SPEECH MATTERS
Getting Free Speech Right.
By Katharine Gelber.
University of Queensland Press.215pp.
It's easy to agree on the principal of Free Speech - until people start saying what they really think. Most will agree there have to be some limits to Free Speech, but few can agree upon where those limits should lie, or how they should be applied.
Katharine Gelber has been pursuing Free Speech, and its evil twin, Hate Speech, through the academic world of political science for well over a decade. Now an Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, she offers this survey of the complex status of freedom of speech in Australia. She points to flaws and inconsistencies in the way governments impose limits on various freedoms that Australians generally think they possess. She also identifies a wide disparity of opinions among Australians as to where Free Speech can, or should, be overridden by other political, social, cultural or moral values.
The book title proposes that we can “get it right”. I turned to the final chapter on How to Get It Right. Sadly, after so much study and explication, the author can only exhort us to try harder with “a more robust commitment to this fundamental freedom” that needs liberating from the strictures that our complacent political culture has allowed to impinge upon it.
Prof Gelber notes that the right to freedom of speech in Australia has been limited in various ways by federal, state and local governments. But the right itself has never been confirmed or defined by our High Court, nor does it appear in our Constitution. By contrast, the United States First Amendment to its Constitution expressly forbids any level of government from making any law that will curb freedom of speech, and successive US Supreme Courts have not only upheld this general right against government limitations, but have extended its ambit to cover many non-speech and non-political forms of expression.
Australia's record is not all bad. Gelber devotes a whole chapter to the repeated refusals of Australian parliaments to make it an offence to insult the Australian flag, despite the calls of nationalists to restrict that particular form of political expression. She also commends the ACT Government for its unique legislation to prevent corporations employing SLAPP writs (“Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation”) to stifle public protest against their commercial activities.
Gelber's case is that Australian political culture has been too ready to accept creeping erosion of the right to free speech in over-reaction to political exigencies. She gives particular attention to the many infringements upon personal liberties, including freedoms of expression, rushed through Australian parliaments in the name of the War on Terror, and never moderated since then. For example, it remains illegal for an academic to collect, for research purposes, any publication that might inspire a mentally impaired person to consider committing an act of terrorism.
Gelber's research indicates that Australians support free speech in principle, but rarely give it priority over other values such as security and social cohesion. Perhaps this is because few Australians have ever experienced the absence of free public expression, and we have sufficient trust in our democratic institutions to believe that if something becomes intolerable, we can change it.
The Free Speech issue is one aspect of the broader contradiction between two democratic values - freedom and equality. Gelber defines "Hate Speech" and vilification as being attacks by the empowered against the “weak and marginalized” in society. At one point she equates vilification with violence. Doesn't this view contradict general free speech principles?
A civilized society will protect the weak against the strong, and institutionalized values should discourage abuse of power through "speech" as much as any other form of abuse. But the record on vilification laws and the politicised notion of “Hate Speech” seems to show that legal avenues of redress are of most value to the most organized, not to the genuinely weakest targets of abusive speech. Without careful calibration and adjudication, anti-vilification laws can themselves be abused to the same effect as SLAPP writs.
This book will be a worthy addition to political science reading lists, but should also find a readership among those who are interested in how we manage our ideals through our institutions of government.
Richard Thwaites values his democratic right to vilify the powerful on an almost daily basis.
Read the full review
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Can we really Tolerate Pluralism?
The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism.
By Tariq Ramadan.
Allen Lane.212pp.
Reviewed: 5 April 2011
Multiculturalism has always had its critics. Elected leaders of Germany and the UK have recently denounced it, and across most of Europe its social benefit is under review.
Tariq Ramadan is a prominent voice in the European debate about multiculturalism, at least at the philosophical level. Of Egyptian background but Swiss nationality and education, he is Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford
In The Quest for Meaning he sets aside the economic, social and political dimensions of the multicultural debate to focus on how systems of belief shape personal and group identities, and then how such identities divide people who are sharing the same space.
