Tag Archives: BBC

Why Radicals Always Target the Family

07 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by in Political Philosophy, Speeches

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Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving

“As our families fragment, so do the deepest structures of our consciousness. When a certain kind of family breaks down, so do the values which once linked parents and children, and gave continuity and character to our inherited world.

Which is precisely why ideological radicals have focused on the family. Change it, and you change humanity. But let’s turn the argument around: if changing the family would change the world, protecting the family might be the best way of protecting our world.

Which is, I believe, what our religious tradition has been doing until now — because the Bible is above all a book about the family. It begins with one: Adam and Eve, and the command to bring the next generation into being. And from then on the book of Genesis never relaxed its grip on the subject. It endlessly turns to some new variation in the relationship between husbands and wives, parents and children. Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebecca; Jacob, Rachel and Leah: these aren’t miracle workers or agents of salvation. The heroes and heroines of Genesis are simply people living out their lives in the presence of God and the context of their families.

And we can perhaps now see that this forms the foundation of the Bible’s larger moral and social themes. The family is the matrix of individuality. It’s that enclosed space in which we work out, in relation to stable sources of affection, a highly differentiated sense of who we are. It’s hard to imagine a culture which didn’t possess a close family structure arriving at the breathtaking idea that the human individual is cast in the image of God.

De Tocqueville once wrote that ‘as long as family feeling is kept alive, the opponent of oppression is never alone.’ By which he meant that the family is the great protection of the individual against the state. It’s no coincidence that totalitarian regimes have often attacked the family. Against this, it was the Bible that gave rise to the great prophets who dared to criticize kings. The family is the birthplace of liberty.

Not only that, it’s where we care for dependents — the very young and the very old, those to whom we gave birth and who gave birth to us. And it’s a short step from this to the biblical vision of society as an extended family, in which the poor and powerless make a claim on us, by virtue not of abstract principle but of feelings of kinship. It’s this that lies behind the prophetic identification with the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. They’re not merely people with theoretical rights. They’re part of the family.”

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Pulled from part three of Jonathan Sacks’s 1990 Reith Lecture for the BBC.

You can find this and the rest of Sack’s excellent, six-part lecture in his book The Persistence of Faith: Morality and Society in a Secular Age. As with anything from Sacks, however, try to enjoy it in audio form. His voice makes Morgan Freeman sound like Gilbert Gottfriend.

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Jonathan Sacks

Peter Hitchens: The House I Grew up in

27 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by in Biography

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Peter Hitchens

“I know perfectly well that it’s actually quite wrong to try to live in the past or to seek it.

I think a lot of the reason why people do sometimes do it and some little moment of reminiscence will bring on a voyage into the past is because they would like to open a door and find that their parents were alive again. And then you could show them that you’d grown up. You’d like to say, ‘Look, all that nonsense that you had to put up with, it’s over. And here are your grandchildren,’ who in my mother’s case, she never met and in my father’s case he only ever met one of them.

So yes, that would be a good thing to do. It’s futile. There is no such door. You can go back into the houses of your youth and they are other peoples’ houses — they’re not yours anymore.

The only purpose of going into the past is to examine it and to know what it was really like. And often these days, people defame the past and pretend that it was a waste of time — nothing but misery and poverty and drabness. And to recognize that while yes there were many things that were wrong about the past, there were good things that we’ve lost and that are recoverable.

And those who know nothing of the past will simply experience the future as a series of unnecessary mistakes and of mysterious events they had no possibility of understanding because they have no understanding of the way people behave and the way nations behave.

He who doesn’t know his own past and the past of his own country and his own people is perpetually a child.”

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The concluding remarks from Peter Hitchens in his 2011 profile for the BBC radio program The House I Grew Up In, for which he returned to several childhood homes on the English coastline to see how they reflected and stirred his memories of family life.

These remarks are especially melancholic in context, as Peter spends much of the episode wandering the streets of his childhood and discussing his rebellious youth, which involved, among other things, burning his Bible on the soccer pitch of his prep school. That prep school, more especially the money it siphoned from his working class mother and father, is to his mind at least part of the reason for their unhappy divorce and his mother’s eventual, tragic demise. Peter declines to discuss either event in much detail; Christopher, his older brother by two years, was more open, facing it with beautiful, plaintive words in the first and best chapter (“Yvonne”) of his memoir Hitch-22.

