Enclaves of likeminded

Beware enclaves of the like-minded

July 17, 2009

Closed communities have no place in multi-racial, multi-religious Singapore
By Lydia Lim

I PATRONISE a heartland beauty salon in Hougang where the soothing music streaming through the speakers is invariably Christian.

The salon’s owners are a pair of Singaporean sisters. They are Christian and conduct Bible study sessions at their shop once a week. Their three staff, one local and two mainland Chinese, often talk about going to church.

I do not recall religion being discussed at places like beauty parlours when I was young. Is that evidence of growing religiosity here? It is difficult to say.

Shortly after the recent leadership tussle at women’s group Aware, one of my colleagues, who is not religious, said she was worried about religion’s growing influence in workplace interactions.

Did I not agree, she asked, that a boss who is Christian would be more likely to promote a fellow Christian rather than a non-believer?

Such sentiments may underlie the Government’s recent expressions of concern over what it perceives as growing religiosity in some quarters, and its potentially adverse impact on social harmony.

The most recent expression of concern came from Minister without Portfolio Lim Boon Heng. At a People’s Association event last Sunday, he observed that the current economic downturn has led many to turn to religion for solace and guidance.

‘It’s not a bad thing,’ he said. ‘I think all religions teach us fundamental values and across the religions, the values are largely similar…But there is a danger, as we see in different countries, that the practice of religion can make a community become closed.’

‘We are a multi-racial and multi-religious society,’ he emphasised ‘and our harmony depends upon people of different races and creeds interacting with one another and sharing common interests.’

There is no survey that has tracked the changing levels of religiosity over time in Singapore. What we know from the population census of 2000 is that 85 per cent of Singaporeans profess a religion, a figure that has remained largely unchanged for decades. But that tells us little about the extent to which religion guides people’s lives.

In 2005, The Straits Times tried to gauge the level of religiosity in a poll of 622 Singapore residents aged 15 and above.

The survey found that among those with a religion, half devoted time every day to prayer, meditation or the reading of religious books. Close to half of this group would not marry someone of a different religion and one in 10 would consider going into religious service full-time.

Those polled, however, differed on whether Singaporeans had become more devout over the years. Some 23 per cent said yes, 49 per cent detected no change and 27 per cent said people had actually become less religious.

What needs emphasising is what Mr Lim warned against: Not growing religiosity per se, but religious practices that leads to closed communities.

Some – especially those who are not religious or are only nominally so – may confuse the two and perceive religious devotion itself as a threat.

Every society has its share of people who are more religious than others. The overwhelming number of them are hardly social threats. On the contrary, their religious convictions may inspire them to do good works that benefit society.

But I agree with Mr Lim that community, as lived out today, is a double-edged sword: it both draws people in and keeps people out.

The communities that threaten social cohesion are the ones that are closed because they insist on ‘purity’ – whether of religious beliefs, ideology or race – as the measure of a person’s worth.

Such groups want to draw in those who are the same (‘pure’) and keep out those who are different (‘impure’). That is the path to segregation, not integration.

So it was indeed worrying when in a recent survey of the views of 183 Christian clergymen here, sociologist Mathew Mathews found that close to 50 per cent of them feared that inter-religious dialogue would compromise their religious convictions.

Some 41.5 per cent of them also said they would find it difficult to collaborate with a non-Christian religious leader in a charity drive because they feared it might lead to the perception that all religions are equal.

Dr Mathews, a visiting fellow at the National University of Singapore and a Pentecostal church pastor, commented that Christianity here tends to be conservative and evangelical, ‘embracing an exclusivist stance’ towards other religions.

Some scholars of modernity, such as sociologist Ziygmunt Bauman of Britian’s University of Leeds, argued that the uncertainties of modern society tend to push people towards communities of the like-minded. There is ‘the impulse to withdraw from risk-ridden complexity into the shelter of uniformity’, Professor Bauman wrote in his 2000 book, Liquid Modernity.

It is this flight to uniformity that we must resist. In a sense, that struggle is not new. At the birth of our multi-racial, multi-religious nation in 1965, the Government made a radical decision to break up the old enclaves where people of the same race and dialect group congregated. Many people lived in the safe embrace of those who spoke the same language, ate the same food and worked the same jobs as they did.

And as Singaporeans were resettled in public housing estates, the Government enforced a racial quota to prevent such enclaves from re-forming.

Today, we have to make a conscious effort to resist enclaves of the like-minded. But this time, the barriers are not made of bricks and mortar but spring from our most deeply held beliefs and values.

The challenge we face may thus be greater than it was in the past.

lydia@sph.com.sg

Posted by El Lobo Loco at 9:49 AM

Thio Li-ann’s comment on militant secularism

http://www.we-are-aware.sg/2009/05/28/religion-the-secular-state/

IN A recent interview, Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng reiterated that religion and politics must not be mixed. This is sound, though there are difficulties of definition as no bright line demarcates ‘religion’ from ‘politics’. We need to understand what ’secularism’ entails in Singapore for more specific guidance.

A state’s attitude towards religion turns upon its model of constitutional secularism. ‘Secularism’ is a protean, chameleon-like term: what it means depends on the context and who is using it; it can be a virtue or a vice. It is timely to eschew glibness and examine the Singapore model of secularism with precision.

There are in fact many secularisms or degrees of secularity. This complex term needs to be unpacked.

Historically, ’secularism’ originates from the Latin ’saeculum’, meaning ‘temporal’, worldly affairs, rather than ’spiritual’, other-worldly matters. The word ’secular’ is an emblem of intense historical conflict.

Today, in some circles, ’secularism’ connotes systematic hostility towards religion, as a synonym for a politicised form of ideological atheism whose creed is that humanity is destined to wholly shed religious conviction. The atheistic word was made flesh in the atheistic state produced by the Russian Revolution of 1917, devoted to Marx’s assumption that religion stupefies the masses and must be eradicated to bring forth the new Communist Man.

The principle of secularity dates back to the Roman Empire. It derived from the teaching of Jesus to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s’. This principle of limited government opposed state absolutism in suggesting Caesar did not wield absolute authority: While a citizen was to obey civil authority, he was to enjoy freedom from state interference in matters pertaining to the worship of God. Religious liberty thus limits state power. America first experimented constitutionally with dividing sacred from secular authority, rejecting the European conflation of civil and religious power.

Senior Minister of State Zainul Abidin Rasheed described Singapore secularism as ’secularism with a soul’. This deft juxtaposing of the material and the metaphysical speaks to the cooperative relation between state and religion.

The Constitution does not forbid the state to lend financial or other support to a religion; thus we have the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore as a statutory government body serving the Muslim community.

In 1989, Foreign Minister George Yeo observed the Government was ’secular but it is certainly not atheistic’. This evinces a rejection of a thick, atheistic version of secularism.

Secular humanism, which posits a morality independent of God, is a comprehensive anti-theistic world view. Some courts recognise it as a religion. It dogmatically asserts the absence of God, without any empirical evidence. We know from elementary logic that it is impossible to prove a universal negative. Whether God exists or not cannot be proved or disproved by evidence or logic.

It takes faith to believe or not to believe in God or gods. A lot of faith is needed to believe there is no divine. As Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol wrote: ‘It is the atheist’s opium to regard that unsubstantiated faith as established fact.’ Thick secularism is thus an anti-religion religion.

Secular democracies should be neutral not only between traditional religions but also regarding modern religions with atheistic foundations.

What is the situation in Singapore? DPM Wong emphasised the secular nature of the political arena and how keeping ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ separate was a key rule of political engagement.

What this means specifically is that laws and policies derive their legitimacy not from divine sanction but from a democratically elected government. Law generally applies to and equally protects all citizens, regardless of race, religion or social status. Clearly, the Singapore model of secularism is anti-theocratic in that religious tenets and secular law are separated, not conflated.

While anti-theocratic, the Singapore secularism is not anti-religious. This is a vital distinction.

DPM Wong welcomed the public service of individuals inspired by their religious convictions; they also ’set’ society’s ‘moral tone’. He affirmed that religious individuals had the same right as other citizens to ‘express their views on issues in the public space’ guided by their beliefs.

Religion is thus separated from politics, but, religion is not separated from public life and culture. Everyone has values, whether shaped by religious or secular ideologies; all may participate in public discourse to forge an ethical social consensus. While religion is personal, it is not exclusively private and has a social dimension which is not to be trivialised.

Thus, Singapore secularism is ‘agnostic’ and ‘thin’. The Government does not favour or disfavour any particular religion. We practise ‘accommodative secularism’ described by the Court of Appeal as removing restrictions to one’s choice of religious belief. Religious values do have a role in public debate.

Agnostic secularism of this sort is a virtue; it is a ‘framework’ which facilitates the peaceful co-existence of religions.

