Pussy Riot? Not required, just better politicians

Pat Rabbitte

Irish Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte, made an ill-advised remark on RTÉ radio on Sunday, drawing headlines such as “Rabbitte orders Brady to stay out of abortion row” (Herald.ie).

So who actually said what?

It started when Cardinal Brady told RTÉ’s This Week radio programme "We would have a media campaign, we would be lobbying public representatives and also hope to write a pastoral letter on this situation … We would want to inform people of the ills of abortion."  He was responding to the question how the church would react if the Government decided to legalise abortion.

Pat Rabbitte then came on and said he was "surprised" when he heard "the cardinal's reference to lobbying and engaging, canvassing public representatives … I don't welcome the cardinal promising to engage in the political campaign."

and

“I don’t have any objection to any of the churches stating its position and making it clear, but I think it would be a retrogressive step if we were to go back to the days of the Catholic Church dictating to elected public representatives how [they] should address an issue.”

Responding to these remarks, Dr John Murray of the Catholic Iona Institute said: “It is Minister Rabbitte’s comment that is actually retrograde. First of all, lobbying is not the same as dictating.  Secondly, why should business organisations or farming organisations or trades unions be allowed to lobby politicians but the churches cannot do this?”

Too easily swayed

I don't often agree with the Iona Institute but this time it's hard to quarrel.

A blogger (describing himself as “an atheist with no time for the Church”) put it well;  he agreed with the Catholic Dr John Murray, and added:

“ I'm sure that Pat Rabbitte isn't suggesting that the Church shouldn't be allowed to lobby, but nevertheless it's a bit ill-advised for a cabinet minister to single out one organisation and tell them to shut up. They're perfectly entitled to lobby politicians if they want. It's up to the politicians to have enough moral courage to make hard decisions regardless of what the Church says. If the politicians are too easily swayed by their Bishop, then we need better politicians.”

Cardinal Sean Brady

So Pat Rabbitte has got himself into a bit of a mess with these remarks. Even his friends can't really support him, and the opposition Fianna Fáil has accused him of a divisive attack on the Church which has poisoned the debate around abortion.

The Fianna Fáil spokesman on health Billy Kelleher TD said Mr Rabbitte’s rejection of the Church’s right to campaign on the issue “was neither restrained nor respectful” and “While his comments may have went down well with Labour Party activists, they will have served only to antagonise many thousands of others who will correctly feel that their position, as articulated by Cardinal Brady, deserves the same respect as any other voice”.

So what was Rabbitte up to in this interview?

There's a explanation as to why he confused lobbying with dictating.  Within living memory the Catholic church really did dictate to the Irish government.  The celebrated instance of this is the 1951 Mother and Child affair. The health minister Noel Browne wanted to introduce a limited version of the NHS in Ireland, but the bishops said this would be a sin  (if you think I'm exaggerating read my essay on the subject) and none of the cabinet would support the scheme.

At a cabinet meeting where the archbishop’s letter denouncing the Mother and Child Scheme was read out, Browne asked each minister in turn if they assented to the church's ruling that the scheme be dropped. One Labour Party minister muttered "They shouldn't be allowed to do this" but nonetheless nodded assent.  Another minister blustered angrily “How dare you invite me to disobey my church!”

I'm sure this history is what Rabbitte had in mind in the RTÉ interview.  But the blogger was the one who put his finger on it when he said “If the politicians are too easily swayed by their Bishop, then we need better politicians.”

Constantinian church

Russia: defiant Pussy Riot protester

I'll finish with the observation that 1950’s Ireland had the opposite of the Constantinian church.  The Constantinian church is what they have in Russia, it's what the Pussy Riot protest was about: the church at the service of the state.

Here in Ireland we had the state at the service of the church.

The Constantinian church is a reference to the emperor Constantine legalising the previously persecuted Christians and making the church in effect an arm of government. The Greek Orthodox Church remained this way much longer than the Roman Catholic Church, because the Greek emperors lasted almost a thousand years longer than the Roman emperors - hence the Roman Catholic isn't really a Constantinian church (though the Church of England is).

And the Russian Orthodox Church is an offshoot of the Greek Orthodox, and was from the beginning at the service of the Tsars. Hence it was suppressed by the Communists. Now it's been reinstated, and is back at Putin's right hand. 

A word of caution about those last few paragraphs. They may read as if I know what I'm talking about but actually I don't. This Constantinian church stuff is something I haven't quite got to grips with.  And what I know of the history of the Byzantine Empire, and Russia under the Tsars, would fit on the back of a small envelope.  But as a broad brush picture, I hope I've painted it right.

Arctic Sea Ice : 15 years ago we didn't expect this

North Pole webcam picture taken on 22 August 2012 showing ice cap melting. Climate scientists expect the Arctic sea ice is on course to plummet to its lowest levels ever this weekend. Photograph: University of Washington/ North Pole Environmental Observatory/NOAA

August 24 in The Guardian: Melting at an unprecedented rate, Arctic sea ice is set to reach its lowest ever recorded extent as early as this weekend. These “dramatic changes” signal that man-made global warming is having a major impact on the polar region. 