Ramadan is steeped in the philosophical traditions of both West and East, and has structured this book with a deliberate formality based on balance and counterpoint. Chapters often address a duality like Faith and Reason, Emotion and Spirituality, or Tradition and Modernity. He writes in scriptural rhythms that can become hypnotic. The prose does not so much offer linear arguments as erect a structure of symmetrical chapters and sub-chapters like the compound vaulting of a fine Persian dome.
Ramadan summarises his own book as “a strange mixture of analytic thought, Cartesianism, strict rationalism and flights of mysticism”. He ponders whether his work is that of “an Eastern mind or a Western intellect”.
It was certainly a challenge to the Western intellect of this reviewer, who is normally happy to leave the flights of mysticism to any beings, human or otherwise, who might exist on some other plane. Ramadan is essentially rational, offering many aphorisms such as “Dogmatism is to thought what narcissism is to self-image”.
The first problem is embodied in his title. He equates “meaning” to a clear sense of causality, purpose and direction in a linear cosmic history, and of our place in it. Then he assumes that the quest for this “meaning” is universal to each individual, including rationalists. But those of us who are content to leave imponderable questions unanswered may still find Ramadan’s explorations worth chewing over.
For Ramadan, as a Muslim European philosopher, the real problem is how universal reason can reconcile different faiths that each claim the unique truth. His answer is to call for a deep-rooted pluralism that involves not just “tolerance” of others’ beliefs, but a conscious embrace of the ultimate equality of faith-based belief systems.
This is a tall order that has drawn enmity from conservatives and radicals on all sides. Fundamentalists of all faiths resent his suggestion that they do not hold a monopoly on truth, nor have God exclusively on their own side. Social radicals and skeptics complain that he is too tolerant of hocus-pocus and does not prioritise social change in conservative faith-based societies.
Ramadan was famously denied a US visa to take up a religious post teaching Theology at the (Catholic) Notre Dame University Cairo United States policy and intervention in the Middle East . That would be enough to draw the fire of the Neocons and other powerful lobbies.
Ramadan asserts that all members of a society will benefit from greater inclusiveness of a genuine, deep pluralism. One might question how this ideal can take root in societies based upon competitiveness and distrust.
Richard Thwaites is part of a pluralistic family embracing several faiths, philosophies, and none of the above.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Opening the Files on MI6 - a bit
MI6.
The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949.
By Keith Jeffery.
Bloomsbury Inc.810pp.
Reviewed 12 February 2011
Secret agents have fascinated us since story-telling began. We get excited about the moral ambiguities of Wikileaks and of political propaganda. Practices that are crimes in civil life may be praised as heroic in the competition between nations.
Demand for transparency in domestic politics goes along with acceptance of secret intelligence work in “defence” of common national interests. The paradox is that we are asked to trust in the effectiveness, and appropriateness, of actions undertaken in our names, that employ secrecy and deception, and that are publicly deniable by sponsoring governments.
So an authorized history of a secret organization like MI6 might seem to challenge the professional ethics of a historian, whose access to the archives depends on his agreement not to reveal (potentially juicy) bits of what he has seen. How much is to be believed when you don't know what remains concealed?
Keith Jeffery, a Professor of British History, was given privileged access to the archives of Britain's secret intelligence services - an Aladdin's Cave with filing cabinets.
Jeffery's meticulous 800 pages will help aficionados to sort fact from fiction in the spy memoir genre. He draws on hundreds of published works, as well as the files of MI6, to add anecdote and character sketch to what could have been a rather dry review of this romanticised subject.
In 1909, “tradecraft” was initially of the Sherlock Holmes variety, at best. Off to meet a potential recruit in disguise, Cumming had himself fitted up with a wig and false moustache at a Soho theatrical costume shop, and for good measure had his new appearance photographed so it could be replicated by the next costumier.
Effort and budget were boosted successively by British fears of Imperial Germany, international Communism, the Axis Powers, then Soviet Communism. The organization grew from one man in 1909 to a multi-layered network of thousands of agents and informers across the globe by 1949, when the veil is drawn.
Recruitment carried unavoidable risks. The kind of individuals who would undertake deception and betrayal must include some charlatans and some willing to double-cross - from top-drawer old boy network traitors like Kim Philby down to local informers turning under threat, torture, or for a better financial offer. The many stories of double-cross included here are just a small sample of an alarming rate of attrition among agents.
