On becoming a politician

The question — and I have struggled with this myself — is where do you have the most impact, where do you drive most effectively. It is always changing as the world changes. I used to humiliate CEOs, and one needed to be sufficiently emotionally unaware to live with that ethical contradiction — of making leaders look bad in order to get your point across.

So Paul Gilding, former Greenpeace director, as quoted in an article about the Australian singer-turned-politician Peter Garrett [in the SMH's Good Weekend, apparently not online]. It's worth a read, although it's not always so ethically aware: the journalist wants to have his cake and eat it too, issuing cheap shots against Garrett at one remove, or maybe half a remove. The smarmiest of Garrett's critics is Bob Brown, head of the Greens, who has quite a line in moral one-upmanship. Here's a hint, Bob: if you have a former colleage, whom (as you say) you like a great deal, and feel empathy for, and yet you find yourself feeling "a great deal of anxiety for him as a person", pick up the phone, or walk down the corridor to his office, and talk to him personally. Keep your pious concerns out of the press. Or, you know, we might think it had more to do with establishing your own brand by trashing a professional rival.

Garrett on his own situation:

And I think that's the crux of this, you know, `Peter Garrett is not the person he was before. He's become a politician.' Well, yeah, that's right. I did become a politician and I made that step into the discipline of party politics.

Garrett, currently Minister for the Environment, Arts and Heritage, is — and I didn't know this — the second-oldest member of cabinet, which is a disorienting thought. And how he has ever been able to make it through the song Beds Are Burning, given his personal history, boggles the mind.

Kermode on Vermes on the Resurrection

In the current London Review of Books, just in time for Easter, the critic Frank Kermode reviews Geza Vermes' book "The Resurrection". Sadly, it's not in the publicly-accessible section, so if you're a non-subscriber you'll need to content yourself with snippets, or shell out for the full article. (Or maybe just subscribe: the LRB is an excellent read.) The article, and apparently the book, is an example of informed, reasonable scepticism concerning Christian claims: the sort of thing local author John Dickson was calling for in Friday's Herald.

Of course, one has always been able to find literate discussions in journals like the LRB ... but popular discourse lately has been dire. When I was an undergraduate, one ran into lots of on-campus criticism of Christianity that was complacently ignorant: rather like on-campus talk on some other subjects. One expects people to grow out of such posturing, but it seems some folk never did; and in recent years it has become acceptable, for whatever reason, to dismiss the Christian faith in ill-informed and wholesale terms.

By contrast to this, both Vermes and Kermode are concerned to take the New Testament seriously; this is not to say that they "agree" with it, or with Christianity more generally. Vermes, writes Kermode, is interested in

the inconsistencies, the flaws in testimony, the narrative faults, of the New Testament record, treated as evidence, however flawed, of something that happened. As he remarks, he feels his responsibility to be judicial in character; his main business will be to see whether the stories told by the witnesses stand up in court [... for the] Christian creeds emphasise the presence in their accounts of an undoubtedly historical character, Pontius Pilate [... whereas in] a different sort of narrative he might not have a proper name but be simply the Governor, the Procurator or the like, and we should not need to be told as much as we are about him ...

They go on to disagree on what to make of the Pilate material in John's Gospel, as well one might.

Christian scholarship and advocacy should likewise know what it is talking about, acknowledge other competent interpreters, and avoid claiming too much. For a Herald article, Dickson's piece was very good in this way, and was even willing to take some small swings at his own side. Too often in this town, there seems instead to be a "not in front of the children" attitude about public statements: an idea that one must avoid saying anything that might dismay or confuse the humble believer; an anxiety about always staying on-message. Statements and articles of this kind (some of which can be found on the Sydney Anglican website) either leave me cold, or leave me infuriated ... and since I'm conservative enough that I believe the Nicene Creed, it's not as though this is a question of orthodoxy.

So if Dickson's piece reflects a renewed willingness for conservative Christians here to talk on something other than our own, zealously guarded home turf --- a willingness to communicate --- then three cheers for it.

[Thanks to The Blogging Parson for pointing out the Dickson article.]

Truthful myths

A thoughtful Herald today! Here are fighting words from John Gray, self-proclaimed sceptic:

While the myths of religion express enduring human realities, the myths of secular humanism serve only to conceal them. It may be a dim sense of the unreality of their beliefs makes militant atheists so vehement and dogmatic.

One searches in vain in the company of militant unbelievers for signs of the creative doubt that has energised many religious thinkers...

As a scientist who is also a relatively conservative Christian, I have been dismayed by the recent descent into Philistine belligerence in the ongoing Science-Religion turf war. Here's a hint, people: if you can look at the capital letters on "Science" and "Religion" in the preceding sentence, and not feel an immediate need to swathe them in inverted commas, you are probably part of the problem.

Tanya on Jane on Catherine and reading and ...

In today's Herald, my near-contemporary Tanya Plibersek, Federal member for Sydney and recently-appointed minister for something-or-other, makes a heartfelt plea for reading, fiction in general, and Jane Austen in particular. I like her better already.

The PM and his puppy

In today's Herald: why the Mersey Hospital is like a puppy. The analogy is surprisingly exact.

