Brontides

A couple of days ago, a Palestinian man got convicted for rape by deception in Israel. The bare facts of the case are this. The man met an Israeli woman in a bar. The two got to talking, and during the course of the conversation the man directly claimed to be Israeli. The two spent the night together; explicit consent was given, and that consent was not made explicitly dependent on the man being an Israeli. Later, the woman discovered that the man was, in fact, an Arab, and prosecuted him for rape by deception.

This is a complex situation, clearly, and large sections of the internet have devoted considerable time to overreaching in search of hard conclusions. Mondoweiss, for example, which does this by raising false equivalences. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera calls it “the selective application of the law against Arabs” and “just plain racism.” Even Feministe concludes that “there are certain circumstances where rape by fraud is a legitimate claim” but “this… is not one of them, and opens the door to even greater abuses.”

One thing is clear: the crime of rape by deception is a legitimate complaint, and not in an abstract sense. Cases have been successfully prosecuted where the man has lied about his sexual health, passing HIV onto his partner; where a man posed as a senior official and promised increased social security payments in exchange for sex; and where a woman consented to sex with a man who she believed to be her boyfriend but was actually her boyfriend’s brother. The statute is not used for situations where a man, say, claimed to be 27 when he’s actually 25, or a woman who claims to be a supermodel in a bar.

For many, though, the overtly racist nature of the complaint seems to be the deciding factor. My own personal feeling is perhaps dangerously relativistic, but my gut tells me that racism needs to be viewed through a different prism when dealing with Israel and Palestine. From a western perspective, the explicitly racial justification for the suit can be nauseating; but then, racial issues – although by no means defused in Europe or America – are less of an immediate concern than they are in the Levant. It is impossible not to decry the institutional racism and xenophobic nationalist tribalism exhibited by both Israeli and Arab political and social elements.

But the heart of this case isn’t an abstract principle; it’s rooted in personal actions and responses. The woman felt genuinely and legitimately deceived and violated. That in itself isn’t enough to determine guilt of course. What is, however, is the fact that the man knew that the deception was of decisive magnitude and did it anyway. The problem here is that the man chose to tell a lie of sufficient magnitude to deny the woman the opportunity to give consent. That the woman’s objection to the deception was racist in nature is vile but to some extent beside the point.

In many ways, Israel and – to a lesser extent – the occupied territories (particularly the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip) are fundamentally racist. They are societies constructed on a nationalist ideal, defined by opposition to an alien “other”. Widespread societal changes are needed to prevent citizens of Israel from viewing non-Israeliness as a defining flaw. But the fact remains that, for now, it is a defining flaw, and that fact is a factor that must have been known to the defendant.

As much as it galls me, I have to accept that in this case the verdict was probably correct.

EDIT: For an interesting comparative, check out how rape is handled in the UAE.

As painted by Monet in 1904.

Pippa Norris has a great analysis of the parlous state of female representation in Westminster. This election has clearly demonstrated that more needs to be done to encourage women to run for high office. This can’t be achieved just by instituting all-women shortlists; not only are they controversial and prone to generating ill will, they also don’t address the problem of a lack of women engaged in politics at the lower levels – councillors, party activists and political pundits. America has a generally more robust mechanism for this; the Democrat party and the leftwing have EMILY’s List, a political action group dedicated to increasing female representation at all levels; a British version sprang up in 1993 but appears defunct. There is a clear need for a similar UK body.

This has just appeared as a guest post over at All Lit Up. Any comments would be appreciated over there.

A Winter In Arabia by Freya Stark is not a straightforward book to read, but it is extremely rewarding for anyone with an interest in history, archaeology, the Middle East, and kick-ass female explorers who make it look easy.

The book was published in 1972, some 45 years after it was written. In it, the author chronicles the season that she spent – along with her companions – searching for the ancient city of Shabwah, the capital of the southern Arabian state of Hadhramaut. Long since lost, the city had been a capital of culture and trade in the region; Pliny catalogued it thus:

Almost in the very centre of that [South Arabian] region are the Atramitae [Hadramis] – the capital of whose kingdom is Sabota [Shabwah], a place situated on a lofty mountain. At a distance of eight posts [days' travel] from this is the incense-bearing region inaccessible because of rocks on every side, while it is bordered on the right by the ocean, from which high plateaux shut it in. The forests extend eighty miles in length and forty in width.

