The rest of it…

September

August

July

June

May

April

March

February

January 2003

December 2002

November

October

Just trying something out, here…

July

June

May

April

March

February

January 2004

December 2003

November

October

Have you noticed? It’s September. I love September, and always look forward to its arrival. Because I don’t like summer much, and I do love autumn, and then I don’t have to go back to school, so what do I care.

And since it is September – next month is October. (Seven, eight – that’s how to remember.) And at the end of October, the Dictionary comes out, and you can all rush off to the nearest Waterstones’ and buy armfuls. Yes, armfuls, I tell you – you can give them as Christmas presents. Every single person you give one to will be your friend for life – except for academic pseuds, who will be your enemy for life, so you win either way, you see. And in the meantime you can admire it or even order it here. Since it’s a new month (September, that is) I thought I’d better put the link on this page, for everyone’s convenience. I might do the same thing on October 1. It will be interesting to find out, won’t it.

I’ve been thinking about the puzzling (to me anyway) question of where all this automatic hostility to science comes from. This is not the first time I’ve thought about that question, of course; it’s not even the second, or the fifth. I think about it quite often. It is something of an enigma. There are a lot of people out there who do reliably say very dismissive things on the subject, not as if such things were controversial or debatable, but as if they were obvious and taken for granted and incontrovertible. As if it were just common knowledge among all people who pay attention even slightly, that science is root and branch wicked and harmful and to be condemned out of hand. It’s odd.

The question has renewed force because of reading Sandra Harding. She’s a really good example – paradigmatic, one might say – of this kind of thing. Of just assuming from the outset that science is a terrible thing and that everyone who reads her already knows that. She has to be assuming that, because she sure as hell does a crap job of making a case for it. In fact she does no job at all. She just takes that assumption as her starting point. No evidence, no explanation, hardly even any examples. Just earnest cross-eyed science-hatred. Okay, so why?

There are some obvious reasons. It’s powerful and succesful, it’s difficult, capitalism needs it, it can be smelly and/or dirty, we were bad at it in school. That kind of thing. Compelling stuff, needless to say. But there are other reasons, and those are the ones that it’s interesting to think about. (Irritating, but interesting.) The ones that are less explicit, less ‘theoretical’ and rational, less academic; the ones that are more like fear of snakes or spiders, or dislike of people in suede shoes.

Thinking about those reasons of course risks getting into into armchair-Freudianism territory, and that’s not a territory I want to light out for. But I’ll take the chance anyway. Cautiously. Right: I think one of those background reasons is the fact that science doesn’t give a shit. At all. It’s not just that it’s not all that bothered, it’s that it does not care at all. That’s the problem right there: it’s the realm of what just is, no matter what we think about it. Where our wishes, hopes, plans, fears make nothing happen.

Of course that’s true of life anyway, with or without science. It rains or it doesn’t, the volcano erupts or not. In fact science and technology are our best shot at changing obdurate facts about the world that we don’t like – sickness, weather, hunger. But still, science also makes the independence of what is from what we want it to be, systematic and official, and that’s why people hate it, as if it were a bully wandering around stomping on all our little doll houses and acorn tea sets. We feel beside the point next to it. It’s not democratic, or multicultural, or libertarian, or kind; all those words and all words like them are just the wrong category. We feel more at home in the kind-ought-value-want category. So it feels natural to a lot of people to hate science, and they assume not only that it feels natural to everyone but also that that is the right way to feel, the humane, thoughtful, reflective way to feel. At least, that’s my guess. But it’s not a scientific guess, just an armchair one.

[Update: By ‘we’ of course I mean those who fit the description and not those who don’t.]

David Lodge has a new novel out, Author, Author. It’s about Henry James, and about writing – especially about writing. I thought Lodge’s two latest novels were really verging on bad, but this one sounds brilliant. The people on Saturday Review last week (all but one, who was tepid) competed with each other in superlatives. ‘I just, loved it,’ they kept exclaiming.

I find James quite an interesting character, and always have. His letters fascinate me. I have a lovely volume of letters beween him and his also fascinating brother William. But I find Harry even more interesting, I suppose because he’s more obsessive and peculiar – less ‘normal’ than William. Though neither of them was what you’d call average. At any rate, it’s suddenly apparent that a lot of people find Harry interesting, although predictably and boringly enough that’s sometimes because of his sexual orientation rather than because of the intellectual life – the writing and the thinking about writing. But not Lodge’s, apparently.

Mark Lawson did a long interview with Lodge on Front Row yesterday. It’s good stuff. And Jonathan Derbyshire did one for Time Out last week and has posted the transcript on his blog. Lodge has written about consciousness before, and the new novel could be seen as the third in a sort of trilogy about consciousness. But this one is also a historical novel, which complicates things:

Somewhere in ‘Consciousness and the Novel’, in fact, I quote [James] saying that the historical novel is an impossibility, because the novelist cannot think himself back into the consciousnesses of people in, say, the Middle Ages. That was a very interesting indication of how he thought the quick of fiction was in the interior consciousness of the characters, and that however many facts you might accumulate, you could never actually know what it was like to experience the world in those distant periods.

It’s a suggestive thought – because of course what it suggests is ‘yes but you can’t actually know what it’s like to experience anyone else’s consciousness, no matter how contemporary. You can get hints, an idea, an approximation – maybe – provided your sources aren’t lying to you, or lying to themselves and hence to you, or inarticulate, or confused, or…’ – well you see the problem. It’s all guess-work and extrapolation. Though I suppose what James meant is that we have far less material with which to make those guesses and extrapolations; we have fewer hints and ideas and approximations.

