This question does keep coming up. And up, and up. When is free speech free speech and when is it incitement to murder? (That’s only one version of the question, of course. It can be phrased other ways. When is free speech protected as such and when is it not because it is incitement to violence? That’s another version. There are more.)

Scott Jaschik has an article at Inside Higher Ed where the question seems to be in play, although it’s not absolutely clear whether the people involved in the matter actually phrased it that way. It’s also not clear whether that was avoidance or just lack of clarity – confusion, in short.

An adjunct English instructor at Warren Community College in New Jersey resigned a few days ago, after an email he sent to a student who was organizing a pro-war lecture set off a controversy.

Daly’s e-mail said that “real freedom will come when soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors and fight for just causes and for people’s needs.” He also wrote to the student, head of the campus chapter of Young America’s Foundation, that “I will continue to expose your right-wing, anti-people politics until groups like yours won’t dare show their face on a college campus.”

Stark enough. Does saying ‘real freedom will come when soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors’ constitute free speech – protected, protectable free speech – or does it constitute advocacy of murder? Or are the two the same? Ought advocacy of murder – in certain circumstances, or in any and all circumstances – to be considered free speech and protected as such? And does saying ‘until groups like yours won’t dare show their face’ constitute a threat, or is it clear that he means ‘dare’ in the sense of ‘for fear of shame and embarrassment’ rather than ‘for fear of being attacked’?

In interviews conducted as conservative groups organized a campaign to have him fired, Daly stood by the substance of his e-mail…But Daly said that since she had sent her e-mail from a personal account, and he had replied from a personal account, there was no reason for the college to be involved. He also said in an interview on Sunday that he was not advocating a literal revolt by soldiers, and that he would have replied with a different tone had he realized he was communicating with a student.

Enter mitigating circumstances. He thought he was sending a personal email. Casual conversation is subject to different norms from publication. On the other hand email to strangers perhaps falls somewhere between those two categories. Or perhaps not. Using threatening language to a stranger is different from using it to a friend; whether or not the threat applies to a third party also changes things; whether the more clearly threatening language applies to a distant third party while the more ambiguous language applies to a group that the stranger belongs to, also changes things. Complicated, isn’t it. As the president of WCC said.

Austin called the First Amendment “the most precious freedom all Americans share,” and said that he was “committed to working unceasingly” to protect the freedom of speech of students and faculty members at the college. But he said that he also had an obligation to enforce state laws and college policies “to ensure that all members of our college are free and encouraged to exercise their right to free speech without fear of intimidation or retaliation.”

There seems to be a real knot here, one that it’s hard to cut through. Daly seems to be in trouble (and hence to have resigned his job) merely for something he said in what he thought was a personal email. But the wording of his email was at least arguably somewhat intimidating, and intimidation is not a trivial matter. (Ask any civil rights worker or union organizer.) Threats and intimidation are where free speech law and practice and theory get very, very tricky.

Who’s Deborah Solomon? I don’t know, apart from the fact that she writes for that monument to mediocrity, the New York Times. She says dumb things in this article on Lynne Truss’s new book on rudeness.

To be sure, most people, regardless of the precise elasticity of their flesh, would like to live in a world where everyone respects one another. Yet Americans have always harbored a suspicion of manners, which evoke visions of English history at its most hierarchical and hoity-toity – of dukes, earls, lords and viscounts tripping over one another in phony displays of deference and veneration. Who would want to live with all that kneeling and curtsying, all that monarchy-mandated fawning? Not the American revolutionaries, who believed that a fluid class democracy should subscribe instead to “republican manners” and promptly did away with titles.

Manners evoke visions of hoity-toity hierarchies, of earls and dukes, of kneeling and curtsying? What is she, an idiot? What’s kneeling got to do with anything? What have dukes? Manners is about things like not pushing in front of people, not grabbing things, not making a noise when people are asleep or studying nearby, being grateful when people do something kind, doing something kind yourself now and then, helping people when they need help – it’s about being considerate, and attentive, and observant, and kind, and helpful, as opposed to being selfish and mean and careless and greedy. Dukes and kneeling are neither here nor there. It’s imbecilic to think they are.

In our own time, the belief that manners reinforce social inequalities was key to the upheavals of the 60’s, when the shaggy-haired counterculture broke every rule in Emily Post’s book of etiquette.

What belief? What belief? What belief? What cretin ever believed that? Manners don’t reinforce social inequalities – low wages reinforce social inequalities, along with signs saying ‘Whites Only’ and landlords who don’t rent to coloureds and people who go out on Mississippi back roads at night with guns. Does Deborah Solomon think racial segregation and union-busting are now or have ever been carried on in a polite manner? Does she think the goons who beat up the Reuther brothers did it in a ducal manner? Does she think the white people who expected black people to yield the sidewalk to them were polite about it? Does she think the white folks were polite to Rosa Parks that day? What can she be talking about?

But bad manners are not necessarily all bad. In 1996, in an essay titled “Seduced by Civility,” the critic Benjamin DeMott defended rudeness not only as a basic right but also as a necessary inducement to change and social progress. Indeed, who wouldn’t rather live with incivility – with the curse words in rap songs and the excessive chatting in movie theaters – than with inequality?

Eh…what? Those are the choices? Those are the only alternatives? You can have civility, or you can have equality, but you can’t have both. The one displaces the other. Kind of like the way you can be on top of Mt Everest or you can be in Fulham but you can’t be in both places. But – why would that be? Why would it be at all, even a little bit? Why would it be even microscopically true? Why wouldn’t it in fact be the opposite of the truth? Why isn’t it far more likely that equality goes with the idea that everyone should be treated politely, not just the rich or the white or the elaborately-dressed? Because…the same idea works if everyone is treated rudely? Is that it? Is that the idea? If so, it’s a hateful idea. To repeat – manners aren’t just some posh frill, they’re not about spoons, they’re about treating people decently. They’re basic. Arguably the same idea is behind manners as is behind equality – simply that people should be treated decently. Treating people badly on principle is not a good plan; I’m against it.

In her new book, Truss remains mostly silent on the subject, forgoing social analysis in favor of groaning about the status quo.

Forgoing social analysis. Of the kind you just did? That kind of social anlysis? Gee, I wonder why.

And finally – as she winds things up – the coup de grâce.

For what are manners, anyhow, but a distancing device, a mechanism for widening the spaces between people?

How true! How true, how wise, how deep. What, indeed, are manners, anyhow, but a way of shoving people back as hard as you can. Yes sir. The way to pull people close to you and give them a great big fuzzy hug is to run over them as they cross the street, push them when you want to get past, elbow them aside when you’re in a hurry, park your car in the middle of the sidewalk and then laugh when they fall down as they try to maneuver around it in the ice and snow, blow smoke in their faces, bump into them in crowded shops and then call them names for being in your way – and so on. Yes indeed – there’s intimacy for you, there’s closeness and trust and narrowing the spaces between people.

