Author: Ophelia Benson

Wow. Cool. Look – Huxley.

Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it. It may seem an audacious proposal thus to pit the microcosm against the macrocosm and to set man to subdue nature to his higher ends; but I venture to think that the great intellectual difference between the ancient times with which we have been occupied and our day, lies in the solid foundation we have acquired for the hope that such an enterprise may meet with a certain measure of success.

The things one can find on the Internet. (Is it, or is it not, God’s will? If it is, why didn’t he give Voltaire and Hazlitt and Seneca and Protagoras the pleasure? Witholding bastard.)

Excellent. Hazlitt again. Say what you will about the Guardian – they do have a good books section, and they do keep having articles on Hazlitt. More than you can say for the New York Times!

I’ve said it before so why not say it again (especially since the article is saying much the same thing). Hazlitt is the most inexplicable case of undeserved literary obscurity that I know of in the case of an Anglophone author. Absolutely the top one. To be sure, there are Elizabethans and 17th century people who are well worth reading, who don’t get read all that much any more – Sidney, Nashe, Browne, Burton. But the barriers to reading them are easily understandable. But Hazlitt? Hazlitt?? Hazlitt is so readable it’s absurd, and the genre he writes in, unlike the genres that Nashe, Browne and Burton wrote in, is still very much current. He wrote essays and reviews. Big leap, huh? Nobody reads essays and reviews any more!

So why is Hazlitt so damn gone? Why was I made to read Lamb essays in school while I never so much as heard of Hazlitt? Why, why, why? I have no idea. I mean I really don’t – I don’t have a lurking suspicion of something or other; I have no clue; it makes no sense.

Because here’s the thing. He’s a brilliant stylist. Brilliant. Not just pretty good, not just very good; brilliant. One of the very, very best. He makes Orwell look lame. And nobody reads him. It’s tragic! And in case being a brilliant stylist is not enough, he’s no slouch as a thinker. And he’s politically interesting, and he’s good on literature, and he has an interesting mind and personality and take on things. There’s just no downside to reading Hazlitt. But no one does.

A reasonably well-educated friend noticed this book peeping out of my pocket one morning and remarked that it was rather heavy reading for such a time of day, or indeed for any time. I do wish people would stop doing this. Because Hazlitt died 170-odd years ago and is not as famous as Wordsworth or Coleridge, they assume that he cannot be an easy read, or even less of an easy read than W&C, or that to read him is more of a duty than a pleasure.
If you want a depressing lesson in contemporary cultural memory, go to any average-sized branch of a chain bookstore and ask for anything by Hazlitt. You will notice that it will take the person at the counter four or five goes to get the spelling right…

Terrible. Hazlitt rules. Down with archbishops and up with Hazlitt. Happy Easter.

Right. Let’s get down to it. With some help from Polly Toynbee.

But here the usefulness of faith ends, for it is mainly the power of the religious lobby that forces people to die in pain and indignity due to beliefs on the nature of life and death shared by very few. For 20 years now, every poll on the subject shows that 80% of people want the right to be helped to die at a time and in a way of their own choosing. But that kind of “choice” is not on the agenda.

And furthermore, even if the beliefs were shared by very many, even if they were indeed universal, they would still be both wrong (in the sense of inaccurate) and disgusting. (Which is the same problem that always comes up in discussions of for instance ‘honour’ killing and the like. I heard an example on the BBC World Service the other day, talking about the murder of Hatin Surucu in Berlin recently: the reporter said that clerics are telling the people in their mosques that ‘honour’ killing is not in the Koran. Well, clearly that’s one useful precaution under the circumstances, but the fact remains that even if it were in the Koran it would still be disgusting, contemptible, reprehensible. That the question to ask about a social practice that does obvious, radical, extreme harm to some people is not ‘Is it condoned or recommended or mandated in the Holy Book?’ but ‘Is it a good or acceptable or justifiable practice? Is it a cruel savage domineering controlling practice with no shred of justification?’) They would no doubt be much, much harder to get rid of; indeed they would probably be impossible to get rid of, if they were universal; but they would still be bad and wrong.

