First off, a personal message: stop reading now Fryslan, you’re not going to like this.

I realise that there is nothing people like more than a game (except maybe chocolate); so here’s the first in a new regular spot on the B&W blog (I hate that word).

Guess that Blog

All you’ve got to do to win – and the person who gets the most right at the end of the series will win a copy of The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense – is to guess, on the basis of the (imaginary) subject titles below, which blog I’m talking about. Answers on a postcard; or using the comments facility below.

Here we go:

1. Republicans are fascists.

2. Bush stole the election in Florida (yes, I’m still going on about this).

3. Bush kills cats.

4. Professor Smith takes up new position at Not As Good As Mine University.

5. Bush eats babies.

6. Republicans stole election in Delaware (surely, they must have done).

7. People who disagree with me are wrong, have never achieved anything in
their
lives, and have no qualifications (Part 1).

8. Republicans are aliens from Mars.

9. I’m great.

10. Professor Jones – who admires my work – takes up new position at Really Quite Good University.

11. Bush bribed nun to forge election results.

12. Bush sighted wearing suspicious black shirt (shock).

13. People who disagree with me are wrong, have never achieved anything in
their lives, have no qualifications, and they’re hopeless in bed (Part 2).

14. Bush eats babies whilst they’re still alive.

15. I’m really great.

I’m confused – I must be, because I really don’t understand this at all. I usually like Polly Toynbee (not that I read everything she writes), but this seems to me to be a very odd thing to say:

The countrysiders in the Lords will oppose the hunting bill again, but others will oppose it for good liberal reasons – proving the need for a second chamber. Liberals should always be wary of banning people from doing as they like. There needs to be an overwhelming case for the serious harm done: hunting just doesn’t meet that criteria (killing a few foxes is not more cruel than battery farming).

Wait – what? ‘Liberals should always be wary of banning people from doing as they like.’ But isn’t that awfully sweeping? ‘Doing as they like’? Doesn’t that cover an awful lot of ground? Underpaying and mistreating employees, abusing children, driving dangerously, vandalising parks or libraries, threatening or stalking people? And all sorts of things. People get banned from doing as they like all the time. Obviously. What does she mean ‘overwhelming case’, what does she mean ‘serious harm’? Overwhelming according to whom, serious by whose measure? My point isn’t about fox hunting, it’s about the generalization itself. I don’t think there should be some presumption that people should be allowed to ‘do as they like’ – it depends very much on what it is they like. Ah well – I must be confused.

I was thinking earlier this morning in an idle moment – well not altogether idle, because I was looking out the window, because it was one of those staggeringly beautiful autumnal mornings when it has partly cleared up after rain and clouds and the air is bright and clear and hard like diamonds or ginger ale or I don’t know what, and the sun is at just the right angle so that it makes the windows on the boats in the marina wink and twinkle which they certainly don’t do most of the time, and the light and shadows on the water and the peninsula look much more light and shadow-like than usual – one of those mornings. I was thinking, while staring at all this, about the difference – the subjective difference, the cognitive difference, the difference in our heads – between people one knows in real life and people one knows via the written word. That thought led to the related and equally familiar thought about books and their authors and how we think about them. To what extent we have ideas of their ‘personalities’, and how accurate or inaccurate such ideas may be. How some writers have (seem to have, via their writing) more ‘personality’ than others, and how that does not necessarily correlate with the quality of the books. A writer can have bags of personality and write crap books, or have none at all and write dazzlers. And what do we mean by personality, and how does it differ from character, and does the same apply. Can a writer have no discernable character and write brilliant books? Offhand I would say no – I don’t think so. The brilliance, the brilliant-book-writing, is the character, or part of it. But it’s not the personality, so much. Why? I don’t know why. Because personality is more adventitious, and so more beside the point? More just one of those things, like curly hair or buck teeth? Whereas character is more basic, and more important. But I can’t swear that’s not just a mere matter of labeling, rather than a genuine distinction.

Emerson and Carlyle met briefly when they were comparatively young, and had an immediate rapport. They sustained this friendship for years via letters; then Emerson made another trip over, and they found they didn’t like each other at all. Emerson found Carlyle a savage misanthropic terror; Carlyle found Emerson full of moonshine and endlessly talking (one knows the type).

I wouldn’t much want to meet either of them, myself. There are some writers I would want to meet; others I would want to observe but not meet; others I wouldn’t want to meet or observe. But what’s odd about it is that the groups don’t correlate with either favourites or hierarchies. It’s not that I want to meet all the best (in my opinion) writers, or all the ones I like the best. No. There’s something interesting about that fact…but I’m not sure what.

Shakespeare, Keats, Chekhov. Them I would like to meet. Emily Bronte, Byron, Montaigne – them I would like to watch, but not meet. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, George Eliot, Austen – I don’t even want to observe, let alone meet. And yet Austen is possibly my very favourite novelist and the one I think is the best. And Wordsworth is one of my favourite poets – but I would go out of my way not to meet him. Hazlitt, now – yes, I would want to meet Hazlitt. I would be frightened, but I would want to. Thoreau. I would like to meet Thoreau. Emerson said walking with him was like walking with a tree. He sounds like exactly my kind of person. I’m a tree myself. Two trees taking a walk; it sounds very agreeable, in a chilly sort of way.