In search of this city, Stark travelled through pre-Westernised Yemen, detailing the culture of the people with whom she interacted and the landscapes through which she journeyed. Her heroics are matched by the land she describes; Hadhramaut is a particularly dramatic part of Arabia. Comprised of an immense valley, which runs for 160 km from open plains in the west, where the cliffs of the rocky plateaux to north and south close in about it, near Shabwah, towards the dry and inhospitable Wadi Masilah in the east, the area is a curious mix of desert and fertile river plains. The main Wadi (Wadi meaning river or river-cut valley) Hadhramaut itself is 12 km wide in some places, and is fed by innumerable tributaries, but beyond the city of Shabwah one quickly reaches the desert of Saihad – ‘an empty desert, a wilderness where the winds blow in all directions, a country where crows are king ‘. Only after travelling west across this desert for three days would one come to irrigated fields and settled lands once more, the beginnings of highland Yemen. This is the country that Stark describes.

The first thing that should be said about this book is that it is deeply poetic. Stark’s writing is fluidly lyrical, and is as evocative as it is enlightening. Her voice is not that of a dull-but-worthy academic, in pursuit of esoteric potsherds, any more than it’s an echo of the manly heroics of Thesiger and Lawrence; it’s… well. It’s a voice the deserves to speak for itself:

In the dry bed of the canal, close to where it takes off from an ancient “damir” or dam, we pitched our camp. A lithab tree (ficus salicifolia) hung above with long and pointed leaves; from its boughs my mosquito-net and the guns of the beduin were suspended… As I lay in bed I could hear Sayyid ‘Ali entertaining, and the entranced laughter of the company: he was imitating the
sayyids of Meshed, and the voices murmured on into my sleep; till a shock-headed man, creeping round my bed for his gun, woke me – the last inhabitant of Radhhain going home. I lay then, enjoying the warm delicious night. A sickle moon was shining; the pointed leaves of the lithab hung black before it, in Chinese loveliness; a small wind woke suddenly from nowhere, flapped the leaves against each other and died as it had come. The moon sank. Voices of foxes echoed in the cliffs – echoed and re-echoed, like some lost chorus high above the world. When I woke again it was to the singing of birds. The branches, so lovely against the moon, were the everyday branches of the lithab. Only their enchanted memory remained.

Stark’s writing conveys deep knowledge and understanding, but also profound affection for the land, the people, and the life that surround both. It’s not necessarily easy to read; you have to concentrate, or otherwise after an hour or so it all starts to elide into a formless mass of undifferentiated beauty. But this is a book to dwell over, and it rewards the persistent reader with keen insight and human detail.

The star of the book is the character behind the narration, however. Stark was an incredible woman. This book doesn’t document her first trip to Yemen; a previous expedition had failed due to an illness that almost killed her. Before then, she had already travelled extensively throughout Arabia, notably completing three dangerous treks in western Iran and being the first European to reach Alamut, the long-lost fortress of the Assassins. She was more than just an explorer, however, and A Winter in Arabia is littered with passages expounding upon her own philosophy (of which a lengthy excerpt can be found here). She continued to travel until her death, at the age of 100, in 1993. To experience Arabia with the benefit of her perception, humanity and fierce intellects is one of the great draws of this book.

This book deserves to be regarded as belonging to a corpus of European works which, when taken together, provide an overview – albeit Eurocentric – of pre-Westernised Arabia. The aforementioned Thesiger’s Arabian Sands is perhaps the most famous of this body of work. In many ways, Stark and Thesiger had a great deal in common. Thesiger was an explorer, too, most famous for crossing the Empty Quarter of the Arab peninsula – several times. He was only the third Westerner to do so, and often operated contrary to the wishes of the local and international authorities, but with the respect, admiration and friendship of the local Bedu – a respect that lasts to this day; an adventurer in the classic sense of the word, but also a gifted social observer. He shared Stark’s dismay at what he perceived as the growing Europeanisation of Arabia and its indigenous culture. A major theme of both books was the deterioration of an old order, just as it was about to be swept away: Thesiger’s last journey across Arabia’s sands was from the oasis of Al Ain to the trading port of Muscat, now a city in the UAE and the capital of Oman respectively. He spent nearly two months in 1949 in that interior. It now takes just under 4 hours to drive from the Hilton in Al Ain to the Sheraton in Muscat; I know because I’ve done it. Thesiger would have hated it, and the power of the book is such that it made me hate it, too, even as I was doing it.

