In Obama’s own words: “And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright – tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.”

As Obama spoke last night of the “young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America”, those standing around me erupted in applause. San Francisco was on fire! So too were New York’s Times Square, Chicago’s Grant Park, Stanford’s and Berkeley’s university dormitories, and so very many other places – or so it seemed from the television screen. The relief and sheer merriment was palpable here in this otherwise ordinary Grant Street bar – more palpable even than the despair of eight desolate, alienating years.

Looking now at my hand-scribbled notes of yesterday – about time spent at a local polling station while various walks of life exercise their constitutional right; stern warnings from my hairdresser that many would flee the country if McCain took the White House (and so please help us God); emptied Champagne shelves at a local Safeway; noisy clusters of “No to Prop 8” warriors on street corners; a shared sense of anticipation as exit polls predict a flipping of Ohio and Florida in favour of the Democrats; one defeated candidate for District Supervisor left to lick his wounds over a solitary drink; a NPR commentator who suggested that an Obama win would “show the world the true soul of America” – how dated these notes now seem, not 24 hours old.

Of course there remains much to worry about. Not all’s perfect. The financial crisis is far from over. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still extracting their pound of flesh. But let today be for hope. After all, as Jonathan Sacks wrote: “The human spirit is unique in its capacity to correct its own errors. What we can damage we can repair. What we destroy, we can rebuild. There is one proviso: that we do not lose our sense of hope.”

There are things about Lincoln’s tenure that, at least to me, appeared as a complete novelty. For example, I hadn’t realized that Lincoln, upon his appointment, was considered (by many) inferior to such rivals as Seward, Chase and Bates. Even as Lincoln won his party’s nomination, each of these rivals believed the wrong man had been chosen (“Well they would, wouldn’t they?” I can hear you gripe). Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote at the time: “The comparatively unknown name of Lincoln [had been selected] … we heard the result coldly and sadly. It seemed too rash, on a purely local reputation, to build so grave a trust in such anxious times.”

I can’t imagine that Lincoln wouldn’t have been acutely aware of the lack of confidence in his abilities. And yet he was able to manage doubt and govern. In fact, he put together a cabinet that was to include his rivals for the nomination. (Seward became secretary of state, Chase became secretary of the treasury, and Bates attorney general.) As Goodwin explains: “Every member of his administration was better known, better educated, and more experienced in public life than Lincoln. Their presence in the cabinet might have threatened to eclipse the obscure prairie lawyer from Springfield.” In an age and people of pride, I would expect this to have taken a great deal of courage.

Moreover, Lincoln had previously been defeated twice in a bid for the Senate. Yet his attitude remained magnanimous. Even as he must have felt sore about each subsequent defeat (and one can include an effort to Seward to undermine Lincoln early in his administration), he reacted graciously – expressing his esteem for those who had defeated him, and making it clear that no hard feelings were harboured against those in his party who had failed to support him. Once more I was taken by surprise – I suppose particularly in this era of ‘negative campaigning’ – where so much seems to be gained by ‘mudslinging’.

And (on a minor note perhaps) I hadn’t realized that it was the Republicans who fought slavery – rather than the Democrats. Funny, the things you learn.

Perhaps my surprise at the above merely reflects my ignorance in US history (it probably does, in fact). Be that as may (and cheesy thought it may sound), they can still inspire, can’t they?

Serendipity was recently voted the most popular word in the English language. From only a handful of references in the late 1950s, a Google search today reveals 3 million hits. It is also one of the most frequently queried words in the dictionary, typically used in lieu of luck, chance or coincidence. Accordingly, the New Oxford Dictionary of English defines it as “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way”. Aside from bringing us aspirin, The Pill, insulin, penicillin, antihistamines and the smallpox vaccine, it produced Scotchgard, Teflon, Velcro, Nylon, the Post-It Note, the Weekender camera, Ivory Soap, and the technology behind the HP Inkjet printer. We wish people ‘good luck’, observes Nicolas Rescher, to suggest not that they are incompetent but simply that effort alone is hardly ever sufficient in meriting success. Our lack of omniscience, if nothing else, leaves scope for luck.

