2006 Articles (7)
Learning from History
In 1942, when Singapore fell to the advancing Japanese army, Russell Brandon, a 21-year-old Australian gunner, was captured and spent four years in Changi prisoner-of-war camp. He survived, and went on to become an outstanding journalist. On April 23, 1983, two days before Anzac Day, he wrote an article for the Sydney Morning Herald called 'Remember Singapore'. Here he reminded Australians of their country's past relations with Britain and the USA, and he recalled how two British prime ministers, first Neville Chamberlain and then Winston Churchill, lied to the Australian government. With the USA weakened by the Great Depression of the thirties and with a president, Roosevelt, who was a critic of British imperialism, Australia could not look to America for protection from the Imperial Army of Japan. Russell Brandon wrote, 'Australia's safety depended upon the ability of the Royal Navy to keep the Mediterranean a British lake and Singapore an impregnable fortress.' When the Australian government sought reassurance that, in the event of the Imperial Army advancing south, a British fleet would be despatched to the Far East, Neville Chamberlain lied. In a cable to the Australian prime minister he said, 'The idea that, in the event of war, we might not be able to defend our overseas possessions is entirely false.'
Two British ships were sent to Singapore but without air cover. They were immediately sunk by the Japanese. Winston Churchill, now Prime Minister, asked the Australian government to send a division of Australian troops to Malaysia. Mindful of Australia's 'special bond' with Britain and the Empire, and of how Australian troops had fought in the Boer War and in the First World War alongside the British, the Australian government complied. The troops arrived in time to be killed or captured by the Japanese.
As a twenty-one-year-old gunner was to discover,
We were fed lies about our potential enemy. Disregarding Japan's recent history (of which we were ignorant), our intelligence officers were required to assure us that Japanese soldiers were both physically and militarily inadequate.
Yet they had hated Britain and America ever since the 1920s when the one had refused to renew the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the other had banned them from immigrating.
And when they joined (or were drafted into) the Emperor's forces, their instructors had never stopped telling them, 'Do not be afraid of combat, and do not come home alive.'
And every one of them who was about to be shipped to Malaya carried a booklet entitled Read This Alone, which said of us: 'Here before you is a man whose death will lighten your heart of its burden of brooding anger. Should you fail to destroy him, you may never rest in peace - and the first blow is always the vital one.'
Compare that with what we were told about them - which was that they were puny, myopic, afraid of the dark and badly armed. Would that we had been armed as they were to march the full length of the peninsula, constantly encircling our defensive positions as they raced through the jungle with confidence.
The victorious Japanese army was halted, first by a 'mere battalion or two' of Australian troops stationed at Milne Bay and on the Kokoda trail in New Guinea, and then by the Americans, forced into the war by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour.
Russell Brandon concluded his memories of Singapore with
So the moral for this Anzac Day is that, in either diplomacy or war, there is no excuse for bad intelligence; and that good intelligence is not the exclusive prerogative of our more powerful allies. We may not be in a position to defend ourselves for another hundred years, but we should never again be asked to face an enemy about whom everything that we have been told is either untrue or wishful thinking.
How short, or non-existent are the memories of those who govern us! It is said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. Tony Blair, George Bush and John Howard repeated history and achieved a simultaneous tragedy and farce. This is the tragedy of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the farce of these three men still strutting upon the world stage and claiming to be wise, honourable statesmen. It is said that Blair once admitted to wishing that he had studied history. The only history Bush seems to have learnt is a falsely glorified history of his own country. Howard cannot claim to be ignorant of Australian history. There are still many of us alive who remember the fall of Singapore in the way that Americans remember the fall of the Twin Towers. I was eleven when Singapore fell, and it was the first time I had seen my father be afraid.
Blair, Bush and Howard claim to be Christians, but they have failed to remember the Christian teaching that, when we sin, we must acknowledge our guilt and shame, and embark on a life of penitence and unostentatious humility. Christian or not, it is only by guilt, shame and penitence that we can learn from our mistakes and err no more.
'Remember Singapore' was republished by the Sydney Morning Herald on April 22, 2006.
