Tam Dalyell, UK MP and father of the House of Commons, may not be fashionable, but I’m pretty sure he has “nonsense” inscribed on his forehead. At the end of March, he had this to say about Tony Blair:

I…believe that since Mr Blair is going ahead with his support for a US attack without unambiguous UN authorisation, he should be branded as a war criminal and sent to The Hague.
The Guardian, March 27th 2003

Okay, so maybe there will be one or two Baathists reading this who will think that this is not such a bad idea. But I wonder what they will think about Mr Dalyell’s latest offering in today’s Observer/Guardian:

My view is that, depending on the inquiry, they [Campbell and Blair] have got to reflect on their positions. I am not at this moment asking that the Prime Minister resign, but it may be that, after a few days, he will feel he has to move aside for someone else. It could not be graver for him.
The Observer/Guardian, July 20th 2003

So we have the situation where Mr Dalyell seems to believe both that Mr Blair should not immediately resign*, but should be branded a war criminal and sent to the Hague for war crimes. Excellent! It’s always good to hear that war crimes do not necessarily warrant one’s resignation. Also it’s pleasing that the intellectual Left are resurgent again…

*Yes, yes, I know he’s talking about a different issue, but if you think about it closely, you’ll see it doesn’t alter the logic here.

Well here’s a turn-up for the books. Plagiarism now. Someone has helped himself to the article I wrote for In Focus recently, ‘What Is Elitism?’ and posted it on a philosophy forum without so much as a by your leave. Not a word about B and W, not even a shy mention of the fact that he hadn’t written it himself. Well except the dopy last sentence, he may have written that; I certainly didn’t. But I bloody well did write the rest of it.

I’ve been emailing him on the subject, but answer came there none. He did append a vague (and highly overdue) remark to the effect that ‘a version’ of this article appeared somewhere or other, naming two places where it damn well did not appear and not mentioning the one where it did, which he knew perfectly well, since I’d just written him about it! It’s quite funny really. In a maddening kind of way. So then, apparently realizing that hadn’t quite mollified me, he helped himself to yet another B and W item and posted that! He did say it was from B and W this time, but without a link, without permision, and in its entirety, which unless you have permission (did I mention that he doesn’t?) is a violation of copyright. Even funnier!

A kind reader emailed me about all this, or I never would have known. Unfortunately it’s not possible to expose and ridicule the plagiarist on the forum, because as my correspondent told me, he is the moderator and manager, and posts go through him instead of being posted directly (odd arrangement). So he simply (surprise!) doesn’t post them. I’ve written to the server, but who knows how long that will take to do any good. So I just thought I might as well expose and ridicule him here in the meantime.

A UN representative says the UK government is breaching the United Nations convention on children’s rights by imposing a targets and testing regime in English schools that ignores their needs. This is an interesting notion, and one is tempted to mock it noisily. There is a right not to be tested? Who knew! If only that right had been discovered when I was twelve! How much more fun I would have had. But perhaps one ought to resist the temptation. But perhaps one still ought to point out some problems with that idea, without actually mocking.

Of course, the whole question of tests and testing is a controversial, endlessly-debated one. There is much to be said for both sides, which is why the debate is endless. There are some inherent tensions in the issue, and all one can do in the end is bite the bullet and choose one or the other. But at least it helps to know what the tensions are.

Article 29 says education should be “directed to the development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential”…”We should drive away from this competitive-oriented uniformity, that all children should be cookie-cutter test-takers.”

Cookie-cutter. Well, possibly, but then again, possibly there simply are things that everyone ought to know, cookie-cutter-fashion? That’s the tension I’m looking at here. There is the educationist, progressive, Deweyish (or perhaps pseudo-Deweyish, because Dewey is notoriously over-simplified and misunderstood and paraphrased, and I in fact have read very little of him) school of thought that says each child is unique and has a unique set of talents and capacities that must be cherished and nourished etc. etc. We’ve all heard the rhetoric, I should think. And surely there is much truth in it. Different people do have different talents, and of course it does make sense to develop the talents people actually have. But then again there is also the school of thought that maintains there are some things that everyone should know, and that’s all there is to it. For reasons having to do with democracy, civic responsibility and participation, a full and adult human life, the value of understanding the world one lives in, the education of future generations, and so on, as well as the more drearily instrumental matter of job skills. So there is a point at which it is not helpful to say little Leslie would prefer to study drawing and football and simply skip math and science and history, thank you. I should know, I leaned on that way of thinking heavily when I was in school. Ooh, I’m a creative type, I read a lot, I’m deep, I don’t need to pay attention or work hard in math class. Huge mistake, and not one to urge on other people, in my opinion.

