Month: September 2004

Oh I don’t know…it’s just that it’s all such an effort, you know? I’m supposed to go to London in a couple of weeks (well not ‘supposed to’ – it was my own idea – but it’s planned and scheduled and so on). But…I don’t know…I have so much to do. I should tidy up the living room, and I should hang all my clothes up one of these days, and I ought to wipe the shelves in the fridge. It just all adds up. Plus there’s B&W, and a book to write, and one thing and another. And then a trip on top of that? You have to pack, and make sure you have everything, and go here and go there. And then there are all those hours and hours and hours in an airplane. Maybe I should just stay where I am and get the living room really tidy. There’s that closet, too.

Another interesting pairing. This piece by David Aaronovitch and this one by Ishtiaq Ahmed. They say some parallel things.

Aaronovitch:

When the Muslim theologian was asked to give an example of where the secular concept of human rights might be seen as deficient by other societies, his immediate answer was: ‘Women’s rights.’ Did secularists not understand, he asked, that there were cultures in which women did not want equal rights? ‘How do you know what they want?’ I snapped at him. ‘Have you polled them?’…And this, it seems to me, is what it always boils down to…Why is it that when God speaks through man, he so resolutely demands that women are subordinate?…It is extraordinary how mainstream religions devote themselves to the unequal restraint of women, this restraint acting as the glue that holds their cultures together.

It is, isn’t it. And Ahmed:

This suspicion is confirmed when we remember that the Islamists almost never champion the rights of the exploited and dispossessed and spend most of their time giving vent to anger against the imagined liberation of women. It is alleged to result in laxity of moral standards and thus subversive of Islamic morals.

Women, Dalits, obedience, submission, tradition. It’s important stuff. People who have the whip hand are not always easily persuaded to give it up. And now that they’ve discovered the fine new dodge of calling it Multiculturalism and claiming the victim role themselves – why, their ownership of the whip gets perpetuated a good while longer…

I saw something that made me laugh at Normblog this morning – I mean, I saw something at Normblog that made me laugh. I would never laugh at Normblog, or any other blog. I’m not that kind of person. Yes I am, but I pretend not to be. I am however the kind of person who would laugh at woolly novelists – would and does.

It’s a funny thing about novelists, at least some of them. The ones that have a certain kind of success, and get a certain kind of, what to call it, of cultural standing and credibility as a result. When I say ‘certain kind’ I don’t mean I know exactly what that kind is. Some combination of respectable critical acclaim (winning the Booker certainly doesn’t hurt) and notoriety and popularity. That will be our working definition of ‘certain kind’. Novelists in that category become omniscient. They become wise, and full of insight, and informed on all subjects, and equipped to set everyone straight. Because – ? They have a way with words and a talent for telling stories? I don’t see the connection, myself. It may be the case that some novelists really are well-informed and full of insight, but in the case of this category those qualities seem to be assumed in an odd way – that’s the part that I think is a funny thing.

And Norm’s comment is about a case in point.

But I have to say that even upon this terrain you can come across something so bloody funny that an uncontrollable belly laugh is impossible to avoid. Such is the following item from Jeanette Winterson, author:

I’ll never forgive them about the war. It’s not a women’s issue, it’s a world issue. I am buying a place in Paris because I no longer want to be in the UK full-time. I want to be European, not a piece of the USA.

The war is about her, do you see? ‘They’ have let her down, and she’s jolly well ‘buying a place in Paris’. Byeeee!

That is pretty funny. ‘I’ll show them – I’ll buy a place in Paris! So there!’

And it reminded me of something I meant to comment on several weeks ago, and never got around to. It was about seeing, on two concurrent evenings, Arundhati Roy and Azar Nafisi on C-Span, and what different impressions the two of them made on me, and what if anything that difference is about. Probably nothing really, probably just a matter of personality on their parts and perception on mine. And yet…

The first one was a session of a conference of US sociologists, which for some fairly unfathomable reason was devoted to listening to Arundhati Roy give her opinions on stuff. I didn’t see the beginning (was merely channel-surfing as opposed to deliberately watching), but I saw quite enough of sycophantic admiration on the audience side and smug self-satisfaction on Roy’s. The whole thing was just very ‘I am buying a place in Paris.’

