Egyptian Hieroglyphs
My name using Egyptian Hieroglyphs!
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February 28, 2006
Must Charity Be Multicultural?
Today's New York Times writes in its Paris Journal (to read the article just click "read more" at the end of this entry) about a soup kitchen that serves soups made with pork, and therefore making it impossible for people of Jewish or Muslim faith to partake of that charity. The French police are pursuing the owner of the soup kitchen for discriminatory practices.
Are we all going mad? Must charity be mandated and prescribed? I know it is currently, as any Jewish immigrant who has a preferential entry to Germany or the US knows. Or like any Russian citizen of German origins. Catholic schools, Evangelical drives. Charity is and always will be SOMEONE's money given to others. That SOMEONE may or may not, at his/her discretion prescribe how and on whom the money should be spent. Unless it is a government handout, which then by definition has to be all-encompassing, all-covering aid.
It is not just another French thing. I can only imagine the uproar one would create by serving pork soup only on the streets of New York, and stating so explicitly on the sign above one's soup kitchen. I would also imagine that it wouldn't be a hungry guy who would write a letter of protest to the newspaper or call the media. It will be some fully sated, torn jeans-clad lefty uber-liberal "striving for equality", yet looking only for self-importance.
Poor and Muslim? Jewish? Soup Kitchen Is Not for You.
By CRAIG S. SMITH
PARIS, Feb. 27 — More than 200 political demonstrators defied a police ban here on Thursday, scurrying across Boulevard St.-Germain and under the sycamore trees of Place Maubert to engage in their forbidden action: eating "pig soup" in public.
With steaming bowls of the fragrant broth soon passing through the crowd, Odile Bonnivard, a short-haired secretary turned far-right firebrand, climbed atop a dark sedan with a megaphone in hand and led the crowd in a raucous chant: "We are all pig eaters! We are all pig eaters!"
Identity soup, as the broth has come to be called, is one of the stranger manifestations of a growing grass-roots backlash against the multiculturalism that has spread through Europe over the past 20 years. People are increasingly challenging the care taken in Nazi-chastened Europe, and in France in particular, to avoid the sort of racial or religious insults that led to widespread protests in the Muslim world this month after wide publication of cartoons considered offensive to the Prophet Muhammad.
The movement began in the winter of 2003 when Ms. Bonnivard, a member of a small far-right nationalist movement called the Identity Bloc, began serving hot soup to the homeless. At first, she said, the group used pork simply because it was an inexpensive traditional ingredient for hearty French soup. But after the political significance of serving pork dawned on them and others, it quickly became the focus of their work.
Made with smoked bacon, pigs' ears, pigs' feet and pigs' tails together with assorted vegetables and sausages, the soup is meant to make a political statement: "Help our own before others."
The "others," Ms. Bonnivard explained, are non-European immigrants who she and her colleagues on the far right say are sopping up scarce resources that ought to be used for descendants of the Continent's original inhabitants. In other words, the soup is meant to exclude those who do not eat pork — for the most part, Muslims and Jews.
"Other communities don't hesitate to help their own, so why can't we?" she asked, noting that Europe's Islamic charities serve halal food to disadvantaged Muslims and that its Jewish charities operate kosher soup kitchens.
Fair enough, one might argue, but this is France, where there is little tolerance for anything that challenges the republic's egalitarian ideals.
The authorities initially left the pork-soup kitchen alone, shutting it down only once to avoid an altercation with a group of indignant French leftists. Then came the riots that swept France in October and November last year, waking the government to the deep alienation felt by Muslim youth. As winter closed in and other pork-soup kitchens run by similar-minded groups popped up in Strasbourg and Nice — and in Brussels, Antwerp and Charleroi in Belgium — authorities worried that they might be witnessing the start of a dangerous racist-tinged trend.
In December, Ms. Bonnivard said, a van of plainclothes police chased her soup-bearing car through the streets, and several busloads of officers arrived to stop her group from setting up at their usual spot near the Montparnasse train station, citing "the discriminatory nature of the soup."
She and her fellow soup servers filed an appeal. A Paris police spokesman said the appeal was pending and would be decided "on the basis of the current regulations, in particular concerning risks to public order and incitement to racial hatred."
They have been playing cat and mouse with the authorities since then.
Ms. Bonnivard talks glowingly of the camaraderie engendered by her group's gatherings, whose motive, she said, is to defend European culture and identity. "Our freedom in France is being threatened," she said. "If we prefer European civilization and Christian culture, that's our choice."
Even newly arrived immigrants from Eastern Europe are more welcome than Muslims from North Africa, she said, a sentiment shared by some of the diners.
"At least here there are people who are of the same mind as me," said a woman named Hélène, 61, who is not homeless but comes for soup because she has little money left for food after paying her rent. "The French, and the Europeans in general, roll over for foreigners, and particularly Islam."
This being France, most soup kitchens provide the downtrodden with a complete French dinner, including cheese and dessert. Ms. Bonnivard's group even throws in a glass of red wine with every meal.
"The only condition required for dining with us: eat pork," reads the group's Web site, which bears the image of a wanted poster for a cartoon pig in a pot framed by the words, "Wanted, Cooked or Raw, Public Disturbance No. 1."
The police initially granted permission for the "European solidarity feast" that Ms. Bonnivard's and the other right-wing soup kitchens planned last Thursday. But the authorities called late Wednesday evening to say the permission had been revoked. Officers appeared at Ms. Bonnivard's apartment at 6 a.m. Thursday to deliver a written notice prohibiting the pork-eating rally.
By evening, four police vans filled with anti-riot police officers were waiting at the group's designated meeting point outside a conservative Roman Catholic church while Ms. Bonnivard and her associates huddled in a nearby cafe, plotting diversionary tactics so they could serve their soup before the police could intervene.
"They're more afraid of us than any march by Islamists or Jews," Ms. Bonnivard's husband, Roger, declared as people slurped soup around him. (In the end, despite the official ban, the police did not intervene.)
Bruno Gollnisch, the silver-haired No. 2 in the far-right National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen, mingled in the crowd, calling the "persecution" of the soup kitchen a "betrayal of the French identity." Others handed out slices of oily sausage as flags bearing the French fleur-de-lis fluttered overhead. There wasn't a police officer in sight.
"We're not yet living in a land of Islam," Ms. Bonnivard bellowed from atop the sedan.
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February 27, 2006
Book-a-Minute
Our Florida correspondent got my attention to this wonderful site, which contains a very, VERY, very short renditions of many books: classics, science fiction and bedtime.
Here are some samples (all written by David J. Parker and Samuel Stoddard):
Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
(The Earth gets BLOWN UP.)
Arthur. I'm a bit upset about that.
Ford. Yes, I can understand that.
(They fly around the galaxy. They go UNDERGROUND, where they see...)
Arthur. The Earth.
Deep Thought. Forty two.
The End.
Inferno by Dante
some woman puts Dante through Hell
The End
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
History controls everything we do, so there is no point in observing individual actions. Let's examine the individual actions of over 500 characters at great length.
The End.
The IT Crowd
You can find the description of the show and the episode list here
Episode 1. Yesterday's Jam
Episode 2. Calamity Jen
Episode 3. 50:50
Episode 4. The Red Door
Episode 5. The Haunting Of Bill Crouse
Episode 6. Aunt Irma Visits
February 25, 2006
Met: The Art of Medicine in the Ancient Egypt
Yet another wonderful exhibit at the Met is devoted to the art of medicine. Make sure not to miss the treatise on how to treat the head wounds (two lengths of cloth, oil and honey). Here are the "pictures from the exhibition
I am on my way to that exhibition :)
Met: Pearls of the Parrot of India
A great new exhibit is currently on at the Met. Having attended it yesterday, I can only wish there were more images, more translations in better English, so that I could put the captions and the images together and form a coherent story. Take a look at the pictures from the exhibition
Poet Amir Khusrau Dihlavi's Khamsa (quintet of tales) was one of the most sumptuous manuscripts created for the great Mughal emperor and patron of the arts, Akbar. The surviving 29 images are currently on display and you can use a loupe/magnifying glass to appreciate the miniatures that are at the same time sublime and very realistic.
I am completly immersed in a wonderful world of Khamsa
Proust's opus is finally in Arabic in its entirety
Now, of course, you may say that this is the greatest achievement yet - we could now occupy (!) the Arab minds with Proust, and since it is such a long novel, it may take them a while to get through the admittedly best novel of the 20th century, James Joyce notwithstanding. The first time the novel was mentioned in Arabic was in Egypt in 1945, parts of it were translated before in the 70s and the 80s.
L’histoire de la traduction de la Recherche commence en 1977 avec la parution en Syrie de Du côté de chez Swann. Cette première partie du roman fut traduite par Elias Badiwi, un traducteur émérite qui avait réussi à rallier à son projet Mme Najah al-Attar, ministre de la culture syrienne de l’époque. Se sont succédé ensuite A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, en 1979, puis Le Côté de Guermantes, en 1980.