Stark’s work evokes a similar sense of deterioration, but unlike Thesiger, the bland, monied future that she feared, cleansed of all of its identifying features by a glut of RAF bases and oil revenue, didn’t come to pass. What did come to pass was worse; an awkward halfway-house between modernity, with its guns and narcotics, and tribalism, poverty and alienation. Unable to resist the world that developed around it, and lacking the resources to preserve its heritage, the Yemen of today is a much-changed beast.

An alternative perspective on the issue comes from Geoffrey Bibby’s Looking for Dilmun. At the outline level, these books have a great deal in common; like Stark, Bibby was an archaeologist seeking the remains of a long-lost civilisation. Bibby’s obsession was the empire of Dilmun, a long-lost – and supposedly mythological – empire which was mentioned in Sumerian legend but never geographically placed. Contemporaneous with the Indus Valley civilisation, Sumer, Babylon and Akkad, Dilmun was found by Bibby on the island of Bahrain, although hints have since been found of an earlier civilisation on the same grounds; it is thus one of the oldest sites of human civilisation that we know of.

Unlike Stark, however, Bibby was an oil man himself, based in Bahrain and gifted only with an intellectual curiosity and a slightly more moralistic outlook than many of his contemporaries. Where Stark and Thesiger detailed an Arabia as yet unsullied by the graft of Europe’s finest grubbers, Bibby’s story is all about the cracks in the façade as they slowly spread, and the desperate attempt by Arabia’s last traditional rulers – such as the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi, who distrusted Bibby enough to eventually exile him despite Bibby’s professed academic and historic mission. Compare that with the reaction earned by Stark and her companions in the excerpt above!

Many of the characters and locations appear in two or even all three of these books. Between them they chart a heartbreaking story of the decline of an indigenous way of life, albeit – and this has to be stressed – from the somewhat Eurocentric perspective of a motley band of explorers and outsiders. Their value thus exceeds their individual conceits; these are more than just travelogues or historical diversions. They are records of a way of life that has deteriorated over the course of a single lifetime.

In that capacity, Stark’s work immediately stands out as the most successful. The human warmth and compassion that she has for her Yemeni and Bedu hosts is apparent on every page (“We cannot be completely isolated, like European delicacy in cold storage”), and her relationships with the people that she encounters transcend the vignette. In an early passage, she returns to one of the sites of her earlier journey, and “wonder[s] uneasily which of the many delicate causes that ruin eastern relationships could possibly have ruined my friendship with those two, Sa’id and Husain;”when, a few pages later, they reconcile, there is a sense of human connection that overcomes cultural barriers.

For me, this was a wonderful, nostalgic read. As an account of an a culture that has long since passed on, it’s stimulating. But what makes the words jump off of the page is the lucid, witty prose of Stark, and the character that lies behind it.

Equality

I’m going to be slightly unusual here and admit that, as a young straight white male, I’m probably not your most likely source of insight into equality issues this time around. I can read the manifestos, certainly, but as an explicitly privileged generalist I’m unlikely to be able to deliver the kind of quality analysis that these issues deserve.

For that reason I’m going to point you in the direction of some excellent, non-partisan primary sources. I know that equality issues tend to be the province of the left, but there are a few scrupulously fair resources out there.

For issues of women’s rights and and how the manifestos will affect women in general check out the Fawcett Society. They sent a raft of questions to each of the parties on a wide array of issues and got detailed responses from all of them.