9 December 2006
New Scientist rarely covers stories about education but this week's issue has a special report on home schooling in the
Because children who have received this kind of teaching would have difficulty when they progressed to an ordinary college or university
One of the principles of rhetoric and debate is that facts should never be allowed to spoil a good argument. When it comes to evolution creationists are not in the business of applying a scientific scrutiny to the statements of probability that scientists produce. Scientific statements are always framed with, 'It is likely that. .. .' or 'The probability of this event happening by chance is . . .' In rhetoric and debate statements can be, and usually are, statements of absolutes. Lawyers don't tell the jury, 'There's a sixty per cent probability that my client is innocent.' They say, 'My client is innocent.' Under the Bush administration
Rhetoric and debate unsustained by truth can be successful, but only for a limited time. A point is reached where the facts overwhelm the argument. Ever since
One technique used in rhetoric and debate is called 'hypothesis saving'. We all use this from time to time. You promise a friend that you'll carry out a particular task for him 'by the weekend'. The weekend comes and you haven't done what you promised. When your friend confronts you, you say, 'Well, I didn't mean by this weekend definite. I meant as close to the weekend as I could manage, early next week, or Friday by the latest.' In rhetoric, hypotheses can be saved by using the same word with two different meanings, or changing the word into a phrase that sounds like the word. For instance, geneticists have been saying for a long while, that a single gene cannot produce complex behaviour such as we see when someone is depressed or psychotic. Psychiatrists have gone on talking about 'a gene for depression' or 'a gene for schizophrenia' until recently when they have been forced to abandon their idea of 'a gene for'. Rather than say, yes, we were wrong, they hypothesis-save by talking about 'a genetic component' or 'genetic inheritance'. Hypothesis saving always means that you have moved on to less secure grounds, and the anxiety caused by trying to defend what is becoming an indefensible position can be quite destabilising.
To deal with this, many people, rather than change their ideas, become increasingly aggressive. Religious conflicts, whether between individuals or groups, always arise when one or both sides have had their beliefs seriously challenged by events. No Pope could simply say to
When we trust another person we see this person as having the power to keep us safe. It is not just a kind of safety that protects us from predators. It is the safety of keeping the world the way we see it as being. When the person we trust betrays us we feel the ground beneath our feet dissolve into nothingness. All that was solid and secure in our world vanishes or crumbles at our touch. So terrifying is this situation that many people refuse to believe that they have been betrayed and, despite all the evidence to the contrary, they declare that they have not been betrayed. To maintain this position they have to adopt a stance of never looking, never questioning, and avoiding all situations where questions might be asked and doubts raised. If pressed, they excuse their parents with, 'Dad always meant well', 'Mum always wanted me to be happy'. These statements may indeed be true, but they are statements which only an adult using hindsight could make. These statements do not convey what the child's experience was when he discovered that he has been lied to by the adults he trusted.
At the heart of every lie is fear. Even our whitest of lies, such as when we assure a friend that she's as pretty as a picture or he's still an attractive man, contain the fear of what the consequences would be if we told the truth. We lie, not to spare other people, but to spare ourselves.
Science shows us that the universe is a strange place, tantalisingly beyond our understanding no matter how much we discover, and completely indifferent to our existence. History shows us that God does not balance out the bad with the good. Bad people can be victors and hang on to their spoils, and good people can suffer without recompense or reward. Life is always uncertain, and there is little which we can keep under control. It takes great courage to accept the conditions of our life and still face the future with hope.
The students at
New Scientist
Garry Wills 'A Country Rules by Faith' New York Review of Books
(The idiosyncratic dating of issues of the NYRB means that I could purchase a copy of the latest issue and quote from it before the date given on its cover.)
TATE Britain Exhibition Holbein in England October 2006
A middle-aged man in a pin-striped suit turned away from the Holbein drawing he had been examining, saying loudly and authoritatively, 'It's very good.' 'No,' I thought, 'It's not merely good. It is absolutely extraordinary.'
There is no doubting Holbein's skill as an artist. We see real people whom we would recognise if they walked into our room in modern garb. What is extraordinary is that he was working in the court of Henry VIII. If he had displeased a powerful courtier or, worse, the king himself, he would have been, at best, banished from England, at worst, killed. Yet he did not seek to protect himself by creating portraits which showed his sitters to be secure and happy. Instead, he showed all the tension, the guardedness, the fear felt by the people whose lives and livelihood depended on the whim of a supreme monarch who was vain, self-centred, wilful and unwise.