I recommend listening to the entire episode, as Peter’s a first class guide of not only his past but of a kind of postwar English life that’s now nearly all gone. Perpetually overcast skies drizzling on hedgerows and Edwardian pubs; wheezing tea kettles; the cults of Winston Churchill and Admiral Nelson; double-decker buses and soldiers scuttling by in crisp Royal Navy uniforms. The England of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. Peter can immerse readers and listeners in that world because he is of that world. His wry lamenting of his 60’s rebelliousness recalls one of his most epic lines, wielded in his debate at the Oxford Union on the existence of God: he opens his rebuttal by saying of his opponents that they — paraphrasing — “remind me of the most obnoxious, selfishness person I’ve ever known: my 15-year-old self.”

For more on Peter’s conversion to Christianity, pick up his apologetic memoir The Rage Against God. For more on his politics, check out The Abolition of Britain and Short Breaks in Mordor: Dawns and Departures of a Scribbler’s Life.

More Hitchens bro’s:

Peter and Christopher Hitchens 3 Peter and Christopher Hitchens 1 Peter and Christopher Hitchens 2

Should We Call Terrorists ‘Islamic’?

19 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by in Interview, War

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Kurds3

Interviewer: Do you think this appalling act [ISIS’s beheading of 21 Copts] will focus minds?

Douglas Murray: I think it’ll focus minds for 24 hours until the next atrocity somewhere, maybe in Europe, maybe in North Africa, maybe in the Middle East. We live in an incredibly forgetful news cycle these days, in a time when people don’t want to add things together.

You know Sisi himself, general Abdel el-Sisi the leader of Egypt, at the end of last year made a very important interjection to the scholars of Al-Alzhar, the main center of Sunni learning in the Muslim world. He told them we have a worldwide problem of radical Islam and it needs to be sorted out by the scholars and leaders of the Muslim world.

Now Sisi has made himself very unpopular in parts of the region and the wider world for saying this, but it did need saying.

What I think is striking is that across the Western world — even in the wake of atrocities we see now day in and day out — there is no desire to add these things together.

The man who ran into a free speech seminar in Copenhagen a couple of days ago and sent machine gun bullets ripping through the cafe and then shot up a synagogue, the people who shot up newspaper offices and a kosher market in Paris last month, are individuals who share the exact same ideology of the people who want to cut off the heads of Christians and persecute moderate Muslims.

It is an unbelievably fascistic ideology. It is a united ideology. And it has to be comprehensively identified in order to be defeated. And it is a great symbol of the problem of our time that we have so little leadership here that General Sisi has to lead the world in admitting there is a problem.

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Douglas Murray again, this time speaking in an interview with the BBC on Monday. The pictures are of our friends the Kurds as they reclaimed Kobani on January 28th.

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Kurds 5

Kurds

Terrorism Works

14 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by in Freedom

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Interviewer: In a sense the terrorists are winning, aren’t they? They’ve cowed the Western media into not reprinting the cartoons.

Douglas Murray: Not only are they winning, they’ve won. They’ve won. Terrorism works — that’s the brutal fact of it.

And a lot of people will take lessons from that today.

You know, after the 2005 Jyllandsposten cartoon, by the conservative paper in Denmark, the only paper in Europe, really, that was still willing to draw pictures of Muhammad in the same way they’re willing to draw pictures of every other religious, political — you name it — figure, was Charlie Hebdo.

So Charlie Hebdo stood alone. Charlie Hebdo was attacked.

That’s why I’ve suggested that there’s really only two options that the press can choose from here.

The first is that we all agree that we live under an element of Islamic blasphemy law. I think that would be highly regrettable. I don’t think that is what our society should live under. I think we should do everything possible to avoid it.

But if we are going to avoid it, I think that it’s going to have to be done unanimously. All of the newspapers, all of the magazines — the BBC, Sky, Channel 4 — should unanimously publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons at a particular hour, because as Ayaan Hirsi Ali said after the Danish cartoons row, we have to spread the risk around.

It cannot be that a single cartoonist is holding the line for all freedom of speech. Or that a single, small satirical magazine is doing it.

It has to be everybody.

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Douglas Murray, the clearest voice on the issue of Islamism in Europe, speaking during a BBC discussion with Maajid Nawaz.

