Speaking ill of the dead: Dreyfus, Guildford Four Maguire Seven, and Jimmy Saville

Amy writes:

Some time after WWII my grand-mother said to my sister: "That Dreyfus man, really, he was guilty.  Wasn't he?" I would not say that my grand-mother was anti-Semitic or racist.  But I would say that the fact that the great-grand-son-in-law who lives in her house is Malagashi, and two of her descendants' families are half-Jewish feels like some kind of divine retribution.  My grand-father was a career officer. His wife must have thought something like this: "There is no way this little Alsatian Jew, of no consequence whatsoever, can be right and the French army wrong." 

But at least the Dreyfus Affair provoked a hurricane in France.

For a long time a dull mist hanged over the 1977 conviction of the Guildford four and Maguire seven. They were only little Irish people of no consequence and everybody needed badly to find culprits 3 years after the Guildford pub bombings.  The way their convictions were obtained and sustained does not make for pleasant reading.  They were acquitted only in 1989 in the case of the Guildford four, and 1991 in that of the Maguires.  I do not know how long it took before the Irish establishment listened to and was convinced by the evidence given by children abused by their priests.  It was more important for the bishops to protect the reputation of the Church than to protect the children and they were good at it. 

We know how long it took for the abuses of Jimmy Saville to come to light.  But it seems to me that, in every case, the greatest guilt belongs not so much to the French army, the English police, the forcibly celibate priests, the addicted Saville as to the establishment, and possibly ourselves, always prepared to give more credence to the mighty and powerful than to the little people.

Let us not renew this error.  Let us leave the police and judiciary to do their job in peace (and hope for the best!) while looking out for any sign of a witch-hunt incited by the powerful and mighty media.

More about 'proper philosophy', human nature and egoism

Amy writes:

Of course I do not want anything changed in our lovely meetings at the cafe-philo. But having heard on three occasions different people commenting that these were not 'proper' philosophical discussions, I was curious to know what such a discussion would be. My proposal was for a unique experiment just as we have had philosophy students talking to us once a year.

Is curiosity a specific feature of human nature? No, my cat was curious. Same with egoism (which we discussed at the last session). Like apes nowadays some prehistoric men did happily lend their nut-crushing stone, some not. But only man could use words to tell his friend whether it was worth or not asking for the loan. As language got refined an abstract concept of selfishness /generosity emerged which became more and more complex and imprecise as time passed. Sometimes, we discuss our various ethical topics as if there existed up there, where God resides, a big dictionary in which there is the definite definition of these various concepts and as if the only reason we cannot consult this dictioinary is that we are human, with very limited faculties. I believe that the only dictionaries in existence are the little ones handed to us by our parents, masters and friends which are slightly amended by each generation and each of us to suit our needs. Though the dictionaries of a given culture are very similar there are no two identical ones. Hence our lively discussions.

Of course it may be said that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was such universal dictionary. But all Adam and Eve learned from eating its fruit was that it was shameful to be seen gallivanting in the nude in the Garden of Eden (a piece of information for which they payed an outrageous price and anyhow how is it that it was OK before they ate the fruit?). As for the ten commandments, they are exactly that: commandments: thou shall, thou shall not. The only commandment worth discussing at the cafe-philo is honouring father and mother. What does honouring consist of?

I wonder what Moses would think of our discussions on the percentage of selfishness entering the motives of a man jumping in the water to save a stranger's life. But then was Moses a philosopher?

What are 'proper' philosophical questions?

Amy has a proposition to make:

I have heard it said a number of times that our discussions at the cafe-philo are not proper philosophical discussions. So I ask myself what is a proper philosophical discussion. And I get an idea:

• First you would need to find out who are the 'proper' philosophers among the attendants of the cafe.  Would they have to declare themselves or be declared by Christian?
• The 'proper' philosophers would propose the topics in the ordinary way, the whole assembly choosing the one they prefer.
• The discussion would then be restricted to the 'proper' philosophers, except for the end of the session when the rest of us would discuss the propriety of the word 'proper' applied to philosophy as well as the topic itself.

That's my idea.

Amy

related posts:
Sommes-nous tous des philosophes?
Is philosophy dead?
What good is philosophy for?
Philosophy overview

War, sport and childbirth‏

Amy writes:

What do they have in common? The adrenaline of course.

