then.

You'll note that no mention was ever made to me of Scientology, Hubbard's ingenious attempt to establish that the inestimable Mr Barnum was indeed correct when he opined that there was a sucker born every minute.

I think I came across that ludicrous pseudo-religion in a magazine article a few years later, shortly afterwards racing through Russell Miller's Bare-Faced Messiah in a Dublin library. Frankly, I was amazed. I had difficult believing that that seedy little Dublin office, manned by some rather pathetic-seeming people was just one tentacle of a massive international organization. That's not even getting into the embarrassing science fantasy that passes for Scientological theology. I'm not even going there.

Anyway, as the years have passed and the letters have appeared less and less often, I've often been bemused to watch the same pathetic-looking people lurking on Abbey Street, pouncing on vulnerable-looking passers by. What do these have in common with the likes of Tom Cruise? Sadly, they didn't show up to tell the crowds in UCD back in November, so I'm afraid I'm none the wiser.

As for Mr Cruise, his ecstatic rantings on the subject have been plastered all over the web for the last few days, but most clips just show highlights of him wittering about Scientologists being the authorities on the mind, or about how only Scientologists can help when there's been an accident. Gavin Sheridan, usefully, has posted links to the entire Cruise video, so you can get it all in context. I doubt the videos will stay online for long, so in expectation of them being pulled, here's how the Scientologists introduce Mr Cruise, our modern messiah:

There is a worldwide arena where the game is played for the fate of whole populations . . . where one side schedules entire generations for psychiatric drugging, and marks five million more for lethal toxic exposure . . . Also on the board, scores of nations where no workable technology will even be permitted . . . and plans in play to keep people so restimulated they can barely envision a future, much less consider the eternal scope of Scientology.

But there‘s someone on the other side of that global arena . . . Someone advancing Scientology on a fully epic scale to a very different future . . . And he is Class 4 OT7 Platinum Meritorious and IAS Freedom Medal of Valor Winner . . . Tom Cruise!

Wonderful, eh? Someday I hope I'll get such introductions, though if I do I'll make damn sure I wear a cloak and have the theme to The Mission playing when I stride onstage. Oh yes.
____________________________________________________________
* By the way, in case you're curious, the picture's a screenshot from Muppets Tonight -- the Cindy Crawford episode. The key bit is just over six minutes in. Aside from featuring Ms Crawford and, er, L. Ron as childhood Frogeteers together, the episode's highlights include the Irish Rodents, and Andy and Randy asking Ms Crawford what -- if she was a supermodel -- were her superpowers. Kieran Healy wrote about it way back when on Crooked Timber.

More things in Heaven and Earth...

I mentioned a week or so back how, the subject of the impending canonisation of Cardinal Newman coming up, some friends of mine expressed some unease at there being a miracle attributed to him. I can't say I blame them, as if you hold to a wholly materialist understanding of the Universe, then miracles are, by their very nature, impossible.

C.S. Lewis puts it pretty well in 'Miracles', a 1942 essay which seems to have been the seed that later grew into his book of the same name:

The experience of a miracle in fact requires two conditions. First we must believe in a normal stability of nature, which means we must recognise that the data offered by our sense recur in regular patterns. Secondly, we must believe in some reality beyond nature. When both beliefs are held, and not till then, we can approach with an open mind the various reports which claim that this super- or extra-natural reality has sometimes invaded and disturbed the sensuous content of space and time which make our 'natural' world. . .

If we frankly accept this position and then turn to the evidence, we find, of course, that accounts of the supernatural meet us on every side. History is full of them -- often in the same documents which we accept wherever they do not report miracles. Respectable missionaries report them not infrequently. The whole Church of Rome claims their continued occurence. Intimate conversation elicits from almost every acquaintance at least one episode in his life which is what he would call 'queer' or 'rum'. No doubt most stories of miracles are unreliable; but then, as anyone can see by reading the papers, so are most stories of all events.

Each story must be taken on its merits: what one must not do is to rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation. Thus you may believe in the Mons Angels because you cannot find a sufficient number of sensible people who say they saw them. But if you found a sufficient number, it would, in my view, be unreasonable to explain this by collective hallucination. For we know enough of psychology to know that spontaneous unanimity in hallucination is very improbable, and we do not know enough of the supernatural to know that a manifestation of angels is equally improbable. The supernatural theory is the less improbable of the two.

When the Old Testament says that Sennacherib's invasion was stopped by angels (2 Kings 19:35), and Herodotus says it was stopped by a lot of mice who came and ate up all the bowstrings of his army (Hdt. 2.141), an open-minded man will be on the side of the angels. Unless you start by begging the question, there is nothing intrinsically unlikely in the existence of angels or in the action ascribed to them. But mice just don't do these things.

Granted, the absurdity of Herodotus' tale shouldn't lead us to automatically assume that the Biblical narrative is historically correct, but Lewis's basic point is sound: we can be absolutely confident that whatever thwarted the Assyrian invasion, it wasn't an overnight assault by a swarm of field-mice on their quivers, bowstrings, and shield-handles; we cannot be quite so confident about the behaviour of angels!

The first question, really, concerns whose side we take, Hamlet's or Horatio's. You know the line, of course: 'there are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosphy'. If you accept that, than all manner of things can fall into place.

I found myself pondering this quite a bit last April, when the papers were awash with stories of the curing of Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre. It's worth reading Matthew Parris's response to this:

During Holy Week we are treated to a variety of decent-sounding people in print and on the airwaves explaining that religion — or “faith” as they now prefer to call it — is basically all about shared moral values, making the world a better place and gaining a proper sense of awe at life’s mystery. We are given to understand that the great world religions are all really fumbling towards the same truth.

And by doveish voices we are urged to join what is essentially a campaign for increasing the amount of goodness in the world. Who could be against that? Such faith sounds so reasonable. Churlish nonbelievers like me are made to feel it is we who are being arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded. How can we be so sure? And then this. A nun has apparently been cured of Parkinson’s disease through writing the name of John Paul II on a piece of paper.

Ecclesiastical authorities in the Roman Catholic Church have been investigating the alleged miracle, interviewing neurologists, graphologists, psychiatrists and medical experts. The diocese of Aix-en-Provence is now satisfied that it has a putative supernatural intervention on its hands, and this week submitted its dossier to Pope Benedict XVI, who may declare an official miracle and begin procedures for making the late Pope a saint . . .

Where are you, intelligent Christians? Where is your voice, your righteous anger? Where is your honest contempt for this nonsense? Take that claimed recent miracle, for instance. I know lots of nice, clever Catholics — friends, thoughtful men and women, people of depth and subtlety, people of some delicacy, people who would surely cringe at the excesses of Lourdes. Do they believe that John Paul II may have cured this nun from beyond the grave?

Where are the shouts of self-respecting bishops and cardinal-archbishops, raised against the woeful confusion of faith with superstition? I have a theory about their reticence. I think they know this stuff is the petrol on which the motor of a great Church runs; that without these delusions to feed on, the unthinking masses would falter. And they may be right. But what a melancholy conclusion: that the thinking parts of a religion should be almost extraneous to what moves it; far from the core; just a little fastidious shudder; a wink exchanged between the occupants of the reserved pews.