On a lighter note. (Lighter than what? What could be lighter than Andrew Ross? Okay not lighter then, just different.) I have a staggering piece of news for everyone. Are you sitting down? Because this is a real shocker, and so new and fresh and unfamiliar – you just can’t think how new. Ready? Okay here it is.

Americans don’t get irony.

You didn’t know that, did you. You’ve never ever heard that before, have you. That’s not a stupid boring worn-out stale dull flat endlessly-recycled tedious cliché, is it! No indeed. No, you only hear that some three times in every BBC arts programme, that’s all.

I do beg your pardon. How unbecoming. And unironic. But there it is, you see – I don’t get irony. Never have. It’s a closed book to me. Comes of being born in New York, you see, that well-known haven of flat-footed wide-eyed literalness and naiveté.

No it’s just that I heard that particular gem of folk wisdom three times in one day last week. It’s just that it’s gotten so I can hear it coming, and prepare to roll my eyes. The minute one of the boffins on ‘Front Row’ or ‘Saturday Review’ comments on a certain sentimentality or fatuity in a new American movie, I know the next sentence is going to be the one about how Americans don’t do irony. Followed by a Tweedle-dum-Tweedledee-esque group hug. ‘Aren’t we cool, aren’t we great, aren’t we swell, we get irony and those poor pathetic dweebs across the pond don’t, not one of them, they’re all Biblical literalists and every other kind of literalists to boot.’

Gross exaggeration, I know. Well that’s what I do instead of irony, you see – hyperbole. I always do that. (And, I have to admit, a lifelong habit of doing that has revealed to me that some Americans do indeed not get irony, in the sense that I have had people of that nationality owlishly correct or question obvious hyperbole. ‘Was he really ten feet tall?’ Uh – no.) But if other people are allowed to do irony, then I’m allowed to do hyperbole. There’s a law on the books about it. I’d show you but I’m too busy.

One of the funny (possibly even ironic) things about the three in one day is that one of them was so very old. Two were from ‘Saturday Review’ but the other was from an ancient Morse I happened to watch on tv – one from 1991. Some guy tells Morse he’s going back to Princeton and it will be so nice and restful because Americans don’t do irony. Oh really! Princeton’s an irony-free zone, is it! Well I grew up there, and that’s news to me. In fact it’s bollocks.

To be fair, one of the two mentions on ‘Saturday Review’ was saying the same thing. Good old Tom Sutcliffe pointed out that it’s not that there’s no irony in the US, it’s just that it’s not evenly distributed. It may be a bit scarce in Nebraska, he said mildly, but there’s a lot of it on the coasts. Well exactly.

I’ve been slightly touchy about this for years – decades in fact. Ever since reading a long windy pompous self-congratulatory novel by John Fowles, Daniel Martin, which went on and on and on about how Americansdon’tdoirony. Even the clever ones, even the clever and funny ones, even the very clever and funny ones – even they don’t do irony. Whereas, apparently, all Ukanians, however dim and unfunny, do irony like polecats. I hadn’t a clue what he meant by it, which I thought might possibly indicate that it was true and that I too did not do irony. That it was like those notes that only dogs can hear, or sonic thingies that only dolphins can detect – that I simply couldn’t even recognize it, let alone appreciate it or smile at it or deploy it myself.

Well. That was a long time ago, and I’ve long since realized that Fowles was talking self-flattering crap. (And after that review of his diaries in the LRB the other month, I have serious doubts about his talent in the irony department, frankly.) Yes, granted, of course, a lot of our movies are full of sentimental bilge, but I’m such an ironist that I don’t go see them, so they don’t implicate the whole population, now do they. And granted our presidential campaigns are full of even more sentimental and utterly irrelevant bilge (Vote for me, I have a dog!), but – um – well never mind what. But we can too so do irony. We just don’t always happen to feel like it.

Just a bit more. Because I promised, and because there are more that are too good not to share.

…it is perhaps worth drawing an analogy between the demarcation lines in science and the borders between hierarchical taste cultures – high, middlebrow, and popular – that cultural critics and other experts involved in the business of culture have long had the vocational function of supervising. In both cases, we find the same need for experts to police the borders with their criteria of inclusion and exclusion…[F]alsifiability is often put forward as a criterion for evaluating scientific authenticity…But such a yardstick is no more objectively adequate and no less mythical a criterion than appeals to, say, aesthetic complexity have been in the history of cultural criticism. Falsifiability is a self-referential concept in science, inasmuch as it appeals to those normative codes of science that favor objective authentification of evidence by a supposedly dispassionate observer.

Isn’t that lovely? There’s so much in it. It’s like a big ol’ treasure chest. That ‘it is perhaps worth drawing’ – more of that caginess our sharp-eyed readers have noticed. Sure, ‘perhaps’ – that’s safe to say. Then again perhaps not. And ‘worth’? Well, that depends what you mean by ‘worth’. If you mean in the sense of ‘worth because likely to produce interesting, true, useful lines of thought,’ then no. If you just mean ‘more fun than having your teeth cleaned,’ possibly. Okay and then ‘demarcation lines’. Right. That’s what science is all right, it’s kind of like a football field. And then borders. He has a bit of an obsession with borders, Ross does. He seems to think that every distinction and every value judgement (except the ones he makes) equates to establishing and patrolling borders in a peculiarly compulsive, anal, property-hugging, pedantic way. And then ‘supervising’ to underline the point. Right – people who pay attention to culture (slightly more perspicuous attention than Ross pays, one hopes) spend all their time supervising borders; that’s what ‘culture’ is all about. And then, skipping lightly over several more lovely items (experts, police the borders, criteria, inclusion and exclusion) we come to that loopy phrase about falsifiability. Put forward? Scientific authenticity? Oh never mind. And then all the rest of it, all that bilge about normative codes and ‘a self-referential concept’ and ‘objective’ and ‘authentification’ (he seems to have science confused with stamp-collecting) and ‘supposedly’. I’m exhausted now.

