And André Glucksmann says what badly needs saying.

Offence for offence? Infringement for infringement? Can the negation of Auschwitz be put on a par with the desecration of Muhammad? This is where two philosophies clash. The one says yes, these are equivalent “beliefs” which have been equally scorned. There is no difference between factual truth and professed faith; the conviction that the genocide took place and the certitude that Muhammad was illuminated by Archangel Gabriel are on a par. The others say no, the reality of the death camps is a matter of historical fact, whereas the sacredness of the prophets is a matter of personal belief.

Thank you. Finally! No, evidence-based facts are not the same kind of thing as religious beliefs. They are, in fact, in crucial ways opposites, diametrically opposed, incompatible. It’s about time we got that straight.

This distinction between fact and belief is at the heart of Western thought…Civilised discourse analyses and defines scientific truths, historic truths and matters of fact relating to knowledge, not to faith. And it does this irrespective of race or confession. We may believe these facts are profane or undignified, yet they remain distinct from religious truths. Our planet is not in the grips of a clash of civilisations or cultures. It is the battleground of a decisive struggle between two ways of thinking. There are those who declare that there are no facts, but only interpretations – so many acts of faith. These either tend toward fanaticism (“I am the truth”) or they fall into nihilism (“nothing is true, nothing is false”). Opposing them are those who advocate free discussion with a view to distinguishing between true and false, those for whom political and scientific matters – or simple judgement – can be settled on the basis of worldly facts, independently of arbitrary pre-established opinions.

And not only can be, but have to be, on pain of being consigned to the horrible mental prison where intensity of belief determines what is true.

A totalitarian way of thinking loathes to be gainsaid. It affirms dogmatically, and waves the little red, or black, or green book. It is obscurantist, blending politics and religion…It is high time that the democrats regained their spirit, and that the constitutional states remembered their principles. With solemnity and solidarity they must recall that one, two or three religions, four or five ideologies may in no way decide what citizens can do or think.

Damn right.

Julian has a good thing in the Guardian. Makes a change from Andrew Brown.

In order to be a distinct belief system, a religion has to have specific doctrines. That automatically creates two types of dissenters. Heretics are those who claim to be of the same conviction, but who disagree on some fundamentals…Apostates reject the religion altogether…In public life, we allow heretics and apostates their sinful ways. But within religious institutions, to grant the same liberty would be absurd. For example, you can’t have a Pope who thinks the Bible is a good book, but is no more the product of divine authorship than The Da Vinci Code.

Just so. That’s similar to the point Edmund Standing makes in ‘Misdirected Outrage’: that if a religion teaches something, then that is what the religion teaches, and it’s no good pretending it doesn’t.

Either choose the human rights culture born of the rejection of the old discriminatory approaches of religion, or choose the moral order of Allah, the divine dictator. Allah is not a proponent of human rights. Allah does not believe in the right of the individual to choose how to live. Anyone who thinks that Islam and homosexuality can be reconciled is living in a fantasy world. Take a look at what the Qur’an has to say about homosexuality. This is what Islam teaches. Don’t like it? Then get out.

This confusion is behind (or at least enables) a lot of the soft squashy but relentless pressure to ‘respect’ religion at the moment: the mistaken idea that religion is compatible with human rights. But it isn’t. That’s why we hate it, that’s why it’s coercive, that’s why it can’t be argued with or reasoned with, that’s why it has to be kept out of public policy: because it rests on divine dictatorship. It’s really really important to keep that in mind, especially when the ‘let’s be nice to religion because that’s where the votes are’ crowd is writing its wrong-headed polemics.

Back to Julian’s piece:

This matters to more than just believers. The idea of a secular state is currently under fire as people call to bring religion into more areas of public life, such as education. But if more institutions become the domain of religion, questions of heresy and apostasy will become relevant to all who use those institutions, and work for or with them.

And what a nightmare world that would be. Wouldn’t you say? Questions of heresy and apostasy muddying things up in what should be secular institutions? Let’s not go that way.

A little more on Swinburne, just for drill.

Why do all particles behave in exactly the same way as each other, so as together ultimately to produce human life? This enormous coincidence in particle behaviour requires explaining. I’ve got a good theory which explains it; you haven’t. And if you are really telling me that the production of humans is not, objectively, a good thing, I find myself wondering if you really mean something so implausible.

He’s got a good theory to explain it. His good theory to explain it is a big person (where? where is this big person? outside the universe? on one side of it? or all sides, going all the way around? a big round person with the universe at the middle of it?) who is perfectly this that and the other, that no one can see or smell or talk to, that doesn’t take phone calls or answer letters, but does answer prayers, sometimes, maybe. That’s a good theory? It’s not just a tiny bit, erm, implausible, on the face of it? I have to be honest: it seems very implausible to me. Not just mildly implausible, but very implausible. A big person, wot made the universe, in order to make yooman beings. Nope – don’t buy it.

Okay, next bit. (And what’s that we’re always being told about how uncertain and modest religious believers are? Not if Swinburne is anything to go on they’re not.) It’s implausible to say that the production of humans is not objectively a good thing. But why are they a good thing to anyone but themselves? Well, maybe not quite only themselves. I can see why rats would be pleased, and pigeons, and flies, and various types of virus and bacteria. And of course wheat and soybeans and potatoes are delighted – it’s worked out terrifically well for them. I do quite see that. But that’s not objectively – that’s just to a few species (and who knows how many naysayers there are even there, eh? maybe lots of pigeons and rats would really have preferred to go it on their own and let things fall out as they would), it’s not objectively. How can the production of humans be objectively a good thing? What ultimate, general, non-personal, non-local good does our existence do? How is Jupiter, or Alpha Centauri, or the next galaxy over, better off for the existence of humans?

Is this the best theists can do? I suppose it must be. Since I don’t think they have any good arguments, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the arguments they do give seem awfully thin. But – then why do they get to be Topp, and publish books, and so on? It seems a little strange.

I don’t like Andrew Brown’s tone. I’ve said so before and I say it again. It’s an unpleasant tone – sneering, nose downlooking, insinuating, and sloppy about the facts (or interpretations of the facts). It’s the kind of tone that failure to grovel to religion seems to bring out in a lot of people at this particular historical moment.

The faults are visible right from the beginning.

