Throughout the [19th] century such issues were part of a wider trend, in which the spectre of religious manipulation stalked the anti-clerical imagination. The Jesuits were thought to be plotting to restore the Monarchy.

Actually, most of the Catholic church in France in the 19th century was actively and covertly doing its absolute best (a) to control French education (b) to install a friendly government. At the extreme, the Ultra-Montanes (recidivist aristocrats and senior churchmen) did indeed form secret societies whose purpose was to bring the French church – and ultimately the French state – under the control of Rome.

Why doesn’t R. Harris come clean about this? Because like so many well-disposed people she has forgotten what our very own church militant used to be like. Nor does she make the connection between Muslim oppression of women and the policies of the current Catholic church.  Those of us who want a complete separation of church and state cannot afford to treat the world’s religions as if they were all as toothless as the C of E.  Oh, I’d forgotten – they have their problems with women, too.

Similarly their ban on women driving (a year ago) and their policing of couples in the streets (duly married, or else). Has to be public health.

Gaza women are forbidden from riding motorcycles with their husbands; women are forbidden from getting haircuts at male hair salons; women are forbidden from walking on the beach without a male family member’s accompaniment; and they must wear the hijab and full-length dresses to courthouses, schools, universities.

France looks like a pretty good option.

No doubt they are, and no doubt it will. But the same arguments, precisely, have been used to oppose every re-negotiation of the state-individual boundary – seat-belts, voting-age, you name it.

Adrian Hamilton even finds the near-unanimous vote objectionable: the politicians, he says are doing it for their own interests. Gosh.

Equality for women is a central state value nowadays, and the law is, amongst other things, an expression of state values. Women of course differ among themselves about the burqa. But those who approve of it always concentrate on women who have chosen to wear it, conveniently overlooking all the other women for whom it is the outward and visible sign of female subjection. This difference reproduces the old argument between feminists and women who want to be ‘women’. The feminists won that one, and let’s hope they continue to  prevail here.

Nicolas Sarkozy a year ago, in a speech:

In this country we cannot accept women imprisoned behind a grill, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity.  This is not the idea of the dignity of women endorsed by the French Republic.

Unless we believe that the values of the Republic were engraved on a stone by the Spirit of 1789, we must conceive of them as a developing set, largely implicit, and of course created, to some extent, by such an edict from the President.  France is right about this matter, and despite bully-supporters like Cory Bernardi, we would do well to emulate the French.

We won’t. The arguments from ‘human rights’ will prevail. That is, we will defend the tribal – not the religious – practice of hiding women from men’s eyes because, allegedly, the sight of any portion of their bodies will incite sexual desire. The argument that women are cut off from social life is just fine with tribal men: that’s what they want. The argument from equality doesn’t cut it either.

By the way, when someone is stoned to death in Iran and elsewhere, a man is buried up to the waist, but a woman up to the neck. This is so the men killing her will not see her breasts.

By taking their stand on the equality and dignity of women, the French have avoided the more controversial issue of religious freedom. If we accept the idea that total coverage is a religious practice, it could still be outlawed, but the arguments are  much more difficult and divisive.

They are put with thoroughness and care in the NYT by Martha Nussbaum. Greatly though I respect her, I believe her to be mistaken. Her main mistake is to see the burqa as a religious practice.  There is any amount of publicly-available material in which Muslims themselves  deny this and condemn the garment. Nussbaum also seems to think that the meaning of the practice is somehow hidden, available only to experts. Well, consider Iran, where after 1989 the regime forced women into the garment by arrest, imprisonment and flogging. Nothing very mysterious about that.

In respect to aboriginal people, Australian decisions have consistently re-affirmed that where tribal law conflicts with the law of the land, tribal law must give way. We are dealing here with a tribal practice and we should apply the same reasoning – or else give up canting about equal opportunity.

