The West and the Rest

Gautam Adhikari in The Times of India

What is it about the so-called West that so many in the Indian elite seem to hate? Not ordinary people, but the bureaucratic-academic-intellectual elite that dominates public as well as private discourse in the metropolises, particularly in Delhi and, less influentially, Kolkata and Mumbai. Too many members of that privileged class sneer at the West, especially America, and both right-wing ultra-nationalists and left-wing Lohiaite and Gandhian socialists want to build protective walls for the native masses against a tide of Western culture and values that they fear are out to sabotage India.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty that’s dysfunctional in Western societies, by which we mean the urbanised, modernised and, therefore, advanced economies that lie mostly in the Western hemisphere. But isn’t the aim today of every developing nation to achieve precisely that kind of urbanised advancement as best as feasible?

Swathes of India’s intellectual elite would apparently disagree. They conjure up visions of a bucolic, spiritually untainted, pristinely Indian and self-reliant utopia that can come about if only the Western model of growth were jettisoned once for all. There are several problems with this dream, to say nothing of the futility of searching for a tested model of such an ideal society. Walden Pond, Tolstoy Farm and Sabarmati Ashram are not examples anyone can recreate on a national scale.

Like it or not urbanised modernisation, with all its flaws, forms the only surviving blueprint that humankind has to improve the quality and durability of life. And, it so happens, the current phase of urbanised advancement the human race is passing through indeed began a few centuries ago in societies located in the West.

That by no means implies that the road to this unprecedentedly rapid phase of modernisation of the world began magically in the West. The bricks of that road had been laid gradually over centuries by many civilisations, though it was from Europe for a complex range of reasons that the path began to take the shape of a highway.

Hundreds of scholars and intellectuals, mainly Western, have written on how a 15,000-year-old agricultural system suddenly gave way to an industrial society, and thence to our globalised post-industrial world in the space of a few hundred years. Only, it wasn’t all that sudden, though the speed of change was truly phenomenal.

If you don’t trust Western scholars on the subject, there are non-Western options available. You can read Nayan Chanda’s ‘Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization’. He is of pure Indian origin. His 2007 book traces the ever-growing interconnectedness and interdependence that began from the start of early human migration from Africa 50-70,000 years ago and remains ongoing in this intricately globalised phase of our history.

Much of the foundation of Western enlightenment, for instance, was based on ancient Greek philosophy and logic. Along with their own speculative philosophy, the Greeks were open-minded enough to borrow ideas that had germinated in China and India. The Romans borrowed wholesale from the Greeks and developed ideas to create social and legal systems that form a basis for many modern institutions.

Then came a lull in the area now known as the West for about a millennium. It is commonly called the Dark Ages in European literature but it was not dark at all for a rising Islamic-Arab civilisation, which thrived for much of that period to keep Greek thought alive while also developing Chinese inventions and Indian mathematics to spread ideas across a wide empire. The Arabs thus formed a crucial link in global civilisation.

Then, to compress a complex story, came the European Renaissance. As the name implies, it was a ‘rebirth’ of ideas and a socio-cultural reawakening that led in due course to the industrial revolution and to this extraordinary stage in civilisation that we inhabit. In sum, we live a life born of interconnectedness and interdependence.

To put it another way, what we call the West today is little more than a stage in the march of human history. In the intertwined world that has come about as a result of millennia of exchange between cultures, the West is a convenient geopolitical term that combines both a violently harsh as well as enlightened tale of interdependence.

So, get over it. Why try to reinvent the wheel?

As a Muslim woman, I see the veil as a rejection of progressive values

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Guardian


 

 ‘In 1899 Qasim Amin warned that unless Muslims embraced modernity and equality, the future would be bleak. We are in that bleakness now.’ Illustration by Noma Bar

It could be a millenarian crisis or a delayed reaction to decades of bad history, but millions of Muslims seem to have turned inwards, hankering for an imagined golden age. They are contemptuous of modernity’s bendable, ductile values. Some are drawn to reactionary dogma, and preachers while a good number have thrown themselves into political Islam to resist and combat western hegemonies – or so the story goes.

As a practising (though flawed) Shia Muslim, I watch the new puritans with apprehension. So too other Muslims worldwide, the silent many, watch and tremble. From the eighth to the early 20th century, Muslims strove for a broad education (as commanded in the Qur’an), questioned doctrines, and were passionate about scientific advancements, political and social ideals and art. Not even humiliating colonial rule deterred them from the march forward. Now the marchers are walking backwards. The hijab, jilbab, burqa and niqab are visible signs of this retreat from progressive values.

