Parsi Time!

Dotted around Mumbai, there's quite a few Parsi buildings; there's a monument to an influential member of the community just around the block from my hotel that has inscriptions in actual cuneiform, and I've stumbled across three or four Zoroastrian Fire Temples within a very few minutes walk.  A couple of miles away, on Malabar Hill, the Tower of Silence is hidden discreetly behind some trees; I'm not sure whether the kites circling above were taking advantage of the thermals, or whether they knew something that I didn't.  Entry to the Temples is forbidden to non-Parsis.  (This is, incidentally, different from Iran: we had no trouble visiting a Fire Temple in, if I remember rightly, Yazd.)  But if I can't get into Parsi places of worship, I can do the next best thing, which is to patronise their restaurants.

The Britannia is a few blocks east of my hotel, and it's recommended by Lonely Planet, so I pootled across there the other day with dinner in mind, only to discover that it's open only from noon until 4.  So I went there for lunch today.

The restaurant is in a building that would charitably be described as dilapidated.  Plaster has fallen from the ceiling in a couple of places, and the paint is peeling from it in many others.  The chandelier is the filthiest thing I have seen in a long time: I can't imagine that it was supposed to be grey when it was fitted.  On the walls, there are the flags of the UK, India, and Iran; these are close to pictures of Zoroaster, Gandhi, and the Queen, and of Bombay-as-was and Persepolis in the 1930s.  There's also a life-size carboard cutout of William and Kate.  The waiters are all elderly men in bowties.

The place is impossible not to love.

The waiter who brought me the menu was keen to talk me through it; he drew my attention to the chicken berry pulav.  I noted that people on the tables all around me seemed to be eating huge plates of zereshk polow, so I asked if that was what it was.  (It looked really good, but I had my heart set on the mutton dansak.)  Clearly, I'd given myself away as a Persephile; when I'd finished eating, and had paid the bill, the waiter invited me to stay sitting because he wanted me to meet the proprietor.

This is the proprietor.  We exchanged a few words in Persian before my memory gave out on me entirely, and then we switched to English.  (One side-effect of this is that it's brought home to me just how much I want to get that language nailed down; it really does bother me that I've not managed it yet.  I've not even had a lesson since about May.  So I shall have to get in touch with Mozghan or Nafiseh, and make a point of learning the vocabulary this time.)  He is a slightly stooping gentleman of advanced years, with a kind face and a very gentle handshake, and he told me a number of things, the credibility of which is somewhat variable.

The first was that he is 96 years old.  This I have no problem believing.  He looks well on it, though.  The second was that the world's oldest man died in Indonesia recently, aged 146.  This was reasonably widely reported, though whether I believe those reports is a different matter.  The third was that he fully intended to break that record.  I do believe that this is his intent; I cannot say whether the intent will be satisfied.  But he took such glee from the way he talked about breaking it that I really, really hope that he does manage the feat.  The fourth was that he hoped that I should live long enough to break his record, whatever that may turn out to be.  I am touched by the sentiment, but am not sure I share it.  An extra 104 years is a heck of a long time.

He told me also that he had a half-hour long meeting with the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall; since he has an A4 photo of the meeting, and is evidently very proud of it, I cannot but believe that.

But then he told me one thing that I cannot believe, but that again he delivered with amazing charm.  He couched it as a jokey sort of request: when I get back to England, or Britain, or the British Isles, or the United Kingdom ("So many names for one country!"), and the next time I see the Queen, could I tell her that she would be more than welcome to move to India to (re)take the crown there?  A new Buckingham Palace could be built, and accommodation could also be made for George, Charlotte, and Louis.

I'm not sure if this was meant as something that Indians en bloc, or the people of Mumbai, or the Parsis, or he alone wanted to see.  It seemed rude to press for more details.  I told him I'd pass on the message if I ever got the chance - though I don't think I will.  Get the chance, I mean: I will pass it on should I bump into her in Tesco.  If, however, somebody reading this does happen to meet the Queen, could they do the honours?  There's a nonagenarian restaurateur who'd be thrilled.


Oh, and I'm definitely going back there for lunch tomorrow.

.فردا, من ناهار می خورم آنجا

(I think that's roughly how to say it...)

Academics Anonymous

The launch of a new academic journal doesn't normally attract much attention; but the launch of a journal that promises anonymity to authors who need protection, who who feel that they need it, because of the nature of their ideas has caused a bit of a stir.

I don't know most of the people involved; but I know some, and others are friends of friends.  No particular alarm bells are ringing.  (Francesca Minerva's name has been mentioned.  I'm not bessie mates with her, but I do know her professionally; she's whip-smart, as well as being a nice person.  On the other hand, she does have form when it comes to pressing for anonymity, and I articulated my concerns about her position at the other place... crikey.  Five years ago.)