I tell you what – I just crossed Deborah Solomon’s name off the guest list for my next dinner party. Thank you.

Voltaire. The Philosophical Dictionary. Good read.

What can be said in answer to a man who says he will rather obey God than men, and who consequently feels certain of meriting heaven by cutting your throat? When once fanaticism has gangrened the brain of any man the disease may be regarded as nearly incurable. I have seen Convulsionaries who, while speaking of the miracles of St. Paris, gradually worked themselves up to higher and more vehement degrees of agitation till their eyes became inflamed, their whole frames shook, their countenances became distorted by rage, and had any man contradicted them he would inevitably have been murdered.

Sound familiar at all?

There is no other remedy for this epidemical malady than that spirit of philosophy, which, extending itself from one to another, at length civilizes and softens the manners of men and prevents the access of the disease. For when the disorder has made any progress, we should, without loss of time, fly from the seat of it, and wait till the air has become purified from contagion. Law and religion are not completely efficient against the spiritual pestilence. Religion, indeed, so far from affording proper nutriment to the minds of patients laboring under this infectious and infernal distemper, is converted, by the diseased process of their minds, into poison. These malignant devotees have incessantly before their eyes the example of Ehud, who assassinated the king of Eglon; of Judith, who cut off the head of Holofernes while in bed with him; of Samuel, hewing in pieces King Agag; of Jehoiada the priest, who murdered his queen at the horse-gate. They do not perceive that these instances, which are respectable in antiquity, are in the present day abominable. They derive their fury from religion, decidedly as religion condemns it.

The ‘respectable in antiquity’ thing is irony. Very Gibbonesque – which is to say, Gibbon’s irony was very Voltairean. Gibbon is a good read too.

Time for some heavy-duty mocking and sneering. At the Guardian’s ‘Islam Awareness Week’, for a start.

Religious hate crime is on the increase in the UK, according to the latest Crown Prosecution Service statistics – a worrying trend that the government is attempting to tackle in its Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, which creates the new offence of incitement to religious hatred…Much of the Islamophobia experienced by young British Muslims is the result of a legacy of ignorance about the beliefs and practices of Islam.

No doubt. But, sadly, some of it – depending on how the Guardian is defining ‘Islamophobia,’ of course – could also be the result of knowledge about some of the beliefs and practices of Islam. Especially if by ‘Islamophobia’ the Guardian means simply dislike or disapprobation of some of the beliefs and practices of Islam, that could well be the result of knowledge rather than ignorance. This article seems to assume that more knowledge of beliefs and practices of Islam will necessarily lead to increased admiration of them. But that is merely an assumption.

The article points us toward this site where we find this lovely page on ‘Family Life’.

It is usual for the men to meet at cafes or meeting places and women to meet together at one of their homes. It is rare for men and women to meet publicly. In the home visitors will be met by the man of the house, women stay in the background.

Ah. In other words, it is usual for men to be able to go out in the world and to go wherever they like, and it is usual for women to be confined at home. Men act like grown-up people, women act like stupid frightened children. That is usual.

On the seventh day of a baby’s life his or her hair will be shaved off and the equivalent weight of gold given to the poor. An offering follows. Two sheep if it is a boy and one if it is a girl.

Because, of course, a boy is worth twice as much as a girl. Obviously.

They are expected to work hard in school, can be treated quite strictly, (especially the girls), and expected to spend time with their families.

A sinister note.

Arranged marriages are usual with in a muslim community. Most young people are happy that their parents will make a good choice for them.

Ah. Asked them, have you? Asked, especially, the women? Asked them with no men present? (No, of course not, because you can’t, so that’s out.) How exactly do you know, then? And why do you even think it’s likely?

It is very unusual for a Muslim man to have more than one wife. He is able to have up to four but he must be able to provide fairly and equally for all of them. Occasionally it might happen that if a Muslim man’s wife cannot have children or she becomes very ill and needs looking after, then the man will take a second wife but it is not common.

Oh is that how it works! Occasionally if a woman becomes very ill, her husband will take a second wife to look after the first one – I see! I didn’t realize that. What a charming custom. One wonders what the second wife gets out of it, but it’s certainly nice for the first one.

Once a Muslim lady become a wife her first responsibility is to look after the home and family.

And of course because of the arranged marriage thing, along with the being worth only one sheep instead of two thing, and the not being allowed to go out thing, a Muslim lady doesn’t really have the option of not marrying at all, so if she happens to be a person who doesn’t in fact want to look after a home and family, well that’s just too fucking bad, isn’t it.

Divorce is not really acceptable to Muslims. It is considered to be the worst possible occurrence, it is distasteful and only allowed only in extreme circumstances though of course it is a legal option even if not a cultural one. If she is divorced a woman becomes the responsibility of the men in her family.

And on those vanishingly rare occasions when divorce does happen, it is made beautifully easy because the man has only to recite the talaq three times and hey presto that is the divorce. (This rule does not apply to the woman.) The men in the family of a divorced woman are not always best pleased to see her, and are sometimes apt to kill her in a fit of temper when they think she might have done something to their honour by being a divorced woman. If she doesn’t have any men in her family, she starves, of course. And quite right too.

So there you are, children; now all your nasty Islamophobia will go away, won’t it. A little knowledge works wonders.

Hey, happy anniversary, Origin of Species. It was published on this date in 1859.

Susan Jacoby writes in Mother Jones:

When the Supreme Court…ordered two Kentucky counties to dismantle courthouse displays of the Ten Commandments, Justice Antonin Scalia declared that the Court majority was wrong because the nation’s historical practices clearly indicate that the Constitution permits “disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.” The Constitution permits no such thing: It has nothing to say about God, gods, or any form of belief or nonbelief – apart from its absolute prohibition, in Article 6, against any religious test for public office and the First Amendment’s familiar declaration that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” From reading Scalia, a Martian (or polytheist) might infer that the establishment clause actually concludes with the phrase “free exercise thereof – as long as the faithful worship one God whose eye is on the sparrow.” The justice’s impassioned dissent…is a revealing portrait of the historical revisionism at the heart of the Christian conservative campaign to convince Americans that the separation of church and state is nothing more than a lie of the secularist left.

Yet another reason truth matters. Historical revisionism is a fine thing – it is, as Eric Foner points out, what historians do – if it gets things right, but if it gets them wrong, it’s horrid. The kind that tells the truth about what happened at Nanjing and Auschwitz, in Armenia and Bosnia, is good; the kind that tells lies about it is bad. It’s no good pretending there is no difference, or that the difference doesn’t matter.

