The American Historical Association are debating a resolution opposing the Iraq War, on the grounds that it involves practices ‘inimical to the values of the historical profession’ (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19930). Specifically they argue:

the American Historical Association adopted a resolution in January 2004 reaffirming the principles of free speech, open debate of foreign policy, and open access to government records in furthering the work of the historical profession;

...the current Administration has violated the above-mentioned standards and principles through the following practices:

* excluding well-recognized foreign scholars;
* condemning as "revisionism" the search for truth about pre-war intelligence;
* reclassifying previously unclassified government documents;
* suspending in certain cases the centuries-old writ of habeas corpus and substituting indefinite administrative detention without specified criminal charges or access to a court of law;
* using interrogation techniques at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and other locations incompatible with respect for the dignity of all persons required by a civilized society;

...a free society and the unfettered intellectual inquiry essential to the practice of historical research, writing, and teaching are imperilled by the practices described above

My question is, concentrating on the final two issues raised: do the suspension of habeas corpus and torturing people imperil historical research? They’re certainly bad things to do, and harm society generally. But do they harm historical research and if so, how? You could argue that historians might get imprisoned indefinitely or tortured, but I see no reason to suppose that they are particularly liable to such treatment. And, in fact, lots of historians in classical times and ever since have managed to produce good historical work in countries which allowed torture and arbitrary imprisonment.

The problem for the hundreds of US historians who have signed this statement is that if you take away the final two issues, the three you have left are irritating actions by the US government, but not major threats to the historical profession. There are other democracies also interfering blatantly in historians’ work: see e.g. this article on the Indian historian Romila Thapar (http://www.himalmag.com/2003/june/analysis_2.htm). If historians want to protest the Iraq war and Bush’s policies (as most of the ones I know in Britain do), that is perfectly reasonable. But to claim that such policies are unacceptable to historians as historians seems to me a specious argument.

One of the few things that has been more depressing than the recent UNICEF report arguing that British children had the lowest well-being in the Western world (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6359363.stm) was some of the responses on the internet and in the media to these results. The nadir was reached by Barbara Ellen in the Observer (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2015633,00.html). Her argument: British children aren’t unhappy and engaging in self-destructive behaviour, they’re just ‘arsey’.

According to Ellen, the British teenagers who answered surveys were just winding up the interviewers, when they talked about getting drunk, feeling their health was poor, being unhappy at school and engaging in underage sex. And this behaviour, is in her view:

much less creepy and disturbing than the thought of all those sucky-up kids from Holland and Sweden (henceforth known as the apple-polishing nations) chirruping away about how much they respect their elders.

The same attitude is visible in many other comments I’ve seen elsewhere. Why is British childhood seen as bad for having large amounts of underage sex, drinking and drug-taking? Surely those are the good things in being a teenager? If British children are saying other children are unfriendly, isn’t that only being honest?

What is staggering about these views is firstly how ingrained a view of childhood and adolescence as naturally unhappy and self-destructive has become to British people, when the statistics for other countries show this is not inevitable. And more than this it also shows the vile reversal of values that seems to have swept over this country. To be a teenager or adult who does not break the rules, who behaves responsibly, respectably, morally, is the worst possible crime in some circles. It is to be a goody-goody, boring, conformist, an abnormal freak. It is the same attitude visible in some of the reactions to the news that David Cameron used cannabis at school. Hasn’t everybody tried drugs (other than a few sad cases?)

This isn’t about liberalism versus traditional values or religion versus secularism. The overall results of the study show religious countries doing both relatively well (Spain/Italy) and poorly (US), as well as largely secular countries doing well (Netherlands, Scandinavia) and poorly (UK). Countries with liberal traditions can do very well: Scandinavia, for example, shows that countries with relatively high levels of single parents and step-parents can still have happy children. The Netherlands combines low rates of abortion with low rates of teenage pregnancy and only average rates of underage sex.