Yet to liken serendipity to luck reflects a sloppy reading of the 16th century tale in which serendipity has its origins. Instead of being tantamount to chance, serendipity signals the ability to single out ‘correct pairs’ of observations that may have nothing in common except that they can be meaningfully related. (By this token, the New Oxford Dictionary’s definition appears inaccurate).

In contrast to serendipity’s ordinary usage, this characterization is entirely true to its etymological origins. Horace Walpole, in 1754, wrote of a critical discovery he had made, of an exciting old Arab tale. One fine day, so goes the tale, three princes from Serendip (Ceylon, or modern-day Sri Lanka) were sent by their father on a prolonged journey to acquire empirical experience as part of their training. Misfortune befell the princes when happening upon a camel driver. The driver inquired about a lost camel. Though the princes never saw the animal, they were nonetheless able to accurate describe it: it was blind in one eye, lacking a tooth, and lame. Furthermore, the camel was carrying butter on one side and honey on the other, and was being ridden by a pregnant woman. Their description was so accurate, in fact, that the camel owner accused the princes of having stolen his camel, and formally charged them in the emperor’s court. However, in the presence of Emperor Behram, it became clear that the princes were entirely innocent, having merely pieced together various events. They explained that they thought the camel blind in the right eye because the grass had been cropped only on the left side of the road. They inferred that it was missing a tooth from the bits of chewed grass scattered across the road. Its footprints seemed to suggest that the animal was lame and dragging one foot. Also, finding ants on one side of the road and flies on the other, they concluded that the camel must have been carrying butter on the ant’s side, and honey on other. Finally, as for the presence of a pregnant woman, a combination of carnal desires on the part of the princes, and imprints of hands on the ground sufficed to bring about this final conclusion.

Clearly, the princes did far more than make chance observations. The tale is instructive precisely because the princes relied on their ability to recombine observations and deduce ‘meaningful’ pairs. Thus they arrived at a surprisingly effective (and, as it happens, entirely accurate) plot. It seems to me that to redefine serendipity as a consequence of recombining data into meaningful pairs is not only etymologically correct but makes serendipity a close relative of “knowledge bridging”, “porting”, “creativity”, “speciation”, or Schumpeter’s “carrying out of new combinations”. Serendipity is serendipity precisely because something other than chance is involved.

The philosopher Thomas Kuhn, provides a lovely example of this combinatorial process in developing his theory on the structure of scientific revolutions. Struck by the stark contrast in social dynamics between the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences (where he spent the 1958-9 year) and the scientific community in which he had been trained, he hit on the idea of scientific ‘paradigms’, or “scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners”. As Kuhn writes: “Once that piece of my puzzle fell into place, a draft of this essay [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions] emerged rapidly” (Kuhn, 1970: viii). And, when reflecting on periods of scientific revolution: “The scientist must usually rearrange the intellectual and manipulative equipment he has previously relied upon, discarding some elements of his prior belief and practice while finding new significances in and new relationships between many others (Kuhn, 1959: 227).”

Is serendipity a capability? Would that explain why some people, or organizations for that matter, appear more prone to fortuity than others? If so, where is it to be found? How is it cultivated? How is it protected? Who owns it? Or would any competitive value added by it been destroyed in its discovery?

One of the curiosities of the organization sciences is the prevalence of formal modelling in a world dominated by singular events. After all, aren’t many (if not most) significant events in organizational life of the ‘one of a kind’ variety? If so, such events are, by definition, resistant to statistical or econometric analysis, and yet we wish to learn from them. Learning about unique events, in turn, often begins with a why-question. Why was Google prepared to pay so much to acquire YouTube? Why did Pfizer fail to secure continued protection of the patent for its blockbuster drug Viagra when challenged in court? Why did Honda succeed so spectacularly in the US motorcycle market?

Explaining why an event occurred typically involves constructing an account of the causes that led to it. These accounts, very roughly, are instances of what we refer to as causal explanations. As our examples suggest, why-questions about unique events and the causal explanations they elicit may reflect important practical concerns – be it for managers or those who study organisations. Where so, there will be premium on getting these explanations right.

How then should the strength of causal explanations of unique events be assessed, given that they cannot be subsumed as members of classes of repeated instances of the kind required in standard statistical analyses? How can those who study organizations assess the relative strength of the causal explanations on offer, including their own? We all know that some explanations are better than others, but what exactly is it for one explanation to be better than another?