The revisionist script goes something like this: The founders were devout men who based their new government on Christian teaching (the religiously correct invariably use the term “Judeo-Christian”); they were unconcerned about religious interference with government and cared only about government interference with religion; and, last but not least, there was no tension between secularism and religion in the nation’s halcyon early decades, because everyone accepted God as the source of civic authority.

That bit about caring only about government interference with religion, not religious interference with government, is why we so often hear that fatuous (and ominous, and irritating) parrot-cry that Joe Lieberman is so fond of: ‘The founders gave us freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.’ Well at least that has the virtue of honesty – at least we know where we are with that. No, you don’t get to have freedom from religion, the government can force it on you if it feels like it. Sit still and be quiet.

Confronted with the Constitution’s silence on divine authority, revisionists repeatedly fall back on the specious argument that since everyone took God’s omnipotence for granted in the 18th century, there was no need for the framers to make a special point of mentioning the deity. If that were true, there would have been no bitter debates in the states about the nonreligious language of the Constitution…It is ludicrous to suggest that men as precise in their use of words as Adams and Madison would, perhaps in their haste to get home to their wives, have simply forgotten to mention God.

Besides which it’s not even true that everyone took God’s omnipotence for granted in the 18th century. There have always been atheists, and there were more of them than hitherto usual in the 18th century.

Arguments relying on custom, bolstered by personal religious belief, have great potency when presented to a public with a shaky grasp of even the most fundamental facts of American history…”Oh! Lord!” Adams complained in 1817 to his old friend and rival Jefferson. “Do you think that a Protestant Popedom is annihilated in America? Do you recollect, or have you ever attended to the ecclesiastical Strifes in Maryland, Pensilvania, New York, and every part of New England? What a mercy it is that these People cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.! If they could they would.” If they could they would. Wherever and whenever they could, they did – and that is why the revolutionary generation bequeathed the unique gift of a secular Constitution to future Americans.

Let’s hope we can hang on to it.

Mick Hartley commented on a review of Postmodern Psychoanalysis Observed yesterday. The review says some odd things.

A key tenet of postmodernism is that both internal and external reality are social constructions, reflecting (among other things) an individual’s cultural background, his language and his past and present experience. In the empirical setting, postmodernism has led to a resurgence of constructivist research and an emphasis on cultural relativism in any discourse.

Tenet. A key tenet. What is a tenet, anyway? Just kind of like an attitude? A hunch? A wild surmise? An ‘as if’? A sillybuggers idea that you know isn’t true but like to mess around with anyway? Something you like to say to make people roll their eyes and ask to see your travel papers? My Concise Oxford says it’s a principle, dogma, doctrine. Yeah, dogma – that fits. Because really – external reality is a social construction? Just like that? The objections to that are too obvious to be worth making – along the lines of ‘Okay, let’s see you jump off that building then.’ (Dawkins made the familiar observation about social constructionists at 30,000 feet.)

It may be that what the reviewer means, and what some postmodernists mean, is that our ideas or knowledge or beliefs about external reality are social constructions – but then they really need to say that, don’t they. And it may also be that the reviewer and some postmodernists mean that external reality itself is a social construction – in which case they’re barking mad and not worth reading. And a third possibility is that they mean the first but say the second in order to confound and mislead the general public, in which case they’re posing irresponsible frauds and still less worth reading.

In clinical setting, postmodernism has led to greater focus on narrative truth and skepticism regarding the relevance of objective research methods to all important psychological and psychopathological issues.

Oh, has it. Has it indeed. How very convenient. Skepticism regarding the relevance of ‘objective’ research methods – because subjective, i.e. evidence-free hunch-based inner-knowledge-driven ‘research methods’ are so much better. Because ‘narrative truth’ i.e. whatever story anyone feels like telling is so much better than plain old non-adjectival truth. Narrative truth, story truth, fun truth, what I like to say truth, ego-puffing truth, dramatic truth, exciting truth, colourful truth – all so much better than the plain unadorned kind. Hooray for postmodernism.

So to Baudrillard.

All of our values are simulated. What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car? It’s a simulation of freedom.

Really!? Is it! Nothing to do with – oh, let’s see – the freedom to talk to other people, even strangers, even people of (breathe deeply now, stay calm) the opposite sex? The freedom to work? The freedom to walk about in the world? The freedom to go to school, even to university, even to graduate school or law school or medical school? The freedom to read? The freedom to write? The freedom to say ‘No’ to a marriage to someone one doesn’t want to be married to? The freedom to walk around in the world with one’s entire head even including the face and the whole of the neck naked and unclothed and bare? The freedom to write poetry? The freedom to have a book of poetry published? The freedom to write a book of poetry and have it published and succeed and win a prize? The freedom to write a book of poetry and have it published and succeed and win a prize and not be murdered for it? Is that a simulation? I don’t know – I have all those freedoms, myself, and I have to say I don’t regard them as simulations. I might, if I didn’t know there are other people in the world – women, actually – who don’t have all those freedoms – who don’t in fact have any of them, not one – and who end up as bleeding heaps of flesh as a result – but I do know that, so I don’t.

So I think Baudrillard is a damn fool for saying that. (It looks as if the interviewer thought so too. Good on her.)

Just one more thing. The first three paragraphs of this review of biographies of Rousseau and Voltaire in the Nation. They’re good.

After all, the great battles of the Enlightenment had burned out long before. Religious intolerance and fanaticism were no longer matters of major concern. Indeed, for many of my French fellow students, the great enemy was the Enlightenment itself. Every week they would cram into a crowded lecture hall at the Collège de France to hear Michel Foucault, then in the last year of his life, explain how the eighteenth century saw the imprisoning of the Western world in a straitjacket of mental discipline. They struggled to grasp the quicksilver sentences in which Jacques Derrida deconstructed the criteria of rationality and truth that eighteenth-century philosophy had taken as axiomatic. They spoke derisively of an Enlightenment that had culminated not in modern democracy but in Auschwitz.

Yes and I kept asking plaintively ‘So what would you like instead? What do you want instead of the Enlightenment? What do you propose to use instead of rationality and truth?’ And by gum – you’ll be amazed to hear this – answer came there none. So I sat down and folded my hands and waited patiently for B&W to come into existence.

Today, things look rather different. Pace Foucault, enlightened psychiatrists and prison reformers do not seem particularly dangerous compared with suicide bombers and book burners. In the twenty-first century the Enlightenment appears anything but the triumphant imperial “project” denounced by vulgar postmodernists. Its heritage is fragile and endangered. Admittedly, its works remain in the “canon”–but perhaps only because they go largely unread in certain quarters. I sometimes wonder what would happen if, for instance, a public university system asked all entering students to read Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, with its deep, deliberate offensiveness toward Christianity.

