Is it unconscionable if we:

a) Talk about homophobia in the black community?

b) Think that honour killings may not be entirely a good thing?

c) Find mutilation rather distasteful?

d) Don’t much like the idea of Shari’a?

e) Think that Russians sometimes get things wrong?

f) Think that maybe there is an argument to be had about the headscarf ban?

g) Suspect that Islam and women’s rights are not perfect bedfellows?

Answers on a postcard.

People have been pointing out in comments that there were a good many items in Marc Mulholland’s post that I neglected to mention. True enough. I was short on time, for one thing, and I think I have a sort of built-in idea of the maximum desirable length for a comment here. I don’t like article-length blog posts, on the whole. So I didn’t dispute everything I could have disputed.

And perhaps I didn’t stipulate as much as I could have either. I could have made the same stipulation that Norm does in his post on the subject –

There’s a central point in what Marc is saying which I would not contest, and this is that in the tense political climate we all now inhabit, it is important to avoid doing anything to feed ethnic or religious prejudices and hatreds. In so far as Muslims are on the receiving end of these, they must be defended – as would go for any other group.

Sure. Of course. But then it becomes all the more important to get clear about exactly what we’re talking about – about what we mean by ‘groups’ and ‘communities,’ for example. Something Chris Bertram said in comments may illustrate the point:

Perhaps if Mulholland had made his point using the example of true generalization about African-Americans made by certain types of conservative Republican it would have been clear to you.

Yes but that’s not a good analogy, because it’s a different kind of thing from what Mulholland is talking about. What kind of true generalization could one make about African-Americans, after all? Seriously. I can’t think of any – apart from the definitional one: that they are Americans who are at least partly descended from Africans. Go beyond that and there just aren’t any true generalizations available. And the same is true of Muslims, especially given the way the term is usually used, so that it includes secular and atheist ‘Muslims’. It would be pretty risky to generalize even about what all Muslims believe, just as it would be risky to generalize about what all Catholics believe. But Mulholland doesn’t talk only about Muslims or Catholics in his post, he also talks about Islam and Catholicism – and that’s a different subject. Note, just for one thing, that there is no equivalent word that one can use in the case of African-Americans. There is no religion, ‘African-Americanism.’ And if there were, people being what they are, not all African-Americans would agree about it; hence the epistemic as well as moral and political riskiness of saying what all Xs believe. But it is possible to talk about the tenets of Catholicism or Hinduism or Islam. There is still room for debate, but at least there is something to say. Mulholland neglected to make this distinction in his post; I think that’s where a lot of the muddle starts. So, of course I agree with Norm’s point, but (as Norm goes on to point out) Mulholland said far more than that.

The fact that every outlook is an outlook, has a genesis and a social and cultural milieu, no more means that all such outlooks should be taken as equivalently valuable, than does the fact that different explanations of empirical phenomena (like the movement of heavenly bodies or the causes of illnesses) have a genesis and a ‘sociology’ mean that all of these, these would-be explanations, are equivalently valuable. Marc needs to resolve for himself the tension between his seemingly pejorative ‘ahistorical “rights”‘ (with the rights in scare-quotes) and his more favourable ‘generally accords with universal values’. Meanwhile, there are many who will feel that, however the conception of universal rights has made its way in the world historically, it’s a damn sight better as the basis of a political order than are alternative conceptions of things which allow for brutal invasions and oppressions of the human person…Avoiding Islamophobia and every other kind of such phobia has got to be consistent with criticizing various cultural and religious outlooks for the ways in which they victimize or oppress human individuals.

That’s what I’m saying.

Jonathan Derbyshire also has a skeptical post on Mulholland, along with the SWP’s Nazi-Soviet Pact with fundamentalist Islam. (And to think that I used to be a sort of wannabe Trot myself. Well, I have a thing for the Old Man, I admit it.) Jonathan also links to a review of a book on relativism which I haven’t read and clearly need to immediately.

Now, back to the Mulholland piece for a moment. One thing I wanted to comment on yesterday and didn’t, was the question of truth.

Islamaphobia is often defined as slanderous untruths. I think there is an excessively narrow definition of Islamophobia at play here. It is not right that simply stating ‘the truth’ is sufficient to clear one of Islamophobia…If ‘truth’ about a community is expressed intemperately and one-sidedly, and that community is already under a burden of suspicion and disadvantage, then one must conclude that this is a freedom of speech exercised in such a manner to oppress and marginalize the group. I think its a cop-out to argue that attacks on beliefs are different from attacks on inherited characteristics such as colour etc…

Well, again – inevitably – we’re back with definition problems. What does he mean by ‘”truth” about a community’? If he means some statement about all Muslims, then is such a truth even possible? Again, I can’t think of any that wouldn’t be just tautologous. All Muslims are Muslims (and even that would depend on a very broad definition of Muslim, to include some sort of ethnic component, which of course is tricky since Muslims come from all over the globe). Or does he mean (as seems more likely) factual statements about what some Muslims do? But then – what? He wants truths like that to be concealed? So that, even if it is true that, say, a given Muslim man murders his daughter, that fact should be hushed up or played down, in order to avoid Islamophobia? Well…just for one thing, what about the daughter? And what about all the other daughters? They’re part of the ‘community’ too. Maybe they would find it ‘daughterophobic’ to play down daughtericide, and maybe they would have a point. And that’s just for one thing. I think the idea that ‘simply stating “the truth” is [not] sufficient to clear one of Islamophobia’ is a pretty risky idea, both epistemically and morally.

I’ve just been chatting with my colleague on the phone, and along with other things we discussed, we agreed that this post is a lot of nonsense – and nonsense of a kind that leaves us shaking our heads (yes, both of them) in baffled amazement.

Islamaphobia is often defined as slanderous untruths. I think there is an excessively narrow definition of Islamophobia at play here. It is not right that simply stating ‘the truth’ is sufficient to clear one of Islamophobia…One must take the content in the whole. If the overall impact is intemperate and insinuating, the overall conclusion is that it is oppressively anti-pluralistic. One must also take into account the context. If ‘truth’ about a community is expressed intemperately and one-sidedly, and that community is already under a burden of suspicion and disadvantage, then one must conclude that this is a freedom of speech exercised in such a manner to oppress and marginalize the group.

