Something about postmodernism
Tina Beattie in Open Democracy.
If we are to understand [the upsurge in various forms of religious extremism] and its social and political implications, then we must go beyond the headline-grabbing confrontations between religious and atheist extremists.
She says, contributing her own mite to the headline-grabbing confrontations between religious and atheist ‘extremists,’ in particular by using the phrase ‘atheist extremists’ at all. What are atheist extremists? And in what sense of the word are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens – Beattie’s chosen examples – extremists? Do they advocate violence against believers? Suppression of believers? Forcible silencing of believers? No. They disagree with them, that’s all; they think believers are wrong, and they say so. In what sense is that extreme?
The attempt to stage a war between religion and science – whether fuelled by religious or scientific fundamentalists – is part of the problem and not part of the solution with regard to the times we are living in.
She says, attempting to do her bit to stage a war between religion and science by using the phrase ‘scientific fundamentalists,’ as if unaware of how oxymoronic that phrase is, and how tiresomely overused it also is. Really, she’s doing quite a job here of saying tut tut, let’s not do this, and doing exactly what she is saying let’s not do.
If we seek to preserve our liberal western values, then we need to resist the spirit of aggression and confrontation which is becoming increasingly characteristic of public debate – in Britain and the United States especially – concerning the role of religion in society.
Do we? But who says it is a spirit of aggression and confrontation? Why is it not instead a spirit of honest inquiry and forthright criticism? Honest inquiry and forthright criticism are very much part of liberal values (not just western ones – why did she specify that?), aren’t they? And I would say that attempts to shut those activities down by using inflammatory and inaccurate words like ‘extremist’ and ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘aggression’ to characterize mere written and spoken analysis and criticism is very illiberal indeed.
Also lurking within the media treatment of religion today is a masked anti-Catholicism, for that too has been a feature of modern societies such as Britain and America whose values have been largely shaped by Protestantism.
Oh, it’s not masked in my case. I hate Catholicism. But that’s allowed – that’s part of liberal values. We can hate libertarianism, we can hate socialism, we can hate Catholicism.
The recent confrontation between religion and science is in this context a smokescreen which is distracting us from much more urgent political and intellectual issues. It allows the secular intelligentsia to hide behind a convenient and inflated – where not fabricated – myth of religious extremism…
So it’s the secular intelligentsia that is fabricating a myth of religious extremism. What about those myths of atheist extremism then? Who is fabricating those?
God this stuff is drivel. Thank you for reading it so we don’t have to.
Any WOMAN who could actually write the phrase “myths of religious extremism” deserves to be deposited, alone and unarmed, in a distant village in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Even if she’s one of those willfully self-deluding dimwits who declares (in the face of all evidence to the contrary) that misogyny is somehow not in any way “really” religious in character and motivation, she would learn otherwise very quickly.
Does Tina Beattie have children, I wonder? Would she consider it acceptable for her teenage daughter to be sold as a wife/slave to a wealthy sexagenarian? Or to be awarded as compensation to a man who was wronged by someone else in her extended family? The thing is, such profoundly immoral actions, even where not directly inspired by religion (Muhammed acquired multiple pre-pubescent “wives” after all) are certainly indirectly supported by religious ideas on women’s nature and role in society.
Well done for tackling the “extremist” label by noting how relatively innocuous the alleged “extremism” of Dawkins et all is. It just shows how unbalanced are the scales used by Tina Beattie are.
I’m proposing a law: Anyone who cites quantum mechanics as a reason for believing anything that’s not itself about quatum mechanics is a self-evident charletan.
Anyone who cites quantum mechanics as a reason for believing anything is a self-evident charlatan.
So lets ask ourselves, WHAT is the driver for this kind of thinking?
Is it contravening some drive for higher niceness that offendz her? Or is she just a lazy hack knocking out a formula article replaying the framing of some stuff she read elsewhere, thus meeting the expectations of her employer?
I mean, we can LEARN something from this – surely?
Well, that pretty much puts the kibosh on Stephen Hawking’s reputation then JoB.
“Erm, why does Ms.Beattie remind me of Madelaine Bunting?
Anyone else get that deja vu feeling?”
Yes, I did but saying someone reminds them of Mush Brain is grossly offensive, liable to make the person thus described being held in contempt, so I didn’t mention it in case I was summoned to some human rights commission to answer to a charge of hate crimes.
