Beauty, dead-ended.

One of the many things that orbited my exasperated mind when watching Roger Scruton's Why Beauty Matters is what Derrida would have thought about it all. It's not that I envisaged a feisty philosophical face-to-face (mind-to-mind) combat between them (I can't imagine consent for this would have been forthcoming from Scruton); it was more to do with deconstruction, actually, and how Derrida might have glided across the panorama of Scruton's argument, in search (if such a search were possible) of its aporias, lacunae, fissures, or good old holes. Deconstruction, I thought, would have this argument for dinner. Since deconstruction's tagline insists critique is always already there, this would be a cannibalistic repast, the argument feasting on itself.

Another thing that popped up in my head whilst watching this lamentable effort of lamentation was the groundwork it seemed to construct for the next government's aesthetic ideology, which, if the media has its way, will be orchestrated by the Conservative Party. Can you have a proleptic sense of the uncanny, or is it just a foreshadow of things to come? What I mean is that we might look upon Scruton's programme in years hence as a preparatory argument for the aesthetics pleasures to be had (or should be had, since that it is the general thrust of Conservatism in general and Scrutonism in particular), Conservative-stylee, in Britain in the twenty hundreds. (Am I implying that Scruton's film forms part of a massive Conservative conspiracy concocted by the media, principally the BBC? No, not really, but that doesn't meant to say that this is an impossibility.)

Scruton's argument for beauty is ideological. He may quote the philosophers (from Plato to Kant), but since the process of selection for such arguments is the golden modus operandi, it is nothing else but a cynical manoeuvre calculated precisely to coerce the interlocutor into a Scruton-shaped hole. Powers of persuasion (rhetoric privileged over watertight logic) require a level of selectivity that debunks the opposition (or oppositional discourse) in advance by ignoring its existence. When Scruton launches into his argument against 'modern architecture', he walks forlornly through the brutalist arse-end of a largely 1970s Reading urbanscape, bemoaning whilst doing so the architectural idyll recalled from the pre-modern Reading of his childhood. Rather than finding exemplary icons of modern architecture, he fashions his argument from within a highly selective context that dissociates the idea of beauty from the idea of the modern. In other words, you may think that Norman Foster's The Sage is a stunning specimen that effortlessly merges form and function, but you would be mistaken if you thought this constituted any definition of the beautiful. You may think that Zaha Hadid's new MAXXI in Rome reconfigures architectural space through repeated allusions to the universal and recurring patterns of nature itself, but similarly you would be deluded in thinking that this too embodied any sense of beauty. Thing is, we will never know what Scruton thinks about such examples of contemporary architecture because he failed to acknowledge them in his film. And naturally, there are thousands of similar buildings he could have drawn upon in order to argue that No, the idea of modern is tied up with notions of beauty. Beyond the arse-end of Reading, then, Scruton only offered the viewer images of mediocre corporate architecture from the City of London in order to demonstrate that his argument had acknowledged more updated examples of 'modern architecture'.

Scruton's notion of beauty lies outside what he calls 'the modern'. There is little distinction in his argument between 'modernity,' 'modern,' or 'modernism'. These three terms critically collapse in a homogeneous signifier that evokes the willful destruction of all that is adored by the conservative: nature, the Divine, beauty itself. This is where 'ugliness' comes in, which the modern signifies unequivocally. Enter ideology: for if Scruton is arguing that all that is modern (by which he means us and the world as we know it) should be cast aside, then he is implicitly arguing that life today should also be spurned. Aesthetics is forever attached to politics; it is its bedfellow, its hinge and bracket, its bunk up the ladder of power. If we must return to the art of the past, then we must also resurrect the old values that our age of political correctness and increased human rights have been so determined to demolish: we must do away with civil partnerships in favour of heterosexual marriage; we must do away with gays in favour of the family; in place of individual rights should be the rightful restitution of the patriarchal order of the Church; we must eschew multi-ethnic diversity for the monoglot, imperial so-called 'civilisation' of the sovereign West. This brand of conservatism has it that the individual is surplus to requirements if he (normally 'he') fails to subscribe to the dominant discourse and power of the ruling class. This seems to be the argument of the centre-right magazine Standpoint, and it lies discretely at the foundations of Scruton's theory of beauty.

