Daily Archives: August 14, 2011

Sharia Law, Vatican style

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I meant to post this ages ago, but it got lost in the furore over Murdoch and the ‘riots’. It’s an extract from the statement that the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Enda Kenny, made to Parliament following the publication of the official report into child abuse (and the covering up of same) in the Diocese of Cloyne. The Irish Times published the statement in its issue of July 21, and it’s worth reading in full. The extract that first caught my eye runs like this:

THE REVELATIONS of the Cloyne report have brought the Government, Irish Catholics and the Vatican to an unprecedented juncture. It’s fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy reports Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children.

But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order.

Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic – as little as three years ago, not three decades ago.

And in doing so, the Cloyne report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism – the narcissism – that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or “managed” to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and “reputation”.

Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St Benedict’s “ear of the heart”, the Vatican’s reaction was to parse and analyse it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer. This calculated, withering position being the polar opposite of the radicalism, humility and compassion upon which the Roman Church was founded.

The radicalism, humility and compassion which are the very essence of its foundation and purpose. The behaviour being a case of Roma locuta est: causa finita est.

Except in this instance, nothing could be further from the truth…

As someone who fled my clerically-oppressed homeland many moons ago, I never thought I’d live to hear an Irish politician speak so plainly. And to be honest, I didn’t think that Enda Kenny had it in him. I was wrong.

The key issue is whether the Catholic church accepts the principle that its agents and employees have to obey the laws of the jurisdictions in which they operate. One of the most shameful aspects of the country in which I was brought up is that the Vatican was allowed by the State to run its own version of Sharia Law.

As a result of the statement, the Papal Nuncio (Ambassador of the Vatican) has been recalled to Rome. We await with interest the Vatican’s response. In the meantime one useful interim step the Irish government could take would be to remove all Catholic church involvement in Irish schools.

Reading, the Net and the plasticity of the human brain

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Good piece by Maryanne Wolf, whose book — Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain — was really helpful when I was writing Chapter 1 of G2Z.

To begin with, the human brain was never meant to read. Not text, not papyrus, not computer screens, not tablets. There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain's protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way. Indeed, every time we learn a new skill – whether knitting or playing the cello or using Facebook – that is what we are doing.

New capacities, however, change us, as the evolutionarily new reading circuit illustrates. After we become literate, we literally "think differently" about language: images of brain activation between literate and nonliterate humans bear this out. The brain's plasticity allows an intrinsic variety of possible circuits – there is no set genetic programme. For example, in the case of reading, this means there will be different reading brains depending on various environmental factors: the Chinese reading brain, for example, uses far more visual areas because there are more characters to learn.

The power of images — and their fragility

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This morning’s Observer column.

Dear Photograph is a remarkable demonstration of the power of ordinary, humdrum photographs to evoke memories. Anyone who has ever found a shoebox of old prints in an attic will know this. They yield up images of ourselves when we were young, slender and innocent, of our parents with unlined, carefree expressions and unfurrowed, untroubled brows, of holidays once enjoyed, places once visited. Photographs freeze moments in time, reminding us of who we were – and, by implication, of who we have become.

But Dear Photograph is also a stark reminder of how threatened this power of photography has become. There is, for one thing, the brusque, matter-of-fact, upfront Terms and Conditions of the site. “When you submit your materials,” it reads, “you grant dearphotograph.com a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to use the work to be used, copied, sub-licenced, adapted, transmitted, distributed, published, displayed or otherwise under our discretion in any and all media”. Or, to adapt the famous broken English internet meme, “all your memories are belong to us”.

CORRECTION: Broken link to dearphotograph.com now fixed. Thanks to Seb Schmoller for spotting it.