Author Archive for Kate Maltby

Without Trace

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on August 23, 2008
in History and Politics
. 1 Comment

My depression for the day is supplied by the news that Susan Eisenhower is walking out on the Republican Party. Not because she’s a big deal in herself, but because she claims it is no longer effective for constitution-guarding individualist types to spend time

trying to reinvigorate a political organization that has already consumed nearly all of its moderate “seed corn.”

You’d have to be really believe a party is beyond salvation if you don’t feel it’s even worth your staying in and fighting for your vision of its future. We don’t all have to share in Eisenhower’s sense of hopelessness about the future of the Republican party, but most of us can agree that it’s going to need to conduct an intensive intellectual debate within itself if it’s to reestablish a cogent ideological foundation. lf classical liberals in the Eisenhower tradition want to be part of that reestablishment, they have to be part of the internal debate. It’s saddening to see someone with such privileged access to the Republican machine giving up on it. Particularly as there are plenty of us who’d gladly fight the same fight, but not being grandchildren of Presidents, need leaders within the party to represent us - and it feels like Eisenhower is walking out on us as well.

It seems like the Susan Eisenhower story has been buried by the long-awaited announcement that Biden will indeed be Obama’s running mate. Hat tip to Crooks and Liars for linking it to this timely reminder of how horrified the original Eisenhower would be today.

Consolation Prizes

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on August 21, 2008
in Ladies, Links and Politics
. 4 Comments

Coates and Sullivan are both puffing this little paragraph from Dana Goldstein:

Sebelius, of course, would be the bold, unconventional choice — very Obama. But by choosing a female running mate, Obama would, unfortunately, thrust the Hillary die-hards and their ever-more marginal discontentment back into the spotlight. That said, anyone who believes that only Hillary Clinton deserves to be the first female president or vice president doesn’t deserve the designation “feminist.” So I’d relish watching the reactions to a Sebelius nod, not only because such a choice would double down on Obama’s most effective message — “change” — but because it would reveal exactly which Clinton boosters are ready to widen the lens and enthusiastically support women’s leadership as such.

Really? I’m surprised no one seems to be picking up that Obama appointing a female VP in these circumstances would mark a serious set-back for the feminist movement. It’s widely accepted that such an appointment would constitute an attempt by Obama to apologize to feminists for beating Hilary to the job that really matters. Goldstein herself draws her argument from the belief that it would “double down” on Obama’s message of change, i.e. remind everyone that he won’t let those nasty old white men keep all the jobs. So surely the great American public is quite capable of drawing the same inference - and then assuming en masse that Sebelius can dismissed as merely a token floozy.

While the VP’s job has long been little more than helping the candidate cover some demographic bases, it would be sad to see such a blatant confirmation of it. And the more superficial the VP job becomes, the less of a feminist triumph is it to see a woman in the post. Just as affirmative action inspires resentment, so parachuting a woman in to burnish Obama’s feminist credentials is only going to inspire the Rush Limbaughs of this world to claim that women are now doing down men. It might even give the naive cause to think that 2008 constituted a successful year for women in public life, instead of the year that exposed the endemic misogyny underlying media responses to strong women. So Goldstein is wrong to claim that feminists should be supporting “female leadership as such”. We want to see more women taken seriously on their own merits, not because they fulfill quotas. And we’d like to see it in jobs that actually count.

While we devotin’ full time to floatin’

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on August 13, 2008
in Media, Navel Gazing and Technology
. 0 Comments

I’m still buzzing from Andrew Sullivan citing my Transhumanist post in the Daily Dish. Of course, my favourite bit of the Simon Barnes piece I’d originally sparked off was his finale:

It is required behaviour at such a point for the journalist to give all the answers to the world’s problems in a couple of pithy phrases and then go to the pub.

So by extension, the blogger is luckier - it is required behaviour for the blogger to collate a few sources, briefly sketch out the complexity of all the world’s problems, and then, leaving one’s readers to go to puzzle out their own solutions, to go to the pub.