Julienne Stroeve, a scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, told the newspaper:  "Unless something really unusual happens we will see the record broken in the next few days. It might happen this weekend, almost certainly next week  …  The rate of ice loss is faster than the models can capture [but] we can expect the Arctic to be ice-free in summer by 2050."

She also said: "Only 15 years ago I didn't expect to see such dramatic changes – no one did. The ice-free season is far longer now. Twenty years ago it was about a month. Now it's three months.”

Feedback loop

Sea-ice loss is a positive feedback loop: if the white sea ice no longer reflects sunlight back into space, the region can be expected to heat up even more than at present. This could lead to an increase in ocean temperatures with unknown effects on weather systems in northern latitudes.  The consequences of losing the Arctic's ice coverage for the summer months are expected to be immense.

And the Antarctic

Meanwhile at the other end of the world, a new report in Nature released Wednesday says that on the Antarctic Peninsula, human-generated greenhouse gases have almost certainly been by far the most important driver of warming over the past half-century. Story on Climate Central.

On the shaping of ends

John Dover Wilson's Hamlet

The image is my copy of Hamlet from Cambridge in 1969.  Except I'm sorry to say it’s not, as I got rid of it a long time ago.  I hanker to have it back. But the moving finger writes and having writ moves on. It’s the Dover Wilson edition. As I got the image off the Amazon website, perhaps that's actually my old copy for sale. Comforting to think so.

An unhappy consequence for me of studying English literature at Cambridge was that for the best part of 20 years thereafter I lost any interest in it, and placed little value on my books. Reading any sort of fiction was associated in my mind with essays, deadlines and drudgery.

Here's what brought me back to this book. Last year there was correspondence in The Guardian about a labourer unconsciously quoting Hamlet’s words in Act 5, Scene 2 of the play:

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

I blogged about this at the time, and resolved to see for myself the origin of the labourer story.  It's in the very book I once owned, Dover Wilson's Hamlet. Which a few months ago I tracked down in the British Library. And studied more assiduously, I suspect, than ever I did as an undergraduate.

Here's his note to these lines :

Mr J P Malleson writes (privately): Years ago a country labourer astonished my father by saying as he sharpened stakes for fixing hurdles in the ground: ‘My mate rough-hews them and I shape their ends.’

The unspoken assumption is that the labourer was unfamiliar with Shakespeare. Of course the assumption might be false, and “the labourer” as Mr Malleson calls him (wrongly, because a craftsman had a mate, a labourer didn’t) was perhaps alluding to Hamlet deliberately and playing a trick on the posh gent. Who knows.

King of the Britons

Saxo Grammaticus (Wikipedia)

To digress, according to Dover Wilson the original of the Hamlet story is “lost in the mists of antiquity through which, mingled as it were with sea spray, we can dimly perceive the common ancestors of the English and Scandinavian races.”

The earliest writer to give Hamlet permanent literary form was the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus in the 12th century. (I've a feeling I knew all this once.)

His story is in all essentials the plot of Shakespeare’s play, including Hamlet’s long speech to his mother in her bedroom after he has despatched Polonius (as Shakespeare calls him).

The main differences appear to be that in Saxo Grammaticus, after the King of the Britons has executed the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern characters, Amleth marries the king's daughter and resides a year in Britain before returning to Jutland to complete his mission by killing his treacherous uncle, with (as in the play) a swapped sword. Amleth survives. That was all too happy happy for Shakespeare who invented the pirates to prevent Hamlet ever arriving in England and marrying a king’s daughter. And of course he has Hamlet die by the same swapped sword.

The first edition of Dover Wilson's Hamlet was 1934. Strange to think that in 1969, that was only 35 years ago.  Like 1977 is to us today. Subsequent editions came out in 1936 (with the note in it) and 1954 (the one I must have once possessed).

The British Library copy is a digitally printed version (2009), and carries the comically superfluous disclaimer: “This book reproduces the text of the original edition. The content and language reflect the beliefs, practices and terminology of the time, and have not been updated.”  I suppose an example of what they had in mind is Dover Wilson’s reference to the “English and Scandinavian races”.

In my day Dover Wilson was god when it came to Shakespeare studies, and his What Happens in Hamlet was the gospel.

The Philosopher’s Zone

When I related the parable of the farmer and the runaway horse a few days ago, I recommended the BBC In Our Time programme on Taoism but I forgot to mention the excellent Australian radio programme The Philosopher’s Zone, presented by the recently deceased Alan Saunders.  I've corrected the oversight.

I usually make a point of downloading these episodes which last only 25 minutes but pack a lot in. In this one on Taoism he interviewed two Chinese academics.
 

From the link I've given it's easy to download the episode as well as a transcript.

Alan Saunders was awarded the Australasian Association of Philosophy's Special Media Prize.  He died unexpectedly on 15 June.

