Golly. It’s over. I’m a bit choked. I told you I was looking forward to congratulating Homa – but she got there first. I tell you what, honey, when I clicked onto my email page and saw that subject line in an email from Homa – ‘congratulations to you all for a battle well fought’ – I must have jumped a foot.

I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t be all that elated, it’s just the prevention of something that never should have been suggested in the first place. But I don’t care. It was suggested, and it has been prevented, and that will make a difference, so I am elated.

And so is Homa. It says so right here.

Homa Arjomand, the women’s rights activist who organized a series of protests across Canada and Europe last Thursday to convince McGuinty to abandon Shariah, was elated when she heard the news late Sunday. “I think our voice got heard loud and clear, and I thank the government for coming out with no faith-based arbitrations,” said Arjomand. “Oh, I am so happy. That was the best news I have ever heard for the past five years.”

Homa led the entire protest, all this time, and it’s finally worked. Well done Homa! Congratulations! Hurrah!

Seyran Ates has very interesting things to say.

Why are a few particularly estimable, highly intelligent women and men in very prominent positions, blind in one eye when it comes to the protection of minorities? Why are they blind in that eye with which they have otherwise promoted equal rights for the sexes, and still do? The so-called minority protection with respect to Islam and religious freedom can only be had at the cost of the equal rights of women, and ultimately only serves to perpetuate and reinforce obsolete, archaic, patriarchal structures. The situation of Muslim girls and women in Germany has been played down to an extreme…I want to know, and many thousands of Muslim girls and women have a right to know, why understanding and infinite tolerance is practised with particular cultural traditions that are clearly oppressive of women. Human rights are universal and unconditional. And that goes most certainly for religious objectives.

This blind eye and playing down may finally be beginning to change, because women like Seyran Ates and Fadela Amara are speaking up and getting published in large-circulation newspapers and magazines. As are men like Johann Hari and Kenan Malik – in fact the list of women and men who are doing this is getting quite long. But there’s a lot of accumulated blindness to get rid of, so the list needs to keep getting longer and longer.

Fadela Amara, who founded ‘Ni Putes ni Soumises’:

Amara emphasises that this is the difference between those who talk about cultural relativism and her organisation, which is aimed at achieving universal human rights. “An exaggerated tolerance of supposed cultural differences which results in the maintenance of archaic traditions – that’s just not acceptable.”

Like the archaic traditions ‘Shinaz’ found herself up against:

For months, a Muslim woman living in Toronto tried to wring a divorce out of her local imam. Under sharia law, her husband had to consent to the divorce – even though he had abandoned the family four years earlier and married another woman in a South Asian country where polygamy is legal. The imam told her that her spouse wanted $100,000 and all her gold jewellery, she said, asking that her identity not be disclosed because she fears retribution from her ex-husband, the imam and her community…”The imam told me, ‘there are some sharia conditions you must follow, we must come to a settlement within sharia.’ I agreed because I was desperate,” said the woman, 29, who uses the pseudonym Shinaz.

There’s room for some optimism on the sharia in Ontario front though. The Attorney General released a statement on the day of the international protests against Sharia in Ontario – in fact, ninety minutes after the Toronto demonstration ended.

The McGuinty government is firmly and completely committed to equality principles and women’s rights as guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms…We have heard loud and clear from those who are seeking greater protections for women. We must constantly move forward to eradicate discrimination, protect the vulnerable, and promote equality. As the Premier re-iterated this week, we will ensure that women’s rights are fully protected. We are guided by the values and the rights enshrined in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We will ensure that the law of the land in Ontario is not compromised, that there will be no binding family arbitration in Ontario that uses a set of rules or laws that discriminate against women.

Let’s hope he means it. Of course, fans of the idea of sharia courts insist that the ‘set of rules or laws’ in question doesn’t discriminate against women, that the rules are different for the two sexes but not discriminatory, etc etc etc – but let’s hope the AG is not playing that game. That looks on the face of it like a pretty strong (and clear) statement – the kind it would be hard to reconcile with sharia courts in the face of strong protests, without paying a heavy political price.

Homa Arjomand released a statement on the Attorney General’s statement, of which she sent me a copy.

TORONTO – “The government is definitely heading in the right direction”, said Ms. Homa Arjomand, Coordinator of the International Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada, “I hope this statement by the Attorney General means he will soon bring an end to faith-based courts in Ontario”. Yesterday at noon, Ms. Arjomand led over 400 protesters to Queen’s Park to demand the liberal government stop allowing family legal matters such as divorce and child custody, to be settled in private courts based on religious laws. At 4:30 pm, ninety minutes following the demonstration, the Attorney General of Ontario issued the…statement…”I agree with the Attorney General, we do need more protections for women and to eliminate discrimination, said Ms. Arjomand, … we can best achieve this through the Family Law Act of Ontario. The Canadian Charter can guide us as it clearly states ‘Every individual …has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination’. All we ask is to be treated equally, the same as other Canadians.” added Ms. Arjomand.

It will be nice to be able to declare one victory. I’m looking forward to it, and to congratulating Homa.

