Recent events in both France and England have again focused attention on the wearing of the veil, headscarf or hijab by women from Muslim communities. Is this, as Islamists claim, an issue of religious freedom? Or is it rather, as many women of Muslim origin would argue, about oppression?

The French government, who recently banned the wearing of headscarves in schools and public institutions are in no doubt. Nor was the judge in Luton, England, who decided that requiring a Muslim girl to wear a standard school uniform – and no veil – was not an infringement of her religious rights.

Suddenly the veil has become a major issue. Veiling the heads and bodies of little girls and adolescents has … Read the rest

Peter J. Swales, author of numerous pioneering essays exploring the early history of psychoanalysis, is unimpressed by Mark Solms’s article in the April 2004 issue of Scientific American, “Freud Returns”. Here we reproduce an unpublished letter to Scientific American which questions Mark Solms’s competence in the field of Freud scholarship, together with an addendum and postscript.

Letters to the Editors
Scientific American

May 10, 2004

In reproducing a diagram from an 1895 manuscript, Mark Solms endeavours to portray Sigmund Freud as both percipient and prescient by drawing special attention to the “contact barriers” between neurons whose action he there supposedly “predicted”. Solms elaborates: “Two years later English physiologist Charles Sherrington discovered such gaps and named them synapses”. In truth, … Read the rest

Update: New material on the campaign against Shari’a Court in Canada

Report of Meeting with Marion Boyd Regarding Shari’a Court in Canada

On Thursday July 15, 2004, Homa Arjomand, Co-ordinator of the International Campaign Against Shari’a Court in Canada was called to a meeting with Marion Boyd regarding concerns about Shari’a court in Canada. Marian Boyd has been appointed by Premier Dalton McGuinty to review the 1991 Arbitration Act

This meeting lasted over three hours and many issues and case studies were presented:

Homa Arjomand emphasized the fact that The Ontario Arbitration Act 1991 has made it possible for the Islamic movement to make another attempt to attack both secularism and the women’s movement for equality. She stated that … Read the rest

Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative religious organization, delivers what could be the signature line for our backwards times in America:

There’s an arrogance in the scientific community that they know better than the average American.

In fact, of course, scientists do know quite a bit better than the “average American” about the matters for which their scientific expertise equips them. Those with knowledge, surprisingly, know more than those who are ignorant. Is that arrogance?

As Chris Mooney remarked, “science is not a democracy,” and in a democratic culture, that inevitably becomes a cause of resentment, as Ms. Lafferty’s comment attests. This resentment of competence was first made vivid to me when I appeared … Read the rest

Although Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature is clearly intended to be read primarily by graduate students or instructors just beginning their teaching careers, one can also read the book, against the grain of the author’s own rhetorical goals, perhaps, as a guide for the academic outlander to the curious practices of that disciplinary subculture responsible for what still passes as literary study. Those who retain an image of the English professor as a high-minded if pedantic guardian of the treasures of Literature will find provided here what amounts to the finishing touches on the recast image the profession has been working on for at least twenty years. Just as high-minded but in a more earnest, socially-conscious way, even more firmly attached … Read the rest

Our brains are huge, particularly if you take into consideration the relative size of our bodies. Generally, the proportion of brain to body is pretty tight among mammals. But the human brain is seven times bigger than what you’d predict from the size of our body. Six million years ago, hominid brains were about a third the size they are today, comparable to a chimp’s. So what accounts for the big boom? It would be flattering ourselves to say that the cause was something we are proud of–our ability to talk, or our gifts with tools. Certainly, our brains show signs of being adapted for these sorts of things (consider the language gene FOXP2). But those adaptations probably were … Read the rest

The European and local elections of June 2004 saw the emergence of a new political party in the United Kingdom; called Respect, it presented itself as a new force in British politics, driving a progressive agenda. However, there are contradictions within this agenda, and in its practices, which threaten to turn it into a reactionary party rather than a progressive one.