Right. Here’s an Op-Ed piece by Daniel Dennett that gives one answer to Susan Greenfield’s notion that ‘science-religion ding-dongs’ are a complete waste of time. The anecdote he tells about taking part in a conference at which leading authors, artists and scientists talked to clever high school students, and he at the end of his talk mentioned that he is an atheist.

Many students came up to me afterwards to thank me, with considerable passion, for “liberating” them. I hadn’t realized how lonely and insecure these thoughtful teenagers felt. They’d never heard a respected adult say, in an entirely matter of fact way, that he didn’t believe in God. I had calmly broken a taboo and shown how easy it was.

This is what I keep saying. Majority opinion and rhetoric do have their effects, and do need to be countered (if one disagrees with them, that is). It’s no good just shrugging or sighing and saying as Greenfield says, ‘No one is going to change their views.’ Even apart from the fact that we can’t know that in advance (and Dawkins tells many a story of Bible-raised students thanking him for being the first to explain evolution to them so that they understood and were convinced), there are all the people who already are non-theists but are convinced by the relentless battering of public rhetoric that they’re in a minority of about six people four of whom are insane.

Most brights don’t play the “aggressive atheist” role. We don’t want to turn every conversation into a debate about religion, and we don’t want to offend our friends and neighbors, and so we maintain a diplomatic silence. But the price is political impotence. Politicians don’t think they even have to pay us lip service, and leaders who wouldn’t be caught dead making religious or ethnic slurs don’t hesitate to disparage the “godless” among us.

Just so. That diplomatic silence lets the undiplomatic aggressive god-botherers have it all their own way, with all sorts of sinister consequences for the quality of thought and debate. Counter-theism is not a waste of time.

Science and Religion again. I happened on this odd little item at SciTech Daily. I haven’t read it yet – when I have, perhaps I will comment further – but just on the front page there is a somewhat absurd quotation.

Science can tell us how chemicals bond but only religion can answer the why questions, why do we have a universe like this at all?

Excuse me? Only religion can answer those questions? Er…doesn’t that rather presuppose that religion can answer those questions? And isn’t that a fairly ridiculous presupposition? Answer them how? By making assertions? By telling stories? By making stuff up? At that rate, I can answer those questions too, and so can science, and so can anyone at all. As Hotspur says in Henry IV Part One when Glendower announces ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep,’ ‘Why, so can I, and so can any man, but will they come when you do call for them?’

No, sorry, that kite just doesn’t fly. Naturally science can’t answer the why questions, because there is no answer. It’s childish to pretend there is, and even more childish to pretend that religion has some expertise in the matter.

Update: I’ve read it now, and I should tell you: don’t waste your time. The religious people don’t say anything remotely convincing. Can’t they do any better than that?

And as long as we’re on the subject, why not add a few words from the Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, as well? Especially since it was his kind of atheism (as well as her husband’s) that Susan Greenfield was taking issue with in that interview.

There is ‘Snake Oil and Holy Water’ for instance, in which he quotes a classic bit of Wool in which a psychiatrist says that traditional African healers

are able to tap that other realm of negative entropy–that superquantum velocity and frequency of electromagnetic energy–and bring them as conduits down to our level. It’s not magic. It’s not mumbo jumbo. You will see the dawn of the 21st century, the new medical quantum physics really distributing these energies and what they are doing.

Or the classic ‘Dolly and the Cloth-Heads’, which gives one cogent answer to this question of whether or not it’s a waste of time to attempt to convince religious believers that they’re wrong: consider all the time that is wasted in public discussions of ethical issues because of the convention of including one or several religious leaders to address subjects in which they have no sort of expertise or knowledge.

This has the incidental effect of multiplying the sheer number of people in the studio, with consequent consumption, if not waste, of time. It also, I believe, often has the effect of lowering the level of expertise and intelligence. This is only to be expected, given that these spokesmen are chosen not because of their own qualifications in the field, or as thinkers, but simply because they represent a particular section of the community.

