That Special Glow
I need a word to describe a category of word that (when used for rhetorical purposes) presumes to declare its own value in advance of judgment. Pre-emptive, or pseudo-hurrah, are the two I’ve come up with.
The one I have in mind at the moment is ‘family’. This is by no means the first time I’ve had hard thoughts about that word (there was the 2000 presidential campaign, for instance, when the Democrats completely dropped the word ‘people’ from their vocabularies in favour of ‘families’, so that working people became working families, as if they were all hired and paid in a bunch instead of one at a time), but they’re always being refreshed; at the moment it’s Faisal Bodi’s sinister crap about keeping families intact at the expense of the girls and women they push around that inspired this particular set of hard thoughts.
The community is bothered, both by the effect forced marriage has on the victims, and its unique ability to tarnish our image. We are also desperate for answers – but not the sort that take the form of edicts by government and voluntary agencies which have little or no empathy with our faith. Take women’s refuges. Not without cause do we view them with suspicion and mistrust. Refuges tear apart our families. Once a girl has walked in through their door, they do their best to stop her ever returning home. That is at odds with the Islamic impulse to maintain the integrity of the family.
Interesting use of ‘we’ there, too – who’s ‘we’? We in the community (community of course is another pre-emptive pseudo-hurrah word), except not quite all of us in ‘the community’ since ‘we’ clearly can’t include the girls and women who need refuge. So Bodi inadvertently lets slip the fact that he doesn’t consider ‘the victims’ part of ‘the community’ – which makes his ‘bothered’ feelings about the effect forced marriage has on the victims seem a little dubious. But never mind that for the moment; for now let’s just consider his worry over ‘our families’ (which ‘our’?) and their tearing apart and the threat refuges pose to the maintenance of their integrity. Let’s ponder that, and then ask so the fuck what? If a family is willing to trash a girl’s life despite her resistance, refusal, and finally escape, who cares if it ends up being ‘torn apart’ by her departure? (In fact – if she’s being forcibly married off she’s departed anyway, hasn’t she? Why is it okay and non-family-apart-tearing to force her to marry and live with a man she doesn’t want to marry and live with, but not okay and family-apart-tearing for her to leave and live somewhere else and not go back? We can probably guess why. Because it means she has taken possession of her own life instead of leaving it in the possession of the precious ‘family’. Well the hell with that.)
And that’s where the word comes in. The holy word ‘family’. It simply assumes – the way Bodi uses it there – that family is always and necessarily benign and benevolent and loving, so that it is always and necessarily a tragedy when a member departs and refuses to return. Well, that’s crap. Families vary, and a good many of them are quite damaging for at least some members of them. I would say that one which includes forcing a girl to marry against her will would be one of that kind. So the word comes in handy to distract the attention of the credulous by the little holy glow around the ‘family’. That’s the kind of work that pre-emptive pseudo-hurrah words are meant to do. They’re meant to cause us to forget to examine particulars – never mind families in general, what about the particular families in question, what are they like, how did they treat the girls who fled? – because we’re too entranced by the general.
So that’s a trick to watch out for.
Why not s”word” (intentional scare quotes)
It aims, but does not please
Ugh. I hate the word ‘family’. It’s always paired with some other word or phrase – ‘family values’ or ‘ordinary decent families’ for example – which implies that if you don’t conform to a very narrow view of what the ‘family’ is, you’re somehow criminal or deviant.
Also, good point about the idea being used to keep women down. There’s this implication that the government shouldn’t meddle in what goes on behind closed doors, even if what goes on is apalling violence and abuse.
And why the ‘Islamist’ concern for family integrity? Is this the same Islamists who support polygamy and allow men to divorce their wives so easily? The ones who stone adulterous (i.e. raped) wives to death?
Interesting definition of integrity…
Autolaudatory?
Is anyone else reminded of how some women right here in the US feel pressured to get married and start crankin’ ’em out? I know that that isn’t a forced situation of the same magnitude by any means, but it looks to me like the sort of thing that could turn into a similar atrocity, if some people have their way. [Anyone else recall that big scare headline some 20 years back about women of a certain age being more likely to be in a terrorist attack than find a husband? I then said, “Simple. Marry a terrorist.”] Anyone else ever worry just a teeny bit that forced marriage and forced breeding might happen HERE?
And that stuff about keeping the family intact–why am I reminded of pronouncements by so-called experts here that the parents must put up a “united front” against the kids, even when it means that whatever sick, crazy thing one parent does to that poor kid is just fine with the other?
And even more off topic–do “nature” and “natural” ever qualify as autolaudatory words?
“trance word”, “shibboleth” or “singularity” don’t do it but explain the use of such words from different evaluative viewpoints.
As a fully paid-up Stately Homo of England (though now resident in Wales), I have seen how the ‘family’ can make one of its members feel, and my family were OK (i.e. not ready to kick me out once they discovered I was a poofter, but it was a subject that just wasn’t talked about, so I didn’t get the support my hettie chums got from their mums and dads, aunts and uncles, when they began to take an interest in someone in a sexual/romantic way. Some families, of course, of all races and religions, can be downright much worse than that, and turn their offspring out onto the street or just make their lives hell.