Nafisi was different. Mind you, I’m biased going in – I think Nafisi has something worthwhile to say, and I think what Roy has to say is more mixed (at best). But all the same, Nafisi wasn’t preening, she didn’t keep gazing around in a queenly way as Roy did. She was intense, urgent, impassioned – what she was saying was not about her, it was about what she was saying. Self-forgetful. Not a performance but an attempt at communication. The contrast was interesting.

Update: Martin Amis. He’s another one. I meant to mention him and forgot. Though he neglected to win the Booker – but maybe the early success is the equivalent and has the same effect. At any rate, he has that novelist’s omniscience, such that he feels it necessary to tell us that Stalin was bad, because we didn’t know that until he told us. And he’s a great preener. In fact his memoir has more preening in it than any other book of comparable size I can think of.

by Jeremy Stangroom

I’ve just been sent a review copy of a book called Debating Design. I don’t normally go in for book burning, but I’m tempted. It’s edited by Michael Ruse and, wait for it, William Dembski. It claims to provide a “comprehensive and even-handed overview of the debate concerning biological origins”. And, guess what, there’s a whole section on intelligent design written by the bastards – to quote Norman Levitt – from The Discovery Institute.

Maybe someone could explain to me why Cambridge University Press would publish such a book? If I decided to resurrect the theory of phlogiston, I wonder if I could persuade them that it warranted a book.

Perhaps more to the point, why did Ruse and the other scientists and scientific thinkers agree to particpate in such a project as Debating Design? I don’t entirely agree with the stance taken by scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Steve Jones when they say that they won’t debate with creationists and their ilk. But given that part of the ‘wedge strategy’ of the intelligent design people is to establish the scientific credentials of their enterprise, why participate in a project which might so obviously go towards furthering that aim? That just seems very bizarre. Intelligent design is primarily a political movement, so why give them a political victory?

Okay so if you’re tired of reading about the Dictionary (the Fashionable Nonsense one) then just skip this post. Don’t read it. Not any of it, I mean – because that’s all this one is going to be about. So, fine, you’re still reading, so don’t come complaining to me that it’s about the Dictionary, because I did say.

Although I must say you’re very fussy and demanding if you are tired of reading about it. I mean after all. Look around you. Do you see any advertising? Any PayPal? Any donation box? Any subscription? You do not. Is this place all cluttered up and junky and slow to load like Slate because it’s so full of advertising? It is not. Here I am, all rags and darns and patches, wondering where my next meal is coming from, and you’re tired of reading about the Dictionary? That’s gratitude! Never satisfied, some people –

No no, I’m only joking. You know how I am. Anyway, the point is, the prospects for the Dictionary are looking quite good. We heard awhile ago, in the summer sometime, that it would be in all the branches of Waterstones. That seems like a good sign (as well as of course a good way for lots of people to be able to pick it up and open it and read a bit and shriek with laughter and buy it). Seems like a sign that someone at Waterstones thinks more than four people will find it funny. Okay so that was good, and then last week we heard it’s also going to be at Smiths. That’s an even better sign. Someone at Smiths must think more than eight people will find it funny. Actually what we heard, or what we think we heard, is that it’s going to be featured in one of Smith’s Christmas promotions. But that can’t be right. We must have misheard, we must have missed a ‘not’ or something. A ‘never in a million years’ perhaps. ‘The Dictionary is going to be featured in one of Smith’s Christmas promotions when hell freezes over and Madonna converts to secular rationalism’ – that’s what was said but there was a sudden burst of traffic noise along with machine gun fire, low-flying aircraft, and a blast of heavenly trumpets, just as the clause starting with ‘when’ was uttered – so we missed it. We’re a little bit deaf anyway, and then the sound effects came in. Or maybe it’s the Smiths bit we misheard – maybe the Smith in question is not W.H. Smith but one W.A. (Arnie) Smith who has ever such a nice little bookstall in Slough, along with another (a ‘branch’) that his nephew manages in Luton. Quite busy places, both of them; they get as many as fifteen customers a day sometimes. And they do lovely Christmas promotions.

