Quick thing. I just want to note it. I have noted a dislike for Joseph Epstein before. I’m going to do it again. I dislike a remark in this article in Commentary – which Arts and Letters Daily for some reason quoted in its teaser (which is why I saw it in the first place). Why flag up such a – well, here is the remark:

Wilson at his meanest shows up in Dabney’s account of his marriage to the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy—a marriage made in 1937 when he was forty-two and she was twenty-five. “I was too young,” McCarthy would later claim, and “I was too old,” Wilson would counter. It would be closer to the truth to say that both were too selfish and wanting in the least human insight. McCarthy always mistook her snobbery for morality; Wilson mistook life for literature. Dabney, summing up this wretched partnership, writes: “American letters has not seen another alliance so flawed and so distinguished.” So flawed and so distinguished – what a way to characterize the union of a true bitch and a genuine bully.

That’s disgusting. I’m not going to bother saying why, because I think it’s obvious. I’m tempted to call Epstein all sorts of foul names, but I won’t, because I’m better than he is. I will, however, point out that he has a mediocre intellect and McCarthy did not. Maybe that’s why he calls her foul names.

How funny – a harmonic convergence, or something. The very day that I noted the oddity of Steve Fuller’s comment on Meera Nanda’s book at Amazon, in view of his testimony at Dover – Michael Bérubé commented on exactly the same thing.

I’m working on something that I’ll explain more fully next week (when, I hope, it will be done), but in the course of my work on it I found that sociologist Steve Fuller blurbed Meera Nanda’s 2003 book, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India by writing, “This first detailed examination of postmodernism’s politically reactionary consequences should serve as a wake-up call for all conscientious leftists.” Right, well, it so happens that I’m down with much of Nanda’s argument myself, as I explain in a bunch of things I’ve been writing lately. But wait! This Steve Fuller is that Steve Fuller, the author of Social Epistemology (and much, much more) who showed up in Dover, Pennsylvania this past October to testify that Intelligent Design is a legitimate science…

Snap. All the more interesting because Michael has told me that it was reading Meera’s articles here (at B&W) that caused him to worry about these politically reactionary consequences himself, and that’s why he’s writing about the subject now. Which is good since he’s an influential fella, on account of being such a damn brilliant writer (well, on other accounts too, but the writing is like some kind of atomic magnet). So that means B&W is useful, in its plodding little way, and it’s always good when I get to think that B&W is useful, because it keeps me going when discouragement over hackers and my inability to fix things that need fixing threatens to cause me to run away from home and become a confectioner.

So then, to add to the interest, Steve Fuller commented on Michael’s post, and Michael turned that into a new thread with comments from a lot of knowledgeable people like P Z Myers and John Emerson. There is also a comment at the Valve. And there’s a post from October at Panda’s Thumb.

I’ll just offer a few of Fuller’s…stranger remarks.

It’s not clear – at least not to me – that there is some psychologically credible line to be drawn between ‘revelation’ and ‘reason’. This distinction exists, if at all, at the public level of how you would have your ideas tested: By calculations? By experiments? By the Bible?

And

But in my circles people don’t talk much about their religious beliefs, so I just go on my reading and intermittent outbursts of others. I do wonder what might be the motivation for atheists to do science in the grand unifying sense: Why do they believe there’s sufficient order in the universe to merit the systematic efforts at inquiry?

Because they think there can be order without design, and because there’s an immense amount to find out about that if so (or, in another way, if not). That question is oddly reminiscent of Nicholas Buxton saying in that Guardian article that the only rational thing for people who think the universe is uncaused to do is jump off a cliff.

And

Actually if you’re a Darwinist ‘all the way down’, you should say that life began as some random collocation of micro-units of matter that happened to stabilize long enough to reproduce and then mutate: i.e. the self-bootstrapping theory of life. However, Darwinists don’t want to commit to this because it’s not empirically provable – which means it allows room for more feint-hearted Darwinists to believe that God kicked off the whole process.

Provable – oh dear. That’s a very basic mistake for someone in this field, especially when he does such a lot of de haut en bas condescending to everyone else on the thread.

Now that the nonsense is out of the way – on to a very interesting article in the NY Times that starts from the murder (the ‘honour killing’) of Hatun Surucu and the trial of her brothers which began in September, and moves on to the large and familiar subject of women in Muslim immigrant enclaves in Germany.

Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun Surucu’s capital crime was that, living in Germany, she had begun living like a German…It’s still unclear whether anyone ordered her murdered. Often in such cases it is the father of the family who decides about the punishment. But Seyran Ates has seen in her legal practice cases in which the mother has a leading role: mothers who were forced to marry forcing the same fate on their daughters. Necla Kelek, a Turkish-German author who has interviewed dozens of women on this topic, explained, “The mothers are looking for solidarity by demanding that their daughters submit to the same hardship and suffering.” By disobeying them, the daughter calls into question her mother’s life – her silent submission to the ritual of forced marriage.

That makes a horrible kind of sense. If their daughters don’t want to do what they did, what does that say about what they did? That’s a familiar situation with parents and children in general. The intrinsic sadness of what is known as upward mobility is that parents often see their children educated out of their reach, or at least out of easy communication.

When a broader German public began concerning itself with the parallel Muslim world arising in its midst, it was primarily thanks to three female authors, three rebellious Muslim musketeers: Ates, who in addition to practicing law is the author of “The Great Journey Into the Fire”; Necla Kelek (“The Foreign Bride”); and Serap Cileli (“We’re Your Daughters, Not Your Honor”)…Taking off from their own experiences, the three women describe the grim lives and sadness of Muslim women in that model Western democracy known as Germany.

There were signs, but the author (a German man himself) didn’t worry about them much.

