Web 2.0 skeptic, author of dotcom entrepreneur, Andrew Keen fought a feisty battle with a number of callers to Five Live's phone-in the other morning. Keen feels much of the web is devalued by amateur content that spawns inane theory and the devotion of the feeble-minded. When Tim from Notting Hill called in ranting about the absurd 911 conspiracy theory website Loose Change, claiming how 'four MPs' had now given the site the seal of approval, it was as much a Keen could take. Tim got short shrift as he tried to disprove Keen's assertion that bloggers and callers were unpaid purveyors of content drivel who devalued professional content proivders in particular, and the web in general. As Tim whined away about Bush and Cheney flying planes into buildings, Keen resorted the withering insults. Poor old Tim could not have proved Keen's assertion more vividly. Underneath all this was a more salient message that the web as an omnibus media - or should that be media omnibus - has seriouosly damaged democracy in process.
Politicians in the web age have a thankless, impossible task. The immediacy of the internet puts pressure not just on the print media, but rolling news on radio and TV, and one of Blair's more unattractive legacies is New Labour's rampant pandering to this agenda.
However, with the recent of the Falklands War and the Thatcher premiership, and more recently the raft of Blair premiership obits, it does seem the past can deliver those who have suffered from the present. It is extraordinary how those of us who remember successive Tory victories seem to have forgotten that the only media of any weight in town - the daily press - was almost entirely faithful to the Tories. With the exception of Maxwell's Daily Mirror and The nascent Independent, every single other paper offered little more than canine devotion to the Tories. Is it any wonder Blair - and New Labour's - priority was media influence? When the bleating about spin first emerged, my initial instinct was of the bear defecating in woods school.
History will record this, as it will wonder at how Blair's nickname 'Bambi' disappeared from the public consciousness almost the day his was chosen as John Smith's successor. It's not so much that the web is the cause of this forgetfulness, but it certainly clouds the memory. That said it is heartening to hear both sides of the spectrum rubbishing the unfair and fundamentally wrong assertion that Blair was Bush's poodle, for example. Indeed, if he was, part of the Balkans might well have adopted the effete beast as its totem. Likewise, more are relating how Blair insisted on Britain's part in the Iraq invasion.
It was obvious to anyone capable of putting aside a natural revulsion of George W Bush pre-9/11 record, that Blair's endorsement of that adventure was a genuine conviction move. Paxman was absolutely justified in asking the Prime Minister if he and Bush prayed together, but I don't think he implied subservience in this question.
The killer blow - the dossier - was, in many cases almost literally, manna from heaven for the bloggers. The web produced a legion of bedroom polemicists, mostly from the left. Traditionally a free press would provide a platform for a Pilger or a Fisk to turn reportage into soapbox. Now bloggers could do the same, usually by slavishly rehashing their copy verbatim, mixed in with any old rumour from around still more unaccountable website and blogs feeding a self serving community of unquestioning paranoia and ignorance. Global reach gave succour to the deluded and strength in numbers the unshakable belief they were, still are, right. Loose Change is the ultimate expample of this. A site that devotes itself to promoting a ludicrous conspiracy implicating the Bush administration in 9/11 and yet ignoring the fact that it is allowed to exist by the very police state it purports the Bush administration to be.
Nick Cohen's What's Left bemoans the way the traditional left had completely forgotten any notion of solidarity in the context of the Iraq War. He is not alone on the traditional left who finds himself aghast that liberals and trade unionists couldn't find it in themselves to support the plight of the Iraqi people - and trade union members - as they were delivered from their fascist oppressor. For that the web may not be to blame, but it certainly hasn't helped.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Oh. My. god
Like any keyboard ranter, I regularly have a metaphorical sharpener at Hitch's Bar. Christopher Hitchens is always satisfying, often inspiring, frequently amusing and for many, essential reading. More recently, thanks to the workers' paradise that is YouTube, he's become the downloader's master pundit, debater and scourge of fighty interviewers of all media.
The fact that his enemies so often fall into one, or both, of two caricatures - the hurt lover or bewildered centre back - makes him all the more entertaining. Throw in poetic offence, delivered with an actor's voice employed with the effect of a kidney dagger, and it's no wonder Hitchens (major) sells out any hall with his name on the bill.
He was on good form at The Garrick this week, where a half pint of diluted malt failed to compromise an hour's eloquence on the evil of religion to a packed house of the faithless.
He was, understandably, on a roll. Three weeks earlier - just as the 'god is not Great' tour shed is godless shadow over the deep South - the almighty chose to smite down Jerry Falwell, prompting the networks to offer Hitchens his finest hour; the opportunity to broadcast a Falwell obituary that resembled disco fever, and simultaneous prime time promotion of his anti-theist masterwork. The timing must have confused the great sage as to whether there really was a God, Kharma or Kismet. Or maybe Old Nick was repaying him for his pro bono work as his 'advocate' in the case of Mother Teresa. Either way, seldom has Kismet presented a more deliciously ironic opportunity and Hitchens seized it with both hands as he savaged Falwell's legacy on CNN. The following night he was bacj for more as he savaged Fox TV's Sean Hannity - himself a believer and Falwell apologist. The contrarian is nothing if not an opportunist
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IDfKKWBEZk
Having been loathed by anti-war liberals for the ultimate apostasy of mutating from leftist poster boy to Gulf War Standard Bearer, suddenly Hitchens was top of the best seller list and darling of hitherto silent atheists everywhere. In a relay of fiercely argued, anti-religion best sellers, the baton has been passed from Sam Harris to Daniel Dennett to Richard Dawkins and now to Hitchens in the anchor role, his lunching of religion widely 'praised' and flying off the shelves in a godless reaction to America's unseemly lurch towards unfettered religiosity.
For those liberals who supported the Iraqi campaign and Hitchens' lonely arguments for the liberation, it has been a welcome respite from the tedious squabbling with those from the left for whom the word solidarity has been sadly erased from their collective conscience.
