december2010

netherhalldecember news 2010

what is the point of going to university?

contents in this issue 12 16 18 22 24 26 27 28 32

university s why bother? only a bad dream s waking up from darwin’s nightmare pathways to poverty s the centre for social justice what’s so good about shakespeare? s the long and short of it condoms s not the solution think you’re happy? s the economic psychology of happiness from professional killer s to headmaster animal rights s and wrongs sudan s on the brink of war

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editorial director’s notes film club desert island discs Cover page: in the month when students took to the streets to protest cuts in higher education funding, aaron taylor asks what’s the purpose of university education anyway? (see page 12)

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Giles Macdonogh, journalist and writer, visited Netherhall 22nd November 2010 and spoke about Germany straight after the second world war. While Germany inflicted great suffering on many other nations during the conflict, she herself suffered greatly in the immediate aftermath. Mr Macdonogh, whose interests and publications range from gastronomy to German history, argued that Germany was greatly punished for her crimes. Without in anyway trying to play down her guilt, Mr Macdonogh considered that recognising this fact is a matter of historical truth that should not be overlooked.

CONTENT EDITOR Zubin Mistry MANAGING EDITOR, DESIGN & SETTING Luke Wilkinson CONTRIBUTIONS AND ADVICE Peter Brown, Fr Joe Evans, Simon Jared, Aaron Taylor, Andrei Serban, Dominic Burbidge, Prakarsh Singh, Raffy Rodriguez, Karl Hohenberg, Miguel Lim, James Osborne PHOTOGRAPHY Raffy Rodriguez, Simon Jared CIRCULATION Netherhall News is sent by e-mail to current and past residents of Netherhall House. It is also available at http://www.nh.netherhall.org.uk/magazine/magazine.htm CONTACT US Would you like to be included in our mailing list, contribute to or express your opinion on Netherhall News? Write to: LUKE WILKINSON C/O NETHERHALL NEWS, NETHERHALL HOUSE, NUTLEY TERRACE, LONDON, NW3 5SA, U.K. or E-MAIL: alumni@nh.netherhall.org.uk DISCLAIMER All opinions expressed in this magazine are those of the authors concerned and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors of Netherhall News, of Netherhall House or of Opus Dei.

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editorial one of life’s more important lessons is that zombies are dead pesky things, learns zubin mistry 4 netherhall news

top left: Max Schreck’s decrepit Count Orloff bottom left: Excessive viewing of zombie films can have detrimental health effects, to which zubin’s pallor attests. Zombie films should be consumed moderately as part of a balanced televisual diet eastern European folklore. In the eighteenth century, a kind of vampire hysteria gripped various communities, with alleged cases of empty graves and sprees of vampiric murders in Prussia and the Balkans. These vampires were not suave, sophisticated and dangerously seductive creatures but foul beings supposedly created by untimely deaths, improper burials and magic rituals. Local communities dug up graves and staked corpses in panicked response. Vampire hysteria was a real problem and, in the midst of the Enlightenment, scholars found themselves dealing with vampire stories. Voltaire mentioned vampires, sceptically of course, in his Philosophical Dictionary, while other scholars were more undecided. Following official debunking enquiries, controversies and panics were quelled. The Habsburg monarch Maria Theresa saw fit to send her own physician to investigate matters and prohibited exhumations after he had reported authoritatively that vampires did not exist.

But the folkloric memory was not altogether forgotten. It was transmitted particularly in fiction, most famously at the end of the nineteenth century in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Since then, vampires continue to be written about and have attained a powerful visual presence on the screen, ranging from Max Schreck’s decrepit Count Orloff in the classic silent film Nosferatu to the suave but in retrospect slightly camp portrayals of Dracula by the likes of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee. Vampires are now safely domesticated. The disconcertingly photogenic vampires in the phenomenally successful Twilight series, based on an equally successful series of books by Stephenie Meyer, appeal to hordes of teenagers while Count von Count, a delightful muppet version of Bela Lugosi, has been an integral part of Sesame Street for years. They call him the Count, incidentally, because he loves to count things.

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aced with a zombie apocalypse, life wouldn’t be easy for struggling bands of human survivors. For a start, they would have to locate conveniently discarded firearms. (The prospect of a zombie apocalypse is, of course, the strongest argument for liberal gun control laws). They would have to aim for the head. But, just as fearfully, they would also have to struggle with semantics: does it make any sense to kill what’s already dead? Prima facie, zombies aren’t a terribly pretty sight. That even holds true for the prettier ones. But, they’re more intriguing and adaptable than first appearances suggest.

All manner of other creatures have their own history. For example, even if blood-drinking entities have a long cultural history across epochs and continents, recognisable vampire stories grew out of

Zombies have not quite become instruments of television education. They nonetheless have enjoyed a comparable trajectory in twentieth century popular culture. If the quality of these artefacts of popular culture has undoubtedly varied, then it must be said that those, like me, with a penchant for zombie fare have a capacity to savour the trashiest zombie flicks, though I’ve never been tempted to join any of the organised zombie walks which are, apparently, growing in popularity. I have lived through a revival of interest in zombies since the late 1990s, a revival which has led to bad jokes about how zombies never die and a range of intriguing and, sometimes, bewildering cultural products. Aside from better known films, like the breathtaking 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, are the parodic homage Shaun of the Dead and the low-budget British film Colin (which I’ve yet to see) in which viewers are treated (if that’s the word) to a zombie’s perspective on an apocalyptic infestation. In print, two standouts have been Max Brooks’ excellent World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War,

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a fictionalised collection of first-person accounts purportedly published a decade or so after a worldwide zombie outbreak, and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Which is exactly as the title says.

Like vampires, zombies also have their own deeper history. But, perhaps uniquely among the panoply of disquieting monsters, the modern zombie can be traced back clearly to non-Western origins. The zombie has roots in the zombi peculiar to the Caribbean island of Haiti, embedded in Voodoo or Vodou, the Haitian religio-cultural system which developed over centuries during Haiti’s time as a disputed slave colony and, later, the first ‘black republic’. Known to us largely through the caricatures of western travel writers from the end of the nineteenth century, Voodoo was the product of syncretistic evolution. Largely West African slaves brought over traditional religions which remarkably endured by interacting with certain Taíno beliefs (the Taínos were pre-Columbian inhabitants of various Caribbean islands) and incorporating formal and ritual aspects of Catholicism, in part to hide practices from disapproving slave-masters.

Within this system, the zombi was a figure of living death. In popular belief, someone who died could be revived as a zombi by a bokor, or sorcerer, using magic or potions. These zombis had lost their will and remained under the control of bokors. The livingdead zombi was not necessarily an integral part of Voodoo, which at any rate has no centralised organisational structure, but existed in folklore at the margins of a broader cultural system.

Two interesting features of zombis and Voodoo are worth emphasising. First, the zombi, which stood as the surest sign of Haitian depravity and credulity to outsiders, made a certain sense from an internal perspective. In the 1980s, a Canadian anthropologist, Wade Davis, investigated Haitian zombis and argued that they really did exist, in a sense. There had certainly been cases of people who had been reported dead and even buried, only to reappear years later. A famous case concerned Clairvius Narcisse, a man who was apparently poisoned with drugs that provoked a deathlike state after a quarrel over land with his brother. Narcisse was buried in 1962. But, the story goes in Davis’ telling, his body was recovered and he was given a hallucinogenic drug by a bokor, who forced him to work on a sugar plantation alongside other zombi slaves. When the bokor died and the regular doses of the hallucinogenic ceased, Narcisse came to his senses. Many years later, he returned to his family.

On Davis’ account, the Haitian zombi could be explained beyond caricatures. The purpose of zombification was set by certain covert societies which monitored community norms. Voodoo moral norms focussed particularly on greed and community transgression, and zombis were believed to be punished for such transgressions. The means were pharmacological, powders specially prepared to simulate death (based on the lethal drug Tetrodotoxin) and thereafter subjugate victims. But, crucially, these drugs were not sufficient in themselves. They required a cultural context in which victims were frightened of becoming a zombi and believed they had indeed become one when administered the powders.

Davis’ work, however, was roundly criticised. His analysis of the drugs in question together with his assumptions about Voodoo and Haitian society were considered highly problematic.

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Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow drew on the director’s interest in Davis’ book on zombis of the same title, but ended up sensationalising the subject matter

For, second, Haiti has long been represented and comprehended in a sensationalising way. Part of this was, in Inglis’ words, ‘stimulated by stimulated by racist fears over what was in the nineteenth century a glaring socio-political anomaly, the world’s first ‘black republic’ ’. Haiti was born of an eventually successful slave revolt initially led by the famous former slave Toussaint Louverture and which finally overthrew the French in 1804, a conflict in which the death toll reached many tens of thousands on both sides. The successful overthrow was followed, however, by cycles of violent political rivalry among post-revolutionary leaders, and Haiti became a source of disgust to many western observers. From the end of the nineteenth century, the zombi stood as the ‘condensed symbol of Haitian barbarity’ in many western eyes. (This morbid fascination lingers on. Earlier this year, during a broadcast disaster relief appeal following the Haiti earthquake, the American televangelist Pat Robertson said: ‘Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it...

[The Haitians] were under the heel of the French...and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.’ True story. And the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another.’).

