The Vatican is planning a party. Sounds like fun.

The Vatican has called on Catholics to atone for the sex abuse scandals that have engulfed their church in recent years by taking part in what may be the largest global prayer initiative ever seen…[E]very diocese in the world should name a priest to work full-time on the arrangements for the “perpetual adoration” of the eucharist. This would involve parishioners taking turns to keep a round-the-clock vigil in front of a consecrated host representing the body of Jesus…The aim was “to make amends before God for the evil that has been done and hail once more the dignity of the victims”, who had suffered from the “moral and sexual conduct of a very small part of the clergy”. He did not indicate how long he saw the adoration continuing.

Or, apparently, how the whole thing would work. How would parishioners taking turns standing around in front of a bit of bread ‘make amends’ (before God or before anyone else) for sexual abuse of children by priests? It’s not exactly entirely altogether perfectly clear – but hey, these people know what they’re doing, they’re experts in the field, if they say standing around in front of pieces of bread I mean perpetual adoration of the eucharist will make amends, then –

I gotta go.

Ah yes, the matriarchy myth. That’s one I haven’t gotten around to yet. Long overdue!

I have been a close observer of the myth of matriarchal prehistory for fifteen years now and have watched as it has moved from its somewhat parochial home in the feminist spirituality movement out into the feminist and cultural mainstream. But I haven’t been able to cheer at the myth’s increasing acceptance. My irritation with the historical claims made by the myth’s partisans masks a deeper discontent with the myth’s assumptions. There is a theory of sex and gender embedded in the myth of matriarchal prehistory, and it is neither original nor revolutionary. Women are defined quite narrowly as those who give birth and nurture, who identify themselves in terms of their relationships, and who are closely allied with the body, nature, and sex—usually for unavoidable reasons of their biological makeup. This image of women is drastically revalued in feminist matriarchal myth, such that it is not a mark of shame or subordination, but of pride and power. But this image is nevertheless quite conventional and, at least up until now, it has done an excellent job of serving patriarchal interests.

Precisely. Difference Feminism bollocks. Yes we are nurturing and sweet and slightly dim, but that’s a good thing. Bleah. We’re not nurturing and sweet, dammit, we’re ornery and crabby and disobliging and we bite.

[I]t is my feminist movement too, and when I see it going down a road which, however inviting, looks like the wrong way to me, I feel an obligation to speak up. Whatever positive effects this myth has on individual women, they must be balanced against the historical and archaeological evidence the myth ignores or misinterprets and the sexist assumptions it leaves undisturbed. The myth of matriarchal prehistory postures as “documented fact,” as “to date the most scientifically plausible account of the available information.” These claims can be—and will be here—shown to be false. Relying on matriarchal myth in the face of the evidence that challenges its veracity leaves feminists open to charges of vacuousness and irrelevance that we cannot afford to court.

Relying on any kind of myth in the face of the evidence that challenges its veracity leaves the people who rely on it looking like chumps. ID, Afrocentrism, Noah’s ark, the Goddess; away with all of it.

This idea that human rights are for individuals rather than for groups is relevant to the Vatican’s reflection on the Rights of the Family in the context of the Universal Declaration, too. (Do you see a pattern here? There is one. Religions, especially coercive, totalizing, domineering religions such as Catholicism and Islam and Protestant fundamentalism, are suspicious of human rights and would like to elbow them aside in favour of group rights, especially [of course] religious-group rights. We need to watch that, so that we can fight back.)

This bit of the Pontifical Council’s ‘reflection’ is the giveaway:

One aspect of fundamental importance for the promotion of human rights is recognition of the “rights of the family”. This implies the protection of marriage in the framework of “human rights” and of family life as an objective of every juridical system. The Charter of the Rights of the Family, presented by the Holy See, implies the conception of the family as a subject that includes all its members. The family is thus a whole which should not be divided up when it is being dealt with by isolating its members—not even for reasons of social substitution which, although necessary in many cases, should never put the family as a subject in a marginal position.

What’s that saying? That the family should be treated as a person, indivisible and with rights, and that in aid of that the members of the family should not be treated as indivisible persons with rights, they should be treated as parts of an indivisible whole. The family is a subject, with all that that implies, and the people who make up the family are merely parts of that subject.

