One of me, two of them
This will amuse you – I’m going to be on Nightwaves on Thursday. A ‘debate’ – more or less about the book, as I understand it. The Other Side will be represented by two people – which perhaps hints at where the BBC’s sympathies lie.
I won’t tell you who the other people are now, because I prefer to tell you later.
Ach, they just know that if they only put up one opponent, you’d breeze through them too damned fast, and they’d be struggling to fill the rest of the timeslot…
:-)
Now, go on, who are your vict…I mean other debaters?
I’m not going to spoil the surprise!
:- )
I bet the other two are Rowan Williams and Melanie Phillips. A classic good cop, bad cop pairing.
You’re clo-ose.
Except of course they would see Mel as being on my side, and the actual two are definitely on the other side.
(Also of course the archbish wouldn’t waste his time on small beer like me. But other than that, you’re close.)
I’m hoping they got Jesus and Mo.
Jesus and Mo sent reps!
hahahaha
That must mean I was right about the good cop, bad cop angle. And since we now know it’s a Muslim-Christian tag-team, it must be Inayat Bunglawala and Mary Kenny.
That’s even closer.
snicker snicker
Damn it, Ophelia. I kind of want to hate you for being a tease, but I’m also kind of. . .tittilated.
Oh, it’s all just so wrong .
Nightwaves is generally a decent serious prog – Christopher Hitchens was on a couple of days ago talking about Tom Paine. Terry Eagleton was also on a few weeks ago, but, hey, you can’t have everything.
My guess is Tariq Ramadan and Madeleine Bunting.
Nightwaves is often great, but usually too late for me to listen. Thursday will be an exception. I reckon it will Maddie leading the opposition too.
Ah, c’mon, give those of us with no braincells left (ie. me) a wee clue –
Are they both regulars on either:
Comment Is Free (but rationalism costs)
and/or
(Distinct absence of) Thought For The Day??
Clifford Longley?
maybe its BBC Maths. Two people with half a brain = 1 person with a brain (that’d be you) :-)
A wee clue?! You’ve had clues – and anyway I’m not going to tell until afterwards.
I’d love it to be Stephen Green and Bungles, but life couldn’t be that good.
Bit late for me, but I’ll catch on iplayer.
Well I’d love it to be the pope and Osama bin Laden, but life isn’t perfect!
:- )
What a tease! It occurs to me that your opponents may look at this website before the programme. (Hello Maddy!)
Don’t forget that you’re the only one of the three (I imagine) who doesn’t believe that the other two will be tortured horribly for the whole of eternity.
Makes ecumenism an uphill struggle too: if you believe that those who don’t share your beliefs are condemned, does this not reduce your incentive to get on with them in this life? Ought to give pause for thought whenever you read about inter-faith meetings. (Do religious leaders not actually think such things about each other? And if not why not?)
Oh well, if that’s the way you’re going to be, I’m not playing any more…
(I spend too much time with small children – a level of reasoning you’re probably going to meet tonight!)
:-)
Nice to see you get a supportive article in today’s edition of Private Eye, taking the Sunday Times’ Christine Toomey to task for creating “a controversy where none existed”.
Tell us the Beeb haven’t roped in “bonkers extremist” Anjem Choudary (“former leader of the banned Al-Muhahiroun”), too??
Power to elbows, as ever..
Just for the record, straight off the Beeb site: “And does God hate women? Yes, says American philosopher Ophelia Benson, who argues that religion encourages the oppression of women and attacks Western liberals for not speaking out against religious misogyny. Rana debates this controversial claim with Ophelia Benson, Madeleine Bunting and Humera Khan.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ksx94
Well I don’t exactly say ‘yes’…and I’m not a philosopher, just a trouble-maker. And liberals do speak out against religious misogyny, it’s anti-liberals who don’t.
Anyway…
Ah, the perennial problem of the abuse of the word ‘liberal’ to mean ‘a person who disagrees with what is perceived to be the prevailing view of (western, developed world) conservatives’
Listening right now – once again it seems that Madeleine Bunting appears to be arguing at cross-purposes to herself, never mind anyone else…
Patrick: At least, that proves that the show is not a fake, unlike the alleged Apollo moon landings. ;-)
The program is not available yet on podcast. Will it be?
Could I prevail on any of our British friends to download the program if it becomes available by podcast? I’ve noticed the BBC has a nasty habit of not allowing anyone outside Great Britain to access a lot of its programs. I’d be really grateful if someone would email it to me!
It should be on Listen Again for a week. I don’t know if it’s there yet.
It is. Mind you, it keeps disconnecting, but maybe that’s because I have dial-up.
JoshS,
Telly is restricted, but radio should be ok everywhere.
Heh – MB does argue against herself, doesn’t she. No no, it’s all about men controlling women. Er – yes, that’s rather the point.
So the book is not only strident but also shrill? OB, laconic, good-humoured and telling. Obviously it was a conversation rather than a competition, but you won anyway.
Yeah wasn’t that great? Strident and shrill – you mean incisive and fearless!
Ha!
