Letters

There are promising early signs that Gordon Brown will not continue the Iraq policy of his predecessor. As Daniel Litvin points out in his piece on the Iraq oil industry (August), the Anglo-American invasion has already provided rich lessons in "blowback." But as pressure rises on Brown to "stay the course," he should take heart from Harold Wilson's refusal to support America's Vietnam war, despite strong urging.

Iraq is Tony Blair's outstanding failure, without which his diplomacy, especially in Africa and Europe, has been creditable. Unfortunately, Iraq overshadows every other foreign policy matter, and Blair will be remembered for his blind support of George W Bush. The Iraq invasion will stand as one of the monumental disasters of the 21st century.

Derek Coombs
Chairman, Prospect

In praise of pedantry
13th August 2007

William Skidelsky ("Will's words," August) is right to suggest that pedantry should only be practised where its distinctions serve a useful purpose. But such a principle does not require us to acquiesce to the misuse of the word "decimate." There are already many words that express the thought that something has been vanquished. Let us hold on to the original meaning of "decimate." Language is more useful, and our thoughts more precise, if we don't allow related words to get muddled together.

Ben Hooper
London SW1

Volunteering via the web
16th August 2007

You suggest (News & Curiosities, August) that there should be a state-run "volunteering database that makes it simple and convenient to find someone near you in need of the kind of help that you can offer…" Such a database already exists, and is growing rapidly, at www.wwv.org.uk, which has over 1.1m volunteering opportunities from over 1,500 different organisations. There is no need for yet another state-initiated bright idea.

Peter Sharp
Director, Worldwide Volunteering

Who works harder?
18th August 2007

Catherine Hakim argues (August), with a confidence I find astonishing, that men work harder than women. The methods by which she reaches this conclusion are dubious. She starts by dismissing earlier case studies that concentrated on women bringing up young children on the grounds that this is a "relatively temporary phase." Yes, it is temporary, but it is surely nevertheless a highly important time that affects the rest of one's life. She then describes the results of a time-use survey which suggest that if one combines different types of work, men and women in Britain spend about the same amount of time working. She seems to have no doubts about the validity of such a self-report survey. Even if we accept its results, how does one move from a finding that men and women work equal amounts to the conclusion that men work harder "measured in economic value"? Surely most people, when thinking about how "hard" a job is, would consider issues such as the amount of effort required or stress experienced. The time-use survey does not deal with such issues, no doubt for the very good reason that they are not matters which lend themselves to investigation by questionnaire. In any case, why in 2007 should one ask whether men or women work harder? In the 1960s, feminists may have posed such a question for the good reason that they believed that women's contributions to society were undervalued. Even then it had its limitations. Which men? Which women? That moment is past. Hakim has revived a crude question and answered it in a crude way.

Sandy Hobbs
University of Paisley

CBT and the pain within
26th July 2007

In his portrait of Albert Ellis (August), Jules Evans suggests that a number of different philosophies and religions are pretty much like cognitive behavioural therapy, if without the focus on delivery. It was Freud who said the ego is pain, meaning that it is our struggle with ourselves that causes distress. In this, he shared something with Socrates, who put knowing yourself in order to transform yourself at the heart of his philosophy. Similarly, the Stoics believed that you must become a different person to have a happy life. Eastern religions, to generalise, suggest that the self must be recognised as a delusion and transcended.

CBT is very different. It is behavioural, operating at the level of what you do, not who you are. It works to bolster self-esteem and fortify bashed egos, not question and transform the self. This is why it has much in common with positive psychology. It is also why it flourishes in a consumer culture—one that would do anything to avoid facing the pain that lies beneath the surface.

Mark Vernon
London SE5

Don't elect the inspectors
13th August 2007

John Denham's call for changes in public inspection regimes (August) is welcome. The systems now used in public services are crudely mechanical, and do not serve the public interest. Nor are they seen as fair and effective by service providers. Denham is right to say that managers are in thrall to an inspectorate which is not publicly accountable. Ofsted is a case in point. Always a blunt instrument, in 2005 it sacked three quarters of its schools inspectors and since then has increasingly relied on crude statistical methods and arbitrary sampling.