That’s a really terrible idea. It’s also nonsensical. Families aren’t persons; no matter how united and loyal and loving they are, they still are never persons, they are groups of people, and a group of people is never the same thing as one person. You don’t add a person and a person and a person and get one big person, you get three people; three different, separate people, each with her own wants and needs and plans. They may all cohere and cooperate and agree, fine, but that still doesn’t make them all one person. No group has a mind; no group is aware; no group has consciousness or sensations or feelings or experience. All those belong to single individuals, one at a time. They may want to make sacrifices for the good of their family or religious group or political party, but that is still not the same thing as the notion that any of those groups has its own rights. Beware of anyone who tries to persuade you otherwise.

Beware of ‘religious and cultural specificity.’ Beware especially when religious and cultural specificity is invoked in the context of human rights. Religiously and culturally specific human rights are not the real thing, they are impostors wrapped up in burqas. The International Humanist and Ethical Union knows.

The Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) representing the 56 Islamic States renewed its attack on the Universality of Human Rights at the 6th Session of the Human Rights Council that ended on 14 December. On Human Rights Day, 10 December, Ambassador Masood Khan, speaking on behalf of the OIC, claimed that the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam “.. is not an alternative, competing worldview on human rights. It complements the Universal Declaration as it addresses religious and cultural specificity of the Muslim countries”.

No, it doesn’t; it doesn’t complement, it competes; it contradicts, it denies, it deprives, it prevents.

Even a cursory reading of the Cairo Declaration shows just how widely its definition of human rights differs from those of the UDHR. No “complementary” document (the word implies adding to, not subtracting from) should restrict the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration. Yet this is precisely what the Cairo Declaration does. Under Shari’ah law a woman has no personal autonomy. A women’s word or the word of a non-Muslim counts as half that of a Muslim man; and they are valued as half that of a Muslim man. No woman is considered an autonomous individual but needs a guardian: her father, husband, son or another male relative, and may not make autonomous decisions. Freedom of religion is limited to freedom to become and remain a Muslim. Apostasy and any actions or statements considered blasphemous are harshly punished, in some states by death.

Oh that kind of religious and cultural specificity.

On 18 December 2007, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution “Combating Defamation of Religions” by 108 votes to 51 with 25 abstentions…The resolution expresses “deep concern about the negative stereotyping of religions and manifestations of intolerance and discrimination in matters of religion or belief”. But the only religion mentioned by name is Islam…The Western delegations stood firm, however, in their opposition to this resolution. The Portuguese delegate, speaking for the EU, explained clearly why: “The European Union does not see the concept of ‘defamation of religions’ as a valid one in a human rights discourse. From a human rights perspective, members of religious or belief communities should not be viewed as parts of homogenous entities. International human rights law protects primarily individuals in the exercise of their freedom of religion or belief, rather than the religions as such.”

Human rights are for humans, not for groups. Human rights are for individuals, not for groups. The IHEU ends on a depressing note…

Notwithstanding these objections, those opposing the resolution found themselves on the losing side of a two-to-one majority in favour. The implications of this resolution for freedom to criticise religious laws and practices are obvious. Armed with UN approval for their actions, states may now legislate against any show of disrespect for religion, however they may choose to define “disrespect”. The Islamic states see human rights exclusively in Islamic terms, and by sheer weight of numbers this view is becoming dominant within the UN system. The implications for the universality of human rights are ominous.

Anthony Grayling points out a great and central struggle of ideas:

[A]re individual human beings capable of overcoming such limitations of circumstance…to achieve by will and endeavour what they identify as good…? Or are people, or the vast majority of them, too weak, too fallible, too constrained by those circumstances, to be able to do this, meaning that they are essentially dependent, and need to be instructed and guided by the few who assume the role of leaders, teachers, those who know the right answers and possess the truth?

I would say we’re all more or less weak and fallible and constrained, but not so weak and fallible and constrained that we are essentially dependent. That’s perhaps a somewhat optimistic view, but I do think most people can change and learn and improve.

The monolithic ideologies require a dependent, submissive mass mind; in recovering the classical idea of individual potential for autonomy – the capacity of individuals to shape themselves according to their conception of such truly human goods as love, friendship, pleasure, kindness, knowledge and discovery, creativity and achievement – the modern western liberal and secular mind has fought to break itself free from that imposed dependency.

