Friday, October 29, 2004
There's a warning in the burqa
The court case in which two Muslim women witnesses want to remain behind their veils is a warning regarding the cultural future of New Zealand.
One of the two woman, Fouzya Salim, who is from Afghanistan, told the Auckland District Court this week she would rather kill herself than reveal her face while giving evidence in a fraud case due to be heard next year. She said to remove her burqa, which she has worn since she was 15, would be embarrassing and against her religion. Another prosecution witness, Feraiba Razamjoo, also wants to remain veiled.
Putting aside the question of whether it is important for the defence lawyer to be able to see their faces, there is the far more important question about whose cultural standards should prevail.
The answer is simple. When people immigrate to New Zealand, they should expect to assimilate as far as possible. The Human Rights Act permits people to practice their religion, and so it should. However, there is a point at which religious and cultural practices stand against New Zealand legal and cultural norms which have to be defended. The price we will pay for failing to require newcomers to assimilate will be a country divided, descending into ghettos and a loss of a sense of identity. The law will become a morass of competing idealogies undermined by a loss of confidence in any certain standard.
It is time for the government to make clear exactly what it means by wanting New Zealand to become a multicultural society, and where the boundary lines should be drawn.
The court case in which two Muslim women witnesses want to remain behind their veils is a warning regarding the cultural future of New Zealand.
One of the two woman, Fouzya Salim, who is from Afghanistan, told the Auckland District Court this week she would rather kill herself than reveal her face while giving evidence in a fraud case due to be heard next year. She said to remove her burqa, which she has worn since she was 15, would be embarrassing and against her religion. Another prosecution witness, Feraiba Razamjoo, also wants to remain veiled.
Putting aside the question of whether it is important for the defence lawyer to be able to see their faces, there is the far more important question about whose cultural standards should prevail.
The answer is simple. When people immigrate to New Zealand, they should expect to assimilate as far as possible. The Human Rights Act permits people to practice their religion, and so it should. However, there is a point at which religious and cultural practices stand against New Zealand legal and cultural norms which have to be defended. The price we will pay for failing to require newcomers to assimilate will be a country divided, descending into ghettos and a loss of a sense of identity. The law will become a morass of competing idealogies undermined by a loss of confidence in any certain standard.
It is time for the government to make clear exactly what it means by wanting New Zealand to become a multicultural society, and where the boundary lines should be drawn.
A severe overhaul needed
The US system for electing a president urgently requires a severe overhaul. Something is desperately wrong when Messrs Bush and Kerry are the two best candidates for the position of the most powerful political leader on planet Earth. There may, of course, be a far better candidate further down the ballot, but because of the system, which is all to do with backroom deals and big money, that person will never get a look in.
How come it is impossible to get a unified voting system for a Federal election totally eludes me. No other country allows individual states or provinces to design their own ballot papers and voting procedures, does it? This is madness.
Then we have the litigious brigade out in force. Tens of thousands of lawyers have been hired and are primed to clog the courts with protests over the voting (they've already begun lodging their suits). Americans will be lucky to know who their new President is before the next election comes around.
If Kerry wins, it also has to be asked whether any President can now be more than a one-term President? Each President seems to bequeath to his successor a successively greater intractable mess -- economically, politically, socially and spiritually. I suspect that many of those lauding Kerry now will be baying for his blood in four years time.
No matter who wins, I fear for America, and am scared to imagine what this nation will look like next time round.
The US system for electing a president urgently requires a severe overhaul. Something is desperately wrong when Messrs Bush and Kerry are the two best candidates for the position of the most powerful political leader on planet Earth. There may, of course, be a far better candidate further down the ballot, but because of the system, which is all to do with backroom deals and big money, that person will never get a look in.
How come it is impossible to get a unified voting system for a Federal election totally eludes me. No other country allows individual states or provinces to design their own ballot papers and voting procedures, does it? This is madness.
Then we have the litigious brigade out in force. Tens of thousands of lawyers have been hired and are primed to clog the courts with protests over the voting (they've already begun lodging their suits). Americans will be lucky to know who their new President is before the next election comes around.
If Kerry wins, it also has to be asked whether any President can now be more than a one-term President? Each President seems to bequeath to his successor a successively greater intractable mess -- economically, politically, socially and spiritually. I suspect that many of those lauding Kerry now will be baying for his blood in four years time.
No matter who wins, I fear for America, and am scared to imagine what this nation will look like next time round.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Ideas have consequences
“If I was a legislator, I would quite simply propose the removal of the word and the concept of marriage from the civil code. ‘Marriage’, an incarnation of religious, sacred and heterosexual values with the accompanying vows of procreation and eternal fidelity, is a concession made by the secular state to the Christian church and in particular its monogamous form which derives neither from Jewish … nor Muslim [traditions]. In suppressing the word and the concept of marriage, this equivocation, this religious hypocrisy which has no place in a secular state, there would be in its place a civil union, something contractual, a sort of generalised civil marriage, improved, refined, flexible and able to be adjusted between partners of whatever sex or number.”