There is, of course, an alternative: that they too believe the nonsense; that the Prime Minister’s wife (and maybe the Prime Minister), and the Communities Secretary, and the Chancellor of Oxford University and former Governor of Hong Kong — not to mention several of my colleagues on these pages in The Times — honestly entertain the possibility that from beyond the grave the late Pope John Paul II interceded with God to cause a woman to be cured of Parkinson’s disease.

You are living, dear reader, at a watershed in human history. This is the century during which, after 2,000 years of what has been a pretty bloody marriage, faith and reason must agree to part, citing irreconcilable differences . . .

“But how can you be sure?” Oh boy, am I sure. Oh great quivering mountains of pious mumbo-jumbo, am I sure. Oh fathomless oceans of sanctified babble, am I sure. Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a Pope’s name down. He didn’t.

Well, maybe He didn't, though if Mr Parris really accepts the possibility that there's a He who didn't do this, I'm surprised he's so closed to the possibility that this same He might have done so had he so wished. After all, Parris hasn't answered the question he poses. How can he be sure? That demands an explanation of why he is so certain, and he doesn't provide one. Instead he just shouts louder. Assertion is, however, no substitute for argument.

Let's look at the facts, as we know them. Back in 2001, a French nun was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, and over time her symptoms worsened so that she could barely drive, walk, or write. By 2005, she could barely move the left side of her body at all, could hardly sleep for the pain, and could only write in an illegible scrawl. She couldn't bring herself to watch the aged John Paul II on television, trembling with Parkinson's himself. Her illness worsened after his death, and her order prayed for his intercession on her behalf. Then, one evening, she apparently heard a voice telling to take a pen and to write the name of the late pope. She did so, and was amazed at how her handwriting was clear and legible. She slept then, and woke the next day, at about half past four on the morning of 3 June 2005. She was cured.

I'm not saying that there's not another explanation for this, but it seems that nobody's got one. The whole scenario seems to be medically inexplicable. It really looks as though a miracle took place, and this possibility -- despite Parris's shouting -- can't be dismissed out of hand except on grounds of prejudice. Mark Shea tore into this impressively at the time, quoting extensively from chapter nine of Chesterton's Orthodoxy to do so. It's worth a read.

I've no idea what the miracle being associated with Newman is, by the way.

I Am Better Than Your Kids

NMRBoy sent me a little message yesterday, saying that he didn't have time to talk -- as indeed neither did I! -- but that when I got a chance I ought to watch this clip of a Sean Lock stand-up routine. It was very important, he said that I watch I watch it right through to the end, not just because it's pretty funny, but because its climax could provide me with a useful approach in an absurd meeting that'll be coming up soon.

No, not my thesis defence. My viva will require an entirely different strategy.

Anyway, I eventually watched the clip, and liked it, so he suggested I watch this rather shorter one from 8 out of 10 Cats, where Mr Lock is decidedly scathing towards children. It's hilarious, and reminded me of this shockingly funny site, analysing children's drawings. I'd not thought of it in years, so spent a very happy couple of minutes perusing it yesterday, and passed it on to a couple of friends, who rather sensibly joined me in my mirth.

Indistinguishable from Magic

It seems pretty obvious that Grey's Law, which I was talking about yesterday, owes more than a little to Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law of Prediction, which states that 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'

Clarke is one of those writers of whose work I've read far too little -- just 2001: A Space Odyssey, I think -- but of whom I've been aware for basically as long as I've been aware of authors. I think this may have owed less to his books than to his TV series about Fortean phenomena, so hilariously spoofed in this marvellously funny scene from The Goodies, which opens with the introductory spiel: 'The Mysterious World of Arthur C. Clarke -- strange monsters, unexplained things in the sky, bizarre happenings, out-of-focus photographs...' If I remember rightly, the episode involves Clarke himself being declared not to exist, and the three lads setting out, determined to find him and prove his existence. They don't manage that, but Tim has the misfortune of becoming a real-life Bigfoot in the course of their expedition.

Clarke also has the memorable distinction of being namechecked in an extremely funny and really rather sweet song from The Divine Comedy. 'Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World', for so the song is named, begins as follows:

Do you remember that old T.V. show
Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World?
Well if ITV make a new series
They ought to come take a look at my girl

I don't understand her
She doesn't make any sense to me
I don't understand her
It's like she's speaking in Swahili.

Don't worry, the song moves on from just saying how little sense this poor girl makes, as the singer accepts that he'll never understand her and embraces her contradictions. It's really a fine song, and surely one the best I was introduced to while on last year's Hellenic road trip.

Offhand I think it probably bettered only by Nick Cave's 'Into My Arms', which surely has one of the most beguiling opening couplets ever written, two magnificent lines that stormed right into my heart.

I'm not sure how well the lyrics work in isolation, though. Songs are designed to be sung, after all, and so much of their meaning comes from timing, phrasing, and intonation. That's kind of why I always feel a little uneasy when people talk of Bob Dylan or Shane MacGowan as poets -- there's a sense in which it's true, of course, but I'm not sure that poets and songwriters are really the same thing.

The point being: if you can find a way of listening to these, you really ought to. Really.

Indistinguishable from Malice

There's a bit in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy where Arthur Dent, lying in the mud in front of his doomed house, tells the relevant council officer how it was only the previous day that he had discovered the scheduled demolition of his home:

'But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.'
'Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anybody or anything.'
'But the plans were on display...'
'On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.'
'That's the display department.'
'With a torch.'
'Ah, well the lights had probably gone.'
'So had the stairs.'
'But look, you found the notice didn't you?'
'Yes,' said Arthur, 'yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filed cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.'

I couldn't help but think of this today when telling someone about the Byzantine procedures of the University of Manchester, and how so many ones which are of importance to students are tucked away in the Staff part of the website -- access to them is not denied to students, it's just not advertised. It's as though the University doesn't want its students to know the way things are supposed to be done.

'Hanlon's Razor,' replied my Laconic friend.

You've heard the saying 'Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity,' I presume? Well, it seems that this sage bit of advice is known as Hanlon's Razor. It takes its name from one Robert J. Hanlon who in 1980 proposed this 'law' to a book compiling various jokes based on Murphy's Law, which you must know.

Curiously, both the name and substance of Hanlon's Razor seem to have been foreshadowed in Robert A. Heinlein's 1941 novella The Logic of Empire, where one character observes to another, 'You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.' What has since been termed Heinlein's Razor, so, builds on Hanlon's Razor but adds an important coda: 'Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice.' Of course, you might wonder what exactly the difference is between incompetence and malice.

Grey's Law, another one of these 'laws' that seem to blossom on the internet -- and no, I have no idea who Grey is, and it seems that nobody else does either! -- is a necessary corollary to Hanlon's Razor and states that 'Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.'

Take a look at my posts on University Procedures. Evans and Gill, the authors of Universities & Students: A Guide to Rights, Responsibilities & Practical Remedies, take pains to state that they don't see Universities as being run maliciously. On the contrary, they go out of their way to give universities the benefit of the doubt:

Universities are complex societies and not easy to run well and they do not have a good record for seeing their way clearly through the ordering of priorities. From a students'-eye position that is alarming, for the individual student is in a weak and precarious position. [...]

