What does a moderate Muslim look like?

What would a moderate Muslim look like?

A moderate Muslim:

*Retains the narrative of one God and multiple prophets but regards most of the rest of contemporary  Islam as abhorent claptrap.

*Reads the Quran in its historical context and understands its claim to be Divine Speech not literally but as ‘Logos’ through an intelligent metaphysics.

*Does not detect even the slightest reference to modern technology in the Quran.

*Has an agnostic view of the life of the Prophet (Sira).

*Is sceptical of the entire Hadith literature and especially of ridiculous claims made for the veracity of al-Bukhari.

*Has a healthy contempt for religious scholars.

*Regards the entire Wahhabi sect as a noxious poison.

*Regards the building programs undertaken by the Saudis in Mecca and the Holy Places as damnable desecrations and a blasphemous destruction of the Islamic heritage.

*Thinks that the Sharia is a barbaric concoction of desert desperadoes in the late Dark Ages.

*Does not have an infantile desire to ape every item of trivia from fictional medieval accounts of the Prophet’s personal life.

*Admits that the expulsion of philosophy and rational methods of analysis from Islamic intellectual life in the late Middle Ages was a catastrophe.

*Thinks that the history of the four schools of Sunni law in which reasoning by analogy plays less and less a role is nothing less than a long slow lobotomy.

*Appreciates the Sufi traditions as the core of Islam transcending the limitations of the religion’s ossified outer forms.

*Demands that the doors of Ijtihad be opened.

*Loves the richness of the Islamic cultural tradition and sees the best of Islam in the Islamic Arts and Humanities.

*Does not believe that unthinking piety will restore Islam to its days of glory.

*Has separated religion from terriory and no longer thinks in terms of “Dar as Salam’ and the nexus between Islam and land.

*Rejects restorationism as a way forward for contemporary Islam.

*Shuns the post-colonial leftist conspiracy theory view of the world that attributes the derelect state of the entire Islamic world to the Americans.

*Never uses the moronic word "Islamophobia". 

*Doesn’t indulge in self-pitying victim narratives.

*Gave up on the Palestinians years ago.

*Thinks that the oft-quoted hadith about the best of ummahs is nothing less than risible.

*Thinks that halal food certification is an extortion racket.

*Wears tasteful contemporary clothing rather than dressing like a 6^th C. camel driver. 

That, at least, is a good start towards a moderate Muslim. 

- Harper McAlpine Black

Jules Guerin's Egypt

One of the most sublime realisations of orientalist Egypt is found in the illustrations of American artist Jules Vallee Guerin in the book Egypt & Its Monuments text by Robert Hitchens. Guerin was best known as a muralist and architectural illustrator based in Chicago, but he travelled the Near East with Hitchens between 1909 and 1911. See a selection of his Egyptian illustrations below.

I have had the opportunity to peruse an original copy of this book. The text is undistinguished, but the illustrations by Guerin are wonderful. He captures the epic timelessness of Egypt.

Guerin learned his art by painting theatre backdrops. He was a major American muralist - his works include a mural in the Lincoln Memorial.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Triumph of Nominalism

A convergence of articles and ideas that came to my attention last week together convinced me that what we are witnessing in the mushy world of contemporary liberalism is nothing less than the triumph of nominalism. This - nominalism - is the antithesis of Platonic realism and states that there are no "realities", per se, and hence no "nature" but merely names or labels that we habitually dress up as realities or natures, usually for the purposes of obtaining or exercising power. The nominalist/realist debate was all the rage in the Middle Ages. Since then, the realist position has been in decline and the nominalists have gone from strength to strength. To explain: nominalists claim that God has no attributes. The attributes we claim for God are merely labels that we hang on Him for our own purposes. This has huge implications. Finally, it means that there is no such thing as human nature either, and, more directly, there are no such things as fixed identities. Whatever identities we claim for ourselves are not intrinsic but are merely conventions (names).

Here is an interesting example. Professional stirrer Andrew Bolt - Australian conservative commentator - was taken to court, and lost, when he wrote against certain Australians who claimed to be indigenous (aborigines). They were, in fact, whiter than white to all appearances, but they claimed that on the basis of a 1/100th ancestral lineage they were aborigines and therefore entitled to various government support schemes to assist aborigines. Bolt claimed they had no right to claim to be aborigines and were in fact rorting the system. The court, however, ruled that the white guys in question did have a legitimate claim to aboriginality and, moreover, had no choice in the matter - they had been born into aboriginality, regardless of how Anglo-saxon they may appear to the eye.

You see, this is a debate about identities. What are realities and what are merely labels? Are these people *really* aborigines or have they merely adopted that label?

Last week, I read an account of this case that put it in a different perspective. Against the judge, and against Bolt, a liberal academic argued that - as he put it - the "bedrock of contemporary ethics" is that all identities are matters of personal choice. He agreed that Bolt was out of line, but he also disagreed that the "victims" had no choice in their aboriginality. The judge said they were born that way, but this academic argued that the bedrock of contemporary ethics is that no one is prisoner to how they were born. Identity is a matter of choice. And it is always so. As he wrote, a person might identify as something a thousand times, but they must always be free to change their mind and call themselves something else. This is the essence of "freedom". Thus, the "victims" in the Bolt case should always be free to deny aboriginality, and the judge, no less than Bolt, had denied them their freedom. Again: identity is a matter of choice. It is never a matter of birth.

Thus, for example, gender - in so-called "contemporary ethics"- is a matter of choice and not a reality. You and I might think that being a man or a woman is a matter determined by birth, but not so. It is merely a choice we make. Thus the realism/nominalism divide. Gender is not a reality, it is merely a label, a name. And no matter how many times I identify as a man, I remain free to change my label and identify as a woman. This is the philosophical basis of transgenderism. It is a form of nominalism. It denies there is any such thing as human nature. A free being is free to make of itself what it will. It is the whole basis of contemporary liberalism. Liberals hate and despise any category that supposedly traps someone into the circumstances of their birth. Freedom, by definition, belongs to the self-creating, self-determining being.