Le projet a alors connu, faute de moyens, une très longue interruption. Voyant que la parution des deux parties restantes se faisait attendre, le Centre national du livre (CNL) français a décidé, par l’entremise du programme d’aide à l’édition (baptisé Taha Hussein) qu’il soutient via l’ambassade de France au Caire, de reprendre sous son aile la publication d’une édition égyptienne intégrale.
Pour ce faire, les trois parties déjà publiées ont fait l’objet d’une réédition, parue à Damas en 1994. Il était prévu que la suite de la traduction paraisse en Egypte, au rythme de l’avancée d’Elias Badiwi. Hélas, si le travail qu’il avait accompli a bien été édité au Caire (Sodome et Gomorrhe en 1998 et La Prisonnière en 2001), il s’agissait pour le traducteur d’une publication posthume puisque celui-ci est décédé en 1997.
C’est un érudit syrien spécialiste de littérature française, le professeur Jamal Chehayed, qui a pris la suite, s’attelant à la traduction des volumes restants, Albertine disparue (en 2003) et Le Temps retrouvé, il y a quelques mois. L’intégralité de la Recherche est maintenant disponible en arabe : c’est un événement considérable que Les Nouvelles littéraires (Akhbar al-Adab) – le seul journal littéraire du monde arabe – ont célébré en publiant un numéro spécial consacré à Proust et à son influence sur la littérature arabe.
February 23, 2006
Paris
Paris last week greeted my with never-ending rain, heavy clouds and cold temperatures. It is a good thing that we're in love for a long long time so that nothing can really come between us any more.
Anglo-American in Paris
This photo shows a very small sign (it is almost life-size) that I saw in Paris this Monday. The sign says (if you ne parlez pas):
There are more signs in Anglo-American around Paris now, than there were in German during the Nazi occupation. It would suffice if French-speaking people just revolt against the decision-makers. I am of the people, and my language is of the poor people.
and the sign is signed Michel Serres, philosopher, academician, historian of science at Stanford University (USA).
irony.
February 22, 2006
February 18, 2006
A building almost 1 mile high **fr
Certains voient grand. Javier Pioz et Maria Rosa Cervera, deux architectes espagnols, espèrent construire une « ville verticale » réunissant logements, commerces et bureaux, pour accueillir jusqu’à 100 000 personnes. La Bionic Tower, construction de 300 étages, est prévue pour s’élever sur une petite île artificielle au large de Shanghaï, à 1 228m de haut.
« Les matériaux actuels, dont les bétons ultrarésistants, permettent
d’atteindre de telles hauteurs de construction, commente Jean-Pierre Viguier, architecte de certaines tours de la Défense. Ils présentent même une flexibilité et une résistance au feu plus intéressantes que l’acier, jusque-là principale faiblesse de nos gratte-ciel.» La tour, de 250 mètres de diamètre, devrait se construire par blocs de 80 m. « Les tronçons terminés pourront être habités alors que la construction continuera », précise M. Pioz. Entre chaque bloc sont prévus des espaces coupe-feu et des bassins pour récupérer l’eau ruisselant des façades. Un réseau de 368 ascenseurs a été imaginé pour gérer les déplacements.
Les détracteurs du projet ne remettent pas en question sa faisabilité, mais s’interrogent sur l’utilité d’un tel bâtiment et son impact sur la vie urbaine. Les
concepteurs répondent que « la densité de population et la limite du territoire forcent à imaginer les buildings du XXIe siècle ». Les attentats du 11-Septembre ont un temps freiné ce projet. Mais la course aux gratte-ciel semble à nouveau relancée, notamment à Dubaï où une tour de plus de 700 mètres est en construction. « Nous attendons désormais la licence de la ville de Shanghaï, qui interdit pour l’instant toute construction dépassant les 500 mètres », conclut M. Pioz, qui espère voir débuter le chantier, prévu pour durer quinze ans, en 2015
February 17, 2006
Images of the day
The image of Opera Garnier is by me. Beautiful building, facade, vestibule - everything is shining, majestic, grandiose!
LRB: On Genocide
by Malcolm Bull
The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing by Michael Mann · Cambridge, 580 pp, £17.99
Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Vol. I: The Meaning of Genocide by Mark Levene · Tauris, 266 pp, £24.50
Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Vol. II: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide by Mark Levene · Tauris, 463 pp, £29.50
Waking to find myself a touch genocidal, I would, I imagine, be uncertain how to proceed. An unprovoked attack on my target group with whatever weapon came to hand might take out a few of them, but also bring my venture to a premature end. Reflecting that few are lucky enough to be in a position to do the job themselves, I could either confine myself to advocacy, or else embark on the difficult anid protracted business of getting into a position in which I could expect others to obey my orders.
The problematic nature of this project suggests that genocide, if defined (as it is in the UN Convention) as actions undertaken with intent to destroy a specified ethnic, national or religious group ‘as such’, is not a solitary crime. If someone is sitting in their bedroom planning the annihilation of half the population, it is probably better described as fantasy than intent. On the other hand, soldiers who take no prisoners when clearing the survivors out of a bombarded village may have no sense that they are engaged in anything other than a messy military operation, and be quite indifferent to the identity of those they kill. Connecting the genocidal fantasy with the murderous reality is tricky. Genocide is a big-picture, ‘vision thing’; acts of genocide are generally routine police and military actions involving small numbers of people in particular locations. The fantasists will probably have killed no one, and (pace Daniel Goldhagen) none of the killers may share in the fantasy at all.
It is for this reason that prosecuting individuals for genocide has proved extremely difficult. Even if the fantasists and the executioners are part of the same organisation, it does not necessarily follow that the former gave instructions to the latter. Organisational goals are often ill-defined, and sometimes imperfectly understood by everyone. So genocide, like corporate negligence or fraud, is difficult to prove, and the people most likely to be prosecuted are the senior to middle managers who may have neither envisioned nor executed the genocide, but somehow got stuck with the task of translating a vaguely defined project into the practical steps necessary to make it possible. Nevertheless, outside Rwanda, no conviction has yet been upheld for anything more than ‘aiding and abetting’ or ‘complicity’ in genocide.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the definition of genocide has been endlessly debated. Feeling that nothing like the Holocaust should ever be allowed to happen again, the UN Convention on Genocide tried to define exactly what it was that had happened. The omission of political, occupational and other social groups from the terms of the UN Convention, which thereby excluded the mass killings of Stalin and Pol Pot, has been criticised by many. Michael Mann chooses to call such massacres ‘classicide’ or ‘politicide’, and reserves ‘genocide’ for the destruction of ethnic or religious groups. Mark Levene, on the other hand, includes all of these within his definition of genocide as ‘the state-organised total or partial extermination of perceived or actual communal groups’.
However, the Convention also inadvertently included within its definition many other things that none of the signatories regretted very much, like the colonial depopulation of Australia and the Americas. Mann prefers the term ‘ethnocide’ for the unintended annihilation of racial groups, but for both victims and perpetrators the consequences are much the same. Without the benefit of such ethnocides many readers of the LRB would not be living where they are now. Few think of themselves as being in favour of genocide, and many would like to see Israelis dismantle their settlements on the West Bank, but no one is going to demolish their own house and give the land back to the indigenous people. Zionists remember this, and so did Hitler.
The associations are perhaps more uncomfortable than they need to be. Genocide may be more difficult than it looks, but that does not mean that it is wrong. There are good arguments for it, the strongest of which come from just-war theory. If you accept that wars fought as a last resort by legitimate authority with the sole intention of responding to unprovoked aggression with proportionate force are justifiable, then there are circumstances in which you may find yourself supporting genocide. If your adversary is unshakeably committed to a total war involving every member of the population in a struggle that brooks no surrender (and in the modern period most states have been committed, at least rhetorically, to just such an undertaking), then it follows that the war must continue until all the enemy are either dead or incapacitated. If they insist on fighting, you have to keep on killing them, and if they all keep on fighting, you will end up having to kill the lot.
It is not only in cases of total war, however, that the just war is potentially genocidal. The doctrine of double effect, which allows for civilian casualties incurred as a result of striking legitimate military targets, is also a potential route to genocide in the age of mass destruction. An aerial bombardment or a tactical nuclear strike may be directed at military targets, but nevertheless cause immense destruction, including, coincidentally, the annihilation of entire social groups that happen to get in the way. And then there is what Michael Walzer and John Rawls both call a ‘supreme emergency’, when direct attacks on civilian targets are required in circumstances of dire military necessity. Since, in the nuclear age, ‘supreme emergency has become a permanent condition,’ this means that it is legitimate to possess strategic nuclear weapons and threaten to use them against civilian populations, committing who knows how many forms of genocide in the process.