The fight is risky, because people are weak and fallible and they can always go toddling off towards fascism or jihadism or God hates fagsism or some other combination of ignorance with bullying. But the alternative – a dependent, submissive mass mind – is so awful (and anyway also risky) that the risk seems worth it.

This is not a merely abstract point…[T]he matter is so fundamental that it merits far more than blog-bitesize examination. That examination might show why there can be such passionate opposition to anything that requires the entrapment of the human mind in the cage of one big truth that demands submission, the yielding of the autonomy that is our central human potential – think of the Christian tenet of “dying to the self” and what is meant by the “sin of pride” (viz thinking one can get by without God), remember that “Islam” means “submission”, think of Stalinism: they are all about obedience, heteronomy, dependence, tutelage, amounting even to a prohibition against thinking for oneself; for the first sin in Eden was disobedience, and the disobedient act – all too significantly – was one of acquiring knowledge. And what is this submission and heteronomy but the condition of slavery…?

Exactly. And I suppose that’s one of my most bedrock beliefs or assumptions – my ‘religion’ if you insist – that thinking for oneself is of the essence of being human, and that if you give that up you miss what it is to be human; you miss the kernel of the experience; you might as well be a cat or a potato. ‘Be a Potato for Stalin/Allah/Jesus’ – no thank you.

The Vatican seems to have a strange lack of acquaintance with reality – at least its Council for the Family does. It has a statement on the family and human rights which floats weirdly free of the difficulties that humans tend to encounter.

The father and the mother, as a couple, with the characteristics proper to them, procreate and raise the child. The child thus has the right to be welcomed, loved and recognized in a family.

That’s a pretty idea, but the trouble is, it’s the Vatican itself that does more than any other human institution to make that right impossible to implement. It’s the Vatican that forbids birth control, thus removing (in intention at least, which is what’s relevant) people’s ability to avoid having children who are not wanted and thus at risk of not being welcomed. The same applies to abortion. The child may have a right to be welcomed and loved, but what of it? who is going to force the parents to welcome and love the child if they don’t in fact want it or (in the event) love it? The Vatican? How?

As the first natural community, the family is the exemplary place for solidarity. In the family human beings gradually become aware of their dignity, acquire a sense of responsibility, and learn to give attention to others. In the family, solidarity develops beyond the spouses’ love relation and extends to the relations between parents and children, siblings, and inter-generational relations.

Need for reality check again. ‘In the family, solidarity develops’ when it does, but when it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Has no one at the Pontifical Council for the Family ever encountered an unhappy (a ‘dysfunctional’) family? Has it never encountered a family that is more indifferent than anything else? Or one that is downright hostile, or one that is bullying and demanding and controlling? One that is shot through with tensions and jealousies and resentments? One that is estranged? Does the Pontifical Council for the Family really seriously think that all families are of their nature and essence loving and loyal and generous? Some are, certainly, but all of them? No. Yet the Pontifical Council prattles away as if it had never even read any Jane Austen, or any newspapers.

Family values people are like that, I suppose – they’re so keen to stamp out all the freedoms and choices and eccentricities and ways of living that thrive outside the familiar ones that they’re forced to pretend there is no flourishing outside The Family and no misery inside it. But then do they convince anyone?

A lot of women in Saudi Arabia attempt suicide. Now there’s a surprise.

Within family circles, boys always get preferential treatment. What is more, there is very little or no communication between girls and their parents. The report highlights many factors that can lead women to consider killing themselves, one of them being forced marriages.

Others probably being things like no freedom of movement, no ability to walk around in public looking at the sky and the flowers and anything else that comes along, no sense of having equal rights and duties. That must get a trifle dispiriting.

Disregarding a woman’s free will and her right to choose her life can simply lead her to desperation.

Well yes. It can.

Hmmmm.

This week the “better” democracies are wagging fingers at worse ones, like 17th-century popes reprimanding missionaries in the distant jungle. They tut-tut over a stuffed ballot box in Nairobi, a banned radio station in Islamabad or a murdered journalist in Moscow. They condemn a riot here, a bombed polling booth there and an imprisoned politician somewhere else. How dare these “developing” peoples corrupt the sacred rites of mother church?