No need to wonder – the merde would hit the fan, that’s what.

So, another village council in Pakistan is having some fun with the local female population.

A village council in Pakistan has decreed that five young women should be abducted, raped or killed for refusing to honour childhood “marriages”.

Really…what can these people be like? I can’t entirely get my head around it. What can men be like who solemnly get together and decide that five young women should be abducted, raped or killed? Why don’t they embarrass themselves? Why don’t they sicken themselves and each other? I can understand how people can do horrible things in a temper – but this calm cold-blooded judicial-seeming official-like ‘decreeing’ business – this monstrous business of punishing other people – and weaker, more defenseless other people at that – for something done by different people entirely – it’s so brutal and disgusting and contemptible and just plain chickenshit one wonders how they can stand themselves. I mean, what’s the deal? A man does something, but they don’t punish him, because what? he’s a man and he might slap them, so they punish various women who have nothing to do with it instead, because the women won’t slap them, because they know they would immediately be torn into shreds and fed to the dogs?

The women, who are cousins, were married in absentia by a mullah in their Punjabi village to illiterate sons of their family’s enemies in 1996, when they were aged from six to 13. The marriages were part of a compensation agreement ordered by the village council and reached at gunpoint after the father of one of the girls shot dead a family rival. The rival families have now called in their “debt”, demanding the marriages to the village men [be] fulfilled.

Yes, well, that’s fair.

Amna Niazi, the eldest of the five at 22, is taking a degree in English literature, while both her sisters want to attend university. Their fathers are supporting them and have refused to hand them over…The women have said they will commit suicide if their fathers obey the council. Speaking at their home in Sultanwala, a remote cotton and sugar-cane growing village, Amna said: “It is a great injustice that should be ended. Why should we pay for a crime committed by someone else? We will commit suicide if it happens. We would be treated like animals by them. Our misery would never end as this is just another way of using us as tools in the feud.”

You know – sometimes I get a feeling that a lot of men in Pakistan don’t much like women.

So now I’ve got one with the big flower or shell-shapes against the glass doors, on my desktop. Mick takes a good picture.

I’ve only just realized there may be another problem with the hacker and the email. My old editor-at-B&W address isn’t working – I assume it’s been disabled with the rest of the email – and it doesn’t tell you it isn’t working. I didn’t know any of this until a few days ago when I sent myself a test mail and used that address (because it comes up first in the address list) – and it never arrived. It didn’t tell me it had failed, it just didn’t arrive. So it’s only now occurred to me that some readers may have been emailing me at that address – in which case I don’t know it and they don’t know I don’t know it. If so – boy I hope they read this particular comment, and I’m really sorry, and they should re-send, and I’m not ignoring them.

Damn hacker. I don’t think one single person has bought the Dictionary since hacker struck, and now I’m being inadvertently rude and ignoring people’s emails.

Gosh, Xmas has come very early this year. Kind Mick Hartley sent me seven blisteringly gorgeous pictures from Kew. Really – when I saw the second I kind of squeaked – the fifth made me exclaim aloud – and the sixth and seventh made my eyes feel all funny. I have to say, I think this is one of the best art ideas of all time. Tracy Emin can keep her old unmade bed; give me Chihuly curled fluted curved shell-like flower-shapes in iridescent colours posed against a pair of glass doors in the Temperate House.

I immediately stuck one on my desktop – looking across the Palm House pond toward the museum, with the glass bobbling things in the foreground and the boat full of multicoloured objects just barely visible in the back, and the fountain and the museum and the trees – and I just keep gazing fondly at it, with my mouth hanging open foolishly.

You have until January 15th. You’re silly if you miss it.

Philip Pullman is eloquent on identity and related subjects. He makes the point that ‘What we do is morally significant. What we are is not.’ Which relates to what I (and other people) keep saying about the religious hatred bill: that religion is not the same kind of thing as race, because it’s not what you are, it’s what you do (and doing includes thinking). Yes, it’s not always easily voluntary, but it’s still not as unchosen as ‘race’ is.

At its extreme, it can lead to a sort of cognitive dissonance, when people claim an inner “identity” that has nothing to do with their actions: “Yes, I murdered my wife and children, but I’m a good person.”…So “being”, in the eyes of many people, apparently has its own moral quality, which may be good or bad, but which is resistant to any form of change except the miraculous (being born again). “Being” trumps “doing”.

Probably that guy in Herat thinks he’s a good person.

It’s hard to convey the sheer bafflement and distaste I feel for this attitude towards “identity”. I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike “identity”, must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest (“gay”, “black”, “Muslim”, whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity. Literally vulgar: from vulgus. It’s crowd-thought.

That’s exactly what it is – in more than one way. It’s a crowd way to think, and it’s about thinking of oneself as part of a crowd.

For myself, I like it best when I have no such simple and public “identity”. I don’t know what I “am”, and I don’t especially want to. But I know full well that I am free to feel anonymous and invisible, which I like feeling…

Oh, yeah. Same here. I like to go out in the world, to walk to and fro in it, like a spy. Unnoticed, unseen, unwatched.

There’s a great deal more – it’s a long piece, and very good. I have to go, I have some spying to do.

This is an absolutely horrible story.

She risked torture, imprisonment, perhaps even death to study literature and write poetry in secret under the Taliban. Last week, when she should have been celebrating the success of her first book, Nadia Anjuman was beaten to death in Herat, apparently murdered by her husband…“She was a great poet and intellectual but, like so many Afghan women, she had to follow orders from her husband,” said Nahid Baqi, her best friend at Herat University…Herat, in particular, has seen a number of women burn themselves to death rather than succumb to forced marriages. Anjuman’s movements were being limited by her husband, her friends believe. She had been invited to a ceremony celebrating the return to Herat of Amir Jan Sabouri, an Afghan singer, but failed to attend. Her poetry alluded to an acute sense of confinement. “I am caged in this corner, full of melancholy and sorrow,” she wrote in one “ghazal”, or lyrical poem, adding: “My wings are closed and I cannot fly.” Afghan human rights groups condemned Anjuman’s death as evidence that the government of President Hamid Karzai has failed to address the issue of domestic violence.

I don’t think domestic violence is really the right term for it. It doesn’t really cover it. It suggests (to me anyway) mostly sporadic, exceptional violence against a background of at least some basic rights and freedoms. What women like Nadia Anjuman face is more systematic institutionalized coercion and subordination against a background of no rights at all. Of being forcibly married, then told what to do and kept in confinement by a man who owns her whom she didn’t want to marry, and then murdered by him.