It is an ideal philosophy for a consumerist/industrial society. It espouses mobility as an inherent good. Platonic realism supposes that we have a distinct, intrinsic nature and that the richness of life consists in developing that nature to its fullest potential. It supposes, for example, that some people are born to be carpenters, and they find fulfilment through being carpenters. Liberals find this idea repugnant. Instead, liberals champion as heroes those individuals who, though born into a family of carpenters, defy their parents and their heritage in order to become ballet dancers instead. Or, better still, who decide not to be anything, but are carpenters one day, ballet dancers another, and dabble in a bit of plumbing as well, as their mood takes them. They have no fixed identity. This suits industrial labour markets perfectly, whereas the Platonic idea that we have inherent vocations is utterly medieval. Similarly, free agents who can call themselves and be whatever they like whenever they like are the best sort of consumers. Old fashioned realists are not easily convinced to take up new fads and new identities at the whims of advertising.

At the core of the nominalist outlook, then, is the abstract individual just as the core of nominalist theology is the abstract God. In nominalism, God has no attributes, and therefore, neither do I. This sense of "I" is perfectly empty.

At this point, it all starts to smell a bit like Buddhism, doesn't it? And you'd be right to suppose so, for Buddhism is precisely a hyper-nominalist approach to religion. The Supreme Reality is not a reality at all, but merely an empty convention. The thing that we hang identities upon is, in fact, a Void. It has no attributes whatsoever. We can only say what it is not.

Applied to sociology, though, it leads to odd conclusions. So, apparently, I can call myself an aboriginal if I so choose, and apply for government support schemes on that basis. It doesn't matter if I don't look like an aborigine, or even if I have a single drop of aboriginal blood - if I say I'm an aborigine then I bloody-well am, and if you say otherwise you are oppressing me. It gets very Monty Python. You'll remember the sketch where Stan wants to be called Loretta. He wants to be a woman and he wants to have babies. John Cleese objects on the basis that "He hasn't got a womb. Where are they going to gestate? Are you gonna keep them in a cardboard box?" To which Stan says: "Don't you oppress me." They agree in the end to support Stan's struggle to have babies, which Cleese characterizes as Stan's struggle against reality. Note the word "reality". Cleese, in this sketch, thinks there is a reality to which we must conform. The others, however, see this reality (namely Stan's lack of a womb) as an obstacle to be overcome. We fulfil ourselves by overcoming the obstacles of reality.

The Monty Python sketch goes back a way now. Today, the Cleese view is politically incorrect, or worse. Indeed, transgenderism is the new cause-of-the-day. It soon becomes illegal to label children boys or girls. This is to deny them the choice of free abstract individuals. Gender is not a reality but a label - devised purely for nefarious reasons of power and privilege - and to impose gender upon children is to do violence to them. This world-view is well advanced in ultra-liberal societies such as the Scandanavian democracies, but it has taken root throughout the Western world.

It is even rearing its head in the Vatican. The latest stir there is the philosophy of a certain Cardinal Kasper, hence Kasperism. The Kasperists hope to apply a nominalist theology to the question of divorce. At present, divorcees are very often denied the Eucharist in Catholicism because their subsequent marriages are officially deemed improper and therefore sinful. The contemporary Church wants to get around this impasse and to open the Church to this expanding demographic. Kasper proposes doing in this way: he deems the married state to be a mere label that is not, in fact, a reality. It is just a name. The only reality is phenomenonlogical; that is, the subjective experience of the individual concerned. It doesn't matter how often the Church says I am still married to my first wife, the fact is that emotionally and otherwise I have moved on and so has she. That marriage only exists on paper. It is not a reality. The reality is what I identity as my reality, namely my new marriage and my new post-divorce life. Nominalism. Kasperism is nominalism by another name.

So we see nominalism advancing at every turn. Some people want to take it as far nationalities. These are the multiculturalists and open-border advocates. Just because you were born in Vietnam should not lock you into being Vietnamese. Why shouldn't you just decide to become a Canadian instead? Open-border advocates resent the restrictions imposed by birth. Why shouldn't gypsy Romanians migrate en masse to southern England, or west Africans make their way to Italy by boat? Why should someone be geographically constrained by where they were born? Why not open the borders - dissolve the borders - and make the whole thing open slather? If I want to live in China, I go and live in China. The existing restrictions of nation states are artificial constructs posing as realities purely in order to keep some people rich and others poor. So the argument goes. The only fair system is the melting pot. Be whatever you want, wherever you want. That's freedom.

Conservatives, as I say, subscribe to the opposite view, namely that there are realities and that nominalist ideas of freedom are spurious and finally reduce human beings to undifferentiated sludge. Instead, by birth and circumstance, we are given certain resources which are realities and we find fulfilment through actualizing them, not through denying them. Rather than seeing my gender as a curse or a straight-jacket imposed by odious oppressors, I can see it as a beautiful thing, a gift, and take delight in it and strive to make the best of it. Thus too my racial and ethnic identity. Instead of spending my life cringing and apologizing for being a white guy, I can accept the reality of my genetics and ancestry and be proud of it and find fulfilment through it, as far as it might be relevant to fulfilment. I can lead a rich life enjoying being an Australian rather than pretending to be an Arab.

These are the markers of this endless debate. The nominalists are winning, no doubt. The drift of our times is towards a triumphant nominalism. I would point out, though, that the debate is intractable and there will be reactions.

Finally, in my view, it is a corrosive debate built upon a false dichotomy. Surely, both points of view are true, and it remains to be debated as to where we draw the distinctions. The nominalist/realist divide tends to be all-or-nothing. It is really a matter of both. I remember discussing this with my friend, the late Lithuanian scholar Algis Uzdavinys, who pointed out to me that the nominalist/realist issue is treated by Plotinus as a continuum, a sliding scale, and not as an either-or duality. Indeed. That is how I see it. I think the pinkos are nuts. They can't grasp realities because their brains are made of spineless jello. Of course you can't call yourself an African American just because you feel like it! There has to be some basis to the claim - a basis in reality.

