Smiles

People tell me I look rather fierce. I think that is because, being smaller than me, they look up at my face from below. Take a mirror and check for yourself. Place the mirror below face level, keeping your mouth as straight as you can, and the image seems to curve down. Put it higher and your lips seem to curl into a smile, although you haven't moved them. This is because the mouth is never straight; it curves back at the sides - 'up' seen from above and 'down' from below.

Evolution has made men on average taller than women. So does this mean that men are more likely to look stern to women than to each other, and women more friendly? Certainly children usually look up at adults and are more likely to see the corners of their mouths as turning down. Perhaps the curled-lip smile, as opposed to the toothy smile, evolved partly to counteract this signal. Perhaps the respect shown to tall people results partly from their apparently stern lips. There's an experiment for someone to do.

The most important invention

I was reading The Skeptical Adaptationist (Randy Nesse's blog) and came across the discussion about the most important invention of the past 2000 years. He suggested printing. I would say the contraceptive pill, because of its effect on human behaviour.

Feminism has been around at least since the French Revolution, but it only began to take off when the pill gave women control over their own fertility. I remember a discussion at breakfast in my Oxford college in 1961. The other students, all male, were excited at the thought that women would no longer have an excuse not to yield to them. I argued that this would mean the end of marriage as we knew it and perhaps the collapse of parenthood. At the time all my women friends were scrambling to get engaged before their last undergraduate year ended. Every week someone else started showing off her ring.

And what has happened? Where the pill is freely available hardly any students think of marriage. People live together for years without marrying. The age of first pregnancy has moved from the mid twenties into the early thirties. A large proportion of young women say they never want babies, and some are freezing their eggs in anticipation of perhaps choosing motherhood when they are past menopause. The birth rate in most of Europe has fallen below replacement rate. In fact this one factor alone has slowed down the world's population growth and may reverse it just in time to prevent calamity.

The audacity of boats

Welcome back to the A of B blog! And thank you for reminding us of the self immolation of Jan Palach. I don't remember his suicide as having had much effect. It was one thing to be burnt by the Inquisition - witness the Martyr's Memorial in Oxford, which still sends a chill after nearly five centuries. It is another thing to burn yourself. It seems a sort of self-indulgence to try to make yourself a martyr if no one else will do it for you.

I got a shock today when I googled a church for a bit of research and found that it advertises itself as "a traditional catholic orthodox anglican parish, faithful to the apostolic church and 3-fold (male) priestly ministry". It is as if the Oxford martyrs had died for nothing. The differences with catholicism that cost them their lives have been sponged away, together with the differences between catholic and orthodox that split the churches a thousand years ago. You don't get rid of conflicts by pretending that they never existed.

Obama's speech in Cairo was a brave attempt to mend fences between America and the world's Muslims, but he is still carrying some very heavy baggage. He called the Iraq invasion a "war of choice" as opposed to the one in Afghanistan which is a "necessary war", but he did not apologize for the former, nor did he see the colonial flavour of big, rich, mainly Christian or post-Christian countries trying to impose their solution on a small poor Muslim-majority country. No foreign power has ever managed to control Afghanistan, and eventually NATO is going to have to negotiate with its opponents, so the sooner the better.

I don't deny that the Taliban ideologues are oppressive bigots, but peoples have to conduct their own revolutions, and the presence of foreign armies makes that very difficult, perhaps impossible; can anyone give me an example of a country that transformed itself under occupation? Post-war Germany and Japan are not examples, because they resumed change in a direction they had been moving in before they were taken over by warmongers.

Korea

All the big boys have lined up to condemn North Korea for its nuclear test, but when will the world ever learn that the worst way to deal with a rogue state is to isolate it and threaten it? That just enables the delinquent rulers to tell the people what danger they are in and to strengthen their grip. The way to encourage "regime change" is to remove the threats and lower the tension.

I am not sure that Iran should really be called a rogue state. It's electoral system is not much less democratic than that of Great Britain, and if it has a nuclear weapons programme it is surely defensive and not offensive. Iran has not invaded a neighbour for centuries, and the ancient Persian empires were more devolved and multi-cultural than most European ones.