Okay, so I’m a hurricane. Big deal. We all have our faults.

Meanwhile. I’ve been wanting to mention for days, but other subjects kept intervening – the proofs for Why Truth Matters have arrived. Jeremy got his Tuesday, my set arrived Wednesday – on account of how he’s a few miles from Continuum and I’m six thousand miles farther off.

We had a little discussion about the acknowledgements. Gremlins had replaced that page with the acknowledgements from a previous book of Jeremy’s and Julian’s, one that I had nothing to do with. (It would have been even funnier if it had been replaced with the acknowledgements from a book by someone entirely unknown to any of us, thanking a great crowd of people we’ve never heard of, for doing things neither of us would ever dream of doing in our most inebriated or gangrenously delirious moments, such as being helpful or patient or cheerful or pleasant.) Those acknowledgements thanked me for help with the editing – therefore would have looked rather odd in a book I co-wrote. One doesn’t usually thank oneself in the acknowledgements – although it might not be a bad idea. Who else is going to do such a thorough job of it, after all?

And finally, I would like to thank Myself, for being so unfailingly amusing, so inexhaustibly interesting, for shutting up when I needed quiet, for chattering when I needed distraction, for knowing exactly when to moan and whine and fuss, when to shout and rail and execrate, when to smirk and gloat and prance, when to titter and squeal and dribble; for knowing exactly when I wanted to eat something and when I didn’t, when I needed to go for a long walk and when I needed to lie on the floor and breathe deeply. For always being there, for sympathizing so deeply, for admiring so unreservedly, for knowing so well exactly what was wrong about everyone else and right about me.

But I hadn’t thought of that on Wednesday, so I merely suggested a smaller re-write: ‘Special thanks to Jeremy Stangroom for writing some of it, special thanks to Ophelia Benson for writing some of it.’ Jeremy suggested an alternative: ‘Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom would like to thank Ophelia Benson and
Jeremy Stangroom for making the world a better place.’ I think that’s an excellent sentiment, and that we should add it to the front page of B&W.

Christ. It keeps getting worse. If this account is reliable – it’s hair-raising.

Two paramedics, in New Orleans for a convention of emergency medical people, stuck in a hotel that ran out of food and water and on the fourth day, turned them out and locked the doors.

As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City’s primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. The guards further told us that the City’s only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in.

Oh. Okay. So they along with a lot of other refugees from hotels decided to pitch a camp outside the police station. The police were not pleased, and told the campers to go to the bridge over the river, where there were buses lined up waiting to evacuate people. Hurrah – so off they went. They passed the convention center, where a lot of people asked where they were going, and, upon being told, joined the march to escape.

Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm. As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads.

Well now – that’s what I call rescue.

As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move. We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans…All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot. Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle.

Is this common knowledge? That the bridge was actually blocked? By law-enforcement people firing guns? Is it true? I know at one point on Friday the mayor wanted to get everyone at the convention center to walk out via that bridge – and that that wasn’t possible for everyone because it is two or three miles and there is a steep climb to get up to it, so older, sicker, weaker, and disabled people and the people who stayed with them wouldn’t be able to. But nothing was said about people with guns blocking the way! Christ almighty.

Things don’t get better, either.

Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, “Get off the fucking freeway”. A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water…The next days, our group of 8 walked most of the day, made contact with New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search and rescue team…We arrived at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The airport had become another Superdome. We 8 were caught in a press of humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush landed briefly at the airport for a photo op.

Then they have what Barbara Bush thinks must be such a thrill for all those ‘underprivileged’ people – they make it to paradisical Texas. Where ‘the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief effort continued.’ I can’t stand to quote any more of it, it’s too sickening.

Oh, dear. I haven’t been to Michael Bérubé’s place in awhile – not on purpose, just because I haven’t gotten around to it. He was off on a vacation for awhile, I think, and I got out of the habit. Anyway I’m reading it now, and I keep bursting into laughter, so I thought I might as well share one or two of the shots. To set the scene for you – they have to do with Katrina and ass-covering. A major rescue operation:

“Operation Cover Our Asses was carried out with a combination of precision, speed and boldness the American people did not expect,” Bush told a select group of Gannons standing on the flight deck. “We set up an array of emergency photo ops and Potemkin villages with a can-do spirit that dazzled the world. I personally have hugged black people in the Gulf Coast, and the photos are now available on the White House website.”

Some comments on FEMA then and now:

Writing in Slate, Bruce Reed reminds us that thanks to Clinton and Gore’s wonky, do-good “reinventing government” initiative, FEMA was transformed from “a dumping ground for political hacks” to a competent, responsive agency.

But Bush had other ideas. He

appoints a campaign contributor/ horse whisperer to manage FEMA, thereby restoring to the agency the corruption and cronyism of his father’s era. (And not just any horse whisperer, mind you! An incompetent horse whisperer who was pushed out of his horse-whispering job because he was a “total disaster.” Give that guy a disaster-management position!)

Maybe that was it. Maybe the word ‘disaster’ gave someone the idea. I’m not sure I don’t believe it.

