Sticks and Stones

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day, this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father’s died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!”

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi - from every mountainside.

Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring - when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics - will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

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They aren’t just his views. They are views espoused by millions of people across Europe. Young and old, man and woman, - and every shade in between. There are people of every race, colour, and creed who believe in the all-accommodating views of Rowan Williams. These views plague not just the Archbishop of Canterbury, but people from all walks of life. Across this great old continent, the birthplace of Enlightenment liberalism, a wave of this philosophy is growing in popularity.

This philosophy purports to be a pluralistic, multicultural creation. One that allows all people to live as they wish, practice their religion as they choose, and adhere to their societal beliefs in any country. If you do not know what this actually means, it can sound appealing.

An example from Slate illustrating why we must not subscribe to this philosophy:

Picture the life of a young Urdu-speaking woman brought to Yorkshire from Pakistan to marry a man—quite possibly a close cousin—whom she has never met. He takes her dowry, beats her, and abuses the children he forces her to bear. She is not allowed to leave the house unless in the company of a male relative and unless she is submissively covered from head to toe.

When your culture allows this to happen, when your customs, rites, and traditions infringe on the rights of any other human being (including those who claim to be of your religion, race, or country) they should not be permitted, in a free and just society. Which is exactly what we live in, and exactly what Rowan Williams threatens.

Rowan Williams’ all-embracing, non-judgemental philosophy is so dangerous not because we should place our civilisation on a pedestal as Fukuyama does. We must see the value in other civilisations, because many countries, including some in President Bush’s Axis of Evil, have glorious histories and inspiring traditions. It is so dangerous because all civilisations have deep flaws, and to indiscriminately embrace everyones’ flaws is calamitous, cruel to the subjugated, and an abandonment of real liberalism.

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I recently objected to the legislative distinction between murder and attempted murder, reasoning that since in both cases the intention was to kill, the punishment should be the same.

Well, it turns out, the British judicial system agrees. The maximum punishment for attempted murder is indeed a life sentence. While this is different from the mandatory life sentence for murder, it allows for judicial discretion, and the failure to commit murder does not necessarily lead to a lesser punishment.

So, while I was ignorant, I now have the satisfaction of knowing that my local justice system is just.

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Ameya Tripathi wrote a post about how we think of time, and how we address living within the constraints of time at his blog ‘Lucidations and Luminations’.

Time seems a most unconquerable dimension and inexhaustible topic because whenever one looks at time, they must concede the inherently myopic nature with which they view it. This can be proved by the simple fact that humanity’s own occupation of time is minute. However, the struggle to unlock the secrets of time is evident, as trillions of articles have been written about time, a dimension possibly beyond human conquest and comprehension.

An atheist like myself scorns at the idea of God being incomprehensible, being acutely aware of how that statement forms a sense of an infallible God (and a neat side-step from the explanations of evil). Equally, many a scientist indubitably would despise the idea that it was physically and mentally impossible to untangle the myriad of ideas, thoughts, conceptions, notions and hypotheses that form time.

There are many theories suggested (in vain) in order to resolve this conundrum, however, I shall only pick one, which is analogous to previous fields of research, and that is the perplexing theorem that ‘time is a human construct’. This is the simple theory that time is created in the mind to organize thoughts, sometimes coupled with the frightening ideal that every one of the trillions of moments we experience in our lifetime happen simultaneously, and our brain simply sorts them.

Click here to read the full post at Lucidations & Luminations.

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Each of us has his or her particular chauvinism with which they like to define themselves, be it their nationality, ethnicity, gender, etc., even though in the majority of cases these are determined by the arbitrariness of birth. The most fiercely religious adherents to a given sect tend to have been born and raised in that sect, while the most ardent patriots tend to be those who were born in their country. Notwithstanding the sheer illogic of these self-categorisations, they, like all forms of bigotry, are actually dangerous.

Trotsky, everyone’s favourite internationalist, wrote eloquently and lucidly on the detrimental effects of dividing the human race into arbitrary groups within arbitrary borders. Earlier, Thomas Paine remarked, somewhat throat-lump-inducingly, that he was a “citizen of the world”. And yet today’s so-called ‘liberalism’ seems to pride itself in its so-called ‘multi-culturalism’, which comes down to tolerating all different ways of life.

In it’s furthest extrapolation, this philosophy has led to condoning the atrocities perpetrated, for example, by the fundamentalist Muslim community, both in the West and in Islamic countries. Because these would-be lefties differentiate between themselves and their fellow human beings, they dismiss the stoning, hanging, rape, oppression and murder with a simple “they do it their way, we do it ours”.

No! Whatever happened to that wonderful self-evident truth, that all men were created equal? Why is an Iraqi’s life worth less than an American’s? Why did we in Britain raise such a furore when that moronic (but British) woman Gillian Gibbons was about to get forty lashes, when that is a punishment to which dozens of women, if not more, are subjected to across the Islamic world every single day? Since when did universal human rights cease to be the foremost priority of the liberal left?

It may not be true to say that the USA declared war on the Confederacy, or Britain on Poland, or the Coalition on Iraq, out of a duty to ensure that the human rights of slaves, Jews and gays, or Kurds (to name but a few) were fulfilled, but in my view the ends in these cases justify the means. It may not have been his primary objective, but Lincoln’s actions led to the emancipation of four million human beings. Similarly, had not other countries interceded in the Second World War, who knows how many more would have been slaughtered?

We in the West are very lucky to live in a liberal, free society, for which thousands gave their lives over the generations at every gradation on the long path to freedom. Anyone who imputes that an Iraqi, or a Korean, or an Iranian, does not deserve to live in such a society is, quite simply, racist. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness should be guaranteed for all human beings, and to say that fellow human beings living under oppressive regimes on the other side of the world is not our problem is both reprehensible and hypocritical.

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