Although many of the issues involved are never far from the surface in methodological contributions to the organizations literature (Sutton & Staw, 1995; DiMaggio, 1995; Weick, 1995; Starbuck, 2006; Van de Ven & Johnson, 2006), these questions are rarely raised explicitly. This neglect is doubly surprising in view of the historical importance of single-case research (e.g. Selznick, 1949; Gouldner, 1954; Kanter, 1977, Pettigrew, 1979, 1985; Heimann, 1993; Weick, 1993), and the prominence of case teaching in business schools.
One exception is the article by March, Sproull & Tamaz (1991), from which this blog (and our related paper) stems. Yet, aside from acknowledging the fact that the evaluation of ‘sample of one’ stories is not an arbitrary process, and that there are criteria for differentiating between good and bad stories, the authors leave the gauntlet where it is – and where it remains today.

The preliminaries to a discussion of causal explanations – and their evaluation – are daunting. I won’t test your patience by covering these in this blog. For a detailed review of the philosophical literature on causal explanation you could refer to a paper jointly authored with a Cambridge colleague, Jochen Runde (who happens to be one of my more interesting colleagues). Let me leave you instead with three criteria by which causal explanations of unique events may be rationally assessed. They are deceptively simple in ensuring that such explanations satisfy three broad criteria: (1) that the factors cited as causes can be accepted as having been present in the run-up to the explanandum event; (2) that those factors can be accepted as having been causally effective in contributing to producing that event; and (3) that, given an affirmative answer to (1) and (2), the causes actually cited in the explanation explain well, taking into account various contextual and epistemic considerations relating to the intended audience for the explanation, and the interests and theoretical presuppositions of the person providing the explanation.

No doubt our argument will be challenged on the grounds that the criteria we have presented are very general and (i) will therefore not have sufficient bite to discriminate between competing explanations in practical situations, and (ii) are not up to guaranteeing what John Kay calls the ‘ultimate truth’ about episodes as complex as the well-known “Honda effect”. On the first objection, we have pitched our account at a highly abstract level, and realize that there may be more specific methods and techniques in particular areas of research that can be used to distinguish between competing explanations. But the existence of such methods would not undermine our general account – nor need of it. On the second objection, our never being able to achieve the ‘ultimate truth’ about the causes of any event seems to us an inescapable part of the human condition. This is something that would require a God’s eye view of the full list of causes of that event. Given that this is likely to remain beyond reach, even our very best explanations will invariably be partial and interest-dependent (and it is worth remembering that even the very best statistical analyses are no better on this count). The best we can hope for is that weaknesses or biases in causal explanations can sometimes be identified and that weak explanations can be ruled out.

For a more detailed discussion, please see: Runde, J. & de Rond, M. ‘Evaluating causal explanations of samples of one’, JBS Working Paper. (A draft of this paper can be emailed upon request).

I’ve something on my mind – something that has preoccupied me ever since starting my ethnography of the Cambridge squad. It is at once a great source of embarrassment and an intellectual challenge. Try as I might, I cannot remember a time when I dreamt as vividly as during my fieldwork. In contrast to most ordinary nights, these dreams were far from innocent.

How can it be that a healthy soul gives, in dreams, the strangest, the most incoherent, the most illogical manifestations, and afterwards, when awake, performs its function again in the most normal way? (Rignano, 1920). I’d frequently wake up feeling parched, pooped, confused – haunted by the ghosts of last night’s dreams and wondering why they’d suddenly become so vivid, so menacing, so wounding? Who were these vengeful shadows from the netherworld floating in and out of my head, and why are they here? Was I not allowed some reprieve from the excessive introspection and worry that enveloped me like candyfloss since joining the squad? Like Philip Larkin’s mum and dad, the squad fuck you up: ‘They may not mean to but they do / They fill you with faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.’