For a German of my generation, one of the most holy legacies of the past was the law of tolerance. We Germans in particular had no right to force our highly questionable customs onto other cultures. Later I learned from occasional newspaper reports and the accounts of friends that certain Muslim girls in Kreuzberg and Neukölln went underground or vanished without a trace. Even those reports gave me no more than a momentary discomfort in our upscale district of Charlottenburg. But the books of the three Muslim dissidents now tell us what Germans like me didn’t care to know. What they report seems almost unbelievable. They describe an everyday life of oppression, isolation, imprisonment and brutal corporal punishment for Muslim women and girls in Germany, a situation for which there is only one word: slavery.

Tolerance of what, is always the question. One we’re finally remembering to ask.

Before the murder of Hatun Surucu there were enough warnings to engage the Germans in a debate about the parallel society growing in their midst. There have been 49 known “honor crimes,” most involving female victims, during the past nine years – 16 in Berlin alone. Such crimes are reported in the “miscellaneous” column along with other family tragedies and given a five-line treatment. Indeed, it’s possible that the murder of Hatun Surucu never would have made the headlines at all but for another piece of news that stirred up the press. Just a few hundred yards from where Surucu was killed, at the Thomas Morus High School, three Muslim students soon openly declared their approval of the murder. Shortly before that, the same students had bullied a fellow pupil because her clothing was “not in keeping with the religious regulations.” Volker Steffens, the school’s director, decided to make the matter public in a letter to students, parents and teachers. More than anything else, it was the students’ open praise of the murder that made the crime against Hatun Surucu the talk of Berlin and soon of all Germany.

Well, a good thing something did. (Well done Herr Steffens.)

For more than 20 years the Islamic Federation of Berlin, an umbrella organization of Islamic associations and mosque congregations, has struggled in the Berlin courts to secure Islamic religious instruction in local schools. In 2001 the federation finally succeeded. Since then, several thousand Muslim elementary-school students have been taught by teachers hired by the Islamic Federation and paid by the city of Berlin. City officials aren’t in a position to control Islamic religious instruction…Since the introduction of Islamic religious instruction, the number of girls that come to school in head scarves has grown by leaps and bounds, and school offices are inundated with petitions to excuse girls from swimming and sports as well as class outings…Councilwoman Stefanie Vogelsang stresses that the majority of the mosques in Neukölln are as open to the world as they ever were, and that they continue to address the needs of integration. But the radical religious communities are gaining ground. She points to the Imam Reza Mosque, for instance, whose home page – until a recent revision – praised the attacks of Sept. 11, designated women as second-class human beings and referred to gays and lesbians as animals. “And that kind of thing,” she says, fuming, “is still defended by the left in the name of religious freedom.”

Just so. And not just in Germany, as we know.

This is the least expected provocation of the three author rebels: a frontal assault on the relativism of the majority society. In fact, they are fighting on two fronts – against Islamist oppression of women and its proponents, and against the guilt-ridden tolerance of liberal multiculturalists. “Before I can get to the Islamic patriarchs, I first have to work my way through these mountains of German guilt,” Seyran Ates complains. It is women who suffer most from German sensitivity toward Islam. The three authors explicitly accuse German do-gooders of having left Muslim women in Germany in the lurch and call on them not to forget the women locked behind the closed windows when they rave about the multicultural districts.

Which is exactly what Maryam Namazie and Azam Kamguian and Homa Arjomand and Ayaan Hirsi Ali – in the UK, Canada, the Netherlands – also say. Multiculturalism, religious freedom, diversity, tolerance, guilt – they leave Muslim women in the lurch.

The fact is that disregard for women’s rights – especially the right to sexual self-determination – is an integral component of almost all Islamic societies, including those in the West. Unless this issue is solved, with a corresponding reform of Islam as practiced in the West, there will never be a successful acculturation. Islam needs something like an Enlightenment; and only by sticking hard to their own Enlightenment, with its separation of religion and state, can the Western democracies persuade their Muslim residents that human rights are universally valid. Perhaps this would lead to the reforms necessary for integration to succeed. “We Western Muslim women,” Seyran Ates says, “will set off the reform of traditional Islam, because we are its victims.”

And they’re doing it now. Best of luck, all.

And then there’s the Narnia thing.

Icky icky ick.

What Pullman particularly objects to about the Narnia series, as it comes to a climax in The Last Battle, is that the children are killed and go to heaven. ” ‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’ “

Yeah okay – sorry, I’m with Pullman here. I hate that medieval (literally medieval) ‘this world is crap boring shadowlands and “heaven” is all joy tralala’ idea. I hate the idea of a modern children’s story that tells them being alive is like being at school and being dead is holidays, that life is the dream and being dead is waking up. What does that give you? Well, at the outermost edge, it gives you people who are so eager to get there that they kill themselves to do it, and so deluded about what is ‘good’ and what their putative deity wants that they do it by killing as many other people as possible. Not just tube-exploders and semi-airplane pilots, either – also the child soldiers in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war: they were given plastic keys and told they were the keys to Paradise, and sent off to be killed. And only slightly removed from the outermost edge, it gives you all the monster raving loonies who believe in the ‘Rapture’ and get pleasure in contemplating the future torture of most human beings on the planet – which means you get morally disgusting human beings. And then you get a lot of people who just waste the lives they do have by failing to appreciate the real world.

Furthermore, to be morally mature will involve acknowledging that reality and living in relation to God, the ground of our being and the goal of our longing. There are different concepts of reality, and following on from that different understandings of what it is to be morally mature. For the atheist, moral maturity must involve rejecting religion. For the religious believer, it must involve acknowledging the supreme reality from whom we draw our being.

That sounds grand, doesn’t it. But it’s just windy nonsense dressed up. What’s morally mature about that?

The religious bad-argument-purveyors are out in force. Lloyd Eby at World Peace Herald for instance. He says an earlier article of his got a lot of ‘responses and comments from atheists who claim that this article misrepresents what atheism is and what atheists actually believe.’ Now there’s a surprise – religious people generally do such a good job of representing what atheism is and what atheists actually believe. No strawmen there! Hardly ever.

So Eby answers the answers.