Liberalism, then, need not destroy morality: it can create a new, more inclusive morality of compassion and consideration for all. In Britain, however, it does not seem to have done so. Instead rebelliousness seems to have become the norm. It may be normal for many teenagers to be rebel against their parents. But it is not normal or healthy for parents to still be seeing themselves as rebels, to refuse to become mature, to applaud harmful behaviour in their own children and others. I am worried for my daughter’s future sometimes. How I can bring her up to have standards, without her being picked on for having them, to enjoy studying without being despised and bullied for this? I do not want to move to the Netherlands, but nor do I enjoy living in a society which celebrates the ‘arsey’ and despises the well-behaved.

I have recently got embroiled in a long argument at Crooked Timber (http://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/07/fathers-not-allowed) about discrimination at playgroups. The facts (as far as we know them) are these. A Dutch muncipality has started a playgroup for 18 months-2 years old, which is for women only. The (presumed) reason is that this was because it was trying to reach out to immigrant women who would not be willing to go to events with strange men present. (Note: the person who started the discussion had not been able to confirm that it was immigrants who were the target audience). A heated discussion has ensued on whether any such playgroups should be allowed. This is my attempt to pull some of the issues together in a way I can’t do in serial posts.

I’m not going to get into the question of state versus private funding, because it doesn’t seem the key issue to me. At least in the UK any such non-profit group would a) be liable to the discrimination laws, and b) would probably aim to get some state funding as well at some point. For this age-group of children, I think it’s also safe to assume that they will be unable to tell the difference between single-sex and mixed-sex groups. (It would be different for older children). So sex-segregated groups would not adversely affect the children, whereas they would possibly benefit from the activities planned. The plan also seems to be to give advice to the mothers on childcare, nutrition, play etc, so it would benefit the mothers. Does this justify sex discrimination?

Some people on Crooked Timber have argued that single-sex groups are never acceptable, as they are discriminatory. Traditionally, however, feminist thinking (and similarly liberals talking about race, sexual orientation, disability etc) has seen the existence of segregated groups (i.e. specifically excluding one sex/race/sexual orientation etc) as acceptable under some circumstances. In fact many of these equality movements have early on had *some* women-only, black-only, gay-only groups. The reason is that these are seen as necessary for such subordinated parts of society to gain their own voices and be able to speak freely. If they have let in members of dominant groups, however, well-intentioned these people might be towards the oppressed groups, the group dynamics have been adversely affected. For the same reason it seems to me reasonable that there are still occasions when single-sex groups are necessary today and that such groups can reasonably decide that they want to exclude all members of the opposite sex. Consider, for example, a support group for new fathers. They might decide (possibly from experience) that allowing any mothers along, made fathers less willing to discuss sexual problems, more defensive, unable to bond properly via ‘lad-talk’ etc. It would seem to me justified to ban women from the group in that case. Similarly, a group encouraging mothers to breastfeed might feel that having fathers there, however, supportive, would make other women uncomfortable and less willing to attend. Again, this seems to me justifiable in principle. If you are going to argue that sex-segregated groups are *never* acceptable, you will get no fathers’ groups, for a start, and I haven’t seen anyone on the thread arguing for that.

The question then becomes what general principles might justify such segregation. After all, how do you avoid the same justification being used for white-only parent groups? My tenative list of criteria would be:

1) the group intended to be helped is socially disadvantaged (either in society as a whole or with respect to some particular activity)

2) the aims of the group meeting/activity are socially beneficial

3) the aims would be severely compromised if members of another social group were allowed to take part

4) the excluded groups are not put to too much inconvenience or disadvantage

These seem to me to give some way of distinguishing when segregation can be justified. For example, this wouldn’t justify whites (in the West) having racially segregated groups. It wouldn’t justify having men-only social clubs, because even if their aims are socially beneficial, it’s doubtful that these would be severely compromised by having women present. Similarly, you could justify having women-only sessions at sporting facilities on the grounds that women use them much less, it would be good if they took more exercise, and some women get very put off by having men in the pool/gym with them. But you couldn’t justify having a large percentage of the available time women-only, because this would cause too much inconvenience to the excluded group (here, men).

