Christmas vs Easter
1st March 2004
Frederick Fries (Letters, March) is worried by the secularisation of Christmas - "the most important religious and cultural holiday for Christians." Whatever happened to Easter, without which Christmas would have no meaning at all?
Hugh Pierce
Ipswich
Too diverse? 1
19th February 2004
Having followed the controversy generated by David Goodhart's essay (February), I would like to assure the gentle Prospect reader that Goodhart is no racist. As a (Scottish-Australian) ex-employee of the magazine, I was one of around 12 staff that included a French-Iraqi Jew, a south-Asian Canadian, a half-Indian half-Chinese Briton, a Sri Lankan brought up in Hong Kong, a German, a south-Asian Kenyan and one and a half more Australians. Luckily for Goodhart, there was one other Briton in the office with a "shared history" to mull over. Sadly, the sense of solidarity between them started to break down when it was discovered that even Goodhart was half American.
Hugh MacLeman
London NW1
Too diverse? 2
1st March 2004
David Goodhart's thought-provoking article elicited a host of fascinating replies, many from leading political theorists Most of these claim - in line with well ploughed academic furrows - that what we need is a commitment to a set of shared "civic" values that maintains a respect for ethnic diversity. This makes perfect sense, but means there is little real difference between most multiculturalists and their civic-nationalist adversaries. Goodhart's argument about solidarity, however, goes beyond the civic (politics and mass culture) level to include the ethnic (ancestry and cultural markers). Political theorists sidestep the latter because it is easier to reconcile a "thin" national identity based on language and the state with "thick" ethnic identities. Large-scale immigration thus matters little if all of us subscribe to the civic creed. But what if language and shared values are not the main issue but window-dressing for a deeper problem? What if we are dealing with competing "thick" ethnicities? In this case, only ethnic assimilation through many generations of intermarriage, of the kind that turned Gerry Adams's English forebears into Irishmen and many native Indians into Wasp Americans, will do the trick. This is a much slower process: witness the case of the highly assimilated Afro-Caribbean English, who are still "outsiders" to the English ethnie in a way that Huguenot descendants are not. Goodhart and Robert Putnam's point about the proportion of visible minorities governing people's inclination to redistribute thus becomes pivotal. African-Americans may speak and value the same things as whites, but for many whites, "they" are not "us." Putnam's well researched claims have not been addressed with empirical counter-evidence: citing Canada hardly constitutes such a rebuttal.
Eric Kaufmann
Birkbeck College
Democratisation in Russia
4th March 2004
The comment attributed to me in Gideon Lichfield's article on Putin's Russia (March) - "The late USSR was the heyday of democracy" - does not correspond with my views. I asked Lichfield to change the comment to: "The last years of the Soviet Union constituted the heyday of civil society and political activism." He agreed to make the change, but somehow the original appeared in the published version. Russia, alas, has not yet enjoyed a "heyday of democracy." The period between 1988 and 1991 was one of remarkable democratisation, but democratisation is a process and not identical with established democracy.
Archie Brown
St Antony's College, Oxford
Editing Gilligan
15th March 2004
I have read Magnus Linklater's article "Editing Gilligan" (March) with care but I am still not sure of the difference between the allegations which Gilligan and the BBC did make and those which, apparently, they should have made.
The key seems to lie in Linklater's sentences: "That the prime minister's office took part in redrafting an intelligence document to sharpen its political impact might not have surprised insiders. It would undoubtedly have shocked the public." I had thought that this was the allegation, and as a member of the public I was duly shocked. I am now unsure whether the criticism of Gilligan is that what he said was untrue or that it was so boringly obvious to those in the know that it was not worth saying.
Rory O'Kelly
Beckenham, Kent
French secularism 1
11th March 2004
A smug exercise in political correctness, Tim King's article (March) is grossly unfair to the French concept of la?cit?. This is indeed a French tradition, part of a long historical process to rid ourselves of any religious ascendancy within the public sphere. France is no more a paragon of virtue than any other country, but it does have its traditions. Should I disapprove of having to take my shoes off, I would simply choose not to enter a mosque; no obligation there. Likewise, being in favour of le voile does not give one the right to impose that tradition upon the public. Jewish people in France have always accepted this simple rule and the more orthodox among them, like their Christian counterparts, have opened up their own schools where the only imposition of the state is that children should be taught the basic academic requirements necessary for a modern society. It's about time Islam had a good look at itself. After all, no two Muslims see eye to eye as to whether Muslim women should wear the hijab or not.