I also know, and know of, a fair number of people who have faced appalling treatment for holding certain intellectual positions or advancing particular arguments.  Sometimes, those are positions and arguments that appear in peer-reviewed journals; I would be curious to know how much of the treatment comes from people who've read carefully the peer-reviewed papers about which they're protesting, as opposed to people who are outraged by proxy.  (Francesca wrote what I jokingly call The Paper Of Which We Do Not Speak and faced all kinds of abuse for it - much of it, I think, by proxy, after the Daily Mail and then Glenn Beck got hold of it.)  Sometimes they aren't positions articulated in journals; several academics that I know and respect have found themselves attacked for what seems to me to be the crime of being insufficiently woke on questions of gender and the law.

Either way, more often than not, as far as I can see, this treatment has come not from universities, but from civil - no: uncivil - society.  Universities have, at least sometimes, done the right thing in sticking up for academics.  This matters, because people receiving abuse for their positions are obviously people who have not been silenced and who - presumably - count as evidence against the case for anonymity.  Still, I can see how people might think that anonymity would be desirable, at least sometimes.  And there are anecdotes about people's academic careers suffering because of their intellectual commitments.

And yet I'm unconvinced by this journal, and for a number of reasons.

In it for the Money

Something I'd never realised about my job was that I've been missing out on the chance to turn into a cash-machine.

In the grand scheme of things, academic pay isn't bad... once you get established.  The problem is that getting established isn't easy: I was 30 before I'd ever earned enough to pay income tax, and it's got harder since then to get a foot on the career ladder.  Taking into account the level of student debt that new entrants'll've accrued, which are far higher than people of my cohort would have had, and the way that they're expected to have a portfolio of publications even before getting a job, I'm glad I'm not looking for a first job now.  Still, the point stands that, once you've got a foot on the ladder, the average academic salary is comfortably more than the average salary.  All the same: a bit more income on the side would never be a bad thing, would it?

Considerablay richer than yeow.

Daniel Sokol, writing on the JME blog, thinks that it should be possible to monetise medical ethics, and offers advice on how to do so.  Well, he might be offering advice.  He might simply be looking to tell the world that he's doing nicely, and tacking an advert for his book on at the end.  It's hard to know.  Anyway: he's got some suggestions.

I'm not going to rehearse what they are point by point, because that'd be tedious.  The gist is that there're thousands of pounds to be made if you happen to make the right moves.  But one wonders quite what planet he's on with the figures he quotes, and about the character that'd be required to make the moves that he recommends.

Edwards, Fuller and the Rule of Law

Phil Edwards posted a short essay on The Conversation a few days ago in which he articulates his concerns with the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill, the latest piece of counter-terrorism legislation to be brought before Parliament.  This Bill, says Phil, was "justified" by Sajid Javid "as a way of ensuring that 'the police have the powers they need to protect us'".  Now, my hackles are already raised here because of the use of the word "justified" - Javid didn't justify the legislation thus, though he may well have attempted to do so.  To say that he justified it is to concede that his attempt was successful, and since Phil goes on to imply that the thinks that the Bill is open to serious criticism, Javid can't have justified it.  I know that a lot of lawyers use "justify" to mean "attempt to justify", or "defend", as well as... well "justify", but I do think that the distinction is important and worth maintaining.  I think that the lawyer's use of the word opens the door to a whole load of trouble.  After all, if you can't distinguish attempt from success in any enterprise, you're probably screwed.

But I digress... already.  Despite being less than a thousand words long, there's a lot crammed into Phil's piece.  Distilling the essence of the essay, I think that we'd end up with something like this:

1. There are certain "precursor" activities that, though not terroristic in themselves, might nevertheless be subject to prosecution on the basis that they are precursors to terrorist activity.
2. Laws that criminalise precursor activities may be worthy of our disapprobation in their own right.
3. Such laws may be worthy of "second order" disapprobation, on the basis that they are (likely to be) inconsistently applied.
4. This is because inconsistent application of a law is a violation of the Rule of Law.
5. An appeal to Lon Fuller can help us understand the move from (3) to (4).

I want to concentrate here on one aspect - the final one - though there'll be the original shoutout to others.  But, in the spirit of being as candid as possible about my commitments, I suppose it's worth laying out a couple of responses to the parts Phil's argument that I'm going to bracket for now.  Thus, for example, I don't have any problem in principle with the idea of precursor crimes.  There're times when it seems to me perfectly proper to intervene to prevent a risk being realised.  While it's true that there's always a chance that a person planning to commit a crime might stop short of doing so even though fully prepared, it seems reasonable for the law to be concerned about that preparation.  Now, quite how prepared one would have to be in order to be the proper object of legal concern is a further question, and I'm not sure how the law ought to draw the line here.  I'm also not sure that it necessarily has to; setting out too rigid a list of criteria might force juries to convict the plain fantasist, and to acquit the genuine danger, simply because of the way the law has been drafted.