They what? They ‘tut-tut’?? Over a ‘stuffed ballot box in Nairobi’ – meaning a possibly stolen election followed by an outburst of ethnic cleansing which perhaps heralds more? Over ‘a banned radio station in Islamabad’ – meaning eight years of military dictatorship, a state of emergency declared in order to fire all the Supreme Court justices and replace them with more compliant ones, followed by a tiny matter of the murder of the likely winner of the upcoming election? Over ‘a murdered journalist in Moscow’ – meaning Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered perhaps by the government, for exposing human rights abuses in Chechnya? These things strike Simon Jenkins as trivial and apparently slightly laughable? Not the kind of thing anyone should ‘tut-tut’ over? Well what would be the right kind of thing then?

If I had been Musharraf in receipt of such patronising remarks, I would have drawn deep from the well of irony. I would have referred Britain’s prime minister to his poor poll rating and said Islamabad was “dismayed” he had funked a democratic mandate last October. I would have expressed Pakistan’s disappointment at Brown’s record on habeas corpus, ID cards and the exploitation of Pakistani doctors by the NHS.

No doubt you would, but what is your point? That Gordon Brown and Pervez Musharraf are much of a muchness and that there is really nothing to choose between them? That Gordon Brown is the same kind of thing as a military dictator?

For all the manifest horror of the past week in Pakistan and Kenya it is presumptuous for the west to demand that the world take the same route to self-government that it spent bloodthirsty centuries pursuing. We may regard liberal democracy as the one true religion, but it is doubtful if many Russians or Chinese do likewise at present. Like many places on earth, they give a higher rating to security and prosperity.

Well if that’s the case, then they could vote for that, if they got the chance, couldn’t they. But if they don’t get the chance, then you don’t know what they give a higher rating, do you. What makes you so sure it’s not ‘presumptuous’ for you to decide what they give a higher rating when there is no mechanism for them to declare that? Presumptuous yourself.

Pamela Bone notes that Islamists hate women.

The fear of women, of women’s freedom, and most of all, of women’s sexuality, runs through Islamism. It is a large part of Islamist hatred of the West. “The issue of women is not marginal,” writes the Dutch scholar Ian Buruma. “It lies at the heart of Islamic occidentalism (anti-Westernism).” It is the “deep, ignored issue”, writes Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism. Why, I wonder, is it mainly men who are making these points?

Well, I’m not sure it is, really; it may be just that the men who are making these points are bigger names than the women who are making them are, but there are a good few women making them. Gina Khan, Homa Arjomand, Azar Majedi, Marieme Hélie-Lucas, Maryam Namazie, Houzan Mahmoud, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and many many more. I consider myself one of them, in my own small way. There are lots of us. Eventually the drip drip drip of water will wear away the stone.

Al-Qa’ida has made it perfectly clear that its aim is an Islamic caliphate, first in all nominally Muslim countries and ultimately in the whole world. The jihadis would, if they could, impose the same rampant misogyny on women worldwide as was, and still is to a large extent, imposed on the women of Afghanistan.

Of course they would. Otherwise what’s the point? Rampantly misognyist oppression and suppression of women is the chief, central, throbbing reward of being an Islamist; without that the game is hardly worth the candle. (What, you get to force everyone to pray five times a day? Where’s the fun in that?) That’s why I went into a prolonged fit of rage and despair when I turned on the news in San Francisco last Friday; that’s why I don’t think Islamism is the hot new form of radicalism that’s going to make the world a better happier freer place; that’s why I dislike putative leftists who have a soft spot for Islamism. I take it personal-like.

Norm Levitt reads Steve Fuller. You remember Steve Fuller, right? The guy who so helpfully testified for the defense – for the ID side – at Dover? The guy whose testimony helped the other side win? The supposed lefty who is a fan of creationism? Sure you do.

The book under review is Fuller’s subsequent effort to justify philosophically the position that failed so miserably to sway the Kitzmiller ruling in ID’s favor. It is with frank satisfaction and not a little glee that I can report that it is a truly miserable piece of work, crammed with errors scientific, historical, and even theological…In this review I also want to consider the defection of Fuller (who all his life has proclaimed himself a progressive and “leftist”) to a cause demonstrably reactionary in all respects.

No but see the thing is the religious side is always the left side because The People are religious and The Scientists are an elite so therefore a good lefty always has to side with religion.

