Month: January 2005

Much as I hate to, I have to disagree with Norm on this one. I think he’s misrepresenting what Dawkins said, with the annotation about the depth and finesse of the adolescent secularist. I don’t think Dawkins is making a shallow point at all, or that he’s expressing a flip certitude, or that he’s being callous about the deaths and griefs of others. On the contrary. (I say that partly because I remember his reaction to September 11 – there was certainly plenty of emotion behind that contribution.) The deaths and griefs are precisely the point. It cuts two ways, this business of clutching at God after a tragedy: yes some people get consolation from the thought of God, but at the price of getting consolation from exactly the guy who caused the tragedy. I think part of Dawkins’ thinking here is that that’s not really a consolation – that there’s a core of bitterness to it. Think of it this way: there you are, minding your own business, harming no one, and suddenly in comes a huge guy who beats you up, knocks your house down, kills all your relatives and friends, poisons your water supply, and trashes all the roads so that you can’t get help. A Job number, in short. Or a Banda Aceh number. You lie there on the ground crying, in pain and fear and agonizing grief. Then the huge guy comes and sits down next to you – and in desperation you crawl into his lap and he cuddles you and says ‘There there.’ And you feel ever so slightly consoled.

Is Dawkins really being so very brutal and callow to suggest that it actually might be more consoling to realize that nothing conscious caused the earthquake to happen? Epicurus wouldn’t have thought so, Lucretius wouldn’t have thought so. That was the very essence of Epicureanism: pointing out that fear of the gods was an unnecessary source of misery. Part of the core of bitterness in having to turn to God for consolation after a disaster is the knowledge that God let the disaster happen. Yes, people do it, and it no doubt works for some (if they can comparmentalize with enough rigour, so that they forget that the God they’re turning to for comfort is the same one who made them so unbearably miserable and bereaved), but why can’t Dawkins genuinely think that a naturalistic explanation of disaster is also comforting because it’s impersonal? And that is what he says, after all.

Of course, if you can derive comfort from such a monster, I would not wish to deprive you. My naive guess was that believers might be feeling more inclined to curse their god than pray to him, and maybe there’s some dark comfort in that. But I was trying, however insensitively, to offer a gentler and more constructive alternative. You don’t have to be a believer. Maybe there’s nobody there to curse…Science cannot (yet) prevent earthquakes, but science could have provided just enough warning of the Boxing Day tsunami to save most of the victims and spare the bereaved…And if the comforts afforded by outstretched human arms, warm human words and heartbroken human generosity seem puny against the agony, they at least have the advantage of existing in the real world.

I don’t find that at all flip, or unattractive, or like an adolescent; in fact I find it rather moving.

This is a depressing and disturbing article. And of course it’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s not just France, obviously, it’s women all over the world, who have miserable coerced restricted cramped threatened lives. A thought we don’t like to dwell on, since there’s not a lot we can do about it. But a thought all the same.

Horror stories of what happened to girls who tried to fight their families circulated in the projects. Yildiz knew of girls who had been tricked by their parents into going on a vacation to Turkey or Algeria, only to find themselves being turned over to the families of their new husbands…The French press, with its need to reconcile political correctness and the reality of the new demographics, rarely raises one increasingly critical question: How many women in the country actually live in repressive conditions without access to the full rights guaranteed by the republic? If you ask the question at any of the tiny storefront agencies trying to help these women, you will hear a startling number: 70,000. The figure comes from the High Council of Integration, a government agency, and refers primarily to women in forced marriages.

And the French press doesn’t talk about it much? How very unfortunate…

Occasionally a murder case will make the news, but the grisly narratives of most of les femmes des quartiers slip under the radar of Le Monde and the serious talk shows. From time to time a memoir detailing a brutal gang rape in the cités may get published—Samira Bellil’s best-selling Dans l’Enfer des Tournantes is an example—but, for the most part, the life of the women of the cités remains a mystery, an unpopular cause largely ignored by politicians attempting to win the potentially immense Muslim vote. But it is these women who are on the fault line in Eurabia, a mere 30 minutes from the Louvre.Throughout Paris, women are caught in the maw of cultural relativism as the French hesitate to sound intolerant of another culture. “Given how these women are treated, why does no one make a fuss? There is the danger of being accused of racism.”