The fault lies for the most part not in lack of goodwill, but in lack of training, expertise and sheer awareness of the obligations upon providers of higher education, and lack of funding to enable universities to put their house in order in this area.

In other words, Evans and Gill are firmly of the opinion that most of the time when Universities screw a student over they do so through incompetence rather than malice. Whether that's really an acceptable excuse in an organisation that supposedly gathers together all manner of highly intelligent people is a point that's probably best set aside.

Where Grey's Law comes into play here is to recognise that such incompetence can reach a point where it might as well be malice.

The effects of incompetence are identical to those of malice, of course, but there's more to it than that. A willingness to tolerate such incompetence, while often driven by nothing more dynamic than laziness or arrogant complacency, can often be tantamount to wilful negligence, and this can easily move what might previously have been mere stupidity into the realm of malice.

In some respects, I think this relates to what Aristotle says about how actions which are carried out in ignorance or under compulsion should only be considered truly involuntary if -- on reflection -- their perpetrators regret and repent of their deeds. Failure to repudiate such acts suggests that they weren't really against the wills of the perpetrators, and that they might as well have been acting voluntarily.

There are times when I think that the Nicomachean Ethics was the thing I'm most glad I studied as an undergrad.

Bear with me, as Lyra Belacqua would say

I know, I stole that from the Brother. It was bound to happen, wasn't it?

So, as you probably know, while I think Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy loses the plot altogether by the end, with characters and story being sacrificed to his muddled message, I love the first book. Northern Lights really is about as good as fantasy for children gets, being a heady mix of Michael Moorcock -- something reviewers somehow never pick up on -- and C.S. Lewis. And in Northern Lights what I love most are the armoured bears or the panserbjørne if you prefer. They're a dazzling idea, aren't they? Take nature's most ferocious animal, and then put it in armour. Everyone's a winner.

It seems Pullman's a big fan of the majestic creatures even in their unarmoured form, at least going by an interview in yeterday's Telegraph. All well and good, but you have to wonder about his priorities:

It was in Edinburgh Zoo that I first became emotionally affected by polar bears. It was a hot day and the bear was just stretched out on the concrete, in a little pen no bigger than this room.

I thought: "This is absolutely monstrous!" An animal like that wants the ice and 50,000 square miles to roam about in. It's worse than slavery, absolutely appalling, to keep an animal in those conditions. This one was lying there looking as though it wished it were dead.

Now, they're all going to be extinct if there's no ice left, unless they put them all in zoos or round them up and put a fence round them and throw them a seal or two from time to time. But that's no life.

If the polar bears leapt from the pages of my fiction into reality and saw what was happening, they'd eat us. Eat as many of us as quickly as they possibly could. And good luck to them.

To be fair, I don't think I know anyone in Dublin who wasn't appalled at the cramped conditions in which our polar bears used to be kept, because as we know they should have been lounging about in the Arctic, drinking coke and chatting to seals, rather than bored senseless in a cramped enclosure, but even so, this seems an extravagant response.

Keeping bears in concrete enclosures is worse than slavery? Really? Depriving animals of their freedom is worse than depriving people of their freedom? It's worse than owning people and compelling them to work for you? Hmmm. I'm not sure about that. I'm pretty sure there are a few people in -- say -- Mauretania or Niger that might disagree.

Perhaps he was exaggerating for rhetorical effect.

The Key to Reserva

Having mentioned Hitchcock parodies the other day, this seems like a good time to point you to this spectacular homage to Hitchcock by Martin Scorsese. I know, it's been floating about online for ages, but there's a chance that some of you won't have seen it. Basically, it's an advert for dubious Spanish sparkling wine, but what an advert!

It purports to be a documentary about a secret project which could have bold repercussions on future film preservation. Supposedly Martin Scorsese has managed to acquired three-and-a-half pages of script from a film that Hitchcock had meant to make, but never did, for some reason, and has resolved to shoot them as the master would have done, to make his own Hitchcock film.

'It's one thing,' he says, 'to preserve a film that's been made. It's another to preserve a film that's not been made.'

Scorsese's clearly having blast in this, whether appearing in the documentary sections or making the mock-Hitchcock film itself, into which he tosses references to North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, Rear Window, and surely a few other Hitchcock films that aren't leaping to mind just at the minute.

Even without the references, the homage is spot on, down to the costumes, the hairstyles, the lighting, the sound, and of course the credits. The only thing that's missing is the director himself -- though I wonder if Mr Scorsese is somewhere to be seen in the film.

Hmmmm.

From Shadows and Appearances into Truth

Having been singing the praises of the Savage Chickens yesterday, it seems only fitting that I should seek their help today.

Cardinal Newman came up over lunch the other day, which isn't really all that surprising in light of the crucial role he played in my alma mater back in the 1850s. One of my mates has been reading one of Trollope's Barchester novels, and it seems that Newman's Tractarian movement and eventual conversion to Catholicism play some part in the book's background.

This led into a discussion of how Newman's beatification is apparently on the cards in Rome. The reported miracle, so necessary a requisite for the Church to recognise someone's sancitity, troubled the others, which isn't surprising if you simply don't believe that miracles can happen.

I'll come back to that another day, but I want to stick with the Cardinal himself for today.

I've long found Newman a fascinating and inspiring figure in all sorts of ways, not least for his moral courage and intellectual honesty. I read his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine a few years ago, having bought it just weeks after moving to Manchester, and though it's not an easy read it's an enthralling one and one that so many sceptics -- whether of Christianity in general or Catholicism in particular -- would do well to read.

Essentially what Newman does in the book, in which he inexorably thinks himself out of the Church of England and into the Catholic Church, is to treat Christianity as a historical fact. As he says in the book's introduction:

Christianity has been long enough in the world to justify us in dealing with it as a fact in the world's history. Its genius and character, its doctrines, precepts, and objects cannot be treated as matters of private opinion or deduction, unless we may reasonably so regard the Spartan institutions or the religion of Mahomet... It has from the first had an objective existence, and has thrown itself upon great concourse of men. Its home is in the world; and to know what it is, we must seek it in the world, and hear the world's witness of it...

And so he sets to work, trawling through the writings of the Church Fathers and the records of the Church Councils, discovering whether he likes it or not that the Christian Church of the first centuries after Christ was alarmingly similar in doctrine, practice, and organisation to the Catholic Church of his own day.

It's a remarkable achievement, and if you've already accepted the basic truth of Christianity, it's difficult to read it without bowing your head with Newman and conceding the fundamental claims of the Catholic Church.

One of Newman's great hobbyhorses was the compatibility of faith and reason, two great gifts from God that are so frequently set in false opposition to each other. Too often religious belief is seen as something incompatible with reason, but Newman's uncompromising search for truth, wherever it may lead, gives the lie to that supposed antagonism.

For Newman, intellectual assent to the truth is needed for us to truly accept it. As one of his characters in Loss and Gain, one of his novels, puts it:

Certainty, in its highest sense, is the reward of those who, by an act of will, and at the dictate of reason and prudence, embrace the truth, when nature, like a coward, shrinks. You must make a venture; faith is venture before a man is a Catholic; it is a gift after it. You approach the Church in the way of reason, you enter it in the light of the Spirit.