That obliviousness is even more evident in Fuller’s utter failure to come to terms with the political nature of the Intelligent Design movement. He mentions the notorious “wedge” strategy once or twice, but only with an exculpatory purpose…The “wedge”…is a patently reactionary political program, not a philosophical one. Naturally, this embarrassing fact is too much for someone who, like Fuller, thinks of himself as a left-populist, to admit directly.

Some of us had some experience of trying to argue with Fuller directly over at Talking Philosophy, but he’s one of those exasperating people who just ignore anything they don’t feel like answering. Like Theo Hobson. The fact that he doesn’t admit the reactionary nature of the program he’s supporting comes as no surprise.

Hi – This is Jerry.

Ophelia mentioned that we spent Christmas together in California. It was very cool. Here are some photos I took. Thumbnails appear below. Just click on the thumbnail for a larger picture.

(If the guy who complained last summer about this turning into a travel blog is reading – you should Stop Right Now. You will find this distressing. You have been warned!)

– Pebble Beach sunset

– A beach just past a mission.

– A marsh. (Notice how the sky has cleverly changed colour.)

– This tree is a tree next to a very important tree.

– Ophelia’s favourite dog just after I had read him chapter 2 of Why Truth Matters.

Copies of these prints are available at no good bookshops.

Happy New Year!

Speaking of the combination of bullshit and bullying – consider the way the word ‘faith’ is everywhere used as a tool of that combination. It’s a bully-word precisely because it’s about bullshit; it gets to bully people on the grounds that it is about unwarranted belief. What an odd arrangement.

Look at Deborah Solomon talking to Ian McEwan for instance.

It seems to me that the impulse to atone is a religious one, and yet you are a self-declared atheist. Yes, I am an atheist, and probably Briony is, too. Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It’s a little easier if you’ve got a god to forgive you.

Not necessarily. Faith in itself is not easy to sustain. Well, we won’t get into that.

‘Faith in itself is not easy to sustain.’ And why is that? Because it’s ‘faith’ – it’s not based on evidence or probability or plausibility, it’s just a choice, an act of will; naturally it’s ‘not easy to sustain’ when there are so many ways it can seem wrong. Yet Solomon turns it into a smug boast combined with a reproof. ‘Faith’ is not easy to sustain therefore people who sustain it are brave or loyal or dedicated or athletic, or some such thing. Faith-people are the brave strong tightrope-walking ones, atheists are the pale weak cowards who stay at home and suck on their pacifiers. That’s sheer intellectual bullying, that is, and McEwan, politer than Solomon, allowed her to get away with it. But faith-people really ought not to play that card, because it’s not a legitimate card to play; it gives them an unfair advantage based on other people’s civil reluctance to embarrass them; it’s tawdry and passive-aggressive to take advantage of that politeness.

The Texas Education commissioner used the same tawdry weapon in discussing the firing of Christine Comer.

The Texas Education commissioner, Robert Scott, told The Dallas Morning News that Ms. Comer was not forced out over the message, adding, “You can be in favor of science without bashing people’s faith.” He did not return phone calls to his office.

‘You can be in favor of science without bashing people’s faith.’ What does that mean? You can be in favor of science without forwarding a message saying that Barbara Forrest was going to be giving a talk in Austin? You can be in favor of science without thinking and saying that science classes ought to teach science and not religion? You can be in favor of science without saying that Creationism and ID are not science but religion? Is that what that means? (In the context, it sort of has to mean that; there’s not really anything else it can mean.) Well, if it is, it’s nonsense. You can’t be ‘in favor of science’ while raising no objection to the replacement of science by religion in the science classroom. That’s not ‘being in favor of science,’ it’s being in favor of religion in place of science. But, of course, calling such a view ‘bashing people’s faith’ is just the way to prevent a fair and open discussion of the question and to substitute a sweaty atmosphere of guilt and shame and apology – if people buy it, that is. Chris Comer didn’t buy it; good; no one should buy it. Everyone should be highly sensitized to the deployment of the ‘faith’ guilt-trip, and should ward it off with contumely and scorn.

Some ideas are dangerous any way you look at them. This is one.

