Think 6

global trends

i n t e r n at i o n a l a f fa i r s Issue 6

thought leadership

2013

“Think. magazine is aptly named: in our complex and rapidly changing world, magazines that can channel and curate some of the best and most dynamic thinking on the key trends shaping our future should be cherished and are vital to our progress.

I look forward to reading many more issues.“ Afshin Molavi, Senior Research Fellow, The New America Foundation, and Co-Director of the World Economy Roundtable

Half of humanity:

the Women’s Report

Subscribe today.

Simply send an email to thinksubscriptions@qf.org.qa

Susan Faludi asks if it’s time for a feminist spring /// Bono We can free the poorest of the poor /// Rowan Williams Human rights only exist because of religion /// don’t mistake my hijab for a symbol of oppression says Shelina Janmohamed /// Sophie Hastings on Damien Hirst and the fragility of existence /// My home – the call center of the world Miguel Syjuco

global trends international affairs thought leadership

Think., the quarterly international magazine from Qatar Foundation, is dedicated to exploring global trends, international affairs and thought leadership in every sphere of human endeavour.

We welcome your views and opinions on @Think_QF and on Think. International Magazine

Name: Company: Position: Full postal address:

Contact number:

Your details will be used solely for the distribution of Think. magazine and will not be passed on to any third party.

global trends international affairs thought leadership

welcome

EQUALITY FOR ALL?

W

omen hold up half the sky.� The antiquity of the well-known Chinese proverb serves only to underline that although the roles played by women everywhere have always been acknowledged as important, they have not always been granted the prominence they deserve. There have, of course, been exceptions, with women occupying positions of glory and honor back to the time of the Queen of Sheba, a figure recognized both by the monotheistic religions and the histories of the ancient world. But it was only in the late 20th century that a culture of true equality between the sexes began to take root, and then to an extent only sporadically.

Today, however, questions about how that equality should manifest itself have still not been settled. Should the aim be for men and women to be the same in all matters – regardless of whether they actually want to? Should it be a question of opportunity, of quotas, or of rigidly exact pay scales? (Is it really all about money and power?) On top of this have been laid distinct perspectives prescribing what dignity, respect and empowerment for women should consist of; perspectives that have not always taken into account the cultural differences that have led many prominent women in more conservative societies to comport themselves in ways that those in the West often find difficult to appreciate are freely chosen. An ever-controversial subject, therefore, retains all its ability to stimulate fierce debate.

That is why in this issue of Think., the quarterly magazine devoted to analyzing global trends, international affairs and thought leadership, we have chosen to concentrate on aspects of the role, state and status of women around the world today. Our expert contributors hail from across the continents and offer a range of opinions, from the provocative to the professorial. To come to fixed conclusions on such a topic may be a near-impossiblity: one note that does run through our essays, however, is that of cautious optimism. A relationship of full dignity and respect between the sexes may not yet have been achieved. But we may, perhaps, be moving steadily toward it.

Haya bint Khalifa Al Nassr Director of Communication, Qatar Foundation

july 2013

1

contents

22

40

bulletin

2

26

5 The Logic of Language 6 Crossroads of Asia 8 Two Wheels Good, Four Wheels Bad 36 The Think. Debate

think. review

We can Win the War on Poverty

38 Correspondence

49 Inside the Head of Hirst

the women’s issue

10 State of the Sisters

Today, if you want to find true female role models, look east: the real fighters for feminine dignity and equality are now to be found in the developing world

20 Veil of Ignorance

Far from it signalling oppression, wearing a headscarf is a defiant expression of my choice to be a woman on my own terms, says one writer

22 Why aren’t Women’s Rights Human Rights?

10

50 years after the publication of the landmark The Feminine Mystique, have we really got much closer to solving the basic problems of cultural expectations and childcare? think. magazine

30 26 From Companion and Friend, to ‘Unexploded Ordnance’

Stereotypes and resentment have always surrounded female leaders but, as our historical survey shows, from Catherine the Great to Margaret Thatcher, they have triumphed against the odds

30 The Ultimate Glass Ceiling

For the first time ever a woman is a serious contender for the White House. What does this mean for America – and the world? july 2013

49

On the eve of a major new exhibition, Think. profiles one of the most iconic artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries – Damien Hirst

55 Words Around the World briefings

40 religion is the Source of all Rights

The gap between the discourse of rights and faith can only be filled by an acknowledgement of the divine, argues a former Archbishop of Canterbury

44 Why the World Should Learn to Love Good Accountants

They have been crucial to the smooth operation of world trade since before the time of Columbus. In an era of financial crises, our ignorance of their profession is perilous

While traditional publishing struggles, the literary world is now dominated by festivals. Who and what are they for? asks one writer whose life has (nearly) been taken over by them

60 Letter from Manila

Confusing, polluted, crowded: the Philippines’ capital beguiles only the deserving, says Miguel Syjuco

64 The Ideas Column

Archana Kapoor says don’t underestimate the power of information – it can save lives

3

contributors

Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and internationally acclaimed author. American women are now encouraged to think they can have it all, but is the currently-touted model of success deeply flawed and compromised, she asks? Page 10

bulletin

Bono is lead singer of the Irish rock band U2 and a co-founder of the global advocacy organization, ONE. The battle for justice and dignity for all can be won. We have the momentum – we just mustn’t let inertia stop us, he says on page 36

Sophie Hastings is an art critic and commentator and a Contributing Editor of GQ. Death, its ever-present threat, and the beauty its proximity gives to life, are what have always defined the extraordinary career of Damien Hirst, she writes. Page 49

Miguel Syjuco is a writer whose first novel won the Man Asian Literary Prize for 2008. If you’re a cultural chameleon, does that mean you sometimes forget to celebrate your own heritage, he ponders? Page 60

Elementary students learning grammar at the Nova School, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1969

4

THE LOGIC OF LANGUAGE

by Sholto Byrnes

Lord Williams is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and was Archbishop of Canterbury and Head of the Worldwide Anglican Communion, 2002-2012. Human rights are only a set of artificial claims without sacred underpinning, he argues on page 40

Archana Kapoor is a filmmaker, publisher and founder of an NGO that seeks to help bring “a quiet revolution” to deprived communities in India. Information and awareness are key, she writes.

Page 64

Nicholas Wapshott was a founding Senior Editor of The Daily Beast and is the acclaimed biographer of JM Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. A longtime New York-based commentator, he analyzes the remarkable trajectory of Hillary Clinton – from Arkansas to the White House. Page 30

Jacob Soll is Professor of History and Accounting at the University of Southern California. One of the world’s least loved professions is central to the functioning of world trade. We overlook it at our peril, he warns on page 44

Qatar Foundation Communication Directorate Rima Ismail Publications Manager, rismail@qf.org.qa +974 4454 0960 Ghada Saade Head of Translation & Editorial Unit, gsaade@qf.org.qa +974 4454 0961 Sayed A Mohamed, samohamed@qf.org.qa +974 4454 1701 Sholto Byrnes Editor, sbyrnes@qf.org.qa +974 3306 5378 Follow us on:

At Think., we welcome comments from readers. If you would like to respond to any of the articles, please contact the editor at Think@qf.org.qa and mark your email “for publication”

facebook.com/thinkinternationalmagazine twitter.com/Think_QF

Photography: Corbis, Getty and Shutterstock. Damien Hirst by Prudence Cuming Associates © 2013. Qatar Foundation. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of Qatar Foundation. The opinions expressed in this magazine are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect those of Qatar Foundation. For more information on Qatar Foundation please visit qf.org.qa

Think. is printed on paper produced from sustainably managed forests and is certified by the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC)

think. magazine

T

his spring, as Harvard held a conference on The Humanities and the Future of the University, the Massachusetts institution’s Gazette released a set of statistics that, although particular to the US, will still have struck notes of dismay (although not necessarily surprise) in liberal arts departments around the world.

“In 1979, federal grants for science were worth five times those for the humanities. By 1998, 33 times more. In 2011, 200 times more,” it said.

“The crisis is real,” commented the conference’s moderator, Homi K Bhabha, “and it is global.”

One of the main criticisms leveled at the humanities in general is that the results of july 2013

studying such subjects are difficult to quantify on a cost/benefit analysis, unlike the way that, say, a degree in chemistry yields obvious advantages for those wishing to pursue a career in science or industry. Given that, it is curious that one discipline that falls under the humanities umbrella – and which is of such everyday usefulness that it is counterintuitive that it should need any defence – nevertheless attracts consistent outrage and opprobrium whenever anyone suggests it ought to be taught rigorously in schools. I refer, you may have already guessed, to grammar.

Throughout much of the English-speaking world (mainly that part settled

by Europeans; less so in the other former British

colonies), a trend over several decades was that formal instruction in the rules of language should be avoided in favour of “immersion”, the idea being that pupils would naturally pick up or “catch” correct usage through conversation, reading and by example. That this signally failed to ensure that good standards were being achieved has long been evident. A 2005 survey found that, in America, Forbes 500 companies were having to spend more than $3 billion a year training their employees in basic English. Universities across the continents have been complaining for at least 20 years about students’ poor writing (spelling is a battle that was surrendered even before the advent of computer spellcheckers

Sholto byrnes on grammar Imran Khan on pakistan Harry Mount on transport

supposedly rendered its mastery superfluous), with institutions such as Australian National University now insisting that those enrolling for beginners’ level Latin and Ancient Greek spend a semester studying traditional English grammar. That such a drastic step should be necessary may be shocking.

But then how can you understand the structure of another language if you don’t even know the components of your own?

Yet opposition to the teaching of this subject at the pre-tertiary level remains ferocious. When Britain’s Education Secretary, Michael Gove, announced last December the introduction into schools of what his department called a “new grammar, punctuation and spelling test [that] will ensure children are taught to understand their language and to use it properly, creatively and effectively,” there was uproar. Scarcely could the reaction have been greater had the mild-mannered Scot suggested that a light application of the cane might improve the behavior of miscreant schoolchildren.

Despite the fame – within educational circles, at least – of cases such as that of New Dorp High School on Staten Island, New York, which went from facing closure to witnessing a dramatic turnaround in graduation rates and overall scores after embarking on a return to basics in writing, including sentence, paragraph and essay construction, Gove’s reform came under instant attack by

5

bulletin lecturers, teachers’ unions and an array of left-leaning commentators. The row reerupted in May when a group of academics who had written an open letter criticising him were awarded an inaugural Bad Grammar award for the quality (or lack thereof) of their own missive.

6

What is it about the teaching of grammar that riles so? The view that it is both unnecessary and arcane is not without some superficial validity. It is not, perhaps, the worst impoverishment to go through life without being able to separate the past tenses into the perfect (I have done), the aorist (I did), the imperfect (I was doing), the pluperfect (I had done) and the future perfect (I will have done).

Neither is it inexcusable to find the occasional grammatical rule irritating to the point of exasperation. As Winston Churchill supposedly commented on being told off for ending a sentence with a preposition: “This is the kind of pedantic nonsense up with which I will not put!” In defence of the first example, one could argue that there is a kind of intricate beauty that accompanies the acquisition of these terms, however little one may end up using them formally, just as there is in learning other alphabets – be they Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese or Khmer – even before one is capable of understanding the words their letters will then form. To address the second: it is only because Churchill was exactly aware of the rule he wished to break that his riposte is such a concise masterpiece of delicious ridicule.

It is true that a certain proficiency can be achieved

in many fields through forms of immersion. Musicians can learn to play by ear, just as foreign tongues can be picked up through listening and talking; although most of us would rather not hire an architect or consult a surgeon who knew his trade through merely observing others.

Precision, however, requires knowledge of theory, of rules; and when it comes to language that means grammar. Without precision and clarity, meaning is liable to become unfixed.

That is especially no small matter in the arenas of the law or international relations.

Ultimately, if “grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason,” as the 19th century philologist and cleric Richard Chenevix Trench put it, it is surely too serious to assume that it will seep in via some kind of osmosis. To argue against its teaching is to risk children leaving school with insufficient knowledge of both grammar and logic; and those are two gifts of the humanities without which any area of study could simply not function. Even those on the generously funded science programs so envied by the Harvard conference attendees would concede that.

The sciences may have the money, but the humanities still provide the foundation stones on which all learning is built. It behoves us all to be responsible for the upkeep of those stones – and if that means the odd lesson in a subject some find tedious, so be it.

Sholto Byrnes is the Editor of Think.

A former Chief Interviewer of the Independent, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a contributing editor of the New Statesman.

normalising ties and seeking a resolution to the Kashmir issue, in a context of stronger bilateral relations.” Zaidi’s thoughts are carefully chosen and diplomatically worded.

Not everyone is so careful.

Raza Rumi, another former government advisor, appreciates that regional relationships are key but says there are other, more important factors. “Pakistan’s military are the ones that really shape foreign policy.

They have direct relationships with two key powers, the US and China. America supplies money, China technology and infrastructure. “To say that Pakistan is concentrating on regional relationships is not quite right.”

Presiding officials carry electoral ballots under army supervision in Karachi during the general election, May 2013

Crossroads of Asia

by Imran Khan

M

onths after the first time a democratically elected government has given way to another in Pakistan, it’s worth looking at the country’s neighborhood in order to understand its foreign policy challenges.

To the east, India, a world power that continues to rise.

To the west, Afghanistan, a borderline failing state. To the south, Iran, engaged in a game of blink first with Western powers over its nuclear program. Then, to the north, China, a firm ally with massive investments in the country.

Whatever the government, Pakistan’s entire worldview is shaped by this neighborhood,

and by its important friend across the oceans – America.

It’s an obvious enough thought, but crucial to understanding a country at the crossroads of Asia which, while often in the news, is frequently misunderstood or misrepresented.

Mosharaff Zaidi, a newspaper columnist and former advisor to the Pakistani Foreign Office, believes that the state’s diplomatic efforts are now concentrated regionally. “Pakistani leaders agree on the need to focus on strong and productive relationships with its immediate neighbors,” he says, arguing that achieving that goal, particularly in terms of India, has so far proved elusive – but crucial.

“A major investment of time and effort is required in think. magazine

In fact, the country has to tread a very delicate balancing act on many fronts. For one, its acute energy shortage means that it is in constant need of electrical power.

While I write this piece, there is an electricity blackout in the provincial capital of the Punjab, Lahore – a major city without electricity for much of the day. Iran has surpluses that could easily be transferred, but America is against any such deal, despite Pakistan signing up to build a joint pipeline with the Islamic

a consensus of sorts has been reached — Five years of civilian rule has recalibrated the relationship between the General and the Politician july 2013

republic. America has the ear of the generals; the pipeline has yet to materialize.

The military, meanwhile, will not allow any civilian government to jeopardize its core foreign policy goals which, simply put, are: a strong relationship with both China and America, a friendly government in Kabul, and easing tensions with India. What the country effectively has is two parallel foreign policies: the civilian government – of whatever stripe – with its limited powers, and the army with its limited goals. The military and the government are involved in a very delicate tango, with the government taking small steps in terms of dealmaking, and the army very carefully leading the dance.

This has meant that a consensus of sorts has been reached internally. Five years of civilian rule has recalibrated the relationship between the General and the Politician. The army understands that it cannot simply seize power as it has in the past, and the Pakistani government understands it can push the army, but only to a certain degree. Neither can make radical changes. In Pakistan this must be seen as a victory. The country has a very long way to go before its civilian government is truly in charge of foreign policy, but until then the Faustian bargain between the electorate, the government and the army continues, with Pakistan’s soul the currency underwriting the deal.

Imran Khan is a roving correspondent for Al Jazeera English who reports on South Asia and the Middle East

Two wheels good, four wheels bad

by Harry Mount

I

n New York in May, Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced the Citi Bike scheme, unveiling thousands of bikes at docking stations all over the city. The initiative was inspired by London’s socalled “Boris bikes” – named after Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, who set up the program in 2010.

The bicycle is emerging as the next stage in the evolution of urban transport.

Increasingly, one can chart a city’s development through its attitude to the bike. The classic historical routine goes: mass bicycle use in the early 19th century, mass car use in the 20th, and a gradual return to the bike in the 21st century.

This two-wheeled evolution is hitched to the green revolution: the bicycle is the ultimate environmentally friendly vehicle, powered not by fossil fuel but by humans.

It’s not just free-living ecotypes, though, who have embraced the change. Urban professionals have realized that, in gridlocked cities, the bike is the quickest, healthiest way to get around – and, for those classes, time and fitness rank alongside money as their most valued currency.

There is new evidence that cities in developed nations are reaching car saturation: average traffic speeds in Manhattan and London are now as low as they were in horse-drawn Victorian

days; for routes under five miles – the vast majority of urban journeys – a bicycle is quicker than a car. As long ago as 2004 the number of kilometers an average person traveled in a car began to decline in the US, Britain, Germany, France, Australia and Sweden, and the trend has continued ever since.

For most of the 20th century, however, governments promoted cars over bicycles. Encouraged by the beginnings of a highspeed road network, and the oil and automobile lobby, the car industry took precedence over bicycling interests.

It helped, too, that car manufacture employs more people than bicycle framebuilding, and that oil people are richer than bike people.

Railways suffered, too, from the deferential attitude to the all-powerful car; the bulk of American and British freight now goes by road instead of rail, unlike in Continental Europe.

The dismissive attitude towards bikes is also to do with latent snobbery – until the 1960s, the bicycle was regarded as the poor man’s transport in Western countries, as it still is in India and China, while the car was seen as the symbol of the future, of money and progress. For a century, we worshipped the car over the bicycle, which was seen as something you had as a child or might occasionally use for pleasure, but never as a pragmatic way of getting around.

7

bulletin

Something magical happens when bicycles become the dominant form of transport and Cyclists are no longer an embattled minority

8

The Citi Bike scheme has been introduced all over New York City, including at the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn

In order to embrace bicycling, a country’s professional middle class must get over this outdated opinion that bicycles denote poverty; cars, wealth and luxury. Only someone who is utterly confident in their professional standing – and their financial health – has the nerve to choose a form of transport that is so cheap to buy and maintain.

