Sometimes the disgust surges like bile.

Amid continued protests, the pressure on the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin is continuing to mount, as a prominent Muslim cleric today called for her to apologise for her “anti-Islamic” writings.

He didn’t call for her to, he ordered her to, in no uncertain terms.

[T]he offer to remove the paragraphs from new printings of the bestseller was not enough for Syed Ahmed Bukhari, the chief cleric of New Delhi’s Jama Masjid mosque, who suggested earlier today that Indian Muslims should “not tolerate the infamous authoress Taslima Nasrin on the Indian soil” unless she offered a written apology for what he called her “anti-Islamic publications”.

“The apology must bear her assurance that in future she will desist from repeating such venomous writing that may have any inkling of blasphemy,” he said in a statement. “India is a democratic nation and the constitution here neither does permit any citizen nor allow any foreign national to be irreverent to the tenets of any religion,” the cleric continued. “The entire responsibility of the consequences shall rest upon the government of India,” Bukhari warned.

That’s good, isn’t it – India is a democratic nation and thus it follows as the night the day that it forbids citizens and foreigners alike to be irreverent to the tenets of any religion. India is a democratic nation and therefore it has no truck with any pesky notions about people’s freedom to say what they think. But in case his audience doesn’t get the message, he finishes up with a nice flourish of threats. What a despicable man.

Things are humming in the Maghreb. Excellent.

Human rights activists from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania attending a Tunisian seminar last week stressed the need to separate religion from state as “an essential approach to realizing gender equality.” The “Maghreb Women’s March towards Realizing Equality” seminar on November 24th and 25th addressed the marginalisation of the Maghreb woman and the gender gap in each country…Activist Malika Remaoun from Algeria complained about the concessions given to Islamists at the expense of women…Tunisian Balkis Mechri agreed, saying “the battle to realize equality is not only legal, but social as well.” Ourida Chouaki of Algeria, however, warned that secularism in Maghreb societies is mistakenly being perceived as a call to apostasy.

And doubtless also painted and framed and presented as a call to ‘apostasy’ which of course is not just disapproved but forbidden. That’s one hell of an obstacle to get around. Good luck Maghrebians.

Razi pointed out that family law still gives men the right to polygamy, compels the return of women to the matrimonial home and governs child custody…Rejectionists, she maintained, “are using religion as a means to swallow up women’s rights”.

It’s a good wheeze, isn’t it. It’s a capital crime to leave the religion, and the religion is used to forbid women’s rights. Heads I win tails you lose.

Good luck Maghrebians.

Ho hum – a woman says women are equal, male clerics pitch fits.

Zeinab Radwan…announced during a conference on “Citizenship” that “the testimony of a woman is legally equal in weight with a man’s testimony.”…Clerics were swift to condemn Radwan’s statement, as expected. Gamal Qutb, former head of the Fatwa council in Al-Azhar, impugned Radwan’s credibility on Islamic Jurisprudence and warned against tampering with the Shari’a. In his view, it would be insane to continuously alter interpretations of the Quran every time conditions in society human behavior changed.

Oh well quite. Exactly so. It would be stark staring insane to keep on and on and on forever changing interpretations of the Koran simply because conditions changed – what could possibly be madder than that? Because conditions change all the time, society changes, human behavior changes, all those things are fickle as windmills, they’re always whirling up and down and round about, first one thing then another; one minute it’s slavery and hierarchy and violence and the next minute it’s equality and freedom and peace, up down, up down, skirts long, skirts short; it’s all so arbitrary and whimsical and meaningless, there’s no way to choose among them, of course the only thing to do is have one interpretation of one book written fourteen centuries ago and then stick to it like death forever after no matter what. Because who cares if people grow and learn and change, who cares if we gradually collect data and explanations and experience that indicate that some ways of life are better for more people than other ways of life are? A pox on all that; what we want is stability and continuity and certainty and above all predictability – we want to know that women were inferior yesterday and they’re inferior today and they’ll be inferior tomorrow. We want to know where we are. We want to be able to find our way around with our eyes shut because it’s too god damn much trouble to open them.

While being interviewed by Al-Jazeera yesterday, Qutb lashed out at the Western world for “having molded such speakers to serve their interests and who are being guided by the West. Those who live in our midst while representing another culture and regardless of their elevated worldly status are unqualified to speak on religious matters.”

Those who live in our midst while representing another culture – interesting touch – reminiscent of Leon Kass’s ‘All friends of human freedom and dignity—including even the atheists among us’ combined with the convenient genuflection to ‘culture’. Note the contradiction, too – we mustn’t change interpretations of the Koran every time conditions in society change, yet ‘culture’ is a valor-word. On the one hand the timeless and eternal, on the other hand the contingent and situated and mutable. Well that’s clerics for you, any port in a storm.

A comment or attempted explanation on BBC jokes got my curiosity awake.

This still seems to need spelling out for some. In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam. Gibbons was convicted of this crime. Should it be a crime? No. Given that it is a crime, was Gibbons guilty? Again, no: she didn’t insult Islam. Nevertheless, she was convicted of insulting Islam. In saying so I quote no-one, but simply state a fact. Tim Evans was wrongly convicted of murder, not “murder”.

Which is to say that the BBC wasn’t doing anything risible or marked or noteworthy by reporting that

Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, had spent eight days in custody for insulting Islam before eventually being pardoned by President Omar al-Bashir.

The claim seems to be that news organizations don’t use scare quotes on crimes if they are in fact crimes in the state that is in question. ‘In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam’ so it is not normal practice to put scare quotes on ‘insult Islam’ with reference to Sudan. I thought about that, and it seemed to me that it wasn’t true; so I did a little looking and found something. Then I wished I hadn’t wasted any time looking, because I remembered Turkey’s Article 301 which outlaws ‘insulting Turkishness’ – I know the BBC uses scare quotes on that ‘crime,’ I knew that even before looking it up. ‘Insulting Turkishness’ is decidedly a real crime in Turkey: prosecutions for it are not rare, and the existence of the crime has been a major stumbling block for Turkey’s membership of the EU.

