Right, Hamid Dabashi and his rebuke of Azar Nafisi. Good stuff, is it? Readable? Persuasive? Eloquent? Reasoned? Thoughtful? Fair? Dispassionate?

No.

Let’s sample it.

This body of literature, perhaps best represented by Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), ordinarily points to legitimate concerns about the plight of Muslim women in the Islamic world and yet put that predicament squarely at the service of the US ideological psy-op, militarily stipulated in the US global warmongering…”Islam” in this particular reading is vile, violent, and above all abusive of women–and thus fighting against Islamic terrorism, ipso facto, is also to save Muslim women from the evil of their men. “White men saving brown women from brown men,” as the distinguished postcolonial feminist Gayatri Spivak puts it in her seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

The distinguished postcolonial feminist, mark, in her seminal essay. Already (this is only page 2 of 11 in the printed version) we are in deadly familiar territory, where the in-crowd is always awarded nice little heaps of flattering adjectives like ‘distinguished’ and ‘seminal’ (those are both favourites – it’s remarkable how predictable Theory-heads allow themselves to be) while the out-crowd is scrupulously forbidden such wanton luxury. Already, only on page 2, we begin to feel the familiar queasy disgust at the mix of abuse and sycophancy. And we read on, and the mix gets more so and then more so – until we feel so sick we can’t read any longer. And it’s only page 4.

…one can now clearly see and suggest that this book is partially responsible for cultivating the US (and by extension the global) public opinion against Iran, having already done a great deal by being a key propaganda tool at the disposal of the Bush administration during its prolonged wars in such Muslim countries as Afghanistan…Meanwhile, by seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire, Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India…through the instrumentality of English literature, recycled and articulated by an “Oriental” woman who deliberately casts herself as a contemporary Scheherazade, it seeks to provoke the darkest corners of the Euro-American Oriental fantasies…Rarely has an Oriental servant of a white-identified, imperial design managed to pack so many services to imperial hubris abroad and racist elitism at home–all in one act.

And so bloody on. Veering from spit-flecked abuse to vulgar testosteroneish sneering but never losing the overwrought inquisitorial tone – as long as he is talking about Nafisi; but when the Good People enter the picture, of course that’s another story. (Dabashi fumes about Bush and the axis of evil but is apparently too stupid or too excited to realize that he thinks in exactly the same terms himself.)

In his study of the cultural foregrounding of imperialism, Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said examined the overlapping territories, as he called them, between the literary and the political, the cultural and the imperial, in the Euro-American imperial imaginary. This, as he was never tired of repeating, was not to reduce European literature to the political proclivities of any given period, but in fact conversely to posit the political fact, in his proverbial contrapuntal hermeneutics, as the principal interlocutor of the literary event–of the European literature of the period in particular. In her similarly groundbreaking work on the relationship between domestic and foreign policies of an empire and their cultural manifestations, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (2002), Amy Kaplan has demonstrated the link between domestic and foreign affairs in the manufacturing of such an imperial project. In this extraordinary work of literary investigation, Amy Kaplan demonstrates how at least since the middle of the nineteenth century etc etc…From the other side of the same argument, in her pioneering investigative scholarship, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, Gauri Viswanathan has traced etc etc…The study of English literature, as Viswanathan has ably demonstrated etc etc…

Why is this combination of spraying thuggery on the one hand and groveling ass-kissing on the other so repulsive? Because (I guess) it’s a combination of spraying thuggery and groveling ass-kissing. The two just do make a nasty, repellent, stomach-turning pair. Vituperation and accusation immediately followed by beaming smirking licking are a sign of something horribly amiss, of someone with too much bullying rage and too much slavish bootlicking unpleasantly yoked together in one person. And the combination is, of course, especially repellent in an academic. In a corporate executive or an advertising genius or a marketing guru or an entertainment boffin it wouldn’t be attractive, but it wouldn’t be all that astonishing or out of place, either. But academics really aren’t supposed to be that out of control. The writing in that article is just intellectually out of control. It’s swamp thing.

And the guy teaches at Columbia. I don’t want to go all Horowitzy on everyone’s ass, but I find that…disconcerting.

Is it just me, or does this seem a little confused?

Measure to make all faith schools open their doors to children from other religions are to be considered in an attempt to break down barriers between communities. Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, will announce today that he plans to look at the intakes of existing religious schools as part of a review of the admissions code for schools…In remarks likely to alarm supporters of faith schools, Mr Johnson will say in his speech: “Young minds are free from prejudice and discrimination, so schools are in a unique position to prevent social division. Schools should cross ethnic and religious boundaries, and certainly not increase them, or exacerbate difficulties in sensitive areas.”

But then…why are they expanding religious schools? I think Johnson is quite right that schools should cross ethnic and religious boundaries (cf Brown v Board of Education for some of the reasons to think that), but then their policy on the issue is – how to put this – wrong, isn’t it? Maybe they’ve decided that.

