Here in Oz we like our believing politicians to wear their religion lightly: Tony Abbott for this reason will never be Prime Minister. Not so in the US, where all candidates for high office must be pious. Even so, the spectacle of confession and group hug at Saddleback Church was disgusting. We are inured to boasting in candidates: modesty and a proper degree of reserve are luxuries reserved for the obscure. But Saddleback took us into that dark place in which the sincere is contaminated by performance.

It’s interesting to compare the two candidates’ answers to the question about regret. Which, I wonder was the more hypocritical?  McCain spoke about his first marriage, using a ritual formula in which one party is entirely responsible for something described as a ‘failure’. Besides the obvious point - that the formula deprives the first Mrs McCain of agency - an admission in that form follows the adman’s recommendation for damage control: admit everything and apologise repeatedly.

Obama I suspect was more complicated. First we had blame-transfer. Gee, I lacked a father and consequently dabbled a bit. The audience knows all about absent fathers in the black community, so it does no harm to offer oneself as an example. You get to be a victim. As for drugs, Clinton has lowered the bar on those: after him politicians fell over themselves to confessing a tiny bit of youthful naughtiness. Which leaves only self-pity, as regular a feature of adolescence as acne.

Too cynical? Onscreen,  McCain convinced me that he really does feel lousy about whatever he did in his first marriage, not that that matters a damn. Obama reminded me of Prince Hal in the Eastcheap Tavern. This man is not knowable, either, not yet. Wait for Act V.

The whole scene brought to mind the scene in Coriolanus in which Menenius and Volumnia busily compute how many wounds Coriolanus has on his body. It was customary to exhibit before the plebeians the scars of wounds received in battle against Rome’s enemies. Oh goody, says Volumnia, ‘there will be large cicatrices to show the people.’ (She’s his mother, by the way.) He gets away with it, but only just:

Third Citizen:        … You have not indeed loved the common people.

Coriolanus:           You should account me the more virtuous, that I have not been common in my love. I will, sir, flatter my sworn brother, the people, to earn a dearer estimation of them; ’tis a condition they account gentle: and since the wisdom of their choice is rather to have my hat than my heart, I will practise the insinuating nod …

The admirers and followers of the Alcoran insist on the excellent moral precepts interspersed through that wild and absurd performance. … But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.

David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, 1760.

The Jewel of Medina was written by a journalist called Sherry Jones. It recounts the life of Aisha, a girl who was married off at the age of six to a 50-year-old man called Mohamed ibn Abdallah. On her wedding day, Aisha was playing on a see-saw outside her home. Inside, she was being betrothed. The first she knew of it was when she was banned from playing out in the street with the other children. When she was nine, she was taken to live with her husband, now 53. He had sex with her. When she was 14, she was accused of adultery with a man closer to her own age. Not long after, Mohamed decreed that his wives must cover their faces and bodies, even though no other women in Arabia did.

You cannot read this story today – except in the Koran and the Hadith. The man Mohamed ibn Abdallah became known to Muslims as “the Prophet Mohamed”, so our ability to explore this story is stunted. The Jewel of Medina was bought by Random House and primed to be a best-seller – before a University of Texas teacher saw proofs and declared it “a national security issue”. Random House had visions of a re-run of the Rushdie or the Danish cartoons affairs. Sherry Jones’s publisher has pulped the book. It’s gone.

In Europe, we are finally abolishing the lingering blasphemy laws that hinder criticism of Christianity. But they are being succeeded by a new blasphemy law preventing criticism of Islam – enforced not by the state, but by jihadis. I seriously considered not writing this column, but the right to criticise religion is as precious – and hard-won – as the right to criticise government. We have to use it or lose it.

Johann Hari ‘We need to stop being such cowards about Islam’, Independent 14th August 2008

Hari’s whole piece is excellent. And the next time we hear from the collection of Imams whom the commonwealth deems ’spokespeople for the Islamic community’ it is worth remembering another passage of Hume’s essay:

Of all speculative errors, those which regard religion are the most excusable in compositions of genius; nor is it ever permitted to judge of the civility or wisdom of any people, or even of single persons, by the grossness or refinement of their theological principles. The same good sense, that directs men in the ordinary occurrences of life, is not hearkened to in religious matters, which are supposed to be placed altogether above the cognisance of human reason.

Werl, as the new Doctor Who says, it all started some weeks ago when the partner brought home A.C. Grayling’s Towards the Light This is too well-known to need describing to my learned readership, but (if you came in late) it is a Whiggish account of those struggles for liberty which culminate in the UN’s 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. Grayling begins with the Reformation and the scientific revolution of the 17th century, goes on through the Encylopaedists, the American Revolution and 1789, describes the movements to achieve personal liberty for slaves, workers and women and ends with a polemic directed against those in Western governments who wish to protect us against terror by removing civil liberties.