Over the past decade, thousands of people, from top politicians to ordinary voters, have been murdered by Islamists in Muslim countries that have held reasonably free elections (Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia). Islamist opposition to democracy is based on the claim that allowing men to legislate would be a form of sherk, that is to say associating Man with God, who is the “sole and ultimate legislator”. Man-made law cannot rival God-made Shariah.

Humans can’t and mustn’t (especially mustn’t, because in fact of course they can, so they have to be stopped) correct or review or displace or act for or contradict or just plain ignore ‘God’; God always trumps humans, humans have to do what God says, never the other way around; yet (here’s where things get scary) ‘God’ of course is not around, not available for consultation or plea, not at the bench to commute sentences or pardon mistakes or hear about extenuating circumstances. All that’s around is a very very old and tedious book, and various interpretations of and commentaries on that book, along with a great many self-appointed interpreters of that book, who are pleased to kill you if you don’t do what they say, armed with the self-righteous claim that they are killing you in the name of this absent ‘God.’ You could hardly come up with a better recipe for that miserable combination of bullshit with tyranny which torments so much of the world. The sole and ultimate legislator is some sky-dweller whom no one ever sees or talks to, so all six-plus billion of us down here on this lumpy little planet are helpless to say anything about our laws or leaders or lives (unless we’re mullahs, of course). Heads they win tails we lose.

So…I was driving around in San Francisco yesterday afternoon, I had dropped Jeremy and Cheryl at the SF airport and then gone on into the city to have fun looking around for a couple of hours until it was time for me to go back to the airport. I turned the radio on and found some okay music and drove up 19th and through the park and through the Avenues a little and over to Arguello, and then the music changed so I looked for another station and hit a news one – and then I found myself repeatedly shouting a bad word as loudly as I could possibly shout it, and kind of thrashing back and forth in rage. It took me awhile to calm down, and all I calmed down into was despair and only slightly quieter rage. I was upset, and I went on being upset all afternoon.

Because…well, perfect. Great. There’s a glimmer of hope that Pakistan might get to be able to have a secular democracy after all, and thus be an example to other majority Muslim countries; and one with a woman at the head of it besides, and thus even more of an example; well of course we can’t have that, so Bang. And I admired Bhutto, while being unsure how justified the corruption charges were or were not. And – you know how it is – I hate it when women who get some power, whether political or intellectual, are killed because they got some power. I hate it. It makes me feel threatened and furious. I hate being reminded that people can prevent each other from doing things any time they feel like it, just by finding a gun or a bomb, and that lots of people do feel like it. It’s the truth, it’s reality, and it stinks.

Merry Xmas. (No war on Christmas here.)

As may be obvious, I’m away for a few days. I’m on the Monterey peninsula doing my day job, and Jeremy and Cheryl are here for a visit. We went to Point Lobos yesterday, on a brilliant beautiful windy day, with pelicans flying back and forth in front of us. Jeremy took a few thousand photographs (he’s a professional you know) and he says he will post some here when he gets back. Normal broadcasting will resume on Friday.

‘If the essays in “Thinking Politically” share a single theme, or better, a common tension,’ says Adam Kirsch, ‘it is Mr. Walzer’s effort to reconcile his liberal instincts with his leftist commitments to socialism and cultural relativism.’

The problem for Mr. Walzer, as a left liberal, is that the left has never really shared the morality of liberalism, or even credited it…To the left, the liberal love of freedom is a self-deception, designed to obscure the fact that the material conditions of life leave most [people] unable to enjoy their freedom. The danger of this conviction is that, once the love of freedom is discredited, freedom itself usually follows, as the history of the last century shows again and again. And when freedom is lost, equality — which was supposed to take its place, in the Marxist vision — also disappears, since without the liberal respect for the individual, there is no basis on which to erect equality.

Unless you just swap group equality, ‘community’ equality, cultural equality. Which is exactly what a lot of people seem to have done, often without fully realizing it, or the implications of it.

It is only because he is deeply wedded to liberalism that Mr. Walzer assumes that all cultures can converge on the liberal belief that the self-legislating individual is the ultimate ground of value. Ironically, Mr. Walzer seems to be guilty of the very same error that he chastises in his polemics against John Rawls and the Rawlsians: His ostensibly neutral moral deliberation rests on principles that he smuggles in because he cannot openly declare them.

