I’d like to tell you a little more about me. They say you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t tell people about yourself. Because it gives them ammunition to attack you, steal your private data and identity. Information is knowledge and knowledge is power. And yet, with this I have a problem. Because if the aim of my blog were to talk about myself in terms that did not reflect who I am, I’m not sure there would be any point to the exercise.
Image by Kevin Frayer. Refugees from Rohingya clamour for food after crossing into Bangladesh from Burma in 2017. The weeping boy, who is deaf and dumb, created the photograph at the foot of the post.
You will read, if you delve into the archive, a lot about what I think and feel and how I view my world and parts of yours. You may occasionally read things that make you think I don’t like you, and you may occasionally read things that make you not like me. And, about those two things I cannot dissuade you. If we fall out, it will not be because of some spurious reason, of that you may be assured.
A friend and I are working on a project at the moment, one that concerns the Caribbean nation of Haiti, which, coincidentally, has hit the international headlines in the time that we have been engaged on the project. Perhaps that is apropos; perhaps it’s just coincidental. I will be writing more about Haiti, therefore, in the coming time. But, in relation to that project, my collaborator and I have been batting around a few notions, ideas, and conceptions about Haiti. He is from there, I am not.
This was one idea about which I recently wrote, and I wanted to share it with you. It starts with a quotation from the UK Institute for Government, and says some wise things. Then, I continue to talk about me.
We are here to act as a catalyst for inspiring the best in government.
We spark ideas, generate debate, challenge preconceptions, bring experience to bear and make new connections that work to improve government for the benefit of society.
In all that we do, we will seek to be:
Innovative—we will push at the boundaries of current knowledge, exploring and experimenting with diverse approaches to find the best solution.
Rigorous—we will be thorough and precise in our method and produce the highest quality data and services.
Impartial—we will be objective in our approach, neutral and politically non-aligned.
Trusted—we will earn the confidence of all those we work with, being open and challenging whilst protecting confidentiality when partners so wish.
This comes from the Vision and values section of the website of the Institute for Government. They’re in the UK, but it should be a statement of vision and values for any government.
I was directed to the website whilst reading an article in the newspaper about section 114 bankruptcy notices by local government authorities. What struck me—and it strikes me increasingly, because it happens so rarely—was the impartiality of the Institute’s explanations (you can read them yourself here).
Of the values set forth in that small paragraph, one strikes me above all others: to challenge preconceptions. That doesn’t mean not grinding an axe. It means challenging the status quo; challenging the received wisdom; and challenging our own, private whims.
Three stories.
#1.
I’m not anti-trans. I think people should be able to do what they want with their bodies and their make-up and their dressing habits, and not be subjected to ridicule for the choices they make. On that I am firm. But I have reservations about being required to know the pronoun that applies to every last one of the eight billion people who inhabit this world. That is asking too much. My use of a pronoun is based on my intimate knowledge of the subject, failing which on his or her appearance. And if the subject has chosen or felt impelled to alter their appearance so as to befuddle my judgment, then that is not a cause for concern on my part. That is tic-tac-toe.
What I always admired with the German language is its ability to function without prepositions. Frequently, prepositional function is incorporated within the case structure of a noun, so that der Mann is a subject, des Mannes means belonging to him and dem Mann means to(wards) him. This is intricate and is just one small example of how language fits together to make syntax, in which ambiguity can never be expunged, and always requires resolution through context, but which grows organically through experience. Forcing changes in language may seem easy, but can result in catastrophe, very quickly. I wrote an essay about it on this blog.
Those who oppose my stance would say that I am stuck in my preconceptions about language. And my retort would be that they seek to change language without being aware of the quick sands into which they venture. Who’s right?
#2.
When Britain voted to withdraw from the Treaty of Rome, from the EU, I was caught in a bind. My political preference was to remain in the Union. My constitutional preference was to acquiesce in the will of the democratic majority. So, which of these preconceptions should I prefer? Should I advocate that the will of the people, having been solicited, be then ignored because they chose wrong? Or should I hold true to the democratic principle that, whatever the people may decide and however idiotic it may seem, it should be implemented?