However, Denham's solution of local democracy is flawed. Inspection systems have to be independent, objective and tied to national standards. Any locally elected system will be subject to political intervention or pressure group politics. Whatever the faults of bodies like Ofsted, they cannot be criticised for bending to external pressure. Elected inspectors and politically driven service agendas would lack credibility because they would be regarded as serving narrow political ends.

Trevor Fisher
Stafford

More than a boson
16th July 2007

Philip Ball (June) says that "the only use of the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] that anyone ever hears about is the search for the Higgs boson." But this is not so. Physicists may look crazy, but they are not crazy enough to build such a complicated and technically demanding installation just to hunt down one particle. The LHC will be the world's most powerful instrument in particle physics for the next ten to 20 years, and it has been built to help us understand more about the 96 per cent of our universe that remains a mystery. The first thing physicists will be looking for is the Higgs boson, but this is just the beginning of a long journey into the unknown. As with earlier accelerators, there will be surprises.

Reinhard Budde
Begnins, Switzerland

The sacred and the human
6th August 2007

Roger Scruton (August) is right to say that a sense of the sacred is part of being human. But his claim that this is because the sacred is essential to resolving conflicts is far from the whole story. Humans, so far as one can tell, have had a sense of the sacred from the very beginning, probably rooted in a sense of awe about the world. And many people find something sacred, in the sense of inviolable, in certain human relationships and in certain individuals. Whatever one's beliefs, or lack of them, these are reasonable sentiments.

It is true that the sacred facilitated the aggregation of much larger communities, as in ancient Egypt. Tribal differences were probably overcome by a combination of force and persuasion, as has often happened since. History, however, suggests that this did not end conflict, but transferred it to an "inter-national" scale, where it has remained since. It hardly needs to be said that these larger human groups often go to war about, among other things, their competing senses of the sacred.

Antony Black
Dundee

A bone-headed boycott
31st July 2007

With all due respect to Benjamin Pogrund's (July) noble intentions, his critique of the proposed British boycott of Israeli academics reminds me of a defence counsel whose summation concedes basic prosecution points in order to drive down the sentence. For the sake of heuristic hyperbole, let's push the analogy. Let's imagine a German Jew in the 1930s who counters anti-Jewish boycotts (Kauft nicht beim Juden—don't buy from the Jew) as follows:

"Actually, most Jews don't care much about politics; they just want to get on with their work and lives. The issue between them and the Nazis is complex; it is shades of grey rather than black and white. Contrary to the denunciations, Jews love their fatherland; many have given their lives to it in the war. The antisemitic parties accuse them of polluting the race, but more than half of German Jews marry among themselves. Yes, some Jews have become quite rich, whereas millions of ordinary Germans are victims of the depression. But aren't there many more Christian profiteers? True, there is a disproportionate number of Jews at the head of university departments and research institutes, but how will it serve German interests to drive them out to America and Britain? Let calmer heads prevail, for it is harder work to bring people together than calling for boycotts."

This is the reasonable, "postmodern" way, where everybody has a point, right? Wrong. This boycott is not a matter of pragmatic debate. It is shameful and immoral by any standards, especially those of academia. Let dons and researchers as citizens march for the Palestinian cause; that is their choice. But let them not as members of the academics' union pretend that they serve their calling by destroying its essence, which is the free exchange of ideas in a peer-reviewed marketplace.

In that market, you don't arrive at the truth by ostracising those who hold different political beliefs, or merely belong to a state you loathe. In any case, to single out Israel is to disregard the moral pathologies of the world at large, and of the Arab-Islamic world in particular. The war in Chechnya has not triggered an anti-Russian boycott. How about cutting off all academic contacts with the Chinese over Tibet and the Falun Gong? Israel's neighbours from the Levant to Iran excel in the industry of oppression—religious, ethnic, intellectual. None of these countries can hold a candle to Israel, defective as its policies may be, when it comes to academic and democratic freedoms.

Josef Joffe
Hamburg