Update: I now have the crucial bit: contact information. The name of the group is Masaka Children’s Fund. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and therefore donations are tax-deductible. Checks may be sent to:

Masaka Children’s Fund

c/o Loretta Thomas

7450 S. 114th Street

Seattle, WA 98178

USA

I ran into a friend in the library yesterday afternoon. She’s a retired judge, an omnivorous reader, a novelist, and an activist (she did election monitoring in 2004, for instance). She told me she was thinking of going to Uganda for Thanksgiving. I probably looked quizzical, or surprised, or frightened; anyway, she explained: she has this friend, who has a house in Uganda where she shelters orphans and pays for their schooling – with her own savings from a lifetime of working. She’s up to 45 children now. My friend Katharine found out about her via this article in the Seattle Times; she was so impressed she phoned the reporter who put her in touch with Emily Bourgeois. Bourgeois is back in the US now, because she’s used up her savings and plans to work some more so that she can finance more children. I said hey, I can flag her up on B&W. Any readers who have deep pockets and would like to help Emily Bourgeois pay for the schooling of Ugandan orphans, there she is. (She has, Katharine said, now set up a foundation so that she can accept donations.)

According to The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University, read Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article, about the Bush admin’s plans to whack Iran, with dismay.

The article prompted him to dust off an essay that he had written a few years before and publish it in the June 1 edition of the Egyptian English-language newspaper Al-Ahram. His target? Not President Bush or the Pentagon, but Azar Nafisi, author of the best-selling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran…His blistering essay cast Ms. Nafisi as a collaborator in the Bush administration’s plans for regime change in Iran. He drew heavily on the late scholar Edward Said’s ideas about the relationship between Western literature and empire and the fetishization of the “Orient” to attack Reading Lolita in Tehran as a prop for American imperialism…In an interview published on the Web site of the left-wing publication Z Magazine on August 4, Mr. Dabashi went even further, comparing Ms. Nafisi to a U.S. Army reservist convicted of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. “To me there is no difference between Lynndie England and Azar Nafisi,” he told the magazine.

No difference. Interesting. And pleasant, and reasonable, and conducive to rational dialogue.

I saw the article via Crooked Timber just now, and it grabbed my attention with some violence. It is a subject I think about. The aftermath of Ramin Jahanbegloo’s release brought the subject sharply into relief, and I worried about it a good deal – specifically about the possibility of tainting Iranian reformers, in or out of Iran, by supporting them; or endangering them; or both.

Coincidentally enough, I was interviewed briefly by Maryam Namazie yesterday for her tv programme, and blurted out my worries on this subject. I had a feeling as I was blurting that it wasn’t the ideal thing to say, but it was what came into my head – and it gave Maryam an opportunity to be eloquent about internationalism and solidarity, so perhaps it was all right. (She is damn eloquent, Maryam is.) At any rate, under the circumstances, it really is hard for an American not to worry at all that she could be tainting people with suspicion of being in cahoots with the Bush administration, however unwittingly. As the Chron points out –

The conundrum, say these scholars, is how to voice opposition to the actions of the Islamic Republic without being co-opted by those who seek external regime change in Iran through a military attack. “All of us are mortified about the possibility of a U.S. attack on Iran,” says Janet Afary, an associate professor of history and women’s studies on Purdue University’s main campus and president of the International Society for Iranian Studies.

But Tim Burke blows some nonsense out of the water.

But read further, and you’ll see one more thing, which is the underlying manner that a great deal of ostensibly “postcolonial” literary criticism is basically nationalism in disguise, because to Dabashi the greatest sin of Nafisi is that she doesn’t like Iranian culture. E.g., this is not so much about whether or not the post-1979 government is or is not repressive. Dabashi isn’t about to be enough of a tool to argue that it is not repressive. This is about diasporic struggles over national identity, and a pretty crude attempt to rough up someone who speaks as a “national” but commits cultural treason against the nation. Anybody who on this blog, commenter or otherwise, has ever railed against the bullshit cultural nationalism of the American right – the calling out of Sontag et al as traitorously “European”, the argument that any time an American intellectual expresses distaste or disgust for American culture, should recognize what Dabashi is doing here. He is posing the sheer impossibility, in his view, of ever being a native who hates or criticizes his native nation (not government, but nation-as-culture, culture-as-nation). In Dabashi’s reading, the moment that a postcolonial subject expresses that perspective, they MUST, inevitably, be a hollow vessel within which lurks the empire. Whereas “Western” subjects still retain the liberal privilege of hating or disliking their nation; they are choosing subjects. This is noxious on a great many levels, not the least of which is the political puppeteering that is going on here. Western subjects choose and so long as they choose to become anti-national, they are good choosing subjects; native subjects must be loyal to their nation or be nothing more than pawns of empire. Two different kinds of human subjectivity here: what could be more faithful to the colonial bifurcation of the world into West and non-West?