Nonetheless, Davis’ work raises important questions. His emphasis upon not simply studying the pharmacological properties of drugs but also the cultural contexts in which their use made sense is widely shared by the best practitioners in the history of medicine. (In a shameless plug...this is something I consider in my own PhD). Furthermore, outside perspectives which emphasised Haitian credulity and depravity were not really ways of understanding zombi beliefs any more than similarly scornful perspectives on crusading, Inquisitions or blood libels have illuminated medieval history. In a Haitian context, the zombi resonated with real fears over community cohesion, landgrabbing and even a flickering memory of Haiti’s slave history.

Moreover, as the sociologist David Inglis has noted, even if Davis’ work was problematic, part of the backlash reflected broader tendencies which minimised any possibility that Davis’ more interesting suggestions could be taken seriously. Specifically, a ‘hundred years and more of sensationalising representations of Haiti’ combined with the ‘evolution in popular culture of the zombie figure away from its roots in Haitian folk culture towards something that exists only in apparently debased commercial, industrial-cultural contexts’, namely the modern zombie. According to Inglis, we are predisposed to find Davis’ work ridiculous because the subject matter combines a context (Haiti) prone to sensationalist misunderstanding and a subject (zombies) which we associate with the frivolity of entertainment.

From the 1920s, stories drawing on the tropes of Haitian voodoo fed the popular imagination and allowed the entry of the now-anglicised zombie into the vernacular. The first great wave of horror films also incorporated these themes. The 1932 film White Zombie depicted the transformation of a young woman into a zombie at the hands of a voodoo master played by none other than Bela Lugosi. The connections between zombies and Haitian Voodoo were not ephemeral and over the decades a clutch of other films contained similar depictions. The 1966 Hammer horror flick The Plague of Zombies brought Voodoo to, er, Cornwall in the form of a a villain who returns from a trip to Haiti with knowledge of the dark arts and revives victims to work in a mine. But an evolution was also taking place. Fiction like Richard Matheson’s 1954 I Am Legend and, earlier, several H.P. Lovecraft stories introduced novel themes: respectively, the idea of an apocalyptic infestation and the resurrected dead as uncontrollable and violent. Likewise, other films depicted zombie hordes unleashed by aliens (Plan 9 from Outer Space) and mad scientists intent on resurrecting the Third Reich (Revenge of the Zombies).

As is well known, the real turning point came in the late 1960s, with George Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead, which remains the benchmark for zombie films and the prime source for the conspicuously recognisable modern zombie, the rotting, stumbling, mindless living dead. Where earlier zombie themes had been sensationalising, this new approach had moved far from the zombi origins and sought to embody forms of social critique.

After Romero, the cinematic landscape changed, and zombie films have been produced in varying cycles of gravitas and gore, underground and mainstream.

Underneath the recognisable form of the grotesque modern zombie, then, lies a less familiar history of mutations. None of which, of course, will be of any use if a zombie apocalypse were to unfold, for zombies are infamously indifferent to cultural contexts.

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director’ s notes peter brown realises that you just don’t

know who your neighbour will become...

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t’s like London buses. None come for ages and then a whole crop come at the same time. We haven’t had a PhD viva for ages and then suddenly lots of Netherhall residents are finishing and passing their vivas. Strange though it may seem, Russell Wilcox (2004-07) was the first. Russell finally passed his viva earlier this year despite (and this is rumour) his thesis being 3.5 times the maximum size permitted by SOAS. Russell was quickly followed by Kevin Gouder (2005-10) whose PhD research has been keeping occupied several wind tunnels at Imperial College for a number of years. Then this week we have had staying with us Ricardo Ribeira (2004-09) who has successfully completed his viva on Wednesday 24th November at UCL. Congratulations to all three. It’s interesting too that they are in such different areas of expertise. Ricardo on economics, Kevin on aeronautics and Russell on, well, everything since the world began (though ostensibly a comparative study of Chinese and Indian Law). Hopefully we shall very soon be able to add Miguel Anton and Prakarsh Singh to the roll of honour.

from left-right: pat perry, who recently celebrated his 60th birthday, peter brown (age not disclosed), and ricardo ribeira, who has just had his phd viva 8 netherhall news

in attendance at the first annual Netherhall anglo-french reunion, (back row l-r): olivier pluchery, jean-eudes huguet, paul schira, miguel lim, olivier coste, xavier de regloix, edouard de monicault, jean d’eau (seated l-r) amaury vuatrin, peter brown, benoit perrin If one were to ask any normal British student the two most important dates in recent Anglo-French history they would most likely (and quite rightly) point out 21st October 1805 (Battle of Trafalgar) and 18th June 1815 (Battle of Waterloo). But I’d like to think that there is now, at least in Anglo-French Netherhall history, another important date in the calendar: 5th January 2010. It was on this day that we held in Paris the first of what we hope to be an annual reunion of former French residents. We met initially in Garnelles (a centre of Opus Dei in Paris) where we had a meditation and aperitif and then spent a wonderful evening in a local restaurant. I don’t know what the former residents made of it but I enjoyed it enormously. It was wonderful to see so many of them in their own country. Initially many of them (especially Paul Schira) were insistent that we go to a restaurant where we could get English food, so sentimental were they about their time in Netherhall!! Eventually I managed to convince them however that as we were in Paris we really ought to give French cuisine a chance. The oldest former resident was the great Olivier Coste (1996-1997 and 2002-2003). Also present were Jean Rapheal Lapluye (2001-2), Jean-Eudes Huguet (2010), Benoit Perrin (07-08), Paul Schira (08-10), Edouard de Monicault (2010), Amaury Vuatrin (09-10), Miguel Lim (09-), Xavier de Regloix (09-10), and Jean Michel Pinto (08-09).

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Congratulations next to Aditya Singh who departed Netherhall on 26th November. He will be married next week in a four day ceremony to Saubhagya Kankshini. We wish him and his fiancée every happiness for their life together. Aditya has been here in London studying filmmaking and we look forward to seeing the great Bollywood productions we are sure he will direct in the future.

Congratulations too to Andrew Lawrence (2008-) who was received into the Catholic Church at Brompton oratory on Saturday 27th November. It was a wonderful ceremony followed by a celebration later in the evening here in Netherhall with all the Laurence family in attendance.

Finally, congratulations to Mr Pat Perry who qualifies for his freedom pass today (1st December) as he reaches 60! Pat has been the maintenance manager here since 1994. He literally stops the house from falling apart.

Finally, if you lived in Netherhall in 1989-1990 you will be interested to hear that Sükhbaataryn Batbold, a resident from October 1989 to June 1990, is now the Prime Minister of Mongolia. You just don’t know who you have as a neighbour!

“You just don’t know who you have as a neighbour”

left: we recently learned that former resident sukhbaataryn batbold, (1989-1990) is now the prime minister of mongolia below: andrew laurence (centre) with friends and family. He was received into the Church at Brompton Oratory, on Saturday 27th November, by Fr Ignatius Harrison, Provost of the Oratory. After this he received his First Holy Communion in a Mass of the Extraordinary Form. A contingent of some 10 Netherhall residents went down to attend the ceremony. In the evening we had a reception at Netherhall for him and his family, with numerous residents attending, to celebrate the event. Andrew studies Theology at Heythrop College. He is in his second year at the hall

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University: Why Bother?

In a month when student politics took the headlines, Aaron Taylor asks what education is really for

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ere in the United Kingdom, £85.6 billion was spent on education in the last fiscal year, £12.9 billion of which was allocated to tertiary education. The only major areas in which the state spent more money were health, welfare, and pensions. This figure, of course, only takes into account the money spent from taxes collected by the state, and does not include spending by private individuals on independent schools, paying for private tutors, donations given by alumni, money invested in research projects by businesses and other organisations, tuition at private universities, and so on. Yet with the cap on tuition fees looking likely to be lifted by the coalition government, pushing graduate debts even higher, perhaps it is worth asking why we bother spending all this money. What is the point of education?

Recent years have witnessed the increasing popularity of a new subject amongst the smorgasbord offered at colleges of further education in the UK. ‘Critical thinking’ is of course an excellent skill in itself (although one wonders why it needs to be taught as a separate subject rather than simply inculcated through sound academic practice), provided we remember that the critical faculty, when isolated from any solid philosophical foundations, is not actually able to teach us anything. William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), the influential American academic who coined the term ‘sociology’, wrote back in 1906 that: ‘Education is good just so far as it produces [a] well-developed critical faculty . . . A teacher of any subject who insists on accuracy and a rational control of all processes and methods, and who holds everything open to unlimited verification and revision is cultivating that method as a habit in the pupils. Men educated in it cannot be stampeded . . .They are slow to believe. . .Education in the critical faculty is the only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens.’

Yet, we might ask, what are men thus educated actually learning, apart from being able to offer witty dissections of other people’s arguments? Are men thus educated likely to have a profound grasp of anything at all, or simply become intellectually arrogant airheads without any good ideas of their own? This is not to say that the critical faculty is not incredibly important, but we can only make judgments if we have a standard to judge things by. Men have a natural desire to attain to knowledge of the truth, something they expect to be able to achieve through education. If the purpose of education is not to help us to discover the truth, but simply to help us look clever in a relativistic world, then why bother spending so much money on it? Many readers I hope will be nodding their heads in agreement at such an expression of common sense, but the stumbling block for many comes when we consider the question of whether education needs to teach us anything beyond true facts.