Muslims, of course, can’t recognise that someone might be gay without his/her actually having chosen that sexuality; and in general their attitude towards women is just as insensitive and crass. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised by what this bloody upstart is saying.
Angiportus writes :
“Anyone else recall that big scare headline some 20 years back about women of a certain age being more likely to be in a terrorist attack than find a husband?”.
This whole story was nonsense based on innumeracy. See http://www.stats.org/stories/terror_crunch_jun05_06.htm
Dear OB
I like families. A problem is that, because families are such a ‘good thing’, they have been used as a linguistic version of ‘human shields’ – see the article in the Times about the Taliban, those brave fighters against female emancipation and Enlightenment values , and how they use women and children. You should distinguish between the good (families) and the use to which they are put (patriarchal and social control).
A request to you. I am happy(?) with the idea of objective absolute moral standards/truths. That is relatively easy for a Christian and, I dare say, for a Jew or Muslim or Sikh etc. Many atheists behave as though they too believe in objective truths. I can’t remember how this is descrined though my daughter and I had a nice discussion about it very recently. Could you (a) describe it and (b) elucidate it on your blog not just for my benefit?
Best wishes
Yes, it is sad that “family” has become more a weapon than a word, because as a loving group of people it’s a wonderful and, fortunately not rare, thing.
Which makes it all the uglier when it is turned into a word to be used as a weapon.
Jeffrey,
Sure. I didn’t say I hated families, I said I hated the word. But I still maintain that families are only a good thing when and if they are a good thing. Bad ones can be hellish, and do terrible harm to people. So I do take myself to be distinguishing, but not “between the good (families) and the use to which they are put (patriarchal and social control)” but rather between the blanket use of the word that simply assumes all of them are good, and a more cautious use.
Objective moral standards. Arrgh – sure, I’ll just rattle that out in ten words or so. That’s a big subject!
I think one can argue for objective moral standards on the grounds that humans have certain universal needs and wants. But – it’s not that simple, because one still has to argue why one should care about other people’s needs and wants. Emotivists claim that it’s just a basic intuition or commitment, in the end: an irrational one.
I’m curious though about the connection between Christianity (and other religions) and “objective” moral standards. If you derive them from your religion they’re not really objective, are they? You take them to be the deity’s moral standards, don’t you?
You never answered about Jesus and the Pharisees. I think I won that round, frankly…
Dear OB
I was rather hoping for a longer piece on objective truths as I am sure many visitors to your site would find it interesting.
Jesus and the Parisees, eh? Thought you won that round, did you ?
You implied that I had accused you of being cold,unfeeling when I wrote that I could not find any cold unfeeling statements unless wrenched out of context. I don’t think the John 15 statement fits your bill and I never intended to impugn your warmth. I don’t maintain that Jesus never said harsh words, but from the canonical Gospels, his anger was directed at uncharitable behaviour and hypocrisy in particular, of which some at least in the party of the Pharisees were guilty (the Sadduccees were not guilty of hypocrisy, but rather of smugness. They were a party of the ruling class as far as one can tell).
You may recall that I was upset by your linking of Nazis, in particular with a piece that ran into Ruth Kelly and Catholics. You should know that hitler was opposed to the Church and Catholics
“The war will be over one day. I shall then consider that my life’s final task will be to solve the religious problem.” Hitlers Table Talk, reported in Michael Burleigh’s A New History of The Third Reich.
In 1937 the Pope published an Encyclical known from its opening words as ‘Mit Brennender Sorge’ (‘With Burning Anxiety’) which condemned the Nazi persution of the churches, Nazi racism and Mussolini’s deification of the State.
The Nazis imprisoned or murdered 6000 Christian priests under the Third Reich. Himmler’s SS was explicitly pagan and anti Christian. etc etc. So Christians find connections between Nazis and Christianity as deeply offensive because wrong.
The point about objective truths and religious belief is not that we only believe these things because we are believers and thus taught to believe them, whether or not they are right, but that this is an assurance that these standards/truths/rights are, indeed universal and always apply.
Best wishes
Oh dear – what a tangle.
JM, yes, I got that you were hoping for a longer piece, but I have only so much time and a lot to do.
No, no, no, I didn’t imply that you had accused me of being cold and unfeeling. Apart from anything else, I am cold and unfeeling; but in any case that’s not the point; the point is what I take to be a misrepresentation of the nature of the NT. My claim is that it is not the case the Jesus is always kind and loving, and that people who claim he is are reading terribly selectively – as in saying that the cited passage of John doesn’t count because there he was railing at the Pharisees. Of course there he was railing at the Pharisees: but that was my point: he’s not always kind and loving. Yes I know he is portrayed at being angry at uncharitable behaviour and hypocrisy in particular; but that is a different argument. Saying he was angry and hateful for good reasons, saying he was angry about moral qualities that deserve anger and hate, is not the same thing as saying he was never angry and hateful. You’re conflating the two.