I have a very good friend who worries about this approach to the Faith; I think his fear is that one might become so enamoured by the historical basis of Christianity that one might lose sight of its universal significance. He has a point, but as long as we follow Cardinal Newman and remember that reason is the road, not the destination, we should be okay.

The Chickens Know...

I was astounded a little earlier when an ecstatic friend of mine sent me a Facebook message headed 'I have an irrational fear of Beatles movies... people think I ought to get Help.'

Yes, it's an early Savage Chicken cartoon. But how was this new to Dublin's most incorrigible punster? Hadn't I told him about the site before? Evidently not...

Have you seen Savage Chickens yet? If you haven't, and if you can spare any time at all, you should get over there pronto.

Trust me: these chickens will change your life.

I was introduced to them just under two years ago, when someone showed me one of the greatest cartoons ever, back when the craziness that still taints Manchester for me was just beginning. That intrigued me, but I think it was this magnificently bizarre beauty that bewitched me.

Since then, I've been ardent in my devotion to the site, not least because of its utter mastery of the finely crafted bad joke. Doug Savage is a fine successor to Gary Larson, whether in terms of the extraordinary strangeness and magical silliness of his work or simply its flawless timing.

Delightful though that would be in its own right, there's more to the site than random weirdness and glorious puns. Over the years, Savage has suggested a reason for watching bad films with the commentaries turned on, explained just why Scooby-Doo isn't loved quite as much as it should be, proposed an intriguing entry to Flann O'Brien's catechism of cliche, lamented how much we fear, answered the question creative types most fear, shown us how to insult someone and everyone they know with just one damning word, given us advice against quoting The Shawshank Redemption when defending our theses, pointed out how useful it can be to have a gift for strategy -- something with which I'm sure Tony Harrison would agree, commented on how pointless life can seem, observed that Mondays always suck, warned against open-ended employment contracts, and simply noted how some people clearly think its okay to sack people from their jobs without telling them why.

And that's just for starters.

A Kafkaesque Fantasy

Sometime before Christmas, Student Direct, Manchester's student newspaper, ran an article on an open meeting between Alan Gilbert, the University's President, and an unspecified number of the University's students. I've already mentioned how Student Direct seems to have made it its mission this year to pick up on all the areas where its given the University a free pass since the merger of the University of Manchester and UMIST.

Unsurprisingly, plenty of issues reported on by Student Direct in the weeks prior to the meeting were aired, though I was intrigued by the article reporting that Professor Gilbert's had requested that he be copied into any e-mails of complaint that students sent to the University. Did he really say this? How many complaints are sent to the University every day? Does he plan on reading all these e-mails? Even if he reads them, does he plan to do anything about them, or is this just to satisfy his curiosity? Does he plan to do any work at all before he leaves?

Copying Professor Gilbert into complaints certainly ought to be a good idea, not least because it will enable him to see just how inefficient -- and that's a charitable adjective -- the University can be.



They hide that information in books
For example, say there's a student who's being bullied by a lecturer, and about whom a lecturer is telling lies, doing everything possible to destroy that student's credibility should they complain. I'm not saying that that's the sort of thing that happens, but you know, let's just say.

How would the student complain? Well, if she didn't think to talk to the Students' Union, and many students don't, because they tend to assume all it does is organise parties and 'Stop the War' stuff, she'd probably go to the University's StudentNet page, and from there make her way over to the section on Student-Related Policies, once she finds it. So what sort of policies are there?

Well, there are quite a few: an Appeals and Complaints Procedure for Prospective Students; a Policy on Changes to Postgraduate Research Degrees; a Data Protection Policy; an Equality and Diversity Policy; a Freedom of Information Act Policy; a Guidance Document -- but no policy? -- on Harassment, Discrimination, and Bullying; a Guidance Document on the handling of cases of Academic Malpractice; an I.T. services Policy; Information Systems Security Policies; a Mitigating Circumstances Policy; a Policy on Misconduct in Research and a Guidance Document for dealing with such; a Personal Development Planning Policy, whatever that is; a Prevention of Smoking on Campus Policy, a Policy on Progress and Review of Research Students; a Race Equality Policy; a Religious Observance Policy; a Skills Training Policy for Postgraduate Research Students; a Policy on Split-Site PhD Arrangements; a Policy on Supervision for Postgraduate Degrees; a Policy and Guidelines regarding Student Academic Representation; and a Student Admissions Policy.

What's that, twenty, maybe twenty-two documents? It's sounds like a lot, sure, but believe it or not it doesn't actually cover the problem I've posed. I'm sure these people wouldn't be the least bit surprised, though. They'd probably say it was par for the course where universities are concerned.


In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration...
The trick in this case, would be to have a trawl through StaffNet, which probably wouldn't even occur to her! Assuming she made her way there, she'd discover buckets of other policies there for the scrutiny of all and sundry. It's a treasure-trove of procedures to which the University pays lip service. Not just in the 'Policies' section either; the 'Documents' section is crucial reading too. So she'd have to dig about, especially since the whole thing is an organisational mess.

You could have fun with Venn Diagrams charting this.

So where would she start? Perhaps she could complain under the Student Complaints Procedure, using the supplied form? I say 'supplied', but if you look you'll find that neither the procedure nor the form is to be found on StudentNet -- she would have to go to StaffNet to seek them out! Assuming she found them there, she'd discover that there's a separate policy for dealing with bullying -- it's not under the remit of the Complaints Procedure. Fair enough. That makes sense.

Of course, I suppose in this case she'd probably be bright enough to have realised that anyway, as there's a Guidance Document on StudentNet regarding the Harassment, Discrimination, and Bullying Policy firmly planted among the Student-related Policies. Of course, there's not a whiff of the policy itself. No, to find that, she'd have to go over to the Policies section on StaffNet, where you'll find the Student Guidance Document and also -- if she looked carefully -- the Staff Guidance Document. Fine, but what about the investigators? How would she find out who the Investigators into this complaint ought to be, and how they should do their job? Well, the Managers' Guidance Document is over in Documents.

They don't make this simple, do they?


... under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good
But it gets worse. Remember the scenario I described: the lecturer was telling lies about the student, trying to destroy the student's reputation. Could the student find out what the lecturer had been saying?

Well, in theory yes. There is an 'Openess' policy, after all, which presumably resembles an Openness Policy and which used to be available among the Student-Related Policies. Not anymore, mind, as the University has presumably decided that students have no interest in transparency and fairness, and decided to hide this little policy away in the Documents section of StaffNet. Ah, the irony.

So yes, the Openness Policy, for so it should surely be called, would give the student the right to know. So too would the Data Protection Policy, sensibly provided -- in a daring break with tradition -- among the Student-Related Policies. The trick would be for her to make what's called a Subject Access Request, saying that she wants to see all communications from the offending lecturer to whoever she thinks he's been lying to. She'd be entitled to this data under the Data Protection Act. Although it's not in the policy, the best way to do this is to go to the Records Office, fill out a form, and pay them a tenner.