Perhaps these would not be genocides ‘as such’ in that the ethnic or religious identity of those killed would not be the primary determinant of their fate. Even so, what we have here are examples of what, fusing the terminology of Rawls and Mann, we might think of, if not as ‘reasonable liberal genocides’, then at least as ‘decent ethnocides’. And if your definition of a just war extends beyond self-defence to include armed intervention in outlaw states, as it does for Rawls, then opportunities for genocides of this type increase exponentially. It would, for example, be possible to put up a robust defence of the genocide of native peoples in the New World. Rawls argues that in the case of societies like that of the Aztecs, which are ‘driven by slavery and the threat of human sacrifice’, intervention might be necessary. Noting, with regret, that there is no way to influence ‘primitive, isolated societies, with no contact with liberal or decent societies’, he concludes that in such cases sanctions will not work. In which case invasion is the only answer. And if the natives resist to the death? Then there is no choice.
Oh well, invasion and extermination are some of the dangers people encounter when they cannot manage to develop a ‘well-ordered’ society. (It may be difficult to maintain a full range of liberal institutions if, like the Tasmanians, you have forgotten how to make a fire, but it is still inexcusable.) And so this was the fate not just of the Aztecs, but of the native populations of Australia and North America, whose rates of attrition after contact were 80 and 95 per cent respectively. As Mann points out, 12 years of Nazi rule in Europe resulted in the death of 70 per cent of the Jewish population; in the first 12 years of California’s statehood, the Native American population fell by 80 per cent. Anyone who imagines that a post-genocidal literature must be unreadable should try Little House on the Prairie, or perhaps Joan Didion’s Where I Was From.
The idea of outlaw peoples brings to the field of international relations a concept more familiar from domestic polity. Everyone appears to accept that it is necessary to eradicate certain social groups – not in the sense that all their members should be killed, but that their defining practices and common ways of life should cease. For example, states are committed to eradicating crime and the subcultures that sustain it, and ensuring that all serious criminals are, if not executed, at least safely locked away in prison. Is this then a genocide against criminals? Most would say not. But it is arguable. China is said to execute about 10,000 people a year, 100,000 in a decade – well up to what, in other circumstances, might be called genocidal levels of slaughter. And what exactly is the difference between the criminalisation of an occupation (being a drug-dealer, say, or a speculator or a ‘kulak’) and the criminalisation of a religious group? Religious careers have often been criminalised; some criminal careers are religious vocations.
Reasoned defences of most genocides can be constructed on the basis of a conjunction of the just war and social exclusion arguments, for if there is an identifiable social group engaged in total war against you, then it has to be neutralised. The Armenian genocide in 1915 was justified on these grounds, for the Armenians were expected to fight with the Russians in the event of an invasion of Anatolia. Stalin’s classicide was an attempt to deal with counter-revolutionary elements who might have sided with the Whites in the event of a renewed civil war or foreign invasion. A defence of the Holocaust might be constructed along the same lines: the attack on Bolshevism was a just war against an outlaw state ‘driven by slavery and the threat of human sacrifice’; it became a total war in which Jews would probably have taken the Soviet side; their pre-emptive internment was therefore a natural precaution, and their execution an unfortunate necessity at a time of ‘supreme emergency’ when the Red Army threatened the Fatherland. If you accept the just war and social exclusion arguments, then these genocides can only be criticised on the basis that they relied on shaky political analysis. They were, in effect, misjudgments, failures of statesmanship, perhaps.
These are not hypothetical arguments. Orhan Pamuk was until recently awaiting trial for affirming the existence of an Armenian genocide, while the president of Iran has cast doubt on the Holocaust, and floated the idea of relocating the state of Israel in Central Europe. Mann and Levene both see genocide as a modern practice coextensive with the rise of the West, and imply that the Middle East has been relatively insulated from this historical pattern. But as war and democracy march hand in hand into the region, that may change. On Mann’s analysis, the chances of some sort of genocide must be quite high. According to him, murderous ethnic cleansing takes place where the demos is equated with the ethnos. Young democracies are particularly at risk, especially those where ethnicity trumps class as the primary means of social classification. The danger zone is reached when two groups claim the same territory, and they reach the brink either when the weaker group fights rather than submits (perhaps believing it has outside support) or when the stronger thinks it can act with impunity. Genocides do not occur in stable, peaceful environments, but at moments of crisis when the state is in danger. So societies only go over the brink when the perpetrators of the genocide are radicalised by war.
Elements of this scenario will sound disturbingly familiar. The new Iraq would appear to offer a promising setting for future genocides, the Sunnis or the Kurds being the potential targets of Iraq’s Shia majority – an outcome, according to Mann’s theory, less likely during the occupation than it might be thereafter. The Israel-Palestine conflict (which Mann inexplicably discusses in terms of class) conforms to his model still more closely. As a democratic settler state with an ethnically based conception of citizenship, Israel is a prime example of the type of polity within which a genocide might be expected to take place. Had either of the Iraq wars spread that far, the consequences for the Palestinians might have been even worse than they were. Conversely, were the Israelis ever to discover their trust in the United States to be unfounded, things could go the other way; though in the latter case, it is unlikely that the Palestinians would have to resort to genocide.
For genocide to take place, the victims have to be a more or less credible source of threat, and yet be relatively helpless. Even then, as Mann persuasively demonstrates, genocide is rarely the initial objective, but the last in a series of expedients prompted by the frustration or failure of earlier plans that have escalated from repression, to forced emigration or deportation, to mass killing. There is a strong link between the last two, for, as the unfolding disaster in Darfur reminds us, genocide is a testimony to people’s acute vulnerability when deprived of the ability to shelter and support themselves. Because settlers usually have somewhere to go, they rarely end up being driven into the sea, and can usually be induced to leave long before this becomes a possibility; the white population of Zimbabwe has fallen by 70 per cent since the end of minority rule, without having experienced anything more than sporadic intimidation.
Were what has long been hailed as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ to become the site of genocide, it would offer strong confirmation of Mann’s thesis. In opposition to democratic peace theory, which makes much of the idea that democracies do not go to war with one another, Mann argues that democracies, unless they are securely established liberal democracies, are actually more likely to become genocidal than authoritarian states:
Modern ethnic cleansing is the dark side of democracy when ethno-nationalist movements claim the state for their own ethnos, which they initially intend to constitute as a democracy, but then they seek to exclude and cleanse others. There was also a dark side to socialist versions of democracy. The people was equated with the proletariat, and after the revolution cleansing of classes and other enemies might begin.
The ‘most direct’ evidence for this hypothesis comes from European settler states which, Mann argues, were more genocidal if democratic; from Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, where authoritarian rule repressed and democracy inflamed ethnic tensions; and from India, where martial law had a similarly dampening effect on inter-ethnic hostility.
Mann’s work brings a new and impressive sociological rigour to the study of genocide, but despite its provocative title, his book does not establish the link between democracy and ethnic cleansing. The fate of Native Americans under the republic may have been worse than it was in the colonial period, but it did not differ all that much from that of Aboriginal Australians (who were still notionally under colonial rule), or that of the Guanches (the indigenous inhabitants of the Canaries), the Caribs or the Arawaks – all victims of Castilian or Spanish colonial expansion. And then there is, as Mann acknowledges, the rather obvious point that none of the terrible genocides of the 20th century occurred in democratic societies.
A tempting logic lies behind Mann’s theory. Because democracy is the rule of the people, it is easily conflated with the rule of the majority ethnic group, which then seeks to remove minorities in order to make the state safe for democracy. But it’s hard to see what incentive a majority (as opposed to a minority) has for homogenising a democracy, for democracy is the one form of government that ensures the rule of the majority in the first place. Perhaps the problem is not democracy itself but rather the related concept of citizenship. Democracy is an inclusive concept, while citizenship is traditionally an exclusive one. But a democracy has to have more clearly defined boundaries than a monarchy or aristocracy because in a democracy the boundaries of citizenship are also those of sovereignty. Empires may be limitless, claiming lost territories and unknown numbers of unidentifiable subjects, but democracies have to be more careful. Genocides, it may be noted, are frequently, but not invariably, attacks on second-class or non-citizens. The Jews were deprived of German citizenship by the Nuremberg laws of 1935; Native Americans gained US citizenship only in 1924; Stalin thinned the ranks of the lishentsy (disenfranchised); the genocide in Kampuchea drew on the notional distinction between ‘base people’ and the suspect ‘new people’.
Mann admits that ‘if the two meanings of “the people” become fused . . . the privileges of citizens may involve discrimination against ethnic out-groups,’ but Levene comes closer to acknowledging the centrality of citizenship. In answer to the question of what it is about the modern world that has made genocide more prevalent, Mann would point to organic democracy, whereas Levene would say the nation-state. In his account, genocide involves a state commitment to the extrusion of a real or imagined social group; an occasion in which this is unhindered; a crisis in which the state believes itself in danger, and in which prolonged killing is led by state operatives. So for Levene, the origins of modern genocide are to be found in the French Revolution, and in the equation of citizenship with participation in the general will. This allowed opponents to be classified as enemies of the people, and cleared the way for war to be waged against French citizens as though they were a foreign enemy. Levene therefore follows the controversial French historian Reynald Secher in seeing repression in the Vendée as the archetypal modern genocide.
