normblog

Jeffrey Goldberg on what Obama is trying to do in Israel:

[H]e's trying to organize Tzipi Livni's campaign for prime minister, or at least for her inclusion in a broad-based centrist government... The goal is [to] force a rupture in the governing coalition that will make it necessary for Netanyahu to take into his government Livni's centrist Kadima Party...

The rest is here.

For the next seven days I'm otherwise engaged, in a family-directed sense, and blogging will be on a reduced and more intermittent basis. I'll make an appearance here when I can - that's the best I can say. Well, it's not the very best. I could give you some lines from the poets. But you'll have got my drift. In the meantime, you will have lots else to do, but you might like to take a moment and look at some quilts.

Argument by ambiguity - or so it strikes me anyway. I'm referring to a post by Roger Hardy, billed as 'a Middle East and Islamic affairs analyst with the BBC World Service for the last 25 years'.

Here's how it goes. First, 'Islamism is, at root, a reaction to western power.' OK, let's just take that as unproblematic, but note that something's being a reaction to something else doesn't yet enlighten you about the moral quality, the justification or otherwise, of the reaction. If you put ants in my breakfast cereal and I react by protesting, that would seem to be OK. But if I lend you a book you've asked to borrow and you react by shredding it before my eyes, that wouldn't. If Brian says a friendly hello to Amelia and Amelia reacts by kissing Brian long and suggestively in the presence of Brian's wife Molly, the whole situation is a bit more complicated and one may need to know more before saying what's good about Amelia's reaction, if anything, and what isn't good about it.

We need to know more, too, about what Roger Hardy thinks of the Islamist 'reaction to Western power'. Surprisingly, he never tells us except by indirection. Thus, he says:

In this narrative [the 'narrative of humiliation' developed by Islamists], the aggressive violence of the west must be met with the defensive violence of the mujahid, the holy warrior. The jihad is not only just; it washes away the stain of humiliation.

But that's in the narrative. And Hardy offers no word to say whether, from outside it, what's in the narrative should be deemed just or unjust or a combination of just and unjust. Except that we can see from his concluding paragraph that he thinks there's something at least partly just there. For he concludes:

Much of the talk about winning Muslim "hearts and minds" is shallow and misguided. The issue is often seen, especially in the United States, as a matter of public relations – as if America has an image problem in the Muslim world, and dollars can buy it a better one... Without a surer grasp of Islamism and its discontents, the battle for Muslim hearts and minds will be lost.

From which the inference seems obligatory that America needs to understand that this isn't only about image, because some of the discontents are soundly-based.

It's a short logical step from that to the inference: Hardy must think either that the narrative of humiliation is composed of grievances which are just, well-grounded; or that the narrative of humiliation is composed of some just grievances, but alongside elements which are unjust - groundless complaints, unreasonable prejudices, racist hatreds, murderous impulses, and so forth. But if it's the latter of these two things he thinks, he's not letting on. Why not? Search me. I don't know the man. Maybe because he has the mind of a typical Guardianista liberal,* for whom it is a practical truth that the only faults one should ever pronounce on are 'ours', the faults of the West. All other faults may go unsaid (if they are even accepted as being that). Or maybe there's some other explanation.

* Guardianista liberalism, incidentally, is unlike the real thing; it is liberalism of the verkrappt kind.

Peter Scott, vice-chancellor of Kingston University, writes of the false alternative, as he sees it, often posed in discussions of the purposes of higher education:

Today there seems to be a black and white choice between "what is higher education for", bristling with instrumentality, and "higher education for its own sake", all blue-skies. The truth is neither serves.

Setting out some cognate pairs of options, Scott rejects the either-or they offer, and then explains why. His explanation in short: mass higher education's 'essential link with democracy'. The link is better appreciated in the US, Scott says, where going to college is understood as being connected to 'the founding values of the republic'. For us too, higher education must no longer be about elites; it is about citizens.