Hell hath no fury like a philosopher scorned – even one who doesn’t believe in hell. Two of the leading philosophers of evolution have been caught in an email slanging match that has been printed on the blog of their mutual enemy William Dembski, a supporter of the rebranded creationism known as intelligent design.

That’s a snide and not very accurate way of putting it. It’s not a slanging match, it’s Ruse being unaccountably rude to Dennett; ‘caught’ is an odd word to use of both since the bad behavior is all Ruse’s; the email exhange didn’t just happen to be posted on Dembski’s blog, Ruse sent it to Dembski, apparently without permission.

There is a poetic justice to this, since the row started with an argument over how to combat creationism.

No, there is not a poetic justice to this, there is a breach of manners at the least, and the ‘row’ isn’t so much a row as an ambush.

When a long piece about the struggle against creationism in the New York Times Book Review suggested there was some truth to Ruse’s belief that “evolutionism” is being pushed by people like Dennett as a substitute for religion, Dennett was aggrieved, denouncing Ruse’s ideas as “a transparent example of a well-known cheap trick”.

That’s a misleadingly evasive account. Very. This ‘denouncing’ of Ruse’s ideas was in a letter to the Times that the Times did not in fact publish, and at the time Ruse sent the first (according to Brown, ‘teasing’) email to Dennett, it hadn’t been published anywhere. That ought to be relevant in a statement that makes it sound as if Dennett’s ‘denunciation’ of Ruse were public knowledge before the email exchange. (As a matter of fact, the only place Dennett’s letter to the Times has been published is right here at B&W, so that’s where Brown saw it, but he doesn’t mention the fact. Sloppy. The date on it is after Ruse sent the email exchange to Dembski. Sloppy to glide over that.)

Dennett had more cause for complaint when, three weeks later, the NYT Book Review printed a rude review of his book Breaking the Spell. After reading the review, Ruse, sitting in Florida, could not resist sending a jeering email to Dennett. This was not, he now says, a very Christian thing to do. “But it was funny.”

A review so rude, so downright vulgar, as to be somewhat shocking. And – Ruse thinks a jeering email on the subject is funny? He really is more daft than I had realized.

What Dennett thinks of all this I do not know, since he has not replied to my email. Ruse is unrepentant. “Let’s face up to it: all Dan was doing was slagging me off.”

All Dan was doing where? In a letter that the Times declined to publish? In their email exchange? If the latter, so what? If the former, again so what, since it hadn’t been published? In short, what is Ruse’s grievance? That Dennett disagreed with him 1) in a then unpublished letter to the Times and 2) in an email exchange that Ruse instigated? And therefore it’s fine that Ruse sent the exchange to Dembski? Notice that Brown never even mentions how ethically dubious that is, in fact he doesn’t even mention the matter of permission. Notice also the vulgar abuse that Ruse descends to in the rest of Brown’s quotation from his email, drawing level with and then passing Wieseltier.

Not an edifying spectacle.

The Little Professor has been watching the dramatization of Bleak House.

I battered my head against the wall when Esther described Ada’s and Richard’s lodgings as a “damn poky little place.”

Oh, ya. I know that battering. It happens when it becomes suddenly abruptly clear that the people doing the dramatization simply don’t realize that people a century ago didn’t do everything exactly the way we do. That things were, you know, different then? Not the same? Otherwise? Dissimilar? Not identical?

I can think of a few examples that made me want to batter. The tv dramatization of Middlemarch, when disagreement first started to surface between Dorothea and Casaubon – and the way it surfaced was that Casaubon said something unpleasant and Dorothea immediately shouted at him at the top of her voice. That’s not quite how it was written, and not quite how a person like Dorothea would have behaved in 1830. The movie (originally tv) dramatization of Persuasion, when Anne shouted at her father at the dinner table. Not how written; not how a person like Anne. The movie dramatization of The Wings of the Dove, when Kate and Milly wander up to the roof of the country house at dawn in their nightgowns – their thin, limp, transparent nightgowns – and are joined by a man and all three stand around chatting idly for quite a long time. Err – no. Later in the same movie, when Milly says irritably, ‘Do I look like I could climb up the stairs of a church?’ and we’re suddenly violently shunted from Henry James world to a high school lunchroom circa 1999. The perky way Elizabeth 1 hops into bed with Dudley and Viola de Lesseps hops into bed with Shakespeare. The way Marguerite de Valois in the movie dramatization of Dumas’ novel ran down the stairs of the palace and into the street, grabbed the first man she found, and humped with him against a wall – a scene not found in the novel. That kind of thing. Just, a weird deafness for the difference of the past.

I’ve been wanting to mutter a few words about this exchange between Dennett and Swinburne. Actually it’s Swinburne I want to mutter about.

…if there is a God of the traditional kind – omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly free and perfectly good – we have every reason to expect that he will bring about the existence of good things; and one especially good thing is the existence of embodied creatures such as ourselves who have a choice between good and evil and can influence the world and each other in various ways.

Why is that an especially good thing? Why is it a good thing at all? In what sense is it a good thing? Above all, to whom is it a good thing? I can see why it’s a good thing to us, that is to say, in our view: because it’s about us (‘such as ourselves’ – Daisy, he means you and me!). We think it’s an especially good thing that there should be embodied creatures who can influence the world and each other in various ways and compose music and invent new video games, because we are those very creatures (what a coincidence! these creatures Swinburne talks about turn out to be none other than human beings! what a small world, eh?). We think creatures that do things that humans do are an especially good thing because they do the things we do – so how could they not be? But Swinburne, I take it, is claiming to go beyond that merely parochial point of view, and talk about things more in general – and in that case I don’t understand what he’s getting at. What’s so good about it? Who is there to think it’s an especially good thing, other than more of us? I look around, I flip through the catalogue of other solar systems and galaxies, I ask flies and fir trees and bits of plaster, and I can’t find anyone else who thinks it’s an especially good thing. So what does Swinburne mean? Just – ‘we think it’s a good thing because here we are and our preference is to go on being here so we think it’s a good thing that we are here’? No, surely more than that. But what? Why is anybody or anything anywhere in the rest of the universe supposed to give the smallest tiniest damn whether we have a choice between good and evil or not? And if no one and nothing else does, in what sense is it an especially good thing?