In none of the portraits is the sitter smiling. Lady Guildford risked what might be a teasing glance at her husband whose portrait hangs next to her, but the pudgy, dour face of Sir Henry tells us that he would quench any sign of her levity. He may have married her because she supplied the gaiety and charm which he himself lacked, but women who are charming and outgoing are often indiscreet.
Holbein's portraits of Henry show that in Henry's court no one could afford to be indiscreet. Henry may have once been a handsome, approachable young man, but, as his portraits show, in middle age his face and body have thickened. He has a mean little mouth and cold, expressionless eyes. When he stands legs apart, his codpiece curls through a parting in his skirt like a vicious serpent. In the painting Henry VIII and the Barber-Surgeons Henry is seated with his codpiece at the point in the painting close to what is called the golden mean or golden section, thus becoming the cynosure for all eyes. The Worshipful Company of the Barber-Surgeons kneel on either side of the throne, their faces at the level of the cod piece. Power is symbolised by more than the crown.
The Barber-Surgeons were themselves all powerful men, but power and high office did not protect them, or other powerful men, from Henry's displeasure. John Fisher might have become the Bishop of Rochester and Chancellor of Cambridge University but when he opposed Henry's divorce he was imprisoned along with Sir Thomas More and beheaded. Holbein's sketch of him, done shortly before his death, shows him pinched and gaunt with eyes full of pain as he contemplated his inevitable end. Sir Henry Wyatt's portrait was painted not long before his death and from it we may guess that his death, natural though it may have been, brought to an end a life full of worry that left its marks on his face. Dr Chambers, a cleric and physician of Henry, lived to eighty, but probably at the expense of his wife and family, as dogmatic and angry men always do. Sir John Godsalve was only in his early twenties when he took up the important post of Clerk to the King's Signet, just before Holbein painted his portrait. Unlike most of the other sitters, Sir John gazes directly at the painter, and at us, with that anxious air of unreality, 'What am I doing here?' He could be a modern day young man who suddenly finds himself promoted to a position for which neither his training nor his experience has fitted him. He spends the rest of his working life waiting to be revealed as the incompetent he is.
The women sitters fare no better than the men. Lady Jane Seymour, painted shortly after she became Queen, has an expression and a little tight mouth that say, 'It's not fair,' and it wasn't. Her family used her as a pawn in their power game, and her prize, Henry, would not have applied his vicious serpent to her with charm and grace. She died in childbirth not long after her portrait was painted. Margaret Bacon, Lady Butts, was the wife of Sir William Butts, the royal physician portrayed in the barber-surgeons portrait. Her portrait gives her age as fifty-seven, and she looks it. Her wrinkles, her unhappy eyes and the set of her mouth tell of constant worry and unhappiness.
One rich and powerful circle of people, separate from the royal court, were the foreign merchants from the Hanseatic League, a league of merchant associations within the cities of northern Germany and the Baltic. The portraits Holbein painted of these merchants are very different from those of the court. There the majority of the court sitters look away from the painter, whereas the merchants , full face on, gaze stare at the painter, and at us, saying in their stance, 'This is me. Take me as I am.' But even here Holbein dares to show a discrepancy between the sitter's idea of himself and what he actually is. Cyriacus Kale stands in front of his personal motto, 'Patient in all things', but patience is not the striking feature of his face. His thick neck supports a large, flat face with the eyes and mouth of a man who tells himself that he is patient until others drive him to explode with wrath. Herman von Wedigh sits at an angle and turns his face to look at us with an expression which says, 'Prove to me that you're honest and reliable.' Derich Born may have been only in his twenties but he had business connections with the royal court. He wanted the royal painter to know that he had judged the king and his circle and found them wanting. Perhaps his contempt was directed at the mismatch between Henry as a person and the pride Henry took in himself. Perhaps it was directed at the meagreness of minds that are dominated by fear.