The seminal book by C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, is often considered as one of the most well-crafted defences of the natural law tradition ever written. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute ranked it as the second best book of the twentieth century. Yet many people forget the book’s subtitle: Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools. An article by David Naugle entitled ‘Education and the Abolition of Man’ provides an excellent exposition of Lewis’ argument, which can be summarised as: ‘the purpose of education is to teach genuine truth and virtue to students, and to reinforce such teachings by the cultivation of the appropriate affections that would shape genuine human character and simultaneously protect young people from temptation’. The purpose of education according to Lewis, as Naugle observes, was not to teach fact alone, but to teach truth and virtue. But why virtue? And why should it be something which educators aim at?

Steve Bertucci, an American writer and speaker on education, brings out the reason for this more succinctly than I could in a short article entitled ‘Education: What’s the Point?’. He starts by observing that when he speaks to groups about education, he often asks the question ‘Why are you going to all this effort, and expense? What is the point of it?’ And, he says, he receives a variety of answers:

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“A good education is not just one which teaches us true facts about the world, but should also help us to develop the virtues necessary to live in accordance with the truth we come to know� netherhall news 13

The roots of the Western tradition as represented by Raphael’s ‘The School of Athens’ ‘They generally fall along these lines: The end of education is to produce good citizens. To produce productive people. To learn to efficiently find information. To get a good job. To achieve full potential.

To read and write well. To learn to think.’

He goes on to point out that none of these responses is actually an answer to his question, but just lead to a bigger question of why we should want ourselves or our children to do or achieve those things. Why should we want to be good citizens? To find a job?

To learn to think? He argues that: ‘The question about the goal of education cannot be answered without first answering the question. “What is the goal, or end, of a human being?” After all, shouldn’t the goal of education be to help us achieve whatever is the goal of human life? Is there a goal that is universal, common to all people? Aristotle says that is happiness. Everybody wants it. We want other things as a means to obtaining it . . . That leads to a big question - who is the happy man? Socrates [another ancient Greek!] says the happy man is the one who is good and noble.

How do we become good? By learning to love what is true and good and beautiful we will learn to be virtuous and, as Aristotle says, it is a life of virtue that gives us the best chance for a good life, a happy life.’

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Thomas Aquinas observed that when men have a passion in relation to something, it tends to drag them to excess or defect in their judgment about that thing. To give a rather specious example, many people today have all kinds of phobias, and a surgeon who has ‘Ergasiophobia’ – defined as ‘a fear of work of any kind’ – is likely to be severely hampered in his judgment regarding whether a chronically ill patient requires an operation, and may come up with foolish reasons (which seem plausible to him) why the patient doesn‘t need an operation at all.

A silly example, but it illustrates the point that intellectually we are all damaged goods. We might conclude that the solution is to adopt the kind of detached approach advocated by the ‘critical thinkers’, but this is not the classical approach to education advocated by the great thinkers of the western tradition, although rigorous analysis of arguments is certainly part of that tradition.

The classical tradition argues that we ought to have passions in relation to certain things, and that a good education consists just as much in teaching us to have the right passions in relation to the right things, as it does in teaching us knowledge. We do not call a man who does not love his own mother enlightened, but heartless. We intuit that, unless he has had an exceptionally horrifying upbringing, he is lacking something, both in his intellectual judgment and his moral fibre.

C. S. Lewis sums up this second function of education in The Abolition of Man when he argues that ‘[the] little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful’. A good education is not just an education which teaches us true facts about the world, but should also help us to develop the virtues necessary to live in accordance with the truth we come to know. There are things that a well-formed human person should feel in certain situations, because these feelings will motivate us to act in the way we ought to act, which in turn conduces to the common good of society. If people are not educated to have the right responses to the right things, then society is in great danger.

This is not to say that education in the past did not have an element of regard for utility – quite the opposite. Even in the medieval period, universities existed not just for leisurely speculation, but to provide those who would become the leaders in medieval society with academic formation befitting their social function.

However, in our times this intuition that a person’s education must be useful not only to them, but to the community of which they will form a part, has become detached from a traditional socio-political perspective which viewed society not just as a bunch of individuals stuck on the same island, but as an organism – an interrelated body of people striving toward a common aim which was seen, at least in purely temporal terms, as virtuous living.

The common aim of modern society, insofar as one can be discerned at all, seems to be simply perpetual material enhancement, and thus any education which does not help us to acquire more material goods is discarded as ‘useless’, at the same time as people complain ever more loudly of rampant social problems which can all be traced to a lack of one thing: virtue. This idea of the dual and inseparable purpose of education seems to have been almost completely obscured during the twentieth century, and it is a very interesting point for discussion whether it is possible at this stage to recover a more holistic concept of education and if so, how we might go about it.

Thankfully, there are still a number of people, not least those who actually work in academic institutions, who are of the opinion that university education is for something more than pure utilitarian advantage. When Charles Clarke, Education Secretary in the previous government, stated in 2003 that ‘universities exist to enable the British economy and society to deal with the challenges posed by the increasingly rapid process of global change’ and suggested that the state should not pay for ‘ornamental’ subjects such as Medieval History, he faced what was reported as a barrage of criticism from academics. ‘Clarke lays into useless history’ was the headline in the Times Higher Education Supplement. One Professor at Oxford University argued that ‘Education at all levels can never in a civilised society be merely or even mainly about furthering the economy’, whilst the director of the Southampton Institute observed perceptively that ‘[the] only view of higher education is to study and disseminate knowledge for its own sake.

One of Charles Clarke’s arguments is that university education needs to be relevant to modern society, but universities are all about helping us to decide what is relevant and what not.’

above: c.s. lewis, professor of literature, novellist and christian apologist, wrote ‘the abolition of man’ in 1943. it proved to be a deeply prophetic book, as we now see many of the things which lewis foresaw playing out in modern society.

Here we can see some promising indications. Although comments such as ‘the only view of higher education is to study and disseminate knowledge for its own sake’ represent an incoherent concept of education if divorced from the broader question of why knowledge is a good which we naturally desire, they do represent an echo of a more humane tradition which affirmed that, even if not goals in themselves, seeking the truth and learning to live in accord with the truth we discover are essential to human fulfilment. The fact that some academics seem to have at least resisted the tendency to direct education toward purely utilitarian goals is a promising ray of hope in the darkness.

This article is based on a talk given at the first session of the Thomas More Institute’s reading group for Students and Young Professionals entitled ‘University: Training for the “Rat Race” or Forming Virtuous People?’. The final session will be held at the Institute’s seminar rooms in Hampstead on Tuesday 7 December. Those who are interested in attending please see details on the Institute’s website: www.thomasmoreinstitute.org.uk

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only a bad dream

in a recent documentary, poverty is made out to be humiliating and unavoidable, but, argues dominic burbidge, it is not

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first heard of the film Darwin’s Nightmare while conducting research last year amongst market-sellers in Mwanza, a fishing city located on the bay of Lake Victoria in Tanzania (‘Investigating Authorities in East Africa’, Netherhall News, November 2009). Market-sellers were afraid to talk in case foreigners like myself were producing another exposé documentary. They spoke of white men having come here to ‘take a picture of a fish’. These men had taken pictures of the dirtiest fish they could find, the market-sellers said, and now sales were down. This was something I did not understand until I chanced upon a viewing of the film in Oxford.

Darwin’s Nightmare is an Oscar-nominated documentary that explores how the forces of globalization have affected the lake-side city of Mwanza. It caused a storm amongst Tanzania’s political elite. According to the film, the poverty that permeates the city has been exacerbated by the furious export of the Nile perch, a fish dropped into the lake as an experiment of western scientists in the late 1950s.

The fish took over the lake and has since become a popular dish within the European Union. The documentary shows Indian-run factories preparing the Nile perch for export while local Africans fight over the leftovers. The street children of Mwanza beat each other over scraps of food and sniff melted plastic at night to forget their unhappiness. Only the Russian pilots, who fly cargo in and out of Tanzania, enjoy the industry. They are, it is strongly implied, trading weapons in exchange for the fish and spend much of their time in Tanzania indulging in local prostitutes.

The film was produced in 2004 and I have visited Mwanza twice, in 2009 and 2010 for a few months at a time, conducting research with market-sellers and street children, and teaching in a local primary school. The film bends over backwards to make its claims and its suggestive portrayal of the lake-side city is not accurate. Whilst critics acclaim the film as ‘not to be missed’ and full of ‘jaw-dropping revelations’, Tanzanian politicians see malice behind its production. They are right to take offence.

In Darwin’s Nightmare, poverty is made out to be animalistic and humiliating. But it is not. Poverty is a lack of material wealth and is not dealt with better when it is exaggerated. In Darwin’s Nightmare, a child is dressed up as a pilot and speaks into the camera saying he wishes to become a pilot when he is older. At the same time, shots are filtered through to the viewer of the supposed transport of arms to the region by plane, a prostitute flirting in the pilots’ cafe the evening before she is murdered, and the nightmarish words of an old priest who refuses to promote condoms as the solution. Everything is portrayed as working together to dig Africa deeper into a hellish pit.