Israel, which has invaded its neighbours at least six times in 61 years, has never been put under pressure for its nuclear weaponry. Indeed it has never admitted to possessing it. Mordechai Vanunu, who alerted the world to the scale of the problem in 1986, was kidnapped, spent 18 years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement, and is now not allowed to emigrate from Israel. If the world can't condemn Israel it should not condemn anyone.

Nakba Day! Anniversary of the declaration of independence of Israel and the formal beginning of 61 years of war. So let's pay attention to Sri-Lanka and Burma, where other peoples are being oppressed in their own lands. The cases are not strictly parallel of course; historic situations never are. The Tamils never were the majority in Sri-Lanka, and many of them are descended from ancestors brought in by the British as cheap labour, but they are a big minority - the majority in large areas of the North - and now they are being attacked by a government that offers them no option but surrender. Burma is controlled by one of the most appalling regimes in the world, which has never accepted its defeat in the only general election it ever organized, and which maintains its people in poverty and ignorance.

Just as Palestine was abandoned to Zionism thanks to President Truman of America, who used his power to swing the vote in the UN, so the Burmese generals are kept in power with Chinese complicity and the Sri-Lankan government owes much to Japanese aid and investment. The wider world too has a share of responsibility, failing to use the methods which were so successful in putting an end to apartheid in South Africa.

But the main point I want to make is that no one blames Buddhism for oppression in Burma and Sri-Lanka - two countries with Buddhist majorities, and no one should blame Jews or Judaism for oppression of the non-Jewish minority in Israel and of the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza. The aims and methods of Zionism owe nothing to the religion of the great prophets who shaped the Jewish religion, and many of those who most vehemently denounce Israel do so in the name of Judaism.

Stern reality

Last night I listened to a talk by Nicholas Stern, now Lord Stern, on climate change. He was very lucid on the risks that we run, but less so on the remedies. At one point he said 'No doubt, economic growth can't go on forever', but he didn't follow it up. In fact he was talking about how to resume economic growth in a way that reduces our greenhouse emissions. But he spoke only of action by governments and corporations; he did not talk about how individual life-styles can and must change drastically. He made no mention of the fact that livestock production is thought to emit more greenhouse gas than motor cars, though eating less meat is probably the greatest single contribution each of us in the rich countries can make.

The fundamental problem is one of differences in wealth and income. As long as some people are vastly richer than others, the rich will be able to go on spending on forms of consumption with a big carbon footprint. The only way to distribute cuts fairly is by rationing. In World War Two, the British willingly accepted ration books, which ensured that there was enough food for everyone and that we all shared the hardships. Genuine action on climate change will feel like a war; time to rediscover rationing!

Not that it will be easy! Electricity, for example, can be produced from anything from near zero to 100% fossil fuels. It would therefore be difficult to ration its use according to its carbon footprint. Perhaps the simplest would be to ration a few things with a large footprint, such as meat, gas, petrol and coal. This would also have the psychological effect of reminding people repeatedly that all consumption has ecological costs.

Hawks and doves.

Shimon Peres, architect of Israel's nuclear programme in the 1960s, has managed for fifty years to pass as a dove, so what is a hawk like? He has been in Washington this week, warming up the Administration for Netanyahu's visit next week. He warns that Iran's alleged search for nuclear weapons threatens the whole world.

Perhaps it won't work. Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller said on Tuesday that America wants Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. How awkward it is that Iran is already a signatory, and indeed is on the committee preparing the review conference for next year!

Despite all the propaganda about Ahmadinejad being the new Hitler, there is nothing to suggest that Iranians are irrational. If they obtained nuclear weapons they would be subject to the same logic that kept America and the Soviet Union from mutual destruction. Nor should the language of 'wiping Israel off the map' be taken as a call for the wiping out of Israelis. East and West Germany were wiped off the map twenty years ago without anyone getting killed. The world would be a more peaceful place if those Israelis who don't want to share a state on equal terms with Palestinians went back home to America, Australia, South Africa, Russia and Europe.