Prior to the American and French Revolutions, citizenship was usually conceived in terms of duties rather than rights; after the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, citizenship became an attempt to co-ordinate rights and duties. Initially, it was a matter of giving rights to those who already had duties. But the emphasis quickly changed. By 1795, the Declaration of the Rights of Man had become the Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, with new clauses specifying that citizens ‘should both know and fulfil their duties’, and that those who openly defied the law would be ‘in a state of war with society’.
The equation of citizenship with the exchange of rights and duties received its classic statement in the much-repeated formula of the First International: ‘No rights without duties, no duties without rights.’ The implications of this were spelled out in the Soviet constitution of 1918. Work was the duty of all citizens: ‘He who does not work shall not eat.’ The conjunction was echoed in the Nazi programme of 1920. The ninth point was that ‘All citizens must possess equal rights and duties’; the tenth: ‘The first duty of every citizen must be to work.’ Arbeit macht frei.
Where there are no rights without duties, and no duties without rights, it is axiomatic that those who do not perform duties relinquish their rights. Jews, the handicapped, and others who supposedly did no productive work, were the victims of this particular equation in Nazi Germany. But they were only the last in a series of victims of the attempt to co-ordinate rights and duties. From 1918 to 1936, the Soviet constitution disenfranchised employers, speculators, clergy and others not engaged in ‘productive and socially useful labour’. Even colonial genocides were justified by the supposed failure of native peoples to exercise the duties incumbent on the holders of property rights. The underlying fear was always the one Rousseau first articulated: that someone ‘might seek to enjoy the rights of a citizen without doing the duties of a subject’.
Paradoxically, therefore, human rights universalism becomes part of the problem. By investing everyone with rights that they may not previously have known they had, it places duties on them which they may be unwilling or unable to perform. For people in this situation the result can be either oppression – to enable them to perform their duties and so secure their rights – or else abandonment to a state of rightlessness in which duties are no longer required of them. In the latter case, as Hannah Arendt put it, ‘their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed, but that nobody wants to oppress them.’
Given that declarations of the rights of man seem to end up equating rights either with the rights of the dutiful citizen, or else with the non-existent rights of those deprived of citizenship, the philosopher Jacques Rancière has recently offered an alternative formulation in which ‘the Rights of Man are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not.’ He takes the example of Olympe de Gouges, whose Declaration of the Rights of Woman argued that if women were entitled to go to the scaffold (a right that women had even in the absence of civil rights), they must also be entitled to go to the assembly (a right they lacked notwithstanding their notional inclusion in earlier declarations of the rights of man). On this account, the political relevance of the French revolutionary discourse of rights emerged at precisely the point it appeared to break down: in the creation of subjects simultaneously included in and excluded from the political sphere.
Pushing the thesis a little further, Rancière, in his essay ‘The Thinking of Dissensus’ (2003), presents democracy as the rule of those ‘who have no qualification for exercising power’, and have ‘no specificity in common’:
The ethnos is the people identified with the living body of those who have the same origin, are born on the same soil, or worship the same god. It is the people as a given body opposed to other such bodies. The demos is the people conceived as a supplement to the parts of the community – what I call the count of the uncounted . . . The life of the demos is the ongoing process of its differentiation from the ethnos.
Here, it might appear, is an account of a democracy that does not need to define its own boundaries (for it is always outside them) and forever refuses the genocidal equation of demos with a particular ethnos, social class or political group.
However, arguing that ‘the Rights of Man are the rights of those who have not the rights they have’ amounts to little more than saying that the rights of man are the legitimate claims of those who have duties, such as a liability to legal penalties. And what about those who have the rights that they have (in the sense that they already have full civil rights) and do not have the rights that they have not (in the sense that they do not have any duties)? What is the fate, in Rancière’s democracy, of those who are qualified to rule?
Rancière’s account of democracy as ‘the power of those who have no qualification for exercising power’ aligns it with what the primatologist and anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls a ‘reverse dominance hierarchy’, in which those least able to dominate individually do so collectively. In Hierarchy in the Forest (1999), his study of the origins of egalitarianism among bands of hunter-gatherers, Boehm found that in order to establish egalitarianism the first humans had to reverse the hierarchical social organisation of their ancestors (which persisted in great ape societies). Egalitarianism did not arise spontaneously but had to be rigorously enforced by sanctions, expulsions and executions of potential upstarts and free-riders. So, unlike Jared Diamond, who has suggested that human genocides are continuous with the murderous inter-group skirmishes of chimpanzees, Boehm sees a radical discontinuity between the hierarchical social organisation of the chimpanzees and the egalitarianism of human hunter-gatherers. It was the human ‘egalitarian revolution’ that created the possibility of both altruism and genocide.
If feeling genocidal is a symptom of what Boehm terms ‘human egalitarian syndrome’, is our abhorrence of genocide then the effect of a growing revulsion towards egalitarianism? Most modern victims have been perceived to be in possession of some form of capital to which they had no right. Many have indeed been socially or economically more advantaged than their persecutors – the educated and people in middlemen occupations being particularly at risk. But indigenous peoples, as the illegitimate occupiers of immense tracts of land, also fall within this category. And citizenship itself, as a form of legal and social capital, can provoke the same genocidal impulse if held by those who appear not to merit it. In almost every case, genocide is the attempt to eliminate free-riders, the pests and parasites of society.
In contrast, having duties without rights appears to be the best defence against genocide. One sentence rarely found in the annals of human history is: ‘And then they killed all their servants.’ The Spartans used to carry out an annual raid against the Helots, just to remind them who was in charge. But despite having the right to do so, slave owners rarely slaughtered their slaves. Even the most bloodthirsty reactionaries do not call for the annihilation of the working class. And illegal immigrants are not rounded up and deported en masse, because they are usually hard at work doing something beneath the dignity of a citizen.
Slavery or genocide may be the ultimate political choice, but it is not the most inviting one. A simultaneous refusal of both is possible, though perhaps more difficult than we like to imagine. As the former Situationist Raoul Vaneigem observes in his critique of ‘Declarations of the Rights of Man’, such a refusal will almost certainly mean relinquishing the contractarian practice of bartering rights for duties, and with it the dictatorship of exchange value itself.
Malcolm Bull is the head of art history and theory at the Ruskin in Oxford. His books include Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision and Totality.
February 14, 2006
Tod aus Luft (Death from the Air)
by Steven Shapin
Between Genius and Genocide: The Tragedy of Fritz Haber, Father of Chemical Warfare by Daniel Charles · Cape, 313 pp, £20.00
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Along with DNA, ammonia is a candidate for ‘molecule of the 20th century’. DNA is a very large molecule, and ammonia a very small one, but ammonia has greater bearing on the way in which the century’s history unfolded. Synthetic ammonia is both a foundation stock for the manufacture of such nitrogenous fertilisers as ammonium nitrate or sulphate, and a substance which, in its liquid state, can be directly injected into the soil. Plants need nitrogen to grow but they cannot get it directly from the atmosphere, which is 78 per cent nitrogen by volume. Legumes – plants like peas, beans and clover – harbour nodules of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in their roots, converting free atmospheric nitrogen into compounds usable in plant metabolism, and you can plant legumes to give the soil a dose of fixed nitrogen. But prior to the Haber-Bosch process, sources of nitrogen-containing fertilisers were limited. You could use animal manure, but that was bulky, hard to distribute and low in nitrogenous oomph. You could use the bird fecal deposits called guano, usually obtained through a vast global trade from islands off the coast of Peru, or the naturally occurring nitrates from saltpetre deposits in the deserts of Chile. But by the end of the 19th century, it was looking as if both of these sources would soon be exhausted.
In 1898, the English chemist William Crookes sounded a Malthusian alarm: the world’s population, he said, would very soon outstrip its food supply. This was a global crisis in the making, but, Crookes warned, it was especially acute for white people: ‘The fixation of nitrogen,’ he announced, ‘is a question of the not-far-distant future. Unless we can class it as among certainties to come, the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost in the world, and will be squeezed out of existence by races to whom wheaten bread is not the staff of life.’ Crookes’s apocalyptic vision was widely credited and may indirectly have inspired Haber’s work. The production of cheap synthetic fertilisers permitted by the Haber-Bosch process was a vital ingredient in the sevenfold increase in the world’s food supply during the course of the 20th century and the almost fourfold increase in its human population. Brot aus Luft was the slogan: bread out of the air. A hundred million tons of nitrogen a year are now removed from the atmosphere and turned into fertiliser. That’s the bit of Haber’s career which gets him called a genius and a saviour of humankind.