This article will divide people. Women I respect and like wear hijabs and jilbabs to articulate their faith and identity. Others do so to follow their dreams, to go into higher education or jobs. And an increasing number are making a political statement. I am not assuming that the coverings all represent simple oppression. What I am saying is that many women who take up the veil, in any of its forms, do so without delving fully into its implications, significance or history. Their choice, even if independently made, may not be fully examined.

Muslim feminists of the past critiqued and repudiated the veil. One of them was a man, Qasim Amin, an Egyptian judge and philosopher, who in 1899 wrote The Liberation of Women.He was the John Stuart Mill of the Arab world. Huda Shaarawi set up the Egyptian women’s union in the early 1920s. One day in 1923, as she disembarked from a train in Cairo, she threw off her veil and claimed her right to be visible. Educated Iranian women started feminist magazines and campaigned against the veil around the same time. These pioneers have been written out of history or are dismissed as western stooges by some contemporary Muslim intellectuals.

After the transformative 60s, Muslim feminists resumed the fight for equality. European rule was over. It was time. The Moroccan academic Fatema Mernissi, Egypt’s Nawal El Saadawi and the Pakistani scholar Riffat Hassan all argued for female emancipation. They rightly saw the veil as a a tool and symbol of oppression and subservience. Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil ( 1975) is a classic text. So too El Saadawi’s The Hidden Face of Eve (1975). But more conservative Islamic tenets have taken over lands, communities, families, heads and hearts.

The promise of this version is a return to certainties and “purity” of belief, a mission backed by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Deobandi revivalists, funded by Arab money, now run more mosques in Britain than any other Muslim subgroup. Women are told not to travel without male relatives, not to work, to be subservient, to veil. This movement began as a reaction against the Indian raj and mutated into a fundamentalist creed. Today their pushback against “cultural imperialism” appeals to many alienated young Muslims. And, in part, it explains the growing popularity of the hijab, jilbab and full veil .

But in the Qur’an, the veil is mostly used metaphorically to describe barriers between good and bad, believers and nonbelievers. In two verses, women are told to lower their gaze, and to cover their private parts and bosoms. Men are also instructed to lower their gaze, and to dress modestly. One verse commands the women in the prophet’s family to fully veil, partly to protect them from enemies and supplicants.

Sahar Amer, associate professor at the University of North Carolina, has studied these sacred injunctions: “[Nowhere] is the hijab used to describe, let alone prescribe, the necessity for Muslim women to wear a headscarf or any other pieces of clothing often seen covering women in Islamic countries today. Even after reading those passages dealing with the female dress code, one continues to wonder what exactly the hijab is: is it a simple scarf? A purdah? A chador? Or something else? Which parts of the body exactly is it supposed to cover? Just the hair? The hair and neck? The arms? Hands? Feet? Face? Eyes?”

Veils, in truth, predate Islam. Zoroastrian and Byzantine upper-class ladies wore them to keep aloof from the hoi polloi. When Islam’s armies first reached Persia, they were shocked at this snobbery; then they adopted the custom they loathed; the control of women was hard-wired into their psyches.

All religions cast women as sinners and temptresses. Conservative Islam has revived the slander for our times. Women have to be sequestered or contained lest they raise male lust and cause public disorder. Some young Muslim women argue that veils liberate them from a modern culture that objectifies and sexualises females. That argument is appealing; but if credible, why would so many hijabis dress in tight jeans and clinging tops, and why would so many Muslim women flock to have liposuction or breast enhancements?

It is complicated: veils for me represent both religious arrogance and subjugation; they both desexualise and fervidly sexualise. Women are primarily seen as sexual creatures whose hair and bodies incite desire and disorder in the public space. The claim that veils protect women from lasciviousness and disrespect carries an element of self-deception. I have been at graduation ceremonies where shrouded female students have refused to shake the hand of the chancellor. Veiled women have provoked confrontations over their right to wear veils, in courts, at schools and in colleges and workplaces. But I regard their victories as a rejection of social compromise.

Of even more concern are young Muslim lives. Little girls are being asked to don hijabs and jilbabs, turned into sexual beings long before puberty. You can even buy stretchy baby hijabs with fake Calvin Klein and Versace logos.

Like a half-naked woman, a veiled female to me represents an affront to female dignity, autonomy and potential. Both are marionettes, and have internalised messages about femaleness. A woman in a full black cloak, her face and eyes masked walked near to where I was sitting in a park recently, but we could not speak. Behind fabric, she was more unapproachable than a fort. She had a baby girl in a pushchair. Her young son was running around. Will the girl be put into a hijab, then a jilbab? Will the son expect that of his sister and wife one day? To never have the sun warm your face, the breeze through your hair – is that what God wants? Whatever happened to sisterhood?