If we accept the usual or most prevalent definition of religion, a definition in which religion is explicitly tied to belief in and/or service of a supernatural god or supreme being, then atheism could not be a religion because active atheism can be defined or described as the positive rejection of the existence of any supernatural god or supreme being. Atheism is the active belief that there is no god. As one atheist put it, “Atheism is the rejection of supernatural belief. As an atheist, I do not believe in the reality of any supernatural being, and as a result of this, reject religion.”

Well there’s a bad start. That’s his first paragraph, apart from the exposition, and already he’s done exactly what he’s accused of doing. Furthermore he’s done it in the space of one sentence, in full view of the readers, and apparently without awareness that he’s done it. That’s what I call sloppy. Behold the translation – the atheist he quotes says ‘I do not believe in the reality of any supernatural being’ but Eby cites that as illustration of his version, ‘Atheism is the active belief that there is no god’ – and he apparently doesn’t see (or else he’s being tricksy) that the two are different – that he’s translated. Theists are always doing this! It’s highly irritating, and it’s dirty pool. Not believing something is not identical to believing that something not. Some atheists of course do ‘actively’ believe there is no god, but a great many don’t. A great many atheists are just, what the word implies, not theists. That’s all. Theists don’t get to redefine the word to make their case – except they do, because they do it all the time, and get away with it.

Oddly, farther down in the article, he makes that very distinction himself, and then says that the mere non-theists are not the atheists he’s talking about. Well that’s fair enough, but then he should have worded the opening gambit differently. More people will read the first two paragraphs than read the whole article (few people, I would guess, read a middle paragraph and nothing else, but lots read beginnings and nothing else).

I do indeed hold that theism and atheism are both religious. The atheist who thinks otherwise is mistaken because he is using a tendentious or incorrect definition of religion, a definition that attempts to privilege atheism and give it a logical, legal, and evidential status over the usual notions of religion. But that is unwarranted. The theist cannot prove that his belief is true; his belief is metaphysical and a statement of faith that goes beyond the observable evidence for it. And the atheist cannot prove that his view is true either; his belief is also metaphysical and a statement of unbelief that goes beyond the observable evidence for it.

Wait – stop right there. More dirty pool. How did ‘prove’ get in there? More tricksiness? This guy is a philosopher! He knows beliefs can be warranted without being provable. So he’s playing games. It’s a very familiar game, to pretend there is nothing between proof and belief in the sense of faith. Of course atheists can’t prove that atheism is true, but there is plenty of evidence that makes a deity seem pretty improbable. It’s reasonable to point out that there are some metaphysical beliefs or assumptions underlying the belief that evidence is evidential – that the world is orderly, and so on – but that’s not the same thing as the claim that atheism and theism are on exactly equal footing with regard to logical and evidential status.

More later.

Speaking of ethics and politeness, the difference between what one has a right to do and what is right to do – as we just were in comments on ‘A Valediction Forbidding Nonsense’ – I’ve been pondering a certain pattern of behavior which I’ve seen in a few people I know (especially, but not exclusively, in rich people I know) and find interesting. I should give it a name, for ease of reference – but it’s hard to think of one, because it’s a complicated pattern, with several steps.

Step 1. Volunteer the statement – unprompted by the other party – that you are going to do something. Perhaps something generous or kind or helpful, something extra – give a present, help with a project, loan a valuable object, perform a service, do a favour – something unexpected, welcome, significant. Collect gratitude. Or perhaps just a simple bit of routine scheduling – ‘I will do X on Thursday,’ ‘I will get Y done by the end of the month.’ Collect recognition of duty done.

Step 2. Don’t do it. Don’t give or loan or help with or perform whatever it is. Don’t do X on Thursday, don’t finish Y by the end of the month.

Step 3. Never state the fact. Never say ‘oh by the way I can’t [do whatever it is] after all.’ Never mention it or refer to it.

Step 4. Entailed by Step 3. Never explain. Since you don’t say ‘I’m not going to [do whatever it is] after all,’ it is not possible (or necessary) to explain.

Step 5. Also entailed by Step 3. Never apologize.

That’s it. Say ‘I’m going to give you A’ or ‘I will help you with B’. Then don’t do it; don’t say you’re not going to do it, you’re not currently doing it, you haven’t done it; don’t refer to it at all; ignore it entirely; act as if nothing was ever said, the subject was never mentioned; never explain why you’re not doing it, haven’t done it – much less why the reasons you haven’t done it are good reasons. Never apologize. Never do anything at all, simply proceed on your way as if nothing had happened.

Maybe I should call it ‘the Gaslight deception,’ on the theory that the goal is to make the other party think it was all a hallucination born of insanity.

People of course have a right to do this. But is it the right thing to do? I leave it to your wisdom to decide.

A couple of passages from the president of the Royal Society’s valedictory speech because they are so B&W.

In short, I guess that the same ill-understood circumstances that allow complex human societies to arise and persist also – and perhaps necessarily – have elements that are strongly antithetic to the values of the Enlightenment. What are these values? They are tolerance of diversity, respect for individual liberty of conscience, and above all recognition that an ugly fact trumps a beautiful theory or a cherished belief. All ideas should be open to questioning, and the merit of ideas should be assessed on the strength of the evidence that supports them and not on the credentials or affiliations of the individuals proposing them. It is not a recipe for a comfortable life, but it is demonstrably a powerful engine for understanding how the world actually works and for applying this understanding.

See – ‘and above all recognition that an ugly fact trumps a beautiful theory or a cherished belief’. That’s where we came in.