But must you go this far (which isn't going far enough) to expose the inherent flaws of this woefully myopic BBC film? Scruton may have spent much time negatively communing with Marcel Duchamp's iconic Fountain in Tate Liverpool, but failed to listen to the otherwise nuanced argument forwarded by a conceptual artist whose opinions he sought. At one point in that discussion, Scruton uttered the phrase 'tin of shit' (referring to Piero Manzoni's Artist's Shit) with such contempt in response to that argument that it was if he'd closed his ears and mind right from the start. Scruton may appreciate an elegant formulation and a well-wrought train of thought, but only if it issues from two things: himself or the mind and mouth of another conservative. Thus we return to the manipulative selectivity of rhetoric itself: namely, if the example you give happens to be an artwork that deliberately resists what is deemed by tradition to be beautiful, then you're on course for a dead end. No matter, for conservatives like a dead end. They've a good habit of converting it into a verb: they dead-end dissent; they dead-end distasteful freedoms (cue gays and lesbians); they dead-end responsibility towards the Other (not just community members in an otherwise 'Big Society').

Scruton emphasised that the modern world lacks love for beauty and consequently lacks love - the ability to give love rather than one-sidedly receive it - overall. This is funny, because in the moments after watching his programme, I felt desolate, beaten into submission by a rigidly preordained ideological system of thought that left no room for my own thinking or love for the random beauties of the modern world. In Scruton's world, beauty is set in stone by religious divinity and respect for the past. Perhaps this is one of the most glaring glitches in his argument, ripe for deconstructive parody: Scruton is amnesiac, for history has taught us that it is not always 'love' that conquers all.

Kaffee und kuchen

Sadly only virtual, but not sadly at all given the comprehensiveness of Philosophy, Lit, Etc.'s tour of present day Viennese cafe society. There's enough to whet your appetite - for belletristik as much as your desire for Einspanner und Guglhupf mit extra Schlagobers! A sad note is that one of the establishments is now a S*****cks. Do they have Guglhupf in the Austrian version of the Seattle chain that I refuse to name in this context, or is it all NY cheesecake, shipped over from an industrial estate thousands of miles away?

Back down to Viennese earth. Another tantalising fact from the Rough Guide to Vienna has it that Frau Freud made Guglhupf and coffee for the at-home meetings of the Psychoanalytical Society every Wednesday evening chaired by her bourgeois paterfamilias husband, 'who ruled his disciples with an iron rod, ejecting anyone who disagreed with him, most famously Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, in 1913'. Now that explains why this particular strand of Viennese intellectual life was home and not cafe-bound. Freud wanted his Guglhupf and ate it.

Philosophy, Lit, Etc. also alerts us to the forthcoming publication of a book that will interest all those with a literary taste for Vienna: Gert Jonke's The System of Vienna: From Heaven Street to Earth Mound Square, published by Dalkey Archive Press. Go here for a description of this edition.

Return to Berlin

And here I am reneging on my deal with Vienna.

The second episode of Matt Frei's captivating Berlin series concentrated on the city's architecture and the way in which buildings are contested, vaunted, vehemently disliked and loved in equal measure. Perhaps more than any city in the world, Berlin's history can be told with considerable authority through its buildings. This fact has undoubtedly contributed to the new architectural language inspired by the fabric of Berlin itself, whether it's the charged synthesis between old ruins and contemporary style, or, in Matt Frei's phrase, 'new old buildings,' involving the neurotic reconstruction, brick by brick, column by column, of former architectural icons, and with it the reinvigoration of historical memory. For this, you only have to consider the controversy and (not unusual for Berlin, this) passionate debate over the proposed rebuilding of the Stadtschloss, which the DDR demolished to make way for the architecturally hideous but socially celebrated Palast der Republik, and whose own demolition was completed only recently. As you'll find out from Matt Frei's programme, the site is in the heart of Berlin on the banks of the Spree and at the end of the Unter den Linden, opposite Alexanderplatz: it is now an immense sandpit awaiting the reconstruction of a monumental icon from the city's past. (I am dizzy thinking about the historical metaphors suggested by this empty space in the heart of Berlin...)


