Do You Think You're Clever? Page 10
Underlying it all, of course, is the behind-the-scenes power of globalisation. Economic and communications links around the world are now so strong that nations are no longer able to act entirely by themselves, while the financial clout of global corporations and banks is such that the affairs of the world are, in many ways, directed and governed on a global scale independently of national governments. In some ways, it might be said that we already have global government de facto in the hands of global economic powerbrokers, even if not de jure in the hands of an official world government. It’s in the interests of such people to keep global governance away from governments (especially global governments) – and they argue that, on the whole, the effect of too much government power is to restrict free trade and enterprise and so stifle economic growth. When France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Angela Merkel recently argued for tough global policing of banking practice, the USA and UK won the argument against them, insisting that such policies would almost certainly deepen the recession – and no doubt the financial powerbrokers breathed a sigh of relief.
Back in the 1940s and 50s, when Einstein was campaigning for world government, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley created their dystopian visions of how global government might actually turn out in Nineteen Eighty-four and Brave New World, visions of soulless worlds in which there was no room for the individual. In the face of the monolith of the Soviet Union, that fear seemed all too real. Kant argued that the main problems with world government in the present world were that it might either be too powerful or too weak, and the fear that it might be too strong seemed uppermost.
Like Orwell and Huxley, many people, at least in the West, have feared the power of over-arching government. The continued distrust of many ordinary people in Europe of increasing federalisation of the European Union shows how deep-rooted this fear is. The UK’s Labour government are generally committed to greater European integration, yet they have had to tread very carefully with the British public, avoiding, for instance, a referendum on the Lisbon treaty – fully aware that they would face an uphill battle to get it accepted. If people cannot be persuaded to accept integrated government in Europe where liberal democracy is universal, the chances of achieving it on a global scale seem remote indeed.
To most people around the world, the firmest attachment beyond family and neighbourhood is to their historic nationality. While they are willing to give their consent to be governed by their own national government, made up of people of their own nationality, speaking their own language, they tend to resent what they see as interlopers from transnational governments. Hence, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Georgia and many other parts of the Soviet Union were quick to stake out their right to independence as soon as the USSR broke up, while Scotland has asserted its own right to govern itself within the UK.
With this kind of nationalism, a voluntary political union of the world seems as remote now as it did in Dante’s time. The British Empire brought the world closer to world government than at any time during history, controlling a quarter of the world, but it was never a voluntary union and broke up as soon as the centre proved weak enough to lose its grip, leaving new nations such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and India to emerge.
And yet an interesting thing happened recently. The election of Barack Obama as President of the USA was greeted with almost universal acclaim around the world, and Obama has become something of a hero. On a visit to Ghana in early July 2009, Obama was welcomed by crowds so enthusiastic that it was as if he was their leader, not the leader of the USA. Ghana is the rising star of African democracy – which is maybe why Obama avoided its more democratically challenged neighbour Nigeria – and one gets the feeling that if Obama was to stand as president of Africa, he would be elected by a landslide in free and fair elections. And if he was to stand as president of the world, maybe he would be elected, too. Of course, this is unlikely to happen, but such speculation suggests that world government may not be such an impossibility after all.
Back in the mid-nineteenth century, US General Ulysses S. Grant, reflecting on the triumph of the American federation after the Civil War, commented: ‘I believe at some future day, the nations of the earth will agree on some sort of congress which will take cognizance of international questions of difficulty and whose decisions will be as binding as the decisions of the Supreme Court are upon us.’ Only time will tell.
Is the Bible a fictional work? Could it be called chick lit?
(English, Oxford)
What a strange question this is! The first part about the fictional nature of the Bible seems intriguingly provocative. The second part about whether it’s ‘chick lit’ seems simply bizarre. It’s hard to imagine anything less like chick lit than the Bible.
The term chick lit apparently came into being in the later 1980s on American college campuses as a way to describe the female literary tradition – presumably authors such as Jane Austen, the Brontës and so on. But in the 1990s it acquired its present tag as new women’s fiction, targeted at ‘chicks’ (young white women) about ‘chicks’ (hip, contemporary, fashion-conscious, career-driven, sex-obsessed young women). No one in the Bible remotely fits that bill – except perhaps Samson’s paramour Delilah, and John the Baptist’s nemesis Salome. Women generally have a very subordinate role in the Bible, and are immoral when sexual, like Lot’s daughters, and wicked when ambitious. Even though sympathetic, strong women do appear in the Bible, they are stoic rather than determined, maternal rather than seductive. The Bible is a 2,000-and-more-year-old collection of books written mainly by men living in a very traditional society. There is nothing at all chick lit about it even by the furthest stretch of the imagination. Mind you, it does have enough incest, violence, bestiality, murder, betrayal and special effects to satisfy the most demanding horror movie fan …
Whether it’s fictional or not is a much more interesting question. Most church authorities long ago conceded that not every single word is literal truth. Only a minority of more fundamental Christians, for instance, believe that God literally created the world in seven days with all the creatures of today fully formed. The Bible stories are, for many believers, metaphors rather than actual fact. But that doesn’t necessarily make it all a fiction. Movies like Braveheart and Schindler’s List are entirely imaginary, yet are based on real historical characters, while movies like Titanic and Pearl Harbor place fictional characters within real historical situations. Even stories like Harry Potter blur fiction and fact, using real locations such as King’s Cross station then adding imaginary details like platform 9¾. In fact any history, where it tells a story, however closely based on real events, tends to blur history and fiction – with the historian filling in the blanks here and omitting other details there. Moreover, there is often an irresistible temptation to colour the events of the past to make a good story, or reassess their impact with the benefit of hindsight. Many historians have tried to avoid this ‘Whig’ history, but it’s almost impossible to be entirely objective unless you simply present historical documents. So even if the Bible has fictional or metaphorical elements, that would not necessarily make it a fictional work.