Ah yes – the ever-present danger. I was reading a long article or declaration from the Vatican a couple of hours ago, and noticing exactly that. It makes certain things crystal clear and leaves obscure the implications of those things – because it cannot openly declare them. It smuggles in the principles that make one set of things more important – more clarity-worthy – than others. Always something to watch for (in self as well as others, of course).

“If each of us walks with his own god, then all of us will sit in peace under our vines and fig trees,” Mr. Walzer writes sanguinely. But the assumption that our god wants us to sit in peace, rather than to convert the heathen, is already a thoroughly liberal assumption, which would find no purchase in, say, fundamentalist Islam.

Another assumption is that we will all even be able to sit in peace under our vines and fig trees. What will actually happen is that prosperous men will be able to sit in peace under their vines and fig trees while women do all the domestic work and unprosperous men cultivate the vines and fig trees.

The alternative to this illusory neutrality would be openly to confess that liberalism is a positive creed, which holds some human types and some forms of society to be better than others. Such an admission would considerably ease Mr. Walzer’s difficulties in articulating a criticism of the enslavement of women — a practice he clearly loathes but finds it hard, given his axioms, to directly condemn.

Yes. JS and I are busy doing that for this book that articulates a criticism of the enslavement of women (that’s why I was reading a Vatican declaration a couple of hours ago). We openly confess that we hold some forms of society to be better than others. That item is much too big to smuggle.

After that it’s good to be able to read Farrukh Saleem.

Aqsa is dead; she can wear a scarf no more; can go to the school no more. Aqsa can change into jeans no more; she can breathe no more…Honour killing is our export to Canada…Of the 192 member-states of the United Nations almost all honour killings take place in nine overwhelmingly Muslim countries. Denial is not an option…[H]onour killings have taken place in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada. Intriguingly, all these honour killings have taken place in Muslim communities of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada. Denial is not an option.

Soumaya Ghannoushi, meet Farrukh Saleem. Denial is not an option (and neither is obfuscation via ‘discourse’ about binaries and the other and hegemony).

Here’s another fact: Illiteracy and honour killings are correlated. Jacobabad District has a literacy rate of 23 percent, the lowest in Sindh. Jacobabad has the highest rate of crimes of honour; 91 honour killings in 2002…Another fact: Around 2.5 percent of humanity lives in Pakistan. But, nearly 30 percent of all honour killings reported from around the world are reported from Pakistan. Is denial an option? Who will take the honour out of these killings? Who will expose the horror from under the hijab? Who will protect women from the laws of men?

Well, probably not Soumaya Ghannoushi.

Soumaya Ghannoushi tells us there are two discourses that are actually one – that are ‘one in essence’: a conservative one that keeps Muslim women stuck at home and in the power of male relatives, and a liberation one that is opposed to the first one but is (somehow) wicked too.

It is a game of binaries that pits one stereotype against another: the wretched caged female Muslim victim and her ruthless jailer society against an idealised “west” that is the epitome of enlightenment, rationalism, and freedom.

Meaning…what? That there are no Muslim women in wretched ‘caged’ situations? That the ‘west’ is not in fact the epitome of enlightenment, rationalism, and freedom and therefore there are no Muslim women in wretched ‘caged’ situations?

The narrative revolves around a dehistoricised, universal “Muslim woman”; a crushing model that oppresses flesh and blood Muslim women, denies them subjectivity and singularity, and claims to sum up their lives with all their vicissitudes and details from cradle to coffin. It reserves for itself the right to speak for them exclusively, whether they like it or not.

Really? Does it? Where? Who spins this narrative, and where, and to whom? I’ve read a fair bit about this subject and I don’t recall anyone blathering about a dehistoricised, universal ‘Muslim woman.’ Could this be just a phantom in Ghannoushi’s mind? I don’t recall anyone reserving the right to speak for Muslim women exclusively, whether they like it or not, either. I really think I would have noticed.

Representations of the Muslim woman serve a dual legitimising function, at once confirming and justifying the west’s narrative of itself, and of the Muslim other.

Yes yes yes, we know, Orientalism; we’ve heard. Tell that to Gina Khan and Irshad Manji and Maryam Namazie and Necla Kelek and Fadéla Amara and countless others. Then tell it to Aqsa Parvez and Mukhtar Mai and the women of the Abu Ghanem family.