I think our sensibility and our consciousness is not so totally different from that of the late Victorians. So it’s not impossible to reconstruct their view of the world. And we have an enormous amount of data about how people actually felt and thought. We know an immense amount about James himself too. So we know a lot more than a Victorian novelist could know about medieval history. So there’s no real contradiction in trying to write a novel about Henry James.

The letters help, and there are a lot of them. James did have a point – there aren’t a great many letters of the kind he and William wrote, from the 14th century. The Paxtons wrote different kinds of letters and besides they were later.

Aww. I don’t know when I’ve been so, so, so almost maudlin with emotion. So nearly overcome. So tempted to soak my delicate silk and lace hanky with tears. So hungry. (Eh? Well it’s past noon, and anyway I’m pretty much always hungry.) Norm is planning to swap anecdotes with me in the great chat-fest in the sky. And he’s chuffed to learn that we’ll both be able to, according to no less an authority than the dear achbish of Canterbury. I do love those guys. So – agile in their accomodation of dreadful beliefs along with less disconcerting ones. Yes, Jesus decides these things, and yes he sorts the sheep from the goats and sends the goats (or is it the sheep) to the The Bad Place – but not to worry! because he’s a mysterious fella (see below) and it could be that some of the sheep (unless it’s goats) will go to the Good Place anyway because – um – because it’s cheerier to think so, and we still get to believe in the magical livestock-sorting abilities of Jesus? Because it’s not so much cheerier as more polite, tactful, acceptable, ‘appropriate,’ multicultural etc to think so and we still get to believe Jesus knows who belongs where? Probably. Very probably, in fact.

I don’t know, though, I think Norm may be taking a slightly optimistic view of the archbishop’s statement. Rowan Williams (I always do want to say Atkinson) did say that Muslims can go to heaven, according to the Telegraph, but he is not quoted as saying that atheists can. I really think Norm may be jumping to conclusions in thinking that if Muslims can then atheists can. I mean, there are limits, after all. Otherwise what’s the point? Right? If atheists can, well hell then anyone can and you might as well not bother having heaven at all, it just becomes ‘that place where anyone at all can get in no questions asked.’ Kind of like, you know, the world, where people just arrive, regardless of quality.

And then, it’s important to note exactly how the archbish phrased it.

Dr Williams said that neither he nor any Christian could control access to heaven. “It is possible for God’s spirit to cross boundaries,” he said. “I say this as someone who is quite happy to say that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father except by Jesus. But how God leads people through Jesus to heaven, that can be quite varied, I think.”

You see? Did you catch it? That little ‘I think’ there at the end. That says it all. He doesn’t actually know all this – he just thinks it. Well what good does that do?! I don’t want some guy’s off the cuff opinion about whether I get to sit around chatting in heaven or not, I want to damn well know, don’t I! I mean – what business does he have giving an opinion anyway? What are opinions worth on this kind of thing? What’s his opinion based on? Anything? Just the fact that he thinks things will be more comfortable that way (see above)? Is that the kind of thing that decides how things fall out in the real world?

Okay, I’ll stop. I know it’s silly. One doesn’t go to an archbishop for rigorous or even clear thought. But it’s fun to pretend now and then.

I’m not one to laugh at the religiously afflicted (okay, that’s probably not true), and certainly not at people being seriously injured; and I know that this is probably terribly unsophisticated, but what’s god up to? She’s an omnipotent, omniscient being (apparently). You’d have thought she’d be able to handle a bit of grandstand seating. But it appears not. Hmmm. Which reminds me of the story of Widecombe parish church. October 21 1638, in the middle of an afternoon service, a lightning bolt lands smack bang in the middle of the church, killing or maiming half the congregation. Needless to say, the devil is the chief suspect. Isn’t it just always so…

And since I’m talking about religious lunacy, how about the fella who decided to apprehend the leader of the Olympic marathon in the middle of the race. Seemingly, it had something to do the first coming* of the son of god. I can just imagine the thought process:

My lord and saviour is sending her only forgotten** son to atone for the sins of mankind (again).*** I know what, I’ll interfere with the Olympic marathon. That’ll please everybody.

Class.

* There appears to be some mistake on the notice thing he’s carrying. Something about a second coming… Did I miss the first one?

** That’s poetic license.

*** The atoning thing probably isn’t theologically sound. Sorry.

So it turns out my colleague is not the only person out there who finds Crooked Timber irritating. Not a bit of it. There is for instance Oliver Kamm who has just posted about his decision to unlink the Timberites. His reasons are strikingly similar to those Jerry S has alluded to in passing.

Of Kant’s observation about “the crooked timber of mankind”, Isaiah Berlin, in his book of that title, wrote:

To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity.

Recently the authors of the Crooked Timber blog have excelled not only in the neatness of their uniforms, but also in their eagerness to congratulate themselves on how they look. It is an unendearing rhetorical tick to commend one’s own uniqueness among bloggers in commenting on a particular subject, and Crooked Timber’s authors appear to have caught it from each other. But if it were only their perspicacity, I should still find it tolerable; it’s their monopoly of virtue and omniscience that gets me down.