Industrializing countries don’t yet have that confidence. In China and India, the bicycle, the principal postwar form of transport, is increasingly being replaced by the car (in fact China became the world’s largest auto market in 2009, knocking the US off the top spot). As car ownership climbs, an inevitable process is set in motion: traffic jams build, average speeds drop and, in time, the natural transport

evolutionary process will take place. So one may be reasonably confident that the Chinese and the Indians will one day return to the bike, too – although it may be some way off in the future.

Really sophisticated cities, such as Amsterdam and Florence, moved to bikes half a century ago, or skipped the mass car use phase entirely. In the 1970s, the Netherlands made a conscious national decision to turn from the car towards the bicycle. Today, 30 percent of high school children there bicycle to school, compared with only two percent in Britain.

In 1972, in the northern Dutch city of Groningen, the authorities closed off the city center to all private vehicles, allowing only buses, taxis and business vans. Sixty percent of all journeys in the

town are now made by bike.

On a recent trip there, I took a taxi at rush hour – and found it was practically the only car on the streets.

Something magical happens when bicycles become the dominant form of transport. Cyclists are no longer an embattled minority, ignoring red lights and swearing at motorists; they become relaxed, and indulgent to other drivers, who also tend to be cyclists and so are more considerate in return.

They also bike slowly and steadily, not quickly and aggressively – as a result, no one turns up hot and sweaty at the office. When I visited Groningen, bicycling had become so completely incorporated into daily life that couples cycled hand in hand, each leaving one palm on the handlebars.

If you did this in America

or Britain someone would throw something at you; in Holland, it was no different to walking arm in arm.

Hotter, more humid cities may never take up the twowheeled challenge. But, even there, the movement will be away from the individual being isolated in his or her gridlocked car toward a greener, faster, less introverted public space in which transport will be something to be shared and enjoyed rather than endured.

There are other reasons why in some places the bicycle revolution may take time. It might be tricky to persuade, say, a Penang trishaw peddler to abandon his dream of owning a Prius and driving his customers around in air-conditioned comfort. It may take decades for the wheel to turn full circle, but it will happen, as it has done in London’s West End, where bicycle rickshaws now often take the place of motorized taxis. The only way forward is backward – so farewell, engine power: hello, pedal power.

Harry Mount is a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and a best-selling author whose latest book is How England Made the English: From Hedgerows to Heathrow. think. magazine

Half of humanity ]

FROM

E [20 ] C N A NOR hts? [22 CE’ [26] G I IL OF man rig RDNAN [10] VE S ts hu PLODED O ER T h S I S rig EX he men’s t N [30] U f ‘ o O E G T o T , N A I ST ’t w FRIEND SS CEIL aren D A y Wh NION ANLTIMATE GL A THE U COMP

half of humanity worldwide survey

STATE of the SISTERS

10

The revolution in support of women’s rights began in America in the 1960s. But, asks a leading expert and theorist, have those considered to be role models in the US lost their way - and are the true fighters for feminine dignity and equality now to be found in the developing world?

11

written by Susan Faludi

I

n the fall of 1991, after an unprecedented decline in women’s representation in the Swedish parliament, nine women gathered around a kitchen table in Stockholm to organize a group they named the Support Stockings. They declared its membership “secret”. That way (and with the help of stickers plastered in the parliament building’s men’s rooms that read “Little Sister Is Watching You”), they figured the male establishment would imagine a vast web of feminist conspirators. The Support Stockings quickly became exactly that: vast, spawning more than 120 other feminist groups nationwide and ushering in what came to be known as “the women’s revolution”.

In the spring of 1994, nearly 40 percent of Swedes answered yes to this poll question: “Would you consider voting for a women’s party headed by [Support Stockings leader] Maria-Pia Boëthius?” The leaders of the powerful Social Democrats panicked – and promised to make at least half of their own candidates women in the upcoming election if the Stockings abandoned the idea of forming a party. As a result, that fall, Swedes elected

what was then the most female government in the world: a parliament that was 41 percent women, and a cabinet that was 50 percent (including the speaker of the parliament and the foreign affairs minister). In his inaugural address, Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson vowed that the new Social Democratic government would stand, first and foremost, for gender equality.

Talking with Boëthius one day in 1995 as we sat at her now-famous kitchen table, I said, “I wish American feminism could be so ingenious and effective.” Boëthius considered my remark with bemused sorrow. “In the 60s and 70s, the world’s women looked to the US for inspiration,” she said. No longer.

To so many, American feminism seemed increasingly stagnant and sterile. “Now the US should be looking to the world’s women.”

Nearly 20 years after the Support Stockings, feminism is surging in the developing world and resurgent in the United States. The different character of those revivals bears out Boëthius’s remark: once again women in the US could be learning from their sisters overseas.

Atlantic City, New Jersey, 7 September, 1968: demonstrators from the Women’s Liberation Movement picket the Miss America Pageant

think. magazine

july 2013

half of humanity worldwide survey

Leaning in

12

At a TED talk in December 2010, Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, declared the start of what has since been dubbed “the second women’s revolution”. After a one-sentence nod to flextime, training, and other programs that might advance working women, Sandberg declared, “I want to talk about none of that today.” What she wanted to talk about was “what we can do as individuals” to climb to the top of the corporate ladder. Her speech was a pep rally encouraging the highpowered to “lean in”, so they can “get to the corner office.”

The TED talk was a warm-up act. This spring, Sandberg published her book, Lean In:Women,Work and the Will to Lead, with a promotional offensive that rivaled a Hollywood roll-out. The book, accompanied by an online “Lean In” campaign that partnered with a large roster of major corporations, instructed American women to overcome their insecurities about “not being liked” and “have the ambition to lean in to your career and run the world”. It catapulted to the top of the bestseller list, as the Lean In website was populated with “positive” testimonials – and only positive testimonials were welcome – from high-achievers (or at least the highly celebrated), recounting their personal “Lean In moment” that allowed them to get ahead. Among the testifiers were Oprah Winfrey, former First Lady Laura Bush (and both of her daughters), Harvard President Drew Faust, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, The New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson, Newsweek Editor-inChief Tina Brown, Dun & Bradstreet CEO Sara Mathew, US Senator Barbara Boxer, Hollywood actress (and Avon’s first “Global Ambassador”) Reese Witherspoon, and supermodel Tyra Banks.

Lean In’s version of feminism – success and celebrity besotted, and singularly preoccupied with the concerns of women who have (or desire) the highest net worth – is hardly anomalous. The same recessionary period that gave rise to Occupy, a movement championing “the 99 percent”, has spawned a new wave of feminism obsessed with the ambitions of a female one percent. Where Occupy’s protesters surveyed America’s economic polarization with anguish and

“For the first time in history,” Hanna Rosin concurred, “the global economy is becoming a place where women are finding more success than men.” Women are “the standard by which success is measured.” outrage, the new feminists sometimes seem punch drunk on either a giddy triumphalism or, as with the Lean-Inners, an elite aspiration.

In 2009, Maria Shriver, former TV news host and California First Lady, issued The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, which declared that “the battle of the sexes is over”. That pronouncement – based on the fact that women were now half of the workforce – received massive media coverage. Shriver’s good-news bulletin was followed, in 2012, by Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men: And the Rise of Women and Liza Mundy’s The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family, both of which celebrated the imminent emergence of a female supremacy. Mundy called this the “Big Flip”, and predicted we would soon be living in a world “where women routinely support households and outearn the men they are married to” and men “will gladly hitch their wagon to a female star”. “For the first time in history,” Hanna Rosin concurred, “the global economy is becoming a place where women are finding more success than men.”

Women are “becoming the standard by which success is measured”.

Even those Second-Women’sRevolutionaries who aren’t quite so Pollyanna focus on problems of the privileged. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s muchballyhooed Atlantic magazine cover story last year, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”, bemoaned her own difficulties balancing work and family as the first female director of policy planning at the State Department and a tenured professor at Princeton University. She quit the State Department post after two years because, as she wrote in The Atlantic, her career was taking her away from her family and distressing her teenage son (she didn’t, however, abandon her Ivy

13

Long Beach, California, 26 October, 2010: Oprah Winfrey celebrates receiving a Minerva Award for humanitarian work from the then California First Lady Maria Shriver at the 2010 Women’s Conference

League perch – and, in fact, she also quit the State Department because Princeton revokes tenure from its professors who go on leave for more than two years). Her solution to the work-family problem? “It’s time to embrace a national happiness project,” she wrote, calling on other “women in power” to “help change the norms” – by talking in the office about their children and their desire for “a balanced life”. gumption and a yoga mat

Slaughter’s let’s-make-the-corporation-ahappy-place summons was soon taken up by some of her upscale sister travelers. Arianna Huffington, founder of the online media site, The Huffington Post (and coiner of the phrase, “the second women’s revolution”) announced in The Wall Street Journal and Forbes magazine that this new stage of feminism would be all about improving working women’s “well-being” – by getting corporate workplaces to offer yoga classes, meditation areas, and “nap rooms” (for napping adults, that is; onsite child care think. magazine

july 2013

did not make the well-being list). Her own company, which recently installed two nap rooms, was leading the way: “We at HuffPost launched a free app, GPS for the Soul, to track your stress level through your heartrate variability.” By “leaning back” through company-sponsored “stress reduction programs”, Huffington said, women would “become much better at leaning in” and, thereby, speed their way up the corporate ladder.

These exponents of CEO-and-celebrity feminism imply that the pursuit of structural change is unnecessary: a woman can do anything, all by herself, if she puts her mind to it – and if you don’t believe it, just look at how great they’re doing. All a woman needs, they suggest, aside from her own gumption (and a yoga mat), is a great mate; the Lean In testimonials are full of such marital bragging rights, starting with Sandberg, who likes to announce, “I have an awesome husband, and we’re 50/50.” A great Mom occasionally comes in handy, too. Here’s Tina Brown’s “Lean In Moment”, as she

half of humanity worldwide survey

14

recounted it on LeanIn.org: persuading her parents to move from England to “the apartment across the corridor from us on East 57th Street in New York”, so her mother could take care of the children while Brown took the helm at The New Yorker. Who needs day care?

This model is ascendant at the very time when essential efforts on behalf of women in the US – battered women’s shelters, welfare justice organizations, women’s legal services, and domestic workers’ rights groups, to name just a few – are underfunded and struggling, and when so many women on the ground are facing a perilous and degenerating situation. Ever more draconian restrictions on reproductive rights are metastasizing, with a record 916 bills introduced in state legislatures in the first three months of 2011 alone, 135 anti-abortion state laws passed in the last two years, and 694 even more extreme measures – some seeking to ban abortion even in the first trimester – introduced in the first three months of this year. There are now no abortion providers in 87 percent of US counties. Meanwhile, according to the Census Bureau’s latest statistics, the poverty rate for American women is at its highest point in 17 years (14.5 percent), and the “extreme poverty rate” at the highest point ever recorded (6.3 percent).

As of 2010, 17 million American women were living in poverty, compared with 12.6 million men. The social support system for working mothers in the US ranks at the bottom of the heap of virtually all developed nations (and a good number of developing nations, too). While authors Rosin and Mundy celebrate American women’s predominance in occupations with the largest projected job growth, what gets less play is that these “growth” jobs – home health aide, child care worker, customer service representative, office clerk, food service worker, dental hygienist, medical assistant, etc – are among the lowest paying occupations, with few benefits and little room for advancement. Nor, for that matter, are women making much progress at the other end of the job pyramid: 84-to-98 percent of the people in the top positions of power in every single sector of American life are men, and incremental progress has stalled in recent years.

assault from assailants who often include police officers and soldiers conducting socalled “virginity tests”.

The teams supply the assaulted women with clothes and shoes (the marauding gangs of men frequently strip their victims) and whisk them to safe houses they’ve set up. Some women in the safety patrols openly wield knives, and are prepared to use them. “Don’t worry about me,” Abeer Haridi, a 40-yearold lawyer, told a reporter at a recent march.

“I’m armed.” Other all-female collectives have roamed the city, covering walls with graffiti and murals that decry women’s humiliating conditions. One of the more ubiquitous painted slogans: “I’ve opened the floodgates.”

It is a quote from Fouada, the heroine of the classic Egyptian film, Something to Fear, who saves her village from a despot and drought by unleashing a dammed river. The Fouada Watch, an initiative launched last year, issued monthly bulletins on the new government’s policies on women and distributed 106,000 stickers and posters across Egypt, calling on people to vote “no” in December’s constitutional referendum for what they regarded as the failure of its proposed provisions to protect women’s rights.

the Second Women’s Revolution has little relevance for the women who aren’t flying first class Sandberg says she favors militating against this latter absence, but her campaign fails to meaningfully connect the struggle at the top with the one at the bottom, a tragic severing.

When women like Sandberg enthuse about the support they’ve received from their “awesome” husbands (who often are also awesomely well-off; Sandberg’s spouse, tech entrepreneur David Goldberg, is CEO of SurveyMonkey, a company valued at $1 billion), they turn a blind eye to the more than 50 percent of mothers who will be sole custodial parents at some point in their lives and who have no such luxury: 40 percent of single mothers are both poor and “food insecure”, despite working more hours than single mothers in any other comparable highincome nation. In short, the Second Women’s Revolution has little relevance for the women who aren’t flying first class.

River of protest

Insurgent feminism

At the same time, outside the US, another model has emerged. The insurgent feminism in the developing world is grassroots, pertinent to the concerns of the vast majority of the female population, and unfolding not in the corner suite but on the street corner.

In one country after another, women from a wide range of backgrounds have been expressing outrage over their sex’s demeaning and dire straits, often at great risk to their personal safety, but buoyed by collective courage. This is not a revolution launched by a TED talk or a book-tour appearance on Oprah, or by appeal to any officially anointed platform. “What’s fascinating about these new feminist movements is their independence,” The Guardian commentator Laurie Penny observed recently. “They’re developing organically, outside the well-worn circuit of NGOs, government lobbying and quiet petition-signing that has been the proper format for feminist activism for more than two decades.” She dubbed it “vigilante feminism”.

Young Egyptian women supporting the global day commemorating the first anniversary of Egypt’s revolution on 21 January, 2012, in Toronto, Canada

think. magazine

july 2013

A colleague of mine in Cairo who has been following the feminist resurgence there emailed recently: “Between the Women’s March and the women self-organizing patrols and safe houses for victims of sexual violence, sisterhood seems as powerful as ever in Egypt.” She was amazed, as well, at the lack of attention paid by the American media to the Egyptian women’s protests.

“Why are they so underreported?” she wrote. “And what can be done?” Women began mobilizing in Cairo last year in mass numbers. They were responding both to the repeated attacks on and rapes of female protesters during and following the Arab Spring – at least 18 women were assaulted in Tahrir Square on the second anniversary of the revolution – and to the new conservative government’s disenfranchisement of women.

All-female protective teams began forming to rescue victims of sexual harassment and

In India, the brutal gang rape and beating of a 23-year-old medical student on a Delhi bus the same month undammed its own river of protest. Even before the young woman died 13 days later of her injuries, an uprising was underway on the streets, and the torrent of fury over police and politicians’ indifference showed no signs of abating as thousands of demonstrators endured tear gas and water cannons. Hundreds of students stormed the city council and forced a session with the home minister. By late December, reporters were wondering if they were witnessing the start of what one of them called the “Feminist Spring”. Thanks to the demonstrations, the government finally began to address the epidemic of sexual assault (in 2011, India had 24,206 reported cases, 17 percent of them in New Delhi, known as the “rape capital”), and passed legislation against sexual violence. Six alleged assailants of the young woman on the bus were arrested and put on trial in a fasttrack court.

The protests against sexual violence rapidly spread across India and throughout

15

half of humanity worldwide survey

the difference between populist and elitist impulses, and between communitarian and corporate activism, conceals an unrecognized commonality

16

South Asia. Rallies and marches clogged the streets from Sri Lanka, to Pakistan, to Bangladesh. In Nepal, after a 21-year-old woman reported being raped and threatened with death by a police officer and robbed by immigration agents, hundreds of protesters descended on the prime minister’s home in Kathmandu, demanding an overhaul of the laws and changes in attitudes toward women. “We had seen the power of the mass campaign in Delhi’s rape case,” Anita Thapa, a demonstrator, said. “It is a pure people’s movement.”

The developing-world’s street mobilizations and the US executive-suite movement are obviously responding to different needs – women in many Third World countries face issues of safety that Americans would consider unthinkably desperate. And they are faced with many political cross-currents, among them rising religious restrictions and social prejudice against the cause of women’s liberation for, ironically, being associated with the old dictatorial regimes. But the difference between mass rallies against rape and calls for company nap rooms, between populist and elitist impulses and between communitarian and corporate activism, conceals an unrecognized commonality.

Both models of feminism are engaged with the capitalism prevalent in their societies, as feminism has always been. The women’s movement in the developing world may be different from the women’s movement in the US to the degree that capitalism in these nations is different.

Women’s ability to work outside the home, which permitted the kind of independence that got enshrined through political action, began with the dawn of the industrial age.

Women were not only industrial capitalism’s

earliest exploited laborers, they were also among the first to take to the streets to demand their rights. As the female workforce of the textile mills in the United States led the movement for a 10-hour work day, they also agitated for women’s equality. As the Boston Evening Transcript reported of a strike leader at the New England mills in the 1830s, she gave a “flaming Mary Woolstonecroft [sic] speech on the rights of women and the iniquities of the ‘monied aristocracy’.” The forces of industrialization propelled women out of the home, freed them from the fetters of the patriarchal family, and set them loose in urban areas with few social controls, so creating an environment in which women began to see themselves as equal. Along with that came a new vision of citizenship, and the need to organize against oppressive conditions. The “mill girls” understood then,

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an early advocate of equality between the sexes, best known for her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Dhaka, January 2013: protesters outside the offices of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association demand greater workplace security following fires at two factories

as the women protesting in Egypt and India do now, that survival required that they act as a group, not as individuals. All the lone “leaning in” in the world wasn’t going to help them. As the petition signed by hundreds of women during the 1834 Lowell Mill strike concluded: “Resolved: That none of us will go back, unless they receive us all as one.” In that way, among others, capitalism could be said to be feminism’s midwife and ally.