I experienced a tremendously uncanny moment watching Frei's programme. As you might know from the post below, I have visited Berlin three times. During Frei's discussion about the site of the Palast der Republik/Stadtschloss, a memory from my first trip resurfaced. I recall making my way with a friend over the vast expanse that opens up at the end of the Unter den Linden by Alexanderplatz. The Berliner Dom, next to the Lustgarten, is to our left, and the Fernsehturm overpowers us straight ahead. But to our right is a structure of steel, obviously the framework of a building that is being demolished. It looks as if it's perched precariously on the Spree. It might fall in at any moment, the steel cascading into the narrow river, the massive echoes ricocheting over what feels like a vast urban plain. On that freezing, wet, dark November evening, the scale of everything in the heart of Berlin was profoundly intimidating. Traversing the way from the Unter den Linden to Alexanderplatz seemed like an insurmountable task, especially in the attempt to protect ourselves from Berlin's November chill.

I don't think I'll ever forget that steel structure. Its vulnerability, suggested by its isolation and exposure to the unremitting elements, turned towards me: I was made vulnerable by its brooding air of surveillance. At the time my instinctive thought was that this steel structure was the remnant of something important, but I failed to check this out at the time. It's only now, two years after my first visit to Berlin, that I know that the steel structure was indeed the remnant of something truly significant: what I was captivated by in the darkness were the remnants of the mighty, monstrous Palast der Republik. This icon of the DDR has passed over into history, and a new, unmistakably Berlin-style future apparently awaits the space left by its demolition. The Stadtschloss will rise from historical and individual memory, unsullied by its long, ignominious absence. But I cannot now believe that I was that close - I could almost have touched it! - to the Palast der Republik, a structure that is now confined to history and memory. Unwittingly, I was there at the time, but my memory circulates a knowledge-shaped hole. What an uncanny experience it is to be simultaneously inside and outside history.

Returning to Berlin is now unavoidable and irresistible. It never leaves you.

Wien! and the Baedeker of our times

Having pursued an obsession about Berlin for the past couple of years, resulting in three trips and the purchasing of many books and films about this city of cities, I feel I'm pulled southwards to VIENNA. Vienna has always been in my imagination, principally because of Freud and Mahler, to name but two of the iconic figures the capital of Austria has given the world and the history of time, and of course the orchestras of orchestras, the Vienna Philharmonic. I have yet to watch The Third Man and read The Man Without Qualities. I aim to read Peter Singer's biography of his grandfather, which appears by association also to be a biography of Vienna. One film that I have watched and which I enjoyed was Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise. I now have a clearer sense of Vienna's topography: from the first scene of the two characters becoming more intimate on a tram on the Ringstrasse, through to the moment in which they seal their relationship to each other suspended above the city on the Prater's famous Ferris Wheel. I am magnestised by both of these views: the panoramic one, offering a verdant, deciduous picture of this most beautiful of cities; and the circular one firmly on the ground, albeit shifting over it in one of those vintage trams that evoke the image of the city as being evocatively urban, humanity constantly in motion.

On Wednesday I received my copy of the Rough Guide to Vienna. I am now officially closer to booking the tickets, but not that close. I will probably have to wait until towards the middle of 2010. Until then, books, films, and the frank but detailed descriptions of the Rough Guide will have to suffice. Like in the case of my Berlin experiences, my first footfalls in Vienna will inevitably be mediated by all that I have read and viewed on screen beforehand. Before bed last night I was struck by a number of quotations and descriptions from the Rough Guide. One of them I will not repeat here because its author is Adolf Hitler. (However precise and depoliticised the Rough Guide's selection from Mein Kampf might be, is it at all appropriate? In other words, can anything ever written by Adolf Hitler be removed from the ineluctable context of the history of the Third Reich?) The other thing that struck me was a description of Freud's daily life in Vienna:

He saw patients without appointment daily from three to four in the afternoon [...] afterwards he would write until as late as three in the morning. Every afternoon, he would walk the entire circuit of the Ringstrasse at a brisk pace; every Saturday he would play the card game Tarock, and every Sunday in summer, the family would dress up in traditional Austrian peasant gear, right down to their Lederhosen, and go mushroom-picking in the Wienerwald.