On this basis, it seems to me fairly clear that the women-only playgroups satisfy the first three criteria. Migrant women are socially disadvantaged, this scheme would help them and mixed-sex playgroups have presumably been found not to work for some immigrant cultures. (I should point out here that although some people have tried to turn this into a religious question, it’s not strictly one. There are Muslim women who will socialise in mixed sex groups. It is only Muslims from some cultures (and possibly non-Muslim women from these cultures as well) who have problems with this.)

The problem comes with deciding on criterion 4. Do the single-sex groups inconvenience/disadvantage those excluded too much? There is a practical problem here and also a moral problem. The practical problem is whether you have sufficient mixed-sex groups that fathers with small children can go elsewhere reasonably easily? My suspicion is that provided there were only 1 or 2 single-sex groups and a number of similar mixed-sex groups, they would probably not be disadvantaged much. (One point I made in my posts is that immigrants are normally concentrated in urban areas, where there is a relatively high density of provision). The moral problem here is that fathers are themselves disadvantaged as parents and full-time fathers in particular face discrimination. As they already suffer, why should they be made to suffer more?

You can certainly argue whether in any specific case the benefits of sex-segregated playgroups outweigh the disadvantage to men. But what about the principle of the matter? Is it ever justified to discriminate against fathers? My view would be that the existence of two discriminated against groups doesn’t in principle mean that you can’t provide opportunities for one at the (temporary) expense of the other. For example, women and ethnic minorities are both discriminated against getting jobs in the media. Supposing someone sets up a ‘Minorities into TV’ group which gives ethnic minority people special training/advice etc in breaking into the media. It seems reasonable to me that they could decide to exclude white women from the programme, even though they are also discriminated against. (Alternatively, a ‘Women in the Media’ group could exclude black men). Similarly, a mixed-sex ‘gay parent support group’ could say that they did not want straight fathers to join, because that would distract from the aims of their particular group. A group for battered men might want to exclude battered women, because it would discourage men from attending and vice-versa. I think, in such circumstances, it would be right to ensure that excluded groups also suffering discrimination were getting support as well. One of the things I’ve been arguing for is that there ought to be better provision of fathers’ groups as well.

What depresses me is that a number of men on the thread, who were the main carers of their children, and who I thus presumed would be reasonably liberal minded, rejected women-only playgroups absolutely. (None of them specifically objected to fathers-only groups, which would have been consistent). The response of some men and women to ethnic minority women who might not come to mixed-sex playgroups tended to be unsympathetic, if not actually hostile. Such women were told to ‘get over it’, as if changing their cultural norms was as simple as changing their TV channel. There were relatively few people making the obvious point that the women in these cases were largely those without power in their own cultures. Implicitly, the disadvantages of fathers (which are real disadvantages) are made out to be the only problems in these cases. There were also some of the old arguments trotted out about feminism just benefiting women.

I don’t know what, if anything, could be done to change attitudes. I think there were some good posts on the topic and I was certainly trying to be constructive (though possibly not successfully). Maybe this hostility reflects a combination of current anti-Muslim feeling and a lot of angry fathers. I did ask whether if fathers were made more welcome at supposedly mixed-sex playgroups, (which in practice are usually women-dominated), they would feel less hostile towards the existence of a few women-only playgroups. But overall what the discussion suggests is that even if feminism is getting somewhere in practice, its liberal principles are still not getting through.

Mark Ravenhall in the Guardian is claiming that it is time that ‘liberals fought back’. http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/drama/story/0,,2006078,00.html.
His specific complaint is about drama students refusing to participate in certain parts of their university courses on religious grounds. He gives three examples. Two of these are a US student who refused to watch a play involving a gay kiss and a British female student who was unhappy about exercises that involved her touching male students. In the third case:

I met a woman who has been directing a production of my play Mother Clapp's Molly House with final-year students at a British university. It's a less innocent play than Citizenship, and contains not just gay kissing but a great deal of enthusiastic sodomy. "It all went very well," she said. "But unfortunately our lead boy had to pull out at the last minute. His mum is a Christian and she found a copy of the script, so he had to withdraw."

