Further to my post on internet-access as a right, Denis Pelli and Charles Bigelow have plotted the growth in rates of authorship since 1400:

This is the first published graph of the history of authorship. We found that the number of published authors per year increased nearly tenfold every century for six centuries. By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That's 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.

Their criterion for what counts as published authorship is being read by 100 or more people. They anticipate uinversal authorship sooner rather than later and that 'International concern for the minority who can't read may soon extend to those who can't publish'. The analogy works only half way. Having access to the technical means of authorship may well come to be regarded as an important right; but no one can have a right to some given number of readers (100-plus or whatever) without there being a corresponding requirement for others to read them (when this doesn't happen of its own accord, so to say); and it's hard to see there being widespread agreement to such a moral or legal requirement.

Would you like to look at some interesting clouds? Yeah... course you would. Particularly impressive is this one. (Via Liam.)

In a historical overview entitled 'What was communism?', Fred Halliday sets out four elements of the Marxist tradition that he sees as having contributed to the 'bloody and criminal' record of the former communist regimes. The fourth of them is this:

the lack of an independently articulated ethical dimension. True, there was a supposedly ethical dimension - whatever made for progress, crudely defined as winning power for a party leadership, and gaining power for a, mythified, working class - was defended.

However, the greatest failure of socialism over its 200 years, especially in its Bolshevik form, was the lack of an ethical dimension in regard to the rights of individuals and citizens in general, indeed in regard to all who were not part of the revolutionary elite, and the lack of any articulated and justifiable criteria applicable to the uses, legitimate and illegitimate, of violence and state coercion.

I'll say amen to that.

According to the report here, there are, stretching back through the last decade and a half, Foreign Office briefing papers saying that Britain's interests would not be served by acknowledging the Armenian genocide; our relations with Turkey are too important. A briefing from 1999 is quoted thus:

Recognising the genocide would provide no practical benefit to the UK.

Isn't that extraordinary? You might have thought that a country would derive some practical benefit from being known not to collude with historical lies.

In a column in Haaretz Robert Wistrich compares Nazi and Islamist anti-Semitism. He mentions themes common to both:

For example, the pervasive use of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with its perennial theme of the "Jewish conspiracy for world domination;" or the medieval blood-libel imported to the Muslim world from Christian Europe; or the vile stereotypical image of the Jews as a treacherous, rapacious, and bloodthirsty people engaged in a ceaseless plotting to undermine the world of Islam.

He also speaks of new tropes: Holocaust-denial, and the identification made between Israel and Nazism. And he ends by wondering why 'the Western world largely turns a blind eye to the likely genocidal consequences of such a culture of hatred' (my italics).

There are different things that might be said in response to this. One is that what Wistrich laments is part of a broader culture of apologetics that hesitates to find fault with the Muslim world, preferring to see any problems there as primarily responses to injustice. Another is that there is some tendency to treat such contemporary anti-Semitism (as, for example, in the mouth of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) as no more than windy rhetoric, not to be taken seriously. However, I think the main reason a blind eye is turned, when it is, is that the eye belongs to people who don't really believe that genocidal consequences are at all probable. Whether because Israel is too strong, or because its backing by the US is too secure, or for some other reason or combination of reasons, they think that this new anti-Semitism is most unlikely to lead to another genocide against the Jews.

It shouldn't need saying that that hypothesis is not a compelling reason for turning a blind eye to the fomenting of hatred. Nobody knows the future, non-genocidal futures can also be terrible, and we all have a moral duty to combat racist hate-mongering. (Via.)

James Harkin asks whether access to the internet is now a human right? On the way towards arriving at an answer to the question, he considers whether it is proper to deny individuals access to it for internet-related misdemeanours of various kinds. He concludes that, though internet-access is 'approaching a basic human need', it shouldn't be thought of as a human right. To think of it as one, he says, 'confuses people's access to tools and resources with the proper stuff of human rights'.

It isn't a good enough argument. There's nothing wrong, of course, with comparing access to the internet with access to other tools and resources. But some resources matter more than others - food, for example (see Article 25). It is therefore necessary to consider how important a resource the internet has become, to gathering information, communicating easily with others, and so on. It seems to me at least arguable that the apt comparison here is of internet-access with the right to education (Article 26).

Incidentally, even if access to the internet should be regarded as a human right, it wouldn't automatically follow that people mustn't be denied access for certain types of (serious) misuse of their access. It's a standard form of retributive justice to treat certain rights as having been forfeited by those guilty of crimes. (See here and here.)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, who celebrated his 100th birthday last November, has died in Paris.

"The thirst for objective knowledge," he wrote, "is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call 'primitive.'"
.....
[The] application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times.

There's an amusing piece by Joe Queenan in the Guardian's G2 today. He complains of Hollywood's tendency to make the same kinds of movie over and over again.

This isn't just a reaction against sequels; it is a reaction against films that so closely resemble other films that they seem like sequels... It is also a reaction against films where Jennifer Aniston cannot find the right guy and never suspects that her hair may have something to do with it.

