Some rather disheartening boilerplate on the merits of multiculturalism and identity and groups and communities from – surprise surprise – a university chancellor.

At the end of the day, the hope of these two kinds of projects – internal multicultural dialogue and external multicultural collaboration – is that we all come to value diverse groups, not just diverse individuals.

Well, as always, that depends on which groups we’re talking about, and what we mean by ‘value’, and what aspects of those diverse groups we are expected and hoped to value. It also depends on what happens when valuing groups is in tension with valuing individuals. What about individuals who want to leave or dissent from or change their groups, for example? Are we expected to refrain from valuing them in order to value their groups instead – in order to value ‘their’ groups as static entities that must not change and must not respond to the wishes of, for instance, subordinated people within the groups? If so, why? Or to put it another way, if so, forget it.

The comments are worth reading, as the comments at Inside Higher Ed often are. See especially H E Baber’s.

More of the usual multicultural bs, in the usual long-winded, jargon-ridden style…It’s amazing that, resisting all empirical evidence, multiculturalists like the author of this article are still promoting the communitarian group identities line. Since the end of the Cold War every major armed conflict, from the Balkans to Sri Lanka to Darfur to the current war in the Middle East has been a tribal war between groups affirming their cultural/ethnic identities. Women and people of color with stature as public intellectuals, including Amartya Sen, Anthony Appiah, Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have spoken out against this communitarian, multicultural ideology and in favor of cosmopolitanism.

Indeed they have. H E writes about multiculti at the Enlightenment Project sometimes. (B&W has published some of her E.P. articles.)

Bill Condon’s comment is also good. The comments on this article are better than the article.

Ohhhhhhh lordy. Look at this. It’s called ‘Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism.’ Isn’t that just the best title? But the content is even better.

Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena.

Microfascism! Yelp! What will happen when those evidence-based movement bastards turn to macrofascism? Will they get even more outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative on our asses? Or will they just kill us? Let’s ask Deleuze and Guattari; they’ll know.

The philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari proves to be useful in showing how health sciences are colonised (territorialised) by an all-encompassing scientific research paradigm – that of post-positivism – but also and foremost in showing the process by which a dominant ideology comes to exclude alternative forms of knowledge, therefore acting as a fascist structure.

But what if it’s a Deleuzoguattarian ideology that is dominant, does it exclude alternative forms of knowledge and thus act as a fascist structure? I bet I’m not supposed to ask that question, am I. I have to go sit on the microfascist stool for four minutes.

Because ‘regimes of truth’ such as the evidence-based movement currently enjoy a privileged status, scholars have not only a scientific duty, but also an ethical obligation to deconstruct these regimes of power.

You understand, don’t you? It’s clear, isn’t it? Dominant ideology excludes alternatives and it enjoys (whee! woopah! heehee!) privileged status so it’s a regime of power and a fascist structure. The only liberatory and truly fair thing to do is to have evidence-free health science; that’s an ethical obligation.

This thing is so ridiculous that it’s hard not to suspect it’s another Sokal hoax. Hey – [tap tap] – are you another Sokal hoax? Hello?

I like William Empson. Don’t try to talk me out of it.

As a poet who had written anti-Fascist propaganda for the BBC during the war and had taught ‘English literature’ in China both before and afterwards, he didn’t want writers or readers to trade in emotive, ineffable or overly abstract (i.e. religiose) language. Literature was there to alert us, to make us think rather than assent; close reading was the preferred antidote to indoctrination. The consequences of listening or reading inattentively, and of not seeing how language can be used to sustain inattention and sponsor cruelty, were Empson’s abiding preoccupations.

Well, you probably won’t bother trying to talk me out of it, because you can see right there why I would like him, and how futile such an attempt would be. Anyone who isn’t keen on ineffable or religiose language is going to be someone I am going to like. (Emotive language is a little different. I like emotive language [used sparingly] as long as it’s clear that everyone knows that’s what it is. It’s emotive language that’s smuggled in that I can’t stand; emotive language that pretends to be neutral. I don’t know what Empson would have thought of that.)

There were two related things that Empson as a literary critic could not abide. One was submission to authority, and the other was torment, both the wish to inflict it and the wish to suffer it. Empson was criticised and indeed ridiculed for this hatred, which was directed mostly against Christianity and ‘neo-Christian’ literary critics, but these are things one is unlikely to be casual about if they matter to one at all.

Well, yes. If you mind them at all you tend to mind them a lot. Thus the Rapture-fans, who revel in the thought of being snatched up into the clouds to watch the left behind be tortured, repel me and shock me quite intensely, just as the students at Patrick Henry who sign up (literally sign up, in writing) to the doctrine that the unsaved will be tormented in hell for eternity, and then go cheerily about their business, repel me and shock me. It’s bad stuff. I don’t see any way to get around that.