Not that I doubt the solidly reliable word of the Rough Guide, but so magnetised am I by these details, I now hunger for more of the same; the question is which biography to check and expand upon these delicious facts of the everyday life of no less than the father of Psychoanalysis...

To my knowledge Vienna was not one of Walter Benjamin's subjects. Paris, Berlin, Moscow, yes - but sadly not Vienna. You wonder what he might have written: unlike Paris, I imagine Vienna could not have served as the teeming metropolitan locus for Benjamin's critique of capitalist modernity, symbolising as it does an empire preserved in aspic and not, like in the case of Berlin, in ruins. Vienna articulates the persistence of an idea, then, evocative insofar as the dislocation between the reality (no empire) and the symbol (of its imperial grandeur) allows. When I think of Paris and Berlin, revolution comes to mind. For me, 'Vienna' evokes an image of a solidly conservative society that resists revolution through a tenacious attachment to the past. Such are my preconceptions; we can only dream of what Benjamin's conclusions might have been.

Still, these days Benjamin is never far behind contemporary architecture and museum building, and so I was struck (as I should be, given the terms of the theory) by the Rough Guide's allusion to Benjamin when it talks about the Jewish Museum on Dorotheergasse:

Special exhibitions [also] occupy part of the second floor, which contains the museum's permanent displays. Taking the Marxist Jewish critic Walter Benjamin's contention that "the past can only be seized as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again", the museum employs a series of free-standing glass panels imprinted with holograms - ranging from the knob of Theodor Herzl's walking stick, to a short clip capturing an everyday instance of anti-Semitism from 1911.

Otherwise known as 'dialectics at a standstill', Benjamin's notion surrounding the writing of the past would seem at odds with the way in which Vienna looks upon itself as an urban reality.

But this is mere speculation on my part because I have yet to experience the real Vienna beyond the otherwise reliable confines of the Rough Guide. The anticipation of being proved wrong is intense.

Anti-Bullying Week

After some stylistic tweaking, the previous two posts could be merged to form one debate. As I argued sarcastically in the last post, the passing of the hate crimes legislation with the freedom of speech clause intact effectively allows intolerance to flourish. This means people of religious faith have a right to criticise gay people to whatever extent they like in public. The following questions arise from this state of affairs.

First, what other community is subjected to this level of scrutiny by people who are not community members themselves? Following on from this, how acceptable would it be to have proponents of the Bell Curve theory extolling in a public square the 'intellectual primacy' of whites? Those racists who believe in this pseudo-scientific guff might argue that the force of their argument is substantiated by 'scientific research', and so publicly alluding to such 'research' forms part of their freedom of speech. Such a situation would be intolerable, primarily because of its racist bias, but also because of the damage that would be done to the values of proper academic research. Proponents of the Bell Curve theory taint the entire enterprise of academic thinking by inserting pernicious ideology as an article of pure, unadulterated, hate-imbued faith. Because such 'research' can really only be believed, for it is not in any way intellectually valid.

Second, criticism of gay people stems from hatred, pure and simple. Homophobes continue to deny and ignore in their mendacious lives the reality of the substantial contribution gay people make to the community in particular and society in general. The contribution of gay people both to their communities and societies is disproportionate to the size of the community itself. Moreover, we are neither threatening nor violent, and so respect the law by staying clear of public disorder. By making these remarks, I do not seek overwhelmingly to valorise gay people; nor do I intend to indulge in some ignorance myself by failing to acknowledge those instances when gay people act as individuals by committing this or that offense. The reality is that as a community, LGBT people pose little or even non-existent direct threat to other people. It is a sharing, inclusive, generally upbeat milieu, one of whose contributions to society lies in its celebratory ethos. All of this is against the odds - against a background of repression by legislation, oppression by non-gay people, and perennial and seemingly perpetual self-questioning and doubt foisted on it by many external hostile agents. So why else do straight people flock to gay nightclubs to have a good time? Why else do straight women value their friendships with gay male friends? (This last point might sound like I'm drawing my conclusions from Sex and the City, but the very idea that such prototypical characterisations exist is indicative of the consensus backing my own argument.) To reiterate: like other minority communities (such as the heterogeneously diverse communities of the African and Jewish Diasporas), LGBT people have made and continue to make cultural contributions whose iconic significance far outweighs the actual size of the community itself. Hence, all criticism of gay people counteracts a reality backed by consensus. All criticism of gay people pursues an (often religious) ideological agenda that seeks to turn non-gays against their fellow humans, fostering invidiousness and tacitly encouraging fatal violence and abuse. This ultimately increases the very crime levels that conservative, homophobic people usually bewail in other areas of life. Counterproductive, inhumane, unsubstantiated, and reflective of a thwarted or even non-existent kindness towards the Other, homophobia is what poses a threat to society's stability. It is certainly not the existence of gays that does so.

