Can't believe that exactly a year ago I was in HK just wrapped the production of my film, and went straight to celebrate new year with T, Pat, Stephen and my beloved cast and crew, and a year later I'm wrapped in blankets at home nursing my cold and cough. Anyway, hope everyone had a good celebration for the new year.
Something I recently read that I think is interesting and timely to share:
Freedom is central to democracy. That fact doesn't change, but the
amount and type of freedom that we have does. And it feels as if it has
changed dramatically in the past few years. With the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights approaching its 60th birthday, Intelligent Life
asked a few eminent people from different walks of life to look back over
their adult lifetime and name the freedom we have gained and lost that
means the most to them. They were free to take freedom in any sense,
political or cultural, social or technological. What mattered was that
it mattered to them.
THE SCIENTIST: RICHARD DAWKINS
Aged 67, Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of
Science at Oxford University and author of nine books, including the
bestsellers "The Selfish Gene" and "The God Delusion"
FREEDOM GAINED:
Your computer mouse gives you the freedom of the world, from library to
art gallery, from museum to learned journal, from online bookshop to
travel timetable. Admittedly, the internet also spreads rubbish, from
the trivial to the sinister. But we are free to ignore it. The net
educational worth of instant worldwide information must be positive.
The internet has no truck with national boundaries, and can thumb its
nose at dictators and tyrannies, at priests and mullahs and all who
would restrict knowledge and critical thinking.
Computer power doubles every 18 months, and its cost is declining at a
similarly dramatic rate. This gives hope for worldwide enlightenment,
even in those parts of the world that are still in thrall to
nationalism, to tribalism, and to the vile superstitions of
misogynistic desert tribesmen whose preachings arbitrarily became
fossilised in influential "holy" books. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the
English physicist who, almost single-handed, invented the world wide
web, has justly been awarded the Fellowship of the Royal Society and
the Order of Merit. I hope for a time when he will be seen to deserve
the Nobel peace prize too.
FREEDOM LOST:
We are beset by rulebooks toted by lawyers and petty bureaucrats, who
worship the letter of the law and have lost the spirit of compassionate
discretion. Most familiar in the infamous and despised "Health and
Safety", it goes further and deeper. Time after time, we encounter
horror stories of petty--and not so petty--injustices, which could so
easily have been sorted out if only officials were granted the
discretion to take decisions based on the spirit of goodwill and
fairness, rather than on books of rules drawn up by lawyers trained to
an exaggerated degree of suspicion. We hand responsibility over to the
rulebook instead of shouldering it ourselves.
Doctors and nurses, teachers and professors, policemen and social
workers spend their days filling in forms, which take them away from
their valuable jobs. They are cowed, intimidated, lawyer-driven to
cover their backs. Employers are terrified of being sued for
"constructive dismissal". Teachers are terrified of showing affection
or even compassion for their pupils. Travellers are terrified of making
jokes to immigration officials. Rulebooks rule, and human kindness,
discretion and fair play are running scared.
THE COMMENTATOR: NEAL ASCHERSON
Aged 75, expert on eastern Europe, former
columnist on the Observer and the London Review of Books.
FREEDOM LOST:
Can one regret a right which damaged other people’s rights—in this
case, their right to health and clean air? I was never more than an
occasional smoker. Yet I still miss the compound pleasure of going to a
movie in the afternoon, putting my boots on the seat in front, and
lighting up a fat black Gauloise. The smoke curling up to the cupola of
the almost empty cinema. The total, concentrated anticipation. The
feeling that “this is the life”. With that loss went a whole grubby
sensual underworld: the extinct trick of telling where a stranger came
from by the perfume of his cigarettes: Ekstra-Mocny from Poland,
Nazionale, Roth-Händle (this guy’s a west German left-winger), Morava
from Nis which was so much sweeter than Morava from Sarajevo...
FREEDOM GAINED:
The new right for which I am most grateful has to be visa-free travel.
A right still limited to certain parts of the world. But the knowledge
that, within a few hours of an impulse, I can be not just in a capital
city (Prague, Warsaw, Berlin) but wandering down Piotrkowska Street in
Lodz , or standing on the cobbles of an East Bohemian village inhaling
its scent of pork chops and cabbage, or buying the real original Weihnachtsstollen
at the Christmas Fair in Dresden—that’s still miraculous. Do I regret
the long waits at frontier stations, the sound of jackboots slowly
moving along the corridor from compartment to compartment? No, it’s all
been perfectly preserved in novels. And if you still hanker for that
paranoia kick, just put on a burqa for your return journey to Britain.