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Posters for Darwin’s Nightmare in French, English, Japanese and Spanish. No version was made for Africans, and no version produced in Swahili, the national language of Tanzania

child of 13 years who works as a plastic bag seller in Soko Kuu, Mwanza’s main market, every day of the week. He has no parents but three younger siblings and a grandmother whom he also needs to look after. The boy is ‘in poverty’, whether one measures this by income per day or access to sanitation, food, healthcare or education. His three siblings do attend state-run schools but it is through the income he and they earn through selling plastic bags that they achieve this. Each night he returns home with a bit of food. He cooks it and then wakes his siblings up so that they eat. He then goes to sleep and wakes up early the next day to continue his work. He is hoping that when they finish school they will also, in their turn, help him out.

Hope is needed in international development, not despair. The postmodernist portrayal of the global south has room only for pessimism and does not show the real Africa. Such artists should steer clear of the continent unless they want to embarrass themselves.

Africa is a land of hope and human solidarity. To give an example: this year I held an interview with one

In the midst of hardship, virtue rises to the fore. People are determined to strive higher, to punch above their weight. For some of the Tanzanians of Mwanza, hardship is borne daily. But not without cheer, not without happiness. This inner strength has to be recognised in the fight against poverty; doomsaying will not get us anywhere.

Hardships bring people together—a power just as important in dealing with poverty as it is in dealing with natural disasters or epidemics. The solution to people’s problems lies in people themselves. Portraying poverty as humiliating and debilitating is so damaging because it says precisely the opposite. People are displayed as victims of something that cannot be changed. But the first step in solving poverty is realising its limit.

Dominic is a Netherhall alumnus and PhD student of Oriel College, Oxford

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pathways to poverty the centre for social justice has brought poverty and social breakdown back to the top of the political agenda. zubin mistry reports

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n September 2006, a funeral service in Gallowgate, a poverty-stricken area of Glasgow, marked the sad demise of a man found dead in a park pond. Jason Dobbie had been addicted to heroin and had suffered from schizophrenia. But, sadly, his death was not altogether surprising. Gallowgate is home to the densest concentration of drug addicts in all of Great Britain.

At the funeral, among those consoling Janis Dobbie, the bereaved mother, was the politician Iain Duncan Smith. This was not, of course, their first encounter. Back in 2002, while Duncan Smith was leader of the Conservative party, they had happened to meet just days after Janis Dobbie had lost another son, Allan, to a heroin overdose. The unlikely pair had met at the Gallowgate Family Support Group, a local office from which Dobbie and others give advice and support to the beleaguered parents of addicts. The grieving mother had shown Duncan Smith around the squalid, bruising neighbourhood, and he was deeply surprised and moved by what he saw. ‘For too long,’ Duncan Smith said in a visit to Netherhall in November 2006, ‘I feel we do our politics from the political centre of Britain without really knowing what is going on.’

Ultimately, the experience of encountering utterly depleted communities like Gallowgate affected Duncan Smith’s political energies more than his short-lived stint as leader. Determined to tackle the profound problems underlying economic and social poverty, in 2004 Duncan Smith co-founded the think-tank the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ).

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Speaking at Netherhall on 18th October, Gavin Poole, who took over as Executive Director earlier this year, explained that since its foundation the CSJ has pursued this end with an almost pathological obsession. The think-tank has sought to understand the nature of poverty and social breakdown in contemporary Britain, and to support initiatives to tackle poverty at national and local levels. In a short space of time, the CSJ has certainly become influential. Under David Cameron, the Conservative party has been following CSJ publications closely and, following the election, Iain Duncan Smith has become Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in the new coalition government. Most recently, the government’s White Paper on welfare reform and universal credit, published on 11 November, clearly bears the imprint of CSJ policy recommendations.

The CSJ’s work identifies five so-called ‘pathways to poverty’: family breakdown; welfare dependency; poor education; drug or alcohol addiction; and debt. A sixth significant element might be termed fragmented local communities, an area in which the voluntary sector and the small, localised, low-budget groups it contains do vital work. A fairly stable person, suggested Mr. Poole, could live amid two or, albeit with increasing difficulty, even three of these factors, but four or five spells grave trouble for individuals and communities alike.

These different ‘pathways to poverty’, Mr. Poole stressed, are inter-connected. Indeed, the correlation between the ‘pathways’ is striking. For instance, compared to a child who grows up in a

“I feel we do our politics from the political centre of Britain without really knowing what is going on�

two-parent family, a child who does not is: 75% more likely to fail at school 70% more likely to be a drug addict 50% more likely to have an alcohol problem 40% more likely to have a serious debt problem 35% more likely to experience unemployment and welfare dependency

above: the centre for social justice is one of the leading uk think tanks left: janis dobbie shows iain duncan smith around gallowgate, glasgow below: gavin poole, executive director of the centre for social justice

Another example of a striking correlation concerns the prison population in comparison with the general population. Just under half of the (male) prison population experienced the care system and school exclusions in their youth compared to only 2% of the general population. Moreover, while small minorities of the general population have been unemployed or suffered from mental health disorders, an overwhelming majority of prisoners have experienced unemployment and suffer from two or more mental

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health disorders (respectively, 67% and 72%), a huge proportion compared to the general population (5% in both cases).

The CSJ’s research combines diagnoses of particular questions with policy recommendations, and the range of topics addressed has been broad, from primary education and early intervention to asylum seekers and street gang culture, the last of which has increasingly permeated our culture, Mr. Poole revealed, to the extent that middle class children are increasingly attracted to gangs and even ‘commute’ from their more affluent areas to participate.

ject of faith groups, Mr. Poole explained that the CSJ was not for or against faith-based groups from the voluntary sector, but simply favoured groups which offered the biggest bang for the buck.

In practical terms, he added, refusing to use any faith-based or faith-influenced projects whatsoever would preclude in the region of two-thirds of all local-based initiatives). Yet, at the same time, the CSJ has gained cross-party support from Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs, and in 2009, the CSJ was jointly awarded Think Tank of the Year (along with the Institute for Fiscal Studies) in 2009 by the broadly left-leaning Prospect magazine.

Politically speaking, the CSJ emanates from the centre-right.

This is certainly discernible in some policy recommendations and broader focuses which hardly sound like the stuff of the political left: family stability, welfare dependency and so on. (On the sub-

This broader appeal reflects the CSJ’s non-partisan approach to social problems. The 2008 report ‘Asylum Matters’, for instance, raised the problem of forced destitution as a de facto measure to encourage asylum applicants to leave voluntarily along with

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left: the centre for social justice’s work on prison reform and prisoner rehabilitation has brought these issues to the attention of the conservative party in an unprecendted manner crime within weeks of release.

An area on which the CSJ has been concentrating recently is the benefits system and welfare dependency. The 2009 report, ‘Dynamic Benefits’, criticises the welfare system for deincentivising work, and emphasises that ‘work must be supported as the primary sustainable route out of poverty’. Among the recommendations are a simplified system (the Universal Credit announced in November) and an increased earnings disregard (i.e. allowing low earners to earn more before the withdrawal of benefits).

As Mr. Poole stressed, work has to pay and the current benefits system obstructs this. But, moreover, those entering the workforce after a lifetime of welfare dependency also need help adjusting to the culture of working. Mr. Poole cited the example of a voluntary organisation which was helping a woman get into work by staying in regular contact with her and her employer. On the first couple of days, everything went fine. On the third day, there was a slight altercation at work and a volunteer helped to smooth things over. The fourth day went fine. But on the fifth day, Friday, the organisation received a call from the employer because the woman had not turned up to work. A volunteer paid the woman a visit and she answered the door in her dressing gown. When asked why she had not turned up at work, she replied, a little bemused, that it was the weekend. She had gone through her life thinking that the working week was over by Friday.

a host of other problems faced by asylum seekers over the many years it usually takes for appeals to be processed.

Likewise, the 2009 report ‘Locked Up Britain’ offered practical measures to help in the rehabilitation of prisoners. (Indeed, fostering Tory interest in prisoner rehabilitation was one of the reasons why the CSJ won the Prospect award). The report recommended revamped prison education and restorative justice programmes (whereby prisoners meet face-to-face with victims). Moreover, it highlighted the problem of prisoner finance upon release. As Mr. Poole explained, prisoners are released with a £46 discharge grant in their pockets. Though entitled to benefits, it can take up to eight weeks before they receive anything. In effect, released prisoners have to rely on family or friends, who often have their own financial pressures. It is scarcely surprising that many turn back to

How CSJ policies become translated into political reality over the coming years is an intriguing question. As Mr. Poole candidly noted, the think-tank’s attempts to address the problem of worklessness comes in the midst of a recession with further job losses on the horizon in the coming year. Added to this is the instability of the short to mid-term political future set against the CSJ’s long-term approach to social problems (implementing welfare reform will take over five years according to Mr. Poole), and how policies on poverty are affected by other political moves (the Institute for Fiscal Studies prompted a political maelstrom when its number-crunching suggested that the chancellor George Osborne’s budget spending review will hit the poorest hardest).

A crucial aspect of the CSJ’s work is insulated more, if not entirely, from political shifts. The CSJ emphasises the importance of the insights of small organisations which work on the ground with the most vulnerable and impoverished members of society. Each year, the think-tank hosts an awards event to recognise the work of an array of poverty fighting groups, which receive cash prizes and increased exposure for their work. This year’s winners included Caring for Ex-Offenders (a Christian charity providing voluntary support for people coming out of prison), the Whitechapel Mission (a homeless project based in east London) and the Ley Community (a drugs and alcohol rehabilitation programme from Oxfordshire). It is these organisations which provide the real links to the experiences of local communities.