Another occupational hazard was over-confidence on the part of those who enjoyed the risk-taking aspects of operations. One internal critic of MI6's early World War II sabotage operations in Europe compared it to “arranging an attack on a Panzer Division by an actor mounted on a donkey”.
There were repeated takeover attempts by the Defence Forces establishment. MI6 also faced frequent pressure from the Foreign Office to curtail activities that could embarrass the local diplomats .
The history reminds how difficult relations were between Britain and the USA over this period. Bringing down the British Empire was an open objective of many Irish Americans (notably Ambassador Joseph P Kennedy, and several US journalists who actively spied for Germany), of many German Americans, and others who saw Imperial Britain as an economic competitor.
Keith Jeffery avoids too many obvious references to James Bond. Commander Ian Fleming appears as the author of disinformation published to cover the bungled murder of a traitorous agent.
Bond was most likely modelled on a suave Paris-based MI6 agent with a legendary taste for fast cars and faster women, but a name more evocative of tweeds than of tuxedos.
“The name's Dunderdale … Biffy Dunderdale”.
Read the whole review
Richard Thwaites' father was an ASIO officer 1950-1971, but his own experience of the field consists solely of being kept in the dark .
The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949.
By Keith Jeffery.
Bloomsbury Inc.810pp.
Reviewed 12 February 2011
Secret agents have fascinated us since story-telling began. We get excited about the moral ambiguities of Wikileaks and of political propaganda. Practices that are crimes in civil life may be praised as heroic in the competition between nations.
Demand for transparency in domestic politics goes along with acceptance of secret intelligence work in “defence” of common national interests. The paradox is that we are asked to trust in the effectiveness, and appropriateness, of actions undertaken in our names, that employ secrecy and deception, and that are publicly deniable by sponsoring governments.
So an authorized history of a secret organization like MI6 might seem to challenge the professional ethics of a historian, whose access to the archives depends on his agreement not to reveal (potentially juicy) bits of what he has seen. How much is to be believed when you don't know what remains concealed?
Keith Jeffery, a Professor of British History, was given privileged access to the archives of Britain's secret intelligence services - an Aladdin's Cave with filing cabinets.
Jeffery's meticulous 800 pages will help aficionados to sort fact from fiction in the spy memoir genre. He draws on hundreds of published works, as well as the files of MI6, to add anecdote and character sketch to what could have been a rather dry review of this romanticised subject.
In 1909, “tradecraft” was initially of the Sherlock Holmes variety, at best. Off to meet a potential recruit in disguise, Cumming had himself fitted up with a wig and false moustache at a Soho theatrical costume shop, and for good measure had his new appearance photographed so it could be replicated by the next costumier.
Effort and budget were boosted successively by British fears of Imperial Germany, international Communism, the Axis Powers, then Soviet Communism. The organization grew from one man in 1909 to a multi-layered network of thousands of agents and informers across the globe by 1949, when the veil is drawn.
Recruitment carried unavoidable risks. The kind of individuals who would undertake deception and betrayal must include some charlatans and some willing to double-cross - from top-drawer old boy network traitors like Kim Philby down to local informers turning under threat, torture, or for a better financial offer. The many stories of double-cross included here are just a small sample of an alarming rate of attrition among agents.
Another occupational hazard was over-confidence on the part of those who enjoyed the risk-taking aspects of operations. One internal critic of MI6's early World War II sabotage operations in Europe compared it to “arranging an attack on a Panzer Division by an actor mounted on a donkey”.
There were repeated takeover attempts by the Defence Forces establishment. MI6 also faced frequent pressure from the Foreign Office to curtail activities that could embarrass the local diplomats .
The history reminds how difficult relations were between Britain and the USA over this period. Bringing down the British Empire was an open objective of many Irish Americans (notably Ambassador Joseph P Kennedy, and several US journalists who actively spied for Germany), of many German Americans, and others who saw Imperial Britain as an economic competitor.