The question of which candidate would do a better job with FEMA just wasn’t important enough for most of our press to cover.

One more.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur. Chertoff, fielding questions from reporters, said government officials did not expect both lightning and thunder in the extreme weather that devastated the Gulf Coast over the past week…“We knew about the lightning,” Chertoff insisted. “We had all gathered to watch the lightning, which was really awesome. But then came the thunder, and before we knew it, most of us had dived under tables, chairs, desks, anything—anything to get away from the horrible booming noise no one could possibly have expected.”

Read the rest. Read the whole dang page.

The hijab ban a year later.

Twelve months on, the row has subsided and the law is being hailed by the Government as a success that has stemmed the Islamic fundamentalist tide and brought calm to the nation’s lycées. Fathima, who is 16, agrees. “In the end I really don’t think it was a bad law at all. I wear my voile until I get to the school gates and then I take it off. School is not a place for religion. It is a place where we are all French and we are all equal. After lessons, I put the scarf back on again. There’s no difficulty.”

That’s good – that seems a hopeful sign. Except…one hopes that after school Fathima doesn’t have to go someplace where we are not all equal. One hopes that school is not the only place in Fathima’s life where ‘we are all equal.’ But if it is – well then, what a good thing it is there, and let’s hope its influence spreads.

And in Kabul people get to see a Shakespeare play. ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ which would not be my first choice, nor my tenth or twentieth – but never mind that. After 27 years of no Shakespeare at all, LLL probably looks like Twelfth Night and Hamlet combined.

It was the finale to a four-night run that was enthusiastically received by the audiences but met some fierce criticism in the conservative press, which saw it as an imposition of western values.

That’s right. It’s multiculturalism. Enjoy!

One actress had to move out of her home: neighbours suspected her of adultery or prostitution because she was coming home after sunset owing to long rehearsals.

Well then obviously she’s out spreading her legs somewhere! The slut – what business do women have being away from home after sunset?! I ask you. If the good lord had wanted women to be away from home after sunset, he would have given them night vision. I rest my case.

The audience of about 400 included members of the Afghan royal family, the French ambassador, students and builders restoring the gardens. Miss Jaber said the cultural obstacles, particularly for the female actors, had been enormous. “At first the actors would not even look at each other,” she said. Faizal Azizi, who played a courtier, said the Taliban, which ruled for five years until the 2001 American invasion, would “never allow us to put on a play, to tell a story about love. Now we have a democracy and we can show these things to our people. I am so proud.”

And so you should be. Go, Faizal, go, students and builders. Live, breathe, fly kites, listen to music, go to plays, stay out after sunset. Live.

Everyone’s already seen this, but I just wanted to keep it for the record. I saw it in several places, but this one is from the Guardian on September 3.

At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses rolled up so some 700 guests and employees from the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line – much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the stinking Superdome since last Sunday. ‘How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead of us?’ exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed guests with their luggage. The 700 had been trapped in the hotel, next to the Superdome, but conditions were considerably cleaner, even without running water, than the unsanitary crush inside the dome.

Impressive, isn’t it.

As is the perpetual cognitive dissonance.

President Bush, in his weekly radio address on Saturday, said: “In America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need.”

Well that’s a funny joke – since the entire world has been watching with its jaw dropped as we in America did exactly that – jumping into the SUV and hightailing it out of New Orleans while the SUVless stayed behind – well and truly abandoned. If we don’t abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need, what was all that, exactly? An optical illusion?

This interview with Salman Rushdie is full of good observations. Packed with them.

I suppose I became more intellectually engaged in the subject of freedom. If you live in free countries you don’t have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.

It sure does. The more I hear of women not allowed to leave the house without a man’s permission – not allowed to live at all without being owned by a man – the more aware I become of my own freedom, and the more savage I feel at the thought of being any less so, and at the thought that most women in the world are a great deal less so.

Shikha Dalmia: Do you think freedom of speech is threatened by cultural relativism—by the idea that principles like free expression are not universal truths but simply local cultural constructs?

Rushdie: The idea of universal rights – the idea of rights that are universal to all people because they correspond to our natures as human beings, not to where we live or what our cultural background is – is an incredibly important one. This belief is being challenged by apostles of cultural relativism who refuse to accept that such rights exist. If you look at those who employ this idea, it turns out to be Robert Mugabe, the leaders of China, the leaders of Singapore, the Taliban, Ayatollah Khomeini.

Bingo.

Shikha Dalmia: Where does this leave us on the question of democratic reform in Islamic countries? Do you think that Islam lacks a crucial piece to build a foundation for freedom?

Rushdie: What it has is an extra piece that believes that religion can be the foundation for a state. It’s a question of removing that piece rather than adding something.

Brilliant. Apart from anything else – the accuracy, the explanatory power – it’s politically good, because the idea of lacking a crucial piece is obviously fairly pejorative, but having an extra piece is not.