People of a certain age and background may well ask what point there is in telling such a familiar story.
Younger people, however have not usually been encouraged to learn this particular narrative, and if they have been exposed to the humanities and social sciences, have encountered instead the various anti-Enlightenment stories that now constitute an orthodoxy in universities. They have heard, for example, that no possible historical narrative is superior to any other, that what is called Enlightenment is only another species of repression and that the central Western values of liberty, autonomy and equality before the law are nothing but masks of Power. They have learnt that reason itself is part of a repressive apparatus.
In other words they can make no meaningful distinction between their lives and those of (say) Afghani women under the Taliban. Oops.
That orthodoxy - never quite the only game in town - is fading today: what will replace it is unclear. Meanwhile, for all its shortcomings, Grayling’s book is a very useful one for the young - and we have some of those around the place.
Werl anyway: I began to think about reason and science and all that, and the ways in which Grayling’s book might be improved, and re-read Locke’s Second Treatise for the first time in decades, then dug out Leslie Stephen’s account of Shaftesbury and . . . I fell into the Age (always so-called) of Reason. That it might not have been - was any age? - but it was the age of lucid, graceful and flexible prose. Oh and of Johnson.
Forgetting briefly that I was supposed to be checking out the Whig story I picked up the century’s most famous Tory and was lost. It’s many years since I had occasion to read Johnson and for a week or so there I was struck dumb with admiration. It’s a wonderful feeling. I read straight through The Lives of the Poets, dutifully earmarking blogworthy bits until . . .
I picked up Boswell to check something. But I’m up to A.D. 1762 Aetat. 53 and even Johnson can’t live forever.

According to the BBC today:

. . . students starting A-level courses in September will become the first to be eligible for the new A* grade when they are awarded to those attaining more than 90% in 2010.

The change followed criticism that the rise in the number of A grades at A-level meant universities could no longer spot the brightest students.

Last year, 25.3% of A-level entries in the UK were awarded an A grade, with 96.9% of entries graded from A to E (pass).

Anthony McClaran, chief executive of Ucas, the body which handles undergraduate applications to UK universities, said: “As with every year, some people will inevitably claim that A-levels are getting easier but we shouldn’t really take away from the hard work of those students who have done well in their results today.

“It is difficult to compare the A-levels of today with those of 40 years ago as the world is quite a different place.”

Sure is. It gets more and more like Lake Woebegon, where “all the children are above average.”

The thing about Rakim — and to a lesser extent all the MCs of this era — is I learned from him the incredible beauty of words. In hip-hop, words — optimally — work on two levels. They function percussively, so that certain syllables arranged correctly on the beat basically accent the drums. Then they work as just words in the sense of meaning and connotation. From hip-hop, I came to believe that words really should be beautiful on both levels. They should sound good, and when unpacked, they should also mean something beautiful too. Some people learn this in the classroom. I learned it on the street, and that fact has always made me a believer in the great democracy of words — that in many cases (and I’ve had this confirmed in my career as a journalist), the man who stands on the corner can organize his thoughts just as beautifully as the decorated professor.

Ta-Nahisi Coates in the New York Times; via the nice Jenny Davidson.

If it’s a postmodernist professor, much more so.

What follows is old news in two ways - familiar gist, year-old link - but it’s what’s on my old mind.

Suppose we asked a group of Presidential candidates if they believed in the existence of atoms, and a third of them said “no”? That would be a truly appalling show of scientific illiteracy, would it not? And all the more shocking coming from those who aspire to run a technologically sophisticated nation.

Yet something like this happened a week ago during the Republican presidential debate.  When the moderator asked nine candidates to raise their hands if they “didn’t believe in evolution,” three hands went into the air-those of Senator Sam Brownback, Governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancredo. …

I don’t know whether to attribute the show of hands to the candidates’ ignorance of the mountain of evidence for evolution, or to a cynical desire to pander to a public that largely rejects evolution (more than half of Americans do).  But I do know that it means that our country is in trouble.  As science becomes more and more important in dealing with the world’s problems, Americans are falling farther and farther behind in scientific literacy.  Among citizens of industrialized nations, Americans rank near the bottom in their understanding of math and science.  Over half of all Americans don’t know that the Earth orbits the Sun once a year, and nearly half think that humans once lived, Flintstone-like, alongside dinosaurs.