That's all fine and dandy in my book. But Scott's conclusion rebounds against his premise. If higher education is about democratic citizenship, then I'd want to challenge his dismissal of one of the choices from which he began: namely, higher education for its own sake. I'd challenge his dismissal of this on the grounds that I doubt there is a better way of educating citizens, educating participants in democracy, than making available to them the free and open environment that goes with the traditions of a liberal education. Shaping higher education towards some special programme of learning-for-citizenship doesn't sound at all appealing. It's reminiscent of civics lessons at school. It would narrow rather than broaden. Let people teach and study what interests them, but with the discipline that true study demands; try to ensure that it really is study and not merely farting about.

Born in 1946, David McNaughton had the good fortune to go to an excellent state grammar school in Nottingham which inspired in him a life-long love of literature and philosophy. He has been teaching philosophy in universities for 40 years - first at Keele and now at Florida State University. He misses many things about Britain, but is relieved and delighted to have escaped from the UK higher education system. His other interests include listening to music, watching cricket and fell-walking. Opportunities for the last two are somewhat limited in Florida, so he returns to the Lake District each summer. His main philosophical work is in ethics and in philosophy of religion. David is the author of Moral Vision. He is currently writing a book on forgiveness with Eve Garrard. Here he discusses Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

David McNaughton on Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

I first read Conrad's Heart of Darkness when I was fifteen, and I have been haunted by it ever since. Certain scenes are engraved in my memory: Marlow, with 'the pose of a Buddha preaching'; the ship firing aimlessly at the African bush; the old knitters of black wool in the city that resembled a whited sepulchre; the row of heads on posts. Perhaps even more insistently, phrases and whole sentences echo in my consciousness. That the book has lingered in my porous memory is not wholly explained by the fact that I had to study it for 'O' level, for other set books have long ago vanished without trace. Nor, indeed, though I am ashamed to confess it, am I a devotee of Conrad's works as a whole. To me, the extraordinary power of this book lies in the flawless marriage of form and content. The horrific bleakness of its vision is perfectly captured by Conrad's incantatory language.

What first attracted me to the book was its intense atmosphere. From the beginning, Conrad's language conjures up a sense of brooding, ominous, stifling darkness that builds like an insistent drumbeat to the crescendo of Kurtz's last words. Almost every paragraph is crafted to intensify the effect: patterns of words and phrases that evoke darkness and mystery are repeated with variations, so that they echo and re-echo. The effect is almost symphonic, the reiterated images and phrases acting as leitmotifs. Only Macbeth can match it for the relentless evocation of darkness and evil.

The opening scene, which provides the setting for Marlow's tale, brilliantly establishes the mood. The air 'seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth'. Only the river escapes the darkness; it has 'the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth'. We expect, then, a tale of distant travel to dark places, but Marlow reminds us that the darkness is close; it hems us in on all sides. '"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."' Light is evanescent as a lightning flash: 'We live in the flicker... But darkness was here yesterday.' Conrad's incantatory style is already in full flower; the words 'brooding' and 'gloom' (or their cognates) are frequently repeated. But this conscious repetition is the result not of poverty of language but of intensity of theme. You might as well complain about the frequency of words evoking darkness in Macbeth, or Beethoven's endless return to the opening phrase in the first movement of his fifth symphony.

Central themes of Marlow's narrative are futility, absurdity, hypocrisy, self-deception, evil and mystery. Darkness does double duty: it signifies both evil and mystery. It is impenetrable. The whole colonial enterprise is portrayed, not only as cruel and pitiless, but also as inefficient, chaotic and absurd. Plenty of rivets where they are not wanted; none where they are. On the voyage out Marlow passes a gunboat futilely firing into an impenetrable and seemingly uninhabited jungle. 'In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent... Nothing happened. Nothing could happen.' The ill treatment of the natives is justified by categorizing them as rebels or criminals – terms that, torn from their original context, make no sense to those to whom they are applied. The people Marlow meets are small-minded, self-important schemers and charlatans who disguise from themselves the rape and pillage in which they are engaged. Long before Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil, Conrad portrays the type of the petty bureaucrat whose absorption in daily tasks blinds him to the enormities of colonialism. At best, they are comic ('He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear'); at their worst, their attempts at evil - though they do real harm - are hollow and pathetic ('this papier-mache Mephistopheles'). They are the devotees of 'a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.'