I was very struck when Joe Lieberman was chosen as the vice-presidential candidate, and there was a certain amount of rubbish talked about whether Americans would vote for a Jewish candidate. I remember a big opinion poll taken by The New York Times in which people were asked whether they would accept as a presidential candidate a woman, a Jew, an African American, a homosexual, and an atheist. In four of those five measures, the result was resoundingly yes, by a gigantic majority, but for an atheist it was no better than 50-50. Somebody who overtly professes not to have religion can’t get elected dog catcher in this country. That’s a problem, because it creates a political discourse full of sanctimony.

Ya think?

There’s a lot more excellent stuff, read the whole thing if you haven’t already. I can’t quote the whole dang thing because it’s, you know, not mine – so read it.

Ah – things become a little clearer. I became curious about a commenter who keeps conflating theism with theology, so I googled and found a blog, where conflation turns up again.

Early in the month, a friend called my attention to this Salon interview with philosopher of science Michael Ruse, talking about evolution-vs-creationism. Ruse is pointing out some of the argumentative excesses of science (for example, the rantings of Richard Dawkins, which I’ve blogged about before) and he’s trying to stake out space to allow someone to endorse both science and religious faith. I liked what he had to say. As I’ve seen argued elsewhere, atheism didn’t exist before the Enlightenment.

Just by the way, that’s not true. Consider Lucretius and Epicurus and Democritus, for instance; and consider the entire world; and consider all classes and conditions, including people who lived out of the reach of clerics. But that’s a side issue.

According to Ruse, scientism, positivism, secularism, whatever you call it, is a worldview, quite comparable to a religious worldview in that it dictates modes of thinking, patterns of rhetoric, and certain cultural norms at the expense of other valid norms.

Hang on – you can’t call ‘it’ those three things interchangeably, because they’re three different things. You might as well say ‘According to X, mysticism, Biblical literalism, spirituality, whatever you call it, is a worldview.’ Different things are different things, and it’s impossible to get anywhere in a discussion or analysis by blithely tossing them together and saying ‘whatever you call it.’ Making careful distinctions is a crucial part of careful and critical thinking. We seem to have a habit of mind, here.

This Ruse interview caught the notice of Butterflies and Wheels, who quickly proceed to belittle Ruse. This is an example of why I lose heart for this type of argument. Ophelia of B&W pretty bluntly admits her ignorance of theology on her way to dismissing it as a serious discipline. This is Richard Dawkins’s M.O. as well. In the way of many scientists and analytic philosophers, they are overly literal, clumsy in their use or interpretation of metaphor. Also, they argue by way of snark and bullying, of unacknowledged biases and a distinct arrogance in the face of something they don’t know much about.

This is probably where the confusion started. In that comment, I did indeed talk about theology, because Ruse did. That was the subject of that comment. But it was not the subject of a later comment, which was not about Ruse, but about Paul Davies, who did not mention theology, but rather belief in God, which is not the same thing. ‘…belief in God is largely a matter of taste, to be judged by its explanatory value rather than logical compulsion. Personally I feel more comfortable with a deeper level of explanation than the laws of physics.’ Distinctions again, you see. Theism is not theology, and theology is not theism. And more: asking questions is not necessarily the same thing as admitting ignorance. Asking questions is a (well established) part of argument and analysis. And I still think the questions I asked are both serious (as opposed to being ‘snark and bullying’) and legitimate. I still want to know: if God is outside of nature, how can theology exist at all? How can human beings study or inquire into something that is outside of nature? I can see how we can speculate about it, imagine it, tell stories about it, have hopes and dreams and wishes about it – but I fail to see how we can make an ology out of it. That by the way is an argument with (or a question about) what Ruse said, more than it is about theology itself, because for all I know (there is some ignorance – I don’t know) theology in fact does not hold ‘the classic Augustinian position that science and theology can never directly contradict one another, since science can only consider nature and God, by definition, is outside nature.’ Maybe theology repudiates that idea for the very reason that it would make theology itself a nonsense. But Ruse is the one who put it forward, not I. He seems to think it is still a respectable theological view.

So: let’s keep our distinctions distinct. Scientism is not secularism, secularism is not positivism, and theism is not theology. (And cheese is not peanut butter, Keats is not Shelley, blue is not green, dog is not cat – see how this goes?)

So the truth is out. The well-kept secret that there is a large and growing gap between rich and poor in the US has suddenly tumbled out of the bag and into the spotlight. Well whaddya know – you mean all those people working in Walmarts and motels and chicken-processing plants and McDonald’s aren’t earning enough to buy a big house in the suburbs and an SUV? Well I’ll be damned – I coulda sworn everybody who did an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay in this country got to be a millionaire in a couple of years or so.

As President Bush scurries back to the Gulf Coast, it is clear that this is the greatest challenge to politics-as-usual in America since the fall of Richard Nixon in the 1970s…Instead of secretive “Deep Throat” meetings in car-parks, cameras captured the immediate reality of what was happening at the New Orleans Convention Center, making a mockery of the stalling and excuses being put forward by those in power.

And of the deeply fake folksy ‘concern’ of the scurrying president.