That way she'll probably get what she wants within forty calendar days, though it does depend on her being able to find the Records Office! For what it's worth, last time I checked it was near Student Services, just up a little stairway. It has, however, moved more than once in the last couple of years, so it might have been secluded somewhere else since my last visit! Any directions I were to give on this point would come with a caveat.

Right, so assuming our poor bullied student has somehow sucked up the bullying and mistreatment, and the possible victimisation that may have followed on from her subject access request, and hasn't died of old age or exhaustion at this point, she now has the job of trawling through all the nonsense that will have been spouted about her. That's assuming the relevant offending documents were supplied to the Records Office after the request was processed, rather than being deleted, say.

Destroying or tampering with records after a request has been entered is defined as a criminal offence under Section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act. It's a personal liability offence, in that the individual tamperer is deemed to be personally responsible for the tampering, rather than the institution. Interesting, eh? It'd certainly be a very bad idea for the offending lecturer to have broken this rule -- or for anyone else to have done so in order to protect them.

Not, of course, that I'm suggesting the University myrmidons would close ranks in a situation like this. Perish the thought!


Somebody must have been telling lies about Josef K
Okay, so she trawls through the stuff, and finds all sorts of defamatory stuff about her. But what does she do with it? Well, the thing is, this isn't exactly covered under the Harassment, Discrimination, and Bullying Policy! It's clearly misconduct, and certainly closer to the kind of misconduct covered in the HDB Policy than in the Students Complaints Procedure, but it's not specified under the policy or in the guidance document. This poses a problem, as the offending lecturer might somehow attempt to destroy the student's credibility by lying about her to the investigators, say. So assuming the student has somehow managed to get proof about this, what could she do about it?

Bear in mind that time is passing. These procedures all take time. The law says forty calendar days for Subject Access Requests and twenty working days for Freedom of Information Act requests -- there is a difference -- and a HDB Investigation supposedly takes twenty working days from receipt of complaint, so even if people do their jobs properly this is going to be messy. And then there can be appeals and such.

But here's the thing: among the policies on StaffNet there's a policy on employees' use of the University's telephone and internet facilities. It makes clear that these facilities must not be used to send any communications that might be defamatory! This is apparently misconduct, and in serious cases will be treated as gross misconduct leading to dismissal! Rightly so, you might think, but it goes further. It seems that employees shouldn't even open e-mails if they think they might be defamatory. And if employees receive e-mails that are defamatory, they certainly shouldn't forward the thing to anyone with the exception of investigators in the relevant computer support unit!

Think about this: the lecturer would have been breaking the rules by defaming the student, and anyone to whom the lecturer had defamed the student who had then forwarded the offending e-mail would himself have broken the rules!

Granted, there's no procedure specified for how a student might complain about this, but I think our lass ought to be safe enough complaining under the HDB Policy. That's assuming that the person she complains to knows and cares enough about the rules and basic fair play that they do their job!


Such a thing might happen when the sky rained potatoes
Of course, the real danger with this is that someone within the University might retaliate, by somehow attempting to discipline the student under the delightfully-named Regulation XVII: Conduct and Discipline of Students. No, that's not on StudentNet either. Don't be silly. Surely you're not expecting transparency this late in the game? No, it's on StaffNet, in the Documents section, under 'C'.

I say 'the real danger'. Of course, that's not it. The real danger is that the poor student would just be ground down by how long this might go on. Forty days here, twenty days there; here an investigation, there a review; here a decision, there an appeal, here a delay, there an excuse; here a vacation, there a lie. Eventually she might finally get the brush-off from the University that is a 'completion of procedures' letter, which would allow her to take the matter to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator.

Of course, the OIA tries to be neutral, and thus won't even give preliminary advice based on the premise that the girl is describing her situation truthfully. No, it will do things at length and in detail, or not at all, so a complaint will need to be entered, and then after a month or so our heroine will discover whether or not it's being considered, and then there'll be further communications over the course of the next five or six months before the Adjudicator will reach a decision.

And one of things the Adjudicator can't do is demand that a University take disciplinary action against an offending member of staff. No, the best the girl could do if the OIA were to agree that procedures hadn't been followed would be to return to the University and say 'Look, the OIA says the rules were broken. So do it again, and do it properly this time.'

And the cycle would begin afresh.

Of course, this is all just a hypothetical scenario just to demonstrate how Byzantine this whole mess would be. I'm not saying that things like this happen, just that they could. You'd need absurd reserves of determination and steadfastness to fight through this, as well as some very, very good friends.

It shouldn't be so hard. Surely it wouldn't be that hard to streamline the procedures? Especially in a university that wants to be 'world-class'.

And yes, I realise that I could probably say pretty much the same thing about any other university, but it's only natural that I should look at one of the ones in the cities where I live, isn't it?

(For what it's worth, I've not linked to the individual documents here because I imagine they'll move soon enough. Probably to Finance or Catering or somewhere obscure.)

In the Company of Wolves

The other day, talking about Christopher Hitchens, morality, and the 'Golden Rule', I raised the question of whether being nice is the same thing as being good; I might as easily have asked whether it's the same thing as being right. I'm inclined to agree with Little Red in Sondheim's Into the Woods who -- chastened by her experiences -- declares that 'nice is different than good'.

Into the Woods was my introduction to Sondheim, long before I was captivated by Sweeney Todd; a musicologist friend of mine loaned me her copy, after raving about it for months, and washed away all my ingrained contempt towards musicals. Heavily influenced by The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim's fascinating study of the importance of fairy tales, it's immensely clever and really quite hilarious in how it interweaves and interprets the stories of Rapunzel, Jack the Giant Killer, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty to enthralling and enlightening effect. If you ever get an opportunity to see it -- whether in the theatre or in the American Playhouse version -- you shouldn't miss that chance.

Bettelheim's analysis of the Red Riding Hood story is primarily based -- like pretty much all modern retellings -- on 'Little Red-Cap', as the Brothers Grimm version of the tale in entitled. He sees this as a fairy tale for inquistive children who've outgrown 'Hansel and Gretel', and sees its value in how it allows children to give vent to their oedipal fantasies while ensuring that the natural order is ultimately restored.

While it's the Grimm version that interests him most, Bettelheim doesn't ignore the tale's prehistory and devotes special attention to Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, Charles Perrault's 1697 French version of the tale, the earliest published form of the story. Unlike the Grimm version, Perrault's version is a cautionary tale that ends with the girl being devoured. There's no rescue by a woodman, no snipping open of the wolf's belly with a scissors, no filling of the wolf's belly with deadening stones. Nope. The girl and her grandmother are eaten, that being the end of them, and in case Perrault's point isn't blindingly obvious, he hammers it home by tagging on a moral:

Children, especially young ladies – attractive, courteous, and well-bred – do very wrong to listen to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide a wolf with dinner. I saw ‘wolf’, for there are various kinds of wolf. There is one kind with an amenable disposition – neither noisy nor hateful nor angry, but tame, obliging, and gentle – who pursues young women in the streets, even into their homes. And alas! Everyone must know that it its these gentle wolves that are the most dangerous wolves of all!