Conversely, militant secularism is an illiberal and undemocratic vice in seeking to gag religious views in the public square and so to privilege its atheistic values, as in communist states.

Secular fundamentalists are oppressive where they seek to mute religiously informed convictions in public debate, by demonising a view as religious.

Militant exclusionist secularism is thus a recipe for social disharmony; it feeds the ‘culture wars’ in the US and provokes those it seeks to exclude. It will not promote unity in diversity.

When it comes to moral disagreements and public policy, the press is powerfully positioned to promote informed debate. However the press may, by biased and selective reporting, misrepresent, distort or obscure an issue. We need to broaden our understanding of responsible journalism in Singapore, which rejects the extremes of an adversarial American watchdog and a Pravda-like lapdog, or running dog.

The feedback I received from friends and strangers on the reporting of the Aware controversy was that much of the reporting, particularly in one paper, was biased. It largely lacked a diversity of views in singing the same chorus that religious groups should not get involved in secular organisations. Some spoke of their new lists of ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’ journalists.

Responsible journalism should extend to covering a diversity of views, not a journalist’s preferred view. It should include the accurate representation of differing viewpoints, and not paint the fringe as mainstream or the pathological as normal. Readers may then see all sides of an issue and decide what is true.

This is important given the near monopolistic position of Singapore broadsheets. A lawyer recently returned from London wrote to me expressing horror in finding local papers apparently had nothing better to report than the Aware saga, as opposed to the more interesting British papers which offered a lot more variety.

This made me somewhat nostalgic for my student days in Cambridge, where I could, with chocolate croissant and Nescafe coffee in hand, survey a range of perspectives from The Times, Guardian, Independent or Telegraph.

–

Barack Obama’s Controversial ‘06 Speech on Religion & Politics

Barack Obama’s Controversial ‘06 Speech on Religion & Politics

// “We’re No Longer Just a Christian Nation.”

By Deborah White, About.com

On June 28, 2006, Senator Barack Obama delivered a controversial speech on religion and politics to the Call to Renewal conference sponsored by Sojourners, a respected Christian progressive organization.

His remarks set off a firestorm among liberals as he stated that they must put aside their religious biases, and reach out to others, including evangelical Christians, as an reconciling essential in a democracy.

TThe following are excerpted highlights of his lengthy, nuanced remarks.

2006 CALL TO RENEWAL KEYNOTE SPEECH

“… today I’d like to talk about the connection between religion and politics and perhaps offer some thoughts about how we can sort through some of the often bitter arguments that we’ve been seeing over the last several years…

For some time now, there has been plenty of talk among pundits and pollsters that the political divide in this country has fallen sharply along religious lines. Indeed, the single biggest “gap” in party affiliation among white Americans today is not between men and women, or those who reside in so-called Red States and those who reside in Blue, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don’t.

Conservative leaders have been all too happy to exploit this gap, consistently reminding evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their Church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage; school prayer and intelligent design.

Democrats, for the most part, have taken the bait. At best, we may try to avoid the conversation about religious values altogether, fearful of offending anyone and claiming that – regardless of our personal beliefs – constitutional principles tie our hands.

At worst, there are some liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word “Christian” describes one’s political opponents, not people of faith.

RECONCILING RELIGION & DEMOCRACY

… over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people’s lives — in the lives of the American people — and I think it’s time that we join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.

And if we’re going to do that then we first need to understand that Americans are a religious people. 90 percent of us believe in God, 70 percent affiliate themselves with an organized religion, 38 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people in America believe in angels than they do in evolution.

This religious tendency is not simply the result of successful marketing by skilled preachers or the draw of popular mega-churches. In fact, it speaks to a hunger that’s deeper than that – a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause.

Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds – dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets – and they’re coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough.

They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They’re looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before. And so they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them…

And I speak with some experience on this matter. I was not raised in a particularly religious household, as undoubtedly many in the audience were… It wasn’t until after college, when I went to Chicago to work as a community organizer for a group of Christian churches, that I confronted my own spiritual dilemma.

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street in the Southside of Chicago one day and affirm my Christian faith…

PROGRESSIVES MUST NOT SHY AWAY FROM RELIGION

That’s a path that has been shared by millions upon millions of Americans – evangelicals, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims alike; some since birth, others at certain turning points in their lives. It is not something they set apart from the rest of their beliefs and values. In fact, it is often what drives their beliefs and their values.

And that is why that, if we truly hope to speak to people where they’re at – to communicate our hopes and values in a way that’s relevant to their own – then as progressives, we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse…

In other words, if we don’t reach out to evangelical Christians and other religious Americans and tell them what we stand for, then the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons and Alan Keyeses will continue to hold sway.

IMPORTANCE OF RELIGIOUS WORDS

More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical – if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.

Imagine Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address without reference to “the judgments of the Lord.” Or King’s I Have a Dream speech without references to “all of God’s children.” Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible, and move the nation to embrace a common destiny.

MORAL HEART OF THE UNITED STATES

Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting “preachy” may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems.

After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness – in the imperfections of man.

Solving these problems will require changes in government policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds.

I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers’ lobby – but I also believe that when a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we’ve got a moral problem. There’s a hole in that young man’s heart – a hole that the government alone cannot fix.

I believe in vigorous enforcement of our non-discrimination laws. But I also believe that a transformation of conscience and a genuine commitment to diversity on the part of the nation’s CEOs could bring about quicker results than a battalion of lawyers. They have more lawyers than us anyway.

I think that we should put more of our tax dollars into educating poor girls and boys. I think that the work that Marian Wright Edelman has done all her life is absolutely how we should prioritize our resources in the wealthiest nation on earth.

I also think that we should give them the information about contraception that can prevent unwanted pregnancies, lower abortion rates, and help assure that that every child is loved and cherished.

But, you know, my Bible tells me that if we train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not turn from it. So I think faith and guidance can help fortify a young woman’s sense of self, a young man’s sense of responsibility, and a sense of reverence that all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy.

SHEDDING PROGRESSIVE BIAS ON FAITH

I am not suggesting that every progressive suddenly latch on to religious terminology – that can be dangerous. Nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith. As Jim has mentioned, some politicians come and clap — off rhythm — to the choir. We don’t need that.

In fact, because I do not believe that religious people have a monopoly on morality, I would rather have someone who is grounded in morality and ethics, and who is also secular, affirm their morality and ethics and values without pretending that they’re something they’re not. They don’t need to do that. None of us need to do that.

But what I am suggesting is this – secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause.

So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Moreover, if we progressives shed some of these biases, we might recognize some overlapping values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of our country.

We might recognize that the call to sacrifice on behalf of the next generation… And we might realize that we have the ability to reach out to the evangelical community and engage millions of religious Americans in the larger project of American renewal.

RELIGIOUS LEADERSHIP ON VITAL ISSUES

Some of this is already beginning to happen. Pastors, friends of mine like Rick Warren and T.D. Jakes are wielding their enormous influences to confront AIDS, Third World debt relief, and the genocide in Darfur. Religious thinkers and activists like our good friend Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo are lifting up the Biblical injunction to help the poor as a means of mobilizing Christians against budget cuts to social programs and growing inequality.

And by the way, we need Christians on Capitol Hill, Jews on Capitol Hill and Muslims on Capitol Hill talking about the estate tax. When you’ve got an estate tax debate that proposes a trillion dollars being taken out of social programs to go to a handful of folks who don’t need and weren’t even asking for it, you know that we need an injection of morality in our political debate.

Across the country, individual churches like my own and your own are sponsoring day care programs, building senior centers, helping ex-offenders reclaim their lives, and rebuilding our gulf coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

BUILDING PARTNERSHIPS BETWEEN RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR AMERICA

So the question is, how do we build on these still-tentative partnerships between religious and secular people of good will? It’s going to take more work, a lot more work than we’ve done so far. The tensions and the suspicions on each side of the religious divide will have to be squarely addressed. And each side will need to accept some ground rules for collaboration.

While I’ve already laid out some of the work that progressive leaders need to do, I want to talk a little bit about what conservative leaders need to do — some truths they need to acknowledge.

For one, they need to understand the critical role that the separation of church and state has played in preserving not only our democracy, but the robustness of our religious practice.

Folks tend to forget that during our founding, it wasn’t the atheists or the civil libertarians who were the most effective champions of the First Amendment. It was Baptists like John Leland who didn’t want the established churches to impose their views on folks who were getting happy out in the fields and teaching the scripture to slaves.

It was the forbearers of the evangelicals who were the most adamant about not mingling government with religious, because they did not want state-sponsored religion hindering their ability to practice their faith as they understood it.

“We’re No Longer Just a Christian Nation.”

Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.

And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith?

So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.

This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason.

I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

RELIGION IN A DEMOCRACY

Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice.

Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences.

To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing. And if you doubt that, let me give you an example.

We all know the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son, and without argument, he takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded.

Of course, in the end God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute, and Abraham passes God’s test of devotion.

But it’s fair to say that if any of us leaving this church saw Abraham on a roof of a building raising his knife, we would, at the very least, call the police and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham. We would do so because we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that we all see, and that we all hear, be it common laws or basic reason.

A SENSE OF PROPORTION AND REASON IS ESSENTIAL

Finally, any reconciliation between faith and democratic pluralism requires some sense of proportion.

This goes for both sides.

Even those who claim the Bible’s inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, sensing that some passages – the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ’s divinity – are central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life.

The American people intuitively understand this, which is why the majority of Catholics practice birth control and some of those opposed to gay marriage nevertheless are opposed to a Constitutional amendment to ban it. Religious leadership need not accept such wisdom in counseling their flocks, but they should recognize this wisdom in their politics.

But a sense of proportion should also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation – context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase “under God.” I didn’t.

Having voluntary student prayer groups use school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats. And one can envision certain faith-based programs – targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers – that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems.

So we all have some work to do here. But I am hopeful that we can bridge the gaps that exist and overcome the prejudices each of us bring to this debate. And I have faith that millions of believing Americans want that to happen.

No matter how religious they may or may not be, people are tired of seeing faith used as a tool of attack. They don’t want faith used to belittle or to divide. They’re tired of hearing folks deliver more screed than sermon. Because in the end, that’s not how they think about faith in their own lives.

So let me end with just one other interaction I had during my campaign. A few days after I won the Democratic nomination in my U.S. Senate race, I received an email from a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical School that said the following:

“Congratulations on your overwhelming and inspiring primary win. I was happy to vote for you, and I will tell you that I am seriously considering voting for you in the general election. I write to express my concerns that may, in the end, prevent me from supporting you.”

LISTENING TO OTHER VIEWPOINTS

The doctor described himself as a Christian who understood his commitments to be “totalizing.” His faith led him to a strong opposition to abortion and gay marriage, although he said that his faith also led him to question the idolatry of the free market and quick resort to militarism that seemed to characterize much of the Republican agenda.

But the reason the doctor was considering not voting for me was not simply my position on abortion. Rather, he had read an entry that my campaign had posted on my website, which suggested that I would fight “right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.” The doctor went on to write:

“I sense that you have a strong sense of justice…and I also sense that you are a fair minded person with a high regard for reason…Whatever your convictions, if you truly believe that those who oppose abortion are all ideologues driven by perverse desires to inflict suffering on women, then you, in my judgment, are not fair-minded… I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.”

Fair-minded words.

So I looked at my website and found the offending words. In fairness to them, my staff had written them using standard Democratic boilerplate language to summarize my pro-choice position during the Democratic primary, at a time when some of my opponents were questioning my commitment to protect Roe v. Wade.

A RECONCILING CONVERSATION ABOUT RELIGION IN THE US

Re-reading the doctor’s letter, though, I felt a pang of shame. It is people like him who are looking for a deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country.

They may not change their positions, but they are willing to listen and learn from those who are willing to speak in fair-minded words. Those who know of the central and awesome place that God holds in the lives of so many, and who refuse to treat faith as simply another political issue with which to score points.

So I wrote back to the doctor, and I thanked him for his advice. The next day, I circulated the email to my staff and changed the language on my website to state in clear but simple terms my pro-choice position.

And that night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own – a prayer that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to others… A hope that we can live with one another in a way that reconciles the beliefs of each with the good of all.

It’s a prayer worth praying, and a conversation worth having in this country in the months and years to come.

Thank you.

Three Rules for These Times

Three Rules for These Times

10:42 PM Monday May 18, 2009
by Alan M. Webber

Most economists agree that the worst of this financial meltdown is now behind us. Unemployment is at a 25-year high, it’s true, but at least the pace of lay-offs has slowed. If there was a doubt before, it seems safe to conclude that we’re going to make it through this mess. There will be enormous social costs. People have lost their livelihoods and their life savings. Seniors have seen their retirement nest eggs disappear; young people have seen their employment hopes vanish. But we’re going to make it.

The question is, what, if anything will we learn from this disaster? Already economists are subjecting their field to a long overdo critical review. In their thoughtful book, “Animal Spirits,” George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, suggest that economics has left out the human factor–the emotional components that drive economic behavior. Alan Greenspan has publicly acknowledged that his mental model of the economy clearly did not match reality. It seems clear that we’ll soon see new regulations put in place, new oversight and legislation designed to change the way the public sector referees the behavior of the private sector in economic matters.

But what if the problem isn’t economics? What if the problem is a business problem–a failure of management and an absence of leadership? Shouldn’t business and business schools be looking at their practices and precepts with the same critical eye as the economics profession? I recently wrote a book called Rules of Thumb, a collection of 52 life lessons. I think three of them can help propel the thinking on these issues in the right direction.

Years ago, when America’s competitiveness appeared to be failing, two legendary HBS professors, Bill Abernathy and Bob Hayes, challenged business schools and business leaders to take a hard look at themselves. “Managing Our Way to Economic Decline” became a must-read text. Isn’t it time for another such review?

What is the business of business school? And what is the purpose of business?

At least once per decade for the last 30 years we’ve seen American business go seriously off the rails. The reengineering fad, Mike Milken and junk bonds, the savings and loan crisis, the dotcom boom and bust, the Long Term Capital Management panic–only a partial, abbreviated history of business disasters–suggest that something systemic is wrong with the way business goes about business. An individual with this track record of crises would be a candidate for an intervention, a time out in a recovery center, and life-long participation in the 12-step program of their choice. Something is wrong–and it’s time to face it.

Business schools teach finance and strategy, marketing and HR, IT and operations management. Those are the courses of a trade school, not the developmental curriculum of a profession.

The first question business schools should teach their students to ask is my Rule #3: Ask the last question first. The last question is, what’s the point of the exercise? Jack Welch famously said it was to maximize shareholder value–a terrible answer in retrospect. Peter Drucker famously said it was to make and keep a customer. What is the answer that fits our situation in 2009, and beyond? Today, business schools need to teach students to ask the last question first–or risk taking their company down the old dead-end path.

The next piece of the curriculum has to be Rule #23: Keep two lists, one that holds what gets you up in the morning and one for what keeps you up at night. Managers and leaders have got to know themselves before they know their businesses. They’ve got to have passion for their work and concern for their world. Otherwise they’re just punching the time clock and risking everyone’s future.

Finally I’d teach Rule #4: Don’t implement solutions. Prevent problems. Everything that will be put in place as a clean up to the mess we’re in now won’t be enough if we keep creating new disasters. We need a new generation of business leaders who anticipate problems and prevent them from happening. It’s smarter, cheaper, and more effective than the every-ten-year clean up we’ve become accustomed to.

Every one of these three rules has two things in common. First, they cut across all the disciplines of traditional business school. They are ways of seeing the world, ways of making sense of everyday business realities. They teach a way of thinking and a way of synthesizing the world of work that every crisis–and every opportunity–shows us we need. And second, they are about people, not about business. They are about the human side of enterprise. They carry the message that work is personal. That each individual has a contribution to make and a decision to weigh. That we have to decide not only what we will do in business, but even more important, how and why we will do business the way we do it in the first place.

It’s time for new course-ware in the business of doing business.

Alan M. Webber is an award-winning, nationally-recognized editor, author, and columnist.

jesus camp

the one of Ted Haggard

Shouts & Murmurs

Amen, Brother

by Paul Rudnick

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2009/04/27/090427sh_shouts_rudnick?currentPage=all

What my therapist says is that I am a heterosexual with issues.
—Ted Haggard.

Thank you, Ted, and God bless you, Ted’s therapist. My name is Stan Belker, and I’m the pastor here at Our Lady of the Irredeemable Sinner, in Nashville, and, just like Ted, I, too, have struggled with my sexuality and have come out the other side, into the good green pastures of Christian family life.

As a teen-ager, I found that I was attracted both to serving Our Lord and to Jimmy Wiggins, the assistant coach of my high-school soccer team. I was in torment, and I would pray for hours on end, asking God why He would command me to love Him so deeply and at the same time just go and create Jimmy’s snug little soccer shorts. I told my clergyman, Father Josiah, about my conflicting urges, and he tried to reconcile them by explaining that from certain angles Jesus looks just like Dennis Quaid. Still, I had agonizing doubts: was I just experiencing a completely normal phase of adolescent uncertainty, or were Jimmy Wiggins’s firm, high buttocks really a calling card from Satan?