Keith Jeffery avoids too many obvious references to James Bond. Commander Ian Fleming appears as the author of disinformation published to cover the bungled murder of a traitorous agent.
Bond was most likely modelled on a suave Paris-based MI6 agent with a legendary taste for fast cars and faster women, but a name more evocative of tweeds than of tuxedos.
“The name's Dunderdale … Biffy Dunderdale”.
Read the whole review
Richard Thwaites' father was an ASIO officer 1950-1971, but his own experience of the field consists solely of being kept in the dark .
Monday, December 20, 2010
Rough Indian Ocean Passage for USA
MONSOON
The Indian Ocean & the Battle for Supremacy in the 21st Century.
By Robert D. Kaplan, Black Inc (Australia), 366pp.
Reviewed: 18 December 2010
It's a difficult time for an American to write a serious review of America's future place in the world. All the facts seem to point to a decline in the global supremacy of the United States. Yet American political debate is still defined by widespread belief in “American exceptionalism”: that the United States has a unique, even divinely-appointed, civilizing mission to the world, so the lessons of history do not apply.
Robert Kaplan is a critic of the Bush regime and sympathetic to Obama, a Fellow in the Democrat-aligned think-tank Centre for a New American Security and member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board.
Kaplan identifies a problem for Americans in even conceptualising the Indian Ocean. Standard American world maps do not split the globe at the international dateline, but place the Americas page centre, filling adjoining space with the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans - the self-referential “Western Hemisphere”.
The Eurasian land mass and the Indian Ocean, home to 80% of humanity, are split into disjointed friezes down left and right margins of an America-centred world. There is no intuitive sense of the continuity of Eurasia by land, or the Indian Ocean by sea.
Kaplan sets out to provide a sense of the scale and diversity of the societies linked by the Indian Ocean, and the key drivers for both conflict and collaboration. These draw in all the world's powers, including the United States. Religion and national ideology furnish his key descriptors, with economics seen as enabler or consequence, more than as driver of events.
To his credit, Kaplan does not actually talk about the “Battle for Supremacy” promised in the book's subtitle. That phrase seems to have been a shot of publishers' marketing hype. He outlines national interests that may stoke conflict between major powers and coalitions of powers, but with none likely to achieve any conclusive “supremacy”.
This is a maritime perspective, but the politics are driven by people living inland. Not only the littoral states such as India and Indonesia, but inland states of Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and above all China, are vitally concerned with their access to Indian Ocean resources and transport lanes. Massive trade volumes between Europe and Asia, and American sea access to Middle East oil, depend on unimpeded Indian Ocean sea-lanes.
China is bothered by the bottleneck at the Malacca Straits where the Indian and Pacific Ocean sea-lanes meet, so it seeks overland access to the Indian Ocean through both Burma and Pakistan, funding massive port developments. A Panama-style canal across the Kra Isthmus in southern Thailand is on the cards, making a direct link between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
India and China each plan massive expansion of their navies, with China in particular building significant facilities as “aid” projects in Sri Lanka and the Gulf, as well as its multi-purpose port facilities in Pakistan.
Of 34 aircraft carrier groups on today's oceans, 24 are American. His case is that these mobile military facilities are not solely projections of military power, but also a “presence” that, for example, can deliver humanitarian assistance to victims of natural disasters. That would be a pretty expensive way to deliver aid. And doesn't current thinking see carriers as too vulnerable to modern missile attack?
Kaplan doesn't see the USA's multi-trillion dollar national debt as an issue. He is certain that America “will recover from the greatest crisis in Capitalism since the Great Depression”.
Kaplan sees the geopolitics of the next century evolving with the USA in diminished, but still central role, balancing the new great powers of China and India. He quotes Huntington and thinks the “civilisational” challenge from radical Islam is real, but will be managed by engagement with moderate Islam. If Indonesian girls can wear hijabs with tight shorts, anything is possible.
He sees China's rise, including its military expansion, as “responsible” and amenable to beneficial co-existence. That's not so good news for dozens of China's less-powerful neighbours who distrust China's hegemonic intentions. Nor does he mention anywhere the topic of Chinese or Indian emigration flows, which are causes of great anxiety throughout the region.
