The new fundamentalism

A Devon town council was told by the High Court it was acting illegally by allowing (presumably Christian) prayers to be said before meetings. The council found a surprising defender in Baroness Warsi, Britain’s first female Muslim cabinet minister. She wrote in the Daily Telegraph:

“To create a more just society, people need to feel stronger in their religious identities and more confident in their creeds. … You cannot and should not extract these Christian foundations from the evolution of our nations any more than you can or should erase the spires from our landscapes."

The British Humanist Association waded in, saying Baroness Warsi’s comments are “outdated, unwarranted and divisive”. Let’s take those one at a time.

Outdated? The intellectuals at the BHA can do better than this. To value an idea according to whether it originated long ago or last week – or on a Thursday, to paraphrase Chesterton – is like saying that job interviewers should appoint the candidate born first, or last, or under Scorpio.

Unwarranted? Means: without basis. Richard Dawkins gives the game away by declaring that Warsi’s comments have “no logical basis” (italics mine). I think he mistakes the nature of faith. I have no logical basis for believing God exists, just as he has no logical basis for believing God does not exist. Or for believing that new ideas are better than old ones. Dawkins and the Baroness each take up a position with a clear basis – in their respective faiths.

(Meanwhile, the idea that God would submit himself for examination by Dawkins is laughable. The opposite may eventually occur, but that is another matter.)

Divisive? This is the most puzzling accusation. I would say Warsi's comments are the opposite. A person of one religion is finding common cause with people of another religion, even though important differences remain. If a secularist tries to discourage this, if a humanist wants Muslim and Christian to disagree: who is being divisive?

The Baroness speaks of “militant secularisation” as a form of totalitarianism. I look forward to the BHA showing us that this is not so – although there is “no logical basis” for that hope: since there is no logical connection between loving one's neighbour and hating God.

First among sequels

Time to reflect on another year’s Hollywood output. And beneath the smart oak veneer of the Oscar lists lurks the usual compressed sawdust of remakes, adaptations and (above all) sequels. Sadly, I haven’t managed to see Hangover 2, Transformers 3 or Mission Impossible 4: so my comments will be generalised, taking in films from earlier years. But nothing much changes.

Generally, I don’t get the point of remakes. I can understand that you remake a foreign-language film in English to spare your audience the trouble of mumbling as they read the subtitles aloud to themselves. And before anyone starts, no, The Lion King is not a rip-off of a Japanese original. Disney says so, and the American courts agree. So I’m not going to argue. 

(Osamu Tezuka, 1965)

But to remake The Ladykillers or Psycho? What's the point? Why not re-release the original? If I want to come up with a great painting, I’m not going to try to update The Mona Lisa.

Or you could have another go at a film that didn’t quite work first time around. The Twelve Chairs had a great plot and some fine moments, but somehow the whole thing fell flat. An idea like that deserves a second chance. And Judge Dredd could be watchable, but needs a lead actor who’s prepared to wear the helmet at all times, as the comic-book character does. (Maybe it needs an actor recognisable from his chin alone, as Kirk Douglas was. Any ideas?)

Ah yes, Judge Dredd. I’ve nothing against adaptations as such. The idea of turning Romeo and Juliet into a ballet seems barmy (“Hey, this would be good if we could just get rid of all the words!”) – but it works. Monty Python had fun imagining Wuthering Heights in semaphore, or the smoke-signal version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. And I’ve read some novels that would make perfectly good haiku, or toilet paper.

Perhaps my disappointment is in how persistently film-makers go to the back catalogue of novels, sixties TV series, or fairground rides. Or pen-and-paper games (Battleship). What next: Noughts and Crosses of the Caribbean? Doesn't anyone have ideas of their own any more? (See my earlier posting: Harry Potter and the Search Engine.) (And check out Remake: redux part 2 – scroll down to the second cartoon – on http://christopolisillustration.wordpress.com/2010/03.)

And then there are the sequels. These days people seem to actively expect sequels. It is alleged that The Madness of King George was so-called because The Madness of George III would have confused Americans who hadn’t seen the first two. What would today’s filmgoers make of Henry V? Malcolm X? Catch-22? Fahrenheit 451?

Sequels are such big business that we have invented new words for follow-ups differently related to the original: such as prequel, for a film set earlier than the original story. The idea isn’t new: El Cid dies at the end of his story, so people wanting to write another story about him were short of options. But the word is new – along with simulquel, threequel, and (ouch) squeakquel.

Again, I don’t object to sequels as such. But it’s the sheer number of them, compared with original output. Wikipedia says 2011 saw twenty-eight sequels made, and I expect that's just in Hollywood. Of the top ten grossest films, excuse me, the ten top-grossing films of 2011, eight are sequels and another is already called "Part 1". If Never-Ending Story truly was never-ending (and it felt like it), why did we need a second one?

A wunch of bankers

So, they have annulled Fred Goodwin’s knighthood. Serve him right? He was clearly motivated by greed to gamble with other people’s security. Mind you, we tolerated this – and our government did not challenge his obscene bonuses – as long as he kept rolling a double six.

On the one hand, we might ask whether his punishment is sufficient. In China they go to the other extreme. Adulteration of baby milk by Sanlo led to a scandal of Nestlé proportions – such that it was necessary to jail protesting parents – and dealers Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping were executed. Of course, China is run by a bunch of commie tyrants. Couldn’t they just have annulled their fishing permits, say, like any civilised nation? We can’t be handing out serious penalties to oligarchs.

On the other hand, I wonder where else we might apply a similar sanction to that inflicted on Mr Goodwin. If an award “for services to banking” (i.e. for making money) can be revoked if one loses money, then can a lifetime Oscar be revoked if the recipient turns out a couple of real turkeys? Or all those Oscars for Titanic, if we ever decide it was actually quite a dull film?

Olympic medals are already routinely withdrawn from people who turn out to have been using drugs. (But not from the steroid-pumped East German women swimmers from the 60s, 70s and 80s. Why not?)

Then there’s Henry Kissinger. Suppose someone spotted that he was involved in the bombing of Cambodia, not to mention Operation Condor: might the Nobel people cancel his Peace Prize? And what about Menachem Begin? 

And if we’re thinking about Nobel Prizes, then let’s not forget Milton Friedman, winner of the Economics prize in 1976. This is the guru behind Thatcher’s Cainite policies (not noticeably changed by her successors), which have allowed some people – such as Fred Goodwin – to become very rich. Hooray! But their fortune has come at great cost to others (and to society, if we still believe that such a thing exists). Now that we know this, now that we have seen the despair and the decay, is it time to annul Friedman’s prize along with Goodwin’s honour?