But do those who choose to veil think of women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and even the west, who are prosecuted, flogged, tortured or killed for not complying? This is not a freestanding choice – it can’t be. Although we hear from vocal British hijabis and niqabis, those who are forced cannot speak out. A fully burqaed woman once turned up at my house, a graduate, covered in cuts, burns, bruises and bites. Do we know how many wounded, veiled women walk around hidden among us? Sexual violence in Saudi Arabia and Iran is appallingly high, as is body dysmorphia.

Liberalism is being tested by the new Islamic ardency. A French-style ban would be unwise and unjust. But institutions can apply dress codes. A bank worker cannot dress like a stripper; a child cannot wear a boob tube to school. Have rules and stick to them, within reason. In 1899, Qasim Amin warned that unless Muslims embraced modernity and equality, the future would be bleak. We are in that bleakness now, and few dare to speak up for its values.

Let’s not fool ourselves. We may not bribe, but corruption is rife in Britain

George Monbiot in The Guardian

It just doesn’t compute. Almost every day the news is filled with stories that look to me like corruption. Yet on Transparency International’s corruption index Britain is ranked 14th out of 177 nations, suggesting that it’s one of the best-run nations on Earth. Either all but 13 countries are spectacularly corrupt or there’s something wrong with the index.

Yes, it’s the index. The definitions of corruption on which it draws are narrow and selective. Common practices in the rich nations that could reasonably be labelled corrupt are excluded; common practices in the poor nations are emphasised.

This week a ground-changing book called How Corrupt is Britain?, edited by David Whyte, is published. It should be read by anyone who believes this country merits its position on the index.

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Would there still be commercial banking sector in this country if it weren’t for corruption? Think of the list of scandals: pensions mis-selling, endowment mortgage fraud, the payment protection insurance scam, Libor rigging, insider trading and all the rest. Then ask yourself whether fleecing the public is an aberration – or the business model.

No senior figure has been held criminally liable or has even been disqualified for the practices that helped to trigger the financial crisis, partly because the laws that should have restrained them were slashed by successive governments. A former minister in this government ran HSBC while it engaged in systematic tax evasion, money laundering for drugs gangs and the provision of services to Saudi and Bangladeshi banks linked to the financing of terrorists. Instead of prosecuting the bank, the head of the UK’s tax office went to work for it when he retired.

The City of London, operating with the help of British overseas territories and crown dependencies, is the world’s leading tax haven, controlling 24% of all offshore financial services. It offers global capital an elaborate secrecy regime, assisting not just tax evaders but also smugglers, sanctions- busters and money-launderers. As the French investigating magistrate Eva Joly has complained, the City “has never transmitted even the smallest piece of usable evidence to a foreign magistrate”. The UK, Switzerland, Singapore, Luxembourg and Germany are all ranked by Transparency International as among the least corrupt nations in the world. They are also listed by the Tax Justice Network as among the worst secrecy regimes and tax havens. For some reason, though, that doesn’t count.

The Private Finance Initiative has been used by our governments to deceive us about the extent of their borrowing while channelling public money into the hands of corporations. Shrouded in secrecy, stuffed with hidden sweeteners, it has landed hospitals and schools with unpayable debts, while hiding public services from public scrutiny.

Relying on the World Bank to assess corruption is like asking Vlad the Impaler for an audit of human rights

State spies have been engaged in mass surveillance. And the police, adopting the identities of dead children, lying in court to assist false convictions and fathering children by activists before disappearing, have infiltrated and sought to destroy peaceful campaign groups. Police forces have protected prolific paedophiles, including Jimmy Savile, and – it is now alleged – a ring of senior politicians who are also suspected of the murder of children. Savile was shielded too by the NHS and the BBC, which has sacked most of the those who sought to expose him while promoting people who tried to perpetuate the cover-up.

There’s the small matter of our unreformed political funding system, which permits the very rich to buy political parties. There’s the phone-hacking scandal and the payment of police by newspapers, the underselling of Royal Mail, the revolving door allowing corporate executives to draft the laws affecting their businesses, the robbing of the welfare and prison services by private contractors, price-fixing by energy companies, daylight robbery by pharmaceutical firms and dozens more such cases. Is none of this corruption? Or is it too sophisticated to qualify?