I became determined to change, to lead a wholly Christian life. In college, I began to date. At first, I took things slow, and I went out with only the most pious, virginal girls, who luckily often had strong, masculine jawlines. I became pre-engaged to Mary Ann Collier, and we’d sit in her sorority’s front parlor reading Scripture together. “I think that St. Francis and St. Michael are my favorite holy men,” Mary Ann said one evening. “You’re right about Francis,” I said. “He’s to die for, but Michael should work on his calf muscles.” “Stan,” Mary Ann asked me, “is there something you’d like to tell me?” “Yes, there is,” I replied gratefully. “I’d just like you to know that, if it weren’t for the teachings of Our Lord, I would very much enjoy having sexual intercourse with you. But, because of our shared beliefs, I’ll just have to make do with my lonely dorm room and this issue of Men’s Fitness, the one with all those great ab routines.”

I was in college when I had my first sexual encounter with a man—Brad Bicknell, a student in my Christian Values seminar. One day, as we stood side by side at the urinals discussing the importance of abstinence, Brad asked me out to dinner. “But just as friends and Christian study buddies,” he assured me. “I have absolutely no intention of allowing our eyes to lock over the bread basket, because that would only lead to the surprisingly roomy back seat of my Toyota Celica, where we’d be forced to grapple with each other’s moist, engorged man areas.”

I’ll be honest; I was curious. I needed to know exactly what sexual activity with another fellow might entail, so I could be ashamed of it. I warned Brad that, while I would be willing to sleep with him as a very small part of my journey to Christian wholeness, I didn’t intend to enjoy the experience. In fact, while we were going at it, I said, “Brad, while what you’re doing feels unbelievably good and just might cause my entire body to explode, it’s nothing compared with what I hope to one day experience with my future wife, if she’s double-jointed.”

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But I knew that what Brad and I were doing was wrong, especially after the fifty-eighth time. That was when I told Brad, quite firmly, “Brad, our being together is sinful and will only impede our development as responsible Christian adults. And your mustache tickles.” The very next day, I met Stacy Crothers, the beautiful, adoring, steadfast woman who would become my wife. When I first met Stacy, in the cafeteria, I was smitten with her shy smile, her sparkling conversation, and the family photographs that she proudly took from her wallet, which included several snapshots of her sturdy quarterback brother, Frank, at the beach in a Speedo. “I have a very good feeling about us,” I told Stacy on that very first day.

After a blissfully romantic courtship lasting only twelve years, Stacy and I were married. We had decided to save ourselves for our wedding night, because, as I reminded Stacy over and over, “The first time I make love to a woman, I want it to be sacred and special, and not just mindless, unending pleasure, like sex with a guy.” And I have to say that, in the bedroom, Stacy and I got along like a house afire, especially if that house was willing to respond to the nickname Skipper.

But I’m not perfect. Like any human being, I had the occasional odd desire, the stray thought, the random yearning to, for example, seduce a seventeen-year-old lad after choir practice. Thanks to my years of work with a gifted therapist, I now fully realize that my actions were inappropriate, even though they were listed in boldface on the daily church calendar, as “Nude Prayer,” “Nude Prayer in the Basement,” and “Nude Prayer with Mutual Body Scrub.”

So, yes, I was flawed, but my commitment to my parishioners, my wife, and my family remained my primary focus, until finally I was caught on tape, attempting to buy crystal meth, sexual services, and a plus-size tube top from a male prostitute. Of course, at the time, in my innocence, I didn’t realize that Jack was a drug dealer and a prostitute; I assumed that his offer of drugs and orgies was just an expression of low self-esteem, and his way of telling me, “After we do the crystal and have sex with all these guys, I’d really like to talk about the story of Ruth.” I felt that I was counselling Jack, sometimes for days at a time, in our cheap motel room, where I would always place a full-color photo portrait of my family atop the minibar.

When the truth finally came out, on every news show in the country, at first I was devastated, and I imagined that I would lose everything, including my church, my family, and my ten-per-cent Clergyman’s Discount with Jack. But you know what? When I was being reviled on every front page, when I was hiding from the media in my den, clutching a bottle of bourbon, when I was trying to explain to Stacy that a male prostitute is just like Mary Magdalene in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” that was when I truly felt the presence of my Saviour. That was when I heard the Lord say unto me, “Stan, now you can begin to truly know thyself, and therefore to know God. Stan, now your spiritual journey can really begin. Stan, put down that bottle and that copy of People’s Sexiest Man Alive issue with Hugh Jackman on the cover, because he’s never going to write back.”

And since that day I have lived in the light. My wife and I have spent months in counselling, screaming and sobbing and finally coming back together, over our shared love for Christian living and early Jean-Claude Van Damme films. And I have told my children and my church that Stan Belker isn’t perfect, and he’s never going to be perfect. That Stan Belker is going to try with all his might to lead a clean Christian life, even if every now and then he still has a yen to offer Keanu Reeves a papal blessing in exchange for his underpants.

But those thoughts, those blips, they’re not who I am. Just like Ted Haggard, I can take responsibility for my actions. Because when I saw Ted on “Oprah,” spilling his guts, promoting his HBO special, and staying a good few feet away from his wife on the couch, I thought, Ted, if you can make it, I can make it. Together we can move forward, into the clean bright light of the Christian dawn. Together we can make only the most righteous choices. Together we will become decent Christian adults. Call me. ♦

Living with schizophrenia

Living with schizophrenia

http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun07/living.html

Print version: page 62

When Elyn R. Saks was first officially diagnosed with schizophrenia during her first year of law school at Yale University, doctors told her she would not complete her degree. In fact, they added, she would most likely never hold a job, get married or have any semblance of a normal life.

In her memoir, which she will discuss at APA’s 2007 Annual Convention, Sunday, Aug. 19, at 4 p.m., readers learn that Saks not only went back to law school, but used her experiences in psychiatric wards to inform her research and writing on mental health law.

Saks is now an associate dean and professor of law, psychology, psychiatry and human behavior at the Gould School of Law at the University of Southern California. Saks battled her increasing delusions-and weathered several hospital stays-to graduate at the top of her undergraduate class at Vanderbilt University, receive a master’s in philosophy at Oxford University and get married.

But the stress of starting anew in law school, combined with ongoing bouts of psychosis, landed her in another hospital. She fully intended to return to school, but the hospital staff had other ideas.

“Without my permission or knowledge, they had called the dean of students at the law school to confirm that I couldn’t return that year or possibly ever,” she says. “In effect, they withdrew me from law school.”

But Saks fought to regain her equilibrium and sanity and returned to law school the next year. There she quickly began focusing on the intersection of law and mental illness. She has since published numerous articles and books on legal issues such as informed consent and the use of restraints. And she is now pursuing a degree in psychoanalysis to further inform her research.

She hopes to reach a more general audience, however, with the publication of her memoir “The Center Cannot Hold: A Journey Through Madness” (Hyperion, 2007).

“My main goals are to give hope to people who suffer from schizophrenia, and understanding to those who don’t,” she says.

In the book, Saks discusses the obstacles she faced as she pursued her career while still in recovery, such as keeping her psychosis at bay, especially around classmates and colleagues. She also recounts her struggle to accept that she needed medication and focuses on how talk therapy has allowed her to make meaning out of her struggles.

“One of the reasons I’ve done this memoir is to explode the myth that psychoanalysis can’t help people like me,” Saks says.

The Great Repricing by George Yeo

The Great Repricing

Madam Pro-Vice Chancellor, Kate Pretty, my old tutor, Professor Navaratnam, dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, it may seem inauspicious that Cambridge should be celebrating its 800th Anniversary at a time when the world is heading into a deep recession the likes of which have not been seen for a long time. From the perspective of Cambridge’s long history, however, this sharp economic downturn is but another discontinuity in the affairs of man of which the University has seen many and participated in not a few. Whether this crisis marks a major break in world history we don’t know yet. Turning points are only seen for what they are in hindsight.

What is becoming clearer is the severity of the crisis. No one is sure where the bottom is or how long this crisis will last. In the meantime, tens of thousands of companies will go bankrupt and tens of millions of people will lose their jobs ─ at least. What started as a financial crisis has become a full-blown economic crisis. For many countries, worsening economic conditions will lead to political crisis. In some, governments acting hastily in response to short-term political pressure will do further harm to the economy.

In an editorial last December, the Financial Times commented that the US Federal Reserve was flying blind. But, in fact, all governments are flying with poor vision. Markets are volatile precisely because no one knows for sure which policy responses will work.

I remember an old family doctor once explaining how every disease must run its course. In treating an illness, he said, one works with its progression. Attempting to short-cut the process may worsen the underlying condition. While emergency action may be needed and symptoms can be ameliorated, the body must be healed from within after which its immunological status changes.