Given what I have argued, I fail to understand what happened in the House of Lords last week. Public criticism of homosexuality is nothing other than the flourishing of a public discourse of homophobia. It would be disingenuous of the people who now enjoy the potential to criticise homosexuality in the public realm to suggest otherwise. The link between homophobic word and deed is an intimate one. This leads me to question the wisdom of sanctioning public criticism against gay people, not only in light of the way words can turn into violent deeds, but also from within the increasingly progressive society nurtured by the policies and achievements of the Labour Party.

This is an ongoing debate. No doubt it will be under much scrutiny over the next year, particularly when faced with the putative inevitability of the Conservative Party winning next year's general election. David Cameron, Nick Clegg, and Gordon Brown have pledged their support for Stonewall's Anti-Bullying Week campaign. The hope is that this support will correct the paradox of protecting the rights of the homophobe to publicly criticise a community whose members continue to be targeted by the very bullies society supposedly despises.

Ah, freedom of expression!

Go on, be intolerant. Now that the House of Lords has defeated Labour's progressive work on equality legislation, retaining the freedom of expression bit of the incitement to hatred laws, you can go about as much as you like criticising gay people. Go on. Do it. Yet again, the law is giving you a bunk-up. Don't miss out on the chance. And don't worry about any homophobic violence resulting from what you say, because - let common sense prevail! - you didn't lay a finger on the poor gay sod (tautology, that).

Sarcasm can be tiresome. Boring. Being overstretched, it loses sight of its rhetorical potential. I know all this, but I am depressed about the so-called 'triumph of common sense' in the Lords. It's as if we've stepped back into the dark again - or the woods, whichever metaphor suits the moment. Common sense envisages a world without gays. Or does it? I don't know. Maybe it does. If common sense means unfastening the seat belt of the car crash of evangelical Christian zeal or risque humour in order to target a much-targeted minority whose relationship to death can sometimes be an intimate one, then this amendment to otherwise progressive legislation is your thing. Just not your man.

Anyway, don't come moaning to us if you're beaten to within an inch of your life and your persecutor claims the new-found vitality of anti-LGBT critique inspired them. It's the hater's privilege. They're allowed by law to express hatred, in whatever discrete, encoded, insinuating way, towards you. And it's likely to goad others to do so, only possibly in more violent ways.

Poor old Norwich Gay Pride. My parents were there on the day. Unwittingly, they were visiting Norwich on the historical day of the first Pride. They enjoyed it. They even brought some stuff home for their son, including some rather nice Jute bags with DIVERSITY printed all over them from the Environment Agency. They enjoyed the positive atmosphere outside the Forum. Sadly, one Norwich resident, who presumably didn't even stumble upon or deliberately go into Norwich city centre that day, didn't like it, and phoned the police to complain. When the police acted on it, it is alleged they were too forceful. Some reports even paint a sinister Big-Brotherish picture (in true Orwellian shading) of a police officer storming into this person's house and telling her she was going to be had for incitement to hatred or whatever. Yes, not a pleasant experience. In light of this case, some Christians are arguing that their rights as Christians are being trampled on by gay people's rights. To think of the historical legacy of gay people persecuting Christians for their religious beliefs. Still, this squares up to all of the hatred, directly acted upon from time to time, emanating from the pure and dignified souls of religious people of all faiths towards gays over the history of time. Oh no, sarcasm has crept in again.. Seriously, though: perhaps this God-bothering Norwich resident should consider that the likelihood of LGBT people robbing her house and threatening the sanctity of her life is very low indeed. We're not perfect, but as a tribe we don't go in for such things. We know what violence is like. No, it's the people who go about gay-bashing who are most likely to commit these and other forms of violence towards whoever lies on the horizon of their own self-hatred and resentment towards life. You might say social 'responsibility' comes full circle.