Torches of freedom

It would prove a troublesome ally. Capitalism, in its more “mature” form, has defeated feminist aims as much as advanced them. The rise of consumer capitalism, coinciding with the 1920 passage of women’s suffrage in the US, hijacked American feminist aspirations and rechanneled them into the marketplace, where women were urged to express their think. magazine

july 2013

“individuality” through the purchase of “liberating” products. The co-option was overt. Rather than agitate for better working conditions, Hoover ads at the time entreated women to experience “positive agitation” at home with the new vacuum technology’s “revolutionary cleaning principle”. “An Ancient Prejudice Has Been Removed”, the banner on a Lucky Strike ad read, above a flapper relishing her cigarette. At the behest of the American Tobacco Company, Edward Bernays, the founding father of public relations (and nephew of Sigmund Freud), organized a procession of debutantes to troop down 5th Avenue during the Easter Parade, asserting their “right” to smoke in public by puffing “torches of freedom”. Over and over, women’s search for dignity was reenacted as farce.

Where industrial capitalism had provoked women to organize and change society, consumer capitalism seduced women into submission to a mass-produced culture. American (and much of Western) feminism has been trapped in that model ever since, despite the efforts of late-60s radical feminists to repudiate the consumer armament of cosmetics, girdles, and hair spray – literally, in their 1968 protests against the Miss America Pageant, when they hurled those “instruments of female torture” into a “Freedom Trash Can”.

In post-industrial society, feminism has been hopelessly conflated with the expression of the self, a “self ” that is increasingly envisioned as a marketable consumer object.

Small wonder that Lady Gaga is hailed by many as American feminism’s “new face”.

It’s hard to identify anything, other than her successful self-marketing campaign, that accounts for the mantle. (Gaga’s own words provide little illumination: she’s variously said that she is a feminist, or “guesses” she might be “a little bit of a feminist”, or is “not a feminist” at all, because “I love men.

I celebrate American male culture, and beer, and bars and muscle cars.”) In any event, Lady Gaga is just the latest in a long line of pop-star ersatz feminists that stretches from 1920s “It Girl” Clara Bow, to 1960s “That Girl” Marlo Thomas, to the 1990s Spice Girls.

In the era of the Second Women’s Revolution, no longer is it just capitalists trying to invoke feminism to advance their brand of commercial and corporate products. Now it’s women invoking

17

half of humanity worldwide survey

18

capitalism to advance their own commercial and corporate brand of feminism. Exhibit A is Facebook’s Sandberg and her “Lean In Community” – one you can only join via Facebook. As The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd smartly said of Sandberg’s effort (in an article that inspired a nasty attack by Sandberg’s supporters): “She says she’s using marketing for the purpose of social idealism. But she’s actually using social idealism for the purpose of marketing.”

The West enjoys its “post-industrial” status to the degree that it can export its industries to Third World regions, where workers, often disproportionately female, produce the fashions that American women wear, and the computers and tablets and smart phones they use to log onto Facebook and LeanIn.org.

The workplace conditions recall their 19th century Western precursors: long hours at poverty wages, harsh and unsafe work environments, overcrowded and substandard dormitories. The lethal explosions in the iPad factories in southwest China in 2011 came on the hundred-year anniversary of the 1911 fire that killed 146 garment workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, New York City’s worst ever industrial accident. This April, over 1,000 people died as a result of the horrific collapse of a Dhaka building housing clothing factories for many major Western retailers, the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry. The disaster followed on the heels of several other garment factory fires in Bangladesh that have killed more than 500 workers since 2006. (Bangladesh is now the second largest apparel exporter in the world; its 80 percent female workforce makes the clothes sold everywhere from Walmart to The Gap to United Colors of Benetton).

Shaking the planet

Outsourced industrialism can replicate the symbiotic relationship with feminism that women wage earners in countries like the United States and England enjoyed a century ago – the collective experience of massmanufacturing labor leading to the collective experience of rebellion against its disfiguring effects. In that sense, you could say the US has outsourced its communitarian feminism along with its manufacturing jobs.

The cautionary prospect is that the honeymoon won’t last long: the period

Outsourced industrialism can replicate the symbiotic relationship with feminism that women wage earners in countries like the United States and England enjoyed a century ago

between industrially induced liberation and consumerist-driven conformity, never protracted, seems to be ever shrinking. The honeymoon is short-lived because, along with its unwanted jobs, the US is exporting its commercial and celebrity culture – a culture that invariably serves to undermine attention to the real plight of the vast majority of women. The 23-year-old Indian medical student whose brutal gang rape set off mass demonstrations in Delhi was paying her tuition bill by working the all-night shift at an outsourced firm, a call center where she handled questions from Canadians about their home mortgages. The global media promotion of Western consumerism was already suggesting to her a new set of aspirations, as was evident in a profile of her in the The Wall Street Journal that ran shortly after her death: As she amassed some money of her own, she enjoyed figuring out how to spend it. Lately, she had her eye on a Samsung smartphone. One day she hoped to buy an Audi. “I want to

New York City, 26 August, 1980: supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment march to observe the sixtieth anniversary of women’s suffrage in America

the author Susan Faludi is a PulitzerPrize winning journalist whose work appears in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Nation, among other publications. Her bestselling Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Her most recent book is The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America.

think. magazine

july 2013

build a big house, buy a car, go abroad and will work there,” her friend, the software engineer, recalled her saying.

The US has long prided itself on its “soft” exports, its offerings of virtuous civic conduct to supposedly more benighted regions. Those exports have either been forces for relative good (the Peace Corps, say) or destructive hubris (“bringing democracy” to Vietnam or Iraq). For better or ill, feminism has been part of this mix, whether in the flurry of microfinancing endeavors championed by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in their book, Half the Sky, or in the One Billion Rising campaign against gender violence launched by The Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler, or in the many Westernsponsored campaigns to save Third World women from global sex-traffickers. Those efforts at virtue can, and often do, boomerang – as when the young prostitutes “saved” by Kristof famously fled his ministrations and returned to their brothel. Nor is it clear how One Billion Rising’s recent hallmark event – a global female dance-a-thon this Valentine’s Day – actually aided raped and battered women, though the organization’s website maintains that it “shook the planet”. On the other hand, such endeavors as the Network of East West Women, founded by feminist scholars and writers Ann Snitow, Nanette Funk and Sonia Jaffe Robbins in the early 1990s, forged effective coalitions between American and Eastern European feminists after the fall of Communism, precisely because its founders understood that Eastern European women were in the better position to judge their own situation. As Ann Snitow,

the Director of Gender Studies at the New School university in New York, observed in a speech in 1992: “Western feminists should never consider a project that doesn’t originate from women in the region… A Western feminist entering this scene had better learn right away that she is not the first to arrive with an ideology crafted in another place and fostered by resources locally unknown.”

Common cause

The razzmatazz of CEO-and-celebrity feminism in the West has attracted voices once associated with a thornier feminist radicalism - Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, and The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt have all praised the Lean In campaign. More troubling, the revolution at the top has so far proved alarmingly blind to the need for revolution at the bottom – in particular, the bottom of some of the very corporations that have allied themselves with Lean In. One would be hard put to imagine DuPont or Dow jumping to sponsor feminist radicals (or any radicals) back in the 1960s. But the list of Lean In’s official corporate “partners” reads like a who’s who of radicalism’s least trusted institutions: Chevron, Bank of America, Citibank, Merck & Co, Procter & Gamble, Goldman Sachs, and, yes, DuPont. On the Lean In roster of corporate partners are a disturbing number of companies that have recently been sued for sex discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, sexual harassment, or unfair promotion practices and wrongful terminations based on gender. One corporation proud to be a Lean In partner (“As we lean in to empower women, it helps us to better serve our customers, develop the best talent, and strengthen our communities,” its CEO and president, Mike Duke, intoned on the Lean In site), is none other than Walmart, currently facing nearly two thousand sex discrimination grievances from female employees in 48 states.

The “second women’s revolution” in the United States won’t be a healthy force for change until it tethers the one percent to the 99 percent, until it can find a way to liberate working women on the factory and retail floor with at least the fervor with which it seeks to advance the fortunes of women in the executive suites. Until that common cause occurs, American feminism will have to look on enviously at the real revolutions being fought abroad. l

19

half of humanity cultural perspectives

by almost exclusively choosing pictures of veiled faces to represent Muslims as a whole, the complexity and diversity of the Muslim world is lost

20

VEIL OF IGNORANCE For many in the West, head coverings of any kind are evidence that Muslim women are oppressed. Not so, says one writer. My headscarf is a defiant expression of my choice to be a woman on my own terms

W

hen I first published my blog about life as a Muslim woman in 2005, I thought carefully about how to make it accessible to readers who might bring with them notions of “subjugated” Muslim females. The color black was firmly banished, therefore, as images of women dressed in long black cloaks, long black headscarves and long black veils are a Western shorthand for denoting our supposed oppression, and a lazy way to instil fear and pity about us in equal measure. So I created a friendly mini-me as the avatar for my website. She wears a pink headscarf, sparkly pink shoes and a cheeky smile. I sport those from time to time also.

the author

written by Shelina Janmohamed

But, I was forced to ask myself, was the color as liberating for me as I thought? It is also intimately associated with a limiting hyperfeminization as a result of which, from the fluffiest pale pink candyfloss to the raunchiest of hot pinks, women are disappearing from sight, or being judged for their physical presence rather than their behavior.

To me, this is no different to the sea of black cloth that makes many Muslim women anonymous. Let me be absolutely clear: I’m all for women wearing modest dress, even headscarves, as I do. I am not “subjugated”.

Tunisian women celebrate participating in the country’s first free election in Ben Arous, 21 October, 2011

think. magazine

Shelina Janmohamed is a columnist for The National, Abu Dhabi, and the author of Love in a Headscarf, the Arabic edition of which has just been published. Her award-winning blog is at Spirit21.co.uk july 2013

I cover out of my own free choice; it is not something imposed on me. Modesty in dress is something I feel is an important social value. It is not something I can make private, because it’s something I think is important for society at large. It’s not a political or religious expression, as people often assume or like to portray it as. It is an outward manifestation of the values that I hold dear to me, and which I think are good for the people I live among.

While I do not wear a face veil and personally do not agree with it, I know women who have elected to wear it, exercising the agency that is theirs. Some women like to wear black all-over clothing specifically to become anonymous. This to me is like the widespread adoption of jeans as majority fashion wear for precisely the same reasons.

But what worries me is that the ocean of black sometimes acts as a cultural mechanism to keep women’s individuality out of the public space, and turns this vibrant half of humanity into an undifferentiated impersonal mass. And when photos are not even taken of women attending public events, their very existence is lost from the social record of contemporary history. This is exacerbated by Western media imagery: by almost exclusively choosing pictures of veiled faces to represent not just Muslim women, but Muslims as a whole, the complexity and diversity of the Muslim world is lost. It is an act that blocks rather than welcomes dialogue.

The narrow confines of both black and pink are equally limiting. Both are just as oppressive and anonymising. Both see women through a male gaze: pink packages women as candy for the gaze of men, while black packages women as temptresses who must be hidden. Both prioritize the male perspective and eliminate female agency. Neither, in

my view, offer women their rightful respect from society. Both are also offensive to men, caricaturing them as weak beings entirely at the behest of their libidos. removal of agency

The truth is that many issues affecting women around the world work in the same way. Take the horrible issue of “honor” killings, where women are murdered for not obeying the codes men have set down. In the UK, two women each week are killed by their partners. Jealousy – another form of control – is a huge part of this.

For me, these are two cultural manifestations of the same problem and women should fight them together, rather than turning “honor” killings into an imperialist mission built on defining Muslims as “barbaric” and then invading countries to “liberate” their women.

And yes, I am speaking of Afghanistan, where a decade later the mission to free women from the Taliban has resulted in little or possibly negative improvement in safety for women.

What was so corrosive about that was the framing of Muslim women as needing to be “saved”, thereby removing our agency and infantilising us. When it comes to violence we’re fighting the same problems; let’s support each other and tackle them at the root – the disrespect for women and the cultures that allow these attitudes to flourish.

Instead of wasting our breath on debating and being distracted by the subject of whether there is a clash between western feminism and Muslim feminism, this should be a joint approach to find the kind of equality, liberty and freedom within the parameters that all women are searching for. This is about an innate sense – something Muslims call the fitrah, the inner conscience – that all men and women have to seek out justice, and to seek what will be beneficial to all.

We are being pulled behind because we are fighting each other to establish what is the “best” way forward, but I don’t believe there is necessarily a universal “one-sizefits-all” version of empowerment and dignity for women – I feel there are different “bests” for different places. Instead, we need spaces where different ideas from different perspectives and different cultures and civilizations can come together to re-ignite the feminist passion and to re-ignite the cause for more equal societies where both men and women can prosper. l

21

half of humanity role of the sexes

22

Why aren’t women’s rights human rights?

Fifty years on from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, some argue feminism has caused more problems than it has solved. But while arguments continue to rage about what the status and roles of women should be, too little real progress has been made

H

ere’s Hillary Clinton speaking on why women’s rights are human rights. “We are primary caretakers for most of the world’s children and elderly. Yet much of the work we do is not valued – not by economists, not by historians, not by popular culture, not by government leaders.” And: “Too many otherwise thoughtful people continue to see the fortunes of women and girls as somehow separate from society at large. They nod, they smile, and then they relegate these issues once again to the sidelines.”

What’s the difference between these two quotes? Nothing. Except almost 20 years. The first is from September 1995, when Clinton gave a speech in a pale pink shoulder-padded power suit in Beijing. The second is from March 2013, when she gave a speech in a shocking pink shoulder-padded power suit in New York. Hillary’s taste in fashion hasn’t changed much in two decades. And neither has anything else.

What she was talking about, though, is something that is suddenly being revived as an issue for feminists and politicians alike. It’s a sticking point for the women’s movement and a conundrum for policy-makers. This equivocation between “human rights” and “women’s rights” has become a horribly thorny

think. magazine

july 2013

written by VIV GROSKOP

area. What is meant by it? And do they signify two very different, contradictory things?

Are we saying that women’s basic human rights are being abused when they can’t get the work that they want, for example? Or are we saying that human rights should apply to everyone and not be gender-specific? Clinton thinks we should give the issues specifically faced by women (and often unique to women) the same prominence we give human rights violations. The alternative view is that this is old-fashioned and that this kind of “special pleading” feminism hasn’t worked.

So why cling on to it?

The answer is that the lack of progress is sending us back to basics. Fifty years on from the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, some argue that Western feminism seems to have caused more problems than it has solved, exacerbating the divisions between men and women and failing to solve the basic burden of childcare, which still falls mostly to women, with often dire consequences for their careers.

With fathers increasingly involved in their children’s lives but not able to take advantage of child-related benefits on the same scale as

23

half of humanity role of the sexes

women (flexible or part-time work, paternity leave), is it time we started seeing things not as “women’s issues” but as “human issues”?

Or does that deny the basic differences between men and women?

designer clothes and loads of make-up underneath their burqas!” What message was being pushed here? That women everywhere need glamour? That’s what makes them women? That’s what we have in common?

That’s our chance to express ourselves? We get to decide what designer brand of shoes to wear? Thanks a lot.

I believe we’re now seeing the limits of this kind of feminism. Which is not to say that I think anyone should avoid dressing like Sarah Jessica Parker, or that looking glamorous is an affront to feminism. It’s just that the two things are not linked, or at least shouldn’t be.

A man is no more or less of a man if he is passionate about the way he dresses. It’s just a quirk of personality how interested he is in his appearance. Why isn’t it the same for women?

(And before you say that is was me who brought up what Hillary Clinton was wearing, I wouldn’t let a man get away with wearing a suit that bad either.)

There is a delicate balance here between respecting history and recognizing the fact that we’ve stalled. In the most practical, obvious and real sense, women will always be different from men. But even if you take biology out of the equation (which most people are unable to do), women and men are different because of the effects of thousands of years of cultural expectations.

That cannot be reversed within a few decades or even a century.

Fierce new debate

24

Outside of that, the picture is as bad as ever.

Women are still basically expected to be both inside the home and, supposedly, if they want to, elsewhere. Amazing though women are, no one can be in two places at once. If you look at the UN’s figures for the numbers of women in national parliaments, they’ve evolved about as far as Hillary Clinton’s wardrobe – which is to say, not at all. Out of nearly 200 countries, only two – Andorra and Rwanda – have parliaments made up of at least 50 percent women, and in 114 countries the figure is less than 20 percent. It has to be fair to assume that if women were (a) encouraged to develop professional lives alongside their parenting responsibilities, or (b) at least not overtly discouraged from doing so, then we would have more female politicians. There can’t be any other explanation. Unless you truly believe that, despite decades of education, women all over the globe are somehow different human beings than men and are not interested in politics.

This area is the seat of a fierce new debate in feminism: are women special and different – and should they be celebrated for that and venerated in their role as mothers? Is that proper feminism and “true” women’s rights?

Or is that the reverse of what feminism was originally intended to be: a way of establishing equality between the genders and a focus on the areas where we’re the same rather than different?

Will we see a move away from the debates of feminism and toward the establishment of “parental rights”, so that, in terms of the workplace, we might one day be discussing “parents versus the child-free”, instead of

The women’s rights movement has never truly answered the question of what “equal” really means

“men versus women”? In this struggle for power, can there ever be true equality?

But the women’s rights movement has never truly answered the question of what “equal” really means. There are plenty of feminists who would argue that “women’s rights” include the right to be respected and accorded certain privileges simply because you are a woman. This is a traditional kind of feminism: the idea that women have a unique place in society and bring something special and different. They also, so this argument goes, deserve unique protection, in part solely by virtue of their gender, but also because of centuries of the effects of patriarchy (a word we’re starting to hear a lot more now).