I end this valedictory Address much as I began my first one, by again reminding us that the Royal Society was born of the Enlightenment. Everything we do embodies that spirit: a fact-based, questioning, analytic approach to understanding the world and humankind’s place in it…Many people and institutions have always found such questioning, attended often by unavoidable uncertainties, less comfortable than the authoritarian certitudes of dogma or revelation…Today, however, fundamentalist forces are again on the march, West and East. Surveying this phenomenon, Debora MacKenzie has suggested that – in remarkably similar ways across countries and cultures – many people are scandalised by “pluralism and tolerance of other faiths, non-traditional gender roles and sexual behaviour, reliance on human reason rather than divine revelation, and democracy, which grants power to people rather than God.” She adds that in the US evangelical Christians have successfully fostered a belief that science is anti-religious, and that a balance must be restored, citing a survey which found 37% of Americans (many of them not evangelicals) wanted Creationism taught in schools. Fundamentalist Islam offers a similar threat to science according to Ziauddin Sardar, who notes that a rise in literalist religious thinking in the Islamic world in the 1990s seriously damaged science there, seeing the Koran as the font of all knowledge.

Because people refuse to recognize that an ugly fact trumps a cherished belief. Because as far as a great many people are concerned, it is very much the other way around – a cherished belief trumps pretty much everything, and certainly anything so small and petty and trivial as a mere fact or piece of evidence. And because deference is paid to them and witheld from the other team – because it’s considered bad manners to tell the cherished-belief-first crowd that they’re mistaken and not thinking clearly, while it’s not in the least considered bad manners to tell the evidence-first crowd that we are shallow, cold, boring, heartless, unimaginative, trivial, shallow, and mistaken and deluded and going to burn in hell forever. An unfortunate arrangement.

Another brief item. Something I noticed yesterday when coding Meera’s wonderful article – on the Amazon page for Prophets Facing Backward there is, of all things in the world, a recommendation by (wait for it) Steve Fuller. What does he say?

This first detailed examination of postmodernism’s politically reactionary consequences should serve as a wake-up call for all conscientious leftists.

Uh…hello? This is the same Steve Fuller – the very same Steve Fuller, my darlings – who testified for the defense – for the ID side – at Dover a few weeks ago. So – uh – uh – what can one possibly wonder other than ‘why didn’t he heed his own advice?’ Why didn’t he hear his own wake-up call? If he went back to sleep again, why didn’t he set the alarm? I mean – yo, talk about ‘postmodernism’s politically reactionary consequences’.

Oh well hang on, there’s no date on the reviews. Maybe he just wrote that. After Dover. Maybe he’s sitting at home all pink about the ears, having just read Meera’s book and feeling like a damn fool. Or…maybe he doesn’t include himself among conscientious leftists? Or maybe he thinks ID is about epistemically reactionary consequences but nothing at all to do with politically reactionary ones? Oh who knows. But anyway, it’s a puzzle.

A small point, one I wanted to make the other day but I was out of time and had to run off. The Bobby J Collitch of Knollitch textbooks again. The one called Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, to be specific.

Twain’s skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth but the deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel…Throughout her [Emily Dickinson’s] life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life.

Okay – so what do these bozos – Ronald Horton, Donalynn Hess and Steven Skeggs – mean by ‘the honest questioning of a seeker of truth’ then? Is ‘honest questioning’ the kind of questioning that knows ahead of time what the right answer is and honestly diverts itself with whatever intermediate activity it takes to get there? Is ‘honest questioning’ the kind that knows with cast-iron certainty what the answer to any given ‘question’ is and will accept no other no matter what the evidence or logic or sumptuous bribe? Is it honest and legitimate to use the honorific ‘honest questioning’ about a questioning that is required to find a particular answer no matter what? No, my brethren, I would say that it is not. I would say that it is ludicrous and self-flattering and a gross example of having it both ways to label ‘honest questioning’ the kind of pseudo-questioning (if indeed any) these buffoons – Horton, Hess and Skeggs – have in mind.

Or to put the matter more bluntly – what do they mean by it? What do they mean by upbraiding Dickinson for viewing ‘salvation’ as not a certainty and at the same time curling their Christian lip at Mark Twain’s skepticism for not being honest questioning? Eh? What do they mean by ever using the phrase ‘honest questioning’ at all in the same book in which they rebuke Dickinson for not ‘accepting’ the Bible as an ‘inerrant’ (!!) guide to life? For that matter what do they mean by writing a book at all, when their thinking is so flabby and fatuous and absurd? They shouldn’t be writing so much as a schedule of their favourite tv shows for the next week, let alone a book for tragically deprived high school students to read.

Normblog’s Writer’s Choice was by Pamela Bone the other day. I’ve linked to several of her columns in the Age here. She’s another one of these eccentrics who think women’s rights shouldn’t be just for the lucky people of the developed world.

On that drive across town Perowne sees three black figures, women in the body and face-covering burqas, huddled together on a pavement.
“He can’t help his distaste, it’s visceral. How dismal, that anyone should be obliged to walk around so entirely obliterated… And what would the relativists say, the cheerful pessimists from Daisy’s college? That it’s sacred, traditional, a stand against the fripperies of Western consumerism? But the men, the husbands… wear suits, or trainers and tracksuits, or baggy shorts and Rolexes, and are entirely charming and worldly and thoroughly educated in both traditions. Would they care to carry the folkloric torch, and stumble about in the dark at midday?”
I have wondered this too, and why left-leaning women do not protest at such an oppression of women’s rights (even if the women go along with their oppression). The reason, as Fay Weldon has said, is that today racism is seen as a much worse crime than sexism; and many people confuse criticism of religion – especially Islam – with racism. It has, of course, nothing to do with racism.

And so have I. Several million times, at a guess.

Anybody get the Evening Standard? Still got yesterday’s? Hang on to it (and if you feel so inclined, scan an article in it and send it to me). A commenter at Harry’s Place says Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote a searing article yesterday.