The same synthetic ammonia that could be transformed into fertiliser could also, by way of nitric acid, become a feedstock for military explosives. After the outbreak of the Great War, the British blockade cut Germany off from its Chilean nitrate supplies, and the rate at which the Haber-Bosch process could make ammonia became crucial to Germany’s ability to wage war, and, especially, to its strategic planning. If enough of the stuff could not be made, a protracted war was bound to be a disaster. In the autumn of 1914 it became clear that Germany would run out of munitions in six months if further nitrate supplies could not be secured. Haber was already on the job, becoming head of the chemistry department of Walter Rathenau’s Kriegsrohstoffabteilung (War Raw Materials Section). For this, and other reasons, he became a hero of the war effort.
The most notorious of his contributions to the war – and probably the one which most engaged his enthusiasm – was poison gas. That’s the bit of Haber’s work which attracts Daniel Charles’s description of him in the subtitle of his new biography as the ‘father of chemical warfare’. As early as December 1914, Haber attended a test-firing of munitions containing a tear gas called xylyl bromide, and was immediately gripped by the opportunities gas offered to the patriotic chemist. He had a better idea than using gas to burn soldiers’ eyes and put them temporarily out of commission: he wanted, as a co-worker related, ‘something that puts people permanently out of action’. Some colleagues drew back from the idea, but Haber suggested to the High Command using the asphyxiating gas chlorine in the stalled trench warfare of the Western Front. The generals had misgivings – if the Germans could use gas, so could the British and French and, anyway, it seemed unsporting – but they agreed, and on 22 and 23 April 1915 several hundred tons of chlorine gas were released into trenches around Ypres occupied by Canadian, French and Algerian soldiers: Tod aus Luft this time. The Germans gained about a mile of territory, and fewer of the enemy than Haber would have liked were ‘put permanently out of action’ – perhaps 350 were killed and 7000 disabled. Haber was miffed that the advantage of being the first to use poison gas was not pressed home: if the German generals had been more serious about gas, he reckoned, the Allies could have been driven into the sea in quick order.
Haber had no qualms about the use of gas, despite its prohibition by the Brussels Declaration of 1874 and subsequent bans by the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. War was hell and death was death: it really didn’t matter by what means a soldier died. Opposition to the use of gas was just standing in the way of inevitable progress. Chlorine was soon replaced with phosgene and then with mustard gas, which Haber applauded as a ‘fabulous success’. He told a group of officers that ‘the disapproval that the knight felt for the man with a gun is repeated by the soldier who shoots steel bullets when confronted by a man who appears with chemical weapons.’ Get used to it. Charles writes that Haber viewed gas warfare ‘as an intellectual challenge’. He thought conventional warfare was like draughts, but ‘gas weapons and gas defence turn warfare into chess,’ he told the industrialist Carl Duisberg. The psychological effects of gas were as much the point as the deaths they caused: they were, and were designed to be, terror weapons, not weapons of mass destruction. The Nobel Prize committee didn’t seem to have had serious problems with Haber’s position. It awarded him his prize for the Haber-Bosch process within months of the war’s end and diplomatically didn’t mention his work with poison gas in its official biography. His first wife, Clara Immerwahr, may have had a different view: just after his triumphant return from Ypres at the end of April 1915, she took Haber’s service revolver and shot herself in the heart.
That aside – and it had been a miserable marriage – war was very good to Haber. At the University of Karlsruhe, he had been Herr Professor; called in 1911 to head the richly endowed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem, he became Herr Geheimrat, walking the corridors of power, mixing with politicians and captains of industry, and turning his institute into a well-stocked science shop for the military. The war completed Haber’s transformation, as a colleague put it, ‘from great researcher to great German’. He had been a non-commissioned vice-sergeant but the Kaiser now promoted him to captain, and, as the physicist James Franck said, he learned ‘to think like a general’. A scientific collaborator, the British chemist J.E. Coates, wrote that ‘the war years were for Haber the greatest period of his life . . . To be a great soldier, to obey and be obeyed – that, as his closest friends knew, was a deep-seated ideal.’ The war ‘transformed him into a Prussian officer, autocratic and ruthless in his will to victory’. (A photograph on the occasion of his second wedding in 1917 shows Haber doubly happy, his new wife on his arm, resplendent in officer’s uniform, sword and Spitzhelm.) In 1986, Haber’s son Lutz, a distinguished economic historian, produced a powerful study of chemical warfare in World War One, and wrote that, in his father, the German High Command ‘found a brilliant mind and an extremely energetic organiser, determined, and possibly unscrupulous’. At the end of hostilities, the Allies put him on the list of German war criminals, and he escaped to Switzerland until the extradition order was withdrawn.
Haber’s embrace of war proceeded from his intense patriotism. In September 1914 he signed – along with the scientists Max Planck, Walther Nernst and Paul Ehrlich – the infamous ‘Manifesto of the 93 German Intellectuals to the Civilised World’, which protested
against the lies and slander with which our enemies are endeavouring to stain the honour of Germany in her hard struggle for existence – in a struggle that has been forced on her . . . It is not true that the combat against our so-called militarism is not a combat against our civilisation, as our enemies hypocritically pretend it is. Without German militarism, German culture would long since have been extirpated from the face of the earth . . . The German army and the German people are one.
The manifesto provoked outrage among British and French intellectuals and deep disappointment in Albert Einstein, Haber’s good friend. Einstein respected Haber as a scientist and was grateful for Haber’s support as his first marriage was disintegrating, but he was astounded at Haber’s unquestioning embrace of German nationalism and militarism. The American historian Fritz Stern – Haber’s godson – wrote that ‘Haber and Einstein had a sense of science as a call to a special priesthood in a faith only recently established.’ The same sense of vocation, however, took different ethical expressions. Einstein thought that the war was insane, that Germany had provoked it, and that scientists who worked as diligently as Haber in assisting the war effort were, in effect, putting ‘an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal’.
Charles’s book has the advantage over Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew, the only other serious treatment of Haber in English – an abridged translation of a worthy but rather stodgy 1994 biography by the chemist Dietrich Stoltzenberg, whose father, Hugo, worked with Haber on poison gas. Charles is a journalist, and was drawn to Haber by way of an earlier book, Lords of the Harvest: Biotechnology, Big Money, and the Future of Food (2001). Between Genius and Genocide goes into far less detail about Haber’s scientific work and institutional circumstances than Stoltzenberg, and, while Charles has made good use of the manuscript and oral history material on Haber deposited in the Max Planck Society in Berlin, he relies heavily on the work of Fritz Stern and Lutz Haber, and on Margit Szöllössi-Janze’s still untranslated 1998 Haber biography. Charles occasionally lets his arguments run away with him – as when he suggests that without the Haber-Bosch process neither the Bolshevik Revolution nor the rise of Hitler would have happened – but his accessible, engaged and often elegantly written book finds the question of Haber’s moral and social identity compelling in a way that Stoltzenberg does not. And if Charles passes severe judgment on Haber’s public and private life, he does so largely by mobilising the assessments of many of those who knew him well. According to their testimony, Haber was capable of generosity, real friendship and great science, but he could also be cold, overbearing, pompous, ruthless and amoral.
Max Weber’s 1918 address on ‘Science as a Vocation’ endorsed the amorality of science, but only by claiming that the possession of scientific knowledge didn’t give the scientist – acting in the person of a scientist – an intellectual basis or an institutional right to pronounce on moral matters. Weber did not consider the morality of technical consequences because he reckoned that the motives of ‘the practical man’ could be clearly distinguished from those pursuing knowledge ‘for its own sake’. But the realities of contemporary scientific life had overtaken Weber’s sensibilities and Haber was spectacular evidence of that fact. Yet in another sense Weber understood Haber’s predicament very well. The scientific life was so insecure and so poorly rewarded that a calling for it had to be unmistakable and intense. ‘The academic life is an utter gamble,’ Weber wrote, but if the aspirant was a Jew, then ‘you can only say: lasciate ogni speranza (abandon all hope).’