Or there’s this debate or rather discussion between Dawkins and Steven Pinker, which is more interesting than any religious discussion I’ve ever read or heard (not that I’ve heard many, you’ll have gathered it’s not the kind of occasion I rush to attend). Really, it’s an act of kindness to try to explain to religious people that they’re not only deluded, they’ve cut themselves off from a lot of fascinating material. And kindness is a virtue, after all.

I found a rather odd interview with Susan Greenfield the other day. The site is some sort of Christian one, but some of Greenfield’s answers are still a bit strange.

My husband, Peter Atkins, is an atheist of the Dawkins stamp and so I’ve sat through many science-religion ding-dongs, and they strike me as a complete waste of time. No one is going to change their views. The Atkins-Dawkins stance treats science almost as though it were a religion, and evangelically try to convert other people. Meanwhile, the religious person can’t articulate why they believe what they do: they just do.

But people do change their views. Of course they do. Not all people of course, and not every time anyone tries to persuade them to, but some people some of the time. That’s what teaching does, isn’t it, it gets people to change their views. Going from ignorance about something to some knowledge to more knowledge, that’s a change of views right there. And people do indeed change their views about religion, quite often precisely because of reading a book or talking to someone. Ideas do that. And as for the fact that religious people can’t articulate why they believe what they do, they just do…well what of it? If I ‘just believe’ that the sun travels around the earth, what’s wrong with someone teaching me that it doesn’t? Religion isn’t just a vague emotion, it’s a set of truth claims; what’s wrong with scientists and skeptics pointing out the lack of evidence for those truth claims?

So, I don’t believe in God but that is a belief, not some thing I know. I believe I love my husband, but I couldn’t prove it to you one way or the other. How could I? I just know I do. My particular belief is that there is no Deity out there, but I can’t prove it and therefore I would not have the temerity to tell other people they’re wrong. The coinage of proof is not appropriate for belief ­ and Dawkins thinks it is.

But it’s not about proof, it’s about evidence. Naturally it’s not possible to prove there is no Deity out there, just as it’s not possible to prove there’s not an intangible invisible scentless and every other way undetectable by the human senses dragon in my living room – but that doesn’t mean I’m required to believe there is one, or that there are four trillion of them. Yes, I can choose simply to go ahead and believe it. But these ‘science-religion ding-dongs’ are generally about religion as a public matter, and there surely evidence is highly relevant. Religions don’t just sit back nicely and let people believe whatever they ‘just do’, they tell them what to believe, and how to act as well; they go into schools, they publish magazines and books, they go on tv and radio and write for the newspapers, they’re called in to give their opinions on ethical issues. So it seems perfectly reasonable and indeed very useful, in fact vitally necessary, for people who notice the non-existence of evidence for their beliefs, to point that out. And the analogy with loving someone seems to me to be a terrible analogy. People used to ask Carl Sagan that in a truculent manner, too. ‘Do you love your wife? Yes? Well how can you prove that? Can you see it? Huh?’ But what’s that got to do with anything? Again – religions are not just emotions, they make truth claims, claims about the world. Truth claims about the world can and should be tested and queried, surely.

Let’s revisit Deborah Cameron’s article yet again, because judging by the comments on my comments, I didn’t make myself clear. Or perhaps I did and people disagree anyway, or perhaps I’m just dead wrong. But I want to try to clarify one or two points all the same. The disagreement is with what I said about the different value we place (the culture we live in places) on thoughts and feelings. I do think that difference exists, I do think there is a seldom-examined or -questioned assumption that feelings are good, authentic, spontaneous, real, honest, natural, and for all those reasons and perhaps more, better than thoughts. Some readers point out that the distinction between thoughts and feelings is not clear-cut – and I agree with that, I realize it’s not. But I’m talking about the rhetoric rather than the reality. It seems to me it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this particular discussion whether it makes sense to separate and oppose thoughts and feelings, because the point is that that’s what the rhetoric does, that’s what the culture does, that’s what other people do. Tell them to stop opposing feelings and thoughts, heart and head; don’t bother telling me, I already know.