National politics reporters and anchors here come largely from the same race and class as the people they are supposed to be holding to account. They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties, and they are in debt to the same huge business interests. Giant corporations own the networks, and Washington politicians rely on them and their executives to fund their re-election campaigns across the 50 states. It is a perfect recipe for a timid and self-censoring journalistic culture…

That’s for sure. It’s also a perfect recipe for a thoroughly corrupt political process – and that’s the meal we get.

But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington. The most spectacular example came last Friday night on Fox News, the cable network that has become the darling of the Republican heartland. This highly successful Murdoch-owned station sets itself up in opposition to the “mainstream liberal media elite”. But with the sick and the dying forced to sit in their own excrement behind him in New Orleans, its early-evening anchor Shepard Smith declared civil war against the studio-driven notion that the biggest problem was still stopping the looters.

It’s interesting. If even Fox suddenly realizes there’s something wrong – maybe the giant irrelevance that is US politics will take a turn for the non-infantile.

When the back-slapping president told the Fema boss on Friday morning that he was doing “a heck of a job” and spent most of his first live news conference in the stricken area praising all the politicians and chiefs who had failed so clearly, it beggared belief.

Yes, and then there was that little problem with the delay of supplies –

Three tons of food ready for delivery by air to refugees in St. Bernard Parish and on Algiers Point sat on the Crescent City Connection bridge Friday afternoon as air traffic was halted because of President Bush’s visit to New Orleans, officials said. The provisions, secured by U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-Napoleonville, and state Agriculture Commissioner Bob Odom, baked in the afternoon sun as Bush surveyed damage across southeast Louisiana…

Oops. But hey – what’s a little delay of food to flood victims when you’ve got a swell funny guy like Bush around cracking jokes and cheering everyone up with his blithe indifference to suffering on a scale we can’t even take in?

We’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we’re going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we’re going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is — and it’s hard for some to see it now — that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)

Isn’t that funny? Isn’t that just a thigh-slapper? Doesn’t it make you wish you’d been Bush’s roommate at Yale, or that Texas high school he went to for awhile, or somewhere? Sure it does.

I just feel compelled to point out a couple of items from this Guardian article on the Bush team’s effort to undo the damage, because they’re funny.

On Saturday Mr Bush ordered 7,000 more troops to the Gulf coast. As important as the content of the speech was its sombre tone. It was clear the White House realised that making a joke about his young hell-raising days in New Orleans in the course of a flying visit to the flooded city on Friday, was a mistake that reinforced allegations he had failed to take the disaster seriously enough.

Gee, you think?

The second element of the White House plan is to insist, in an echo of the September 11 attacks, that the scale of the disaster, the combination of a hurricane and the collapse of the levee system around New Orleans, could not have been foreseen. Mr Bush was castigated for saying on Wednesday: “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees”. It was pointed out that there had been a string of investigations and reports in recent years which had predicted the disaster almost exactly. Nevertheless, administration officials stuck to the line yesterday. In a string of television interviews, Michael Chertoff, the head of the homeland security department, called the situation an “ultra-catastrophe”, as if the hurricane and flood were unrelated events.

That’s really kind of hilarious, in a sick way. (It won’t be hilarious if it works, which seems inconceivable now, but then so did Bush’s running for president at all, so whatever.) It’s disgusting as well as hilarious, because it displays such contempt for our collective intelligence, but it’s also funny. Just keep insisting, guys. Sure, sure, there are stacks of papers and studies showing that many many people did predict exactly that ‘combination’ (it’s not a combination, it’s cause and effect, you fools!), there are books on the subject, there are furious scholars telling CNN that they told various High Officials all about it, there are articles in major magazines from one or five years ago, all predicting exactly what happened. But you just keep insisting that no one could possibly have imagined such a thing. Make fools of yourselves. Go ahead, knock yourselves out.

And not only why is it deeper, but why is it considered a level of explanation? That’s a serious, literal question. I really don’t understand what it means – to talk of a deeper level of explanation based on unsupported assertions as opposed to a shallower level of explanation based on warranted assertions. How can explanations that float free of any rational epistemic requirements and checks and standards be deeper than those that are constrained by what we are able to figure out about the real world via tested methods? To put it more bluntly, how can explanations that are simply made up be deeper than those that are the result of careful inquiry and investigation? Is that what ‘deeper’ means? Made up? Fantasy based? Inventive?

How, in fact, can explanations of that kind explain at all? How can an explanation that is not tethered to evidence or investigation actually explain?

The whole idea seems to work the same way the idea of ‘alternative’ medicine works. What is alternative medicine alternative to? Medicine that works. Medicine that works, as doctors and medical researchers patiently (and impatiently) point out, is simply medicine. If it works, it works, and doctors will prescribe it. If it works, furthermore, it can be shown to work. If it works, it is possible to produce evidence that it works. Proper, replicable evidence. If it is not possible to produce such evidence, then what reason is there to think the medicine in question does work? So alternative medicine is simply a friendly name for medicine that, as far as has so far been shown, doesn’t work. It is also medicine that does not have to meet any standards or pass any tests – because that’s what non-alternative medicine does. Same with God and religion and deeper levels of ‘explanation.’ Deeper levels of explanation simply means explanation that doesn’t explain. Alternative explanation, one might call it. Homeopathic holistic alternative explanation, that doesn’t explain a damn thing, but simply tells a story. About as deep as the drop of sweat on a gnat’s eyebrow.