This type of feminism has also now been co-opted by capitalism. “Hey, you’re special because you’re a woman, and so you deserve unique, special treats. After all, you’re worth it. And why shouldn’t you have whatever you want?” Consumerism as a means of empowerment has further confused feminism’s political messages.

Does Sex and the City represent the success of feminism, or its total failure? There was something especially uncomfortable about the representation of Muslim women in Sex and the City II. “Look, they’re also wearing

Rwanda’s parliament became the first and only in the world to have a majority of female MPs in 2008

Different lens

the author

Viv Groskop is a columnist, author and broadcaster and contributed to the anthology Women of the Revolution: Forty Years of Feminism. think. magazine

july 2013

We have tried to re-educate ourselves and it has not really worked. When Margaret Thatcher died, one of the articles on her life declared that people “felt sorry for her children”, implying that she had been a bad mother. It might be true. It might not. But why is it relevant or remarkable? No one ever called even Stalin a bad father. While we look at women and men through a different lens, it’s not easy to get anywhere.

So is the solution to expanding the rights of women protecting them as a special interest group or promoting affirmative action? Or should we be extending to men many of the rights we traditionally associate with women?

This doesn’t mean that mothers can’t have a close relationship with their children or that men can’t be the breadwinners if they want to.

But it means that these should be active rather than default choices.

There is a delicate balance here between respecting history and recognizing the fact that we’ve stalled Meanwhile, the women’s movement is being revived internationally on a scale we haven’t seen for some years. Russia’s Pussy Riot is seen as proof of the passion, creativity and commitment of young feminists. Similarly, the exploits of Femen, who appear at highprofile political events topless, with slogans graffitied on their naked torsos and backs, are now making headlines all over the world.

But in some ways these protests seem like a desperate step backwards. This is the sort of thing activists did in the 1960s and 1970s to get noticed. They took their clothes off.

They physically menaced public figures. For their aesthetic and a lot of their values, they borrowed from punk rock.

These tactics did not work the first time, so it is not clear why anyone would imagine they will work a second time, especially now that they have lost their shock value. And already these initiatives are backfiring. There was a Femen confrontation at a trade fair in Hanover, Germany, in April this year, where Angela Merkel was hosting Vladimir Putin. It went badly wrong when, instead of being offended, the Russian president expressed his great enjoyment at seeing a young, beautiful, seminaked protester.

It would be wonderful if we could say that we don’t need to fight for women’s rights anymore. And perhaps if we change the frames of reference slightly and keep in mind the fact that we’re incredulous that we’re still fighting for those basic rights, we’ll make more progress. But so many things haven’t changed and aren’t changing. As Hillary Clinton said two decades ago, women make up half of the world’s population but 70 percent of the poor, and two-thirds of those who are not taught to read and write. Twenty years on, the figures are the same. Until they change, we don’t have the luxury of claiming something that should just be a fact and not an opinion: that women’s rights are the same as human rights. They’re not, and we can’t pretend otherwise. l

25

half of humanity woman rulers

FROM COMPANION AND FRIEND, TO

‘UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE’

26

27

A renowned historian reflects on how female leaders from Catherine the Great to Margaret Thatcher have always had to fight against stereotypes and resentment – and draws some waspish conclusions

I

t was not the best moment in the history of Oxford. The late Margaret Thatcher, whose passing in April was marked around the world, had graduated from the university, in chemistry, and then become a tax-lawyer, both demanding subjects. She then, in 1979, became Britain’s first female prime minister.

Oxford has traditionally given honorary degrees to distinguished people, especially its own. Many less celebrated figures were thus honored, including President Jimmy Carter (when his mother was told that he was standing for US president, she asked, “president of what?” and could not believe the answer).

But in 1985, the academics refused to confer the degree on Thatcher, allegedly because she was reducing expenditure on education. It was an unworthy act. British finances were in a mess, government

written by Norman Stone

spending was too high, and inflation had been running at 25 percent: someone had to do something, and Thatcher did. Most economists howled with rage and predicted doom, but the policy was successful, and Britain famously recovered. London, which in the 1970s was a run-down city, came to look, in parts, very glossy indeed. Oxford, anyway none too efficient at managing its own affairs, made itself look silly.

However, you wonder if there was a hidden motive – men’s resentment of the successful woman? Thatcher’s rise was almost accidental. There had been great discontent at the policies of her predecessor as leader of the Conservative Party, Edward Heath (Prime Minister 1970-1974). He was to be overthrown by his party’s right-wing. Its chief figure was the Hamlet-like Sir Keith Joseph, who made an unfortunately-timed speech saying that the lower orders made too many think. magazine

From top: Christine Lagarde, Margaret Thatcher and Benazir Bhutto

july 2013

half of humanity woman rulers

babies and ought to be discouraged (he had not looked at his speechwriter’s draft before reading it out). The press screamed and, in despair, he said he could not now challenge Heath for the leadership. Thatcher had been cooking, and came out of the kitchen looking determined: “If you won’t stand,” she said, “I will.” She did, and won; she is now quite widely regarded as the savior of the country, and sensible opponents acknowledge this. The feminist Germaine Greer even said, when Thatcher fell in 1990, that she had done more for the cause of women than any amount of legislation could ever do. And, especially during her early years as party leader, this was a time when women MPs were often treated with a casual and unrepentant sexism.

One was once greeted by a fellow (male) MP with the words, “Hello Betty.” When she answered, “My name’s not Betty,” he said, “Well you all look the same to me.”

28

Certainly, in the quarter-century since Thatcher fell, it has become quite common to see women in positions of confident authority: Christine Lagarde at the International Monetary Fund the most impressive, but there are and were many, many others. Women have led from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, the Philippines and Indonesia, to Argentina and Chile, Liberia, Turkey, France, Germany, Ireland and, of course, the Nordic countries. It is interesting to see how antiquated the old arguments against women’s voting – let alone standing for office – now sound: that women were just outsized children, that they made everything personal, that they thought uncreatively and in terms of shopping lists. It may have taken a couple of centuries, but as James Buchan, an authority on the Scottish Enlightenment among other areas, puts it: the seeds of that change date back to around 1800, when “woman as friend and companion gives way, with the French Revolution, to women as unexploded ordnance”.

But to be a woman in a position of political authority has historically been very difficult.

The biological facts – childbirth especially – get in the way, and even women born into regal families found them hard. Any court would of course have its intriguing women (they are the stars of the show in a Turkish soap opera, Magnificent Century, which is about the era of Suleyman I; it is popular

knocked out France in the later 16th century and Germany for two centuries after 1618.

(Her sister-predecessor, Mary, wife of the King of Spain who sent the defeated fleet in 1588, had started such a civil war, and had died before she could complete her work.

There is a famous Holbein portrait of her in which she appears as the personification of the nightmare ruler: grim, hysterical, cruel, stubbornly impervious to argument, with no sense either of proportion or humour: the finger pointed at the watch a ready reprimand if, for some reason or other, you were a few minutes late.) In power, of course, it matters to employ able subordinates, and both women knew how to do this – in Elizabeth’s case, a formidable bureaucrat, William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, and an admiral, Sir Francis Drake, who defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588 and launched the Royal Navy as a leading one.

The effigy of Queen Elizabeth I in Westminster Abbey, London

Late 18th century portrait of Catherine the Great, Czarina of Russia

throughout the old Ottoman lands including Greece), but power means going beyond intrigue and string-pulling. Two regal women stand out in particular – Elizabeth I of England and Catherine the Great of Russia. Elizabeth launched her country as a world power and in 1588 defeated a huge Spanish fleet sent to destroy her navy. The religious settlement that she introduced, in 1559, reinstituted a Church of England that was a compromise – it burned books; it did not burn people – and one that saved England from any equivalent of the civil wars between Protestant and Catholic that

the author

It is interesting to see how antiquated the old arguments against women’s voting now sound: that women were just outsized children, that they made everything personal, that they thought in terms of shopping lists think. magazine

Norman Stone is Professor in the Department of International Relations at the University of Bilkent, Turkey. A former Professor of Modern History at Oxford and advisor to Margaret Thatcher during her premiership, his latest book is World War Two: a Short History. july 2013

Catherine the Great in Russia was an equivalent, turning Russia into a European power. Like Elizabeth, she too was formidably well-educated (she corresponded with Voltaire and helped translate Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations into Russian) and knew how to deal with able men such as Count Suvorov, who defeated the Ottoman Turks (and is one of the few generals in history never to have lost a battle), and Prince Potemkin, her long-term confidante, who ran the conquered territories and transformed the Crimea. The trick in both women’s cases seems to be that they knew how to handle men: they could be cooingly feminine when they needed to be, and then behave like the nanny from hell when that was in order.

Both had had to survive, as young girls, in a murderous atmosphere. And for both, Elizabeth’s words before the Armada battle might be remembered: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” But these rare regal women were exceptional; their more ordinary sisters would, until very modern times, have had to remain firmly in the background.

In the 20th century, Indira Gandhi in India was a colossal figure, dominating her extraordinary country’s politics for some 20 years until her murder in 1984. Born into the purple of Indian national politics, daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the state’s founding prime minister, she also inherited,

“I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.”

from the British intelligentsia of the Left, a progressive tradition in which women were meant to flourish. Then as now, the Nehru dynasty represented continuity, and she flourished (also despite, or perhaps because of, a complicated childhood, during which she seldom saw her father) with a formula of trying to run the world in order to run India.

She became a global figure, although her vision was in the end a cul-de-sac of Third Worldism. Megawati Sukarnoputri, who ran Indonesia from 2001 to 2004, belongs in this category as well. Her father was the founder of the country, whose independence from the Netherlands he proclaimed in 1945. (It would be tempting to imagine that it was the would-be industrializing nationalism of the time that gives rise to her unusual name, with “megawatt” symbolizing electrical power. In Soviet Russia, the same impulse gave women names such as Traktorka. But Megawati is in fact an old name derived from the Sanskrit for “Goddess of the Clouds”). But her time in office is not remembered as being one of much achievement; and the same is sadly true of Benazir Bhutto – Oxford-educated and at home in the West she may have been, but this member of another political dynasty was also ultimately a sad, transitory figure.

We have yet to see a Developing World Margaret Thatcher. Some might still feel greater reassurance sticking with a generally male pattern of leadership. But maybe one should be prepared to find such figures in unexpected places. After all, as several obituarists concluded about Thatcher’s career: she was the only real man in her cabinet. l

29

half of humanity madam president?

THE ULTIMATE

GLASS CEILING

30

For the first time ever, there is a realistic prospect that a woman could be elected to the most powerful office on earth – President of the United States. A leading New Yorkbased historian and commentator asks what this says about America, how it has changed, and what Hillary Clinton might do were she to return to the White House

H

illary Rodham Clinton has already made the election of a female president of the United States more likely. There have been other women who have put themselves forward for America’s top job – among them, in 1996, Elizabeth Dole, the Republican senator and former head of the American Red Cross; in 1964, Margaret Chase Smith, the Republican congresswoman who became the first woman to be placed in nomination at a party convention; and, in 1972, Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman

Hillary Clinton about to address supporters in Burlington, Iowa, during her 2007 run for the Democratic presidential nomination

think. magazine

july 2013

written by Nicholas Wapshott

to be elected to Congress and also the first to run to become a major party’s presidential candidate – but Mrs Clinton has achieved far more than they.

She has, quite simply, ended the debate about whether a woman can be elected the most powerful person on earth. When, in 1984, Geraldine Ferraro made history by making it onto the presidential ticket, albeit only as the Democrat Walter Mondale’s vice

31

half of humanity madam president?

die-hard Clinton aides such as James Carville, the Louisiana bruiser with the shaven head whose hard driving tactics and reminders that “it’s the economy, stupid” helped propel Bill Clinton into the Oval Office in 1992.

Nor is Hillary Clinton leaving her chances to others. Although she announced she would be taking 12 months out of the limelight to contemplate her future, starting when she stood down as secretary of state at the end of February, she is hardly taking a rest. She is writing a book about what she learned during her four years as America’s top diplomat and, while the sales and promotional tour dates and venues have yet to be fixed, no one will be surprised if the schedule takes in the early primary states, like Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, where momentum for a successful presidential campaign is built.

Her run for the Democratic ticket in 20072008 was not a token bid but a full-blown attempt; had it not been for the exceptional qualities of Barack Obama, she would surely

32

Political action committees formed to put hard cash behind her putative presidential bid are already taking donations and are being staffed by die-hard Clinton aides presidential running mate, she was attacked simply for being a woman (and Mondale, who had been vice president during the Carter administration, was criticized for supposedly giving into a special interest group – women).

Twenty-five years later, no one dares doubt that Clinton is capable of being just as tough as a man. She is so self-evidently qualified, it would be foolish for any to try to argue that only a man could be president.

Mounting evidence

There have been women before who have wielded the power of the presidency. Edith Bolling Galt Wilson quietly ran the federal government behind closed doors for two years after her husband Woodrow Wilson suffered a catastrophic stroke in 1919. And Franklin Roosevelt’s rambunctious wife Eleanor leveraged her role as first lady to

become the nation’s conscience and arguably the most influential American woman ever.

When Eleanor discovered letters showing her husband was having an affair with her personal assistant, she struck a bargain with him: she would not insist on a divorce and bring his political career to an end so long as she was allowed to pursue her progressive interests. But neither could remotely have presumed that it would be possible for them to occupy the position their husbands held.

Times have changed. Despite her unconvincing protests to the contrary, and the vow of silence maintained by the old school political hands that surround her, evidence is fast mounting that Clinton will indeed stand in November 2016. Political action committees formed to put hard cash behind her putative presidential bid are already taking donations and are being staffed up by

have won. (As it was, Obama’s ultimate victory in the primaries riled some who thought that a man had been allowed to jump the line, because in the pecking order of progressive sins, racism lay ahead of sexism, and Obama’s candidacy offered the rare chance to elect a president of color.) But being billed, as she was then, “the inevitable” candidate, and then suffering a political and personal bruising when she lost a comfortable lead to an opponent who proved hard to attack, has given her invaluable experience in how to win in 2016. So if she does decide to run again, she will expect to emerge as the candidate. Vice President Joe Biden believes he can succeed, too, but it seems unlikely he will throw his hat in the ring if Clinton has already done so. Nine out of 10 Democrats say they would happily pick her as their standard-bearer. With polls showing that two-

When former First Ladies meet. From left: Mrs Harry S Truman, Mrs Woodrow Wilson (seated) and Mrs Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at a dinner to honor the then House Speaker Sam Rayburn, in Washington DC, 17 April, 1955

think. magazine

july 2013

thirds of Americans think well of her, and with half of Republican women prepared to vote for her, and with Republicans deeply divided over dogma, if Clinton stands her chances of re-entering the White House on her own terms must be rated highly.

Partisan abuse

If that happens, however, it will be with more experience of how difficult it can be to be a woman in politics than most. For as the wife of the leader of the Democratic Party – who remains Bill Clinton despite Obama’s two terms as president – she has endured decades of open vilification. What befell her during her time as first lady, for instance, struck many baby-boomer Democratic women as sexist and unfair, particularly when under assault from what she described as a “vast right-wing conspiracy” and when putting on a brave face to conceal the embarrassment of her husband’s trysts with Monica Lewinsky. The mayhem surrounding Bill Clinton’s presidency continues to dog Hillary’s ambitions, and some of the abiding resentment toward her results from Bill’s initial boast that if they elected him Americans would get Hillary for free, a presumptuous constitutional stretch that played badly in homes where men wear the trousers.

She has, however, learned lessons from having such partisan abuse hurled at her.

Usefully for a politician, she has developed the skin of a rhinoceros. And while she failed to introduce health care reforms in her husband’s first term, she later remade herself as a hard working senator, willing to work across the aisle to get things done; and in her primary defeat she was gracious and dignified, loyally agreeing to work for her former opponent.

The old pre-Senate Hillary, with thick glasses, a tragic hair-do, a dweebish embrace of complex public policy, and a well deserved paranoia about the press and her political opponents, has given way to a softer, more mature leader. Her personal story from first lady of Arkansas via the travails of the White House to Obama’s ultra-loyal secretary of state has been cast as the irresistible rise of a champion of women’s rights. So exactly how would Hillary Clinton in the White House change the world – and what does it say about America that it is finally ready for a female president?

33

half of humanity madam president?

34

The opening of Obama’s second term coincided with a sharp change, as if the 1960s revolution in social attitudes was finally reaching its conclusion. Without solving many, if any, of the deep-seated problems endured by black Americans, Obama’s election nonetheless drastically changed the race debate in America. Racists, for decades left biting their tongues as African-Americans slowly emerged from the underclass, are now in full retreat. Border-state hostility to Hispanics that had held up immigration reform for years appears to be crumbling.

Other progressive social issues, like the legalization of same-sex marriage, are also in the ascendant, causing the conservative sage George Will to acknowledge an irrevocable generational change in attitudes. “The opposition to gay marriage is dying,” he said.

“It’s old people.” Marriage equality won public acceptance so rapidly that Obama and Clinton were left playing catch up.

America remains as profoundly divided politically as at any time since the Civil War, yet those who would choose Eisenhower’s complacent country over today’s more liberal society are less vocal, less persuasive, less powerful than before. Clinton’s election would confirm that the change from the traditional social rigidity of the Fifties, hard on women and hostile to minorities of any kind, to today’s more free, mobile and meritocratic society is complete. The elevation to the Republican vice presidential slot of a token woman, Sarah Palin, in 2008 not only proved disastrous electorally but appeared the last gasp of those who thought women could still be pandered to. A Hillary Clinton victory would put an end to similar trickery.

In practical terms, such a result would likely provide a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, as candidates of her party would benefit from a “coat-tails” effect. In that scenario, the first two years of a term, before the next House of Representative elections give voters a chance to change their minds, are a rare chance to get things done. How would she spend them? She would inherit an incomplete progressive agenda where all the main headings have already been ticked – greater personal freedom for women and for minorities; universal health care – but not yet consolidated. For such a commercially dynamic society, America can seem very slow to adapt to changed social circumstances.