For example, a quotation in Cameron’s book Good to Talk?, from ‘Circle Time’, a bit of advice on ‘teaching interpersonal and communication skills that is used in some British schools’:

Within the circle children are encouraged to talk about their feelings and about problems that may have arisen at school…

Pure boilerplate, of course, and that’s my point. People are always encouraged to talk about feelings, full stop, not about feelings and thoughts. Now, granted, and here is where we probably just have to agree to differ, if I do have to choose one to talk about and say is better than the other, I will choose thoughts. I do think that when the two are separated there is an entrenched cultural habit (blame D.H. Lawrence, if you like) to say and believe that feelings are better, and I would reverse that if I could. But even leaving that aside, even without that disagreement, I still think there is room to notice and ponder and question the complete omission of thoughts. I think that is part of the subtext of Cameron’s article, and I think it’s worth making supertext, that is to say, explicit.

Here is part of that quotation from the article again:

The main premise of the ‘Mars and Venus’ literature is exactly the one restated by BT—that men are far less at ease than women with self-revelation and the verbalizing of emotional states.

Again. There is a whole set of implicit assumptions there. That self-revelation equates to verbalizing emotional states and not cognitive ones. Yes, the two bleed into each other and overlap, of course they do, but then why is emotional the only word used there? If both are involved, why are both not mentioned?

Oh dear, I ought to write a book myself, no doubt, but it would be such an effort.

Well, this is what I’m always saying. This is where anti-elitism gets you. Influential political operatives who are not ashamed to sneer at education.

Why this administration feels unbound by the consensus of academic scientists can be gleaned, in part, from a telling anecdote in Nicholas Lemann’s recent New Yorker profile of Karl Rove. When asked by Lemann to define a Democrat, Bush’s chief political strategist replied, “Somebody with a doctorate.” Lemann noted, “This he said with perhaps the suggestion of a smirk.” Fundamentally, much of today’s GOP, like Rove, seems to smirkingly equate academics, including scientists, with liberals.

And hence with really terrible people. The GOP could of course look at it another way – they could wonder why people with more education tend not to be of their party, they could pause to wonder what that says about their party. They might wonder what people have learned, that tends to make them dislike right wing parties. That would be one reasonable reaction. Or they could do what they are in fact doing, they could be certain in advance that dislike of right wing parties can’t possibly be well-founded and that therefore any activity that tends to promote such dislike must be corrupting and polluting. Hence higher education is a bad thing.

And then of course that has the incalculable added benefit of giving an entirely spurious but tragically convincing aura of populism to the party of tax cuts for the rich, so that people who make too little money even to pay taxes vote GOP all the same in the illusion that the GOP is on the side of Just Plain Folks and against elites. Stark nonsense. The GOP may pride itself on sneering at people with doctorates, but it’s very much in favor of elites.

Now, language is an interesting subject, isn’t it? So much of what we talk about at B and W comes down to language – well it would, wouldn’t it, since we’re talking about what gets written and said in academic ‘discourse’ and ‘texts’. Naturally it’s language, what else would it be, mud pies? But it’s interesting all the same.

I mentioned Deborah Cameron the other day, after hearing her with Richard Hoggart on Thinking Allowed. A friend sent me a link to this article of hers, which is an excellent read. Also quite amusing in places.

In the past, the habit of talking about oneself was almost universally decried as impolite, immodest and vulgar. Today’s experts, by contrast, do not regard self-effacement as a virtue…As BT’s ‘better conversations’ booklet puts it: ‘Unless you’re able to recognise your own feelings, you won’t be able to express them clearly and be open with other people.’

Well, maybe, but so what? What makes us all think that other people want us to be open about our feelings? How do we know they don’t want us to shut up about our wretched feelings and talk about something more interesting? Hurrah for people who are closed, and not only don’t express their feelings clearly, but don’t express them at all. Granted, that’s a slight exaggeration. Here I am expressing a feeling right now: exasperation. I’m very clear and open about it; aren’t you pleased?

Multinational corporations may require their employees to import the American English preference for informality into languages like Hungarian, where the distinction between formal and informal address is more strongly marked in the grammar (and where formal address would be the unmarked choice for the context).

Tell me about it. I often feel like a Martian in my own land. Oddly enough, I don’t like it when complete strangers telephone me to sell me something, and to start things off call me by my first name and ask me how I am. I must be Hungarian then.

Will we all consent to become the caring, sharing, self-reflexive, emotionally literate communicators who are currently idealized in both expert and popular literature? Or might we have our own ideas about what makes it ‘good to talk’?

I have one or two more thoughts on this matter of scientific literacy that we were discussing last month (that is to say, yesterday), inspired by this article on the CSICOP website, which was in turn inspired by a pair of articles in the Guardian.