What kills you in the end if you have cancer or other terminal diseases? Not often the cancer itself. Nor the morphine that people innocently imagine will one day waft them away on a cloudy pillow of dreams to some opium-fuelled nirvana. What people actually die of, like Terri Schiavo, is dehydration when they can no longer swallow enough water to live – and it takes time. Enough morphine to die quickly is very rarely administered these days. Instead, cautious doctors, extra wary after Harold Shipman, give just enough morphine to kill people by degrees. It is enough, in the very end, to render them unable to drink so they die, semi-conscious, of thirst. Hospices don’t put up drips to keep people alive, but they don’t give out death-dealing injections either. The legal compromise is death by dehydration or sometimes slowly and gasping for breath by morphine-induced chest infection – “old man’s friend”. That is the great unspoken truth.

There. That’s nice, isn’t it. Something to look forward to. Read it all. Read about morphine-induced constipation and hallucinations.

Good though palliative care can be – my mother had the NHS at its very best – its own practitioners admit they often watch people die in great mental and physical anguish. People clutch at doctors’ sleeves, begging for an injection: “Can’t you do something?” How easy it is to slip into death-like unconsciousness under an anaesthetic, gone into oblivion before you can count to five. That little death in the operating anteroom is a paradigm for how the good death could be for those who want it.

Let’s hope the law is changed in the UK. And here – though it obviously won’t be any time soon, with these unspeakable bastards imposing their ‘culture of life’ on the rest of us even though we don’t want it. Because of their sick pathetic delusional beliefs.

As the Pope rasps out his last breaths, his bishops are using his final suffering as a testament to the religious requirement to endure whatever quality of life God sends. Both C of E and Catholic archbishops here will fight any attempt to change the law. Politicians have taken their cue from the churches.

The religious requirement to endure whatever quality of life God sends – what complete raving nonsense! If there is a requirement to ‘endure’ then doctors and medicine are illegitimate, right? Or, if the requirement to ‘endure’ somehow means the requirement to endure both illness and what medicine and doctors are able to do about it, then why does it rule out medical decisions that it’s time to put out the light? Because religion is a diseased imposition on human life, that’s why. What requirement? What kind of God is this that wants people to suffer as much as possible at the end of their lives? What is the matter with archbishops that they believe this kind of crap and impose it on everyone else? Serial killers and torturers go to prison (and in the US are executed) for causing that kind of suffering, but archbishops are respected for it.

Do archbishops live outside? Do they shiver in the cold and get wet in the rain? Do they blunder about in the dark, bumping into things? Do they eat all their food raw? Do they abjure clothes, books, transportation, medicine? If they have a headache do they not take aspirin? If you prick them do they not apply a band-aid? What is this hypocritical incoherent inconsistent sadistic mindless drivel about ‘what God sends’?

Go, archbishops, and sin no more.

Oh, Florida, Florida, Florida. What is your problem.

I mean for one thing there’s this winner.

Republicans on the House Choice and Innovation Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to pass a bill that aims to stamp out “leftist totalitarianism” by “dictator professors” in the classrooms of Florida’s universities…According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities.
Students who believe their professor is singling them out for “public ridicule” – for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class – would also be given the right to sue.

Is that a clever idea? I mean…what if students believe ‘God’ made the earth a few years before their parents were born? What if they believe 11 plus 2 equals 957,853? What if they believe Napoleon invented the automobile and Hitler was a Notre Dame football star?

What do students go to university for at all, if it’s not to have their beliefs not respected? They go there to find out that some of the things they believe are wrong. Dang – they even go there to find out that beliefs aren’t about ‘respect’. Well, except in Florida, maybe. (And, if Horowitz has his way, in Ohio and a few other states and pretty soon all fifty and I have to go pack my trunk now.)

And then there’s the Jebster.

Mr Bush’s brother, Jeb, meanwhile, has suggested doctors might have misdiagnosed Mrs Schiavo’s condition, which he says might be one of minimal consciousness rather than vegetative.
According to the Associated Press news agency, the governor and the state’s social services agency say they have filed a petition with a Pinellas County trial court seeking to take custody of Mrs Schiavo.