She relates how a woman in a burqa recognised her…and having followed her home last week, begged for help. She took off her burqa to reveal horrific injuries to her face and body which were inflicted by her father and brothers in their bid to control her desire for independence (She is a chemistry graduate from Bolton). She claimed that the burqa is being forcibly used to cover the injuries of many women she knows, and that her friend had been killed. “She took off her burqa to reveal a sight I shall never forget. There before me was a woman so badly battered and beaten that she looke painted, in deep blue, purple and livid pink, The sides of her mouth were torn – “He put his fist in my mouth because i was screaming” she explained.” Brown now has 12 letters from young British Muslim women with such allegations. She comments: “The pernicious ideology is propogated by misguided Muslim women who claim the burqa is an equaliser and a liberator.” She made a film for Channel 4 and met an entire class at a Muslim school in Leicester who told her that negating their physical selves in public made them feel great. Last week in Southall, Brown watched a woman in a burqa sit while her family ate – she of course couldn’t put food in her mouth. Brown rails against politicians who dare not speak out against this attack on autonomy and equality, and she finds even more baffling the “meek acceptance of the burqa by British feminists who must be repelled by the garment and its meanings. “What are they afraid of? Afghan and Iranian women fight daily against the shroud and there is nothing “colonial” about raising ethical objections to this obvious symbol of oppression..The banning of the headscarf in France was divisive.but it was also supported by many Muslims. The state was too arrogant and confrontational, but the policy was right.” She concludes: “Thousands of liberal Muslims would dearly like the state to take a stand on their behalf. If it doesn’t, it will betray vulnerable British citizens and the nation’s most cherished principles and encourage Islam to move back even faster into the dark ages, when we all need to face the future together.”

Thousands – I should think that’s a conservative number. More like hundreds of thousands of people who don’t like being brutalized, I should think.

Timothy Garton-Ash talked to Ayaan Hirsi Ali last week. He didn’t think ‘Submission’ was a very good film (I know people who agree with him, including people from the Netherlands), but he thinks it makes a necessary point.

However, I have not a shadow of a doubt that Ali’s script is trying to make an important point about the suffering of women oppressed in the name of Islam – suffering that Ali knows at first hand both from her own experience and from acting as an interpreter for other women from Muslim backgrounds in the Netherlands. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is much more than just a voice for the voiceless oppressed. In person, she is a thoughtful, calm, clear, almost pedantic spokeswoman for the fundamental liberal values of the Enlightenment: individual rights, free speech, equality before the law.

Which makes her the best kind of voice for the voiceless oppressed. The other kind just leave them voiceless.

But her central claim seems to me vital and irrefutable: if being a free country means anything at all, it must mean that people have the chance to criticise freely, and without fear of reprisal, Islam, Hinduism or Sikhism, as they now in practice have the chance to excoriate Christianity (despite Britain’s ridiculous blasphemy laws), Judaism or, for that matter, Darwinism.

That ‘Darwinism’ thing is stupid – it’s like those old ‘which object doesn’t belong’ question on intelligence tests. Ding ding! Not a religion! But anyway.

This right to free speech, which is to an open society what oxygen is to human life, is under direct threat from people whose position is very simple: if you say that, we will kill you. And not just in the case of Islam. Remember that violent protests and death threats from extremists in Britain’s Sikh community forced the playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti into hiding, and her play Behzti off the stage in Birmingham. How does our government react?…By making the right noises about tolerance, peaceful protest and free speech. But also – shamefully, stupidly, cravenly – by itself proposing to restrict that right, in an ill-considered, ill-drafted bill to bar “incitement to religious hatred”. Among the motives behind the reintroduction of this already once rejected bill in Labour’s last election manifesto were appeasement of some self-appointed spokespersons of the Muslim community in Britain and transparent political opportunism…

Exactly. Appeasement of self-appointed spokespersons of the ‘Muslim community’. Pretty craven and stupid all right.

Now here’s what Tony Blair, the home secretary, the attorney general and the rest of the cabinet need to do. First, they should go back and read the magnificent pages in which John Stuart Mill explains why what he calls the “collision of opinions” is vital to the preservation of liberty, and why it is “obvious that law and authority have no business with restraining” attacks on either religion or what he calls “infidelity”…Then they should reflect on the example of a brave Somalian woman who, inspired by authors such as Mill, is risking her life every day to maintain our right to free speech.

Yeah.

Here’s a nasty piece of news. One that as far as I can tell has had zero attention in Anglophone newsmedia or blogs.

I’ve written to Azam and Homa and Maryam about it, and to Nick Cohen. Let’s hope it stops being a story in Norway and nowhere else.

Fjordman explains:

Samira Munir, Norwegian politician of Pakistani origins, died two weeks ago. All the details surrounding her death have not been revealed, but the police have hinted that it may have been suicide. It is not impossible that this could be the case, but she had received death threats many times from the Pakistani community in Norway because of her courageous fight for the rights of Muslim immigrant women, and for banning hijab, the Islamic veil. Regardless of what caused her death, it is a fact that she received far too little support from Norwegian authorities and even her own party, who were afraid that her outspoken defence of women’s rights could cost them Muslim votes and damage the country’s glossy, Multicultural self-image. Her death thus puts this country to shame. She was a brave woman, and will be missed.

An English version of Aftenposten had this article in March 2004.

A member of Oslo’s City Council who was born in Pakistan but now holds Norwegian citizenship has twice been called to Pakistan’s local embassy. Both times, Pakistan’s ambassador to Norway questioned her political standpoints, and now Norway’s foreign minister Jan Petersen has been told that she felt pressured…The calls from Pakistan’s embassy came after Munir became the first known Muslim woman in Norway to support a proposed ban on the use of head scarves and other religious symbols for youth. She then became a target of criticism within the local Pakistani community. She declined to comment on the issue after receiving several anonymous and bothersome phone calls.

And now she’s dead – after an encounter with a train.

Stay tuned.

So, not content with our current level of credulity and vacuity and inability to think or judge or question or analyze or reflect, with, not to put too fine a point on it, our score on the stupidity meter, some parents are going to considerable trouble to do better – so that in a few short years no one at all will any longer be able to see what’s wrong with The World According to Bob Jones University Press ‘textbooks’.