Let’s talk a little more about this idea of ‘a deeper level of explanation than the laws of physics’ that Paul Davies refers to.

…belief in God is largely a matter of taste, to be judged by its explanatory value rather than logical compulsion. Personally I feel more comfortable with a deeper level of explanation than the laws of physics. Whether the use of “God” for that deeper level is appropriate is, of course, a matter of debate.

What’s interesting about that is the question of what the word ‘deeper’ is gesturing at. Well, what is it? What makes this putative deeper level of explanation deeper? Deeper than the laws of physics, and possibly to be identified with ‘God’. So it’s something outside nature, necessarily, because otherwise it can’t be ‘deeper’ than the laws of physics, it would be on the same level. So therefore the usual tools and methods for inquiry into nature (stars, dirt, humans, nematodes, bacteria, psychology, fire, weather) are irrelevant, because we’re after something different, and deeper. So…we have to avoid the usual methods of inquiry then. We have to use different methods. What other methods are there? The ones that are not useful and are not legitimate in inquiry into nature. Ones that don’t consult evidence or logic, ones that don’t submit to testing and peer review, ones that don’t have to produce replicable findings and checkable sources and evidence.

Unless I’m missing something, and there’s some third option? Something that is on a ‘deeper level’ than the law of physics, yet still relies on evidence and logic and peer review, but a somehow different kind of evidence and logic and peer review from the kind that the laws of physics rely on? But…what would that be? Do tell me, if anyone knows. We could call it The Third Way.

But meanwhile I have to operate on the assumption that there are only two options. There is rational inquiry carried on in the usual way – in history, forensic investigation, detective work, daily life, as well as in science – and there is the other thing. So it is the other thing that provides a deeper level of explanation. How? By not having any constraints. By being free as air, free as the wind blows, free as Emma Goldman on her best day. By floating free of any requirement to back up its assertions and truth claims.

Okay, so what I want to know is, why is that level deeper? Why is it not, rather, incomparably more shallow? Why is it not a mere thin layer of spit compared to the deepest part of the ocean?

I must say, I’ve been a little surprised at some of the reactions to my (fairly mild, I think) comments on New Orleans.

They reinforce what I said to a different reader last week: that I’m emphatically not a tragic realist, who thinks ‘the strong do what they want and the weak endure what they must.’ No. On the contrary – I think we have to fight and resist, argue and keep on arguing, not give up, not lie down, not surrender, and certainly not shrug and say ‘that’s just how it is’ and go about our selfish business. I’m a little shocked at the amount of ‘that’s just how it is’ I’ve received in the past couple of days, in censorious emails as well as in comments.

This for instance, from an academic: ‘Please focus on what can be done to help the poor people of New Orleans. Spare us the superior morality stuff.’ I replied, and was replied to in turn: ‘I doubt that many of us need reminding that inequality exists in the US. Indeed, it’s a fact of life everywhere on this planet.’

True, inequality is a fact of life everywhere on this planet. So – ? So there’s no point in talking about it? So it’s wicked to talk about it (because, the first message said, catastrophic events are exploited for ‘political gain’)? But that doesn’t follow, and it isn’t true. All sorts of things are a fact of life on this planet; some of them can and should be changed; it’s worth trying to change them. Why wouldn’t it be? How can the fact that inequality is a fact of life everywhere possibly mean (all by itself) that it’s necessary to rebuke people for mentioning it or condemning it?

For another instance, ‘As for the the rich living on high ground, in any culture that has ever existed part of the definition of being rich is to live on high ground.’ Actually that’s not true – in volcanic areas it’s the other way around. But that’s a side issue. The central one is the same as the first. Yes, the difference between rich and poor is an old one and a widespread one – so what? It doesn’t follow that there’s no reason to discuss it. It doesn’t follow for instance that there is no difference, or no difference that matters, between relatively small gaps between rich and poor, and enormous ones. It also doesn’t follow that there is no difference between having a small underclass and having an enormous one. These things are eminently discussable (and in fact there are quite a few perfectly respectable academics who do discuss them), so the cold scorn of my critics has surprised me.

The hell with tragic realism.

I have other stuff I wanted to mutter about, but it’s hard to think about anything else right now.

I watched a lot of cable news last night. Shattering stuff. ‘We need help, sir, we really do.’ ‘Look at these old people over here – look at this little baby.’ People in floods of tears, people mopping each other’s faces, people angry on behalf of those older, younger, weaker, frailer than themselves. People desperately needing water. (We all know what it’s like to be thirsty – imagine being that thirsty for four days! While watching people around you dying of dehydration – knowing if you don’t get water you’ll all die soon.) People who’ve lost everything they had, who went to the convention center as they were told, to be evacuated.