And besides that – if there is ‘a God of the traditional kind – omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly free and perfectly good’, then why did it, why would it, create or arrange the emergence of creatures like us instead of better creatures? Why would it take so long to do it? Why would it waste so much material, create or generate so many stars and planets and so much space between them, just to get inadequate patchy bloodthirsty creatures like us? Why such a massive to-do for such a derisory product? Why not something better? Why all the extinctions? Why all the suffering? If we have ‘every reason to expect that he will bring about the existence of good things’, then why the hell didn’t he (and how does Swinburne know he’s a he, anyway?) bring about the existence of more of them? Why not lots and lots and lots more good things and much fewer bad ones? Why don’t we have every reason to expect that? I would really like to know. The whole idea seems remarkably lame, to me.

Mark Fournier has some comments on Swinburne in a similar (but different) vein. I love this bit:

All those billions of years, all of those trillions of stars, all that space, just so that the Almighty could gather to himself a handful of syncophants. Hardly seems worth the trouble, if you ask me. And why does a Being so Great crave the adoration of some great apes from the unfashionable arm of a rather low-rent galaxy?

Really. None of it seems worth the trouble, and wouldn’t you think the Being would want some more glam adorers?

And another thing. About that passage from Locke’s Second Treatise and how essential Christianity or theology is or is not to ideas of democracy and equality before the law. Let’s have another think about that passage.

To understand political power aright…we must consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom…A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.

One interesting thing is that the edition I have, unlike the one Jonathan quoted, doesn’t capitalize nature, but does capitalize Lord and Master. But what strikes me about that passage on further thought is that Locke isn’t citing the Lord and Master to ground the assertion about the natural state of freedom and equality, but rather to note an exception to it. He’s not citing the L and M to say he, as it might be, endowed us with certain inalienable rights, but rather to say that he may take them away if he so decides. He says we (I take the liberty of including women with men) have freedom and equality in nature, unless – unless, mind you – the L and M chooses one person and puts him on Topp. So – I don’t see why that particular passage is a good illustration of the statement that the principle of human equality is an axiom of theology. The axiom of theology in that particular passage seems to be an exception to equality rather than equality itself.

And then a second point is that the whole passage seems more deist than Christian, and it was the Christian antecedents I was raising questions about. (It’s also interesting that in the next paragraph Locke quotes a long passage from Hooker. I’ve read more Hooker than Locke, eccentrically enough. But I like Elizabethan prose.) Anyway – Jonathan was right to take me up on what I said, because I put it too sweepingly – answering ‘Western liberal democracy owes much to the Christian view that all have equal worth before God’ with ‘No it doesn’t. Or at least no one knows if it does or not.’ That’s too sweeping if Stephen Beer means his own statement less sweepingly than the way I read it. If he means merely that the Christian view that all have equal worth before God is one thread in Western liberal democracy, then I don’t dispute that. I took him to be saying something more like ‘Western liberal democracy wouldn’t exist were it not for the Christian view that all have equal worth before God.’ I think he probably was implying that, but I can’t be sure of it, so no doubt the rules require me to plump for the charitable reading. (Then again, it was a mildly polemical piece, taking issue with something Ian Buruma had said, so the truth is I still think he was implying what I thought he was implying. But [slaps self] I should read charitably.)

All this of course leaves unanswered the pressing questions of how we recognize that ‘manifest’ declaration of the Lord and Master’s will, and how we distinguish the evident and clear appointment from the usurpation. (Which must have been a question that vexed Locke, since he wrote the treatise while everyone was more and more fretful about the Duke of York and his succession and how to shunt him aside without doing anything quite so ill-mannered as beheading him. It was all very worrying. And that was even without the dear Duke of York telling everyone what was what about rights and alternative medicine and carbuncles.)

What was that we were saying about violence and intimidation and threats and silencing? What was that Garton Ash was saying?

Here the animal rights campaign has something in common with the extremist reaction to the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, as seen in the attacks on Danish embassies. In both cases, a particular group says: “We feel so strongly about this that we are going to do everything we can to stop it. We recognise no moral limits. The end justifies the means. Continue on this path and you must fear for your life.”…If the intimidators succeed, then the lesson for any group that strongly believes in anything is: shout more loudly, be more extreme, threaten violence, and you will get your way.

I meant to talk about this yesterday along with the rest, but went on a different tack and forgot to return to it. But what a particular group is saying is not just all that, but also ‘We feel so strongly about this that we don’t care that we are a tiny fraction of the population and not in any sense representative of anyone but our impassioned selves, we are going to force our view of What Is Right on everyone, because the fact that we feel strongly about this means that we are right about it, therefore all the rest of you don’t count, you have to do what we say.’ They are, in short, unaccountable. They can’t be negotiated with or talked to or persuaded or outvoted; they can only be submitted to. They give us two choices: submit, or be assaulted and damaged in whatever way we see fit. That won’t do. That is not how human beings want to live, and it won’t do. (It’s probably not how bears or elk want to live, either, but they have no choice in the matter; we do.) It won’t do. It’s unacceptable. It’s all wrong. We all know that. We don’t want violent, threatening, bullying, damage-inflicting people telling us what to do; we want the rule of law, and the right of appeal, and the absence of random violence, instead. Therefore – the intimidators must not succeed. The more they torch buildings and kill people, the less they should succeed. And if they do succeed, if targets of intimidation do decide that they are not willing to risk the danger for themselves or the people who work for them, then that decision has to be called what it is, so that everyone will hate it and wish it hadn’t happened and resist its ever happening again, rather than being called respect or sensitivity, so that people will like it and be glad it happened and hope it goes on happening.

The conviction of the six Shac members is therefore a good thing. Here’s why.

During the three-week trial, defense lawyers acknowledged that a Web site run by Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty posted home addresses and other personal information about animal researchers and others. But the activists said they were simply trying to shame their targets into dissociating themselves from the company, Huntingdon Life Sciences, and they disavowed any involvement with the vandalism, death threats, computer hacking and pipe bombs against those on the Web site. Although federal prosecutors presented no evidence that the defendants directly participated in the vandalism and violence, they showed jurors that members of the group made speeches and Web postings from 2000 to 2004 that celebrated the violence and repeatedly used the word “we” to claim credit for it.

Posting home addresses is not a way to shame people, it’s a way to threaten them and put them at risk. It’s a way to try to force them to submit, by a tiny group that no one elected or appointed or has any way to call to account. It won’t do.

There was that other demo in Oxford.