As well as going through the repetitions that have begun to weary him, Queenan ends by suggesting some types of film the industry could be making instead, and on this score I have a gripe: he might have mentioned ordinary human dramas. No special effects, no breaking glass, no explosions, no parallel worlds, no weird creatures, no time travel, no ultra-violence, no endings that cancel out everything you thought you'd just seen, no clever clever postmodern subversions of meaning... Just proper people in interesting situations.

Did you know that there are people who can determine how many human beings were eaten by a pair of lions... in 1898? They do it by studying the remains of the lions. And still there are malcontents who think we have made no progress.

[I reproduce below an email to me from Jeff, with his permission - NG.]

In your post 'The human condition has been around for ages', you nicely picked up on Janet Daley's confusion. If I were a Marxist, I might even go further than mere 'confusion' and describe her statement as a typical example of a certain type of widespread ideological mystification.

But in some ways I thought your interpretation of her remarks was actually too generous. You said:

Daley surely wouldn't want to assert that the human condition, with its mix of vices and virtues, was absent from pre-capitalist or other non-capitalist social formations. Did, and do, the denizens of non-capitalist societies not experience such features of the human condition as birth and death, joy and grief, love, hatred, illness, old age, indigestion and that dream where you're trying to get away from some looming threat and your legs just won't move fast enough, if they'll move at all? What Daley means to say, I think, is not that capitalism is just the human condition, as if other types of society might not be the human condition, but that capitalism is the optimal form of society for bringing out the best in human nature.

My guess is that she really DID mean to say that capitalism just IS 'the human condition' - unless it is artificially and/or coercively interfered with. This comes out even more clearly, I think, if one quotes the key sentence from her piece without ellipses:

Properly speaking, capitalism is not a system at all (which is why most of its supporters prefer the term "free market economics"): it is just the human condition in economic form.

You talk about 'pre-capitalist or other non-capitalist social formations', but that takes for granted precisely what Daley would probably deny or find baffling - i.e., the idea that, even before 20th-century Communism, there were coherent NON-capitalist socio-economic systems that could be seen as alternatives to a capitalist market economy, rather than simply imperfect or underdeveloped forms of a capitalist market economy. As Daley says, capitalism is not just one system among other systems. It is human nature unleashed.

In this respect, the mentality I am attributing to Daley is actually very widespread in the modern world (whether or not the people who hold it could or would spell it out explicitly). And people who think this way have a powerful and respectable theoretical warrant for their perspective, whether or not they are fully aware of its origin.

What I'm talking about is what might be called everyday Smithianism. (This is largely equivalent to economic liberalism, in the proper 19th-century sense of that phrase, but to avoid distracting details I will just refer to the interlocking visions of human nature and social order laid out by Adam Smith in Books I-II of The Wealth of Nations.) Smith is actually a very complex, interesting, and illuminating social theorist - more than most Smithians, in fact - so one shouldn't oversimplify or casually dismiss him. But in the core doctrine of The Wealth of Nations he did offer one of the most powerful and systematic arguments in favour of the propositions that the market economy and market activity are 'natural' and - unless 'artificially' interfered with - also universal and transhistorical, not least because they're rooted in central and transhistorical features of human nature. With variations in detail and explicit terminology, these beliefs are at the heart of an orientation that for centuries now has been one of the most durable, pervasive, and influential theoretical and ideological perspectives in the modern world.

This Smithian perspective is important and worth taking seriously, and in certain circumstances it can even help illuminate important aspects of social and historical reality. But, like you (and Marx), I believe that, taken as a whole, it's oversimplified, incorrect, and profoundly misleading (theoretically, historically, practically, etc).

However, it is important to recognize that for a great many people (including, over the years, a lot of vulgar Marxists) this perspective and its central premises look like obvious common sense and/or the deepest and most sophisticated theory. That is, if you just clear away 'artificial' obstacles to individual action and the free expression of the defining propensities of human nature, something like 'free market economics' spontaneously emerges.

(And one doesn't have to go to the Daily Telegraph to find these underlying assumptions. This is a pervasive phenomenon, of which I will offer one small academic example. I've recently been having a small exchange with a friend of mine, an archaeologist, about the latest fashions in the economic archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, which involve yet another of the perennial resurgences of Smithianism. Nowadays a lot of archaeologists working on such issues - including the kinds of ex-Marxists or semi-post-Marxists who have gone 'post-modern' - see themselves as reacting against the kinds of positions they attribute to Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley as caricatured in the misbegotten 'formalist vs substantivist' debates in economic anthropology and economic history. Both Polanyi and Finley had appropriately pointed out that it is wildly misleading to simply equate 'economic' activity with market activity and to treat all past socio-economic formations as though they were simply imperfect or rudimentary market economies. The latest fashion is to dismiss this sensible perspective as 'primitivist', and instead to keep repeating the brilliant point that even back in the Bronze Age one can find examples of people engaged in exchanges, trucking and bartering, using money, and acting intelligently - as though any of that were the point of the argument. In short, straightforward vulgar Smithianism is once again being triumphantly rediscovered and trotted out as super-sophisticated innovative wisdom. Of course, I'm not questioning any specific archaeological analyses, which would obviously be far beyond my expertise, just the larger theoretical and ideological orientations that inform how the implications are interpreted.)