Respect, or to give it its full title, Respect – The Unity Coalition, was formed on the 1st February 2004. It was set up both to replace the Socialist Alliance (although it was stated that Respect’s position was not explicitly socialist), and also to transform the Stop the War Coalition into a political party – thus taking protest against … Read the rest

John Milton, who in his Paradise Lost selflessly gave the world the image of hell as a lake of fire, was also the 17th century’s greatest proponent of freedom of speech: as long as you were a Puritan (like Milton) or an Anglican (like the king) you should be able to say anything you like–as long as you did not attack Puritanism or the Anglican Church. Catholics, on the other hand, were but the puppets of a Satanic pope, disloyal British subjects who therefore should be allowed no such rights. John Locke, another Puritan and one who greatly influenced the founders of the American republic, held similar views.

This is all mildly interesting from an historical point of view, but … Read the rest

Around the time of the huge demonstrations of February 15 th 2003, the Stop the War Coalition had emerged as one of the biggest protest movements in British history, yet it failed to achieve its goal of preventing war in Iraq. Moreover, within weeks of the February protests, the STWC had gone into decline with startling rapidity. Its core activists were unable to capitalise on the huge groundswell of support they had received prior to the war in Iraq , and it was to become dogged by poor leadership and vulnerable to hijack by political and religious extremists.

The Stop the War Coalition had been formed on September 21 st 2001 in London , in the wake of the September … Read the rest

[Note: Murli Manohar Joshi was the minister of Human Resource Development and Science and Technology under the BJP government. He led the campaign to Hinduize education in public schools and universities. He was the architect of the Vedic astrology programs introduced in Indian colleges and universities in 2001.]

Murli Manohar Joshi has learned the hard way that astrology does not work after all. The will of the Indian voters has overturned the alignment of auspicious stars in the astrological charts of the BJP, just as it has defied the numerology of the pollsters.

Indian voters have thrown out the obscurantist-in-chief and the party he represented. Even though most of the 370-million-strong voters did not consciously set out to punish the … Read the rest

The British astronomer Percy Seymour has recently published a new book entitled The Scientific Proof of Astrology (2004). Two reviews of the book were published in the mainline press—Ian Sample’s “Written in the Stars” (The Guardian, May 18, 2004), and Johnathan Leake’s “Top Scientist Gives Backing to Astrology” (Sunday Times, May 16, 2004). Both articles are misleading in some ways in which they present the information.
For a start, Seymour’s recent ideas aren’t overly different from those he published in Astrology: The Evidence of Science (1988), revised edition (1990), and The Scientific Basis of Astrology (1997). Seymour is not interested in star -sign horoscopes so popular with much of the astrological community. You will also look … Read the rest

Allen Esterson comments on Melvyn Bragg’s radio programme on hysteria, “In Our Time”, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 22 April 2004.

Melvyn Bragg, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s long-running weekly series “In Our Time”, has an impressive record of encouraging practising scientists to make even abstruse scientific topics accessible to the radio-listening public. But when it comes to Freud and psychoanalysis it’s a different story. Whereas scientists are questioned closely about the origins of the ideas in their field, Bragg’s chosen experts on Freud (ne’er a dissenter among them) are given a free run to propagate their faith to the listeners, and manifest errors and dubious assertions are rarely challenged.

On 22 April 2004 the chosen topic was “hysteria”, and … Read the rest

The May 2004 issue of Scientific American carries an article on Freud and some recent research in neuroscience with the title “Freud Returns”. Below are some comments on the article by Allen Esterson.

I never cease to be astonished at the confidence with which erroneous assertions about Freud are made in articles such as “Freud Returns” in the May 2004 issue of Scientific American, written by Mark Solms, psychoanalyst and neuroscientist. For instance, Solms writes: “When Freud introduced the central notion that most mental processes that determine our everyday thoughts, feelings and volitions occur unconsciously, his contemporaries rejected it as impossible.” This piece of psychoanalytic mythology has been shown to be false by historians of psychology since the 1960s and … Read the rest

Modern agriculture is increasingly being used as an all encompassing category of evil by critics of globalization and transgenic (genetically modified) food crops, and by street protestors and their mentors and organizers. Implicit in the protest rhetoric is a dichotomy between modern agronomy (assumed to be large corporate enterprises either farming or selling to farmers) and small self-sufficient farmers, who replant their own seeds from year-to-year and have little or no reliance on the market for inputs.