Standing at the corner of Mansfield Road, I was proud of the demonstrators who were reminding my university what, at best, it is still about: the pursuit of truth and the defence of reason. Protests against student loans or higher rents – these we expect. But here were students turning out on a chilly Saturday morning to stand up for science.

Yeah – well it’s becoming more and more clear that we all really need to stand up for those – science, the pursuit of truth, the defense of reason. If we don’t they’re going to be eroded more and more, as we’re told to be sensitive and respectful and spiritual and so shut up and obey.

For a few minutes, Mansfield Road, Oxford, was at the front line of a new struggle for freedom that is being fought in many different places and guises. These days, the main threats to freedom of thought, freedom of speech and freedom of association no longer come from the totalitarian ideological superstate…[T]he distinctive feature of this new danger is the creeping tyranny of the group veto.

That’s one of the by-products of communalism. Or maybe not so much a by-product as a central goal.

Here the animal rights campaign has something in common with the extremist reaction to the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, as seen in the attacks on Danish embassies. In both cases, a particular group says: “We feel so strongly about this that we are going to do everything we can to stop it. We recognise no moral limits. The end justifies the means. Continue on this path and you must fear for your life.”…If the intimidators succeed, then the lesson for any group that strongly believes in anything is: shout more loudly, be more extreme, threaten violence, and you will get your way. Frightened firms, newspapers or universities will cave in, as will softbellied democratic states, where politicians scrabble to keep the votes of diverse constituencies.

Damn right they will. Violence and threats have that effect. They work. Theo Van Gogh has been definitively silenced. There’s no magic mechanism that keeps force and bullying and murder from doing what they’re meant to do.

But in our increasingly mixed-up, multicultural world, there are so many groups that care so strongly about so many different things, from fruitarians to anti-abortionists and from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Kurdish nationalists. Aggregate all their taboos and you have a vast herd of sacred cows. Let the frightened nanny state enshrine all those taboos in new laws or bureaucratic prohibitions, and you have a drastic loss of freedom.

Which is exactly why I disagreed with Stanley Fish about taboos. Taboos are bad because they are not reasoned; that is what makes them taboos; therefore they should not be enshrined in law.

If you agree with me so far, and believe that reason requires consistency, then you should want David Irving let out of his Austrian prison and Ken Livingstone let off with a rap over the knuckles. Why? Because the fateful tendency in all this is to reject everyone else’s group taboos while obstinately defending your own.

But that’s where I get off the train. Not because I think Irving should be in prison – I don’t think he should, although I’m not sure what I think about the Austrian law – but because I disagree that what’s operating with respect to Irving is a taboo. I disagree that the cartoons and Irving are exactly comparable. I don’t think reason does require consistency if consistency requires the ignoring of salient differences (which it doesn’t, because that wouldn’t actually be consistency). I think the discussion about Irving is a different discussion from the one about the cartoons (as I’ve said to the point of tedium), and I think it’s not useful to mash them together by calling them both group taboos.

What is sauce for the Islamist goose must be sauce for the fascist gander. What Irving says is horrible, an insult to the Jewish dead, survivors and relatives, but on any reasonable assessment it does not result in a significant threat to the physical safety or liberty of living human beings.

Well, that’s the problem – I’m not confident of that. Genocides have happened too often and too quickly lately for me to feel confident of that. Garton Ash may be right, but I disagree about the ‘on any reasonable assessment’ part. Especially given what just happened to Ilam Halimi, I don’t think anyone can be all that sure that no one listening to Irving will be pushed over that final edge, that no one listening to Irving will be inspired to find a Jew to torture to death. So I think worries about Irving are more than just taboos. Actually animal rights people and anti-abortionists could say the same thing – they also have reasoned arguments. Taboo isn’t really the right word for what Garton Ash is talking about here. But the point about the group veto doesn’t depend on the taboo idea, and it’s a good point.

Your boy Chuck is funny, isn’t he – I mean really, really, fall down and roll around funny. Like a John Cleese routine. He just cracks me up. I mean you have to admit, there is something hilariously funny about one of the richest and most overprivileged men on the planet thinking (and even talking) of himself as a ‘dissident’. Aw, honey, won’t they listen to you then? Are you all excluded and ignored and not paid attention to? Aw, diddums, that is such a shame. Of course there’s that architect whose career has never been the same – but never mind, never mind, never mind, if you want to call yourself a dissident, you go right ahead. I have every sympathy. I do love a good pout; I’m a world-class pouter myself; so if you want to spend a few decades pouting at public expense, why that’s just fine, all part of the job. Victoria pouted, the dear Duke of Windsor pouted, so you just carry on, you lovely man. Nobody understands you, nobody appreciates you – it’s shocking, isn’t it?

You have to admit. There was that time he made a fuss about unqualified people expecting to be promoted. I did find that, coming from him, irresistibly funny. And then there’s all the pontificating about ‘alternative medicine’ and Gerson therapy, for which he gets plenty of attention and publicity, because he is the Air to the Phrone, while medical dissent from his pontificating doesn’t get nearly the same attention. Does that make him a ‘dissident’? Does someone who gets respectful attention as well as plain attention out of all proportion to his intrinsic merit, deserve to be called a dissident? I wouldn’t have thought so, myself. I would have thought otherwise. But there, I don’t understand the whole monarchy thing, so don’t listen to me.

But there is something ever so slightly disquieting about the fact that the future king, however limited and notional his remaining power may be, feels a need to whine to a government minister about the Human Rights Act. There’s also, actually, something more than slightly sickening about it. More than a whiff of let them eat cakeism.

Prince Charles wrote “rubbish” on a letter defending the Human Rights Act, a leaked copy of the document showed today. The letter was part of an exchange between the prince and the former Lord Chancellor Lord Irvine of Lairg about a perceived rise in litigiousness in British society…He expressed concern that the Human Rights Act risked promoting an “American-style personal injury ‘culture’.”…The prince underlined a statement beginning: “[I see the challenge we face as ensuring that] as we become a society more based on responsibilities and rights …” According to the Times, he dismissed the claim with the handwritten comment: “But this is rubbish – we’re a society based on rights alone.”

Huff huff huff, chummhaw – that won’t do at all old boy, not at all, riffraff and ordinary people mustn’t have all these bloody rights, they’ll only use them to put coal in. Oh, he’s a trip, that prince. I saw him interviewed by a US journalist recently, and his air of barely controlled disdain was something to behold. He actually used that phrase ‘people like you’ – you know, peasants, underlings, inferiors, commoners, vulgar little men from that vulgar big country. Every inch a dissident.