Um – really? Always? Is that a good general rule? I suppose it depends (as it so often does) what you mean by ‘community’ – and that’s probably exactly why the word was used. Because of course we all know that communities are good things, warm fuzzy kind loving things, so obviously any community that is under ‘a burden of suspicion and disadvantage’ is being unfairly persecuted in some way. Stands to reason, doesn’t it. So even if one tells the truth about a community, if one does it the wrong way, then one is oppressing and marginalizing the group. ‘The group’ – that’s another one of those words. Kind of dodges the question, doesn’t it. Suppose the truth that is being told about this community/group is that it treats some of its members like dirt, that it not only oppresses and marginalizes them, it beats them and when angry enough, kills them. Then is one really oppressing and marginalizing the whole group by telling the truth even in an intemperate way? Or is one in fact ‘oppressing’ or rather exposing and with any luck stopping part of the group, to wit, the perpetrators?

Yes. The problem (one problem) with that whole absurd quotation is that not all communities are in fact good or benign or harmless, even to all of their own members. Is that really a big news flash? If they are engaged in oppressing and marginalizing, battering and murdering, coercing and depriving, people within that very community (or outside it) then the truth should be told about that. Yes, intemperately. And there are communities and groups like that in the world. So as a generalization that paragraph just won’t wash. (The rhetoric of ‘community’ and ‘group’ is yet another example of what Julian was talking about in that Bad Moves I commented on last week – language that is ‘the means by which question begging occurs.’)

But cultures must be respected as rounded expressions of full humanity, just as we expect our cultures to be treated so. By all means, condemn what one wishes in whatever culture, but liberals must remember that we are a world not of human atoms accorded rights defined by ahistorical reason, but organic and evolving communities deserving of respect by virtue of their framing of human existance. To serve liberalism by highlighting all that is wrong with Islam is to whip up prejudice and is thus unconscionable.

Well, again – what does ‘respected’ mean? And what on earth does ’rounded expressions of full humanity’ mean? Nothing, would be my guess – just a formula to elicit some kind of right-on emotion. But if it does mean anything – again, the question arises: what if these ‘cultures’ deprive some of their members – as some cultures certainly do – of the ability to develop their own expressions of full humanity? Must such cultures then be ‘respected’? If so, why?

Mullholland has a lot to say about the silly assumptions of ‘liberals’ but he makes some silly assumptions himself, such as the assumption that communities and groups are single entities that all feel and think alike, that all have the same interests, that all feel oppressed and marginalized as one by the truth-telling of outsiders. But communities aren’t like that. Even ‘groups’ of two people aren’t like that, not all the time, and whole communities certainly are not. Susan Moller Okin put it this way in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?:

Most cultures are suffused with practices and ideologies concerning gender. Suppose, then, that a culture endorses and facilitates the control of men over women in various ways (even if informally, in the private sphere of domestic life). Suppose, too, that there are fairly clear disparities of power between the sexes, such that the more powerful, male members are those who are generally in a position to determine and articulate the group’s beliefs, practices, and interests. Under such conditions, group rights are potentially, and in many cases actually, antifeminist. They substantially limit the capacities of women and girls of that culture to live with human dignity equal to that of men and boys, and to live as freely chosen lives as they can. Advocates of group rights for minorities within liberal states have not adequately addressed this simple critique of group rights, for at least two reasons. First, they tend to treat cultural groups as monoliths–to pay more attention to differences between and among groups than to differences within them.

You could say that.

Since OB was talking about books below, I thought I’d just quickly flag-up the funniest book review I’ve ever come across.

It’s here.

I vow that if I ever get a review like this, I’ll frame it and stick it by my bedside table. Along with the letter from the guy from Australia who wrote to tell me that one of my books was “A disgrace to publishing”!^*

*I should say I haven’t actually framed the letter because I lost it, but otherwise I would have done…

This again. Will it never go away? (No, of course not, because it serves a purpose, however wrong-headedly.) The old ‘atheism is a belief just as theism is’ number. This time it’s in a thread on secularism at Harry’s Place, in which Harry points out how indispensable active secularism has become.

Once was a time when the National Secular Society gave the impression of being one of those curious leftovers from the 19th century, membership of which was the preserve of eccentrics who enjoyed rehashing their Oxbridge debates about theology. Sadly, given the times in which we live, it is now a much-needed organisation and one which I intend to join and urge others to do so. The weekly round-up of articles, Newsline has become essential reading for any secularist who is concerned with issues such as the Blunkett proposal, faith schools and other examples of creeping clericalism.

Very good, but in the comments Peter Cuthbertson of Conservative Commentary insists that secularism itself is a belief system. But it isn’t. It’s not about beliefs, it’s about what to do. There are plenty of believers in various religions who are also secularists. I know several myself. Then farther down, the claim becomes one about atheism as a belief – partly in order to separate that from the claim about secularism. But atheism is not a belief either, it’s the absence of one, as I tried to argue in terms you’ve all heard a million times already, so I won’t bother repeating them here. I’m just noting the oddity of the fact that people can so easily accept that not believing in X amounts to a belief as opposed to, precisely, a non-belief. Not believing in X doesn’t entail believing in something else to take its place. I don’t believe in gremlins. That doesn’t mean I’m committed to a belief in, say, rmlniges instead.

I think part of what’s going on is some kind of fancy footwork about what kind of ‘belief’ is meant. Some kind of secret elision of the difference between warranted belief and just plain belief; between believing something because there is evidence for it, and belief that’s independent of evidence.

Now that’s an idea. There are all these lists all the time – Prospect’s list of the top intellectuals, the BBC’s list of Favourite Reads or whatever it was called, Norm’s lists of everyone’s favourite movies, three novels (was it?), rock groups (that last one actually incited my colleague to vote, though he usually thinks he’s too good for such frivolities) (that’s a tease, obviously), and so on. Now Norm has a new list, just his own this time, of

10 great books of my life (sort of). Though I’ve been thinking about the list for some time, I protect myself against assault by saying that these are not necessarily what I judge to be the 10 most important of the works that I’ve read in my life (on whatever criterion, or set of criteria, or scale). But they’re all ones which have had a marked and lasting influence on the way I think about the world.