Among the sources used by Transparency International to compile its index are the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. Relying on the World Bank to assess corruption is like asking Vlad the Impaler for an audit of human rights. Run on the principle of one dollar, one vote, controlled by the rich nations while operating in the poor ones, the bank has funded hundreds of white-elephant projects that have greatly enriched corrupt elites and foreign capital while evicting local people from their land and leaving their countries with unpayable debts. To general gasps of astonishment, the World Bank’s definition of corruption is so narrowly drawn that it excludes such practices.

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The World Economic Forum establishes its corruption rankings through a survey of global executives: the beneficiaries of the kind of practices I’ve listed in this article. Its questions are limited to the payment of bribes and the corrupt acquisition of public funds by private interests, excluding the kinds of corruption that prevail in rich nations. Transparency International’s interviews with ordinary citizens take much the same line: most of its specific questions involve the payment of bribes.

How Corrupt is Britain? argues that such narrow conceptions of corruption are part of a long tradition of portraying the problem as something confined to weak nations, which must be rescued by “reforms” imposed by colonial powers and, more recently, bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF. These “reforms” mean austerity, privatisation, outsourcing and deregulation. They tend to suck money out of the hands of the poor and into the hands of national and global oligarchs.

For organisations such as the World Bank and the World Economic Forum, there is little difference between the public interest and the interests of global corporations. What might look like corruption from any other perspective looks to them like sound economics. The power of global finance and the immense wealth of the global elite are founded on corruption, and the beneficiaries have an interest in framing the question to excuse themselves.

Yes, many poor nations are plagued by the kind of corruption that involves paying bribes to officials. But the problems plaguing us run deeper. When the system already belongs to the elite, bribes are superfluous.

Great teacher = great results? Wrong

Jack Marwood in The Guardian

Sir Michael Barber, once a chief education adviser to Tony Blair, introduced one of the enduring modern myths about education when he quoted an unnamed South Korean policymaker in 2007, who said: “The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” This great teacher myth is often presented as a simple equation: great teaching gets great results. It’s a view that is widely held, tremendously appealing and completely wrong.

It sounds plausible. After all, children spend a lot of time at school and, collectively, we spend a great deal of money on education. By the time they are 16, children have been at school for 10,000 hours, the figure often said to be the minimum necessary to master a skill, and we spend around 5% of our GDP on education. Surely teachers must be the biggest factor in ensuring that all this effort is worthwhile?

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David Cameron spoke “as a parent, not just a politician” when he recently introduced yet another plan to “deliver the best teachers” to “make Britain the best place in the world to learn”. “The best teachers” has become a common refrain in the ongoing narrative about schools, and it is very clear that many parents, pundits and politicians assume that the prime driver of attainment in schools is teachers themselves. So embedded is this idea, in fact, that when we hear that teaching is in crisis it is often assumed that this is because we don’t have enough good quality teachers. And often, we hear that by removing the bad teachers from the system, we will see improvements in future.

There is a huge problem with this view. Just how do you know who are bad teachers? For the past 40 years, a movement now known as “school effectiveness research” has promoted the idea that good teachers get good outcomes for children. Those who believe this also believe that, by removing bad teachers from our schools and replacing them with better ones, the crisis will be averted.

The key issue with this line of thinking is that teachers aren’t actually directly responsible for the learning in schools. Because, when it comes down to it, children are the ones who actually have to do the learning. Unfortunately, much to the frustration of every teacher – and parent – in the land, children don’t always do what they are told, or learn what we attempt to teach them. What’s more, children are by definition immature, and they don’t always know what is best for them. To further complicate matters, some children find school and learning easy and some don’t, often for reasons out of their, and our, control.

While teachers have to take responsibility for providing the very best circumstances in which to learn, any parent will know that children have their own ideas regardless of what we have to say about the matter. Children, sadly, are not all passively waiting to be filled up with facts and knowledge like empty vessels. The resistance of some children is legendary. Others overwhelm us with their eagerness to learn. But trying to teach anyone anything is tricky unless they actually want to learn, and are in a position to do so. What’s more, learning is hard work; it requires effort, repetition, practice, mental and physical exertion.

All this adds up to a picture of complexity ill served by the great teacher = great results myth. As is well known in the world of educational research, the variation in outcomes within any school is much, much larger than the variation between schools. In the same school, with the same teachers, some children learn a lot and others not so much, because while teachers teach, children are ultimately responsible for what they learn. There is lots of evidence that the vast majority of any child’s learning is due to their own efforts, not that of the school or of their teachers. In fact, academics such as Dylan Wiliam of the Institute of Education in London suggest that around nine times as much of a child’s measured learning outcomes can be attributed to the child rather than the difference their schooling has made.