A bit too laconic really – I think for good radio they want copiousness.
Rana Mitter was very nice.
Listening now. Astonishing. Maddy Bunting admits that women have had to contend with patriarchy for 2,000 years under these Abrahamic religions, then she turns around and says women “find succor” in these very same traditions. I actually gasped. Is this not like saying that abusive parenting is important, because after children are beaten with a belt, they find comfort in the arms of mummy or daddy who say, “I only did it for your own good?”
What is wrong with Madeline Bunting?
It’s all amazing, isn’t it – she has no idea what I’m talking about, why after all, the Anglican church has women vicars. (That’s nice, what about other churches, what about the Catholic church which says female ordination is excommunication-worthy, what about Islam?!) There are slavery bits in the Bible but Christians were in the forefront of anti-slavery. (That’s nice, but it came after many centuries of slavery unopposed by Christians and many Christians went right on not opposing it in Wilberforce’s day and well after.) Yes religion is about the control of women by men but then you say God hates women that’s just crazy talk!! (Does the word ‘metaphor’ ring a bell?)
And then there’s the bit where Humera Khan talks about ‘things not quite working, violence and so on…’
Funny stuff.
Oh, Maddy. She did say “strident and shrill,” didn’t she? That phrase should only be deployed with a (TM) symbol. It’s the contemporary equivalent of the old formulation used against gay rights activists: “Flamboyant and shoving it down our throats.”
It’s not an observation, it’s a conversation-stopper. It’s a sort of imperative punctuation mark (or a stage-direction, or an audience cue card) that means, “your entire point of view is invalid and a caricature. Shut up.”
Well. I just listened to the broadcast. So many new concepts that I can’t think straight. A good and fair patriarchy that you negotiate. The one or two examples of extraordinary women for us to gaze upon and be inspired by.
Neither of your interlocutors showed any depth of thought or any possibility of taking a wide, clear, or even interested view of actual events in today’s world. They were pathetic and should have done much better. They weren’t worthy. And the strident and shrill comment is, in my view, nothing new, after all it’s been there all the time and banal as well. It was kind of you to devote part of your day to listening to their blather. What silly contributions they made to the conversation.
The odd economic argument just rose to the surface of my brain, like a glob of grease.
How in the world is it economically adaptive to have social rules that condemn women to be killed? It makes sense under the “controlling the behavior of society members” category but I could not track its application to the economic argument. It didn’t make sense to me as an explanation for anything, especially not religion or patriarchy.
What a lack of imagination they showed. . . poor things. They need some extraordinary women to be inspired by perhaps.
O –
I think you came across as eminently reasonable, and as someone who’d actually thought about what she was saying before she said it. I’m probably biased of course, being someone who already likes your writing, but there you are.
If I could make one suggestion for a different approach in style over radio, I’d say, don’t let the Maddy Buntings of the world blather on so long. She manages to hog a lot of airtime with her trademark Word Salad, which, to the uninitiated, can sound much deeper than it is. There is a point when it’s fair to interject and say, “wait just a minute, I have to respond to that.”
I get that it’s hard to know exactly what tone to take in a media venue. I’m frequently interviewed on the air for the subject that I work in, and you always have to adjust your style to what you think the audience (or host) expects. I’m just always on guard for the Buntings of the world, who are very good at hogging the microphone, while signifying nothing.
For the record, I got the distinct impression the host, Mitter, was far more sympathetic to your point of view. Good showing!
Bunting and Khan’s arguments were pretty awful.
Khan was arguing that Islam is neutral on patriarchy/matriarchy/equality and that it is all down to culture. So what about the parts of the Koran that say a woman’s testimony is worth 3/5ths of a man’s and so on? That isn’t neutral.
Then she went on to claim there’s a distinction between good patriarchy and bad patriarchy!
Bunting pretty much admitted that the Bible is sexist, but then said that it’s also pro-slavery and Christians were prominent in the abolition movement. You could use the same argument to claim that Christianity has nothing to do with the ten commandments.
Both of them were pushing the idea that “real” religion is about practice rather than what the scripture says. But the practice is sexist too!
Khan seemed to realise that so she kept going on about how “you can negotiate.” You might as well say that Nazism isn’t really anti-Semitic because you could try to talk them out of it, and maybe one day they’ll listen.
What Claire and Jakob said, squared.
I can barely wait for Eric and Russell to weigh in, too!
The other two are not on a treadmill going nowhere. They’re on one going somewhere. But where?
They’re going to CrazyTown, Ian. Duh. And don’t you say otherwise.
Just listened to the interview – just once, I’m afraid. It seemed that you, Ophelia, were in the unfortunate position of trying to pick up cooked spaghetti with your bare hands, and the noodles kept slipping between your fingers. I had the feeling, despite your calmness – and kudos to you for remaining calm! – that you were very frustrated, because neither Bunting nor Khan seemed to have the slightest idea what the problem was, or even that there was one.
