Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood
No, I don’t agree with Taner Edis, and I agree even less as he clarifies. This is all the odder in that he doesn’t even agree with himself – he prefers secular liberalism himself, but says he can’t defend it. Yes you can, Taner! Try harder! It can be done. It can’t be done absolutely, or permanently, or in such a way that no one anywhere will disagree – but it can still be done.
Meanwhile…
My political preference is very much the opposite. I would, personally, consider a multicultural regime a dystopia…My reasons for all of this, however, have almost everything to do with my particular interests and aspirations, and next to nothing to do with any claim that these are universal considerations applicable to all reasonable people.
Well you can fix that. Read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights again. Read Susan Moller Okin’s ‘Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?’ Read the first few articles in Martha Nussbaum’s Sex and Social Justice. Read some Amartya Sen. Re-read Mill.
How, then, would multicultural laws work? We do have proposals to this effect, and they come down to communities having a good deal of autonomy in regulating their own affairs…
But again, that treats ‘communities’ as if they were people. ‘Communities’ don’t have affairs; people do, one at a time. The affairs of one person may be different from those of another person, and it just isn’t safe to assume that ‘communities’ as such treat all their members equally. We know that some ‘communities’ don’t treat all their members equally, and that that’s why it’s dangerous to give communities certain kinds of autonomy.
[The state] leaves the internal affairs of communities alone. Particularly areas such as family law become the domain of quasi-autonomous communities. After all, if devout Muslims feel that the ability to communally follow sharia law is essential for them to live their religious commitments properly, well, why not? Why interfere?
Because ‘devout Muslims’ aren’t identical to one another, and because one cannot assume that putative ‘Muslim communities’ contain only ‘devout Muslims,’ and because even devout Muslims don’t necessarily agree about what it means to ‘communally follow sharia law.’ Isn’t this obvious? Consider a teenage daughter who wants to refuse a marriage for instance – the community’s autonomy to regulate its own affairs is not in her interest! Consider a married woman who wants to work or go to school; consider an adult daughter who is seeing a man from some other ‘community,’ against the wishes of her parents; consider any girl or woman who has had or is having non-marital sex; consider any girl or woman who doesn’t want to wear hijab; consider anyone at all who wants to leave Islam. Autonomy for their ‘community’ is slavery or death for them. Sorry but it’s just callous to say ‘why not?’ and ‘why interfere?’.
This is not theocracy—Christians, Buddhists, or even secularists can live according to their own law regulating their interactions within their own communities.
No they can’t. That must mean something much more limited than the actual words say, because the actual words are just wrong. There are a very few religious exceptions in US law, for instance (most of which should be repealed), but there’s certainly no blanket right for people to ‘live according to their own law’ even within their darling communities.
Groups are real, they shape and serve their members’ interests, and it is only practical to arrange state institutions to recognize this reality.
Sure, groups are real in some sense (though not in all senses – they are after all an abstraction in many senses), but they do not necessarily or automatically serve the interests of all their members. This is the thing that is absolutely crucial to remember about groups and communities and even families – they are made up of individuals and it is not safe or fair to assume that all those individuals have the same interests all the time. That is precisely why the state should not treat communities as homogeneous and putative community ‘leaders’ or ‘representatives’ as genuinely representing everyone in the notional community.
Now, there are all sorts of practical questions that arise. How, for example, do we propose to keep communities from oppressing some of their members lower in their internal hierarchies? To some extent, this will happen, and there might not be much to do except shrug and say some oxes are always gored under any political order. Still, especially since massive oppression itself can threaten the peace, we would need institutional arrangements to help ease such problems.
Oh, god, Taner – there you go right off the rails. That’s a horrible thing to say! Shrug? I’ll be god damned if I will! There’s plenty of that as it is, we don’t need more of it. And do you really mean to minimize the inherent badness of oppression itself, even if it doesn’t ‘threaten the peace’? If so, why on earth? Oppression is bad – humans treating other humans like crap is the curse of our species – it’s the nightmare from which we can’t awake, to adopt Joyce’s phrase – it’s our horrible dreadful heritage, from the Armenian genocide to the corpses in Jos to the misery of generations of children in Irish industrial schools to the tens of thousands of girls kept out of school in Afghanistan. It’s not something to shrug at.