Mr Bush’s brother suggested that based on what, exactly? His own medical knowledge and familiarity with the case and personal examination of the patient? Intuition? Something he saw on tv? A fairy whispering in his ear? Hmm. I wonder if I can do that. [closes eyes, thinks hard] Okay, let’s see. There’s a car in the shop in Wichita, Kansas, that the mechanics have said has transmission problems, but I, sitting at my desk here in Seattle, suggest that the mechanics might have misdiagnosed that car’s condition, and actually what it has is ugly upholstery. I mean, my opinion is as good as theirs, right? It’s disrespecting my beliefs to say it’s not. It’s hell’s own arrogant for those stupid doctors to think they know more about Terri Schiavo’s condition than Jeb Bush does, just because they’ve examined her and he hasn’t and they know how a brain works and he, to put it mildly, doesn’t.

Well, great. What the hell. Let’s let legislators decide what college teachers should teach, and let’s let governors decide when doctors have made boo-boos. Peachy. Three cheers for minimal government. Not only micromanaging hospital care and university teaching, but also claiming universal competence. Brilliant.

Whatever. Maybe when Jeb gets custody of Schiavo he’ll have his parents move in so they can babysit for her and give him some time off. That would be sweet. Family values kind of thing.

This is a dispiriting read. They win. Bullying wins, death threats win, force wins, violence wins, pushing people around and beating them up and killing them wins. Interesting situation, isn’t it. People who have some capacity for moral reflection and awareness make some effort not to oppress and dominate and bully other people; people who don’t, don’t; so the people with some capacity lose to the people who have none. Familiar paradox. People who don’t give a rat’s ass about the freedom and rights of anyone but themselves are, of course, at a similar sort of advantage over people who do. People who think, like Callicles in the Gorgias, that people who can win because they’re stronger should go right ahead and do just that, often get their way. (Would he have thought so if he’d been small and puny and weak and sickly? Probably not. Hence the use of the Veil of Ignorance. But of course the Callicleses of the world don’t mess around with any old veils of ignorance, because they’re not small and puny and weak and sickly, so why should they.)

The decision by Wilders and Hirsi Ali to reveal their secret lives, one in a jail cell, the other on a naval base, has raised a question that is troubling many Dutch: is it acceptable for legislators in a Western democracy to be forced to go into hiding, to live like fugitives on the run in their own land?
Abram de Swaan, a prominent sociologist, said: “Of course this is an outrage. It’s not bearable. The government must come up with better solutions, like putting them in protected homes. That’s the way it happens in other countries.” The NRC Handelsblad, a leading daily newspaper, ran an editorial recently headlined “Unacceptable”. A situation in which legislators are “hampered in carrying out their tasks puts democracy in question and makes terror successful…”

Is it acceptable? That’s an easy question to answer. No, it’s not.

It was Hirsi Ali, though, who first decided to go public with her own and Wilders’ hiding places, out of frustration at the government’s seeming foot-dragging over finding appropriate housing. Her own proposals were regularly rejected as unsafe, she said.
Her bodyguards, she said, have deposited her on many weeknights on a naval base in Amsterdam, or hustled her off to sleep in different hotels. “They are keeping me alive, but I cannot concentrate on my work,” she said. “I need a place where I have my desk, my books, my papers, a home where I can meet with people.”…Hirsi Ali concedes she is struggling with the question of how long she can continue in politics, denouncing what she regards as the excesses of Islam. In the past she has shown she is not easily cowed, but she said a deep fatigue was setting in. “I am willing to sacrifice a great deal, but I don’t know if I can live like this for a lot longer.” She put her inexorable quandary this way, “The real problem is, I cannot stop because that will only serve and stimulate the terrorists.”

I find that dispiriting because I can imagine it so well – I can imagine going stark raving mad being forced to live in hotel rooms or on a naval base all the time, away from my desk, books, papers, own living space. Hirsi Ali is tired of it. She doesn’t want to live that way. And why the hell should she? How could she? So they’ve already won – even if she does persist. They’ve won by spoiling her life and making her work impossible. The mindless sexist bullying thugs who can’t stand to see women who are not under the thumb of a man, get to win. It makes me crazy.