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This comes from my weekly Pedant column, about language. It appears in a section of The Times that isn't online, so I'll reproduce the column here from time to time.
Vincent Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, wrote last week of the Government’s aim to save money by making services more efficient. He commented: “This begs the question why, if efficiency could be so improved, wasn’t it done earlier?”
Meanwhile Chris Huhne, the party’s Home Affairs spokesman, commented on the rise in detections of illegal attempts to enter the UK. This, he said, “begs the question how many illegal immigrants were slipping through the net before”.
It is politicians’ business to insinuate that their opponents’ record is poor, but the Lib Dem frontbenchers are misusing a useful phrase. To “beg the question” does not mean to raise or prompt the question. It means to assume in your premises the truth of your conclusion.
For a nice example of question-begging, consider Sarah Palin, the hapless former US Republican vice-presidential nominee. As a candidate for Governor of Alaska in 2006, Ms Palin was asked whether she supported the teaching of Creationism alongside evolution in school science classes. She replied: “Don’t be afraid of information and let kids debate both sides.”
The notion that Creationism is “information rather than religious dogma is exactly what scientists dispute. Ms Palin had presupposed her conclusion, that Creationism had a place in school science, in her premise.
Question-begging arguments crop up frequently in public life. It becomes more difficult to expose them when the phrase “begging the question” is in wide misuse. In its proper sense it has no exact synonym (though “circular argument” comes close) and is worth retaining.
Why is the phrase “begging the question” so often misused by politicians in particular? I have a theory. To say that a question is raised or prompted suggests that it is an open question, and politicians do not in the main wish to imply that they have not yet come to a view. By saying that something begs the question, they hope to signal with laboured irony that they do not expect their opponent to be able to give a plausible answer. This is not the mordant rhetorical technique that they assume, however, and it is past time that “begging the question” other than in its technical sense should be retired from public debate.
I went on Radio 3's Nightwaves programme earlier this week, when the subject was the age of austerity - whether it's something we should celebrate or reluctantly get used to. Here are one or two points that I thought of (most of them, as usually happens, just as the programme had ended).
I see no merit in austerity for its own sake, but nor are acquisitiveness and consumption ("getting and spending", in Wordsworth's matchless phrase) valuable ends. The virtue of an affluent society is the ability it gives us to choose the good for ourselves. If you want a contemplative and simple life, you can adopt it. I value the environment and acknowledge the importance of mitigating climate change, but that is an economic task rather than a spiritual challenge.
The relation between living standards and pollution is much debated. There is a plausible economic case that it's like an inverted U-curve on a chart: pollution rises with growth in a developing country’s average per capita income, but then turns and declines as that country reaches a certain level of wealth. (This is an application of the Kuznets curve, which poses the same relationship between a poor country’s average per capita income and inequality in the distribution of income.) If we're heading for a long period of austerity, then environmental policies are unlikely to win support.
There was a lot wrong with the old social democratic, Keynesian consensus that Mrs Thatcher overturned. It couldn't cope with the persistent problem of the inflationary consequences of demand management. But it did embody an important principle: where there is sustained economic growth, liberal reforms such as a narrowing of inequality and the eradication of racial discrimination are easier to achieve. If you want an example of an austere, stable agrarian society, Vichy France is a fairly accurate model.
"After the Taliban took power in 1996, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, denounced the group as an affront to Islam, and the killing of 11 Iranian diplomats and truck drivers in 1998 almost led to an Iranian invasion of Afghanistan...." - Neil Clark, "Our Ally in the War on Terror", The First Post, 13 July 2009
"After the Taliban took power in 1996, Iran's supreme leader denounced the group as an affront to Islam, and the killing of eleven Iranian diplomats and truck drivers in 1998 almost triggered a military conflict." - Council on Foreign Relations' backgrounder, "Iran and the Future of Afghanistan", 30 March 2009
I recently started a weekly column called "The Pedant" in the newspaper. It deals mainly with language. Here's this week's offering.