But just a little more, because there is one very sly item.

A more exhaustive treatment would take account of the local, qualifying differences between the realm of cultural taste and that of science –

Oh it would! It would notice those differences would it? Well that is a relief!

– science, but it would run up, finally, against the stand-off between the empiricist’s claim that non-context-dependent beliefs exist and that they can be true, and the culturalist’s claim that beliefs are only socially accepted as true.

There, that’s the one. That’s what Susan Haack calls the ‘passes for’ fallacy. That’s that rhetorical trick where epistemic relativists substitute the word ‘beliefs’ for words like ‘facts’ or ‘truth’ and hope we won’t notice. And he follows that up with our last sentence for today.

Ultimately, the power of science rests upon making and maintaining that distinction, and we ought to recognize that science’s anxiety about authenticating its belief in truths is, in the truly Foucauldian sense, a question of power.

There you have it – the making of a celebrity cultural critic.

A little more. Because it’s hard to resist. Because there are just so many – um – interesting remarks.

To set the scene. Ross once attended what he calls a New Age trade convention, and gives us his thoughts on the subject.

The more official and centered voice of condemnation against the New Age community can be found in what are often charaterized as the witch-hunting activities of CSICOP…CSICOP is an international ‘inquisition’ of mostly academic ghostbusters, set up…to police the boundary between science and pseudoscience contested by a host of New Age alternatives to institutional scientific orthodoxies.

Same again. Official, ‘centered’ (huh?), witch-hunting (!!), inquisition, police, boundary, institutional, orthodoxies. All that in 1.5 sentences. Talk about over-egging the pudding (or over-egging the omelette, as the Alternative Idiom Community likes to call it). And then on the other hand (cue friendly music): community, contested, alternatives. That’s another way Ross is like Harding, despite the superficial differences in style: he’s what you might call insistent. He doesn’t have much to say, so he resorts to saying it over and over again. He says community, alternative, marginal, contested as often as he possibly can, and orthodoxy, official, authority, dominant, even oftener. Maybe one day we’ll get the point and change over from authoritative science to the New Age kind. Yupuhuh, gonna do that, fer sher.

But such exposés of paranormal activities, whether in dry polemics or showbiz, are always conducted through appeals to the kind of experimental certification that rationalist science has established as the single standard of truth and reason in our dealings with the natural world. In this respect, they might be seen as affirmations of faith in the world-view of a particular culture…

Well that’s wrong, for a start; ‘rationalist’ science has not established ‘experimental certification’ as the single standard of truth and reason; that’s just bollocks. And that tired crap about affirmations of faith – well, it’s tired crap, that’s what. Sure, they might be seen as that, because anything might be seen as anything. But that don’t make it true.

Sandra Harding had her time in the limelight; now it’s Andrew Ross’ turn. Fair’s fair. All children are talented, all children are special, all have something to say, we must listen politely to all of them and not make some feel bad and excluded and marginalized and of low worth by ignoring them. Nor must we throw the little bastards out of school merely because they threatened or assaulted a teacher, unless a gun or a knife was used. Once again, fair’s fair. Exclusion damages the academic performance of people who are excluded (except when it doesn’t), therefore it is important to avoid exclusion except in the most extreme of cases. A child who shoots up the classroom with an AK-47 would probably do better in another environment, but short of that, it’s all love and inclusion and extra attention for the dear little mischief-makers. But that’s another subject. We were talking about hip trendy Andrew Ross.

It’s interesting reading Ross right after Harding, because in a way he is far more sophisticated than she is, but in another way he isn’t. There is a veneer of sophistication of sorts in his writing – in the style rather than the substance – that is very different from the way Harding writes. You don’t keep getting that dismayed feeling that you’re reading the work of a small child, or at best a teacher of small children who has forgotten how to write for grown-ups. No, you can tell this guy is an adult, all right, and that he’s been around, he knows what’s what, he knows how to push the buttons and impress the right-on. But a veneer is all it is. It’s about a millimeter thick; it’s all surface. The content is just as dopy as what Harding says. And there’s almost as much self-betrayal. There is for instance the way Ross informs us that he’ll be taking a good hard look at the rhetoric of science, while all the time he is peddling nothing but rhetoric himself. That’s exactly why his writing seems so silly: it’s so obvious, the way he simply relies on sly emotive language in place of evidence or argument – and yet he fancies himself a debunker of rhetoric! It’s a joke, and one that he seems to be blithely unaware of. So not as sophisticated as he’d like to think. Apparently he’s quite good-looking though, so that’s all right.

You’ll be wanting some examples.