This entry is a call for help as much as an attempt to untangle the clutter that are my thoughts. Rather than soliciting names of psychotherapists, however, my invitation is of a scholarly kind. A handful of sociologists to date, including Loic Wacquant (author of Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer), have made inroads into formulating a carnal sociology – or an attempt to describe the subject’s world ‘by immersion’. This approach is, Wacquant argued, a radical departure from conventional ethnography. For it embraces the view that our subjects are first and foremost embodied, carnal beings of blood and flesh who relate to the world in passionate ways. This calls for a manner of ethnography that recognizes and takes full epistemic advantage of the visceral nature of social life, such as Wacquant’s boxing gym or my rowing squad. (As many of you will know, Wacquant credits the origins of carnal sociology to his mentor Pierre Bourdieu and his notion of ‘participant objectivization’, or entering social worlds that can often only be grasped in practice.)

To the seasoned sociologist, my interpretation of Wacquant’s vision no doubt seems superficial – in which case I’d gratefully stand corrected. That said, it has very strong intuitive appeal. As a carnal sociology my recent work has serious drawbacks, the most relevant being that of me being unable to ‘partake’ of the training in the way Wacquant could – and did. After all, Boat Race preparation requires a level of skill and fitness that come only with many years of dedicated training and coaching. The best I could do was to participate with them in core exercises and, in lieu of their physical training, to row and train and compete with a less competent city based crew instead. It’s not perfect, but probably as good as it gets given the nature of the beast.

What interests me (coming to the point) is the extent to which Wacquant’s carnal sociology might need to be extended by allowing subconscious experience to inform analysis? After all, dreams were often regarded as truth-telling oracles in times past and, like it or not, we spend a significant portion of our lives unconscious. More relevantly, dreams may well serve as an important compliment to conscious reality. That, at least, was Jung’s view in seeing dreams as spontaneous self-portrayals, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious. (It is partly here that Jung deviates from Freud’s thesis on dreams as wish-fulfillment). Jung took dreams to be diagnostically valuable facts. So why shouldn’t we as ethnographers?

I believe it was C.S. Lewis who suggested that dreams do not suddenly cease to exist when unmasked for the delusions they are upon waking. Nor is the experience of everyday life snuffed out when descending into sleep. The two worlds are unmistakenly distinct and yet somehow related. This would seem particularly true in ethnography, where dreams might serve to highlight vital links between the observer and the observed. (This link may not be altogether different from that described in Damasio’s Descartes Error in linking emotion to reason, for instance, where emotion may increase the saliency of a premise and, in so doing, bias the conclusion in favour of this premise). But what precisely is this relationship? And how important is it in the research process?

The literature relating dreams to ethnography is (understandably) sparse, particularly with organizational ethnographers. An obvious methodological difficulty lies in the inability for others to participate in dreams except by means of first-hand accounts (which raises issues of reliability).

Though I’m happy to write about my dreams – and to try and contextualize them as best as I can – it seems that significant scholarly progress would require two things: an ontology of dreams, and (possibly) a theory of behaviour as encased in dreams. Should dreams be treated as data, as bias or as analysis? Can they be considered data in the same way we consider interviews or first-hand observation data? If so, what are they data about? About the subject? About the observer? Or about the relationship between observer and subject?

Or are dreams best treated with contempt – as a source of bias – in colouring observations and analysis? Even in this case, it would seem important to recognize this (much like we confess to other potential sources of bias in reporting research).

Or are dreams active participants in analyzing data? To what extent do they help crystallize what we (think we) see?

I have some thoughts on the above, but no firm answers. Perhaps you do. That said, intuitively I feel very strongly about the importance of acknowledging dreams in writing carnal sociologies – though I’m less clear on what this acknowledgement comprises.

It seems rather interesting that a word not in common use has become rather popular of late. I wasn’t sure what it meant so looked it up. Apparently it can be used as a transitive verb, meaning “to pronounce incorrectly”; as an intransitive verb, meaning “to speak incorrectly or imperfectly”; or as meaning “to speak or express yourself in a way that is inappropriate, inaccurate, or unclear”.

To that extent it seems appropriate in the cases of Sharon Stone and Michael Pfleger: it attests to their ignorance, insensitivity, stupidity, or a slip of the tongue (as Pfleger claims). However, in Hilary’s case it risks signifying something far less innocent – a lie. What bothers me is the extent to which the verb “to misspeak” may become gradually more entranched into our everyday vocabulary to accommodate everything from blatant un-truths to Freudian slips, and making Hilary’s ‘mistake’ appear rather more innocent – or if not more innocent than at least more vague – than it really is. One cannot help drawing parallels between her choice of words and her husband’s, when referring to his relationship with Monica as something other than “sexual relations” (even if we have the stains to prove it).