And then, in a response to our guilty pleasure at the incarceration of Paris Hilton, a sort of deliverance from our own hopeless obsessions, who should improbably and perversely defend the indefensible? Step forward the not so young contrarian.
Hitchens' odd 'defence' of Paris Hilton (http://www.slate.com:80/id/2168128/fr/flyout) is more an attack on the genuine schadenfreude in the face of a widely welcome reality check. Indeed, never was apparent injustice so deserved in the eyes of the hoi polloi. It escaped no one that she was hoisted by her own petard. A gentle spell inside was a fair price for La Hilton's relentless drive to subvert the youth of the world.
In this instance, however, Hitch is uniquely out of touch. In dipping his immaculately styled pen into the mire of celebrity sleaze, he oddly misses the point. He was, as ever, on the mark about the sex tapes, ('I could almost have believed that she was drugged.') the Kingsley Amis reference (even as he wanted a certain spectacle to go on, he also wanted it to stop) was au point, but his portrait of her as a victim of the vindictive was disingenuous, and betrays a bizarre sympathy, and a distance gifted to those of higher pursuits from the reality beneath. Whatever slings and arrows he suffered for bravely following a point of principal that, for many, cast him as traitor, Hitchens' scourge is in no way eqitable to the relentless hold this pointless woman has over the mass media in general, and female youth culture in particular. If controversy was his intention, it was a poor afternoon's work.
Ultimately Paris Hilton was as guilty as any rich and powerful person who believes themselves above the law, and it has been obvious to all that the evidence clearly showed signs of this. Wonderful as his barracking on FoxTV of creepy Christian republican Ralph Reed was, there was little difference between the arrogance of Reed's friend, convicted fraudster, Jack Abramoff and that of Paris Hilton.
But, oddly, in his support of Paris, Hitch seemed completely unaware that in the modern celebrity age, a modest downfall offers unlimited opportunity. Perversely, Christopher has ignored Paris' hilariously brassy discovery of god and her cell-bound transubstantiation into Mother Teresa. Depressingly, the world still awaits St Paris of West Hollywood.
At risk of over-egging the irony pudding, if Hitch needs any evidence that bad behaviour begets great opportunity, he need look no further than his own disgraced ex-editor, and now fledgling US superstar, the truly grotesque, but apparently irresistible, Piers Morgan.
The fact that his enemies so often fall into one, or both, of two caricatures - the hurt lover or bewildered centre back - makes him all the more entertaining. Throw in poetic offence, delivered with an actor's voice employed with the effect of a kidney dagger, and it's no wonder Hitchens (major) sells out any hall with his name on the bill.
He was on good form at The Garrick this week, where a half pint of diluted malt failed to compromise an hour's eloquence on the evil of religion to a packed house of the faithless.
He was, understandably, on a roll. Three weeks earlier - just as the 'god is not Great' tour shed is godless shadow over the deep South - the almighty chose to smite down Jerry Falwell, prompting the networks to offer Hitchens his finest hour; the opportunity to broadcast a Falwell obituary that resembled disco fever, and simultaneous prime time promotion of his anti-theist masterwork. The timing must have confused the great sage as to whether there really was a God, Kharma or Kismet. Or maybe Old Nick was repaying him for his pro bono work as his 'advocate' in the case of Mother Teresa. Either way, seldom has Kismet presented a more deliciously ironic opportunity and Hitchens seized it with both hands as he savaged Falwell's legacy on CNN. The following night he was bacj for more as he savaged Fox TV's Sean Hannity - himself a believer and Falwell apologist. The contrarian is nothing if not an opportunist
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IDfKKWBEZk
Having been loathed by anti-war liberals for the ultimate apostasy of mutating from leftist poster boy to Gulf War Standard Bearer, suddenly Hitchens was top of the best seller list and darling of hitherto silent atheists everywhere. In a relay of fiercely argued, anti-religion best sellers, the baton has been passed from Sam Harris to Daniel Dennett to Richard Dawkins and now to Hitchens in the anchor role, his lunching of religion widely 'praised' and flying off the shelves in a godless reaction to America's unseemly lurch towards unfettered religiosity.
For those liberals who supported the Iraqi campaign and Hitchens' lonely arguments for the liberation, it has been a welcome respite from the tedious squabbling with those from the left for whom the word solidarity has been sadly erased from their collective conscience.
And then, in a response to our guilty pleasure at the incarceration of Paris Hilton, a sort of deliverance from our own hopeless obsessions, who should improbably and perversely defend the indefensible? Step forward the not so young contrarian.
Hitchens' odd 'defence' of Paris Hilton (http://www.slate.com:80/id/2168128/fr/flyout) is more an attack on the genuine schadenfreude in the face of a widely welcome reality check. Indeed, never was apparent injustice so deserved in the eyes of the hoi polloi. It escaped no one that she was hoisted by her own petard. A gentle spell inside was a fair price for La Hilton's relentless drive to subvert the youth of the world.
In this instance, however, Hitch is uniquely out of touch. In dipping his immaculately styled pen into the mire of celebrity sleaze, he oddly misses the point. He was, as ever, on the mark about the sex tapes, ('I could almost have believed that she was drugged.') the Kingsley Amis reference (even as he wanted a certain spectacle to go on, he also wanted it to stop) was au point, but his portrait of her as a victim of the vindictive was disingenuous, and betrays a bizarre sympathy, and a distance gifted to those of higher pursuits from the reality beneath. Whatever slings and arrows he suffered for bravely following a point of principal that, for many, cast him as traitor, Hitchens' scourge is in no way eqitable to the relentless hold this pointless woman has over the mass media in general, and female youth culture in particular. If controversy was his intention, it was a poor afternoon's work.