The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter understood the importance of creative destruction. The end of an economic cycle does not return the economy to where it was at the beginning. During the downturn, firms go bankrupt, people lose jobs, institutions are revamped, governments may be changed. And in the process, resources are reallocated and the old gives way to the new.

Charles Darwin, whose 200th birth anniversary we mark this year, understood all that. Life is a struggle with old forms giving way to new forms. And human society is part of this struggle.

The question we ask ourselves is, what is the new reality that is struggling to emerge from the old? History is not pre-determined. There is, at any point in time, a number of possible futures, each, as it were, a state of partial equilibrium. And every crisis is a discontinuity from one partial equilibrium state to another within what scenario analysts call a cone of possibilities.

Well, whatever trajectory history takes within that cone of possibilities in the coming years, there will be a great repricing of assets, of factors of production, of countries, of ideas.

Economic Repricing

Let me first talk about economic repricing. Many bubbles have burst in the current crisis starting with sub-prime properties in the US. All over the world, asset prices are plummeting. In the last one year, tens of trillions of dollars have been wiped out. How much further this painful process will continue, no one can be sure. Many months ago, Alan Greenspan, in his usual measured way, peering into the hole said he saw a bottom forming in the fall of asset prices; it turned out to be the darkness of an abyss very few knew existed. That bottom is only reached when assets are sufficiently repriced downwards. Public policies can help or hinder this process. Unfortunately, many stimulus packages being proposed will make the adjustment more difficult. For example, bailing out inefficient automobile companies may end up prolonging the pain of restructuring at tremendous public expense.

The repricing of human beings will be even more traumatic. With globalisation, we have in effect one marketplace for human labour in the world. Directly or indirectly, the wages and salaries of Americans, Europeans and Japanese are being held down by billions of Asians and Africans prepared to work for much less. China and India alone are graduating more scientists and engineers every year than all the developed countries combined. Now, while it is true that trade is a positive sum game, the benefits of trade are never equally distributed. We can therefore expect protectionist pressures to grow in many countries.

Governments will try to protect jobs often at long-term cost to their economies. It is wrong to think that we can force our way out of a recession. Beyond a point, the stress will be taken on exchange rates. If governments try to prevent the repricing of assets and human beings, international markets will force the adjustment on us. A country that is over-leveraged living beyond its means will itself be repriced through its currency. Its currency will be devalued, forcing lower living standards on all its citizens.

The world is in profound imbalance today. All the G7 countries are in recession. The West is consuming too much and saving too little while the East is saving too much and consuming too little. China, India and others need to consume much more of what they produce but they are unable to take up the present slack in global demand because their GDPs are still too small. In 10-20 years, they may be able to but certainly not in the next few years. In the meantime, the global economy may suffer a prolonged recession, a global Keynesian paradox of thrift.

Political Repricing

When this crisis is finally over, which may take some years, out of it will emerge a multi-polar world with clearer contours. Although the US will remain the pre-eminent pole for a long time to come, it will no longer be the hyperpower and power will have to be shared. The Western-dominated developed world will have to share significant power with China, India, Russia, Brazil and other countries. Thus, accompanying the economic repricing will be political repricing.

Following the spectacular opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing, Tony Blair wrote in the Wall Street Journal of August 26 last year: “This is a historic moment of change. Fast forward 10 years and everyone will know it. For centuries, the power has resided in the West, with various European powers including the British Empire and then, in the 20th century, the US. Now we will have to come to terms with a world in which the power is shared with the Far East. I wonder if we quite understand what that means, we whose culture (not just our politics and economies) has dominated for so long. It will be a rather strange, possibly unnerving experience.”

Those words were said by Tony Blair in August last year before the financial meltdown. How much more they ring true today. Sharing power is however easier said than done. But without a major restructuring of international institutions, including the Bretton Woods institutions, many problems in global governance cannot be properly managed. The meeting of G20 leaders started by President George Bush in November last year is a necessary new beginning. But it is a process. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is hoping that the next meeting on 2 April in London will sketch out the main elements of a global bargain. To be sure, the reform of global institutions is a process that will take years to achieve. During the transition, many things can go wrong. In his analysis of the Great Depression in the last century, the economic historian Charles Kindleberger identified a major cause in the absence of global leadership during a critical period when power was shifting across the Atlantic. Great Britain could not exercise leadership while the US would not. In between, the global economy fell.

In the coming decades, the key relationship in the world will be that between the US and China. Putting it starkly, the US is China’s most important export market while China is the most important buyer of US Treasuries. The core challenge is the peaceful incorporation of China into the global system of governance, which in turn will change the global system itself. This was probably what led Secretary Hillary Clinton to make her first overseas visit to East Asia.

Three Points About China

The transformation of China is the most important development in the world today. Much has been written about it, the re-emergence of China. But I would like to touch on three points.

China’s Sense of Itself.

The first point is China’s sense of itself which was written about by Joseph Needham many years ago. Over the centuries, it has been the historical duty of every Chinese dynasty to write the history of the previous one. Twenty-four have been written, the first a hundred years before Christ by Sima Qian in the famous book, Shi Ji. And since then the later Han wrote about the Han and then the Xin, the Three Kingdoms and so on. So twenty-four in all. The last dynasty, the Qing Dynasty, lasted from 1644 to the Republican revolution of 1911. Its official history is only now being written after almost a century.

When I visited the Catholic Society of Foreign Missions of Paris in January this year, I was told by a Mandarin-speaking French priest who served many years in China and in Singapore that out of the 90 volumes envisaged for the official history of the Qing Dynasty, 5 volumes would be on the Christian missions in China. When I was there at the Society, I met a Chinese scholar researching into the history of missionary activities in Sichuan province. No other country or civilisation has this sense of its own continuity. For the official history of the People’s Republic, I suppose we would have to wait a couple of hundred years. It was Needham’s profound insight into China’s sense of itself that led to his remarkable study of Science and Civilization in China. Ironically, China’s sense of itself was mostly about its social and moral achievements within the classical realm. It was Needham who informed the Chinese of their own amazing scientific and technological contributions to the world.

However, China’s sense of itself is both a strength and a weakness. It is a strength because it gives Chinese civilization its self-confidence and its tenacity. Chinese leaders often say that while China should learn from the rest of the world, China would have to find its own way to the future. But it is also a conceit, and this conceit makes it difficult for Chinese ideas and institutions to become global in a diverse world. To be sure, the Chinese have no wish to convert non-Chinese into Chinese-ness. In contrast, the US as a young country, believing its own conception to be novel and exceptional, wants everyone to be American. The software of globalisation today including standards and pop culture is basically American. And therein lies a profound difference between China and the US.

The software of globalisation today, including standards and pop culture, is basically American. If you look at cultures as human operating systems, it is US culture which has hyper-linked all these different cultures together, in a kind of higher HTML or XML language. And even though that software needs some fixing today, it will remain essentially American. And I doubt that the Chinese software will ever be able to unify the world the way it has been because it (Chinese software) has a very different characteristic all of its own. Even when China becomes the biggest economy in the world as it almost certainly will within a few decades.

Cities of the 21st Century

The second point I wish to highlight today about China is the astonishing urban experimentation taking place today. China is urbanising at a speed and on a scale never seen before in human history. Chinese planners know that they do not have the land to build sprawling suburbia like America’s. China has less arable land than India. Although China already has a greater length of highways than the whole of the US, the Chinese are keenly aware that if they were to drive cars on a per capita basis like Americans, the whole world would boil.

Recognising the need to conserve land and energy, the Chinese are now embarked on a stupendous effort to build mega-cities, each accommodating tens of millions of people, each the population size of a major country. And these will not be urban conurbations like Mexico City or Lagos growing higgledy-piggledy, but cities designed to accommodate such enormous populations. This means planned urban infrastructure with high-speed intra-city and inter-city rail, huge airports like Beijing’s, forests of skyscrapers, and high tech parks containing universities, research institutes, start-ups and ancillary facilities.

In March last year, McKinsey Global Institute recommended 15 ’super cities’ with average populations of 25 million or 11 ‘city-clusters’ each with combined populations of more than 60 million. Unlike most countries, China is able to mount massive redevelopment projects because of the Communist re-concentration of land in the hands of the state. If you think about it, the great Chinese revolution was fundamentally about the ownership of land. This is the biggest difference between China and India. In India and most other parts of the world, land acquisition for large-scale projects is a very difficult and laborious process.

As we looked to the US for new patterns of urban development in the 20th century with its very rational grid patterns, we will have to look to China for the cities of the 21st century. Urbanisation on such a colossal scale is reshaping Chinese culture, politics and institutions. The Chinese Communist Party which had its origins in Mao’s countryside faces a huge challenge in the management of urban politics. From an urban population of 20% in Mao’s days, China is 40% urban today and, like all developed countries, will become 80-90% urban in a few decades’ time. Already, China has more mobile phones than anybody else and more internet users than the US.