So: you are free to be intolerant. Enjoy the privileges. Don't forget to pray for the condemned souls of those most likely to be condemned to death on your streets for doing really..absolutely..nothing..at..all.

The mendacity of David Cameron

Is Labour really mucking the country up? Is it a myth? Is it a myth being propounded by the Conservative Party to whip the electorate up into Brown-bashing? Is the Sun the Conservative Party's Communications Department? Was David Cameron's Hugo Young Lecture at the Guardian last night all linguistic gossamer and policy-lite? Is it true what the Conservatives say about Labour, that they have made Britain a broken country? Are communities really more fragmented than when the Conservatives were last in power? Is society more fragmented than when the Conservatives were last in power? Is one reason for the fragmentation of society unfettered materialism? And does this not suggest that the very people likely to vote Conservative in the next general election the very people who enjoy the unfettered materialism critiqued by the Conservative Party as part of their campaign for a Britain built around civic communitarianism? Would this not be paradoxical on the part of those voters? Is the Conservative Party right to ask people to roll back their own levels of materialism when the Party is ever so keen to waive inheritance tax for the rich? Is the Conservative Party right to promote marriage, rewarding people for getting married, when all's said and done, marriage is purely a matter of choice and very rarely a manifestation of civic responsibility? (Moreover, is it not true that modern marriage exhibits the very crude levels of materialism that the Conservative Party wishes to erase?) If the Conservative Party is truly progressive, then why do they not refer to civil partnerships in their civic crusade for heterosexual marriage? Moreover, would rewarding heterosexual marriages increase levels of inequality, by ignoring civil partnerships, which in turn implies that they cannot function as part of the massive reorientation of Britain's moral compass? Moreover, moreover: how does the Conservative Party's love affair with heterosexual marriage square with the need to erase poverty, seeing as it implicitly targets the lives of single-parent mothers, whose 'moral compass' is skewed precisely because they are raising children outside of a marital framework?

In sum, does this country need to wake up from the spells being cast by David Cameron's rhetoric and the myths being propounded by the Conservative Party?

More questions to follow (suggest your own in a comment to this post)...

No sex, please (we're a faith school)!

In a way, this story doesn't affect me, since I don't have children. I am not bothered, either way, by the threat of a teenage daughter becoming pregnant well before she should do, wrecking her life because of the selfish actions of an irresponsible male child who in any case absconds the scene when the deed has been done, leaving the poor girl in pieces at the looming magnitude of her future. It's awful that continue to happens, but given my situation, it's beyond my concern.

The issue of sex education in schools, however, does bother me, particularly where the lack of information for gay students is concerned. So when Ed Balls announces that sex education in schools is to be made compulsory, including information for gay kids, then the government is to be congratulated. But then he completely detracts from the potential success of this new policy by allowing parents the option to withdraw their children from such classes, and faith schools the freedom to make ideological statements which conflict with it. All in the name of 'values'.

There are two main problems here. One is the issue of the parents who choose to take their children out of sex education classes, deeming such tuition inappropriate. You only wonder what the more enlightened parents feel about this 'voluntary' action: they couldn't be blamed for saying something like 'So my child learns something vitally important, but you think your child is beyond this? Are they beyond the responsibilities taught by the course as well?'

The second issue has to do with faith schools. The luxury afforded faith schools is that unlike in the case of non-faith schools, they are allowed to step outside government policy as per the 'values' and 'ethos' dictated by the institution's religion. In respect of Roman Catholic faith schools especially, you can see where this one is going in terms of sex education: with contraception, homosexual, before marriage - sex is just not up for discussion.

Teachers in religious schools will still be free to tell pupils that sex outside marriage, homosexuality or using contraception are wrong, because the legislation will include a clause allowing schools to apply their "values" and "ethos" to lessons.