So – behold the Beeb putting scare quotes on a crime even though it is a crime to insult Turkishness in Turkey.

Turkey’s most internationally-acclaimed novelist will go on trial here charged with “insulting Turkishness”.

The fact that Article 301 exists does not prevent the BBC from putting scare quotes on the crime that Article 301 forbids. Therefore there is nothing automatically or necessarily or ethically or journalistically preventing the BBC from putting the same scare quotes on ‘insulting Islam’ when reporting on Gillian Gibbons. It chose not to; I chose to point that out; I fail to see that there’s anything obviously unreasonable about that. Why would it not be of interest to notice what an influential news medium chooses to hold at arm’s length and what it doesn’t? Why would it not be of interest to notice the ways the BBC frames various issues? It’s supposed to be a good thing to be media literate, isn’t it? Isn’t noticing things like subtle cues and unobtrusively coded language and careful wording part of the whole project of figuring out how media outlets shape the way we think?

Sure it is. It could still be the case that I did a crap job of it, of course, but I don’t think the ‘In Sudan it is a crime to insult Islam’ argument shows that.

The Beeb really is hilarious sometimes. In its report on Gillian Gibbons’s story it puts ‘ordeal’ in quotation marks but leaves ‘insulting Islam’ free of them. So we get

A British teacher jailed in Sudan for letting her class name a teddy bear Muhammad has spoken of her “ordeal”, after returning to the UK. Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, had spent eight days in custody for insulting Islam before eventually being pardoned by President Omar al-Bashir.

You have to admit – that really is funny.

I trust you read that piece by John Tierney on the need to be more respectful of female genital mutilation – or rather, of what he carefully decides to call ‘female circumcision’ because it’s critics who call it female genital mutilation. Well we call it that because chopping off the clitoris and most of the labia and sewing up the whole hatchet-job does seem like mutilation – we critics are funny that way.

Tierney’s piece on Leon Kass’s speech last week was terrific, but this one is…not so good. I do not like it. It makes me cross.

But the one by Richard Shweder puts Tierney’s in the shade. It’s jaw-dropping.

He’s very angry with feminists who don’t like FGM.

The article is one of a series of sensational, lurid and horrifying pieces that the Times has printed over the past decade or so covering the topic, all giving one-sided and uncritical expression to a representation of the practice that has been constructed and widely circulated by feminist and First World human rights activist groups.

Horrors. Feminists and human rights activist groups have ‘constructed’ a representation of FGM that portrays it as a drastic mutilation imposed on female children as a way to control women by chopping off most of their genitalia. How imperialist, how colonialist, how elitist, how cosmopolitan, how wicked. Of course mutilation of girl children is a fine thing as long as it’s done six thousand miles away.

If you read and believe those statements or most of the other things you find written about “FGM” in the popular press (which, for the most part, are recapitulations of the advocacy literature) then you must conclude that Africa is indeed a “Dark Continent”, where for hundreds, if not thousands of years, African parents have been murdering and maiming their daughters and depriving them of the capacity for a sexual response. You must believe that African parents (mothers and fathers) are either (a) monsters (“mutilators” of their children) or (b) fools (who are incredibly ignorant of the health consequences of their own child rearing practices and the best interests of their children); or (c) prisoners of a insufferably dangerous tradition that they themselves would like to escape, if only they could find a way out, or else (d) that African women are weak and passive and live under the patriarchal thumb of cruel, loathsome or barbaric African men.

In short, you must be a racist. Is that clear? Do you understand? Is the implied threat unmistakable enough? If you think FGM is mutilation then you think Africans are monsters, stupid, trapped, and passive. In order not to think that you have to understand and accept and believe that FGM is PERFECTLY ALL RIGHT for the people who already think it is perfectly all right, just as footbinding was perfectly all right for the people who thought that was perfectly all right.

[A]t least two things have changed since the 1920s and 1930s in Africa: anesthesia is more available, and the “civilizing” missionary efforts of militant Protestants have been supplemented and even supported by the evangelical interventions of global feminists and human rights activists…[I]t is time for a new more tolerant neo-liberal global discourse to be developed concerning unfamiliar or “alien'” body modification practices around the world. One of the central human rights claims of this new “tolerance promoting” (or at least “sufferance promoting”) neo-liberal discourse might be the following: that an offense to the culturally shaped tastes and sensibilities of cosmopolitan elites or the citizens of rich and powerful societies (whether they are Christian missionaries or secular humanist human rights activists) is not sufficient reason to eradicate someone else’s valued way of life.

‘Cosmopolitan elites’ is interesting – I wonder if Shweder is aware of how Nazi that particular formula is. If he is aware, it seems incredibly bizarre that he uses it as a weapon. But more to the point: it’s interesting that he thinks having or not having sheared off external genitalia is a mere matter of culturally shaped tastes and sensibilities – rather as if non-fans of FGM were campaigning for the people of Somalia and Egypt to eat more sushi.

I am going to argue that the emerging rules of the cultural correctness game have been fixed by the “First World” and deserve to be critiqued…I am going to suggest that these “First World” governments and activist organizations (who, ironically, often frame their campaigns in a discourse of human rights) have actually acted in violation of several human rights, including rights to self-determination and rights to family privacy…

Family privacy – yes – that is indeed where things get tricky. Let’s look at ‘rights to family privacy’ for a second. Do they include rights for male members to beat or whip or lash female members? Do they include rights of sexual access for all males to all females? Do they include rights to deny medical treatment? Rights to force children to marry people of the parents’ choosing no matter how repugnant? Rights to give young daughters to much older men to pay a gambling debt? Rights to give daughters to other tribes to settle disputes or compensate for a crime? Rights to kill daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, aunts who disobey male relatives?

He goes on to say more reasonable things about rights and the difficulty of grounding them, but the first half of the piece is riddled with unpleasant innuendo.