In her brief time in the Senate, she advocated a handful of practical, unshowy measures intended to put women on an equal footing alongside men in the workplace

Decades after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, for example, African-Americans continue to slip behind other groups when it comes to education, employment, voting rights, or staying out of prison.

Then Senator Clinton speaks during a campaign stop at East High School, Des Moines, Iowa, 27 January, 2007

the author

enduring influence

Clinton is a practical person, not an ideologue, and does not – yet, at any rate – have a ready prepared legislative program, like Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, John F Kennedy’s First Hundred Days, or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. As secretary of state she was content to ignore her own views and apply Obama’s foreign policy. In her brief time in the Senate, she advocated a handful of practical, unshowy measures intended to

Nicholas Wapshott is a Reuters Contributing Columnist and was a founding Senior Editor of The Daily Beast. The author of numerous biographies, his latest book is Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics. think. magazine

july 2013

put women on an equal footing alongside men in the workplace. She backed the Family and Medical Leave Act, which promoted paid sick leave and workplace flexibility, and outlawed discrimination against working parents. And she co-sponsored the Paycheck Fairness Act, which bolstered the weak Equal Pay Act of 1963, and the Fair Pay Restoration Act, which aimed to establish genuine equality of pay for both sexes in order to counter any judicial backsliding. She also supported fully funding the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal government body established to police gender inequality that has been starved of money and staff since the Reagan years.

While her most enduring influence is sure

to be among American women, Clinton’s feminist goals relate to women in the rest of the world. Her four years as secretary of state came after half a lifetime in front-line politics and showed off her sober competence and political pragmatism to good effect.

Alongside the topical diplomacy that led her to fly nearly a million miles to 112 nations, wherever she traveled she ensured that there was also a back channel devoted to furthering women’s rights in whatever country she was addressing, and she also appointed the first permanent “Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues” to “ensure that women’s issues are fully integrated in the formulation and conduct of US foreign policy”.

As well as engaging with her male counterparts on an equal footing, Secretary Clinton also reached out to women leaders abroad. When Burma’s military dictators decided unexpectedly to restore the country to democracy, it was Clinton’s personal rapport with Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader placed under house arrest for more than a decade, that helped speed the breakthrough.

If Hillary Clinton becomes president she is likely to achieve her ends not by mighty means but by soft power – the power of personal example. Her very election will act as a challenge to men who believe women should remain in the home and provide a boost in confidence to women who wish to play a fuller role in society. Clinton seems prepared to be the feisty champion of the legions of hard-done-by women around the world who, despite high individual achievements and evident skills, are still shut out of board rooms and cabinets. She, too, has suffered severe setbacks and her ultimate rise to the very top, against the odds, would show that the battle for women’s rights can be won. l

35

The think. debate written by Bono

L 36

et’s go back before Christ, three millennia, to a time when the journey for justice and the march against inequality and poverty really began. Three thousand years ago civilization was just getting started on the banks of the Nile, and some slaves, Jewish shepherds, proclaimed to the Pharaoh sitting high on his throne, “We are equal to you.” And the Pharaoh replied, “No, you’ve got to be kidding.” And they said, “That’s what it says in our holy book.” Cut to our century, the same country, the same pyramids. Another people are spreading the idea of equality with a different book – this time it’s called the Facebook.

Crowds are gathered in Tahrir Square, and they turn a social network from virtual to actual and reboot the 21st century.

Not to undersell how messy and ugly the aftermath of the Arab Spring has been, nor to oversell the role of technology, but these things have given a sense of what is possible when the age-old model of power, the pyramid, gets turned upsidedown, putting the people on top and the pharaohs of today on the bottom.

It has also shown us that something as powerful as information and the sharing of it can challenge inequality.

Facts, like people, want to be free; and when they’re free, liberty is usually around the corner even for the poorest of the poor. Facts can challenge cynicism and the apathy that leads to inertia. Facts can tell us what’s working and, more importantly, what’s not, so we can fix it. Facts, if we hear them and heed them, could help us meet the challenge that Nelson Mandela made in 2005 when he asked us to be that great generation that overcomes that most awful offence to humanity, extreme poverty. And what the facts are telling us is that humanity’s long, slow journey of equality is actually speeding up.

we can win the war on poverty The statistics show it: we can eradicate extreme poverty by 2030 – if we trust in the transformative power of transparency and new ways to share knowledge

Since 2000, there are eight million more AIDS patients getting lifesaving antiretroviral drugs. There are eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have cut their death rates from malaria by 75 percent. Child mortality for children under five is down by 2.6 million a year, a rate of 7,265 children’s lives saved each day.

This fantastic news didn’t happen by itself. It was fought for, it was campaigned for, it was innovated for, and this great news gives birth to even more great news, because the historic trend is this: the number of people living in think. magazine

back-breaking, soul-crushing extreme poverty has declined from 43 percent of the world’s population in 1990 to 33 percent in 2000 and then to 21 percent in 2010. It has halved.

The rate is still too high. There are still too many people unnecessarily losing their lives and there’s still work to do, but this is heart-stopping. If you live on less than $1.25 a day, in that kind of poverty, this is not just data – this is everything.

If you’re a parent who wants the best for your children, this rapid transition is a route out of despair and into hope. And if the trajectory continues, the data tells us that the number of people living on $1.25 a day gets to the zero zone.

This is the virtual elimination of extreme poverty, defined as people living on less than $1.25 a day, adjusted for inflation from a 1990 baseline. Some of you think this progress is all in Asia or Latin America or in model countries like Brazil. But look at sub-Saharan Africa. There’s a collection of 10 countries that some call “the lions”: Cameroon, Senegal, Guinea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Niger, Mauritania, Mozambique, Burkina Faso and Uganda. In the last decade they have had a combination of 100 percent debt cancellation, a tripling of aid, and a tenfold increase in foreign direct investment, which has unlocked a quadrupling of domestic resources – local money – which when spent july 2013

something as powerful as information and the sharing of it can challenge inequality. Facts, like people, want to be free; and when they’re free, liberty is usually around the corner wisely – good governance – has cut child mortality by a third, doubled education completion rates, and halved extreme poverty. At this rate, these 10 countries get to zero extreme poverty by 2030 too.

The pride of lions is the proof of this concept.

2030 is just around the corner. So why aren’t we jumping up and down about this? The opportunity is real but so is the jeopardy. We can’t get this done until we really accept that we can get this done. The graph of inertia is how we screw it up. And the next one, momentum, is how we can bend the arc of history down towards zero, just doing the things that we know work.

It is inertia versus momentum and, of course, the closer you get, it gets harder. We know the obstacles that are in our way right now, the difficult times. Some who mind the US purse want to cut life-saving programs like the Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. And you can do something about that, you can

tell politicians that these cuts can cost lives.

Right now, oil companies are fighting to keep secret their payments to governments for extracting oil in developing countries.You can do something about that too.You can join the One campaign and leaders like Mo Ibrahim, the telcom entrepreneur, in pushing for laws that make sure that at least some of the wealth under the ground ends up in the hands of the people living above it. We know that the biggest disease of all is not a disease, it’s corruption.

There’s a vaccine for that too – transparency. Technology is really turbocharging this; it’s getting harder to hide if you’re doing bad stuff.

Let me tell you about U-report. It’s 150,000 millennials across Uganda: young people armed with 2G phones, creating an SMS social network, exposing corruption and demanding to know what is in the budget and how their money is being

spent. Once you have these tools, you can’t not use them.

Once you have this knowledge, you can’t not know it.You can’t delete this data from your brain, but you can delete the clichéd image of supplicant impoverished peoples not taking control of their own lives.You can erase that – it’s not true any more. By 2030, by the time we get there, every place with a rough semblance of governance might actually be on their way. I’m thinking of Wael Ghonim, who set up one of the Facebook groups behind Tahrir Square in Cairo.

He got thrown in jail for it, but I have his words tattooed on my brain. “We are going to win, because we don’t understand politics. We are going to win, because we don’t play their dirty games. We are going to win, because we don’t have a party political agenda.

We are going to win because the tears that come from our eyes actually come from our hearts. We are going to win because we have dreams, and we are willing to stand up for those dreams.” Wael is right.

We’re going to win, if we work together as one, because the power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power. l Bono is lead singer of the Irish rock band U2 and a co-founder of ONE, a campaigning and advocacy organization fighting extreme poverty and communicable disease.

37

briefings

Correspondence consequences for the relevant countries. I felt that they could have concentrated rather more on the role of women, though. There have been women in very prominent positions in the Arabian Gulf and in political leadership roles in South and Southeast Asia over some decades; but this does not seem to have had enough of a knock-on effect on other levels of society, where female participation in the workforce remains far lower than it should be. This is a situation that must be addressed if the benefits your authors hope for are to be realized.

38

Rosmah Abdullah, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

IDEAL ANALYSIS

After Ed Howker’s very readable but outstandingly gloomy analysis of the challenges facing younger generations around the world (“Generation Y: Feckless or Failed?”), how cheering it was to read your profiles of the five 20- to 40-something individuals who are putting into practice that idealism one hopes may still characterize the young (“The Promise of Hope” by Rachel Aspden). With wars and economic and environmental catastrophes clearly destined to be as much a part of the 21st century as they were of the 20th, it is a relief to learn that across the continents there are still those who want

to make a difference and retain the optimism necessary to dedicate their lives to doing so.

Bruce Lamb, Sydney, Australia

KNOCK-ON EFFECT

I note that both Tarik M Yousef (“Seizing the Moment”) and Najib Tun Razak (“Unlocking the Potential of the Ummah”) view the “youth bulge” in the Arab – and more broadly, the Muslim – world as offering the potential for great growth, and correctly suggest that this is an opportunity that should not be missed, not least because failing to grasp it could have quite deleterious

DIGESTIVE PROBLEMS Sir Nicholas Kenyon’s history of the Early Music Movement and the influence it has had

write to us

“It is essential that, in an age that is often simultaneously sentimental, utilitarian and impatient, we do not allow the language of rights to wander too far from its roots in an acknowledgement of the sacred” p40

on the interpretation and performance of the whole classical canon (“A Sound Revolution”) was well traced.

He is right to point out how extraordinary it is in hindsight that the use of period instruments, to take one example, has, some 40 years on, begun to be accepted as part of the mainstream. What he rather skates over, however, is just how awful lots of period ensembles sounded for a very long time. It is no wonder that many people remained convinced that it was a progress to perform Baroque music on brass instruments that were unknown at the time of Bach and Buxtehude – when the alternative appeared to be to utilize primitive horns that came across at best as outof-tune kazoos, and at worst suggested that those playing them were suffering from severe digestive problems.

Kenyon quotes “a reviewer in the respected Gramophone magazine” saying that “a revival of period strings was as desirable as a revival of period dentistry”. Whether strings or horns, some of us would still agree.

39

Mary Scott, London, UK

“the public needs to cry out not only for reforms and pragmatic regulations; they must demand numbers and good balance sheets. The key to the health of world trade might lie in better mathematical and financial education” P44

At Think., we welcome comments from readers. If you would like to respond to any of the articles, email us at: Think@qf.org.qa Mark your email “for publication”. Please do not send attachments Follow us on:

facebook.com/thinkinternationalmagazine twitter.com/Think_QF

think. magazine

july 2013

briefings status of ethics

RELIGION IS THE SOURCE OF ALL RIGHTS

40

Without faith in the Creator, human rights are merely a matter of aspiration or prescription. We must acknowledge the sacred to safeguard principles of universal morality

T

he Universal Declaration of Human Rights is unquestionably a landmark in the history of moral consciousness, one of the factors that have consistently given hope and purpose to political life throughout the world since it first saw the light of day in 1948. It has offered a global benchmark for identifying injustices to those who have never been able to make their voices heard, and it has been an energizing force in the witness of more than one community of faith in their struggle against arbitrary oppression and for the protection of the vulnerable. Yet the language of human rights has, surprisingly, become more rather than less problematic in recent years.

Questions about human rights have begun to give anxiety to some religious communities who feel that alien cultural standards are somehow being imposed – particularly in regard to inherited views of marriage and

think. magazine

july 2013

written by Rowan Williams

family. We face the worrying prospect of a gap opening up between a discourse of rights increasingly conceived as a universal legal “code” and the specific moral and religious intuitions of actual diverse communities.

The “universal” aspect of rights is a central element. What makes the gap between religion and the discourse of rights worrying is that the language of the Universal Declaration is unthinkable without the kind of moral universalism that religious ethics safeguards. The presupposition of the Declaration is that there is a level of respect owed to human beings irrespective of their nationality, status, gender, age or achievement. They have a status simply as members of the human race; so that this language takes for granted that there are some things that remain true about the nature

41

briefings status of ethics

affinity, all specific ways of making sense of our world. But what is it that grounds the moral vision that belongs with these things – belonging, recognition, dignity? The truth is that mutual recognition is a fragile thing: social exclusion and political oppression begin when the imperative to care only for those who appear instantly and obviously like us takes over; and it recurs constantly in human history. What Freud called “the narcissism of small differences” translates into political terms when near neighbors sharing territory and often even language are driven toward mutual hostility by wider circumstances – food or water shortages, demographic projections, the suspicion of the other that is intensified at times of general social disintegration. The effects are horribly familiar: at worst, genocide, at the very least, the enshrining of massive discrimination.

take away this moral underpinning, and language about human rights can become either a purely aspirational matter or something that is simply prescribed by authority

42

or character of human beings whatever particular circumstances prevail and whatever any specific political settlement may claim.

While this is not, as a matter of fact, a set of convictions held uniquely by religious people, religious people will argue that they alone have a secure “doctrinal” basis for believing it, because they hold that every human subject is related to God independently of their relation to other subjects or to earthly political and social systems.

From one point of view, therefore, human rights has to do with the individual person, establishing the status of the person as something independent of any society; from another, it is a doctrine deeply opposed to “individualism”, since it locates this status of the person within a scheme that (logically) requires any person to acknowledge the same status in every other person, near or far, like or unlike. Every individual’s account of their own needs or desires has to be thought about and negotiated in the context of this mutual recognition, this assumption of a basic empathy between persons living out the same human condition. Take away this moral underpinning, and language about human rights can become either a purely aspirational matter or something that is simply prescribed by authority. If it is the former, it is hard to see why legal systems should be expected to enshrine such recognitions. If it is the latter, its force depends on the will of some actual legal authority to enforce it; the legitimacy of such an authority would have to be established; and there would be no in-built guarantee that the unconditionality of the rights in question would always be honored.

The risk would be that “human rights” would

be seen as a set of entitlements specified by a particular political authority, and thus vulnerable to being redefined according to that authority’s convenience and preference and circumstances. So it is important for the language of rights not to lose its anchorage in a universalist religious ethic – and just as important for religious believers not to back away from the territory and treat rights language as an essentially secular matter, potentially at odds with the morality and spirituality of believers.

the author Lord Williams is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and was Archbishop of Canterbury and Head of the Worldwide Anglican Communion from 2002-2012. His latest book is Faith in the Public Square, published by Bloomsbury/Continuum.

The language of human rights becomes manifestly confused and artificial when divorced from our thinking about belonging, recognition, dignity and so on. It is vulnerable to being seen as a culture in itself – usually an alien culture, pressing the imperatives of universal equality over all local custom and think. magazine

july 2013

To acknowledge the dignity of another person is in effect to admit that there is something about them that is, so to speak, beyond me: something to which my individual purposes, preferences, fears or hopes are irrelevant. The other is involved with more than me – or indeed, more than people that I think are just like me. Mutual respect in a society, paradoxically, means both the recognition of another as mattering in the same way that I do, sharing the same human condition, and the recognition that this entails their not being at my disposal, recognizing their independence, their distance from me. What makes this theological principle so significant for “human rights” is that this nest of relationships means that we cannot separate any human individual from a “morally charged” environment, rooted first and foremost in relation with the Creator. Their life, and the lives of groups of such persons, are of significance in the eyes of God; what I recognize in recognizing the dignity of the other is that they have a standing before God, which is, of its nature, invulnerable to the success or failure of any other relationship or any situation in the contingent world.

For human rights to be more than an artificially constructed series of conventions, embodied in a set of claims, there has to be some global account of what human dignity means and how it is grounded. It cannot be left dependent on the decision of individuals or societies to act in this way: that would

turn it into a particular bundle of cultural options among others – inviting the skeptical response that it is just what happens to suit the current global hegemonies. It has to establish itself as a vision that makes sense of the practice of law within and between societies – something that provides a general template for looking critically at the claims of any particular society to be equitable and inclusive, not something that just represents the preferences of the powerful. A credible, sustainable doctrine of human rights must therefore be both modest and insistently ambitious. It must be modest in seeing itself as the legal mopping-up of issues raised in the context of a broad-based struggle for social equity and consistency – the negative face of what appears positively as the capacity to work for justice in a spirit of mutual reverence; but it must be ambitious in insisting on the dignity of every minority and their consequent claim to protection, to be allowed to make their contribution, to have their voice made audible.

The mistakes sometimes made are to be ambitious in the wrong areas and modest in the wrong areas – to be ambitious for human rights as a universal program for what might be called affirmative action; to be modest about the uncompromisingly metaphysical or religious foundations that the discourse needs and about the “humane” education of the emotions that is involved. The implication is clear that we need a vocabulary of the sacred here, a sense almost of “blasphemy”.

It is this that religious doctrine offers to the institutions and dialects of “human rights”, and it is a vital contribution. It is essential that, in an age that is often simultaneously sentimental, utilitarian and impatient, we do not allow the language of rights to wander too far from its roots in an acknowledgement of the sacred. This means, on the one hand, that would-be secular accounts of rights need to hear the arguments against an excessively abstract model of clearly defined claims to be tried before an impartial or universal tribunal. On the other, it means a warning to religious bodies not to try to make anxieties about their freedom to make religiously based ethical judgments an excuse for denying the unconditionality – and the self-critical imperatives – of the language of rights. Too much is at stake for the world’s well-being. l

43

briefings finance

44

anxiety and mistrust. Then as now, the payoffs and the risks have always been potentially enormous. For medieval Italian traders, such as the Genoese, setting up a business venture was not so different from today. It meant finding investors, outfitting a ship, purchasing a product – like pepper or redcurrants – and bringing it back to Italy from China or India, via Persia, Arabia and the Ottoman Empire, exchanging currencies, paying duties, marketing and selling the goods, and dividing profits.