Not so Kurtz; his is the evil of greatness gone wrong. Round him still hangs the glory of the fallen archangel. He is great, gifted, eloquent, but fatally flawed, like all tragic heroes: 'there was something wanting in him - some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence.' The wilderness 'had found him out early', had 'whispered to him things about himself which he did not know'. Not only is he unable to restrain his lusts, but he is consumed by the sin of pride - the placing of self at the centre of existence: '"My intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my" - everything belonged to him.' In fact we never discover what Kurtz's original ideals were. When he finds Kurtz, Marlow is in a dream-like state, perhaps brought on by fever. He cannot accurately recall what Kurtz talked about; he is mesmerized by the style, but the substance eludes him. This is no accident, for Conrad makes it clear that Kurtz is a man for whom the spellbinding declamation of passionate conviction is more important than the thing declaimed. 'He electrified large meetings. He had faith... He could get himself to believe anything... He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party.' Marlow's vagueness about the content of his talks with Kurtz also serves Conrad's narrative purpose. To be specific would not only dispel the mystery, but also risk bathos. Marlow's hints ('It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence') leave all to the reader's imagination.

Yet, for Marlow, Kurtz was a 'remarkable man'. He had 'kicked himself loose of the earth'. Like Satan he stands alone, self-sufficient, believing in nothing outside of 'himself - his own exalted and incredible degradation.' He had attained enlightenment; looked into the abyss of things and seen the horror of them. 'He had summed up - he had judged. "The horror!"... this was the expression of some sort of belief;... it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth.' Of that final cry Marlow says: 'It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!'

Conrad's vision was bleak, perhaps partly as a result of his experiences in the Congo which supply the basis for Heart of Darkness. He summed up his credo thus:

Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die... There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that... is always but a vain and floating appearance... A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains - but a clot of mud, of cold mud, of dead mud cast into black space, rolling around an extinguished sun. Nothing. Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing.

There could scarcely be a more resounding rejection of religion and morality. Yet, to my mind, Heart of Darkness is a deeply religious and moral work, despite rejecting God and morality. One who rejects all meaning in life may see the world as 'just one damn thing after another'. But to Conrad there is mystery at the heart of things; a mystery that is awe-inspiring and magnificent. It offers nothing by way of comfort or reassurance, but Conrad's attitude to it is reverential and almost mystical. In him we have the religious attitude without its normal object.

And, despite the lack of any external moral authority, it matters how one lives. There is moral struggle and even, as we have seen, moral victory. Conrad expressed his 'conviction that the world... rests on a few very simple ideas.' Chief among these is the 'idea of Fidelity'. Marlow's unpretentious integrity stands in sharp contrast to the moral posturing of those he encounters. Like his near namesake, Philip Marlowe, he can walk the mean streets without himself being mean. 'You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me... It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.' Being true to one's self-forged beliefs replaces morality. 'He must meet that stuff with his own true stuff - with his own inborn strength. Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags - rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.' Conrad's response to his bleak vision prefigures the later response of the existentialist privileging of authenticity.

For Marlow there is also the possibility of redemption, not so much through work itself, as through one's commitment to that work. 'I don't like work - no man does - but I like what is in the work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - what no other man can ever know.' Here again, Conrad anticipates an existentialist motif which is especially prominent in Camus. As Camus later wrote: 'We must imagine Sisyphus happy.' I strongly suspect that Conrad's attempt to combine his nihilistic vision with his passionate commitment to the need for a 'deliberate belief' to which one must remain true would not survive the cool gaze of philosophical scrutiny. His leading ideas are in tension. It is, of course, a tribute to the power of Conrad's writing that in Heart of Darkness they seem fused in indissoluble unity.

Nowadays, it is perhaps impossible to discuss Heart of Darkness without mentioning the question of racism. But when I first read the book in 1963, that issue was invisible to me. I was raised on Little Black Sambo, collected 'golliwogs' from Robertson's jam, and was given a money box in the shape of a caricature of a negroid head. Yet my parents were good-hearted, humane, liberal people who were appalled by the notices on signs offering rooms to rent that read 'No coloured; no Irish'. In retrospect such insensitivity, wholly typical of its time, seems incomprehensible. One cannot read this novel today and fail to see why the charge of racism has been levelled against it. It is not just the frequent repetition of the 'N' word, but the attitude of the narrator (and, one assumes, of Conrad himself) to Africans that is disturbing in many ways. It is by turns patronizing and fearful. Worse, the Africans are barely human. 'No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of their not being inhuman.' There is no room to discuss this properly, but I want to say three things in Conrad's defence.