I heard Robin Fox explaining that democracy is not ‘natural’ on NPR this morning. He said we think that what we’re used to is human nature, but it’s not, it’s just what we’re used to. Most people in the world are used to tribalism, he went on, and that’s what they want. They don’t care about nation or categories like ‘Arab,’ they care about family and tribe and what brings honour to them.

It’s interesting, and persuasive up to a point, but only up to a point. For one thing, there are objective benefits that tend to go with democracy and don’t tend to go with tribalism. And for a perhaps more significant and more far-reaching thing, what does Fox mean by ‘they’? He means what people always mean by ‘they’ in such contexts: he means the people who determine what ‘the tribe’ wants, and in tribes and all other hierarchical patriarchal arrangements, that means the people who have the power to do that, and that means (some of) the men. In other words Fox doesn’t actually know what everyone wants, because he can’t, because the people without power are silenced. They don’t get to sit around with the visiting anthropologist and tell him what’s what.

Natasha Walter could perhaps fill in the picture a little. She went back to Afghanistan last year, and was shocked and depressed at what she found. On her previous visit, soon after the Taliban was kicked out, she went to a ‘dirt-poor village’ and met women involved in a literacy project after years of no education and house arrest under the Taliban.

When I asked the students, who ranged from 13-year-old girls to 50-year-old widows, if they thought all women in Afghanistan wanted more freedom and equality, my translator struggled to keep up with the clamour: “Of course we do,” said one widow furiously. “Even women who are not allowed to come to this class want that. But our husbands and brothers and fathers don’t want it. The mullahs keep saying freedom is not good for us.”

On her second visit, the room was empty.

“They were threatening us, telling us not to do it any more, and we were scared. For a while we continued, but we were afraid that they might do something worse. This place is a place of Taliban. Neighbours may work for the government in the morning but at night they are the same Taliban with the same thoughts.”

All very tribal or familial – but ‘they’ are not happy about it. The women are miserable. Let’s not be too sure they don’t want those funny foreign things but would much prefer to stick with their good old families and tribes.

Human Rights Watch says that a third of districts in Afghanistan are now without girls’ schools, due to attacks on teachers and students by the Taliban and other anti-government elements; and traditional practices such as child marriage and baad, in which women are exchanged like objects in tribal disputes, still continue unchallenged. “Every day women are sacrificed for their family or tribe,” Nilab Mobarez, a 45-year-old doctor who stood recently as a vice-presidential candidate, tells me angrily. “We still do not have the judicial system to resolve this.” Women who stand up against oppressive traditions are vulnerable; the number of assassinations and threats against women working for the government and international organisations is rising.

Let’s not be too sure all those women are delighted to be sacrificed for their family or tribe. It doesn’t sound as if they are.

Walter talks to Malalai Joya.

“I have only just moved here,” Joya says. “I have to keep changing my house. I hate guns, but I have to have men with guns guarding me all the time. One day they will kill me. They kill women who struggle against them.”…”Here there is no democracy, no security, no women’s rights,” she says. “When I speak in parliament they threaten me. In May they beat me by throwing bottles of water at me and they shouted, ‘Take her and rape her.’ These men who are in power, never have they apologised for their crimes that they committed in the wars, and now, with the support of the US, they continue with their crimes in a different way. That is why there is no fundamental change in the situation of women.”

Then she makes a crucial point.

Joya talks like this to me, furiously, for more than an hour, almost weeping as she catalogues the crimes against women that still keep them in a state of fear: from Safia Ama Jan, the leading women’s rights campaigner assassinated in Kandahar earlier this year, to Nadia Anjuman, a poet murdered in Herat last year; from Amina, a married woman who was stoned to death in Badakhshan in 2005, to Sanobar, an 11-year-old girl who was raped and exchanged for a dog in a reported dispute among warlords in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan last month. She is desperate for people to take account of the silent women whose voices we never hear.

That’s just it you see – we never hear their voices because they’re not allowed to use them. They’re not quiet because they’re content, they are silenced. It’s very very important to keep that always in mind when trying to think clearly about these subjects. Fox is of course right that it’s silly to take it for granted that our way of doing things is the natural and best way, but it’s mistaken to assume that the way group or tribe X does things is the way all members of group or tribe X wants to do them – it’s mistaken to forget that whole swathes of people may be systematically prevented from ever saying or acting on what they want, and that powerful people don’t invariably treat powerless people kindly and generously.

Are you shy? Introverted? Reserved? Hostile? Easily bored? Hypercritical? Tightly wound? Quarrelsome? High maintenance? Have you considered medication? It could be that KlineGlasgowSmith has just the pill for you. Do you have restless legs? A limp dick? Flat hair? Do you get hungry several times a day? Do you scratch a lot? You could have a treatable syndrome: please turn on your tv, and the right ad for your condition will appear sooner than you expect.

Frederick Crews looks at the wonderful interplay between Big Pharma and middle-class hypochondria.

Most of us naively regard mental disturbances, like physical ones, as timeless realities that our doctors address according to up-to-date research, employing medicines whose appropriateness and safety have been tested and approved by a benignly vigilant government. Here, however, we catch a glimpse of a different world in which convictions, perceived needs, and choices regarding health care are manufactured along with the products that will match them…Clearly, the drug companies’ publicists couldn’t exercise their consciousness-shaping wiles so fruitfully without a prior disposition among the populace to strive for self-improvement through every legal means…Americans have required little prodding to believe that a medication can neutralize their social handicaps and supply them with a better personality than the one they were dealt by an inconsiderate fate.

See, that’s where I elude their clutches; I’ve never wanted a better personality, even though I would never describe my personality as the ideal personality for everyone to aspire to. I just happen to like mine, that’s all. I like being grouchy and surly and difficult; it suits me; I’m used to it. I’m bemused by people who want to be warmer and more gregarious. What an odd thing to want, I always think, pounding another nail into the board over the window.

I didn’t know about this though – drug companies concealed the side effects of SSRIs and argued in court that there was insufficient evidence for them – until –

Eli Lilly bought the marketing rights to a near relative of its own patent-lapsed Prozac. According to the new drug’s damning patent application, it was less likely than Prozac to induce “headaches, nervousness, anxiety, insomnia, inner restlessness…, suicidal thoughts and self mutilation”.