#3.
In 2014, I was tried in a court of law for the death of an individual named Raf. The charge was that I had neglected to succour to his aid and thereby procured his death. It was a pathetic attempt by prosecutors to line up a row of tin cans on a wall, blindfold themselves and take pot shots at them with a BB gun. However, it worked in two out of three cases.
During the time when I was alleged to have done nothing to aid Raf, I had been performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on him. Between the time when I was interviewed by the police and the time of my trial, there was no further interview or interaction between me and LEA. In short, the evidence that I led at trial was exactly the same as had been recorded in my police statement. It wavered not one whit. Yet, the evidence deemed sufficient to submit me for a criminal trial (my statement) was dismissed by the criminal court as insufficient (in the form of testimony) to convict me. I was acquitted, and the conclusion has to be that the prosecution was wanton, malevolent even. And yet it wasn’t.
The prosecution fell short of an arbitrary line drawn in the law defining what constitutes sufficient action to discharge the onus resting on a member of the public to succour to the aid of his fellow citizen. The law does not, however, require the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the victim was alive at the time the omission was committed. That means that all the prosecution must prove is that an act was not done. But not that the absence of that act caused a death, which is supposed to be the whole purpose of the doctrine of culpable omission. What the law does not provide, however, is that he who is innocent of culpable omission on one score must exhaust all possible means to obtain aid and, to be truthful, there are many other things I could have done to try to save the life of Raf, but didn’t.
You may be asking yourself what this all has to do with preconceptions and some will immediately see that the story challenges their entrenched preconceptions of dutiful behaviour whilst others will appreciate the arbitrary nature of the test to which I and my co-defendants were subjected.
So, whilst your views on this narrative may vary, according to your views on the world generally, indirectly, it lays a foundation. The foundation of challenging oneself and one’s own prejudices, one’s own angle of attack to an issue, one’s own confirmation biases, one’s own preconceptions. Because the court came out with an acquittal on my part, but findings of guilty on the part of two others, one of whom took his own life as a result. He was 25 years of age and had begged me to advise him. I’d told him he had nothing to fear, because he had done nothing. That, unfortunately, proved to be his undoing and it has, in the intervening 10 years, also been mine. If nothing else it has challenged my preconception of what is justice, which I studied for six solid years to learn and, as a result, thought I knew.
The court’s disposal of my guilt in terms of legality still leaves me with a lifelong question of my moral guilt even outwith the bounds of any legal duty incumbent on me: far more the duty of friendship that I owed to Ivar. It is that which preoccupies me far more than any duty to an arbitrary legal rule. In fact, I’m convinced that Raf was dead long before I discovered the situation in which he found himself so hapless. But I am likewise convinced that the whole sorry story was twisted by law enforcement to create little more than a promotion-inducing win in court to match with its own preconceived notions as to what had happened that night—which was not that Raf had been extravagantly adventurous in his own proclivities while suffering a borderline heart condition. And it is that kind of preconception that we are also bound to challenge. Because it behoves us to do so.
If we do not feel beholden to do that, then to do what, exactly, do we ever feel ourselves beholden? Keeping calm and carrying on?
I look on at the outrages in the Gaza Strip, and I look on at the seeming chaos in Port-au-Prince and I look at the refugees in Cox’s Bazar, and I ask myself why I sit in Belgium at my computer and do nothing. I raise small voices of calm against monstrous acts of hatred and yet remain inactive, abstaining from any endeavour to stop them. And this time there is no prosecution and there is not even a slight wave of guilt. Not a blush.
And yet those, with more gumption and more initiative than I, who place themselves in danger’s way to succour to the forlorn, the desperate and the needy are themselves eliminated by acts of enormity, dismissed light-handedly as a sorrowful but quasi-inevitable consequence of their having been where they were.
Jimmy Chérizier, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Burmese Junta. Me. Are we all monsters?
Image by the now 15-year-old Asom Khan.