Sometimes the Truth Hurts

Now this is interesting. Yesterday on Twitter I saw that somebody had retweeted this:

'Huzzah, the Catholic church sticks it to Irish mammies! Kids with two dads must be thrilled to have dodged that one.'

I wondered what that meant, but then a while later someone else posted a link sayin, 'This priest seems to have set out to rile people.'

It seems that a Wexford priest in the diocese of Ferns, Father Paddy Banville, has written an article in which he's said:

'In exposing abuse within the Catholic Church, we have opened the door to hell and stepped inside the front porch, and standing there in horror some have dared to peer further, into the hallway and reception areas of a very dark and unexplored house.

In time, I believe Ireland will discover that there is nothing particularly unique in the Catholic bishop’s bungling attempts to deal with clerical abuse...In fact, I believe that covering up is a typical response to child abuse right across the board, at least until very recently.

Few can accept my next point and, of course, it’s so politically incorrect to make the point, but there is another category of people that will match the failure of the bishops, and probably surpass it; the wives and mothers of Ireland, not exclusively wives and mothers but far too many who failed miserably to deal with the abuse of their children by other family members.

A multitude of people are implicated in this cover-up.  I believe it is a significant percentage of the population.  Nobody in this once sovereign democratic republic wants to hear this.

Let me conclude by adapting the words of the Taoiseach: there is no shortage of dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and narcissism in the Republic of Ireland 2011, where the rape and torture of children are downplayed or managed, to uphold instead the primacy of the family, the family name, its power, standing and reputation, and where multitudes living in our midst, have turned a blind eye: not my business!

We don’t know it yet, or perhaps we don’t want to know it, but in terms of child abuse the Catholic Church is holding up a mirror to Irish society.

This time Enda Kenny has got to go all the way and all the way is much further than the Vatican!'

I don't think I'd have worded it in as inflammatory a way as this; I'd have been uneasy with the use of the term 'cover-up', and I don't think I'd have singled out wives and mothers, although given the matriarchal nature of the Irish household until quite recently I can see Banville's point. Such niceties aside, though, he's basically right. What's he's trying to show, in forceful language that is, nonetheless, in line with the facts as we have them, is that the problem of abuse in Ireland is far deeper and far more extensive than the most vociferous antagonists of the Church would have us believe.

The Numbers Don't Lie

Anybody who's been reading this blog will be familiar with such blunt facts of abuse in Ireland as revealed in the 2002 SAVI study as that 27 per cent of Irish adults had been sexually abused in their childhood, that barely one abuse survivor in 200 saw their abuser convicted in court, and that for every adult survivor of sexual abuse by a priest there were 59 other victims of childhood sexual abuse. The most prominent abuse survivors in Ireland -- the ones who appear in the media with depressing regularity -- are profoundly atypical.

The SAVI Study showed that 58.3 per cent of abuse survivors had been abused by people within what might be deemed the family circle: immediate and extended family, neighbours, friends, and babysitters. Nowadays, it seems the figure is far higher. The Irish Times ran an article in February 2009 which reported one Mick Moran, a Garda Detective Sergeant working with Interpol to fight internet paedophiles, as saying that 85 per cent of child sexual abuse takes place in the family home or in the family circle, and a few months later reported the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland as revealing that 97 per cent of those who had been sexually abused as children and who had sought the help of Irish rape crisis centres in 2008 had been abused by somebody within the family circle.

These are abominable figures and the incessant media focus on the Church has the effect of obscuring them, distracting people from the dangers on our own doorsteps.  Just that let sink in for a minute. Historically, 58 per cent of abuse in Ireland was committed within the family circle; nowadays it's at least 85 per cent, and perhaps as high as 97 per cent, and it seems that between a quarter and a third of that is committed by adolescents.

Right now, if you're attacking the Church, you're not attacking abuse. Worse, you're distracting people's attention from where it's really happening, and by doing so, you're faciliating it and are endangering children.

(And, for what it's worth, you're not even giving a moment's thought to the problem of neglect, which is apparently an even bigger problem than abuse nowadays.)


In what Circumstances would Somebody not want to Report?
Still, let's stay with this. Historically most abuse took place within the family circle, and nowadays almost all abuse takes place there.  We rarely read about it in the papers, but we know from the SAVI report that almost half of all abuse victims at some point disclose their abuse to somebody, with barely one abuse case in twenty ever being taken to the Gardaí.

That's the first thing. Almost half of Ireland's abuse survivors have confided in people about the abuse they've experienced, without passing it on to the guards, possibly because they knew that only about one in ten reported abuse cases leads to a conviction. In huge numbers of cases they must have told people of abuse they suffered from people who were still alive and still had access to children.  Husbands will have told their wives, for instance, of childhood experiences, just as wives will have told their husbands. They'll have had good reasons for not reporting it; it'll have been a long time ago, they'll want to move on with their lives rather than revisiting old pain, and besides, they'll hope their abusers will have changed.

These are understandable reasons. Frances Fitzgerald was talking the other day on the Frontline and rhetorically asking in what circumstances people might not want to report abuse. Well, those are circumstances that I think you'll find all over the country.

Hell, you'll see similar instances in the Cloyne Report, instances of people having come to the Diocese to report decades-old instances of abuse, but insisting that they didn't want the matter to go to the Gardaí. People hope that others can change, and don't want to trawl through their own childhood hells afresh.

But the fact is that there are people who'd argue that that constitutes the covering up of abuse. It's not a phrase I'd use to describe it, but I could understand that argument. If you're told of abuse, and you listen, and try to help the survivor, but don't try to punish the abuser -- is that covering things up?

(I don't mean legally, as unless the situation I've described counts as a 'reasonable excuse', anyone who acted that way would soon be deemed guilty of just that, and vulnerable to a five year prison sentence. I mean realistically.)


Remember Senator Norris' Letter

One of the things I talked about when the Norris affair broke a couple of months back was that I didn't believe Norris had reacted to Ezra Nawi's crime in a way that was at odds with how the typical Irish person -- or perhaps the typical person anywhere -- would react to such a crime. I said:

'Faced with the reality of someone he knew having -- let's be frank -- taken advantage of a child for his own pleasure, Senator Norris had responded with love and concern, but with love and concern that was directed wholly towards the person he knew.

This, as it happens, is how I think huge numbers of Irish people respond when they hear that people they know have been accused -- or even found guilty -- of such crimes. In their minds they rationalise the behaviour of their loved ones, they minimise the damage that was done, and say that whatever their loved ones may have done, they're still their brothers, or their sons, or their friends. This is, in fact, exactly how Denis O'Callaghan behaved in dealing with allegations of abuse in Cloyne. The Cloyne Report recognises his personal kindness but quotes him as admitting that he sometimes tended to show favour to accused priests, having been emotionally drawn to their plight, in such a way that that compromised his care for complainants.'

It's been observed by psychologists that when there's abuse in families, the family will often be more protective of the abuser than the abused. Sure, sometimes this is just a case of families wanting to protect their reputation, but more often there's something far more natural and wholesome -- but no less destructive -- at work.

While there'll be anger there, and horror, and a deep sense of betrayal, there'll also be a huge amount of confusion and fear. The tendency is to think that there's something wrong with the abusive child or brother or husband or whoever, and perhaps even that the parents or older siblings or wife are in some way to blame; they want to help the abuser. What's more, they fear for how he'd be punished in the hands of the authorities, and don't see how the shame of him being punished could help anybody; there's a lady I know who says that pride is the sin of the Irish, and she may well be right. Linked with this, there's a deep need to minimise in their minds the amount of harm that's been done to the victim; the less damage that's been done, the less culpable the abuser is.

