Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update (credit: GQ)
Via Daylight Atheism and corroborated by the BBC, I just wanted to share the news that high level briefings circulated in George W. Bush’s administration during the beginning of the Iraq war were emblazoned with Bible quotations.
I won’t even bother with the rest of the spiel, because we all know the litany of excuses. Religion isn’t meant to be mixed with politics, check. Christianity teaches peace and love, check. People need faith, check. Churches are pretty, check check check. And just look at all the good it inspires!
But these people just don’t get it. The point is not whether faith inspires good or bad, or whether it makes you feel all nice and fluffy, the point is that faith itself is fundamentally broken. Yes, you can use faith to justify the most wonderful things in the world, but that’s because you can use faith to justify absolutely anything at all. Faith is simply belief that is impervious to evidence, and only evidence can anchor belief in the real world. And to use faith – even for good – is to perpetuate the myth that faith itself is an intrinsically good thing and worthy of respect. And then stuff like this happens.
Here’s a fun game: George W. Bush believes that the invasion of Iraq was carried out with the blessing of God, humanity’s divine creator. Is he right or wrong? And if you too believe as an act of faith that God is humanity’s divine creator, and that he has active plans for humanity, what possible intellectual tools do you have to argue that George W. Bush is incorrect? He has access to the same sense of faith as you. He feels that God is with him as much as you do. He can quote scripture as easily as you can. (Hey, he probably even thinks that churches are really pretty, too.) So, go on, genuinely, try arguing without being able to resort to the much-sneered-at concept of ‘evidence’ and see where it gets you.
Or think again.
I’ve been thinking about dreams in fiction. And, more specifically, why we accept them without puzzlement. After all, it should be obvious that fictional dreams tend to bear absolutely no resemblance to real dreams. Real dreams are not just surreal but incoherent – it’s not that your living room suddenly morphed into a spaceship, it’s that your living room inexplicably was a spaceship, at the same time, because it was your birthday. They are filled not with the profound but with the ‘whatever’s crossed your mind over the past few days’. And real dreams also tend to make terrible narratives: and then X happened, and then Y happened – no wait, maybe it didn’t, because the spaceship had exploded by then? – but then Z definitely happened, and then I woke up.
So it’s no surprise that writers don’t go down the tedious route of describing ‘realistic’ dreams for their characters any more than they would devote a chapter between ‘boy meets girl’ and ‘boy turns out to be vampire’ to the unremarkable weather which didn’t signify anything about their relationship because, y’know, it was just so unremarkable. Nor is it surprising that dreams provide a tempting convention through which to explore hidden desires, hint at broader themes or just blatantly overuse metaphors and ellipses. A little bit of consequence-free magic to further the plot. (In cinema, it’s also an excuse for cool visuals.)
No, my question is why we don’t find it jarring to substitute ‘reflective surreal interlude’ for ‘incoherent jumble’. Is this just a convention which endures through its continued use in fiction? Is it a legacy of Freud? Does it just reflect the fact that most things in fiction contribute to a message of some sort – unlike real life – and dreams shouldn’t be any different? The more you think about it, the weirder all of fiction becomes: we become so trained to explain in GCSE exams that the stormy weather mirrored the stormy relationship (and et al.) that we never wonder why on earth it should. Why is it satisfying? Is it the same runaway obsession with ‘purpose’ and ‘meaning’ which results in the mental train wrecks of final causes and Alpha courses?
(But this isn’t a complaint against fiction. Indeed, one of the beauties of fiction is that it can be demonstrably and wholeheartedly enjoyed without permanently overturning what we know to be true. If human beings sat stony-faced in cinemas, thinking about the mechanics of projection, that would be a shame. They don’t.)
In real life: Sophie, waffles; Irfan, man of letters; Owen, Space Munity!; Oliver, “Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith”. There you go – it’s blogging with all the speed and clarity of the shipping forecast 
Blogging when I’m in a particularly good mood seems likes an excellent plan, so I shall do so! Yesterday, by contrast, was a little bit of a multi-faceted disaster. But we won’t talk about yesterday. Instead, I’ll talk about fun things like going to see Star Trek on Friday night. By the time that we arrived at the cinema, as it happens, we were already rather happily chilled out from thoughts of work after accidentally finding ourselves in the middle of a Caius pub quiz. (Naming counties is unreasonably hard – couldn’t we name cities instead?) The film itself, though, was great. I described it to my dad thusly: “you know how Star Trek Nemesis was rubbish and made no sense? Well this one was fantastic, although it still made no sense”. I stick by this, because the more I think about it the more illogical it seems. However, it was fun, which is something that Star Trek sometimes has distinct problems with. Success!