It was about the time that the young Haber decided on an academic career that he had himself baptised. He had already had his application for a Prussian reserve officer’s commission rejected – no Prussian Jew had yet become an officer, apart from in the medical corps – and he was not keen to have the experience repeated in the academic profession. From then on, he would identify himself on official forms as evangelisch (‘Protestant’). There is no evidence that his decision was doctrinal: his transformation was from secular Jew to secular Christian. Apart from removing the professional obstacles that stood in the way of Jews, baptism was a way of identifying with the idea of Germany. For many Jews originating in eastern lands, German seemed the language of Enlightenment and German Protestantism a Vernunftreligion – a ‘religion of reason’. Many years later, Haber had a tense conversation on the subject of his conversion with his friend and physician, Rudolf Stern. He described to Stern the enthusiasm he and his friends had felt for the cause of German unification: ‘We felt 100 per cent German, and no longer felt any ties to the Jewish religion.’ The equation between Christianity and German identity was reinforced in Haber’s mind when, as an adolescent, he read Theodor Mommsen’s passionate defence of German pluralism against an anti-semitic outburst by Heinrich von Treitschke: the Jew, Mommsen asserted, was as much German as the Schwabian or the Prussian. The idea of Germany required both the toleration and the submergence of diversity. Just as the Schwabian should submit tribal loyalties to the idea of Germanness, so too should the German Jew, and this, in Mommsen’s view, meant conversion to an encompassing form of Christianity that was far more cultural than doctrinal. And so, in Haber’s mind, as in that of other German Jews, many things partook of one common sensibility: rational science (for which he felt a personal vocation), the idea of Germany (which stood for reason, civilisation and tolerance), Protestant Christianity (a religion of reason), the German state and its army (the bulwark of reason and civilisation), and the use of the fruits of rational science to protect everything in Germany that made the practice of science possible.
But the ease of assimilation was a great illusion: Jews and Germans turned out to combine with rather greater difficulty than hydrogen and nitrogen. With the Nazi seizure of power, Haber discovered that he wasn’t German after all and that his service to the German nation counted for nothing. In April 1933, Hitler’s new regime promulgated a law removing all Jews from civil service positions – including the universities and the Kaiser Wilhelm institutes – except those who had served in the Great War. That left Haber on a narrowing ledge, but, unlike some other Jewish scientists, he continued to hope. Moving more swiftly than he had expected, the Nazis demanded some immediate dismissals, and Haber’s associates urged him to sack junior staff at once in order to protect the institute’s top scientists. Haber chose instead to dismiss two of his most senior scientists, including the Hungarian Jew Michael Polanyi, who had been offered a position in Manchester. ‘The old man is completely kaputt,’ a junior colleague wrote at the time. A few days later, Haber had had enough and decided to retire. He was a broken man even before he left Germany in August, shuttling between Switzerland and England. ‘I am bitter as never before,’ he wrote to a German colleague: ‘I was German to an extent that I feel fully only now.’ And to an English colleague he wrote a begging letter inquiring about the possibility of an academic appointment: ‘Perhaps you will have some understanding for the feelings of an old man who was tied to his country for his whole life, but who now has the feeling that he has lost his homeland – a homeland that his ancestors and he himself served to the best of their ability.’
Desperate, he made contact in London with the Zionist leader, and chemist, Chaim Weizmann, and began a series of conversations with him about the possibility of moving to Palestine. Weizmann found dealing with Haber almost unbearable: ‘The truth is that I could scarcely look him in the eye. I was ashamed for myself, ashamed for this cruel world, which allowed such things to happen, and ashamed for the error in which he had lived and worked throughout his life.’ By the time he and Weizmann met again in Basle in August, Haber was talking himself into Jewishness and even into Zionism: ‘I was one of the mightiest men in Germany’ but ‘at the end of my life I find myself a bankrupt. When I am gone and forgotten,’ he told Weizmann, ‘your work will stand, a shining monument, in the long history of our people.’ ‘In my whole life,’ he told Einstein, ‘I have never felt so Jewish as now.’ Einstein – who had renounced his German citizenship as an adolescent – responded in terms as cruel as they were sympathetic. Borrowing a phrase from Nietzsche, he expressed his pleasure that Haber’s ‘earlier love for the blond beast has cooled off a bit’. Haber still hoped to secure a decent resignation settlement from his institute, and, in December 1933, wrote a letter asking for help from his old associate Carl Bosch, now the chief executive of I.G. Farben: ‘I have never done anything, or said a single word, that would stamp me as an enemy of the men who rule Germany.’ Bosch did not reply. In January 1934 Haber died of heart disease.
Late in World War One, Haber had done some research on insecticide gases which could be used to control flour moths and other pests. The hydrogen cyanide-based gas developed by his institute worked quite well, but, because it was odourless, endangered the people who used it, so a process was devised to warn workers by giving the gas a foul smell. Development continued through the 1920s, making the gas still safer and easier to use. During the starving years of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Zyklon B protected the food supply and ensured that more people were adequately fed than otherwise would have been. But soon a use was found for the gas that made the addition of a foul smell unnecessary, and among those who perished in the gas chambers were many of Haber’s own relatives.
Is Google Good?
by John Lanchester
review of The Google Story by David Vise · Macmillan, 326 pp, £14.99
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle · Nicholas Brealey, 311 pp, £16.99
Google is the only multi-billion-dollar company in the world that is also a spelling mistake. Back in the palaeolithic era (that’s the palaeolithic era in the internet sense, i.e. autumn 1997) its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were graduate computer science students at Stanford. They were working on an insanely cool new search engine, wanted to incorporate it as a company, and needed to find a name. David Vise, in his breezy book The Google Story, tells how they came up with one. A fellow graduate student suggested to Page and Brin that they use the name given to what is sometimes, erroneously or metaphorically, called the largest number, 10100: google. They looked up the name on the internet, found that it wasn’t taken, and registered their brand-new brand, google.com. The next morning they found that the reason the name hadn’t been taken was because it should be spelled googol – and that googol.com had, of course, already been bagged. (It belonged, and still belongs, to a Silicon Valley software engineer and home-brewed beer enthusiast called Tim Beauchamp: ‘The links on this page are a mishmash of eclectic destinations that may be of interest to you. Actually, they may only be of interest to Tim but what the heck. It is his site!’) Lesser men might have considered that a bad omen, but Larry and Sergey are not bad-omen kind of guys. Just over eight years later, Google is the fastest-growing company in the history of the world – with, at the time of writing, a market capitalisation of $138 billion. Larry and Sergey, the Wallace and Gromit of the information age, are worth more than $10 billion each.
Companies are a bit like people in that they tend to bear the imprint of the milieu in which they were formed. Google, spelling mistake and all, is a product of the intensely academic environment in which both Page and Brin were raised. Page was born in Michigan, Brin in Russia, but apart from that their backgrounds were eerily alike: ethnically but not religiously Jewish, educated in Montessori schools, their fathers both university professors of science (computer science at Michigan and maths at Maryland, respectively), their mothers both also super-numerate (database consultancy and Nasa – it must be fun to say ‘my mum works at Nasa’). Brin was 16 when he began taking classes at the University of Maryland, and 19 when he graduated. He went to Stanford to begin work on his PhD. Page, who had done his first degree at the University of Michigan, came there a year later to have a look at the computer science PhD programme. On a Stanford orientation day in 1995, looking round San Francisco, Page began arguing with the tour guide, a second-year comp. sci. PhD student whose opinionated obnoxiousness so closely resembled his own. You have seen enough buddy movies to know what happened next.
The key idea which underlies Google came out of this academic milieu; it was an insight that could occur only to someone thoroughly marinated in academic ways of thinking. John Battelle, an internet-world insider and search-engine specialist, gives a fascinating account of it in his indispensable book The Search. Page was fooling around at Stanford, trying to come up with an idea for his PhD thesis. He had always been interested in Nikola Tesla, a scientist whose list of brilliant inventions – ‘wireless communication and X-rays to solar cells and the modern power grid’ – was not matched by the success he had in marketing them, or himself. Page liked the idea of making things that caught on; he had no interest in hiding his light under a bushel. He began to think about his own web page, and who was reading it, and whether or not anyone was not just reading it but linking to it – which would definitely be an indication of a more than casual interest. But while it was easy to find the outward links from a web page, it was not at all straightforward to find out the reverse, who was linking to that site. So Page wrote a program which solved the problem of finding out who was linking to any given web page. He called the program BackRub.
Once BackRub had been written, Page began to wonder if there was a way of using it to determine the utility of any particular site – and this is when he, or he and Brin, had a big idea. It was based on one of the most widely mocked areas in academia, that of bibliometrics: assessing the importance of any given article or piece of information by measuring how often other people in the field mention it. In bibliometrics, no attempt is made to see how sensible or useful or well-argued a piece of work is: all you do is count how often it is mentioned. This never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width approach sounds like a ridiculous way of assessing the importance of intellectual work but it is, I am told, a surprisingly powerful tool. In any case, it is what gave Page and Brin the idea for a program which measured the importance of a web page by counting how often other web pages linked to it. Page gave the mathematical algorithm which worked out this problem the name PageRank.
Then the boys set out to build a search engine which used PageRank. (The patent for PageRank, incidentally, is owned by Stanford University. Google have exclusive use of it until 2011.) The idea was that a search engine which knew how important a page was would have a powerful advantage in assessing the quality of the information on that page. The search engine would not only be able to look for specific words, it would have a way of assessing the quality of data on the page where those words occur. That would give it a huge advantage in delivering useful information.