On the other hand, there are those (the so-called far right) who over-state the claim. Not content to be white guys - as born - they want to suppose that being white is better than being anything else (i.e. white supremacy). They claim inherent attributes of superiority just as they suppose that non-whites are inferior and no amount of education or welfare will lift them out of their inherently subordinate state. That type of philosophical realism, as we know, ends in Nazism and monstrous consequences.

As with other issues, therefore, the truth lies between two exaggerations, both of them evil. As social creatures we are always in a process of negotiating positions between these two extremes. This is true of the Catholic Church too, if it comes to that. It is a forum for these big debates that swing one way and then another. At present, under Pope Francis, a liberal nominalism is asserting itself. It is surely true that defunct marriages are defunct and that the new lives of divorcees are real - but at the same time surely a marriage has to make claims upon people if it is to be a serious thing and not just an empty convention that people can trash and walk away from at a whim? Regardless of what the "bedrock of contemporary ethics" might be, surely the fact you don't have a womb is a relevant reality pertaining to your desire to give birth to children, isn't it? And surely you can't just call yourself an aborigine in order to get preferential accommodation at a University campus or a $3000 higher education bonus, can you?

- Harper McAlpine Black

Raja Ravi Varma - Indian painter

Orientalism was not a one way street. Typically, we think of it as a situation where European artists depicted oriental subjects. Some of the more interesting cases, however, are where oriental artists adopted European conventions and practices and joined the fun. This again undercuts the simplistic (Saidean) characterization of orientalist art as exploitative. The fact is, rather, that many artists in the colonial era admired and aspired to European standards. One particularly stunning example of this is the great Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906). Here we have an Indian artist living under the British Raj who admired and then acquired the skills of European (orientalist) painting and then applied those skills to subjects from Indian (Hindu) mythology.

 Ravi Varma's works have now become the classical depictions of Hindu mythology in modern times. They are copied and reproduced and you will find them not only in books but in many Indian homes. They have had a profound impact upon the Indian imagination - when Hindus think of scenes from their mythology do tend to do so through the filter of Ravi Varma's idealised depictions. Here below are some examples of his work, including perhaps his most famous and copied work 'Dhamayanthi and the Swan'.

The Sandhurst Coffee Palace - some local history

This article has been hoisted from another of my ill-fated blogs. As I discontinue that blog, bits I deem worth saving will migrate here. This is one such bit. 

The picture above shows the Sandhurst Coffee Palace, Bendigo, 1890s. You might suspect that the coffee was fairly ordinary in those days; it is hard to imagine that you'd get a decent coffee in a dusty goldmining town in far away southern Australia. But you'd be wrong.

Local coffee production began in Australia in the northern parts of Queensland in the 1880s. Australian soils produced a good flavoured coffee bean with distinct caramel qualities. The venture was so successful that Australian grown coffee won awards in Europe in the late 1880s. The industry prospered and supplied high quality beans to food stores throughout Australia until the coffee growing region was hit by a tsunami in the early 1900s. By then there was a lack of labour needed to rebuild and coffee growing - and coffee drinking - went into decline in Australia.

But our photograph is from 1890s, before the death of the industry. And it is in Bendigo, then one of the wealthiest cities in the country. We can therefore assume that the coffee served at this illustrious establishment was probably quite good. The usual practice was to roast and grind beans on the premises. These would have been Queensland-grown beans which were world-class.

We tend to think that coffee drinking is a relatively new trend in Australia. In the post-war period, certainly, tea-drinking was the norm in working class and middle class Australia. There was instant coffee, but more sophisticated versions of the beverage were associated with Italians and other post-war migrants ("wogs"). Coffee drinking and a coffee culture has only emerged from the 1980s onwards, that is in the last few decades. But actually, there was a thirty year period, from about 1880 to 1910, when coffee drinking (with good beans) was popular in Australia. Our photograph is evidence of it. The Sandhurst Coffee Palace is as big as a hotel. It is a picture of coffee drinking on a grand scale. It is not a shop, not a cafe, it's a "palace"!

How was the coffee prepared? Microfoaming wasn't developed until the second half of the twentieth century, so any frothing, either of coffee (for creme) or of milk would have been done by hand whisks or by drawing air between cups, a method you can still see being done in India and other ploaces today. Sugar was plentiful in Australia, also being grown in Queensland, so we can gather that coffee was drunk with sugar to taste. Or perhaps it was only consumed black? It is hard to establish what modes of coffee were available to the paying customer. The large number of Germans in Bendigo, suggests that the Viennese ways of enjoying coffee were probably preferred.

Another point to note: Coffee drinking in this period was a distinctly "Orientalist" activity. Coffee drinking was first developed in the Islamic world, initially among the Sufi brotherhoods. In the 1890s, the time of our photograph, Europeans had a sympathetic fascination with the "Orient". We can see this in the art produced and collected at this time which is still on display in the Bendigo Art Gallery; orientalist paintings. At this time, coffee drinking would have been a part of that aesthetic.

In the second wave of coffee drinking - the contemporary wave - coffee has been associated with "multiculturalism" and post-war immigration Australia, not with the "orientalism" of the British Empire. This is the important difference between the two waves. To schematize it, there are several styles or schools of coffee drinking. There are oriental styles (like Turkish coffee) and then there are the European appropriations, specifically through Vienna and through Italy (Venice). Coffee in Australia today is predominantly of the Italian school. If you train as a barista, it is Italian coffee making you learn. The cappuccino, espresso, machiato – these are all italian. In the 1890s, though, the oriental styles and the Viennese appropriations would have been in vogue. Or so we can surmise.

The Sandurst Coffee Palace is long gone. Australia and the world at large have changed. Thankfully, though, Sandhurst is now Bendigo and Bendigo is once more a place where enthusiasts and aficionados can again enjoy a decent cup of coffee, the so-called “wine of Islam”, the world’s most popular drug.

Presidential paintings

Who can say that this portrait of Mr Putin is not without insight? Look at that right eye. 