Investors faced piracy, thievery, pests, the plague, counterfeiting, bad weather, hostile foreign powers and the problems of banking.

Communication was slow and some trade expeditions took years.

Along with the real risks, there were also those of the imagination. In Western lands there were rumors that in Asian countries were to be found giant ants, cannibals, men with feet for heads, and Cyclops.Yet tales of monsters were paired with Marco Polo’s promises of riches.

Once eastern spices worth their weight in gold started pouring into Italian ports, the ambition of international traders and bankers became limitless, as fears were overcome by the desire for wealth and precious goods.

Why the world should learn to love good accountants

Profit and loss

To manage multi-partner sea-trading companies and international banking houses, medieval Italians developed doubleentry bookkeeping at the end of the 1200s.

The separate columns of debit and credit controlled accuracy. If one column was different, an error had been made. By tallying income and loss in separate columns and then balancing the two, double-entry bookkeeping provided detailed statements of income: how much profit came from serving customers rather than shrewd investing, and how much loss sprang from the burdens of operation, rather than unexpected accidents and unwise speculation. Once a boat returned its cargo safely to port, its accounts and logbooks were integrated into the firm’s central ledger so that each partner’s equity could be calculated.

Thus began the practice of modern accounting – a profession often regarded as “boring”, which may explain the lack of attention paid to it. But in fact, as we shall see, it plays an essential role in the smooth functioning of world trade; and our lack of focus on the subject is a particularly dangerous lacuna in our financial and economic understanding at

Compared to the drama of interest rates and fiscal cliffs, accounting and auditing are often overlooked, seen as mundane and boring. But, warns a historian of the subject, they have been crucial to the smooth operation of world trade since before the time of Columbus. In an era of financial crises, our ignorance is perilous

F

rom the G20, to Davos and Doha, political leaders and pundits both defend and decry globalization, often in the same speech. Globalization offers the prospect of both riches and the faceless menace of unaccountable power.

The new world that accompanies it is at once unavoidable, remarkable (from iPhone production and strawberries in winter), yet also fear-inducing (unsafe Bangladeshi textiles factories, pollution, human trafficking and off-shore finance). Even the most

written by Jacob Soll

informed citizens and investors who benefit from global trade have only a hazy view of how companies and banks operate in an age where the laws of nations can be skirted by porous borders, mismatched and unenforceable regulations, and mysterious banking havens.

But this is not entirely new. From its inception, global trade has been attended by think. magazine

july 2013

a time when little-anticipated crises have laid waste to the treasuries of states across the continents.

Genoa ran itself as a city of global commerce.

The government contracted boats to bring pepper back to its port and then to appear in an authenticated municipal record. By the mid-1300s, the massari, or stewards, of the city legislated: “And [we decree] that the ledgers be kept in the office of the Two Accountants, so that they may better control the accounts of the Commune of Genoa.” Through this state account book, the government and citizens could verify investments, taxes paid, and the profitability of ventures. Transparency and balanced books provided the confidence which fed credit and investment in Genoese trade. Chinese pepper seemed less foreign and less risky when it was accounted for in clear numbers and neat columns.

As world trade expanded with Columbus’s first voyage in 1492, so did the possibility for profit, but also for mistrust and confusion. The profession of navigator, the fabled seaman enticingly claimed, “created a curiosity about the secrets of the world”. He promised Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon “miraculously” rich lands and submissive subjects. Columbus did not, in fact, find the route to the Indies, or indeed to India, but his “discoveries” transformed navigation, expanded trade routes and created the potential for a network of world markets, which led to globalized new products, like sugar, tobacco, potatoes and chocolate, and set the foundation for new cultures at once terrifying and grandiose, from Peru, Mexico, and Goa to the Philippines.

However, in 1499, when profits ran scarce and famine set in, and the indigenous peoples of Hispaniola – the Caribbean island now divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic – rebelled, and were subsequently enslaved, tortured and even dismembered under Columbus’s orders, the Spanish monarchs were shocked and their confidence in Columbus and his reports shaken. In 1500, they sent Francisco de Bobadilla, a royal juez pesquisidor, or examining justice, to arrest him and put him in chains. Back in Spain, humiliated, Columbus wrote a book, El Libro de los Privilegios (1502), outlining all the duties he believed were owed to him and his family. “I beg your graces, with the zeal of faithful Christians in whom their

45

briefings finance

Highnesses have confidence, to read all my papers, and to consider how I, who came from so far to serve these princes… now at the end of my days have been despoiled of my honor and my property without cause, wherein is neither justice nor mercy.” Columbus demanded 10 percent of all the wealth of the New World, but would receive nothing in his lifetime. Others enriched themselves from Columbus’s brilliant but morally compromised enterprise and, for a time, Spain reaped massive wealth from the gold, silver, forced labor and natural resources of its new colonies. The monarchy’s financial management, however, was poorly staffed and disorganized, with no central bookkeeping office. Accounting was often unclear and many who kept financial records, like Columbus himself, rightly feared their accounts would not make it back to Spain, or if they did, that they would be ignored or misunderstood.

Ruinous debt

46

The demands of maintaining a planetary empire, overreliance on natural resources for industry and war, and poor state accounting undermined the Spanish economy, which collapsed as all talent and resources went into extracting wealth rather than industry.

By 1575, after finally employing professional accountants, the crown established that it had only an estimated income of 5,642,304 ducats and debt of over 73,908,171 ducats.

Without any expenditure at all (an impossible state of affairs), it would have taken the crown 15 years of high income to pay off its debts, and yet Philip II was only beginning to fight his wars against the Protestants in Holland and the Turks in the Mediterranean, all on credit. Finally, with the disastrous Armada against the English in 1588, he lost his fleet, his fortune and even shook his own faith; he had overstretched the state into unmanageable debt. He could no longer effectively protect his gold and silver convoys that now were being pirated by the boats of the tiny, breakaway Dutch Republic. For all of its mighty dominions and Philip’s reforms in financial administration, Spain had few highly trained accountants, and, in comparison with Holland, no schools to train managers in both the techniques of accounting and the ethos of accountability. Those who did write rudimentary accounts for the state or Church could not be sure their superiors would put them to good use.

the financial press developed in part so that investors in Bombay could read about profits and fraud in Montana By the time Philip died in 1598, his heirs, unable to face the debts and challenges of such a massive, crumbling empire, began to undo his accounting reforms, only making matters worse. Global trade without the capacity or, indeed, will for clear financial communication or accountability promised the world, but, as Columbus – and the Spanish monarch – found, could end in financial ruin.

Spain provided the great exemplary warning that as commercial empires grew, longdistance trade was much more risky without accounting being central to the enterprise.

Financial numbers were one way to shrink distance and inspire confidence. Britain’s North American colonies began as joint-partner companies, mixing business with religion as Puritan pilgrims searched for a promised land of religious freedom through colonial business ventures. Faith was made stronger in both through clear accounting. Established in 1624, the Massachusetts Bay Company relied on good account books and audits so that investors back in England felt in control of their investment: “But for that there is a great debt owing by the joint stock, it was moved tha some course might be taken for the cleering thereof, before the gouvmt bee transferred; and to this purpose it was first though fit that the accompts should bee audited, to see what the debt is.” When the company struggled, therefore, audits were made and new accountants shipped to America.

Accounting, audits and the ratings firms failed to protect investors from the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that led to the decade-long Great Depression

on the railroad

So it was widely recognized that international trade needed strong audits and vigilance by all for it to flourish. In 1850, Parliament passed the English Companies Act and related laws, which required an independent examination of a company’s accounts in order to make a certified financial statement.

British companies did systematic audits of their accounts, as outside inspectors would “examine the books of the treasurer” to ascertain “that the amount of moneys received and paid out, were correctly entered upon his think. magazine

july 2013

books”, based on an examination of vouchers and receipts. But British accountants had a hard time imposing their standards overseas.

This was a problem for global trade. British investors, flush with cash from the Industrial Revolution, saw America as a primary point for their money; US railroads promised wealth on a scale previously unknown. The problem was, how could an investor keep track of equity in companies with complex expenses and depreciation? Many investors in Europe did not have a firm grasp on the enormous complexity of overseas holdings. Everything from steam engines, ticket sales and track wear all had to be accounted for in one way or another, and fraud could take place on a massive scale, from ports in Scotland, India and the Philippines, to obscure railroad stations in Utah and depots in Pennsylvania.

Books could be falsified at all levels, from cost accounts to the improper valuing of stocks.

Indeed, Jay Gould (1836-92) – the vastly rich and corrupt railroad speculator – paid off legislatures, made Boss Tweed (head of the equally infamous New York State “Tammany Hall” political machine) the director of the Erie Railroad, and simply burned the stocks of his inquisitive British railroad investors, instantly wiping out their stakes.

Such scandals created the market for ratings firms. While today the Big Three ratings firms are under fire for conflicts of interest, companies like Moody’s and Poor’s were both founded to create verified financial statements for railroads so British speculators could

invest overseas with relative confidence. Poor’s Manual from the 1880s published verified financial statements on the Pacific Railroad. In 1912, John Moody followed suit with his How to Analyze Railroad Reports. Even the financial press developed in part to publish these statements, so that investors in Bombay could read about profits and fraud in Montana. The better and more trustworthy the statements were, the more were willing to invest in global trade. By 1897, American accountants moved to create the regulated profession of Certified Public Accountants.

But in each financial crisis, from the Crédit Mobilier/Union Pacific Railroad scandal of 1872 to the crash of 1929, accounting, audits and the ratings firms failed to protect investors; either bookkeeping standards or auditing laws were too lax to provide accurate controls. After each crisis, there was accounting reform, such as the creation of the American Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1934, which aimed to enforce how companies in the US reported their accounts.

For a time, rigorous regulatory standards and public awareness of them restored confidence in world markets and similar institutions grew in other countries. Transparent accounting and reporting regulations accompanied the great economic boom that followed World War II. Over the past seven decades, there has been a move to standardize world accounting and auditing procedures.

But as we know, it has only partially succeeded. Accounting and auditing have not kept up with the complexities and grey zones of international trade and banking. In spite of the SEC, American corporate balance sheets are only a snapshot of their earnings and risks, and bookkeepers have many ways to cook those books. Indeed, from Enron to Lehman Brothers and Bank of America, auditors have been slower than companies at finding tricks to mask losses and risks. Since the 2008 banking crisis and the ongoing crises of accounting and accountability in Greece and other European countries, the global public has declining faith that banks, companies and governments will properly report their earnings and debts. fragile giants

Paradoxically, confidence is most bullish in the most opaque of the great economies. A closed society, China, has lived up to Marco Polo’s promises of seemingly limitless wealth. Investors

47

Review

briefings

Think.

finance

the global economy and the riches many dream it will bring still depend on trust and good accounting

48

overlook poor accounting, auditing and, indeed, social, political and environmental standards, because profits flow so freely. But China’s balance sheets are shrouded in mystery. What if Chinese municipal debts were shown to be unsustainable and the economy slowed? Would world investors lose confidence in the country?

Fitch recently downgraded China’s credit rating to AA-, based on estimates of national debt and worries about opacity in the banking sector. As Russia has learned, the divestment risk for opaque economies is real, as foreign investment has begun to flee its oil-dependent, corruption-plagued economy. The maxim is simple: foreign investors will stop investing if profits are not guaranteed and they cannot trust companies and governments to provide financial transparency.

But world trade faces challenges on the auditing side of the equation too. Confidence in the great credit rating companies – Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s, and Fitch – as well as in the Big Four Auditing Companies – PwC (formerly known as PricewaterhouseCoopers), Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Ernst & Young and KPMG – has been shaken. After Enron and the collapse of Arthur Andersen, the Big Four (down from Eight, then Six) have a monopoly on world corporate accounting with more than 700,000 employees. And yet these are fragile giants, caught in a paradox of their own making. Past debacles have led to regulation that ties their hands and makes it very hard for them to make aggressive audits (they can be sued into oblivion for mistakes). At the same time, however, regulators fear not only that audit companies will work in collusion with corporations, but that exposing such scandals will bring down those companies, only further concentrating the control over auditors in the hands of a few. Their virtual monopoly on auditing makes it very hard to control their conflicts of interest or to push them to make zealous audits. In the face of big finance, they are often ineffectual, dramatically illustrated

by their complete inability to predict any of the crises of 2008. And even with armies of accountants, neither the Big Four auditors nor international regulators have the time, money, will or means to make sure the financial behemoths are effectively audited.

What is most startling is that few even discuss this problem – which as history should show, is of far greater importance than the shifting of an interest rate one percent here or there, or the imposition of a new levy or tax, however dramatic the subsequent discussions may be on the floor of the US Congress or the National Assembly in Paris. It is even more important than the introduction of new regimes of protectionism or austerity. For they involve the visible facades of world trade: but the problems of auditing and regulation are sufficient to weaken its very foundations and structure. Globalization is often discussed in moral terms: the West versus the rest; the poor and the rich; the one percent; oppressors and oppressed. Without doubt, these age-old dichotomies remain. But, just as in the time of Columbus, the global economy and the riches many dream it will bring still depend on trust and good accounting. That few recognize its crucial role and do not seek to expand and support it is reason to fear there will be more crises to come.

What can be done, then, in the face of such enormous global challenges? For transparent financial reporting, we need a return to basic regulation, outlining the clearest financial statements possible, which allow investors and governments to assess the profitability and risks of companies. At the same time, the credit ratings and auditing companies must be reformed to remove all hint of collusion and conflict of interest. This means fewer profits for such companies (who should never be able to provide consulting services for the companies they audit and rate). More aggressive and better-funded auditing mechanisms must be developed to keep pace with the complex and purposefully confusing financial products created by investment banks. But most of all, the public needs to cry out not only for reforms and pragmatic regulations; they must demand numbers and good balance sheets. The key to the health of world trade might lie in better mathematical and financial education. Not dismissing accounting as merely “boring” would be a good start. But that, as we know, is another challenge unto itself. l

Sophie Hastings on art Selma Dabbagh on books Miguel Syjuco’s letter from manila

Inside the head of Hirst His work has always been so controversial and baffling to some that a cleaner once mistook an

installation for rubbish and threw it out. On the eve of a major new retrospective in Doha, Think. profiles a man whose eerie yet serene obsession with death has made him one of the most iconic and celebrated artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries – Damien Hirst

49

the author Jacob Soll is Professor of History and Accounting at the University of Southern California, and author of the forthcoming book, The Reckoning: Lessons from the Perilous History of Finance, Politics and Accountability – from the Ancient World to Modern Wall Street. think. magazine

For the Love of God (2007)

july 2013

Think. Review written by Sophie Hastings

Of all the Young British Artists (YBAs),

50

that extraordinarily diverse group of art practitioners and provocateurs who shot to fame in London and then beyond during the eighties and nineties, Damien Hirst has become the most prolific, the most expensive and the best known. While others of his cohort are celebrated, respected and internationally collected – Gary Hume, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Rachel Whiteread, Sam Taylor-Wood, Mat Collishaw, Gavin Turk, Fiona Rae and Anya Gallaccio, to name but a few – Hirst is a “brand artist”, with the kind of global recognition that reaches way beyond the art world cognoscenti and places him alongside American superstars such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, and Richard Prince. Everyone has heard of Hirst’s sharks suspended in formaldehyde, beginning with The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991); most people have seen a spot or spin painting, and even if they haven’t, they’ve probably bought a mug or a cushion cover inspired by one. For the Love of God, Hirst’s 18th century human skull cast in platinum and covered in 8,601 perfect diamonds, weighing 1,106 carats, stunned fans and detractors alike: with Old Masters and modern art works selling for millions, what does it mean when a contemporary artist creates an object whose worth is indisputable, simply by dint of its materials? When the skull was unveiled in 2007, the multiple layers of meaning that underpin all Hirst’s works were drowned out by shockwaves induced by its apparent swagger and cynicism, its perceived celebration of a grotesquely bloated art market.

But For the Love of God is the ultimate expression of Hirst’s obsession with death, his attempts to contain and examine its ever-present threat, and the beauty its proximity gives to life: “I think it’s the most alive thing I’ve ever made,” he said of the skull. Having been resistant to the idea of a retrospective (there is footage of Hirst responding vociferously to David Bowie in 1996, when asked by the musician if he would ever show at the Tate – “No way!

It’s for dead artists… it’s totally ridiculous!”), Hirst recently changed his mind, leading to the first substantial survey of his work in a British institution which showed at Tate Modern in London last year. “I’ve got far enough away

The Immortal (1997-2005)

from the things I made at the beginning,” he told the gallery’s director, Sir Nicholas Serota, in the accompanying catalogue. “I’m definitely in a different place, and I prefer the place I’m in now, but I’ve still got a lot of work to do.”

Hirst’s astonishing rise to fame and notoriety, his successful manipulation of the international art market, his support of his fellow YBAs, and the impact of his work on us and many generations to come, are all products of a collision of personality and circumstance that were key to the development of the current contemporary art world, with London’s museums, galleries, auction houses and grassroots scene at its heart. Growing up in Leeds, the son of Mary Brennan, a shorthand typist, and a father he never met, Hirst was fascinated by death from an early age, as well as by the objects that speak vividly of people’s lives, particularly in their absence. His next-door neighbor, the mysterious Mr Barnes (who always left the house with a shopping trolley), turned out to be an obsessive hoarder of things ranging think. magazine

from toothpaste tubes, tools and parcels of money to alarm clocks, newspapers, pipes, pens and letters, as well as heads from statues found in graveyards. When Mr Barnes disappeared one day, rehoused by the council, young Damien broke into the house and used the rigorously organized chaos “to piece together the life of a man he never knew”, wrote Gregor Muir, in his memoir of the YBA scene, Lucky Kunst. The influence and language of accumulated found objects are felt throughout Hirst’s oeuvre.