You have to read this book in the company of Kaplan's target reader - an American person of lesser knowledge and greater naivete, to whose voting intentions many allied states entrust a significant part of our future security. Reading it this way, the book is quite instructive.
Read the whole review
Richard Thwaites worked for over ten years with a range of Asia-Pacific cooperative institutions.
The Indian Ocean & the Battle for Supremacy in the 21st Century.
By Robert D. Kaplan, Black Inc (Australia), 366pp.
Reviewed: 18 December 2010
It's a difficult time for an American to write a serious review of America's future place in the world. All the facts seem to point to a decline in the global supremacy of the United States. Yet American political debate is still defined by widespread belief in “American exceptionalism”: that the United States has a unique, even divinely-appointed, civilizing mission to the world, so the lessons of history do not apply.
Robert Kaplan is a critic of the Bush regime and sympathetic to Obama, a Fellow in the Democrat-aligned think-tank Centre for a New American Security and member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board.
Kaplan identifies a problem for Americans in even conceptualising the Indian Ocean. Standard American world maps do not split the globe at the international dateline, but place the Americas page centre, filling adjoining space with the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans - the self-referential “Western Hemisphere”.
The Eurasian land mass and the Indian Ocean, home to 80% of humanity, are split into disjointed friezes down left and right margins of an America-centred world. There is no intuitive sense of the continuity of Eurasia by land, or the Indian Ocean by sea.
Kaplan sets out to provide a sense of the scale and diversity of the societies linked by the Indian Ocean, and the key drivers for both conflict and collaboration. These draw in all the world's powers, including the United States. Religion and national ideology furnish his key descriptors, with economics seen as enabler or consequence, more than as driver of events.
To his credit, Kaplan does not actually talk about the “Battle for Supremacy” promised in the book's subtitle. That phrase seems to have been a shot of publishers' marketing hype. He outlines national interests that may stoke conflict between major powers and coalitions of powers, but with none likely to achieve any conclusive “supremacy”.
This is a maritime perspective, but the politics are driven by people living inland. Not only the littoral states such as India and Indonesia, but inland states of Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and above all China, are vitally concerned with their access to Indian Ocean resources and transport lanes. Massive trade volumes between Europe and Asia, and American sea access to Middle East oil, depend on unimpeded Indian Ocean sea-lanes.
China is bothered by the bottleneck at the Malacca Straits where the Indian and Pacific Ocean sea-lanes meet, so it seeks overland access to the Indian Ocean through both Burma and Pakistan, funding massive port developments. A Panama-style canal across the Kra Isthmus in southern Thailand is on the cards, making a direct link between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
India and China each plan massive expansion of their navies, with China in particular building significant facilities as “aid” projects in Sri Lanka and the Gulf, as well as its multi-purpose port facilities in Pakistan.
Of 34 aircraft carrier groups on today's oceans, 24 are American. His case is that these mobile military facilities are not solely projections of military power, but also a “presence” that, for example, can deliver humanitarian assistance to victims of natural disasters. That would be a pretty expensive way to deliver aid. And doesn't current thinking see carriers as too vulnerable to modern missile attack?
Kaplan doesn't see the USA's multi-trillion dollar national debt as an issue. He is certain that America “will recover from the greatest crisis in Capitalism since the Great Depression”.
Kaplan sees the geopolitics of the next century evolving with the USA in diminished, but still central role, balancing the new great powers of China and India. He quotes Huntington and thinks the “civilisational” challenge from radical Islam is real, but will be managed by engagement with moderate Islam. If Indonesian girls can wear hijabs with tight shorts, anything is possible.
He sees China's rise, including its military expansion, as “responsible” and amenable to beneficial co-existence. That's not so good news for dozens of China's less-powerful neighbours who distrust China's hegemonic intentions. Nor does he mention anywhere the topic of Chinese or Indian emigration flows, which are causes of great anxiety throughout the region.
You have to read this book in the company of Kaplan's target reader - an American person of lesser knowledge and greater naivete, to whose voting intentions many allied states entrust a significant part of our future security. Reading it this way, the book is quite instructive.