Women were banned from working or studying by the Taliban, whose repressive edicts forbade women to laugh out loud or wear shoes that clicked. Female writers belonging to Herat’s Literary Circle realised that one of the few things that women were still allowed to do was to sew. So three times a week groups of women in burqas would arrive at a doorway marked Golden Needle Sewing School…Once inside the school, a brave professor of literature from Herat University would talk to them about Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and other banned writers. Under a regime where even teaching a daughter to read was a crime, they might have been hanged if they had been caught.

Teaching a daughter to read was a crime. Because…? What? Because if a daughter knows how to read she might pick up a book or newspaper that has some semen on it and it would accidentally fall into her and get her pregnant? What?

One of them, Leila, said that she stayed up till the early hours doing calculus because she so feared that her brain would atrophy. “Life for women under the Taliban was no more than being cows in sheds,” she said.

Well, I guess that’s why. Because a woman with an atrophied brain is like a cow in a shed. She doesn’t rebel, she doesn’t talk back, she doesn’t run away. Makes life easy.

I saw about fifteen minutes of a thing on tv last night about the Chihuly glass exhibition at Kew. It made me long to be in London and be able to go see it. Really long. Any of you been?

I love – really love – the Palm House and the Temperate House anyway. And with – well, look.

And look. You can see why I want to go.

All of you who can, go, and take pictures, and send them to me for Xmas. Have fun, now.

Nicholas Buxton. Why don’t I beat up on Nicholas Buxton a little. I’ve never heard of him before, but I think he’s silly, or else slyly rhetorical (it can be so hard to tell which). More of the same old gabble – why atheism is wrong and confused and befuddled.

It is a secularist article of faith to maintain that religion will soon be eliminated as a by-product of “progress”.

No it isn’t. Next?

No but really – how stupid. Of course it isn’t!

Atheists complain that religion proposes unprovable accounts of life and death. But this is uninteresting.

No we don’t.

What a berk. We criticise religion for not proposing but dogmatically asserting and shoving in all our faces accounts of various things that are not supported by evidence and are highly implausible. That’s quite a different matter from ‘complaining’ about ‘unprovable’ accounts of anything.

Death is obviously a fact, but how we make sense of that fact is not the sort of question that could be subject to “proof” any more than a painting could be judged “wrong”. Insights into human nature derived from the plays of Shakespeare may be equally “unprovable”, but that doesn’t mean they’re not meaningful, useful or true. The atheist’s first mistake, then, like the fundamentalists they often object to, is that they completely miss the point.

Oh, Christ. No kidding, no kidding, and no we don’t, because we know all that, you fool. God I hate it when people put quotation marks on their own wildly erroneous versions of what other people say or think. He’s the one who says we say ‘unprovable’ when we don’t and then he drops in all these bogus citations of ‘unprovable’ with the quotation marks as if he’d gotten that from somewhere other than his own stupid assertion! What a mess of an ‘argument’.

Faith has nothing to do with certainty: it is not a set of closed answers, but rather a series of open questions with which to engage.

Oh really. Maybe in the circles you hang out in, but not in all circles where ‘faith’ is considered a virtue. To put it mildly.

I recognise that life’s potential for meaninglessness requires us to give it a meaning it would not otherwise have. This is the function of religion.

No it isn’t. One, it may be one of the functions of religion, but it’s not the function of religion, and two, it’s not the function or a function of religion alone. Other ways of thinking also give life a meaning it would not otherwise have.

The alternative is nihilism. If we truly believed that life was meaningless, we would have no reason to get up in the morning – ultimately, the most rational thing to do would be to jump over the edge of a cliff.

Oh, please. Why would that be rational? ‘Hey ho, life is meaningless. Whaddya know. Well, here I am, I’ve just finished writing this book, I’m going to Italy tomorrow, next year I’m going to China, I’m learning to play the cello, a friend is coming over for dinner tonight and afterwards we’re going to the theatre, this afternoon I’m going to go for a walk in the mountains, I have a bowl of fresh peaches for breakfast, the coffee smells good, the Trout Quintet is playing on the radio, it’s a gorgeous day, oh look, there goes a bald eagle – but life is meaningless, so obviously the most rational thing to do is go jump over the edge of a cliff.’

Without religion’s insight that human beings are essentially flawed, we lose all checks on our hubristic pride, and risk making a false god of our own scientific genius, even though there is no evidence to support the belief that society advances in tandem with science.

Oh? That depends on what you mean by ‘society advances’, I suppose. If you want to live in a world without antibiotics, anaesthetic, dentistry, electric light, efficient heating, sewer systems, public transport, efficient agriculture, abundant cheap books and music – well, go ahead, but I think of all those things as social advances. That does not however mean that I make a ‘false god’ (whatever that means) of our own (our own? certainly not mine!) scientific genius.

Can religious arguments really be as deeply unimpressive as the ones we keep seeing in the newspapers? Can they really not do any better than this? Surely that’s not right. Surely they can say something persuasive and somewhat sensible. Surely…

I said it first, I said it first. Okay no I didn’t, because people don’t write Observer columns in ten minutes – but I said it before I saw this.

…and so, it was reported, there was great excitement in ‘the HIV community’, just as a subsequent debunking of the claim led to equal disappointment, also in ‘the HIV community’. Now, given that there are 40 million people in the world with HIV infection, you might think it improbable that, for instance, an orphaned baby in Malawi is doing a lot of communing with a drag queen in Chelsea or a junkie on the streets of Chicago. But never mind; the merry shorthand that parcels them together went unchallenged, as it always does.

This is what I’m saying.

Not an eyebrow was raised when a recent BBC broadcast, reflecting upon violence in Birmingham, included three phrases used within the same minute: ‘the black community’, ‘the Asian community’ and – or should we say but? – ‘white people who live in the area’.

Yes it was, yes it was – my eyebrow shoots up and down like an elevator at lunch hour. I did do some eyebrow-lifting about ‘community’ talk and the Birmingham riots.

The word trips lightly off the tongues of politicians, police and media. We have ‘the Muslim community’, ‘the gay community’, ‘the international community’ (fabulous oxymoron that it is, but it was used twice on yesterday’s Today programme)…If there is any rational intent behind the abuse of the term, it’s probably that it’s meant to sound warm, cuddly and inclusive…In fact, it is the antithesis of inclusive; it is the wholly artificial creation of a single entity by those who, almost by definition, live outside it.

Yes, but it’s then picked up by the people who live inside it. It works as a kind of crowbar or grappling hook to extract ‘respect’ and unctuous attention from those who live outside it.