The Plain English Campaign gained publicity last week for mocking an execrable 102-word sentence contained in a police document. The campaign chose a deserving target but was being imprecise in calling it jargon. Jargon is a term applied to different types of writing. Most of the offending sentence comprised phrases that were pretentious, clumsy and obscure: for example, “the amorphous challenges of managing cross force harms”. Language like that has come to be known as jargon, whereas Fowler’s Modern English Usage (I use the 1965 second edition, not its unworthy successor) prefers to reserve the term for specialised vocabulary. The distinction is worth retaining, for a reason that the Plain English Campaign unintentionally demonstrates.
The campaign lobbies for clear English but is so zealous that it attacks technical as well as impenetrable language. That is worse than a tactical error, for it demonstrates a populist suspicion of ideas. Linguistic precision is an important cause; anti-intellectualism is a pernicious one. Every scholarly discipline or profession has a technical vocabulary. So far from obscuring meaning, technical language makes sense to practitioners and aids understanding. It is a type of shorthand.
The Plain English Campaign once loudly derided a reference by Gordon Brown, then Shadow Chancellor, to “endogenous growth theory”. Never mind what this is: the phrase is not gobbledegook but a recognisable term in discussions about economics. (A journalist who heard the speech tells me that Mr Brown also prefaced his use of the phrase by remarking that it was not the stuff of sound bites. In short, it was a deliberately ironic reference.)
There is nothing wrong with jargon in this sense. In any discipline, from particle physics to musicology, technical terms will be obscure to those without training. It is a demanding skill to explain complex subjects to laymen, but it is not the same task as talking to other specialists.
Unfortunately, the Plain English Campaign is prone to incomprehension. Another of its targets a few years ago was Donald Rumsfeld, then US Defence Secretary, for a long disquisition on known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns in military planning. The joke was on the campaigners. Rumsfeld’s analysis was precise and coherent. Just as not all jargon is bad, plain-speaking is not a synonym for philistinism.
UPDATE: I'd forgotten that The Guardian published in 2003 a good leading article on Rumsfeld's supposedly convoluted remarks:
"This is indeed a complex, almost Kantian, thought. It needs a little concentration to follow it. Yet it is anything but foolish. It is also perfectly clear. It is expressed in admirably plain English, with not a word of jargon or gobbledygook in it. A Cambridge literary theorist, US Air Force war gamer or Treasury tax law draftsman would be sacked for producing such a useful thought so simply expressed in good Anglo-Saxon words. So let Rummy be. The Plain English Campaign should find itself a more deserving target for its misplaced mockery."
I defended Boris Johnson's views on hedge funds last week. Will Hutton in The Observer takes a very different view. He argues:
"But hedge funds do represent the unlovely priorities of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. They were an important factor behind today's financial crisis. Brutally, it would matter scarcely a jot if the hedge-fund industry shrank to the size it was a decade ago. It might even promote a less casino-oriented financial system. Instead, I want to hear politicians talk about great innovations and inventions. I want them to fight for what counts - the clusters of wealth-generating excellence in medicine, health, biotechnology, engineering, our great manufacturing companies, creative industries, and business service companies. Wouldn't it be fantastic if instead of pleading for hedge funds on Radio 4's Today programme as Johnson did last week, he went into bat for, say, more resources for our financially pressed but brilliant universities and research teams. But the country's Brian Greenwoods don't invest the time and effort in lobbying, funding political parties or turning up at agreeable lunches. They just get on with saving lives."
Now, I have a lot of respect for Hutton's writings. On some economic issues, notably the euro, I think he talks more sense than almost anyone else in the British press. (Modesty prevents me from identifying the members of the British press whose judgements are more consistently reliable.) But the paragraph I've just quoted is a fantastic non sequitur.
I'm in favour of universities and all the other things that Hutton mentions. I don't consider, either, that the size of the hedge fund sector is of crucial importance to the economy. But so what? Hedge funds are a useful part of a sector that is crucial to a modern economy, namely financial markets, whose function is to put together those who have capital with those who can use it productively. Hedge funds make that process more efficient by, among other things, being able to take short positions in companies whose managements they believe are underperforming. It is a high-risk strategy, because your potential losses in a short position are unlimited. (If you take a long position, i.e. you buy the stock of a company, your potential losses are bounded by the fact that the stock price can't fall below zero. I talked more about this in an article here.)