Beautifully said.

To be continued.

See Jeremy and Julian being silly – I mean having a serious (albeit brief) discussion of aesthetics, elitism, cuisine, jazz, preferences, and alphabetization.

Martin Newland tells us plaintively that ‘these days people find it hard to accept that religion and rationality can co-exist.’ Well, maybe; some people; other people clearly find it very easy. And as for ‘these days’, I would say the social pressure is running more in the other direction ‘these days’ than it did, say, twenty years ago. But maybe by ‘these days’ Newland means ‘these past three hundred years’.

At any rate, he shows us how well religion and rationality can co-exist.

I am a Roman Catholic. As such, I believe that God took the decision to be born into a poor family in Roman-occupied Palestine. I believe that His short life on earth was spent setting down the rules by which He expected us to live, and I believe that as a sign of His love for us He humbled himself on a cross, died and rose again. I believe that He left behind a church which is infused with His Spirit but also subject to sin. I further believe, if pressed, that the fullest incarnation of God’s plan for his church resides in the Roman Catholic Church, with the successor of St Peter at its head and the Apostolic Succession as its historical guarantor.

Okay [Interlude. My eyes happened to move up from the screen to the window while I thought for a second, and they caught the most lurid rainbow – I had to get up and go stare at it for awhile. You should see it. It happens to end right in the bit of Puget Sound I can see from that window – grey water, grey clouds, and this luridly glowing arc of colour transecting them, hovering above the water. It’s moved closer now and is over the marina and ends on the shipping pier. Now it’s fading. Going…going…whew, that was pretty.] Okay do I think it’s rational to believe those things? No. I can see wanting to believe them, and so deciding to believe them; I can agree that I have plenty of irrational beliefs myself; but I can’t say that I think those beliefs are rational; so in that sense he’s right: I don’t think religion and rationality can co-exist. I think rational people can have irrational beliefs, but I don’t think the irrational beliefs become rational merely because rational people have them; I think they remain irrational. So if Newland’s point is that we should think those beliefs are religious and also rational, it’s a fair cop: I don’t.

He says other things along the way, some of them rather unpleasant.

Reactions in everyday secular society to manifestations of religiosity, such as the veil, range from a patronising accept-ance to the downright insulting…Yasmin Alibhai-Brown claims that the veil is not mandated by the Qur’an. But what is mandated is that women cover themselves. What is also mandated is that men dress plainly. And the original texts have been followed, as in all the mainstream faiths, by teachings and interpretation which are also considered by the faithful to be linked to the will of God.

What does that mean, ‘linked to the will of God’? Linked how? In what sense? In what way? By whom? But more to the point – does he not realize what a repulsive phrase that is, ‘what is mandated is that women cover themselves’? Especially when followed by the asymmetrical mandate that men dress plainly? Does he not know how that sounds? Does he not get that it sounds like sheer revulsion and hatred? That it sounds like a visceral reaction to women as both seductive and disgusting? That it frames us as purulent heaving steaming piles of sex organs? He probably doesn’t, but he damn well ought to. He ought to imagine for one second walking down the street in ordinary clothes and having someone shout at him in a voice of rage ‘Cover yourself!’

But I feel a kinship with those Muslim women because the world is full of Jack Straws, who imply by their actions that religiosity entails something vaguely misguided or sinister, something that is ill at ease with public life. By involving the nation in an intensely critical, secularised debate on their personal religious observances, Straw has insulted these women in the same way that I feel insulted and hurt by Madonna aping Christ crucified, by part of the Act of Settlement, by the burning of papal effigies in southern England and by the use of a compulsory BBC licence fee to broadcast the offensive Jerry Springer: The Opera.

But the ‘personal religious observances’ in question are also public, and what we do in public has the potential to be the subject of debate. That’s how it is. (That’s why I never go out. Everybody’s a critic.) At least until theocracy becomes universal (at which time it might not be Newland’s religion that is the favoured one, and he will get all nostalgic for secularism).

Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury. He goes on trial on Thursday. He could get the death penalty. For what? ‘His crime is to have tried to attend a writers’ conference in Tel Aviv on how the media can foster world peace.’ Ah yes – that’s a good reason to kill someone.

But few stories better illustrate the Islamist tinderbox that Bangladesh has become than Mr. Choudhury’s. “When I began my newspaper [the Weekly Blitz] in 2003 I decided to make an end to the well-orchestrated propaganda campaign against Jews and Christians and especially against Israel,” he says in the first of several telephone interviews in recent days. “In Bangladesh and especially during Friday prayers, the clerics propagate jihad and encourage the killing of Jews and Christians. When I was a child my father told me not to believe those words but to look at the world’s realities.”

So he was beaten up for ten days, then spent 16 months in solitary confinement, until he was released on bail.