I thought there were a lot of strange statements (assertions, even) in this review in the New Statesman of a book by some fella named Baggini. Never mind who wrote the book in question, in fact never mind the book itself, which I haven’t read. The point is these odd statements or assertions, which kind of stand alone (which is part of the problem with them, if there is one). They’re odd because Edward Skidelsky (for it is he) doesn’t say why they’re true, why he thinks they’re true, why we should believe them, and because one can instantly think of counter-examples that make them seem quite dubious.

We may be free to give our life any meaning we choose, but this meaning is “valid” only in so far as it is recognised by others. Not for us the insouciance of Bunyan’s pilgrim, who, secure in his love of God, could afford to “care not what men say”. We care desperately what men – and women – say, because there is no longer any higher court of appeal. Failure in this world is absolute. The checkout girl is just a checkout girl, the tramp just a tramp…The terrors of hell have been replaced by the terrors of social and sexual failure.

Well, hang on. Is that true? Who says? Is it really true that if we don’t believe in a deity as a higher court of appeal, we therefore care desperately what people say? And is it really true that we care more than people did who believed (and do who believe) in that deity? Is it really true that in more unquestioningly theistic times, people did not care about social and sexual failure? I can think of a few plays, poems, novels, philosophical dialogues, essays and the like from religious periods, written by believers, that would seem to indicate people cared quite a lot about such things at the very same time as they believed in a deity. The peasant was just a peasant, the servant was just a servant – the curate was just a curate, the doctor was a mere doctor, and so on and so on. Read a single page of Austen or Fielding or Shakespeare or Chaucer or Homer and then try to claim that caring about social status is a novelty.

Remove the transcendental perspective, however, and why should anyone want to be anything other than what society deems valuable? If value is not cosmic, then it is social. The alternative to God is not a world of self-creating Nietzschean supermen, but universal conformity.

Same thing. One, is that true? Two, does history offer any evidence that it’s true? If so, what?

Even apart from the historical question, I don’t see why it should be true. Sure, I can see why social status and What People Say is one source of meaning, but I don’t see why it should be the only one apart from transcendent ones, and Skidelsky never bothers to spell it out. Another case of taking something to be self-evident that isn’t, I guess. He’s convinced of it in his own head, maybe, and doesn’t realize that we might not be, that we might require something further by way of explanation or justification in order to see what he means and possibly agree. (Of course, that may be partly because I’m deeply nerdy myself and I really don’t care What People Say,* but what of that? The world is full of deeply nerdy people. It’s possible that all people are deeply nerdy. That’s sort of a version of the Other Minds problem. We all have the same problem [that’s why it’s a problem], and in that sense we all are nerds, aren’t we. So why not make the most of it and accept our own self-created meanings? Eh? No reason, and to a considerable extent we do.) What of sources of meaning that are neither conformist and status-anxious nor transcendent? What of politics, various kinds of reform, art, learning, sport, adventure, travel? What of philanthropy, the built environment, nature, agriculture, astronomy, engineering, medicine? Don’t people find meaning in all those activities and others like them? Do any of them necessarily entail conformity or status-anxiety? Do not many of them indeed entail their opposites? Independent-mindedness and carelessness of self come in handy for those things, after all.

None of this would matter particularly, except that reducing the possibilities in that way is (surely) one way of trying to persuade people that religion is necessary. And a rather bogus way at that. It’s that old false dichotomy we’re always having shoved at us – without God there is no morality/no meaning/no arbiter of truth/no motivation to feel guilt/no difference between right and wrong. That’s a bad way to argue about facts, as we know, but it’s also not true.

*Yes I know, JS, just never mind, writing doesn’t count, that’s a different kind of thing. Yes it is. Is too. Is.