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People have been pointing out in comments that there were a good many items in Marc Mulholland’s post that I neglected to mention. True enough. I was short on time, for one thing, and I think I have a sort of built-in idea of the maximum desirable length for a comment here. I don’t like article-length blog posts, on the whole. So I didn’t dispute everything I could have disputed.
And perhaps I didn’t stipulate as much as I could have either. I could have made the same stipulation that Norm does in his post on the subject –
There’s a central point in what Marc is saying which I would not contest, and this is that in the tense political climate we all now inhabit, it is important to avoid doing anything to feed ethnic or religious prejudices and hatreds. In so far as Muslims are on the receiving end of these, they must be defended – as would go for any other group.
Sure. Of course. But then it becomes all the more important to get clear about exactly what we’re talking about – about what we mean by ‘groups’ and ‘communities,’ for example. Something Chris Bertram said in comments may illustrate the point:
Perhaps if Mulholland had made his point using the example of true generalization about African-Americans made by certain types of conservative Republican it would have been clear to you.
Yes but that’s not a good analogy, because it’s a different kind of thing from what Mulholland is talking about. What kind of true generalization could one make about African-Americans, after all? Seriously. I can’t think of any – apart from the definitional one: that they are Americans who are at least partly descended from Africans. Go beyond that and there just aren’t any true generalizations available. And the same is true of Muslims, especially given the way the term is usually used, so that it includes secular and atheist ‘Muslims’. It would be pretty risky to generalize even about what all Muslims believe, just as it would be risky to generalize about what all Catholics believe. But Mulholland doesn’t talk only about Muslims or Catholics in his post, he also talks about Islam and Catholicism – and that’s a different subject. Note, just for one thing, that there is no equivalent word that one can use in the case of African-Americans. There is no religion, ‘African-Americanism.’ And if there were, people being what they are, not all African-Americans would agree about it; hence the epistemic as well as moral and political riskiness of saying what all Xs believe. But it is possible to talk about the tenets of Catholicism or Hinduism or Islam. There is still room for debate, but at least there is something to say. Mulholland neglected to make this distinction in his post; I think that’s where a lot of the muddle starts. So, of course I agree with Norm’s point, but (as Norm goes on to point out) Mulholland said far more than that.
The fact that every outlook is an outlook, has a genesis and a social and cultural milieu, no more means that all such outlooks should be taken as equivalently valuable, than does the fact that different explanations of empirical phenomena (like the movement of heavenly bodies or the causes of illnesses) have a genesis and a ‘sociology’ mean that all of these, these would-be explanations, are equivalently valuable. Marc needs to resolve for himself the tension between his seemingly pejorative ‘ahistorical “rights”‘ (with the rights in scare-quotes) and his more favourable ‘generally accords with universal values’. Meanwhile, there are many who will feel that, however the conception of universal rights has made its way in the world historically, it’s a damn sight better as the basis of a political order than are alternative conceptions of things which allow for brutal invasions and oppressions of the human person…Avoiding Islamophobia and every other kind of such phobia has got to be consistent with criticizing various cultural and religious outlooks for the ways in which they victimize or oppress human individuals.
That’s what I’m saying.
Jonathan Derbyshire also has a skeptical post on Mulholland, along with the SWP’s Nazi-Soviet Pact with fundamentalist Islam. (And to think that I used to be a sort of wannabe Trot myself. Well, I have a thing for the Old Man, I admit it.) Jonathan also links to a review of a book on relativism which I haven’t read and clearly need to immediately.
Now, back to the Mulholland piece for a moment. One thing I wanted to comment on yesterday and didn’t, was the question of truth.
Islamaphobia is often defined as slanderous untruths. I think there is an excessively narrow definition of Islamophobia at play here. It is not right that simply stating ‘the truth’ is sufficient to clear one of Islamophobia…If ‘truth’ about a community is expressed intemperately and one-sidedly, and that community is already under a burden of suspicion and disadvantage, then one must conclude that this is a freedom of speech exercised in such a manner to oppress and marginalize the group. I think its a cop-out to argue that attacks on beliefs are different from attacks on inherited characteristics such as colour etc…
Well, again – inevitably – we’re back with definition problems. What does he mean by ‘”truth” about a community’? If he means some statement about all Muslims, then is such a truth even possible? Again, I can’t think of any that wouldn’t be just tautologous. All Muslims are Muslims (and even that would depend on a very broad definition of Muslim, to include some sort of ethnic component, which of course is tricky since Muslims come from all over the globe). Or does he mean (as seems more likely) factual statements about what some Muslims do? But then – what? He wants truths like that to be concealed? So that, even if it is true that, say, a given Muslim man murders his daughter, that fact should be hushed up or played down, in order to avoid Islamophobia? Well…just for one thing, what about the daughter? And what about all the other daughters? They’re part of the ‘community’ too. Maybe they would find it ‘daughterophobic’ to play down daughtericide, and maybe they would have a point. And that’s just for one thing. I think the idea that ‘simply stating “the truth” is [not] sufficient to clear one of Islamophobia’ is a pretty risky idea, both epistemically and morally.