On issues of gay rights it’s pretty hard to find a single source that doesn’t editorialise. That’s somewhat unsurprising; only 4% of gay voters are planning to vote Tory, which is itself perhaps the only information you need on this topic. MyGayVote gives a fairly stark indication of how the voting records of the three main parties stack up.

On black and minority politics check out OBV. They’re doing great work on keeping minority issues in the spotlight, and I’ll be keeping an eye on them long after the election is done.

Issues related to the elderly and elder care haven’t received anywhere near enough attention online or off. Mary Ridell, the Telegraph’s token leftie, argues fairly persuasively that Labour would be the best bet, and my own read corroborates this.

Civil Liberties
An area in which I am much more comfortable.

First off, forget Labour. The party of ID cards, detention without trial, the massive extension of the surveillance state and the Digital Economy Bill couldn’t give less of a shit about civil liberties, and their manifesto reflects that. Labour would extend CCTV coverage to 700 new areas, strengthen the DNA database and ram through ID cards by hook or by crook.

The Tories are better – the party of David Davis and their excellent Shadow Justice Minister, Dominic Grieve, has a significant wing dedicated to the rollback of liberty-encroaching legislation – but their approach is too punative. It’s moderately good to see that the party commits itself to rolling back the database state – ID cards, the ContactPoint children’s database and the vetting and barring scheme will be scrapped or reduced. The Tories would also curtail the surveillance powers of local councils, giving more power to the information commissioner, and would introduce privacy impact assessments on all new legislation. However, the party does not go far enough on changing the law in respect to the DNA database, and they still insist on repealling the Human Rights Act, which gives the European Convention on Human Rights full force in the UK. They would likely replace it with a UK Bill of Rights, which would be softer on prohibitions of torture and harder on legitimate asylum seekers. The Tories don’t even fully leverage their own dogwhistle policies of overturning the smoking and foxhunting bans.

But the truth is that this is the one area in which the Lib Dems have a clear, unambiguous and historic tradition of strong performance. They would curtail the use of CCTV, restore the right to protest, guarantee the safety of investigative journalists from prosecution, protect whistleblowers, scrap ID cards, role back “Escelon” measures (laws and secret doctorines governing government monitoring of email and internet traffic), repeal the Digital Economy Bill, scrap ContactPoint, reduce pre-charge detention to 14 days and scrap secret evidence. The DNA database would be heavily curtailed. It’s an absurdly complete wish-list for anybody who cares about the erosion of liberty in this country.

It remains unclear why the Tories were so anaemic on this issue, but they hand a clear win to the Yellows on what should have been a major plank of their election offering.

Lots of people (apparently galvanised by the New South Wales Government) are claiming that Australia is the first country to recognise ‘non-specified’ gender.

This is nonsense. Even if we ignore simple iterations of cultures with a third gender, there are hundreds of examples stretching into prehistory of ambiguous gender specifications. India has an ancient and firmly established tradition of non-binary gender which Pakistan has recently adopted. Indigenous North American cultures had Two-Spirit, which allowed for an array of gender roles to be filled – or dispensed with altogether. Ethiopia, Kenya and Congo all recognise non-gender, as do Indonesia, Polynesia and the Phillippines. Going back into history, Mesopotamia and Sumeria recognised non-gender states, and Sumerian myth even speaks of the goddess Ninmah, who fashioned a being “with no male organ and no female organ”, for whom Enki finds a position in society: “to stand before the king”. In Akkad, Enki is remembered as instructing Nintu, the goddess of birth, to establish a “third category among the people” in addition to men and women, that includes demons who steal infants, women who are unable to give birth, and priestesses who are prohibited from bearing children. Ancient Egypt had a third gender category for “non-gendered” while Indic cultures – including the ancient texts of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism – all refer to non-gender thanks to the influence of Vedic culture.

So: yes, well done Australia, I’m very pleased that you have taken this step. But let’s have less of this blinkered Eurocentricism!

Last week, Anna Arrowsmith (aka Anna Span) declared her intent to become the Lib Dem MP for Gravesham. Interesting in and of itself because she was Britain’s first female, and self-avowed feminist, pornographer – here’s the article for the Guardian in which she elaborated on her candidacy. She stands an very remote chance of winning – the seat’s a CON-LAB marginal, having gone Blue in 2005 with less than 700 votes to spare, and one in which the Dems have always come a distant third, but she’s had a lot of press since announcing last Thursday, and with a few thought-out media appearances and some considered policy talk, such a situation can ignite a candidacy.