Empson, who believed in the ‘straddling’ of contraries rather than their resolution, who found ambiguity in literature more truthful than conviction, could not avoid unequivocally taking sides when it came to the Fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, and what he took to be the virtual fascism of the Judeo-Christian God. His letters, like all his critical writings, show that he was as unambiguous as he could be in his hatred of the haters of variety. He wanted a variety of sorts of feeling and an unendable clash of different philosophies. So by his own lights he couldn’t and didn’t create his own orthodoxy…‘What else does one write criticism for except to win agreement?’ he asks in a letter to Christopher Ricks, and yet the winning of agreement – or perhaps the winning of too much agreement, the way literature coerced assent instead of opening argument – was the very thing that troubled Empson.

Which is very like a running argument (or discussion) that’s been going on around here about consensus. Very like it indeed. Suggestive stuff.

Indeed, the thing Empson seems to have been most at odds with himself about was conflict…Empson believed that disagreement was often the more adequate response; to say where you think someone is wrong is to be on the side of variety…The possibility of disagreement was, I think, mostly evidence for Empson that one was not at anyone’s mercy. The writer could be at the mercy of his conflicts, just as the critic could be at the mercy of the text, or the institution that employed him. So the Empson who believed that the most morally disreputable thing a writer could do was suppress the conflicts that animated him, the Empson who preferred a clash to a consensus…

Was a very interesting fella.

And speaking of Wonkers, Ian B sent me a lovely little piece from the Wall Street Journal the other day, that’s more of the same kind of bowl of warm spit. Written by one Charlotte Hays – which sounds like a woman’s name to me. Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend. Does Charlotte Hays think she’d be writing for the WSJ without feminism? Hmm?

Perhaps the nicest thing about attending the National Organization for Women’s 40th birthday event last weekend was that I didn’t have to pack a lot of fancy party clothes – the dress code was strictly old feminist. The mindset was of the same vintage. Though there was a “summit” for young feminists on Friday before the conference got under way in earnest (and I do mean earnest), most of the 700 women in attendance were no spring chickens. They were joined at the Crowne Plaza by a handful of hen-pecked, middle-age men, always touchingly eager to demonstrate their ardent sympathy.

There’s lots more of the same kind of thing. Old, boring, old, boring, old, not hip, old, not as hip as I am, old, we’ve heard that before, yes that Equal Rights Amendment, yawn, 1982, yawn, old, I chose to get a bite to eat at Quizno’s instead. Stupid stuff. And the Wonkette shall inherit the earth.

I wonder if Katherine Rake has been reading Wonkette.

Roll up, roll up, for a spot of that old favourite, feminist-bashing. Anyone can have a go, it’s easy. Trot out that readymade mythological figure of the dungaree-clad, scary, hairy and humourless feminist.

Don’t forget ‘fixated’ and ‘so angry’ – they go with the humourless bit. And as for rolling up – the comments are depressing. Actually they’re more like disgusting. And that’s at the Guardian! So men in the rest of the world are even more misogynist and contempt-filled – how encouraging.

And we now also have to contend with the hypersexualisation of our culture, a phenomenon that has developed and snowballed with hardly a murmur of dissent. Against a backdrop of ubiquitous images of women’s bodies as sex objects, rates of self-harm among young women are spiralling, eating disorders are on the rise, and plastic surgery is booming.

Well there’ve been quite a few murmurs of dissent from me, but I do my murmuring in such a quiet, genteel, whispery, mousy way that no one hears me, what with all that panting and grunting going on. I suppose it’s my karma.

I think there’s some tension there though, and I think it’s a tension you find in a lot of feminists. A bit of eating cake and having.

The stereotype of the mythological feminist, while ridiculous, is dangerous in that it gives the impression that feminism is first and foremost about how women should dress or whether they should wear make-up…Against a backdrop of ubiquitous images of women’s bodies as sex objects…

Well, which is it? It’s no good disavowing concern with how women should dress in one breath and then expressing concern with ubiquitous images of their bodies as sex objects with the other. The two are, unfortunately, linked. I myself have a Talibanish tendency to flinch when I see women ambling around the supermarket with their stomachs or buttocks or tits poking out, for precisely that kind of reason, a tendency which always causes me to ask despairingly why women can’t just wear clothes instead of either tents or bathing suits. I ask that question for feminist reasons, because I think it makes a difference to how everyone thinks of women – so I don’t think it’s much good pretending feminism isn’t concerned with that subject, even to suck up to the Wonkette crowd.

Any Buddhists out there? I have a question. Or not so much a question as something I don’t get. (I know of at least one Buddhist out there. Maybe I’ll email her, or maybe she’ll say something here before I get around to it.) This morning I was reading a book about feminism and world religions – called Feminism and World Religions – and in the essay on Buddhism Rita Gross tells us that many Buddhists explain male dominance as a result of karma: everyone’s ‘current position’ is a result of karma from the past, so women’s inferiority results from ‘negative karma’ so they have to bear it gracefully, which will probably lead to the good karma of rebirth as a man. (She then says what’s wrong with that view – you don’t get to say ‘it’s your karma to be oppressed by me’ because that’s bad or ‘negative’ karma for you.) But on the next page she talks about egolessness and the non-existence of the ego, the self, the identity. That’s fine, I have no problem with that, it just sounds like dear Hume to me; but what I don’t get is how those two things can possibly make sense in combination. If the self doesn’t exist in this life, what sense can it possibly make to say that what we did in a past life belongs to us in this one? Accepting the (absurd, but never mind) idea of rebirth just for the moment for the sake of argument – what is it that is reborn if there is no self? I want to know. What is it that is reborn, and what is its relationship to its ‘karma’? It’s presumably not anything material; it’s not meant to be the same atoms or anything; but it’s also not the same person, because personhood is an illusion. So what is it?

