Author: Ophelia Benson

I’m a little perturbed and repelled by this idea (expressed in comments on Difficult Daughters) that the murder of a girl is ‘worse’ than the murder of a woman. Actually, I think I’m more than a little perturbed and repelled by it. And no one but me has even taken issue with it yet, so perhaps that indicates it’s conventional wisdom, even a truism. But I think it’s all wrong, and not only wrong but sinister. I’m perturbed not only by the specifics of the ranking but by the idea that ranking of murder is a valid and sensible way of thinking about it. But why would it be? Why should it be? Why don’t we all have an egalitarian reaction which says that qualities and attributes are fundamentally and radically beside the point when it comes to murder, that there is no better or worse, that nobody wants to be murdered (masochists excepted) and that’s that. What is this impulse to say that murder of children is worse? It seems to me to border on saying that the murder of cute people is worse than the murder of uncute people, which borders on saying the murder of pretty people is worse than the murder of ugly people.

Now, mass media do in fact say exactly that, albeit implicitly. The weird obsessive coverage of Jon-Benet Ramsay is one glaring example, and there are plenty of others. But why do rational people want to follow their lead? Why does anyone want to try to argue that some murders are worse than others? I can see why in certain very extreme circumstances, so extreme as to be very rare in the rich world, people might be forced to try to decide how to rank the worth of various people for the sake of triage. If death is inevitable for some members of a group because the water and food are limited, then calculations are one way to decide who is saved – but it’s well known (isn’t it?) that they’re a damn horrible way, which is why people often decide to draw straws instead. Sophie’s choice was not a choice she wanted to make.

There seems to be an idea that it’s a natural and instinctive thought that the murder or death of a child is ‘worse’ (in what sense? I don’t quite know, but the meaning seems to be taken for granted) than the murder of an adult. But I don’t think it is. I think that’s basically a sentimental idea, which is probably a product of the 19th century, of Dickens and Stowe and their fans and epigones. Dickens at some point realized that the death of a child could be milked for emotional reactions, and milk he did. You don’t find that kind of sentimentalism about children before Dickens. Even the cult of sensibility was mostly a sensibility about other things – about adult griefs and sorrows, on the whole. But Dickens had a winning formula, and Hollywood carried on his work; Little Nell and Little Eva have been haunting us for a long time now. But tear-jerking tricks of popular novelists aren’t necessarily the best possible guides to moral reasoning.

And I don’t buy it. As I said in the comments, I can see that the death or murder of a child is more poignant than that of an adult, for obvious reasons (innocence, defencelessness, helplessness, trust etc) but poignant is not the same thing as worse. It is true that one variable can be easily quantified: age translates directly into amount of potential life taken away. Okay; so if you’re in the village in a famine with stocks dwindling fast and no relief on the way, or in the lifeboat with one bottle of water, then one way to decide who starves is to say it’s the people with the least time left to lose. But that doesn’t translate directly into saying that the murder of a child is worse than that of an adult. And there are other criteria that (if one wants to take such criteria into account, which I don’t) cut the other way. You could easily argue that the murder of an adult is much worse than the murder of a child because an adult has a far clearer idea of what’s at stake, and because an adult probably has goals and plans and dreams that she wants to try to fulfill, and because adults are much more likely to have adult friends who value them, and because adults have probably invested a lot of time and effort in training or education that is just wasted if they are murdered, and because adults may have dependents who need them, which children don’t.

But I don’t want to make that calculation, because I don’t want to claim that the murder of one kind of person is worse than the murder of another kind. Because I don’t think it is. I think claiming that amounts to saying that some lives are intrinsically (not circumstantially, in the sense of having dependents or making a contribution) worth more than others. And frankly I think there’s something deeply icky and regressive in the idea that children are, intrinsically, as children, worth more than adults. I think that’s sentimental and sinister – as if people deteriorate by growing up; as if innocence were necessarily better than experience; as if ignorance were better than learning and potential better than actuality. It depresses me to think that anyone believes Hina Saleem’s murder would actually be worse if she’d been twelve instead of twenty one – as if she’d done something corrupting and tainting and compromised by growing up.