All of this is natural. And in the main, it's driven by love, by loyalty, by forgiveness -- by the very best qualities we have. And it's terribly dangerous.

Because, of course, in so many cases, this doesn't seriously engage with the problems, and instead seeks to sweep them under the carpet and hope they go away. Would such behaviour count as a cover-up? Yes, I think it would, and potentially a very destructive one too. But not one driven in any way by malice, rather one driven by a confused and disoriented sense of compassion and hope.



Could the Church possibly be to blame for this too?
A few times over the years I've seen people take the view that even if it is true that most Irish abuse happens within families rather than within the institutional Church, it's still the fault of the Church, and I saw this line being wheeled out today in connection with Banville's article. The Twitter feed of Colm O'Gorman kicked off in spectacular fashion in connection with this, and Colm wasn't slow to pass comment on the article, saying, in a series of tweets:

'So now we know. Its the women of Ireland who are to blame for the covering up abuse across Irish society. So women are to blame as is the desire to uphold the primacy of the family. So a Catholic is attacking the primacy of the family? Bizarre. "In terms of child abuse the Catholic Church is holding up a mirror to Irish society" Of course it is. Obviously. Transparency is its mantra.

There is no doubt about the fact that society did deny the reality of abuse. We knew, and we chose not to name it or act. But to suggest that wives and mothers were THE problem? That the RCC is holding up a mirror to society? Such comment ignores the simple reality of the overarching power of the RCC in Irish society. It dictated public attitudes. IT defined them. It is vital that we honestly assess the 'Why' of our gross collective failures re child protection. But not by attacking an entire gender! [...] The RCC dictated societal attitudes and values. The culture of silence & deference was of their creation.'

This needs unpacking.


Breaking it down...
The line about the Irish Church holding up a mirror to Irish society has nothing to do with transparency, because mirrors are rarely transparent; rather, Banville's point is that the behaviour of the Irish Church reflects Irish society. If Irish priests abused, was this because Irish people abuse? If Irish bishops covered up that abuse, was this because Irish people cover up abuse? Given how many Irish familes until very recently had priests, brothers, and nuns in their ranks, it's clearly nonsense to distinguish between the twentieth-century Irish Church and twentieth-century Irish society. They were, in effect, the same thing. That the behaviour of clergy should have reflected the behaviour of the society that produced them isn't really that surprising at all.

The Banville article doesn't suggest that when it came to covering up abuse in Ireland, Irish wives and mothers were the problem; it does, however, say that their actions will have been a huge part in the problem, and I think that's true, especially given the structure until recently of the typical twentieth-century Irish household. Is this an attack on a whole gender? No, not at all; the Banville article simplifies matters on gender lines, such that while it explicitly holds that a huge amount of abuse was concealed by females, it implicitly takes the view that basically all abuse was committed by males.

Does it make any sense to blame the culture of concealment on the Catholic Church? I don't think it does, any more than to blame the culture of abuse in Ireland on the Catholic Church, attempts which Fintan O'Toole the other day rightly dismissed as cynical rubbish.

For such claims to be meaningful, they'd need to be compared with abuse and concealment data compiled using identical methods across a range of countries, both culturally Catholic ones and otherwise, and you'd need to work hard to explain, for example, why secular atheist post-Protestant Sweden seems to have remarkably high abuse rates. Indeed, that our own isn't quite so unusual is surely attested by O'Gorman's former organisation, One in Four, having been founded in the UK in 1999, three years before the SAVI study discovered that the rate of abuse in Ireland was slightly higher than one-in-four. One in Four must surely have taken its name from data relevant to somewhere other than Ireland.

The simple fact is that abuse is concealed pretty much everywhere it happens. It is a staggeringly under-reported crime in every country. O'Gorman says that Amnesty International Ireland is soon to publish research on the underlying dynamics that tolerated and permitted abuse in Ireland, but unless it relies heavily on data using the same methods from other countries, it'll tell us very little: it'll be highly misleading raw data, devoid of context or meaning, prone to mistaking correlation for causation.

I realise I'm prejudging it, but a tweet such as the following --  'It will address societal attitudes, the nature of power in Ireland of the time and lessons for today. Very in depth.' -- is hardly the sort of thing to inspire confidence. It suggests that this soon-to-be-published Amnesty study is hardly the massive pan-European study that's needed, but is instead merely another national study, and one -- unlike the SAVI study -- conducted by an organisation run by someone who has a very serious axe to grind.

Not without reason, of course, but an axe for all that.


Inflammatory Comments?
Was Father Banville over the top in what he said? Maybe, but unlike Enda Kenny with his claims in the Dáil, he wasn't actually wrong; he just painted in broad strokes. Was this inflammatory? Yes, it was, but at this stage I'm starting to think inflammatory language is needed.

Banville's saying nothing that wasn't already implied in the SAVI study, but how many people have ever heard of that? The Cloyne Report, which revealed little other than that two clergymen hadn't followed their own professed guidelines but in doing so had broken no laws, was mentioned in 163 Irish Times pieces in just one month, whereas over the previous nine years the SAVI study -- the most in-depth and far-reaching study ever conducted in Ireland into the phenomenon of abuse in Ireland -- had been mentioned in just 63 Irish Times articles and letters. The most important and revealing body of data on sexual abuse in Ireland had basically been ignored, save by Vincent Brown and Breda O'Brien, each of whom would occasionally try to alert people to its importance.

We're endangering children by keeping the media focus on the Church. We need to look at ourselves. If jolts such as Banville's are what it takes to jar us out of our complacency, well, so be it.

Eolaí and his Painting Tour: Week Eleven

It's been a rough week in the Brother's Painting Tour of Ireland. With time fast running out, and him having to crack on if he's to get home in time to tend to the dog and make some money, nature has conspired such that what should have been a week of hard pedalling has seen him in the saddle for just four days.

As you'll remember, he cycled into a bunting-festooned Donegal town last Thursday evening, and on Friday he was treated to a drive up to Slieve League, site of Ireland's highest cliffs.

And not many taller in Europe, as it happens.

Yes, I know everyone thinks the Cliffs of Moher are the tallest in the land, but they're not; the cliffs at Slieve League are about three times as high, clocking in at a terrifying 601 metres. They're not quite as starkly vertical as the Cliffs of Moher, but they are taller. After the drive it was time to set off through the hills of Donegal...

Taking his time, unaware of the storms within and without due to play havoc with the trip, he cycled on the bog roads between Barnesmore Gap and Castelderg in Tyrone, his twenty-second county, revelling in such simple pleasures as the sight of a red corrugated roof. Weaving his way around the back roads, he made his way through Clady to Strabane, having started the day tweeting for a host there, and was very kindly offered one.

Saturday saw him being taken out to Sion Mills which he painted the weir at breakneck pace, and to great effect, before leaping back on the bike. To hear him describe the day, it sounds like a bizarre sporting event, like a triathlon for creative types. It's been a while since painting was an Olympic event, but maybe it's time to reintroduce the practice.

It baffles me how this could ever have been done at speed.

North then, hopping on the bike at four in the afternoon, chasing the sunset and battling the rain as he fought his way along the main Foyle road into Derry, his twenty-third county, pushing on to the coast before cutting inland just before Ballykelly. The weather having been at his back till this point, the last climb was a bit of a struggle, and things didn't quite got to plan when he reached his destination, as his Dunbrock hosts were out, but he was temporarily rescued by friends in Limavady, and drowned though he was, he was able to relax after having safely finished cycling for the day.