That’s a good quotation. We should have it as an epigraph somewhere. Again – it’s another one of those neat, eloquent statements of what we say in ‘About B&W.’ It’s probably a very unendearing rhetorical tick of mine to keep mentioning that – but I don’t do it for reasons of vanity, I don’t think. I do other things for reasons of vanity, no doubt, but not that. I don’t think. I think I do that 1) to reiterate the basic point because it is a point worth reiterating, if only because it’s a mental trap we’re all liable to, decidedly including me. I’m reminding myself as much as (if not more than) anyone. And 2) simply by way of quotation, aesthetic pleasure, etc. To enrich the point by offering particularly eloquent statements of it. And 3) to point out other people who think and say the same thing, by way of demonstrating that there are a lot of us. There are more of us than we think. A lot more. That’s been one of the major surprises of doing B&W, as a matter of fact: finding out what a lot of us there are. As I think I’ve mentioned a few times, Jerry S thought when we started B&W that we were going to get a lot of hostility (he looked forward to it) and not much of the other thing. It hasn’t turned out that way. That seems to be an indication that dislike of irrationalist strains and conformist pressures in the Left, by the Left, is quite widespread. Well what a good thing that is – there may be some hope of getting rid of them then (by exerting conformist pressure to be anti-irrationalist).

I’m a kind and generous person, and I’ve just been enjoying a good laugh, so I’ll let you enjoy it too. It’s funny how I found this essay. It’s on Alan Sokal’s site, but that’s not how I found it (there are a lot of articles there, happily, and I haven’t read them all yet). No, I found it by typing Sandra Harding and – a certain unkind adjective, into google. What a lot came up! I’ll have to try it with different unkind adjectives in the future. What a pity that life is so short – I’m sure to miss some interesting stuff. Quite a lot. But I found a lot, too.

This essay is about Social Text and the Sokal hoax and related matters. The author has a good time with Andrew Ross, and then he gets to Harding: ‘If Gross and Levitt are “shrill,” what would Ross have to say about Sandra Harding, whose raving essay opens this Ross-authorized collection?’

“It is ironic,” she begins, “that the major criticism of the new social studies of science and technology from the antidemocratic right in fact provides yet more evidence for the value of these science studies.” For me, “antidemocratic right” did not bode well for the level-headedness or credibility of this essay, especially when goofily reiterated in “the antidemocratic right’s recent clarion calls for the citizenry to join in stamping out feminism,” which reads like a parody from “Doonesbury.”…Harding, incredibly enough, is a professor of philosophy at the University of Delaware, which doesn’t speak well for the current state of precise thinking amongst people who nowadays can pass as philosophers. Her first two footnotes defy credulity: “I use antidemocratic right and democracy-advancing movements or tendencies in a somewhat simplistic way throughout this discussion,” surely the understatement of the year. And the second note offers yet another modification of her intemperate off-the-wall philosophizing: “Local knowledge systems … are by no means always more accurate and effective than modern scientific knowledge, but sometimes they are.” And sometimes professors of philosophy are hard to distinguish from idiots (but not always)! Why say stupid things in the first place if you are going to take them back in footnotes?

It was that last line that caused me to crack up. It sounds so exactly like the kind of thing I scream, shout, snarl, or whine as I read Harding. ‘Goofily reiterated’ is exactly right, too, and so is the ‘incredibly enough’ about the professorship of philosophy. Yes, it is incredible. Well, I have to go think up some more adjectives now.

More Harding. Why? Because there is more, that’s why. Because you don’t know the half of it. Because that previous comment barely scratched the surface. Because it just keeps getting worse. Because my jaw keeps dropping until I can barely use the damn thing to talk and eat anymore. Because this book was published by Cornell University Press. I repeat – this book was published by Cornell University Press.

And because I’m a woman, god damn it, and a feminist, and this kind of bilge is enough to discredit both categories. Feminist! She calls herself a feminist! She links what she’s doing with feminism! It’s an outrage! Well you see what I mean about the jaw. Same thing with the exclamation points – they’re hospitalized with severe overuse. It’s a wonder I haven’t yanked all my own hair out – I feel like it while reading.

The book by the way is Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, in case you want to read more.

Many writers have identified the distinctively Western and bourgeois character of the modern scientific world view. Some critics have detected social values in contemporary studies of slime mold and even in the abstractions of relativity theory and formal semantics. Conventionalists respond by digging in their heels…As historian Thomas Kuhn said, back when he was such a conventionalist…

That was page 80. Here is one from page 84:

Contemporary physicists, ethologists, and geologists collect evidence for or against hypotheses in ways different from those that medieval priests used to collect evidence for or against theological claims, yet it is difficult to identify or state in any formal way just what it is that is unique about the scientific methods.

Well it is difficult for Harding, at least, which she proceeds to demonstrate by making an amazing hash of it.

‘Observing nature’ is certainly far too general to specify uniquely scientific modes of collecting evidence; gatherers and hunters, premodern farmers, ancient seafarers, and mothers all must ‘observe nature’ carefully and continuously in order to do their work.

Umm…yes, fair enough, ‘observing nature’ is quite general. But then, is that a usual answer to the question ‘what is unique about [‘the’] scientific methods?’ And then, why is that the question in any case? Why is she looking for uniqueness? Because it makes a useful red herring? Many of the discussions of ‘scientific methods’ I’ve seen in fact talk about their continuity with other kinds of inquiry and research; those of Susan Haack for example.

But then it gets even better.

Scientific practices are common to every culture. Moreover, many phenomena of interest to science, though they can be predicted and explained, cannot be controlled – for example, the orbit of the sun and the location of fossils.

I swear. You’ll think I’m lying, but that’s exactly what it says. I tell you what, that’s some pretty deep thought.

Update: Here is an interview with Harding, which will give you a larger sample.

I mentioned that I’ve been reading Sandra Harding. I have. Therefore I need to vent. I also need to write in short simple clause-free declarative sentences, because that’s the way Harding writes, and it’s catching.

