Journalists sometimes use the phrase "cruel twist of fate" when a person or family suffers more than one occurrence of the same loss or injury. Charmaine Kennedy whose boyfriend and ex-husband are both shot by gunman Derrick Bird. Frances Culling, who has watched her husband and four children die of the same genetic disorder, and now fears losing her remaining daughter and grandchildren. These people are unlucky, but there is no twist involved - unless you count the irony of Mrs Culling's surname.
I think the phrase properly applies to those cases where it seems natural to personalize fate, and attribute him with a cruel sense of humour. Two of the following examples have a good-news-bad-news structure, the third follows the frying-pan-into-fire pattern, and the fourth is an example of being "hoist" (blown up) by one's own "petard" (bomb). There may be other patterns.
A miner who lived through the worst pit disaster in a county because of a twist of fate died in a similar accident nearly 30 years later on the other side of the world.
Northern Echo 13 February 2009
A woman who survived a ferocious "death roll" crocodile attack in the wild has been killed after being bitten by a snake in her garden.
Daily Mail 4 March 2008
A schoolboy was killed when he walked on to a busy motorway after arguing with his father at a wedding.
Crawley News 18 July 2010, Daily Mail 18 July 2010
Jimi Heselden, the British philanthropist and owner of Segway Inc., tragically passed away on Sunday after an accident involving an off-road model of his own company's famous two-wheeled vehicle.
AOL News, 27 September 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Global Injustice and Moral Challenge
@RSAevents My son is studying economics at high school, so I took him to a talk by Amartya Sen at the RSA last week on Reducing Global Injustice. (Follow link for audio and video. See also summary by Mick Yates.) Sen is undoubtedly one of the greatest economists of our time but he is not the most inspiring speaker, and spent much of the time explaining subtle differences between his position and that of other thinkers, rather than presenting a clear ethical argument from first principles. My son found Sen's conversation with Matthew Taylor extremely heavy going, despite Matthew's best efforts to draw out the more interesting aspects of Sen's recent thought.
Someone asked Sen to identify the greatest form of injustice, hoping that he would identify gender inequality, but he rightly refused to do so, saying that different forms of injustice are both incomparable (on what basis can you possibly say that gender inequality is greater or smaller than mass poverty or genocide) and interconnected (injustice against children, invalids, old people and women are not separate injustices). Sen has demonstrated his strong support for women's rights and feminism in his books, but that doesn't mean that gender ranks above all other possible injustices.
Meanwhile, the idea that gender inequality is the central moral challenge of the 21st century is being strongly argued by husband-and-wife team Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn - most recently at TED Global 2010. Their position: in the 19th century, the central moral challenge was slavery; in the 20th century, it was totalitarianism; but in this century the issue dominating moral debate is gender inequity. See for example Kristof Calls Gender Parity a 21st Century Moral Challenge, a report of a talk at Fordham Law School in February.
The idea that in 2010 we can already identify the central moral challenge of the 21st century seems farfetched. Totalitarianism didn't exist as an issue in 1910: nobody could possibly have identified totalitarianism as the central moral challenge of the 20th century until at least the 1930s and possibly not until the 1950s. For much of the century communism and fascism were widely perceived as opposites, and it took decades before people were ready to make sense of these as two contrasting manifestations of a single phenomenon which came to be labelled totalitarianism.
One might even argue that the various manifestations of totalitarianism grew up in the 1920s as a series of flawed responses to the very issues that were perceived as uppermost in 1910. So we should be very wary of declaring the central moral challenge of the century, as if we could predict the pattern of the next ninety years. History tells us that humankind is perfectly capable of creating appalling new injustices, which could make all present injustices seem trivial in comparison.
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are highly acclaimed journalists, who have won Pulizer Prizes for their earlier work, and perhaps the desire to punctuate history in convenient 100-year chunks is a journalistic meme. But in calling out gender inequality as the central moral challenge of a century that has only just started, this not only brings them into conflict with those who would see some other injustice as equally or even more important, as well as those such as Sen who object to singling out any injustice as central. It also brings them into conflict with those such as Nancy Kallitechnis who argue that gender inequality has been a central moral challenge for thousands of years already.
What is the purpose/effect of singling out one central moral challenge? Presumably the intended effect is to mobilize efforts around this challenge, and around some set of perceived solutions. But this kind of thinking is dangerously close to slipping back into the centralizing mindset that Kristof and WuDunn have already identified as the central moral challenge of the century in which they grew up. For the 21st century, perhaps we need fewer hedgehogs and more foxes.
Someone asked Sen to identify the greatest form of injustice, hoping that he would identify gender inequality, but he rightly refused to do so, saying that different forms of injustice are both incomparable (on what basis can you possibly say that gender inequality is greater or smaller than mass poverty or genocide) and interconnected (injustice against children, invalids, old people and women are not separate injustices). Sen has demonstrated his strong support for women's rights and feminism in his books, but that doesn't mean that gender ranks above all other possible injustices.
Meanwhile, the idea that gender inequality is the central moral challenge of the 21st century is being strongly argued by husband-and-wife team Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn - most recently at TED Global 2010. Their position: in the 19th century, the central moral challenge was slavery; in the 20th century, it was totalitarianism; but in this century the issue dominating moral debate is gender inequity. See for example Kristof Calls Gender Parity a 21st Century Moral Challenge, a report of a talk at Fordham Law School in February.