The difference between the two presumed types of agriculture could not be more stark in the minds of the believers. The enemy is the monopolistic seed corporations and industrial farms that are mechanized, use purchased inputs including synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides, and … Read the rest

Martha C. Nussbaum’s new book, “Sex and Social Justice,” makes a case for liberal feminism.

More than a generation ago, women’s rights established a foothold in U.S. politics. Women’s rights included primarily, though not exclusively, a concern for equal treatment under the law; this in turn focused down to two areas of central concern: equality in access to educational opportunity and equality in compensational structure and career opportunities.

Persons, male as well as female, who supported and campaigned for women’s rights were, and are, feminists. There are few persons today who would openly oppose the general principles of equality that drive feminism.

Feminist political theory has since developed apace. Feminists who believe in the power of legislative and case law … Read the rest

In China, people of a certain generation will tell you stories about an era that might as well be a millenium ago. There are thousands of children, amassed in Shanghai’s train station, waiting for the beginning of what feels to them to be a big and important adventure. Their parents are weeping, watching their children bound towards the carriages on their way to the countryside, where – as part of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – they will spend their formative years learning from the peasants.

The kids who participated in this vast exodus are now in their forties and fifties, and most complain of the gap in their education and the wasted decade lasting from 1966 to the death … Read the rest

Not long ago the television show Biography aired a documentary on the life of Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company. Midway through the film came the obligatory two minutes concerning Ford’s anti-Semitic rantings, his Nazi medal, and his anti-Jewish newspaper The Dearborn Independent. When it came time to put Ford’s anti-Semitism into perspective, the film-makers explained that Ford’s views were part and parcel of growing up on a Reconstruction-era farm in southeast Michigan, and as such the great man was no different than anyone else of his time and place. The film-makers didn’t go into the reasons why the good folks of southeast Michigan should be naturally anti-Semitic. There were after all no Jews to speak of in … Read the rest

The Underlying Belief System

Gail Omvedt speaks of a “a distorted image of farmers held by a section of the urban elite” in India as well as in developed countries. This mythic image:

depicts them romantically but demeaningly as backward, tradition-loving, innocent and helpless creatures carrying on their occupation for love of the land and the soil, and as practitioners of a “way of life” rather than a toilsome income-earning occupation. These imagined farmers have to be protected from market forces and the attacks of multinationals, from the seductions of commercialization and the enslavement of technologies (Omvedt 1998).

Modern agriculture and the food supply it provides, along with modern medicine and the pharmaceuticals and technological devices it uses and the … Read the rest

Meera Nanda’s book Prophets Facing Backward is an extraordinary and compelling book. Few in the West are aware of the alarming confluence of ideas arising out of the contemporary nationalistic politics of India with its endorsement of ‘Vedic science’ and the dominant postmodernist, social constructivist and sociological trends in science studies in the West. Nanda’s book is an intellectual bombshell dropped on this potent combination. No one interested in the ways in which science and culture can interact should ignore this book and the challenging case it makes against the prevailing orthodoxies of much that passes for Western science ‘studies’. It should serve for years to come as a reference point for what can go wrong in science studies when … Read the rest

Introduction

On 5 January, 2004, the renowned Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune was vandalized by some 150 thugs. Priceless manuscripts and artefacts were destroyed. Those responsible declared themselves to be members of the ‘Sambhaji Brigade’, linked to the Maratha Seva Sangh, a regional organization with anti-Brahmin sentiments. They apparently chose this method to protest against allegedly insulting remarks made against their hero, Shivaji, in a recently published book by the American historian James W. Laine.

The link with the Institute was somewhat indirect: Laine had acknowledged the help of several academics at Bhandarkar with the translation of certain manuscripts. The book concerned, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, has been withdrawn by Oxford University Press, and the author has … Read the rest