Read the whole review
Richard Thwaites worked for over ten years with a range of Asia-Pacific cooperative institutions.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Madoff on Wall Street - the Fall of the Damned Greedy
THE BELIEVERS
HowAmerica
By Adam Lebor.Phoenix
How
By Adam Lebor.
Do you really know where your superannuation and other savings are stashed? Hundreds of wealthy Americans and Europeans, discovered on 10 December 2008 that they had lost billions of dollars to Bernard Madoff, whom they had trusted for years, even decades. They had considered themselves canny investors.
Madoff’s swindle was the greatest Ponzi scheme ever recorded. New capital coming into the fund was used to pay regular and generous “dividends” to investors, and to pay out promptly any investors who occasionally sought return of their capital.
Investors received detailed monthly statements setting out which stocks and Treasury bonds had been traded on their behalf. The problem was, all of those trades were fictional. Any “dividends” were simply part of the client’s capital, as bait for further investment.
Adam Lebor traces, in often painful detail, Madoff’s talent for exploiting the psychological weaknesses of others, principally by making them feel privy to a rare and special opportunity.
He had his staff turn down all unsolicited requests to invest. Investors felt that they were part of a closed group, privileged to benefit from complex and secret investment strategies that Madoff would never divulge. In hindsight, it had all the features of a classic confidence trick.
Madoff could pull this off because he had another public and legitimate career as a Wall Street stock trader. He was a founder and chairman of the NASDAQ secondary exchange, a pioneer in developing electronic share trading, and prominent in the industry negotiations with government and regulators. Far from being an aggressive Gordon Gecko type, he presented himself as modest, personable, and deeply engaged in philanthropy. Some of New York
Lebor, himself Jewish, says Madoff was able to exploit clannishness and love of “beating the system” to defraud his own people more than any outsiders. Some admitted to believing that Madoff was using insider trading to generate his exceptional “profits”, and this added spice to the investment “opportunity”.
The players were by no means all Jewish. Many “feeder” funds were set up to tap into wealthy communities such as the WASP wealthy of Connecticut
At one level, this tale reads like a Reformation tableaux on the Fall of the Damned. Investors were sucked in not just by simple greed, but by a belief that they could beat the market odds, by entitlement, privilege, or cunning.
This grim tale is a reminder that securities markets will never be “self-correcting” because information on the market will never be symmetrical. One of the Wall Street operators declares, “There are no smart trades on Wall Street, just better informed trades”. And less informed investors to fleece.
Read full review..
Read full review..
Richard Thwaites has modest investments in superannuation and keeps his fingers crossed.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Hamlet had a Blackberry
Hamlet's Blackberry
A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age,
by William Powers, Scribe, 267pp.
William Powers is a journalist and media critic who lives on (and in) the world of digital connectedness, but sees peril in a life that is continually distracted by the beeps, flickers and tweets issuing from our always-on smart-phones, portable screens, and email alarms.
He has recognized that addiction to connectedness can seduce willing victims of E-harassment with demands for attention from workplace, from well-meaning friends, and compulsive participation in spurious “social networks” that feed on a false sense of artificial community.
But Powers is no I-phobe. The issue, as in every instance of a powerful new tool, is to winnow the useful applications from the purely wasteful and the actively harmful. It is for the individual user to work out how much connectedness actually contributes to what philosophers call “the good life”.
Without time for introspection and intimate conversation, unmediated by technology, an individual cannot attain “the good life”.
Socrates, with a career based on conversation, was addicted to the bustle and chance encounters of the Athenian agora - to being “always on-line”. Yet once forced off-line to a rural walk and uninterrupted conversation with one individual, he acknowledged feeling significantly refreshed.
The tale of Hamlet's Blackberry is a wonderful piece of Shakespearian exegesis. At one point Hamlet, trying to clear the “distracted globe” of his mind, declares:
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records…
And later, when struck by something he wants to remember..
My tables - meet it is I set it down..
The “Tables” was a new invention - a pocket notebook with erasable pages, all the rage among Elizabethan early-adopters. Powers' point here is that Shakespeare links Hamlet's distracted mind with an obsessive collection of “trivial fond records”, just because he possesses the device that enables this collection.