What a good idea. I want to do that. Let’s do that. I’ll do one, or perhaps I’ll do several (on account of how I’m terrible at making up my mind, I’m mushy and vacillating and unstable and fickle and undiscriminating, I like everything, or not everything but a lot of things), and if you feel like it you can do yours in comments or by email.

And while you’re at it, check out a new blog by Jonathan Derbyshire. He’s a colleague of my colleague’s and his colleague (if you see what I mean) – that is to say, he’s Reviews Editor of TPM. There’s a delightfully eclectic note to the blog, with a post on Jeeves and Wooster cheek by jowl with one on secularism. I love eclecticism (see above about fickleness and mushiness which is actually eclecticism, breadth, wideness of views, love of variety and multiplicity, etc.).

Interesting. I was about to type up a quotation from Simon Blackburn for something I’m working on, and before doing so thought I might as well check our Quotations in case we already had it there (then I would only need to copy it instead of typing). We don’t, but we do have one that is pleasingly relevant to the subject we’ve been discussing lately, along with Brian Leiter. So I thought I would put it here. It’s from Prospect, April 2003.

It is not the slavish remnant of a religious worldview to admit that the person who has gone and looked is more of an authority than one who has not. It is not just convention which dictates that years of surveying, or years in the archive or laboratory give you a better title to be listened to on your subject than years spent ignoring the issue.

And I also thought I might as well give you the quotation I typed up. It’s from the ‘Postmodernism’ entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.

While the dismantling of objectivity seems to some to be the way towards a liberating political radicalism, to others it allows such unliberating views as the denial that there was (objectively) such an event as the Second World War or the Holocaust…The postmodernist frame of mind…may seem to depend on a cavalier dismissal of the success of science in generating human improvement, an exaggeration of the admitted fallibility of any attempt to gain knowledge in the humane disciplines, and an ignoring of the quite ordinary truth that while human history and law admit of no one final description, they certainly admit of more or less accurate ones…

Good stuff.

Ah good. Amazon has corrected the little oddity whereby it named the alphabetically first author of the Fashionable Dictionary and disappeared the alphabetically second one. I filled out the correction thing last week, but it looks as if Amazon has also heard from the publisher, because the jacket flap copy is now on the page, which it wasn’t last week. So here is the page. You can order your copy or copies right now, thus making a first printing of fifty thousand copies necessary. Or at any rate you can admire the page, and the jacket copy, and the presence of two names instead of just one, and the mention of B&W. Or you can just roll your eyes and ignore me, but I had to mention it. Of course I did.

This is a nice bit of dovetailing, of convergence, of two minds with but a single thought, of – okay, we get the idea. Brian Leiter was talking about different examples of exactly the same kind of thing I was talking about two days ago, in ‘Close Reading’. The Little Professor noticed the parallel. Leiter’s post is really interesting; it touches on several issues I have on my sort of mental list of things to discuss sometime. It quotes Andrea Lafferty, director of something called ‘the Traditional Values Coalition’ (oh please) saying ‘There’s an arrogance in the scientific community that they know better than the average American.’ Well – uh – yeah. Because they probably do, ya know? Seeing as how the ‘average American’ has a very good statistical chance of thinking the sun travels around the earth. But, you know, that there’s against the law around these parts, thinking you know better than the average American. The average Lithuanian, now, that’s okay, and as for the average Frog – ! But I’ll stop ranting for a moment and let Leiter take over.

In fact, of course, scientists do know quite a bit better than the “average American” about the matters for which their scientific expertise equips them. Those with knowledge, surprisingly, know more than those who are ignorant. Is that arrogance? As Chris Mooney remarked, ‘science is not a democracy,’ and in a democratic culture, that inevitably becomes a cause of resentment, as Ms. Lafferty’s comment attests.

Which might be a good reason to stop having a democratic culture. Maybe it’s time to learn to separate a democratic political system from a democratic culture? Or if not, if that’s too drastic – at least learn to think a little more clearly on the subject. First step: read Tocqueville and Mill. Try to get your mind around the idea that the majority is not automatically right about everything, that sometimes (often, in fact) minority ideas are better than majority ideas, and (most difficult of all, it seems) that knowledge really is better than ignorance, that people who know something really do know more than people who don’t, and that on any particular subject that is likely to be a minority situation.

Unfortunately, I don’t see much room for compromise in this domain. Knowledge and competence can not become meek and abashed merely to avoid offending the vanity of the undereducated, the parochial, and the unworldly. The Enlightenment dream was to extend the blessings of reason and knowledge as widely as possible. In the United States, that Enlightenment project has been stymied: at the highest echelons of the culture, the material and institutional support for the pursuit of knowledge and competence is unparalleled, yet the fruits of these labors are often either regarded with suspicion and resentment in the public culture at large–or simply go unrecognized and unnoted altogether.

Exactly so. And often in the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘anti-elitism,’ too, which is hugely ironic, not to say pathetic. What’s really anti-elitist is to ‘extend the blessings of reason and knowledge as widely as possible,’ not to prevent that extension by discrediting, mocking and despising those secular blessings.

That’s quite amusing. I wrote the comment below before I read Julian’s new Bad Moves, which also has partly to do with Prince Charles’ medical expertise compared with that of mere, you know, medical experts.

The strict dietary regime in question is the Gerson Therapy, which eschews drugs in favour of coffee enemas and fruit juices. It has the support of well-known medical experts such as Prince Charles, interior designer Dudley Poplak and Lord Baldwin of Bewdley. Their opinions, of course, carry more weight than those of the American Cancer Society, which warns that the treatment could be dangerous.

Pure coincidence, that. And then he goes on to make an excellent point about language that helps question-begging to do its thing.

Begging the question – assuming what needs to be argued for – is often a result of a careless use of language. More specifically, we often use “success” words where more neutral vocabulary is needed. For example, we say learned French when really we only studied it and never developed any real competence…The unjustified use of success words is not the same mistake as begging the question, but it is often the means by which question begging occurs.