Ultimately Paris Hilton was as guilty as any rich and powerful person who believes themselves above the law, and it has been obvious to all that the evidence clearly showed signs of this. Wonderful as his barracking on FoxTV of creepy Christian republican Ralph Reed was, there was little difference between the arrogance of Reed's friend, convicted fraudster, Jack Abramoff and that of Paris Hilton.
But, oddly, in his support of Paris, Hitch seemed completely unaware that in the modern celebrity age, a modest downfall offers unlimited opportunity. Perversely, Christopher has ignored Paris' hilariously brassy discovery of god and her cell-bound transubstantiation into Mother Teresa. Depressingly, the world still awaits St Paris of West Hollywood.
At risk of over-egging the irony pudding, if Hitch needs any evidence that bad behaviour begets great opportunity, he need look no further than his own disgraced ex-editor, and now fledgling US superstar, the truly grotesque, but apparently irresistible, Piers Morgan.
Bennett-Jones' revealing naivety
Richard Curtis and his silly producer, have done well out of the BBC over the years and that relationship was clearly exploited to the full with Make Poverty History. The notion that MPH was not a political campaign is arrant nonsense and a disgraceful attempt to excuse what was obvious to most and the Trust in particular. MPH emerged to orbit the G8 summit along with Curtis' feeble drama and the Geldof ego fest, and to exert its childish influence over politicans. This was all well and good, but there was little critique of MPH, with its unedifying parade of naive multi-millionaires preaching to the hoi polloi about poverty, whilst it criminally refused to confront the real reasons behind poverty. That isolated episode was a disgrace, but there are other more subtle examples of bias. I listen to the BBC almost every day and I welcome the Trust's report. There's no question news editors in particular fail to provide balance, even in phone-ins on Five Live, where the vaccuous Victoria Derbyshire redefined toe curling political correctness. It would be wrong to say it was endemic, but the pockets of bias increasingly ruining the cut of an otherwise good suit.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Sweeney Odd
What was particularly sad about this programme was how it underlined the depths to which Panorama has sunk since it tried to turn itself into Tonight with Trevor McDonald.
The subject matter so clearly lent itself to the Louis Theroux school of 'give 'em enough rope' reportage, rather than that of the buccaneering Sweeney.
Footage of the 'Church's' Tommy Davis barging into an interview with a rap sheet rubbishing the interviewee was all one needed to see. Credible, benign, responsible organisations just do not behave like this. And the rest of us know that.
We all know Scientology is a creepy cult, but is it dangerous? Clearly it has the potential of being so, what with schemes like Narcon, aggressive celebrity endorsement, its views on psychiatry, its effects on families, and the likes of Tommy Davis.
The subject matter so clearly lent itself to the Louis Theroux school of 'give 'em enough rope' reportage, rather than that of the buccaneering Sweeney.
Footage of the 'Church's' Tommy Davis barging into an interview with a rap sheet rubbishing the interviewee was all one needed to see. Credible, benign, responsible organisations just do not behave like this. And the rest of us know that.
We all know Scientology is a creepy cult, but is it dangerous? Clearly it has the potential of being so, what with schemes like Narcon, aggressive celebrity endorsement, its views on psychiatry, its effects on families, and the likes of Tommy Davis.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Cold comfort
At a time when crafted, high-minded polemics are putting the boot into religion, and riding high in the best-seller lists, it is poignant that the agonising abduction of Maddy McCann underlines that still, for any of us thrust into the nightmare of utter impotence at the hands of a kidnapping or simple disappearance, the concept of God is still the only emollient on offer. The arguments forcefully and persuasively put by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and most recently Christopher Hitchens in his book God is not Great, present an unforgiving logic in situations such as these.
The role of religion as a palliative to human insecurity is indeed something of a theological flashpoint. In a bizarre coming together, Dawkins recently singled out Britain's latest national treasure, Peter Kay, for the treatment. Kay, hardly a presence on this particular battlefield, had admitted religion was a comfort to him. "I believe in a God of some kind, in some sort of higher being. Personally I find it very comforting."
Claiming he'd been ambushed for a quote in response to Kay's admission, Dawkins nevertheless retorted "How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?". With Kay a fellow nominee for a literary award, Dawkins felt obliged to apologise. Although somewhat disigenuously. Professor Dawkins is as on-record as it is possible to be, saying the notion of religion as comfort is akin to a child craving a dummy. It is hard for atheists to argue this isn't so. The logic may be strong, but for the believer, prayer prolongs hope. For the unbeliever, the only truth is the facts as they are. Hope is born out of speculation. Nothing more. Therein lies a fairly brutal difference.
As a parent I find the agony of the McCann's hard to bear. In the absense of any development in the whole affair, the endless scrutiny of what they should or should not have done merely picks at an open sore. The realisation that the odds of a happy ending are long sap the spirit. But, and this is a horrendous but, should those odds transpire, where does that leave prayer? Countless millions surely would have committed to their God their hopes of a happy ending. The circumstances of such an outcome for many believers will, in their minds, confirm their prayers to have been answered. They will, in their joy, ignore completely the capricious nature of the deity who chose such an outcome. Just as they would ignore the deaf ears onto which previous and future prayer will have fallen.
This is surely part of human nature. I was educated by Jesuits from age 9 to 18. Around 12 I was convinced of the creation of God by man. The fabulousness of the churches and icons and men who dominated my life had conspired, up to then, to convince me, until I realised that that alone was why I believed. Hitchens had a similar epiphany at 9 when sold a line by a well meaning teacher that God had made plants green because that made them easy on the eye. Clearly to him, as it was to me, a sizemic step in logic.
However, despite my revelation at 12, I still trusted a strange phenomena I had experienced all my childhood, whereby I would get an inexplicable, pronounced ringing in my ears as a warning of impending trouble. And past my epiphany, this was still a reliable, although not entirely comforting, sop.