By the same token, I suggest that there might be a man or a woman, somewhere in, say, Bradford, with four drops of two-generations-old Pakistani blood in their veins and whose self-perception is that they are, first and foremost, superb doctors or great golfers or even – imagine the thought! – British. But if they live within a stone’s throw of the murder of a police officer, and any among this weekend’s vox-popping cameras catches them in the street, you can bet your last rupee that their broadcast views will be introduced with: ‘Members of the Asian community are concerned…’ Thus are brown citizens categorised, with the gabbiest among them – often with no other discernible qualification, let alone election to office – equally carelessly branded ‘community leaders’.

Well exactly, exactly, exactly. People can be (and are) first and foremost anything and everything, and they don’t always feel like being grabbed and bundled into the ‘Asian community’ box. And as for the unelected unqualified ‘community leaders’ – well, we know. We’ve discussed this quite a lot.

Officials, reporters and commentators would, no doubt, feel uncomfortable with stark words like ‘black’ or ‘brown’ which, in truth, are often all they really know of their subjects (although, as noted, there seems to be no difficulty with ‘white people who live in the area’). Nevertheless, they need to find a better way to ease their discomfort than by enrolling complete strangers into ‘communities’ to which they may have no wish to belong and which might not, even, exist.

Well said.

Andrew Anthony has a piece on the niqab, a female face-covering that leaves only the eyes uncovered (presumably so that the woman wearing it doesn’t need an expensive trained dog in order to grope her way around).

Just a decade ago, this form of enshrouding was seen as an unambiguous sign of female oppression and feudal custom, but now it is frequently referred to as an expression of religious identity, individual rights and even, in some cases, female emancipation.

Yes but emancipation from what.

She says that she deliberated for a whole year before finally deciding to wear the niqab. ‘I think the main thing that was holding me back was my university degree. I was doing a lot of course work, a lot of group work, and so I was constantly thinking, “How am I going to do group work with all these people?” Then one day, I just woke up and thought, “Why am I letting people stop me? I’m not doing it for other people.”‘ Both as a student and a teacher, Chowdhury clearly placed her own right to conceal herself above the group’s right to see her.

Well, presumably, the reason she was letting people stop her was that she had chosen a kind of work that necessarily involves interacting with ‘all these people’. She doesn’t have to be deciding to wear the niqab ‘for other people’ in order to have an affect on other people by doing so – the two things are separate. We can do all sorts of things for our own reasons that nevertheless do have an impact on other people as a byproduct. We may listen to Bruce Springsteen at top volume at 3 a.m. with all the windows open, for our very own reasons (we’re awake at 3 a.m., we like Springsteen, we like fresh air) that have nothing to do with other people, but our activity may affect other people all the same. So the thought she one day just woke up and thought was a stupid thought, because incomplete and irrelevant.

‘There is no place in the Koran,’ he said, sounding like the schoolmaster he once was, ‘that says she must wear the burqa. No place.’ In fact, the burqa, the grilled mask that is popular in Afghanistan, is a relatively modern item, but it’s true that there is no mention of the hijab, much less the niqab in the Koran. There are two key passages that deal with the correctness of women’s clothing…Over the centuries, various Islamic scholars have come to interpret these words as directives to cover the ‘pudendal’ nature of women in its entirety, which, they argue, is everything, including, in the most strict rulings, at least one eye.

There you go – that’s it, you see. Every bit of women (including that one eye – it’s just that seeing-eye dogs are expensive) is pudendal. They’re just big, walking, throbbing, wet genitalia. They may pretend they’re not – they may pretend to be thinking about something else – they may pretend they can talk and walk and think and laugh and eat and look at the birds and flowers and just generally be human, but it’s a pretense, a disguise, a trap. They’re like those horrible women in The Faerie Queen or Orlando Furioso or Jerusalem Delivered or Paradise Lost or The Shining – gorgeous, sexy, welcoming, smiling – until you touch them and then bam! out comes the hideous witch who devours you. Women are just disguised as people with brains and hands and legs and purposes and capacities; in reality they’re just big old ambulatory pudenda. Help me Jesus.

I was keen to hear a woman explain in her own words her reasons for covering herself. This was proving very difficult…The main aim of the niqab is to deter contact between women and men who are not married or related…I checked the etiquette on a Muslim website that detailed the requirements of a woman wearing a niqab. ‘Do not engage in social conversation with persons of the opposite sex,’ it instructed. ‘This is simple, just don’t do it. When a kaffir [infidel] of the opposite sex asks you, “Did you have a good weekend”, look down and say nothing in return.’

Yes, that is simple. Of course it is – it’s all simple. That’s the point. Women are nothing but pudenda, and they are entirely pudenda; therefore, they have to be concealed and confined as far as possible and even farther – but if a seeing-eye dog is not affordable then one eye can remain uncovered (though it’s risky). Simple. Don’t talk to people of the opposite sex. Any of them, ever, for any reason. Simple. A radically impoverished, constricted, narrow, suffocating life – simple. Enjoy.

I did try one couple…I then asked permission to speak to his wife. He looked at me as if I were mad and referred me to the Central Mosque. Would I be able to speak to a woman there? I asked. ‘No, of course not,’ the man said. ‘But there will be men there who will be able to tell you why it is best for Muslim women to be covered.’ His wife remained silent.

Ah – yes, no doubt there will. And if human rights inspectors go to Guantanamo, of course they won’t be able to speak to the prisoners, but there will be guards there who will be able to tell them why it is best for prisoners to be at Guantanamo. If investigators go the house of an exorcist, of course they won’t be able to speak to the devil-possessed children there, but there will be exorcists there who will be able to tell them why it is best for the possessed children to be beaten and starved and shouted at. And so on. Nice racket. Good wheeze.

Robert rejects the idea that if the niqab causes social unease, it undermines its purpose of creating calm. For her, being veiled is all about maintaining the private zone of her faith. But you could equally argue that it is just another way of making public the private. For what is this privacy but a public announcement of the sexually provocative nature of women? It does not challenge the idea of woman as sex object; it simply confirms it.

Just so. It simply confirms it, and puts all the work and deprivation of avoiding the provocation on the women.

I asked Robert at what age she thought a girl should start wearing the hijab in preparation for the niqab. She said that it was not necessary until puberty but as a matter of practice, it’s best to start at seven or eight. In its own way, this premature recognition of female sexuality is every bit as significant, and disturbing, as dressing a child in a high-street approximation of Britney Spears, all bare midriff and attitude.

Not to mention the life-long deprivation for both sexes of simple ordinary routine interaction. All because women have the bad taste and bad judgment to be walking pudenda. Sad.