Of course, badly thought-out appearances and ill-considered policy talk can go straight through ignition and all the way to immolation, but that’s the gamble. The Dems are casting the bones on the possibility that, off the back of the current Party Conference and the televised debates, they’re going to get some momentum going – and those indecisive Con-Lab marginals might just start thinking about third parties, especially those in the media glare.

Her candidacy has had exactly the reaction that you’d expect – Ann Widdecombe thinks that having a pornographer run for parliament is “inappropriate,” while leftie bloggers, like Hopi Sen, reject the fuss as middle-England’s usual strident puritanism, and in the meanwhile columnists in all sections of the media have fallen over themselves chortling at their own clever double entendres and witty conflations of politics and the sex trade.

All well and good, but personally, I’m not convinced that this is a question that really requires a moral dimension – I’m just interested in whether she’d make a good enough politican to be worth voting for. Initial signs aren’t promising; the Guardian article linked to above is, in fairness, a bit of a rambling, narcissistic mess. She claims that she can fix the Westminster boy’s club, on the grounds that she’s “been here before; last time [she] changed [her] industry for ever;” I must respectfully disagree. Anna Arrowsmith may have entered the pornography arena with the best of intentions, but it is no less grubby, fundamentally unrealistic and driven by underlying mysogyny than it ever was – if anything, it’s getting worse. One must question the judgement of anyone who thinks that a single person could fundementally change the nature of pornography from within.

On the other hand, it’s probably fairly safe to assume that she doesn’t have any skeletons in her closet. And she’d probably be a rather more worthwhile MP than the incumbent.

It is not uncommon for those who favour the legal protection of abortion rights to dispute the label that their opponents have chosen for themselves. “Pro-life”, they say, is disingenuous; everyone is pro-life at some base level, but by making the pro-life label their own, the anti-abortionists are implying that pro-abortionists are anti-life by opposition. A cheap trick, I hear. Empty grandstanding, a propagandist rhetorical trick aimed at framing the debate. I think that this belies a fundamental lack of understanding.

The pro-rights view differs, of course, from one group to the next. Broadly speaking, however, most pro-rights groups are “pro-life”, at least to an extent; but any situation in which abortion is a possibility is bound to be much more complex, nuanced and delicate than such a broad-blanket term can possibly hope to encompass. Many proponents of this view think that the term “pro-life” seeks to remove that distinction. In fact, it simply refers to a difference in priority. Anti-abortionists are not unaware of this argument, they just don’t agree with it. They feel that the essential sanctity of life is greater than any confounding nuance or mitigating factor. The term “pro-life” has stuck because it does effectively describe the philosophical basis from which anti-abortionists are working. By arguing strongly against the label “pro-life”, the pro-rightsists are indulging in a little moral hypocrisy; this is possibly not the saddest thing, nor the most surprising, in this most vexed of culture wars, but still disappointingly intellectually dishonest.

The idea of the sanctity of life can be attacked rationally, if one tries. It may seem like an obvious thing to say, but the fetishisation of life is not new; human culture has accepted it as a predicate almost from the get-go. The western view of life is older than Hobbes, but was best described in his Leviathan, where he said that ‘natural law’ forbids one from doing anything “that [...] is destructive of his life, or takes away his means of preserving the same.” 

Religion is a natural disseminator of life-fetishism. Judaism and the faiths that it fathered are untiring in their promotion of the “divine spark” argument. Genesis 9:5 (“And surely the blood of your lives will I require”) is taken as the basis of much Talmudic law on subjects regarding the taking of life; if our lives belong to God, then it is of course immoral for us to do with them as we will. Christianity has the interesting distinction of being the only religion to overtly depict the act of suicide in its holy book; in fact, their were no less than seven suicides in the bible, and a early, heretic, sect of Christianity even believed that martyrdom, and thus Heaven, was only attainable through suicide. It wasn’t until the sixth century AD that St Augustine justified the act of suicide as a sin, based on the sixth commandment (“Thou shalt not kill”.) This is now an accepted orthodoxy, and has informed debates over the sanctity of life ever since, even though the Catholic Church is currently more progressive – the catechism currently states that “grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide”; and goes on to say “We should not despair for the eternal salvation of those who have taken their own lives… God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance.” 