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what’s so good about shakespeare?

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if truth were known, we know shakespeare better than we think, and that is the long and short of it, reports simon jared

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hakespeare’, you may say, ‘is Greek to me, I don’t know a thing about him.’ But in saying so, you are quoting him. Feeling hoodwinked or in a pickle? Don’t be alarmed; do not knit your brows. If truth be known, you probably quote Shakespeare every day. I have quoted Shakespeare five times in this article already and not without rhyme or reason. Like Professor John Mullan, who spoke to Netherhall residents on Monday 11th October about the famous bard, I too think it is high time people learned just what is so good about Shakespeare. Now you may bid us English academics good riddance and send us packing. Those of you who had Shakespeare forced on you in your schooldays may wish all his plays would vanish into thin air. But you should not be so hasty to rid us of his works. They are much more important than you realise.

Professor Mullan, who lectures at University College London and writes for the Guardian, outlined three reasons why Shakespeare is so good: the first being that he is just so good with words. Shakespeare had a vocabulary of roughly 30,000 words (three times the average) and if you ever pick up the Oxford English Dictionary (which has etymo-

qu than in Shakespeare you have been t insisted on fair pla had short shrift, c the more fool you and clear out bag that truth will o have your teeth surely you ha you wish vil

On Quoting Shakespeare If you cannot understand my argument, and declare ``It’s Greek to me’’, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are uoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow n anger; if your wish is farther to the thought; if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting e; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, ay, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool’s paradise -why, be that as it may, u , for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days g and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you h set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for ave a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if h I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted llain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut tut! For goodness’ sake! What the dickens! But me no buts! - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.

Bernard Levin logical and historical notes) you may notice that he was the first ever to write many of these words down. Perhaps he even created a few. This is the first way he has contributed to our language.

But do not stand on ceremony for him yet. It is not so much his words which made him great but what he did with them. He was a metaphor master and created hundreds of expressions, some of which are so brilliant they have survived 400 years and are still common today.

The second reason is Shakespeare’s innovation and skill as a dramatist. His first example of this was the way in which Shakespeare played with what Aristotle called the three dramatic unities: time, space, and action. Aristotle argued that for a play to be effective it needed to be coherent. This meant that all of the action had to happen primarily in one location and within a day. The action also had to be necessary to show the character of the hero within that play. A prime example of these unities at work can be seen in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Whilst Shakespeare was fully aware of Aristotle’s opinion he did not conform to it. He was so talented that he could move location seven times and traverse six months in eight minutes of stage time (as in Anthony and Cleopatra).

In Shakespeare’s time there were no sets on stage and all plays were performed during the day because they were lit by sunlight.

Yet in the first 15 lines of Hamlet we know the characters are in Denmark, they are guards of a castle, something has happened to the king, they are scared and anxious, it is past midnight, it is cold, it is quiet, and the main character is yet to come. This is just from reading the play, not seeing it, and with stage directions merely telling us the names of the characters entering. The most outstanding thing is that if you read or see these plays they are coherent, logical and entertaining without being ridiculous. But Shakespeare was a genius who could manipulate the stage and

performance in a way nobody else managed before or since.

‘Fair play’, you may be thinking, ‘Shakespeare’s no stony-hearted villain who was sent to make life harder for schoolchildren all over the world’. But there is still one more reason why Shakespeare is so good (and that’s without saying a thing about his plots, the quantity of his work, its timelessness, how he stood apart from his contemporaries, the accessibility of his plays, his poetry, etc.).

The third reason is that Shakespeare was hugely ahead of his time in terms of his sense of humanity, his representation of inequality and his questioning of the moral code of society. There are endless theories about Shakespeare being a feminist or a Catholic because of his sensibilities towards women and his treatment of religion.

But it is impossible to say with any certitude what Shakespeare’s personal preferences and beliefs were. One thing scholars can agree on is that Shakespeare was able to show humanity like nobody else in the whole of English literature. Most English literature academics will agree that Prince Hamlet is among the most human and realistic characters ever written.

Mullan gave the example of Shylock’s impassioned speech about religious/racial equality from The Merchant of Venice in which he asks: ‘If you prick us do we not bleed?’, drawing empathy from the audience before asking ominously: ‘If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’, thus showing two very different sides to his character. This richness of characterisation is one of the greatest qualities of Shakespeare’s work.

So whilst there is no quick answer as to why Shakespeare is so good, it is best just to read or see his plays and find out for yourself. You will not be disappointed. And for those of you who were counting: I quoted Shakespeare 16 times in this article.

Simon Jared is in his third year studying English with Film at King’s College, London. This is his second year in Netherhall.

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condoms are not the solution

netherhall chaplain fr. joseph evans clarifies the catholic church’s perspective on artificial contraception and hiv/aids

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verybody has got very excited by Pope Benedict’s declarations on condoms with some publications claiming it represents a U-turn by the Catholic Church. But as always, what is needed – and what is so often lacking – is a clear head. To this end, we need to ask ourselves a few questions: what exactly has the Pope said? What is the Catholic Church’s position and why, and has the Pope’s words altered this in any way? And just what is the cause of all the hullabaloo?

In his recent book, Light of the World, the Pope has simply said that in some exceptional cases (and he gives the example of a male prostitute) the use of condoms may be considered ‘a first step’, ‘a first assumption of responsibility’. The prostitute is at least starting to show the tiniest of consideration to the ‘clients’ he risks infecting. But Benedict insists that this is not ‘a real or moral solution’.

In other words, if one is going to do something evil, some effort to make the deed less wrong shows a beginning of moral sense. As Janet Smith puts it in an article in The Catholic World Report: ‘If someone was going to rob a bank and was determined to use a gun, it would better for that person to use a gun that had no bullets in it. It would reduce the likelihood of fatal injuries.’

The Holy Father is not saying more. He has not approved or even less recommended generalised condom use by people who are HIV positive, as many claim. Nor can his words be used to justify the oft repeated assertion these days that the Church is at last coming to see that condoms really are the answer to Africa’s AIDS’ pandemic.

The media reaction to the Pope’s limited comments shows an obsession with condoms which merely confirms other words of his in that same interview. He says that the ‘sheer fixation on the condom implies a banalization of sexuality (...) no longer seeing sexuality as the expression of love but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves’.

The Catholic Church remains convinced as to the immorality of artificial contraception believing that it does not promote true love

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and frequently leads to sex without responsibility. We see contraception as going against the very meaning, the objective nature and purpose of sex, which we consider is for the generation of new life and the union of the spouses. Sex, then, is something great and even holy, but only in marriage and open to life.

Where grave reasons exist which mean that a couple is not in a position to receive the great gift of a child, then natural methods may be used to avoid procreation. The Church allows these because they are no more than making use of the natural cycles already existing in the woman’s body – they cooperate with nature and do not violate it – and also because such a method requires respectful communication between the spouses and loving selfcontrol by both. It becomes a responsible act and not the use of chemicals or rubber to avoid responsibility.

As for contraception use to reduce the risk of HIV infection, particularly in places – like various countries in Africa – where it is endemic, the Church is convinced that this is not the way to solve the problem. She is not putting her ideology before people.

She cares deeply about the people and that is why she argues so strongly against condom use. Significant experts in the field, with or without religious faith, have backed the Church in her stance simply because they consider statistical data and field evidence suggest she is right.

Hence, Edward C. Green, former Senior Research Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health and director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Centre for Population and Development Studies, has said: ‘The largely medical solutions funded by major donors have had little impact in Africa, the continent hardest hit by AIDS. Instead, relatively simple, low-cost behavioural change programs – stressing increased monogamy and delayed sexual activity for young people – have made the greatest headway in fighting or preventing the disease’s spread.

Ugandans pioneered these simple, sustainable interventions and achieved significant results.’

Put simply, Green is not convinced that condoms help to reduce AIDS. He said: ‘We have found no consistent associations between condom use and lower HIV-infection rates, which, 25 years into the pandemic, we should be seeing if this intervention was working.’

The Catholic Church provides about a quarter of all HIV care in Africa. She is therefore very aware of the problem. Maybe she might just know something about the solution. To throw contraceptives at Africa is to try to implement the same policies which have failed so disastrously in Europe and contributed to a ‘sexual revolution’ which has only led to an incredible rise in abortions, promiscuity, family breakdown, ageing population, and general decline. Are we so envious of Africa’s growth and youth that we want to inflict upon it our own decrepitude?

The use of condoms might in each individual case reduce the risk of infection but in the long term it greatly contributes to the growth of AIDS. It creates a culture of irresponsibility whereby people think they can have ‘safe sex’ and so indulge in irresponsible sexual behaviour which sooner or later leads to catching the disease. The only real and lasting solution, the one which is best

for Africa, is abstinence before marriage, fidelity in it, and the promotion of virtue and self-control. This is not an impossible utopian dream.

Green refers above to the situation in Uganda. A web-search for ‘Uganda and AIDS’ or similar terms reveals very differing positions as to whether this country’s ABC (Abstinence-Be faithfulCondoms) policy has in fact worked. For numerous years Uganda has stressed the A and B over the C and this seems to have produced good results. Some authors deny this is so. Recently Uganda seems to have backed down somewhat and stressed more technical means over moral ones.