Cambridge is another institution which can struggle with the concept of fun during Easter Term, but we turned that all around on Saturday night with the help of Abi’s friend Kat. After some successful cooking and welcome wine drinking came the social device which is almost guaranteed to result in acrimony and bitterness. I speak, of course, of Monopoly. But due to a strange fluke, no-one got enough property to start developing and the result was the most pleasant game I have ever played. You travel around the board, paying paltry little sums to each other, with no fear of bankruptcy since everyone is getting progressively richer through passing Go anyway. In the end we just called it a day, everybody ending with over £1000 in cash and a new admiration for the middle class way of life.
This photo, incidentally, doesn’t quite capture that harmony. But it does instead rather nicely illustrate Oliver’s absolute pleasure at being photographed:
Oliver and Kat
And finally! The ex-editor of the Evening Standard, Veronica Wadley – she who took it downhill from ‘alright’ to ‘awful’, and couldn’t even make ‘awful’ profitable – is screeching today about the prospect of a marginally more positive approach under its new owner. [cackles] Good good! The dismantling of the Boris PR machine is rather overdue, and all that’s really left is for Andrew Gilligan to get on his bike and we could be halfway there.
Roll up, ladies and gentlemen, roll up! I’ve two scintillating sequences of events for presentation on the blogging symposium today, after which there will be an opportunity to ask questions and some light refreshments. Quieten down at the back now please. I open with Sanna’s visit on Monday which comprised of waffles, further waffles, being told that I was neglecting an amazing garden and socio-theological waffle which, as you may know, is the tastiest of all. No one tried to pick a fight with me, however, which I suppose rules out Sanna as the common factor. (Very slightly off-topic, by the way, but still worth mentioning, is the fact that Spotify fans can and by all means should check out The Lion King soundtrack… in Swedish. I still don’t know how to actually say ‘problem free philosophy’ but I can certainly hum it.)
Moving on swiftly, last night was the Peterhouse Politics Society dinner which I went along to on the basis that it was Andrew’s farewell event as President. (That’s what I said, of course, but the real reason was the food.) Those of you who have better things to worry about than arcane Cambridge trivia may not know that Peterhouse has a reputation for being a bit… conservative… so I made sure to go out and buy a red tie beforehand just to make the point. As it happened, though, I found myself amongst the liberals; you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be swapping praise for Ken Livingstone with the wonderful couple I was seated next to over port at Peterhouse, but there you are. In fact, known quantity of Caroline aside, I only tracked down one true Tory for conversation and he was very affably mad. (I mean that in the nicest way possible. He did want to privatise the entirety of state education, sure, but it adds character.)
At the end of the night I joined Andrew, Caroline and Cornelius for even more wine. (Cornelius, by the way, has bagged what is quite possibly the greatest name ever. I bet he never has any trouble getting the username he wants.) During the course of the following discussion I somehow found myself giving strategic and spin-doctory advice to Caroline regarding CUCA. Perhaps I was too drunk for it to be any good, but the fact remains that there are lines I shouldn’t cross, and actively suggesting ways to make the Conservatives more popular (as if they needed any help at the moment) is one of them. So, sorry!
Just back from seeing In The Loop with Owen, Andrew, Matt and Caroline. As a big fan of The Thick Of It I knew this was going to be good but, wow, I don’t know if there will be a film I’ll enjoy quite as much for a long time. Fantastic stuff: I laughed all the way through and (the mark of a good film) didn’t check my watch once. Go see this!
Of course, the flip side is that it comes across as a brutally realistic portrayal of politics. This, one could argue, is a tad depressing. Not unlike the prospects for the UK, actually, and Owen and I had a good time enraging one another on the way home by imagining the upcoming weariness of a Conservative government. It’s all so predictable already: watch out for the token right-wing nasties thrown to the back benchers at times of trouble (bribes for marriage! inheritance tax cuts! privatised police!) which will punctuate the mundane, day-to-day rubbishness. (I originally put ‘privatised police’ as a bit of a joke, but the more I think about it the more plausible it becomes.) This is nothing, however, when it comes to the threat of the BNP in June. People sometimes shrug their shoulders about this since they’ll never be more than a pungent smell from the sidelines. They’re missing the point. Powell didn’t win, either, but it sets a tone of racism which sinks deep into local communities. So, if you wouldn’t mind, could everyone who’s just received one of those pretty white poll cards for 4th June vote please. Labour, Lib Dem, Green, even Tory – I don’t really mind, but just do it 
Ooh, this is clearly going to come out as a bit of a rant. And they never get any comments! So here’s a funny picture instead 
Shameless distraction
(Oh, and I’m going to steal an anecdote from Owen because it’s a good one: he overheard someone proudly announcing that for his 21st birthday his mother had bought him private health insurance. Who does this?!)
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