One thought, which I touched on but in a jokey not to say flippant manner, has to do with how manipulative and touchy-feely and sub-rational it all seems. The public feels this and feels that, and the public feels this or that because we do things to make them feel that way. We hold their hands, we flatter them, we plant moist kisses on their cheeks, we tell them we really value their opinions. Is this not a little creepy? A little like the way we talk to six year olds who need a nap? Or the way advertisers and ‘Public Relations’ experts and real estate agents and political operatives and indeed politicians themselves talk to us? There are books and expensive seminars on how to do that kind of thing, how to tickle people’s sensitivities and nudge their fears and activate their prejudices in order to get them to do what we want. Hitler was good at it and the nice people who sell everyone enormous SUVs are good at it, too, but are those really examples of how we want scientists to talk to us? We all become like poor stupid drugged Linda in Truffaut’s movie version of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ thinking the nice man in the giant TV screen is really talking to her. ‘And what do YOU think, Linda?’ ‘And what do YOU think, Public?’ ‘Montag, look, they’re talking to me, they want to know what I think!’

The other thought has to do with some unexamined assumptions. Or some sacred cows, would be another way of putting it. Especially the assumption that the public already knows enough about science to make decisions about it. All the public, apparently, all six billion plus of us, infants included. How did we get that knowledge? Were we born with it? Is it innate? Do we just kind of breathe it in, or get it by osmosis? Susan Greenfield puts the matter this way:

Or could the “it” be that I was implying, however covertly, a patronising attitude to an otherwise Renaissance general public, who are already, as Turney avows, clear minded and up to speed with the subtleties and problems facing the integration of science with society? This mindset is, of course, in the focus-group-anti-elitist spirit of our age.

Exactly. The public must be universally wise and reflective and knowlegeable enough, because that’s the only decent thing to think. If experience and evidence contradict that happy thought, well, experience and evidence must be elitist, so we’ll just pretend they don’t exist.

I’ve had one or two further thoughts about Deborah Cameron’s ‘Good to Talk’ article.

And the relevance of this to the subject of conversation is that intimacy must be created and sustained to a large extent through a particular kind of talk, involving continuous mutual self-disclosure. The modern cliché ‘they just couldn’t communicate’, proffered as an explanation for the break-up of a marriage or other significant relationship, does not imply that the parties never spoke or that they found one another’s conversation unintelligible. Rather it implies a lack of honesty and emotional depth in their exchanges—a failure by one or both individuals to share their feelings openly and express their true selves authentically.

This is all true, and good stuff, but there’s a further aspect Cameron doesn’t go into (at least in this article). Why is self-disclosure and the authentic expression of our true selves purely emotional? Why is it only feelings and emotions that we’re supposed to reveal, disclose, express, communicate, converse and talk about? When how and why did we decide that the true authentic hidden-until-expressed self is purely emotional? Why aren’t our thoughts and ideas part of our selves too? Why can’t self-disclosure be cognitive as well as or even instead of emotional?

It’s interesting to note, for one thing, that if we did understand the self that way, the tacit or covert preference for the putative female style of communication might disappear.

The main premise of the ‘Mars and Venus’ literature is exactly the one restated by BT—that men are far less at ease than women with self-revelation and the verbalizing of emotional states…But in a culture that places emphasis on self-reflexivity and the creation of intimacy through self-disclosure, it is entirely logical that the (real or perceived) asymmetry between women and men should come to be apprehended as a serious problem. It is also logical that the problem should be seen to inhere primarily in men’s behaviour—for despite the efforts of authors like Deborah Tannen to present the sexes as ‘different but equal’, comments like the one quoted above from BT suggest an implicit common-sense belief in female communicational superiority.

If women are boringly and claustrophobically assumed to be better at communicating their feelings, men are perhaps assumed to be better at communicating about ideas. All too often that is seen as a flaw – a sign of how emotionally crippled and stunted men are compared to honest, open, in touch with their feelings women. Well that’s one way to look at it – but then, another way is that it’s women who are crippled and stunted, unable to get their heads out of the boring egotistical sludge of their own personal feelings and think about something more important.