Does that mean that teachers don’t matter? Of course it doesn’t. We need teachers who help children to get the most from their time in school. It does, however, mean that the common assumptions about what schools can achieve are based on a fallacy. Because learning is done by the child, and not by the teacher, and no education system can exceed the desire and capabilities of its children. The Korean policymaker was wrong. Schools are a very thin layer of icing on a very, very big cake. As highly skilled, dedicated and inspirational as the icing might be, in the end it is the cake that counts.

She took a year off from her marriage to sleep with strangers. What could go wrong? The Wild Oats Project Review

Carlos Lozada in The Independent

Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project”. And not just the book. Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project” phenomenon — the debates, the think pieces, the imitators and probably the movie. Get ready for orgasmic meditation and the Three Rules. Get ready for “My Clitoris Deals Solely in Truth” T-shirts.

Robin Rinaldi, a magazine journalist living in San Francisco by way of Scranton, Pa., initially wasn’t sure she wanted children, but she knew that Scott, her stoic Midwestern husband, did not. Over time, Rinaldi decided a baby would add purpose to their lives, but Scott wouldn’t change his mind. “I wanted a child, but only with him,” she explains. “He didn’t want a child but wanted to keep me.” When Scott opted for a vasectomy, she demanded an open marriage.

“I refuse to go to my grave with no children and only four lovers,” she declares. “If I can’t have one, I must have the other.”

If you’re wondering why that is the relevant trade-off, stop overthinking this. “The Wild Oats Project” is the year-long tale of how a self-described “good girl” in her early 40s moves out, posts a personal ad “seeking single men age 35-50 to help me explore my sexuality,” sleeps with roughly a dozen friends and strangers, and joins a sex commune, all from Monday to Friday, only to rejoin Scott on weekends so they can, you know, work on their marriage.

The arrangement is unorthodox enough to succeed as a story, and in Rinaldi’s telling it unfolds as a sexual-awakening romp wrapped in a female-empowerment narrative, a sort of Fifty Shades of Eat, Pray, Love. “I wanted to tell him to f— me hard but I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth” is a typical Rinaldi dilemma. At the same time, she constantly searches for “feminine energy” or her “feminine core” or for a “spiritual practice guided by the feminine.

But more than empowering or arousing, this story is depressing. Rinaldi just seems lost. Still sorting through the psychological debris of an abusive childhood, she latches on to whatever guru or beliefs she encounters, and imagines fulfillment with each new guy. She still rushes to Scott whenever things gets scary (a car accident, an angry text message), yet deliberately strains their union beyond recovery. “At any cost” are the operative words of the subtitle.

Robin and Scott agree to three rules — “no serious involvements, no unsafe sex, no sleeping with mutual friends” — that both go on to break. He finds a steady girlfriend, while Robin violates two rules right away. “In truth, I was sick of protecting things,” she writes about going condom-free with a colleague at a conference. “I wanted the joy of being overcome.”

The men and women she hooks up with — some whose names Rinaldi has changed, others too fleeting to merit aliases — all blur into a new-age, Bay Area cliche. Everyone is a healer, or a mystic, or a doctoral student in feminist or Eastern spirituality. They’re all verging on enlightenment, sensing mutual energy, getting copious action to the sounds of tribal drums. The project peaks when she moves into OneTaste, an urban commune where “expert researchers” methodically stroke rows of bare women for 15 minutes at a time in orgasmic meditation sessions (“OM” to those in the know). “Everyone here was passionate,” Rinaldi writes. “Everyone had abandoned convention.”

Rinaldi holds little back, detailing her body’s reactions along the way. At first she is upset that she can’t feel pleasure as quickly as other women, but she finally decides she’s glad that her “surrender didn’t happen easily, that it lay buried and tethered to the realities of each relationship.” Her clitoris, although “moody,” was also “an astute barometer. . . . It dealt solely in truth.”

And truth often comes in tacky dialogue. “Your breasts are amazing,” one of her younger partners tells her. “You should have seen them in my twenties,” Rinaldi boasts. His comeback: “You’re cocky. I dig that.” (Fade to dirty talk.) When they do it again months later, he thanks her in the morning. “Something happens when I’m with you,” he says. “I feel healed.” I’m sure that’s exactly what he feels.

Rinaldi can’t seem to decide why she’s doing all this. The project is her “rebellion.” Or “a search for fresh, viable sperm.” Or a “bargaining chip.” Or “an elaborate attempt to dismantle the chains of love.” Or just a “quasi-adolescent quest for god knows what.”