It’s funny about that article of Stanley Fish’s, because I don’t always disagree with him on the subject. I agree with much of what he says in the article ‘There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech’. This for instance –

In saying this, I would not be heard as arguing either for or against regulation and speech codes as a matter of general principle. Instead my argument turns away from general principle to the pragmatic (anti)principle of considering each situation as it emerges. The question of whether or not to regulate will always be a local one, and we cannot rely on abstractions that are either empty of content or filled with the content of some partisan agenda to generate a ‘principled’ answer. Instead we must consider in every case what is at stake and what are the risks and gains of alternative courses of action. In the course of this consideration many things will be of help, but among them will not be phrases like ‘freedom of speech’ or ‘the right of individual expression,’ because, as they are used now, these phrases tend to obscure rather than clarify our dilemmas. Once they are deprived of their talismanic force, once it is no longer strategically effective simply to invoke them in the act of walking away from a problem, the conversation could continue in directions that are now blocked by a First Amendment absolutism…

I like that, it’s pretty much what I keep saying when people ask me indignantly what I mean by approving of Irving’s imprisonment when I haven’t done any such thing, I’ve only asked some questions. I’m trying to discuss the subject rather than just saying ‘freespeech’ and walking away. That’s not interesting, and it doesn’t tell us anything, and it ignores the problems, so I don’t see the point. But the NY Times article is another matter. Maybe it’s just that Fish writes in a different voice for the Times compared to the one for the Boston Review.

Tooting Station (not Pootergeek – Tooting, Pooter – get it straight, can’t you?) seems to be reading Why Truth Matters. He quotes a passage from it and then quotes Amartya Sen in that article we’ve been reading here. He doesn’t say anything about hating WTM.

A couple of days ago I saw this guy who went to Waterstone’s in Piccadilly to browse because it was raining (I’ve done that! Gone to that same Waterstone’s to get out of the rain – that was one very rainy day) – went there to browse, I say, and he bought one book. Just the one. Discerning fella.

I dropped in at Jonathan Derbyshire’s blog just now and realized I must not have done so for awhile, because I hadn’t seen a post from January about something I said. He quotes me disputing in my usual intemperate way the idea that ‘Western liberal democracy owes much to the Christian view that all have equal worth before God’ and then asks, ‘I wonder, has Ophelia ever read Locke?’ No, of course not; I haven’t read anything. Well, I may have read a few words of Locke here and there (on calendars, jam jars, the sides of buses, that kind of thing), but not actually read. Reading makes my head hurt.

So there’s this thing in the Second Treatise, chapter 2, about the state of nature which is one of

equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.

Jonathan adds that ‘Jeremy Waldron makes clear in his remarkable book God, Locke, and Equality that the principle of human equality articulated in the Second Treatise…is an axiom of theology’, and that ‘it is simply ahistorical to deny that our (liberal) conceptions of equality and human dignity have Christian antecedents.’

But is it? I’m not convinced. I don’t deny, in the passage Jonathan quotes, that the Christian ‘view that all have equal worth before God, and the idea of democracy and equality’ were around; what I deny is that it’s possible to know that that particular source was an inescapable source. Maybe it was. Maybe every single person born after Locke’s Second Treatise was steeped in it and had no other source for the idea of equality – but I don’t quite see how anyone could be sure of that. And beyond that, it seems to me inherently unlikely that the idea of human equality is such a far-fetched, odd, unthinkable idea that without Locke, no one would have imagined it. It seems to me that people have a noticeable tendency to develop ideas of equality all on their own, merely by the experience of being treated as unequal. The Thersites effect, one might call it. These things do come up. Seneca talked about a kind of equality; so did Montaigne; at least as possible ideas, if not as desirable goals. So, I don’t deny that Christianity was one antecedent, but I do deny the version that apologists give us, which is that it was the necessary antecedent, that (by implication at least) without it we wouldn’t have the idea at all. I’d need more than the existence of one book by one philosopher to convince me of that, I think.

Stanley Fish likes to play Confuse a Cat sometimes. So it seems at least.

This is what it means today to put self-censorship “on the agenda”: the particular object of that censorship – be it opinions about a religion, a movie, the furniture in a friend’s house, your wife’s new dress, whatever – is a matter of indifference. What is important is not the content of what is expressed but that it be expressed. What is important is that you let it all hang out.

My wife’s new dress? But I don’t have a wife. Does he think only men read the NY Times? Does he think women are too busy buying new dresses to read it? Strange guy. But never mind that; the point is, he’s wrong. He may be right about the editor of Jyllands-Posten, but he’s certainly not right about everyone who opposes the pressure to ‘respect’ religious zealots who make death threats, torch embassies and kill people over cartoons about a long-dead prophet. To some of us, the content of what is expressed and the content of the pressure not to express it are important.

The first tenet of the liberal religion is that everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas) is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously…It is in the private sphere – the personal spaces of the heart, the home and the house of worship – that one’s religious views are allowed full sway and dictate behavior. But in the public sphere, the argument goes, one’s religious views must be put forward with diffidence and circumspection. You can still have them and express them – that’s what separates us from theocracies and tyrannies – but they should be worn lightly. Not only must there be no effort to make them into the laws of the land, but they should not be urged on others in ways that make them uncomfortable.

Has he been reading Stephen Carter? That sounds exactly like Carter’s claim that the separation of church and state ‘trivializes’ religion. And then why is he calling it a ‘religion’? Has he been reading Wieseltier? And why does he sound so disdainful throughout? Of course ‘in the public sphere…one’s religious views must be put forward with diffidence and circumspection’. You bet they must! The alternative is theocracy, in which laws are decided by revelation and authority via one holy book (which it is taboo to disagree with, much less make fun of). So what’s up with the disdain?

What religious beliefs are owed – and this is a word that appears again and again in the recent debate – is “respect”; nothing less, nothing more. The thing about respect is that it doesn’t cost you anything; its generosity is barely skin-deep and is in fact a form of condescension: I respect you; now don’t bother me. This was certainly the message conveyed by Rich Oppel, editor of The Austin (Tex.) American-Statesman, who explained his decision to reprint one of the cartoons thusly: “It is one thing to respect other people’s faith and religion, but it goes beyond where I would go to accept their taboos.” Clearly, Mr. Oppel would think himself pressured to “accept” the taboos of the Muslim religion were he asked to alter his behavior in any way, say by refraining from publishing cartoons depicting the Prophet. Were he to do that, he would be in danger of crossing the line between “respecting” a taboo and taking it seriously, and he is not about to do that.