When how and why did we decide that feelings are better than thoughts? And not only better but also somehow more real, more honest, authentic, internal, of the self? I wonder if it has to do with benevolent impulses toward egalitarianism and inclusiveness. Perhaps we’re afraid that not everyone has much in the way of thoughts and ideas, but we’re pretty sure that anyone can have feelings – it’s simply a matter of ‘getting in touch’ with them. So we convince ourselves that the core of our being is emotions, and that thoughts are some sort of aristocratic artificial overlay, an external frippery and decoration that disappears when the going gets tough; and then we convince ourselves that the core is the part that counts and the overlay is a slightly suspect sophistication or adulteration or pollution. So we end up coercing each other, with the best of intentions, to distrust the cognitive and overtrust the emotional. We get atrophied intellects and hypertrophied feelings. There are some drawbacks to that arrangement, I think.

On second thought, I take it back. That business about incentives and rewards. The fact is I don’t really believe that, or if I do it’s only about 25%, it’s only set about with a mass of stipulations and qualifications and reservations. I don’t so much believe it as see that other people have a point when they believe it. Or perhaps I mean I don’t so much believe it as want not to be a silly fatuous naive wool-gatherer who doesn’t understand how the economy works. I don’t want to have the kind of ideas that, if anyone were ever so stupid as to put them into practice, would immediately reduce the economy to a level with Bangladesh’s. So as a result I tend to concede ground that I don’t really concede. I make dutiful noises about incentives, but they’re only dutiful. Because I don’t believe it, I think a lot of that stuff is pure rhetoric and self-interest, is rich people throwing up a smoke screen to veil the fact that they always want more and more money, whether that’s good for the economy or in fact bloody bad for it. More money for me please even if that does mean that all those tiresome poor people can’t afford to buy anything and so the economy tanks.

And above all I don’t believe money is the only incentive there is. Well I wouldn’t, would I – nobody pays me a dime to do this. Nobody pays me a dime to do most of the things I like to do, I just like to do them. Don’t we all. Do we get paid to look at the sunset, to watch birds, to read Flaubert or Austen, to swim, to go to the theatre? There are such things as intrinsic goods, and intellectual activity is often thought to be one of them. The fact is I don’t really believe that academics at Oxford necessarily become mediocrities just because they don’t have a star system and no one is rushing around to give them a flat overlooking Christ Church meadow and a cottage in the Dordogne. Why should they? If they’d wanted to get rich they would have gone into a different line of work in the first place. Not everyone values money above everything. Academics at Oxford can perfectly well be motivated to write brilliant books and/or teach inspiringly for internal reasons, reasons having to do with thinking the job is worth doing and valuable and interesting. I don’t want to be woolly but I also don’t want to think or even pretend to think that money is the best thing in life.

The Boston Globe has a depressing article about the star system in US universities. Maybe in the great scheme of things it doesn’t matter much, maybe I’m just a Puritan to find it so dreary. But it does seem so Hollywoodish, so rock star-ish, so hype-driven, so silly, so irrational-appeal-based, and hence so anti-intellectual.

“One couldn’t imagine all of this happening in Oxford, where there’s a kind of gentleman’s agreement that we’re all equally brilliant,” Ferguson says in an interview. “It’s extremely bad form to suggest that one person is as vulgar as to be a star.”

Yes…well I know what you’re thinking. You’re picturing a crowd of moss-covered mediocrities in Oxford contentedly trudging along the daily round, boring their students into fits and never publishing anything, but by gum they’re all equal. Fair enough. There is something to be said for making a fuss over people who teach or write better than others; for incentives and rewards. I can see that. But do they have to be so enormously better than everyone else’s rewards?

Star compensation at these “nonprofit” universities can top $200,000 for only a class or two a week, which in turn has widened the divide between haves and have-nots in higher education. Columbia offers fancy apartments with majestic views to woo stars (though not every home is as stunning as Sachs’s town house west of Central Park); meanwhile, part-time faculty who do the bulk of the teaching are forming unions just to fight for cost-of-living wage increases.

Philip Cook and Robert Frank wrote an excellent book called The Winner-Take-All Society explaining how these markets work and also why they’re not entirely desirable. All very academic.

This month is rather empty. A great many N and Cs got erased by the server malfunction. I might eventually put some of them back, if only for my own satisfaction. And the date is really July 27, but I have to call it June to get it in this month.

