Letters

The best communist joke (May) I heard in the 1980s was the one about the old Russian lady's responses to the official questionnaire for the Soviet census. She was asked: a) where were you born? b) where did you grow up? c) where do you live? d) where would you like to live? She answered: a) Saint Petersburg, b) Petrograd, c) Leningrad, d) Saint Petersburg. One can only wonder: is the joke on her nowadays?

Spyros Vretos
Athens


A secular Islam
2nd June 2006

Contrary to the view expressed in Prospect (Cultural tourist, June), the term "Islamic art" is generally understood to encompass secular as well as religious art. This is an important issue to settle, because Islamic art forms a significant part of world culture. Islamic art includes secular art because the Prophet Muhammad was a political leader as well as a religious guide. He founded a new state as well as a new religion. After his death, this state evolved by conquest into an empire stretching from Spain in the west to Afghanistan in the east. Islamic art is understood to be the art of this empire and of its successor states down to the present (even where patrons and makers of that art were Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians).

Islam as a religion played a key role in the formation of Islamic art, especially in areas such as mosque architecture and manuscripts of the Koran. But it was not the only factor. A sophisticated court culture also played a role. This is why many Islamic works of art feature images of humans and animals, which were generally not countenanced in a religious context. We intend that the V&A's new Jameel gallery of Islamic art will represent this broader Islamic culture in all its variety and sophistication.

Mark Jones
Director, V & A Museum

Buddhism and therapy
24th May 2006

As a western Buddhist clinical psychologist who has used both CBT and mindfulness in my clinical practice for over 25 years, I want to respond to a comment made by Alexander Linklater and Robert Harland in their essay "After Freud" (June). They state that the "fanciful pairing" of cognitivism and Buddhism "ignores a glaring contradiction that the practice of Buddhism does not encourage talking about your problems" and that "high Buddhist teaching is scarcely similar in tone to the active, positive psychology of the cognitivists." This assertion is wrong. The practices of the Buddhist eightfold path—"right effort" and "right mindfulness," for example—are precisely about cultivating psychologically and ethically positive mental states and behaviour, and one usually needs to discuss their application in relation to oneself, including one's "problems." Moreover, the doctrine of karma is that one's actions have consequences, in particular consequences for one's own mental state and behaviour (as well as for other people and the world at large). It is thus a prescription for taking positive action in the present. The doctrine implies that we condition ourselves and are not just conditioned by biological inheritance and social factors. It thus fills a gap in western scientific thought, which recognises only biological and external conditioning.

Ian Wray
Sheffield

Iraq and history
11th June 2006

Robert Cooper (June) says that foreign policy is more difficult than other areas of politics because history is the only basis for decision-making and it does not help much. This may be true in general, but Iraq must surely be the exception to the rule. Britain had nearly a century of dealing with the tribes and religious groups and knew full well the difficulties involved. In the 1980s, Britain and the US dealt with Saddam and knew perfectly well the degree to which he controlled and terrorised the country. Cooper suggests Italy in 1943 and Argentina in 1982 as examples of successful regime change through military defeat. Neither of these examples comes within the remit of "regime change" as understood at present. In fact, there are no authentic examples of successful regime change brought about by an invading army nor of introducing democracy from top-down. Total colonisation is the only route to regime change that stands a remote chance of success, but which government today has the stomach to "colonise"?

Robert Laver
London SE21

I taught Tony Blair
12th June 2006

The review by Brian Eno (June) set my mind in turmoil. If his review had been confined to social history, I could have accepted the relevance of the argument, but it implied that the pop music of the 1960s was of artistic importance.
There is nothing wrong in using music or any other art as entertainment, provided it observes its station, respects the criteria of art and does not expect to be taken too seriously. What is wrong is when sound is manipulated for its own sake, as a purely commercial undertaking, and is designed to induce degrees of thoughtless hysteria in those who, for the most part, take no creative part in it.

By chance, I was nominally responsible for our prime minister's musical education for four or five years. For understandable political reasons, he chooses now to stress his interest in pop music. He organised a pop group while he was at school, and I was pleased that he showed the initiative. What I do not forget is that he was also a voluntary member of the chapel choir and showed every sign of enjoying singing a wide range of music from Palestrina to Stravinsky.