Reading Harding is a very strange experience. I keep wondering – huh? What happened? Why did this book get published? Why didn’t anyone shove it back at her and say (at the very least), ‘I’m sorry but you’ll have to re-write this for grown-ups. Children don’t read books about epistemology.’ Why does she write the way she does? Why do people let her? And then publish it? And then why do other people buy the books and read them? And why, godgivemestrength, why do people cite them and quote them and praise them? As they do? You can google her and find people calling her ‘distinguished.’ A distinguished philosopher. But – seriously – the things she says are beyond wrong, they’re just inane. I’ll give you some examples.

At least one person has pointed this out – this ‘yes but her work is not acceptable’ aspect: Gonzalo Munévar in the collection Scrutinizing Feminist Epistemology edited by Cassandra Pinnick, Noretta Koertge and Robert Almeder. An excellent collection, I recommend it highly.

I argue not that Sandra Harding’s epistemology, so highly regarded by feminists [not all of them! ed], is wrong; rather, I intend to show that serious scholars should consider the quality of her work unacceptable…The reader’s embarrassment grows with each amazing example…

It does. I feel actual discomfort reading her – I kind of squirm as I read. I feel like letting out little yips of protest like a dog – not to mention the occasional howl.

So. Want an example or two? Sure you do.

Might our understanding of nature and social life be different if the people who discovered the laws of nature were the same ones who cleaned up after them?

No. Next question.

Furthermore, there are many feminisms, and these can be understood to have started their analyses from the lives of different historical groups of women: liberal feminism from the lives of women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and American educated classes…Third World feminism from late twentieth-century Third World women’s lives. Moreover, we all change our minds about all kinds of issues.

Ah! Do we! I hadn’t realized that. That’s good to know. But that’s how she writes, you see. Repetitively. Ploddingly. Pointing out the obviously. Everything she says is either tautologous or obvious or wrong. Oh Third World feminism has to do with Third World women – I see! Thank you for clearing that up.

Okay, that’s enough venting for the moment. I feel slightly cruel – as if I’ve been mocking the afflicted. But she writes these damn books, and some people take them seriously. That’s a symptom of something very odd.

Just to gather them all in one place. Jonathan Derbyshire has a post about the vexed (especially around here – we vex the damn thing to death) matter of the, shall we say, tender-mindedness of some parts of the left toward Islamism.

There seems to me to be an essential continuity between the stance adopted towards radical Islam by the intellectual left broadly conceived (and not just the SWP), and certain of the attitudes that characterised the so-called ‘New Left’ in the 1960s, and which were brilliantly diagnosed by Irving Howe in a wonderful 1965 essay entitled ‘New Styles in “Leftism”‘…

Yes, I like Howe, and he looks better all the time. He nailed the anti-intellectual aspect of the New Left as soon as it stuck its head over the parapet. I only wish more people had paid attention. Jonathan lists some ‘characteristic attitudes’ (are they Anglo-Saxon attitudes? now cut that out! ed.) that Howe noted then and that are still with us.

Then Oliver Kamm picks up the discussion, quoting from correspondence from Jeffrey Ketland of Edinburgh University:

…it’s hard to say to what extent the anti-Enlightenment features of postmodernism and social constructivism animate the views of current far left groups, including SWP and Respect, and the occasional letter to Guardian. To some extent, there is an undercurrent of relativism and sneering towards allegedly Western notions of truth and objectivity. Alan Sokal described this undercurrent as a “weird zeitgeist” in modern academia and beyond. But I would argue that they are predominantly motivated by simple-minded hatred of the US, rather than direct sympathy for Islamic theocracy. For example, I’ve never seen political leftists directly defending Sharia law, stonings, beheadings, etc., but there’s sometimes a disturbing whiff of apologetics.

Hmm. Not Sharia law and stonings, no, but the hijab, yes. No, of course the hijab is not as bad as stonings, but it is part of the whole system of unequal laws and rules for women and men, so the passionate support for it seems – peculiar. Not to say worrying. Anyway the point about the undercurrent and the weird zeitgeist seems pretty unmistakable. If I’ve seen one sneer at alleged Western notions of objectivity, I’ve seen several. (Often in the same paragraph, actually – I’ve been reading Sandra Harding. She’s like a factory for the output of such sneers all by herself.)

In place of obviously crude biological racism, modern fascism (in the form Wolin calls ‘designer fascism’) has adopted a cultural racism that decries the achievements and principles of the Enlightenment. The astonishing spectacle of the far-Left around the Respect coalition defending the progressive character of – among other aspects of Muslim particularism – the hijab is the ‘left’ variant of the same phenomenon. I stress that we are not talking here of Muslims’ right to adopt the practices and observances of their faith, for religious liberty is an essential principle of the Enlightenment tradition. I mean instead the insistence that the character of those observances is itself a principle to be defended.

Yup. I have huge reservations about the stipulation about ‘Muslims’ right to adopt the practices and observances of their faith’ – because of course that instantly gets right back into ‘defending Sharia law, stonings and beheadings’ territory. Religious liberty covers a multitude of sins, unfortunately, so I just don’t think it’s helpful to give blanket exemptions like that. But that aside, I agree with the rest of it. The insistence that the hijab (and the attitude to women that prompts it) is actually a good thing, is…unfortunate.

And then there’s one at Crooked Timber. Chris takes issue with Ketland’s reading of Foucault:

Foucault was a difficult, obscure, contradictory and often infuriating figure. At his worst he wrote nonsense. At his best he can be profoundly unsettling to the lazier assumptions of the “Enlightenment” (with a capital E) view of the world, in a similar way to the manner in which Rousseau and Nietzsche also can disturb them. What he won’t do is provide an easy example for blogospheric divisions of the world into sheep and goats.