From Taliban, Ahmed Rashid, page 114:

Until Kabul, the UN’s disastrous lack of a policy had been ignored but then it became a scandal and the UN came in for scathing criticism from feminist groups. Finally the UN agencies were forced to draw up a common position. A statement spoke of ‘maintaining and promoting the inherent equality and dignity of all people’ and ‘not discriminating between the sexes, races, ethnic groups or religions.’ But the same UN document also stated that ‘international agencies hold local customs and cultures in high respect.’ It was a classic UN compromise, which gave the Taliban the lever to continue stalling…

In the chapter ‘Women and Cultural Universals’ in Sex and Social Justice Martha Nussbaum tells ‘true stories’ of conversations at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, ‘in which the anti-universalist position seemed to have alarming implications for women’s lives.’ Pp 35-6.

At a conference on ‘Value and Technology’ the economist Stephen Marglin, a leftwing critic of classical economics, gives a paper urging the preservation of traditional ways of life in a rural part of Orissa, India, citing for example the fact that unlike in the West there is no split between values that prevail at work and those that prevail at home. His example of this: ‘Just as in the home a menstruating woman is thought to pollute the kitchen and therefore may not enter it, so too in the workplace a menstruating woman is taken to pollute the loom and may not enter the room where looms are kept.’ Some feminists object. Frédérique Apffel Marglin replies: ‘Don’t we realize that there is, in these matters, no privileged place to stand? This, after all, has been shown by both Derrida and Foucault.’ Those who object are neglecting the otherness of Indian ideas by bringing their Western essentialist ideas into the picture.

Then Frédérique Apffel Marglin gives her paper, which expresses regret that the British introduction of smallpox vaccines to India eradicated the cult of the goddess Sittala Devi. Another example of Western neglect of difference. Someone (‘it might have been me’ says Nussbaum) objects that surely it is better to be healthy than ill. But no: ‘Western essentialist medicine conceives of things in terms of binary oppositions: life is opposed to death, health to disease. But if we cast away this binary way of thinking, we will begin to comprehend the otherness of Indian traditions.’

This is where it gets really good. Eric Hobsbawm has been listening ‘in increasingly uneasy silence’; now he rises to deliver a ‘blistering indictment of the traditionalism and relativism’ on offer. He gives historical examples of ways appeals to tradition have been used to support oppression and violence. ‘In the confusion that ensues, most of the relativist social scientists – above all those from far away, who do not know who Hobsbawm is – demand that Hobsbawm be asked to leave the room.’ Stephen Marglin, disconcerted by the tension between his leftism and his relativism, manages to persuade them to let Hobsbawm stay.

That’s good, isn’t it? Feel for poor Stephen Marglin, confronted by outraged relativist social scientist colleagues who don’t know who this tiresome old geezer is and don’t like his blistering indictment, demanding that Eric Hobsbawm be thrown out! It would be funny if it weren’t, at bottom, so disgusting.

On a different note – the Saudi rape victim has been ‘pardoned’ by King Abdullah – the one we ‘share values’ with, according to Kim Howells. But don’t get the wrong idea – the King (the one we share values with) doesn’t actually think there was anything wrong with the sentence – the two hundred lashes for being raped – he just thinks it would be inconvenient at the moment, that’s all.

Mr. Khashoggi [a newspaper editor] said that the woman, who has married, had been living freely while her case was being appealed. There have been reports that her brother has tried to kill her to remove the “stain” to the family’s honor, and bloggers and international human rights activists have expressed concern for her safety. The Saudi minister of social affairs, Dr. Abdul Mohsin Alakkas, reached by telephone, said that Saudi women who run into trouble with the law frequently fear retribution from their relatives. Some women who serve prison time refuse to leave prison at the end of their sentences, he said. The Ministry of Social Affairs operates special shelters for these women, and Dr. Alakkas said the Qatif victim would be able to live in one.

Ah. Isn’t that sweet. Isn’t that kind. She gets to go live in a special prison for the rest of her life to avoid being murdered by her brother; is that thoughtful or what.

Commenting on the pardon, the Saudi justice minister, Abdullah bin Mohammed al-Sheik, told Al Jazirah that the king fully supported the verdicts against the woman but had decided to pardon her because it was in the “interests of the people.”

That’s the ticket. Stick to your guns, kingy. Merry Christmas and happy shared values.