When we see a group of people staying close together despite the fact that they all suffer in one way or other we ask ourselves, 'Why do they stay? Why don't they just leave?' Why does a wife stay with a cruel husband, and adult child with cold, critical parents? To outsiders there is no prison that keeps the person trapped. But there is, and the prison is in the person's own mind. Henry's courtiers and their families had or could have acquired country homes and residences away from court. However, they told themselves that they were bound to Henry by fealty, and that Henry had been appointed king by God. They saw the court as the centre of their world. Moving away from that would be the end of who they saw themselves as being, a person who was significant, important, virtuous, admired, if not by others, at least by themselves.
Were they afraid that Henry would be angered by portraits that showed his courtiers to be miserable and frightened? No, they weren't, because they knew, though they might not have admitted it even to themselves, that Henry wanted them to be unhappy. Their unhappiness and fear were signs of his power. He could give them treats and let them be happy for a short while, but soon he would need to call them to heel and punish them in order to reassure himself that he was powerful. No doubt Henry would think that, as he wasn't happy, why should they be?
However, these portraits were not painted to be hung at the court. They were hung in important buildings and in the grand mansions owned by the families. Did not the sitters want those who saw the portraits, not just their contemporaries but those in the distant future, to see a painting of someone who had been secure, successful and serene? Indeed no. They wanted their suffering to be seen and remembered because is not suffering in the cause of duty a great virtue which all must admire.
Hans Holbein duly obliged.
Reference
Susan Foister Holbein in England Tate Publishing, London, 2006.
http://tudorhistory.org/henry8/gallery2.html © (copyright) 1995-2006 Lara E. Eakins
When Michael Leunig isn't upsetting right-wing Australians (they're very easy to upset) he draws the most perceptive cartoons about life. Some of these cartoons are full of joy, but many are about what the Buddha called dukkha, suffering. The Buddha explained, 'Pain, grief and despair are dukkha. Being forced into proximity with what we hate is suffering; being separated from what we love is suffering; not getting what we want is suffering.'
George Bernard Shaw once remarked that there are only two tragedies in life: not getting what you want, and getting it. The trouble with getting what we want is that along with getting what we want comes some things that we don't want. Parents want their children to be good. Children want to be good because that way they can try to make sure that they don't lose their parents' love. If we all didn't try to be good, living in an orderly society would be impossible. But being good means seeing yourself as being not good enough. When we believe that we are not good enough we blame ourselves when things go wrong. The natural response to a disaster is to feel sad. However, if we blame ourselves for that disaster we turn natural sadness into depression.
Good people are experts in blaming themselves. This is why only good people get depressed.
October 25, 2006
Women who have received breast implants are two to three times more likely to kill themselves as those who have not.
'People seem puzzled by suicide in women with breast implants, but I wouldn't be surprised if BDD [Body Dysmorphic Disorder] was behind it,' says
A combined study of 21,936 American, Swedish, Finnish and Danish women who had had cosmetic breast implants found that, while in a group of such a size only 25.2 women would be predicted to commit suicide, actually 58 did so.
New Scientist didn't contact me. Had this happened, I would have said that it was really very simple. Just ask each woman what she hoped the breast implant would do for her, and take what she says seriously, not merely as evidence for or against an abstraction like BDD which resides nowhere but in the mind of a psychiatrist or psychologist who believes that such a disorder exists.
Whenever we find ourselves seemingly trapped in a way of life that leads us to be miserable we look for a change of circumstances which would mean that we would be happy. We know the form of misery we are enduring minutely but the picture we have of the circumstances where we would be happy can lack all the details which real life would reveal. If we look at someone who seems to be in the situation where we long to be we see that person as being perfectly happy. When the psychologist
Unhappy people often locate the source of their unhappiness in just one simple facet of their life. In a society where women are constantly told that to be attractive is to be happy, and that attractiveness resides in a substantial bosom, it can be much easier to blame one's unhappiness on modest breasts rather than on one's upbringing or oneself. From the way the media presents well-endowed women, they seem to be leading happy, successful lives, enjoying excellent relationships and being admired by all. That fact that life is hard for all of us, irrespective of the size of our bosoms, can be completely overlooked.
Once the operation is over, the truth slowly dawns. Bigger breasts do not open the door to paradise. Making this discovery, the woman can chalk the operation up to expensive experience and resolve to be more sensible in the future. Or she can blame herself, and feel herself to be too inadequate and to unacceptable to live in this world.