I recognised in this the same placid acceptance I had experienced in California - an acceptance that the values of education and culture, and the authority of the teacher, must come second to religious conscience and parental authority. Liberals, so used to tolerating all beliefs and cultures, haven't got the strength to defend the values of a liberal institution.

Ravenhall concludes: “There should be no opt-outs when it comes to culture.” I am not quite sure how inclusive this remark is meant to be. Must I go and see Ravenhall’s work or its equivalents in order to be seen as cultured? (I’m not arguing for banning such plays, but they’re not to my personal viewing taste, whether featuring straight or gay sex). Even taking him to refer solely to arts education, Ravenhall seems to be implying that if you don’t want to simulate explicit sexual acts you have no place at drama school. Such views seem to place considerable limits on who the arts are for. I am also worried by his insistence on the ‘authority of the teacher’ in such matters. If a teacher repeatedly used material that glorified male violence against women or that promoted antisemitism, for example, surely students should have the right to protest? If teacher always knows best, how much difference is there between liberalism and authoritarianism?

There is a significant point here, but Ravenhall does his argument no favours by overstating the case. Some arts courses are always going to include material that some students find offensive, whether for religious or other reasons. It is up to the university (and individual teachers) to find a reasonable balance between which of this material is necessary and what should be optional, based on general academic and professional practice. (There are parallels in other courses: should vegetarians have to do meat-based cooking or dissect animals?) It’s reasonable, for example, to insist that art students must be willing to study the nude and drama students to touch one another. I’m less convinced, however, that all art students must be prepared to study (say) the Chapman brothers or film students must study Quentin Tarentino. Putting these into optional courses seem more suitable to me. Within such courses, it might be entirely reasonable to have any amount of X-rated violent and sexual content, as seems appropriate. (I suspect Mother Clapp’s Molly House may have been in such an optional course).

In compulsory courses, however, it seems to me that teachers should be very careful about introducing extremely controversial material. For example, for one seminar on the treatment of Jews in medieval England, I found a picture from a talk that I’d once been to, which was argued to be the oldest medieval caricature of a Jew (i.e. one showing the ugly hook-nosed stereotype). I considered including the image on the handout that I was going to give the students. Then I reconsidered. I wasn’t sure I would have the time to discuss the image in detail, to explain its context. Simply as a picture on the handout it was ugly, potentially offensive without being enlightening. I decided to omit it: for a different kind of class in the future I might well use the image.

Talk about how the liberals needing to fight more fiercely in culture wars, as Ravenhall does, seems to me to be missing the point. You need to think very hard about the educational purpose of controversial material and whether it will actually achieve this purpose. It is important that students’ views are broadened by their time at university, but it’s not going to be done by simply alienating and dismissing those with non-liberal views. How can liberals convert conservatives, after all, if potential converts are not made freely welcome into the liberal church?

I’ve been reading up on late medieval religion for a seminar I’m giving and for the first time read Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England,1400-1580 (or at least some of it, since it’s a very long book). He is one of the key ‘revisionist’ historians of the English Reformation. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get to grips with his arguments fairly, because it’s all written in such partial terms. Duffy is a Catholic who does not even attempt to avoid his own confessional bias. He is constantly writing in biased and polemical terms. (The Voices of Morebath , a later book by him is rather better in that respect). For example, in discussing laypeople who were enthusiastic Protestant he refers to ‘unlucky clergy, with enemies or proto-reformers in their parishes ready to denounce them’ (p 415), a ‘snake in the grass in this traditionalist Eden’ [parish in Barking] p 417 and comments on how:

sturdily conservative clergy might find themselves afflicted with radicals in the congregation. The Canterbury parish of All Saints Northgate had a nest of radical Protestants in it, in particular several generations of the Toftes family...Margaret Toftes the younger, a termagant who refused to creep to the cross on Good Friday and wanted to burn the church down round the “idols” within it’ (p 437)