Reporter Suein Hwang interviewed white parents who are pulling their kids out of elite public high schools, schools known for sending graduates to the nation’s top colleges. They are doing this, writes Hwang, because the schools are too academically rigorous, too narrowly focused on such subjects as math and science. Too Asian…White parents are putting their kids into private schools or moving to areas where the public schools are whiter, less Asian and less demanding. Where sports and music also are emphasized, and educators value, as one parent put it, ‘the whole child.’

Yes – the whole child. One not all warped and distorted and tipped over on one side by excessive book-thumbing. One not all nerdy and squinty and pencil-necked because of too much reading and not enough tv-watching. One not all defiant and rebellious like that horrible Mark Twain or all presumptuous and disrespectful of authority like that (pencil-necked) Emily Dickinson. We want our kids to be normal, by god – we want them to be ignorant and gullible and thoughtless and inarticulate like that nice fella in the White House. We want them to be ordinary, and humble, and modest, and average, so they can run for president when the time comes.

I sent that link (which Eric Berman sent to me) to Allen and he sent me this one in reply.

According to the Government, parents increasingly can no longer be trusted to teach qualities such as self-worth, restraint, friendliness, empathy and resilience to their children, so schools must assume the burden…Dinah Morley, the deputy director of the Young Minds charity, agrees. “Schools can no longer see themselves as just a place for learning,” she said. “They have to do the nurturing that so many kids are missing out on.”

Note that ‘just a place for learning’. Interesting, isn’t it. As if it were kind of small-minded and parochial of schools to think of themselves as ‘just’ – mere, only – places for learning. As if they really ought to pull their socks up and realize that they have better things to do, because learning is such a trivial, fussy, silly, time-wasting activity.

Actually that is exactly what a lot of people think. I once heard a teacher of my (very short-lived) acquaintance say that schools aren’t just for teaching ‘information,’ as she chose to call it, but at least as much for teaching social skills. The hell they are, I wanted to tell her, rather loudly and impolitely, but I didn’t. (Because I’m no slouch in the social skills department myself, unless I’m in a bad mood or feeling slightly irritable.) But I took note of her opinion, and began that very day to plot the resistance.

The guidance demonstrates the extent to which “emotional intelligence”, a term coined in 1995 by American psychologists to describe the ability to perceive, access and regulate emotions, is regarded by the Government as education orthodoxy. Education inspectors at Ofsted now routinely monitor schools and nurseries for how well they promote pupils’ emotional and social development.

You know…even apart from the ‘no thank you I’d rather be doing something else’ aspect, it just sounds so – revolting. So intrusive, so get away from me, so who do you think you are. It sounds almost Christian in its intrusiveness. The bastards are closing in on us – the Zeal-of-the-land-busy types from one direction and the brow-moppers and hand-holders from the other. We’re going to have Pat Robertson shouting damnation in one ear and some creepy empathist whispering damply in the other. It’s hell on earth, I tell you!

Not every one is convinced, however. Teachers complain that they are not paid to be psychologists, academics are worried that subject content is losing out to indefinable “skills”, while traditionalists think the responsibility lies with parents.

Ya think? Ya think teachers aren’t shrinks, and time spent on bedwetting won’t be spent on reading, and maybe parents should be doing the touchy-feely stuff?

“It is one thing to be sensitive to some students’ lack of confidence, or to refer individuals to a support service. It is another when students must fill in questionnaires about emotions and self-esteem and review these with classmates and teachers. Not only is it intrusive, but it elevates emotional needs as a concern and sidetracks teachers.”

Exactly. Never mind the whole child, never mind emotional literacy – stick with the kind of literacy that people need in a world full of graduates of Bob Jones U.

Sometimes the contempt and disgust (and dread) just become overwhelming. This California lawsuit by a gaggle of Christian high schools against the state university system for not crediting some of their courses is one of those times.

Among those courses are “Christianity’s Influence in American History” and “Christianity and American Literature,” both of which draw on textbooks published by Bob Jones University of Greenville, S.C., which describes itself as having stood for “the absolute authority of the Bible since 1927.”

‘Textbooks.’ ‘Bob Jones University.’ The ‘absolute authority.’ Of ‘the Bible.’ One doesn’t know where to direct the most rage and hatred, the profoundest disdain and incredulity. So let’s read some passages while we try to figure it out.

“United States History for Christian Schools,” written by Timothy Keesee and Mark Sidwell (Bob Jones University, 2001), says this about Thomas Jefferson. American believers can appreciate Jefferson’s rich contribution to the development of their nation, but they must beware of his view of Christ as a good teacher but not the incarnate son of God. As the Apostle John said, “Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (I John 2:22).

That’s a history ‘textbook’. Well, look, you might as well use a ‘textbook’ that says ‘American believers can appreciate Frederick Douglass’s rich contribution to the development of Their Nation [cue pledge], but they must beware of his view of Bugs Bunny as a good role model for mischievous children but not the incarnate son of the Easter bunny’ and then gives a quote from The Wizard of Oz. And then pitch a fit and file a lawsuit when the University of California won’t credit courses in which such a ‘textbook’ features.

Or what about this half-witted bilge about the Progressive movement?

On the whole, they believed that man is basically good and that human nature might be improved. … Such a belief, of course, ignored the biblical teaching that man is sinful by nature (Ephesians 2:1-3). Progressives therefore also ignored the fact that the fallible men who built the corrupt institutions that they attacked were the same in nature as those who filled the political offices and staffed the regulatory agencies that were supposed to control the corruption.

So woe unto you, ye generation of vipers, if you think the evil corrupt sinful fallible froth froth gummint can ever possibly conceivably ever ever do anything to control corruption – oh no oh no, I say unto you, even as seven times seven, only the sinful by nature fallible bidness community can ever control the corruption of the sinful by nature fallible bidness community. Yea verily even as the fox alone can guard the henhouse, even as the prison guard alone can control the prison guard, even as the Christian alone can chastise the Christian, so no gummint nor political officeholder nor regulatory agency nor reformer can ever guard or control or chastise the bidness community, nay even as the Gadarene swine remove the mote from his eye, amen.