This is a blindingly obvious problem, so surely it must have been discussed to within an inch of its life, but I seem to have slept through that class. Answers on a postcard please.

Just a little update on community. Because I know we’re all slightly worried that the idea of community is so out of fashion and that people don’t get reminded often enough that we all live in A Community and we are all members of A Community (just one though – mind now) and we must all respect other people’s Communities as they must respect ours. So it is good to see that in some few corners of the media, respect for The Community is not quite dead yet.

For instance there is this nice little BBC article which uses the word no fewer than twelve times. Not bad for such a short piece! I feel all cuddly as I read it. Stifled, but cuddly.

Some 120 members of the Bangladeshi community from London and beyond marched in protest against the forthcoming film adaptation of Monica Ali’s novel, Brick Lane…This community first complained vehemently when the novel was first released in 2003 to much critical acclaim…Soon chants began, and slogans such as “Community, community, Bangladeshi community” and “Monica’s book, full of lies” repeatedly rang out…Dr Husain delivered a short speech in which he explained how the Bangladeshi community felt about Ms Ali’s novel. “A book has been written, that has greatly offended the hard-working, industrious Bangladeshi community,” he said. “This hard-working community has been offended by lies, slander and cynicism. There should be a limit to what you can write or say.”…It was quite noticeable that there were almost no women directly involved in the march. One of the two who did march was Salina Akhtar, 41, who lives not far from Brick Lane. She said she didn’t know why women were not at the protest, but said the female members of the Bangladeshi community were upset by Ms Ali’s novel.

Isn’t it interesting the way they all feel entitled to speak for ‘the community’? How do they get that way? How do they know that every single ‘member’ or ‘female member’ of ‘the community’ agrees with them? They don’t, of course, they just like to claim they do or pretend they do. Thus coercive groupthink and conformist pressure get a foothold, and the BBC helps out.

Tom Morris makes the same point:

The Guardian has a sensible enough piece saying on the Brick Lane issue. But what they fail to understand is that by even using the word “community” (something that Natasha Walter does twenty times in this article), they give support to the very problem they are highlighting. It’s individuals we are talking about, not communities. It’s a flawed and useless way of talking about what is a matter of individuals. Some people think the book is treacherous/blasphemous/nasty-nasty, and some people don’t. To use the word “community” automatically gives these busybodies the very credibility that they are trying to achieve.

Which could be why one of the favoured slogans was ‘Community, community, Bangladeshi community’. No flies on them.

And one more that caught my attention yesterday:

Peter Tatchell, of OutRage!, the gay rights group said: I wrote to him about lyrics that incite murder of gays and lesbians by some black singers and suggested that the CRE co-ordinate a round table meeting with the black and gay communities to have come to an agreement about challenging racism and homophobia.

Eh? A meeting with the black and gay communities? That would be kind of a large meeting, wouldn’t it? You’d have to hold it in Richmond Park, and then nobody would be able to hear. What is it with this synechdoche thing where a few people talking somehow is everyone who fits the description ‘member of the ___ community’? If some woman or some American or some atheist went to a meeting somewhere would I consider her to be representing the women’s or Americans’ or atheists’ community and therefore representing me? Just automatically, because of her ‘identity’? No. No, I’ve actually met a few women I don’t agree with about much of anything, and much the same can be said of my experience of meeting Americans. Is it different with gays and blacks (and Bangladeshis) because they’re all so oppressed that they all think alike? No, because that’s not how that works. There are lots of women who think women ought to be subordinate to men; I’m not part of their community. Same thing with any community. Bangladeshi, gay, dust-collecting; all of them. Humans don’t share one big brain, no matter how communitarian they are, and it’s not possible to turn all those billions of brains into one big collective shared brain simply by dint of endless repetition of the word ‘community.’ And a good thing too. I like to keep my brain to myself, thank you.

I spent most of the past three days working on a sudden rush job. Now I’m all speeded up like something in a cartoon. Hurry hurry hurry, do it as fast as possible. I should do some big long-delayed project like, um, tidying my desk; I’d probably get it done in two minutes. But…nah. I’m not in the mood. All rushed out.

Well, Ash Kotak talks good sense, at least.

As for the “Brick Lane community” response, Greer is assuming a community speaks with one voice; it is patronising and arrogant. Any community is made up of a group of individuals. However a community together tries to protect and uphold common values, not everyone will support them all the time. This Brick Lane media-generated controversy has reinforced the truth that a community which has little voice – and some of those within it who have no voice – will continue to remain invisible.