Fascinating, isn’t it? Deny the side effects until the patent lapses and it’s time to sell a new one, and then mention the side effects. Don’t I feel clever and vindicated for having no urge to take pills to make me Nicer.

Then there’s the way the DSM is geared to validating ‘disorders’ so that psychiatrists can treat them and insurance companies will treat them. (This is US of course, not relevant to other places.)

As for psychiatry’s inability to settle on a discrete list of disorders that can remain impervious to fads and fashions, that is an embarrassment only to clear academic thinkers like these two authors. For bureaucratized psychological treatment, and for the pharmaceutical industry that is now deeply enmeshed in it, confusion has its uses and is likely to persist.

Great phrase, that: confusion has its uses. It does indeed.

A couple of days ago I asked what if there had been (quoting Bunglawala) ‘apparent intention to offend Islamic sensibilities or defame the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad’ – would that make the arrest of Gibbons okay?

Should ‘defaming the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad’ or ‘offending Islamic sensibilities’ be a criminal offense under the law? It’s good that Bunglawala said Gibbons shouldn’t have been arrested, but his reason for saying so is not so good, and the fact that the BBC is still automatically phoning the MCB for the obligatory comment is also not good. The BBC still needs to expand its Rolodex.

Bunglawala obliged us by answering the question*, and what do you know, he answered it as I thought he would; he answered it as a theocrat would answer it.

Muslim majority countries have their own laws and customs. If you set out to deliberately insult the Prophet Muhammad in a country where such behaviour is regarded as unacceptable and against the law then I would have little sympathy for you.

And that’s the man the BBC still thinks is the first person they should phone for a comment on these issues – that’s the man who is still often the only Muslim quoted in its Muslim-relevant reporting – that’s the man who is still considered and treated as some kind of establishment, obvious, central, representative, sane, reasonable, non-extremist non-wacky spokesperson for all British Muslims. It’s astonishing.

*Thanks to mirax for alerting me.

Ed Husain takes Ayaan Hirsi Ali to task.

Just as Wahhabites and Islamists bypass scholarship, context, and history in the name of “returning to the book”, Hirsi Ali and others such as Robert Spencer and Ibn Warraq commit exactly the same error…Let’s take the question of apostasy. At an Evening Standard debate the other night, Rod Liddle had no qualms in declaring Islam, with a barrage of other baseless abuse, “a fascistic ideology”. Why? Because the Qur’an commands the killing of those who abandon it…[T]here is no verse in the Qur’an that calls for the killing of apostates…There is no stronger argument against religious fanatics than to illustrate the scriptural weaknesses of their case.

Well, maybe so, when you’re dealing with religious fanatics, but that still leaves you with the problem of having to argue over what’s in a 1400-year-old book – it still leaves you with the problem of worrying about what ‘scripture’ says instead of about what is best for human beings in the light of current knowledge and accumulated understanding and moral insight.

When ex-Muslims such as Hirsi Ali ignore the nuances, complexities, and plurality inherent within Islam…then she plays into the hands of extremists and allows their discourse to dominate one of the great faiths of our world. Worse, it creates a public space in which attacking all Muslims and Islam becomes acceptable, even fashionable.

Attacking Islam is and should be acceptable, and even fashionable. Attacking all Muslims of course should not, but attacking Islam (and any other religion) should. Attacking people is bad, attacking ideas and beliefs is not.

Timothy Garton Ash is also pondering the issue.

When a Muslim letter-writer in yesterday’s Guardian tells us, with the aid of Qur’anic references, that Islam, properly understood, supports “the vital principle of freedom of speech”, what possible interest have we non-Muslim liberals in arguing against him?

None in arguing against his support of free speech, certainly…but there are risks in basing that support on claims that the Koran is really liberal after all, because there are always going to be plenty of people who will offer up different Koranic references to support the claim that it’s not.

Nick Cohen disputes Garton Ash’s view.

Garton Ash met Hirsi Ali at an electric meeting in London on Wednesday. Unlike Buruma he had the good sense and good grace to think again and he gave her a public apology. Nevertheless, he stuck to the argument that there was no point in liberals treating her as a heroine because her abandonment of Islam and embrace of atheism meant her arguments carried no weight with Muslims. Instead he told us to encourage those Muslims who reject the stoning of women because they dispute its scriptural authority. Religious debates about whether the Prophet Muhammad really approved of stoning may be ‘gobbledegook’, but, he cried, ‘We must support gobbledegook that is compatible with liberal democracy.’

Well there’s a stirring call. There are risks either way, so I’m not attracted to the ‘support bullshit’ version.

I’m not sure how he can be certain that Hirsi Ali has no influence. How does he know what seeds she is planting in the minds of Muslim women? I know one former jihadi who thought again after reading Salman Rushdie…Ayaan Hirsi listened to Garton Ash and had two questions. If liberal secularists, like my heckler, didn’t have pride and confidence in their principles, why should they expect anyone else to take them seriously? And if, like Garton Ash, they turned away from democrats and insisted on treating European Muslims as children who can only be spoken to in the baby language of gobbledegook, what right did they have to be surprised if European Muslims reacted with childish petulance rather than the broad-mindedness of full adult citizens?

Two damn good questions, if you ask me.

Just a little more.

First of all, I mostly agree with Norm here.

One thing we are saying is that the human worth of those prisoners in the camps was being denied. Making them stand naked and vulnerable in the circumstances I have described was a way of announcing that anything – anything at all – could be done to them…To put the same thing differently, the respect or status we normally hold to be due to people simply in virtue of their humanity has here been removed.