Ain’t it though. Another example I notice a lot is saying someone realized or understood or recognized or saw something when the something in question is precisely what’s in dispute. ‘She realized that logic is a patriarchal imposition.’ Oh yeah? How do you ‘realize’ something that isn’t true, huh?

I suppose you do it by scrupulously avoiding logic because it’s a patriarchal imposition. How useful language can be!

I re-read an article yesterday or Sunday that I kept wanting to do a comment on as I read it. Line by line, even word by word, in places. I wanted to comment not just on the article as a whole, but on each bit of sly rhetoric as I read and noticed it. Not a macro-comment but a micro one, not an overall comment but a close-up.

And that reminded me, in an almost nostalgic, sentimental way, of the beginning of N&C. In September or October 2002, when we were thinking about and discussing what to include on B&W, what features to add. It reminded me that we didn’t exactly think of N&C as a blog, at first, or even as a blog-like thing. The original idea was that we needed a place to do close readings of nonsense. Sort of Leavisite lit-crit examination of manipulative rhetoric, fancy footwork, evasive tactics, subject-changing, translation, that sort of thing. That was the first thought. I don’t even remember how we got from there to a bloggish sort of thing – whether we just realized, well, that sounds like a blog, or we actually decided, well let’s make it a bloggish sort of thing while we’re at it, since we might as well.

Which of course raises the question, what’s the difference? What is a blog or a blog-like thing, and how does it or would it differ from a place to do close readings of other people’s rhetoric? That’s an interesting question, and I don’t know the answer. It’s not unlike the question ‘What does the word ‘race’ mean, and is it a word that refers to something real that exists in the world, or is it a word that refers to a human idea about or description of something that exists in the real world?’ Then again it’s not all that much like the question, since blogs are clearly a human invention, whereas the word ‘race’ purports to name something in the world, though whether it actually does that or only purports to has been much debated in human history. And then again, again, the question of what a blog is doesn’t matter much, whereas the question of what race means, if anything, has massive implications. People have been slaughtered in wholesale lots on the basis of the reality of that word, which seems unlikely in the case of blogs.

But that’s all a digression. The article in question is from Lingua Franca, July-August 1996; it’s the response of Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins, editors of Social Text, to the Sokal hoax. ‘Mystery Science Theater,’ they call it with the masterful irony Ross is famous for. Now, it may seem slightly in the breaking a butterfly on a wheel department, to bother with an ephemeral article from nearly ten years ago. It may even be in that department, as well as seem to be. But the kind of rhetoric it resorts to is still around, and still percolating through the larger culture, and then this article is such an egregious example of it, that I think it’s worth a look anyway. Or maybe I just mean that I feel like it. So. There are several bits I want to look at; this one is near the end. (The article, alas, is apparently no longer online, at least all the links I found were dead, so I’m quoting from the version published in The Sokal Hoax by Lingua Franca Books, University of Nebraska Press, pp. 54-8.)

Our main concern is that readers new to the debates engendered by science studies are not persuaded by the Sokal stunt that this is simply an academic turf war between scientists and humanists/social scientists, with each side trying to outsmart the other. Sadly, this outcome would simply reinforce the premise that only professional scientists have the credentialed right to speak their minds on scientific matters that affect all of us. What’s important to us is not so much the gulf of comprehension between ‘the two cultures,’ but rather the gulf of power between experts and lay voices.

There are several things to say about that passage; I’ll just mention one for now. Consider ‘the premise that only professional scientists have the credentialed right to speak their minds on scientific matters.’ What does ‘speak their minds’ mean, for a start? Surely we all have a right to speak our minds on scientific matters – don’t we? I don’t know if we have a credentialed right or not, but then I don’t know what that phrase means, either. That’s just it. It’s supposed to imply a lot, without actually saying it, because if it said what it means too plainly, it might be too obvious how silly it is – so that’s where meaningless phrases come in handy. What they seem to mean is something more like ‘only professional scientists have the credentialed right to speak their minds on scientific matters and be listened to.’ Which is another matter. I can ‘speak my mind’ all I like, on the human genome project, on virology, on GM crops, on anything I like; so can you, so can anyone. But that doesn’t mean we’ll say anything valid, or true, or useful, or worth paying attention to in any way, does it. And it seems reasonable to think that ‘professional scientists’ are more likely to be able to say valid, true things about ‘scientific matters’ at least in their own fields than non-scientists, doesn’t it. Which is not to say that scientists and only scientists should be the ones to discuss the consequences of science, but then that’s not what the passage says either.

And then consider ‘the gulf of power between experts and lay voices’. Ah yes, that gulf. Like the gulf between, say, cancer researchers and Prince Charles? Researchers who know something about autism and the MMR vaccine, and Juliet Stevenson? That gulf? No, not that gulf. That’s not the one they mean, but it ought to be. The result of hand-wringing over this ‘gulf of power’ between people who know something about a subject and impassioned people who know nothing about it but want to ‘speak their minds’ is – that we get science according to celebrities and journalists in place of science according to ‘experts’. Be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes.

Another miscellany, because there is an ever-growing backlog of items I want to point out and perhaps say a few words about – and I only have six hands you know. Be reasonable. I’m going as fast as I can, here, but I can’t do everything. And besides I have this mosquito bite or spider bite or moth bite or whatever the hell kind of bite it is just right at the bend of my elbow, on top where it gets maximal chafing from my sweatshirt, and it itches, dammit! It’s been itching for days and days and days and days. Normally bites stop itching after a few days, am I right? But this one just keeps on going, like the Eveready battery rabbit. Nasty thing. So naturally this interferes with my ability to write an individual N&C for every item I see. Besides I have burnout. No I don’t, that’s a joke. P Z Myers mocked bloggers who whinge about blogger burnout at Pharyngula yesterday.

There is another excellent post at Black Triangle on quackery and suckery. Anthony also quotes from an article which is one of the items in that backlog I mentioned, about Prince Charles and his presumptuous advice on medical matters. The doctor who gives the Prince what-for makes exactly the point I made about both P.C. and Juliet Stevenson a few months ago – the fact that they and people like them abuse their fame and influence. They ought to recognize that they are famous out of all proportion to their actual importance, for one thing, and that they are famous for things that are entirely separate from any kind of medical expertise, for another, so they really ought, morally speaking, to use immense caution before making the world a present of their opinions on such subjects. In cases where people can do real harm by getting things wrong, celebrity non-experts ought to think and think and think again before going on Radio 4 or talking to journalists about what vaccinations to get and how to cure cancer.