With that said, it is likely that we ought to worry about inconsistent application.  Whether that worry can be soothed, granted the idea that it's desirable to avoid rigid criteria for prosecution and conviction is uncertain.  It might be that the price we pay for desirable flexibility is the risk of inconsistency.  Whether or not that's a price we should pay is not immediately obvious; it needs more in-depth consideration than I can give it here.  Maybe we have to pay attention to the distinction between apparent and actual inconsistency, on the understanding that instances of the former may not be instances of the latter.

One thing that would seem to make the price too high would be an erosion of the Rule of Law tout court.  A world in which nobody can be certain whether and how the law will respond to their actions is a world in which the Rule of Law seems not to obtain: rather, we'd have the Rule of Agents of Law, or Rule of Prosecutors, or Rule of Judges, or something like that.  And this is where Fuller comes in.

The Public Realm and the Public Good

This is a pair of Supertrees.  They're in Singapore, at a place called Supertree Grove, which is part of the Gardens by the Bay; and they've made me think about one of the ways we do public space in the UK.  But I need to set things up a bit first.

I'd not expected to like Singapore; or, more strongly, I'd expected not to like it.  It's got a reputation for being a bit preppy, a bit too hyper-capitalist, a bit authoritarian, a bit... well, a bit neat.  But I went there for a conference in 2010, and I loved it.  I got a sense that the reputation was accurate to an extent, but only to an extent.  For sure, it's authoritarian, and it does a good show of being very ordered.  But it's also completely bonkers.  Not that I can put my finger on exactly why, of course.  But it is.  If you've been, you'll know what I mean.  If you don't... you should go.  (Forced to elaborate, I'd say something about the juxtaposition of the hyper-modern and sleek with the rather more ramshackle; about the way that finance capital rubs shoulders with food hawker stalls; about the way that Taoist temples in Chinatown and Hindu shrines in Little India are only a few minutes walk from gleaming skyscrapers.  Bonkers, for sure - but also beautiful.)

Anyway: I got the chance to go back there at the beginning of this month, on a work thing.  I made a show of reluctance, but I did want to go back.  And while there, I wanted to go to see Supertree Grove, which wasn't there last time.  These "trees" are a bit hard to describe.  They're big.  They're a funny shape.  They look like something from the cover of a sci-fi paperback.  Part of their function is to be a component of exhaust and aircon system for the biomes.  But they're obviously much more than that; another part of their function is aesthetic.  They're home to thousands of plants, and are artworks in their own right.  They fit perfectly into the bonkers-but-beautiful theme.

As it goes dark, they're illuminated; and twice an evening, there's a 15-minute son et lumière show.  It's cheesy as hell, but there's no shame in giving in to that every now and again.  And this is the bit that made me think about public space in the UK and in Singapore.  Though you have to pay to go into the biomes, the rest of Gardens by the Bay is free - including the son et lumière.  Not only that; there's no branding.  Were it in the UK, I'm pretty sure that there'd be signs all over the place trumpeting that the show was brought to you in conjunction with SuperBank MegaCorp, and there'd be an announcement to that effect as well (as if SuperBank MegaCorp had any relevance at all to the lives of the people watching).  And in hyper-capitalist Singapore?  Nothing like that.  It's just there.  A good thing, provided pro bono publico - which may be what makes the cheesiness of it OK.

A Limited Defence of Toby Young

(Originally posted as a two-parter at the other place, here and here.  Admittedly, events have moved on a bit since yesterday, but the point about eugenics stands.)

The response to Toby Young's appointment to the new Office for Students has covered the whole range from "He's not the best person for the job" to "He's the worst person for the job".  Some of the reasons offered have to do with unsavoury comments about women; some have to do with his general lack of qualification.  Writing in The Times, Janice Turner is - I think - balanced in her assessment of his qualities, but still finds him to be (to say the least) wanting.  But the thing that's of interest to me here, on what is a bioethics-related blog, is one of the other sources of controversy: his public support for (a kind of) eugenics.  The mere fact that he could be associated with eugenics has had some people in paroxysms.  Taken more or less at random here's a tweet from Vince Cable:

Theresa May stood by Toby Young when she should be firing him. This is a man who has a record of misogyny and backs eugenics. His appointment shows poor judgement and, as May admitted, a lack of due diligence. It seems all you need to survive is be a friend of Boris Johnson #Marr

— Vince Cable (@vincecable) January 7, 2018

Note that "backs eugenics" is offered as being a reason in itself to object to Young's appointment.  Cable is not, by a long way, the only person to make this sort of comment.

Is it justified, though?  Well, the article that's generated the ire is this one, called "The Fall of the Meritocracy", published in 2015 in Quadrant.  It's a long piece, and the eugenics bit only comes about 80% of the way through, and for that reason I'll only home in on a few details.  But it is worth looking in a bit more depth at some of those details.  I think that what he's arguing is, in many ways, fairly unremarkable.  It's mistaken in important ways, too; I'll come to those in the next post.  But whatever problems there are with the piece do not flow from the use of the "E-word".  And so, to the greatest extent possible, I'll try to talk about it without mentioning eugenics.