Eg-zacktly. And the dang Guardian and the dang BBC don’t help by calling twenty people ‘the community’ all the time. Which surely they must be beginning dimly to realize, since people keep telling them and telling them and telling them – you think some day they’ll stop?

For some people living within such communities, that place is their entire world. There is little reason to “escape”, especially when you consider the outside, alien world to be hostile – examples of which are keenly sought by the protectors/oppressors within. Even though the protesters, generally, have been marginalised, a few self-appointed community leaders have perpetuated the stereotypical belief of the limited and inward thinking by “them” in the minds of the British public. To publicise their views is the same as giving one of the self-appointed Sikh community leaders a platform on Bezhti, the play that prematurely closed in Birmingham, and representing it as the voice of the community.

Isn’t it just. Ash Kotak, you rock.

Read the whole letter; it’s spot on.

They’re ba-ack. The dear Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Discouragement of Vice is making a comeback. Nostalgic, innit.

Behind a desk in a spartan government office, a bearded official says he is swamped with job applicants for a proposed department to promote virtue and discourage vice, which would send out religious monitors to uncover and correct un-Islamic behavior in the populace.

I bet. I bet he’s swamped with applicants who want to go out to uncover and correct things that other people are doing – laughing, singing, talking to friends, going outside; sinister stuff like that. Uncover it and correct it, quick, before everything goes to hell.

The cabinet also approved reviving the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Discouragement of Vice…It became notoriously punitive under Taliban rule, from 1996 to 2001, when turbaned enforcers whipped women if their veils slipped and arrested men for wearing too-short beards or playing chess…”We would be as different from the Taliban as earth and sky,” said Sulieman Hamid, an official of the Ministry of Hajj and Religious Affairs who would oversee the virtue and vice monitors. “They used Islam for political purposes. We only want to stop people from committing bad acts and help maintain the honor of Islam.”

Ohhhh, well then – nothing to worry about. Yes indeed. I know if I learned that the government was going to set up a Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Discouragement of Vice and it assured us that it only wanted to stop people from committing bad acts and help maintain the honor of Christianity, I wouldn’t be worried at all that it might be ever so slightly intrusive and coercive and that its ideas of ‘bad acts’ and ‘honor’ might be different from mine. Nope, that wouldn’t be an issue. Everything would be fine.

“We would not beat people or force women to wear scarves. But we have to do something to protect society, to tell people they should not drink alcohol or smoke hashish or kill their Muslim brothers.”

Tell people? Just, gently, softly, in a nice voice, tell them? Or…something a little firmer than that? And then – drinking alcohol and killing are the same kind of thing? ‘Dear sister, you should not drink that vodka martini, it is un-Islamic. Dear brother, you should not kill that Muslim brother, it is a bad act.’ And then – it’s only Muslim brothers people will be told not to kill? So it’s okay to kill women and it’s okay to kill infidels? And then – isn’t killing people against the law anyway, so isn’t a Virtue Committee to amble out and whisper to people that they ought not to, a bit superfluous? Or could it be that the final item was thrown in to make up the numbers, so that the alcohol and hashish ones wouldn’t look quite so footling? Hey, all we’re going to do is tell women they shouldn’t let their faces stick out and they shouldn’t murder people – is that so harsh?

If the parliament takes up the issue, it is likely to pit factions led by Islamic clerics and former militia leaders against others composed of professionals, women and Western-educated figures. These groups represent major competing strains in Afghan society as it charts a path between traditional Islamic values and modern democratic norms.

That’s a rather stupid and confused opposition, the one between traditional Islamic values and modern democratic norms – because traditional Islamic values can perfectly well be democratic: as long as a majority prefers them, that’s what they are. What the writer probably means is ‘modern secular norms’ – but that’s not really an acceptable thing to say in US mass media. It might be okay in The Nation or Mother Jones, but not a big newspaper; so journalists say ‘democratic’ instead, even though it makes the argument a little meaningless. But it’s interesting that (if I’m right) ‘secular’ is not an acceptable word here – interesting and somewhat alarming.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown reviews Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism in the Indy.

Cosmopolitanism, in its reconstructed meaning, says Appiah, provokes attacks from the left for whom it is dilettante and elitist. The right despises it because cosmopolitans make bad nationalists and patriots. All authoritarians detest the internationalist spirit. Hitler and Stalin launched regular invectives against “rootless cosmopolitans”.

Yeah. And identitarians hate it, which is one reason it is worth trying to dispute identitarianism, especially of the solitarist variety, John Gray notwithstanding. Cosmopolitanism is a good thing. Cosmopolitanism is Sarajevo before everything went to hell.

The Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Human Values, Princeton no less, is not as bold as he could have been. A crucial treatise is rendered impotent by neat self censorship and a surfeit of facts. He elegantly turns away from the implications of his advocacy, in particular for the US…This volume ends up being a nice book for good people. He confesses: “This book is not a contribution to the debates about the true face of globalisation. I’m a philosopher by trade and philosophers rarely write useful books.” And that’s the pity of it all.

Well I don’t agree with him about that, actually, I think Cosmopolitanism is a useful book. I admire useful books. Jerry and I are working on a book that we think could be useful. We’re not philosophers, so we plan to be as bold as we can be.