Your power and authority rest on an accident of birth. Furthermore, your public utterances are worthy of four pages, whereas, if lucky, I might warrant one. I don’t begrudge you that authority and we probably share many opinions about art and architecture, but I do beg you to exercise your power with extreme caution when advising patients with life threatening diseases to embrace unproven therapies. There is no equivalent of the GMC for the monarchy, so it is left either to sensational journalism or, more rarely, to the quiet voice of loyal subjects such as myself to warn you that you may have overstepped the mark.

Exactly.

And speaking of Stevenson, it was the MMR ‘debate’ she was opinionating on, and Harry’s Place has an interesting post on a Washington Post article on that subject. There’s a fair bit of silly verbiage at the beginning of that article, talking about Wakefield’s charisma and so on, but it settles down after awhile, and it does make the point that media coverage of this kind of thing tends to be grotesquely distorted – to pretend that it’s a 50-50 thing, that expert opinion is split, when that’s not the case at all.

And finally I thought this post at Brian Leiter’s about the state of Nietzsche scholarship was worth a read. I haven’t the slightest idea whether he’s right or not, but the look at the way institutional necessities can distort things is interesting.

Leiter thinks I’m a prat, by the way. But I’m not sure he’s chosen a very good example of my prat-hood. He just doesn’t like an article I linked to in News, that’s all. But I didn’t write it, after all, I only linked to it, and I don’t invariably agree with every single word of every article in News. If I had to go by that standard, our front page would be a tad dull.

So why are they posting prominent links (this used to be on B&W’s front page) to tabloid trash like this, which misstates Foucault’s views from top to bottom, and offers no rational criticism of any view he actually held, while offering up a series of fallacious arguments (ad hominems primarily–you would think Ms. Benson of B&W might notice that references to Foucault’s homosexuality do not refute his ideas).

Huh? Of course they don’t, but who says I think they do? The author of the article itself doesn’t even think they do, as far as I can see, and even if he did it wouldn’t follow that I do. A small point, but then I specialize in making small points.

There is a common element in the two examples of political rhetoric about religion we’ve been looking at recently – Steven Waldman’s last weekend and David Blunkett’s this past week. Both of them argue at least partly from perceived alienation or resentment or anger or grievance, or all those, of religious groups or ‘communities’. Alienation and resentment of religious believers at being ignored by secular Democrats or Democratic secularists, and alienation and grievance of Muslims at not being protected by the Race Relations Act, because it doesn’t cover religion. ‘While Jews and Sikhs are covered under the existing law, those of Islamic faith and Christians are not,’ as Blunkett put it on the ‘Today’ programme. One interesting thing about that argument is that grievances and alienation can be manufactured and constructed. As there is manufactured consent, so there can be manufactured grievance, manufactured anger, resentment, outrage, indignation, offense. So all these claims and announcements that voters will be alienated by candidates who don’t, or don’t appear to, or don’t obviously enough appear to, share their religious beliefs – all these claims are doing more than describing a situation, they’re also calling the situation into being. They are in fact doing their best to create the very situation they purport to be predicting and warning against. Of course, all political discourse does that to some degree – but it’s as well to be clear that that’s what’s going on.

Also of course that’s emphatically not necessarily a bad thing. It can be an excellent thing, even the best thing. Waking people up out of their apathetic slumbers, bringing injustices to their attention, inspiring them to want and demand changes – that can be one of the most moving and valuable things humans can do. Think William Lloyd Garrison, John Stuart Mill, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. But it can also be the other thing – think Pope Urban II, Savonarola, Luther, Hitler, Paisley, Khomeini, bin Laden. Sometimes apathetic slumber is infinitely preferable to wakefulness. So one ought at least to be attentive to such things, and not simply to assume that all mentions of the indignation of some ‘community’ or other is automatically justified and righteous.

I have a profound inner knowledge of all this, a source of deep insight and intuition and wisdom, on account of how I’m a genius at manufacturing and then wallowing in grievance myself. To put it another way, I’m a petulant brat. Perhaps it comes from being the youngest child – hmm? (Of course if I were the middle child I would say it came from that, and if I were the eldest, that it came from that. Anything will do.) I mean after all, you know – my sister and brother did get to put their feet on the sofa when I didn’t. Therefore I get to whine and pout whenever I feel like it for the rest of my life. Right? Of course.

It’s the old Smothers Brothers (yes I know hardly any of you will know what that is, never mind that) recurring line ‘Mom always liked you best,’ which for some reason always made me laugh like a drain. I suppose because it’s about sibling rivalry, and as I said, I have this deep insight into sibling rivalry. It’s a useful corrective, the line is. Whenever I have a bad manifestation of Adult Onset Transferred Sibling Rivalry-Positional Jealousy Syndrome, I simply say to myself, ‘[Insert name here] always liked you best,’ laugh maniacally, and become magically sane again.

Well maybe not sane, exactly, that’s probably expecting too much, but in the manner of Bertha Rochester, a little quieter.

As I promised or threatened yesterday, more on the ‘attempt by various well meaning people to legislate religious hatred as a ground for prosecution on the same basis as racial hatred,’ as Meghnad Desai put it in The Independent. Desai also thinks it’s a bad idea. Good, that. Let’s hope many people think so and say so.

A secular tolerant democracy needs to get away from privileging religion as a mark of citizenship rather than giving it a special status. The Anglican Church needs to be disestablished and its privileges such as the Blasphemy Law removed. Human rights should adhere to one’s humanity regardless of special characteristics. In a truly equal society we will all be citizens protected under the law, regardless of our race, colour, gender. To progress to that state we need to reduce, not increase, divisions. We need to put equality in the public sphere as a top priority rather than enshrine separatenesses into our law.