Don’t look now, Taner, but you are defending liberalism. You can’t provide a reasonable way of setting up the society that you propose without doing massive injustice. So it’s simply ridiculous to go on suggesting that you are proposing a reasonable alternative to liberalism unless you can show how it could be done. So far you haven’t, so what you are saying is simply like the hiss on a recording. When you’ve got a political theory, then you will have a debate. Until then you’re just talking to the ether.
What is really tiresome about this is that there are number of places in the world where attempts have been made to allow “communities”, in Edis’s sense, to play by their own rules, while other “communities” play by their different rules. Malaysia or Nigeria are cases in point. Both of them are good examples of how not to organise a society, if you want to preserve decency and justice, and it’s simply ridiculous for Edis to suggest that this way of organising society is not only in competition with liberalism, but that it is, other things being equal, a better way to organise society than liberalism is. This is not only silly, but it really offends the intelligence of his readers.
We seem to have this case in India , where the major Hindu party wanted to push for a uniform civil code (read based on current Hindu values of course) which is opposed by all other religious parties and even secular(?) ones.
Any reasonable person would accept that governance should be secular however
the problem is that how much should the government interfere (e.g marriage, children’s upbringing, clothes etc).
For e.g. in the fundamentalist church of latter day saints , once you have brainwashed the girl child, as an adult she insists for the right to brainwash her children. The only way around it would be legislation against such upbringing but I doubt most parents would support the legislation.
“Groups are real, they shape and serve their members’ interests, and it is only practical to arrange state institutions to recognize this reality.”
It seems to me that the only place this could possibly lead is to balkanization and the eventual dissolution of the state. After all, once you begin catering to the wishes of specific groups, you must then come to terms with the reality that many of these groups don’t care for their neighbors at all. Tribalism and racism have a long and storied history intertwined with religion, after all.
If the state then decides it must intervene to keep inter-group tensions from erupting into open conflict, well, then, all we’ve done at that point is kick secular liberalism up one level (at disastrous human cost). And if the state does not, or cannot, intervene, then it’s hardly a state at all, since it has failed in one of its most basic functions.
I hate to sound presumptuous, but Taner’s casual dismissal of the effects of group religious rules on minorities and women really makes it painfully obvious that he’s a straight male! I hate to say it, but all too often men, even liberal ones, often just don’t get how bad misogyny can be, since whatever happens, they won’t be the ones living under those rules. I don’t particularly like the jargon, but “male privilege”? I didn’t much care for his post back in the archives called “Does Islam oppress women?” (http://secularoutpost.infidels.org/2007/09/does-islam-oppress-women.html), which seemed to say to me that we shouldn’t say that it does because many Muslim women are perfectly happy under Islam and don’t think it oppresses them. Well…other women might have a different viewpoint, needless to say, and then there’s the whole issue that if you’ve been taught all your life that this is the way things have been ordained by God, you’re more likely to submit to that view and even profess yourself happier with them and vociferously defend them. Do you know how many blog posts by devout Catholic women I’ve read denouncing what they call the “contraceptive mentality” as being anti-woman and anti-life, and strongly defend the Church’s teaching on artificial contraception? Still, they aren’t calling for contraception or divorce to be banned for Catholics in accordance with Catholic rules, which might actually happen if Taner’s notions were put into law. How many religious people would REALLY like to live under the rule of the church/religious leaders they profess to follow, when so many believers simply ignore their unpleasant teachings?
The kicker is that I’m even somewhat sympathetic to some conservative religious concerns, given that I kind of occupied that mindset when I was a Muslim but at the same time I thought it would be horribly unjust to force anybody to live that way if they didn’t want to. I understood that it was probably asking too much of pro-lifers to sit back and accept what they saw as the murder of babies in the name of liberalism, but on the other hand the correct way to deal with such concerns was to debate it in “the public square” and let everybody have their say. If they don’t like it, they can agitate and write articles and try to influence the process by convincing more people to see things their way, but they must do all this within the confines of liberal democracy. I’m all in favor of religious people living the way they feel is right, whether that’s covering themselves or whatever — so long as they don’t force anybody else to participate, and everybody is free to leave if they don’t like it. But that’s a very “liberal” and “individual rights” notion — religious groups and clerics tend to resort to force and extreme societal pressure to force their believers to remain in the group and conform, and to organize the whole society in their image under their universal remit, and if they’re prevented from doing so it’s only because another religion is holding that dominant spot. (I recall something in some Church encyclical about how “error has no rights” and it is the duty of the Church to wipe out error everywhere, plus the monotheist religions’ insistence on not just being alllowed to worship their deity but also to wipe out all polytheism, as Moses, Joshua, David, Muhammad and others so brutally demonstrated.)