Problems started to rear their head on Sunday, as Hurricane Katia threatened to ravage Ulster.

-- I might not paint tomorrow, observed the Brother. I'm just thinking of eating. And drinking. And sitting down, thinking mostly, but sitting down.

-- I think after twenty-three counties you deserve a good sit, he was advised.

Unfortunately, it was about at this point, with the storm on its way, that the Brother's mifi decided to pack in, leaving him scarcely able to roam. Given that the trip's about social networking as much as anything else, this was a bodyblow. And the wind was rising.

He stayed put on Monday too, watching the wind from rural Derry, all too aware that it would have been suicidal to attempt pushing on to Antrim. This, surely, was the right decision, given how one of his followers more than a hundred miles south had commented on how there were 'human kites everywhere'.

(It's not been calm here either, nearly 250 miles south-east of where the Brother was; my housemates' parents' conservatory was destroyed by huge branches blown from trees.)

Unable to tweet to update us of his exploits, he ventured out again on Tuesday, cycling by a furious sea all the way to Portrush in Antrim, his twenty-fourth county. It hadn't been a pleasant journey, as -- struck by a bug -- he'd vomited his way past Magilligan, Coleraine, and Portstewart, all the way to Portrush, where he was beset by chills and unable to eat and could but vicariously enjoy the lovely meal his hosts had made for him.

If there was any consolation in how the day had gone, it lay in how Maman Poulet had let him know that Jean Byrne, meteorological icon of the Irish twitterati, had been named winner of the European Meteorological Society’s TV Weather Forecast Award for 2011. Given the way the weather had so ravaged the Brother's week, it was surely worth letting him know about one of the Irish climate's silver linings.

-- Oh my, said the Brother. Super.

She was due to be presented with her award in Berlin today. I can't wait to find out what she wore...

Things had improved internally by yesterday, but not enough for the Brother to chance another day in the saddle, so he slept and suffered and missed the first clear blue sky in weeks. In the evening he found the strength to go for a little walk, and so went down to the harbour, afterwards reflecting on how soon it'd be that he'd be home, as he stood outside his hosts' house watching the sun go down over Donegal.

As for today? He painted till lunchtime...

.. and then set off on the north Antrim coast, visiting Dunluce Castle, the Giant's Causeway, and Dunseverick Castle, as he chased the sunset again, this time aiming for hostless Cushendun, and climbing the hills to get there while the daylight lasted

The climbs slowed him down a bit, so he just a few kilometres north of Cushendun when he rescued by a lovely lady from south Antrim, armed with soup, tiger bread, and -- I can only presume -- a special fine-toothed saw to cut his bike into small pieces so it could be fitted into her car and taken to safety. Or something. 

There's only one more week to go in the Painting Tour, with the Brother hoping to make it to south Antrim tomorrow and then onward through Down, Armagh, Monaghan, Louth, and Meath before like a weary Odysseus, and after seeing and learning so much, he comes home. 29 Counties, so. 30 if he's very lucky and can squeeze Westmeath in too. Not quite the 32 he'd hoped for, but something to be very proud of for all that. The Midlands may have gotten a bit shortchanged, but given the route he's followed, it's easy to understand why. And I'm sure he'll be back.

Eleven weeks under a somewhat tighter belt...

If you think the Brother might be passing within twenty miles or so of where you live as he winds his counter-intuitive way home to Dublin, and if you have a bed to offer and fancy a painting, do get in touch with him. Or, you know, even if you have a whim to buy him lunch or tea and have a chat if he's passing through. Just let him know.

There's only a week left of the Painting Tour, and if you belatedly want to get onboard, you can follow it on the Brother's blog and above all on Twitter, where the hashtag's #paintingtour. The Brother's Facebook account's worth a shout too, but Twitter's where most of the real action is. 

Give Ireland's first digital nomad™ a shout -- the tour's about Irish social media as much as it is art and the Irish countryside, after all, and even if his equipment's misbehaving, I've no doubt there are people who'll pass on your messages.

Just tweet.

Even if Johann Hari said he knew where the bodies were buried...

Would anyone believe him?

I'm afraid I've had no sympathy for Johann Hari over the last few months; indeed, uncharitable though I've surely been to think such a way, I've found it hard to look on his predicament with anything other than a cynical sense of schadenfreude. Yes, I know he's not well now, but that aside, the last few months have simply struck me as a shoddy journalist getting something that's been coming to him for a long time.

We all know the story, of course, of how a couple of bloggers noticed how Hari's interviews, as published, seemed to have been a hybrid of original and previously published material -- the latter being books and interviews conducted by other people, in the main. Then we had Tim Worstall reeling off a litany of Hari's fallacious claims, and the Spectator's Nick Cohen describing some very peculiar experiences on Wikipedia in connection with a ridiculous review by Hari of a book Cohen had written.  David Allen Green, then, began digging further into Wikipedia, exploring the deeds of the peculiarly obscure 'David Rose', who was so keen to promote the brilliance of Hari, and who appeared to have a sideline in underage incest pornography.

Why does one chubby journalist matter?

The dominoes began to fall, as the extent of Hari's behaviour became clear. Smart people pointed out that given Hari's influence as a journalist, real answers and serious action were called for:

'I said before about Hari that I didn’t think he was a cynical liar out for the main chance, but a well-intentioned bullshitter. That’s why I quoted Peter Oborne, whose book is excellent on the subject of Good Cause Corruption, with particular reference to the career of Mr Tony Blair. If you have moral right and a good cause on your side, then surely inconvenient facts are just a distraction. Accuracy is pedantry. This is positively dangerous from politicians, with dodgy dossiers and the like potentially leading to lots of people getting killed. Which is why you need a press that’s honest, accurate, even pedantic. When journalism falls prey to Good Cause Corruption, it just becomes propaganda. Hari himself once said that he viewed his job as being a paid advocate for the causes he believed in, which might indicate some of the issues behind his journalism.'

Hari is a classic example of somebody who thinks facts and accuracy don't matter as long as you believe your cause is just.* He wrote a particularly offensive and inaccurate piece around the time of last year's Papal visit to England and Scotland, a piece which was carried far and wide, going no small way towards creating the poisonous atmosphere that surrounded that trip. As Caroline Farrow put it:

'This article was syndicated everywhere, even the Daily Mail published it, and it was responsible for a surge of criticism. Catholics everywhere were dismayed by Hari’s distortions, his hysteria and his patronising language. Hari’s implications were clear. Catholics were obviously very stupid if kindly and generally benign individuals who didn’t understand their own religion. Hari would condescendingly deign to explain to them what the Gospels really meant, what Jesus would really think and he would have absolutely no problem with them being Catholics, so long as they didn’t agree with a large portion of their Church’s teaching and they attempted to get their leader arrested on his say-so. “Catholics, I implore you” he bleated. If Catholics didn’t agree with him, they were either ignorant, bigots or defenders of child abuse, probably a mixture of all three, but to be despised at any rate.'

Others dismantled the article directly, whereas I used a day sick in bed to write an insanely long Facebook post so any friends of mine who were being fed lies by the likes of Hari, Richard Dawkins, Terry Sanderson, or Peter Tatchell could actually start to look at the facts for themselves.