You should see the New York Times today. Huge headline the width of the page: Despair and Lawlessness Grip New Orleans as Thousands Remain Stranded in Squalor. Under that a huge photo nearly the width of the page, of a body floating in the floodwater. Not the usual NY Times, not the usual Nawlins, not the usual anything.

State officials have described the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as a national disgrace.

Much of the frustration has been directed at the national authority, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema). The head of the New Orleans emergency operations, Terry Ebbert, has questioned when reinforcements will actually reach the increasingly lawless city. “This is a national disgrace. Fema has been here three days, yet there is no command and control,” Mr Ebbert said. “We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can’t bail out the city of New Orleans.” One man, George Turner, who was still waiting to be evacuated, summed up much of the anger felt by the refugees. “Why is it that the most powerful country on the face of the Earth takes so long to help so many sick and so many elderly people?” he asked.

New Orleans’ mayor expressed some rage in a radio interview – there is an audio link to the interview on this page. He and the interviewer both lose it at the end.

The Times points out what should be obvious – that the unbelievable mess in New Orleans shows up the usually papered-over or shoved-aside inequality in the US.

The scenes of floating corpses, scavengers fighting for food and desperate throngs seeking any way out of New Orleans have been tragic enough. But for many African-American leaders, there is a growing outrage that many of those still stuck at the center of this tragedy were people who for generations had been pushed to the margins of society. The victims, they note, were largely black and poor, those who toiled in the background of the tourist havens, living in tumbledown neighborhoods that were long known to be vulnerable to disaster if the levees failed. Without so much as a car or bus fare to escape ahead of time, they found themselves left behind by a failure to plan for their rescue should the dreaded day ever arrive…In the days since neighborhoods and towns along the Gulf Coast were wiped out by the winds and water, there has been a growing sense that race and class are the unspoken markers of who got out and who got stuck.

NPR cited and talked to the author of what sounds like a highly relevant book, this morning – Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature. He talked about the role of race and class in the city’s geography. Richer people live on the higher ground, the poor live on the low ground. If you have money, you’re safer, if you don’t, you’re not. If you have money, you can leave town, if you don’t, you can’t. And that’s that.

Why is it taking so long? There are relief supplies there, we’re told. Why can’t they get them to the convention center? I can see why it would be slow to take them to widely scattered areas – but they can’t even take them to the convention center?

Which has quite a few dead bodies in it now. Well – it will have a lot more in the morning. After four days with no water…

A reporter on ‘The World Tonight’ told us about an elderly man with diabetes who asked if he could buy some water from the reporter – and that there were a lot of requests like that. It’s just a nightmare.

Bush explained this morning that things were moving slowly because nobody foresaw that the levees would break. Really – then why was everyone foreseeing exactly that on Sunday? Isn’t that why the Mayor issued the mandatory evacuation order? Isn’t that why the possibility of a category 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans directly is one of the top items on the list of potential national disasters, along with terrorist strikes and earthquakes? Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. But Bush didn’t realize that. Now that’s what I call doing your homework, and your job.

I’ve transcribed some of that chat with Salman Rushdie on ‘Today’ last Monday, because he said several excellent things, worth preserving.

First he was asked his opinion of Muslim ‘leaders’…

Well for a start I’m not sure how much of a ‘leader’ these people are – it’s interesting – sort of a moot point about how many people actually follow them. But I think the mistake is to see these people as being somehow the voice of moderation. Sacranie and his deputy Banglawala have been very very vociferously hard-line on a range of issues for a long long time, and I think the Panorama programme kind of exposed that.

Then he said he wasn’t very confident that people like Sacranie would change much:

I think what really needs to happen is that the very large majority of British people of Muslim origin who don’t want to be just defined in terms of their religion start speaking up and creating a genuine voice which represents the majority rather than these kind of minority figures claiming to be…claiming to be important.

Today: But how does that happen? It doesn’t just happen spontaneously does it.

Rushdie: No it doesn’t. I think it’s quite encouraging that there are beginning to be voices speaking up saying ‘We don’t accept these leaders’ – there needs to be an organization but I don’t see it happening, but, you know, that’s not for me to organize.

Today: You’ve also been quite critical of the Prime Minister for relying on people of that kind in the fight against terrorism.

Rushdie [earnestly]: Yeah, I think it’s a very bad mistake – I think if you look in the papers right now, you have a two thirds majority of the British people objecting to the introduction of faith-based schools and yet that’s an absolutely central plank of the government’s policy. If he thinks that more religion is going to solve the problem, then not only is he in my view wrong, but he’s also seriously out of step with the country.

Today: Change has to come from within the Islamic community.

Rushdie: Yeah I think that’s right, but the point I’m trying to make is that even to describe it as ‘the Islamic community’ is in a way to go down the road of communal politics. It’s important to see that for most people of Muslim belief or Muslim origin in this country, they have a range of political and social interests which have nothing to do with whether or not they’re religious, and it’s that ordinary political agenda which needs to emerge amd be concentrated on, rather than this kind of faith-based approach.