Over the last week it has emerged that former US President, George W. Bush has been dabbling in portrait painting. Samples of his work have been appearing on news services, generally being treated as a novelty story. Left-wing news services and their seemingly endless parade of professional "commentators" and "experts" have been trying to make mileage from it, with article after article condemning his work as unsophisticated and banal. For the Left, of course, Bush is an object of enduring hatred and ridicule - how easy then to tip buckets of bile upon his admittedly amateur art work. As if pre-programmed, social media chimed in too, with streams of vicious abuse, mockery and derision punctuating the usual treadmill of Save-the-World "memes" and pictures of cats. 

Once more I find myself out of phase. Not because I am in any way of fan of Mr Bush - I'm not. And not because I am or ever was a supporter of the Iraq war or any other policy or action of the United States during his presidency. As a matter of fact, I regard the invasion of Iraq as a crime and the conduct of the war that followed an even greater crime. But, to be perfectly objective about it, I don't mind the paintings. I disagree with the Leftist reviews I have read which describe them as inept, childish, lacking in insight or just plain embarrassing. Such reviews, I feel, have taken the paintings as an excuse to take cheap shots at an unpopular President. There's the usual smug self-righteousness and elitism that is so characteristic of leftist intellectuals, but there is very little real engagement with the paintings themselves. Nearly all critics I've read have not been able to distance themselves from their feelings about the painter. In a case like this, though, that is the first thing any critic or reviewer must do. 

They are not great paintings, but frankly, they are not bad, and they are considerably better than I would have guessed. Mr Bush reports that he has only been painting for two years. "Yes, it shows!" one critic ranted. I am less unkind. I think that for someone who has been painting for such a short period of time, and taking up a brush late in life, they show considerable talent. I sometimes venture down to the local Easter Art show, or a YMCA painting exhibition, and by any measure the paintings of Mr Bush are better than most amateur efforts. They are not without insight, or humour, and his self-portraits in the bathtub reveal a streak of self-mockery that I find endearing and refreshing. He is not a man who takes himself too seriously. His detractors will say he is an imbecile, but the naivety in his paintings is genuine. He is not pretentious. (Compare this to 99% of contemporary art!) 

I, at least, am quite capable of appreciating these paintings independent of my views about the Bush presidency, and I think they are not without virtue. I do not feel any compulsion to be snide and bitter and cheap about them, anyway. Some of them are quite interesting. I like their flatness and - to use a word that Bush himself used in reference to them - their "joy". What makes them interesting is a type of celebratory innocence, devoid of any attempt to psychologize the subject. He's obviously not a deep man, Mr Bush; he quietly celebrates ordinariness and the way the ordinary man refrains from being judgmental. This homely lack of pretentiousness is probably the quality that accounts most for his electoral popularity amongst Americans. These are not intellectual paintings, that is to say, but nor are they anti-intellectual. They are just what they are - an ordinary vision free of cant. The idea of painting a series of portraits of the world leaders he encountered while President is quite legitimate, an unaffected inspiration. 

* * * 

Some news reports feel it necessary to compare Mr Bush with that other notable leader/artist Winston Churchill. In one particularly spiteful, paranoid and idiotic article the writer suggested that both men had deliberately turned to painting as a way of "softening" their evil image, as if painting was something they took up on recommendation from the Ministry of Propaganda, rather than being just an innocent pastime. I don't find it a revealing comparison, but while we're at it, let me say that Churchill was, in fact, a very good painter, a serious painter. Bush will never be that, but he is not, at least, awful. Here below are two paintings by Churchill. See! He was a very good painter, a worthy member of an English (orientalist) tradition. Mr Bush's paintings are not nearly as accomplished, but they are not deserving of the scorn and contempt that has been heaped upon them. The inability of "progressive" commentators to put aside their loathing for the ex-President and to consider the paintings as paintings (albeit amateur paintings) is really quite juvenile but not unexpected. Hatred is a stain. The real objection from most Leftist commentators has been that these paintings might help humanize Mr Bush after the Left have spent so long and worked so hard demonizing him. Well, that's just the nature of art. 

Wars on the Left, Wars on the Right

As Australia fumbles her way through a generally unintelligent debate about anti-racism laws and freedom of speech, I am reminded that both sides of politics indulge in totalitarian culture wars that are typical of this blighted age. On the Right, most obviously, there is the "War on Drugs". This has been an on-going catastrophe since the Nixon years, officially, but goes back into the early decades of the 20th C. It is a puritan crusade to demonize and remove unapproved substance use from the entire population. Vast sums have been spent, innumerable people have been prosecuted, and still the war goes on. Conservative politicians make mileage from denouncing any public figure who might be "soft on drugs" and, in the face of obvious  defeat, argue that the war can be won if we clamp down tight enough - what we need is a culture of "zero tolerance". The Right is happy to have the State intrude into the personal recreational habits of citizens and to trash civil liberties and construct a vast policing regime in order to fight this "war". Most recently, mandatory blood testing of otherwise innocent citizens seems to be increasingly accepted as a part of this "war"; a citizen's life-blood is no longer his own private concern.

On the Left, there is a parallel war on "racism". Anything and everything that can be construed as even vaguely racialist is to be suppressed, denounced, criminalized and snuffed out at every level. This entails such intrusive measures as laws that criminalize forms of speech - or even just words - that may "offend" or simply hurt someone's feelings. There must be "zero tolerance" of bigots in all spheres of life. The slightest utterance that might be "racist" cannot be tolerated in a tolerant society. Every social construction of racism must be eliminated at root. In Australia, most infamously, two-bit social commentator and provocateur, Andrew Bolt, was successfully prosecuted for asking why white-skinned people with only one sixteenth aboriginality are claiming welfare benefits given to indigenous Australians. Bolt had dared to question someone's racial identity. This, the court determined, is illegal. The extent of such laws has led to circumstances where certain groups happily refer to themselves and each other as "nigger" but no one else - absolutely no one - is allowed to utter it in any context, not even by way of reference. (Strictly speaking, this blog should have only referred euphemistically to the "n word" and not used it at all. Tut. Tut.) The Left is happy for the State to determine what free citizens can and cannot say to each other in speech or print. There is a "war" on racism and it won't be over until all vestiges of racist thinking are expunged from the very thinking processes of the common man.