I wrote a piece about him last February, but never posted it, mainly because I'd wanted to accompany it with an illustration I couldn't find. It strikes me that tonight, in the aftermath of Hari's mealy-mouthed and weasel-worded 'apology', might be a timely opportunity to post it, tweaked ever so slightly...

* * * * * * * * *

Unearthed from the Unused Pile...

I have a friend who once described his politics views as being left-wing, but not to the extent that he's able to read the Independent without occasionally wincing. Granted, the Independent is a mixed bag, and its columnists can be far from progressive in their opinions, and I'm not sure there's a better foreign correspondent out there than Robert Fisk, but I think my friend may have had the likes of Johann Hari in mind.

I'm no fan of Hari. I think he's a bore, and a sloppy one to boot, a journalist with no respect for factual accuracy. I don't think I've ever read a column by him that hasn't had me gritting my teeth in frustration at his claims. A few weeks ago, for instance, in an article which posed a decent question in response to one of Melanie Phillips' screeds, he claimed that:

'In every human society that has ever existed, and ever will, some 3 to 10 percent of the population has wanted to have sex with their own gender.' 

The thing is, of course, that this statement is completely speculative. It's impossible to make such a claim with any degree of historical certainty. We have no statistical evidence for the prevalence of homosexuality in any societies other than, well, our own one for just the last half century or so. Hari's claim might well be right, but it's utterly unprovable.

The same article claims that Christian religious texts mandate bigotry against gay people -- even though there was no concept of 'gay people' or indeed of homosexuality as a distinct phenomenon in Biblical times, and then, in a rhetorical flourish claims those same religious texts that allegedly mandate bigotry against gay people, also laud a god who feeds small children to bears.


Elisha and the Bears
Now,  I'm not for a moment saying that 2 Kings 2:23-24 isn't what a friend of mine has called 'a challenging passage', but it simply doesn't describe God feeding small children to bears.

It describes an episode in which the prophet Elisha, the disciple of Elijah, is accosted by a large gang of youths. The words the King James Bible translates as young children are the Hebrew words nah-ar and yeh-led; the former word means 'boys' and could be used to describe children, servants, soldiers, and even a man such as Isaac in his late twenties; the later means 'young men'. Elisha was being harassed by dozens of these young men. He prays for assistance, and two bears appear, attacking and mauling 42 of the youths; the sense of this is that were more than forty-two youths, and there's nothing in the story that says that the forty-two died.

Like I said, it's not an easy story to ponder, but it's certainly not a case of small children being fed to bears.

I think the great Brian Bolland can be forgiven for getting the details wrong...

Because it's not okay to lie about Mormons either...
It goes on to say that until 1975, when the Supreme Court ruled otherwise, Mormons didn't believe black people had souls. This, of course, is nonsense too: Mormons certainly held that black people couldn't be priests in their church, but they never said they didn't have souls; furthermore, while they did change this policy in the 1970s, but this was in connection with them expanding into other countries and having to face the reality of largely black congregations. I'm not saying they weren't racist, just that they weren't racist in the way Hari claims. How on earth does he believe the American Supreme Court could ever be empowered to rule on the doctrines and beliefs of any religious group anyway? Does he do any research?


Or about Muslims...
Anyway, today he's off on one about the Anglican bishops in the House of Lords, as though this matters, putting the boot into Nick Clegg who he regards as a hypocrite for not getting rid of them, and indeed for considering expanding the numbers of Lords Spiritual by adding rabbis and imams etc.


Or about Anglicans.
I hold no candle for the Anglican Church, but I happen to think removing its bishops from Parliament would be a bad idea. Well, I think it'd be a bad idea for the United Kingdom; I think it might well be the making of the Church of England.

He opens with:

'Here's a Trivial Pursuit question with an answer that isn't at all trivial. Which two nations still reserve places in their parliaments for unelected religious clerics, who then get an automatic say in writing the laws the country's citizens must obey? The answer is Iran... and Britain.'

He means the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of course, but even so, this is a bit on the disingenuous side, isn't it? Presumably it's meant to make us think that the Iranian parliament is stuffed full of unelected Mullahs, whereas the reality is that there are five seats in the parliament reserved for unelected clerics from the 2% of Iranians who adhere to a religion other than Islam! The Mullahs hold the reins in other respects, of course, but not in Parliament.

As for the UK, sure, 26 out of 786 members of the House of Lords, which at this stage has power only to delay for a year the implementation of laws passed by the Commons, are indeed bishops of the Church of England, but I think a 3% presence in an essentially advisory chamber isn't something to worry about.

Onward he goes, claiming that the 26 Anglican bishops vote on the laws that bind us, whereas they usually just vote on a small number of them, and  proclaiming that they 'use their power to relentlessly fight against equality for women and gay people'. There are many of things of which people can accuse the hierarchy of the Church of England, but putting all their efforts into misogyny and homophobia really isn't one of them.

Onward he burbles:

'But let's step back a moment and look at how all this came to pass. The bishops owe their places in parliament to a serial killer. Henry VIII filled parliament with bishops because they were willing to give a religious seal of approval to him divorcing and murdering his wives – and they have lingered on through the centuries since, bragging about their own moral superiority at every turn.'

Now, I'm no fan of Henry VIII, but to call him a serial killer for having had two people executed seems a bit -- well -- extravagant. But think about the general thesis here: we shouldn't have bishops in Parliament because Henry VIII, who was a nasty man, put them there. Well, look at the events that gave rise to the key features of the British Constitution: the Civil Wars and the Glorious Revolution. Should you throw them out because Cromwell was a genocidal nut and because James II was driven from his throne because he wanted to introduce freedom of religion?

And do the bishops really proclaim their moral superiority? Really? I'd like to see some quotes in support of this. Real ones, not ones Johann's just plucked out of his backside.

Speaking of which, he's shameless with his next claim:

'According to Christopher Hitchens, though I haven’t been able to source this quote elsewhere, in 1965, the then Archbishop of Canterbury (Michael Ramsey) scorned the people who were campaigning for nuclear-armed countries to step back from the brink, on the grounds that "a nuclear war would involve nothing more than the transition of many millions of people into the love of God, only a few years before they were going to find it anyway". A previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, is reported to have said something similar a few years earlier and it may be that these sentiments should be attributed to him instead. In 2008 the incumbent Rowan Williams, said it would be helpful if shariah law – with all its vicious misogyny, which says that women are worth half of a man – was integrated into British family courts.'

Look at that. He doesn't even bother to source his quotes. He just throws them out, like a loud teenager in a student bar, confident that if he shouts loud enough nobody will challenge him. And did Rowan Williams really say that it would be helpful if shariah law -- 'with all its vicious misogny' -- were integrated into British family courts? Or did he say that he thought the adoption of certain aspects of it might be helpful and was, in any case, inevitable? In fact, didn't he -- in making those comments -- explicitly speak out against the misogyny of some aspects of Shariah law?

I know, I know, you can prove anything with facts.

I could go on, but it's hard to struggle through the gibberish of a bigot who claims that the Anglican bishops' prime motivation is to deny equality to women and gays, and that their 'second greatest passion is to prevent you from being able to choose to end your suffering if you are dying.'

I'm pretty sure it's not. I'm pretty sure that if you asked them what they care most about they'd talk about Jesus, saving souls, evangelisation, and helping people here on earth. The phrase 'social justice' might come up. It's entirely popular that tea, cake, wine, gin, or football would appear too. 'Opposing euthanasia' probably wouldn't make their top ten, though they might well mention having a belief in the sanctity of human life, such that they believe it's wrong for anybody to end any human life unless it's absolutely unavoidable.