There is another possible interpretation of Chris Bertram’s statement. By ‘true generalization’ I think he meant ‘as a good example of the fallacy of generalization’ rather than a generalization that was also provably true – basically the opposite meaning you attributed.
I don’t mean this in the Post-Modern Text any-interpretation-is-valid sense, but rather in the ‘Hey, Chris, at least someone understood where you were going’ way.
Well, I was thinking of statistical generalizations about groups, actually, rather than statements that hold strictly true for each and every member. But I thought you might want to insist on the disanalogy between African-Americans as a racial group and Islam as a body of belief.
So lets try a closer analogy. If I constantly went on about the negative and reactionary features of Judaism, perhaps ran a website or wrote lots of articles, I think you might suspect that my motives were other than just spreading the values of liberal enlightenment. And if I did so in a context where many Jews were faced with anti-semitic persecution and discrimination, you’d be right to condemn my statements – even if every one of them taken separately were true.
Thats why I think that Marc M has a point, which might have been differently or better expressed, but which deserves more sympathetic consideration that it has received so far on B&W.
“I think you might suspect that my motives were other than just spreading the values of liberal enlightenment.”
We might be suspicious of your motives, but we wouldn’t claim that:
“to serve liberalism by highlighting all that is wrong with [Islam] Judaism is to whip up prejudice and is thus unconscionable.”
And we also wouldn’t rule out the possibility that your motives were good.
This is a ridiculous argument. If you follow Mark’s position to its logical conclusion one cannot criticise the extremes of any ideology if there is a chance that it’ll give fuel to the bigoted.
People who attack Muslims, asylum seekers, etc., in the UK are bastards; you only have to read their web sites to know this. But Islam has many distasteful aspects – even moderate Islam – particularly the way it views women, its attitude towards punishment, its attitude towards science, the fact that it *is* a religion – and liberals should say so more often, not less often.
That will teach me to stick my nose in. I was wrong. My apologies, OB, for even thinking you could err, and CB, for interposing when you can take care of things yourself.
Yeah, the answer ‘statistical generalizations about groups’ popped into my head while I was offline. Should have thought of that.
But then having thought of it, I thought about it, and my answer remained the same. Sure, I might and would suspect people’s motives all over the place, but I wouldn’t then go on to urge them to shut up about the facts. For many reasons, reasons that are central to B&W. Just for one thing, it’s suicidal. If the left goes around trying to muffle the facts, it’s just going to look like a political tendency that wants to muffle the facts! It’s gone down that road before with bad results. And there are other, less instrumental reasons, too.
Nonsense, Mark, I err every two seconds! Not thinking of statistical generalizations, for one.
“None of this means we shouldn’t have difficult debates. It just means that we should proceed in a thoughtful manner.”
But who exactly are we talking about here?
Haven’t we all been on anti-racism marches, this kind of thing? It’s not as though liberals don’t make it clear that they abhor racism, etc.
And is the suggestion seriously that people like Christopher Hitchens, Polly Toynbee, etc., are making race relations worse because they’re giving fuel to racists?
If so, then it needs to be backed up by empirical evidence. The tabloids in the UK have been running a concerted campaign against asylum for the last four or five years. The impact which this has had on race relations is more important, by orders of magnitude, than liberal islamophobia (check out the opinion polling data).
Academics need to get a grip here. Most people don’t care what they think. This means that they can write their articles without fear that it’s actually going to make a difference to anything.
“Paradoxically, when minority groups feel attacked, they do tend to close ranks”
I know – and it’s understandable, of course. I’m at my most feminist when people are pissing on feminists. And US feminism has been wrestling with this for decades – with the way black women often reject feminism because they figure the black struggle comes first. (And people for whom the black struggle does come first would phrase what I just said completely differently. And so on.)
But that’s just it, that’s one reason I’ve gotten so wary of identity politics – because of the way solidarity can trump truth or some other value.
“Academics need to get a grip here. Most people don’t care what they think.”
Naturally not, but…there can be some trickle-down, some drip-drip, surely? A much smaller drip than that of the tabloids, but it’s still something.
And then there is the fact that what academics say may matter to far fewer people, but it also may matter more to people with power and influence than what the Sun says. Most people don’t know from Rawls or Walzer, but New Labour does. No?