The Medicine Cabinets series and the vitrines filled with pills, boxes of medication, clinical instruments, ashtrays, cigarette butts and shells are re-workings of the Victorian cabinet of curiosities, but they can also been seen as the constant reorganization and formalization of the detritus of Mr Barnes’s existence.

While these installations are a response to the legacy of Pop art, Abstraction and Minimalism, Hirst is ultimately most interested in looking at life and mortality. Amid intimations of the search for self and the absent father, Hirst’s conjuring of death and his re-evaluation of our desperate faith in science as some kind of cure-all, are what give these works their resonance. “The fragility of existence was Hirst’s big theme from the beginning,” wrote his friend and frequent interviewer, the late Gordon Burn. “The action of the world on things. It’s why he puts things behind glass and in formaldehyde in big steel and glass cases: to hold off the inevitable decay and corruption; as part of a futile effort to preserve them.” Hirst told Serota: “I’d always thought about death since I was seven years old. I remember when july 2013

Urea-13C (2001-2006)

Relics, a retrospective and the largest ever exhibition of Damien Hirst’s work, will show at the ALRIWAQ DOHA space, next to the Museum of Islamic Art, from 10 October, 2013 to 22 January, 2014. qma.org.qa

it first dawned on me that it was inevitable, and I could never stop thinking about it, from a gruesome point of view. I’ve thought about it every day since, and every day I think about it, it’s different. It goes from being impossible to the only thing. I remember thinking that, in a way, it’s what gives life its beauty… But you never really can come to terms with it or understand it.”

His early explorations of death, art, medicine and science came in the form of visits to the Leeds Museum and Art Gallery, which brought together a natural history display with a library and an exhibition space upstairs, serving to introduce Hirst to art as part of life rather than something “other”, a rare piece of luck for a British working class boy born in 1965.

As a teenager, he spent time at the Leeds University anatomy department, thanks to his girlfriend’s mother, who worked there. Hirst drew cadavers and body parts and pored over medical pathology books, imagining himself as a young Leonardo – crossed with a sophisticated consumer able to enjoy “hideous subject matter in the context of pristine, detached photography so they become delicious, desirable images”, as the critic Brian Dillon put it in his essay on Hirst, Ugly Feelings. Later, Hirst compared these photographs to the clever, clinical advertising of Saatchi & Saatchi, whose slick, minimal aesthetic he emulated in his art. The appearance of intellectual detachment should not be interpreted as emotional distance, however.

Hirst’s work is as much about feeling as it is about ideas. As the Tate Curator Andrew Wilson points out: “Hirst’s art exists at the tipping point between the rationalism of Enlightenment

51

Think. Review thinking and the irrational and unpredictable emotion of romanticism.” Or as Hirst would have it: “I like creating emotions scientifically.”

52

In a now iconic photograph of Hirst posing next to the severed head of an older man whose flesh hangs in lugubrious folds, With Dead Head (1981), the 16-year-old Hirst looks elfin, with spiky hair and a manic smile. “If you look at my face, I’m actually going, ‘Quick, quick, take the photo,’” he told Dillon. “It’s worry, I’m absolutely terrified. I’m grinning but I’m expecting the eyes to open and for it to go: ‘Grrrrrraaaagh!’” As a clear precursor to For the Love of God, With Dead Head demonstrates Hirst’s early understanding that an on-going confrontation with death was to be his subject, no matter how uncomfortable. The photograph was also an indication of Hirst’s preternatural abilities: to produce one’s first memento mori aged 16 is unusual. The budding artist took his preoccupation with the morgue, the abattoir, the laboratory and the operating theatre to Jacob Kramer College, Leeds, where he completed an art foundation course, and then to the depths of southeast London, where he attended Goldsmiths College between 1986 and 1989. The impact of Goldsmiths on Hirst’s generation of artists cannot be overestimated.

Under the aegis of the college’s head of art, Jon Thompson, who took the enlightened step of eradicating boundaries between departments so that students could move at will between painting, sculpture, print and photography, Goldsmiths became known as a hub of intellectual and artistic freedom where the exploration of all the disciplines merged with rigorous discussion, seminars and tutorials.

Students were treated like artists, an openstudio system encouraged self-confidence and self-motivation, critical debate abounded, and teachers included the practicing artists Yehuda Safran, Richard Wentworth and, most notably, Michael Craig-Martin, whose influence has often been acknowledged by the YBAs. At Jacob Kramer, unable to decide between sculpture and painting, Hirst had focused on collage as a medium where the two collided. At Goldsmiths, his inability to choose was par for the course. “I suppose that’s what happens in music now,’ he told Serota, “it’s like sampling, and that’s really what we were doing as artists.”

London hadn’t been cool since David Hockney and Peter Blake emerged in the Swinging Sixties, but as Britain reeled from the

Damien Hirst at his exhibition Beyond Belief at White Cube gallery in London 2007

“Hirst’s art exists at the tipping point between the rationalism of Enlightenment thinking and the irrational and unpredictable emotion of romanticism”

Black Monday stock market crash of October 1987 through to the Poll Tax riots of 1990, Hirst found himself in a city that was experiencing profound change. Punk and Goldsmiths had instilled in him a healthy disrespect for the rules; the Saatchi Gallery in North London, with shows like the two-part NewYork Art Now, and the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, where Hirst worked part-time, gave him a window into the world of artists such as Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Robert Gober, Ashley Bickerton and Jeff Koons. At the same time, the workings of the art market were a source of fascination to him. He eschewed the traditional trajectory by which the artist went from college to gallery, to be given a show every two years or so and left to work toward the next one in the interim; and he was not alone in his rejection of a system that left the artist virtually powerless. In early 1988, his fellow student Angus Fairhurst organized an exhibition at the Bloomsbury Gallery that included works

by Hirst, Fairhurst, Mat Collishaw and Abigail Lane. Then, in August of the same year, with the help of Fairhurst and Lane, Hirst produced Freeze, a three-part exhibition that showcased the work of many future YBAs in an industrial building renovated by the students themselves.

“For a group of young art students, there was no precedent for such a high level of presentation,” observed Muir. “The exhibition was filled with flashing lights and minimalist wall paintings, with a selection of conceptual sculptures and paintings being given the run of the space. For his contribution, Hirst exhibited one of his earliest spot paintings, a regimented assortment of multi-coloured dots painted directly onto the walls.”

that became so substantial and widespread it could not fail to be noticed.” Hirst returned to college, presenting four Medicine Cabinets for his degree show. He made more spot paintings, which he described as a way of controlling color through a “scientific approach” to painting, as well as expressing his love of Minimalists like Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd. He was also struggling whether to give up art and become a curator, deciding eventually to apply his curatorial skills to his work. This led directly to the creation of A ThousandYears, the lifecycle installation that involved a rotting cow’s head covered in feasting, hatching flies which ultimately found their way to the deadly insecto-cutor, their death-throes vocalized by crackly, electrical zaps.

Made for another highly significant group show, Gambler, curated by Carl Freedman and Billee Selman in 1990, A ThousandYears was heavily influenced by the paintings of Francis Bacon. Hirst wanted to make art with meaning, he said, after the “happiness” of the spots: the flies were black dots, spots with darkness, and the work was “alive”. Burn wrote that “‘Francis Bacon said repeatedly that he was committed to the brutality of fact. Echoing this, Hirst has said he likes the violence of inanimate objects.”

The endless dualities and juxtapositions in Hirst’s work – life and death, movement and stillness, dark and light, beauty and gore, hope and fear, science and religion – came to fruition in this strange, visceral work that was almost dangerously good. “The fly piece was the most exciting thing – still is, possibly – the most exciting piece I made,” Hirst told Burn.

Hirst’s professionalism as the curator of Freeze was part of what made that show legendary.

He didn’t just invite the collectors and curators of the day, like Charles Saatchi and the Royal Academy’s influential Exhibitions Secretary, Sir Norman Rosenthal; he drove them to the Docklands himself, and he also took them to see his friend Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture, Ghost, showing at the Chisenhale Gallery in the East End. “There was at this time, and happily continues to be, a great generosity of spirit among these artists, who not only show together but support each other in a thousand other ways too,” wrote Rosenthal in his essay for the Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition in 1997. “Thus was established a new subculture think. magazine

july 2013

“I spent a long time trying to escape from who I am. I always wanted to try not to make ‘Damien Hirsts’, which is why I’ve made so many kinds of things.”

Mother and Child (Divided) (Exhibition copy 2007, original 1993)

“I still don’t really understand how you get to those moments. It’s instinctive; you can’t really control what you do. Lucian Freud said to me, ‘I think you started with the final act, my dear,’ or something like that. And in a way I think he was right. I’d feel lucky if I made another piece that was like that. But I don’t really know what the inspiration was.” Hirst followed this apparently inimitable work with its polar opposite, his mind-blowingly beautiful two-room installation, In and Out of Love, conceived as a solo show in a former travel agency in London, 1991. In the first room, five white canvases were scattered with pupae that hatched into butterflies, which fluttered into the second room to live off flowers and sugar water, laying eggs and landing on surprised visitors, before eventually dying.

Hirst said it was an attempt to create “a living de Kooning painting – but I ended up with something else”.

At this point, 1991-2, Hirst was given a solo show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art and began to make his first works containing animals suspended in formaldehyde. Charles Saatchi’s commissioning of Hirst’s hugely ambitious tiger shark project, for which he gave the artist £150,000 production costs, resulted in what is widely considered to be one of the most iconic images of late 20th century art. Dillon has referred to Hirst’s ability to touch that feeling we all experience, sometimes called the sixth sense, “a particular bodily shudder, a grimace that we are unsure whether to ascribe to the aesthetic or the organic”. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living certainly

53

Think. Review

New York (1989)

54

induced a collective shudder across the UK when it was unveiled in 1992. Loved and hated in equal measure, Hirst’s shark became the emblem of the burgeoning Britart scene, an example of brazen self-promotion or a powerful new conceptualism underpinned by wit, originality and immense sophistication of design, depending on your take. Hirst described the project as “irresistible”, told us that “art can heal”, and continued to work in this medium. His single lamb floating in a glass tank, Away From the Flock (1994), was a heart-breaking embodiment of loneliness, loss and vulnerability, although Hirst found it “almost serene”. A dissected cow in 12 tanks, Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything (1996), allowed the viewer to walk through and around the segments of the animal that seemed to stretch endlessly ahead – death was contained yet relentless, clinical yet suffocating. Mother and Child Divided, the bisected cow and calf first shown at the 1993 Venice Biennale, referenced the religious iconography that Hirst, a Catholic until he was 12, juxtaposes with his examination of science as the now dominant belief system in the West.

In the immensely productive years that followed, Hirst added to his signature spot and spin paintings; developed his Medicine Cabinets and pharmacy installations; made sculptures of delicately levitating balls, of flayed saints and angels, as well as a 20-foot bronze replica of a child’s anatomical model, Hymn 1999-2005. He

Believer (2008)

the author A former Features and News Editor of Art Review, Sophie Hastings has written on art for numerous publications and is a Contributing Editor of GQ.

made monochrome canvases of dead flies and others that resembled stained glass windows filled with iridescent butterflies. He opened Pharmacy restaurant by London’s Notting Hill Gate in 1998 and closed it in 2003, auctioning the fixtures and fittings for £11 million. Always a controversial figure, Hirst inspired much tabloid hilarity in 2001 when an installation at Eyestorm Gallery was thrown away by a cleaner who mistook the bottles, empty coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays Hirst had assembled to represent an artist’s studio for rubbish. He showed his collection of works by Warhol, Prince, Bacon and Banksy, as well as by many of the friends he had once exhibited at Freeze, in the group show, MurderMe, at the Serpentine Gallery, 2006. And then, in 2008, he mounted an auction of his own work at Sotheby’s, a move that he describes as “a moment of transition”.

Beautiful Inside My Head Forever was no mere auction; in bypassing the gallery system and making his own market, Hirst whipped the international art world into a buying frenzy, bringing in £111,576,800 and establishing art as “the most powerful currency in the world”, as he put it. “I spent a long time trying to escape from who I am. I always wanted to try not to make ‘Damien Hirsts’, which is why I’ve made so many kinds of things. Now I don’t try so hard to do that, I just want to make art.”

Whether he has been successful in his new aim is a subject on which visitors to the forthcoming exhibition in Doha will be able to draw their own conclusions. l think. magazine

55

Words around the world

While traditional publishing struggles, literary festivals have taken the international arts scene by storm. But who are they for, and how can they best balance the competing demands of art, politics and money? asks an author who has appeared at events from Glasgow to Gaza written by Selma Dabbagh

When my first novel was published

last year, almost 10 years after I started working on it, I had little idea that my life was about to be taken over by the literary festival circuit. And when that started to happen, I had even less idea of the far-flung travels that would result. After a huge growth in popularity in the past decade, more than 250 literary festivals are now held each year in the UK alone, with others launching every season from Norway to Nepal.

july 2013

Liam Brown, programme director of the Dublin Writers Festival, explains the rise of festivals as the result of audiences’ hunger for face-to-face interaction with writers and other readers. “In the age of the internet, Facebook and Twitter, a festival event offers a sense of a community of readers that is very appealing,” he says. Brown also notes that, since 9/11, readers’ interest in international books and writers has grown. “There has been a greatly increased desire to discover more about other

Think. Review

56

parts of the world, a sense that potentially everything, wherever it might occur, matters now. Festivals are a wonderful way to find out more and ask your own questions.”

Delight and obligation

Before this year, my idea of a book tour involved a VW camper van, a schedule and a box of books. In reality, what I experienced was a series of emailed invitations from individuals, organizations, festivals, solidarity groups (my novel concerns Palestinian resistance) and educational establishments.

In material terms, offers ranged from no expenses or fees – apart from requesting the nomination of a charity for the donation of proceeds – up to business class flights, accommodation and a daily retainer. I was asked to speak alone, to be interviewed, to sit on a panel, to interview other writers or to be a writer-in-residence giving a series of workshops and talks. Some invitations made me whoop with delight; others made me groan with a sense of obligation.

The 2012 Palestine Festival of Literature was the first to take place in Gaza as well as the West Bank

All of them, however, brought adventures.

Apart from numerous London-based events, I travelled to Glasgow, Hebden Bridge, Dublin, Frome, Lahore, Jaipur, Guildford, Sheffield, Bristol (three times), Malta, Dubai and Gaza.

I was driven in armored cars and made to wait at borders for hours. I was asked to read two novels by the next day in order to interview a pair of writers in their second language; I argued with children’s authors until three in the morning over conservative family values in children’s literature; and I sat in a trade and labor club in the north of England with debut novelists and dogs on strings.

Questions from the press ranged from the role of the writer in softening up western public opinion about military attacks (not me), to the motivation of my characters (you work it out), my favorite book (depends on the day), the nature of my former marriage (ouch, please skip), and the political situation in Yemen (why me?). I was told by photographers to hold my pen slightly upwards and lean back, then forward, then to lift the pen up, no, down and turn slightly.

I trudged home from the tube station in the early hours of the morning in bitter British winters wondering what I was doing. I loved all of it without being able to detect a grand plan, as each festival has a different agenda and its own particular culture and character.

“Literature festivals are about the rhythms and sounds of language, about what metaphors can do to take you beyond the here and now,” says Adrian Grima, director of the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival.

“But they also reflect the ideologies of those who create them, invite the writers and set the literary agenda.” Over the past 15 years literature festivals have been held in Beirut, Belfast, Kerala, the Maldives and Zacatecas in Mexico as offshoots of the Hay Festival, which aims to “gather people to think about the world as it is and to imagine how it might be”. Meanwhile, the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival has become a platform for politicians, Bollywood stars and cricketers as well as poets and novelists.

These events have cleaned up, lit, filled and festooned underutilized arts centers (the Lahore Literary Festival); been tear-gassed and partially closed down (the Palestinian Festival of Literature, PalFest); and heralded a new era of political openness (the Irrawaddy festival in Burma). Some are connected to think. magazine

“The challenge for literary festivals is that they have largely become promotional tools.The questions they now face are: what are they trying to achieve? Are they marketing devices for an increasingly commercial business, or are they trying to curate art?”

writing awards, from the modest (short stories at Frome) to the most prestigious of global prizes (International Man Booker at Jaipur).

Some have specific geographical interests (Nour Festival of Art from the Middle East and North Africa and Shubbak, both held in London), gender focuses, or celebrate the work of one writer. Others are integrated into industry-focused book fairs such as those in Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. One is hosted by the English aristocracy (Port Eliot), while others are sponsored by airlines (Emirates Airline Festival of Literature) or infrastructure developers (DSC Jaipur). Sponsors usually have little to do with festival programming – this year, I sat on a panel with writers who used the platform to condemn the policies of the firm paying for the gathering (in this case, Tata Steel in India). But the relationship with july 2013

Burma’s democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi speaks during the media launch of the Irrawaddy Literary Festival in Rangoon, 6 January, 2013

big business raises important questions about festivals’ purpose.

“The challenge for literary festivals is that they have largely become promotional tools,” says the independent consultant Caroline McCormack. “The questions they now face are: what are they trying to achieve? Are they marketing devices for an increasingly commercial business, or are they trying to curate art?

For writers invited to appear, the question of motivation can be more straightforward.

Suzanne Joinson, author of A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar, finds “attending festivals very stimulating and useful, a wonderful networking opportunity, lots of fun and a good chance to hear and talk to other writers”. She says: “Writing can be very solitary and the festival world provides a much-needed break from that lonesomeness.” Most authors agree, although the process of networking and selfpromotion in the midst of stiff competition can be unnerving. It is also extremely difficult to combine travel comprised of short multiple trips with the type of regimented discipline that writing demands. freedom of expression

Beyond their impact on writers’ lives, festivals can be useful tools of “soft diplomacy”. The Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi opened the inaugural Irrawaddy Literary Festival in February 2013 by expressing hope that it “would encourage more people to explore the world of literature and further their understanding of the English language”. But the event was also read as a sign of Burma’s new openness to foreign investors. “Freedom of expression and a marketplace of ideas, as demonstrated

57

Think. Review “Festivals cannot operate in a temporary free speech bubble, isolated from the society around it; they need to accommodate voices that can make authorities uncomfortable”

58 by new literary festivals and the recent launching of independent newspapers, are clear examples of President U Thein Sein’s efforts to reintegrate Burma into the global community,” says James Richard, a partner at New York-based Namir Capital, an investment firm focusing on emerging markets.