In July, the offices of the Weekly Blitz were bombed by Islamic militants. In September, a judge with Islamist ties ordered the case continued, despite the government’s reluctance to prosecute, on the grounds that Mr. Choudhury had hurt the sentiments of Muslims by praising Christians and Jews and spoiling the image of Bangladesh world-wide. Last week, the police detail that had been posted to the Blitz’s offices since the July bombing mysteriously vanished. The next day the offices were ransacked and Mr. Choudhury was badly beaten by a mob of 40 or so people. Over the weekend he lodged a formal complaint with the police, who responded by issuing an arrest warrant for him. Now he’s on the run, fearing torture or worse if he’s taken into custody.

So it’s time to turn the glare of public attention on Choudhury and his fate. Jeff Weintraub alerted me (and a slew of other people) to the matter, and particularly urged Juan Cole to make a statement about it on Informed Comment. Norm already has a post (Jeff noted that Norm beat him to the punch). Pass it on.

The Wall Street Journal is not letting the Bush admin off the hook on this one.

The U.S. Embassy in Dhaka has kept track of Mr. Choudhury and plans to send an observer to his trial. But mainly America’s diplomats seem to have treated him as a nuisance. “Their thinking,” says a source familiar with the case, “is that this is the story of one man, and why should the U.S. base its entire relationship with Bangladesh on this one man?”…The Bush administration, which every year spends some $64 million on Bangladesh, has made a priority of identifying moderate Muslims and giving them the space and cover they need to spread their ideas. Mr. Choudhury has identified himself, at huge personal risk, as one such Muslim. Now that he is on the run, somewhere in the darkness of Dhaka, will someone in the administration pick up the phone and explain to the Bangladeshis just what America expects of its “moderate and tolerant” friends?

Good luck, Mr. Choudhury. Be well. Solidarity.

More on that Eagleton review. I have my doubts about other parts of it.

For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief.

Well, for one thing, that depends how you define mainstream Christianity (and I’m not too sure about that ‘always,’ either, in fact I think it’s wrong – for most of mainstream Christianity’s history, honest doubt has damn well not played an integral role, but led straight to the nice hot bonfire). For another thing, it could be seen as a contradiction to say that doubt plays an integral role in belief. For another thing, Eagleton doesn’t do a great job of modelling honest doubt himself.

He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning…The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end. Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom.

How does he know? Where is the honest doubt in all this?

And what does he mean? There’s a lot of it that I can’t make head or tail of. It scans, it makes grammatical sense, but I cannot figure out what it’s saying. Maybe I’m thick. Or maybe there’s no head or tail to be made.

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster.

What does all that mean? Why is believing in God not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist? Why is God not a celestial super-object? And what on earth does it mean to say that theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe? And the bit about transcendence and invisibility? I’m lost. It all seems like pure blather – grand words that fail to refer to anything.

He asks how this chap [meaning God] can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.

Eh?

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing.

Except that ‘he’ (who is not a person, remember – yet ‘he’ does have a gender) is not the answer, because that’s not an answer. It’s just a lot of declaration, most of it incomprehensible.

After that he gets onto Jesus, and that part is much better. Jesus is compelling, and Eagleton puts the rhetoric to better use there. There’s one thing though –

On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.

No, what’s really far more likely is that it will be both. It will be Islamists offing Musharref and taking over Pakistan – and bye bye misbelievers.

Still…

Dawkins, as one the best of liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or Taliban. He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s. In its admirably angry way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago.

But he overplayed his hand, Eagleton ends up. He’s clear enough once he leaves God behind.

I was stopped cold by a paragraph in Terry Eagleton’s review of Dawkins’s book in the LRB (it’s subscription, so I can’t link to it; a kind reader sent me a copy). I’ll show you why.

Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature.

Staggering, isn’t it? One suspects – one suspects – that very few of ‘those’ ‘right-wing’ dons had read much Derrida; one suspects, but one doesn’t know, and one certainly doesn’t offer the reader a shred of reason to share one’s suspicion, or evidence that would back it up, but, nothing perturbed, one immediately proceeds to spring off from one’s own unexplained and unargued suspicion to point out that the ‘right-wing’ dons would doubtless be cross with students who hadn’t done the reading. But one has forgotten – how very quickly, in the space of one sentence – that one doesn’t know (or one would have said so) that the ‘right-wing’ dons hadn’t read much Derrida, one merely suspects it. One has forgotten that one doesn’t know, and one blithely proceeds to use the suspicion to bludgeon someone else, as if a suspicion were the same thing as an established fact.

Then he has the brass to call Dawkins bumptious. One suspects that it is not altogether unfair to think Eagleton is a little bumptious himself, and one directs a bumptious and suspicious raspberry in his direction.