Hedge funds can pose a risk to financial stability by the amount of leverage they take on, which is why regulation is needed. (There's a widespread misconception on this, though. Hedge funds are not regulated, but hedge fund managers operating in the UK have to be registered with the Financial Services Authority.) There is a test case: a US hedge fund with the awesomely inappropriate name of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) failed in 1998 and was rescued by an injection of capital from eight banks, co-ordinated by the Federal Reserve.
(LTCM's trading strategy was to buy bonds that were not widely traded and wait for their price to converge on those of more liquid bond issues with otherwise similar characteristics. The Fund failed because liquidity in the market suddenly vanished when Russia defaulted on its sovereign debt. There was nothing essentially unsound with the fund's trading; it just couldn't sell the securities when it needed to, and because it had large amounts of leverage it posed a systemic risk. This in a much bigger way is the problem with the banking system now. The banks hold securities for which there is no market. Government needs to intervene to provide that liquidity, just as it's the proper role of government to stabilise the business cycle through monetary and fiscal policy.)
But that's about it so far as the indictment goes. It's nonsense to claim, as Hutton does, that hedge funds were an important factor behind today's crisis. Hedge funds have almost nothing to do with it. This is a big and somewhat esoteric subject, which I'll write about at greater length in due course. But Hutton cites the failures of two Bear Stearns hedge funds and three BNP Paribas hedge funds in 2007 as the triggers for the freezing up of the interbank lending market.
He's wrong. The failures of these funds would have been (as most market participants expected at the time) restricted, in the damage they caused, to the parent companies and the investors, but for one factor. The banks themselves - the most regulated part of the financial system - were pursuing yield-based trading strategies. A more likely trigger for the credit crunch was the failure of IKB, a German industrial bank that held around €14 billion of structured credits in off balance sheet vehicles. This was almost a replica of the problems at Bear Stearns, with low asset quality and tightening credit limits. But it was in the banking sector. Banks ought never to have got involved in this business.
There is, incidentally, a serious factual error in Hutton's piece. Hutton says tangentially: "Along the way, Bernie Madoff's hedge funds were shown to be a $50bn rip-off."
Madoff did not run hedge funds. He ran investment advisory services. This may seem a pedantic point, but it it isn't. It has a large bearing on how Madoff's crooked operations escaped detection for so long. If you run a hedge fund, then the securities in your portfolio are held by external custodians. If you do not in reality hold those securities, then auditors will find out by checking with the custodian. If you run an investment advisory business, then you are managing clients' accounts within the firm. Hutton has completely misunderstood the nature of Madoff's business, in order to try to link it with hedge funds. To put it no higher, that's an error of fact rather than interpretation, and The Observer ought to correct it.
I've received a letter from Ziba Norman, Director of the Transatlantic and Caucasus Studies Institute, an educational charity whose work I support. With her permission, I'm reproducing it here, to publicise an important case in the defence of free speech. There is coverage also in Le Monde and RFE/RL.
I would be very grateful if you could draw attention to the plight of two of our very brave blogger friends in Azerbaijan, Emin Milli and Adnan Haji-zade (btw, I know Emin personally) who have been recently remanded in custody and are currently awaiting trial. We have people in Baku who tell us that their lawyer has thus far been denied access to them and no one else has seen them to determine whether they are being well treated.
What we do know is that they were seated in a public restaurant in Baku when approached by two men in plain clothes. The men opened a menacing discussion with them asking why Emin and Adnan had been blogging on internet forums on subjects such as liberty and democratisation. By way of warning them against future activity they beat them in the restaurant, apparently there were a number of witnesses.
Emin and Adnan eventually left the restaurant and reported the incident to the police, it was at this stage that they themselves were arrested for hooliganism. As far as we are aware the two men who beat Emin and Adnan are not being pursued in any way by the Azeri authorities.
At this point Emin and Adnan, who have been been charged with the crime of hooliganism, which carries a maximum prison term of 5 years, could be be awaiting trial for up to two months.
A number of international organisations have made representations on their behalf. What has happened to Emin and Adnan has been reported in certain segments of the press, but unfortunately not widely enough. Needless to say we are extremely concerned about their exact whereabouts and state of health.