If exasperation could give you orgasms, this book would leave me a deeply satisfied reader.

One of her oldest friends calls her out. “How is sleeping with a lot of guys going to make you feel better about not having kids?” she asks. Rinaldi’s answer: “Sleeping with a lot of guys is going to make me feel better on my deathbed. I’m going to feel like I lived, like I didn’t spend my life in a box. If I had kids and grandkids around my deathbed, I wouldn’t need that. Kids are proof that you’ve lived.” It’s a bleak and disheartening rationale, as though women’s lives can achieve meaning only through motherhood or sex.

For all her preoccupation with feminine energy, Rinaldi seems conflicted over feminism. “I would die a feminist,” she writes of her collegiate activism, “but I was long overdue for some fun.” Later, she pictures women’s studies scholars judging her submission fantasies, and frets over “those Afghan women hidden under their burqas” who could be “beaten or even killed right now for doing what I was so casually doing.” But when she finds a sexual connection with a woman who backs away because of “emotional issues,” Rinaldi channels her inner alpha male: “I was drawn to her body but shrunk back when she expressed unfettered feeling. . . .  It only took sleeping with one woman to help me understand the behavior of nearly every man I’d ever known.”

When the year runs out, Rinaldi returns to Scott, even though she soon starts an affair with a project flame. She’s no longer so upset about the vasectomy, regarding it as a sign that Scott can stand up for himself (though it may also mean she now cares less about him, period). No shock that post-project, their chemistry is off, and when Rinaldi makes a casual reference to their time apart, Scott finally explodes. “Do you know how many nights I cried myself to sleep when you moved out!?” he asks. “Do you care about anyone’s feelings but your own!?” She was “too stunned to reply.” But the fate of this marriage, revealed in the final pages, is anything but stunning.

“These are the sins against my husband,” Rinaldi recounts. “Abdicating responsibility, failing to empathize with him, cheating and lying.” After blaming him for so long, “in the end, I was the one who needed to ask forgiveness.”

In a rare moment of heartbreaking subtlety, the book’s dedication page simply says “For Ruby,” the name Rinaldi had imagined for a baby girl. Except, “there is no baby,” she writes at the end. “Instead there is the book you hold in your hands.”

And that is a frustrating book, with awkward prose, a perplexing protagonist and too many eye-rolling moments. Yet it is also a book I see launching book-club conversations and plenty of pillow talk — not just about sex and marriage, but about the price and possibility of self-reinvention. You don’t have to write a great work to cause a great stir.

Does Rinaldi reinvent herself? She survives the aftershocks and even seems to discover some happiness, however fragile she knows it to be. So maybe she needed this after all. Or maybe sometimes “empowerment” is just another word for self-absorption.

Child rearing is too important to be left to the market

Zoe Williams in The Guardian

“Early years” is the most freighted term in politics, deployed to convey so much. For me, the phrase conjures an image of toddlers, hefting great boulders of public policy intention – like dutiful dwarves in fairytales. At election time, you see it dredged out to convey the following: first, this party is “family friendly”, which really means “women friendly”. Even though men are, last time I checked, intimately involved in the creation of children, and tend by modern mores to consider themselves responsible for the rest of the child’s life, the provision of care for children is an issue for a lady-voter; something to pique her interest after she’s been turned off by the conversation about defence spending and economic stability.

Also, early years – when attached to the word “intervention” – is a way of talking about deprivation without sounding as though you might do anything to tackle its structural causes, while at the same time avoiding the trap of callousness. You care, of course you care: who would blame a poverty-stricken three-year-old for failing to extend their vocabulary to match that of their peers? But your answer never relates back to the deprivation itself, rather, it suggests ways in which the state can make up the household deficit with thrifty, well-costed interventions. You have thereby established yourself as a caring, practical politician, who can meet a knotty problem head-on. It would be great if these interventions served more than a political purpose and made a difference to the children themselves, but you can’t have it all.

Last week the Nuffield foundation produced a report into the efficacy of early-years childcare and education. It found the demonstrable effects of the policy to be “modest”. Looking particularly at disadvantaged groups, it observed “some evidence that the impact of increased free entitlement on outcomes at age five was larger for children from lower socio-economic backgrounds”, but that this effect faded during primary school. The report highlights, furthermore, the fact that you can’t really reach a blanket conclusion about the influence of early years intervention, since provision varies. I want to say “varies wildly” but, to stick with the report’s sober language, it merely divaricates: state provision – especially attached to primary schools – is better.