But leaving aside disputes over statistics, surely the country’s President Yoweri Museveni had a point when he said: ‘We are being told that only a thin piece of rubber stands between us and the death of our Continent ... they (condoms) cannot become the main means of stemming the tide of AIDS.’ As Western culture becomes ever more ethically confused it has tended to exalt technology as the solution to all our problems.

It also displays a growing deterministic pessimism that considers humans enslaved to sex and unable to change their behaviour.

The Catholic Church is more optimistic. Technology will not save us – or Africa – but ethical improvement will, and it is possible.

“The Catholic Church provides about a quarter of all HIV care in Africa. She is therefore very aware of the problem. Maybe she might just know something about the solution” And now, briefly, to the final question. What has prompted all the hullabaloo? I think it is a mixture of something positive and something negative. Positively there is a genuine and generous concern about the AIDS epidemic in Africa and elsewhere and a sincere conviction that condom use will help to reduce it. People do not have facts or data to back up this opinion, but that is what they have been told and that is what they believe. Negatively there is quite simply a general dislike of the Catholic position on contraception. People do not like to be told that condom use is wrong, even though their own consciences might suggest this to them. The Church’s insistence on the immorality of artificial contraception is an affront to them. Many grasp at this apparent ‘U-turn’ as one clutching at straws, in the hope that it might lead to further changes in the Catholic position. It won’t. Indeed, ever since Pope Paul VI explicitly affirmed the immorality of contraceptive sex in the 1960s, subsequent events, together with the profound theological reflections on sexuality by Pope John Paul II, have led the Church to be ever more convinced as to the rightness of her stance. It is an uncomfortable message but it is true and the only one which will help solve Africa’s problems and the even more profound malaise of modern Europe.

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the economic psychology of happiness prakarsh singh reports (in a moderately happy state)

above: paul webley (centre) in the netherhall lounge

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ost surveys that ask people to rate their happiness on a scale of 0-10 reveal that people are fairly happy. In developed countries, the average score tends to be around seven. What seems to matter most for happiness, explained Paul Webley, the Director and Principal of the School of Oriental and African Studies, in a talk on November 15th, are good relationships, close friends, personal control, being extroverted and high self-esteem. Since happiness is a disputed term within and outside psychology, Professor Webley, whose academic work has focussed upon the interface between psychology and economics, restricted his definition of happiness to a state of well-being which can be measured.

lose their newly found happiness and return to their original levels. Marriage also makes people happy only for the first year.

Similarly, people whose limbs have been amputated do not feel unhappiness in the long run. Nature has a way of stabilizing happiness levels and bringing us back to equilibrium.

While shedding light on new patterns emerging in empirical studies on happiness, Professor Webley also raised some important questions, both philosophical and methodological. In economics, it is difficult to separate out the causes and effects of happiness. The resultant indicators (e.g. marriage, extroversion, personal control) may be both drivers and consequences of happiness. Or a third factor (e.g. delaying gratification) may be the There appears to be a positive correlation between faith and hap- cause of all the indicators as well as happiness. piness. Income seems to have a positive impact up to a certain threshold but then its effect tapers off both across and within Separating out the mechanisms as well as identifying the reduced countries. This stylized fact has been shown in several empiri- form causal impact of happiness is still an ongoing research area cal studies, but the irony is that most students who have been in the economics of happiness. Similarly, an important quessurveyed believe that money makes people happier at all levels. tion that arises from this discussion is the valid control group for interpreting a person’s happiness: to whom does the person People who report being unhappy are those in prison, under po- compare his happiness? Does he compare his happiness today litical oppression, recently hospitalized or undergoing new thera- to his happiness yesterday? To his neighbour’s happiness? To his pies. Another interesting fact about happiness is that people tend potential or latent happiness? To what extent are culture, religion to adapt quickly to their present state of affairs. Lottery winners or genes responsible for choosing his comparison group?

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“Newman turned me from a professional killer into the Headmaster of his School” karl hohenberg explains

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he last few months have seen a number of talks and events in connection with the Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman following his beatification by Pope Benedict in Birmingham on the 19th of September. Recently, there was another talk at Netherhall about Newman and education, by Clive Dytor, the headmaster of the Oratory School, which was founded by Newman.

Mr. Dytor gave a recap of Newman’s life, focussing on his path to becoming a Catholic and mentioning how Newman played a big role in his own conversion to Catholicism. A former Royal Marine, and Anglican clergyman, Mr. Dytor said that Newman’s writings, particularly his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, completely changed his life: ‘Newman turned me from a professional killer into the Headmaster of his School.’

He mentioned Newman’s initial belief in the ‘Via Media’, an attempted Anglican middle road between the Catholic Church and Protestantism, and his involvement in the Oxford Movement. After reading the words ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum!’ (‘the verdict of the world is conclusive!’) by St. Augustine, Newman wrote: ‘By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theology of the Via Media was absolutely pulverised.’

(Apologia, part 5) He realised that Anglicanism could not stand alone seeking to be independent from the belief of universal Christianity.

Mr. Dytor continued with Newman’s ideas on education, and his two ‘educational projects’, one being the university he founded in Dublin, which failed, and the other being the Oratory School. Newman believed in a ‘holistic’ education, centred on body, mind and spirit. Mr. Dytor said that these ideas of Newman are reflected in the ethos of the school and strongly influence the way he runs it today. The school, he insisted, is not an exam machine, but focusses on sport and the spiritual development of every pupil while still achieving high academic standards. One of his favourite quotes when showing parents around the school: ‘A busy boy is a happy boy.’

Karl Hohenberg studies engineering at Imperial College.

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animal rights and wrongs T

we ought to treat animals humanely, argues raffy rodriguez, but that’s not because animals have rights

he USA has been called a nation of ‘animal lovers’ because of various acts of ‘animal liberation’. Quiet, otherwise politically inactive middle-class citizens pelt trucks containing live animal exports with rocks, form human barricades, break into laboratories to release captive creatures into the wild, disrupt fashion shows and hunting meets, and bombard their politicians with letters of complaint about the abuse of animals.

However, behind such baffling sentimentalism, one finds much hard-edged ideological resentment at the way animals are treated, resentment which can turn into action at the slightest provocation. Very few individuals have braved the trenches in order to oppose animal rights and place the human species over and above every other animal in the world.

Upon seeing the passion and commitment with which animal rightists defend their cause, most people think: ‘Surely people who can get so worked up about an issue must have a point?’ And when someone stands up to say that animals do not have rights, or that it is at least an arguable issue, in many eyes this is tantamount to saying that animals have no absolute moral standing whatsoever and that we can do whatever we like to them.

But this is not the case! It does not follow that because one thinks that animals do not have rights, one also thinks it is permissible to treat them however one likes. This would only be the case if rights are the whole of morality, which they are not (more on this later).

The traditional moral position is that although we have no duties toward animals, we do have duties in respect of them. We are not free to be cruel to them or cause them unnecessary suffering. We are bound to look after and preserve the entire natural world as best we can in accordance with our abilities, in a way consistent with our own flourishing as a species. Hence we are free to use animals for our benefit and for reasons that do not in themselves involve vice or immorality, such as food, modest clothing and scientific research that can benefit the life and health of man.

But if this also means condemning fur coats as unnecessary fashion accessories or investigation into the latest ways of pandering to our human vanity (such as cosmetics research), so be it. I do not imagine the animal rights lobby will object. We are also free to hunt animals for the protection of our property or the country side, and even for leisure. None of this, however, licenses cruelty, bloodlust, or the deriving of pleasure from a sentient being’s pain.

The basic principle is one of modesty: the living of an unluxurious life, with attention to necessities and respect for creation.

It is time the animal rights issue was looked at in a less emotionally charged and more philosophical way. It is time that some myths, often deliberately sown, were cleared up. Here’s one: If

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you think animals do not have rights, you must think it is all right to do anything to them and that their welfare does not matter.

As a prelude to explaining this myth, let me sketch the traditional position on animal rights. Once we get the board clear on what ethical status animals lack we can be clear about what status they have. Note initially, however, that there is no puzzle in the idea that we have a duty, say, not to inflict unnecessary suffering on animals, but that they have no right not to be treated this way.

There are many things one person ought not to do to another, but which do not involve a right by the second against the first. You ought to be kind to strangers, but they do not have a right to your kindness. Rights and justice go together (whereas duty and rights do not always go together) - when you violate a right you are being unjust. When the priest and the Levite passed by on the other side, they were not being unjust to the man who fell among robbers; they were being uncharitable. Morality involves more than rights: it involves duties, virtues (like charity and compassion), customs, traditions, and so on.

So how do rights fit in? What is a right, anyway? In order to understand the concept of a right, we need to have a basic understanding of the concept of a good. Then we need to grasp why it is that holders of rights, namely human beings, have such a status; and then we can then see why this status cannot be extended to other animals.

To begin, a good can be defined as that end of an action which fulfills the nature of a thing. There are a number of goods which fulfill human nature, without which a human being cannot flourish or live a distinctively human life. These include things such as food, shelter and health, but also things of a more psychological, emotional or intellectual nature, such as family, friendship, knowledge and understanding, work, play, artistic experience, and religion. These are some of the principal things which fulfill us as rational animals. The absence of any of them diminishes our human dignity, our integrity - it leaves not just a quantitative but a qualitative gap in our lives.