In the circles of ethnographers such questions remains hugely pertinent. ‘Good’ (and, dare I say, imaginative) writing helps one pick up scents of tripe and damp in George Orwell’s “Wigan Pier”; of smoke and stout in Kate Fox’s “Pubwatching with Desmond Morris”; of sweat and leather in Loic Wacquant’s “Body and Soul”; of weed in Tom Wolfe’s psychedelic “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”; of fear and loathing in William Whyte’s “Street Corner Society”; of despair in Alexander Masters’ “Stuart: A Life Backwards”; of these things and more in our pen-and-paper universes.

Here is a relevant contribution by one of our best known organizational ethnographers, John Van Maanen:

“…there still is not much of a technique attached to ethnography despite the last 20 plus years of trying to develop a standard methodology… Ethnography it seems cannot and will not be made safe for science leaving it trapped as it were between the humanities and sciences. This I do not decry or find terribly worrisome for a standard methodology would effectively neuter or perhaps destroy the still present Columbian spirit that marks the trade as broadly inquisitive and adventurous – “bringing back the news” of what and how certain identifiable people are doing these days whether they are located at the far ends of the world or across the street.

There remains among many, perhaps most ethnographers, a general indifference if not distain for the seemingly endless efforts of social scientists to develop methodological rigor. In this respect, ethnography remains open to a relatively artistic, improvised and situated model of social research where the lasting tenets of research design have yet to leave their mark

… In the end, this is the way I think it should be

… textual sophistication can be (and has been) learned by many and will, in the end, help produce sharp, exciting, convincing and ultimately useful ethnographic work.” (“Ethnography then and now”, QROM, 1/1: 18)

With that in mind, here goes …

“Speed is a function of rhythm. And rhythm in a crew is surprisingly tangible. It is that easy, predictable, relentless, nothing-else-matters-no-matter-what feel of the boat – a separation of stroke and recovery, a flawless coordination of lungs and legs, of push and let go, of brace and release: a wedlock of oarsman and boat, of oarsman and coxswain, each stroke an investment with the certainty of a return.

This rhythm is designed to generate flow, that most enviable of experiences – one familiar to many yet extraordinarily difficult to call up at will. It captures that rare moment in time where one is totally absorbed in what one is doing. It’s the experience of pure harmony, or that point at which mind and matter fuse effortlessly and you know that something special has just occurred.

Flow is said to lift experience from the ordinary to the optimal, to a Zen-like state, and it’s in precisely those moments that we feel truly alive and in tune with what we are doing. For the oarsman, it’s an experience in which the self merges with the act of rowing and becomes indistinguishable from it. Where anxiety, self-doubt, indeed self-consciousness itself has been cut out as if by a clever surgeon – a feeling John Steinbeck described as very near to a kind of unconsciousness – where time changes its manner and where minutes disappear into the cloud of time. A time where everything finally falls into place: a groovy sensation of weightlessness yet total control, being really and truly alive in the present and knowing that nothing else matters, at least not now. Even as crowds roar, cameras flash, helicopters swivel dizzily overhead … yet none of it matters much. All that matters, the only thing that matters, is being right here right now – a rare glimpse of perfection.

The rhythm of a boat is like the beating of a heart: a platform upon which everything depends and all else becomes aligned. It is the condition on which flow depends – on which it feeds. And in a very real sense, it is the unremitting quest for rhythm and flow that helps explain the controversial choice to replace a brash but experienced American coxswain with one much less experienced, British and female. It explains why the five most experienced rowers questioned matters of selection, insisting that a Canadian oarsman be selected despite him being less competent than the Brit he would unseat.

It explains why Cambridge won the Boat Race, and why it nearly lost.”

(The idea of “flow” was popularized by the Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly.)

The night before had been no less surreal. Having moved into the apartment earlier that afternoon, I returned from a shopping trip (armed with bed-linens, toothpaste and a corkscrew) rather later than I had hoped for. Vallejo Street was shrouded in darkness. I walked up to the door of what looked like my new apartment, unlocked the door with my very own key and, armed with two paper shopping bags, made my way up the carpeted stairs. There, in the darkness I made out three rooms, each far more copiously decorated than mine should be.