The article makes clear that a lot of this is also down to the French failure and refusal to integrate Muslim immigrants, and to the elitism of the culture as a whole, which is not interested in the plight of poor people and has no Oprah to draw attention to such subjects. All very depressing, as I said. Just thought I’d mention it.

It can be very difficult to discuss these issues of ‘community’ and cherished beliefs, ‘offense’ and rights, fundamentalism and fuzzy language, without prompting impassioned if inarticulate yells about Robespierre and stigmatization and the like. It can also be very difficult to get a clear statment of why that is – but the thought bubbling away at the bottom appears to be that all this kind of thing is merely more or less covert racism. So it is heartening to read the letter to the Guardian from Pragna Patel, one of the founders of Southall Black Sisters.

As Asian women of Sikh, Muslim and Hindu backgrounds, we have been struggling for many years against attempts to silence our voices in relation to violence against women…We oppose the proposed new law on incitement to religious hatred because it would lend to and encourage the culture of intolerance that already exists in all religions. We have no doubt that it would be used as a weapon to suppress dissent within our communities, particularly those who are more vulnerable and powerless. Until we see greater equality and increased accountability from within, we can no more rely on religious leaders than we can on the state that often appeases them in the name of multiculturalism. It is not just the freedom of expression that is at stake. As in the Rushdie affair, we support the right to dissent because of the ramifications for women in minority communities.

There it is. The benevolent people who urge ‘respect’ for the ‘cherished beliefs’ of ‘communities’ think they are siding with the oppressed and stigmatized, when in fact they are siding with the powerful within those communities against the ‘more vulnerable and powerless.’

Pragna Patel goes into the subject in much more depth in this article on ‘The Impact of Fundamentalism.

In the UK, Hindu revivalism has been quietly gathering strength — a result
of the multicultural politics, a largely de-politicising and
anti-democratic, homogenising process with the effect of co)opting certain
layers of the community, usually business and religious institutions and
individuals into the state apparatus by giving them a voice as ‘authentic’
representatives of their communities. In this way, more radical progressive
voices within the asian communities are isolated…The politics of multi-culturalism with its
tendency to construct Asians as religiously monolithic entities, have also
entrenched and perpetuated class and caste divisions, benefiting
fundamentalist projects in Asian communtities. Muti-culturalism has
therefore successfully avoided a challenge to the divisions of class, caste
and power.

Exactly. We saw that tendency only last week in the coverage of the protest against Behzti: the reports kept referring to the ‘Sikh community’ when they meant that segment of the Sikh community that was protesting against Behzti. Why should Sikhs (or Hindus or Muslims) be monolithic? Why are they so readily presumed to have exactly the same opinions on matters of controversy? Why do so few reporters even think to ask? Why is the coverage so formulaic and mindless?

In India
the impact of Hindu fundamentalism has been particularly devastating for
women, for example the revival of sati practices and the attempt to
universalise the Hindu personal laws are perceived to be integral to the
new Hindu identity. The VHP has been very vociferous in demanding that the
Hindu personal code should be applicable to all…The law in
Britain, in relation to marriage, divorce and child custody matters, has
become a particularly fertile ground for fundamentalists of all hues. Much
of the day to day casework of Southall Black Sisters and other Asian
women’s groups bears witness to these developments – where the law and the
welfare system have become effective arenas in which fundamentalists and
orthodox leaders attempt to assert the precedence of religious and
traditional customs over rights and remedies laid down in civil family law.

Patel is a lawyer, she does this casework herself, so she knows what she’s talking about. Good ‘community’ stuff – which so often boils down to men maintaining their control of women. So ten cheers for the Southall Black Sisters; let’s hope their work goes well and soon becomes unneeded.