It’s funny, because in our current liberal society, individuals already have the right to impose extra restrictions on their own lives. For instance, they can follow the advise of religious leaders or even Sharia, even if it’s not in their best self-interest. The government can’t (and shouldn’t) do anything to stop them if that’s what they want.
What our law currently doesn’t allow, however, is for people to impose such restrictions upon others. There still needs to be a law that protects the rights of those who do not wish to be subjected to such restrictions.
This is pretty much what we currently have, though, and what traditional liberal ideas would suggest we should need.
So either Edis is arguing for the current situation, or he is arguing that we should stop protecting the rights of citizens when those rights aren’t recognized by the community they happen to be in. I really hope it’s the former.
There is indeed a lot of Nussbaum (who was a professor of mine once) and Mill in this post.
Which is great–Nussbaum and Mill have extremely valuable things to say on these matters.
Thanks Ophelia. You and Russell and Lisa have been great in this discussion.
Dear Ms. Benson:
Thank you so much for writing this piece and the previous one. I cannot thank you enough.
As a former Muslim who has left the faith, allowing Muslim leaders to make decisions for the entire Muslim community would take away my right to make my own decisions and have a similar effect on other former Muslims and moderate Muslims. It always irritates me when people assume that everyone born into a certain family or community will always agree with all other members of the community.
I am eternally grateful that my parents moved to the U.S. I can make my own decisions and religious leaders aren’t given the right to interfere (and if they try, secular organizations defending the First Amendmenet stand in their way).
I am also horrified by the suggestion that we should “shrug” when group leaders hurt members of their own groups. If it’s wrong for a person from one group to hurt someone from another group, why in the world would it be okay for a person from one group to hurt someone else from the same group?
Thank you again! I plan to read your and Mr. Stangroom’s book “Does God Hate Women” soon.
-Sharmin
“It seems to me that the only place this could possibly lead is to balkanization and the eventual dissolution of the state. After all, once you begin catering to the wishes of specific groups, you must then come to terms with the reality that many of these groups don’t care for their neighbors at all. Tribalism and racism have a long and storied history intertwined with religion, after all”
This reminded me of another serious problem with Edis’ notion of a multicultural government or system of law: it is rare that one can identify a “community” with any kind of precision; any selection criterion for determining who is and who is not in a particular community is bound to be a heuristic.
Thus, we really have a few problems:
1) The community may lay claim to the authority over an individual who does not agree to that authority.
2) A particular community may be divisible into smaller communities that differ — in which case, one subcommunity may be oppressing another. Since the oppressed are not recognized as an autonomous community, they have no legal recourse. Which leads to…
3) Is there any way to systematize the recognition of legitimate communities? Could I start a Church of the Jedi for myself and like-minded outcasts of pre-existing communities?
4) In any situation where there are state-recognized entities already in existence and other entities hoping to be recognized by the state, it is in the interest of the former set of entities to try to prevent the state from recognizing the legitimacy of the latter set. This protects privileges and power for the former.
On the other hand, as several people have pointed out, Muslims who want to live according to their religion don’t have to choose between their religion and allowing a liquor store to be built in their neighborhood. They also have the choice of simply NOT going to that store.
On the other hand, what do we do about Muslims for whom living according to their religion involves brutal and oppressive treatment of the women in their communities? A liquor store in a Muslim neighborhood doesn’t violate anyone’s personal autonomy. Honor killings clearly do.
Don’t worry. There are only two other hands. It’s not like I have four hands (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
“Groups are real, they shape and serve their members’ interests, and it is only practical to arrange state institutions to recognize this reality.”
Like the RC church in Ireland, or the OSD in 16th C Spain, do you mean?