I hadn’t thought of this until I started typing, but Hannah Arendt talks about this whole issue in Eichmann in Jerusalem. She is scathing about the way the Jewish councils helped the Nazis by (among other things) coming up with various privileged categories of people who should be saved, and she’s adamant that they shouldn’t have done it.

What was morally so disastrous in the acceptance of these privileged catagories was that everyone who demanded to have an ‘exception’ made in his case implicitly recognized the rule…Even after the end of the war, Kastner was proud of his success in saving ‘prominent Jews,’ a category officially introduced by the Nazis in 1942, as though in his view, too, it went without saying that a famous Jew had more right to stay alive than an ordinary one; to take upon himself such ‘responsibilities’ – to help the Nazis in their efforts to pick out ‘famous’ people from the anonymous mass, for this is what it amounted to – ‘required more courage than to face death.’

We just don’t need to do that. We don’t need to collaborate with murderers by saying that the murder of one kind of person is worse than the murder of some other kind. We’re under no obligation to sort people into the more and less murder-worthy; so let’s not.

Uh oh.

A criminal investigation has been started by Scotland Yard into an advertisement from the Gay Police Association (GPA) that blamed religion for a 74 per cent increase in homophobic crime…Detective Chief Inspector Gerry Campbell, who leads the domestic violence and hate crime unit, disclosed the investigation in a letter to Ann Widdecombe, the Conservative MP. He wrote: “The original advertisement has been recorded as a religiously aggravated hate crime incident following a crime allegation by a member of the public.”

The original advertisement is a hate crime (incident). That’s interesting. Where I come from it’s things like murders and assaults that are hate crimes, not just ads. But that’s okay, maybe I come from a silly place. But – isn’t this what everyone said? Not everyone, but everyone who thought this here religious hatred bill was not such a hot idea? Atkinson and Rushdie and people like that there? That it would be used to punish and prevent criticism of religion? And didn’t everyone who thought the religious hatred bill was indeed a hot idea say that no no, no no no no no, it wouldn’t do that, good heavens no, it wouldn’t impede or suppress legitimate criticism of religion at all, no no, it wouldn’t have a chilling effect on humour or satire or mockery or polemic about religion, it would be used strictly to prevent – um – the kind of thing that needed to be prevented, and nothing else. Trust them. It would. Honest. So – now you get someone making an allegation of crime and Scotland Yard wheels majestically into action? But – what exactly is the crime here? Expressing an opinion about the connection between Biblical literalist religion and homophobia? That’s a crime? Well jeez, welcome to 1589, enjoy your stay.

Widdecombe, a Christian who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1993, was angered by the advertisement. “It seems a deliberate attempt to stir up hate against Christians,” she said. By using that famous line of worship, In The Name of the Father, the association is effectively alleging that Christians are solely responsible for hate crime. “The implication of this advertisement is that Christians stir up assault and abuse against homosexuals. This is not true, as Christians are specifically taught not to hate; not just to refrain from acts or expressions of hatred, but not to give in to hate itself.”

That is an absurd thing to say. Really profoundly absurd. Some Christians are specifically taught not to hate, but she must know (and if she doesn’t she ought to; it’s her duty as an MP, especially one who talks to newspapers about this subject) that not all Christians are taught any such thing. If she really thinks that no Christians anywhere are taught to hate homosexuals, she’s living in a dream world. (Perhaps she means that Christians who pay attention to what Jesus actually said are taught not to hate. But that’s not true either. It’s true of what Jesus says in some parts of the gospels, but it’s not true of what he says in other parts.)

Bernard McEldowney, the deputy chairman of the association, which is an independent body, said: “We wanted to focus on what we regard as a problem of faith-based homophobia, not just Christianity. “But when most people think about religion they think of the Bible which is why we agreed to illustrate the advert pictorially with a Bible. In hindsight maybe we should not have used the Bible but we wanted to highlight serious homophobic incidents on the grounds and justification of religious belief.”