Most importantly we need to maintain a media presence on this issue, so if you can raise awareness on your site and/ or perhaps pass this information on to colleagues at The Times I'd be very, very grateful. For us it was personally upsetting to receive this news, especially as it shows a trend towards the hard line approach being taken by governments in the region in the aftermath of the enormous demonstrations in Iran.
The Guardian is a great newspaper, whose values I share; but sometimes I wonder whether we speak the same language. An article in the paper last week by John Dugdale reported a claim that Ernest Hemingway's name had appeared in the 1940s on a list of KGB agents in the US. I hadn't heard this before, but the historians who advance it, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes (with Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer), have done remarkable work over many years in documenting Soviet operations in the US during the early Cold War.
Here is Dugdale's conclusion:
"Revelations made in recent years have not been kind to some of the writers and artists who made their reputations in the Spanish civil war. George Orwell's list of public figures who were crypto-communists, prepared for a Foreign Office propaganda arm in 1949, sullied his saintly image when it was published six years ago. Research in Soviet archives led Antony Beevor to call Andre Malraux a "mythomaniac". Robert Capa has been accused of faking the best-known photo of that conflict. The virulent hatred of Arabs of Martha Gellhorn - Hemingway's third wife, who covered the civil war with him - has been exposed. And now it's the turn of Hemingway himself, the biggest name of all, to lose some of his lustre."
It should be immediately clear that one person in that list of disrepute doesn't belong there: George Orwell. Dugdale does not appear to be immersed in the politics of the late 1940s, and I modestly direct him for information to my dated book Anti-Totalitarianism:
"The announcement in the summer of 1947 of Marshall Aid for the reconstruction of Western Europe, coupled with the Soviet Union’s refusal to take part itself in the scheme, undercut the parliamentary opposition to Bevin’s foreign policies. Opposition was confined to a tiny caucus of Labour MPs, whom the party expelled from membership or otherwise withheld support from.
"One of these, John Platts-Mills QC, died only in 2001, aged 95. He was so shameless an apologist for Stalin that even an obsequious Guardian obituary could scarcely overlook his record. It compromised by imputing to him values lodged somewhere in his psyche that were somehow absent from his political record: ‘He seemed to visit and support every Warsaw Pact country – though, as a true freedom-lover at heart, he could not accept the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary.'"
Platts-Mills was one of the people on Orwell's list; and Orwell was right about him and many others besides. The Foreign Office official who requested Orwell's help, Celia Kirwan, sought to distribute pro-democracy material in countries threatened by the Soviet Union. Reasonably, she wanted the material to be written by people who weren't covert Soviet sympathisers. When you consider that the Foreign Office's China specialist at the time was Guy Burgess, you can understand her anxiety on this point.
Orwell provided his obervations not to some shadowy espionage agency but to a branch of the diplomatic service that was doing important work. It's extraordinary that there are some quarters where patriotic service in defence of democratic values is considered morally suspect, and it's dispiriting that the Guardian should be among them.
Boris Johnson argues: "I don't say this in any particular spirit of perverse wanting to stick up for bankers, but it is very important that we defend an industry that generates huge sums of tax for this country."
The sector Johnson is defending is hedge funds, which he says were not the culprits in the financial crisis. I have a column in the paper today agreeing with him:
"In the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, hedge funds are an easy target but no villain. The collapse of the financial system was engineered not by unregulated hedge funds but by the most regulated part of the system, the commercial banks, through irresponsible risk-taking and lending. Giving new life to cliché, the EU proposals seek to close the stable door after the horse has bolted, but succeed merely in kicking the farmyard cat in frustration."
Daniel Finkelstein makes an interesting point about the forthcoming by-election in Norwich North, which Labour is obviously struggling to retain and where the Greens have a strong presence:
"If things do trundle on and the Conservatives win the seat, as they are favourites to do at the moment, then the Greens should look back on this as a huge missed opportunity. They are perfectly placed for an insurgent campaign. They are credible challengers with a local base and there is a real hunger for an alternative. The Greens could have won. Indeed, they actually still could.
"The problem is that their candidate - Rupert Read - while articulate, pleasant, and local, is also quite hardcore. They could - probably should - have selected a candidate who is less of an ideologue."