But then that is putting it differently, and that’s what I’m saying. I don’t really literally think ‘dignity’ is meaningless – but I do think it means too many things and that some of them are suspect or tricky, and that’s one reason I don’t like it for these purposes, although there isn’t really any substitute word that I do like. I do agree that degradation of this kind is special; I don’t mean to minimize that; but I don’t think humans have only two states: dignity or degradation. I think something is removed from people when they are degraded, but I don’t think dignity is exactly what that something is. Respect is closer. It perhaps doesn’t matter much…I think one reason I keep worrying it is that I’m curious about exactly what it is that’s removed. I keep coming back to the thought that it’s a feeling of normality – not dignity, not really even respect or status or worth (although those are all relevant), but just normality, just feeling ordinary, like everyone else, all right. And the other thing I keep coming back to when I think that is that that’s enough, and that it sort of matters that it’s enough. We don’t have to aspire to anything elevated, we just want to be all right, we don’t want to be treated like garbage. I prefer the minimalism of that. Why…?

Because it seems more reasonable, more like something we all get to expect; it seems…humble, human, everyday, commonplace, like bread, or air, or sleep, or peace. Not something inflated and puffed up, not something grand, not on stilts. Maybe that’s all it is: I just don’t want the stilts. We all, all, all have every right to expect to be left in peace and allowed to walk around without being bullied or stripped naked or bought and sold, and to me dignity doesn’t feel like the right word to describe that ordinary state of being. We love our lives and our ordinary state of being even if they have no great truck with dignity.

And just a little more. I’m like a dog with a bone, you know. There’s a rather Kassian argument in comments on an older post (combined with some vituperation to make it go down more smoothly). It’s interesting.

One doesn’t need to be a Christian, or even a theist, to be extremely alarmed at some of the directions that secular ethical thinking seems naturally inclined to go in – especially in its common utilitarian and more generally consequentialist forms…The concept of human dignity is central to any attempt to articulate the strong feeling shared by many (including many atheists) that something has gone badly wrong with this sort of ethical thinking….It’s difficult to say what’s wrong with necrophilia (if anything is wrong with it), or with leaving one’s mother’s corpse out for the garbage collector, without appealing to this concept or something very like it.

Maybe so – but then I don’t think anything is wrong with those two things, given certain stipulations (no one else harmed, etc). These two items would fit perfectly well in ‘Taboo,’ which used to be on B&W as well as TPM (and for which I wrote an essay) but got taken down when the hacker struck, and which is now in the briskly-selling Do You Think What You Think You Think? which I see in good bookstores everywhere. I think necrophilia is obviously disgusting, but that doesn’t make it wrong, and I don’t think it is necessarily wrong. Mother’s corpse is interesting, because if you think about it, corpses are basically taken away by garbage collectors, just in a cleaner and more polite manner. Don’t get me wrong, I find the idea repellent and painful, but again, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong. (Leaving aside the law, and sanitation concerns.) Suppose a situation of total isolation, suppose the mother doesn’t know and neither does anyone else, suppose the offspring is untroubled by this arrangement and never regrets is; why would it be wrong? Wouldn’t it be Yuk rather than wrong? Taboo? It’s okay to heed taboos like that (some of them – others are about, say, untouchables, or people of Other Races), because the feelings matter, but if they’re not there and no one else is harmed…?

Dignity. We got an interesting discussion in the comments, and I suddenly realized (belatedly) that I could think of contexts in which the word ‘dignity’ wouldn’t repel me: contexts and situations in which people have managed to hang onto their dignity despite the assaults of other people or of nature. I probably still wouldn’t use it myself, but I would see the point of it.

But where this started was with Leon Kass; that’s why potentilla asked the question that prompted my series of them. I left Kass out of the dignity post, because I wanted to talk about the idea more generally and also (partly) more loosely. I wanted to free associate, partly. But now let’s look at Kass some more.

He uses the word no fewer than eight times in that speech, and it’s fundamental to his whole strawman indictment of ‘scientism’. He uses it to give force and weight and a kind of prestige to his alarmist fantasies about ‘soul-less’ scientism.

Scientific ideas and discoveries about living nature and man, perfectly welcome and harmless in themselves, are being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and dignity…All friends of human freedom and dignity—including even the atheists among us—must understand that their own humanity is on the line…Instead, bioprophets of scientism…issue bold challenges to traditional understandings of human nature and human dignity…In order to justify ongoing research, these “humanists” are willing to shed not only traditional religious views but any view of human distinctiveness and special dignity, their own included…Here, in consequence, would be the most pernicious result of the new biology…the erosion, perhaps the final erosion, of the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious, or godlike, and its replacement with a view of man, no less than of nature, as mere raw material for manipulation and homogenization.

The whole long speech is a textbook example of the attempted argument ‘this would be bad therefore it is false,’ and it also relies repeatedly and consistently on absurd false dilemmas. Every few paragraphs we’re given a choice between two alternatives as if two exhausted the possibilities when in fact there are myriad other possibilities. The whole ‘freedom and dignity or scientistic reductionism’ binary is the overarching false dilemma, of course, and the one between ‘ the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious, or godlike’ and ‘mere raw material’ is one of the many supporting false dilemmas. And that string of adjectives hints at why I basically dislike the word. I don’t and don’t want to think of humans as noble, dignified, or godlike. Valuable (rather than precious), yes, but the other items, no. And that doesn’t force me to choose ‘mere raw material’ instead – why the hell would it? Leon Kass just says it would, he never explains why it would.

And that makes me suspicious of the word and its uses. I suspect that it’s the kind of word that people like Kass reach for when they want to snow credulous audiences with grand verbiage. People like Kass meaning people making fundamentally bad, sloppy, emotive arguments; people relying on rhetoric and tingly words to make their case for them because nothing else will do it.

Norm doesn’t agree.

One oddity of Ophelia’s argument, as it strikes me, is that it holds to the meaninglessness of ‘human dignity’ while at the same time insisting that humans shouldn’t be degraded or humiliated. But ‘degrade’ carries on its face that there is a standard in light of which some person is being reduced…But if we believe – as Ophelia does believe – that there are general standards valid for the treatment of all human beings and just because of their humanity, then it seems logical to say that there are general forms of human degradation and humiliation and that human dignity is the thing they assault.