While I occasionally analyze the language, philosophy, and rhetoric of the dominant scientific claims, my chief interest lies in describing how various scientific cultures – sublegitimate, alternative, marginal, or oppositional – both embody and contest these claims in their cultural activities and beliefs…I have devoted a good deal of attention…to alternative cultures like New Age that are subordinate, marginal, or opposed to official scientific cultures governed by the logic of technocratic and corporate decision-making.

There, that’s good, don’t you think? See what I mean? On the one hand you have ‘cultures’ that are marginal, oppositional, alternative, subordinate, opposed, sublegitimate (do you begin to get his drift, or is it too subtle?), and on the other you have ‘cultures’ that are dominant, official, governed (ew) by the logic (oh no not that) of technocratic (urrgh) and corporate (ow!) decision-making (fascists!). Impressive stuff.

Consequently I focus on how the authority of dominant scientific claims is respected and emulated even as it is contested by apprentices, amateurs, semi-legitimates, and outlaws who are detached in some degree from the authoritative institutions of science.

That’s a great one. Notice how he manages to refer to ‘authority’ twice in the space of one sentence! Now I call that resourceful. And of course he doesn’t limit himself to that. Certainly not. Why bother with precision when you have a nuke in your pocket. No, throw in dominant and institutions while you’re at it, and of course on the other side talk of semi-legitimates who ‘contest’ (always a great hurrah-word), and especially those dear detached outlaws.

Yep, you bet, that’s how the work of ‘contesting’ the ‘authority’ of ‘dominant’ scientific ‘cultures’ is carried out: via vocabulary and innuendo. That’s all it takes. Just say one side has all the advantages – authority, dominance, all that stuff – and the other side has all the other thing – marginalization, opposition, outlawhood – and the job is done. Obviously science is the exact equivalent of slaveowners, feudal masters, priests, landlords, bosses: possessors of arbitrary unjust power which they use to dominate and trample everyone else and engross all the riches. There’s no need to know anything at all about actual science – and Ross doesn’t: notoriously he dedicated this book (Strange Weather) to all the science teachers he never had. Nope; rhetoric is all-powerful. But it’s not authoritative, so that’s all right.

I’ve been updating the Dictionary a little – for the first time in more than a year. We decided a long time ago to stop adding to it because of the book, and it was almost a year ago that we decided it was time to get serious about the book – but we may have stopped adding to it many months before that, even, because we thought of the book long before we decided to get serious about it. I don’t remember. I don’t remember if we went on adding to the Dictionary for several months, or if we stopped only a couple of months after we started. Probably the latter.

So anyway. We had a lot of leftovers. I’ve been cleaning out my email, and there’s this immense bulge in March, when we were doing the book and generating definitions like mad. I didn’t just delete them all with one blow of my fist because of the leftovers – I knew I had to go through each one in order to salvage the ones we didn’t use. So I’ve been doing that. Salvaging. Now, before you smite your brows and exclaim ‘Oh thank you so much, just what we want, a lot of rejected jokes!’, that’s not it! I’m not salvaging boring unfunny ones. No. There weren’t any of those, as it happens. No, there were other reasons for not including some, especially since we ended up with more than we needed so could afford to be nice. Some we didn’t include because they were obscure or cryptic; they’re extremely funny, it’s just that you have to know what the reference is to see that. Others we didn’t include because they were too similar to others, which of course is not a problem for the site version, which doesn’t include those others. And others again I really don’t know why we didn’t include – perhaps we forgot. One of us is incredibly forgetful and is always losing things. I forget which one.

Terrible about Samira Bellil. A difficult life and then an early and very nasty death – thanks a lot. What godawful luck some people have. I know; no kidding; but it’s worth pointing out anyway. It’s worth registering these futile protests that don’t go anywhere. Worth shaking our puny fists at the sky.

I happened on this article in Dar al Hayat, and it seems relevant, to the issues that Bellil raised and those we’ve been discussing lately. They’re all the same issues at bottom.

In this framework, there are two forms of enmity against Islamists. The first is the annoyance of the wide spreading Islamic thought in comparison with other trends, to the extent that people wish to wake up one day and see no single woman wearing a headscarf on earth!

Well, yes, as a matter of fact. I do wish that. Though I suppose I could imagine other utopian scenarios in which the hijab had shed every last trace of connotation of subordination, inferiority, blame for male sexual attention, coercion and control and ownership, and had become simply a piece of clothing like any other. I can imagine such a scenario, but that’s not the same thing as thinking it’s going to happen, so until and unless that does happen, yes, I would be delighted to wake up one day and find every last woman on earth free of the requirement to wear it. And that is indeed one reason I am not pleased about wide spreading Islamic thought, why in fact I think it’s a bad thing.

There is an excellent article by Irfan Khawaja on this larger subject on Ibn Warraq’s Secular Islam site. Khawaja discusses the way nonsense about ‘essentialist’ claims works to deflect critical discussion of Islam.

What Staerk is telling us is that it’s easier to generalize rigorously about the behavior of 1.25 billion existing Muslims plus all the Muslims who have ever existed in the 1400 years of the existence of Islam—than it is to generalize about the claims of a handful of Islamic texts! That is the unavoidable implication of his claim that those who use the Qur’an as the basis for claims about the essence of Islam generalize “sloppily,” while those who rely on Gallup polls for information about “the” behavior of “Muslims” generalize with rigor.