Catherine Bennett notes that the Rational Dress Society protested against dress fashion that ‘impedes the movements of the body’ with the result that after three or four decades, women were able to ride bicycles. Well, yes. Clothes and dress codes seem like a comparatively trivial matter, but they’re not. They’re immensely important. I’ve felt that literally all my life – from earliest earliest childhood. I always wore jeans when I could, I always fought wearing a skirt whether for school or for social occasions, I always fought binding or uncomfortable clothes. I remember fussing (okay probably whining) about a dress that was too tight or pinchy somewhere when I was a child; my mother said something to the effect that a little discomfort was the price of looking elegant; I rejected the principle absolutely. And it’s gone on that way ever since. I loathe the dress code for women, and that includes the secular dress code as well as religious ones – I loathe all the things women are expected to wear that impede the movements of the body. Did you know the streets of lower Manhattan were littered with high heeled shoes on September 11? Women are expected (and expect themselves) to dress for work in such a way that they can’t even run. They even, ‘Wonkette’ tells us, amputate ‘their little toes the better to fit their Jimmy Choos’ – and it’s been little more than a century that we’ve been able – and allowed – to ride bicycles, run, play sports, swim freely. Imagine not having that option. Imagine always having to wear a long dress, a corset, little flimsy shoes; imagine never ever being able to run, breathe freely, lounge, jump around – never being able to use your own body in an unconfined untrammeled way. Imagine life imprisonment.

Over a century on, this is just one of the many freedoms that young, enthusiastic female proponents of the jilbab and veil are content, apparently, to deny themselves. Yes, they freely choose not to be able to see properly nor to be able to communicate directly, nor move freely, nor play sports, swim in a public place and willingly embrace all the attendant limitations on their professional and social lives. Meanwhile, they are happy to watch their menfolk caper about, bareheaded, in western trainers and jeans.

Imprisonment for me, freedom for you – ‘freely’ chosen.

All this free choosing, according to Straw’s critics, we should accept, uncritically, at face value, because – here’s their trumping argument – what does freedom mean, if it doesn’t mean being free to oppress yourself? What does freedom mean if you can’t feel comfy in a niqab? Or happy to shave off your hair and wear a wig instead? Or comfortable – if you so choose – with footbinding? Or keen – if that’s what you want – to have a clitoridectomy?

The irony is beautifully stark in this item on a teacher suspended for wearing the niqab in class (the students, not surprisingly, couldn’t understand what she said).

She said: “The veil is really important to all Muslim women who choose to wear it. Our religion compels us to wear it because it’s in the Koran.”

As Edmund Standing pointed out when he sent me the link, note the juxtaposition of the liberal language of choice with the anti-liberal language of religious compulsion. She chooses to be compelled to wear it – and presumably not to fret too much about the women in Iran and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and many other places who are unable to choose not to be compelled to wear it.

Sorry – a couple of people have reproached me for linking to Nagel on Dawkins when it’s subscription. Sorry. I got access via bugmenot (which will probably now be taken away) a long time ago, so I forget that it’s subscription. I thought it might be on the Dawkins site but it isn’t, at least not yet. Try bugmenot – it doesn’t always work, but it sometimes does. It’s cheating, but then again, one can read magazines at libraries, and that’s not cheating.

It’s worth the effort (no surprise there).

One of Dawkins’s aims is to overturn the convention of respect toward religion that belongs to the etiquette of modern civilization. He does this by persistently violating the convention, and being as offensive as possible, and pointing with gleeful outrage at absurd or destructive religious beliefs and practices. This kind of thing was done more entertainingly by H.L. Mencken (whom Dawkins quotes with admiration), but the taboo against open atheistic scorn seems to have become even more powerful since Mencken’s day.

Just so, perhaps especially in the US (although it seems to me to be pretty powerful [in public discourse] in the UK too). I was saying just that to Jeremy the other day – that yes Dawkins and Dennett are rude about religion, but that I think they do that not because they are smug or arrogant but because the default assumption has become that it is taboo to be scornful of religion, with the result that unbelievers can feel very isolated and peculiar, especially young ones; I think what both are doing is at least partly performing the fact that it is and ought to be permissable to be scornful of religion. They’re performing for that high school student that Dennett talked about in his NY Times Op Ed – the one who felt so isolated and peculiar until Dennett spoke at his school and was quite matter-of-factly atheist. At least I think they are, I think that’s one possible and even likely explanation, though they may also just be being irritated.

I agree with Dawkins that the issue of design versus purely physical causation is a scientific question. He is correct to dismiss Stephen Jay Gould’s position that science and religion are “non-overlapping magisteria.” The conflict is real. But although I am as much of an outsider to religion as he is, I believe it is much more difficult to settle the question than he thinks. I also suspect there are other possibilities besides these two that have not even been thought of yet.

That’s just it, in a way – other possibilities. That’s interesting, where saying ‘God’ is the opposite of interesting. It’s about as interesting (and plausible) as saying Joe.

