The real battle is within Islam rather than between Islam and other faiths
January 16th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I recently had dinner with a friend who had just returned from a holiday in Tunisia and we were debating the role of islam in the modern world.
My friend felt that Islam is a forcefully proselytising religion and that its fundamentalist adherents want not just an Islamic caliphate but an Islamic world. He feared that, especially in Britain, the immigration of those of Muslim faith, the higher birth rate of Muslims, and the strong religious practice of Muslims all mean that the UK would increasingly become an Islamic-influenced country.
I took a different view. I think that large-scale immigration to Britain from Muslim countries is over, the birth rates of Muslim families in the UK will fall, and that over a couple of generations the intensity of religious practice will also decline as rising education levels and living standards exercise a secularising influence.
I see no evidence worldwide of Muslims seeking to convert non-Muslims on any great scale. Rather I see a battle within Islam over the ‘true’ version of the faith. We are very familiar with the conflict – bloody in many Islamic countries – between the Sunni and Shia traditions but, within both traditions, there are major and bitter rivalries.
In today’s “Guardian”, there is an article about the religious battle in Pakistan where two branches of the Sunni tradition – the Sufi-influenced tradition of Barelvism versus Saudi-funded Wahhabism – are battling it out. This, I think, supports my argument that Muslims are not seeking to convert non-Muslims on any scale; the real problem is extreme Islamists seeking to convert more moderate followers of Islam to their brand of Islam.
What do you think?
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (1)
A review of the film “Righteous Kill”
January 15th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have only been in the same film on three occasions. “Righteous Kill” was the third one and is reviewed here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
The London street called Crutched Friars
January 15th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I have lived in London now for over 40 years and one of the many reasons I love the city is because it is so old and so saturated in history. This week I visited a street in Central London that I have never even heard of before, the wonderfully named Crutched Friars.
The explanation of the name comes from this web site:
“The House of Crutched Friars, or Friars of the Holy Cross, at the corner of Hart Street, was founded by Ralph Hosiar and William Sabernes, about the year 1298. The founders themselves became friars of the order, and to them Stephen, the tenth prior of the Holy Trinity, granted three tenements for 13s. 8d. In the reign of Henry VIII. the Crutched Friars solicited the City magistrates to take the establishment under their patronage. At the dissolution the watchful emissaries of Cromwell caught the Prior of Crutched Friars flagrante delicto, and down at once went the king’s hammer upon the corrupt little brotherhood. The church was turned into a carpenter’s yard and a tennis-court, and the friars’ hall eventually became a glass-house. On the 4th of September, 1575, Stow says, a terrible fire burst out there that destroyed all but the stone walls.”
I was was actually joining some professional colleagues for lunch at the Lloyd’s Club which is housed in a splendid Georgian Grade II listed building. The club’s web site has this account of the origin of the friars:
“Crutched Friars were officially known as The Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross, referred to as Friars of England, which is a reflection of the name they consistently gave themselves: Fratres Sanctae Crucis. There were never more than 40 members at any one time, and indeed in over 300 years of their existence the number was less than 750 men of which only 150 have been identified. Historians have treated them as one of the “dim little Orders” and to speak of them as an exiguous and undistinguished body.”
Posted in History, My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
Still more confirmation of the truth of evolution
January 14th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
It was in 2004 that scientists discovered a fossil called Tiktaalik, a 375m-year-old freshwater creature which was a link in the evolutionary chain from fish to amphibian, but at that time only the front part was available.
This week, we have news about the back part which confirms the importance of Tiktaalik in demonstrating how evolution has worked.
I mentioned the Tiktaalik fossil in my web site essay on an explanation of evolution which you can read here.
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
What you heard but did not see in the movie “Gravity”
January 14th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
This week, at the Golden Globes, “Gravity” [my review here] won the Best Director award for Mexican director Alfonso Cuardón. If you’ve seen this brilliant film, you will remember the bit where Dr Ryan Stone is in radio contact with someone on Earth speaking an unfamiliar language. The director’s son has produced this very short feature revealing what that communication was all about.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Beware the holiday destination of the Darlingtons
January 13th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
The joke among our family and friends is that, when we choose to visit a particular part of the world for our holiday, something dramatic often happens there.
I suppose it started when we made our first visit to what was then Czechoslovakia in 1988. The following year the country overthrew Communism in its ‘velvet revolution’ which triggered other revolutions in Central & Eastern Europe.
