Category Archives: Asia

Asia, Books, History

Book Review: Atlantic Furies

LITERARY REVIEW

WHEN Ruth Elder arrived back in New York in 1927 after attempting to cross the Atlantic in her monoplane American Girl, the crowds were in awe.

The female aviator dubbed the “Flying Flapper” looked like a chic society woman with her Parisian suit, fox-fur coat, and bobbed hair.

It didn’t matter that American Girl was downed into the sea several hundred miles north of the Azores. As far as the media and newspapers were concerned, “Miss” Elder was a new kind of femme fatale.

In this compulsive book – part Barbie movie and part Wacky Races – social historian Midge Gillies tells the story of six women who competed to cross the Atlantic in the late 1920s.

Charles Lindbergh had been the first pilot to succeed non-stop solo in 1927, but now the race was on for the first “girl” flyer to complete the 3,000-mile arduous journey.

In an age of female emancipation, women were flying high.

Gillies’ half-dozen heroines hail from a wide background. There is peer’s daughter Hon. Elsie Mackay, African-American Bessie Coleman whose mother had been born into slavery, and Amelia Earhart who became the first female pilot to cross the Atlantic solo and non-stop.  

As for Ruth, she turned out to be on the run from a scandalous romantic past.

It was not all fun, games, or easy times; there were difficult or serious aspects involved. Four of Gillies’ Atlantic Furies failed to return from their expeditions, the most famous being Earhart who set off in 1937 in a bid to be the first woman aviator to circle the Equator.

Following several crackly radio messages received on July 2, her bright silver Lockhead Electra disappeared from the skies over the Central Pacific. It has yet to be found.

Gillies is adept in giving us a bone-shaking sense of what it must have been like to sit high in the skies, munching on chocolate for energy and in trying to screen out the propeller noise.

Flying through freezing fog involved terrifyingly low visibility, yet straining to get a better view could prove fatal.

In 1926 Coleman unhooked her safety belt to peer over the fuselage just as her plane dipped, with the result that she somersaulted to earth in front of horrified bystanders.

Not everyone believed that a woman’s place was in the skies. One doctor specialising in aviation medicine reported that having a period put a woman pilot at risk of crashing her plane. And then we read the dark comments of Major Oliver Stewart who wrote in the Tatler: “(Women) will be persuaded to mend their ways only when they have learned the truth that the lipstick is mightier than the joystick”.

Gillies makes short work of this historical misogyny, arguing that the courageous women who vied to cross the Atlantic were never going to put up with a man telling them what to do. (It is surely no coincidence that her heroines had 15 marriages between them.)

By the end of this thrilling book, it is impossible not to cheer for these magnificent women in their flying machines.

– Atlantic Furies by Midge Gillies is published by Scribe, 416pp

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Asia, Christianity, Culture

Proverbs: Down-to-earth advice for living

OLD TESTAMENT

THE Book of Proverbs is blunt, earthly, and practical. It belongs to the genre of “wisdom” literature which was common in the ancient world. It is not a book from which to cull theology, but it is a book to show how theology can be applied.

Proverbs has previously been described as a “book which seldom takes you to Church”. Its function in Scripture is to put godliness into working clothes; to name business and society as spheres in which we are to acquit ourselves with credit to our LORD, and in which we are to look for his training.

Although rooted in the culture and lifestyle of an ancient world, much of its wisdom can be extrapolated into modern life. The advice to have honest scales (in which ‘the LORD delights’, 11:1) is fundamental to social order in any age, and the statement that getting drunk is unwise (20:1) has always been rued by those who ignore it.

The book originates from the sayings of a class of “wise men” in ancient Israel, from the time of Solomon onwards. They seem to have been given a status close to that of the priests and prophets as guides of God’s people (cf. Jeremiah 18:18). Other cultures had them too, but we know little of how they operated.

This is a book to be read in short sections and meditated upon. It is perfectly possible to delve into it at random and gain some insight, encouragement, or warning – a practice which is inadvisable for any other Biblical book.