They might say that. I wouldn't put money on it.

* * * * * * * * *

And with that, I left the post to gather dust. I didn't get into how the bishops are chosen, or the fact that they can't vote in parliamentary elections, or what obligations are imposed on local Anglican churches by virtue of being established state churches. As far as I can see, the British State gains far more from having a tame established church than the Church of England gets out of being so established. Of course, I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that even were I drunk as a lord spiritual, I'd not be as wrong as Johann Hari.

*You know, like the Enda Kenny and the rest of the Irish Government, seemingly.

Visiting the Front Line

I'd never watched Pat Kenny's show Frontline until this evening, catching up on last night's programme after hearing from a couple of friends that it was definitely worth watching. The topic was mandatory reporting of abuse, and in large part it focused on the question of how such legislation could relate to the seal of Confession. I'm glad I was advised to watch it, as I was pleasantly surprised by how even-handed it was and by how much sense was talked in it.

Curiously, Frances Fitzgerald kept returning to Alan Shatter's recent refrain, that being that the whole issue of Confession is a side issue in this debate, something that's hardly relevant to the discussion. Early on she said:

'What's interesting, Pat, is that if you look at legislation that's been passed already, if you take the Offences Against the State -- for example -- legislation, you have the same requirement on everybody. Nobody's raised the issue of Confession in relation to that. If you look at the recent Criminal Justice legislation, the same applies, that if you have information -- as in Minister Shatter's bill which he will be introducing -- if you have information which is relevant to an offence as it's outline in the legislation, and you don't tell the Gardaí about it, then you are liable under the legislation. That applies in quite a number of pieces of legislation.'

This is all true as far as it goes: a requirement to report knowledge of crimes is mandatory, unless one has 'reasonable excuse' for doing otherwise, in at least three pieces of legislation, these being the Criminal Law Act 1997, the Offences Against the State Act 1998, and the Criminal Justice Act 2011. As I said about six weeks back, if the seal of Confession is threatened by Irish law, it's been threatened for a long time.

To be fair, Ministers, you started this

The problem with the line currently being taken by Ministers Shatter and Fitzgerald, which basically consists of smiling and accusing Catholics of reacting in a hysterical way to something that's never really been suggested, is that the integrity of the Seal was explicitly threatened on the day they announced their planned legislation. The Irish Times reported the following about Minister Shatter on the very day that the Cloyne Report was released:

'The Minister said that there would be no "legal grey areas" when it came to the implementation of this legislation, adding that the laws would also apply to the likes of doctors and priests, even in the case of the latter where this information is revealed in the confessional.'

There's no trace of such a claim in his official statement of that day, so I can only assume that he made this comment in response to a question, along with his saying that victims of abuse would be safeguarded so that they could not be prosecuted under the legislation. Wouldn't things have been simpler if the Minister had deflected any questions then about Confession by saying that that was a bogus issue, and had no real bearing on the situation? No, he went for the cheap anti-Catholic soundbite.

Since then, of course, we've had the Taoiseach blustering about how 'the law of the land should not be stopped by a collar or a crozier,' standing up in the Dáil and casting all manner of aspersions on the Vatican, and then getting huffy with the rest of the Government when the Vatican refuted the Government's charges. Is it any wonder that people don't trust the Government on this?

Disingenuous Posturing

In a manner staggering for its outright hypocrisy, the whole debate has been plagued by mock outrage on the part of the Government and media.

They've responded with fury -- as though this was news to them -- to the fact that the Vatican responded with caution in 1997 to the Irish Church's child-protection guidelines, despite the fact that the letter that warned the Irish bishops had been quoted from in the 2009 Dublin Report (7.13), with nobody getting angry about it then.

They've responded with fury -- again, as though this were a new development -- to the Vatican's 1997 insistence that the Church's child protection guidelines should be in harmony with canon law, despite the fact that that very injunction was quoted in the 2009 Dublin Report (7.13) and the principle was clearly stated more than once in the 1996 Framework Document itself!

They've responded with fury -- yet again, as though they had been unaware of this -- to the reservations the Vatican expressed in 1997 about mandatory reporting, despite these reservations having been quoted in the 2009 Dublin Report (7.13) and having been shared by the Government of the day, which itself chose in 1997 not to legislate to introduce mandatory reporting. That Government, as we all know, included several members of the current cabinet.

They've also thrown around a lot of baseless allegations, something which aside from being immoral strikes me as very unwise, especially given that they're coming from a small bankrupt country with no hard power and with far fewer  friends than it used to have.

Trying to have it both ways

A huge part of the problem now is that the Government is talking out both sides of its mouth in an attempt to look tough while knowing that if it looks barrel-chested that's due not so much to muscle as to hot air. On the one hand, having postured about there being no exceptions, not even in the case of confession, the Government's now trying to convince people that even though Confession won't be explicitly mentioned in the coming legislation, it will be covered by it. This seems to be delighting opponents of the Church in Ireland, and worrying its defenders.

The reality's pretty simple. 

Confession can't be mentioned in the legislation, as any such law almost certainly wouldn't withstand a Constitutional challenge. This is why it won't be singled out, and we'll have a vague statement to the effect that where an individual has material information that would assist the gardaí in the investigation of a given sexual crime, that they provide that information to the Gardaí, unless there is an undefined 'reasonable excuse' not to do so.

That means the definition of 'reasonable excuse' will be in the hands of the courts. It makes no sense to claim that the seal of Confession is in any way threatened by this. In interpreting the law, the courts will rule based on what the law says, not what its framers claim it says. The framers of laws can say what they like, but their intentions won't be factored into any subsequent legal decisions. Given the centrality of the sacraments to Catholicism, the Constitutional protection of religion, the existing common law protection of priest-penitent privilege, and the need for law to be consistent, there's no way that a court would ever convict a priest for failing to report information received while hearing Confession.

Bluffers

I find it all very depressing, to be honest with you.

I've become increasingly convinced that the Irish Government isn't in any way serious about tackling abuse in Ireland. Part of me doesn't blame it. A serious State-led attack on the problem would require a functioning HSE and an army of social workers and therapists,  and the reality is that the Government can't afford them. The country's broke. Instead, then, the Government's falling back on demagoguery and sabre-rattling.

Faced with the reality of abuse in the Irish Church, the Taoiseach saw fit to blame Irish problems on people almost 1200 miles away. In his speech on Cloyne he never once mentioned the key facts that the Cloyne Report revealed: that two Irish clergy had failed to apply Irish Church guidelines but had broken no laws, and that in failing to apply those guidelines they had potentially endangered children but that no children had been harmed because of them.

For all their talk of tackling abuse, Ministers Shatter and Fitzgerald keep banging on about abuse in organisations -- most especially the Church -- despite the fact that hardly any abuse takes place in organisations, with the overwhelming majority of it taking place in the family circle, in and around the home. Talk of the Church is particularly specious, as it's like grumbling about a tree when you're standing in a forest. Even when clerical abuse was at it's worst, for every child who was abused by a priest in Ireland, fifty-nine were abused by other people; nowadays, the difference would be even more stark. Abuse in Ireland is above all a family matter. I've yet to hear one concrete proposal for dealing with this.

Talk of a 'Sarah's Law' for sex offenders is nonsense, given how few abusers have ever been convicted compared to how many haven't. Remember what the 2002 SAVI Study indicated, that a decade ago, only one abuse survivor in two hundred had seen their abusers found or plead guilty in court. In other words, for every sex offender labelled as such by a Sarah's Law, 199 others will walk free.