Philippe Cl?ment
Flayosc, France
French secularism 2
15th March 2004
I read with interest Tim King's article on la?cit?. Like him I am a white, English immigrant to France. But countries are different, and their inhabitants view the world in different ways. Even after 20 years living here, I can still experience "culture shock" and realise there is something I have not really understood or assimilated.
It is a big error to judge events in another country as if they were happening in one's own. Of the criticism which was expressed in the international press on the subject of headscarves, I think that hardly any of the commentators understood what they were writing about. Tim King did a good job of describing the history of la?cit?, but his position is curiously English. Unless you know a significant number of young Muslim women who live in the suburbs of the big French cities, you cannot form a first hand opinion. In television debates on the subject at least one Muslim woman from this background told horrific tales of what Muslim girls suffer, and was passionately in favour of the ban.
Angus Morison
St Germain-En-Laye, France
Positive rapping
1st March 2004
Nick Crowe (March) makes many valid points about the demise of hip hop as an art form, and a purveyor of a social and political message. But he neglects to mention any of the positive developments in hip hop of the last few years. Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and most recently OutKast have released albums in the past four years that have not only pushed the musical boundaries of hip hop, but have also introduced a strong social and political content into their lyrics. One need only to listen to Red Hot and Riot, the compilation tribute album to Fela Kuti, and one in a series of compilations to raise money and awareness in the fight against HIV/Aids to see that while so-called mainstream hip hop may have reached a "catatonic state," the creative and socially conscious spirit that gave birth to rap and hip hop is still alive and struggling for recognition.
Darian Meacham
Brussels
Sovereignty for Scotland
2nd March 2004
Anthony Giddens (March) is correct to point out the manifest failure of Scotland's ruling executive to address the problems of the Scottish economy, but wrong in apportioning responsibility to the mechanics of coalition per se. The posturing of a toothless provincial parliament is an irrelevance in the global economy. Only with the powers of independence can we create further economic opportunity and deliver the social democratic society that meets people's ambitions.
Ron Wilson
Campbeltown, Argyll
Private spacecraft
4th March 2004
Oliver Morton (March) is misleading Prospect readers with his implication that Nasa spaceflight is the only kind that matters. His statement that Nasa's new direction "marks the end of the era in which the goal of spaceflight is to become routine" will be seen in retrospect as the exact opposite of the truth.
The government space agencies' monopoly on manned spaceflight is about to be broken. Twenty-seven industrial teams, mostly in North America and Britain, are competing to be the first to fly private passengers to the edge of space in a commercially-operated reusable spacecraft. Their immediate goal is to win the $10m X prize (see www.xprize.org). In America, aircraft designer Burt Rutan is almost ready to claim the prize. In Britain, Steve Bennett's Starchaser Industries has been building and test-firing large rocket engines and test-flying a reusable piloted capsule, as well as touring schools with Starchaser 4, which in 2001 became the largest rocket ever flown from mainland Britain.
If our civilisation is to make the leap from a one-planet to a multi-planet one, then, just as when it made the leap from a European to a global civilisation, the ultimate drivers will not be government programmes (of Prince Henry the Navigator, Ferdinand and Isabella, Kennedy and Khrushchev). Progress will rather depend upon commercial enterprises which serve public demand (the East India company, the Cunard line, the embryonic space tourist companies).
It would not surprise me if the first astronaut on Mars were not a government employee, but a visionary entrepreneur like Burt Rutan or Steve Bennett, a CEO of a space tourism company with a string of orbital and lunar hotels. That outcome would take much longer than a focused Apollo-style push. But, unlike any past or future Nasa programme, it would not run ahead of the market or the technology in the way that Apollo did.
Stephen Ashworth
Oxford
Berlin, Marx, Darwin
12th March 2004
Both Philip Gasper and Paul Morland (Letters, December, March) are guilty of partial inaccuracies. Gasper claims that the myth that Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin originated with Isaiah Berlin. Berlin was the first author I know of to make this assertion in English, but he based his claim on the 1934 Moscow Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute edition of Marx's complete works, which in turn was based on a German edition. It therefore hardly originated with Berlin. Berlin's identification of the claim as apocryphal, quoted by Morland, was made in a later edition of the book, as a correction to the mistake he made, in all good faith, in the first edition.
Joshua L Cherniss
Balliol College, Oxford