The New Testament is essentially about Jesus and his life, and the events that followed. It’s mainly written in the form of Gospels and Epistles. Gospel is a word meaning ‘good news’ while Epistle means ‘letter’ and this gives a clue to the intention, at least, of the writers. They do not present themselves as authors intending to create a fictional story, but as reporters and correspondents spreading a news story or giving an opinion piece. Their stories are not told in the breathless matter-of-fact style of modern journalism, nor are they, we might guess, cross-checked for factual accuracy – though we have no way of knowing this; the Gospel writers may have been rigorous in checking their sources for all we know.
Yet the Gospels, at least, are often meant to be based on reports of eyewitness accounts or, at least, rumour and hearsay. Even if it’s merely hearsay and turns out to be utterly mea
ningless (or even invented by some mischiefmaker), it does not turn the Bible into a work of fiction – simply a very flawed piece of reporting. The Bible writers wanted us to believe that these events really happened. Jesus is presented as the true Son of God, who really did live on earth, not as a fictional character. The things characters in the Bible say are almost certainly not verbatim records, but they are probably intended as plausible versions of what they might have said. So even if the dialogue is largely fictional, it does not make the Bible a fictional work – more a docu-drama that is taking (maybe undue) liberties with the smaller truth, with, the authors might claim, the intention of revealing a larger truth.
Historians have found almost no other historical sources to cross-check the Bible and verify its story. Yet little has been found either that denies its story. Recent archaeological finds have shed light on its history and suggest that some of the people and locations featured are real, and some of the events described really happened. But that may make it no truer than Braveheart, or even stories about King Arthur or Robin Hood. That’s why some Bible scholars argue that the Bible is not meant to be an accurate historical document, but rather a work of literature and theology inspired by historical events and stories. It’s a question of faith how much you believe is literal truth.
Is feminism dead?
(Classics, Cambridge)
As long as there are women alive, so will feminism be, since there will always be a woman’s perspective on every issue. But the term ‘feminism’ has particular connotations. It originated in France in the 1880s and was introduced to Britain in the 1890s to stigmatise those campaigning for women’s rights, but it was widely adopted by the women’s movement only in the 1960s and 70s when ‘Women’s Liberation’ or ‘Women’s Lib’ acquired too many negative overtones, associated with strident public demonstrations and notoriously ‘bra-burning’. So when Time magazine famously asked ‘Is feminism dead?’ in 1998, they were not necessarily asking if the women’s movement was dead but if it was true of the 1960s and 70s brand – the feminism of women like Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem and Sheila Rowbotham, the feminism that introduced the notion of sexism and the sex war. This phase of feminism was campaigning not just for women’s rights to be recognised but for men’s entire attitude to women to change.
It’s usually the funeral rites for this particular brand of feminism that Time and many subsequent questioners have asked are due. Just as the Suffragette movement lost its momentum in the 1920s once votes for women were achieved, so the high-profile feminist campaigns of the 1960s and 70s seemed to have run out of steam by the 1990s as they achieved many of their goals. In the UK, the Equal Pay Act of 1970 was introduced to mandate equal pay for equal work, regardless of gender. Then the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 protected women from being discriminated against in employment, vocational training, education, the provision and sale of goods, facilities and services, premises and the exercise of public functions.
By the 1990s, it seemed, women were beginning to take it for granted that they would be accepted in the workplace and might reach the top of their chosen profession (although the picture has not actually proved quite so rosy). Sexism was widely regarded as a term of abuse. Abortion on demand was enshrined in law in many countries. And maternity leave was becoming more and more generous. What’s more, younger women were throwing off the apparently drab, dungaree-wearing, bra-burning intellectual feminism of the 1970s to have fun with ‘Girl Power’, epitomised in the media by the Spice Girls – sassy, fun, in-yer-face and openly sexual in a way that would have appalled the older generation of feminists who hated the portrayal of women as sex objects.
The writer of the 1998 piece in Time, Ginia Bellafante, pointed the finger of blame, too, at Camille Paglia’s 1990 book Sexual Personae, in which she argued that female sexuality was humanity’s greatest force and that it was up to women to realise its power. Bellafante lamented that in the wake of Paglia’s highly publicised proclamation of female sexuality, feminism was melting away in a welter of self-indulgent sexual and romantic confessions, in which a woman only had to proclaim she enjoyed sex – or complain that her love-life was bad – to be lauded by other women for expressing a woman’s perspective. Bellafante lamented too the popularity among women of Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones’s Diary, both of which portrayed the apparently self-indulgent emotional life of 30-something single women – examples, Bellafante felt, of the dead-end into which feminism had strayed.