China’s Political Culture

My third point is about China’s political culture. Over the centuries, China has evolved a political culture that enables a continental-size nation to be governed through a bureaucratic elite. In the People’s Republic, the bureaucratic elite is the Communist Party. When working properly, the mandarinate is meritocratic and imbued with a deep sense of responsibility for the whole country.

During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, there was a rule that no high official could serve within 400 miles of his birthplace so that he did not come under pressure to favour local interests. This would mean that for a place like Singapore, it would never be governed by Singaporeans.

A few years ago, that rule was re-introduced to the People’s Republic, and indeed, in almost all cases, the leader of a Chinese province is not from that province. Neither the Party Secretary nor the Governor, unless it is an autonomous region, in which case the number two job goes to a local, but never the number one job. It is as if on a routine basis, the British PM cannot be British, the French President cannot be French and the German Chancellor cannot be German.

Although politics in China will change radically as the country urbanises in the coming decades, the core principle of a bureaucratic elite holding the entire country together is not likely to change. Too many state functions affecting the well-being of the country as a whole require central coordination. In its historical memory, a China divided always meant chaos, and chaos could last a long time.

To be sure, China is experimenting with democracy at the lower levels of government because it acts as a useful check against abuse of power. However, at the level of cities and provinces, leaders are chosen from above after carefully canvassing the views of peers and subordinates. As with socialism, China will evolve a form of ‘democracy with Chinese characteristics’ quite different from Western liberal democracy. The current world crisis will convince the Chinese even more that they are right not to give up state control of the commanding heights of the economy.

With the world in turmoil, many developing countries are studying the Chinese system wondering whether it might not offer them lessons on good governance. For the first time in a long time, the Western model has a serious competitor.

I make these three points about China to illustrate how complex the process of incorporating China into a new multi-polar global system will be. The challenge is not only economic, it is also political and cultural. Yet, it must be met and the result will be a world quite different from what we are used to. Developing countries will no longer look only to the West for inspiration; they will also turn to China and, maybe, to India as well.

The Nalanda Revival

The simultaneous re-emergence of India and China, together making up 40% of the world’s population, is endlessly fascinating. Two countries cannot be more different. One is Confucianist and strait-laced, the other is democratic and rambunctious. Or to use Amartya Sen’s words, “The Indian is argumentative”. Yet, in both countries, we can feel an organic vitality changing the lives of huge numbers of people.

The re-encounter of these two ancient civilizations is itself another drama. Separated by high mountains and vast deserts, their historical contact over the centuries was sporadic and largely peaceful. In recent years, trade between them has grown hugely, making China India’s biggest trading partner today. But of course, we must remember that during the Raj, China was also British India’s biggest trading partner. But they are suspicious of each other. India remains scarred by its defeat by China in 1962 during the border war, a point which Chinese leaders seem not to understand fully.

We in Southeast Asia have a strong vested interest in these two great nations who are our immediate neighbours having peaceful, cooperative relations. Let me talk briefly about a project which may help bring South, Southeast and East Asia together again. This is the revival of the old Nalanda University in the Indian state of Bihar.

Through Chinese historical records, the world is aware of the existence of an ancient Buddhist university in India which for centuries drew students from all over Asia. At its peak, Nalanda accommodated ten thousand students, mostly monks. It had a magnificent campus with a nine-storey library and towers reaching into the clouds, according to the extravagant but remarkably accurate account of the 7th century Tang Dynasty Buddhist monk Xuan Zang. Xuan Zang’s journey to India to bring back Buddhist sutras was such an odyssey, it has long been mythologized in Chinese folklore – the Journey to the West. He spent a number of years in Nalanda. Unfortunately, Nalanda was destroyed by Afghan invaders at about the time Oxford and Cambridge were established 800 years ago and again initially, mostly for monks.

The Indian Government has recently decided to revive this ancient university as a secular university, offering it for international collaboration. A 500-acre site not far from the ruins of the old has already been acquired. Like the old, it will be multi-disciplinary, drawing on the Buddhist philosophy of man living in harmony with man, man living in harmony with nature, and man living as part of nature. A mentors group chaired by Amartya Sen has been appointed by the Indian Government to conceptualise its establishment, of which I am privileged to be a member. I hope the new Nalanda University will help usher in a new era of peace and understanding in Asia. I also hope it will have strong links to Cambridge.

Cultural Repricing

A multi-polar world is a messy world. It means that no particular value system will hold complete sway over others. The current crisis has already caused many people to question the nature of capitalism, socialism and democracy. Chemically-pure capitalism, to use a phrase coined by former French Premier Lionel Jospin, has become a dirty word. In contrast, John Maynard Keynes seems to have been repriced upwards again and all of us have been dusting the old copies of The General Theory that we have on our shelves. A recent Newsweek cover proclaimed that “we are all socialists now”. Even Karl Marx is being re-read. Ideas, cultural norms are all being repriced as countries search for ways out of the crisis. If high unemployment persists for many more years, dangerous ideas and ideologies may reappear as they did in the 30’s.

Without American leadership, multi-polarity can easily lead to global instability. And there is much expectation of what a new Obama Administration, sensitive to cultural nuances, can do to restore order and growth in the world. Unfortunately, there are no quick or easy solutions. We should expect instead a fairly long period of untidiness and confusion. Most importantly, we should be sceptical of absolute or ultimate solutions for these are often the most dangerous.

The Inspiration of Darwin and Needham

In responding to the current crisis, let us be inspired by two Cambridge men, Darwin and Needham. Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species 150 years ago represented one of the greatest intellectual leaps by mankind. At the British Museum of Natural History, they call it “The Big Idea”. It was a very big idea. Natural selection has an obvious analogue in man’s intellectual and social development. Like biological species, human ideas and systems are also subject to selection through wars, revolutions, elections, economic crises, academic debates and market competition. Those which survive and flourish should, we hope, raise civilization to a higher level.

Needham understood China like few other men did. As Simon Winchester wrote in his recent book on Needham, The Man Who Loved China, Needham might not be surprised to see the huge transformation of China today.

Both Darwin and Needham were drawn from our university tradition of being sceptical without losing our moral sense. Only by being sceptical can we be objective, can we see ourselves critically and learn from others. Only with a moral sense will we be motivated to work for a larger social good. It was China’s corruption and inability to learn from others in an earlier period that led to its long decline. The Qian Long Emperor told George III during Lord McCartney’s mission in 1793 that China had nothing to learn from the West. That marked the beginning of China’s long decline.

Human civilisations learn from one another more than they realise, more than we realise. In a collection of essays published by Needham on the historic dialogue of East and West in 1969, he chose for his title Within the Four Seas. That title was from the Analects of Confucius, who said, “Within the Four Seas, all men are brothers”. In the heyday of Third World solidarity in the 50’s, the Indians had a saying ─ “Hindi-Chini, bhai bhai” ─ Indians and Chinese are brothers. In these confused times, we need to learn from one another on the basis of a deep respect for each other as human beings.

Gen George Yeo.

Freakonomics

Pre-emptive Executions?      

The notion that legalizing abortion drives down crime rates is logically flawed and morally repugnant.

By Steve Sailer

Did legalizing abortion in the early ’70s reduce crime in the late ’90s by allowing “pre-emptive capital punishment” of potential troublemakers? Or did the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, by outmoding shotgun weddings, adoption, and respect for life, instead make more murderous the early ’90s crack wars fought by the first generation of youths to survive legalized abortion?

Since 1999, the University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt has been pushing his theory that legal abortion is responsible for half of the recent fall in crime. This assertion is the most prominent element in Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, the entertaining new book Levitt co-wrote with journalist Stephen J. Dubner.

Despite his claim to be a “rogue economist” (and his excruciating taste in book titles), Levitt is much admired within his profession. In 2003, the American Economics Association awarded him, at the unusually early age of 35, its biennial John Bates Clark medal as the outstanding economist under 40.

The theory that legalizing abortion cuts crime is hardly original to Levitt, but it has long been more whispered than printed. Levitt’s hypothesis embarrasses pro-choicers, who don’t want public discussion of how quite a few people, from crusading eugenicist and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger onward, have backed fertility control as a way to limit “undesirables.” Since blacks undergo about three times as many abortions as whites per capita, white liberals realize that endorsing Levitt’s reasoning could be politically disastrous.

Levitt’s idea also outrages pro-lifers, who note that King Herod used similar logic in ordering the slaughter of thousands of babies to try to eliminate the threat posed by the infant Jesus.

That doesn’t mean the argument is false. As a social scientist, Levitt has an obligation to follow the data wherever they may lead him. But that doesn’t mean it’s true, either.