That's my assessment too. After the Madrid bombings, Read wrote this letter to The Independent (16 March 2004):
"If you live by the sword, then your innocent citizens (though luckily not you) may well die by the sword. Aznar, Blair and Bush should choke on their words of condolence to the victims in Madrid. It is their atrocious criminal violence that has led to this counter-atrocity."
Now, I think this gets the moral responsibility for the murder of 191 civilians exactly the wrong way round. But Read's view is one that all my readers will have heard sometime, if not necessarily in such vitriolic terms. What even the advocates of that position may find surprising is the clarity with which Read discerns direct responsibility on the part of government policy for specific cases of human suffering. In another letter to The Independent, 23 June 1999, Read wrote:
"British higher education is in a crisis that only increased funding can help resolve. Academics' workloads have gone up while salaries have been cut. Class sizes have increased enormously. This "Labour" government continues to cut the budgets of universities each year.
"One consequence is that suicide rates among staff and students alike have roughly quadrupled, over the last 15 years. This is a horrifying fact - responsibility for which must be laid a the door of the departed Tory government, and of the current government."
So Read not only holds the British Government responsible for the murder of Spanish civilians. He also blames this Government and its predecessor for the suicides of identifiable people owing purely to decisions to spend taxpayers' money in one way rather than another.
The oddity of this position (to put it no higher) is that Read holds a different view of moral responsibility for human suffering and death in the case of people who plant bombs that are specifically targeted at civilians in shopping malls and restaurants. In a column published in the Eastern Daily Press (a newspaper to which my grandfather contributed a weekly column on rural life for many years) in January, Read talks of "Hamas, the democratically-elected government of Palestine" without once referring to its record of violence. And it's clear this is no oversight, for Read offers a historical parallel. He refers to his experience in the 1980s as an officer of the Oxford Union (i.e. the debating society, not the student union), when it invited Gerry Adams to address its members:
"Before the Oxford Union debate, I met Gerry Adams, and noticed the way he walked, still affected by the bullet lodged in his body. At dinner, I sat beside one of his bodyguards, a man from a background so different from my own, that, by the end of the meal, I felt I could start to understand why someone might take as hard-line a position on the possible use of violence - as a means of resisting what they saw as an occupation - as he and Adams did."
I've given as disinterested and factual account as I can of Read's beliefs, because I think they ought to be aired and examined in his election campaign. But I will say what I think of them.
If you can "begin to understand" sectarian violence pursued to overthrow the will of the majority, or fail to think it worth mentioning violence targeted at civilians in a campaign to annihilate the Jewish state, then you are, as Daniel says, an ideologue. More than that, you are denying what the philosopher Michael Walzer has aptly described ("Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses", in Arguing About War, 2004, p. 51) as "the peculiar evil of terrorism - not only the killing of innocent people but also the intrusion of fear into everyday life, the violation of private purposes, the insecurity of public spaces, the endless coerciveness of precaution".
That's what Rupert Read, the Green candidate for Norwich North does. I hope that this characteristic isn't overlooked in the noise of a by-election campaign.
The Times reports: "The Government has ordered a full-scale strategic defence review to try to solve the biggest crisis in Armed Forces resources for decades."
Analysis of the spending decisions is here, from my colleague Michael Evans. It's not a great prospect. Britain is under severe budgetary constraints. I'll come back to this subject, but if there's one thing that we liberal-democratic internationalists tend to overlook it's the principle of matching ends to means. One of the foreign-policy thinkers most worth recalling on this is Walter Lippmann, who came up with more than half the Fourteen Points advanced by President Wilson in 1918 in support of the League of Nations and collective security.
Lippmann came to reject the Wilsonian approach to reshaping the international order, and his book American Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, written shortly before WWII, is the best statement of the realist case I know. He argued that in the first 100 years of the Republic, America's overseas commitments had been kept in balance with its economic resources. But the rise of liberal-democratic internationalism, and specifically Wilson's aim of spreading liberal ideals, caused that balance to be disturbed. Where a democracy embarks on a regional or global aim without matching its resources to it, or with a reasonable expectation that the means will be created, then it will fail in that end.
There unfortunately lies much of the recent history of Anglo-American foreign policy. I support a foreign policy that seeks the spread of democratic values. It's right in itself and it aids our security, because autocracies aren't reliable allies. But it can't be done without a degree of social consensus on the ends of foreign policy.
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