First, Conrad's racism is mild by the standards of the time. I have already pointed out that 50 years ago enlightened people could fail to see racism when it was staring them in the face. How much more difficult 100 years ago. Second, Conrad is sympathetic to the plight of the colonized and exploited Africans in ways that were, I think, well ahead of his time. Third, he not only exposed the evils of colonialism, at times he suggests that 'civilization' is only a veneer; in the opening scene, darkness broods over the 'greatest town on earth'. London, the heart of Western civilization, is a 'monstrous town... marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.' Darkness is not confined to Africa or to 'prehistoric' peoples; darkness is at the heart of the world, and in the hearts of men.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

To all my readers trying to get their bearings in the matter of Australia's vice-captain Michael Clarke absenting himself from a one-day series in New Zealand to be with his fiancée Lara Bingle, I commend this piece by my friend Gideon Haigh:

Now it was the cricket media's turn to scoff. Support? Surely Clarke should be demonstrating that he was the stuff of a future captain by ditching his fiancee immediately in favour of resuming that terribly important one-day series whose results will be forgotten next week.

Former players such as Ian Chappell and Michael Slater argued that being Australian vice-captain came prior to any relationship, both speaking with the experience of first marriages that did not survive their cricket careers.

I draw the column to their attention even in the case that the set of 'all my readers trying to get their bearings [etc]' is extrememly small, and there are more amongst you in danger of confusing Lara Bingle with Brian Lara.

Is there an argument yet to be made in justification of the Iraq war, or about its lack of justification, that has not already been made? I don't know. But you can still happen upon things of the most extraordinary kind in the way of background reflections on this issue. Such an extraordinary thing is the proposition by Henry Porter in yesterday's Observer that the putative perspective of future historians on the Iraq war is not to be trusted because their knowledge is bound to be inferior to our own:

[T]he wisdom of people who have not been born seems questionable to me because I can never entirely believe that they will match what we know of our own time. It's not an iron rule, naturally, but deferring to people of the future to decide whether something is right or wrong, a ghastly error of judgment or sublime inspiration, seems to me [to] be misguided. History selects and sifts and ends up relegating such things as human suffering to the incidental file.

Let us not dwell too long on the intrinsically ridiculous nature of this claim, which cancels out every advantage that a later generation of historians might gain from knowledge of subsequent consequences, from new information that may not yet be available to us here and now and from achieving some distance from the partisan passions of the present; and which cancels out every disadvantage of that very partisanship and the way it might make people (on every side of the debate) insensitive to facts or considerations that are awkward for them - a well-known human tendency and limitation. And let us not dwell too long either on the bizarre suggestion that, in reckoning up issues of justification, future historians must be less capable than our contemporaries of weighing the costs in human suffering against other factors. Does this apply to historians of either ancient or new world slavery? To historians of the First World War?

But one may notice, beyond these points, the unbalanced structure of Porter's argument. The costs of the Iraq war in human lives and human suffering he insists, quite rightly, on keeping to the forefront of moral assessment. The idea, however, that there is anything else to be weighed there, anything that might have motivated support for the war amongst those who did support it, is shoved to the sidelines. That Iraq was ruled by a murderous tyrant and a regime responsible for tens and hundreds of thousands of deaths? That who knows what the future costs could have been in human lives and suffering if the regime had been left in place? Mere fluff in the wind for all that Porter is willing to allow. Thus:

It is possible to say that intervention in the service of humanity is desirable, as many did during the Bosnian civil and Kosovo wars, but the very important difference with Iraq is that we were told that this was a matter of self-preservation and of eliminating Saddam's arsenal of WMD. We weren't going in to rescue the Shia Muslims, or the Kurds, or found a test bed democracy in the Arab Middle East. These were incidental to the clear and present danger of his weapons, yet now ever so subtly the revisionists alter the casus belli to account for the lack of WMD, at the same time as downgrading assessments of dislocation, grief and death.