Levitt’s theory rests on two plausible-sounding statements. First, he claims that abortion lowers the number of “unwanted” babies, who would be more likely to commit crimes someday. Second, crime did fall. Levitt writes, “In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years—the years during which young men enter their criminal prime—the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals.”

Although Levitt’s research has been praised by normally hardheaded gentlemen such as George Will and Robert Samuelson, few have probed its statistical complexities. Overall crime-trend data are frequently questionable. For example, the city of Atlanta long understated crime to attract the 1996 Olympics. The FBI’s homicide statistics, however, are more trustworthy because, as Arthur Miller might have said, attention must be paid to a dead body with a hole in it.

According to Levitt’s logic, murder should have declined first among the youngest and last among the oldest. Did it? Unfortunately for Levitt, the opposite is true. The murder rate for Americans age 25 and over started falling way back in 1981 (when the youngest person in this cohort was born in 1956) and fell fairly steadily for two decades. Indeed, in contrast to his theory about post-Roe individuals being especially law-abiding, the adult murder rate has only begun to creep back up now that people born after Roe have begun to make up a noticeable fraction of those 25 and up. From 1999 through 2002 (the latest year available, when a 25-year-old would have been born four years after Roe), the murder rate among 25- to 34-year-olds has risen 17 percent, while continuing to drop among the under-25s.

But the acid test of Levitt’s theory is this: did the first New, Improved Generation culled by legalized abortion actually grow up to be more lawful teenagers than the last generation born before legalization? Hardly. Instead, the first cohort to survive legalized abortion went on the worst youth murder spree in American history.

Abortion became legal in 1970 in California, New York, and three smaller states. Let’s compare the murder rate of 14- to 17-year-olds in 1983 (who were born in the last pre-legalization years of 1965-1969) with that of 14- to 17-year-olds a decade later in 1993 (who were born in the high-abortion years of 1975-1979). Was this post-Roe cohort better behaved than their pre-legalization elders? Not exactly. Their murder rate was 3.1 times worse.

In contrast, 18- to 24-year-olds in 1993—some born before legalization, some after—committed 86 percent more murders than a decade earlier, while people 25 and up—all born before legalization—were 18 percent less lethal. Back in 1983, 14- to 17-year-olds were barely more than half as likely as 25- to 34-year-olds to kill. In 1993 and 1994, however, this purportedly better-bred generation of juveniles was more than twice as deadly as 25- to 34-year-olds.

Although Levitt desperately wants to avoid talking about race in relation to abortion and crime, blacks make an ideal test case for his theory because, as Levitt himself has noted, black women have about triple the number of abortions per capita as white women. So Levitt’s theory suggests that black teens should have “benefited” more than whites from abortion. Instead, black 14- to 17-year-olds were an apocalyptic 4.4 times more murderous in 1993 than a decade earlier. The black-white teen murder ratio grew from five times worse in 1983 to 11 times worse in 1993, according to the FBI.

The embarrassing truth, as Levitt admitted to me when I debated him on Slate.com in 1999, is that when he dreamed up his theory with John J. Donohue, he looked at crime rates in 1985 and 1997 and paid little attention to the vast crack epidemic that laid waste to urban America in between.

It makes no sense to credit abortion for any subsequent improvement in the behavior of the first post-Roe generation, when abortion so dismally failed to keep them on the straight and narrow when they were juveniles. Instead, the most obvious explanation for the ups and downs of the murder rate is the ups and downs of the crack business.

This generation born right after legalization is better behaved today in part because so many of its bad apples are now confined to prisons, wheelchairs, and coffins. About two million people are now in jail, four times more than in 1972. (Levitt attributes roughly one-third of the recent fall in crime to increased incarceration.)

The leaders in the decline in murder in the later 1990s were black male 14- to 17-year-olds, who by 1998 were killing at less than one-third the rate of their older brothers just five years earlier. These African-American kids born in the early ’80s survived abortion levels similar to those faced by the crime-ridden 1975-79 generation, but seeing their big brothers gunned down in drive-by shootings may have scared them straight.

I believe Levitt when he says he has no political axe to grind about abortion—but he does have a bit of an ego about his ideas. To find a justification for his naïve initial hypothesis, he has been stubbornly straining his formidable cleverness. (Although in Freakonomics he employed the simplest way to deal with these objections: he ignored them completely.)

For example, he argues that crime fell first in the five states that legalized abortion back in 1970. Okay, but isn’t it at least as interesting that crime had previously gone up first in those early legalizing states? And hardly surprising it then burned out there first?

Indeed, there is at least as much evidence that legalizing abortion increased homicide. As Levitt acknowledged to me in 1999, “[T]he high abortion places like New York and California tended to have a bigger crack problem, and tended to have crack arrive earlier.” In other words, the two big urban areas that were the first to enjoy the purported crime-fighting benefits of legalized abortion in 1970, New York City and Los Angeles, were also the ground zeroes of the teen murder rampage that began, perhaps not coincidentally, about 16 years later. From NYC and LA, gangsta rap (such as NWA’s landmark 1988 album “Straight Outta Compton,” featuring “F*** Tha Police”) glamorously spread the crack-dealer’s credo to the hinterlands.

The liberal politics and permissive social attitudes that made legal abortion popular in New York, California, and Washington, D.C. (where it was de facto legal before Roe) likely also contributed to the crack epidemic. D.C., for example, enjoyed both the highest abortion rate in the U.S. and, in later years, a popular mayor, Marion Barry, who was himself a crackhead.

Still, the social effects of abortion demand closer study. Although Levitt claims that legalized abortion should have improved the conditions under which children were raised, it made adoption rare. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported, “Before 1973 about one in five premarital births to white women were relinquished for adoption. By the mid-1980’s (1982—88), this proportion fell to 1 in 30.”

Even worse, the national illegitimacy rate soared, from 12 percent in 1972 to 34 percent in 2002. The growth didn’t begin to slow until the mid-1990s, when the abortion rate declined. Increased illegitimacy is socially devastating, not just because of the long-run harm to the child of being raised without a father but because of the immediate effect of freeing young men from the civilizing clutches of marriage.

Why did the abortion rate and the illegitimacy rate both skyrocket during the ‘70s? Isn’t abortion supposed to cut illegitimacy? Roe largely finished off the traditional shotgun wedding by persuading the impregnating boyfriend that he had no moral duty to make an honest woman of his girlfriend since she could get an abortion. The CDC noted, “Among women aged 15—29 years conceiving a first birth before marriage during 1970—74, nearly half (49 percent) married before the child was born. By 1975—79 the proportion marrying before the birth of the child fell to 32 percent, and it has declined to 23 percent in 1990—94.”

The most striking fact about legalized abortion, but also the least discussed, is its pointlessness. Levitt himself notes that following Roe, “Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent …” So for every six fetuses aborted in the 1970s, five would never have been conceived except for Roe! This ratio makes a sick joke out of Levitt’s assumption that legalization made a significant difference in how “wanted” children were. Indeed, perhaps the increase in the number of women who got pregnant figuring they would get an abortion but then were too drunk or drugged or distracted to get to the clinic has meant that the “wantedness” of surviving babies has declined.

The sheer waste of it all is staggering. And the impact on the overall morality of our society of this Supreme Court-condoned carelessness over life is incalculable.

Tibet’s Legal Right to Autonomy

May 2008
Tibet’s Legal Right to Autonomy
http://www.feer.com/essays/2008/may/tibets-legal-right-to-autonomy by Paul Harris

Posted May 2, 2008

The Chinese government claims Tibet as an “inalienable” part of its territory, and anyone who questions this is subject to vitriolic attacks by the official Chinese media. If they are themselves Chinese and live in China, they are “splittists” and liable to be imprisoned. Those from outside China are “anti-China” and “interfering in China’s internal affairs.”

However, to the Tibetans and most people in the world outside China who are familiar with Tibet’s situation, this is an international problem crying out for a mediated solution. Therefore one must start with how international law might support Tibetans’ rights to self-determination.

Nobody disputes that the Tibetans are a distinct people with their own language and culture, who form a large majority of the population of Tibet. Moreover, Tibet is controlled by the Chinese government by means of military occupation for the benefit of the Chinese state. Tibet is a country “under foreign military occupation, and its people are subject to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation” within the meaning of the United Nations Resolutions on Colonial Peoples and on Friendly Relations. The severity of the repression the Tibetans have undergone, combined with the threadbare nature of China’s territorial claim to Tibet, mean that if the universal right of peoples to self-determination has any meaning, it must extend to Tibet.

Self-determination

By the time the U.N. was set up after World War II, it was generally recognized that peoples had the right of self-determination. Article 1.2 of the United Nations Charter states that the purposes of the United Nations include the development of friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of self-determination of peoples. It can therefore be said that all states which have become members of the U.N. by ratifying the United Nations Charter—including China—have accepted the principle of respect for the self-determination of peoples.