John Gray is not entirely convinced by Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence, despite his admiration.

Impassioned, eloquent and often moving, Identity and Violence is a sustained attack on the “solitarist” theory which says that human identities are formed by membership of a single social group…There is a deeper unrealism in Sen’s analysis, which emerges in his inability to account for the powerful appeal of the solitarist view…Along with many liberal philosophers, he seems to think human conflict is a result of intellectual error. But if the error of solitarism is so blatantly obvious, why do large numbers of people continue to believe in it and act on it? Sen refers repeatedly to manipulation by malevolent propagandists…But are people really so stupid? Or is the failure of understanding actually in the liberal philosopher?

I’m very interested in that question, because I share in the failure of understanding (if it is one), at least partially. I think I understand the appeal of the solitarist view, up to a point, but I do have trouble understanding why it doesn’t break down fairly quickly under pressure from non-solitarist views. In other words, I see the temporary appeal of identifying with other (whatevers) – women, Muslims, Americans, Jews, gays, blacks, Asians, whatever – but I don’t fully see how one item on the menu manages to trump all the others all the time. I don’t. I extrapolate from myself, and so I don’t see it. I think of myself as a woman (and a feminist) some of the time, and I certainly don’t ever think of myself as not a woman (or a feminist), but I don’t and don’t want to think of myself as primarily a woman all the time; in fact I hate it. It bores me and it makes me feel claustrophobic and above all it makes me feel diminished. If the most important thing about me is that I Am A Wooman along with some 3 billion other people on the planet – well I might as well decide that my identity is all wrapped up in being a mammal, or a vertebrate. I might as well be a grain of wheat in a thousand-acre field (as of course I am, but I don’t particularly want to make that a Badge of Identity). I want to think about other things, and that precludes always uninterruptedly obsessing over and massaging my identity as a woman – or as anything else. So that’s my blind spot, that’s why I have trouble understanding the solitarist view: why do other people want to hug just one identity? Why don’t they get bored?

What does Gray tell us on this point?

For Sen, as a good liberal rationalist, it is an article of faith that the violence of identity is a result of erroneous beliefs. He cannot accept that its causes are inherent in human beings themselves…The people who knifed the day-labourer in Bengal and who dragged off the man to his death in Petrograd made no error. They did what they did from fear, desperation or cruelty. Such atrocities express deep-seated human traits that are not going to be removed by the kind of conceptual therapy offered by Sen.

That answer seems to me a good deal less satisfactory than anything Sen writes. Just for a start – the people who knifed the day-labourer in Bengal did make an error, because whatever fear, desperation or cruelty prompted them to do it, it certainly didn’t gain them anything. That is an error – an error is exactly what it is. To be so crazed with fear, desperation or cruelty that you murder someone of the ‘wrong’ religious or ethnic (or both) group just because he is of the wrong group and is in ‘your’ neighbourhood – is a big fat error. It’s not an error in arithmetic or spelling, but it’s still an error. So what does Gray mean saying it isn’t? In other words – I think he’s right that the appeal of solitarist identity has to be explained, but I don’t think he did anything at all in the direction of explaining it, and I think he made an error besides.

This is Jerry, so don’t blame OB for this post.

I’ve just returned from my protest against the awful anti-Israel, pro-Hizbullah march in London. Here are four pictures from the march.

Draw your own conclusions.

Interesting. Mediawatchwatch points out that Germaine Greer’s defense of her article on the Brick Lane ruckus slightly adjusts what she said in the first article. It’s right there for all to see…

July 24:

The community has the moral right to keep the film-makers out but they cannot then complain if somewhere else is used and presented to the world as Brick Lane.

August 5:

I have been accused of saying things I never said about Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane and the campaign to prevent its filming in the East End of London…Natasha Walter, writing on these pages, claims not to know what I could possibly mean by saying that the residents of Brick Lane have a “moral right” to refuse to cooperate with the people making the film of Monica Ali’s book.

Come on, GG – play fair.

The irony is, she has grounds for her defense: after all, she immediately goes on to say ‘There is only one remedy available if your reality is being recycled through a writer or a movie-maker, and that is to write your own novel or make your own film – and accept ostracism as your just desert.’ She could have just said that was her basic point; but massaging what she actually did say is an error.

So didja listen to JS on Little Atoms? It was pretty funny, in an absurd sort of way. He has some kind of bee in his bonnet that people who sign the Euston Manifesto think it is going to set off a mass progressive movement. It turned up in that HERO interview too. HERO asked ‘Ophelia, you are a signatory to the Euston Manifesto, and Butterflies and Wheels is an affiliated site. What are your expectations of the movement for a rational left, and how much do you feel that blogging and, more widely, the internet has contributed to the timing of this development?’ and he answered –

The Euston Manifesto will die a quick death. There is no chance for any kind of mass movement of the rational left, and blogging and the internet will have little effect outside the chattering classes. I think there is an interesting point here about wishful thinking, irrationalism, etc., which is that it has always been the case that the politically engaged – well, large numbers of them anyway – have very little sense of just how uninterested the mass of the population are in politics.