I am sure that there are many plastic surgeons who take the time to listen to their prospective patients and thus identify those whose expectations of the operation lie only in the world of fantasy. But listening to someone is hard work, and takes time. It's so much easier not to listen, do the operation, and blame the sad outcome on the fiction of Body Dysmorphic Disorder.
Inside
[The niqab is] a mark of separation and that is why it makes other people from outside the community feel uncomfortable.'
While
All the discussion centres not on the veil itself but on the young Muslim women who choose to wear it. What young women choose to wear has always been a matter of controversy. In whatever decade you might happen to be a young woman, whatever you wear will provoke controversy. When I was fifteen in 1946 my friend
It is very difficult to achieve both simultaneously. One popular ploy is to follow the fashions of the day while proclaiming that these fashions themselves are virtuous. Thus, my mother would never appear in public without being wrapped in her whalebone corsets. Just like the glamorous
Locking themselves in chains, women declare that they are free. Ignoring the fact that, in a world without men, there would be little call for their services,lap dancers and porno actresses claim that their occupation gives them freedom and self-confidence. In the same way, as the journalist
All this public interest in the jilbab, the long black robe, the hijab, the headscarf, and the niqab, the veil, gives young Muslim women something they need - other people's attention. When everybody ignores us we all start to feel that, not only does our existence have no significance, but that we are in danger of disappearing. Many people, whatever their age and gender, prefer to be criticised, even abused, rather than ignored. An attacker at least acknowledges your existence.
Though they don't always realise it, all young women are beautiful. Youth lends a beauty which age takes away. When a young Muslim woman wraps a hijab around her face she might have a glimmer of understanding how much more beautiful she is than the non-Muslim girl who hides her beauty under an inch of make-up. When a willowy Muslim girl covers her slim frame with a jilbab, she might have more than a glimmer of understanding that sexual attraction lies in mystery, not in revealing all. What could be more tantalising than the glimpse of lovely eyes above the veil? If a girl really wants to hide away from men's sexual appraisal she should wear a burka, though a glimpse of a slim ankle would entrance men just as it did in Victorian times.
It seems that all this fuss about the veil arises not from political and religious issues but from the ability of a young woman to bewitch a man - particularly an older man. And as we all know only too well, men politicians are easily bewitched.
Beware Dictators
Safia Amajan, the head of the department of women's affairs in Kandahar, Afghanistan, was assassinated in front of her house, within reach of her husband and her 19-year-old son.
If you've been watching television news over the last few days you would have seen many pictures of large numbers of North Koreans showing how exceedingly well trained they are in marching or in waving bunches of coloured ribbons in time. The soldiers march in a high-kicking goosestep which must be much more difficult to do than even the goosestep used by
Dictators try to stop their subjects thinking. To achieve this they will deny their subjects an education.
The only way to deal with subversives is to persuade people that, if ever they think differently from what their leader tells them to think they are always wrong. Thinking differently from what your leader tells you to think is not an alternative view but a sin. In achieving this state of affairs the Catholic Church has always been far more successful than any dictator.
In her memoir the Spiral Staircase
All too often we are our own dictator, our little Church, telling ourselves that black is white and stamping on our mind when it tries to tell us what the truth actually is. We lie to ourselves because the world is not what we want it to be. We fear that acknowledging the truth might lead us to despair, or might overwhelm us completely, destroying us. It can seem so much easier to tell ourselves beautiful lies.
However, the lies we tell ourselves can themselves become the time bomb that destroys us. The truth does not go away when we ignore it. It stays there ready to invalidate us, to tell us that we have made a major error of judgement and that there is a serious discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it actually is. As much as we tell ourselves beautiful, comforting lies we know the truth, simply because we cannot construct a lie unless we know the truth which the lie seeks to deny.
Defending ourselves against the truth, we create life of constant tension. We cannot live freely and be ourselves. The tragedy of the spectacle of the North Korean leaders applauding their drilled and obedient subjects and their subjects applauding them is not just that vast amounts of money and effort are being wasted on such events while the populace starves, but that the leaders and their subjects are tightly bound, one to another like prisoners at the stake, by their mutual lies.