The revisionism here is Porter's own. The justification for war under international law, and as made by those who led it, did not centre on regime change for humanitarian reasons. But the moral case for getting rid of Saddam depended on this from day one. To suggest otherwise is an act of deliberate self-blinding.

Many of those who were for the Iraq war supported it for reasons of this kind. Many who opposed it did so because they feared the costs would be too great, or because of the issue of legality, or because they doubted the intentions of the Bush administration or doubted that there could be a democratic outcome for Iraq, or for some combination of these and/or other reasons. Some of those who supported the war subsequently came to think they had been mistaken in doing so. I was one of these people - because I had been mistaken in my expectations about the human costs of regime change in Iraq, and those costs had proven exorbitantly high. But in changing my mind I never lost sight of the potential costs if there had been no war or regime change, and it is this, among other things, that continues to separate me from the army of the self-blinding, self-righteous multitudes of the anti-war camp, people not only convinced that they were right to oppose the war, but incapable of recognizing that those who supported it might have had conscientious moral reasons for doing that.

Porter writes:

The dispute I have with those who trumpet the democratic advances in Iraq... is that they narrow the issues to this one area of democracy and so are able to claim, at least to their own satisfaction, the prize of justification.

He just cannot understand how any supporter of the war can close their eyes to the suffering the war has caused. Indeed no one should close their eyes to it. But he closes his own to the argument there was for democracy in Iraq and for having tried to end the suffering of the Iraqi people at the hands of the Baathist dictatorship; he closes his own to what would have been the human costs of the counterfactual path, of an Iraq still ruled by Saddam and his sons. That, for him, is not narrowing the issue. Only what the war's supporters do is narrowing the issue.

How to describe someone who on a complex moral question, with grave potential consequences whatever one does, can only see the considerations he wants to see, the considerations that suit him? Doubtless, there is more than one apt description. But a description that would seem to fit is 'moral infant'. The number of them in Henry Porter's neck of the woods these last seven years has been legion.

How often do you come across a truly startling thought? I came across one yesterday, in this book review. The words are Arthur C. Clarke's:

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

Isn't it, though? And what, for me, adds to the interest of Clarke's thought is the very fact that both the one possibility and its opposite should be staggering. Are there other antithetical possibilities that share this quality?

Being a piece about a project that aims to mark the cultural connection between the two communities in New York City:

Last October, [Mick] Moloney completed an album celebrating [the] Irish-Jewish relationships both within his own life and in American musical history. Growing up in Limerick, Moloney says, he knew "very little" about Jews or Jewish culture. He met Jewish people for the first time while at college in Dublin, and later learned that Limerick was one of few Irish cities ever to have a pogrom, in 1904. Moloney sees this project as "turning the circle, as it were," celebrating Irish-Jewish cooperation. "If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews" includes 14 songs, all researched and performed by Moloney, and products of the fruitful and nearly forgotten era of collaboration between Irish and Jewish songwriters in New York's pre-World War I Tin Pan Alley.

You can listen to the song 'If It Wasn't for the Irish and the Jews' under the link to the article itself. And Moloney sings another song from the album here - 'Typical Tipperary'.

There are many other ways of doing this, but drawing attention to the story recently told by Maziar Bahari at a meeting at the University of Toronto is one way of showing that what Terry Eagleton regards as 'illiberal, supremacist noises about the superiority of the west' may look to others like a concern for the interests of people struggling for democracy where it is denied them. The Maziar Bahari story is here.

Some 10 days ago BBC Four screened a documentary about child poverty in Zimbabwe. It was almost too painful to watch. You can read about it here and see a couple of video clips. I can think of few things I've seen or read in recent times that brought home so starkly the ruin of Zimbabwe - and what it means to live in despair, abandoned by others of your kind, I mean humankind.

Some people don't want their Prophet insulted; with other people it's a tree stump. Good to see that the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland is rejecting a complaint of blasphemy on that account. I don't think the reasons the BAI gives are sufficiently robust:

"Most people in Ireland today would be highly sceptical of claims of apparition and would find nothing wrong in such claims being satirised or treated as suitable subject matter for jokes."