Well you can’t, because saying things like that is a crime. Amen.

Catching up with le blog Bérubé again, and found something relevant to thoughts about universalism and human rights and pluralism and discussion.

We have not yet devised the political means to realize this utopian vision, and perhaps we never will: utopia, to date, is a place we know only by way of speculative fiction. But over the years, as we’ve developed family/clan relations, city-states, empires, kingdoms, caliphates, constitutional monarchies, theocracies, military dictatorships, communist autocracies and liberal democracies, we’ve come to learn that liberal democracies stand the best chance of realizing some approximation of that ideal, and – just as importantly – the best chance of changing their collective minds, so to speak, about how to approximate the ideal as they go along. Because they allow for plural, disparate, multiply competing political constituencies and modes of advancing political argument, liberal democracies seem best suited to realizing the kind of social self-reflexivity necessary for any significant political—or personal—change of understanding with regard to human rights.

That’s from Michael’s new book; he adds now:

But universalism with regard to rights and liberal internationalism with regard to foreign policy will perform a very useful function for any useful left: they will absolutely prevent you from expressing even the slightest degree of “solidarity” with Hezbollah, or the Iraqi resistance, or Slobodan Milosevic, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, simply on the grounds that they are opposing the Hegemon, the Empire.

Yeah. And then he adds a bit more after a discussion of Chomsky:

I would be so much happier if Chomsky were to take a moment to criticize the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic. I think that would be just great. Because, in my humble opinion, the left should have no part in such an enterprise, any more than we would take part in the International Committee to Defend Augusto Pinochet.
Or the International Committee to Defend Henry Kissinger.
Or the International Committee to Promote the Triumph of the Iraqi Maquis.
Or the International Committee to Point Out that Osama Bin Laden is Higher on the Moral Scale than Bush/Cheney.
Or the International Committee to Assert That We Are All Hezbollah Now.

Yeah.

Norm said something interesting today.

A framework for public life based on accepting that there is no single ‘road to salvation’, or – put otherwise – no single overriding moral truth, or that there is no way to be completely certain about whatever moral truth there may be, would seem to be the only alternative to permanent warfare between people of different belief systems (and that applies, of course, not only to religious belief systems). Call this framework ‘pluralist liberalism’. Is it not itself premissed, then, upon principles for which universal validity is claimed by its adherents? Some would say no, but I’ve never seen a persuasive argument for that. Liberalism makes a claim of its own to moral truth, but it’s a moral truth permitting those who believe in competing moral truths to live together, provided they don’t try to impose these on one another by violence. Which means that liberalism has to exclude the attempts of antithetical belief systems to monopolize the public domain for themselves. If there is an air of paradox about this, I don’t know how to resolve it.

Well…one way might be by saying there is a difference between a single road to salvation – which is, for instance, the kind of thing David Horowitz and Jamie Glazov kept trying to pin on Norm and Nick and the whole of the left in that misbegotten interview in Front Page a month or two ago – they kept insisting that the left as a whole believed in utopianism – like this:

But if you are on the Left, are you not part of an ideology that holds that human redemption, accompanied by human equality and a classless society, is possible and that it can be engendered through social engineering?

No. Next question. Or rather, back to what I was saying when I interrupted myself – that sentence isn’t even finished, which is a disgrace. Ahem: by saying there is a difference between a single road to salvation, and a framework based on accepting that there isn’t one (or, pluralist liberalism). By saying that universal validity isn’t exactly the same thing as a single road to salvation or a single – single, mark – overriding moral truth. By saying that a single road to salvation, a single overriding moral truth, and certainty about whatever moral truth there might be, are all on one side of this divide, all fit into one definitional box, while a framework based on accepting that there is no such thing, and plural liberalism, and claims of universal validity, are on the other. Perhaps it’s the secular aspect that separates them. Roads to salvation and single overriding moral truths tend to be theistic, and handed down by authority, and thus immune to questioning and reason; a framework that says there is no such thing isn’t. All the words Norm chose for the first half of the equation smack of taboo, of hands off, of don’t touch, of the holy of holies; the words he chose for the second half smack of the human and the discussable. The first half can be delivered by fiat; the second half relies on reasons. The first can’t be explained; the second can.