As for how it works in practice, the first thing to realise is that Google does not search the internet. If it did, the internet would grind to a halt under the strain of all the searching taking place, because Google alone (let alone the competition) makes upwards of 100 million searches every day. Instead the program searches a copy of the internet stored on its own computers. It sends out a ‘crawler’ which downloads copies of internet pages. A full circuit of all the web pages in the world takes roughly a month, which is why the information on Google is often a few days old; the most recent snapshot of the page copied back to the Googleplex is available as the ‘Cached’ link on any given Google result. (This delay is one of several reasons why, if you can’t find anything on Google, it is worth trying an alternative search engine, such as Yahoo or Clusty.) Having copied the internet, it then indexes it. Google makes an index of every word on a web page, where it stands in relation to other words, whether or not a word is listed in a title, whether it is listed in a special typeface, how frequently it is listed on the page and so on. It also gives a lot of importance to the PageRank of the page in question. There are more than a hundred of these criteria, and Google gives a numeric weight to every one of them, for every searchable term on every one of eight billion web pages. When a query arrives – which it does at the rate of many times every second – Google searches the index for the relevant terms, measures the relevance of the results using all its various metrics including PageRank, crunches out a single number for each page, and lists them, with the highest score at the top, usually within half a second or so.
Even if you didn’t know a thing about computers, you could tell this involved a truly scary amount of computational power. This is another area in which Google’s origins show up as a strength. When the program was first conceived, Page thought he would be able to download an entire copy of the internet to his own PC. That turned out not to be the case: Page and Brin ended up having to scrounge, cadge, rustle up and ‘borrow’ every scrap of computational power they could find at Stanford to gather the necessary data. What they learned in the process became one of their great strengths. Google does not run on huge, expensive mainframe computers but on a very large number of bog-standard, over-the-counter PCs, the same sort used by ordinary mortals. The PCs are tweaked and cabled together in particular ways to provide Google’s ‘special sauce’ – this is one of the revelations in David Vise’s book – and run a customised, stripped-down version of Linux. When a PC breaks, they chuck it away and replace it. Nobody knows just how many of these PCs Google has. John Hennessy, the president of Stanford and a Google board member, says that it’s ‘the largest computer system in the world’ – Vise puts the figure at more than 100,000 PCs. Without their experience in graduate student bodging, the founders of Google would never have learned how to put together a computer cluster that combined such replaceable simplicity with such computational muscle. Its main problem these days is the heat generated by all those silicon chips.
The boys took the company public in 2004, leaving it as late as they could, this being one of the many ways in which Google diverged from the Silicon Valley norm during the long-lost boom. The general pattern during the internet gold rush was to launch a company as early as possible, and hope that investors bought the shares before the company ran out of cash. That was because most dot.coms had no money; their business model involved truly spectacular revenue projections, set some distance in the future. A standard pitch started by pointing out the size of some market – to take the example used in the cautionary documentary Dot.Com, that for paying parking tickets. Say $1 billion worth of parking tickets are paid every year. Say the company servicing the payments earns 30 per cent of the fee. Say you could set up an online service to pay these tickets, and then – and this was the enticingly pseudo-sensible part of the pitch – take into account that only, say, 20 per cent of the public will be willing to pay in this convenient new way. Lo, you have just created a business with annual revenue of $60 million, and extraordinary potential to expand when other local or national government payment services migrate online. Your company is now worth a couple of billion dollars. Or it will be soon. ‘Grow big fast!’ (That was one of the battle-cries of the internet age.) ‘If you build it, they will come!’ (That was another.) Set up an Initial Public Offering, quick! There’s gold in them thar bills!
Fresh new thinking along these lines caused one of the greatest destructions of capital ever seen. Google’s route was superficially similar. They concentrated on making their search technology the best. Traffic to the site grew at great speed, all without a cent spent on marketing. The company had as yet no business model; as one of its directors said, ‘we’ll figure out how to monetise that.’ This was exactly the thinking that cost so many people so much money. The difference was that Google managed to do it, and they did so by building a huge business in the most nickel-and-dime way imaginable, through small ads. Next time you do a search on Google, have a look at the ‘Sponsored Links’ on the right of the results. These are paid advertisements. The ads have been bid for by people who bid for specific words, or combinations of words: 75c for ‘digital camera’, to take an example from The Google Story, but $1.08 for ‘digital cameras’ (because people who click on the plural are more likely actually to buy them), or $30 for ‘mesothelioma’ (because the people who place the ads are personal injury lawyers looking for clients who want to sue whoever it was they think gave them this particular cancer). Many of the words cost only a few cents to bid for: 30c for ‘pet food’, for instance. If you click on one of the links, the advertiser pays Google the agreed amount.
Google’s ads are so effective at generating income because they tap directly into the intentions of people looking for things. An ad in any normal medium is, to one degree or another, a form of broadcasting: it will appear in front of many people who have no interest in it, en route to finding the minority on whom it will exert some grip. Google’s ads appear only in front of people who are already looking for the thing they are advertising; they are as narrowcast as advertising can possibly be. The general realisation of this was accompanied by the dawning knowledge that Google in effect has a direct line, if not quite to the unconscious dreaming mind of the world, at least to the part of it which voices its wishes. This was something no one foresaw about the internet, that its ‘killer app’ – the thing which made it indispensable to ordinary people – was the ability to find services and information. The received wisdom in the business was that search was a ‘commodity’, something it was simple to buy from the cheapest provider. In disproving that, Google showed that it was wired straight into the global id.
The underlying idea of search-plus-ads was not original: a company called Overture was already doing the same (and Google later settled a suit from Overture out of court). But nobody did it anywhere near as well as Google, and the success of Ad Words (as it is called) is the reason Google, instead of rushing to the stock market as quickly as possible, which is what everyone else did, took as long as they could to go public. They knew that as soon as their revenue figures were disclosed, everyone would go nuts, and their competitors would begin knocking themselves out to get into this amazing new business of search-plus-ads. They had a secret, and it was the opposite secret from every other internet start-up: their secret was that they were already making a ton of money. They have continued to do so. Google in the six months to 30 June 2005 earned $2.6 billion, almost entirely from its ads. It was sitting on more than $3 billion and had no borrowings, and it has since raised another $4 billion in cash. This sheer financial muscle is the reason Google is now such a power in the world.
The financial success of Google since its IPO means that Page and Brin can now do more or less what they like. The limits on their company are set not by what they can afford but by what they can conceive and bring off. The stated mission of Google is ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, an immodest project, to put it mildly, but one on which Google is at least in a position to make a decent start. But the remorseless focus implied by that ‘mission statement’ is a little misleading, since the company’s philosophy is to give bright people a free rein to attack the problems that interest them, and 20 per cent of employees’ time is devoted to pet projects of their own devising. This makes Google a great centre of ‘if you build it, they will come,’ and means that the company is constantly coming up with new schemes and wheezes, not all of which make a coherent whole, but which tend at the least to be interesting ideas. It also means that barely a day goes by without a news story touching on Google in some respect or other.
Since I began writing this piece Google has been in the headlines several times: for governments’ complaints about the spy-friendly potential of the all too detailed satellite maps in Google Earth; for a new feature called Music Search, which does what it says on the tin; for announcing a plan to take a 5 per cent stake in AOL; for being vulnerable to ‘black hat’ tactics from Search Engine Optimisers, who specialise in boosting Google results; and for hugely expanding its nascent Google Video service. The media are obsessed with Google, not least because they are so worried by it. (The general consensus is that Google, having once been seen as a technology company, should instead be regarded as a media company. You may not think it matters, but money people like to see things through the prism of a ‘business model’.) Other recent stories have concerned Google’s offering the whole of San Francisco free wireless access to the internet, setting up a free Google Space at Heathrow airport to allow people to use its products, launching Google Talk as a potentially disruptive way of making free phone calls over the internet, pressing on with its ambitions for Google Book Search (formerly Google Library) to ‘make the full text of all the world’s books searchable by anyone’, and launching Google Base to take over the world’s classified advertising market. In the meantime, the company has launched a Toolbar, including a Desktop Search tool which searches for information on users’ own PCs – something Microsoft, the world’s biggest software company, has been trying and failing to do for a number of years.
What scares people about this is the feeling that Google has a masterplan, and that they are advancing towards world information and financial dominance. It isn’t clear that that’s right, though. My sense of it (and it’s only a sense) is that Google advances more by letting its engineers invent things and solve problems, or perceived problems, one at a time, and that as long as the problem being solved broadly fits with the overall mission statement, they’ll go ahead with it. Some of these stabs seem well thought out, others less so. At the same time the core focus on search stays. People who work in the field say that search is only 5 per cent ‘solved’, and that the huge amount of information located on the internet but (for a variety of reasons) unavailable to searches remains an enormously difficult problem to solve. It seems likely that this focus will give the company plenty to chew on for many years, even after the overheated share price cools off.
