Category Archives: Comment

2008 - again

December 20, 2008 – 12:41 am

I’ve contributed to Prospect’s review of the most overrated and underrated events of 2008 -cultural and otherwise.

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Post-racial kitsch?

November 19, 2008 – 3:04 pm

I have contributed to a Prospect symposium on the future of America under Obama. My piece, which appears under the headline ‘Post-racial kitsch’ (the phrase is Shelby Steele’s), is here.

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A reply to Marc Hauser

June 23, 2007 – 8:38 pm

I’ve been meaning to deal with this for a while.
At the beginning of June, Prospect magazine launched a blog, First Drafts. The second ever post there was a reply by the evolutionary psychologist and biologist Marc Hauser to my Guardian review of his book Moral Minds. It’s entitled ‘Did you actually read the book?‘, and [...]

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Richard Rorty: anti-foundationalism and politics

June 13, 2007 – 8:46 am

Reflecting on the legacy of the late Richard Rorty, Norm points out that there’s no necessary connection between philosophical and political commitments. In Rorty’s case, it’s entirely contingent that his (broadly anti-foundationalist) philosophical views should have lined up with his social democratic or liberal politics. After all, Norm argues, it’s possible to base a secular, [...]

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Religion and the public sphere

May 29, 2007 – 8:12 pm

Chris Dillow reminds us that secularists seek not to extirpate religious belief but to keep it out of the public sphere (a distinction that’s mostly lost on Richard Dawkins, incidentally). At least, that’s the moral I draw from his attempt to answer a “tricky question” raised by Johann Hari about the Christian roots of Gordon [...]

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The limits of necessary disrespect

December 14, 2006 – 4:34 pm

There’s a lovely piece (subscriber-only I fear) by James Wood in the New Republic on the limits of atheistic disrespect. It’s ostensibly a review of Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris, which I haven’t read, but makes some more general points about what Wood calls “public atheistic critique”. To this end, he [...]

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“Something loud and vulgar”

November 3, 2006 – 10:33 am

There’s a very famous remark of Stendhal’s, which Irving Howe discusses in Politics and the Novel. “Politics in a work of literature,” Stendhal said, “is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one’s attention.”
I’ve been thinking about [...]

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No special lobby required

July 6, 2006 – 9:49 am

In my review of Howard Jacobson’s Kalooki Nights, I suggested that the novel might be read as an elaboration of a thought about English Jews that strikes the protagonist of Jacobson’s previous book The Making of Henry—that “‘in America the Jews had taken on a version of the national identity
[and] had made the American cause [...]

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A world-class noticer

July 5, 2006 – 1:13 pm

Jonathan Raban writes acutely and amusingly about John Updike’s novel Terrorist in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books. Updike’s protagonist, Ahmad Mulloy, is an adolescent Islamist raised in the fly-blown precincts of Paterson, New Jersey. Ahmad, Raban observes, is a “very Updikean adolescent”:
painfully polite, self-conscious, intelligent, and a world-class
noticer, someone who’s [...]

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Proportionality and taboo

April 30, 2006 – 1:44 pm

I was struck by something in Ian Garrick Mason’s TLS review (unfortunately, not online) of A.C. Grayling’s book about the Allied area bombing campaigns in World War II, Among the Dead Cities.
I haven’t read Grayling’s book yet, but Mason’s gloss on Just War theory strikes me as confused, and leads to me wonder whether [...]

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