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

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

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

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

Well just read them all. Greetings, No Credentials.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just so. Then Dsquared answered:

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

Then Harry answered that:

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

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

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

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

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

So what are they talking about?

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

Something about George Bush.

Ah, Rousseau. Cool.

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

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

Oh look, George Bush again.

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

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

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

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

George Bush, kind of.

George Bush.

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

George Bush.

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

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

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

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

Pretty darn stupid. He’s got that right.

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

Here’s some good stuff:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.