A religious worldview is only one response to the conviction that the physical description of the world is incomplete. Dawkins says with some justice that the will of God provides a too easy explanation of anything we cannot otherwise understand, and therefore brings inquiry to a stop. Religion need not have this effect, but it can. It would be more reasonable, in my estimation, to admit that we do not now have the understanding or the knowledge on which to base a comprehensive theory of reality.

You bet. I’m happy to admit that. I resent the ‘God’ answer partly because it claims we do have the knowledge – because it’s content with an answer that’s not an answer, and uses the non-answer to close off the question. It’s doubly annoying.

One the other hand – to be fair – Lakoff disputes Pinker’s review and says it says he says the opposite of what he says.

Steven Pinker gets off some good zingers at George Lakoff.

If Lakoff is right, his theory can do everything from overturning millennia of misguided thinking in the Western intellectual tradition to putting a Democrat in the White House…Conceptual metaphor, according to Lakoff, shows that all thought is based on unconscious physical metaphors, with beliefs determined by the metaphors in which ideas are framed. Cognitive science has also shown that thinking depends on emotion, and that a person’s rationality is bounded by limitations of attention and memory. Together these discoveries undermine, in Lakoff’s view, the Western ideal of conscious, universal, and dispassionate reason based on logic, facts, and a fit to reality. Philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge and ethics, it is a succession of metaphors…Citizens are not rational and pay no attention to facts, except as they fit into frames that are “fixed in the neural structures of their brains” by sheer repetition.

Hmph. I don’t believe it. (Nor does Pinker.) Thinking can depend on emotion without completely ruling out reason based on logic, facts, and a fit to reality – can, and has to, and does.

Finally, even if the intelligence of a single person can be buffeted by framing and other bounds on rationality, this does not mean that we cannot hope for something better from the fruits of many people thinking together–that is, from the collective intelligence in institutions such as history, journalism, and science, which have been explicitly designed to overcome those limitations through open debate and the testing of hypotheses with data. All this belies Lakoff’s cognitive relativism, in which mathematics, science, and philosophy are beauty contests between rival frames rather than attempts to characterize the nature of reality.

That captures what I’ve always disliked about Lakoff’s ‘framing’ stuff – its anti-thought, anti-cognitive, anti-intellectual, pavlovian advertising approach. Never mind substance, never mind rational thought about substance, never mind actually thinking about what political candidates say, just offer slogans to counter Their slogans, reflexes to trump Their reflexes, and let it go at that. Meet baby stuff with baby stuff. No thanks, I’d rather do better than that.

Lakoff tells progressives not to engage conservatives on their own terms, not to present facts or appeal to the truth, and not to pay attention to polls. Instead they should try to pound new frames and metaphors into voters’ brains. Don’t worry that this is just spin or propaganda, he writes: it is part of the “higher rationality” that cognitive science is substituting for the old-fashioned kind based on universal disembodied reason.

Ick.

Lakoff’s faith in the power of euphemism to make these positions palatable to American voters is not justified by current cognitive science or brain science. I would not advise any politician to abandon traditional reason and logic for Lakoff’s “higher rationality.”

Yeah. Lakoff’s euphemisms are a tad on the obvious, self-undermining side, also (as Pinker notes) the self-congratulatory side (they almost boil down to ‘just call us The Nice People and all will be well’). His popularity with the Democratic party is 1) suprising and 2) a bad sign.

But David Edgar sees things differently. He sees them strangely, too.

For most of the past 30 years, being in favour of free speech meant being in favour of good things (notably honesty about sexuality) and against denial and repression…Now we are having to defend things we disapprove of, such as the glorification of terrorism or, indeed, calls for censorship. The conundrum that one of the things liberals have to tolerate is intolerance hasn’t needed to be at the forefront of debates on free expression before. It is now, and it should be.

‘One of the things liberals have to tolerate is intolerance.’ No it isn’t. I don’t subscribe to any principle that requires me to tolerate intolerance or to defend things I disapprove of; one of the principles I subscribe to is that things should always be judged on their merits. I think free speech is a good but I don’t think it’s the only good and I don’t think it should always trump other principles; I think it depends. I think free action is a good too, for that matter, but that doesn’t commit me to defending all actions; it depends.

Yes, it is bad for wives to have to obey husbands, or for parents to renounce gay children, but such attitudes were common among this continent’s indigenous peoples until relatively recently – and people coming to live in Europe should not be asked to disavow them as a condition of entry, any more than they should be forced to express opinions on any other matter.

Ah, but that’s not the issue – you’ve given yourself too easy a case there. What about ‘people – men, perhaps? – coming to live in Europe’ who beat their wives or daughters, who take their daughters out of school, who coerce them into marrying someone they don’t want to marry? Or who beat up their gay children rather than merely renouncing them? That’s the issue – not disavowals in airports, but actions.