I won’t repeat the obscenities that crossed my lips at discovering that what I thought would be 442 – was in fact 446 Vallejo Street. Confusion morphed into anxiety when, in the street below, a car approached. As the engine was silenced, blood rushed up into my skull, veins throbbing noisily in my head, my palms sweaty. After all, if it were a lone woman, she’d be freaked out by visions of a strange man stood awkwardly in front of her bedroom. If a man (particularly a burly one) I’d have my bacon whipped before being given a chance to explain how different reality is from appearances.

As it happened, the occupants of the car mounted a house across the street. I walked downstairs, locked the apartment with the very same key, and make my way to the next house over. (I never did figure out why my key opens both 446 and 442.)

These two events, in close succession, reminded me of the surprising nature of reality – of how real life can be quirkier than fiction. Why is it, for instance, that we are so symmetrical in so many ways but so lop-sided in others? Why do we have two eyes, two nostrils, two ears, two arms and two legs but one heart left off centre? (Why not in the middle?) Why do we cover up our private parts as “private” and not our eyes, the windows into our very souls? Why are apples sufficiently round to be called round and yet not really round at all? And why is self-fulfilment best attained by focusing less on one-self and more on another?

There is a rather more serious side to all this. Much of our scholarly practice is focused on inducing generalities about social life. Despite the merits of uncovering general principles (e.g. in being able to be prescriptive), there surely is an inherent risk in this too? What is there to prevent us from falling into the same trap as Tolstoy’s plasterers who, in the absence of the chief superintendent, with much zeal plastered over church windows, icons, woodworks and still unbuttressed walls and are delighted that, from our point of view as plasterers, everything now looks so smooth and regular?

Tolstoy was, of course, a fox in the way that George W. is a hedgehog. “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” Isaiah Berlin wrote in 1953. What Tolstoy’s genius saw was not the one coherent and orderly world but always “with an ever-growing minuteness, in all its teeming individuality, with an obsessive, inescapable, incorruptible, all-penetrating lucidity which maddens him, the many.”

Berlin’s distinction between the fox and the hedgehog became one of his most characteristic contributions. Siding with foxes, he chided hedgehogs for their passionate hold on three, largely untested, assumptions: (a) that to every genuine question there is one genuine answer; (b) that these answers can be found by the application of reason; and (c) that together these answers must form a coherent, internally consistent, logical whole. Reality is like a puzzle, the fragments of which surround us. It is our job to make them fit together into a (predetermined) coherent and unchangeable image. But together they must fit.

These assumptions are not innocent. Their worst expression lies in fundamentalism: Christian, atheist, or otherwise, to Fascism, Nazism, genocide.

What if we were to relax these assumptions? What if there were no internally consistent, fixed, and logical structure to social reality? What if there were no utopian future for mankind? No ideal type into which we can be forced for, if only we were more rational, this is precisely what we would have wanted? What if, as Hedges suggested, the universal desire to be more than simply human lies at the core of the ideologies of atheists as well as the Christian Right?

What if reality is quirkier than fiction?

(Relevant readings: I. Berlin (1953) The Hedgehog and the Fox. C. Hedges (2008) I Don’t Believe in Atheists; M. de Rond (2002) “Reviewer 198, the hedgehog and the fox”, Journal of Management Inquiry)

A soft-spoken, even monotonous, Rose spoke for the good part of one hour, his pain and frustration palpable. He defended his decision to commission the drawings by offering a long list of incidents of self-censorship in Europe “caused by widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam.” Examples include the inability of a Danish children’s book writer to find someone to illustrate a new book about the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Three people turned down the job for fear of consequences. Another involved the request of European translators of a book critical of Islam not to have their names appear alongside that of the author, a Somalia-born Dutch politician who has herself been in hiding.

The idea of commissioning the drawings, he wrote in an Op-ed for the Washington Post (19 Feb 2006), and as he explained to us that evening, “wasn’t to provoke gratuitously – and we certainly didn’t intend to trigger violent demonstrations throughout the Muslim world. Our goal was simply to push back self-imposed limits on expression that seemed to be closing in tighter.”