Just so. This is why I keep pointing out that religion is not the same thing as race. Religions do have texts and/or rules, laws, truth claims. Religions are systems of ideas, and thus both can be and must be criticized, disagreed with, analyzed. To pretend that it’s a kind of racism to disagree with Islam or any other religion is an absurd category mistake, a confusion of terms, and a pretext for allowing a supernatural belief system to run people’s lives on the basis of unfounded claims.

…when it comes to the fundamental clash between Islam and its rivals, our half-hearted secularists almost always find an excuse to beg off. Does God exist? “Let’s not look.” Does faith supersede reason? “Let’s change the subject.” Do the demands of the afterlife supersede the requirements of this one? “It’s a matter of perspective.” Are the claims of the Qur’an true? “Depends on how you define ‘truth’.” Does Islam provide a basis for a viable political order? “Sorry, that question is too divisive.” Is there a connection between the precepts of Islam and Islamic terrorism? “Sorry, that question is too essentialist.” At the end of the day, according to this crowd, the only claims you’re allowed to make about Islam are the recycled pieties of PC toleration, followed by claims so “nuanced” that they cease to mean or imply anything of significance. But I don’t see Muslims constrained by the same imperatives…

Great stuff. Read the whole thing.

Multiple intelligences. Why has the idea always made me want to laugh? Because I’m a mean rotten swine, that’s why. Obviously. Yes but also because it is quite funny. It’s so easy to think of more of those alternative intelligences. Watching tv intelligence, eating intelligence, using the potty intelligence.

Now, one aspect of the general idea seems perfectly unexceptionable.

Gardner’s ideas appealed to many traditional teachers who extolled hard work but also had some students who did better on tests if multiplication tables were set to music or works of literature were acted out in class.

Well, obviously – if it works, do it. (That is, do it if you can, which seems unlikely when most teachers have classes of 30 to 35 students, five times a day. When are they going to get the time to teach everyone differently?) But that’s a different thing from drawing large conclusions about multiple intelligences.

This summer, two university professors accused Gardner, 61, of encouraging elementary school teaching methods, such as singing new words or writing them out with twigs and leaves, for which there is no scholarly evidence of success. Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, wrote in the journal Education Next that Gardner’s theory “is an inaccurate description of the mind” and that “the more closely an application draws on the theory, the less likely the application is to be effective.”

And Gardner says one thing that’s slightly alarming.

He added that “the standard psychologist’s view of intelligence is a recipe for despair. It holds that there is but one intelligence and that intelligence is highly heritable.”

Yes but…the fact that something is a recipe for despair is a separate question from whether there is good evidence for it or not. Sad to say, there are a lot of accurate descriptions of the world that are indeed recipes for despair, as well as hopeful ones that are not accurate. Gardner’s benevolence is a good thing, but benevolence-driven research can get things badly wrong.

Well it’s that time again. Yup, it is – I know that’s hard to believe, but it is. September 10. It’s our birthday. We’re two. Two!! Would you believe it! Well of course you would, why not – but still it does seem very respectable and elderly and established. They haven’t driven us away yet! They haven’t shut us down, they haven’t silenced us, they haven’t sent a plague of locusts. We’re still here! (Who’s they? Oh you know, just the paranoid’s fantasy army. All those faceless Darth Vader types in black plastic outfits who were going to better I mean butter I mean batter down the doors and throw our computers out the window and trample on us until we whimpered and promised to go to Business School.)

And we’re not only still here, we have a book coming out in a few weeks. B&W’s first book. Awww. Don’t websites grow up quickly these days. One minute it just has a logo and nothing else, and the next thing you know it has a book slung over its shoulder and another on the way. (Has nobody heard of birth control these days? I blame the Pope.)

You would probably like to look at last year’s celebration. It was very rowdy. You wouldn’t think it to talk to me, but I am one hell of a rowdy partyer. I get drunk the instant I cross the threshold, I turn the music up until the plaster starts falling off the walls, I aim food in the general direction of my mouth and usually miss, I grope everyone that breathes including the hamster, I smash glasses in the fireplace, and I dance the tarantella. I am fun, man. A few days in the slammer are a small price to pay.

I don’t know if you ever have a look at our Letters page, but if you don’t, you might want to. There are some very interesting letters in there – some of them are brief articles in themselves. I’ve just seen one of that kind, the one at the top of the page (at the moment), a short essay on the Whig interpretation of history and moral relativism (taking issue with an article of ours on the subject), by one Michael Davis. If I had the faintest idea who he was or how to email him, I would ask him if he would like to write an article for us. I wonder if he is the same MD as the MD who wrote some previous letters and quite a few comments here. Anyway, his letter is well worth a read.

Okay, I give up, you win.

For months (months? weeks? years? I forget) I’ve been kind of defending CT to my colleague. Kind of – which means admitting they have a tendency to groupthink, to call people trolls just because they disagree with them, but still thinking they (CT, that is) have their good points. But I give it up.

Everyone knows that comments can get out of hand. A lot of blogs don’t have them; a lot have them only for some threads; a lot have them intermittently, disabling them when things get tiresome. It is also sometimes possible to keep things civil by asking people to be civil, and/or by deleting comments when they’re not. I’ve only deleted comments here once – but then that’s not surprising: the people who read B&W are a civil, polite, rational crowd.