Duffy has no sense of what might have motivated such radicals, claiming: ‘iconoclasm was the chief sacrament of the [Edwardian] reform’ (p 480) and for him there was ‘something...religiously sterile about Lollardy’ (p xxvii). He finds reasons to criticise even the use of the vernacular in the services:

At a more obvious level, the switch from Latin to English [in the prayerbook] immediately rendered obsolete the entire musical repertoire of cathedral, chapel, and parish church. Not the least of the shocks brought by the prayer-book at Whitsun 1549 must have been the silencing of all but a handful of choirs and the reduction of the liturgy on one of the great festivals of the year to a monotone dialogue between curate and clerk. (p 465)

The main argument of the book is that ‘traditional religion’ (late medieval Catholicism) was strong and still widely supported by the laity. The Reformation and its changes were brutally imposed by a ruling elite on an unhappy populace, whose symbolic and material world was thus destroyed. Duffy’s narrative of the Reformation starts with several chapters about the ‘assault on traditional religion’. Yet when he describes actions under Mary, the language suddenly alters. In place of the parish visitations under Edward (‘thorough, in many places aggressive’ (p 453)) and under Elizabeth (‘draconian’ (p 566), ‘the progress of the visitation [in 1559] would be marked out by the smoke of bonfires of images and books in market-places and church-greens throughout the land.’ (p 569)), we have English Bibles simply ‘collected up’ during Marian visitations (p 530). In particular, Duffy tries to minimise the significance of the large-scale campaign of burnings for heresy under Mary:

1557 was a year of burnings in Kent...a study of the restoration of traditional religion is not the place for a survey of the pursuit of heresy, and I shall not attempt to consider the burnings here. This is neither to minimize their horror nor to suggest that they were without importance in the long-term reaction against the Marian reconstruction. (p 559)

The unfortunate implications of Duffy’s comments is that for him, at some level, the burning of Protestants is less traumatic than that of images of saints. Similarly, in the Voices of Morebath he rightly condemns the brutal execution of one of the Catholic ringleaders of the Prayer Book revolt in 1549. Yet a few pages before he describes how one of the demands of the rebels was for the restoration of the practice of executing heretics, abolished under Edward VI. Killing people for their faith was still quite acceptable to sixteenth-century Catholics.

Beneath the polemic, it is very difficult to be sure exactly how popular or unpopular the Reformation was with ‘ordinary’ people. As Duffy reasonably points out, the use of wills to show evidence of Protestantism is very problematic. However, he then proceeds to generalise on equally weak evidence, looking at ‘a single conservative community’ and claiming:

the experience of Morebath almost certainly offers us a more accurate insight into what the locust years of Edward had meant to the average Englishman than the embryo godly communities which had begun to emerge in parts of Essex, Suffolk or Kent...In the majority of English villages, as in Morebath, men breathed easier for the accession of a Catholic queen.(p 503)

Duffy’s argument for the continuing overwhelming popularity of Catholicism in the 1540s and 1550s has two obvious problems. How was the Reformation able to proceed so far under Henry VIII and Edward VI and why did Mary feel the need to use such repressive measures in her reign? Both these suggest at least some strong popular support for Protestantism, even if only by a minority.

Because Duffy sees medieval Catholicism as still vital, he obviously cannot see the Reformation as inevitable, putting it down mainly to political manoeuvring. In the individual case of England it’s certainly possible to argue that there might have been no Reformation. England remaining Catholic is no more implausible than France remaining Catholic. In a European context, however, I’d say that the Reformation was not only inevitable, but necessary.

It seems to me that the success of the Reformation required the conjunction of three things: some popular demand for ‘pure’/’simple’ religion, intellectual criticism of Catholic theology and high-level political support against the Pope. Other attempts at reform suggest that all three things were necessary. The failure of Lollardy suggests that intellectuals with some popular support weren’t enough to sustain a religious movement against a hostile government; the Hussites had more political backing and got a bit further. Meanwhile, King Charles I’s problems with the Prayer Book in Scotland suggest that a government can’t easily simply impose a religion with no popular support. (Whether the intellectuals are necessary is a separate problem: I’d be interested in any examples or counter-examples of that).