A report by sociologists at Cambridge University published in 2008 seemed to confirm that things have moved on even further since the 1990s and that many women are beginning to reject feminism. It isn’t just that many women dislike the label ‘feminist’, which seems to have the same dry, hidebound, rather insulting overtones as the expression ‘politically correct’ – another product of 70s politics. It’s as if many women are actually doubting some of feminism’s core values. The Cambridge report suggested that support for gender equality had peaked in the 1990s but is now in decline. Back in the 1990s, over 50 per cent of women thought it was right for women to work rather than look after children; now it’s barely 40 per cent (under 40 per cent in the USA). According to the study’s leader Jacqueline Scott, professor of empirical sociology, ‘When it comes to the clash between work and family life, doubts about whether a woman should be doing both are starting to creep in’.
Then a few months later, a report in the British Medical Journal led by Professor Jay Belsky suggested that more than twice as many children who were in day-care for more than twenty hours a week were insecure compared to those cared for full-time by their mothers. A recent government report found that toddlers spending more than 35 hours a week in day-care were prone to be more aggressive than their non-nursery peers. It seems more and more women admit to enjoying pornography and are happy to embrace pole-dancing as a form of exercise and self-confidence boost – something that would have horrified an earlier generation of feminists. The emphasis has shifted away from a general political movement, it seems, to self-help. The only battles a woman has to fight, it seems, are not with society but with her own self-esteem.
There are certainly some women (as well as smug men, of course) saying that we are now in a ‘post-feminist’ era. Some women say the idea of feminism is irrelevant in a society where gender equality has, apparently, been achieved. Others such as Naomi Wolf say that they are post-feminists because they are taking charge of their own future rather than putting it in the hands of a political or academic movement. Indeed, they want to shake off the stigma of being labelled a feminist. The ‘glass ceiling’, the invisible barrier that seems to prevent women being promoted above a certain level, is just that, they say – glass, which can be easily smashed by a determined woman.
Yet there are many women who believe that feminism is far from dead. Even if well-to-do white women in the West are having doubts about where it should go, women around the world still face far too many problems. Back in the 1990s, some women argued that feminism should move on from the second wave of feminism – the feminism of the 1960s and 70s which campaigned for equal opportunity at work (the first being the suffragettes who campaigned for the vote) – and begin what Rebecca Walker (bisexual African-American daughter of The Color Purple author Alice Walker) called the third wave.
The third wave, they argued, should not seek to drive every woman towards the white middle-class ideal of the supermum, but should allow all kinds of different directions, which included non-heterosexuals and women of colour. Authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards wrote in Manifesta that: ‘We’re not doing feminism the same way that the seventies feminists did it; being liberated doesn’t mean copying what came before but finding one’s own way – a way that is genuine to one’s own generation.’ Some of these third-wave feminists are willing to embrace female identity in whatever shape or form it takes, including sex-work. What matters to them is challenging oppression. Critics of the third wave, especially those among the ol
der generation of second-wavers, suggest that it lacks focus and cohesion. But third-wavers argue that they are simply adapting feminism for their generation, the generation of hip-hop, pop culture, consumerism and the internet, not Kennedy, Vietnam and Woodstock.
Many of the battles feminism fought in earlier decades have indeed been won, and the feminists of the 1960s and 70s have every reason to be proud of their achievements. Yet all around the world, there is still much to do before women really are treated equally to men. Women still rarely achieve the highest roles in politics, for instance. The UK’s Margaret Thatcher and Germany’s Angela Merkel are still the only women to have become leaders of major Western powers. Women are still in a small minority as elected representatives at both local and national levels. And a scan of the faces at the UN shows just a handful of women among a sea of men. Moreover, average pay levels for women remain significantly below those for men. In many countries, the difficulties women and girls face are much worse, ranging from enforced circumcision and enforced marriage to sexual exploitation and barred access to education and careers. Until all these problems are solved, feminism even as a solely political movement can never be dead.
What percentage of the world’s water is contained in a cow?
(Veterinary Medicine, Cambridge)
Of course, there’s no way you can answer this question easily unless you have a few basic facts, and even then you’d only be able to make rough estimates, not accurate calculations. And yet with those few basic facts, you can make a pretty good stab at the answer to what at first seems an impossible question. For a little more on the value of estimates to apparently impossible questions, see ‘What’s the population of Croydon?’
Whatever the answer to this bovine hydration question is, you know it’s going to be very small. The number of cows on the planet has increased dramatically in the last few decades as more and more people around the world turn to meat and dairy products. There are now about 1.3 billion cows on earth – that’s one cow to every four or five people. So the percentage of water in a single cow of all the water in just cows alone is much less than a billionth of a percent, or 0.000000001 per cent.