I don’t think so. I think the standard in light of which some person is being reduced is that of the ordinary average ‘normal’ state of affairs – I don’t even think it necessarily has a name. It’s just how things ought to be, how we feel all right; degradation and humiliation are intrusions on that. I don’t think when we are humiliated or degraded we normally think of our ‘dignity’. I still think dignity is in a way asking too much – I think we can claim a right not to be degraded but I’m not sure we can claim a right to dignity. But it’s also true that I don’t object to that usage, whereas I do object to Kass’s. I think Kass’s really is meaningless, because I think humans don’t have dignity in the sense that he means it – dignity such that it’s a violation of it for a cognitive scientist to research emotions or morality. His idea of it depends, as he says all too frankly in the closing pages, on our being ‘in the image of God.’ I’m leery of the word because it seems to be all tangled up with nonsense on stilts of that kind.

Joan Smith nails the problem.

In the past, Catholics and Protestants took turns to slaughter each other as Sunni and Shia are doing now, but Christianity has to a large extent been secularised…At the heart of this process is an alteration in the status of religious texts…The idea that a single book written centuries ago has unique authority – in effect, a veto over all other ideas – makes no sense in societies where intellectual curiosity is valued and encouraged. Yesterday Inayat Bunglawala, assistant general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, criticised the arrest of Ms Gibbons in Sudan and described it as a “quite horrible misunderstanding”. But during a public debate in London two weeks ago, he refused my invitation to condemn unequivocally the practice of stoning women to death for adultery. It had happened during the lifetime of the Prophet, he said, “so you are asking me to condemn my Prophet”.

If that’s what it takes, certainly. If ‘your Prophet’ commands or condones stoning women to death for adultery (or anything else for that matter) then yes.

Bunglawala is not the guy to turn to for reasonable views.

Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, also said it appeared to have been a “quite horrible misunderstanding” and Ms Gibbons should never have been arrested. There was no apparent intention to offend Islamic sensibilities or defame the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad, he said.

What if there had been? If there had been, should she then have been arrested? Should ‘defaming the honour and name of the Prophet Muhammad’ or ‘offending Islamic sensibilities’ be a criminal offense under the law? It’s good that Bunglawala said Gibbons shouldn’t have been arrested, but his reason for saying so is not so good, and the fact that the BBC is still automatically phoning the MCB for the obligatory comment is also not good. The BBC still needs to expand its Rolodex.

Notice that the government still feels obliged (understandably under the circumstances) to keep saying with nervous urgency that it respects respects respects.

After the meeting with Ambassador Omer Siddig, Mr Miliband said he emphasised Britain’s respect of Islam and the “close relations” between the two countries. “The Sudanese Ambassador undertook to ensure our concerns were relayed to Khartoum at the highest level. He also said he would reflect back to Khartoum the real respect for the Islamic religion in this country.”

Uh huh. That’s not respect, it’s fear.

Okay, you tell me – what does the phrase ‘human dignity’ mean? I don’t mean look it up, I can do that and that’s not what I’m asking anyway; I mean what does it mean as far as you know? What, if anything, does it suggest to you if you hear it or read it? A commenter pretended to find it scary as well as funny that potentilla and I both consider it meaningless, so I’m curious.

Why do I consider it meaningless? I suppose largely because it doesn’t seem to refer to anything real. What human dignity? I don’t consider humans to have much dignity. We’re too mortal, too fleshy, too fragile, too clumsy, too weak, too dim to have dignity. It’s not a word it would occur to me to use about human beings; it’s not even an abstract noun it would occur to me to attribute to humans. What would be? I would say human inventiveness, human creativity, human curiosity. Human adaptability, intelligence, flexibility, sense of beauty; also the fragility-related ones I indicated above. Cruelty, violence. But dignity? No. I just don’t see us that way. I see us as very complicated animals busily doing a million things; as fascinating, but not dignified.

But why is this either risible or scary? Especially scary? (The risible could be just because it’s so clueless of me – every fule kno what ‘human dignity’ means.) It’s not the case that because I don’t think human dignity means anything that therefore I’m in favour of humans being degraded or shamed or humiliated; I’m not. I think much of the content of B&W makes that pretty unmistakable. So why is it scary? Is the idea that one has to find ‘human dignity’ a meaningful phrase in order to treat humans decently? If so, why would that be? What I think instead is that humans hate being shamed and humiliated, that in fact it is acutely painful for us, and that that is why it should not be done. Why isn’t that adequate?

What’s wrong with the phrase? It’s grandiose, that’s what. It’s a bit of inflated sentimental rhetoric, and I have a real gut-level dislike of sentimental rhetoric. I like precision, and accuracy, and non-inflation. I don’t like parade-ground language or political campaign language or ‘faith community’ language. I’ve thought about it and I don’t think I ever even use the word ‘dignity.’ I dislike it. If someone told me ‘You’ll like Bill, he has a lot of dignity,’ I would know instantly that I would loathe Bill. What’s dignity? It’s an inflated sense of self-worth and self-importance, surely; it’s next door to pomposity. ‘She spoke with a certain quiet dignity.’ No thank you! Who does she think she is, talking like that? In fact I also hate fiction that has people say things ‘quietly’ – I always detest characters who say things ‘quietly.’ It’s meant to indicate that they’re very impressive and superior and Right About Everything, and they make me stop reading whatever it is forthwith. No really – if you’re pissed off, then squawk vulgarly like the rest of us, don’t go saying things quietly. Don’t try to intimidate us with your poxy quiet dignity.

Okay wait – I’ve thought of one exception, and I must say I’m a tad flummoxed, but there it is. The Queen can have her dignity. I much prefer that to the alternative she’s offered. I’m no royalist, but as long as she’s there, she can have her dignity. She did do her best to hang onto it when she had to give that awful speech to appease the baying tabloids after Diana’s undignified car crash, and that was all right. But anyone else? Her husband? Pff. That’s not dignity, that’s a combination of militarism and bastardism. The pope? The archbishops? The president? You’re laughing now, right? You could say Mandela maybe, but I wouldn’t call it that – he’s not pompous enough. Not nearly. That’s why the Queen gets the exemption, I guess: her job forces her to have to parade up and down and be looked at a lot, and given that, she does have to look like something, and at her age by gum she has the right to decide it will be dignified. I noticed it when she was on tv last week – she looked quite grim, quite stiff, quite plodding – and that’s all right. She doesn’t have to look as human as Mandela does.