That’s how I would resolve the paradox. I would say that universal validity is not the same thing as a single overriding moral truth, because it’s a human thing not a goddy thing.

How would you resolve it?

Another pesky disobedient unsubmissive daughter eliminated.

In the garden, buried under a metre of soil and with her jeans and blouse soaked in blood, was the body of the missing girl. Her throat had been slit.

(Why is the Independent calling her a girl? She was twenty-one. Do men of that age get called boys? No. So why is the Indy calling Hina Saleem a girl? Especially in this context? Some strange unconscious desire to trivialize her or make it seem that she really belonged to her father in some way? Or just dumb as a post habitual belief that women really are childish?)

At the beginning of July, she was said to have refused her father’s insistent demand that she return with her mother and sisters to the city of Gujarat in Pakistan, where she was born, to get married. Police believe that her father, a brother-in-law, Mohammed Tariq, and another man, Mahmood Zahid, tried to persuade her one last time. The female members of the family had already departed. It is thought that Hina was told: “Either you come back with us to Pakistan or you’re not going anywhere.”

So now she’s not going anywhere.

Italy’s Interior Minister points out the obvious but still necessary:

The case of the Pakistani woman murdered by her father says a lot about the aims of citizenship, because it is clear that it is not enough to require adhesion to the values of the Italian Constitution. Adhesion to fundamental rights is also necessary, such as the fact that women are to be respected according to rules which I consider universal.

The Indy finds a retort:

In the midst of the rising tide of indignation, some small voices have made the point that not long ago Italy would have understood Mohammed Saleem’s feelings better. The law offering the possibility of clemency in cases of “honour crimes” – still far from rare in the south – was only repealed in 1981.

Yes – and? What of it? What follows from that sly observation? The Indy doesn’t say, it leaves it to us to determine.

John Sutherland on Shakespeare stuff. Harold Bloom, for instance. I like early Bloom, but I really hated his Shakespeare book.

…the Falstaffian Harold Bloom with Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998). Before the Bard, Bloom argues, we were only semi-human. We didn’t know how to express those feelings that separate us from the brutes (so much for Dante and Chaucer).

Not to mention Homer, Euripides, Seneca, Montaigne, and quite a few other people. But one can go too far in the deflationary direction too.

Stanley Wells is the acknowledged dean of the reviser school….[Shxpr] was a “working man of the theatre” – arguably (but not in every respect) superior to Dekker, Middleton, Jonson et al, and no different in kind…If you brought Stanley Wells’ Shakespeare to the present in H.G. Wells’ time machine and asked him “what are you doing, Will?” he would never have said “inventing the human, dear fellow”. He would have said: “turning an honest penny. And, by the way, can I interest you in buying a few tons of malt which I’ve just bought on spec?”

He wouldn’t have said either (as Sutherland is pointing out). The inventing the human thing is very silly, but so is the turning an honest penny thing. If he had been merely turning an honest penny and nothing more, there are thousands of lines he would have written quite differently. The plays are riddled with vocabulary, images, thoughts, effects, speeches, fireworks, that he didn’t need just to get bums on seats or feet in the pit. They are full and overflowing with excess. It is quite possible that he could have made even more money if he had written more simply: then he probably could have written more plays. He wouldn’t have written ‘Troilus and Cressida’ at all; ‘Hamlet’ would have been half the length; ‘Lear’ would have had the happy ending Nahum Tate gave it; the Sonnets wouldn’t exist; and so on. Yes he liked making money, but that’s not all he liked.