Curiosity rover: why NASA isn't looking for life on Mars

Curiosity cradled by Gale Crater: this oblique view of Gale, and Mount Sharp in the center, is derived from a combination of elevation and imaging data from three Mars orbiters (NASA)

I was wrong to suggest the Curiosity rover (full name Mars Science Laboratory, MSL) will be looking for Martian life. MSL is a chemistry lab and will sniff for chemicals that could be relevant to life, but it won't be looking for biological organisms as such.

It's a robotic geologist too, and has landed at or near the end of an alluvial fan, a geological feature which forms when a stream of water flows on to a plain, slowing down and spreading out. Analysing this could answer one of the biggest questions about Mars: when did the planet lose most of its water?

Although NASA's Mars Exploration Programme has as its defining question "Life on Mars?", in the first few seconds of a recent video about Curiosity, project scientist John Grotzinger says, "Curiosity is not a life detection mission. We're not actually looking for life; we don't have the ability to detect life if it was there."

The video entitled The Science of Curiosity - Seeking Signs of Past Mars Habitability, is available on Stuart Clark’s Guardian astronomy blog.  Unlike previous rovers sent to Mars, Curiosity is a robot chemist seeking evidence of past habitability on Mars, the video explains.

On the question of whether there is present-day life on Mars, there has been a subtle but important shift, it seems.  MSL will confine its activities to looking for the ingredients of life on Mars and providing geological data on its climate history.  I thought we had got past that stage, but not so.  The prospects of finding present-day Martian life have dwindled in recent years, due to the absence of shallow underground lake systems, previously, but no longer, thought to exist.

Stuart Clark explains that NASA is playing an artful game to maximise scientific returns and secure future funding.

Gilbert Levin: I've already found it

In The Guardian on 3rd August Paul Davies traced the history of the search for life on Mars, beginning with the 1976 Viking mission. To this day the designer of the experiment, Gilbert Levin, insists he did find life on Mars, but he's out on a limb.

Davies says it's hard to know precisely what to look for. What would be an unambiguous signature of life anyway? Mars is very cold and very dry but of the two, the dryness is the more serious obstacle, water being crucial to known life. On Earth, the driest place is the Atacama desert in Chile.  Astrobiologists speculate that it could host the closest analogue of what actual Martian might be like.

Yin and yan - the farmer and the runaway horse

Taoist yin yan symbol

Long ago in China a farmer’s only horse ran away. The neighbours commiserated with him: “What terrible news about your horse. What will you do?” But the all the farmer said was, “Bad news, good news … who knows?”

A few days later, the animal returned together with a wild horse it had befriended. The neighbours exclaimed: “What wonderful news!” The farmer replied, “Good news, bad news … who knows?”

The next day the farmer’s son tried to ride the new horse, which threw him, breaking his leg. The neighbours said: “What a misfortune! Your son won’t be able to work on the farm.” The farmer replied, “Bad news, good news … who knows?”

The following week the emperor’s soldiers arrived in the village, and conscripted all able bodied young men to fight in the army.  But the farmer’s son was no use to them with his broken leg, so they let him go.

“How lucky for you and your son” said the neighbours.  “Good news, bad news … who knows?” said the farmer.

According to Taoists, being useful may be good, but being useless is good too. This Taoist parable shows how easily such opposites may change places.

A Taoist website explains: yan and yin, light and shadow, useful and useless are all different aspects of the whole, and if we choose one side and block out the other, we upset nature's balance. No single concept or value can be considered absolute or superior. If we are to be whole and follow the way of nature, we must take the hard path of embracing opposites.

For more, try this 45-minute radio programme about Taoism: it's an episode of BBC’s In Our Time. Listen to the episode and find the blurb and studio guests here.  Or to download it as an mp3 file, search for Daoism (with a D) on this page.

Or try this Australian programme. The Philosopher’s Zone, presented by the recently deceased Alan Saunders, interviewing two Chinese academics.

We learn that Taoism first appeared more than two thousand years ago, and for centuries was China’s most popular religion. Based on a book whose author is not known and whose title does not easily translate into English. The goal is to follow the Tao, a word which roughly translates as “The Way”, following life in its natural flow. Taoism has exchanged ideas with Buddhism, and is closely related to the religion of the Chinese imperial court, Confucianism, but has also at times conflicted with it.

Louie died this week RIP

I used to call him the Beast from the Pit.   I'm sorry for doing so.   Not that I'm necessarily conceding it was a false statement.   Louie was, it can plausibly be argued, in league with the Evil One.   I could mention the occasion of the cooked chicken.   All day long I looked forward to tucking into this for my tea, only to spy Louie lolloping across the yard with a guilty demeanour and clutching the chicken in his maw.   Or the day I was to catch a bus to fly to Sweden, and I had lavished particular care on preparing sandwiches for the journey.   It was at the bus stop I noticed them missing, and on my return that I discovered the wrapper in the special place behind the hedge which Louie designated for enjoying the proceeds of crime.  Still and all I'm sorry for calling him that bad thing.   Louie endured many a cross word from me but I never had a cross word from him.   Mighty dog, rest in peace.