But notice – the HERO question doesn’t say anything about a mass movement – JS inserted that ‘mass’ himself, for no apparent reason. Of course I don’t bloody think the Euston Manifesto is going to set off a mass movement! I’m not insane, or delusional, or on Ecstasy. Just signing something isn’t such a huge colossal effort that making the effort implies a magical belief that it will change the universe. I signed the dang Euston Manifesto (despite disagreeing with parts of it, especially the part about the US as a great country – I think the US’s tragically broken political system makes it difficult to say that without instant qualification) for the same sort of reason I (and presumably JS) co-wrote WTM, and I have to point out, signing the EM was a great deal less work and took up far less time. If writing that book was worth doing (and I think JS thinks it was) then why wouldn’t siging a manifesto you mostly agree with be worth doing? Consider: the first takes some months, the second takes – what? five seconds?

I’ll have to give him a good sharp talking-to on the subject if I ever get the chance. But it made for some pretty funny listening – you could tell the hosts were starting to want to slap him. I know the feeling. snicker. There was also some nonsense about how people who disagree with religion (people like me, it seems, since he muttered something about me before launching that particular tirade) don’t understand about death and loss. Now really. Really. He would know, if he ever read the essays I write for TPM Online, that at least half of them are about nothing else; that I’m obsessed with the subject. I mean really.

Then there was the beginning where he said actually he’s not sure truth does matter – that was amusing too. (Mind you, in the sense he meant, nor do I, and I spent the first couple of pages of the book saying so. But ‘why truth matters in rational empirical inquiry’ would have been a not very catchy title, so we didn’t bother suggesting it.) Anyway, it was quite an entertaining interview.

And for dessert, some pleasant savagery from Hitchens; a relief from all that offendedness-frotting.

There’s a lot to dislike about Gibson. He is given to furious tirades against homosexuals of the sort that make one wonder if he has some kind of subliminal or “unaddressed” problem. His vulgar and nasty movies, which also feature this prejudice, are additionally replete with the cheapest caricatures of the English…He has told interviewers that his wife, the mother of his children, is going to hell because she subscribes to the wrong Christian sect…And it has been obvious for some time to the most meager intelligence that he is sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred.

I’m not sure Hitch has a very high opinion of Gibson.

At the time when The Passion of the Christ was being released, many nervous evangelical Christians tried to get the more horrifying bits of anti-Semitic incitement toned down…Many conservative Jews, from David Horowitz to Rabbi Daniel Lapin, stuck up for Gibson as a man who defended family values against secular nihilism.

And why not, I’d like to know? Aren’t family values worth a little anti-Semitism among friends? Sure they are.

It was even proudly announced that Gibson’s next big project would be about the Holocaust. Whether Gibson tries this last catch-penny profanity or not, it is time to lower the boom on him…But this should not be yet another spectacle of the “offensive” and the “inappropriate,” swiftly succeeded by rehab and repentance and perhaps – who knows? – a joint press conference with Elie Wiesel. Gibson did not “misspeak”…No, he spoke his “mind,” and in case anyone wants to burble about political correctness, it should be added that he spoke this way because of his religion, not just his warped personality.

Take that, sugar tits.

And then there’s the tragic clash of world views (or Weltanschauungen as we call them in old Stuttgart) between the Gay Police Association and ‘Christians’ i.e. some Christians.

An advert placed by the Gay Police Association (GPA) that claimed a 74 per cent rise in homophobic incidents due to religious belief has caused widespread offence among Christians…The GPA advert has also prompted a police investigation. The Metropolitan Police says the inquiry “centres on whether the advert constitutes a faith crime”.

A – what? A what crime? A faith what? I know about the religious hatred bill and all, but so do you guys now have something called a ‘faith crime’ that the police investigate? Seriously? For real? Isn’t that just a little…alarming? Isn’t that like Rowan Atkinson’s and Salman Rushdie’s worst nightmare come true true true? Are you all sure you’ve panicked enough?

“The suggestion is that if you get rid of faith, you get rid of homophobic attacks,” believes the Reverend George Hargreaves, leader of the Christian Party, who also sits on a number of Metropolitan Police committees and steering groups. “I believe this whole matter has left us with evidence that the Gay Police Association is Christianaphobic, and I therefore think an investigation is the right course of action. I also believe that the chairman of the Gay Police Association, Paul Cahill, should resign.”

Other than that, of course, the Rev George is as liberal and broad-minded a fella as you’d want to meet – all he wants is for the police to investigate ‘Christianophobia’ and for somebody to resign (as chairman? as cop? he doesn’t say). Modesty itself.

The Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship (LCF) is among the faith-based organisations that are questioning the rise in incidents that the advert refers to…”The incidents need not be criminal offences and may be lawful expressions of opinion, such as an opinion that adoption by gay couples constitutes a risk to the welfare of children.”

Uh…or such as that the Bible fosters homophobia – that kind of expression of opinion. So if yours isn’t theirs isn’t, and if theirs is yours is. You don’t get to make it that yours isn’t but theirs is. Nuh uh.