Almost without fail, as long as I could remember, this random ringing would precede some sort of painful punishment, whether at home or at school. The phenomenon stopped, or at least became noticeably infrequent, when I reached my late teens. Whatever it was, as an inexplicable experience it was depressingly reliable, and, until 12, I had thought it might be evidence of God.
Once that had vanished, another false prophet emerged in my early 20s. I began to seek reason in dreams. When I was 10, my father and I had been approaching London on the M4 when I witnessed the crash of flight BEA which, pre-Lockerbie, had been the largest civil aviation disaster in our history. Some years later, I began to have regular dreams about plane crashes. The dreams were never scary, more exciting, even beautiful. I was usually the witness of a benign yet awful disaster, but occasionally a passenger, albeit one who could casually hop off the doomed aircraft as if alighting from a slowing tram. The very repetition of these dreams led me to look into various interpretations and most claimed such dreams to be classed as 'dreams of contradiction'. As such they were apparently portents of good fortune. And over the years, almost always, they have been. This childish reality sits uneasily with my innate atheism, and a psychologist might argue that the invented reasoning for my regular dream subject had led me to invert the experience and the rationale.
It is no different with prayer, only we, or rather those praying are trying to manufacture a reality that explains a cause and effect. I've never tried to explain the ringing in my ears or the plane crash dreams because they are irrational and a product of faith. That faith is borne out of the inexplicable and coincidence. The terrible fact is that a Liverpool football fan's prayers for victory in Athens are no more effective to the outcome than those millions of prayers being said for Maddy and her family. The best that can be said for prayer is its statement of solidarity which gives comfort to the family. God doesn't come into it.
The role of religion as a palliative to human insecurity is indeed something of a theological flashpoint. In a bizarre coming together, Dawkins recently singled out Britain's latest national treasure, Peter Kay, for the treatment. Kay, hardly a presence on this particular battlefield, had admitted religion was a comfort to him. "I believe in a God of some kind, in some sort of higher being. Personally I find it very comforting."
Claiming he'd been ambushed for a quote in response to Kay's admission, Dawkins nevertheless retorted "How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?". With Kay a fellow nominee for a literary award, Dawkins felt obliged to apologise. Although somewhat disigenuously. Professor Dawkins is as on-record as it is possible to be, saying the notion of religion as comfort is akin to a child craving a dummy. It is hard for atheists to argue this isn't so. The logic may be strong, but for the believer, prayer prolongs hope. For the unbeliever, the only truth is the facts as they are. Hope is born out of speculation. Nothing more. Therein lies a fairly brutal difference.
As a parent I find the agony of the McCann's hard to bear. In the absense of any development in the whole affair, the endless scrutiny of what they should or should not have done merely picks at an open sore. The realisation that the odds of a happy ending are long sap the spirit. But, and this is a horrendous but, should those odds transpire, where does that leave prayer? Countless millions surely would have committed to their God their hopes of a happy ending. The circumstances of such an outcome for many believers will, in their minds, confirm their prayers to have been answered. They will, in their joy, ignore completely the capricious nature of the deity who chose such an outcome. Just as they would ignore the deaf ears onto which previous and future prayer will have fallen.
This is surely part of human nature. I was educated by Jesuits from age 9 to 18. Around 12 I was convinced of the creation of God by man. The fabulousness of the churches and icons and men who dominated my life had conspired, up to then, to convince me, until I realised that that alone was why I believed. Hitchens had a similar epiphany at 9 when sold a line by a well meaning teacher that God had made plants green because that made them easy on the eye. Clearly to him, as it was to me, a sizemic step in logic.
However, despite my revelation at 12, I still trusted a strange phenomena I had experienced all my childhood, whereby I would get an inexplicable, pronounced ringing in my ears as a warning of impending trouble. And past my epiphany, this was still a reliable, although not entirely comforting, sop.
Almost without fail, as long as I could remember, this random ringing would precede some sort of painful punishment, whether at home or at school. The phenomenon stopped, or at least became noticeably infrequent, when I reached my late teens. Whatever it was, as an inexplicable experience it was depressingly reliable, and, until 12, I had thought it might be evidence of God.
Once that had vanished, another false prophet emerged in my early 20s. I began to seek reason in dreams. When I was 10, my father and I had been approaching London on the M4 when I witnessed the crash of flight BEA which, pre-Lockerbie, had been the largest civil aviation disaster in our history. Some years later, I began to have regular dreams about plane crashes. The dreams were never scary, more exciting, even beautiful. I was usually the witness of a benign yet awful disaster, but occasionally a passenger, albeit one who could casually hop off the doomed aircraft as if alighting from a slowing tram. The very repetition of these dreams led me to look into various interpretations and most claimed such dreams to be classed as 'dreams of contradiction'. As such they were apparently portents of good fortune. And over the years, almost always, they have been. This childish reality sits uneasily with my innate atheism, and a psychologist might argue that the invented reasoning for my regular dream subject had led me to invert the experience and the rationale.
It is no different with prayer, only we, or rather those praying are trying to manufacture a reality that explains a cause and effect. I've never tried to explain the ringing in my ears or the plane crash dreams because they are irrational and a product of faith. That faith is borne out of the inexplicable and coincidence. The terrible fact is that a Liverpool football fan's prayers for victory in Athens are no more effective to the outcome than those millions of prayers being said for Maddy and her family. The best that can be said for prayer is its statement of solidarity which gives comfort to the family. God doesn't come into it.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
For the best...
Hard to admit, but as a life long red I'm not entirely distraught by last night's result. AC Milan were the better team on the night and, having seen how heavily policed United/Liverpool derbies are in this country first hand, I for one was not relishing going to Athens with 70000 united and liverpool fans. The feint possibility of us then LOSING to what is, let's face it, a pretty uninspiring Liverpool side, is a further prospect I could do without. The prospect of WINNING against them, while sweet, would surely have resulted in some sort of aggro. So, on balance, while I'm happy the scousers beat Chelsea, and that we look to have the league, I'll settle for a Milan victory in Athens, the double here, and no battling fans on foreign soils.