Surely Sam Harris _does_ advocate violence , indeed torture and slaughter, of people believing “certain propositions”?
Meaning what? That Sam Harris advocates torture and slaughter of people who believe certain propositions because they believe certain propositions? I don’t agree with Harris about torture, but to the best of my knowledge he doesn’t advocate it on the grounds of belief. If I remember correctly he advocates it in the usual ‘if the terrorist knows where the bomb is’ scenario. That has nothing to do with his atheism, as far as I know. In other words if your implication is that he advocates violence against believers as believers, then no, he doesn’t, and don’t be silly.
The Harris quote is:
“some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them”
sounds fairly cut and dried to silly old me
Harris also suggests that Islamic states may be politically unreformable because so many Muslims are “utterly deranged by their religious faith”.
Where is that?
Okay, got it; The End of Faith, 52-3. Fair enough – you’re right. I take it back about Harris.
It was stupid of him to put it that way, because he goes on to say that he meant al Qaeda, so in fact he’s talking about actions, not just beliefs. That’s his point – that some beliefs lead to actions, actions that are lethal to other people – but he was giving a hostage to fortune by saying it that way.
*Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them*.
Read entire passage. It is not too long.
dangerousintersection.org/?p=1173
“but he was giving a hostage to fortune by saying it that way.”
Blair Golson: What prompted you to write
“The End of Faith”?
Sam Harris: It was my immediate reaction to Sept, 11th.
Sam Harris: The Truthdig Interview.
He wrote the book at a very delicate time in American history – when emotions were obviously running very high. So it was only natural that events then would have fired him on and led him to express himself in the manner he did.
I have read the passage. thanks, and I don’t believe that the context defuses the quote. I accept that there’s a right to self-defense, even in some cases against a potential rather than actual threat. But not against beliefs alone, because we cannot know what another’s beliefs are! (modulo Harris’ ESP beliefs)
It’s the lack of reflexivity that I find embarrassing: if one did accept the Harris proposition, I think it itself would qualify as a proposition “ethical to kill people for believing”. Hardly an evolutionarily stable strategy…
Actually, Larry, we do have ways of knowing what others’ beliefs are (without ESP). Turns out, people print and publish their beliefs, and shout them in the street while burning various symbols in effigy, and generally express their beliefs quite clearly. Often, these expressions of belief are accompanied by explicit calls to action, usually something along the lines of “Death to the infidels!” or some such. Since that is the context in which Harris wrote the offending quote, as OB pointed out, I find it baffling that you would make an argument based on the impossibility of knowing what others’ beliefs are.
Not that I agree with Harris’ anti-Muslim jingoism either in substance or rhetorical excess. But your obscurantist “beliefs are inherently unknowable” stuff just doesn’t fly when religious extremists of all kinds are so very, very vocal about what they believe and about what actions they advocate based on those beliefs.
I didn’t say the context did defuse the quote, dammit, I said you were right and that I take it back in Harris’s case. That is, I take back the bit where I (implicitly) deny that he advocates violence against believers.
However, he did make it clear that he didn’t mean just beliefs. (But no, that still doesn’t defuse the quote.)
“So lets ask ourselves, WHAT is the driver for this kind of thinking?”
The limbic system.
You can oppose great evil and receive the approval of your peers, being both very good and very popular, without actually having to do anything. The risk/reward ratio is so high it’s like a wire from the smug part of the brain to the pleasure centre.
That it has real-world effects rather different from how it feels inside isn’t of any import.
OB: my reply was to MTO’L’s post
G: obscurantist, my father’s only son? Profession of belief is behaviour (in Harris’ sense), not belief. But, yes, this is a rather sterile point, made only to set up the cheap ESP jibe.
Re: One world Government
An extended quote from page 151: Sam Harris
“We should, I think, look upon modern despotisms as hostage crises. Kim Jong Il has thirty million hostages. Saddam Hussein had twenty-five million. The clerics in Iran have seventy million more. It does not matter that many hostages have been so brainwashed that they will fight their would-be liberators to the death …. The developed world must, somehow, come to their rescue. Jonathan Glover seems right to suggest that we need ’something along the lines of a strong and properly funded permanent UN force, together with clear criteria for intervention and an international court to authorize it.’ We can say it even more simply: We need a world government. How else will a war between the United States and China ever become as unlikely as a war between Texas and Vermont?”