So Rose, and his Jyllands-Posten, decided to adopt the journalistic principle of “Show, don’t tell” and invited various illustrators to picture Muhammad “as you see him.” In publishing the 12 cartoons, Rose wrote: “The modern, secular society is rejected by some Muslims. They demand a special position, insisting on special consideration of their own religious feelings. It is incompatible with contemporary democracy and freedom of speech, where you must be ready to put up with insults, mockery and ridicule.”

Unsurprisingly, Rose’s presentation generated mixed reactions – and rather a lot too. The issues of right to free speech and self-censorship are complex and I have no particular expertise in this field. However, I do wonder to what extent we have “duties” as well as “rights” – in Rose’s case a duty to protect those more vulnerable?

To mind comes a short essay by Jonathan Sacks. In it he reflects on the nature of “rights” and “duty” based cultures. Rights-based cultures, he argues, reduce us to a state of dependency, where we make claims on others, assuming they have the power to meet our inalienable demands. Its origins are honorable, aimed to protect ordinary individuals from the power of the state. A duty-based culture, on the other hand, asks us to give and to be sensitive to the needs of others – with the possibility of creating a healthier and happier society based on giving rather than demanding.

So which has the higher priority? When, if ever, does duty trump right? Does our right to free speech entail the duty of others to respect whatever we choose to print?

It’s something I’ve often wondered about in writing The Last Amateurs (a book I’ve just finished writing – thanks in part to Fulbright’s support). The book is brutally honest in many respects – not least where it concerns myself (and not always flattering). There have been occasions, however, where I felt that my duty to protect the athletes, coaches and club was more important than my right to free speech. Sometimes this meant removing sections that would have seriously compromised individuals. Where this self-censorship risked damaging the narrative (i.e. by narrowing the window on life inside the Cambridge University Boat Club), I compensated by writing myself into the story, for instance to highlight the sexually charged, masculine nature of the high performance sports. The alternative – an expose without limits – would not have added much in terms of substance, but would almost definitely have caused hurt or offense. (I am well aware of individuals that are still less than excited about the publication of this book, not least for its candour.)

Given the long series of questions, I didn’t have a chance to ask Rose one of mine. I would have liked to have asked him if, given what he knows now, he would have done it again.

I wandered into Stanford’s Kresge Auditorium on Monday night to hear Sir Salmon Rushdie speak on the importance of literary engagement. His lecture was (unsurprisingly) superb and contained all the right ingredients: humour, wit, sorrow, self-deprecation, and sense. Rushdie reflected on the nature and role of fiction, specifically on literature as a tool in the fight against tyranny – religious, political or otherwise – his passions inflamed by some very real, and immediate, confrontations with tyranny (the most high-profile being the fatwa issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1998 for his Satanic Verses). His battle, and that of novelists worldwide, would forever remain that of eradicating oppression, of fostering ‘negative freedoms’ (to paraphrase Isaiah Berlin): freedoms from interference, creating a free market of ideas that (as J.S. Mill speculated out) would give rise to originality, genius, moral courage.

Rushdie then pointed out that literature had blossomed greatly under such tyrannical regimes as Stalin’s and Chowchesku’s. In fact, he argued, literature had suffered enormously in Russia and Eastern Europe, upon the collapse of the “iron wall” – or upon the end of oppression and beginning of freedom.

The irony of fighting an enemy that happens to also provide vital nourishment for one’s artistic development escaped him entirely. Imagine one were given an opportunity to trade all the literature written in response to oppression for the freedom from the oppression that made this literature possible – what would one do?

(I did ask him this question. He, facing the auditorium, pronounced the question dead – as nonsensical – as not worthy of a response.)

I am reminded of a recent documentary hosted by Stephen Fry on the relation between depression and artistic expression. Had anti-depressants been available to Van Gogh, would he have taken them? Would we have wanted him to? What would have been the consequence for his art? As Stephen Fry admitted, he himself has long suffered from depression but realizes too that this disease has infused his work in powerful ways. In concluding the documentary, Fry asked himself whether he’d rather not be depressed – whether he’d take the pill – even if it came at the expense of his qualities as a writer.

With a candour more refreshing than Rushdie’s, Fry concluded he would not. That this would be too high a price to pay.

Mark de Rond
Fulbright Scholar 2007-8
Stanford University