The title of that bit of wisdom is ‘Sorry, but we can’t just pick and choose what to tolerate’ – which is quite laughable, in a depressing way. Yes we can. That’s exactly what we can do, and have to do, and do in fact do, all the time. We tolerate some things and not others, some actions and not others. Think again, David Edgar.

Houzan Mahmoud says it clearly enough.

The veil is not merely a piece of “cloth”, but a sign of the oppression of women, control over their sexuality, submissiveness to the will of God or a man. The veil is a banner of political Islam used to segregate women born by historical accident in the so-called “Islamic World” from other women in the rest of the world.

She’s surprised to find herself agreeing with Jack Straw, but also thinks he’s a bit late.

Jack Straw’s government has always been proud of its “multicultural society”, in which all kinds of backward and anti-human cultures are respected and given space by the state. Women from an Islamic background will be among the most oppressed…More than ever I hear many women claiming that wearing the veil, burqa or niqab is their own choice. I totally reject this view. Not wearing the veil can create harsh problems for women – if it doesn’t cost them their life, as in Iraq, it can cost them long-term isolation from their community…The policies of cultural relativism have claimed the lives of many women in the UK, with their killers not properly brought to justice because “culture” and “religion” are taken into account by the courts. Women’s rights are universal…Imagine if a girl has been told to wear the veil from as early as four or five years old, where is the choice in this?…I understand why girls would veil, but I cannot see it as anything other than a solitary confinement prison.

It’s not just a piece of cloth, she says, it’s a political statement, ‘the banner of a political movement, political Islam, in the Middle East, Europe and worldwide. We must take a firm stand against this by demanding secular laws, secular education and equality for all.’ Count me in.

Salman Rushdie on the ‘Today’ programme on Tuesday. The subject is a collaborative exhibition with Anish Kapoor, based on Scheherezade. Rushdie points out that people forget or don’t realize how murderous the sultan is – he doesn’t point out, but could have, that the reason the sultan murders all those very young women after he’s had sex with them is so that no one else will have sex with them. He gets a new virgin every night, and she is killed in the morning. The subject has echoes of recent discussions, and the reporter asks them about Jack Straw. Kapoor says it’s a matter of respect, and Rushdie asks to disagree. Then he proceeds to do so as thoroughly as possible. So I transcribed it.

“But speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there’s not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of the veil, and I think the battle against the wearing of the veil has been a long and continuing battle against the limitation of women, so in that sense I’m completely on his side. He wasn’t doing anything compulsory, he was expressing an important opinion, which is that veils suck, which they do. You see one of the things that’s interesting about the story around which this work is based is that it is precisely about a woman taking into her hands the matter of her life and taking power back from an extremely powerful and bloody ruler, and I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.”

Damn right. You rock, Salman. And veils suck.

Yasmin Alibhai Brown gets it.

I now find myself in the unusual position of agreeing with Straw’s every word. Feminists have denounced Straw’s approach as unacceptably proscriptive, and reactionary Muslims say it is Islamaphobic.

Not this feminist. (See? This is why the word ‘some’ comes in handy. It’s similar when people over there get going on the subject of Americans. ‘Americans love sentimental movies, Americans are religious fundamentalists, Americans are fat, Americans mispronounce “Victoriar and Albert”.’ Not all of us, except for the last one: we all do make that mistake.) This feminist has not denounced Straw’s approach as unacceptably proscriptive; instead I’ve wished he hadn’t skated over the feminist issues.

But it is time to speak out against this objectionable garment and face down the obscurantists who endlessly bait and intimidate the state by making demands that violate its fundamental principles. That they have brainwashed young women, born free, to seek self-subjugation breaks my heart.

Yeah. And it’s also depressing that that brainwashed self-subjugation results in some liberals (and some feminists – some, mind you) indeed saying Straw’s approach is too proscriptive.

Britain has been both more relaxed about cultural differences and over-anxious about challenging unacceptable practices. Few Britons have realized that the hijab — now more widespread than ever — is, for Islamicist puritans, the first step on a path leading to the burqa, where even the eyes are gauzed over…I refuse to submit to the hijab or to an opaque, black shroud. On Sept. 10, 2001, I wrote a column in the Independent newspaper condemning the Taliban for using violence to force Afghan women into the burqa. It is happening again. In Iran, educated women who fail some sort of veil test are being imprisoned by their oppressors. Saudi women under their body sheets long to show themselves and share the world equally with men. Exiles who fled such practices to seek refuge in Europe now find the evil is following them…Millions of progressive Muslims want to halt this Islamicist project to take us back to the Dark Ages. Straw is right to start a debate about what we wear.

Don’t read the comments on this unless you want to feel sick. The Independent article has gone subscription, so I used this one, but the comments are…nasty.

Great.