Islam is the only religion to explicitly forbid suicide, both in the Qu’ran (“And do not kill yourself, surely Allah is most merciful unto you”, 4:29) and in hadith (“He who commits suicide to himself by throttling will continue throttling in hellfire”). Islam was, of course, strongly influenced by eastern religion as well as the Abrahamic tradition. The Buddhist faith, of course, is possibly the most pacifistic of the major religions, and largely for life-fetishising reasons: one of the first things that the Buddhist is taught is to refrain from the destruction of life. Hinduism is massively diverse, but generally speaking, dharma is thought to protect the sanctity of life. Shinto is perhaps the most equivocal religion on the subject of life, but still it still states that the purpose of life is to live, and calls death “pollution”.

GK Chesterton may seem to have vocalised the Christian orthodoxy on the subject when he called suicide “the absolute and ultimate evil” can equated the act of suicide to “destroying the world”, but a different reading could see this as more of a paean to experience; he describes it as a “refusal to take an interest in existence”, exposing his disgust as more earthly than ecumenical. This is not an uncommon line of secular argument. Camus and Sartre both argued that life should be embraced in all of its absurd glory; Kant, and his deontologist successors, took the religion out of Calvinist and Descartean arguments on Divine Right, arguing that good acts are good without qualification; but they kept many of the assumptions that underpinned religious teachings on life. Kant described suicide as “[an] action [inconsistent] with the idea of humanity as an end in itself.” 

But Kant’s arguments are interesting, as they serve to expose the thought processes that lead to these arguments being woven into the fabric of religion. The idea of “humanity as an end in itself” is no different from humanity in God’s service or humanity in the pursuit of karma. The polytheistic mythologies of ancient Mesopotamia were rather more mute on moral sermonising than their monotheistic successors; the issue of the sanctity of life first achieved prominence in the west with Judaism, possibly adopted from Hinduism but equally possibly adopted independently. But the idea of humanity as a tool of humanity is much older. A legend from ancient Sumer says “We Gods live as Gods; you men live as men;” legends such as the Epic of Gilgamesh place a heavy emphasis on immortality as a virtuous aim. 

So if the sanctity of life can be reduced to Kant’s ideal of humanity as an objective end, then it becomes vulnerable to all sorts of attack. What if humanity is not an end, but ameans to an end? Epicurean living defines life as a vehicle, with which one can seek modest pleasures, attain freedom of fear through knowledge and companionship, and be temperate. The Epicurean goal was to pursue quasi-ascetic, moderate consumption in order to gain freedom from appetites and desires, until one gracefully reaches death – “because death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation.” The Cynics treated death as part of living according to nature; even suicide was regarded as a natural facet of the human condition; Marcus Aureleus considered suicide not just acceptable, but a perfectly ethical and necessary action in some respects. Hugh Arthur Clough wrote “Thou shalt not kill, but need’st not strive officiously to keep alive”; David Hume wrote that suicide was no more sacrilegious than saving the life of someone whose death would be otherwise inevitable, as either way, the only agency that potentially interferes with God’s will is yourself. 

All of which is attacking the point in rather a circular fashion. What I have not done is to present an argument by which it is morally acceptable to kill, either by abortion, euthanasia, or murder; those arguments are being, and will continue to be, thrashed out elsewhere. All that I have sought to do is to look at one specific argument which crops up with alarming regularity, and argument that I find specious: the idea that life has some intrinsic moral worth that must trump all other considerations. Different situations have different criteria for judgement, but a life, if it has any value at all, has a value that is defined only by its possessor.

People who fetishise life will sacrifice all sorts of freedoms, experiences and opportunities in the defence of their intangible essence, but this is a trap; because if life is the pursuit of humanity then that means accepting humanity in its fullest extent.