Yes, and there’s more to it than that. Religion should not be protected the same way race and gender are, because religion is not a given, it’s not inherited. There seems to be a strange Lamarckian thinking going on here, that insists on thinking of religion and race as the same kind of thing. And that kind of thinking leads to a discouraging kind of identity-entrenchment if not identity-imprisonment – as if one is never allowed to escape from or simply leave or change the situation one is born to. But people aren’t born Muslims or Christians, they are raised as Muslims or Christians. The tensions between separateness and equality that Desai refers to, tensions between identity and universality, only get tenser if contingent, chosen, cognitive categories – religion, politics, systems of thought – are treated as part of our DNA.

Johann Hari makes a similar argument here. And a blogger I haven’t read before says what I’m always saying:

But religion must be protected, because it’s special, it’s spiritual, it’s precioussss. Why do we draw a ring around religion to prevent it being questioned? Because it wouldn’t last five minutes in a straight fight with logic and reason.

Precioussss indeed. And part of the problem with that of course is that the more people are told that their religion is precioussss and must not be criticised sharply, the more they believe it, and we get a nice self-reinforcing grievance-hugging circle going. Let’s not do that.

And Anthony’s post at Black Triangle informs us that Rowan Atkinson criticised this bright idea the first time it came up, after September 11.

Some of the criticism at the time came from comedians. The debate was started by Rowan Atkinson when he wrote a letter to The Times, saying he had spent “a substantial part of my career parodying religious figures from my own Christian background”. The Blackadder star was also responsible for a sketch in which footage of Muslim worshippers bowing in a mosque was accompanied with a voice-over stating “The search goes on for Ayatollah Khomeini’s contact lens.”

Now, how do we know whether Blunkett and the judges would think that was ‘sensible’ or not? Hmm? We don’t. So let’s not risk it, okay? Let’s let A Devil’s Chaplain and Why I Am not a Christian and Why I Am not a Muslim and, indeed, The Satanic Verses sit on the bookshelves in safety. Okay?

Wow – that was scary. I just listened to David Blunkett on the Today programme, talking about this new law against inciting hatred against religion. It’s – let’s see – 3:30 in the morning in the UK, so a new Today will be starting in two and a half hours, and I think the archive is only good for one day – until it’s replaced by the next one. So only a few Yanks, if anyone, will likely listen to this, but I’m going to stick it in here anyway.

Update: Oh, the link does still work. I was wrong about ‘Today’s’ archive. So listen – it’s scary stuff.

Because it really is quite disgusting. He wants unity and community and tolerance, and he doesn’t want us expressing strong opinions about religion if they might get in the way of unity. Of course, we’re allowed to express opinions about religion – as long as they’re sensible. He actually said that. Oh I see – you can say anything you like as long as it’s sensible. Oh that’s all right then.

He was very ridiculous, too – accused John Humphreys (was it? I think) of playing chess, of just trying to win at some silly game, but in fact he did a very good job and asked serious questions, that I for one wanted to hear the answers to. It’s not a game! Being threatened with losing the right to criticise religion freely is not a damn game!

As I said – scary. And thanks to Anthony Cox of the excellent Black Triangle for alerting me to this ridiculous story.

More tomorrow.

Okay, that does it. I’m going to have to put my foot down. (Ooh, scary.) I’m going to have to get all authoritarian and domineering – all prescriptive instead of descriptive. There’s no help for it.

There was a discussion on Crooked Timber the other day about the odd usage whereby ‘argue that’ means the opposite of what it means. The example that caught Harry’s attention was this one: ‘Though few would argue that children should be protected from exposure to Internet pornography, COPA, the law designed to protect them has been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.’ You see the problem? It’s confusing, and stupidly confusing – you realize (from the context) when you get to the end of the sentence that it means the opposite of what you took it to mean when you were in the middle of it. The fool who wrote it meant ‘few would dispute or disagree that’, not ‘few would argue that’. It is stupid and bad, especially with a sentence as long as that because you have plenty of time to think it means one thing so then when you realize it means (because of a silly mistake by the writer of it) the opposite you have to go back and re-understand the sentence. What a waste of time and effort.

Right. Few sensible people would argue I mean disagree that that’s a mistake worth not making, because it causes confusion. Or you would think few sensible people would disagree, but actually some would. Some would say that we can figure out the meaning from the context. Well – yes, sometimes, but at the price of extra effort, which is not normally the goal of using words, so why do it? Isn’t it better to use words to mean what they mean rather than what they don’t mean? Is there some benefit in forcing people to puzzle over the meaning of a word when it ought to be quite straightforward and clear? Rather than guessing at the meaning from context, isn’t it better to know the meaning because the right word was chosen? It seems better to me. Why write or say ‘I’m going to the North Pole tomorrow, I hope it won’t be too hot,’ and expect your readers or hearers to figure out from the context that by ‘North Pole’ you happen to mean Atlanta?

And besides, it’s not even true that it’s always possible to figure out the meaning from the context, and in the case of this particular idiotic usage, it can be impossible, and the meaning of everything one is saying can be entirely misunderstood. This isn’t a mere nuance or shade of meaning. It’s more like standing up in court and saying ‘Guilty’ when you mean ‘Not guilty’ or saying ‘That’s true’ when you mean ‘That’s false.’ Basic. And I’ll give you an example – the example that made me say ‘That does it’ and decide to do this N&C. The example was mentioned at the bottom of that thread at CT. It’s from Matthew Yglesias.

It’s one of the fixed-points of the American national security discourse that it would be A Very Bad Thing if Iran had nuclear weapons. And I won’t argue that it would be preferable for them not to go nuclear.

Since I’ve prepared you with all this ranting, perhaps it won’t seem as bad as it is. But it is just hopeless. The reader has to think too much to figure out what the hell he means. Except I suppose not the reader who has become wholly used to this mistake, but then won’t that reader be confused when ‘argue’ is used to mean ‘argue’ instead of ‘dispute’? No, probably not, because the people who use argue to mean both argue and dispute have only a very hazy grasp of what anything means. Maybe to them ‘argue’ means argue, dispute, laugh, ice cream, hair pin, Ferrari, smoke, armadillo, popcorn, shoe. Whatever. But people like that don’t read B&W. So here’s my foot down. Nobody gets to use ‘argue that’ to mean dispute. Period.