The idea that in 2010 we can already identify the central moral challenge of the 21st century seems farfetched. Totalitarianism didn't exist as an issue in 1910: nobody could possibly have identified totalitarianism as the central moral challenge of the 20th century until at least the 1930s and possibly not until the 1950s. For much of the century communism and fascism were widely perceived as opposites, and it took decades before people were ready to make sense of these as two contrasting manifestations of a single phenomenon which came to be labelled totalitarianism.
One might even argue that the various manifestations of totalitarianism grew up in the 1920s as a series of flawed responses to the very issues that were perceived as uppermost in 1910. So we should be very wary of declaring the central moral challenge of the century, as if we could predict the pattern of the next ninety years. History tells us that humankind is perfectly capable of creating appalling new injustices, which could make all present injustices seem trivial in comparison.
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are highly acclaimed journalists, who have won Pulizer Prizes for their earlier work, and perhaps the desire to punctuate history in convenient 100-year chunks is a journalistic meme. But in calling out gender inequality as the central moral challenge of a century that has only just started, this not only brings them into conflict with those who would see some other injustice as equally or even more important, as well as those such as Sen who object to singling out any injustice as central. It also brings them into conflict with those such as Nancy Kallitechnis who argue that gender inequality has been a central moral challenge for thousands of years already.
What is the purpose/effect of singling out one central moral challenge? Presumably the intended effect is to mobilize efforts around this challenge, and around some set of perceived solutions. But this kind of thinking is dangerously close to slipping back into the centralizing mindset that Kristof and WuDunn have already identified as the central moral challenge of the century in which they grew up. For the 21st century, perhaps we need fewer hedgehogs and more foxes.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Twists of Fate 2
"A mother drowned in a freak car crash as she drove home to tell her husband she had beaten breast cancer. Jean Allen, 66, had been forced to take a detour after arsonists set fire to a church and caused massive traffic disruption." [Cambs Times 15 July 2010, Daily Mail 15 July 2010]
Monday, July 05, 2010
Are FA and LTA fit for purpose?
The Football Association has been branded "not fit for purpose" by former UK sports minister Richard Caborn. [BBC News, 5 July 2010]
I guess national sports organizations around the world are accustomed to criticism. In the UK, the two organizations that seem to be getting most of the criticism at the moment are the Football Association (FA) and the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA).
No doubt some of this criticism is triggered by particular sporting events, and British failure in these events. Mr Caborn may have long-standing concerns about the FA, but the best opportunity to air these concerns comes after England's exit from the 2010 World Cup, and the story is illustrated by a photo of some dejected English players. Similarly, although many people in the tennis world are constantly critical of the LTA, the poor showing of adult Englishmen at Wimbledon provides critics such as Pat Cash with an annual opportunity to attack LTA Chief Executive Roger Draper [BBC News 21 June 2007, Guardian 16 June 2010, LTA response 17 June 2010].
Which creates the impression that the purpose of these organizations is British success at the highest level of competition. The purpose of the FA is to win the World Cup; the purpose of the LTA is to win Wimbledon and the Davis Cup.
Meanwhile, many people believe that the real purpose of these organizations should be to encourage the sport at all levels. The FA should do more to improve youth football and the country's academy system; the LTA should be devoting more of its resources to supporting tennis in schools and parks. Hopefully this would create a larger pool of potential professional players, but it would also be a good thing to do for its own sake. The health of the population would be greatly improved if more children and adults engaged in regular recreational sport. This seems to be a much more important purpose for a national sports organization than worrying about the success of a small handful of highly paid professional sportsmen.
I guess national sports organizations around the world are accustomed to criticism. In the UK, the two organizations that seem to be getting most of the criticism at the moment are the Football Association (FA) and the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA).
No doubt some of this criticism is triggered by particular sporting events, and British failure in these events. Mr Caborn may have long-standing concerns about the FA, but the best opportunity to air these concerns comes after England's exit from the 2010 World Cup, and the story is illustrated by a photo of some dejected English players. Similarly, although many people in the tennis world are constantly critical of the LTA, the poor showing of adult Englishmen at Wimbledon provides critics such as Pat Cash with an annual opportunity to attack LTA Chief Executive Roger Draper [BBC News 21 June 2007, Guardian 16 June 2010, LTA response 17 June 2010].
Which creates the impression that the purpose of these organizations is British success at the highest level of competition. The purpose of the FA is to win the World Cup; the purpose of the LTA is to win Wimbledon and the Davis Cup.
Meanwhile, many people believe that the real purpose of these organizations should be to encourage the sport at all levels. The FA should do more to improve youth football and the country's academy system; the LTA should be devoting more of its resources to supporting tennis in schools and parks. Hopefully this would create a larger pool of potential professional players, but it would also be a good thing to do for its own sake. The health of the population would be greatly improved if more children and adults engaged in regular recreational sport. This seems to be a much more important purpose for a national sports organization than worrying about the success of a small handful of highly paid professional sportsmen.
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