The State broadcaster also said it had not received any other complaints in relation to the comments.

"If upsetting one viewer was sufficient to uphold a complaint, many programmes would regularly find themselves in breach. No one was harmed by this gentle and unmalicious joke," they said.

The decision shouldn't depend on what 'most people' think of claims of apparition or of their being satirized; and even if there had been more than one complainant, it would have been right to reject the complaint. 'No one was harmed', that's the key thing. Anyway, they made the right decision. (Via.)

Interviewed by Jonathan Derbyshire for the New Statesman, here's Terry Eagleton:

I'm interested in the way a whole stratum of the liberal literati (Rushdie, to some extent Ian McEwan, A C Grayling, obviously Amis and Hitchens) - the very people you'd have expected to be guardians of the liberal flame of tolerance and understanding - have, at the very first assault, rushed into these caricatured postures driven by panic. I'm very struck by how those who are making ugly, illiberal, supremacist noises about the superiority of the west are precisely the sort of literary and liberal characters from whom you'd expect more imagination, openness and sensitivity.

Coming from a longtime Marxist this is, if I may so put it, somewhat lacking in dialectical subtlety. What these figures are 'making noises' about is not the superiority of the West, but the superiority of liberal values and institutions. That being the case, there is nothing whatsoever illiberal about their not being tolerant or sensitive towards the assault on liberal values currently carried in, amongst other things, the fanaticism of belief, the violence against persons and the oppression of (including violence against) women that Eagleton would appear to want them to be more 'open' about. What is more, Marxists should have no trouble understanding this since, as Danny Postel has lately reminded us, Marx understood it - or at least he mostly did. (Via.)

I've already flagged it once - the Oxford Literary Festival. I'll do so again by pointing you to this piece in the Oxford Times about a day of events centred on alumni of St Hilda's College. Juliet McKenna says:

What this day at the festival offers is a chance to celebrate everything that women can achieve, given equality of opportunity.

Prominent among the achievers mentioned you will find Adèle Geras of this parish.

I emailed Michael to draw his attention to my disgreement with him about world citizenship and he sent back this reply. I post it here with his permission:

Probably our disagreement is mostly terminological, but perhaps not entirely. I am uneasy about the effort to establish a global rule of law through judicial institutions alone. That's why I linked strengthening the UN and establishing the rule of law. Consider the ICC's indictment of the leaders of the Sudan - and then the inability of any other international institution to protect the people of Darfur against the reprisals that followed. The world is very far from being well-organized, and I think that there is a better way of relating to it and dealing with its disorganization than 'citizenship' is. The right response to Darfur (I am sure you agree with this) is solidarity with the people at risk there - and then executive action, not judicial action, on their behalf. And since there is no global executive, we need to look for substitutes, as in unilateral action by a single state or a group of states or by an international brigade or by a coalition of NGOs. And the old internationalism of the left seems to me to offer a better account of what needs to be done than any of the current versions of philosophical cosmopolitanism. It is more concrete; it connects us in a better way to ongoing political struggles, and it provides a better motivational basis for action (solidarity) than international law can possibly provide. Left internationalism should be, though we both know that it hasn't always been, proof against the contract of mutual indifference. Still, I would not want to deny that thinking of world citizenship as a process can help us oppose indifference and perhaps even generate its own motivational energies.

Look, I freely admit it. We older guys are not as mentally adept as our counterparts of the female adherence. Extending the data set available to those who carried out this research, I willingly testify to the fact that whenever I'm at a loss for a name, a word, a... er... well, some other kind of thing, I turn to my ever-loving wife and companion of 42-plus years - sometimes known here as WotN - and she usually has the answer ready, just like that. But and even however, I think these researchers haven't really got to the bottom of the way a bloke's mental processes can go. I mean, see what they say: 'how can men so easily forget birthdays, anniversaries, and even friends' names?' Or this:

Participants in the first test listened to 10 common words being read out and were then given two minutes to recall as many as possible. The second test required them to list the same 10 words about five minutes later. Women scored almost 5% more than men, on average, in the first test, and nearly 8% more in the second.