Me, I don’t know. As I’ve said before, I’ve read only a very little Foucault (I think the bit I read was part of the nonsense), so I don’t know if people are getting him wrong. But I don’t take the point about Foucault to have been central, and I do think Ketland is right about that undercurrent. Well obviously; what else are we about, after all.

Just thought I’d say – there’s an interesting post on JerryS’ Running Madness at Hugo Schwyzer’s blog. It gets a tad religious at one point for my taste, but it’s interesting all the same. Bears out what JS says. Runners will damage themselves rather than stop, and there is a moralistic aspect to that. ‘Coming from a runner, that’s terribly refreshing,’ Hugo says of my colleague’s observation: ‘there isn’t a moral requirement that we should fulfill our potentials; if people are happy with mediocrity, as I am, then let them be.’

I’ve often finished races or long training runs while feeling ill. I’ve only once dropped out of a marathon, down in Long Beach in 2001. I walked off the course at mile 22, but I hadn’t been feeling myself since mile 10. At the time, friends, family, and fellow runners assured me that I had done the sensible thing by not pushing myself through. A part of me, of course, believed them. But another part of me felt very much like a failure. That feeling of failure after the Long Beach marathon lasted longer than the feeling of elation I have had after successful marathons.

That’s interesting, and rather sad – sad in general, I mean, sad if you extrapolate it to runners (and people) in general. Sad if our feelings of failure last longer than our feelings of elation. Let’s hope they don’t, on the whole.

It’s funny all this fuss over Paula Radcliffe.

The first thing to say is that if you haven’t tried to run a marathon quickly, in the heat, then you should keep quiet about whether she could have continued, etc. When the wheels come off marathon running, then it feels pretty much unlike anything else you’ll experience in life. I experienced it in a London marathon. I got to twenty miles in just over two hours. It took an hour and ten minutes to run the next six miles, so you get the picture.

But the interesting thing from a philosophical, sociological point of view is that somehow moral judgements seem to infect how we view sporting feats. It isn’t a character flaw to stop when you’re about to collapse from heat exhuastion, it’s sensible. When I was fairly serious about this running lark, I would train with people who were very serious. In their world, my comparative lack of seriousness was considered to be a moral flaw. They’d continually harp on about the fact that "I wasn’t fulfilling my potential", etc. Well, newsflash guys, there isn’t a moral requirement that we should fulfill our potentials; if people are happy with mediocrity, as I am, then let them be (so long as they don’t write for the Guardian). Food fascists are the same incidentally. Oh you must try this cod with avacado and peach. No, sod off, I like pizza!

And there’s a thing about the running obsessives that I used to mix with. Their personal lives are a disaster area. Because they are through and through self-obsessed, as well as running-obsessed. If you read athletics magazines, periodically they’ll tell the story of Ron Hill, who never missed a training session in his life (or pretty much he didn’t), even when he’d had an operation the same day. They write about him as if he’s some kind of hero. Well, he isn’t. He’s pathological. And shouldn’t be allowed out, or near children.

Update: Paula’s going to run the 10km tonight. Anybody who has ever run a marathon will know that this is mind-boggling.

Another literary post, this is going to be. That’s two in a row. Well – I have a literary side, so you’ll have to bear with me. I usually cover it up here, I pretend to be interested exclusively in other things – and in fact I am interested in other things; I’ve been getting less and less exclusively literary for years. All my adult life really. Which I guess is just a roundabout way of saying I used to be a rather narrow, boring, incurious person when I was young, and then I outgrew it. (Yes I did. I’m not boring. Stop it at once.)

It’s a Shakespeare poll. And not just any poll, but a poll that asks interesting questions, and gets even more interesting answers. And it’s a poll of RSC actors, so of people who know Shakespeare from the inside, so to speak. I learned of the poll from Normblog. Norm had a Shakespeare poll the other day. I have a notion that it was something I said here – the thing about Horatio, and ‘Give me that man that is not passion’s slave,’ and why we love Hamlet – last week that gave him the idea of the poll. No not gave him the idea – prompted the thoughts of his own that gave him the idea. Yes, that’s what I mean. [Update: No, it wasn’t. Nothing to do with me. I suppose I think I make the sun rise, too, do I? And the flowers to bloom, and the dog to smell? Honestly, the conceit of some people.] Anyway he asked me for my ranking before he did the poll – and I was predictable. That is to say, I thought what everyone else thinks. Hamlet and Lear tied for the top spot. Then Macbeth then Othello. Quite conventional.

But the RSC poll has some less conventional answers, at least I think they are. Just for one thing, I’m really delighted to see Henry IV part 2 in fourth place. I love that play. It’s one of my top favourites too. But I had an idea it wasn’t other people’s – partly because the management of the local Shakespeare Festival thinks it is actually much less interesting and audience-grabbing than part 1, whereas I think it takes part 1 and runs with it – soars past it. It’s both funny and moving – and the language!

I’m a bit thrown by the presence of Titus though. But never mind; that’s a wild card. But I love the fact that Paulina was voted the most inspiring character. Paulina is a brilliant character! She fascinates me. She has got the most colossal nerve. She not only shouts at the king and scolds, reproaches, guilt-trips, and calls him hard names – she even ‘thou’s him. Doubly outrageous. Her rank is not all that high, and she’s a woman. She has no business calling him ‘thou’ – it’s a kind of insult, a deliberate insult. Kent calls Lear ‘thou’ in the first scene (and is instantly banished on pain of death), and for the same sort of reason – exactly the same sort of reason, in fact: because Lear has betrayed and disowned a woman closely related to him for the most trivial and absurd of reasons, a woman he should have been loyal to and wasn’t. There is nothing that riles Shakespeare more – cf. Romeo and Juliet (Juliet’s father), Much Ado (Hero’s father), Cymbeline (Postumus and Imogen), Othello. So to make clear how drastically wrong such behavior is, he has underlings and even women chastise the men who do it. It’s extraordinary. And Paulina is much the most defiant and enraged of them all – and also the best reconciler. She gives Hermione back at the end. She’s an amazing character.