Yes – and? What’s wrong with that? Again, what’s up with the disdain? We shouldn’t respect taboos. Taboos are irrational Forbidden Things, they’re often harmful, any benefits they may have can be obtained without the taboo (if they apply to poisonous foods, for instance, we can just point out that the foods are poisonous, rather than declaring them taboo); there’s no reason to respect them and plenty of reason to resist being ordered to respect them.

This is, increasingly, what happens to strongly held faiths in the liberal state. Such beliefs are equally and indifferently authorized as ideas people are perfectly free to believe, but they are equally and indifferently disallowed as ideas that might serve as a basis for action or public policy. Strongly held faiths are exhibits in liberalism’s museum; we appreciate them, and we congratulate ourselves for affording them a space, but should one of them ask of us more than we are prepared to give – ask for deference rather than mere respect – it will be met with the barrage of platitudinous arguments that for the last week have filled the pages of every newspaper in the country.

Yes, and? ‘Faiths’ can be strongly held and still be 1) dead wrong and 2) harmful, and because they are ‘faiths’ they are removed from rational criticism. That’s why they are disallowed as a basis for public policy. That is why we are not prepared to give them deference (or respect either, some of us). What else does Fish expect? Sheer abdication? Why would he expect that?

This is itself a morality – the morality of a withdrawal from morality in any strong, insistent form. It is certainly different from the morality of those for whom the Danish cartoons are blasphemy and monstrously evil. And the difference, I think, is to the credit of the Muslim protesters and to the discredit of the liberal editors.

Well what a revolting thing to think. Really. What with genocide in Darfur and schools incinerated in Afghanistan, people who think cartoons are the most important issue on the agenda are not my idea of morally admirable. Maybe Fish has been out in the sun too long.

So – we were talking about communityism and communalism? Well how appropriate then that today I get an email from someone at Friends of South Asia and the Coalition Against Communalism. Communalism is just the kind of thing I’m against, so I’m pleased to hear from coalitions against it. That’s one of my ‘communities’ – the anti-communalism community, the anti-forced-community community.

The subcommittee of the California State Board of Education mostly listened to sense, although it made (it seems to me) at least one big mistake, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

The committee sought to find middle ground in the contested space of ancient history and religion. For instance, it changed some language that referred to a ‘caste system’ to a ‘class system.’ This angered those who say that social stratification is a part of the larger South East Asian culture, and is not intrinsic to the Hindu faith — as well as those who say that ‘class system,’ as the term is commonly used in America, inaccurately suggests social mobility in the rigid class-based society of India.

That’s depressing. Class isn’t the same as caste, for the reason indicated, so that’s one whitewash that made it in. That’s unfortunate.

According to Charu Bhare, a science and math teacher in the Cupertino school district, ‘How it is taught degrades the Hindu philosophy and faith, and all that is pride that we teach our children.’ The academic community and its defenders did not prevail on every point, but scholars who attended the hearing were relieved that many changes were not made. ‘We have been greatly concerned over claims that equitable portrayal would prevail over historical accuracy,’ although academicians sought to be respectful of the faith, said Lawrence Cohen of the University of California-Berkeley. ‘It is a slippery slope.’

The ‘academic community’ – there it is again. You got your Hindutva community and you got your academic community, and the two communities duke it out for who gets the prize. Why not just call them scholars or academics? Why label them a ‘community’? So they would sound warmer and more respectful? Probably. However that may be, Lawrence Cohen reveals the ever-present and ever-growing problem: that assumption that everyone is required to be ‘respectful’ of the ‘faith’. We ought not to be required to be that. The ‘faith’ or its adherents (its ‘community’) ought to be respectful of the evidence, but scholars ought not to be respectful of evidence-free ‘faith’. That is how that ought to work, but in fact it works the other way around. (You won’t see a word about anyone from the Hindutva side saying they sought to be respectful of the evidence or scholarship. Not a syllable.) That is bad. Irrationalism and antirationalism ought not to have a presumptive advantage over rationalism. This isn’t golf, the side with no evidence and no argument ought not to get a handicap.

However. There were some exhilaratingly sensible people there.

‘History is not written to make us feel better,’ said Simmy Makhijani of San Francisco. The inferior status of women and the ‘untouchables’ of India should not be ignored, she said, because it is uncomfortable. ‘It is important to recognize inequities, and combat them – to challenge injustices in the system.’

The Sacramento Bee also has a good account.

“Why should history be written to make us feel better?” said Simmy Makhijani, a student at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco. The subcommittee voted to recommend changes that Department of Education staff developed in consultation with three scholars – including Harvard University’s Michael Witzel, who opposed the Hindu groups’ proposed changes in November in a strongly worded letter to the board. According to the department, some of its changes reflect “agreement or compromise” between Witzel and Shiva Bajpai, the California State University, Northridge, historian who recommended most of the Hindu groups’ suggestions to the Curriculum Commission last fall.

I’m not sure which version of what Simmy Makhijani said I like best, so I include both. It’s too bad Michael Witzel had to compromise with Shiva Bajpai, but – it could have been worse.

Gender and caste discrimination. The Hindu groups suggested removing passages that described systems of gender and caste discrimination among ancient Hindus. The subcommittee’s action would preserve some mentions of discrimination while removing especially harsh language and making some descriptions more precise.