I believe that the arguments employed by Taner Edis fall very much in the “Camels and Gnats” category, as illustrated here:
Camels, Gnats and Shallow Graves
http://www.starshipreckless.com/blog/?p=1607
All these lovely “customs” are community-enforced and plague the immigrant communities.
“Is there any way to systematize the recognition of legitimate communities? Could I start a Church of the Jedi for myself and like-minded outcasts of pre-existing communities?”
Well, in a proper multi-culti society you wouldn’t even think of doing something so silly at all. Or if you did, you certainly wouldn’t voice something so irreverent and disrespectful.
You’d probably just have to go sit in the Quiet Corner with the atheists and secular humanists and similar unpersons.
Thanks, Sharmin. And felicitations on being able to make your own decisions! I have that ability too, and it’s one that I would like to keep.
I’d like to add John Rawls’ Justice As Fairness to your list of recommended reading, since he deals explicitly with the issue of how to handle illiberal sub-groups in liberal societies.
Lisa, you are completely right when you point out Edis’s blind spot. He doesn’t accept white racism against the brown Muslim minority as an example of a real group serving its members’ needs by “communally following” white Christian norms. So why does he accept misogyny under the same rules?
There’s a rather unpleasant tendency for many men (and unfortunately sometimes women) to dismiss women’s concerns as unimportant and even frivolous, and this is especially jarring when liberal/leftist/progressive men engage in it. Feminist concerns are of secondary or even tertiary importance to them, in contrast with the “real” concerns of independence, anti-colonialism, class struggle, racism, or whatever. How many times have women been told to shut up about women’s rights until the “important” issues (independence in Algeria, or the overthrow of the Shah in Iran) have been settled? (And I can’t help notice that often these issues are either never solved or else new ones simply take their place, leaving women’s rights on the back burner.)
What makes this case especially egregious is that within each religious tradition, there have been outspoken feminists who speak out against sexism and misogyny, as well as the more general discontent of women confronted with grossly unfair rules such as women being at a great disadvantage in divorce cases under Muslim shari’ah or Jewish halakha. Taner simply ignores all of this in favor of arguing for what is effectively the empowerment of the most orthodox, traditionalist, and conservative elements of the tradition as embodied in the “clergy” (for lack of a better term). At least in a liberal society, women are free to ignore the sexist bits of their religion and/or leave, while in a “communalist” setup they’d be forced to either convince the clerics that they’re wrong (good luck with that when it comes to the Pope or the mullahs in Iran or the scholars in Saudi Arabia!) or else to shut up and live with it, since the clerics’ interpretation has the status of binding law within the community.
Then there’s the matter of those Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, or others who simply couldn’t care less about religion and hardly wish to order their lives according to the dictates of the religious law. It wouldn’t make much sense to automatically group them in with the die-hard extremely devout who live, breathe and eat (sometimes literally) all aspects of their religion, unless you hold that the desires of the individual as against the group are to be completely ignored in favor of empowering “groups.” And why should the category of “religion” be so uniquely privileged, as opposed to something like “nationality” or “class” or “profession” or “political views”?
Taner – “Groups are real”
Wow. It’s a kind of set theory Hegelism.
I myself am part of the group that is not part of any group.
Deen – “It’s funny, because in our current liberal society, individuals already have the right to impose extra restrictions on their own lives. […] What our law currently doesn’t allow, however, is for people to impose such restrictions upon others.”
That’s a wonderfully clear explanation of why an open society is better than a theocracy *even for would-be theocrats*.
I despair at soi-disant libertarians who tell you that not allowing people to restrict other people is an unacceptable restriction. They need to read Mill, to copy what OB says…
Back to the middle ages. We had that already, and what fun it was!
I am from Germany, and we had a time when there was a different law for Saxons than for Franks, and a different one again for Thuringians, not to mention Jews or Sorbs (a Slavonic minority), and different laws in cities than in the countryside. And then we made social progress and step by step built a truly civilized society, admittedly with one severe setback somewhere around the middle of the 20th century.
Taner is full of it. I just read through the whole thing and he seems to think that the only examples of secular societies are in Western Europe.
Eastern Asia appears not to exist in his little, Balkanised world.
Further he fails to recognise his idea for “keeping the peace” has actually been tried – it was called Apartheid.