So that’s one way to keep things civil. Another way is just to tell people to go fuck themselves – which seems like a fairly oxymoronic method, frankly. Seems to defeat the purpose. Also it seems ill-advised to resort to it just because you disagree with what a commenter has said, as opposed to because the commenter has gotten out of hand. Well – you know what I’m going to say. No, you don’t, quite, because I didn’t actually get sworn at – I got threatened with being sworn at. But I’m afraid I just don’t find that kind of thing conducive to interesting or rewarding discussion. I can get plenty of that kind of thing in my own living room, thank you very much, I don’t need to go elsewhere for it.

But more to the point, I find it too symptomatic of what Jerry S is talking about – too indicative of what he’s been saying all along. Too groupthinky, too orthodoxy-enforcing. So. I’ll just do my talking here, where men are men and the beer is flat.

There are several sites that have linked to us in the past couple of days on an interestingly wide variety of subjects. I wouldn’t have thought we were all that various. I’d have thought we were focused rather than wide-ranging; narrow rather than broad. But maybe not. Maybe our subject covers more ground than I had quite realized. That’s good, if so. I like a judicious blend of breadth and depth – with just a pinch of coriander.

It was thanks to one such link that I found the articles on the assault on Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiongo and his wife Mary Njeeri, which Robin Varghese of 3 Quarks Daily connects to Martha Nussbaum on Gujarat and the threats to historian James Laine, and to B&W on that whole large subject. One could also mention Salman Rushdie, and Naguib Mahfouz, and Rushdie’s Japanese translator. So…yes, of course all these things are connected. So the more people who see the connections and join the dots, the better. Greetings, 3 Quarks.

And there’s a new blog called No Credentials (hey, that’s my name), which mentions B&W in the same breath with Alan Sokal, which I take to be one of the best compliments we’ve ever had. There’s a lot of excellent stuff on that blog – too much to summarize or quote briefly: scroll down and read. Read Quackademism #2, and Michael Drout responds, and My favorite Marxist – here’s a bit from that last one:

Berman is different from, say, a David Harvey or a Frederic Jameson, in that he writes fluently and beautifully. Not incidentally, he is also a humane writer: The human heart–even the human soul, as he acknowledges in Adventures–is his real subject; it’s just that for his entire adult life he has believed that Marx’s vision offers the soul its best solace, its greatest hope, and so he commits all of his worldly efforts to that vision.

Well just read them all. Greetings, No Credentials.

And there’s the one at Philosophy et cetera that I mentioned below. Okay, maybe three is not several. But it’s almost several. Well maybe I just thought it was several because each one was so interesting – yes that must be it.

Discussion continues, in many places. Jonathan Derbyshire suggests a new thesis:

There’s a view, call it the “Crooked Timber thesis”, according to which the truth of statements about a group or a set of beliefs ought to be weighed against the perlocutionary effect of uttering such statements on the group or the holders of the beliefs in question. In one recurrent variant of this view, true statements about what, for shorthand purposes, I’ll call “political Islamism” ought to be circumscribed, if not actually withheld, for fear of inciting “Islamophobia”…And it seems to me obvious that the point applies in contexts different to the one in which it’s usually applied over at Crooked Timber. So one wonders whether the Guardian might have been advised not to run today Madeleine Bunting’s characteristically egregious and sophomoric piece on “Islamophobia” (these aren’t scare quotes, by the way; they simply indicate that the term is the one used by the author). Bunting manages a passing nod to the “horrific barbarity of Beslan”, but she has other, more pressing business to attend to.

Richard at Philosophy, et cetera has a very interesting post on the related subject of multiplicity, apparently inspired by that Manifesto by people of Muslim culture (including atheists) a few days ago.

This is great stuff, and deserves more publicity. Some of my fellow lefties are fond of diversity, but they only see it at the macro level – they espouse “cultural diversity”, yet ignore the diversity within cultures. But excessive tolerance of the former can have grevious costs for the latter. This blinkered focus can also lead to negative consequences within our own society.

Just so. This ignoring of diversity may explain why we hear so much more about al-Qaradawi and Ziauddin Sardar and Tariq Ramadan than we do about Ibn Warraq or Azam Kamguian or Maryam Namazie or Kenan Malik. Is there an assumption that Muslims are more ‘authentic’ spokesmen for ‘Muslim’ societies than secularists and atheists are? Well let’s hope not. I certainly wouldn’t accept that Christians are more ‘authentic’ spokesmen for the US than atheists are, for example. More representative, possibly, but that’s another matter. That’s that difference between democracy or majoritarianism on the one hand, and truth on the other, that we’re always running into.

A follow-up of sorts to my colleague’s Comment on Crooked Timber. Bush’s monopoly seems to be broken for the moment; the Timberites are discussing Beslan and Islamophobia and Islamophobiaphobia. Somewhat heatedly, as a matter of fact.

There is a thread on ‘Al Qaeda in Beslan?’ for instance, and another on the horror itself which kicked up an interesting comment by Dsquared:

I think that ‘Islamism’ is a politically convenient but fictional construct drawn up by people who want to drag their own pet Middle Eastern issue into the fight against Al-Quaeda.

Ah. Fictional construct. Really. Do the people in, say, Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, etc etc, who are damn well terrified of Islamists, think ‘Islamism’ is a fictional construct? I don’t think so. Didn’t Islamists in fact kill one or two people in Algeria? Don’t Islamists want to impose Sharia everywhere they can? Is that a fictional construct? It doesn’t seem particularly fictional to me. Once again I have to wonder why some people think it’s in any way progressive or respectful to side with an intensely reactionary, regressive, coercive, anti-egalitarian movment, against its progressive, secular, egalitarian, rights-defending opponents.