Especially harsh language – such as the word ‘caste’? But if the word is accurate, it’s somewhat beside the point that it’s harsh, isn’t it. ‘Slavery’ is a harsh word to use of the system of labour on Mississippi cotton plantations in the 1850s, but it is after all accurate. That harshness has sometimes been muted with words like ‘servant’ or ‘work force’, but what is the benefit of that? It may make the descendants of the slaveowners ‘feel better’, but at the expense of telling the truth. And it won’t make the descendants of slaves ‘feel better’, so why sacrifice truth to mollify one group and neglect another? Same with caste, I should think. See the Friends of South Asia press release:

Parents, students, working professionals, faculty, first and second generation immigrants, and representatives of many community groups eloquently stressed the importance of presenting children with accurate, scholarly information on all aspects of ancient Indian history. Some of the most moving testimony before the SBE came from individuals who had personally experienced caste oppression. Representatives of Dalit organizations urged the SBE to restore references to Dalits and the caste system, which had been deleted from the textbooks on the HEF’s and VF’s recommendations. “The caste system is the single most important repressive social phenomenon that has been unique to Hinduism for over 3,000 years and should therefore find a place in the textbooks,” reminded Rama Krishna Bhupathi of FOSA and a Dalit himself. Speaking for the Federation of Tamils of North America, Thillai Kumaran, a concerned parent who stated his lower-caste origins during his testimony, strenuously objected to the textbooks’ suggestion that the caste system is no longer relevant in modern India. “Hinduism continues to affect the social status of people in India, and has condemned millions of Dalits as social outcasts,” he said. Hansraj Kajla, also a parent and representative of the Guru Ravi Dass Gurdwara (a Dalit group), suggested that the deletion of references to the caste system and the word “Dalit” in the textbooks was tantamount to “wiping out the histories of more than 160 million people in India.”

That press release is quite something. They have good writers at FOSA.

Speaking from her experiences of learning about caste and gender oppression in middle school, Veena Dubal, a joint law and doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, explained, “Like many of my European-American classmates whose ancestral histories could be traced to a time before women and people of color were given independent legal identities and allowed political participation… I was painfully embarrassed to read about the injustices committed in my parents’ homeland. Yet it was precisely these lessons that taught me about the necessity for universal civil liberties and human rights.” Simmy Makhijani, who also remembers facing racism and sexism in American classrooms while growing up, challenged the attempts by HEF and VF to sanitize Indian history.

The meeting seems to have been quite a good seminar in history and truth, and what they can teach us.

Yet more on Sen on multiculturalism – it’s a very rich article, and I prefer not to write enormously long N&Cs. They seem to have a built-in ideal maximum length, so I preferred to break things up.

That’s a fancy way of saying I have a short attention span and can’t write more than four or five paragraphs at any one time. After that I have to go outside and play.

On ‘faith schools’ –

Many of these new educational institutions are coming up precisely at a time when religious prioritization has been a major source of violence in the world (adding to the history of such violence in Britain itself, including Catholic-Protestant divisions in Northern Ireland – themselves not unconnected with segmented schooling). Prime Minister Tony Blair is certainly right to note that “there is a very strong sense of ethos and values in those schools.” But education is not just about getting children, even very young ones, immersed in an old inherited ethos. It is also about helping children to develop the ability to reason about new decisions any grown-up person will have to take.

That’s just it. Unfortunately, a lot of people, including a lot of people who have children, think education is indeed just about getting children, especially very young ones, immersed in an old inherited ethos, and that it is decidedly not about helping children to develop the ability to reason about new decisions any grown-up person will have to take. (No, what you do when you have to take new decisions is you ask WWJD or WWMD. You don’t reason. You apply the rules, you do what the community does, you don’t reason.) There’s no getting around the fact that ‘faith’ and ‘faith schools’ can be and often are in tension with reason and its cognates. That’s one towering reason that ‘faith’ should not be treated with extra ‘respect’ or sensitivity or tact or caution or forebearance or any of the other precautionary items were always being told to treat it with. ‘Faith’ needs more criticism and confrontation, not less.

The Bangladeshi community, large as it is in Britain, is merged in the religious accounting into one large mass along with all the other co-religionists, with no further acknowledgment of culture and priorities. While this may please the Islamic priests and religious leaders, it certainly shortchanges the abundant culture of that country and emaciates the richly diverse identities that Bangladeshis have. It also chooses to ignore altogether the history of the formation of Bangladesh itself. There is, as it happens, an ongoing political struggle at this time within Bangladesh between secularists and their detractors (including religious fundamentalists), and it is not obvious why British official policy has to be more in tune with the latter than with the former.

No, it’s not. In fact it ought to be the other way around. (I read a couple of horrific first-person accounts of what happened in Bangladesh in 1971, the other day, in Ibn Warraq’s Leaving Islam. It wasn’t secularism that caused all that.)

Indeed, official British policy has for many years given the impression that it is inclined to see British citizens and residents originating from the subcontinent primarily in terms of their respective communities, and now – after the recent accentuation of religiosity (including fundamentalism) in the world – community is defined primarily in terms of faith, rather than by taking account of more broadly defined cultures. The problem is not confined to schooling, nor to Muslims. The tendency to take Hindu or Sikh religious leaders as spokesmen for the British Hindu or Sikh population, respectively, is also a feature of the same process. Instead of encouraging British citizens of diverse backgrounds to interact with one another in civil society, and to participate in British politics as citizens, the invitation is to act “through” their “own community.” The limited horizons of this reductionist thinking directly affect the living modes of the different communities, with particularly severe constraining effects on the lives of immigrants and their families.

Sigh. Exactly. It is so confining. Limited horizons and constraining effects. Limited horizons and constraining effects are not good things, not even for immigrants, not even for ‘communities’. Which would you rather be – Amartya Sen or Tariq Ramadan? Salman Rushdie or Iqbal Sacranie? Azam Kamguian or Shabina Begum? Maryam Namazie or Yvonne Ridley? Which has the more open horizons, the more freedom from constraint?

The disastrous consequences of defining people by their religious ethnicity and giving priority to the community-based perspective over all other identities, which Gandhi thought was receiving support from India’s British rulers, may well have come, alas, to haunt the country of the rulers themselves.

So get over it, as soon as possible.

Heinz Schlaffer takes on some more theist misrepresentation – the familiar old ‘we are a beleaguered minority’ schtick. Would that it were true.

What? Belief is being ostracised? But it’s en vogue! Whether or not God exists can’t be decided intellectually; but it can be observed that he’s back in fashion among intellectuals…Literary historians like George Steiner and Roberto Calasso read the fictions of the poets as factual proof of the existence of saints…In the institutions of liberal culture, religious statements are being treated as a novel charm, and increasingly gaining the power of conformity.

This is what I keep saying (and tiresome people who disagree with me say Nuh uh). Religious, or ‘spiritual’, statements are being treated as fun new items on the menu, and are gaining the power of conformity. This is not a good trend.