Cheering on the Government when it shouts about the Church doesn't help; the reality is that if you're attacking the Church, you're not attacking the problem. I'm tired of the Government trying to make political hay from children having been abused. We have serious problems. We need serious solutions.

A Surprise in the Framework Document

It struck me this morning that, to my shame, and despite all I've written about the Cloyne Report, I'd not read the Church's Framework Document which effectively underlies the report, which says (C1.15):

'The Commission’s main task was to consider whether the response of the Church and State authorities to complaints and allegations of clerical child sexual abuse was “adequate or appropriate” and to establish the response to suspicions and concerns about clerical child sexual abuse. In assessing how the diocesan and other Church authorities dealt with complaints, the Commission has judged them by the standards set in their own documents – the Framework Document and Our Children, Our Church. The Framework Document was issued in 1996. Our Children, Our Church was issued in 2005. It did not significantly change the procedures set out in the Framework Document, in particular, there was no significant change in respect of reporting to the State authorities'

I'd taken the Commission at its word whenever it referred to the Framework Document, but having just read the guidelines, I'm really not sure I should have been doing that. It seems that the Commission believed the  guidelines ought to have been applied not in the strictest possible way, but in the crudest and most thoughtless possible way. Take, for example, the case of Father Moray, about whom a complaint was entered in 1997, six years after he had died. The Report says (13.10):

'Monsignor O’Callaghan told the Commission that the practice of notifying the Gardaí of complaints involving deceased priests did not exist until, at the initiative of the Child Protection Office of the Irish Bishops’ Conference in May 2003, a meeting was sought with the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Investigating Unit (see Chapter 5) to ascertain its recommendations on good practice. The Commission does not accept that the practice did not exist prior to 2003. It was standard practice in the Archdiocese of Dublin from 1996. The Framework Document requires that all complaints be reported to the Gardaí – it does not specify different arrangements for deceased priests.'

This, frankly, is absurd. I don't dispute for a moment that O'Callaghan had a low opinion of the Framework Document and made no attempt to implement its guidelines, but in this connection with this the Commission's criticisms strike me as profoundly unfair.


On first viewing Cloyne through the Framework Document
Section 2.2.1 of the Framework Document seems very clear:

'In all instances where it is known or suspected that a child has been, or is being, sexually abused by a priest or religious the matter should be reported to the civil authorities. Where the suspicion or knowledge results from the complaint of an adult of abuse during his or her childhood, this should also be reported to the civil authorities.'

This is  in line with the third of the eight guiding principles outlined in the Framework Document for the handling of complaints of abuse, or of situations where it was suspected that a child had been abused. In connection with this, the Cloyne Report says (C1.22):

'The greatest failure by the Diocese of Cloyne was its failure to report all complaints to the Gardaí. Between 1996 and 2005, there were 15 complaints which very clearly should have been reported by the diocese to the Gardaí. This figure of 15 does not include concerns and does not include cases where the allegations were already known to the Gardaí (although some of these also ought to have been reported). Of these 15, nine were not reported.'

The thing is, though, that this really isn't that simple. For starters, I'm not sure which the fifteen complaints are that should have been reported. There were complaints made about nineteen different clerics, so does the Commission mean that the Diocese should have reported the complaints made about fifteen of these to the Gardaí? Alternatively, the Report says the Commission is aware of some 40 people who may have been affected by abuse in Cloyne; is it saying that the Diocese ought to have reported complaints from fifteen people, but not from others?

I'm not being picky. I started trying to work this out, got confused and tired, and then decided I'd better get back to my own work. At most I can see that there were twenty-five or so complaints, but without spending all night on it, I'm not sure which are duplicates or which fall within the remit of the investigation. It's very hard to wade through the report. Some kind of a table would help enormously.


But looking more closely...
Anyway, without getting bogged down in the detail, it's clear that several times the Document states, in one way or another, that:

'The safety and welfare of children should be the first and paramount consideration following an allegation of child sexual abuse.' 

This, I hope we'd all agree, is absolutely correct: the main priority should always be the protection of children. Indeed the recommendations on how to handle complaints of abuse are expressly stated at 2.2.6 as having been made in light of how the protection of children must be the primary consideration in these matters.

There are, however, other factors the Document says should be considered, such as the emotional and spiritual well-being of abuse victims and their families, and the basic rights under natural justice of accused priests. It's a fundamental principle of natural justice that everybody should be allowed to defend themselves against charges.

The Framework Document was never envisaged as something to be implemented in a uniform way across all of Ireland's dioceses and orders. In particular, section 3.4 recognises that 'the uniqueness of each complaint demands that judgement and discretion should be carefully exercised in the implementation of each phase of the protocol'. It's crucial to understand this, especially in connection with Murphy's assumption that the practice of Dublin ought automatically to have been the practice of Cloyne.


What are the protocols when children aren't in danger?
Now, without denying the fact that there were certainly some cases which most definitely ought to have been brought to the Gardaí, I think there were quite a few cases dealt with in the Cloyne Report where O'Callaghan's failure to report is, at least, defensible.  I'm not saying that I wouldn't have reported them to the Gardaí -- as I can imagine there being pastoral arguments for doing so -- or that Monsignors Stenson and Dolan in Dublin wouldn't have done so, but I can at least see why O'Callaghan didn't.

Father Moray had been six years dead when a compaint was entered about him in 1997 (C13), Father Rion had been twenty-nine years dead when a complaint was entered about him in 2005 (C20), and Father Kelven had been fourteen years dead when a complaint was entered about him in 2002 (C24); it's inconceivable that there were any child protection issues where these dead priests were concerned, and thus there would have been no great need to report them to the guards.

On the other hand, the principles of natural justice would have meant that these men were entitled to be able to defend themselves and protect their good name; being dead, they could hardly do that. Formally reporting them for crimes which they might never have committed and which could never be tested in court might well have struck Denis O'Callaghan as unfair attacks on people who could not defend themselves.*

A similar principle was surely in play in the case of the unknown priest who was complained of in 2003 by a man in a nursing home (C19); given the probability that the priest was long dead, or was, if not long dead, at least in his nineties, there can hardly have been any child protection concerns.

Likewise, one might wonder whether the cases of Father Darian, who died in 1997 after a complaint in 1996 (C11) or Father Tarin, who died in 2003 after a complaint in 2002 (C16) were really instances where the safety of children was at stake, given how both priests were old, retired, and basically at death's door when the complaints were made. It doesn't seem that either of us them could credibly have defended themselves, and it's clear that given their circumstances the Gardaí would certainly not have pressed charges. It's hard to see what would have been achieved in relation with the primary purpose of the Framework Document had Denis O'Callaghan reported these matters to the authorities.


In short
Again, I'm not saying that Denis O'Callaghan handled things well, or that it might not have been pastorally useful for him to have reported unprovable allegations to the Gardaí. It's obvious that he handled things terribly, through a combination of clericalism, arrogance, and misguided compassion. All I am saying is that some of the criticism in the Cloyne Report is, I think, misplaced.

And, as I've said before, there's no suggestion in the Cloyne Report that he ever broke the law, or that any child was ever harmed owing to anything he did or failed to do.

There's more than one surprise in the Framework Document. I'll come back to this.


__________________________________________________________________
* Yes, I know. How ironic. I'm not saying I agree. I'm just saying I think this is plausible.