Let me say outright that I regard drug abuse and racism as evils. But in both cases, Left and Right, I am opposed to these totalitarian wars. The problem in both cases is that the wars are being waged upon reality. First reality - human beings take drugs. It is something human beings do. Second reality - human beings notice racial differences and discriminate on that basis sometimes. Human beings are racists. To suppose that we can stop human beings from taking drugs and stop human beings from being racists is just nuts. The very best we can do in either case, in my view, is "harm minimization" as they say. We might be able to create a drug free society - if you want to turn the whole world into Saudi Arabia! It would require a savagely oppressive police state. Similarly, we might be about to create a society where every last whimper of racist ideation is eliminated, but again it would require a pervasive, intrusive Big Brother policing and controlling our very thoughts. Even then, of course, human nature is irrepressible. There are drugs in Saudi Arabia and there are racial murmurs in Leftist Utopia. In the end, totalitarianism is futile, but it is very, very unpleasant in the meantime.

This makes me a conservative. I believe in a reality and I believe in human nature and I think people who don't are dangerous. Apparently, that defines me as a "conservative" these days. We should accept that people are weak and imperfect and only attempt to protect ourselves from the worst excesses of human foibles. We should accept that human beings take drugs for all sorts of reasons. We should, for all of that, take active steps to stop people dying of heroin overdose or driving drunk and stop teenagers sniffing glue, but there are limits to what it is wise to attempt and we really should accept that some harm is inevitable. Any regime of "zero tolerance" is oppressive, dangerous and bound to be ill-fated and will cause more misery than it prevents. The war on drugs has been exactly that.

Similarly, it is entirely my experience that human beings everywhere are, to a greater or lesser extent, "racist". Once I subscribed to that fond middle-class Leftist myth that only white guys like me can be racist, but then I went to Japan, and the Middle East, and elsewhere. People are racist. You realise this when you get spat on and called a "white devil". In most cases, though, it is a low-level thing. Hardened racists are as rare as full-scale smack addicts, but racism nevertheless seems to me to be part of the human lot. People mark differences between each other and will discriminate accordingly. They will. We should accept this about people. At the same time, of course we ought to stop racially motivated violence, incitement and harassment and the most blatant and harmful expressions of racialism. So too we ought to encourage and nurture a culture of racial harmony and tolerance. But there will always be bigots and the cure for that is much, much worse than the disease. The Australian Attorney-General said in parliament last week, "People have a right to be bigots." In my view, it is not so much a question of "rights" as a question of reality. People will be bigots, is the point. But they don't have to right to victimize, malign, incite, inflict harm or burn synagogues because of it.

Where one draws the line in either case is a matter of further debate and may need to shift from time to time. (Changing circumstances is also part of reality.) I would tend to err in favour of personal liberty, an unobtrusive State, and to give people a fair amount of slack. When I discover that my highly respected barrister snorts a few lines of cocaine in his spare time, well, so what, as long as he convinces the jury to find me not guilty. It is entirely his business, frankly. And when I discover that my neighbour would prefer not to rent out his house to Asians, who he regards as "smelly", I'm not going to report him to the Thought Police at the Racial Discrimination Board. It's low-level racism, distasteful certainly, but so what? On cultural differences, most Asians are hard-working and good tenants compared to many of the local Aussie bogans anyway. It's his property and his loss. (He's otherwise a nice bloke and says he doesn't mind Greeks... )

Soldiers engaged in these wars will, I know, insist that there is no parallel to be made. I think there is. In both cases, zealous activists and self-righteous busy-bodies want to engineer a utopia that is contra natura, and they are happy to resort to totalitarian means to do it. In both cases, intrusive do-gooders want to control what everyone else is thinking and doing. I don't trust them. We must remember the limits of prudent social control. You can't legislate away the human propensity to use recreational substances, nor their propensity to discriminate between observable racial characteristics. There are some evils that we just have to live with - within prudent limits. That's because people are people. I do not trust activists and warmongers, Left or Right, who have lost sight of this simple humility.

HMcB

The Voynich Manuscript Revisited

From time to time I revisit the Voynich manuscript. This is - if you are not aware of it - one of the strangest and most mysterious books in the world. A medieval manuscript, it was brought to light by the book collector Voynich in 1912. It is written in an unknown script and language that has yet to be decoded. Consequently it attracts the attention of cryptologists and book sleuths who are attempting to unravel its many mysteries. It is clearly a herbal of some sort, and includes what seems to be an astrological section, but since we cannot decode a single word of the text, we can be certain about little else. 

Since i last had a good look at it, however, some certainty has firmed in at least one regard: the date of the materials used in its construction. Carbon dating tests have at long last been conducted on the vellum of the manuscript and has established - with what the scientists claim to be 95% certainty - a date between 1404 and 1438. I am less sanguine about that degree of exactitude, but in any case we are looking at the first half of the 1400s. Previously, we were just guessing. Now we can narrow it down to a time period. Or at least we can say that the vellum used in the manuscript is from that time period. 

It is possible that vellum from that period survived for a while before it was written on, but much more likely that the book was made not long after the vellum. We can date the vellum - the book is very likely to have been written not long after. To my mind, therefore, I think it becomes almost certain that the work is a production of the 1400s. Vellum made in the early or mid 1400s is not likely to remain intact and used into the 1500s. 

This is encouraging, I think. I accept it as some (reasonably) firm ground. There has been so little terra firma thus far in Voynich studies that any clues are welcome. I have no reason to question the carbon dating, and even if we allow a wider margin of error that the scientists might claim, we can now roughly date the Voynich ms. and so eliminate other possible datings. Others have suggested 1300s and many more have suggested 1600s as the production date. We can now say with some confidence, no, 1400s. 