“Elements of Literature for Christian Schools,” by Ronald Horton, Donalynn Hess and Steven Skeggs (Bob Jones University, 2001), faults Mark Twain for calling God “an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master.” Twain’s outlook was both self-centered and ultimately hopeless. Denying that he was created in the image of God, Twain was able to rid himself of feeling any responsibility to his Creator. At the same time, however, he defiantly cut himself off from God’s love. Twain’s skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth but the deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel.

Not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth – like the kind the people of ‘Bob Jones University’ engage in? As these books – so redolent of honest questioning and truth-seeking – make so abundantly obvious? The deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel – one who should have been tortured and thrown into prison if not executed, no doubt.

Dickinson’s year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary further shaped her “religious” views. During her stay at the school, she learned of Christ but wrote of her inability to make a decision for Him. She could not settle “the one thing needful.” A thorough study of Dickinson’s works indicates that she never did make that needful decision. Several of her poems show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny and a veiled disrespect for authority in general. Throughout her life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life.

Well how dare she. She had a presumptuous attitude. She had a ‘veiled’ (the sly, deceitful thing) disrespect for authority (authority like yours, no doubt). She viewed ‘salvation’ as not a certainty – in other words she lacked your pea-brained flat-headed aggressive hostile impervious impenetrable moronic dogmatic mindlessness. Well shame on her.

“Physics for Christian Schools,” by R. Terrance Egolf and Linda Shumate (Bob Jones University, 2004), addresses the question, “What is Christian about physics?” First, all secular science is pervaded by mechanistic, naturalistic and evolutionistic philosophy. Learning that the laws of mechanics as they pertain to a baseball in flight are just the natural consequences of the way matter came together denies the wisdom and power of our Creator God. … Second, physics as taught in the schools of the world contradicts the processes that shaped the world we see today. Trying to believe both secular physics and the Bible leaves you in a state of confusion that will weaken your faith in God’s Word.

So – you shouldn’t believe secular physics. So if the mood should strike you, you should feel free to take a shortcut from the roof to the ground by stepping off. Your lack of confusion and powerful faith in God’s word will cause secular physics to be suspended for your sake, and you will reach the ground as healthy and happy as you were when you stepped off the roof. We see this every day. Amen.

If these people would just shut up and go away – would settle together in some religious colony in the Arctic circle or somewhere – it wouldn’t be so bad. But of course they won’t. They want to force this shit on all the rest of us. I wish I were more confident that they’ll never succeed.

Alienation is it. Here’s some alienation for you.

The family and friends of an 18-year-old girl, doused with petrol and set alight in broad daylight by the man she refused to marry, led a silent march through a Parisian suburb yesterday. Chahrazad Belayni is currently fighting for her life in intensive care after suffering severe burns on 60 per cent of her body. She is being kept in an artificial coma…She knew her assailant. He was a former workmate of Pakistani origin who was angry about her refusal to marry him. The man and a suspected accomplice are on the run.

Gee – what a loving gesture. Hard to imagine why she didn’t want to marry him.

Several hundred people marched to the town hall yesterday behind a smiling portrait of Chahrazad and a banner calling for “justice, liberty, respect”. “We are here to denounce this horrible act,” said the girl’s brother, Abdelaziz, who criticised the lack of public outcry following the attack. “We are here, not to call for revenge but that justice is done. We are here to denounce all violence against women: women must be able to say No or Yes”.

Say it, Abdelaziz. What a welcome change from the brothers who kill their sisters or slap them around. Let’s just all keep patiently talking and marching and persuading until all brothers see things that way and wouldn’t dream of slapping a woman, let alone dumping gasoline on her and setting her on fire. That’s not so much to ask – that’s not insanely utopian – and it’s certainly not ‘racist’ or Islamophobic or anything like it. You’d never know it to hear some fools talk, but it’s not.

The march was co-organised by Ni Putes ni Soumises (Neither Whores, nor Submissive), an association that tackles growing violence against women, mainly in France’s suburbs. “We are here to tell Chahrazad’s parents that they are not alone in this fight. It is not just a family problem. It is a problem for the whole of France,” said Fadela Amara, founding president of the organisation.

Say it, Fadela. They are not alone in this fight. Not just a family problem, not just the whole of France, it is a problem for the whole world. Women are neither whores nor doormats; we’re people.

Ni Putes ni Soumises has more than 6,000 members and 60 local committees campaigning against the repression of girls in largely Muslim housing estates, where the choice is either to adhere to strict clothing and behavioural codes or be considered to have loose morals. Yesterday’s march was, it said, a “tribute to all the victims of machismo”. Ms Amara said the organisation was overwhelmed by calls for help from women suffering from violence or forced marriages, and asked the government to give more concrete help, notably through campaigns in schools. The French minister for social cohesion and sexual equality, Catherine Vautrin, described the attack on Chahrazad as a “horrible illustration” of male violence against women, which claimed the lives of 163 women in France in 2003 and 2004.

Let’s hope Chahrazad survives – and can have a decent life in spite of the scars. Let’s hope Ni Putes Ni Soumises has such success that it’s no longer necessary, and evolves into a giant book discussion group. Let’s hope branches of Ni Putes Ni Soumises are formed in countries all over the world – including the UK, Canada, the US – until they too are no longer needed. Let’s hope that in much less time than we think, the situation will change and it will become simply unthinkable for men to attack women, all over the planet.

Tribulation. Got that? Think about it.

Yeah. That’s what I thought.

Don’t mind me, it’s just this rapture site I’ve been looking at. It’s inspiring – is that the word I mean? No, not quite. It’s – baffling? No, that’s not it. Hilarious? Pathetic? Oh, it’ll come to me.