The United Nations Charter was followed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The rights in the Universal Declaration were elaborated in two more detailed international covenants which, unlike the Declaration itself, are treaties intended to have legal force. Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states: “All peoples have the right to self determination. By virtue of that right they may freely determine their political status.” The ICCPR has been ratified by 161 of 192 United Nations member countries. Five other countries, including China, have signed but not ratified. A nation which is a signatory of a international treaty, such as the ICCPR, is obliged under international law to “refrain from acts which would defeat the purpose and object of the treaty.” China is therefore bound, both by its adherence to United Nations Charter and by its signature of the ICCPR, to respect the principle of self-determination of peoples.

However, there was no consensus about what the right to self-determination meant when it was included in the ICCPR. Western countries were generally reluctant to include it, but felt obliged to do so in response to the aspirations of recently independent countries to end European colonialism in those places where it still existed.

Since the ICCPR came into effect in 1976 there has been widespread concern that if the right to self determination in Article 1 is applied literally, it would lead to the break-up of many existing states. This applies particularly to Africa, whose national boundaries are mostly colonial-era constructs, but also to numerous other states with ethnic minority populations who form a majority in particular regions. A consensus emerged that the right to self-determination for the purposes of ICCPR Article 1 applies only to entire populations living in independent states, entire populations of territories yet to receive independence and territories under foreign military occupation.

This is a restrictive definition which excludes numerous groups who would in ordinary language be regarded as “peoples.” It gives no encouragement to some peoples with a long history of struggle for independence, such as the Kurds.

China’s present control over Tibet dates from 1950 when the People’s Liberation Army invaded Tibet and defeated the Tibetan Army at Chamdo. China claims that Tibet was already part of China when it invaded, based on a claim to sovereignty over Tibet by the Qing imperial dynasty dating from the 18th century. More recently China has claimed that its rule over Tibet can be traced to the rule of Tibet by the Mongols—known in China as the Yuan dynasty.

There are at least three major historical difficulties with China’s claim. Firstly, it is doubtful whether the relationship between the Qing and the Yuan on the one hand, and Tibetans on the other, was really one of sovereign and subjects. The Kangxi Emperor occupied Tibet in 1720. After his death in 1722 this occupation continued under his successor the Yongzheng Emperor until 1728, and there were further Chinese invasions in 1750 and 1792. However, after the end of the occupation in 1728, and after each of the later invasions, the Chinese armies withdrew and Tibet had virtually complete independence in practice.

Secondly, neither dynasty made Tibet a part of metropolitan China. If it was a political relationship at all, it was one of dependency—what today we call a colonial relationship. It is therefore a basis for concluding that Tibet is a colony and so entitled to self-determination.

Thirdly, and most importantly, there was no relationship—either similar to that between Tibet and the Qing dynasty, or similar to the modern concept of sovereignty—between Tibet and the Chinese Republic, which succeeded the Qing dynasty in 1911. In 1912 the 13th Dalai Lama made a formal declaration of Tibetan independence. Although the Chinese Republic responded by laying claim to Tibet, it never exercised any control over it, save for certain far eastern regions where there had always been an ill-defined borderland. Tibet was entirely independent of foreign control between 1911 and 1950.

Even if China’s historical claim was much stronger than it is, this would not provide a justification for invasion of an independent country. Most countries were at one time under alien rule. In 1911 Ireland was under British rule, as it had been for centuries, Finland was ruled by Russia and Korea was ruled by Japan. The setting up of the United Nations was expressly intended to prevent the kind of aggressive wars, based on spurious or doubtful claims to historical rule or cultural identity, pursued by both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

China has frequently attempted to justify its invasion on the basis that Tibetan society was feudal and backward, and that China therefore brought liberation to the Tibetan peasantry from feudal domination. Scholars agree that the pre-1950 Tibetan regime was backward. One aspect of its backwardness was its failure to appoint ambassadors to other countries or to apply to join the United Nations until invasion by China was imminent. However this failure was not due to lack of independence but due to the absence of a clear sense of the need for a modern state to maintain relations with other states.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the fact that a country is backward cannot justify invading it. Backwardness was often advanced as a justification for 19th century colonialism, what Rudyard Kipling called “The White Man’s burden” when he encouraged the United States to colonize the Philippines. The fact that China relies on the “backwardness” argument to support its occupation of Tibet is a further indication of a classic colonial occupation.

One month after China invaded Tibet on Oct. 7, 1950, the Tibetan government appealed for help to the U.N. No assistance was forthcoming, and Tibetan forces were easily overwhelmed by the Chinese, with the bulk of the Tibetan Army surrendering at Chamdo.

After the surrender the Chinese Government embarked on what would now be called a “charm offensive” in Tibet. Tibetans were given money by People’s Liberation Army representatives, and encouraged to accept Chinese occupation on the understanding that their traditional way of life would be unchanged and that Tibet would enjoy a high degree of autonomy.

In 1951, China and representatives of the Dalai Lama signed the “17 point agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet.” It provides that “the Tibetan people have the right of exercising national regional autonomy under the unified leadership of the Central People’s Government” (Article 3); that “the Central People’s Government will not alter the existing political system in Tibet” (Article 4), and “will not alter the established status, functions and powers of the Dalai Lama” (Article 4).

These autonomy provisions were never observed. The Chinese Communist Party rules Tibet, as it rules China, through a centralized party organization, whereby each organ of government is shadowed by an organ of the party. These party organs are accountable only to the Chinese Communist Party headquarters in Beijing. In Tibet the new Chinese authorities insisted on taking all important decisions and interfered on an increasing scale with the daily life of Tibetans. In response to the harshness of Chinese rule, the Tibetans rose in revolt in 1958. The revolt was easily crushed by China, and in 1959 the 14th Dalai Lama and some 80,000 other Tibetans fled into exile in India.

The severity of Chinese repression in Tibet since that date is well-documented. There is severe repression of Tibetan Buddhism, which in 1997 was labeled as a “foreign culture.” Virtually all classes in secondary and higher education are taught in Chinese, not Tibetan, resulting in a high drop-out rate among Tibetans. Urban development has generally benefited Chinese immigrants, large numbers of whom have moved to Tibet and now comprise about 12% of the population.

Tibetans are routinely detained for long periods without charge or sentenced to long prison sentences for peacefully advocating independence or maintaining links with the Dalai Lama. Torture and ill-treatment in detention is widespread. Freedom of expression is severely restricted. Peaceful political demonstrations are invariably broken up and their participants arrested. Tibetan culture is treated as inferior to Chinese culture, and most key posts in the government and the economy are held by Chinese. Those few Tibetans who are able to enter Chinese government service do so at the cost of alienation from their own people and culture. Tibet’s environment and natural resources are ruthlessly exploited in the interests of China. Overall the situation bears marked similarities in all these respects to the situation of Algeria under the French or of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan under Soviet Russian rule.

Tibet’s status has been given renewed topicality by the recent independence of Kosovo. The recognition of Kosovo would seem to extend the right of self-determination beyond the traditional colonial or foreign occupation situation. Kosovo was never a colony, and the Serbian Army had withdrawn long before the independence issue was determined. The only coherent legal basis for recognizing the exercise of self-determination by the Kosovo people in the form of an independent state is that, prior to that independence and while under Serbian rule, the Kosovar Albanians were subject to “alien subjugation, domination and exploitation.”

If Kosovo has a right to self-determination, the right of Tibet is infinitely stronger. The catalogue of gross oppression, the second class citizen status of Tibetans under Chinese rule, and the identity of Tibet as a country are all much clearer than in Kosovo’s case.

Autonomy and independence

Self-determination need not mean independence. In many situations, autonomy within a larger nation state offers the best of both worlds, combining the benefits of being part of a large state in terms of defense, foreign relations and economic opportunity, with preservation of local laws, customs and culture from outside interference. Hong Kong is a good example.

The Dalai Lama has repeatedly said that he favors autonomy for Tibet within China, provided that it is meaningful autonomy. Such is his authority with the Tibetan people that they would probably support autonomy in any referendum in which he expressed support for it. However unless there is a change in Chinese government thinking, real autonomy does not appear to be on offer. This is shown by the continuing aggressive denunciation and misrepresentation of the Dalai Lama by Chinese official spokespersons.

Unless real autonomy is offered, self-determination in Tibet is bound to mean independence. China may hold down the Tibetans by force for a long time, but, as the example of Ukraine and Russia shows, even hundreds of years of repression is unlikely to extinguish the longing for self-determination among what are, incontrovertibly, a people.

Mr. Harris is a Hong Kong barrister and founding chairman of the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor. This essay is adapted from an article originally commissioned and approved by the magazine of the Hong Kong Law Society, and then rejected as too sensitive after an extraordinary meeting of the society’s editorial board.