If you read up on the origins of that system which has been a blight on my country’s past the same arguments used by Taner were used back then.
The general result wasn’t peace – it was a largely fragmented society where one group ran roughshod over the others.
His reaction to the criticism leveled against his idea appears to be nothing more than ego. He hasn’t adressed the major flaws in his argument, nor has he really clarified anything.
Yes, Bruce, this is indeed the problem. Taner’s not into addressing the major flaws in his argument, but that’s mainly because he hasn’t got one. Taner is not a political philosopher. He obviously has little idea of how liberal democratic polities are organised and how they work. He seems completely unaware of the fact that religious entities are constantly at work trying to carve out little fiefdoms for themselves so that they can govern their own activities without the intereference of law. He does not seem to recognise that many of the restrictions on our right to act in ways of our own choosing are already circumscribed by religious interference in the way that our lives are governed.
One of my particular concerns is the right to assistance in dying when dying has become an intense and perpetuated misery. All of the opposition to assisted dying – or so near to all that it makes very little difference – comes from religious entities, and they will stop and nothing to make sure that their vision of suffering and its value is preserved. I don’t care how much they suffer if that is what they want to do. They may suffer as much as their afflictions determine, if that is what they want to do. But they should have no right to restrict what others may do in the face of suffering, and yet they do, and they will lie and threaten politicians with excommunication and do anything else that is necessary in order to see that their theological writ of prohibition is continued.
And Taner apparently thinks this is a good thing. Well, when Taner has an argument, then he should present it, but so far he’s just mumbling. As Ophelia says, read something, find out about it. Read the tradition: Hobbes, Locke, Godwin, Bentham, Mill, Rawls, Nozick, Sen, etc., and then, when he’s done that, come back and make his suggestions in such a way as to show how human rights are to be protected. The kind of silly cultural sentimentality that Taner’s position expresses so far – and it’s certainly not an argument – needs to be informed by something more than empty dreaming, and, as you can tell, it just makes me angry. But it makes me angry, because, faced with the threats from religious entities, Western liberals seem prepared to close up shop, and move back into some kind of feudal system based on theological speculation and cultural inertia. It’s not the kind of society that I would favour, though it seems to be getting all too much favourable attention by erstwhile liberals who have forgotten what a horror religious overlordship can be, or what a truly divided society (as described by Lisa Bauer, and pointed out so clearly by Ophelia) would be like. What fucking presumption! When Taner has troubled to learn something about the political tradition he is trivialising, then it may be time for him to write again.
| Eric MacDonald | 2010-03-10 – 08:01:09 |
It isn’t so much religion, as a cult of culture.
A few years back I equated it to sticking people in a zoo – and I think the metaphor still fits.
You don’t get the multi-culturism crowd actually engaging with the cultures – they just look at them and comment on how pretty it is having so many cultures.
“Lisa, you are completely right when you point out Edis’s blind spot. He doesn’t accept white racism against the brown Muslim minority as an example of a real group serving its members’ needs by “communally following” white Christian norms. So why does he accept misogyny under the same rules?”
There’s a certain bizarro-world logic common to “post-liberal” thinkers that goes something like this—submission to patriarchy is how women participate in communities, participating in community life is empowering, therefore submitting to patriarchy is empowering. Feminists fussing about what is or isn’t humane or just treatment doesn’t enter into it.
Well, you may be right Bruce, but I think that religion plays an awfully important part in this. You don’t get people getting all overheated when cultures are offended by the things that people say, but translate that all into religionese, and you get strident declamations about the right of groups to live in certain ways and to practice the old customs and be ruled by their (principally religious) laws. Everyone seems to go weak at the knees and all wobbly when someone claims their rights as a religious believer. My point is simply that, if you want to believe in outrageously improbable being, and to claim moreover that those beings prescribe certain ways of life, then you should go off and do that, but if someone finds your practices and supposedly diviine commands more than slightly cracked, then you will just have to put up with the insults and the offensive pictures, because we’re not into coddling religious ninnies sucking on supernatural soothers. And I do get angry – and I do mean angry – when someone like Taner Edis says, butter oozing from every pore, that he just loves this kind of debate, when he obviously hasn’t the slightest idea of the heavy disabilities that people are forced to live under because of other people’s convictions about supernatural things, and it’s just about time that, if people like Edis want to pretend to be liberal, that they begin to act like that, and stop feeding the idiots in their religious cages. They fucking bite!