Ending Violence: A Deluded Fantasy

I realise that given the day that's in it it's probably obligatory to say what I was doing when I first heard of the 9/11 attacks ten years ago. Well, if you're interested, I was in a pub.

I wasn't drinking, mind; I was working, serving drinks and soup and sandwiches to a crowd who'd come in from a funeral. Edel, the loungegirl who was working with me, had asked if she could turn on the telly, down at the far end of the counter where she was washing glasses and crockery, and I'd said no. I could hear customers murmuring and muttering about plane crashes, but I carried on with my work.

My phone rang, to my surprise, as I never had the phone on during work. I have no idea why I'd forgotten to turn it off. It was Heinrich, a German friend of mine, calling from Greece, where he was living at the time.

-- Have you heard the news?

-- No, I said, did a plane crash or something? I've heard some of the customers talking...

-- Worse than that.

-- Have two planes crashed?

-- Two plans have crashed into the World Trade Centre.

-- Do they think it's terrorism?

-- Well, it's hardly an accident.

And after a minute or more of chatting I hung up, and turned around.

-- Edel, I called. Turn the telly on.

And the towers fell.

It's weird to think that for so many people I know and love, this must have been the defining world moment of their adolescence and early adulthood. I remember the Hungarians allowing people to cross the Iron Curtain into the West, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the release of Nelson Mandela, and the prospect of the world getting better.

A History of Violence

Of course, there are people out there who still think the world is getting better. I read an absurd article by Stephen Pinker this evening, entitled 'A History of Violence', in which he argues that:

'Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.'

The whole argument is historically ignorant, reliant on cavalier speculation and colossal assumptions, devoid of any meaningful evidence whatsoever and taking no account of so much that we do know. It is, frankly, a heroic demonstration of why for some people it is best to stick to the knitting. Or maybe to learn to knit.

Words from the Wise

I came across the article after seeing it linked to, with contempt, on the Twitter feed of one Benjamin Gray, a barrister who'd previously studied war studies. Describing it as the 'biggest pile of nonsense I've read in a long time', Benjamin went on to challenge Pinker's claims in a serious of thirteen points and a closing observation.

1. Violence is cyclical, shifting between cataclysmic conflicts and minor imperial tussles.
2. Violence has obviously declined since 1945 as that was the most lethal war in history.
3. Criminal punishments have become less "sadistic" as we've been able to replace them with graded forms of imprisonment and state justice.
4. Interstate warfare has declined in a significant part because the great powers have military power so great it can obliterate everyone.
5. Pinker's writing on Biblical massacres betrays his prejudices. Most of them didn't happen but were later literary inventions written in times of immense persecution (if the Bible were written in Auschwitz you can bet it would prescribe the genocide of Germans).
6. Modernity, starting with the French Revolution, unleashed the most violent, cataclysmic and destructive wars mankind has ever seen; the wars of the medieval and classical eras were much less bloody.
7. The Church and Christian military ethics were significant restraining factors in continental warfare (if not the Crusades).
8. Soldiers today are considerably more violent than in earlier eras. In WWII around 40% of infantrymen would shoot to hit people, now it's around 90%.
9. In every era some academic twit proclaims the decline of violence, and they are always proved wrong.
10. If it happens that this trend continues, it will only be because we are now so well-armed that we can extinguish ourselves
11. We may not burn cats, but we hunt foxes, gore bulls, and fight cocks, dogs etc.
12. Some of the main reasons fewer people die in war is because we have better armour, we fight at longer ranges and and medicine can now save people who only 20 years ago would have been T4s.
13. While we may not torture so many people, we are still horrifically exploitative of the third world. We just inflict our suffering through indifference, consumerism and selfishness.

At any rate, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 with MidEast in turmoil, upcoming Palestine vote, borderline-nuclear Iran w/ regional ambitions, eurozone crisis, nuclear North Korea, nuclear Pakistan sliding to civil war, global economic downturn and American decline I find the idea that we are in a uniquely non-violent era a massively naïve hostage to fortune.

While I'd quibble with some of these, the general thrust of the analysis is absolutely spot-on. Pinker is talking complete gibberish, and it doesn't take a genius to work out where and why he's wrong. 

A Fundamental Ignorance of the Facts

He starts with a description of the torturing of cats in sixteenth-century France, says we'd never do this now, and argues that this is just one example of what he calls 'the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga', this being the decline of violence. Aside from the fact that I don't think there's been any such trend, I think this is merely an example of a heightened respect for animals, at least in the West. If that's seriously to be taken as evidence that we're less violent than we were, I think it needs to be held in sharp contrast with our increased willingness to kill humans who've not yet been born.

A false distinction? I don't think so. I'm not sure there's any sense in saying -- as we would surely do -- that it was violent of, say, the ancient Spartans to expose babies who looked frail or deformed, or of the wealthy Carthaginians to kill their babies -- assuming they really did so -- in the belief that doing so would make their lives better, but that it's not violent of us to kill our babies before they can see daylight, just because they're weak or inconvenient or girls. At the very least we must surely at least recognise that we'd need to agree on a definition of 'violence' before engaging seriously in this discussion. Me, I think 'deliberately killing other human beings' surely falls into any reasonable definition of such.

Admitting that it may seem crazy to claim that violence has been declining, in the decade of Darfur and Iraq and the century -- not shortly after the century, Stephen -- of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, Pinker insists that these are the facts:

'Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.'

This, frankly, is preposterous, flaunting an ignorance of both recent and less-than-recent history. 

Was human sacrifice to appease superstition ever an unexceptional feature of life in human history? Look at what we know of European history: the Greeks didn't do it at all, the Romans seem to have done it just a couple of times, and it never happened in the Christian era; yes, it seems the Vikings and others did do it, but we simply don't have the data to say how often they did so. There's not a lot of archaeological evidence -- certainly not enough to make any statistical claims -- and what we know about them seems to have been written either long later or by their enemies. It's crucial to understand that: it's a common trope of historical and anthropological writing to accuse one's enemies of human sacrifice, cannibalism, incest, and so forth.

As for the rest, and leaving aside the absurdity of trying to maintain that the Second World War was an eternity ago, rather than, in general historical terms, yesterday, it strikes me as staggering that claims such as these could be made less than a decade after the end of the Great African War and within twenty years of the Rwandan Genocide and the Bosnian War.

Particular obscene is Pinker's claim that the notion of rape as one of the spoils of war is something that's rare to nonexistent in the West and infrequent and concealed elsewhere: try telling that to the two million or so German victims of the Red Army, who'd replied to the Nazi atrocities in a manner wholly condoned by Stalin;  try telling that to the 500 or so girls raped each week by the American forces liberating France and occupying Germany; try telling that to those who claim that rape was all too often, in effect, standard operating procedure among GI's in Vietnam; try telling that to the victims of the Serbian rape camps in Bosnia.

And that's just the West, where Pinker seems to think rape is allegedly rare or non-existent in wartime, and where mass rape was one of the signature features of the biggest western war since the Second World War; it's not even getting into the use of rape as a weapon in the Great African War, something that was neither infrequent nor concealed.

The Thirty Years' War happened in the Age of Reason? Really?

Pinker's thesis is that the Rousseauist fantasy of the noble savage is wrong, not because it blinds itself to the reality of human nature, but because it gets things the wrong way round:

'But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.'