Friday, March 9, 2007
Climate debate? Who'd have thought it.
Channel 4's The Great Global Warming Swindle will have shaken up everyone from Glastonbury Tor to Tory central office.
According to numerous, previoulsy silent academics, global warming is not what we thought, is not our fault and is part of ongoing process over which we have little influence. The program maker Martin Durkin has said far from struggling to find academics who disagree with Al Gore's accepted wisdom, C4 found there were hundreds of academics willing to take part.
Those of us who have studied Lovelock's Gaia theory could be forgiven for nodding sagely. But what is the man and woman in the congested street to think? This was a polemic and there was no contradiction of the impressive range of contributors. There were however references to how political forces from all sides have been queueing up with increasing zeal to hijack, and then stymie debate. We had a shot of the tediously unamusing Rob Newman foaming at the mouth from yet another platform, and repeated accusations that bad science underpinned the reactionary fulminations from the 'green' left. So how would the program be received?
A cursory glance at the broadsheet TV reviews is interestingly revealing. While The Times and DT are pretty circumspect in covering the program, The Guardian's Zoe Williams did the best she could to underline the program's point.
Cycling evangelist Williams' critique showed just how the Green lobby has become viciously extremist in its tone, betraying a real lack of tolerance of debate. Williams is typical of the new lefty, desperately searching for a cause which lends itself to the radical tendency of old. In her forensic examination of the debate, she simply launched an astonishingly ignorant attack on Nigel Calder, completely dismissing a 50 year career in popular science, and completely ignored those other MIT professors and ex-greens like Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore. She had a feeble pop at Winnipeg, from whose University came particularly persuasive and reasoned debate - not to Ms Williams' taste, and accused Channel 4 of turning into Fox News. There was no attempt at offering any proper criticism as her attempts at inane wit came across as flailing defeatism.
This programme was the flip side to Al Gore's Oscar-winning and curriculum-bound An Inconvenient Truth and should be seen as a partner piece to it. If nothing because of the number of heavyweight academics who seemed to have turned away from the global warming industry having spent their careers examining the facts in a way, and with minds, that the likes of David Cameron, Thom Yorke and Zoe Williams cannot. The notion then, that the green lobby are in cahoots with the anti-globalisation mob ratched the debate up further. The programme argued the denial of fossil fuel technology to the third world was condemning developing continents to extreme poverty and stagnation. The African input to the debate was particularly devastating and shows just how hypocritical today's anti-West, sod-the-poor hard left-wing activist really is.
According to numerous, previoulsy silent academics, global warming is not what we thought, is not our fault and is part of ongoing process over which we have little influence. The program maker Martin Durkin has said far from struggling to find academics who disagree with Al Gore's accepted wisdom, C4 found there were hundreds of academics willing to take part.
Those of us who have studied Lovelock's Gaia theory could be forgiven for nodding sagely. But what is the man and woman in the congested street to think? This was a polemic and there was no contradiction of the impressive range of contributors. There were however references to how political forces from all sides have been queueing up with increasing zeal to hijack, and then stymie debate. We had a shot of the tediously unamusing Rob Newman foaming at the mouth from yet another platform, and repeated accusations that bad science underpinned the reactionary fulminations from the 'green' left. So how would the program be received?
A cursory glance at the broadsheet TV reviews is interestingly revealing. While The Times and DT are pretty circumspect in covering the program, The Guardian's Zoe Williams did the best she could to underline the program's point.
Cycling evangelist Williams' critique showed just how the Green lobby has become viciously extremist in its tone, betraying a real lack of tolerance of debate. Williams is typical of the new lefty, desperately searching for a cause which lends itself to the radical tendency of old. In her forensic examination of the debate, she simply launched an astonishingly ignorant attack on Nigel Calder, completely dismissing a 50 year career in popular science, and completely ignored those other MIT professors and ex-greens like Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore. She had a feeble pop at Winnipeg, from whose University came particularly persuasive and reasoned debate - not to Ms Williams' taste, and accused Channel 4 of turning into Fox News. There was no attempt at offering any proper criticism as her attempts at inane wit came across as flailing defeatism.
This programme was the flip side to Al Gore's Oscar-winning and curriculum-bound An Inconvenient Truth and should be seen as a partner piece to it. If nothing because of the number of heavyweight academics who seemed to have turned away from the global warming industry having spent their careers examining the facts in a way, and with minds, that the likes of David Cameron, Thom Yorke and Zoe Williams cannot. The notion then, that the green lobby are in cahoots with the anti-globalisation mob ratched the debate up further. The programme argued the denial of fossil fuel technology to the third world was condemning developing continents to extreme poverty and stagnation. The African input to the debate was particularly devastating and shows just how hypocritical today's anti-West, sod-the-poor hard left-wing activist really is.
Monday, March 5, 2007
New labour: Should fathers be present at birth?
If there’s one act that defines the generation gap between couples it’s that old chestnut of fathers being present at the birth of their children. Up until as recently as the early seventies, Dad would follow the example of his forebears, bravely pacing, chain-smoking in some ante-room while the little lady went through what is euphemistically called labour. All too often when mother and child emerged, the new Dad would inspect the new arrival, greet the in-laws, administer a peck on the forehead to mother and child and then off down to the Rose and Crown to wet the baby’s head with a pint of ale and a slim panatella.
In the last 30 years or so, the change in relationship between the sexes in particular, has grabbed the father and dragged him into the delivery room to ‘share’ in the birthing experience, handycam at the ready. But given that mankind has been successfully delivering children without Dad and his DVR, has this rush to ‘share’ been a bit hasty? Could this trend be doing more harm than good?