Cahill says the purpose of the advert was not to cause offence, but to raise awareness…Among other people who were offended by the advert was Dr John Dubbey of Norwich, who believes proof is required to back up the GPA’s statistics.

Come on, Cahill, you know nobody cares what the intent is; if offence occurs, then it is offence, and people are offended, and intent to raise awareness is entirely beside the point. It’s a faith crime to offend people. Like Dr John Dubbey of Norwich. Dr John Dubbey of Norwich is offended – along with other people. People were offended, Cahill, don’t you understand? Offended! They were offended! And there you are swanning around talking about awareness. You should not only resign, you should go on a pilgrimage to someplace nasty and rub dirt on your head.

Meanwhile, J Hale of Sutton says: “We were horrified when we saw a copy of the advert. It does not take into consideration my human rights to religious freedom and to freedom of conscience as a Christian. It is an affront to what I believe in to see the mockery behind the portrayal of the Holy Bible and, presumably, the blood of Jesus Christ, and the words that accompany it.”

Um – who’s J Hale of Sutton, and who cares what it says, and why? And who’s ‘we’? And where did J Hale say all this, and to whom, and when, and why? And why is the Indy collecting what it says? Besides – Sutton – I ask you. Who cares what people in Sutton think?

Okay a great tidal wave of opinion, by which I mean one person, has demanded a post on the contribution of high theory to the Israeli military. I never resist surges of opinion; I splash about in them like a happy little child playing in the surf. By which I mean, that is quite an intriguing piece, isn’t it.

The Israeli Defence Forces have been heavily influenced by contemporary philosophy, highlighting the fact that there is considerable overlap among theoretical texts deemed essential by military academies and architectural schools.

Oh, that fact. Well, one can see that both military academies and architectural schools have a genuine and keen interest in the subject of buildings – but one can also see that it’s a fundamentally different kind of interest. One is up the other is down; one is together the other is fissile; one is assemblative the other is disassemblative; one knits the other unknits; one constructs the other – okay you get it. But anyway it appears that there is more to all this than the theoretical and practical differences between piling bricks on top of one another and knocking them all to the ground.

…the reading lists of contemporary military institutions include works from around 1968 (with a special emphasis on the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Guy Debord), as well as more contemporary writings on urbanism, psychology, cybernetics, post-colonial and post-Structuralist theory. If, as some writers claim, the space for criticality has withered away in late 20th-century capitalist culture, it seems now to have found a place to flourish in the military.

Oh dear – has the space for criticality withered away? The way the state was supposed to but didn’t so much? I didn’t know that. Here I’ve been dancing around in my little space for criticality (as well as nagicality and mockicality and derisionicality) in blissful ignorance, unaware of the walls creeping ever closer. But that’s how it goes, innit – late coughcough capitalist culture makes the space for criticality wither away the way it always does, the pesky thing, but happily the military comes along and saves it and gives it a place (or a space) to flourish. That must be ironic. Or do I mean de-centered.

Kokhavi, commander of the Paratrooper Brigade…said…’We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps.’

The hermeneutics of alleys and doors and windows. Cool.

Kokhavi’s intention in the battle was to enter the city in order to kill members of the Palestinian resistance and then get out. The horrific frankness of these objectives, as recounted to me by Shimon Naveh, Kokhavi’s instructor, is part of a general Israeli policy that seeks to disrupt Palestinian resistance on political as well as military levels through targeted assassinations from both air and ground.

Uh…yeah. And this came as a surprise to you? You’re taken aback by this horrific frankness? Uh…what did you think the objectives were then? To enter the city in order to teach members of the Palestinian resistance how to embroider? Are you sure you have a firm grasp of what words like ‘military’ and ‘battle’ and ‘weapon’ mean?

In a lecture Naveh showed a diagram resembling a ‘square of opposition’ that plots a set of logical relationships between certain propositions referring to military and guerrilla operations. Labelled with phrases such as ‘Difference and Repetition – The Dialectics of Structuring and Structure’, ‘Formless Rival Entities’, ‘Fractal Manoeuvre’, ‘Velocity vs. Rhythms’, ‘The Wahabi War Machine’, ‘Postmodern Anarchists’ and ‘Nomadic Terrorists’, they often reference the work of Deleuze and Guattari.

Way cool. That’s what I call a rich, well-rounded life – combining warfare with referencing the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Doncha think? It’s kind of like Socrates fighting at Potidaea, or those Renaissance men who wrote poetry with one hand and stabbed cardinals in the back with the other. Exciting and erudite both at the same time.

I asked Naveh why Deleuze and Guattari were so popular with the Israeli military. He replied that ‘several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaux became instrumental for us…allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise. It problematized our own paradigms.’

I love the smell of problematized paradigms in the morning.

That’s not even halfway down the page – there’s a lot more. Read it all.

There were some very interesting (and alarming) comments (by one ‘tarxien’) on this post by Sunny on the Brick Lane fuss by (the comments say) a GP who has seen some distressing examples of arranged marriage.