You don’t get people getting all overheated when cultures are offended by the things that people say
No, but you do have people bending over backwards to allow people to do generally-forbidden things because of their “culture,” to an equal or greater extent than because of their “religion.” And you do have people yelling and screaming about how you can’t criticize other “cultures.”
Eric, you’re saying that culture gets special treatment because of its association with religion. I think it’s often the opposite. Religion gets special treatment because it’s identified with this fuzzy thing called “culture” (tribal identity, ingrained childhood sense of morality, habit). Admittedly, this is a chicken-and-egg question, though.
dzd, that is depressing but sounds accurate.
To be fair, I think Taner does have the slightest idea about the disabilities that people are forced to live under, and I think he’s most likely not ignorant of the liberal tradition, because he’s written a fair bit about these subjects. But…mystifyingly, he’s not offering real arguments here, at least not that I’ve seen so far.
Well, perhaps Taner does have the slightest idea, but he’s certainly not putting it to much use in his latest venture into political philosophy, and I find it not only frustrating but irritating that people who do know about the liberal tradition seem to be prepared to surrender it to religious or cultural blackmail.
I agree, Jenavir, when you speak about the fuzzy thing called culture, but it is culture’s religious dimension that is demanding more and more recognition nowadays. What started off as a way of preserving plurality, becomes a way, eventually of fragmenting society into a mosaic of “communities”, even though most people in our plural society don’t belong in that cohesive way to communities so understood, which gives unique power to anyone who claims to speak for and represent such communities.
Even Native Canadians, or Native North Americans, have begun to demand special respect, not so much for their culture, as for their spirituality. Religion expects to be privileged in a way that culture never would be. People of different cultural backgrounds have turned up on the shores of North America, and have been thought mildly perplexing or amusing, and members may have suffered a certain amount of disadvantage while they adjusted to their new lives in a new, rather disorienting culture. It’s called culture shock and it’s real. I experienced it myself, and to a certain extent still do.
Sometimes race is a superadded problem, but I have not noticed, in the relationships I’ve had with people from the Indian subcontinent or the Carribean, that they have suffered intolerable prejudice because of their skin colour. African Canadians or African Americans, born and bred, have probably suffered far more. In fact, most of the Indians that I know fit in rather well. Most of them are Hindu, and they don’t make particularly difficult demands on the surrounding culture, and tend to integrate quite easily, though they may, like Scots with their kilts Gaelic, kit themselves up in Saris and other traditional dress and celebrate their cultural origins and practices. Good for them. I may be a MacDonald, but I’m no more Scottish than African Canadians are African, and I have no particular love for kilts either.
It’s when the cultural difference is instensified by being identified with a religion that the problems really start. People begin to expect a kind of recognition and respect that their cultural practices, by themselves, might have received, if they didn’t come superadded with a fairly intense religious dimension, a dimension which demands, not only respect – which most people don’t have any trouble according to something purely cultural – but a kind of cultural surrender, an acknowledgement that there is something here greater than human wisdom, to which we must pay some kind of homage.
My father was a Christian missionary, and I grew up with the conviction that he was wrong, that we shouldn’t have been there – in India – trying to convert Hindus or Muslims or Jains or whatever to Christianity. There were Indian Christians, and if they wanted to do that, that was their affair, not ours. We had no more light than other religious traditions to offer.
But we were in India when the old British Raj was still a tagible reality, although the British had just left, and so, as white people, we were still given a kind of exaggerated respect, which we didn’t really deserve, and Christianity itself and its foreign servants was given a role in the life of India which it didn’t deserve either. It was largely just a hangover from the Raj. And, as I remember it, in my father’s eyes, Christianity deserved a kind of homage just because it was the religion it was, being the light and truth that he wanted to share with others. Well, it didn’t deserve that respect, or that homage. It was a religious, not a cultural demand, and he had no right to make it. He shouldn’t have been there.