So: is Google a good thing? The geek in me wants to say yes. It certainly has made finding information incomparably easier. Some of the information is even true . . . Actually, that’s not fair, but a lot of what is on the net is false, and the Google-derived mistake is something you do now notice in the mainstream media. One example occurred on the death of Hunter S. Thompson. When he died, several newspapers shared with us, often in the opening sentence, President Nixon’s opinion that ‘Hunter S. Thompson represented the dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character.’ Except (as any Hunter S. Thompson fan will tell you) Nixon didn’t say that about Thompson, Thompson said it about Nixon. But a site giving the line the wrong way around was the first thing to come up on Google on the day of Thompson’s death.
Despite such glitches, Google is from the research point of view invaluable. I’ve used it on a more or less daily basis for the last five years, but it was only when I began working on this piece that I fully realised just how many features it has added, as part of an ambition to do ‘something intelligent’ with every query. Google Scholar, which searches academic papers, is very useful, and will become more so. The powerful calculator feature, which will do advanced maths as well as highly practical things like converting square feet into metres, is useful. The character ˜ lets you search for synonyms, and is useful. Google News, which was invented by an engineer, Krishna Bharat, using his 20 per cent time to come up with a broadly global news service in the wake of 9/11, is useful, and terrifies conventional news organisations. The translation service isn’t useful yet, but I bet it will be one day. The command ‘define’ is a useful quick way of finding what a word means. The blog search is fairly handy and will get better. Google Earth isn’t particularly useful, but it is brutally cool: you begin with a satellite view and gradually descend to earth, homing in with a level of detail which can give you a view of your own house (also, it turns out, of secret military installations). Gmail, with its super-swift searching and 2GB of free space, is amazing, if you don’t mind the fact that your email is scanned and used to target ads (and stored indefinitely). Google Maps is useful, and, because Google lets people write APIs (application programming interfaces) to adapt its programs in ways they find personally helpful, will grow more and more useful over time. One dark example: an API giving a map of sex offenders in the USA, which lets people see whether there are any registered sex offenders near them, and where the sex offender lives. Nice.
On a lighter note, Froogle, the shopping search service, is sort of useful, and has a feature which chills the blood of conventional retailers: when you’re out in the high street and see something you want to buy, you can text its name to 64664 and Froogle will text back the best price it can find online. Also cool is Google Zeitgeist, which tells you which search terms have most increased in frequency in the past year. For 2005 the top five items are Myspace, Ares, Baidu, Wikipedia and Orkut – all of which, I notice in my trendspotting hat, involve some sort of sharing, searching, meeting or collaborating online. It must be said that the coolness of Zeitgeist is reduced by the fact that it no longer lists the most declining search terms. In 2002, the last year they gave this info, the five most increased searches were for Spider-Man, Shakira, Winter Olympics, World Cup and Avril Lavigne; the five most decreased searches were for Nostradamus, Napster, Anthrax, World Trade Center and Osama bin Laden. Thus did we recover from the trauma of 9/11.
Technologically, Google is an amazing thing. As for whether it is a good thing, that depends on what happens next. The company is keen to stress that, because of the voting structure of its shareholdings, it remains in the control of its founders. It is keen to send little signals of its own geekiness: its official IPO filing, for instance, announced that it would sell $2,718,281,828 worth of shares – a number based on e, the so-called natural logarithm, a number intimately familiar to maths nerds. On 18 August last year the company announced that it would sell 14,159,265 shares, with the intention of raising about $4 billion in cash, to do they would not say what – the point here (apart from the huge amount of money) being that the number of shares was based on the value of pi, 3.14159265. And then there’s the fact that Google makes itself available in dozens of languages, including pig Latin and Klingon. These unfunny semi-jokes are designed to show that Google is rooted in the same comp. sci. culture in which it was born, and retains the same focus on the pure excellence of its products.
That does not mean that Google is always aware of the consequences of its actions in the wider world. A strength of the firm – its rootedness in grad student nerd culture – is also a weakness, in the form of a certain arrogance and unwillingness to pay attention to views emanating from lesser forms of life. The example of this currently preoccupying the publishing business is Google Book Search, the plan to scan all the world’s books and have them available for search. This sounds ambitious, to put it mildly, but Google have the resources and the determination to do it, and they have been working at it for some time, beginning with the libraries of Michigan, Stanford and Oxford. They are digitising millions of books in these collections, and have already begun providing access to the out of copyright volumes. Google began to digitise currently copyrighted books in America until they were stopped by a lawsuit from the American Association of Publishers.
A fundamental clash of cultures is at work here. To Google, with its mission to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, it is obvious that books, which contain so much information – accurate information too, far more so than on the web – must be searchable online. The plan is not simply to give the books away: although the whole book will be scanned and stored, only specific fragments of text will be displayed. It will be the best shop window ever for obscure texts. Besides, isn’t their company policy ‘Don’t be evil’? But to publishers, there is something outrageously hypocritical about the contrast between Google’s ferocious protection of its own intellectual property rights and its contempt for everyone else’s. What’s to stop Google giving free online access to the books once they are scanned? It’s probably against the law, sure, but a sufficiently ruthless company which perceived a sufficiently strong demand could find ways around that. Once the texts were scanned and stored, the only thing preventing every writer’s work from being given away free would be a few pieces of computer code on Google’s servers. At the moment Google say they have no intention of providing access to this content; but why should anybody believe them?
More generally, the biggest single area of worry about Google involves privacy. This has been a long-running subject of concern on the net, but thanks to an op-ed piece in the New York Times in November it has begun to attract some wider attention. The paper pointed out that the prosecution in a recent North Carolina strangulation case drew into evidence the fact that the defendant had made Google searches on the words ‘neck’ and ‘snap’. This brought to wider notice the fact that Google logs all the searches made on it, and stores this information indefinitely; and Google installs a cookie on the computer of everyone who uses it, which helps log that user’s searches, and which isn’t due to expire until 2038. Because every computer has a unique IP address, every visit to every website can be traced back to the computer making it – a fact well known in geek circles but remarkably under-publicised outside them. (Last April a Chinese journalist called Shi Tao was given ten years in jail for ‘leaking state secrets’ after Yahoo! in Hong Kong handed over information linking his IP address and his email to the Chinese authorities.) Users of Google’s Gmail service have already given the company their identity, a full record of all their searches, and copies of all their emails, stored indefinitely. According to the tech guru Robert Cringely, the future of Google lies in combining the company’s knowledge of who you are with its Google Video service to produce microscopically targeted TV ads. ‘Google imagines a world where only single people see match.com ads, and people who can’t drive see ads from taxi companies where others see Toyota campaigns. Where fraternities see ads for strip clubs, beer, Cancun weekends and LSAT prep courses, and only seniors (and their adult children) see ads for Alzheimer’s drugs.’ In case that doesn’t seem sufficiently dystopian, one should bear in mind that the information stored at Google is vulnerable to legal subpoena. It’s not hard to imagine this information being sought by governments, litigants or divorcing spouses, and the list does not stop there. Google badly needs to develop tools which ensure privacy.
The alarming potency of Google as a way of finding out information about people is a different subject; though the fact that its potency can be alarming is not in dispute. A journalist at Cnet, a tech-news portal, did half an hour’s Google research on Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of the company, and published the results, by way of showing just how effective Google was at this kind of thing. Schmidt, outraged, threw a major strop and Google announced it would not speak to anyone from Cnet for a year (so there!). But personal information is easily found, especially in America, where phone directories are reverse-searchable and social security numbers are simply obtained. So far, everyone who has invested in Google has made out like the proverbial bandit; but one day the share price will drop, and people who’ve bought shares will find that they’ve lost money. It is then that Google’s leaders will come under pressure to find some uses for that unprecedented goldmine of personal data. As for privacy in relation to governments, the company’s existing privacy policy says that ‘we may share information’ if ‘we conclude that we are required by law or have a good faith belief that access, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public.’ You don’t have to be Diogenes the Cynic to think that this gives Google the latitude to do pretty much whatever it wants. Let’s not forget that in February 2004 Google, having brought its news service to China, immediately gave in to the Chinese government and omitted links to sites which the Chinese government did not want its citizens to see. This was the first big test of Google’s loudly proclaimed ‘Don’t be evil’ policy in a context where the company would have been preferring principle to money, and it was one they failed.
Putting all this together, we reach the conclusion that, on the one hand, Google is cool. On the other hand, Google has the potential to destroy the publishing industry, the newspaper business, high street retailing and our privacy. Not that it will necessarily do any of these things, but for the first time, considered soberly, these things are technologically possible. The company is rich and determined and is not going away any time soon. They know what they are doing technologically; socially, though, they can’t possibly know, and I don’t think anyone else can either. These are the earliest days in a process of what may turn out to be radical change. The best historical analogy for where Google is today probably comes from the time when the railroads were being built. Everyone knew that trains and railways would change the world, but no one predicted the invention of suburbs. Google, and the increased flow of information on which it rides and from which it benefits, is the railway. I don’t think we’ve yet seen the first suburbs.
John Lanchester is the author of three novels: The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour.
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