I do get to have fun, toiling and slaving here at the mills of B and W. I browse Google and sometimes I do find peculiar gems.
This one for example: a review of a book whose very title reeks of fashion: Dis/locating Cultures/Identitites, Traditions, and Third World Feminism. Got all that? You think the author stuffed enough Right On signposts in there for one title? The cute ‘Dis/locating,’ the buzzwords ‘cultures’ and ‘identities’ slammed together with that artful /, and finishing off with a flourish with Third World Feminism. There, that’s all the bases touched, Narayan must have thought in satisfaction. No one can say I don’t know the patois.

And that’s only the title, and only the book under review. The reviewer is such a treat, it’s hard to imagine the author can be quite up to that level. It’s all there, it’s all so very very there, in the very first words. ‘This book is an impressive intervention’ – ooh, an intervention yet. Armed? And impressive besides, imagine. Right, literary critics excuse me ‘theorists’ don’t do anything so tame as write mere books any more, no, they produce interventions. Wouldn’t you think they’d embarrass themselves, giving the game away like that? Do they dress up in Che outfits and parade around the corridors of the English/Philosophy Building looking macho? Do they drive bright red cars and go vrooom vrooom at the lights?

And it (so to speak) keeps it up, too, all the way down the page. Problematic representations of the Other, strategically situates the Third-World female ‘subaltern,’ dominant or as (must get that name in) Spivak says, ‘hegemonic feminist’ (what, because that’s such a dazzlingly brilliant and original phrase that you had to cite Spivak, you couldn’t have said that yourself?) narratives, enacting confrontational praxis…oh Christ, that’s only the first three sentences or so, I can’t bear to do any more. You’ll just have to read it yourselves. It ought to be a parody, it certainly looks like something out of the Jargon Generator, but I don’t actually think it is.

The despotism of the signifier. Feminist colonial discourse analysis. Historically engaged postcolonial hermeneutic. Connection-making apparatuses. No no no, I’ve got to stop! Enjoy, gentle readers.

If you click on the Guardian story link in the ‘Post-Orientalism” entry below, you’ll find it doesn’t work. Here’s why – from the Guardian’s web site today:

A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading “Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil” misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, “The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.” The sense was that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war. The report appeared only on the website and has now been removed.

I wonder whether the Guardian got it wrong because they’d really like it to be right? Nope? Fair enough, I don’t want to be uncharitable, so here’s Jonathan Steele excelling himself in the Guardian instead:

One of the UN’s biggest worries is the future of the oil-for-food programme. Around 16 million people, more than 60% of the Iraqi population, depend on it. At the moment the Iraqi government imports food commercially through a UN-supervised programme. It is distributed by Iraqis via 45,000 outlets in every big city in a scheme which is accepted even by the US and the UK as fair and efficient.

Once the first shot is fired, distribution is likely to stop because drivers will fear going into a war zone. The Iraqi government last month gave people two months’ ration but aid agencies say the poorest Iraqis have sold some of it. Even if they do not flee their homes under bombing raids, they will be at risk of hunger. UN officials will be withdrawn from Iraq in advance of the bombing, and there is no guarantee when their programmes will resume. The World Food Programme appealed for $23m to finance “an initial contingency plan” which would stockpile enough food just outside Iraq to give meagre rations for 900,000 people for 10 weeks. “So far only enough is in place for 500,000 for 10 weeks. We have received only $7.5m,” said Trevor Rowe, the WFP spokesman. “We may have to feed more than 10 times the number we appealed for, that is, 10 million people.”
Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, March 10th

And here he is again a month later:

The Pentagon’s failure to plan for the “day after” adds to the anger. Making the time-honoured mistake of re-fighting the last war, the only preparations they made were for food. Air-dropping humanitarian parcels or delivering food by road provides good propaganda images. In a country that had suffered from three years of drought like Afghanistan it also made sense.

Washington did not seem to know Iraq was different. The one thing people are not short of is food, thanks to the monthly rations of basics such as rice, sugar, cooking oil, tea and flour that every Iraqi receives, regardless of income. In a sanctions-damaged economy, 60% rely on the state-run programme and on the eve of war Saddam Hussein sensibly issued up to five months rations in one go.

Instead of concentrating on food aid, the US ought to have prepared teams of water and power engineers, as well as flown in extra troops to prevent the postwar looting that breaks out in every country when regimes collapse (there should have been no surprise here).
Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, April 21st

What a guy!