Style warning: The last sentence of this otherwise fine article is an appalling pun.

Gotcha!

In a surprisingly non-partisan op-ed piece in Tuesday's Herald, Gerard Henderson attacks the current journalistic sport of trying to catch politicians in an "embarrassing" failure of memory, in this manner: "Can you name all of the Senate candidates of your party from [some_random_State]? Your time starts now ...".

There has been a certain amount of this lately, and it serves no respectable purpose. It should just stop.

The problem with Dawkins (the other one)

The other Dawkins, that is. From today's editorial in the Herald:

The Dawkins restructure of university education reduced higher education from two tiers to one, transforming or amalgamating the former colleges of advanced education into new universities, or separate institutes within existing universities. With hindsight, this development was probably a mistake.

Oh really? With hindsight it was probably a mistake? There was never anything about the idea of taking disparate institutions and calling them the same thing, that seemed like a mistake at the time?

The LHC in the news

The Large Hadron Collider has been in the news lately, with half a page in the SMH a few weeks ago, and big articles in the current New Yorker, and the New York Times science pages.

The LHC is the world's next big particle physics endeavour, and due to switch on soon; my colleagues in the particle physics groups at the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne are working on one of the experiments there, ATLAS.

The NYT article is quite ambitious, skating over a lot of ground; it also manages to be quite jaunty. And in the spirit of a picture telling a thousand words, it links to a beautiful interactive graphic that clearly distinguishes the general-purpose experiments (ATLAS and CMS) from the specialist ones (LHCb and ALICE), and explains what the detectors are doing.

The New Yorker article misses out on things like this, giving the impression (for example) that there are four experiments doing basically the same thing. I actually have a bunch of gripes with the New Yorker article: it disses the CERN cafeteria; it canvasses the idea that the LHC could destroy the world in an ice-nine-type catastrophe (it seems we'll never be free of that one); and it indulges a theoretical particle physicist in a theorist-as-performance-artist act, which is getting a little old. But if that's the worst I can say about a seven-page article in my own field, then it is clearly doing something right. The writer is engaged with the subject; she has talked to a variety of people; she is thinking.

There are, however, some bad thoughts expressed in memorable language, that seem destined to live forever. The New Yorker repeats the dread line that all science is either physics or stamp-collecting: an idea utterly without merit, but still in circulation. But what goes around can come around. Today's (Thursday's) NYT editorial on the LHC contemplates a scenario where the project fails, putting another nail in the coffin of the Age of Physics, in favour of the Age of Biology.

Yeah, right. Physicists, like everyone, are a menace when they get arrogant. So what should we do about it? Hey! I know! Let's replace them with arrogant biologists ...

Perks?

Miranda Devine's ability to spoil an argument never ceases to amaze me.

In an op-ed article in today's SMH she mounts a critique of "try before you buy" cohabitation, hanging it on the Windsor-Middleton breakup the way one hangs a coat on a peg. One first has to wade through a page of tut-tutting at British snobbery: all very entertaining, but surely it's absurd if egalitarian sentiment becomes an excuse for feeling superior to the upper class?

She eventually makes a good point, if scarcely a new one: cohabitation, considered from the outside, seems scarcely in women's interest and "gives all the advantages to men". Very well, but what follows from this?

According to Ms Devine, it follows that If Middleton had really wanted to marry William she never should have set up house with him. Smart girls don't give away marital perks free. Really? Smart girls? Marital perks?

A critique of an institution is, by itself, no guide to individual behaviour. Ms Middleton is no more able to single-handedly change her social environment than any of us, but must act in the place and time she is given.

The naff reference to "smart girls" casts this as a matter of calculation, so let's be calculating. KM may have been trying out some merchandise of her own. Fancy being married to the heir to the throne, ladies? Not sure? Then perhaps you might want to try the role on for size, without making an irreversible commitment. It might be a way of finding out if you really do want to marry the guy, with all that implies. And at the risk of an obvious statement, KM may have been unenthusiastic about living through her twenties in celibacy. Is there anyone who doesn't feel some sympathy on that score? Anyone?

So perhaps the "New Rules" rhetoric is just a wrapper, and MD's real goal is a moral one, seeking to tie sex and commitment closer together. As a Christian, of course I sympathise. But one needs a fairly broad vision of the problem for this to make sense. If one is merely acting in a market, and the market is unchanged, then principles slow you down. There is such a thing as lonely virtue.

The problem is that many people don't feel ready to marry in their twenties, or would not feel supported in such a choice. This is almost certainly a criticism of our society; it may well (say it in a small voice!) be a criticism of ourselves. One is still left with the question of what to do. Marriage (and cohabitation for that matter) is a social phenomenon and I would have thought it an excellent start to broaden the frame of reference. Perhaps we can act differently as families, or groups of friends, or subcultures, or workplaces (!), and provide a milieu where an older-fashioned choice makes sense.

But to jump straight to how-the-individual-should-act is to claim that it is never prudent, or wise, or good, or even the lesser of two evils, to compromise with a flawed institution. This is ethical nonsense, and that makes it bad advice.