“Fourscore and seven years ago, our “fathers”—with half the population excluded from the start—“brought forth”—with the dubious, always questionable assumption of “progress”—itself a value judgment about the meaning of history, which opens up the inherently dubious notion of “history” itself—“a “new” “nation”—a double double scare quote, with the claim of “new” at once instantly erasing the presence of all indigenous peoples and affirming the utterly questionable notion that anything can be qualitatively or authentically “new,” which again calls the very notion of “history” into question—and the word “nation” presupposing a commonality that may be nothing more than a kind of conspiracy of consent, a conglomeration of power meant to enrich the few and marginalize almost everyone else—“conceived”—privileging the idea that anything so questionable as a “nation” could be made up, as if out of nothing—“in “Liberty”—

Well, that’s just too much. We’re going to have to stop right here. We can’t even begin to get into “dedicated to the proposition”—we’ll let that pass—that “all”—“all”? Really? “men”—again—“are “created”—by whom? By what? For what purpose? To what end?—“equal.” Yes. Stop right here.

After the seminar

Greil Marcus, an editor of the New Literary History of America, in a piece called “Scare Quotes are the Enemy”

What Marcus’s parody captures about bien-pensant readings  is their dainty horror at the discovery that people in the past did not think like Us. Which is odd in a generation that rabbits on about the Other.  Texts are produced only to be decontaminated. It wasn’t us, cry the critics, we didn’t silence the Other. It was Them.

Remind me again: why are Australians dying there?

The modern president is America’s shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He’s also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth.

This messianic campaign rhetoric merely reflects what the office has evolved into after decades of public clamoring. … Americans, left, right, and other, think of the “commander in chief” as a superhero, responsible for swooping to the rescue when danger strikes.

Gene Healy in the June 2008 issue of Reason.com.

Right now, Obama is expected to walk out on the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, extract the oil – if a vacuum cleaner can do it, so can the President – and hurl the damned stuff into outer space. (Aliens don’t vote.)

But this is only the first of three disquieting features of the current crisis. Americans ar confronted by a technological problem to which there is no immediate technological solution. This must be somebody’s fault, goddammit. Worse,  the problem is oil, a substance worshipped wherever two or three SUVs are gathered together. It’s as if holy water turned into sulphuric acid.

We know what America does when foreigners  threaten its oil supplies. The question now is what it will do to itself faced with this more intimate threat. Be very glad that Obama is in office. George W. would by now have annexed the Home Counties.

So is the US an “aggressive, war-mongering military machine” obsessed with spending on defence and plumping up its armed forces? Perhaps, the numbers say, not.

But you have to follow the charts quite a way down to see why.  Compare this presentation with the one-line statistics in our newspapers – makes you groan.

Other highlights. The North Koreans have 24,728 people per 100,000 in what might be called the aggression business – soldiers, reservists and paramilitary. A 2008 census gave a total population of about 24 million of whom about half are children. It follows that about half the adult population are in the aggression business.

Then there’s Burma, which spends 26% of its GDP on the military.

Andrew Norton (“Carlton’s only classical liberal”) gives some interesting survey figures to show that on the Australian “Right”, there is a clear statist majority.

Some of us can’t support either major party, and are tired of flinging tokens to Bob Brown. How’s about a re-formed liberal party – Turnbull at its head, Keating the grey eminence?

The intellectual sophistication of the tradition seemed incontrovertible; and I was not yet familiar with the stylistic cunning of apologetics and polemics, modern or medieval, which can spin into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations. I was a liberal, but an infirm one–infirm liberalism being the liberalism that fails to engage its enemies on the left as ferociously as its enemies on the right. It is hard for a young man to walk away from the satisfactions of radicalism, in the way that it is hard for a young man, say, to understand Middlemarch. So I read widely in the Marxist tradition, despite my belief in the inadequacy of a materialist view of life and the absurdity of the idea that justice may be established by means of a dictatorship. I half-wanted to fall under its spell, to find a small place in its saga.

That captures exactly a few years in which I tried to understand Brecht and the Brecht-cult in theatre studies.  The more I read of Brecht, the more I came to hate the man and to understand that, like any commissar, he would say or do anything, licensed by the belief that what was good for Brecht was good for the down-trodden. ( My views of the work are more nuanced, but don’t belong here.)

The lure of a ‘humane’ Marxism operated strongly on my generation, anti-capitalist, anti-liberal as we were – and ignorant of both. When I eventually came across Leszek Kolakowski, the great critic of Marxism, whose recent death is the occasion of Wieseltier’s piece, I had already come to my senses. I wonder if Kolakowski is read by those in our English Departments – both in schools and universities – who peddle ‘Marxist’ approaches to literature? Or are they too busy spinning ‘into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations’?