Other things firm up around this dating. Most impressive to me is the style of the script. Others have previously noted that the style of the script strongly suggests Carolingian minuscule among known scribal styles. This was a very widely used style in medieval manuscripts beginning in the Carolingian renaissance. It is open and clear and was used by Latin scribes. Its use faded in the later Middle Ages but, importantly, was revived in Italy in the 1400s. The Italian renaissance scribes looked back to the classical clarity of the Carolingians and regarded the style we know as Carolingian minuscule as the authentic ancient style. 

Given a (rough) dating we can now say with some confidence that the observation that the style resembles Carolingian minuscule is probably correct. It is likely that the Voynich Ms. is a product of the revival of that style in the 1400s. Less certainly, we might also speculate that the manuscript was made in Italy or at least by an Italian scribe trained in that style. Previously, we had only a resemblance of orthographical styles - the carbon dating of the vellum now underlines that resemblance. We can be sure that the manuscript is not from the Carolingian renaissance, so it must be from the later Italian renaissance when this style of writing came back into vogue. 

Here are samples of the script, first the Voynich and then Carolingian minuscule:

On the strength of this, I want to say that it is now best to proceed on the basis that the Voynich is a product of 1400s Italy. That certainly narrows it down a bit. It gives us a broad context. Previously we were fumbling through the centuries with little idea. Others might still contest this, but for myself I think it would now be a waste of time to dally after other possible datings. The best chance of getting results is to go with the 1400s dating. Italian quattrocento - probably earlier in the century than later.

* * * 

A recent attempt at solving the mysteries of the Voynich has involved identifying and naming the plants illustrated in the herbal section. This is very uncertain territory because no one can agree on which plants are which. All identifications are hotly contested. The botany of the Voynich is therefore not very useful as solid ground. All identifications are conjecture. For simple methodological reasons, I think trying to crack the code via the botany is not a sensible way to proceed. 

But again, given a more solid dating, other aspects of the work firm up. Or, indeed, they become more problematic. Regarding the botany, any dating in the 1400s would seem to rule out identifications of any of the plants as New World botany. Columbus didn't sail the ocean blue until 1492. A dating in the (early to mid) 1400s must count against those who claim the plants in the work are from the Americas. Instead, it must count in favour of those who identify them as plants known in the Old World and/or imaginary plants. 

There are, it must be said, many exotic plants depicted. And the depictions are sometimes crude and often strange. But we can at least say now that they are unlikely to be plants from the Americas. The exotic ones, therefore, must be from nearer to Italy (or Europe more broadly). 

Personally, I am happy about some proposed plant identifications, such as this one proposed by Edith Sherwood:

On balance, I think this probably is a picture of a banana (look at those fronds!). We cannot say for sure, and there might be any number of objections made, but it sure looks like a banana plant to me. This would be interesting, because the banana was cultivated by and was distributed by Muslims. Muslim traders took the plant from South East Asia and introduced it throughout the Muslim world, especially in Africa. But it was growing in Cyprus by the later Middle Ages, and the Italian traveller Capodalista wrote about them in the late 1450s. They were therefore a known plant, albeit exotic and the commercial preserve of the Muslims. 

All of this confirms a general proposition I have had since I first encountered the Voynich MS. It has always seemed very likely to me that it contains knowledge that is in the process of being transmitted from the Muslim world to the Christian world. That is why it is encoded. Many things - especially alchemical and medical knowledge - took an "occult" form when they moved from one world to the other. The Church and other authorities frowned upon and were deeply suspicious of Muslim learning. Against this, though, people were desperate to acquire it. Often that acquisition had to happen through clandestine avenues and was not always a safe trade to be in. 

I want to therefore conjecture that that is what we have before us: a book detailing exotic herbal and astrological and alchemical lore that probably had its prototype in Arabic or perhaps Turkish influence since the single most significant geopolitical event of the 1400s was the fall of Byzantium to the Turks in the middle of the century. Many things point in this direction. I will make my case in a later post. 

Mosques and masjids

Recently it was announced that this city will soon have its first mosque - or "masjid" as Muslims insist on calling it. This has provoked a rather predictable debate in the local media and coffee shops along entirely predictable lines. Critics argue that mosques and Muslims have no place in our culture and mumble dark warnings about terrorists and jihadists etc. Others like to point out that while Muslims are busily buildings their "masjids" here in Australia, Christians are certainly not being allowed to build churches in Muslim countries: on the contrary, Christians have never been so persecuted and oppressed as they are today in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Then there are objectors who are less ideological: they think the new mosque will cause traffic and parking problems and lower housing values.

All of this, as I say, is predictable. In almost every town and city in the country where a mosque has been built, you will find the same objections and hear the same arguments. No surprises at all. What I always find curious, though, are those people who are vociferous in their support for the new mosque. The anti- people and their motives are familiar enough. Many of them are Christians and they have a religious antipathy to Islam. Others are simply displaying an old fashioned xenophobia, a fear of the foreign. But what of those people who are fervently in favour of the mosque? What are their motives? I don't mean local Muslims, of course. Obviously they support the new mosque. Rather, I am curious about those people writing to the newspapers and holding forth over their lattes who are neither Muslims nor indeed religious at all; often, in fact, they are anti-religious people. So why, I wonder, would they want a mosque in their community?

This is something I have always found puzzling. In my former incarnation, working at the local university, I was an advocate for the Muslim students and often held positions on committees and working groups where I encountered this same phenomenon. The strongest supporters of Muslims and their interests were people who I knew to be viciously anti-religious. Often, in fact, I knew first-hand that these same people were agitating against the courses in which I was teaching - namely Religious Studies - because they were activist secularists who believed that no religion should be taught in Universities at all. I found myself sitting on panels and committees with them and watched puzzled as they demanded equal rights for Muslims and huffed and puffed about "inclusiveness" and so on. As I say, I knew these people to be atheist bigots with a passionate hatred of all religion. Why were they so keen to advance the cause of Muslims on campus? The incongruities were quite bizarre. Here were radical feminists arguing for the veil and animal liberationists arguing for halal slaughter. In this context, they were on my side, and their support was welcome. But it always made me feel very uneasy. I always wanted to say to them: "What is it to you? Why do you support Muslims on campus? What makes you so passionate about it?"