Another passage from Haack’s book that is relevant to Ruse’s argument.

The commitment to naturalism is not merely the expression of a kind of scientific imperialism; for supernatural explanations are as alien to detective work and history or to our everyday explanations of spoiled food or delayed buses as they are to physics or biology. And the reason is not that supernatural explanations are alien to science; not that they appeal to the intentions of an agent; not that they rely on unobservable causes. The fundamental difficulty (familiar from the central mystery of Cartesian dualism, how mental substance could interact with physical substance) is rather that by appealing to the intentions of an agent which, being immaterial, cannot put its intentions into action by any physical means, they fail to explain at all.

Just so. Which is why it’s so irritating when religion-symps say, or jeer, that science can’t explain everything. Meaning religion can? Or meaning religion can explain the bits that science can’t? But religion can’t explain anything – not anything at all. Not really. It can pretend to, but it can’t actually do it. Answering ‘magic’ to every question really doesn’t explain anything whatever, does it. Well, answering ‘God’ for all questions that science can’t answer amounts to the same thing. If science can’t answer it, that means it’s the kind of question which can’t be answered by means of inquiry. Well – what else is there? Is there some other kind of epistemic endeavour that genuinely does find out things, but does it with completely different (yet still reliable, testable, coherent, logical, repeatable) methods? Some kind of science+++? Some kind of >science? No. No, what people mean when they say ‘science can’t explain everything’ is that there are some things that can only be explained by making up the explanations out of our own dear heads, without checking them against anything. And that isn’t an explanation. It’s a story, or an aphorism, or a pretty thought, but not an explanation.

It’s irritating in the same way when people say, as Michael Ruse did in a review of Dawkins’ A Devil’s Chaplain last year, that religion asks ultimate questions.

People like Dawkins, and the Creationists for that matter, make a mistake about the purposes of science and religion. Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it. Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions. There is no conflict here, except when people mistakenly think that questions from one domain demand answers from the other. Science and religion, evolution and Christianity, need not conflict, but only if each knows its place in human affairs – and stays within these boundaries.

I pitched a fit about this at the time – but that’s no reason not to pitch another. There is a conflict here – unless one is content to accept empty answers to questions, and ‘meaning’ based on the empty answers to those questions. It’s just way too easy to think we can be rational in one ‘domain’ and out in the ozone in the other ‘domain.’ Of course lots of people do that, but it doesn’t follow that philosophers ought to encourage the practice. It’s a dereliction of duty, if you ask me.

And here it is.

We take it for granted, you know, the comfortable safe manageable world we live in – those of us who do live in a world like that. That seems (to us) like the natural way of things, the normal state of affairs. In many parts of the world, normal life is more like the inside of the New Orleans Superdome, but we think normal life is less hot and crowded and smelly and unsafe and miserable than that. We think it’s normal to be able to get drinkable water and eatable food whenever we want them, to be able to take a shower and use a toilet whenever we need to, to have clean clothes, lights, a place to live. We forget how fragile, how precarious all that really is. It can be gone in a second. We’re used to that thought for China, Bangladesh, Niger – but we’re not used to it for ourselves. Or we haven’t been. But it wouldn’t take much. A global drought, for example, that ruined the wheat harvest in the US as well as everywhere else. Food shortages – higher prices – a war of all against all. Hobbes, meet Malthus.

It’s pretty unsettling to see how badly things are going in New Orleans. They (the officials) can’t even distribute drinking water, apparently – even though people die after three days without water, and it’s been more than three days now. Civilization is a very, very fragile thing. As is life.

Susan Haack takes issue with Paul Davies in Defending Science – Within Reason.

In The Mind of God, Paul Davies, also a physicist, but a believer (and winner of the million-dollar Templeton prize ‘for progress in religion’) concludes that ‘belief in God is largely a matter of taste, to be judged by its explanatory value rather than logical compulsion. Personally I feel more comfortable with a deeper level of explanation than the laws of physics. Whether the use of “God” for that deeper level is appropriate is, of course, a matter of debate.’ This, from the idea that explanatoriness is just a matter of taste, through the play on ‘deeper,’ to the insouciance about the meaning of ‘God,’ sounds to me like – well, a million-dollar muddle.

Same here. That ‘deeper’ is rich. Why are made-up ‘explanations’ considered deeper, more profound, more admirable than the other kind? And then, explanation is strange too – common, but strange. What explanation? What explanation? Why do people find it explanatory to say ‘God’ to questions like ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ or ‘why is there life?’ or ‘why is there Mind?’? Why is the word ‘God’ considered an explanation? Why doesn’t it sound like what it is – either a silly refusal to say ‘I don’t know’ or a dressed-up translation of ‘I don’t know’ or both. ‘God’ is not explanatory. If you say ‘who ate the last brownie?’ and the answer is ‘God’ do you feel as if your understanding has been increased?

Gotta go. The sun is about to set spectacularly over Puget Sound and I have to rush out to get the whole panorama (I can see it from here, but I like the sweeping view from The Wall). Who made the sun to set? God. Or not.