The arguments here follow well-worn themes about extraversion, introversion, self and society, applied to the current context of connectivity enthusiasm - what he calls “digital maximalism”. As so often, the choice is not binary, but of individual balance.
Read full review
Richard Thwaites once worked in the National Office for the Information Economy and pursues a good life, cautiously connected, in Canberra.
A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age,
by William Powers, Scribe, 267pp.
William Powers is a journalist and media critic who lives on (and in) the world of digital connectedness, but sees peril in a life that is continually distracted by the beeps, flickers and tweets issuing from our always-on smart-phones, portable screens, and email alarms.
He has recognized that addiction to connectedness can seduce willing victims of E-harassment with demands for attention from workplace, from well-meaning friends, and compulsive participation in spurious “social networks” that feed on a false sense of artificial community.
But Powers is no I-phobe. The issue, as in every instance of a powerful new tool, is to winnow the useful applications from the purely wasteful and the actively harmful. It is for the individual user to work out how much connectedness actually contributes to what philosophers call “the good life”.
Without time for introspection and intimate conversation, unmediated by technology, an individual cannot attain “the good life”.
Socrates, with a career based on conversation, was addicted to the bustle and chance encounters of the Athenian agora - to being “always on-line”. Yet once forced off-line to a rural walk and uninterrupted conversation with one individual, he acknowledged feeling significantly refreshed.
The tale of Hamlet's Blackberry is a wonderful piece of Shakespearian exegesis. At one point Hamlet, trying to clear the “distracted globe” of his mind, declares:
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records…
And later, when struck by something he wants to remember..
My tables - meet it is I set it down..
The “Tables” was a new invention - a pocket notebook with erasable pages, all the rage among Elizabethan early-adopters. Powers' point here is that Shakespeare links Hamlet's distracted mind with an obsessive collection of “trivial fond records”, just because he possesses the device that enables this collection.
The arguments here follow well-worn themes about extraversion, introversion, self and society, applied to the current context of connectivity enthusiasm - what he calls “digital maximalism”. As so often, the choice is not binary, but of individual balance.
Read full review
Richard Thwaites once worked in the National Office for the Information Economy and pursues a good life, cautiously connected, in Canberra.
Friday, September 17, 2010
A Liberal American Loses her Innocence Abroad
Every Man in this Village is a Liar: An Education in War
by Megan Stack
Scribe (Australia), 255pp
Too many correspondents barely try to step out of their home assumptions, and instead settle for recycling the reportage clichés and stereotypes that their editors won’t question.
Megan Stack reported for the Los Angeles Times for over ten years from the Middle East . She earned a Pulitzer nomination in 2006 for her work in Iraq America at the real Ground Zeros of the “War on Terror”: Afghanistan , Iraq , Lebanon , Palestine , Jordan , Libya , Yemen , Egypt and Israel
Stack writes in a heightened, consciously literary style packed with metaphor that varies from the acute to the distracting. She admits she aimed to “extract poetry from war”, but by the end has tired of that. The book echoes a long American tradition of introspective accounts of combat, from Steven Crane’s Civil War era Red Badge of Courage, to Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and many more.
Stack enters the fray confident in her liberal democratic values, and confident that America US attempt to destroy Al Qaeda in Afghanistan America
The title “Every Man in this Village is a Liar” is drawn from a parable. For Stack, it comes to refer not only to the stubborn opacity of Afghan politics, but also to the disingenuous spin and rhetoric emanating from Washington
Over the next years, she encounters courageous and principled individuals struggling to cope with intolerable local politics, and the often fatal consequences of American intervention. People she interviews are killed. The teenage son of a dedicated Iraqi journalist colleague is shot dead by US troops in Baghdad USA
Stack, the naïve correspondent, emerges from this narrative as emblematic of American liberal values. Seeking truth, she finds lies. Believing she can help make a better world, she finds a trail of resentment, loss and collateral damage.
Richard Thwaites was a foreign correspondent for Australian Brooadcasting Corporation, 1978-1983.
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