He gives a nod to the problems in our evidence, admitting that we simply have no evidence at all for huge chunks of human history and across vast expanses of the planet, but it's a shockingly inadequate nod and one that doesn't stop him maintaining that a picture can be discerned, with a decline of violence being visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years, the leading edge in this having been in England and the Netherlands, and with the tipping point having been the onset of the so-called 'Age of Reason' in the early seventeenth century.

This, as Benjamin Gray had pointed out, is balderdash, and not least because nobody in their right mind defines the 'Age of Reason' as beginning in the early seventeenth century. Indeed, the Enlightenment basically happened in reaction to the phenomenal levels of bloodshed during the first half of the seventeenth century, epitomised by the Thirty Years War and Cromwell's massacres in Ireland. 

The carnage of the first half of the seventeenth century, it needs to be stressed, was highly unusual. European warfare during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had been constrained by all manner of limitations, both those imposed by the Catholic Church through Just War theory and the Peace of God and Truce of God movements, and those imposed by economic and social realities. The so-called wars of religion, epitomised by the Thirty Years War, represented a vast escalation of slaughter, fuelled by new economic models and the breakdown of the Christian consensus, and were precisely what Pinker should recognise as a 'spike of horrific bloodletting'. 

If we flatten out the spike, as Pinker holds that we should, the general pattern of European warfare consists of several centuries of relatively low levels of military bloodshed up to the late eighteenth century, when everything changes as the French Revolution heralds the intertwined era of mass armies and mass democracy, this being amplified by the mechanisation of warfare, as railways and machine guns made carnage possible on a level hitherto unimaginable, and as whole economies were enlisted into war efforts in such a way that civilians became legitimate targets in a way they never would have been before.

And such a naive handling of evidence...

Insofar as Pinker wants to talk of warfare before his new age of peace, he throws science and basic statistical principles out the window by talking of how the proportion of prehistoric skeletons we have showing evidence of trauma caused by violence is such as to suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. Leaving aside the question of how there are hardly enough such skeletons to be deemed statistically representative, he ignores the fact that members of warrior elites and those who die in battle are often buried in special ways, such that their graves are more easily discovered than the graves of those who died less violently, thus massively skewing the sample.

Onward then he cruises to claim that:

'It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.'

Well, this is obviously true, because all tribes everywhere are and have always been the same, because no tribal societies have ever been stratified so as to restrict combat to warrior elites, because tribal societies have never tried to limit casualties through champion combat or symbolic warfare. Ridiculous. Just as an example, here's John Keegan, for instance, talking in his A History of Warfare of how the Zulus fought before Shaka and the lads changed everything:

'Battles tended to be ritualised, conducted under the gaze of old and young, begun with an exchange of insults and finished when casualties were inflicted. There were natural as well as customary limitations on the level of violence: because metals were scarce, weapons were made of fire-hardened wood, thrown rather than used hand-to-hand; and should a warrior happen to kill an opponent, he was obliged at once to leave the field and undergo purification, since the spirit of his victim would certainly otherwise bring fatal illness to him and his family,'

I'm not saying tribal warfare was always like this, just that to describe it as always like anything is historically naive to a dazzling degree. But if that weren't bad enough, on Pinker goes to say this:

'Political correctness from the other end of the ideological spectrum has also distorted many people's conception of violence in early civilizations—namely, those featured in the Bible. This supposed source of moral values contains many celebrations of genocide, in which the Hebrews, egged on by God, slaughter every last resident of an invaded city. The Bible also prescribes death by stoning as the penalty for a long list of nonviolent infractions, including idolatry, blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, disrespecting one's parents, and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. The Hebrews, of course, were no more murderous than other tribes; one also finds frequent boasts of torture and genocide in the early histories of the Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Chinese.'

It's hard to decide where to start with this, save to point out that Benjamin Gray hits the nail on the head in saying that Pinker betrays his prejudices here. The celebrations of genocide, so damned by the likes of Steven Pinker, are clearly literary creations written centuries after the events they describe supposedly happened. And no, this doesn't mean I'm denying Biblical inspiration in any sense -- I'm just pointing out that the Bible is a library, rather than a book, and that individual books represent distinct literary genres.

Until the Greek invention of history as a discipline, the ancients seem to have felt free to emboider, embellish, and even fabricate their histories in order to make what they regarded as deeper truths.* That was the nature of the genre. Indeed, this tendency never quite went away, even after Herodotus changed the game and Thucydides changed the rules. Hellenistic, Roman, and especially medieval writers all had a tendency to treat numbers, for instance, in a rather symbolic way. Pinker shows no awareness of this fact, and treats Biblical claims of massacres as though they're historically accurate accounts of historical events. The fact that nobody's found corroborative evidence for those events, and there seems to be no evidence of massacres inspired by the Biblical 'celebrations of violence' should be a clue that the ancient Hebrews weren't particularly violent at all.

There's something deeply disingenuous about Pinker's admission that the Hebrews, who he clearly regards as deeply violent, were 'no more murderous than other tribes'; he compares them with the Hindus, Christians, and Muslims, as well as with the Chinese, none of which could ever be described accurately as 'tribes'. Talk of the early histories of the Muslims seems particularly misplaced, given how long after the Muslim wars of conquest they were written, such that the evidence as we have it was written in a relatively peaceful era, romanticising the 'heroic' deeds of their ancestors.

So what is his point?

The subtext of the whole article is sharply revealed by this paragraph: people used to be savage and religious, but then along came the Age of Reason, and violence went into a sharp decline with the English and the Dutch leading the way. 

If anything, of course, the opposite seems to have been the case. The French Revolution was the child of the Age of Reason; it fetishised Reason, setting it up on one throne and Madame Guillotine on another as it unleashed an era of mass armies that ravaged the world until the middle of the twentieth century, when a war people claimed would end all wars was succeeded by the greatest slaughter mankind had ever seen, this being unleashed by those who that maintained that 'God is dead' and those who held among other things that it was necessary to work to abolish the opiate of the masses they believed religion to be.

Have things been quieter since the Second World War? In a sense, yes, but that's the natural of statistical outliers. They're the kind of spikes that Pinker thinks we should smooth out. Things aren't going to be quite as bad as that again until the nukes start flying and our mutual destruction is assured. Please God, that'll be a long way off.

In the meantime, we conduct our wars from afar, we kill our enemies from afar, we engage in slavery from afar, and we kill our children before we can look at them or they can look at us.

We haven't got more kind. We've just got more squeamish.

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* As indeed do some moderns, unfortunately.

Update: Sadly, there have been no shortage of people lauding Pinker's work, though I'm having trouble finding many with any historical training who've done so. In a way, this is hardly surprising, since it's clear that Pinker's historical research on this has been extraordinarily shallow. A book as large as this, with a thesis as comprehensive as this, is the kind of book that really only happens as a the fruit of decades of historical work, rather than, well, a year or so.

Just as sad, but fully understandable, is the fact that many would-be critics simply don't want to waste time writing about the book, or even reading it. It's clear from the points Pinker makes in his articles summarising and flogging the book that his methodology is as risible as his knowledge is shallow.

Of those who've challenged Pinker's thesis on the basis of his articles, one on Crooked Timber by Chris Bertram taking issue with Pinker's methodology raises a crucial point. It's beyond ludicrous for Pinker to contrast the roughly 1300-year-long “Middle East slave trade” with the six-year-long “Second World War” on a "scale of evil", with the former "event" being classed as worse than the latter. It shouldn't take a serious statistical thinker to see that Pinker's not comparing like with like here.

Of those who have grappled with this book and then written about it, it's worth reading John Gray, David Bentley Hart, and Ben Laws.