Perrault also seems to have been responsible for introducing the red hood itself to the story; it doesn't appear to have been part of the oral tales from which he drew his Tales of Mother Goose, at least insofar as they can be established, although there was a tale current in the Eleventh Century of a red-capped girl found in the company of wolves.


It seems that Perrault may have toned the story down a bit too, removing elements he apparently deemed unsuitable for his polite audience; this rendering of the tale, taken with just one adjustment from Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, is representative:

Once a little girl was told by her mother to bring some bread and milk to her grandmother. As the girl was walking through the forest, a wolf came up to her and asked where she was going.
"To grandmother's house," she replied.

"Which path are you taking, the path of the pins or the path of the needles?"

"The path of the pins."

So the wolf took the path of the needles and arrived first at the house. He killed grandmother, poured her blood into a bottle, and sliced her flesh onto a platter. Then he got into her nightclothes and waited in bed.

"Knock, knock."

"Come in, my dear."

"Hello, grandmother. I've brought you some bread and milk."

"Have something yourself, my dear. There is meat and wine in the pantry."

So the little girl ate what was offered; and as she did, a little cat said, "Slut! To eat the flesh and drink the blood of your grandmother!"

Then the wolf said, "Undress, and get into bed with me."
"Where shall I put my apron?"

"Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more."

For each garment -- bodice, skirt, petticoat, and stockings -- the girl asked the same question; and each time the wolf answered, "Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more."

When the girl got into bed, she said, "Oh, grandmother! How hairy you are!"

"It's to keep me warmer, my dear."

"Oh, grandmother! What big shoulders you have!"

"It's for better carrying firewood, my dear."

"Oh, grandmother! What long nails you have!"

"It's for scratching myself better, my dear."

"Oh, grandmother! What big teeth you have!"

"It's for eating you better, my dear."

And he ate her.

Darnton has the girl taking the path of the needles rather than the path of the pins, but Bettelheim notes that early versions of the story describe the girl choosing the path of the pins, and explain the significance of the choice by saying that it is easier to fasten things together with pins than to sew them together with needles; as such the girl is choosing the pleasure principle over the reality principle, and suffers accordingly.

I first read this version of the story in a slightly abridged form in Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic, as told by Gilbert -- Gaiman's Chestertonian embodiment of a very special place -- to Rose Walker, the heroine of The Doll's House. It's apparently a pretty accurate reflection of the story as it was told among the peasantry of Eighteenth Century France, at around the same time as Perrault's somewhat sanitised version was gaining popularity among the literate classes; you'll probably have been rather startled both its cannibalistic element and by what Darnton describes as 'the strip-tease prelude to the devouring of the girl'.


Marina Warner, in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, notes that other retellings seem to preserve a different tradition again. She describes how some versions indeed have the wolf tricking the girl into eating the flesh and drinking the blood of her grandmother, but with the girl refusing to get into bed with the wolf, saying that she needs to relieve herself. The wolf encourages her to join her anyway, saying she can relieve herself in the bed, but as the girl persists in her refusal he ties her to the bed post with a long cord that allows her to leave the cottage but go no further; once outside, the girl undoes the knot and escapes.

Warner makes much of how the wolf takes the place of the grandmother in the story, eschewing Bettelheim's psychoanalyical interpretation to point out that both the wolf and the grandmother are marginal figures in the story: both dwell in the woods away from people and are in need of food. This parallel seems to reflect and embody the peasant fantasies of early modern Europe, where the werewolf was a male counterpart to the female witch or crone.

If you've seen The Brotherhood of the Wolf, you might be familiar with the story of the 'Beast of Gévaudan', upon which the film is loosely based. The Beast terrorised a part of south-central France between 1764 and 1767, killing at least sixty people. More than a hundred years later, Robert Louis Stevenson described it as 'the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves':

What a career was his! He lived ten months at free quarters in Gévaudan and Vivarais; he ate women and children and ‘shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty’; he pursued armed horsemen; he has been seen at broad noonday chasing a post-chaise and outrider along the king’s high-road, and chaise and outrider fleeing before him at the gallop. He was placarded like a political offender, and ten thousand francs were offered for his head. And yet, when he was shot and sent to Versailles, behold! a common wolf, and even small for that.

It's not surprising that the locals had been so terrified, and indeed superstitious. The nightmare of the loup-garou -- the werewolf -- was deeply embedded in the collective psyche of the peasantry of early modern France. Throughout the Sixteenth Century, with the countryside apparently being plagued by lycanthropic attacks, thousands of people were accused of being werewolves. Although torture was often used to educe confessions, there were cases where the evidence against the accused was clear in relation to charges of murder and cannibalism, albeit not to association with wolves!

The whole phenomenon, strikingly similar to the witch-trials that were so common throughout Europe at the time, petered out after it was decreed in a 1603 trial that 'the change of shape existed only in the disorganised brain of the insane'. With lycanthropy now seen as a delusion rather than a real supernatural phenomenon, werewolves faded from the French courtroom, but they clearly remained fixed in the French popular imagination, being trasmitted down through the centuries through folklore, fairy tales, films, and even parlour games.

'Blondes Make the Best Victims'

One snowy night years ago, when a girl I rather fancied at the time was foolishly wearing some decidedly inappropriate high-heeled strappy shoes, one of my friends related to me with great enthusiasm and an excess of detail the entirety of 'Think Fast, Father Ted' while we blundered about in the January snow. I'd not seen Ted at the time, and I'm afraid my friend's description didn't whet my appetite any.

Curiously enough, when I finally got round to seeing Ted for the first time, that was the very first episode I happened to stumble upon. I wasn't exactly swept away by it; Dermot and Ardle were great as Ted and Dougal, and Pauline McGlynn was fine as Mrs Doyle, but why the hell was Frank Kelly being wasted -- in so many senses -- as Jack? I was to be a few years before I changed my mind on Ted, and started to appreciate just how good it was, although even now I'm not convinced by Jack. I still think he's the one weak point in the series, but I rate its strengths rather higher now than I did at the time.

In the summer of 2006 I worked my way through the whole series, watching an episode each day while I ate my lunch, or listening to a commentary while I was cooking; this had the rather odd side-effect of reviving my Irish accent to the point where people took to asking me whether I'd been home at any point. No, I'd grin, I've just been watching lots of Father Ted.

You might remember my mentioning the commentaries the other day, when I was talking about RTE's brilliant Art Lives documentary on Graham Linehan. I described them as a 'comedy masterclass', and I'd really hold to that: aside from being very funny, listening to them and thinking about the episodes teaches an immense amount about the structure and timing of comedy, about the sitcom as a form, about the transformation of a written script into a full show, and about how actors realise and reinterpret the writers' vision.