There is an interesting essay on Thoreau in that wicked newspaper that people around here say such hard things about. I’m very keen on Thoreau, especially Walden, myself. Thoreau was such a damn phrase-maker, for one thing. I once memorized this paragraph, just because I liked it so much:

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

Phrase-maker. You have to admit. And there’s a lot of it like that; it’s a joy to read.

Speaking of joys to read, what fun I’ve been having this afternoon. On and off, because I was away for a few hours. But I’m engaged in an enthralling correspondence with someone who thinks I’m just unspeakably reprehensible because there is a sentence that ends with a preposition in ‘About B&W’ and I flatly refuse to share her outrage at the matter. She is quite remarkably agitated about it. It’s cruel of me, but I can’t help finding that funny. It’s especially funny because she insists on confusing me with those people who don’t care about language and grammar and How to Write With Ellegunts, which to anyone who knows me is just – well, pretty uproarious. She wanted me to add Eats, Shoots and Leaves to In the Library; nope, I said, not going to do that; she says that proves all sorts of terrible things about me. Oh? I’d have thought it just proved that I don’t particularly want to add that book, that’s all. How funny people are. My colleague told me amusing exchanges with indignant readers would be one of the perks of working on B&W, and he was right.

Back to the subject. Martin Kettle makes an interesting – albeit quite arbitrary – comparison between Walden and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, and more particularly the respective belief systems rooted in each book. I don’t want to agree with what he says, and I don’t really agree, but I see what he’s getting at.

Thoreau can be seen as quite individualistic, solipsistic, even selfish, at least in Walden. He’s not very worried about poverty there (though maybe that’s not surprising in the 1840s, when land was cheap and labor was scarce and fairly well-paid) (and he was concerned about slavery), and he wasn’t a joiner of social experiments like Brooke Farm. But on the other hand, his ideas also didn’t do much harm; they didn’t inspire any mass killings. I don’t think mass killings are an inevitable result of socialist or utopian ideas…but the possibility does seem to hover over them.

And actually Thoreau is concerned about more than himself. His is a reformist, ameliorative vision. That’s what Walden is – an exploration of different ways to live and to think about one’s life. It is meant to awaken others.

One of the letters written in response to the article mentions Ted Kaczynski – which I noticed, because I mentioned him the other day myself, in an earlier chapter of this rumination on utopian ideas and where they can take us. People like him can make one start to think dark thoughts – that perhaps it’s impossible to have any ideas at all about how things could be different and better, without ending up wanting to kill random people by way of persuasion.

This article by Tibor Fischer about the Booker Prize longlist is good for a laugh too. Or maybe it’s not, maybe I just think so because I laugh every time I look at it, because the picture of him reminds me of someone I know, or rather don’t know but have seen a picture of that looks a lot like that. The same slightly truculent ‘Yeah, so?’ expression. Anyway, I particularly liked this part –

Distaste for the middle class was one common denominator. Writers are entitled to berate and conjure whatever they want, but it was curious to see how the middle class (particularly the white, home-counties middle class) got clobbered: racist, xenophobic, childkillers or just generally evil. Any prostitute, beggar, asylum-seeker or non-caucasian was likely to have a heart of gold. The conformity was such that I felt sometimes that only members of the Socialist Workers Party were allowed to publish novels (I never want to see the words “miners” and “strike” adjacent again on the page).

See, there it is again. That equation of underdoggery with the heart of gold. The sentimental illusion de nos jours. Hey, nobody has a heart of gold, okay? Not caucasians, not non-caucasians, not plutocrats, not miners, nobody. If you want a heart of gold, get a damn teddy bear; otherwise, forget it.

Polly Toynbee has a very good column in the Guardian today (thus incidentally showing that that newspaper is not always the evil spawn of Satan despite what my colleague may say). She says what I’ve been saying for months: that criticism of Islam (or any other religion) is not racism, and should not be called such or talked about as if it were such. She also says that worry about just exactly this equation has caused a lot of people to go all woolly about Islam. Ain’t it the truth.

Fear of offending the religious is gathering ground on all sides. It is getting harder to argue against the hijab and the Koran’s edict that a woman’s place is one step behind. It is beginning to be racist for teachers or social workers to object to autocratic patriarchy and submission of women within many Muslim communities. Islamic ideas that find the very notion of democracy incompatible with faith are beginning to be taken seriously by those who should defend liberal democracy.

‘It is getting harder to argue against the hijab’ – you can say that again! I spent a lot of time doing just that last winter, and was endlessly surprised at the absurd things people on the left were willing to say. It was kind of educational, in a way. The fatwa on Salman Rushdie was educational for a lot of people; the arguments over the hijab were educational for me. I learned that a lot of well-meaning leftists will stop at nothing to mollify Islam. Which is bizarre. Why in a conflict between Islam on the one hand and secularism and feminism on the other, people on the left feel compelled to choose Islam, is beyond me. Well not entirely beyond me; I realize it has to do with the fact that Muslims are the targets of anti-immigrant hatreds and racism; but puzzling all the same.

More alarming is the softening of the brain of liberals and progressives. They increasingly find it easier to go with the flow that wants to mollify Muslim sentiment, for fear of joining the anti-immigration thugs who want to drive them from the land.