Faith schools will be allowed to deliver the lessons in line with the "context, values and ethos" of their religion, the legislation will say.

So, you might ask, what is the point of this new legislation? If sex education is to be welcomed on the basis of its potential positive effects in reducing early teenage pregnancies, then how do you reckon with the situation of Liverpool, a city whose legendary mix of poverty and Roman Catholicism drastically conspire to keep teenage pregnancies high. Given that a massive amount of Liverpool's children are educated by faith schools, mostly Roman Catholic, then how will Catholic teachings on contraception square with the more urgent need (for society as much as for the individuals concerned) to keep teenage pregnancies low precisely with the use of contraception during sex? Pardon the pun, but it beggars belief.

Then there is the relative invisibility of gay people in the school system. Faith schools enjoy luxuries here, too, by enforcing their ideological teachings on vulnerable young people, which ultimately threaten the human and civil rights of gay students. But then, according to the Liverpool schools that recently rejected homophobic hate crime information packs entitled 'Denial', there are no such things as homosexuals in their schools. (Did they not see the irony of this gesture?) So enforced invisibility, ignorance, and inequality of educational opportunities continue to imbalance the rights of gay people. Or they might, if faith schools persist in failing to acknowledge their gay students unequivocally by teaching what the government is asking them to teach. And equally, in terms of religious teachings on contraception, the rights of female teenagers are also put in the balance. The religious ideology on the issue of contraception serves the power of straight males students, whilst the female students whose lives are destroyed by foolish, ill-judged actions are left to tend to the consequences.

Democracy empowers/dies (delete as applicable)

The vote against gay marriage is bad enough. If you think it isn't, then read this little fact:

Gay marriage measures have lost in every state, 31 in all, in which it has been put to a popular vote.

Note: POPULAR VOTE. This is when other people's freedom is put to democracy, and democracy fails in the name of justice. So what we have is a situation in which democracy bolsters discrimination, allows haters the opportunity to limit the freedom of others. Democracy is the freedom to hate. This idea that democracy can work against justice has always been at the back of my mind, but the sentence above says it all. And it makes me feel sick. But more than anything else, I am sorry in particular for the gays and lesbians of Maine, USA, who go about their daily lives today in the encroaching shadow of limited freedom, advancing inequality, and the discrete but threatening knowledge that this has been decided by a number of the people who pass them on the sidewalk. What a society!

Claude Lévi-Strauss 1908-2009

The age doesn't matter, it's still a sad - not to mention, remarkable - event. I'd hazard a guess that it's a epochal one too: not in terms of its ramifications, but rather the way in which the death of such colossal intellectuals invites us to reflect on what has passed, and what has passed along with it. Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Richard Rorty, now Lévi-Strauss: the deaths of thinkers, the very individuals who mine the seam of humanity and present the findings for our illumination and delectation, mark the death of an age. Such is the case with the death of Lévi-Strauss: because of his loss, we really have moved on from the twentieth century. The contribution of Lévi-Strauss's work is immense: he altered whole systems of thought (with structuralist anthropolgy), redirected our propensities (post-colonial before the end of colonialism itself), and reached out to other disciplines by being revolutionary (the bricoleur lends itself so well to the study of literature). And we should fear what he said, because if we're not careful, we really will end civilisation before its time.

Confused rights/rites

I wonder how this little situation can be resolved. What does the far-right and fundamentalist Christians have in common? They hate gays and as far as possible wish to remove the new-found rights of gays and lesbians in the workplace and in the arena of public services. Religious fundamentalists are on the same scale as the thugs who threaten gays and lesbians with death. Until they realise this, religious fundamentalists will continue to be complicit with violent homophobia.

"This case is part of a homophobic fight-back by Christian fundamentalists who resent the removal in law of their right to discriminate against lesbian and gay people," said human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. [. . .]

"Liberty fiercely defends freedom of conscience and religion, including its reasonable expression in the workplace. But other people have rights and freedoms too," said Corinna Ferguson, legal officer at Liberty, which is intervening in the case.

"Ms Ladele is entitled to her views but not to pick and choose who is worthy of public services."