So The Independent tells us Blair went to Leeds ‘to appease the Muslim community.’ Meaning what? He went to Leeds and found all the Muslims in the world gathered in one place so that he could appease them? He went to Leeds and found all the Muslims in the UK gathered in one place so that he could appease them? No, apparently not. He went to Leeds to take part in ‘a consultation exercise with young Muslims in the city’ so that he could – appease all the Muslims in the world or the UK by so doing. How does that work? Why does a consultation exercise with young Muslims in one city appease ‘the Muslim community’? What is this chronic synechdoche thing? This assumption that any random assortment of ‘members’ of some ‘community’ or other can stand in for all the other ‘members’ of that ‘community’? How does anyone know that that happens, and who keeps track? Let’s see – what ‘community’ am I part of – atheists? Atheists will do, as a parallel to Muslims. Okay – if Bush went to Wichita for a consultation exercise with young atheists there, would that appease me? Would I feel somehow magically soothed or comforted or mollified? Well, no. If the vibrant young Wichita atheists managed to persuade him to reverse some of his policies, that would be good – but if they just talked to him and gave him some advice on atheist holidays, that wouldn’t do much to my opinion of Bush. So whence is this idea that by talking to some (unspecified number of) young Muslims in Leeds, Blair is appeasing ‘the Muslim community’?

And why do people buy it? And why do they accept the idea that they belong to one community and not bother with all the myriad other communities they could decide they belong to? Why don’t students belong to the student community? Why are Muslims – all Muslims – assumed to put their Muslimness before everything else? Why is everyone (nearly everyone) so intent on telling them over and over and over again that they are theMuslimcommunity? Why doesn’t anyone stop to think that it’s all rather patronizing and cloying and confining? Why do they keep hammering on it? I seriously wonder.

Blair himself, for instance.

“If I am asked to see the Muslim community, what I will get is the same great and the good of the community,” Mr Blair conceded. “That means we are [not] getting down to people in the community.”

The community, the community, the community – gee, do you think he used the magic word often enough?

Rushdie said it in that ‘Today’ interview a month or two ago: even to talk about ‘the Muslim community’ is to go down the road of a kind of communalism. Just so. Too bad no one listened.

Another interesting thing. At the beginning of the piece:

“We’re losing confidence and trust in you,” Mr Khan told him, unflinchingly. “With this foreign policy Muslims feel you are attacking them. We all used to vote Labour but not any more. You need to row back and take us with you.”

Toward the end:

Someone helping to divorce the concepts of terrorism and Islam would be a step forward, Ms Mather told the Prime Minister. “Every time there is a picture of the suicide bombers on the television, it is followed by people praying at a mosque.” Divorcing nationality from religion would also help, added another. “I’m Muslim but that has nothing to do with my Britishness, which is about being free to go out for a drink and to dance.”

With this foreign policy Muslims feel you are attacking them, and divorcing nationality from religion would also help, because I’m Muslim but that has nothing to do with my Britishness. Well there’s a coherent message for you. Which is not surprising – why should it be coherent? Why should any of these (unspecified number of) people agree with each other? No reason; they shouldn’t; but all this calling them ‘the Muslim community’ is a way of pretending or unconsciously assuming they should. (This kind of thing reminds me of an uncle of mine, who was a big noise in the public opinion polling business, who was always asking me what ‘my generation’ thought about various things. How the fuck should I know! What am I, an oracle? I know about three people, in a geographic radius of about two hundred yards; is that supposed to be a useful sample of our entire age group?)

Maybe none of that is the point anyway, maybe the point is just being seen to be listening, or something. But then – the newspapers really ought to report that Blair talked to some young people in Leeds, and let it go at that.

Did you listen to that In Our Time with Julian and Anthony Grayling and Miranda Fricker? There was one bit near the end where it seemed to me Julian kind of pulled a fast one. I transcribed it. See what you think.

The thing about Rorty is that he does reject this idea of Truth with a capital T, as all the pragmatists do, and – but the thing is it’s not so much that he thinks it’s a philosophical mistake to think we can have that kind of truth, which represents the world – he does think that’s a mistake – but I think more importantly, he thinks it’s just not that important or relevant. And his attitude to philosophers who are very preoccupied with it like a lot of his British critics like Simon Blackburn and the late Bernard Williams is that these people really need to kind of grow up, and this preoccupation is irrelevant, because what matters for the spreading of liberal values, broadly liberal values, is not fundamentally whether or not we can show their truth value, as it were, in a traditional philosophical sense, it’s whether or not we can gain the kind of social solidarity and agreement which allows people to take them up and to share them and to live together – so again it’s that idea of trying to create political values – based on sharing – and truth is irrelevant. Who’s going to persuade someone to adopt, say, broadly western liberalism on the basis that ‘it is the Truth’? No one. Who’s going to get someone to share them on the basis that ‘look, this is how we can live together, this is how we can work, this is how we can get respect – maybe that stands a better chance.

No one, but calling western liberalism the Truth isn’t really the issue, is it? Liberalism is a set of political ideas; it’s a set of values; it’s not a set of facts. The question is not so much who is going to persuade someone to adopt liberalism by saying ‘it is the Truth’ as it is who is going to persuade someone that the Holocaust really did happen and that the gas chambers really were gas chambers, or who is going to persuade someone that the scientific evidence does not support ‘Intelligent Design’. It’s the is-ought gap, the facts-values gap, again. Miranda Fricker indicated that:

In a funny sort of way Rorty, who many – many fans and followers of the original pragmatists are pretty angry with Rorty for his co-opting pragmatism into a very relativistic-sounding programme – many defenders of liberal values, the same values as Rorty espouses, want to say ‘well hang on a minute, it may not be that we persuade others of liberal values by talking about truth, but my goodness, if you’re living in an oppressed state, you really care whether it was true that you were a spy or not when you’re sitting in prison, it really matters what is true and what is not.’ And so there is an unfortunate relativistic drift in Rorty’s co-option of pragmatism, and yet, he is partly responsible for bringing it all back to our attention, and bringing people to read it again, and I think it’s now being taught much more than it was for awhile. And if you pick up a reader on truth you’re much more likely to find something by James or Peirce than you were a few years ago.

It really matters what is true and what is not.

And that’s good because there’s this book coming out in a few months about exactly that – the fact that it matters what is true. Why Truth Matters, it’s called.

So, it seems to be a good day for out-there pronouncements by bloodthirsty authoritarian men. For horrible glimpses into the nasty fetid power-ravenous controlfreak minds of tyrannical shits.

Osama’s pious little wet-dream is not much of a surprise, of course. No surprise at all really. But still worth a passing kick.

Osama bin Laden wants the United States to convert to Islam, ditch its constitution, abolish banks, jail homosexuals and sign the Kyoto climate change treaty…Alcohol and gambling would be barred and there would be an end to women’s photos in newspapers or advertising. Any woman serving “passengers, visitors and strangers”, presumably anyone from air stewardesses to waitresses, would also be out of a job.

