A rather more sinister trend
Chris Moos pointed out to me another Theos blog post by Ben Ryan. It too is badly written and badly thought.
A blog was recently drawn to my attention by one Dr Chris Moos that tries to paint the LSE Director Professor Craig Calhoun as a “faith warrior”. By deigning to argue that religion ought to be taken more seriously in academia in a range of different subjects as an overlooked cause Calhoun is displaying some sort of scary Christian zeal (apparently).
That last sentence really is gibberish, plus he appears not to know what “deign” means. To attempt to translate: I think he’s saying that Chris Moos is saying that Calhoun is a faith warrior because he (Calhoun) says religion should be taken more seriously. I think Ryan is also saying that Chris is being naughty in saying that. Meh. I tend to resent people who say we should take religion more seriously, and I do think it’s a form of bullying, and thus that “faith warrior” is not a bad metaphor.
It is the second half of Dr Moos’s blog that what I suspect is the real reason for the anti-Calhoun attack.
Missing word there. Contains? States? Explains? Offers? It takes a pretty bad writer to leave out a key word and not notice.
Moos led one of a series of stunts in which atheist and humanist societies show up to Freshers’ Fairs wearing t-shirts showing “Jesus and Mo cartoons”. Reports as to what happened next differ depending on who you ask, ranging between just short of the heroic martyrdom of these champions of free speech to a minor disagreement after which they were asked by the LSE to stop wearing the t-shirts or leave. This event has somehow become a cause and argument which has rumbled on now for years.
It wasn’t a “stunt.” That’s just rude. ASH societies like other societies have tables at the Freshers Fairs, and they have material on their tables and they wear relevant T shirts if they feel like it. That’s not a stunt, it’s just a thing that societies do. They weren’t asked by LSE to leave, they were asked by an officer of the LSE Student Union. The LSE SU officer really had no business doing that.
My concern over these stunts is that in this ongoing pointless dispute the protagonists are actually becoming part of a rather more sinister trend and that they have lost sight of the point of their campaigning.
First to be entirely clear – this is a deliberately provocative gesture, whatever its supporters might say to the contrary. The cartoons have been a cause celebre for years, the effect they have is well known.
Nonsense. That’s not true. Ryan may be thinking of other cartoons – the Danish Motoons and/or Lars Vilks – or he may be deliberately misleading the readers. It’s not true that J&M have been a cause célèbre for years. And that crap about deliberately provocative gesture is more of the same old bullshit by which people adopt the viewpoint of enraged theocrats in order to chastise people who are doing things that ought to be completely uncontroversial in a liberal society. It’s a bullying move, and it stinks.
If it were simply provocative that would be a bit irritating but not especially problematic – perhaps universities ought to be forced to be clearer on their stance on particular issues. However, it is the choice of target that I find distasteful. It’s the unpleasant use of jokes and mockery to create an acceptable “other”. In Britain in the past the butt of such jokes have at various times been the Irish, Jews, or among others, West Indians. Each time the effect is to justify a perception that “those people” are not welcome here or that they undermine the efforts of the rest of us. In our own time the acceptable other at which abuse can be thrown has become Muslims.
Every time these student societies decide to be provocative it is invariably Muslims who bear the brunt of the mockery. It is never Sikhs, or Hindus, or Jews or any other minority group.
Dense, isn’t he. He’s apparently forgotten all about poor dear Jesus – who is after all half of Jesus & Mo. How are Muslims bearing the brunt of the mockery when Jesus has top billing?
The guy’s a faith warrior in training.
What mockery? As I recall the t-shirts were Jesus and Mo saying something like “Hello,” and “How ya doin’?” Doesn’t the Theos writer even listen to himself? I.e., “things should promote inclusion, not antagonism.” Isn’t that EXACTLY what the cartoon does? Express friendliness and inclusion across traditional divides? Plus, what’s so terrible (rock vs. hard place) about forcing the university to declare for one side (free speech) over another (religious censorship)?
And the Theos writer himself labors hard to create an “acceptable other” — non-theists — whom it is perfectly okay to censor and punish precisely for not being religious. Project much?
It’s never Jews? Has this idiot paid ANY attention to the voices of British Jews wondering if it’s time to leave?
I like to collect prime examples of cack-handed sentences (hey, it’s a hobby—and, as the saying goes, people in glass houses should throw half-bricks about with gay abandon). And that sentence you mentioned, Ophelia, is a beauty. Almost perfectly backward.
“By deigning to argue that religion ought to be taken more seriously in academia in a range of different subjects as an overlooked cause Calhoun is displaying some sort of scary Christian zeal (apparently).”
“Apparently” needs to go somewhere nearer the start. This would help us know that the writer isn’t presenting us with what-he-reckons but rather with what-he-reckons-they-reckon. He ought to move that subject and verb to the start as well. At least then we’d have some idea of where he’s going with that that long string of phrases within clauses within phrases.
“As an overlooked cause” is pretty clunky. We know what he means to say, but he isn’t saying it. He wants to say religion is an overlooked cause, and we should take it seriously; he doesn’t really mean that its overlookedness is the main reason for taking it seriously or that its overlookitude should be the main point of our seriousity about it.
I award him no points, and may God have mercy on his soul.
overlookitude and seriousity – I think I just fell a little in love with you Gordon.
I know. If I were collecting cack-handed sentences he would be high on my list of Valued Contributors.
By the time Chris Moos and his friend Abishek were wearing their J&M T-shirts at Fresher’s Fayre, there had been other Islam related free speech controversies. One of these involved J&M on university Facebook pages. Another concerned a boy at a sixth form college who received death threats due to a J&M cartoon he posted in response to the one of the university incident.
When Maryam held a to protest about Islamists clamping down on free speech, she put J&M centre stage. They were on the flyers and on a huge banner she made. I went along. My husband came with me because he was afraid there would be trouble (there wasn’t). Chris and Abishek aren’t a couple of naive boys who turned up wearing T-shirts not knowing that people wouldn’t like them. They are activists campaigning for free speech because they think it matters. They might not have known what the exact response would be but they knew that they might be harrassed. I am uncomfortable with the term “provocative” given the nature of some Islamists’ responses to anything they deem blasphemous but they certainly intended to provoke debate.
My point is that it’s not wrong to be provocative and there’s no need to pretend activists don’t know what they are doing. As you might guess from the tone of my post, I am acquainted with these people and have been involved in secular activism in London. Anyone who puts their head above the parapet does so knowing that they risk harrassment and possibly life and limb. They deserve recognition for that. I certainly wasn’t brave enough.
I know. That boy at a sixth form college is Rhys Morgan (now an undergrad). I met him (and Maryam) at QED a few months later. And yes – I agree with all that and it’s what I meant. Ryan was using “provocative” as a pejorative, and my point was that we’re allowed to be “provocative” and intellectuals shouldn’t be rebuking people for being “provocative” in that sense.
There are other ways of being “provocative” that are reprehensible in the way Ryan meant. Donald Trump is nothing but provocative in that way.