In short... does Daley really believe 'that capitalism is just the human condition'? Probably. (Jeff Weintraub)

Peter Tatchell argues that despite legitimate cultural differences, there are some universal humanitarian values. He says:

While all human beings deserve human rights, not everyone's beliefs and traditions deserve respect.

As you'd expect, I agree with the general thrust of this. I have a quibble, only, about the force of the word 'While' there. Is it meant to establish a contrastive conjunction? As in: people deserve rights, but their beliefs and traditions don't all merit respect. Maybe. This is surely also an entailment, though: because human beings have rights, some beliefs and traditions must be opposed - those, precisely, that deny human rights or make light of them.

George Monbiot notes a finding that older people are more likely to resist the evidence for global warming and for its being a serious problem. Wondering why this might be, he offers the following suggestion:

In 1973 the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed that the fear of death drives us to protect ourselves with "vital lies" or "the armour of character". We defend ourselves from the ultimate terror by engaging in immortality projects, which boost our self-esteem and grant us meaning that extends beyond death. More than 300 studies conducted in 15 countries appear to confirm Becker's thesis. When people are confronted with images or words or questions that remind them of death they respond by shoring up their worldview, rejecting people and ideas that threaten it, and increasing their striving for self-esteem.
.....
[I]s it fanciful to suppose that those who are closer to the end of their lives might react more strongly against reminders of death?

Monbiot proposes this as no more than a hypothesis 'worth investigating'. But even so I'd want to suggest, against it, an intuition pointing in the opposite direction. Everyone knows they're going to die; but people who have passed a certain age know it in a way that younger people don't. A point comes where they understand - they fully take in - that they are going to die. Knowing this, I would have thought, would make older people feel less personally threatened by dangers that are global in scope and probably lie beyond the end of their own lives. They are less likely to 'need' protective delusions. This isn't meant as an argument for not taking such dangers seriously; there are enough moral reasons for caring about the future of the human species. It is meant only as providing a reason for scepticism towards Monbiot's psychological hypothesis.

Jessica Ruston's first novel, Luxury, has just been published by Headline Review. She has written two non-fiction books, as well as screenplays and articles. Jessica lives in London with her husband where she is currently working on her second novel. In this post she discusses Shirley Conran's Lace.

Jessica Ruston on Lace by Shirley Conran

When I started to write my novel Luxury, I did a huge amount of reading and re-reading of novels in the genre that inspired me. Some I had read and enjoyed as a teenager, some were new to me, but all were what I would call blockbusters. It's something of an amorphous term; some people use it to mean simply a book which has sold in massive quantities - which (although something that most writers would aspire to) is not what I was looking for.

To me a blockbuster is, most of all, about scale. A big canvas, big characters, big storylines. Big drama, above all. Big emotions. That's what I look for in what I read, and what I aim for in what I write. Though Shirley Conran's books are often remembered more for the sex scenes (a lesbian encounter on a beach in Savages, a scandalous and imaginative moment involving a goldfish in Lace), there is much to be learned from them about that most crucial of tools in the commercial fiction writers arsenal - story.

Story is absolutely central to the success of any good book, and not just the obviously 'story-driven' ones either. There are plenty of literary writers who could do well to pay a bit more attention to creating a compelling story. I digress. Lace is no work of great literature, nor does it claim to be. But it's a damn good story. You can craft as many beautiful sentences as you like; you can create delicious imagery and complex, multi-layered themes, but what will keep your readers turning those pages over and over, is story.

And who could fail to fall for a story whose first chapter ends with the immortal line, 'All right, which one of you bitches is my mother?'? It's the best possible type of hook, one that grabs our attention and which also provides a very clear impetus for the writer. The trick of opening a book with a question, a secret, a mystery to be uncovered, might be an old one but it is one that works. And as a writer, I find that there is something immensely satisfying about the process of burying little clues and lighting the trail of little mysteries in the characters' lives as you introduce them to the reader, and then delving down deep to answer them – or sometimes leaving them unanswered, as the case may be.

Secrets and lies are evidently at the heart of Lace, but it's about so much more as well: the intense loyalty that characterizes female friendship; the destructive forces of sexual passion; the search for and the creation of family. It swishes through the decades and across continents.

And while the story is what really counts, the writing is also wonderfully full of swagger, not in a literary, highbrow way, but in a way that thrills and entices, each chapter ending on a note that tantalizes and teases, that hints at more secrets about to be revealed and sheds more light on whatever has just transpired. Following the notorious goldfish scene, the woman who has just been the subject of Prince Abdullah's attentions speaks to him.

'Your Highness,' she said, uncertainly. There hadn't been time to get on first-name terms. He blinked and looked thoughtful. 'Not Your Highness,' he said, 'Your Majesty.'

The book also contains what is surely one of the best and most bizarre lines ever. Near the end, the beautiful Lili is being courted by a shipping magnate who has sent her a bird in a gilded cage, and Serge, her lover, is driven into a fit of jealous rage; chapter 46 ends thus: 'Serge stormed into Senequier, drank a bottle of brandy, then drove wildly to Cap Camerat where he strangled the white cockatoo.'