Just so. It is alarming, because if liberals and progressives won’t stand up for women’s rights and against Sharia, the hijab, unequal divorce laws and the rest of it, who will? Who the hell will? Who will stand shoulder to shoulder with Homa Arjomand and Azam Kamguian and Maryam Namazie and Ibn Warraq? If liberals and progressives abandon secularists and feminists who have the dire misfortune to live in countries ruled by Islam, in favour of solidarity with a religion that codifies unequal treatment of women – then they are not liberals and progressives any more. They intend to be, but they’re not.

Consider this post at Crooked Timber for instance.

This is one problem that we can’t blame Bush for. For all of his faults, he has consistently urged respect for the Muslim faith and world, and I’m grateful for that.

Okay – why is respect for the Muslim ‘faith’ a good thing? And more than that, in fact the heart of the matter – why is it so taken for granted that it’s a good thing? That’s the part I don’t get. So often it appears to be just – well, a matter of faith, that Islam is automatically and necessarily a good and harmless thing. That it has to be. That it simply can’t not be – so there is no need for further investigation or even thought. It is just not even conceivable (apparently) that right-thinking people might believe and say that Islam itself – not extremist Islam, just Islam – might have some bad ideas right at its core. Christianity has some terrible ideas right at its core; why is it self-evident that Islam does not? Well we know why. Because it’s all mixed up with race and anti-racism, colonialism and postcolonialism, Orientalism and Occidentalism, that’s why. But that’s not a good reason.

It will be more important than ever to stand like Voltaire, ready to defend Muslims, their right to be here and to practise their beliefs against the growing swamped-by-aliens talk that Anas Altikriti warned against on these pages last week…Muslims must also accept the right of others to criticise religions without smearing any critic as a racist.

I’m like a broken record – but it can’t be helped: the wool is out there. Religions cannot and must not be beyond criticism. They’re the last human institutions that ought to have a free pass to go unexamined and unquestioned – and yet so often they are the first to get the magic exemption. Écrasez l’infame, etc.

We were talking about distorted thinking and the way ideological (including utopian) commitments can cause it. There is some fresh material on the subject today. This review-article of Edward Said by his friend Christopher Hitchens, for example.

As someone who is Said’s distinct inferior as a litterateur, and who knows nothing of music, and could not share in his experience of being an exiled internationalist, I try not to suspect myself of envy when I say that he was at his very weakest when he embarked on the polemical…Said was extremely emotional and very acutely conscious of unfairness and injustice. No shame in that, I hardly need add. But he felt himself obliged to be the unappointed spokesman and interpreter for the unheard and the misunderstood, and this could sometimes tempt him to be propagandistic.

It can do that. With dire consequences. Because, just for one thing – the sad truth is that the unheard and misunderstood are not necessarily therefore the good and righteous and kind. Rather the contrary if anything. Being unheard and misunderstood doesn’t generally improve the character. It’s easy to get confused about that – to think that the underdog is automatically also the sweet dog – but it ain’t so. So feeling oneself obliged to be an interpreter for an underdog group can lead to a temptation to conceal and deny and fuzz over the faults of such groups. Understandably. It can seem like just a reasonable adjustment of life’s unfairness. But it’s not the best way to get at the truth.

We ended up having a bitter personal quarrel over the “regime change” policy of the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the disagreement actually began almost a quarter of a century before that, with the publication of easily his worst book: Covering Islam. In that volume, published just after the Khomeini revolution in Iran, he undertook to explain something — Western ignorance of Muslim views — that certainly needed explication. But he ended up inviting us to take some of those Muslim grievances at their own face value. I remember asking him then how he — a secular Anglican with a love of political pluralism and of literary diversity — could hope to find any home, for himself or his principles, in an Islamic republic. He looked at me as if I had mentioned the wrong problem or tried to change the subject.

Yep. And a lot of people are still stuck in the same place – taking some of those Muslim grievances at their own face value. More than some of them, even. There was an article about the Muslim Association of Britain in the Times the other day; I’m linking to the version at Harry’s Place because the Times is behind subscription for those of us not in the UK.

It was the MAB that invited the controversial cleric Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, to London last month. Dr al-Qaradawi is editor-in-chief of Islamonline.net, which insists that it is the duty of Muslims to “achieve supremacy on earth and put their enemies to rout” and “the means for doing so is taking up arms in addition to preparation, financing and planning strategies”…THE MAB rose to national prominence in co-organising the Stop the War Coalition, and launched the pro-hijab campaign to oppose the banning of the Islamic veil in schools. Many leftwingers have joined the campaign on the ground of women’s right to choose, even though they are joining forces with Dr al-Qaradawi, who insists women must be forced to wear the hijab.

This is what I keep marveling at – leftwingers joining forces with Dr al-Qaradawi instead of with the people who resist the hijab, and thinking that’s the somehow leftier thing to do. That it would be ‘Islamophobia’ to do otherwise.

The liberal Left need to ask themselves what they hope to achieve by giving such uncritical support to Islamic extremism. They may believe, in their naivety, that they are helping to combat Islamophobia, which is indeed a real problem. But instead they are encouraging it. The hijacking of legitimate Muslim political activity by extremists will not reduce community tensions in Britain, but exacerbate them.

Anthony Browne who wrote the Times article also wrote a long, interesting post for the Secular Islam site a few weeks ago.

These are curious times. The British Left, long the champion of anti-racism and gay rights, is forging deepening bonds with anti-Semitic homophobes. If these were old-style anti-Semitic homophobes the Left would be campaigning to have them locked up. But instead they are Muslim extremists. What is most unsettling is that the Government, suffering from excessive cultural relativism, is also pandering to Islamic anti-Semitism. Consider the circumstances surrounding a conference to support the Islamic veil next Monday in London. Ken Livingstone, the mayor, is to open the event, organised by the Assembly for the Protection of the Hijab, of which the guest of honour is Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Yeah…I used to think I admired Red Ken, without knowing much about him. Well I don’t admire him any more.