So just for Andrew Sullivan, the King of Bloggers, here’s my thank you present - my vision of the future of Olympic advertising:

And of course such camaraderie towards Sullivan would never be an attempt unsubtly to curry favour. It’s just that us conservative classical liberal Christian homosexual-agenda-promoting cautiously-Obamacon Oxonian Brits in America had better stick together.

Without Limits

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on August 9, 2008
in Arts, Extemporanea and If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention
. 7 Comments

Just as TKB and The Reactionary Epicurean are disputing the level of barbarism entailed in the Olympics, I come upon this gem from Simon Barnes at The Times. When it comes to the subject of doping, TKB takes The Economist as her crib to applaud gene doping, while the Transhumanist Epicurean agrees that gene doping consists of using our “God-given Reason (a part of our Nature) to tweak our God-given Bodies (another part of our Nature)”. Where Barnes goes further than them, however, is in his presentation of the arguments for allowing even those performance enhancers that will cause long term damage to the athlete’s health and life expectancy: “Normally, someone who knowingly does something dangerous in order to achieve great things is regarded as a bit of a hero…so isn’t someone who knowingly takes a dangerous drug to win a gold medal for his country also a hero?” I would agree with his logic if it weren’t for the nagging feeling that the real beauty of the Olympics is that, whatever we pretend, it is not a celebration of the collectivist spirit. It’s about the triumph of the individual will, whatever coloured labels those individuals stick on their backs in return for a bit of cash and support. Indeed, it’s the athletes whose lives do become enslaved to the good of the nation whose stories most sully the reputation of the Games.

Nonetheless, one can be sympathetic to Barnes’ point on individualistic grounds. The achievement of excellence at extreme personal cost is truly heroic according to our traditional conceptions, even when it entails no shared benefits beyond the agent. That’s why Achilles is the foundational hero of the West, and even Macbeth compels our sympathy. Pushing your body to the limit has always been par for the course for athletes - hence the high injury rate - and no one has ever denied that overly building up one aspect of your physique will actually damage your life expectancy. Just look what happens when supermen retire and run to seed. More seriously, we allow people to make their own choice between health and buzz when we let them buy cigarettes and alcohol (yes, you can sell yourself into slavery). But where Simon Barnes is at his most compelling is in his very first paragraph. ‘The worst decision sport ever made was to start testing for drugs. Once they began to catch the cheats, all hell broke out and we began to lose the faith…Now the world is full of people declaring that they don’t care who wins what at the Olympic Games, because “they’re all on something”.’ Constant obsession about drugs takes the magic out of sport. The Tour de France, after all, was created precisely as a superhuman contest that no one was ever expected to endure without boosting their performance artificially - in the good old days, long before doping tests, the athletes were all known to be on cocaine, but people still wondered at and lauded them, because their achievements were so unnatural as to be miraculous. Once we accept that we can’t stop people doping, the less active 99.99% of us might just be content to sit back in our armchairs and watch the sheer spectacle of athletes transgressing the frail limitations of this too too solid flesh.

Which leads me back to the real point at issue between TKB and the Epicurean. For TKB, the Olympics represents “a collective unwillingness to abandon the mud from which we rose”. But her opponent counters that “they represent striving and excellence, not wallowing in our filth. Tacky, contrived, commercialized striving to be sure; but striving nonetheless.” This is precisely why the Olympics is a mark of a civilised world. I say this grudgingly - as a hopelessly nerdy, library-inhabiting child, I watched the sporty girls with a mixture of disdain and envy, asking myself why anyone could take pride in success on the netball field when reading Milton was evidently of far more practical value, because it was a real tool for understanding the world and living the examined life. Yet it’s precisely in celebrating skills without immediate practical value that we demonstrate that we have developed beyond “pagan exhibitions of all that fascinates the reptilian brain within us”. The practical benefits that sports training can bring - teamwork, leadership, confidence and so forth - can only be discovered and harnessed after we’ve historically developed such training for its own sake, as any civilised society should the arts. This isn’t entirely modernistic either, for modernism has always enshrined a cult of utility. To the modernist, human experience only makes sense if there is a practical, evolutionary explanation for it. We no longer live in the pagan world in which one’s skill at the javelin directly correlates to the amount of food on one’s plate, although the biological determinists would surely have us return there. So at the Olympic level, such skills serve a purely aesthetic celebration. And if that aesthetic is one of transgressing humanity, then the Olympics must be an essentially transhumanist celebration.