~ Those are the words of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who died recently at the age of 74. It all sounds terribly familiar.
“If I was a legislator, I would quite simply propose the removal of the word and the concept of marriage from the civil code. ‘Marriage’, an incarnation of religious, sacred and heterosexual values with the accompanying vows of procreation and eternal fidelity, is a concession made by the secular state to the Christian church and in particular its monogamous form which derives neither from Jewish … nor Muslim [traditions]. In suppressing the word and the concept of marriage, this equivocation, this religious hypocrisy which has no place in a secular state, there would be in its place a civil union, something contractual, a sort of generalised civil marriage, improved, refined, flexible and able to be adjusted between partners of whatever sex or number.”
~ Those are the words of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who died recently at the age of 74. It all sounds terribly familiar.
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Gone, but still with us
The death occurred a couple of weeks ago of one of the most influential men in modern western thinking, yet his passing was barely noticed in New Zealand media.
Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher, has had an incalculable effect on the way we think today, even though 99 people on the street out of 100 would never have heard of him.
Derrida was the father of “deconstruction.” That is the literary theory that says that “all writing [is] full of confusion and contradiction . . . the author’s intent [can] not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself.” So, all texts, whether literary, historical, or philosophical, are devoid of “truthfulness, absolute meaning, and permanence.”
Chuck Colson says Derrida may have just been having fun: "I often thought that he put out these unfathomable statements just to watch the confusion. Intellectuals took him seriously and thought he was saying something so profound that their problem was that they did not understand it. So they held conferences to try to figure him out. All the while he was being entertained, however, he created huge mischief: People believed his intellectual nonsense. While his French contemporaries dismissed him, he soon found a receptive audience in America. A generation of American scholars has championed his theories, especially at Yale, where Paul de Man, Derrida’s close friend, taught.
"If Derrida’s maxim that 'there is nothing outside the text' had been limited to literary theory, he might not have done much damage. However, deconstruction broke out of the literature department and was applied to almost every non-scientific discipline: history, 'anthropology, political science, [and] even architecture.'
An example of this took place at Duke Law School. There, Stanley Fish, America’s leading deconstructionist, although not a lawyer, taught courses in law, admitting that he knew nothing about law. Why would we need to? If, like Fish and Derrida, you believe that “there is nothing outside the text” except what the reader brings to it, it doesn’t matter what others have thought and written about the law.
We will be living with the consequences for a long time. A generation of Americans has been taught to believe that there’s no such thing as objective truth, only preferences, and one person’s preference is as good as anyone else’s. If students read books at all, they care less about what the author had to say than about their own opinions and feelings.
The death occurred a couple of weeks ago of one of the most influential men in modern western thinking, yet his passing was barely noticed in New Zealand media.
Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher, has had an incalculable effect on the way we think today, even though 99 people on the street out of 100 would never have heard of him.
Derrida was the father of “deconstruction.” That is the literary theory that says that “all writing [is] full of confusion and contradiction . . . the author’s intent [can] not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself.” So, all texts, whether literary, historical, or philosophical, are devoid of “truthfulness, absolute meaning, and permanence.”
Chuck Colson says Derrida may have just been having fun: "I often thought that he put out these unfathomable statements just to watch the confusion. Intellectuals took him seriously and thought he was saying something so profound that their problem was that they did not understand it. So they held conferences to try to figure him out. All the while he was being entertained, however, he created huge mischief: People believed his intellectual nonsense. While his French contemporaries dismissed him, he soon found a receptive audience in America. A generation of American scholars has championed his theories, especially at Yale, where Paul de Man, Derrida’s close friend, taught.
"If Derrida’s maxim that 'there is nothing outside the text' had been limited to literary theory, he might not have done much damage. However, deconstruction broke out of the literature department and was applied to almost every non-scientific discipline: history, 'anthropology, political science, [and] even architecture.'
An example of this took place at Duke Law School. There, Stanley Fish, America’s leading deconstructionist, although not a lawyer, taught courses in law, admitting that he knew nothing about law. Why would we need to? If, like Fish and Derrida, you believe that “there is nothing outside the text” except what the reader brings to it, it doesn’t matter what others have thought and written about the law.
We will be living with the consequences for a long time. A generation of Americans has been taught to believe that there’s no such thing as objective truth, only preferences, and one person’s preference is as good as anyone else’s. If students read books at all, they care less about what the author had to say than about their own opinions and feelings.