How Society Operates

28 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by in Interview, Psychology

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Will Self

Laurie Taylor: One of the things people say about your books is the difficulty in feeling any empathy or sympathy for the characters… why aren’t your characters lovable?

Will Self: But people aren’t really that lovable. Again an aspect of the modern Kulturkampf is to pretend that everybody’s lovable. That’s a collective delusion. Society doesn’t operate because we love everybody; society operates through sanction, through forms of collective control, through hierarchy, through the imposition of controlled forms of mass hysteria. So the novels that persuade you of the idea that everybody’s intrinsically lovable are pulling off a confidence trick – as are the moral systems that delude people into believing it. You see it time and time again, Laurie, and you know it’s true: people’s capacity for empathy for those who are outside their immediate social matrix is remarkably small. And it doesn’t matter if you validate this through evolutionary psychology or you pull up Stanley Milgram’s experiments at Yale or the genocidal impulse that seems to exist in humanity: these are true facts. The thing is people will hear these arguments and respond, saying, ‘Yes, you’re right, but we’ve got to aim for something better than that.’

But what would that world be like in which you empathized with 7 billion people? What would the world be like if you felt the pain of the 250,000 people who were rubbed out in Haiti a few weeks ago? What a strange place it would be.

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Will Self offering his typically disquieting opinion in an interview with Sociologist Laurie Taylor for the BBC program In Confidence in 2010.

“Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.”  – Zadie Smith

Why Poetry?

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Interview

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Peter Hitchens

Questioner: I teach five-year-olds and we’ve been doing poetry — they love writing it. But making them sit down and recite poems would just be a waste of their time and a waste of my time.

Peter Hitchens: Well, I’ll recite you one a teacher taught me some 40 years ago:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

[Applause] And I’m very pleased that my head is full of things like that, and also lots of hymns, which I also remember — and I feel very sorry for anybody who hasn’t had the chance to learn them. And I think it is a great condemnation of our school system that so few people, and particularly only those whose parents are rich, can actually afford to have their children taught things like that, and have their minds furnished with beauty for the remainder of their lives.

And to pour scorn on it, and to say that it is unimportant, is to declare yourself a spiritual desert. Of course people need these things; and what’s more, they’re a profound part of being British. If you don’t know the literature and the poetry and the music of your own country, then you aren’t really fully conversant with its history and its character.

You’ve lost touch with what your ancestors knew, and you won’t be able to pass it on to your own children and grandchildren.

Of course these things should be taught. I wish our government actually had the power and the policies to make it happen. I really do think it’d be a good thing. I also think that people, particularly teachers, should not say these things don’t matter; they matter immensely.

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Peter Hitchens, appearing on BBC’s Question Time on June 14th, 2012.

Continue by memorizing for yourself the Housman poem, “Those Blue Remembered Hills”. Then take a look at Peter debating his brother Christopher — first on Nietzsche then on the motion “Can Civilization Survive without God?”. Watch Peter’s epic testimony here. Read the great David McCullough answer Why History?.

Martin Amis: How Britain, Germany, and France Have Reconciled Their Roles in World War II

27 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by in History, Interview, War

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World War 2

“Britain, I think rightly, derives a great deal of strength from its performance in the Second World War. Perhaps no other nation in Europe emerges from that war intact — either because of the humiliation of conquest, the humiliation of initiating the war, or the humiliation of collaboration.

And more materially: Hitler conquered a string of countries in a matter of days, sometimes a matter of hours. Denmark, 24 hours; France, 39 days; Yugoslavia, 7 days; Greece, 12 days. And leading up to the attack on Russia, which until halfway through 1941 looked as though it was going to be maybe 45 days. The only defeat suffered by Germany in that time was the Battle of Britain in 1940.

There were all these governments in exile that were standing with us, but we stood alone and we did prevail in the end, although as a minor player by the time the war ended. And I think that’s fit to shape how you see yourself for generations. There was always a feeling — and I think a perfectly intelligible feeling — that a great evil had been bested in the end.

Germany has made superhuman efforts to come to terms with its past. And still wants to talk about it. And is not shying away from it. But it seems to me that France has made no efforts at all in that direction: the myth of the resistance nation has completely supplanted the reality of the collaborationist nation. It takes all my powers of imagination and empathy to think myself into a French skin or a German skin for that reason, because of how tremendously diminished I would be. And ultimately, the English performance, and conduct, in the war is something to be proud of. That is not the case elsewhere.”