Orwell uncovered, day by day

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on August 9, 2008
in Extemporanea
. 1 Comment

Welcome to the blogosphere, George Orwell! Just a quick note to remind of all you out there to keep an eye on http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com to read all that remains of George Orwell’s personal and political diaries, day by day. In the words of the site’s founders: 

‘The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. From 9th August 2008, Orwell’s domestic and political diaries (from 9th August 1938 until October 1942) will be posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were written.’

The entries start from today, thanks to Orwell’s executors, A.M.Heath. Here’s a question: if Orwell were alive and actively blogging today, who would be on his blogroll?

Chairman Dave’s Little Black Book

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on August 8, 2008
in Across The Pond, Extemporanea, Ladies, Politics and Social Theory
. 2 Comments

Anyone who cares about social decay should be heartened to see Michael Gove, the British Conservative Shadow Secretary for Children, Schools and Families speak out against the endemic pornographication of the female body in “Lads Mags” and “men’s magazines”. David Cameron, the Conservative leader, has dropped in a fair few references to our culture of sexualisation in his time as well. Being a Tory, he hasn’t even made the mistake of advocating censorship, but rather throws around concepts of “commercial responsibility” and “social awareness”.

It’s a shame, then, that “commercial responsibility” hasn’t started a little closer to home. Samantha Cameron, David’s elegant wife, is Creative Director of Smythson of Bond Street, London’s most exclusive stationary shop. It’s not a haunt I usually inhabit, but my sister has expensive tastes, so I recently trotted along, as firmly instructed by a birthday wishlist, to rub shoulders with the Duchesses and design divas gasping over bijou party invitations and business cards. Imagine my shock, in such illustrious surroundings, on seeing a display stack of a very special kind of gentleman’s notebook. For a mere £40.00, you can treat the man of your choice to a little black telephone book divided into three sections: Redheads (A-Z), Brunettes (A-Z), Blondes (A-Z). The shop assistant tells me that it’s one of Smythson’s most popular sellers. Now, I’m all for allowing politician’s spouses to retain an apolitical role, with an independent life. Samantha Cameron has never tried to make herself a public figure. But I’m sure David would agree with me that it’s a sad world in which a man’s record in casual sexual encounters remains a mark of such admirable prowess that it’s worth keeping a record in a beautifully bound Smythson quality leather product.

Sticking to one’s principles

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on July 23, 2008
in Across The Pond and Politics
. 0 Comments

This is a particularly ridiculous newsflash from Number 10 Downing Street, that I just had to share:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7520401.stm

If you’re not a YPU nerd, look away now

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on July 21, 2008
in Ladies, Navel Gazing and Yale
. 15 Comments

So I’m a bit late to join the “women in academia or the YPU” party (some of us have real summer jobs, you know) but as a wannabe academic-cum-YPU hack I just couldn’t restrain myself. Dara’s right to argue that we should look at “success as the field defines it”, which is why I’m surprised that no one of my fellow “Union-theory” obsessives has mentioned the political elephant on the room : that according to the obscure nature of Yale Political Union, “Union” posts are actually fairly low-status, as opposed to “Party” office. With the strength of the Parties comes an assumption that “real leadership”, charismatic and intellectual, comes through Party Chairmanship - this is seen as glamorous leadership compared to the administrative responsibilities of the elected Executive Board. So on positions occupied, the YPU no longer seems such a women-friendly place after all, when you notice that for the forthcoming semester, only 1 out of 7 Party Chairmen will be a woman (Jane Hu, of the Progs, the smallest party). 

Within the YPU, the charismatic leadership to which the many aspiring politicos are taught to aspire is explicitly described as masculine.  I’ve never forgotten the very semester I arrived, hearing a dear and intelligent friend state that “leadership has two main areas - administrative management, and inspiration of other people to follow a vision. Obviously, a woman can do the first, but not the second.” This past semester, the very same friend told me “when given the option, a Fall Chairman should always be a man, because he has to inspire new recruits to join his party, and obviously a man in charge will always be more inspirational than a woman”. (N.B. It’s not who you think it is, and I’m not going to tell you).