For those that think that this modern version of the labour experience is down to, well, New Labour, in fact a very Old Labour guard was in charge when the trend emerged. Sexual emancipation and liberation coincided with the growth in number of bigger and better hospitals in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fathers could be better accommodated in the whole process and gingerly stepped into the delivery room as midwives and doctors progressively viewed fathers being present at birth, as a positive development on a number of fronts. Very quickly a trend was established as men quickly persuaded each other that attending the birth of their children was a life-changing and unmissable experience.
Meanwhile, women insisted that men take a greater participation in all aspects of parenthood including the most traumatic event of the lot. Birth itself. Today, at some 90 percent of births in the Western world, the father is present.
But not everybody is convinced this has been a good thing, and when chief among them is world-renowned Dr Michel Odent, founder of the Primal Health Research Center and a veteran of some 15000 deliveries over 52 years, more questions than answers are raised. Odent, who introduced the concept of birthing pools and today specialises in home and natural births, believes that the way we are born has long-term consequences in terms of sociability, aggressiveness or, otherwise speaking, capacity to love. After half a century of delivering babies, he is adamant.
“Although it may not be politically correct, I would now dare to say that I am pretty sure that the most common reason for long and difficult labours is the participation of the father,” he says.
Dr. Odent is clear that in his experience, “for obvious reasons the husband is not the best person to help the woman to feel secure [during birth] because he cannot interpret what’s happening. He’s too rational. It’s full of good intention but it’s obvious. This is what I’ve learnt in 52 years of childbirth.”
‘Womens’ business’
Although some may look back with rose-tinted pince-nez at natural childbirth in the home, the reality was often ghastly and traumatic for mothers and while the post war hospitalization of the birth process reduced mortality rates in childbirth, the trend effectively pushed the father out of the delivery room for good, not that he was really there in the first place.
The establishment of the NHS accelerated the trend. Before that, births were at home and Dad could usually be found in the kitchen boiling endless pots of water. He would never enter the birthing room, as midwives presided over births, many of which were far from easy. It was a million miles from today’s experience. In just three decades a father who is not at the presence of his child is almost seen as a pariah, a throwback to a pre-enlightened era.
“Childbirth always used to be women’s business,” says Dr. Odent. “Then something absolutely new happened in the late sixties early seventies and within some years this became a dogma that the father should participate. What is interesting is how fast this happened and historically speaking we cannot disassociate the concentration of births in large hospitals with the presence of fathers at births,” says Dr. Odent.
Other factors may have been the emergence of the nuclear family as distinct from the extended family, and this smaller unit naturally involved the father in a role previously occupied by various women in the extended family.
Adrienne Burgess is a leading authority and commentator on fatherhood and policy advisor to Fathers Direct, and Number 10. She’s in no doubt that the change in attitudes to childbirth between the generations as much to do with prudishness.
“Our grandparents’ generation probably didn’t even see each other naked and yet since the sixties we have adopted are far more free and easy attitude towards reference to genitalia and the detail of childbirth.”
She sees the wholesale involvement of the father in the process as mostly beneficial.
“The woman often wants the man to be there because pregnancy is the time of togetherness. There’s an element of ‘we’re in this together’. They want them to be there to help.”
However, according to Adrienne Burgess, in the UK men enter the labour room in a state of ignorance. She believes it s much better to get these issues out into the open before the birth.
“In Sweden you’re not allowed into the delivery room unless you’ve been through the ante-natal programme,” she says, while also dismissing suggestions that fathers just get in the way, as a ruse used by some doctors to retain control in the delivery room.
Political correctness
However, what cannot be dismissed is Dr. Odent’s unprecedented experience in neither this field nor his desire to air questions that are routinely ignored due to ‘an atmosphere of political correctness’.
“There are three important questions we should be addressing he says. Firstly, does it make the birth easier or more difficult? Secondly, is there any effect on the sex life of the couple, and, thirdly, can all fathers easily cope with the emotional reaction that can occur to the wife giving birth. These are three questions that were never raised, but should be raised now.”
It is largely true that we usually only hear the voices of those who believe the birth was helped by the presence of the father. So it’s difficult to answer the first question, although one mother we spoke to bitterly regretted her (ex) husband being present precisely because he turned out to be an absent father.
But do women really want their partners to be present?
“Human beings, and women in particular, have two languages,” says Dr. Odent “The verbal language and the non-verbal and when women give birth we must listen to the non-verbal language.” The list of anecdotes where the father leaves the room, and once he’s left, the birth takes place, is he says, endless.
Peter Bruce is a marketing manager and has been at the birth of both his children. However he missed the birth of his first, “The labour had lasted a good six hours and there was a quiet period so I nipped out for a sandwich,” he recalls. “When I came back, some 45 minutes later, Annabelle had been born and I’d missed everything.”
His wife, Michelle, admits that although she insisted on him being there, something about his presence held up the labour.
“I guess it’s a bit like when some men can’t wee if there’s somebody in the same room,” she says. “However, this was not the case when Michael was born,” she adds.
Dr Odent puts this phenomenon down to the need for a relaxed environment to enable the free flow of oxytocin, the ‘love’ hormone released to ease childbirth. In a birth situation, argues Odent, the man is usually releasing adrenaline and the effect of this is contagious, causing the mother to release adrenaline, which, in turn, inhibits the release of oxytocin.
Dr Odent goes further, “This is something absolutely new in the history of mankind so we have to be careful when we change suddenly behaviour which has been the same for millions of years. Mammals don’t have their sexual partners at birth. Privacy is a basic need among mammals giving birth.
“When I visit the house I look for certain things, like the toilet for example. People are surprised, but that’s the one place where details like that are very important - to see the level of privacy.
The female environment
Odent identifies two phases of practicing homebirth in the last 20 years. He used to simply attend such births on his own but the second phase and the most recent involves the use of a ‘Doula’
Doula refers to a small birthing team, usually two women ideally related to the mother who have had a wide range of birthing experience between them, making the environment more female. They, as much as Dr. Odent, are actually involved in the birth, while M. Odent manages the birth and, interestingly, the involvement, or lack of it, of the father.