That many years ago, baby in my arms, I pondered on the circumstances in which a man could experience such overwhelming emotion. I could only think of a dog fight, when the enemy aircraft has been hit and nose-dives. I had not yet seen an Olympics champion. Now I recognize in the tears and the smiles, male and female, the overflow of adrenaline and the unique thought: 'I have done it'. The 'it' not being so much properly defined (I am alive. I am the best in the world. I have produced a perfect baby) as a vague 'I have done what my adrenaline wanted me to do' We can reason all we want after but there is as little room for reasoning during the contest as for analysis during a dream. And this is good. Let us give our no doubt remarkable intelligence a little rest now and then.

About violence: childbirth is as violent, for the baby as well as the mother, as a dog fight. About the reward: the female Olympic champions smiled at their medal the same way as a mother at her baby. ( I would rather have a baby though it will already have lost some of its shine after the first night).

I feel I have to declare my interests in sport: null. Hence the lamentable state of my muscles, hence my difficulties in walking, hence my numerous absences from the cafe philo, hence my brooding at home, hence my numerous contributions to the blog. Which, by the way, is sadly neglected by all of you.

Amy Gibson

Brain-washing and Human conditioning

Amy writes:

Hannah Arendt, who is a proper philosopher, said it in proper philosophical language: "This is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings.  Whatever enters the human world of its own accord or is drawn into it by human effort becomes part of the human condition"  (The Human Condition).

One might say that there is not much difference between 'human conditioning' and 'brain-washing'.  Except that 'brain-washing' is a derogative term and therefore attributes a negative moral value to what has no more to do with morality than the law of gravity.

But then we are conditioned by our judeo-christian culture to pass moral judgments whether or not morality is involved.   Do we not make of our all-powerful god an all-loving god?  Which is something of an oxymoron.  The Greeks did not have such problems, their gods being a rather nasty lot.  

Whether or not we approve of our upbringing we have to be brought up.  And let us not forget that our children will judge their upbringing just as we do ours,  i.e. according to the dictates of their generation!  For, if there is a 'conditioning' which may be qualified as 'brain-washing' it is that of the 'isms' of each generation.  I have known a fair number of them during my long life: marxism, freudism, feminism, atheism, multiculturalism, rights of man, climate change, etc. all of which is very honourable as long as it does not ossify into its 'ism'. 

My 'isms' being mainly determinism, relativism and scepticism.  Not very constructive, I confess.  But that's who I am.

Amy 

Brainwashing?

Amy writes:

At the end of Saturday's discussion about controlling others it was mentioned that we brainwash our children from the time of birth.  A flippant though fashionable remark not to be taken seriously.  Do we qualify the care with which we choose the food we give our children as gutwashing?  (Being French, according to my children I gave them too much salad and fruit and not enough Irish fries or English puddings.  Though now, while considering themselves as British, they feed their own children salads and fruit and I am the one who brings the pudding).  

I have tried since Saturday to make a joke by putting together the 2 metaphors of 'brainwashing' and 'throwing out the baby with the water of the bath'  Could not do it.  Would somebody cleverer?

Another idea while taking in my wet washing.  Should a mother not nurse her baby because he/she will absorb her ideas with her milk?  3 metaphors.

Amy

Islanders & God

Dear philosophers,

our conversation last Saturday centred on the subject of God.  Most of you would say, Come on! Not again! How many times have we approached the very same topic?   But the question is asked in a different way this time: How to describe God to a people on an island?  - sounds like a title for a creative writing course, that would trigger vivid imagination.  As explained by Paul, who proposed the question, it is inspired by a book he read: Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett.  The book is about an isolated tribe of Amazonian Indians (Hence the idea of an island) whose language Everett had learned in order to translate the bible for them.  At the end Everett concluded that these people had no need for a god.  In fact he lost his own faith - a proselytizer has become a proselyte himself.

Our friend Amy writes: 

I had a strange experience recently.  I watched the dvd of a film I had seen some 30 years ago, had much admired and had quoted frequently ever since: Jacques Tati's Playtime.  Well, none of these episodes of which I had such a vivid memory were in fact as I remembered them.  Slowly but surely my mind had twisted the images to make them fit my argument.

I observed the same kind of distortions at last Saturday café-philo.  The question was how to describe God to people who had no notion of him/her/it.  While I was moderately interested in the answer to such a question I was fascinated by the way it was interpreted.  The majority of comments were about religion,  conversion, domination, none of which had to do with the subject. 

I was brought up in a French protestant family in which religion was strictly confined to Sundays when my parents went to church and the children to Sunday school.  God was never mentioned during the week.  My atheism is in the image of my parents' religion: mild and tolerant.  I am always surprised by the strident atheism I keep encountering in G.B. (never in France, which does not mean it does not exist).  I can only wonder if such atheists have been force-fed religion in their childhood.

Amy