THE THEOLOGIAN: TARIQ RAMADAN
Aged 45, professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford University and author of "Islam, the West and the Challenge of Modernity"
FREEDOM LOST:
As we are celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the UN Declaration, one
remains doubtful regarding the progress in the field of our freedoms.
Sometimes it is as if we are witnessing an effective regression. For
the last 20 years, and more efficiently since the attacks in the United
States in 2001 and the so-called "war on terror", we have lost our
right to privacy. The security policies in both America and the
European Union are undermining our legitimate rights to "a protected
private life": we are checked and checked again, all our details
(travels, credit-card numbers, etc) are known and registered. In
Britain, for instance, one may be photographed and filmed more than 300
times within a single day. We are all monitored, but some more than
others.
Security measures are producing new discriminations and, with their
privacy, some are losing their dignity, if not their personal
integrity. The scenes one can witness in airports, especially in
America, are worrying: the Arabs and the Muslims seem to have less
right to freedom and to be treated with respect and in a dignified way.
All these rights are interconnected and our security obsession is going
as far as to accept, "for the more dangerous ones", to resort to
torture which is dangerously acceptable for 53% of Americans. Scary
indeed.
FREEDOM GAINED (with a condition):
Is global communication a kind of standardisation? America and the
European broadcast channels used to dictate the form and substance of
the global news networks. During the first war in Iraq, in 1991, the
American strategy had two main objectives: the battlefield and its
media coverage. It was difficult to know what was really happening and
it was a success. During the past decades, new private and worldwide TV
and radio channels have been challenging this monolithic coverage and
vision. One may be critical towards al-Jazeera and the others, but one
has to acknowledge that they give another angle, a new perspective on
specific issues (Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Tibet, etc).
We may add to these phenomena the alternative means such as the
internet where the ordinary citizen, from South America to India and
all the way through Africa, can reach multiple sources of information
and news. It is not an absolute gained freedom, for mainstream media
remain very powerful. Nevertheless it is clear that no government, no
despot and no society can dismiss the power of these alternative media.
It is a freedom gained for all of us if, and only if, we take the
committed decision to look for it. This kind of freedom by no means
fits with passivity and laziness.
THE FORMER SPYMASTER: DAPHNE PARK
Aged 87, former British diplomat and senior MI6 officer, then principal of Somerville College, Oxford
FREEDOM LOST:
Britain helped to found the United Nations after fighting a long war
against Nazi tyranny. We had to see such allies as the Poles and
Czechs swallowed up by the Soviet Union. Only the temporary absence of
the USSR from the United Nations, when the vote was taken on Korea in
1948, enabled us to fight and win, under United Nations auspices, the
war in Korea where both the USSR and China were engaged against us.
From 1945 we could not travel freely or talk to anyone behind the Iron
Curtain. I felt deep anger, serving for two years in Moscow in the
1950s, because I could not talk to Russians. For them, any foreign
contact meant the gulag.
In all that time the United Nations, because we failed to foresee the
flaws in its constitution, and how it could be manipulated, has been
powerless to intervene in the Sudan, in Myanmar, and in Zimbabwe and,
because of its appalling unwieldiness, it failed to save Rwanda and was
totally ineffective in Sierra Leone. Declarations which cannot be made
good are worse than useless. So long as the UN's mandate is to observe
but never to intervene, it raises false hopes and it colludes in the
death of freedom.
In my life therefore I have seen access to freedom of speech and action
denied to a wide range of brave and valuable human beings, my
contemporaries in a rapidly changing world, where people and ideas are
a vital resource. We have been powerless to change their situation.
(The new world of the internet has made it, however, more difficult to
cut any country off from free communications.) At the same time the
state, in most countries, has become more powerful, and more insistent
that we should accept a multicultural regime which often inhibits
honest comment on the social evils which confront us.
FREEDOM GAINED:
Women matter today. They have always played a significant part in
society but in the last 50 years their overt power and status has
greatly increased in many, though not all, countries. They are
recognised now as equal players (even in the armed forces in some
countries) and certainly in the world of work.
There are important regional variations. Sharia law still
effectively denies access to many of their most important rights as
citizens in our society in the field of education, and in marital
matters. But in general women have been accorded the more powerful
voice in many societies that they deserve and that has had a
significant result in the field of education, science, the media and
indeed politics. Aid works best when it is given directly to women.
Finally, I have known two women prime ministers, both Somervillians!
March 20, 2008
March 20, 2008
March 20, 2008