Of course, if you’re still reading this you’re enough of YPUer to know that the cult of Chairmanship is more powerful in the POR than in any other party. But I’ve heard similar sentiment in other parties (the IP, Tories and POL) - and from members of AdComm explaining that the masculine / feminine dichotomy is  necessary to the very fabric of the YPU. 

The argument goes like this: the YPU is defined by conflict between Parties - at its best, this is competition for intellectual supremacy which makes us all fiercer thinkers. The members of EBoard have to co-ordinate these components and weave together the different parts to make a harmony. Men are naturally more aggressive and confrontational, women more harmonious…Male Party Chairman, Female EBoard = great.  Whether or not we actually buy into gendered conventions of “warrior” or “peacemaker”, as long as others around us in the YPU do, they will be part of the parlance that defines our YPU careers - even if there’s still a status inequality given that leading one’s close comrades is widely considered more significant than leading the Union.

So where does this relate to larger claims about affirmative action and academia? Well, certainly the analogy of warrior and peacemaker holds true for academia. A Yalie who graduated a few years ago and is now a PhD student in philosophy told me recently that “Academia at the highest levels is a blood sport, it really is. It’s all about whose argument you savaged last and whether anyone else has been able to tear a strip off your latest publication. When I meet academics socially, who don’t know my work, and tell them that I want to go into the field, they tell me ‘but you seem like a sweet girl, you’re probably too nice for this’.” In the other side of the field, a Yale academic who served her time on ExComm told me “they’re always trying to get women onto the pastoral and disciplinary committees, because we’re apparently more student friendly”. Anecdotal evidence, but in both cases stemming from years of experience at the hard end.

So for both our microcosm of the YPU and the only larger world that really matters, academia, affirmative action doesn’t stand a chance of succeeding unless it adapts to the subtle discourses that define and redefine success. And as both fields success is chiefly measured by the approbation of the community as a whole, the discourse has to change before anything approaching collective action, conscious or subconscious, can help anyone. Let’s face it, if communities frequently went in for affirmative action in combating their own stereotypes, affirmative action of the tangible kind we usually refer to would never have been proposed in the first place.

And because this is a late night (British time) rant to friends, rather than a structured blog post for public consumption, on that inelegant note I’m going to bed.

Shame, with Love at strife.

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on July 13, 2008
in Ladies, Media and Social Theory
. 4 Comments

Helen continues her advance on the heights of literary society by getting paid to blog ’bout ha’ obsessions. Shame culture, as ever, is on the agenda, as today Ms Rittelmeyer applauds the cashier who told a teenager trying to buy a pregnancy test that “you shouldn’t be having sex in the first place”. Helen has long championed “shame culture” over “guilt culture”, a distinction known to popular parlance ever since ER Dodds identified Homeric society as a “shame society” (even if JT Hooker’s analysis of Iliad threatened to prove him wrong). According to Helen, in a moral society, there should be no “freedom from shame”. The problem is that the example she has picked to illustrate it, on further examination, actually illustrates shame failing to police the teenage sexual activity that Helen so deplores.

According to Helen’s argument, teenagers should cease a behavioural practice simply because other people will express disapproval (which is why Benedict, in her groundbreaking study of shame culture in Japan, defined it as fundamentally collectivist social trait).  Letting aside the obvious protests about the tyranny of the majority, this doesn’t involve the girl in question making a change to her own moral philosophy, just going to enough lengths not to get caught. What the individual does in private doesn’t matter, unless the consequences of that action ever become public and identifiable. This is fine if you think the problem can be solved by the teenager using enough contraception to ensure she never has to face another check out clerk. That’s not what the clerk herself had in mind, however, given that she was keen to dictate her customer that “you shouldn’t be having sex at all”. 

The social behaviour actually enforced by the clerk was: Buying pregnancy tests is shameful. Therefore, don’t buy pregnancy tests at all. 