There is a very fine line between ‘arranged’ and ‘forced’…This is an issue I feel strongly about because as a GP working in Tower Hamlets and south London I have seen many desperate, depressed women in ‘arranged marriages’. None of them could be called ‘forced’ in that the women were not tied up and raped as has happened in some cases but you cannot ignore the emotional pressure that is put on young women by their families (i.e fathers in most cases). Once married these women have no realistic way out if they are not happy. Their own family disowns them once they are married. I could tell some shocking stories but space prevents me.

Then later:

Some of the worst cases of abuse I have seen in my practice are precisly where, either a British bengali woman has been forced or shall we say ‘persuaded’ to marry a man from Bangladesh who does not speak English or understand British traditions of womens’ rights or alternatively where a Bengali woman has been brought to Britain as a wife to a British man. The woman does not speak English and is extremely isolated, separated from her family and culture, often with a man who despises her for her ‘backwardness’.
In both cases it is the women who suffer. Obviously there are cases where the marriage works I would not dispute that. But there are a lot where it does not. There is usually a feeling among professionals – doctors, social workers etc, that we cannot intervene because it is a ‘cultural ‘issue and would upset the community.
I cannot begin to describe the frustration I have felt in having to walk away and leave these women knowing that their life is intolerable. One woman told me clearly that, after 15 years of physical, sexual and emotional abuse from a man who told her on their wedding night that he had only married her to obtain a British passport, that she was waiting until her daughter was old enough to look after herself and she would then take poison. She had tried leaving but her own family refused to take her in and told her to go back to he husband or the family would be disgraced. Shortly after this the family disappeared and I do not know what happened to her.

Do any of you know of any good books or articles on this? I’d like to know more.

How come novelists are so violent? Why are they always running around swinging baseball bats and roughing people up? Are they on steroids or what?

Novelists Salman Rushdie, Hari Kunzru and Lisa Appignanesi have attacked community groups, the police and the media after Ruby Films decided to move shooting of an adaptation of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane out of London’s Tower Hamlets area last week.

Wow. That seems like a lot of people for three unathletic novelists to attack. Did they draw blood?

The criticism follows a march organised by the Campaign Against Monica Ali’s Film Brick Lane yesterday which drew no more than two women and 70 older men. Threats of violence and book-burning failed to materialise.

Ohhhhh, I see – Richard Lea means they criticized all those people, but he chooses to call that ‘attacking’ them. Hmm. Odd choice of word. Maybe that’s because it was the Guardian that made the protest of a few guys sound like the outrage of the whole ‘community’? Or maybe not, maybe it was just an odd choice of word with no sinister motivation.

“After the damp squib of the anti-Monica Ali protest in Whitechapel on Sunday”, said Rushdie, “it is clear that, as many of us suspected, there are no strong feelings in and around Brick Lane about the proposed film of Ms Ali’s eponymous novel.” He called for “all those who over-reacted in this matter”, including the police, the film company, Channel Four, the news media and “the censor’s friend” Germaine Greer to “admit their mistakes, so that the film can be completed, and we can move on.” “We cannot allow small numbers of ‘offended’ traditionalists the power of censorship,” agreed Appignanesi. “Mr Salique’s campaign, the media and the police’s willingness to accept him as a representative, are shaming to the proud history of Brick Lane…”

In other words, stop cheering on tiny groups of male ‘protesters’ who want to silence novelists and playwrights especially when they’re women.

Natasha Walter seconds the motion.

But there can be no justification for trying to suppress fiction because it has not measured up against some irrelevant yardstick. What Germaine Greer meant when she said that, because of the novel’s supposed inaccuracies, “the community has the moral right to keep the film-makers out” is a mystery. Some people may have the power to do so, but nobody has the moral right to stamp on the cinematic recreation of this humane tale.

Not even if they’re offended? Hm. What a thought.

The bad thing about this controversy is not only that one side is barking up the wrong tree, but also that the media have followed the barking of certain voices to the exclusion of other voices in this community…Journalists and commentators have to think again about why we choose whom we do to represent a community.

And, I would add, whether calling anything and everything a ‘community’ doesn’t help along the very line of thought that is the problem here: that ‘communities’ are monolithic and united and cemented together by communal solidarity so that whatever noisy chump pipes up with the loudest voice can properly be assumed to be speaking for the whole ‘community’ because otherwise – um – someone with an even louder voice would be piping up?

Pola Uddin, the only Bengali woman in the House of Lords, was indignant when I asked her why we weren’t hearing more women’s voices in this debate: “Our voices aren’t sought! The media are not interested in in us.”

That’s for sure. The media are interested in wheeling out Bunglawala every thirty seconds, not in going looking for some pesky woman to talk to. Why is that?

People on the left should not feel that in order to support marginalised communities in their fight for more social justice we have to align ourselves with their most reactionary elements. That’s why we need not get caught up in the rhetoric of a clash of civilisations to go on supporting core values of tolerance and freedom of expression. These values are supported by people within every community, as well as by people who understandably feel they have no community that can speak for them, and so would rather speak for themselves.

Well said.