Because such simplifications dominate intellectual discourse today, it’s necessary to recall the historic reasons and the ongoing achievements of the Enlightenment critique of religion – reasons and achievements which may be forgotten and rendered banal today but have not been opposed or nullified. It is still generally taught that scientific discoveries since the 16th century have demonstrated numerous “truths” of Christian teachings to be errors, for instance that the earth is the centre of the cosmos…For as long as it was possible, the church tried to repress the new appearance of the visible realm. When it was forced to give up its fight, it returned to the invisible, to those “truths” that are less easily subjected to verification.

That’s where the fluffy nonsense about non-overlapping magisteria comes from – from the fact that the church lost that particular fight, so has fallen back on the kind of whimsical speculation that can’t be falsified. Okay, they can do that, but intellectuals shouldn’t label that a ‘magisterium’ when it’s just mental invention. Intellectuals shouldn’t take it seriously.

“How far we are from this gloomy world,” the new belief-seekers and belief-finders will say of this historic review and glance at the current situation. They are right, because it was only after Christianity had been disempowered by the Enlightenment that it became civilised, friendly and modest enough that its adherents could find joy in it and its opponents no longer had to fear it. It isn’t Christianity that forms the basis of modern Europe but rather the disempowerment of Christianity, the Enlightenment.

And what a good thing it does, and let’s hope it can survive the current upsurge of the other thing.

It isn’t Christianity that forms the basis of modern Europe but rather the disempowerment of Christianity, the Enlightenment. We don’t have the popes, monks and priests to thank for democracy, equality in the law and individual freedom, tolerance and the right to criticise, but Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu. The world in which we live is the enlightened world in which even those who oppose it would like to live.

If it had been up to the popes, priests and monks, we still wouldn’t have individual freedom and the right to criticise. We’d have bags of solidarity and community, and no freedom or rights. You can keep that world.

The Archive

Theists have a nasty tendency to tell whoppers about atheists. There’s the standing canard that atheists are necessarily immoral; and then there’s the great sea of misquotation, misrecollection, misrepresentation. Theists make a lot of these little careless errors. Like one in this review of Dennett’s new book. (It’s actually a rather interesting and witty review, so the careless error stands out.)

One savors the irony that these lines come from the same man who insisted in an op-ed article for the New York Times two years ago that society should start calling atheists “the Brights” because they’re so much smarter than theists. Right.

The hell he did. Not even close. I was sure of that even without reading it, but I made sure, and he didn’t. Look for yourself. The closest he comes, and it’s pretty damn distant, is ‘Don’t confuse the noun with the adjective: “I’m a bright” is not a boast but a proud avowal of an inquisitive world view.’ That’s actually a disavowal of ‘they’re so much smarter than theists’, so not close at all.

Mind you, I hate the ‘brights’ thing, I think it was a terrible idea, partly precisely because it was obvious that the disavowal would never work. You might as well call yourself a ‘smart’ and then try to claim that it means fashionable, or a ‘wise’ and then try to claim that it means a potato chip. Jeremy wrote a very good article on the subject in 2003, which I’ve just read again, and he makes the same point (minus the slapstick). But all the same, that doesn’t make it okay for hostile witnesses to say that Dennett ‘insisted’ that society should start calling atheists “the Brights” because they’re so much smarter than theists, when Dennett in fact said the opposite.

Theists have a nasty tendency to fight dirty. They ought not to do that. If they have a good case, they should make it.

More on Sen on multiculturalism. It’s a terrific article; don’t miss it.

Being born in a particular social background is not in itself an exercise of cultural liberty, since it is not an act of choice. In contrast, the decision to stay firmly within the traditional mode would be an exercise of freedom, if the choice were made after considering other altenatives. In the same way, a decision to move away – by a little or a lot – from the standard behavior pattern, arrived at after reflection and reasoning, would also qualify as such an exercise. Indeed, cultural freedom can frequently clash with cultural conservatism, and if multiculturalism is defended in the name of cultural freedom, then it can hardly be seen as demanding unwavering and unqualified support for staying steadfastly within one’s inherited cultural tradition.

No, it can’t – but in practice multiculturalism is defended sometimes in the name of cultural freedom, but other times in the name of other things – anti-racism, or identity, or authenticity, or (undefined) diversity, or all those patched together as needed. So these terrible stultifying confining effects are overlooked, as so often happens when definitions change at convenience. That’s the work definition-changing does – it promotes confusion in the service of obscuring important problems.

there is another momentous issue here, which concerns the role of religion in categorizing people, rather than other bases of classification. People’s priorities and actions are influenced by all of their affiliations and associations, not merely by religion. The separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan was based on reasons of language and literature, along with political priorities, and not on religion, which both wings of undivided Pakistan shared. To ignore everything other than faith is to obliterate the reality of concerns that have moved people to assert identities that go well beyond religion.

Exactly. That is exactly why all this ‘the Muslim community’ crap drives me straight up the wall – it simply assumes that all Muslims (and even ex-Muslims) are Muslims before they are anything else, and that’s an absurd thing to assume. It’s not respectful or sensitive, it’s confining and coercive – it seals off all the exits.

The people of the world cannot be seen merely in terms of their religious affiliations – as a global federation of religions. For much the same reasons, a multi-ethnic Britain can hardly be seen as a collection of ethnic communities. Yet the “federational” view has gained much support in contemporary Britain. Indeed, despite the tyrannical implications of putting persons into rigid boxes of given “communities,” that view is frequently interpreted, rather bafflingly, as an ally of individual freedom.

Guardian please note; Madeleine Bunting please note; BBC producers who keep booking Iqbal Sacranie to speak for ‘the Muslim community’ please note.

But must a person’s relation to Britain be mediated through the culture of the family in which he or she was born? A person may decide to seek closeness with more than one of these pre-defined cultures or, just as plausibly, with none. Also, a person may well decide that her ethnic or cultural identity is less important to her than, say, her political convictions, or her professional commitments, or her literary persuasions. It is a choice for her to make, no matter what her place is in the strangely imagined “federation of cultures.” There would be serious problems with the moral and social claims of multiculturalism if it were taken to insist that a person’s identity must be defined by his or her community or religion, overlooking all the other affiliations a person has, and giving automatic priority to inherited religion or tradition over reflection and choice. And yet that approach to multiculturalism has assumed a pre-eminent role in some of the official British policies in recent years.

Home Office please note; student unions please note; everyone everywhere please note.