Okay so down to business. What, you’ve been wondering, is wrong with homosexuality? The FAQ section has a whole page all on its own to answer that important question, so I hustled right along to it, excited and hopeful that I would finally learn just exactly what it is that gets Christians (and other religious zealots too) so frantic with rage about homosekshality while other, one would think more pressing and significant, human wrongdoing is neglected. What, oh what is it, I muttered to myself as I clicked.

A whole lot of things, but mostly this: It’s an abomination to God.

Oh. That’s it. Period. Flatline. Dead end. That’s all there is. No, no, don’t get all excited – he doesn’t say what ‘a whole lot of things’ refers to – he doesn’t say what those things are. Nope. Not so much as a hint, not even about one of the things – just one measly little thing, wouldn’t you think he could –

I’m sorry. But anyway, he doesn’t. No, it’s just that it’s an abomination to God.

Poor God. So that’s what he’s up to up there? Sitting around chewing his fingernails and fretting and making his stomach hurt because of all these rampant prancing queers? So why’s it such an abomination? Why does it bother him so much? Why isn’t he more worried about stuff like torturing children in the belief that they are witches or possessed by demons? Or marrying off little girls to strangers as punishment for something their fathers or uncles or younger brothers did, or as it sometimes turns out didn’t do after all? Or blowing people up to make a point, or ruining the lives of everyone in entire countries out of religious zeal or eagerness to fill one’s pockets with money? Why does he have such odd priorities?

Do you suppose it could be the guy who runs this rapture site who thinks homosexuality is an abomination, and that he’s just saying it’s God who does? That’s a very suspicious thing to think, isn’t it. Or maybe it’s somebody he knew when he was a little boy, and he somehow got that person mixed up with ‘God.’ Maybe that’s it.

Anyway – the great ‘why’ remains unanswered. He has a whole page to do it in, but he never gets there. He has some words on the page, but they don’t say anything except it’s an abomination. Abomination, Bible quotations, Sodom, abomination, Bible quotations. That’s it. So the great mystery – what? what? what is it? what is the problem? why is it such a big deal? why does it worry you so much? why is it worse than murder, torture, cruelty, exploitation? what is wrong with you? – remains a mystery.

However the guy does have a practical side – he does think ahead. (Whew!) He has an answer for the question ‘How do you plan to maintain this site after the rapture?’

I have no master plan for maintaining Rapture Ready all the way through the seven-year tribulation. After the big event takes place, I expect RR to last several months. After all, the internet was designed to survive a nuclear war. It should be able to survive the great catching up of all believers. It is unlikely any one domain will be able to service the massive traffic surge that will be directed at all prophecy sites. The best hope for achieving enough bandwidth to allow for millions of people to view Rapture Ready’s content is for tribulation saints to mirror the site dozens of times.

So he’s quite sensible after all! Except for maybe just this one thing about being so obsessed with homosekshuality. Other than that he’s got his Arkansas (yes) feet on the ground.

Dang, I’m glad he’s in Arkansas. That’s a good two thousand miles from here, I think – maybe more. That’s very good. He probably won’t be knocking on my door or throwing stones at my window any time soon. I’m really pleased – well, relieved – about that.

You should listen to Radio 4’s Inside a Muslim School . It’s rather horrible.

It’s about a very small school in Blackburn, mostly girls with a few boys in the primary grades. The headteacher (who is a man) explains the dress code:

According to the Islamic principle, women should not show their hair. So if the hair is not covered properly, then we will ask them to do so. That’s why they have to wear scarves.

And outdoors, ‘veils’ as well, we find out later – although a lot of girls don’t. But right off the bat they get this nasty, creepy, prying, domineering, bordering on prurient stuff of a Boss Man telling little girls that their nasty dangerous hair is showing, and to cover it ‘properly’. I don’t think that’s good for the way they think about themselves.

We hear a recitation in Arabic, and a lesson in which a teacher tells the students what the Koran thinks of homosexuality (it’s against it), and a teacher telling the credulous reporter that of course the students are taught to ‘question’ everything. Oh yes? Such as why anyone should care what the Koran thinks of homosexuality, or why the headteacher has nothing better to do than tell young girls he can see their hair?

The head says something interesting:

The only restriction is that, because of the Islamic principle, I can’t be very open with my female staff, like you would in any other school.

Oh is that all. The only restriction – as if that’s a small thing. As if it’s a minor point, that relations between adults who work together should be so warped and impoverished by ‘the Islamic principle’ – or what it’s taken to be. As if the free unafraid between-equals open interaction between adults were not one of the best aspects of modern life.

Mind you, he does at least notice it, and think of it as a restriction. But the school is all about restriction – that seems to be the point. There’s more to Islam than that, but you’d never know it.

The credulous reporter does point out that the school is not well-equipped, that there is no science lab and that ‘the school regards music as unIslamic’ (another pretty, enriching thought). And there’s a very interesting bit where she talks to a girl who left and went to a state school to do A-levels. She did not like al-Islah, and she loved the state school. But al-Islah was a friendly place, wasn’t it, the reporter urges – warm, safe? Safe, yeh, the girl said – and you could hear the thought ‘safe and suffocating, safe like a shroud’. But she didn’t like it, no. She wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

And one can easily tell why, throughout the show. It’s that creepy note of suspicion, of over-supervision, of surveillance as Lucy Snowe disdainfully calls it in Villette, of coercion and overprotection, of more concern with ‘Islamic principle’ than with intellect.

Another girl says they were taught they were Muslim first, and she doesn’t want to be taught that. ‘I’m a human first,’ she says – and one wants to cheer, and give her a full scholarship to Cambridge. Her mother is Muslim, but she never taught her they were Muslims first.

That’s the problem* with ‘faith schools,’ isn’t it: that’s what they teach. The credulous reporter keeps using the maddening phrase, too – ‘faith school’ this and ‘faith school’ that. She also refers to state school as a place where there are people of all different faiths. Period. As if there were no people of zero ‘faiths’ in the UK. I thought it was only in the US that people assumed that, but apparently not.

*Well, one of the problems.

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.