In 2003, we made a visit to Nepal when the Maoist insurgency was still active.The day after our arrival in Kathmandu, the chief of police, his bodyguard and his wife were killed while on an early morning walk on the outskirts of the capital.
in 2008, we made a visit to Cuba. Just two weeks before our departure, Fidel Castro announced that he was stepping down as the world’s longest-serving president after an astonishing 49 years in power.
Then there was our trip to Iran in 2009. When the disputed presidential election led to massive demonstrations and brutality in June, the British Foreign Office advised against travel to Iran and we wondered whether the trip would actually go ahead. Fortunately the domestic situation became calmer and we were able to make the trip in the first week of November even though this coincided with fresh demonstrations around the 30th anniversary of the taking of the American Embassy hostages.
The saddest occurrence was the follow-up to our trip to Syria in 2011. Just a couple of weeks after our departure, demonstrations started that soon led to armed conflict and then full-scale civil war. This has resulted in the deaths of more than 120,000 people, forced more than two million to flee the country, and devastated the nation’s cities, economy and social fabric.
Less than a year ago, we visited Bangkok as a break on our flight to Australia. The latest news is that demonstrators are planning to bring the city to a halt in an effort to overthrow the government.
By now, you probably want to know where we are going to visit next. Well, in a couple of weeks, we are going to make a tour of Central America, visiting Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Three of these countries have had brutal civil wars which are now thankfully over, but three have them are ravaged by violent street gangs and drug groups, with two of them having the highest murder rates in the world outside of actual war zones.
I hope to be blogging on our experiences here on NightHawk and we hope to come home safe and sound with some interesting memories.
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (1)
A review of “Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom”
January 12th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
You can read my review of the film here and my review of the book here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Should we abandon the notion of essentialism and accept that most things are relative and changing?
January 12th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I’m a qualified fan of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. I think that he is incredibly bright and writes a great deal of sense, but he can express himself in rather insensitive language. I was fascinated by a piece he has contributed on essentialism to this weekend’s “Observer” newspaper:
“Essentialism – what I’ve called “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind” – stems from Plato, with his characteristically Greek geometer’s view of things. For Plato, a circle or a right-angled triangle were ideal forms, definable mathematically but never realised in practice. A circle drawn in the sand was an imperfect approximation to the ideal Platonic circle hanging in some abstract space. That works for geometric shapes like circles, but essentialism has been applied to living things and Ernst Mayr blamed this for humanity’s late discovery of evolution – as late as the 19th century.
If, like Aristotle, you treat all flesh-and-blood rabbits as imperfect approximations to an ideal Platonic rabbit, it won’t occur to you that rabbits might have evolved from a non-rabbit ancestor, and might evolve into a non-rabbit descendant. If you think, following the dictionary definition of essentialism, that the essence of rabbitness is “prior to” the existence of rabbits (whatever “prior to” might mean, and that’s a nonsense in itself) evolution is not an idea that will spring readily to your mind, and you may resist when somebody else suggests it.Paleontologists will argue passionately about whether a particular fossil is, say, Australopithecus or Homo.
But any evolutionist knows there must have existed individuals who were exactly intermediate. It’s essentialist folly to insist on the necessity of shoehorning your fossil into one genus or the other. There never was an Australopithecus mother who gave birth to a Homo child, for every child ever born belonged to the same species as its mother. The whole system of labelling species with discontinuous names is geared to a time slice, the present, in which ancestors have been conveniently expunged from our awareness (and “ring species” tactfully ignored).
If by some miracle every ancestor were preserved as a fossil, discontinuous naming would be impossible. Creationists are misguidedly fond of citing “gaps” as embarrassing for evolutionists, but gaps are a fortuitous boon for taxonomists who, with good reason, want to give species discrete names. Quarrelling about whether a fossil is “really” Australopithecus or Homo is like quarrelling over whether George should be called “tall”. He’s 5ft 10, doesn’t that tell you what you need to know?
Essentialism rears its ugly head in racial terminology. The majority of “African Americans” are of mixed race. Yet so entrenched is our essentialist mindset that American official forms require everyone to tick one race/ethnicity box or another: no room for intermediates. A different but also pernicious point is that a person will be called “African American” even if only, say, one of his eight great grandparents was of African descent. As Lionel Tiger put it to me, we have here a reprehensible “contamination metaphor”. But I mainly want to call attention to our society’s essentialist determination to dragoon a person into one discrete category or another. We seem ill-equipped to deal mentally with a continuous spectrum of intermediates. We are still infected with the plague of Plato’s essentialism.