But if human beings are rational animals, and have rights, this means that at least one species of animals - us - have rights. So why not others? What’s so special about humans? Isn’t it arbitrary - or ‘speciesist’ - to say that human animals have rights but others do not? When we see how rights interact with goods, it becomes clear that it is not insofar as we are animals that humans have rights, but insofar as we are rational.

A right is best thought of as a kind of protection conferred by morality. A right protects a person in his pursuit of some good. It means that others are under a duty not to violate that right; that

the right holder is morally permitted to exercise his right without hindrance; and even, in some cases, that he is permitted to use force in safeguarding his right (e.g. the right of self-defence). That is all well and good, say animal rights supporters - but why are animals excluded from being right holders? Don’t they, just like humans, have whatever is necessary for the possession of rights?

Animal rightists need to be asked: ‘So what do you think is necessary and sufficient for the possession of rights, seeing as you are

so sure animals possess them?’ A number of proposals have been put forward.

The first is consciousness. Surely being conscious is enough for a creature to have rights? For a start, not all animals are conscious, so consciousness, if it conferred rights, would only confer them on some animals. But you might also ask: what is meant by consciousness? Here the animal rightists might mean several things, such as sentience (the capacity to feel pain and pleasure), percep-

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tion, memory, a sense of the future, and various other features that make a creature a psychological subject. It is true that we humans have all of these things, but it does not follow that we have rights simply because we have these mental characteristics. The truth is that there is no straight entailment between consciousness in any or all of the respects just mentioned, and the possession of rights. What is the logical connection between sentience and rights? Feeling pain/pleasure is just another way that a creature’s life can go badly/well for it, along with having or lacking food, having or lacking disease, and so on. So why don’t plants have rights? They aren’t sentient, but their lives can go well or badly in other ways. What is so special about pain and pleasure?

The same goes for perception, memory or a sense of the future.

Why should we think that a creature has rights simply because it perceives or remembers or anticipates the future? Conceptually, none of these take us beyond sentience. The animal rightist might say that what matters is memory of self, and a sense of one’s own future; but this brings in self-consciousness which I will come to in a moment. For the present, it seems that sentience, perception, memory and a sense of the future might guarantee that an animal is a psychological subject, but not that it is a moral subject. The animal rightist needs to bridge the conceptual gap between the two.

What about beliefs and desires, as well as other mental states such as being afraid, or contented, or sad - don’t they guarantee that

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the animal possessing them has rights? To be sure, there is much philosophical debate about whether animals even have beliefs and desires, or other mental states such as those mentioned. (Note: it is the job of the philosopher to judge this, not the animal behaviourist, because the issue is not just empirical but conceptual, though empirical evidence is of course relevant). But I am prepared to accept for the sake of argument that some animals do have beliefs, desires and other mental states, even if their content is radically impoverished compared to human mental states. The question, however, is: even if some animals have beliefs and desires, how does it follow that they have rights? Again, what is the logical connection between the two? It may be that an animal which has beliefs and desires (as well as perceptions, memories, and so on) has an inherent value in the sense that one can asses how well or badly its life is going independently of how useful it is to other creatures. But the same can be said for ants, amoebae and rosebushes. All that having complex mental states such as beliefs and desires does is to make the ways in which the possessor’s life can go well or badly more subtle and complex: desires can be frustrated, beliefs can be the product of deception, memories can be disturbing, and so on. But none of this implies that animals which have these mental characteristics have rights.

Self-consciousness is one of the features which animal rightists most commonly refer to in support of their thesis. It is not mere awareness, they say, but awareness of self which confers rights; not a mere sense of the past or the future, but a sense of one’s

own past or future. Again, I am prepared to accept for the sake of argument that some animals are self-conscious, though there may not be many. Perhaps only higher apes such as chimpanzees are self-conscious: for one thing, they are capable of grooming themselves with a mirror and a comb. But whether the numbers are large or small, the familiar question reappears: what is the conceptual or logical connection between being self-conscious and having rights? How does being conscious of self add something importantly different from merely being conscious? What is important is not that an animal is self-conscious, but, as I will explain, the way in which it is self-conscious. In fact, my argument against animal rights implies as a necessary consequence that right holders will be self-conscious, but self-consciousness is not part of what it means to possess rights.

Having put the main alternative views to one side, I can now say that two things matter in having rights: (a) knowledge (b) freedom.

More precisely, a right holder must, first, know that he is pursuing a good (i.e. one must know what a right is and its binding nature), and secondly, he must be free to do so. No one can be under a duty to respect another’s right if he cannot know what it is he is supposed to respect. Similarly, no one can call another to account over respecting his right if the former cannot know what it is the latter is supposed to respect. By ‘call to account’ I mean making a conscious demand on them, even without speaking a word. How can the right holder make a conscious demand on another if he cannot know what he is demanding?

Again, no one is under a duty to respect another’s rights if he is not free to respect or not to respect, if he is not able to choose between right and wrong. Similarly, no one can possess a right if he is not free to pursue the good it protects, if he is not capable of planning his life, ordering his priorities, choosing to live in a dignified and human way or a squalid and less-than-human way.

Now it becomes clear why animals - nonhuman ones - cannot possess rights. It is because they do not possess the two features which are necessary for being a right-holder. No animal knows why it lives the way it does; no animal is free to live in one way or another. Animals, from the smallest single-celled organism to the most human-like ape, are governed purely by instinct. That is why, for instance, even the most hard-line animal rightist does not advocate prison (or worse) for chimpanzees which go on random killing sprees as they are known to do. Nor do they advocate forcible prevention of lions from eating gazelles - ‘They can’t help it,’ it is said. And that is precisely the point: they can’t. Such is the paradox at the heart of animal rightism.

We humans are governed partly by instinct, of course: you do not get up every morning and think, ‘To eat or not to eat - that is the question’ - you just go and make some toast! But note two things. First, the more animalistic our behaviour, the more instinctive it is. Food, drink, reproduction - these are the sorts of activities that are largely if not wholly instinctive. Secondly, no matter how instinctive, every such activity can come within the sphere of choice, or freewill; otherwise there would be no hunger strikers and no celibates.

Babies, the mentally handicapped, the senile, and even comatose humans may be governed far more by instinct than by knowledge and free choice, but this does not mean such people have no rights. They are still qualitatively different from other animals because of the kind of creatures they are; and so they have human rights just as much as the sleeping, the drunk and the drugged.

Neither age, nor illness, nor abnormality can change the fundamental fact that all such people are instances of a distinctive kind of animal - free to choose and aware of why it does so or at least potentially able to do so.

“although we have no duties toward animals, we do have duties in respect of them. We are not free to be cruel to them or cause them unnecessary suffering” In all manner of creatures from insects to apes, numerous kinds of complex behaviour have been demonstrated, such as deception, tool-making, social group formation, mutual assistance. But nothing has been found which sets the ape apart from the insect in any qualitative sense bearing on freedom and knowledge of purpose. The ‘gee whiz’ articles that appear in the popular press on a regular basis, revealing the latest trickery or intelligence on the part of some animal (usually an ape), are therefore useless as forming an empirical justification for regarding animals as, in their nature, the same as human beings.

Perhaps, as implied earlier, we look in the wrong direction for the source of our modern brutality towards animals. It is not the traditional distinction between man and beast that needs correcting, but our own selves: the moral degeneracy which makes factory farming and horrendous scientific experiments on animals a part of life. It is the lack of virtue, and flowering of excess, which has resulted in there being far more animal suffering in the world today than ever existed in prior ages.

Raffy Rodriguez is in his third year studying Philosophy & Theology at Heythrop College, London. This is his third year in Netherhall.

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sudan on the brink of war

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udan is on the brink of war and only concerted international pressure can save it. so argued PhD researcher Martin Keulertz, speaking at Netherhall on 25th October. Martin, who is part of the Department of Geography’s London Water Research Group at King’s College London, had just got back from several months of field work. He told us: ‘I have just returned from East Africa, where I spent three very interesting months. Especially Southern Sudan was a great challenge.

I caught typhoid out there which was a nasty experience. (...) The likelihood of conflict in Southern Sudan is high.

I went to quite remote areas in the bordering area between the North and the South. Everything is prepared for a military conflict’.

The country is due to have a referendum on January 9th over whether the southern region should become independent. The south is predominantly Christian, and the north majority Muslim. Martin reported that the Khartoum government is dragging its heels and shows no willingness to make the referendum a success.

Everything has been done, he said, slowly and late, and if the referendum is inconclusive, civil war seems a real likelihood. He finished his talk by reading a moving appeal from the country’s Catholic episcopal conference calling on the international community to act decisively to support the referendum and so avoid bloodshed.

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christmas term house dinner

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he evening of the 22nd of October saw many of Netherhall House’s residents dressed to the nines to attend the house dinner to inaugurate the new academic year. Many familiar faces from the previous year were on show and were joined by a new set of residents who seemed quite happy and even excited to be part of the event.

New Zealander Josh Fransen rented out a morning suit with long coattails and a black bow tie and was one of the standouts on the occasion. A couple of residents, such as Karl H. and Southeast Asians Vincent K. and Miguel L. decided to don traditional dress.

Everyone gamely chatted over aperitifs in the lounge before heading up to the dining room which had been specially prepared by the house staff for the event. At the head of the room, they had placed two large flags – the Union Jack and the Yellow-and-White colours of the Vatican. These were to acknowledge the guest of honour at this particular dinner: UK ambassador to the Holy See Francis Campbell, who paid his second visit to Netherhall.