How likely was it that these three different factors would coincide? Looking at the first area, this isn’t simply a Protestant point. Throughout the Middle Ages (and before and since) there were repeated movements which aimed for a simpler, purer Christianity, with a more direct relationship with God. Doctrinally, this could range from the Desert Fathers to the Franciscans to the Waldensians, and I suspect the same impulses could still be found in all denominations today. There is always a demand among some Christians for a less-institutionalised church, that isn’t corrupted by the world or making accommodations with it, that is poor and holy and as the apostles would have wanted it. The main change in the later Middle Ages was that cloistered monasticism was no longer the preferred place to achieve this wonderful place: the rise of the mendicant orders and the lay orders changed that.

The second thing needed for the reformation was an intellectual critique of the Catholic tradition. Again, once you had universities and scholasticism developing, it was pretty much inevitable that some thinkers would come to reject some Catholic doctrines. The third requirement for a reformation, secular rulers prepared to oppose the Pope, were a continuing problem for the papacy from the thirteenth century onwards.

Given these three factors in existence in the late Middle Ages, it was only a matter of time before they happened to coincide and thus lead to the violent doctrinal break-up of a Reformation. The only way to avoid this would have been for the Catholic church to reform itself sufficiently to prevent the split. And yet that is precisely what it repeatedly failed to do. The conciliar movement ended in disarray and papal corruption and abuses were never tackled. There could not have been a Counter-Reformation without a Reformation and not just in the literal sense.

The relationship of denominations to ‘traditional religion’ is also interesting. As Duffy himself points out, by the 1580s traditional religion was reforming itself around the Elizabethan prayer book (p 589). This suggests both the vitality of traditional religion (in the sense of a localised attachment to specific rituals, customs and beliefs and understandings of religion that aren’t strictly orthodox), but also its changing nature. Arguably, all religions are prone to this accretion of well-loved traditions, whether it is the social customs of Southern Baptists, the particular hymnbooks each Anglican church cherishes, or the different forms that Buddhism and Islam take in particular Asian cultures. Possibly Catholicism’s problem was not the strength of traditional religion, but its too eager embrace of it. Duffy describes the removal of one such custom by the reformers:

And just as the Injunctions [of 1538] condemned the recitation of the rosary, so they struck at the cult of the Virgin Mary by forbidding the ringing of the Ave bell or Angelus. In 1481 Edward IV’s queen Elizabeth Woodville, had consolidated an already established custom by securing a papal indulgence of a hundred days for all who, on hearing the Ave bell at morning, noon or evening, knelt and recited at least one Ave Maria. This charming custom was now condemned as having been “brought in and begun by the pretence of the Bishop of Rome’s pardon” and the bell was silenced.(p 408)

Duffy doesn’t seem to see the contradictions here. The ringing of the Ave bell may be a ‘charming custom’, as may the saying of an Ave when you hear it. But the granting of papal indulgences for that specific act is the arbitrary, mechanical form of religion that reformers (and Protestants like myself) still find so distasteful. This intertwining seems to have been basic to late medieval Catholicism. As Duffy puts it:

There is no easy resolution of this contradiction between devout interiority of devotion on the one hand and an apparently crudely mechanical view of the power of ‘good words’ on the other. Indeed...this paradox lies close to the heart of late medieval English religion. (p 256)

This left Catholicism intrinsically vulnerable to reformist criticism. In contrast, the Anglican attitude to traditional religion (permitting it, but not, on the whole, embracing it) leaves fewer opportunities for complaints about purity.

Given all these insoluble problems in the late medieval Catholic church, it seems to me that the Reformation was both inevitable and also necessary, for Catholicism as well as those unsatisfied with it.