Michael Lester-Cribb
Edinburgh

National anxieties 1
27th May 2006

"Technically Britain is not a nation but a state formed out of the amalgamation of four countries," writes David Goodhart (June). Well, at the next election the Conservative party will do well in England partly because English voters now think that this is no longer true, in ways which disadvantage them. An unintended consequence of devolution has been to leave central elements of the government of England in the hands of MPs and ministers whose own constituents live under different legislation. There is neither an English parliament doing the things the Scottish parliament does nor a federal parliament restricted to overseeing four state parliaments and attending to such matters as national security. New Labour did not intend it but it has encouraged periphery-dominated politics to the extent that the Conservatives could now make a pitch to be the English National party. In contrast, the Liberal Democrat vote in England will collapse because the party has made itself peripheral.

The UK exists—it belongs to the UN, the EU and enters the Eurovision song contest. Britain does not exist, except possibly as the GB sticker on my car. England, Wales and Scotland exist. They have football teams, flags and whole populations—including ethnic minority populations—who think of themselves as belonging to those countries. Two of them have a parliament to support. Goodhart's repeated use of "Britain" in his essay is no more than whistling to keep up New Labour spirits.

Trevor Pateman
Brighton

National anxieties 2
29th May 2006

It is not an "uncomfortable truth" that the modern nation state is based on contractual ideas. The nation state just is. It comes with a bundle of sometimes irreconcilable theories of its basis and legitimisation in fact and law. We can choose what ideas to have about it and how to reconfigure its policies. We can even, perhaps, change it: we are certainly not bound to take it as we find it or to fall in with fashion about how things ought to be done. Describing ID cards as the "master policy" raises the question, who shall be master? It is impossible to see how a "liberal realism" hung on state-issued identity and communitarian values can have any relationship to liberalism. It is the antithesis of liberalism as usually understood, in which autonomous individuals are entitled to self-determination unless they trespass on the rights of others. A more informative label would be "authoritarian populism."

Guy Herbert
London NW1

National anxieties 3
9th June 2006

David Goodhart is to be commended for offering a progressive defence of nationalism. He seeks to provide a coherent version of the idea of Britishness so incoherently pursued by New Labour. But I have some difficulties with what he says. First, he pays too much attention to immigration. While talking about the need to (re-)create solidarity in British society as a whole, he too often lapses into talking about what immigrants (and he usually means Muslims) should do. Suppose one grants his premise that immigrants as a category need to develop a sense of belonging in Britain and participate in the collective welfarist community of the country. It is still not clear why they need so much more attention than the native population, with its drunken hooliganism, mindless celebrity fixation, annihilist consumerism and fundamental ignorance of British history and literature.

Second, his support for a formal two-tiered citizenship opens up (unintentionally no doubt) the possibilities of fundamental political discrimination. Citizenship, like sovereignty, is ideally indivisible. By all means, devise ways of getting people to value citizenship; but do that by paying attention to the education of the next two generations of British children, of whatever background.

When voters express fear of change, they are rejecting precisely a collective solidarity, albeit the one emerging through a culturally enriched British society; it is their lack of a historical sense of how Britain has always grown and changed that drives them into the arms of extremists. Yes, let us look for a common story; but let us also be aware of the incredible intellectual and psychological challenge it poses.

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Lancaster

Who should pay for care?
2nd June 2006

I read "Growing Old Disgracefully" (June) and felt increasingly depressed as I read. The assumption of the piece was that elderly people with money or property should not pay for their own care on the grounds that they may use up all their assets and therefore have none to leave to their children. Where did this assumption come from?
The welfare state was instituted to take care of those who could not, through poverty or lack of family, look after themselves. When did this laudable aim change to one of the welfare state looking after the elderly so that their children can inherit their money? Surely the point about caring for elderly parents and other relatives is that we do it because we love them. If the children can't or won't take on the care, why should the state—the rest of us—pay if the parents already have assets?

Nicki Lewis
London E11