The answer they would provide was the single word: multiculturalism. "We support a multicultural campus," they would say. Fine, but I was still left feeling uneasy. I always suspected nefarious motives. When you see atheists getting behind a religious group you have to ask why, and the idea of "multiculturalism" doesn't really answer anything. The plainest example of the incongruity was the annual hooplah about Christmas. It could only happen in the phoney atmosphere of academia, but whenever anyone dared to say 'Happy Christmas' or similar, the atheists would go into a lather and denounce such utterances as "offensive" to "secularism". But they would also use Muslims as an excuse. Christmas, they would argue, offends our Muslim students. That's why we have to ban it. To say 'Happy Christmas' is a cultural imposition that offends multiculturalism. What about the Buddhists? And the Hindus? What about the Muslims? To celebrate Christmas, they said, offends our international students.

Not that I noticed. It wasn't Muslims (or Hindus or Buddhists) who hated Christmas. It was atheists who claimed to be speaking on their behalf.

What was their motivation? In the end, I concluded it was just vandalism and self-loathing. They just wanted to use Muslim students as a way of attacking Christians. That's all it was. They didn't really have any interest in the welfare of Muslim students. Nor did they have the slightest sympathy for any aspect of Islam. Indeed, by any measure, nearly everything about Islam is - or should be - deeply offensive to them, from belief in an interventionist, totalitarian deity, to women's rights. It was really quite extraordinary to watch these religion haters being all smiley and warm and affectionate about Islam. Their motives were devious. They welcomed and supported Muslims on campus purely as a way of getting at the Christians who they hated with a genuine passion.

The same motives are behind the local supporters of the new mosque. I see them in the newspapers and on social media. 'We support a local mosque!' they trumpet. I want to ask, 'Why? What's it to you?' The fact is, that what it is to them is a way of scoring points against the white anglo-saxon culture they despise. It happens to be their own culture, of course. They themselves are affluent white anglo-saxons. But they hate white anglo-saxons and white anglo-saxon history, language and culture. That's what I mean by self-loathing. They loath the very culture that has made them affluent and prosperous. And they are intent on vandalizing it. Actually, they hate Islam too. They hate all religion. But they are happy to use Muslims to "smash the cultural hegemony"of Christianity. They want a local mosque in order to insult and upset the local Christians. It is as petty as that. Their motives are dishonest and dishonourable. In that sense, their support for "multiculturalism" is toxic.

At the end of my tenure at the University I had withdrawn from my support roles to Muslim students. Amongst other things, I didn't like this hypocrisy. The Muslims were sincere people, but some of their supporters among the white anglo-saxon staff in the system were not. They had hidden motives. They were using the rights of Muslim students to advance a different, hidden agenda. That agenda is, basically, to trash the culture and history  and traditions of white anglo-saxon Australia which they regard as inherently criminal (ignoring the paradox that they themselves are a product of it.)

I support a local mosque. But there are mosques, and then there are masjids. It is perfectly proper for local people to be cautious about what sort of mosque this might be. There are many different Muslim organisations actively building mosques in Australia. Islam is not a single church. There are moderate groups and more extreme groups . Then there are extremist fringe groups that hang around the edges of moderate mosques. There is a wide spectrum. It is proper to ask questions. I'd like to know how much Saudi Arabian money is being supplied, for example, and with what strings attached?

On the whole, though, I don't share the fears of xenophobes. But nor am I a post-modernist. I believe in diversity AND cohesion. In my view, you want a local Muslim congregation that adds to the diversity of the city but, importantly, is also anxious to be part of the city and part of a cohesive culture. Not all Muslim organisations are like that. What you don't want are Muslims who indulge in the same hatreds and antipathies as their latte-slurping tertiary-educated anglo-saxon supporters

Speaking personally, I have every right to love Islam, and I do. That makes me all the more cautious about what ilk of Muslims we are talking about. And it doesn't mean I hate the West. What worries me are the atheist secularist God-haters who purport to love Islam and who clammer for a mosque here. I respect the views of local Christians, even where they are mistaken. They, at least, are not disingenuous. This is, after all, a predominantly Christian city. If a mosque is to go well here, there must be a proper relationship between the Christians and the Muslims. Finally, both of those faith communities must wake up to their common enemy, the godless relativists and their project to vandalize tradition.

As it happens, from what I have heard, those Muslim groups behind the local mosque are making considerable efforts to ensure it will fit into the city and are being sensitive to all local concerns and criticisms. 


Harper

The Janitor's Labyrinth

This story closely resembles another story about which I have previously posted. The story is that a humble janitor dies and it is then discovered that they have laboured quietly, secretly, on a complex artwork for years, leaving on clue as to what he had in mind. In this case, a janitor who worked at a university in Japan left a maze - hand-drawn over 7 years - on a large sheet of paper. Whether or not there is a path through the maze is a matter of debate and speculation. Certainly, no one has found a path through yet. But it is a reasonable conjecture, I think, that since the janitor took such care constructing it over such a long time, that he allowed a path through. Pictures of the maze below.  - HMcAB

Suffrage and the Democracy Disease

Someone put it to me recently that the right to vote ought not be automatic but that it should be earned. As to how it should be earned, he was less sure, but he was adamant about the principle that the right to vote - suffrage - should not be bestowed without some measure of qualification and in that it should not be too easy. "People don't value the right to vote," he said, and noted the way young people often deliberately contrived to stay off the electoral roll as if it was a chore. The best way to restore value to the democratic system, he thought, was to impose limitations upon suffrage. It is a controversial notion, he admits, and he complained that people often misunderstood him on this, but he sincerely considered it important to restore the value of voting. Pressed on this, he didn't think that voting and citizenship should be necessarily linked. Citizenship, he thought, should only bestow the right to qualify for voting but the right to vote should be earned. In part, the context of this conversation was a brief chat about the proposal in Scotland to give 16 year olds the vote. My acquaintance regarded this as the maddest thing since haggis. The idea of extending franchise to 16yos is, he insists, utterly crazy. If he had his way, the opposite would be happening; only mature, responsible (and preferably educated) citizens would get the vote. He felt that a high proportion of voters were dim wits with no qualification to cast a sane judgment upon something as important as government.