This is typical religious apologetics. From the religious there’s a wide-faced innocence, always, as though their interlocutor really doesn’t understand religion at all – that you have to be on the inside really to understand. It’s the old idea that unredeemed reason simply cannot comprehend the vast and undeserved grace of God, and that, looked at it from the appropriate angle, everything is for the best, and if there seems something unjust or oppressive about religion, this is only because you are looking on from the outside, because religions are, far from being unchangeable, undergoing constant processes of negotiation and renegotiation (as though this is unproblematic in a system that is delivered from an inaccessible and unaccountable source). So the religious play the enlightenment game of reason with systems that do not originate in processes of reasonsed negotiation.
But the strange thing is, looked at from the inside, people like Bunting and Khan, who are striving to remain faithful, simply cannot see what critics are talking about. They can negotiate the kind of relationships which make their religious belonging not only comprehensible, but even, in their own minds, fully and richly human.
It’s all a matter, when you come down to it, of interpretation. The mere mention of hermeneutics is supposed to get them off the hook. If not Mary (the putative virgin), we are pointed to Magdalene (the purported prostitute), and the latter becomes a model for true interactive relationship between God (Jesus) and woman.
But then, when we are told that your (and Jeremy’s) book is strident and shrill, we know we’re back to the reflex response of religion. Criticism is always strident and usually shrill, and you know you’ve just been fobbed off as the sinner (although the word can’t be used because this is a rational discussion, after all) who simply can’t understand, and cannot be expected to. It’s a hopeless task.
You must surely have felt some of this hopelessness yourself, while taking comfort in the fact that many women will not be so blinded by their refusal to see, and the book itself, while galvanising the shallow responses of people like Bunting and Khan, will make very clear that hermeneutical possibilities are just a smoke screen for the reality of women’s oppression that is there for all to see.
By the way, where Bunting and Khan are going is into apologetic smoke, hence all the breathless wordiness which the moderator let them get away with. Most religious defenders, like B and K, have no sense of the sheer size and weight of the tradition they seem to think they can move by making a few reasonable adjustments here and there, adjustments which will permit a degree of freedom for the few who are capable, and actually have the freedom, of thinking around the edges, but who are entirely ignorant of the vastness and sheer weight of the tradition which goes on undisturbed by these minute hermeneutical adjustments which give them comfort, but leave most women (as well as men) bound and double bound by tradition.
An interesting feature of this is that, in my experience, anyway, the women who take up official roles in the church, say, as Anglican priests, are much more bound by the tradition than many male priests are. They tend to accept the tradition more literally, and their own role, as centres of authority, much more uncompromisingly. Many of them turn out to be surrogate men. This is a personal observation, and I used to challenge women priests with the remark that, if they are going to hold the faith in that very simplistic literal way, then they shouldn’t hold the position they do, since the tradition, taken literally, is against them. I never received a response to that challenge. Faith, in the end, cannot be a matter of consistency. It’s all about suggestibility, as John Schumacher points out, and is primarily a way of anaesthetising thought.
Josh –
“If I could make one suggestion for a different approach in style over radio, I’d say, don’t let the Maddy Buntings of the world blather on so long.”
I know – I didn’t do a great job of not letting them. I tried! But as you say, it’s not easy. Both Rana and the producer coached me on it beforehand; Rana, especially, said it would be hard because the other two are in the studio and can see Rana signalling, and I’m not and can’t. The main problem I think is that both the other two are very good at sustaining a rapid breathless flow (that is empty of content, but for this purpose that doesn’t matter) which makes it impossible to break in without sounding aggressively interruptive. I myself don’t much like radio discussions that are full of mid-sentence interruptions, so I always waited for the ends of sentences, which seldom came…
But. I do wish I had asked Maddy why mention the Anglican church and women vicars while ignoring her very own Catholic church. Ah well!
Now I’ve listened a second time though I realize that Bunting actually did interrupt me quite aggressively at least twice, so that she did in fact kind of grab control. The ‘strident and shrill’ bit was an interruption, not a reply to anything. She cut me off in order to accuse me of being strident and shrill – there’s something amusing about that.
Well, yes, OB, she did. But the whole thing was composed of typical religious blustering, except when you managed to squeeze in a word here and there. The moderator tried to give you a chance, and really did cut Bunting off in the end. I had forgotten that Bunting was catholic. Yes, why did she mention women in the Anglican Church? Nothing comparable in her own?! But of course that’s why they have to keep up the breathless patter. If you stop the flow, they lose their reason for being! Because there are no reasons – it’s all just words, in the end. Listen to it once again, and notice how words, not reasons, predominate.
Ah, Eric, you never disappoint! Glad you chimed in.
Yeah, it really is damned funny to have someone interrupt (quite obviously) to say “you’re strident and shrill.” Almost like a Monty Python sketch. Bunting is the kind of woman that can drive me to really unkind thoughts, like wanting to stub my cigarette out on her hand every time she gasps and splutters, and “doesn’t quite understand whatever it is that you meant to say, really, because, um, I think it’s very much . . .” blah, blah, blah.
Well she did ask me for permission – as it were – ‘May I ask you a question? My question is: I find the tone of your book very strident and shrill.’
Gertrude, Gertrude, what is the answer.