Thus biologist Jerry Coyne at The Edge

While we’re having fun, let me add something I read lately, source now forgotten. To shore up the Flintstone thesis, which of course is contradicted by the fossil record, creationists now argue that God so really, really didn’t love the world that after the Flood had stifled the sinners, he proceeded to extirpate every last trace of them, right down to the atoms of which they were composed.

It’s not exactly fun, is it, when we recall just how many people voted for Huckabee?  Is it really so melodramatic to claim that in the US, the values we inherit from the Enlightenment are threatened?

Couldn’t happen here? Well no, not in that form. But consider:

• decreasing enrolments in engineering, science and applied technologies
• no improvement in the standards of science journalism - and very few courses in it
• the option of avoiding science and mathematics earlier and earlier in the school curriculum
• education and humanities faculties riddled with the social-constructivist virus (’science-just-another-story’)
• a strong and increasing tendency in both main political parties to a crude majoritarian approach to policy
• new generations convinced that in the broadest sense of the word, the only culture is ‘popular’ culture, in which, as Neil Postman said, thou shalt have no prerequisites.

I brood. And read Voltaire.

Apologies have become feel-good gestures that play to the banal sentimentality of mass audiences that otherwise show little consideration to others in their rush through life. The idea, and virtue, of apologising is being leached of significance and meaning.

If apologies still have any value it is that they can focus attention on those who never say that they are sorry. The Chinese do not apologise for their brutality in Tibet; the Russians do not apologise for the war in Chechnia – and the Bush administration has not apologised for its disastrous invasion of Iraq and its economic mismanagement. And you never hear “sorry” from awful regimes like Burma, North Korea or Zimbabwe.

To say “Sorry, I was wrong” is to acknowledge a moral lapse even if the motive is dubious and the expression mealy-mouthed, and politics is much more about interests and power than it is about ethics and apologetics – particularly in countries like China and Russia. And in gentler regimes apologies are now ritual legal/political devices with substance sacrificed to sentimentality and to financial calculations. It is another small decline in civilisation.

Geoffrey Barker in Australian Policy Online. I wish I didn’t agree.

Simon Caterson in Saturday’s Age has discovered to his evident surprise that the Booker Prize judges tend to come from England.  Worse still, they have “a background that more often than not includes the prestigious British universities and are typically senior prominent academics, reviewers, editors or authors.”

But - and you can hear him trying to unsmack his gob - “there is a tendency for the prize not to go to to people like them.”

Lie down in a darkened room, Simon, and lay off the Foucault. That stuff rots the brain.

On ABC TV news tonight the man who ran down people with a bulldozer was described as having ‘commandeered’ the vehicle. Well, it’s not lexically wrong: Shorter Oxford gives as sense 2. ‘take arbitrary possession of’. But the far stronger and more common usage is that in which officialdom - the army, the police, an emergency crew- commandeer a vehicle; when the need, that is, for urgent action in the public interest temporarily overrides legal possession. Thus the ABC’s way of putting it leaves a faint impression that the man had formal authority.

Does this tiny point matter? Yes, if you care in general about precision. But much more because such things quickly invade usage. You will have often seen and heard that some poor sod was ‘executed’ or killed ‘execution-style’. Again, plain villainy is unduly dignified. The man in Israel stole the bulldozer, then used it to kill people.

The excellent (and mindbogglingly productive) Megan McArdle has a piece in The Atlantic Online about bad numbers which set me thinking again about the role of blogging. OK, all by herself Megan McArdle is a cogent argument for blogging. But what she says implies a place for anyone at all on the Web who is interested in putting out reliable and trustworthy information.

Her thesis about numbers is that they stick in the mind and distort our judgment even when we know better, even when they’re wrong or irrelevant. Despite what ought to be disabling criticisms of its methodology, the first widely-publicised estimate of the number of civilian casualties caused by the Iraq War remains influential. Why? It was first in the field and came with the imprimatur of The Lancet. So the World Health Organisation’s much lower estimate - one quarter of the number - trails in the shadows.

Ideology figures here: the anti-war Left loved the Lancet figure, and no-one committed to an all-embracing ideology ever has much regard for plain old empirical truth. But McArdle cites work in cognitive psychology that shows that we’re all prone to this error. It’s a form of the well-known and well-attested primary availability error: the first thing we see of a particular kind colours our view of that kind. I like to illustrate that one by reminding people how kids cathect proper names - ‘Ooooh yuk, Derek.’

The Web is full of junk so it’s very tempting for reflective people to dismiss it as a venue for discussion. What the phenomenon of bad numbers indicates, however, is the need for good ones.