Here we go again. What is it about Judith Butler that makes people come over all delusional? That causes them 1) to exaggerate her fame and celebrity and stardom and name-recognition in an utterly grotesque manner and 2) causes them to overestimate her real as opposed to apparent or fame-related importance, interest, originality, ‘insight’, profundity, originality, and brilliance?

Well, I suppose one answer is, shall we say, a certain lack of nous. At least on the evidence of this article in Salon that seems to be one answer. [Note: you have to click through a brief advert to read article.] For instance there is the sentence ‘Butler even made headlines in the New York Times when she won an award for “Bad Writing” — writing that was too theoretically obtuse, a trademark of postmodern critique.’ Oh dear. That freshman Comp mistake of conflating ‘obscure’ and ‘abstruse’ and thus saying ‘obtuse’ when it’s not at all what one means. That’s embarrassing (doesn’t Salon have editors?), especially coming from someone who is in such a frenzy of excitement over Butler and her way with language. Of course it’s also pretty funny. Yes, a trademark of ‘postmodern critique’ is indeed that it is way too ‘theoretically obtuse’ but I bet you didn’t mean to admit it!

And there’s also the fact that Nussbaum’s famous takedown of Butler was not in the Atlantic Monthly. (Were all the editors in the Hamptons that week, or what?) So, who knows, maybe the answer to the question in this case is just that that’s what one does for a sloppy puff piece. But all the same, the level of coercive flattery is remarkably high.

These were the Culture Wars, and fighting on the front lines were tenured humanities professors from America’s elite universities, proponents of what has come to be known simply as Theory. Armed with the insights of postmodern philosophy, they shocked and awed through their intellectual acrobatics…

Hmm. Wars, fighting, front lines, armed with – yeah, right. Muy macho. And insights, intellectual acrobatics that shocked and awed. In your dreams. And that sly bit about ‘what has come to be known simply as Theory’ – no it hasn’t ‘come to be known’ as that, the ‘Theorists’ themselves have done their best to force the rest of the world to think of what they do as ‘simply’ ‘Theory’, by calling it that three times in every sentence. And yet still, the only people who think that what English and comp lit teachers do is ‘Theory’ are – wait for it – English and comp lit teachers. And the writers of articles like this one.

…author of the now classic Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, one of the defining works of queer theory…academia’s equivalent of a platinum album…her seminal work…provocative political essays…immense success…there was even a fanzine, Judy!, printed in her honor…fellow academics, who may or may not have envied her popularity…

And then we move directly to mention of the Nussbaum article. You know, I really, really doubt that Nussbaum has the faintest shred of envy of Butler’s putative popularity. I really strongly doubt that Nussbaum would prefer to have written the books Butler wrote rather than the ones she herself wrote. I know I wouldn’t. I know if I could wave a magic wand and have written either, say, The Fragility of Goodness or Sex and Social Justice, or Butler’s Collected Works, I would not choose the latter. No verily, not even if I could be a ‘superstar’ by doing so, nor would I bother envying Butler her supposed stardom, any more than I envy Britney Spears hers.

That sounds like just mockery but it isn’t; there’s a real point behind it. There’s something badly wrong with the kind of thinking that mixes up fame with quality – that gets in such a fever of excitement over Butler’s superstardom and popularity that it becomes quite unable to see that her actual books are not particularly good. In fact it’s just another version of the kind of thing we were looking at the other day: of groupthink and social pressure, coercion and majority opinion-mongering. (It’s especially ironic since another basic idea of the article is that ‘Theory’ and its epigones are Outsiders, radicals, embattled martyrs of thought, nonconformists.) It’s such a basic point – popular is not the same thing as good, majority opinion is not the same thing as truth. And the attempt to admire people for being hugely popular and radically nonconformist at the same time is something of a mug’s game, frankly.

And now to be serious again. Or maybe not so much serious as slightly less egomaniacal. The discussion of Michael Moore’s new movie rages on. Or not really rages, perhaps, but several people are talking about it. Todd Gitlin, for example, who has some reservations –

But now a pause for a moment of conscience. Let intellect have its due. Moore cuts plenty of corners, so how good can that be? Compelling? Useful? Moore specializes in hodgepodge. He jokes his way past the rough edges. He’s neither journalist nor documentarian, for he doesn’t set out to discover what he doesn’t already know. To patronize Michael Moore by calling him useful is to give him a pass for shoddy work, sloppy insinuations, emotional blackmail and all–around demagoguery.

I haven’t seen ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ so I can’t comment on that in particular – well I can, of course, and I’ve been known to comment noisily on movies I haven’t seen, but I won’t right now, is what I mean. I haven’t seen ‘Bowling for Columbine’ either. But I watched ‘TV Nation’ when it was on, and I’ve seen the earlier movies – so I certainly do know what Gitlin means. But I also know what Gitlin means later on in the article:

So give Moore a cheer for this…because, in the thick of a rolling political emergency, he’s packing in blue–state crowds and blue–niche–of–red–state crowds and who–knows–what–color–in–purple–state crowds. Fahrenheit 9/11 opened as the highest–grossing nonfiction (some would quarrel with the label, but never mind) film of all time. Its average box office take per theatre beat out – good God – Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ.

Yep. I’m in two minds, I suppose, because I think nonfiction movies ought to be actually nonfiction movies, but on the other hand – the left is so pathetic and hapless and ignored over here, it is very difficult not to rejoice that his movie is packing them in and his books are best-sellers. Very difficult indeed, so difficult that I don’t even try.

The issue is also being discussed at Crooked Timber and Normblog and Crooked Timber again.

That article of Steven Waldman’s has sent me to dear old Alexis de Tocqueville, the darling percipient frog that he is. Because Waldman’s whole schtick in that article is just exactly the kind of thing Tocqueville, and, inspired by him, John Stuart Mill, had in mind. The old majority opinion trick – the old ‘We all think this so you’d better think it too or else, and never mind whether it’s true or not just shut up and think what you’re told.’ I actually don’t think Waldman is really talking about Kerry there, I think that’s just a pretext – a disguise, a mask, a beard for what he really wants to say, which is that Most Americans believe in God and so all of them ought to and they should be subject to non-stop social pressure and accusations of elitism, coastalism, intelligentsia-wannabeism, and any other kind of thought-crime we can think of if they refuse. (Waldman for instance is toying with the idea that people who refuse to believe are racists, because a lot of African-Americans are believers. He doesn’t actually say as much, but the implication is there, like a faint but bad smell.)