Wisdom is mediated through the Holy Spirit

– A narrative on Proverbs 8

TODAY, wisdom is not often praised as a virtue, but that is partly because we have other ways of describing it. Knowing what is the right thing to do; avoiding mistakes we might regret; keeping our eyes open; seeing all sides of a situation; not being driven by foolish desires.

Wisdom is the mind controlling the heart, the heart informing the mind, and both subjected to the law and leading of God. As a result, compassion, thoughtfulness, and generosity are displayed in social relationships, and blind impulse gives way to far-sighted consideration.

Throughout the book wisdom is lauded as something to be treasured. It produces better returns than monetary wealth (3:13,14), and is more attractive than a bride’s garland (1:8,9); it is the supreme principle of successful living. Get wisdom and you get a lot else thrown in.

Living by wisdom is living God’s way, in harmony with the rules and constraints which he built into creation. With it, we can avoid the pitfalls of sin (2:9-11), look forward to a rewarding life (3:1,2) and enjoy protection from needless danger (4:6).

The author of the first section seems so carried away by his theme that he personifies wisdom, elevating it almost to divine status, but being a Jew, he cannot be suggesting that there is a real divinity named Wisdom.

Christians can see the imagery as a pale foreshadowing of the New Testament image of Jesus as the divine “Word” (Logos) in John 1:1. But it would be stretching the Old Testament too far to suggest that Wisdom in Proverbs 8 is an exact portrayal of the Second Person of the Trinity.

Instead, he is using a poetic image to convey a truth. In human affairs, wisdom is supreme; everything worthwhile in life depends on it, just as life itself depends on God. But the ability to live wisely as God intended does not come naturally; it must be sought and learned, just as God waits for us to turn to him and does not force himself upon us.

The Word made flesh is the source of our wisdom which is mediated through the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:6-10; John 16:7,8,13). And the New Testament agrees that to become a human trait, wisdom needs first to be received as a divine gift (James 1:5). The fact that it restrains the excesses we rather enjoy may be one reason why we don’t seek it with the same urgency as did the authors of Proverbs.

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Asia, Justice, Philosophy, Politics, Society

(Philosophy) Justice

REDISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

WHAT does justice demand? The basic idea is that people should “get what they deserve,” whether in a court of law (criminals and victims), in broader society (the rich and the poor), or on the global stage (neo-colonial powers and the countries they’ve exploited). But what exactly do people deserve? And what principles can we use to ensure that justice is served, and in a way we might all find reasonable?

Anglo-American philosophy has long been dominated by debates about distributive justice: deciding which principles should determine how goods, opportunities, resources, rights, and freedoms are shared out between the members of a society, or even between different societies.

In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls imagined which principles of justice people would agree to if they were unaware of their position in society and other crucial facts about themselves. He theorised that they would prioritise equality and liberty and would only accept inequalities if they were required to create the greatest benefit to the least well-off in society (the “difference principle”). His colleague Robert Nozick responded in Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) by suggesting that if people freely did what they wanted with their talents or other resources, this would produce inequalities that would not necessarily benefit the worst-off, but that would be justifiable given the required respect for people’s individual freedoms.

The American political theorist Iris Marion Young argued that the distributive justice paradigm fails to capture important features of public appeals to justice made by women, people of colour, indigenous peoples, and gay and lesbian civil rights movements. These groups are often excluded from political practices of collective evaluation and decision-making about institutional organisation and public policy, and so lack political representation or power. These exclusions constitute injustices, which Young insisted require philosophical analysis. She defined injustice in terms of “five faces” of oppression: exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Justice, through the eradication of its opposite, injustice, can only be achieved via a “politics of recognition” – acknowledging different groups’ experiences and political needs.

Justice in the legal-judicial sense is often understood as corrective or retributive – correcting criminals for their wrongdoing via means of retribution such as fines or imprisonment. The American activist and scholar Angela Davis argues wholesale against prison as a means to justice. She believes that in an age of mass incarceration, the abolishment of prisons is a central requirement for the achievement of justice in a democratic society. There are others, too, who advocate the principle of “restorative judgement” where criminals face their victims to understand the pain and hurt caused. Research suggests that when such an approach is used recidivism and rates of reoffending are dramatically reduced.

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