Moral controversies such as those over abortion and euthanasia are riddled with the same infection. At what point is a brain-dead accident-victim defined as “dead”? At what moment during development does an embryo become a “person”? Only a mind infected with essentialism would ask such questions. An embryo develops gradually from single-celled zygote to newborn baby, and there’s no one instant when “personhood” should be deemed to have arrived. The world is divided into those who get this truth and those who wail: “But there has to be some moment when the foetus becomes human.”
No, there really doesn’t, any more than there has to be a day when a middle-aged person becomes old. It would be better – though still not ideal – to say the embryo goes through stages of being a quarter human, half human, three quarters human… The essentialist mind will recoil from such language and accuse me of all manner of horrors for denying theessence of humanness.
Evolution too, like embryonic development, is gradual. Every one of our ancestors, back to the common root we share with chimpanzees and beyond, belonged to the same species as its own parents and its own children. And likewise for the ancestors of a chimpanzee, back to the same shared progenitor. We are linked to modern chimpanzees by a V-shaped chain of individuals who once lived and breathed and reproduced, each link in the chain being a member of the same species as its neighbours in the chain, no matter that taxonomists insist on dividing them at convenient points and thrusting discontinuous labels upon them. If all the intermediates, down both forks of the V from the shared ancestor, had happened to survive, moralists would have to abandon their essentialist, “speciesist” habit of placing Homo sapiens on a sacred plinth, infinitely separate from all other species.
Abortion would no more be “murder” than killing a chimpanzee – or, by extension, any animal. Indeed an early-stage human embryo, with no nervous system and presumably lacking pain and fear, might defensibly be afforded less moral protection than an adult pig, which is clearly well equipped to suffer. Our essentialist urge toward rigid definitions of “human” (in debates over abortion and animal rights) and “alive” (in debates over euthanasia and end-of-life decisions) makes no sense in the light of evolution and other gradualistic phenomena.
We define a poverty “line”: you are either “above” or “below” it. But poverty is a continuum. Why not say, in dollar equivalents, how poor you actually are? The preposterous electoral college system in US presidential elections is another, and especially grievous, manifestation of essentialist thinking. Florida must go either wholly Republican or wholly Democrat – all 25 electoral college votes – even though the popular vote is a dead heat. But states should not be seen as essentiallyred or blue: they are mixtures in various proportions.
You can surely think of many other examples of “the dead hand of Plato” – essentialism. It is scientifically confused and morally pernicious. It needs to be retired.”
Hawkins is writing mainly about the use of essentialism in science and medicine, but the notion can be especially pernicious in religion and politics and breed terrible intolerance. For instance, is there an essential version of being a liberal or a conservative or being a Christian or a Muslim? I don’t think so – all these terms are relative and changing and we should tolerate and respect the differences.
Hawkins’ piece is one of a number in an “Observer” feature about scientific ideas that should be dropped. You can check out the others here.
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (1)
Why in Hungary there are no ‘cheers!’ with beers
January 11th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I had lunch in a central London restaurant this week and fell into conversation with our Hungarian waiter, deploying all half dozen of my Hungarian words. He told me something about Hungarians that i did not know , even though I have been to the country three times.
I found the explanation in this piece on the Net:
“As anyone who has committed the heinous crime of clinking beer glasses to say cheers in a bar in Budapest can testify, Hungary is a land brimming with nationalist sensitivities. For the record, this particular idiosyncrasy goes back to 1848 when the Austrians crushed a national uprising and celebrated the impending execution of upstart Hungarian leaders with a veritable cacophony of beer glass clinking. Hungarian nationalists pledged to observe a self-imposed ban on the practice for 150 years. But almost a decade after the statute of limitations expired it is still considered deeply insulting.”
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
My three year old granddaughter after a three week interval
January 10th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
My granddaughter Catrin will be three years old next week. Ever since she was born, I’ve tried to see her each week because I love being with her and sharing her physical and intellectual development.
I had a wonderful day with her before Christmas but I didn’t see her at all over Christmas and the New Year because she was with her parents visiting relatives in San Antonio, Texas.
Therefore, when I saw Catrin this week, it was for the first time in three weeks and, even in that short time, she had developed and grown. She is such a bundle of fun – and now the occasional mischief.
gingerbread man, granddad.”
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)