The conclusions were that more research is needed before more money is committed; the oft-used phrase is “far from conclusive”, and there’s a reason for that. Early years interventions tinker at the edges of deprivation, while never considering what’s at its core. The seminal study on how disadvantage affects children’s educational attainment – and nobody denies that it does – is the 30 Million Word Gap, a 2003 American study that found high-income families talking more to their babies than poorer ones (a difference, by the age of three, of 30 million words). Policymakers have, on both sides of the Atlantic, fallen in love with this study, as they conceive ways in which that gap could be filled by institutions – mandatory parenting classes, graduate nursery staff, the simulation of conditions outside the home in which highly educated people talk a lot. This is accompanied by a complete myopia (I don’t want to call it deliberate; who knows what politicians do deliberately?) around what deprivation is: hunger, homelessness and poor housing, feelings of inferiority and hopelessness.

It is blindingly obvious to a teacher that a primary school cannot erode or undo the negative effect that being hungry has on a child’s ability to learn. A child with pressing housing concerns or very over-worked parents may find it difficult to concentrate. No wonder the effects of the nought to three years fade; these are real practical hurdles to a fulfilling human life. You do not need a sociologist, or a longitudinal cohort study, to find these correlations, as plain as the nose on your face.

And yet we contrive to have debates, and frame policy, around very complex secondary factors, boldly ignoring the very obvious primary ones. The reason is, I believe, moral: there is a fundamental ethical difference between believing in social mobility – opportunities for anyone, so long as they try hard enough – and believing in social parity – a decent life for people, however much they achieve, given that regardless of what happens somebody will end up at the bottom, and their welfare is as meaningful as anybody’s.

If mobility is the only goal you can accept, then to consider too deeply what being poor really feels like for a three-year-old is risky. You may end up caring about the family; you may actually end up thinking that none of them deserve to be hungry, even the ones who aren’t even children any more, and whose rubbish vocabulary is the root of the problem.

There’s a misconception even more fundamental. The Nuffield’s research is laudable, mainly for puncturing the claims about early years care that allow politicians to ignore more fundamental questions of social justice. But it is constrained by an even more fundamental misconception, which is that public policy could ever be cost-benefit analysed in this way – the infinite variegations of a human life crunched down into inputs and outputs; a toddler’s interaction monetised by the GCSEs achieved down the line. Payment-by-results culture is a necessity of any market or quasi-market system: you can’t quantify value if you’re not prepared to devise a set of measures of efficacy. But if we accept that the public sector does this best, why do we endlessly scratch around for the proofs to satisfy the market? We should work instead to the principles of cooperation: that pre-school children get the greatest benefit from universal provision, and the proof of its excellence is that everyone wants to use it.

Data is not the enemy

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

Taking the stats at your disposal into account does not mean your players cannot play a fearless and instinctive brand of cricket


The information is available to the players. It's their choice whether to use it or not © AFP



Poor Peter Moores couldn't have chosen a sentence more likely to turn him into a human dartboard. He needed to "look at the match data," Moores said after England's disastrous defeat to Bangladesh. To a press corps increasingly convinced that the England team has become formulaic and nerdy, this was the worst answer Moores could have reeled off.

It did, however, open up a whole new range of possibilities for the post-match interview. One wondered how historic sports interviews might have been different in the age of referencing match data.

Interviewer to George Foreman after he lost to Muhammad Ali in 1974: "What did you make of the fight, George?"

Foreman: "Haven't seen the fight data yet."

Interviewer: "Well, two men were standing up at the start of the eighth. Then there was one. You were on the canvas. In an algorithm: 2; 8; 1."

Foreman: "Right, got it."

And how would a data-inspired interview have run after the 1978 Oxford-Cambridge boat race, when Cambridge sank into the Thames, live on television?

Interviewer to Cambridge captain: "Disappointing race out there, I imagine?"

Captain: "Impossible to say before seeing the race data."

Interviewer: "Glug, glug, glug - ring any bells?"

All this mischief, however, does not explain very much why England crashed out of the World Cup. Are we really to believe that the central figure in the catastrophe was Nathan Leamon, the mathematician and former schoolteacher who is now England's stats analyst? That is ridiculous. It is Leamon's job to supply evidence that may help the management to make better decisions. It is the job of the coaching staff to use that information appropriately. So even if you believe, as I do, that England need to play a more fearless, instinctive brand of cricket, it does not follow that having access to potentially useful data prevents you from doing so.

The real problem is not maths, which by definition is flinty, pitiless, robust and unsentimental. No, the problem is management-speak, learned jargon and corporate-style snake oil. The unfortunate thing is that coaches can now use the phrase "match data" as just another thing to say when they are avoiding the subject. It slots into the lexicon of cliché, alongside "taking the positives", "skill sets" and "plan execution".