All right but really now – what is ‘human dignity’? A way of saying that humans should not be degraded? But it’s not. We don’t say humans are immortal as a way of saying they shouldn’t be murdered. Humans just shouldn’t be degraded, that’s all, because they don’t like it, any more than they like being hit or run over or made to eat rotting lobster. They don’t have to be dignified first.

Jesus and Mo discuss the ‘personally offensive’ issue. I would love to think Bill Buckingham will see that – but perhaps if he did he wouldn’t realize that it was about people like him.

Richard Chappell also discusses it.

It’s so depressing how arbitrary subjective responses are presented in public discourse as though they were legitimate reasons…The underlying problem, I suspect, is that our public culture has become so infected with subjectivist assumptions that people don’t realize that there’s a difference between desires and reasons. Sentiments are taken as given; no-one ever stops to question whether their reactive attitudes are warranted. Any kind of negative emotion is not just evidence, but constitutive, of suffering injustice. You’re offended, therefore they’re in the wrong.

And all you have to do is say the magic words ‘I’m personally offended by _____’ and everyone is supposed to start clawing the air with eagerness to make you feel better and rescind whatever it was that made you personally offended. That’s clearly what Bill Buckingham was expecting from the world at large. ‘I’m personally offended by evolution’ – and? And someone very important should immediately issue a statement saying evolution has been withdrawn and we’re all very sorry and it will never happen again? Or what? What do people really think should be done about a great mountain of evidence dispersed among thousands of institutions and books and minds all over the world, that they find personally offensive? That it should all be, like, vaporized with one blow of the MagicVaporizerRing? Who knows.

Spinoza’s Lens has appeared in public.

The Manhattan Institute, a conservative ‘think tank’ in the US, declares its mission on each page:

The Mission of the Manhattan Institute is to develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility.

Oh yeah? Then what’s the latest piece of obscurantist theistic sciencephobic mystification from Leon Kass doing there? The ideas are so not new that they’re more like a putrefying corpse, they’re about closing down greater economic choice rather than fostering it, and they’re about irresponsible irrational scaremongering rather than about individual responsibility. Fucking typical of most US conservatives of the respectable stripe: they talk resounding bullshit but they line up obediently behind ‘ideas’ that ought to be anathema to them; in short, they’re just party hacks who make right-wing groupthink everything and careful rational thought nothing, while pretending to do something different. A pox on them.

And on the twice-curdled dreck that keeps spilling out of Leon Kass.

But beneath the weighty ethical concerns raised by these new biotechnologies—a subject for a different lecture—lies a deeper philosophical challenge: one that threatens how we think about who and what we are. Scientific ideas and discoveries about living nature and man, perfectly welcome and harmless in themselves, are being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and dignity. A quasi-religious faith has sprung up among us—let me call it “soul-less scientism”—which believes that our new biology, eliminating all mystery, can give a complete account of human life, giving purely scientific explanations of human thought, love, creativity, moral judgment, and even why we believe in God. The threat to our humanity today comes not from the transmigration of souls in the next life, but from the denial of soul in this one, not from turning men into buffaloes, but from denying that there is any real difference between them.

Impressive, isn’t it? In its ineffable familiarity, its staleness, its pathetic adherence to a formula, its witlessness? I especially admire that ‘let me call it “soul-less scientism”‘ as if all this bedwetting were original with him. Yeah sure Leon, let you and fourteen thousand other people call it that; it still won’t add up to anything useful. (Do you fret about ‘soul-less engineering much? Soul-less shoe repair? Plumbing? Dry cleaning?)

All we have here is yet another incarnation of the absurd strawman claim about a quasi-religious faith that believes biology can give a complete account of everything everything everything, including – would you believe it? – love! creativity! moral judgment! God! That’s a tremendously profound, illuminating, shrewd, cogent, perceptive observation except for the one tiny problem that it’s not true. There is no quasi-religious faith that biology can give a complete account of everything everything everything, that’s a ridiculous claim and it has no function except to rile up a credulous audience. Leon Kass should be embarrassed at himself.

The stakes in this contest are high: at issue are the moral and spiritual health of our nation, the continued vitality of science, and our own self-understanding as human beings and as children of the West. All friends of human freedom and dignity—including even the atheists among us—must understand that their own humanity is on the line.

That’s a nice touch, isn’t it? Even the atheists among us – those unclean kafirs, those aliens, those Others, those bizarre beyond the pale monsters, whom we normally exclude but this time include, and who are inexplicably and frighteningly ‘among us.’ There’s a wealth of implication in that one nasty phrase, all of it unpleasant. And I’d much rather trust ‘my own humanity’ to an honest biologist than to a creeping hyperbolist like Kass.

Science seeks to know only how things work, not what things are and why. Science gives the histories of things, but not their directions, aspirations, or purposes…Science can often predict what will happen if certain perturbations occur, but it eschews explanations in terms of causes, especially of ultimate causes.

And religion doesn’t, and that’s because science understands the limitations of inquiry and religion doesn’t. The explanations that religion gives of ‘ultimate causes’ are worth precisely nothing, and the fact that it offers such explanations while science doesn’t is not a point in religion’s favor but on the contrary a demerit.

It’s a long piece. There’s a lot more of the same kind of thing – arguing from desired states to the truth of what is required for them to be true (Kass wants to feel dignified, therefore the selfish gene is all wrong; etc) and flinging epithets around the way the elephant’s child flung melon rinds. It’s got no connection with what the Manhattan Institute purports to be about, it’s wishful thinking mixed liberally with vulgar abuse, it’s tripe.

How to get into the newspapers: say something fatuous and self-regarding and preeningly righteous.