Does the same thing apply to arguments themselves? To opinions? Anecdotes-with-tendency? I hope so. What makes me almost sure is the work on attitude formation. This shows that they are rarely formed by one event. (We do get over the fact that Derek stole our peanut butter sandwich in grade two.) Attitudes take shape gradually, solidifying out of a cloud of particles of information, events and experiences small and dramatic.

So even the tiniest blog can add a stone to the pile. Well, a pebble anyway.

Pupils are being rewarded for writing obscenities in their GCSE English examinations even when it has nothing to do with the question.

One pupil who wrote “f*** off” was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully.

His paper was marked by Peter Buckroyd, a chief examiner who has instructed fellow examiners to mark in the same way. He told trainee examiners recently to adhere strictly to the mark scheme, to the extent that pupils who wrote only expletives on their papers should be awarded points.

Hat tip to Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science.

Swift would have enjoyed Buckroyd.

For a long time I had pillaged all the books for the respectable hard facts: names, dates, places, words of songs, opus numbers. The authorities spit out these facts time after time and arrange them like so many cherry-stones around an empty plate. Time spent unearthing these things in libraries, compiling endless lists, tended paradoxically to cast doubt on what I thought I knew at the start. Writing about music appeared to involve an oath to connect nothing, to question nothing and to disturb nothing. I began to query my own rôle as a gaoler of music, pinning down each composer, each work, in a separate cell. Because every time I thought they had been safely isolated or restricted to their proper cell-mates, I found evidence that the musical mad-house was alive with mysterious tappings on the pipes.

From a site by James Beswick Whitehead. The point’s been made before, by Joseph Kerman in a well-known book about opera, more recently by the musico-academic Left, but still it continues, dry-as-dust programme notes, random facts on the radio, music teachers who set assignments on composers - and I am not making this up - without requiring the student to listen to a single note.

That crowd in the streets rending its garments and uttering lamentations will now disperse: Wordability is back online. Memo to other bloggers who use WordPress: beware of 2.5.1. Oh it wasn’t only that, hell no, it never is. At the same time, the ISP had a hissy fit and Filezilla suddenly had the wrong settings, so uploads were vanishing into the ether. It has not been pretty, but it’s over, the champagne is flowing, and soon the words will follow.

My 13 year old was rumbled today for mucking around during a speech in assembly and given a detention (chiz). Nowadays kids are required to sign a confession, usually dictated by a teacher, and parents are required to countersign. In these documents the word inappropriate is sure to occur. I duly signed, after adding a note that his behaviour had been, in fact, ‘discourteous’.

As one who has done more than his share of mucking around I tend to take these things lightly. But the lad wanted to know why the amendment and once I explained (courtesy is necessary because we are bored and protects us in our turn when we bore others) he announced that he now felt bad about what he’d done. Welcome to the moral life, kid. It’s what they don’t teach you at school.

‘Inappropriate’ is to teachers what ‘life style’ is to those who work in public health. Consider the words of a professor of medicine writing in the current issue of Monash Magazine.

The combination of immunology and stem cells ‘as body repair kits’ will provide patients with ‘non-rejected’ treatments for many if not all degenerative diseases caused by poor life style selection such as smoking and diet . . .

A lot to think about there. I particularly like ‘non-rejected’, as in ‘non-dead’.

Prospect Magazine’s annual ranking of public intellectuals generated a long list of 100 names. To establish who was truly who, 20,000 online voters then chose their top 5 and Prospect has now published the final list in rank order.

The list reflects a problem with all but the most carefully-controlled web-based surveys, the influence of fan-sites. Here’s David Herman:

Word spread around the internet very quickly, and at least three of our top 20 (Chomsky, Hitchens and Soroush), or their acolytes, decided to draw attention to their presence on the list by using their personal websites to link to Prospect’s voting page. In Hitchens’s and Soroush’s case, the votes then started to flood in. Although it is hard to tell exactly where voters came from, it is likely that a clear majority were from Britain and America, with a fair sprinkling from other parts of Europe and the English-speaking world. There was also a huge burst from Iran, although very little voting from the far east, which may explain why four of the bottom five on the list were thinkers from Japan and China.

That ‘huge burst from Iran’ no doubt explains why we find Shiran Ebadi, the Iranian human rights activist, at no. 12, five places above Pope Benedict XVI. Abdolkarim Soroush, another Iranian in favour with Western liberals, makes the top twenty, whereas the comparable figure of Hans Küng is well down at 61. The Catholics clearly didn’t get the voters out.