Like many girls, Nabila has a boyfriend. However, as the daughter of a conservative Muslim family, this puts her at risk…[H]er two elder brothers have subjected her to repeated beatings, one of which was so serious it resulted in a trip to hospital. Nabila’s schoolwork has suffered, partly as a result of the emotional trauma and partly because of the raging migraines she now gets through being repeatedly beaten about the head…Nabila is one of many victims of “honour-based” violence, which, at its most extreme, can see young women of south Asian and Kurdish origin being murdered by their families. This kind of abuse has its roots in the cultural concept of women’s chastity being in the control of the men in her family; any suggestion of independence is seen as defiling the family’s reputation or “honour”. It can occur in strict Muslim and also Sikh families.

So the girls disappear.

…a statistical analysis done several years ago by Bradford city council. It tracked 1,000 boys and 1,000 girls with Muslim names as they moved through school; at primary, for 1,000 boys on roll, there were 989 girls; by secondary, the 1,000 boys were still around, but the number of girls had dwindled to 860. Across the report the analyst had written: “Where have all the girls gone?” Balmforth, who gives talks to teachers and social workers, says the answer is that the girls have been taken to Bangladesh or Pakistan. In such cases, by the time teachers notice girls have disappeared, it is frequently too late to do anything. The pattern that leads to forced marriage tends to run as follows: emotional blackmail, threats, beatings, imprisonment and kidnap.

Read the whole dang thing.

The BBC also discussed the limbo question.

But limbo has long been a problem for the Church. Unease has remained over reconciling a Loving God with one who sent babies to limbo and the Church has faced much criticism.

So – there’s unease about a loving god who sends babies to limbo, but what about a loving god who gives babies diseases, or one who lets babies get scalded, or raped (it happens), or beaten, or crushed (slowly) after earthquakes? What about a loving god who hands babies and children over to parents who neglect them or tell them they’re ugly and stupid or sell them into slavery or yank them out of school and force them to marry strangers? What about a loving god who allows all the suffering that sentient beings undergo on this particular planet? I’m curious about that. I’m permanently curious about it. Curious and also worried: because I think the resolution or repression of the problem has some unpleasant consequences – a justification or minimization of suffering that is not morally healthy. I don’t think we ought to reconcile a loving god with the way things are for sentient beings; I don’t think it can be done, and I think the attempt is corrupting.

But, that’s a separate issue, so never mind that for now.

But there are those who argue that it is not simply a “hypothesis” that can just be swept aside; that the notion that unbaptised children do not go to heaven has been a fundamental part of Church teaching for hundreds of years. Then, of course, there is the argument that if this can be abolished, what else is disposable?

My point exactly. If it’s been a fundamental part of Church teaching for hundreds of years then members of the church were expected to take it seriously; they were expected to believe it and take it as true, not just think it was an interesting notion of the church hierarchy that they could take or leave. And given that, it is surely bound to give believers pause to have the hierarchy suddenly say ‘Oh, wait, we’ve changed our minds.’ It just is. They’re bound to wonder why, if the idea has turned out to be as revisable as all that, they were told it was true for so long. And as the BBC shrewdly points out, if they wonder that, they’ll also wonder what else is disposable. Why would they not?

You know the US is in the grip of a war on religion, right? Sure. That’s why there are all these religious exemptions cluttering up the place.

Alabama exempts church day care programs from state licensing requirements, which were tightened after almost a dozen children died in licensed and unlicensed day care centers in the state in two years.

Well that’s good thinking. State licensing requirements were tightened presumably to improve the safety of day care centers – but church day care programs are exempt. On what grounds? Because if children in those programs crack their skulls on the concrete under the swing set, they’ll go to heaven so it’s okay? Because the church needs the money? What?

In recent years, many politicians and commentators have cited what they consider a nationwide “war on religion” that exposes religious organizations to hostility and discrimination. But such organizations — from mainline Presbyterian and Methodist churches to mosques to synagogues to Hindu temples — enjoy an abundance of exemptions from regulations and taxes. And the number is multiplying rapidly. Some of the exceptions have existed for much of the nation’s history, originally devised for Christian churches but expanded to other faiths as the nation has become more religiously diverse. But many have been granted in just the last 15 years — sometimes added to legislation, anonymously and with little attention, much as are the widely criticized “earmarks” benefiting other special interests.

Some legal scholars and judges see the special breaks for religious groups as a way to prevent government from infringing on those religious freedoms.“Never forget that the exercise of religion is a constitutionally protected activity,” said Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Michigan who has written and testified in support of greater legislative protection for religious liberty. “Regulation imposes burdens on the free exercise of religion. Exemptions lift those burdens.”

The free exercise clause has some unfortunate effects, in my view – such as zealots suing for the right to post bible verses in their offices saying homosexuality is a sin. Run-amok exemption would be another. Regulation imposes burdens on everything, which is precisely why it should be universal.

Read it all. It’s intensely irritating.