The launch of Karachi’s festival in 2010 and the recent growth of the city’s wider arts scene may have had similarly benign effects. “The past 10 years or so have seen the re-emergence of cultural activity in the public realm with state and elite support,” says the Pakistani sociologist Haris Gazdar.

“After 9/11, Pakistan’s military establishment needed to show a ‘soft image’ and the then president, Pervez Musharraf, came up with his thesis of ‘enlightened moderation’.”

One local businessman who attended this year’s event, Zahid Bashir, hopes that “participation by visitors from abroad may eventually allay security concerns and encourage foreign investment”.

But the intersection of the arts and politics can be as much of a burden as a boon, giving rise to scandals and potential arrests. At the Jaipur Festival in January, the controversial sociologist Ashis Nandy was criticized by India’s

26 January, 2013: Dalit activists protest against controversial remarks made by the sociologist Ashis Nandy, above left, at the Jaipur Literature Festival the same month

Supreme Court following his comments on poor and disadvantaged groups in the country.

The five-year-old PalFest, on the other hand, is deemed political by the fact of its existence alone. According to organizer Reema Fadda, PalFest “allows writers and key figures who occupy a position of prestige and significance within the cultural field to witness the effects of occupation/siege on the lives of Palestinians and act as informants about what they have witnessed”. Last year’s gathering, she says, was also “significant in restoring a unified Palestinian cultural initiative – with events held simultaneously in Gaza and the West Bank”. quotas and blockades

Whether festivals are viewed as political depends, according to Fadda, on “whether arts administrators want to own up to the fact that the event they are hosting carries a political aim and whether they want to declare the cultural as political”. Filmmaker Omar Al Qattan, a trustee of the A M Qattan Foundation for culture and education, which is based in Ramallah, Gaza City and London, broadly concurs, but adds that a festival’s success “will be measured by the quality of its writers, not by its political purposes”. think. magazine

It is not only festivals in the Global South that have political objectives. Sian Norris, organizer of the Bristol Women’s Literature Festival, believes that hosting a women’s festival is vital “because the silencing of women’s culture, or ‘cultural femicide’, is a product of living in a patriarchal society. And when women’s voices are silenced in one area, it becomes very easy to silence women in other areas”. Norris decided to set up her festival after becoming aware that at one prestigious UK literature festival, there was “a panel on feminism that was all women. And then just panel after panel after panel of all male writers”.

Not all organizers agree about the importance of female representation. Al Qattan holds the view that festivals without women participants are “50 percent festivals”, and adds: “In my books, 50 percent means failure.” But Caroline McCormack disagrees.

“I am not interested in quotas, whether based on gender, race or religion; I am interested in great art.” Surprisingly, in Pakistan, where perceptions of gender inequalities are stronger, female participation can in fact be less of an issue. Short story writer and bookseller Aysha Raja explains that “many women had pivotal roles in the planning and execution of the Lahore Festival… both genders were equally represented from the inception. As a result, there was no need for a concerted effort to include women as an afterthought.”

Of all the festivals I have attended, those in Lahore and Palestine had the greatest sense of urgency. In Gaza we were breaking a blockade; Lahore felt like a city experiencing one. In both, audiences filled the aisles and stood against walls, so attentive you could have heard a pin drop. In Lahore, this was partly because, according to Raja, the festival has “a social rather than a political aim.

With the rolling back of cultural activities, largely due to security concerns, life in the city has become increasingly stifling and its inhabitants isolated from the rest of the world”. The festival, she says, “has not july 2013

the author Selma Dabbagh is a Palestinian-British author whose first novel, Out of It, set between Gaza, London and the Gulf, was published by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing last year.

restored us to our former glory when you measure it against all that we’ve lost since the beginning of the ‘War on Terror’, but it has been a much-needed breath of fresh air.”

Festivals can also have a positive effect on a region or country’s broader cultural life.

PalFest, for instance, is linked to the Palestine Writing Workshops, the ShiberHur theatre company in Haifa, and the Freedom Theatre in Jenin Refugee Camp. In Malta, the annual gathering has become a morale booster for the local literary scene, with writers starting to think of publishing books in time for the festival, while also providing an invaluable platform for a diversity of, and dialogue between, smaller languages. At the 2012 festival writers read in Maltese, Arabic, Slovenian, Catalan, Italian, Spanish and Greek, and translated each other’s writings in workshops.

But hosting literature festivals is not without a downside for governments. Openness to investment and culture carries with it the responsibility of hearing voices that some countries would prefer to remain silent.

Festivals cannot operate in a temporary free speech bubble, isolated from the society around it; they need to accommodate voices that can make authorities uncomfortable.

The potentially sensitive nature of literary festivals means funding can be hard to secure. McCormack says she was “appalled” by the responses she received while trying to fundraise for Arab regionfocused organizations, “not only from the corporate world, but also on occasion from the charitable sector”. Omar Al Qattan says the difficulty he has encountered searching for financial support for the Shubbak Festival of Contemporary Arab Culture in London, which he chairs, “is two-fold: there is no political backing as most embassies are deeply scared of culture’s power. There’s also an elite with little self-belief and an overpowering inferiority complex inherited from the colonial age”.

“But,” he adds, “luckily all that is starting to change.”

For literary festivals to continue to thrive, and for literature to develop as an art as well as an industry, sponsors and philanthropists must be prepared to open both their minds and their purses. Without this backing and a hands-off approach to the subject matter, the long-term benefits of literary festivals will occur only by accident rather than by design. l

59

Think. Review Manila is almost

Letter from

mythical in her contradictions and dimensions. Dirty, divine.

Corrupt, colorful. Overcrowded, underappreciated. The city is many things to many people. But to all Manilenos, even those who have left, she remains, singularly, home.

I was born in that city of wall-to-wall concrete, though it was abstract to me growing up. My family had moved to Vancouver after the dictator Ferdinand Marcos imposed Martial Law in 1972 – but we, too, called far-off Manila “home”, for it could never be otherwise. All our relatives were there, along with our culture, our food, our language, our inexorable past and inevitable future.

MANILA

by Miguel Syjuco

60

I remember our trips back, to that foreign place where I belonged. We returned so regularly the vacations blend in my mind into one parallel life. First, the Manila International Airport, as it was still called (it was later renamed after the opposition leader Ninoy Aquino, assassinated there in 1983). Its linoleum was worn as now, the lines at immigration long as ever.

Outside, the humidity and crowds waited expectantly, as did the streets congested with taxis, festooned jeepneys, smoke-belching “Love Buses”, glassy-eyed street urchins and lepers missing limbs. All these became as fascinating and familiar to me as the houses of my parents’ childhoods, the church where they were married, the graves of my ancestors, and the clan reunions with their typical Filipino overabundance.

There’s no shock like home think. magazine

july 2013

“On the surface, the megalopolis is ugly, polluted, and frenetic.

Comprised of 16 distinct cities and one municipality, it’s the eleventh most-populous conurbation on the planet, home to more than 12 million souls – 13 percent of the Philippine population” Compared to my life in Canada, Manila was an odd “normal”. In our house in the exclusive Forbes Park area, I hated being served by maids.

In the malls, I tried to flee my bodyguards, with their bulbous beer bellies, aviator shades, and squawking walkietalkies. My older siblings and cousins dressed like the local teen heart-throbs, who we’d see hanging out at the Polo Club on our way to swimming or tennis lessons.

At night, when the power failed, machine guns would be unpacked, guards at the ready, ears cocked to discern whether the distant thrum was just generators or actually the sound of helicopters heralding a coup d’etat.

At summer’s end came the tearful goodbyes, and we’d return to Canada with boxes brimming with tastes of home – assorted biscuits from the famous Panaderia de Molo; packs of dried mangoes; big chunks of rock salt to rub on our rice; sugared tamarind sparkling like dark jewels under gemhued cellophane; or jars of preserves and sweet beans for making halo-halo, using freshly fallen snow instead of shaven ice. Just as an embassy is sovereign soil,

our Vancouver household was Filipino – replete with the clichéd giant spoon and fork hung proudly on the wall. Even in school at Vancouver College, my best friends were fellow Pinoys, a choice which now seems uncanny and telling for a nine-year-old to have made.

Never did I consider myself Canadian; I don’t even today, despite what one of my passports says.

Finally, in 1986, came that indelible evening that sent us on the road home. Bedtime was ignored as my family gathered tearfully round the TV to watch crowds fill the streets of Metro Manila.

“I just can’t believe it,” my mother said, over and over, as Filipinos peacefully faced down the infantry and tanks, sending the incontinent dictator and his family fleeing like rats from the ship they couldn’t sink.

After that, we returned home more frequently. My father ran for mayor of Makati, Manila’s central business district, and my parents dragged me along on their campaign trails.

Through shanty towns and circuitous barangays, I had my cheeks pinched and hair tousled, and for the first

time closely encountered profound poverty and its great disparity from the world I knew; never had I suspected that you only need a few minutes to go from one parallel reality of Manila to another.

After my older siblings graduated, our family finally returned to the Philippines for good. I never knew my parents had been waiting for that, but I like fancifully to believe that somewhere inside me I knew I would go back. Doesn’t destiny always involve coming full circle? What I know for sure is: to a child émigré, there’s no culture shock quite like returning home.

Today, a large percentage of Filipinos chart their own variations on this theme, impelled not by their politics but by limited opportunities.

More than 10 million workers have passed through Manila on their way to richer cities, from Hong Kong to Jeddah, London to Toronto.

Meanwhile, a new generation of young Filipinos raised abroad is increasingly returning to discover its origins, as I did before.

To all, Metro Manila’s an anchor, both cumbersome and comforting.

On the surface, the megalopolis is ugly, polluted, and frenetic.

Comprised of 16 distinct cities and one municipality, it’s the eleventh mostpopulous conurbation on the planet, home to more than 12 million souls – 13 percent of the Philippine population. Its streets are confusing, its development higgledy-piggledy, and the daily road traffic as bogging

61

Think. Review

62

“The persistent divide between rich and poor is most evident in the capital, where mansions are separated from shanties by only habit and hollowblock walls.The middle class may be growing, but the majority of wealth remains in the hands of the minority”

as its bureaucracies and the annual floods during rainy season. Most Filipinos will encourage you just to pass through on your way to the paradise of our islands.

But those who love her as I do know Manila’s hidden charms make her all the more fascinating. Anyone can fall for Paris, but Manila beguiles only the deserving – the adventurous and the curious who are willing to dig, to listen, to wait, to explore.

Its history is deep and rich. Straddling the river Pasig, nestled between a lake and a bay, the Kingdom of Maynila flourished in the 13th and 14th centuries.

The Sultanate of Brunei later conquered, expanding the reach of Islam. In 1571, on the wreckage of what they’d just pillaged, Spanish conquistadors led by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi erected Manila’s walled city of Intramuros.

It would weather attacks from dastardly Chinese pirates, rising as the bastion for the new capital of the archipelago claimed and named for King Philip II. Noble and ever loyal – that’s what the Spanish monarch dubbed Manila. It’s been ever thus to Filipinos, even through periods of change. During the ManilaAcapulco galleon trade from the 16th to the early 19th centuries, it connected the Philippines to the world.

When nationalists ousted their colonizers in 1898, the revolution centered around the city. After their American allies reneged on their promises, raising the Stars and Stripes over Intramuros, the brutal

Filipino-American War began. Four decades later, General Douglas MacArthur so loved Manila he declared it an open city to save it from the advancing Japanese.

When they, too, retreated, three years later, Manila became the second-most devastated Allied city of the war, destroyed

by Japanese resistance and American artillery.

Manileños abandoned the ruins and trauma, settling the suburbs of what would become today’s metropolis.

Postwar boom became bust, culminating under the Marcoses’ conjugal dictatorship. The musical chairs that followed their ousting have only recently

given way to proper growth.

Throughout, Manila never shed her central significance.

What was once the Pearl of the Orient and the gateway to Asia is now the callcenter of the world, the supermall of the universe.

It’s no wonder the city feels to millions like the beating heart of our very being.

Plus, now, for the first think. magazine

time in generations, the Philippines is booming. Its capital’s skyline is restless with cranes building skyscrapers. The current administration of Benigno Aquino III has focused on fighting corruption, and reports predict the country will join the world’s 10 fastest growing economies this year. In December, july 2013

Standard & Poor’s raised its rating from “stable” to “positive”, while the peso continues to strengthen. The city is filling with thousands of young office workers who a few years ago would have left for jobs abroad as maids or construction workers.

Confidence is so high that Manila’s suddenly seen as worth a gamble – literally, with a multi-billion-dollar casino district opening on Manila Bay intended to give Macau a run for its money.

There’s still so much to be done. The persistent divide between rich and poor is most evident in the capital, where mansions are separated from shanties by only habit and hollow-block walls.

The middle class may be growing, but the majority of wealth remains in the hands of the minority. This year’s Transparency International corruption index places the Philippines up 24 spots, to 105 – though out of a total ranking of 182. Women’s rights are still sacrificed to the superstitions of powerful religious groups. Professors and critics stifle art and literature with the myopic Marxism they hold so dear.

Local politicians steadily demolish our dwindling heritage architecture. The

judiciary gravely needs reform. And 10 percent of our gross domestic product is from remittances from abroad, while an entire generation of kids is raised with their parents working a world away.

But despite the growing pains, it’s hard not to be excited by Manila’s reinvention. I live again in Canada, this time in Montreal; I visit Manila annually, as I did in childhood. But in recent years, the distance between home and abroad has shrunk significantly. Partly, perhaps, because of the internet, which allows expat Pinoys still to participate in familial and national affairs.

But mostly, I think, because of Filipinos’ conception of ourselves, which is expanding to be inclusive rather than exclusive.

Filipinos, you see, have always been the ultimate culture chameleons – quick with accents, mastering pop references, and taking to foreign ways like fries to ketchup. The Pinoy immigrant’s deftness at fitting in tended to render our own culture marginal in the world, separating the “fake” Filipinos who left

from the “real” Filipinos who stayed on our shores.

Nationalism was the cure for imperialism, just as assimilation was the antidote for alienation.

But such postcolonial angst is as outdated as bell-bottomed jeans.

Increasingly, we Filipinos are realizing that our authenticity involves embracing what was once rejected: our centuries-old, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, melting-pot culture. In other words, we’re learning to embrace our diversity. We’re maturing enough to admit it doesn’t dilute us, it expands who we are. From Filipino nurses, to the Los Angelesbased fashion designer Monique Lhuillier; from the fast food chain Jollibee in California, to the upmarket eatery Maharlika in NYC; from Manny Pacquiao, to Enrique Iglesias; from the Philippines’ homegrown Indian or American or Chinese or mestizo communities, to the halfFilipino stars on our national soccer team – we are coming to appreciate that the world is ours as much as anyone else’s.

And Manila: she remains noble and ever loyal.

What was once a place colonized by the world has become a central part of the globetrotting Filipino experience. Whether we’re actually from there, or whether we never return, Manila will always be home.

That’s why we love her. l Miguel Syjuco is a writer whose first novel, Illustrado, won the Man Asian Literary Prize for 2008 and the Grand Prize at the Palanca Awards in the same year.

63

The ideas column written by Archana Kapoor

A rchana Kapoor is a filmmaker, publisher and founder of Seeking Modern Applications for Real Transformation, an NGO working with marginalized communities in India

64

It should be so simple.

If an Indian woman in labor dials the emergency number 102, an ambulance shows up within 30 minutes and prompt medical help is provided to her and her baby. Sadly, it often does not happen like this. In India, 29 percent of newborns die within 24 hours, and 46 percent die within a year. The national average maternal mortality rate is 200 out of every 100,000.

In Mewat district, where I run the not-for-profit organization Seeking Modern Applications for Real Transformations (SMART), these indicators are worse than the national average. One of the most deprived areas in northern India, with a predominantly Muslim population, Mewat is barely 70km from Delhi.

Yet it exists in a different century, isolated from the rest of the world, struggling

with basic needs such as health, education and sanitation.

After years spent running a local radio station, Radio Mewat, I have realized that despite the many problems of the community, it is access to information that changes lives. For example, dialling 102 could mean the difference between life and death for a pregnant woman and her child. The helpline provides emergency care, specialized intervention and free food and medicines – but lack of awareness about the service means that women are still dying during childbirth. A few years ago the reason for not making such a call could have been

lack of access to a telephone, but now most homes in Mewat have at least one mobile phone.

The challenge is to fill in the important piece of the jigsaw puzzle between the phone and the awareness required to make the crucial call. Unfortunately, many women from conservative families are not allowed to use mobiles, making it even more important that this information is readily available to everyone, not only women.

Another challenge has been to engage youth members of local government (Panchayati Raj) bodies. Our endeavor has been to make them

aware of their responsibilities and able to demand accountability from officials and conduct social audits of development funds from the state. Radio programs on local government have enabled these young people to help in the fight against corruption, creating greater transparency while empowering ordinary citizens to hold their governments to account.

Increased awareness has also helped the women of Khedli Dosa village to pick up the phone and reach out to the police about the menace of illicit alcohol peddled by drunk men. After receiving many complaints, the police raided the local distillery. Before the problem was aired on the radio the police had not even lodged an initial report, but the community’s response ensured that they responded more sensitively. A quiet revolution is sweeping areas such as Mewat. Information that was previously withheld is beginning to reach ordinary people, promoting development, equality and access. The voiceless and powerless are now able to challenge the status quo.� l think. magazine

65

july 2013

66

think. magazine