“For example, “ he says, “If the mother vomits during birth – which is not uncommon – the father can often overreact and add to any panic the mother feels, whereas the Doula will say, “That’s OK that happened to me with my second, and so on.”
The word Doula actually comes from the Greek for slave, and indeed female Greek slaves where involved in helping at the birth of their mistress’s children. Never the father.
“I now keep a low profile, occupying the father while the Doula and the mother are occupied with the birth and it makes the process much easier.”
As far as the effect on the couple’s relationships, it was assumed in the seventies that the presence of the father would strengthen the bond between couples. Increasing divorce rates and the progressive breakdown of family units would seem to contradict this expectation. Burgess believes there is no clear link and any problems following on from birth experience were probably already there beforehand, or, incredibly, she believes some cases may have their roots in some sort of oedipal problem. Either way, older parents with long-standing marriages left birthing to women.
Simon Davidson is in his 70s and his wife Adinna had two children born in 1962 and 1964. He can remember a time when a father being present at birth was unthinkable.
“I think in our day, and I’m talking about the early sixties, hospitals actively discouraged any involvement from the father. Not that there was any question of me being present in the first instance. My wife would never have wanted me there and I probably would have fainted anyway,” he says.
As for the issues of the effect on the father, Odent pinpoints a pattern when he visits couples a few days after birth “The mother would very often reveal that the father is in bed, with a variety of psychosomatic illness. There is something like a male post-natal depression”
In this, fatherhood expert Adrienne Burgess agrees that post-natally, more attention needs to be paid to fathers, “the best adjustment is found among men who reflect on their own experiences as children, she suggests, adding, “but if they’re not there they can feel they’ve missed the most important part of their lives.
Company director, Robert Gramming has experienced both, “I was present at the birth of my first child, and while I’ll never forget the experience, I’m not sure I’m being rather self-indulgent there. I don’t think my parents’ generation loved their children less simply because they weren’t present at the business end, so to speak. With the birth of our second child, we did it at home, and I sort of hung around out of the way. The euphoria when she finally arrived was really no different.”
So it seems that despite what is a politically-correct act of modern family relationship development, is actually woefully misplaced. While every case is different, nature would it seem, indicate that something as basic as privacy is a key element to successful birth and that despite what a couple may desire, the presence of the father can be a negative in this aim. Furthermore, in some cases the presence of the father may make the resumption of a normal sexual relationship difficult. Either way it seems the extraordinary ‘dogma’ surrounding paternal presence at birth is about to be re-evaluated to wrestle a degree of common sense from politically correct domination of this debate.
In the last 30 years or so, the change in relationship between the sexes in particular, has grabbed the father and dragged him into the delivery room to ‘share’ in the birthing experience, handycam at the ready. But given that mankind has been successfully delivering children without Dad and his DVR, has this rush to ‘share’ been a bit hasty? Could this trend be doing more harm than good?
For those that think that this modern version of the labour experience is down to, well, New Labour, in fact a very Old Labour guard was in charge when the trend emerged. Sexual emancipation and liberation coincided with the growth in number of bigger and better hospitals in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fathers could be better accommodated in the whole process and gingerly stepped into the delivery room as midwives and doctors progressively viewed fathers being present at birth, as a positive development on a number of fronts. Very quickly a trend was established as men quickly persuaded each other that attending the birth of their children was a life-changing and unmissable experience.
Meanwhile, women insisted that men take a greater participation in all aspects of parenthood including the most traumatic event of the lot. Birth itself. Today, at some 90 percent of births in the Western world, the father is present.
But not everybody is convinced this has been a good thing, and when chief among them is world-renowned Dr Michel Odent, founder of the Primal Health Research Center and a veteran of some 15000 deliveries over 52 years, more questions than answers are raised. Odent, who introduced the concept of birthing pools and today specialises in home and natural births, believes that the way we are born has long-term consequences in terms of sociability, aggressiveness or, otherwise speaking, capacity to love. After half a century of delivering babies, he is adamant.
“Although it may not be politically correct, I would now dare to say that I am pretty sure that the most common reason for long and difficult labours is the participation of the father,” he says.
Dr. Odent is clear that in his experience, “for obvious reasons the husband is not the best person to help the woman to feel secure [during birth] because he cannot interpret what’s happening. He’s too rational. It’s full of good intention but it’s obvious. This is what I’ve learnt in 52 years of childbirth.”
‘Womens’ business’
Although some may look back with rose-tinted pince-nez at natural childbirth in the home, the reality was often ghastly and traumatic for mothers and while the post war hospitalization of the birth process reduced mortality rates in childbirth, the trend effectively pushed the father out of the delivery room for good, not that he was really there in the first place.
The establishment of the NHS accelerated the trend. Before that, births were at home and Dad could usually be found in the kitchen boiling endless pots of water. He would never enter the birthing room, as midwives presided over births, many of which were far from easy. It was a million miles from today’s experience. In just three decades a father who is not at the presence of his child is almost seen as a pariah, a throwback to a pre-enlightened era.
“Childbirth always used to be women’s business,” says Dr. Odent. “Then something absolutely new happened in the late sixties early seventies and within some years this became a dogma that the father should participate. What is interesting is how fast this happened and historically speaking we cannot disassociate the concentration of births in large hospitals with the presence of fathers at births,” says Dr. Odent.
Other factors may have been the emergence of the nuclear family as distinct from the extended family, and this smaller unit naturally involved the father in a role previously occupied by various women in the extended family.
Adrienne Burgess is a leading authority and commentator on fatherhood and policy advisor to Fathers Direct, and Number 10. She’s in no doubt that the change in attitudes to childbirth between the generations as much to do with prudishness.