'Think Fast, Father Ted' has a scene where the priests' car is -- for no apparent reason whatsover -- attacked by a flock of birds. In the commentary, Graham remarks that:

Arthur was obsessed with The Birds. He’s still obsessed with The Birds, ‘cause the special effects look so bad in it, and it’s considered such a classic. It’s just such an odd film in many ways. But, there’s a scene where there’s some schoolchildren running down the street and the birds are attacking in the background: it looks really fake, and Arthur just really wanted to have birds attacking them. Actually he specifically wanted that shot - he wanted that shot - and I didn’t really know what he was getting at, and neither did, y’know, neither did anyone else working on it, so he never quite got what he was after, and I felt bad because suddenly one day I saw it - I saw The Birds - and I thought, y’know, I had seen it but I hadn’t quite grasped what he was after, and I saw The Birds, and I thought, ‘Aww, okay. It’s the running really fast and the obvious fakeness in the background, and the camera slightly at a low angle looking up, and all this, and I didn’t realise he meant exactly exactly like The Birds.’

Arthur evidently carried his obsession for Hitchcock's apocalyptic fantasy over to Big Train; a few years back in Manchester I remember being nearly sick laughing at his brilliant parody 'Alfred Hitchcock's The Working Class'. It's absolutely spot on, right down to Simon Pegg being briefly replaced with an egregiously fake dummy.

Of course, The Birds is a film that's almost too easy to imitate; it's so distinctive in its look and tone, and contains so many unforgettable moments. It's hardly suprising then, that it was so perfectly drawn on in 'A Streetcar Named Marge', surely one of the best films in what really looks like the Golden Age of The Simpsons. You must have seen the scene towards the end of episode, where Homer goes to retrieve Maggie from the Ayn Rand School for Tots, only to walk into a room with every surface covered in babies, the only soundbeing that of hundreds of babies all sucking on their soothers; he gently picks up his daughter and then backs out of the room, and as he leaves the building Alfred Hitchcock can be seen strolling past, walking a couple of dogs. It's pretty much a shot-for-shot homage to The Birds.

I couldn't help but think of all this yesterday afternoon, looking out my window to refresh my eyes, tired from being glued to the screen: in the garden, and the adjoining gardens, and on the telephone wires, were hundreds of birds. There was at least half a dozen magpies, several jackdaws, a few starlings, a handful of jackdaws, a thrush or two, a blackbird, too many crows, and far too many terns for my liking.

I was only glad there weren't any seagulls.

Christopher Hitchens: Self-Satisfied Sophist?

I'm rather fond of On Faith, the Washington Post's forum for discussing religion; at the moment, as well as the usual discussion topic, you can watch a fairly substantial interview with Christopher Hitchens, who explains at some length his deep-seated opposition to religion, his contempt for religion and religious people, why he believes Islam in particular to be deeply dangerous, and why for all that he believes in the importance of religious education, even going so far as to opine that creationism should be taught in schools, albeit not -- rightly -- in science classes.

It's fascinating to watch, not least to marvel at how gifted a speaker Hitchens is: he comes across as urbane, charming, witty, and supremely articulate, all of which serves to marvellously mask his sophistry. Yes, sophistry. It's worth listening to him very carefully, because if you do it'll not take long before you start to realise how flimsy his arguments really are.

In explaining his atheism, he cites Paschal's observation that some people are simply unable to believe in God. Having done that he casually treats this observation as a scientific fact -- he says that perhaps 10 or 11 per cent of people are incapable of religious belief. I would love to know what he's talking about here. Is he claiming that some people simply lack cytosine at a particular spot in VMAT2, the so-called 'God gene', the discovery of which was so proudly trumpeted two or three years back? Even if this was what he had in mind, it wouldn't prove anything: the absolute most that can be said about Dean Hamer's research into this 'God gene' is that it demonstrates that some people are biologically inclined to be more 'spiritual' that others. It's entirely possible to believe in God in some sense, with this belief being wholly rooted in reason, without being remotely spiritual. Certainly the Catholic Church -- of which half of all the world's Christians are members -- has always maintained that the act of faith has its seat in the intellect, rather than the emotions.

Still, Hitchens claims that he didn't so much become an atheist as realise that he was one. He apparently discovered this when very young; he tells a story of a teacher trying to persuade him of how the existence of God could be demonstrated from how our world surrounds us in greenery, the perfect colour for putting us at our ease. In essence, she was using a version of the argument from design. Hitchens intuitively knew that this was codswallop, that surely the causal relationship was the other way around!

It's a fair point, the argument from design is a very easy target, the ropeyness of which has enabled Richard Dawkins to rake in heaps of cash over the years. As Ronald Knox so well demonstrates both in The Belief of Catholics, and in his sermon 'The Cross-Word of Creation' -- published in 1927 and 1942 respectively -- the argument from design is really no more than a foolish and dangerous corruption of the argument from order. As he explains in the latter piece, which reads better as an essay than I'm sure it ever sounded as a sermon, the argument from order, as distorted into the argument from design is:

'on the whole, the stupid man's argument [...] also it is the argument which is most discussed nowadays, partly for the same reason, and partly because the scientific materialists are always discovering, every fifty years or so, that they have now found a way of giving it its death-blow. [...] I don't believe that St Thomas meant to use the argument from design when he gave his fifth proof. I don't think what impressed St Thomas was the fact that everything conspires together for a beneficient purpose; what impressed him was the fact that things conspire together at all.'

Words mean what I SAY they mean...
Hitchens's story of his childhood epiphany is an interesting one, and certainly explains where he's coming from in the main, but I cannot see any explanation for his nonsensical endeavours to prove that agnostics are really atheists:

'If you say you don't believe, which is what an agnostic has to say, because an agnostic says "I can't decide," well, it means you don't believe in God, otherwise you would have decided. Well, if you don't believe, you're an atheist. Q.E.D.'

Rot, of course, and there's no justification for his smug smirk after coming out with such tosh. It's not that all those who don't believe in God are atheists -- if that were the case then babies, unconscious people, dogs, and trees would probably all qualify as atheists. Atheists are not those who don't believe there is a God; atheists are those who do believe there isn't a God! Atheism is a positive belief in a negative, not a negative belief in a positive! Strictly speaking, what we colloquially call 'atheism' is what philosophers more accurately refer to as naturalism or materialism.

Actually, Hitchens goes even further than claiming that all agnostics are actually atheists, saying that he doesn't believe that anyone is really religious, that he's sure that nobody believes in a personal God, led alone an interventionist one, they just pretend to, or wish they could. He can believe what he wants on that, of course, since none of us really knows what goes on in anyone else's head; it's when he twists logic to argue that agnostics are really atheists by definition that I get annoyed.

He gets away with a lot in this interview purely by redefining terms to suit himself, as it happens, perhaps most strikingly when the interviewer doesn't pick him up for the absurd claim -- uttered as an aside to a discussion of the tale of the Good Samaritan -- that none of Jesus' disciples could have been Christians becauses they hadn't read the New Testament!

For Hitchens then, it would seem that being a Christian demands both that you should be able to read and that you should have read the New Testament. This is ludicrous, and denies the title of Christian to the vast majority of Christians throughout history, not least all those who lived before the New Testament was effectively canonised by the Church of the Fourth Century. The term 'Christian' simply means 'follower of Christ' -- or, more literally 'one who belongs to Christ', and it is in that context that the New Testament records the term as having first been used at Antioch, and that St Ignatius of Antioch uses the term of himself a few decades later, the first Christian we have a record of so doing.