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From the BBC program, released in March of this year, entitled Martin Amis’s England.

More Amis:

  • On storytelling: why failure, not success, is its main subject
  • On memory: why it matters more as you age
  • On innocence: why the world is getting less so

Martin Amis

‘Addiction Is No Respecter of Persons’: Will Self on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Demise

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Current Events, Film, Interview

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Will Self


Jeremy Paxman: Do you understand [Philip Seymour Hoffman’s] involvement with drugs?

Will Self: Well addiction’s no respecter of persons. You know there’s hardly anywhere you can point a finger, high or low in our society, and not hit somebody who’s got addiction issues. Heroin is a drug that we associate most strongly with addiction, but people can be addicted to all sorts of things. I think the fact that heroin was involved with his death is what people find very shocking, largely because of the image that heroin has in our culture…

The old sawhorse of whether the fact he was such an amazing actor was in some way connected to his drug use – or the pressures of his life led to his drug use – I dare say that’s in the mix, but you know, you can go to any poor or deprived part of our country, and throw a stick and you’ll hit somebody who’s got a heroin habit.

JP: It’s interesting, it’s often represented as a sort of loser’s drug, which is the environment that you are talking about there. By no stretch of the imagination was this man a loser.

WS: No, and as I say, you will find heroin addicts in every walk of life. But I think in America, in particular, there’s a very strange culture surrounding opiate drugs, which is the broader family of drugs of which heroin is one.

JP: What’s heroin like?

WS: You’re asking me personally?

I think that for people who don’t have a kind of need to be anesthetized, it probably is experienced as, yes, euphoric, but they wouldn’t necessarily feel a pull towards taking it again.

One of the strange things is that most of the people watching us now, at some time or other, will take medical diamorphine, which is heroin. And if they’re in pain, they’ll experience simply the removal of the pain.

JP: But it’s not instantly addictive though.

WS: No, it takes a fairly concerted effort to get addicted to opiate drugs, so you can say that people who do become addicted, maybe they’ve got a predisposition to it, but they have to make some decisions. They have to kind of decide to take it…

JP: But apparently he spent 20 years clean.

WS: Yes, that may well be true. Of course we don’t know whether he had other addictive behaviors that, so to speak, kept the addiction dormant.

I think that the way this story is being reported suggests this idea that addiction’s like a kind of ugly spirit that was cowed and pushed into the background, and then it reared up again in that way. I’m not sure that’s a very useful approach; it seems a rather medieval perception of it. But we don’t know what lead to him being in that situation. Again, very sadly, and this is only supposition, often with people who return to using heroin after a long period of abstinence, they can’t judge the dose. This happens quite frequently…

Philip Seymour Hoffman

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Will Self and Jeremy Paxman, talking last week on BBC Newsnight about the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I recommend watching the remainder of this five minute interview for two primary reasons. First, Self is one of the more naturally expressive cultural commentators out there — and not only that, he’s a former heroin addict. Because of this, we must be extremely careful when weighing his words on this topic, especially those on the question of whether Hoffman’s creative genius was tied to his drug use, given that this riff could be a thinly veiled absolution of Self’s own related sins.

While I understand those who may take it this way — as a bit of self-justification designed to soften any critiques of his parallel personal history — I am inclined to take Self’s analysis as instructive, if also with a large grain of salt. His experience with the stuff colors his perception of it, sure, but it also means he knows more about it than I do. This is why the testimonies of sinners are always more powerful than those of saints: only they can say “I’ve been there” with a straight face.

I think it is also worth commending both Self and Paxman for the sobriety and gravity which they lend to this topic. So often, untimely celebrity deaths mark occasions for saccharine tributes and tabloid prying. So rarely do we recognize what we’ve lost and what we can learn. Yet notice how Paxman says “By no stretch of the imagination was this man a loser”; his voice registers the brilliance of Hoffman, the brutality of his demise, and how these two facts combine to cast a piteous shadow over the entire event. Hoffman’s death is devastating because he was a father, a son, and one of the most incandescently brilliant actors of our time. But it is also a moment for reflection because tragedies, unlike happy endings, are also the most dramatic lessons.