So then Chris posted on Yusuf al-Qaradawi – and the fur started to fly.

Harry of Harry’s Place says what I would have said if he hadn’t (except I probably wouldn’t have said it as well):

If Juan Cole says it then it must be ok to criticise al-Qaradawi now? It appears that for Chris everyone else who pointed out al -Qaradawi’s reactionary views on a whole range of issues at the time of the British visit had some other agenda which nullified the value of the information they put forward.

Just so. Then Dsquared answered:

To put it bluntly (without presuming to speak for Chris) yes. Juan Cole has a very good record as a straight-shooter in these matters. At the time of Qaradawi visit to London, it seemed quite likely that he was a loon, which is why you’ll find no ringing endorsement of him on CT, but the claque screaming for him to be denounced from the rooftops seemed so bloody appalling (and was so chock full of people who had axes to grind and seemed unconcerned about distorting the truth while grinding them) that I for one was reluctant to join it. It strikes me that this is an entirely sensible approach to subjects where one doesn’t have much knowledge; to trust the judgement of those who have proved trustworthy in the past, and ignore those who haven’t, however loud they scream.

Then Harry answered that:

Well that is simply pathetic Dan. I have read multiple sources on al-Qaradawi, including the original source material of his fatwas (easily avaliable in English on his own Islamonline website). It was not at all difficult to make ones mind up about what kind of views he held. But you have to wait for an endorsment from some American academic before you can make a judgement. Pathetic but not at all surprising.

And so on – but you can read it yourself, obviously. It’s just that I’m naturally interested, because this difference of opinion is very like the one we had over Marc Mulholland’s post a few weeks ago, here, here, here, here, here, and here. People do disagree about this. Strongly. I wish people who hesitate to criticize the likes of al-Qaradawi were more aware of groups like the ones I linked to in connection with the demo today, and the one that issued that Manifesto. I wish they would side with groups like that – groups that are for equality for women and secularism, and against homophobia and anti-Semitism – rather than with groups like Fans of al-Qaradawi. I wish they would wake up and realize what it is they’re supporting, in short.

As OB suggested below, it’s been a pretty awful time lately. And it goes without saying that Russia today is just appalling.

Admittedly I should have known better, but I decided to check out what the folk (with apologies to Dubya) at Crooked Timber made of all the horror this week.

Guess what, as far as I can tell – and despite their combined IQ of 213 – they have absolutely nothing to say on these matters. Not a squeak.

So what are they talking about?

Something about ITunes – though I’m too limited to understand a word of it.

Something about George Bush.

Ah, Rousseau. Cool.

Some blindingly obvious stuff about Durkheim. Oh no, it’s really about George Bush.

More about George Bush, but with a staggeringly pretentious title.

Oh look, George Bush again.

Ah, Kerry this time. If only, it actually turns out to be about… Dick Cheney. Variation on a theme. Very good.

Gay republicans. (I tried to think of a way that this was about George Bush, but failed. Damn!)

This one’s about copyright. But somehow it starts off by saying that Republicans are dismayingly insane!

Something about the Enlightenment. By the Rousseau fella. Obviously, he hasn’t caught whatever obsessional illness his colleagues are suffering from.

George Bush, kind of.

George Bush.

Speaker of the House. (Is that George Bush?)

George Bush.

I’m bored now. Okay, this is very childish. But there’s a serious point here. I can’t find a single mention of the murder of the Nepalese hostages, exploding Russian jets, hundreds taken hostage in Russian schools. Of course, people are entitled to their own interests. But not one mention… that I can find. (I did get bored looking!)

I’d like to finish this by quoting someone from Panda’s Thumb (well from their comments section). They’re talking about mass murder.

I was a professor for 12 years. You are fighting a losing battle. Stalin
killed millions. Mao killed millions. Pol Pot killed a million or so. But the
majority of academics will apologize for them. Why? Because most academics and
most professors are pretty darn stupid. It’s that simple.

But thank you for helping me remember why I hate academia—for there are times when I am tempted to go back.

Pretty darn stupid. He’s got that right.

Just a little more Harding – because the previous visits with her are on the August page, which no one will ever look at again, and because at least one reader thinks I may be giving her the straw man treatment. But in fact I’m making her sound better than she is rather than worse, because as I mentioned it simply is impossible to convey how feeble her arguments are via brief quotations. Brief quotations don’t, for instance, and can’t of their nature, make clear how absent any evidence is. They also can’t convey the cumulative effect of her writing, which is genuinely credulity-strainingly childish. Brief quotation for instance misses out how often she repeats the identical inane phrases, but that repetition combined with inanity is a big part of why her work makes such a bizarre impression. It’s like ‘The Dick and Jane Book of How to Know Stuff.’ The meaningless phrase ‘from the perspective of women’s lives’ is repeated multiple times on a single page, even in a single paragraph. The phrase itself is meaningless (lives don’t have perspectives); what Harding means by it (standpoint epistemology) is nonsense; and the endless iteration of meaningless nonsense does not make it more convincing, to put it mildly. But mere short quotations can’t illustrate that endless iteration; so the impression I give is actually better than the one she gives. Ironic, ain’t it.