Religion is apparently about pestering your neighbours...
Despite his constant warring on religion and the religious, Hitchens purports to believe Thomas Jefferson had it right when he wrote in 1782 that 'it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.' You might wonder then why he feels a need to be so vociferous about his atheism, but I think he adequately explains it when he says:

'In the last instance the religious person cannot keep to a promise to leave me out of it, because he wouldn't be true to himself -- or herself -- if he said "I'm not going to bother you with what I think," because that's watching me go to Hell, and how can a friend do that?'

It explains why he does what he does; it doesn't for a moment mean that the explanation is correct. He's ignoring the fact that religious friends might pray for him, unbeknownst to him; granted, he wouldn't value this, but that wouldn't obviate its righteousness in his friends' eyes.

Further, aside from what he ignores, he's assuming that evangelism must be a vocal and intrusive thing. It certainly can be that, but it need be nothing of the sort, and can simply take the form of evangelizing by example, something which is often rather more effective than just spouting Scripture at people: think of the famous exhortation so often attributed to St Francis of Assisi that we should 'preach always, and when necessary use words.'


One Emperor is much the same as another...
Part of problem with Hitchens is that he's so confident in what he says in that marvellously rich voice that unless you're paying very careful attention you're liable to simply trust him when he starts reeling off stuff about religion arising at a time when people didn't know the earth was round, or when people thought the earth was about 6,000 years old, or when he comes out with this:

'In a way the first efforts at philosophy are made by the schoolmen, if you like, by people who were in holy orders. Apparently no one else was allowed to practise it after the Christian empire closed the schools of philosophy in Greece after Justinian made Christianity the official religion of the empire. After that happened, philosophy was a branch of religion.'

Yes, of course he's right to say that during the medieval period philosophy was pretty much studied solely by monks and friars; but then, it's hard to think of anything in the Middle Ages that wasn't studied more of less exclusively by monks and friars! And yes, it's obvious that when he says 'the first efforts at philosophy' he means 'the first modern efforts at philosophy', so he shouldn't really be picked up on for that, but as for the rest of it?

It was Theodosius -- not Justinian -- who in the late Fourth Century made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire. Justinian's closing of the Athenian schools -- part of a general programme to suppress religions other than orthodox Christianity -- didn't take place until 529 AD, so a good century and a half after Theodosius had decreed Christianity the state religion. It's worth pointing out that this isn't an insignificant bit of accidental conflation: for all that Justinian called his empire a Roman empire, his was really that which history remembers as the Byzantine empire. Despite the conquests of his general Belisarius in Italy and Africa, Justinian's imperium consisted of little more than Asia Minor, the Balkans, the Levant, and the newly reconquered Italy and North Africa. His successors' empire rarely stretched far beyond Asia Minor itself.

As such, Hitchens' is massively overplaying the importance of the closing of the Athenian schools; it had a massive effect on Athens, of course, reducing the city to provincial insignificance, but it's difficult to see how he could maintain that this had a massive effect on philosophical thought in the successor kingdoms of the West. They had other concerns.


Morality and monkeys...
I was glad to see him addressing the issue of morality in the interview, although that part of the discussion is cluttered with straw men and red herrings, not least in his laughable attempt to equate social solidarity with morality.

He claims that animals have a sense of social solidarity, and that we have it innately, simply by virtue of being primates: the only thing that's special about us, he insists, is that we're the only animals that think so highly of ourselves that we think we must have got our sense of morality from something divine!

That's fighting talk, but it's not as potent as it sounds: shouldn't he have stopped that sentence when he reached the word 'think'? After all, does he think animals are self-conscious, or that if they are that they are self-conscious but humble, recognising their own sense of social solidarity but thinking, well, it's just like blood, isn't it? It's just one of those things that goes with being alive and moving around?

So for Christopher Hitchens, then, morality is innate; the Golden Rule, as classically formulated by -- he says -- Confucius, is something which most people are born knowing. It's simply common sense that you should treat others as you would have them treat you, unless, I suppose, you're in a position of authority in a University.

I think he's right, up to a point. The Golden Rule is indeed common sense. Everyone knows that it's nice to be nice. But is it more than that? Is it good to be nice? What do we mean when we say things are good? Aren't we assuming that there is a standard of goodness by which things are judged? Because if there isn't, if there isn't an objective morality, then the Golden Rule really is reduced to a trite observation that it's nice to be nice.

It is, of course, but that doesn't offer any answers to someone in a position of power, who knows that he can do whatever he likes to people, happy in the conviction that they will never be able to do the same to him. You can imagine the scene, I'm sure:

'But sire, you shouldn't burn down villages because the people haven't paid their taxes!'
'And why not?'
'Well, how would you like it if they came and burned down your castle?'
'Is that likely to happen?'
'Well, no...'
'So, your point is?'
'Um.'

This what happens when we confuse morality in the sense of a 'moral law' with morality as understood as meaning our moral perceptions, or even our our moral habits. There may be no 'moral law', of course, but if there is, then this is a fact with consequences.

The other aspect to this issue is whether or not belief in God inherently renders religious people more moral than atheists and agnostics. I hate when people say things like this, wheeling out nonsense about people being religious as grounds for assuming that they're to be trusted, as though atheists are somehow less trustworthy by virtue of their beliefs. It's offensive, but more importantly it's blatantly wrong and something to which no thoughtful religious people would subscribe. For all that, though, it's a favourite straw man for the likes of Hitchens to tear to pieces, presumably because it's so ridiculous a claim. He surely can't be so stupid as to believe that religious people, as a rule, believe this.

His favourite way of shredding this straw man is to ask a question, a question to which he says he has never received a satisfactory answer:

'Can you name a moral action or a moral statement made by somebody who's a believer that couldn't have been made by a nonbeliever or uttered by one?'

Apparently nobody has ever been able to answer this. He says somebody once ventured 'exorcism' but he said that that wouldn't count; I'm not entirely sure why, but even if that's excluded I can still think of two answers,bpth of which I suspect Christopher H would rule both out of bounds.

One is petitionary prayer. Only a religious person can pray for something to happen -- or at any rate for his or her will to be united with that of God in willing that something should happen. And assuming that what's being prayed for is something good for somebody else, then surely this constitutes a moral action. Granted, Hitchens might consider it an action devoid of efficacy, but surely he'd have to recognise it as a moral action nonetheless. Its inspiration and motive would have been wholly good, and its execution would have been a moral action that no atheist could perform.

And what of prayers of thanks, and prayers of worship? Isn't the expression of gratitude a moral act? And yet who can an atheist thank for Creation itself? Hitchens might rave about the majesty of the Universe, he might talk about how humbled by it he feels and about how awed he is by its beauty, but assuming that there is a Creator, he can never thank Him.

Indeed, you might wonder about societies beyond our own, where they have different concepts of morality than us, including a higher sense of the sacred. There are probably loads of moral things they could do, by their lights, that atheists could never do. Of course, Hitchens would probably rule these out of court as not matching his definition of 'morality', but that merely opens the question of what is morality, because for most people in the world morality goes beyond 'it's nice to be nice'.

That's just me thinking. I'm sure you can do better.