No religion deserves this kind of respect, or should think of itself as privileged, no matter what the surrounding culture. But I have the sense that many Muslims who come here to Canada think that Islam deserves that kind of respect. Some of them are quite explicit about the kind of homage they think that Islam should be given, and express quite clearly their firm intention that some day Britain, Canada, the US, Australia, etc. will come under the hegemony of Islam, and that is how it ought to be. And that troubles me, not because I’ll ever see the day, but because the traditions of freedom that have been cultivated at great cost to many people are under threat more and more from this kind of religious hubris, and liberals like Taner Edis seem perfectly prepared to grant the religious the kind of respect and regard that will make this kind of religious infiltration of our governing principles more likely. I’d like to think that I could leave something of more value to my children, and to my children’s children, if they should ever get round to having any.
Eric, quite, and he’s done another surrendering-liberalism post today. I really don’t get it.
I feel as if someone should do an intervention, and lock him in a room with…well how about Irshad Manji. She’s actually a believer and he’s not, but she’s the very antithesis of a communitarian.
Or how about my friend Meera Nanda. Or Gina Khan, or Maryam Namazie, or Gita Sahgal, or Necla Kelek, or – well, any number of people. He’s simply ignoring all of them, in favour of people who would silence them if given the opportunity.
Yes, I notice. Has this guy eaten of the insane root which takes the reason pris’ner?
I am just reading Marci Hamilton’s book, God vs. the Gavel – it’s really quite good – and she has something important to say about the role of religions in the scheme of law, worth quoting I think:
What gets me about Taner is that he doesn’t seem to acknowledge that there is any empirical data to go on here. It may not be conclusive, but there is a fairly long tradition about the role of religion in public affairs, and experience suggests that we should limit the capacity for religions to do harm. As Hamilton says: “… even religious reasons are inadequate to justify harming others.” And the story about the councillor that you link today is relevant here to talk about religions, religious community and harm. Anyway, one would have expected someone with Edis’ credentials to think in terms of practical reason, instead of speaking rather fatuously in the rather post-modern style he has adopted. He doesn’t sound like someone who is committed to reason as a way of settling disagreements.
Sorry about the singular verb, plural subject…..
“And the story about the councillor that you link today is relevant here to talk about religions, religious community and harm.”
Ha! Funny you should say that – I just used it for that very purpose.
I’ve also had that line about the insane root running through my head, for days – that is exactly what it seems like. (Have been unable to remember which play it is though. Must look it up.)
Macbeth, duh.
Ah, yes, of course: Macbeth. Shortest play in the Shakespeare canon. Is that why it’s so easy to quote?
Nope! It’s full of very vivid language and images – they stick in the mind.
I saw Derek Jacobi as Macbeth in Stratford in 1994…A high point.
A Taner-type shrug is what you give when you feel powerless to do anything to change an awful situation. 200 years ago people might have shrugged and walked on by as a horse that had collapsed in harness was beaten to death in a street of Sydney or London. Not any more: the culture (and the religious excuse for it) has changed.
A shrug is also what you give when you fear the consequences for yourself of openly opposing something you oppose privately. It is exactly midway between open endorsement and open opposition; an open nothing.
All religious leaders either encourage or demand conformity, and some demand it on pain of devastating consequences for the transgressor. I know of no religion worse in this respect than Islam, and I am sure Ayaan Hirsi Ali would back me up. So whenever there are calls for introduction of Sharia law into secular societies I always make public my own opposition.
“… Dr Matthews said he was referring only to certain elements of family law and inheritance law and was not advocating the sharia penal system.
”I wasn’t talking about sharia law in its entirety – we are not calling for the introduction of the penal system which calls for cutting off hands,’ he said.”
Whew. What a relief. That’s really something, and a big step forward.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/muslim-leader-wants-elements-of-sharia-in-australia-20100307-pqlo.html
But there’s worse:
“There are concerns aid groups are becoming targets for militant groups in Pakistan, after six aid workers were killed when militants struck a World Vision office in the North-West Frontier Province.
“It is not the first time an aid group has been targeted and World Vision has suspended its operations in Pakistan. It is likely other groups will soon follow.
“World Vision said the office was targeted because it was running programs to help women.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/11/2842468.htm
As explicit a statement as one could find from the Islamists that World Vision is doing the right thing from a secular liberal point of view. As Mao said: Support what the enemy opposes.
(He was wrong on many things, but right on that.)