I’ve been reading Richard Dawkins’ A Devil’s Chaplain lately. It’s not available in the States yet, but my colleague sent it to me from the UK. It’s great stuff, of course – Dawkins is a brilliant polemicist, essayist, explainer, persuader. His review of Sokal and Bricmont’s Intellectual Impostures/Fashionable Nonsense is hilarious (though of course it could hardly help it, having such rich material to work with). And Dawkins mentions one fact in passing which I feel compelled to make a fuss about.

Sokal was inspired to do this [his famous hoax] by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition: the Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, an important book which deserves to become as well known in Britain as it already is in America.

Indeed it does, and I have reason to know that it’s not and it can’t be, because it’s damn well not in print there. It’s an outrage! There you all are in the UK, lulled into a false sense of security, calmly and cheerfully going about your daily lives not realizing what demented foolery gets published and admired in the US. It’s worth knowing about, because it’s influential stuff – it’s a meme, in fact. All the knowing sneers and/or impassioned tirades about the social constructedness and patriarchalism and Eurocentrism and horrid cold rationalism of science that one hears on every hand, they come from somewhere, and Higher Superstition gives a detailed account of where that somewhere is. It ought to be in print. At once, please.

My colleague and I have been discussing (or arguing about, if you like) the
Guardian story which reports that Paul Wolfowitz said the Iraq war was about oil. I have more doubts and qualms about the war than Jeremy does, but then as he concedes, I live in the US whereas he lives in the UK: the differences in our respective heads of state could account for our different views all by themselves. But one thing we do agree on is the irredeemable awfulness of Islamofascism, and that there is no proper opposition to it (with, as he points out, the honourable exception of Christopher Hitchens) on the Left.

Why is that? I think it has to do with the way the value of tolerance and acceptance is taken to trump all other values, and the way tolerance is then taken to mean never criticising or questioning. Above all it is taboo to say harsh things about Islam, because most Muslims are in the Third World: therefore it must be Eurocentric and colonialist and (worst of all) Orientalist to say there could be anything wrong with Islam, particularly so-called ‘moderate’ Islam.

Ibn Warraq says in an article on this site that Edward Said’s book Orientalism has a great deal to do with this reluctance to be skeptical or hostile towards Islam on the part of Western Leftist intellectuals. Therefore I was very interested to learn that Azar Nafisi talks about Said in her Teaching Lolita in Teheran, as mentioned in this interview in the Atlantic.

You include an ironic anecdote in your book, about an Islamist student who quoted Edward Said to denounce certain decadent Western authors—an anti-modernist invoking a postmodernist. But haven’t these sorts of contradictions been part of the revolution since the beginning, in the collaboration between the Islamists and the radical left?

Unfortunately (in my view at least) Nafisi then goes on to say that the great divide in Islamic society is not between religion and secularism. Well if it isn’t it ought to be, I think. A non-fundamentalist Islam would be vastly preferable to a fundamentalist one, but a secular society would be better than even a moderate theocratic one. No argument on that around here.

Well I’m always telling people, in my annoying way, that ‘negative’ doesn’t mean bad or critical or disapproving or pessimistic or skeptical or cynical or hostile. That if you want to call something any of those, you should use those words, and not the word ‘negative’ which 1. doesn’t mean any of those and 2. if you do use it as a pointless euphemism for those other words is vague and woolly and non-specific and confusing. By the same token ‘positive’ doesn’t mean approving or friendly or optimistic or patriotic or cheerful or warm or helpful. There’s a bizarre kind of covert thought-control going on in the translation of all words conveying disagreement and dissent into ‘negative’ and all words conveying acceptance and approval into ‘positive.’ We are being told that it is bad and wrong to dislike anything, which means we are also being told that it’s wrong to judge and analyse at all, because it’s impossible to judge and analyse properly if an unfavourable verdict is ruled out in advance.

I’ve been droning about this for years, as I say, and now here’s an amusing example. Richard Lewontin uses the word to mean what it does mean, in a review in which he mentions a book by Evelyn Fox Keller, and Fox Keller understands it to mean what it doesn’t mean and rebukes him for it, whereupon he has to explain (without actually quite saying so) that he was using it to mean what it means, not what it has come to mean lately in mush-speak.

My reference to Keller’s “negative view” of a unified theory of biology was in no way meant to imply that she places a higher value on one kind of explanation than on another. Her view is negative in the simple sense that she characterizes the attempt to create a unified theory as having failed up till now.

See what happens when words go all fuzzy? Confusion, misunderstanding, corrections and corrections of corrections in newspapers. Terrible business. Quite funny though.