While some foreign (and even local) residents are known to have made less than flattering comments about food in Britain, everyone dug in eagerly into the evening’s fare, again with that special touch from the staff. For many, conversation was eased along by wine, and the dining room soon filled with a loud dinner chorus. Some time into dinner, Netherhall director Peter Brown called for silence, to deliver his traditional remarks.

After acknowledging another special guest at dinner, Pat Perry, who ensures the physical maintenance of Netherhall, he voiced his hope that the year that we are all spending in the hall be one that does make a difference in our lives. Citing the ideas of the recently beatified Englishman, Cardinal John Henry Newman, he argued that there was a great deal to be learned from living in a hall of residence like Netherhall – to learn about new cultures, new academic disciplines, and in general, about new friends. Every meal in the dining room was to be a chance to learn a lesson and we should take up the opportunity. These lessons were so important that Cardinal Newman opined that if given a choice whether to attend courses at university but stay outside a residence or live in a residence without classes at the university, he would have chosen the latter.

Ambassador Campbell (pictured below) then took the floor and regaled us with stories of the serious business of diplomacy at the Vatican – tasks which included sorting out the mistaken identity of a (then Minister) Brown adviser, who was mistakenly ushered into the Papal apartments as the Queen of Jordan. But he soon turned to more serious thoughts on the hopeful effects of the recent visit of the Pope to the UK, a trip of many historic firsts, which he felt would open up many possibilities for cooperation between the UK government and the Vatican despite real differences in views over a few issues. He argued that there were many values and goals that the two governments have in common.

Ambassador Campbell maintained that diplomacy revolves around a relationship – ‘it is about building, managing, deepening and maintaining a relationship’. Since governments often have various aims and represent peoples with numerous views, difference is what diplomats have to deal with on a daily basis. It is by understanding what these differences are and by finding common ground that diplomacy is achieved. It was with pride that the good Ambassador highlighted the common ground that does exist between the UK and the Holy See and how this common ground is effected in cooperation on issues such as human rights; trade in international arms; debt relief, and fair trade, finance for development; environmental responsibility, and even the peace process in Northern Ireland. This latter point was highlighted by the Queen when she received the Holy Father on his recent trip to the UK. He added that among the moments that he felt were most memorable was driving down the Mall, London’s Royal Mile, with the Pope in the presence of over a hundred thousand well-wishers as well as the Pope’s address to at Whitehall with all of Britain’s living Prime Ministers in attendance.

Dinner ended with Juan Pablo playing his violin and a prayer of thanksgiving led by house chaplain Fr. Joe. After dinner entertainment was not wanting: residents filed for the auditorium where band Holden, featuring former resident Gerard Holden, sang for us through the evening. And after that, pub-tenders at the North Star welcomed some of their regulars who were dressed far smarter than usual that Friday evening.

Miguel Lim is completing a PhD in Accounting at the LSE

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independents day andrei serban reviews Kevin asch’s new film, starring jesse eisenberg

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n these extremely volatile times in the ever-changing world of film distribution and marketing, filmmakers need independent festivals to get started in the industry.

London’s Jewish Film Festival, currently in its fourteenth year, is a great place for struggling indie directors and for audiences as well, if you want to catch up on the latest cult and underground flicks that you will most likely not get the chance to see anywhere else.

Well… that used to be the case, at least before the Coen brothers premiered their ‘Jewish masterpiece’, A Serious Man, at the festival last year. With their names attached to the project and a budget of $7 million (which may not be so spectacular by industry standards, but can really scare off aspiring filmmakers who rely on a high definition video camera and a lot of hard work and guerilla shooting to get in festivals like this), there was a risk of drastic changes in sight. Nonetheless, A Serious Man is a brilliant existentialist film. It deconstructs an idyllic picture –the perfect middle class suburban Jewish family - by bringing them to their most dysfunctional level imaginable – and it’s still a comedy in the end! Even though I absolutely loved the film, I was personally concerned that the festival would turn into another Sundance – marketing itself as indie but really practicing the old ‘you need to be this big to get in’ policy.

I’m just grateful Sundance’s younger and more independent cousin - Slamdance - is still around for struggling filmmakers!

Well Kevin Asch’s Holy Rollers is another A Serious Man wannabe – it premiered at Sundance and it has a star (or definitely soon-to-be one) attached to it: Jesse Eisenberg. However, the Q&A session with the director proved that this is an indie film made outside the studio system and it is also Kevin Asch’s first feature, about which he was extremely pleased and passionate.

The idea is quite interesting to say the least, based on a true story about Hasidic Jews used to smuggle ecstasy pills from Europe to the US simply because nobody would suspect them. It all revolves around our protagonist (Sam Gold), but this is not really a comingof-age tale about his dehumanization and loss of identity, as the director pointed out himself. Holy Rollers is about community and individuality,

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the juxtaposition between our perceptions and the realities of the ultra-Orthodox as a group. Despite our preconceptions, they have personal desires of their own, struggles and temptations, just like the rest of us. It’s a film about becoming an individual, sadly through a process of loss of morality and identity.

Because of this juxtaposition, the film also has moments of comic relief, when you will surely forget you are watching a drama altogether. It’s a comedy-drama, but also a crime film and a thriller – in fact, it’s very hard to categorize within one genre. Holy Rollers is more about Asch himself growing up in Brooklyn in the nineties in an all-Jewish family, though I can’t really picture him wearing a tzitzit and tallit all the time…

In any case, the film makes good and innovative use of editing, departing from linear and boring transitions between scenes and the five stages of classic narrative structure (exposition, intrigue, course of action, climax and outcome), instead gradually building up in tension without any straightforward outcome or climactic release. It has some psychedelic moments that fit perfectly in the narrative, plus a performance from Jesse Eisenberg worthy of applause. Eisenberg has a great career ahead of him and it’s nice to see that even after his breakthrough in The Social Network, he’s still doing indie films.

Andrei Serban is reading Film Studies at King’s College London.

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desert island discs

james osborn relates curious facts about netherhall residents gleaned from sunday evening interviews

e

very Sunday evening, Desert Island Discs gives the House the opportunity to learn more about one of its residents.

Based on the well-known BBC Radio 4 show, residents are interviewed about their lives and also asked to select three pieces of music to play. Finally, the interviewee has the choice of a book along with the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

The first Desert Island Discs of the year (and this correspondent’s first) featured Rohan Merchant being interviewed by Antonio Gonzalez-Barros. Having only previously heard Desert Island Discs on Radio 4, this correspondent expected the questions to follow that sort of pattern. However, the audience were treated to a range of diverse questions from Antonio.

We learnt that Carbon was Rohan’s favourite element and that if Rohan had to be a tree he would be a mango tree – because, as Rohan explained using a philosophical analogy, ‘as mangoes grow, the tree bows down, which shows that the higher you go, the more humble you have to be’. For dinner Rohan would have Sachin Tendulkar, Cesc Febregas and Mahatma Gandhi round the table. It would be interesting to know what Cesc Fabregas’s favourite element is.

So from mangoes to chickens and in the second week Richard Leigh was quizzed by Pablo Hinojo. Richard is from a farm near Preston which boasts over 113,000 chickens, so all enquiries about our feathered friends can be left with him. His musical choices reflected his love of both classical and alternative modern music, and, in keeping with being a philosophy and theology student, he would like to meet Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

The Greenwich-born Thomas Sloane was interrogated by David Wyatt. Tom revealed that he had no English passport but, rather, an American passport. He recalled how he once ran into a serrated fence, but declined to share whether he had played any part in any theatrical productions – David asking whether Tom might have played ‘second tree’. In keeping with current trends Tom would like to take the Harry Potter series with him to the Desert Island, and a volleyball as the luxury item (apparently a reference to the film Castaway, where the marooned hero develops a friendship with ‘Wilson’, a washed ashore volleyball of that brand.

The following week Karl Hohenberg interviewed Eigil Nordstrom, where the focus was very much on Eigil’s long hair. Eigil revealed that everyone he meets ask him the same question – ‘why do you have long hair?’, but said there was no real answer to it. He loves classical music and plays the viola. Rembrandt is one of his passions, and someone with whom he’d like to have dinner.

“Petteri no longer likes tanks as a result of six months in the military working (and vomiting) in them. But he does enjoy poetry”

Petteri Alppi was next to appear on Desert Island Discs. Petteri, from Finland, no longer likes tanks as a result of six months in the military working (and vomiting) in them. But he does enjoy poetry and has written a poetry collection, and the book he’d like to take was one of his unfinished manuscripts. As one of Petteri’s music choices, the audience was treated to him playing one of his own compositions on the piano.

Fabio Fiorelli then grilled Sebastian Sanhueza. Sebastian is from Chile and in his ‘life highlights’ he described himself as a lousy student prior to university. However, he is now a student of philosophy and enjoys reading novels and comic books. His luxury would be an ipod with an ‘immortal battery’ (wouldn’t we all like one of those?), and the book would be the works of Aristotle as befits a philosophy student.

Finally, Raffy Rodriguez interviewed Felipe Castenheira. Felipe, from Rio de Janerio, would like to be a pilot when he finishes his studies at City University. He enjoys surfing, though one expects not so much in London, and would take a surfboard as a luxury item to the desert island. Continuing the academic trend of books being taken to the desert island Felipe chose the works of St. Augustine to take with him.

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