From air stewardesses to waitresses isn’t all that far – presumably that would also include doctors, nurses, dentists, teachers, many lawyers, checkout clerks, bus drivers – quite a range of jobs.

In the book the terrorist responsible for the deaths of 3,000 civilians in September 2001 says that killing the innocent is wrong.

Of course he does. Nothing easier – you just define the people you want to kill as ‘not innocent’ and the job is done. No problem, no cognitive dissonance. ‘If I hate them, they must be wicked, because I am good, so I wouldn’t hate them unless they were not good, so if they are wicked naturally they are not innocent, and besides I am good, so my killing them must be right, because I am good, so it can’t be not good, therefore, logically, they must be wicked. If they are chosen by (good) me to be killed, then necessarily they must be wicked, or otherwise I (good as I am) would not have chosen them.’ Airtight, you see.

And clearly so Pinochet thinks – with a pretty, devout, humble, spiritual thought.

Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, has declared that God will pardon him for human rights abuses committed during his 17-year rule, according to newly released court documents. Asked by Chilean judge Victor Montiglio about the killing of 3,000 Chilean civilians during the military government, Mr Pinochet, 89, said: “I suffer for these losses, but God does the deeds; he will pardon me if I exceeded in some, which I don’t think.”

Heads I win tails you lose, you see. God does the deeds, so it’s none of me, but I suffer for these losses (note how compassionate I am, how sensitive, how good), but it’s that God fella wot done them, blame him. Anyhow he’ll pardon me if I went just a teeny tiny bit overboard in some – not all, mind you! No indeed, not all! Only some. He’ll pardon me if I went just a little bit mad with the fun – even though he’s the one who does the deeds. You see what I mean?

His logic isn’t quite as strong as Osama’s, but it has that touch of compassion that makes it so moving.

Everything that I did, all that I carried out, all the problems I had, I dedicate to God, all this I dedicate to Chile because this permitted that the country was not communist and arose as it is today.

Ah well – you see. Who can blame him now, after a generous gesture like that? Everything he did, he dedicates it to God. How very, very sweet. That would be the God that murders tens of thousands of people in Kashmir to give a message to Musharraf, I take it, and the God who kills hundreds of people in New Orleans and Mississippi to – what was it? Give the US a message about Darwin, was it? Or was it lesbians? Disobedient women? Something like that.

Okay, good. Great. I can do that too. I’ll dedicate some stuff to God. Here you go, God. Every single person killed or horribly injured by terrorists this year; every single person killed or horribly injured by terrorists throughout history (that’s a highish number, I should think); every person killed or horribly injured in every war; every person who dies in pain; every animal that dies in pain; every person and animal who suffers pain while alive –

Gosh, that seems to be a rather long list. God is frantically signalling that he can’t write that fast, and isn’t altogether sure he wants the dedication anyway.

He’s a funny guy though, isn’t he. Can’t stand poofters, but is terrifically fond of mass murdering thugs and tyrants. How odd. Me, I prefer queers.

Okay so these seventeen archbishops. All tied up in knots they are. All frantic and agitated and unhappy. Tearing their episcopal hair, rending their purple robes, chewing their anglican nails. And for why? For because that the Archbish of C isn’t being harsh enough toward non-heterosexuality. That’s why. Okay – why? Why is that a reason? Why are they so agitated about non-heterosexuality? Why does it upset them? Why does it worry them? Why do they think it’s so terrible?

They don’t really say. Maybe it’s too much to expect them to, in a letter to the Archbish, since they probably expect him to know. But still – since religious types never do seem to manage to come up with real – rational, universalizable, non-theist, non-authoritarian – reasons for the worry, it’s too bad they don’t.

They do make some attempt –

The Second Letter of Peter, which you quoted in terms of our participation in the divine nature (1.4) describes division in the church uncannily like the false leaders in our Communion today: “For, uttering loud boasts of folly, they entice with licentious passions of the flesh men who have barely escaped from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for whatever overcomes a man, to that he is enslaved.” (II Peter 2.18-19)

So presumably they are there saying that sexuality is slavery because of its power? But that won’t do as a reason, obviously, because it’s not as if same-sex sex is overpowering while other-sex sex is not. So that doesn’t really amount to a reason. People who get all tied up in knots about non-heterosexuality do have such a hard time coming up with real reasons – they always just end up with ‘God says,’ and that is not a reason, it’s simply a command. Basic vocabulary: a command is not the same thing as a reason, a reason is not the same thing as a command.

We appreciated your acknowledgement of the “overwhelming consensus” of the Church in time and space in believing that sex is intended by God for married couples only and therefore that same-sex sex is unacceptable and cannot be described as “holy and blessed”. You stated that you as Archbishop must stand with this consensus. We are most grateful for your unequivocal words. We wonder, however, whether your personal dissent from this consensus prevents you from taking the necessary steps to confront those churches that have embraced teaching contrary to the overwhelming testimony of the Anglican Communion and the church catholic. We urge you to rethink your personal view and embrace the Church’s consensus and to act on it, based as it is on the clear witness of Scripture.

Similar (though not identical) problem. ‘Intended by God’ – apart from all the other problems with that, some of which are of doubtful relevance here since the letter is addressed to an archbishop, it assumes that the writers of the letter know what is intended by ‘God’. Tricky. Very tricky. The evidence is contradictory and patchy.

In short it’s hard to escape the conclusion that all this kind of thing is just more Amplification, as Simon Blackburn says [pdf].

But equally perhaps ‘God exists’ functions largely as a license to demand respect creep. It turns up an amplifier, and what it amplifies is often the meanest and most miserable side of human nature. I want your land, and it enables me to throw bigger and better tantrums, ones that you just have to listen to, if I find myself saying that God wants me to want your land. A tribe wants to enforce the chastity of its women, and the words of the supernatural work to terrify them into compliance.

Or I don’t like poofters, and I can throw bigger and better tantrums – I can tell the Archbishop of Canterbury what’s what – if I claim to know what’s intended by God. It’s hard not to think that the Global South archbishops just don’t like people who go in for ‘same-sex sex’ and use God as an enforcer. And this is one of the many many reasons religion is such a regressive, narrow, stifling way to think. In any other context, a two or three thousand year old book is judged on its merits. It may well be taken to be full of wisdom, to have much to teach us, to be well worth reading and learning from – but for secular, rational, communicable, universalizable reasons, not for magical or ineffable or supernatural ones. For discussion-continuing reasons, not for discussion-ending reasons. What an airless, parched, small, blank little world the world of Authority is.