This, of course, is no help to anyone. Whatever your views on abortion, it’s clear that the earlier a pregnancy is discovered, the better. 

We now live in a society where sex has been largely divorced from its visible consequences. So to use shame culture to stop someone having extramarital sex, you have to ensure that shame is inherent in the very moment of the sexual act. You can’t rely on pregnancy itself being shameful. Sexual acts only take place in the presence of people who approve of them. So the only way in which a disapproving spectator can be philosophically introduced is through belief in God. It is possible to teach people to feel shame in the sight of God. 

And isn’t that what we Christian cultures just call guilt?

Ghosts of Obamas past

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on June 21, 2008
in Across The Pond and Politics
. 2 Comments

I know my duty to my American friends. Name: Kate, Identity: British, Sole purpose: provide olde worlde curios, with a smile and charm (much like a trained monkey dressed as a court jester - that’s what they call being “Greece to America’s Rome”) reminding the audience of the quainter side of the Atlantic. So you can expect me to keep you updated with titbits from the motherland.

Some melodrama almost on a par with student politics. I don’t know if an American congressman or senator has ever resigned his seat because he refused to be a member of a House that could pass a particularly piece of legislation. I’d be interested if anyone could tell me. Yet David Davis, the senior Conservative MP responsible for all internal policy, recently stormed out onto the steps of the Houses of Parliament, and announced that he would be calling a special election in his constituency as a protest against the Labour Government’s bill to increase to 42 days the time terror suspects could be held without access to a lawyer. (Think of it as our own little Patriot Act). It’s a real mark of the realignment of British political ground, as Left becomes authoritarian and the Right more concerned with conserving traditions of privacy and liberty. The government appears to have the support of the public on this issue if nothing else, but didn’t have that of its own MPs who had actually studied the legislation - 36 out of 351 of its MPs voted against its own bill, which meant that it had to rely on promises of pork to the nine Northern Irish MPs from the minority Irish party the DUP. Result? Labour won the vote by exactly nine votes. By forcing a special election, Davis wants to create a media storm over the issue big enough to educate the public on the issue, and, he hopes, change public opinion. The election campaign will be the public debate, the special election will be fought on that one issue alone, and the verdict of the polls will be public statement on the issue.

Obviously, Davis’ vision of a glorious triumph isn’t quite working out as he expected. First, he comes from a fairly solidly Conservative area, so no local Conservative victory can really be spun as a statement of support on this one single issue. Secondly, it’s clearly not representative of the nation as a whole. Thirdly, Labour won’t play ball, and are refusing to put up an opposing candidate.

The really sad thing is how incapable the British public now seems of believing that any politician could act on a point of principle. Leading newspapers and Internet mutterings all suggest that Davis must be in the throws of a nervous breakdown, trying to steal the limelight from his party leader, or in someone’s pay. The cause is a phenomenon that ought to worry Democrats. Ten years ago,  a messianic forty-something man with a young family and more brash wife, the centre of a Cult of Personality whose fervent Christian faith found its expression in calls for social justice, who claimed to be on the Centre-Left but was such a media baby that one was never sure what was spin and what was substance, was swept to power in a wave of national adulation. He vowed that his administration would be the breath of fresh air in the capital city that banished the political elite’s casual corruption and instead would be “whiter than white”. Yet ten years later, the man who made us believe that conviction politicians existed has turned the public into a population to whom the word politician means “corrupt liar”. It’s not just Iraq that has baptised the Prime Minister “Bliar” - it’s still entirely plausible to believe, as I do, that Blair searched his soul and did what he believed right - but the constant allegations that donations to the Labour Party resulted in peerages, contracts and even legal exemptions being granted to the donors.

There is no country now more convinced than America that conviction-politicians can be saints. On the morning of Blair’s victory in 1997 there was no country more convinced than Britain. If Rezko/Auchi proves to be the tip of the iceberg of funding scandals, or if, as is more likely, it is beyond Obama’s powers to do much for the lives of African-Americans in office, the disillusionment will give rise to a cynical backlash not just against Obama, but against all in public life. And that level of public bitterness ain’t fun for anybody.