Second-year dental student Emily Mackie said the university’s decision to call its inaugural Dundee Christmas Lecture “Why Evolution is Right … and Creationism is Wrong” is badly timed and insensitive to Christians.

And this makes it into a newspaper because…nothing ever happens in Dundee? Too chilly up there is it?

But since it did make it into a newspaper, I can’t resist looking at it.

The lecture is being given by Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College, London, who claims that all biologists support the theory of evolution and that “intelligent design”—the belief that life was created as part of a divine plan—is wrong.

He ‘claims’ that, does he? Goes right out on a limb and claims that? Imagine. (Steve Jones wrote a little something for B&W once you know – he contributed to the group article on the decision in the Kitzmiller case. ‘Up the Joneses,’ he said, amusingly, celebrating Judge John Jones, Bush appointee and sensible judge.)

Miss Mackie, who is also a member of Dundee University’s Christian Union—reckons the lecture will create divisions rather than bring the community together. She said, “I appreciate that the role of a university is to encourage academic debate on a wide range of sometimes controversial issues. However, as a Christian I am offended that the lecture purporting to coincide with such an important Christian festival has so clearly been chosen to antagonise Christians.

‘As a Christian I am offended’ – there’s one of the worst, most repellent formulas in the discourse of complaint we have today – but boy is it popular. Variations of it were all over Nova’s ‘Judgment Day’: one stalwart citizen of Dover after another talking about being offended. I think that was the first thing the awful Bill Buckingham said – ‘I am personally offended by evolution because the Bible etc etc etc’ – the ‘personally’ was a nice annoying touch. So you’re ‘personally’ offended by reality, so what! The world doesn’t revolve around you, so suck it up.

And by the way the ‘such an important Christian festival’ is codswallop, as Mackie ought to know. It’s an important shopping and eating and air travel festival, it’s not genuinely Christian at all; it has nothing real to do with Christianity (surely she’s heard about the ancient solstice festival?), so she has even less business being offended.

“I also feel that the lecture title allows no scope for a balanced debate on the subject. I call on the university to take a moral stand and choose a new title which better reflects the celebration of the birth of Christ.”

What would that be? “Happy Birthday Baby Jesus: Why Evolution is Right … and Creationism is Wrong”?

Dundee University said its decision to book Professor Jones for its Christmas lecture was “opportunistic” as he is a highly sought after speaker who could only be available at this time…“However, I would deny that we have put opportunism over sensitivity as I think this will provide an opportunity for all sides of the argument to be aired.”

That’s another one – it’s like the mirror-image of ‘offended.’ It’s what you’re supposed to run to the closet and fetch when someone is offended – sensitivity. They’re a co-dependent couple, those two words. Offended and sensitivity; they’re like egg and chips, apple and pears, Ben and Jerry’s. But all the same, there is something very stomach-turning about the idea that a university is supposed to deploy ‘sensitivity’ about the organ of offendedness in godbothering students when planning its lectures on academic subjects.

Timothy Garton Ash gets it wrong, I think.

He gets it wrong in one rather specific way.

In the form “Islamofascism”, and with the added spice of references to “totalitarianism”, the label elides two things that need to be kept separate. One is the mentality of death-seeking and death-delivering fanatics. The other is a totalitarian political system…Now, if nuclear-armed Pakistan and oil-rich Saudi Arabia fall the wrong way, we could be there sooner than we think – but at the moment the only serious contender for the title of Islamic-fascist state is the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Has he been paying enough attention to Saudi Arabia? It’s not a whole lot more benign than Iran. In some ways it has a much firmer grip. I would say it’s a contender.

But the other way is broader.

Most Islamic terrorists are, in some sense, Islamists, but most Islamists are not terrorists. They are reactionaries. They propose a profoundly conservative religious vision of society which, in its attitudes to free speech, apostasy, homosexuality and women, is generally anathema to secular liberal convictions (including, emphatically, my own). But for the most part they do so through peaceful political means, not through violence.

It’s very hard not to make a cheap point about the sentimental views of people who are so sheltered and safe themselves that they can’t even see how things are for other people. It is ludicrous to say that religious reactionaries ‘propose’ their profoundly conservative religious vision of society through peaceful political means – of course they don’t! They don’t propose it, they impose it, wherever they have the power to do that, which is of course at home. They don’t just propose that their daughters shouldn’t see the wrong boys or that their sons had better not be fags or that ‘apostasy’ is forbidden to everyone; they impose all those mandates, and if they are not submitted to, the response is indeed sometimes violence. Surely it’s not a newsflash that religious reactionaries do coerce people when they can and do sometimes resort to violence when they’re resisted? In fact violence of that kind is quite explicitly celebrated in some Christianist writing – that’s an important part of what is affectionately called ‘traditional values.’ One of those traditional values is the importance of corporal punishment of children.

Garton Ash is dreaming if he thinks that peaceful political means are compatible with reactionary religion. Reactionary religion is first and foremost about coercion; that is the essential point of it; that is what makes it reactionary. It is not liberal, it is not about choice, it is not about reasoned debate and free speech and leaving each other alone as long as we do no harm; it is about the opposite of all of those. That’s why it’s hell; that’s why we hate and fear it; that’s why theocracy is anathema. It’s a mistake to minimize it.

And another other thing. Did you know there is no rule of law in Saudi Arabia? That judges get to just make it up as they go along? I sure as hell didn’t. But Human Rights Watch says it is so.

During the recent hearings, Judge al-Muhanna of the Qatif court also banned the woman’s lawyer, Abd al-Rahman al-Lahim, from the courtroom and from any future representations of her, without apparent reason…On October 3, King Abdullah announced a judicial reform, promising new specialized courts and training for judges and lawyers. There is currently no rule of law in Saudi Arabia, which does not have a written penal code. Judges do not follow procedural rules and issue arbitrary sentences that vary widely. Often, judges do not provide written verdicts, even in death penalty cases. Judges sometimes deny individuals their right to legal representation.

Well what fun, yeah? Courts run on the principle of ‘whatever the judge happens to feel like.’ Judicial reform sounds slightly overdue.