Now, is that fair? How is a chap to get on with pondering the things on his mind - whether it be the order of results in some past Ashes series, the optimal shape of an argument for a blog post or journal article, or the number of ways of combining the elements in some abstract set or other - if he has to focus closely on the date of someone's, possibly someone else's, birthday or wedding anniversary or on a list of common words? There's no point in it. Is there?

Marcia Jarnell was born in Lancashire. She studied German at London University. After completing a bilingual secretarial diploma, she moved to Germany, returning to the UK following the birth of her son. She has lived in Scotland for the last 20 years, working with computers and dreaming of living somewhere less wet. Marcia blogs at Lizzy's Literary Life.

Why do you blog? > It's my literary notebook. Online so that I don't lose it.

What has been your best blogging experience? > Being awarded a Gold View Award – it felt good.

What has been your worst blogging experience? > I haven't had a bad blogging experience and long may it stay that way.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Just enjoy!

What are your favourite blogs? > Nonsuch Book, Love German Books, and Bookshelf.

What are you reading at the moment? > Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers (for the Not the TV Book Group) and The Tin Drum by Günter Grass (for the fourth time).

What is the best novel you've ever read? > War and Peace.

What is your favourite movie? > Kenneth Branagh's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

What is your favourite song? > When I'm happy, it's Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, 'Dancing in the Streets', and when I'm sad, it's Neil Diamond's 'I am, I said'.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > I was once an atheist.

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > The Bible. The short answer is that I discovered much more than I bargained for.

If you could choose anyone, from any walk of life, to be Prime Minister, who would you choose? > It's not a job I'd wish on anyone.

What would you do with the UN? > Unite them?

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > If in doubt, don't.

What do you worry about? > I refuse to worry – life sends enough unscheduled stress my way as it is.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Forgiveness.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Dishonesty.

What is your favourite proverb? > In memory of my mum: 'There's nowt so queer as folk.'

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Discussing football results.

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you'd do differently? > The unfortunate answer to that is so many things...

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > Somewhere warm and sunny and dry.

What would your ideal holiday be? > I'm fortunate enough to have experienced it – a three-week tour through the Canadian Rockies. Completely magical.

What do you like doing in your spare time? > Reading, blogging, knitting and travelling.

If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to? > Lizzy?

What talent would you most like to have? > I'd love to be able to draw.

What would be your ideal choice of alternative profession or job? > Tour guide.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > Tommy Cooper.

If you could have one (more or less realistic) wish come true, what would you wish for? > That the diet's successful this time around.

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > The first purchase would be a one-way ticket to Munich.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > I'm opting for a girls' night in: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth Siddal and Marilynne Robinson.

[The normblog profile is a weekly Friday morning feature. A list of all the profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

It's some time since there's been a discussion on this blog of the morality of the Iraq war. Partly that's because I'd already posted so much on the question that nobody who takes an interest in my views on this subject could be in any doubt as to what I thought about it. And partly it's because things move on, even though some people prefer not to. Anyway, I shall revisit the issue, in a manner of speaking, by posting a link to a column in the FT by Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology in the University of Oxford. Guardianistas be on your guard! It may contain more complexity than you can handle. (Via John Rentoul).

Kath at Seven Miles of Steel Thistles is writing about dogs in books. Her post reminded me of the dog in Cormac McCarthy's The Orchard Keeper. It's possibly the book of his I've liked least, but it does have an awful moment when the old man is taken into custody by the police and forced to leave his dog - also old - behind:

... and the old man... looked back at the dog still standing there like some atavistic symbol or brute herald of all questions ever pressed upon humanity and beyond understanding...

Ron Rosenbaum reviews the case for Bob Dylan's sources being Jewish. From this you can learn that 'the Zimmermans were at "the center of Jewish life in Hibbing," and that young Robert's bar mitzvah broke attendance records at the local hotel'. All the same, Rosenbaum suggests that more important than piety in the genesis of Dylan's music may be 'mag-piety'. I'll go along with that. His music doesn't have to have been deeply or widely Jewish in inspiration to be the marvellous thing it is. The singer just has to have been the mixture he became. (Via.)