In addition to that, of course, is the whole issue of the portrayal of the Pharisees, which you seem to be taking as a straightforwardly accurate portrayal, rather than a tendentious one given by much later writers who had their own axes to grind. Your reading is ahistorical.
I wasn’t linking Kelly to the Nazis: I was making an analogy about a kind of argument. Do please read carefully.
“but that this is an assurance that these standards/truths/rights are, indeed universal and always apply.”
Why?
Dear OB
If I implied he was never angry, that was wrong. But not hateful.
The point you make about the Pharisees is partly true. But it is clear that, just as in any clerical dominated society, a part of the the Pharisee party was hypocritical and imposed burdens on the laity. Many Pharisees, no doubt, were not like these, and later disputes after the Revolt in 66-70 AD encouraged all Pharisees to be labelled with the vices of a faction.
About Kelly and the Nazis. Your introduction implicitly compared Catholics and Kelly to the Nazis (and KKK and God Hates Fags Party). This is wrong. An analogy implies that Nazis and Catholics are to be compared. If you don’t mean to compare them, choose a different (offensive, if you wish) comparator.
As you are an atheist I try to stay away from theological and philosophical discussions about the nature of God. Discussions about something one party doesn’t believe in seem a bit silly to me. I could make a long post on this but I don’t have the time as I have three large papers for clients which need reviewing and editing. So I sympathise with your reluctance.
I don’t look to pick a fight on your site as I regularly visit it and enjoy many of the Notes and Discussions.
Best wishes
This is by no means in order to slam JM (I can appreciate that B&W must seem like a bit of a minefield to someone for whom faith does play a role in life), nor do I claim to be coming from a position that views faith and the lack of it as equally valid starting positions. I’d merely like to make the observation that it seems that it is very important to JM that Christian views, at least those attributed to Christ in the New Testament, not seem incompatible with – well, in his own words: “The point about objective truths and religious belief is not that we only believe these things because we are believers and thus taught to believe them, whether or not they are right, but that this is an assurance that these standards/truths/rights are, indeed universal and always apply.”
It is certainly laudable to want one’s values to be those that could be thus described, but the obvious question is then: why is the middleman (sacred texts or dogma) relied upon for the quality of the merchandise (values, truths, beliefs, morals) instead of the merchandise being scrutinised with independent rigour for all it actually implies? Because I have at least an inkling of what faith is (never having possessed it myself), the question may be considered rhetorical, but I raise it (yet again) as a reminder of why some of us are capable of writing things that put them at odds with believers.
JM,
Well, I think the children of Satan stuff is hateful – but I also think (as I said in the comments last time but forgot to mention above) that Jesus didn’t say that. Sure, the Pharisees may (or may not) have been terrible; my point was just a narrow one about what Jesus is actually reported as saying in the canonical gospels.
“An analogy implies that Nazis and Catholics are to be compared.”
I disagree. And your parenthesis “(offensive, if you wish)” kind of undermines your own point. But I disagree even without that. The point of the analogy was that an allegiance is an allegiance, and it’s silly to think it can be walled off and not influence one’s work.
Still – I can see why it would look as if the comparison were implied. I think what I had in mind with those examples was the intensity and ferocity and perhaps the authoritarianism. And Kelly isn’t just a Catholic, she’s in Opus Dei.
Yeh what Stewart said.
The problem is the familiar one. Either the morality is one that you yourself think is a good one, in which case the assurance doesn’t add anything, or else it is not, in which case you ought not to adhere to it.
In other words the assurance you claim to derive from being a believer is a sort of illegitimate add-on or intensifier or enforcer. (I don’t mean that to be offensive, though it probably sounds it.) It’s illegitimate because it attempts to add force or weight or perpetuity to your moral views independent of the quality of the views themselves – and that doesn’t work. And not only does it not work, it also leaves the door open for people with their own moral views to do the same thing, as we see all over the place. My god says you have to obey, or else. What you gain in seeming permanence and universality you lose in accountability and reason and discussability. Surely you have noticed that people use their god to back up their own moral convictions; that (again) is only as harmless as their moral convictions are. When their moral convictions are horrible, the result is a nightmare.
I’ve said it somewhere before, but this is a great place to say it again. In my opinion, most religions contain certain moral precepts that are excellent, all of which, without exception, are immeasurably weakened by their reliance on divine origin.
I also stand by what Daniel Dennett says in “Breaking the Spell,” which is (paraphrasing) that to entrust (i.e. to abdicate) one’s moral responsibilities to anyone else is itself an actively immoral act, regardless of the kind of decisions on the part of the designated authority one is letting oneself in for.
I can well appreciate that a believer reading Dennett and really listening to what he has to say could come away profoundly shaken and disturbed. I happen to think the possibility of exchanging some illusions for some truth is worth paying such a price for.
And once more to emphasise that this is the opposite of an attack on JM, while I don’t respect anyone because of their religious belief, I would have to say that I do respect JM for being open to participation in this forum despite his beliefs.
Ditto.