“Our grandparents’ generation probably didn’t even see each other naked and yet since the sixties we have adopted are far more free and easy attitude towards reference to genitalia and the detail of childbirth.”
She sees the wholesale involvement of the father in the process as mostly beneficial.
“The woman often wants the man to be there because pregnancy is the time of togetherness. There’s an element of ‘we’re in this together’. They want them to be there to help.”
However, according to Adrienne Burgess, in the UK men enter the labour room in a state of ignorance. She believes it s much better to get these issues out into the open before the birth.
“In Sweden you’re not allowed into the delivery room unless you’ve been through the ante-natal programme,” she says, while also dismissing suggestions that fathers just get in the way, as a ruse used by some doctors to retain control in the delivery room.
Political correctness
However, what cannot be dismissed is Dr. Odent’s unprecedented experience in neither this field nor his desire to air questions that are routinely ignored due to ‘an atmosphere of political correctness’.
“There are three important questions we should be addressing he says. Firstly, does it make the birth easier or more difficult? Secondly, is there any effect on the sex life of the couple, and, thirdly, can all fathers easily cope with the emotional reaction that can occur to the wife giving birth. These are three questions that were never raised, but should be raised now.”
It is largely true that we usually only hear the voices of those who believe the birth was helped by the presence of the father. So it’s difficult to answer the first question, although one mother we spoke to bitterly regretted her (ex) husband being present precisely because he turned out to be an absent father.
But do women really want their partners to be present?
“Human beings, and women in particular, have two languages,” says Dr. Odent “The verbal language and the non-verbal and when women give birth we must listen to the non-verbal language.” The list of anecdotes where the father leaves the room, and once he’s left, the birth takes place, is he says, endless.
Peter Bruce is a marketing manager and has been at the birth of both his children. However he missed the birth of his first, “The labour had lasted a good six hours and there was a quiet period so I nipped out for a sandwich,” he recalls. “When I came back, some 45 minutes later, Annabelle had been born and I’d missed everything.”
His wife, Michelle, admits that although she insisted on him being there, something about his presence held up the labour.
“I guess it’s a bit like when some men can’t wee if there’s somebody in the same room,” she says. “However, this was not the case when Michael was born,” she adds.
Dr Odent puts this phenomenon down to the need for a relaxed environment to enable the free flow of oxytocin, the ‘love’ hormone released to ease childbirth. In a birth situation, argues Odent, the man is usually releasing adrenaline and the effect of this is contagious, causing the mother to release adrenaline, which, in turn, inhibits the release of oxytocin.
Dr Odent goes further, “This is something absolutely new in the history of mankind so we have to be careful when we change suddenly behaviour which has been the same for millions of years. Mammals don’t have their sexual partners at birth. Privacy is a basic need among mammals giving birth.
“When I visit the house I look for certain things, like the toilet for example. People are surprised, but that’s the one place where details like that are very important - to see the level of privacy.
The female environment
Odent identifies two phases of practicing homebirth in the last 20 years. He used to simply attend such births on his own but the second phase and the most recent involves the use of a ‘Doula’
Doula refers to a small birthing team, usually two women ideally related to the mother who have had a wide range of birthing experience between them, making the environment more female. They, as much as Dr. Odent, are actually involved in the birth, while M. Odent manages the birth and, interestingly, the involvement, or lack of it, of the father.
“For example, “ he says, “If the mother vomits during birth – which is not uncommon – the father can often overreact and add to any panic the mother feels, whereas the Doula will say, “That’s OK that happened to me with my second, and so on.”
The word Doula actually comes from the Greek for slave, and indeed female Greek slaves where involved in helping at the birth of their mistress’s children. Never the father.
“I now keep a low profile, occupying the father while the Doula and the mother are occupied with the birth and it makes the process much easier.”
As far as the effect on the couple’s relationships, it was assumed in the seventies that the presence of the father would strengthen the bond between couples. Increasing divorce rates and the progressive breakdown of family units would seem to contradict this expectation. Burgess believes there is no clear link and any problems following on from birth experience were probably already there beforehand, or, incredibly, she believes some cases may have their roots in some sort of oedipal problem. Either way, older parents with long-standing marriages left birthing to women.
Simon Davidson is in his 70s and his wife Adinna had two children born in 1962 and 1964. He can remember a time when a father being present at birth was unthinkable.
“I think in our day, and I’m talking about the early sixties, hospitals actively discouraged any involvement from the father. Not that there was any question of me being present in the first instance. My wife would never have wanted me there and I probably would have fainted anyway,” he says.
As for the issues of the effect on the father, Odent pinpoints a pattern when he visits couples a few days after birth “The mother would very often reveal that the father is in bed, with a variety of psychosomatic illness. There is something like a male post-natal depression”
In this, fatherhood expert Adrienne Burgess agrees that post-natally, more attention needs to be paid to fathers, “the best adjustment is found among men who reflect on their own experiences as children, she suggests, adding, “but if they’re not there they can feel they’ve missed the most important part of their lives.
Company director, Robert Gramming has experienced both, “I was present at the birth of my first child, and while I’ll never forget the experience, I’m not sure I’m being rather self-indulgent there. I don’t think my parents’ generation loved their children less simply because they weren’t present at the business end, so to speak. With the birth of our second child, we did it at home, and I sort of hung around out of the way. The euphoria when she finally arrived was really no different.”
So it seems that despite what is a politically-correct act of modern family relationship development, is actually woefully misplaced. While every case is different, nature would it seem, indicate that something as basic as privacy is a key element to successful birth and that despite what a couple may desire, the presence of the father can be a negative in this aim. Furthermore, in some cases the presence of the father may make the resumption of a normal sexual relationship difficult. Either way it seems the extraordinary ‘dogma’ surrounding paternal presence at birth is about to be re-evaluated to wrestle a degree of common sense from politically correct domination of this debate.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)