It Takes a Sentence
There’s a lot of kack in this piece on religion in the New Statesman. This particular sentence especially caught my eye, for sheer quantity of kack in one sentence.
“So far, the response of the government has been mostly correct: dismissing the crude secularism of the French ban on the hijab, allowing for the establishment of Muslim schools and working closely with the leaders of the Muslim community.”
One, the word ‘correct’, as if political decisions were as clear-cut as arithmetic. Two, that much-recycled bit of obfuscation: the French ban on the hijab is not a French ban on the hijab, it’s a French ban on the hijab (and other conspicuous religious symbols and garments) in state schools. It is stacking the deck in one’s own favour to call a state school uniform code a ‘ban’ without qualification. Three, ‘the leaders.’ In what sense are they leaders? Are they elected? Are they accountable? Are they self-appointed leaders? Four, ‘the Muslim community.’ Is there such a thing? Five, the combination, ‘the leaders of the Muslim community,’ which more than doubles the effect of making it sound as if all Muslims think as a block and as a block appoint leaders. The whole sentence is a throbbing example of the kind of covert thought-herding that communitarians go in for. Pure operant conditioning. Pure kack.
“They seem to forget that one of the most important legacies of the Enlightenment, especially in Britain, was a conviction that the truth emerges from the continual collision of ideas. (Their own faith must be pretty shaky if the crazy creationists can get them so rattled.)”
This is the sort of thing that convinces me that Dawkins isn’t a real person with actual arguments to most people – he is simply a symbol for something they don’t like – and funnily enough that applies equally to his biology, his politics, and his atheism. That sentence doesn’t even mean anything, it’s just another tendentious sideswipe at Dawkins and Dennett, the people who really are engaged in the collision of ideas to try and promote the truth, and certainly not people that are in any way afraid of the content of these religious arguments, which is why they engage with them rather than sniping from the back row about muscular atheism or whatever other empty sneer word they’ve contrived for the day.
PM The author is a career social-policy wonk who wants to annoy people more famous than himself. Personally, empty sneer words and phrases work for me, such as ‘Shiboleth-Left’, of which Bunting is also a member.
The criticism of Dawkins is a total inversion of the truth – it is precisely people like him who are encouraging that clash of thought.
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