Here’s some good stuff:

But from the perspective of groups that society excludes and marginalizes, this now conventional claim that all knowers should be interchangeable can appear to have certain antidemocratic consequences. If all knowers are interchangeable, then affirmative action in the sciences can be ‘only’ a moral and political agenda. It can have no possible positive consequences for the content or logic of the natural sciences; the scientific work of men and women, blacks and whites, Nazis and Ku Klux Klanners will be equally supervised and disciplined by scientific method. If all knowers are in principle interchangeable, then white, Western, economically privileged, heterosexual men can produce knowledge at least as good as anyone else can.

Fascinating, isn’t it? And lest you think she’s just describing reality there – she begins the next paragraph with the phrase ‘Even worse…’ No, these are the ‘antidemocratic consequences’ she’s talking about. Apparently she thinks it would be more prodemocratic if, say, the scientific work of women (white ones? ‘economically privileged’? Western? who knows) were ‘supervised and disciplined by scientific method’ in some way other than ‘equally’ with that of men or Nazis. (Well what about Nazi women? Huh? How do we figure all these items out? How does a rich Nazi gay male compare with a poor Western heterosexual female KKKer? Do they get points for each item and then we add them all up and figure out how to supervise and discipline their work? Or what?) Interesting notion. What would that way be, exactly? What other way is there to supervise and discipline scientific work? I would really like to know, but of course Harding does not in fact say. She never does. And that again is what it’s impossible to show by mere excerpt. You’re at liberty to assume that she in fact does say, farther down the page or into the chapter, and I just haven’t bothered to quote that bit. But no. She doesn’t. She just sets up these ridiculous pseudo-‘problems’ and then wanders off and talks about something else. She doesn’t even think through her own claims, or notice the glaring contradictions they’re full of.

So there’s no straw here; it’s all pure solid brick.

And then as soon as I posted that, I found this rather inspiring Manifesto at Jonathan Derbyshire’s blog. And the thing is…it seems to me that people in the US and the UK who side with the pro-hijab side against the ban don’t quite realize the extent to which they’re siding against people like those who wrote that Manifesto. Against people like Azam Kamguian and Maryam Namazie and Ibn Warraq. People who are not arrogant Westerners, not Eurocentric, not colonialists, not Orientalists, not hegemonists keen to trample on the Other, but people who want to get rid of the regressive, punitive, subordinating aspects of their own cultures, just as we all want to get rid of those aspects in our own. I wish Western liberals would pay less attention to pro-hijab protests and more to things like this Manifesto and the Bulletin of the Committee to Defend
Women’s Rights in the Middle East and Ibn Warraq’s Secular Islam site. They’re the ones who need and deserve support.

Damn – it’s one of those days. Horrible sectarian fights breeding violence everywhere you look. What a disgusting world. Schoolchildren and teachers held hostage by Chechen rebels, mosques burned and people injured in Nepal after a group of Nepalese workers are murdered by Islamic militants, two French journalists held hostage by more Islamic militants and threatened with death because of a French law against wearing conspicuous religious symbols in schools. It’s hard not to think that a good deal more secularism would be a helpful vitamin for a lot of people.

It pains me to say it but I don’t agree with Normblog on this issue. At least, not with the way he states it. I think it’s reasonable to disagree about the ban, because there clearly are irreconcilable tensions in it. It feels like a violation of rights, an interference with basic freedom, to both sides. But I think it’s less reasonable to come down on one side or the other by denying those tensions. So I don’t think this is right: ‘The law forbidding it is an unjust and illiberal one, preventing people from affirming their identity in ways that don’t harm others.’ But there is a claim that the presence of the hijab in the classroom does harm others. That’s the whole point. So it’s too easy just to say that it doesn’t.

No doubt I err in the other direction. But I do at least realize that people who want to wear the nasty thing (now stop that) feel unfairly treated.

I do think the hijab a nasty thing though. Very. So I do think that talking about ‘preventing people from affirming their identity’ is a too-emollient way of referring to it. If some people wanted to wear slave-chains, or signs proclaiming them Untouchables, or yellow stars or striped concentration camp uniforms to school, should that be called ‘affirming their identity,’ especially when people in the same ‘group’ found that very identity-affirmation profoundly degrading and subordinating? The whole problem with the hijab is that it does far more than merely affirm the ‘identity’ of the person who wears it. To some extent that’s potentially true of any clothes. I have to say, I’m damn glad that I went to school in the 19th century so that I didn’t have to be surrounded with girls poking their stomachs and buttocks out of their pants all day. They look stupid and kind of pathetic, and I think I would have felt stupid and pathetic by association. (Therefore I think school dress codes are a good thing on the whole, and that is after all all the French law is – a school dress code.) But it’s more true of the hijab because of its history, especially its recent history – because of its connection with Islamism and violence against women. That’s one reason it’s not an exact equivalent of crosses – because people don’t get beaten for not wearing crosses (as far as I know anyway). Furthermore, both sexes wear crosses. They’re just not a badge of subordination in the way the hijab is (even though of course a lot of Muslim women don’t see the hijab as a badge of subordination – but on the other hand a lot do).

I damn well hope those two journalists don’t get murdered as a result of the law though. But no doubt they will. That seems to be the way things fall out these days.