So here is some wisdom from Democracy in America, Volume I chapter 15.

The authority of a king is physical and controls the actions of men without subduing their will. But the majority possesses a power that is physical and moral at the same time, which acts upon the will as much as upon the actions and represses not only all contest, but all controversy…
In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger of an auto-da-fe, but he is exposed to continued obloquy and persecution…He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort which he has to make, and subsides into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth…
Monarchs had, so to speak, materialized oppression; the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind as the will which it is intended to coerce.

1835, this was published. Isn’t it interesting how consistent we are.

Absolute monarchies had dishonored despotism; let us beware lest democratic republics should reinstate it and render it less odious and degrading in the eyes of the many by making it still more onerous to the few…
…there can be no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in America. The Inquisition has never been able to prevent a vast number of anti-religious books from circulating in Spain. The empire of the majority succeeds much better in the United States, since it actually removes any wish to publish them. Unbelievers are to be met with in America, but there is no public organ of infidelity.

Unbelievers are to be met with, that’s still true. But do they fill the newspapers and airwaves? Not on the planet I live on, they don’t. Some of our commenters seem to have found a different planet – and I hope they’re right and I’m wrong. I hope any day now the mass media will fill up with articles and comments urging Kerry to honor the separation of church and state. But, once again, I’m going to avoid breath-holding.

We’ve seen some stupid stuff in the You-Have-to-Believe-in-God department, but this pile of steaming nonsense in Slate is really – well, hard to believe. Get this part, for example:

But in general, most Republicans and most Democrats are pretty religious. The stark differences are at the extremes of each party, and, as so often is the case, the big question is whether the extremes will define the party as a whole. Most Republicans aren’t conservative fundamentalists, although it sometimes seems that way given the proclivities of the leadership. And the Democrats have their own version of that same dilemma, and it’s affecting the most important arena there is-this year’s presidential race: Will Kerry’s Democrats act like the Party of Secularists even if they aren’t?

See? Catch the sly move there? Define secularism as ‘extreme’ – and bob’s your uncle, the job is half done. This is a very, very popular move in US public rhetoric, of course: invent two ‘extremes’ by deciding in the echoing vaults of your own mind that This is the Polar Opposite of That and that therefore the truth of the matter lies between the two. But of course that’s a ridiculous approach for a lot of reasons – reasons having to do with the arbitrariness and artificiality of the categories, just for one thing. But even more, that idiotic formula ignores the need to examine the issue on the merits – on the truth, and on political questions about secular versus religious government.

Of course, that’s not what the author wants to do with this article. He wants to coerce everyone to avoid ‘extreme’ secularism and head for the safe middle with everyone else. Moral blackmail, is what that kind of thing is. David Brooks went in for the same kind of moral blackmail the other day, and Steven Waldman quotes the very line that I quoted in the News link: ‘New York Times columnist David Brooks (who’s still my favorite conservative)) nailed it precisely when he said of his fellow countrymen, “Their President doesn’t have to be a saint, but he does have to be a pilgrim. He does have to be engaged, as they are, in a personal voyage toward God.”‘ But Waldman, of course, quotes it approvingly, whereas I quoted it with disgust. He has to be engaged, as they are, in a personal voyage toward a figment of their imaginations. Oh does he. Notice he’s not required to be engaged in a personal voyage toward Zeus, or Athena, or Ganesh, or Ra, or Ashtaroth – and that in fact if he were, that would not go down very well. Nor is he supposed to be on a trip toward Spock, or Hogwarts, or Julien Sorel, or Hamlet. No, there’s just one literary character that we’re supposed to pretend is not a literary character but Really Real and kindly looking after us in spite of all the evidence that nobody at all is looking after us in any way.

But then the article gets even worse.

First, if Kerry’s uncomfortable with religion then he’s uncomfortable with Americans. Media managers love having him photographed riding a motorcycle because it shows he can connect with regular folks, who apparently all ride motorcycles, too. If Kerry’s really secular, he’s abnormal.

Abnormal? Abnormal?? Is that really what he meant to say? Couldn’t he have chosen a slightly better word or phrase? You know – not like the majority, that sort of thing. Non-conformist, non-majoritarian, different. But abnormal? But. Perhaps it’s useful to know what they think of us.

Second, the fact that people view Bush as a man of faith is very much connected to their viewing him as decisive and steadfast, two of his strongest assets. A man of faith is a man of conviction, and vice versa. So, Kerry’s unwillingness to talk about his faith feeds into one of his great weaknesses, his reputation as a waffler.

Well, see, I would put that quite differently. I don’t admire Bush’s decisiveness and steadfastness, because it’s notorious that he’s unreflective and uninformed – that he prides himself on making snap decisions and then refusing to budge. Well guess what – that’s not always the best way to do things, especially not for someone who’s ignorant and unthinking to begin with. Viewed that way, Bush’s ‘faith’ probably gives him far too much confidence in his own judgment. He thinks God is helping him. Yes, but what if he’s wrong about that? Then that conviction is not such a great idea, is it.

Finally, he needs to talk about his faith because it would strengthen him on the most important issue of the campaign—terrorism…when the country is at war, people appropriately look for signs that the president has real strength. Americans believe that one of the most important sources of inner strength is faith.

One, no they don’t, because I’m an American and I don’t. Speak for yourself, pal. Even if 95% of Murkans agree with you, you still don’t get to speak for all of us. And two – inner strength is another one of those dual-edged swords, isn’t it. We can all think of some other people who got a lot of inner strength from their ‘faith’ too, can’t we. Enough inner strength to go to flight school, and buy plane tickets, and get through security with their box cutters, and – you know. No thanks. I prefer the kind of ‘inner strength’ (whatever that really means, in fact) that’s based on open eyes and rational thought.