And have a look at this splendid interview by Maryam Namazie. Then try to go on thinking that the left by siding with Islamists is siding with everyone in ‘Muslim’ countries. They’re not, they’re siding with one point of view against another, and the point of view they’re siding with is the reactionary anti-modern anti-secular anti-reason side. And this is left wing? How, exactly?

They are trying to say that there is one culture and one religion and they put everyone together. They say the whole country and the whole population is religious, it’s Islamic, and that they have one culture. The reason they do that, I think, is because they want to justify certain things, since it’s very straightforward to understand what we are talking about. We are talking about fundamental values, which transcend anything religious or cultural. They are universal values. For example, human rights. Those rights are not something that can be conditioned by cultural considerations.

So. Be careful which underdog you decide to support. Some of them bite.

And now Norm emails to point out an article of his on this very subject. Very apropos, and full of good points. I want to quote and quote…

Notwithstanding any of this, however, it remains true that from the outset socialism was utopian. It was a distant land, another moral universe. It was radically other vis-a-vis the order of things it aspired to replace. And that is what it still is. A society beyond exploitation is in the realm of the ideal.

And the thing is…well, my colleague will doubtless disagree, but I can’t help thinking that those distant lands we imagine, those other moral universes – those thought experiments and counterfactuals and what ifs – are good for us, if only to get us to realize that the way things are is not necessarily the one and only way they possibly could be. Yes, it can be risky to think that way (al Qaeda dreams its dreams too, as do the people who would like to make the ‘Ten Commandments’ the law of the land, as do white supremacists, as do – ), but it can also be productive.

We should be, without hesitation or embarrassment, utopians…nothing but a utopian goal will now suffice. The realities of our time are morally intolerable…The facts of widespread human privation and those of political oppression and atrocity are available to all who want them.

There is minimum utopia and there is maximum – and even maximum notions have their place, but minimum utopia should be the goal.

There is an interesting column by Ishtiaq Ahmed in Pakistan’s Daily Times that talks about a related subject: revolution as forward-looking, progressive, and revolution as ‘restoration of some normal or pristine state of the past.’

In the dogmatic Islamic conception of time, the pinnacle of human achievements was the Madinese state of the Prophet and his pious caliphs (in the case of the Shias only the period of Hazrat Ali). Since then society is understood to have deviated from that perfect model and has gone completely astray in the current times. Consequently the Wahhabi movement of the 18th century and its current peddlers aim at a revolutionary restoration of early Islam.

Dreams of the lost Golden Age are indeed another version of utopia – and a very scary one for people who are attached to their modern liberties and comforts. I’m a woman, and I don’t want to go back to the 8th century and be locked away for the rest of my life, thanks. I have a perverse fondness for autonomy, for being able to decide all by myself what I’m going to do and where I’m going to go. Most women throughout history and geography have been flatly automatically denied such autonomy, as a matter of course. So have most peasants, surfs, peons, coolies, lower castes, slaves, farm laborers – most people, in fact. And then – autonomy of course is all bound up with time, and who has time if it takes eighteen hours a day just to get the most basic work done? So electricity, running water, refrigeration, various kinds of soap, supermarkets – those are all part of our relative autonomy too; hence facing backward, as Meera Nanda calls it, is not an appealing form of utopianism – except maybe to the people who won’t be doing the drudgery.

So there’s the crux again. Utopia can be a good thing – if it’s the right kind of utopia, but there are other utopian dreamers whose dreams are everyone else’s nightmares.

It’s a depressing thought, really. No getting around it. It’s depressing and discouraging – in fact it’s tragic – to think that our best qualities are so inseparable from our worst. That (if this idea has anything right about it) we can’t even aim to make things better, do great things, right wrongs, improve the world, without risking turning into a butcher or an apologist for butchers. But it seems difficult to deny. Of course some people manage it, of course there have been improvers who don’t become homicidal maniacs or their lackeys. But the inherent risk of it seems difficult to deny – I suppose because the two seem to be actually the same thing only in different forms. What the Romantics valued as intensity, what Hume and James Mill suspected or scorned as enthusiasm. Passion. The Stoics were very wary of it, too. Horatio is a Stoic. ‘Give me that man that is not passion’s slave,’ says Hamlet admiringly, ‘and I will wear him at my heart’s core.’ But we don’t love Horatio, we love Hamlet, and with good reason. He cares – and not just about himself, though some productions give that impression; no, he cares about the world, about the something rotten in Denmark; he cares about love and memory and loyalty and truth. As he should. And yet what havoc he wreaks – as people who care often do.

No, the safest course is to take things as they are, to roll with the punches, to be laid-back, to eat what’s put on your plate. Montaigne knew that, living as he did in the midst of a bloody civil war about (in reality) nothing – disagreements over theology. But…

But this is where the hesitant good word for utopia comes in. There is some obstinate core in me somewhere that thinks we shouldn’t just take things as they are, shouldn’t just settle for the world as it is. That we should want to and try to make things better. And yet I know how quickly and easily that kind of thing can run amok – into orthodoxy-imposing and heresy-hunting, persecution and excommunication, and thinking of people as large abstract units to be shoved around or eliminated and then forgotten. It seems safer to cultiver the old jardin and let it go at that. But then – that thought ‘could do better’ returns. We could be less selfish, less greedy, less trivial…Yes and be more like Ted Kasczynski, I suppose. Ted, meet Osama; Osama, Ted. Have a nice day.