The irony is that real maths, in fact, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from jargon. Maths is exclusively content; jargon is content-free.

In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language", George Orwell despaired of political jargon: "As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of words that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house." Sport soon surpassed politics for meaningless waffle. Orwell deserves a new epitaph: "The man who foresaw the evolution of the post-match interview."

The former England captain Mike Atherton made several good points about the rush to blame data for all England's woes. First, analytics now has less influence over the team than it did in the more successful Flower-Strauss era. Secondly, Leamon's work is not pushed down players' throats. Stats for the particular ground, videos of an opposition bowler's range of slower balls, these things are available if players want to see them. If they don't, fine.



Nathan Leamon has a gift for numbers but he doesn't believe they provide all the answers © PA Photos

In 2006, while I was writing my book What Sport Tells Us About Life, I dedicated a whole chapter to the remarkable success of a school rugby team, unbeaten for three seasons, a sequence of 33 games. From the author's perspective, drawing lessons from a school coach was an unusual and risky approach. After all, other subjects of my book included Zinedine Zidane, Billy Beane and Michael Jordan. What was a school coach doing in that company?

The answer is that I thought his methodology was worth bringing to a wider audience. The coach was a plain-speaking, no-nonsense Lancastrian who pared down his comments to players. Rather than talking for talking's sake - as most coaches do - he researched what really happened in the matches and fed back small chunks of highly useful information. The quest was to find insight, concision and meaning; and to avoid noise, chatter and cliché.

Who was this progressive but unheard-of coach? Nathan Leamon. His approach, then and now, is thoughtful, flexible and open. His character is modest without being deferential, self-contained without being standoffish. Now, nine years on, he must find the way he is portrayed in the media as unrecognisable. Far from being a credulous geek, Leamon is an understated sceptic, a sensible and balanced man who happens to have a gift for numbers. Leamon is the last person to argue that data can provide all the answers - he's much too smart.

While England were exiting the World Cup, the retired NBA player Shane Battier was addressing a sold-out audience at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston. If you want to understand how data can help a sportsman perform better, read Michael Lewis on Battier's playing days.

Or this, exploring why it is so hard, with the naked eye, to understand the way that Mesut Özil, the Arsenal footballer, creates space on a football pitch.

Like it or not, as professional sport evolves it will provide greater scope for academic rigour. A lot of clever people like sport and they are constantly developing ideas - some good, others less good - that may eventually become absorbed into the mainstream. Bill James' understanding of data changed baseball forever. Eventually no coach could afford to ignore James' ideas because it would cost them games.

That is why the status of the sports analyst is going up. Nate Silver, who has become the most important analyst of American presidential elections, cut his teeth modelling sports matches. Ideas that originate in sport are finding wider application in the outside world.

And yet I am equally confident that a central task for sports coaches - now more than ever - is to liberate players, to free them from stifling anxiety and fearfulness.

Those two truths exist in parallel, not in conflict. Coaches will inevitably want to use every tool at their disposal, including relevant data. Then they must have the psychological nous, the feel and the common touch, to allow players to express themselves.



In the future of limited-overs cricket, can batsmen build dominant positions early enough to reduce the risk of getting out so much as to take it out of the equation? size: 900 © Getty Images

In the end, the discussion of data in sport tends to reveal more about prejudices than the underlying reality. It's all too easy to blame other people for using either too much or too little evidence en route to their decisions. I am intuitive, you are strangely convinced, he is delusional. Or, if you prefer, I am rational, you are a reductionist, he is a slave to numbers.

There is another story to emerge from this World Cup. The central innovation, which has now transferred from T20 to ODIs, is that talented batsmen are lethal - perhaps unstoppable - when they play without any fear of getting out. In 2003 I played in the first ever T20 league. I wrote at the time that it allowed players to play as they do in the nets, when they are totally uninhibited.

This powerful freedom, however, is partly earned by the match situation, especially in the middle overs. If the batting team is behind in the match, and there are few wickets in hand, it is far harder to bat as though another wicket wouldn't matter. The challenge now, in all white-ball cricket, is to build a position so dominant that there is no risk attached to getting out. If you are batting at 360 for 2 with seven overs left - with, say, Glenn Maxwell padded up and waiting - there is literally no risk in trying to hit a six and getting out. Paradoxically, of course, that makes you more likely to hit the ball for six!

Perhaps someone can show me the data on how quickly this underlying dominance turns into an impregnable lead. If I was coach, I'd certainly want to know.