I raised the historical objection to this: No taxation without representation. Even if a man is a brainless twit, and a thoroughly unwholesome character, surely the state cannot demand taxation from him without him having some say in how the state is to spend that money? Historically, it was once the case that good and hardworking citizens were being taxed by the state but were not entitled to vote. Only "decent", well-bred and "educated" people - the upper class - enjoyed the franchise. Democracy advocates argued - with some force, I feel - that if someone is paying tax then they ought to have the vote. Taxation without representation is unjust. So, if nothing else, I argued, the very act of paying tax ought to be qualification enough. And everyone pays tax. There's a goods and services (consumption) tax on everything. Everyone pays tax.

Since that conversation, these points have been stewing, along with a string of related ideas and questions. In particular, I was struck recently by an article proposing that at the current time only about 51% of Australian citizens actually pay net tax. It is an alarming figure. It means that some 49% of Australians collect more from the government than they contribute. As the article pointed out, it is much the same figure quoted - infamously - by Mitt Romney in his failed presidential campaign against Barack Obama. Nevertheless, it is true. What Mr Romney was alluding to is a simple economic fact. The conglomeration of government pensions, subsidies, incentives assistance schemes is so pervasive that combined with other factors such as an ageing population, nearly one in two people is a net burden upon society. I can verify this just by flicking through my list of phone contacts. I know a high proportion of people on welfare, or student loans, old age pension, disability payment, or in part-time employment, sickness benefits, and so on. I am not saying any of them are undeserving, but it is a conspicuous fact that our lifestyle has been increasingly unproductive and sheltered.

Romney's comments were especially controversial because he added that this 49% were never going to vote for him. Also true. And it exposes what I (given my Platonic credentials) sometimes characterize as the Democracy Disease. Democracy is such a sacred cow in our era that very few people stop to ask about its shortcomings. There is an obvious problem with democracy. It is this: in a democracy there is nothing to stop a certain class of people ( a very large class) from voting themselves a pension and then opposing any candidate or law that might deprive them of it. Or, to put it another way: in a democracy politicians invariable have recourse to electoral bribes. Welfare expands as politicians buy votes. There is no real mechanism in a democracy to prevent this. It is what has happened to liberal democracies everywhere. Eventually they face bankruptcy. The only way to prevent it is imposed "austerity". Eventually, it requires the force of a tyrant.

This is precisely why Plato warned that democracy is a prelude to tyranny. The demos sends the polis broke. The problem is in the extension of franchise. In the Republic, franchise is extended further and further as the State moves through a succession of constitutions. Eventually, just being a citizen is enough, and then citizenship is broadened as well. Soon, not only natural born citizens but recently arrived immigrant citizens are collecting a pension and living in a council flat. No politician dare touch them.

In the Australian experience, both sides of politics have been complicit in this process. Labor is always guilty of reckless largesse - because it has an ideological preference for big government - but one of the biggest vote buyers in our history was John Howard under whom there was a huge growth of useless middle class welfare. Never mind about small government rhetoric - government and the welfare culture have expanded under governments of all persuasions. At the same time, the revenue base has continued to shrink. Clearly, expanding welfare (if only because of an ageing population) with contracting revenue is unsustainable. The recent Labor governments stretched this to a diabolical extent. They introduced huge welfare schemes (Disability Insurance, Gonski School funding etc.) but, remarkably, their mining tax (designed to fund it all via the mining boom) was a complete fizzer. This was leading the country into severe debt. The Abbott government, on the other hand, is probably the first government I can remember with a genuine ideological commitment to smaller government. We'll see.

In any case, in the long run voters will always vote for a pension. (Even Socrates wanted a pension.) They'll support cuts to programs as long as they are other people's programs and not their own. Plainly, the entire democratic process and the general extension of franchise is not well-equipped for austerity. Ultimately, the only way to break the cycle is by coercion - austerity is imposed. As we have seen in Greece (home of democracy.)

Perhaps, I was thinking, the problem is that we have broken the nexus between taxation and representation. Perhaps the one requirement for voting should simply be that you pay income tax. If the old slogan was 'No taxation without representation' then perhaps the opposite should apply as well: no representation without taxation. Only those who contribute to the common weal have a say in how it is managed. If you want to vote, become a taxpayer. This would disenfranchise a lot of people, admittedly, but it is still a sound basis for a viable state while representation without taxation is not. Workers would be the main bloc of voters. It was workers who led the historical reforms under the slogan No taxation without representation. They appreciate the nexus between taxation and voting. Voting is their chance to have a say about how their tax dollars are spent.

What is the proper basis for voting? Once, it was gender. Or colour. Or race. And wealth. Now it is only restricted to adult citizens - or not even adult ones in Scotland. Inclusiveness is the catch-cry of our age. But inclusiveness does not necessarily craft good governance. A country can be as inclusive as it likes and still go broke. There are some these days - God help us - who want to obliterate all distinct identities so that the only quality that matters is mere humanness. This is implicit in many of the "ethics" sported by Human Rights ideologues. A person is a person is a person. As if people are just undifferentiated sludge. Some people want open borders, or no borders. Some people object to the concept of citizen per se. Why not let everyone vote who wants to vote, without distinction? If you can breathe, you can vote. Open slather democracy. When you go that far you reach the situation where you might as well have government by lot (sortition) as the ancient Athenian's did in the end.

Personally, being a landowner, I am rather nostalgic for the good old days when, at least, there was an upper house for the determination of landholders only. And why not? Why not invest an extra responsibility in people who actually own the soil of a country? I see nothing wrong with that, especially if it was coupled with the Australian dream of home-owning so that a vote in the upper house elections was within the grasp of most working people in their lifetime. Like my friend, I am not sold on the inviable sanctity of universal suffrage. But what criteria do we use to draw distinctions? Julia Gillard wanted 40% of Australian adults to have university degrees. Perhaps this could form the basis of an electoral college? Now, there's a truly terrifying vision!

Harper McAlpine Black