Month: February 2006

I suppose you saw that shockingly bad review by Leon Wieseltier of Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell in the NY Times last Sunday? It’s so awful I keep blinking with surprise when I read it. It’s not just that it’s incompetent, as Brian Leiter points out, it’s that the tone is so unpleasantly abusive, spittle-flecked, bad-mannered. It is, to use a pompous term that nevertheless seems to fit, inappropriate.

For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett’s book…In his own opinion, Dennett is a hero. He is in the business of emancipation, and he reveres himself for it…Giordano Bruno, with tenure at Tufts!…Dennett is the sort of rationalist who gives reason a bad name…Dennett flatters himself that he is Hume’s heir…In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism…What this shallow and self-congratulatory book establishes most conclusively is that there are many spells that need to be broken.

It’s downright childish. It’s embarrassing. And that’s even apart from the substance; just the stupid schoolyardy ‘he thinks he’s such a big deal’ taunting makes Wiesltier look – completely ridiculous, and loutish besides. What can he have been thinking? Did he have a fever? And what was the Times thinking?

And then, more straightforwardly, there’s more of the confusion about free speech, in which people compare unlike things and then stand back triumphantly and say ‘See?’ No, we don’t see, because the two cases are different, not the same, so there’s nothing to see.

In the past few months, Europe has been flexing its muscles as a guarantor of freedom of expression – both in the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, and before that in its criticism of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk for raising the subject of the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in the early 20th century. What a delicious irony that a Europe so sniffy about Turkish justice when it came to Pamuk should end up jailing another writer for three years for delivering his opinion on a different act of genocide.

No, that’s not a delicious irony, or even a nasty one that tastes like burnt okra, because the Pamuk and Irving cases are different. Different. Can you say different? I knew you could. Pamuk was on trial for saying a genocide that did happen, did happen; Irving was sentenced for saying a genocide that did happen, did not happen. There are two differences there. One, Pamuk was telling the truth, and Irving was lying, and two, denying a genocide that did happen is a kind of threat to the survivors, whereas asserting a genocide that did happen is not. Which is not, repeat not, to endorse either the Austrian law against Holocaust denial, or the sentence; it is simply to say that the two cases are not only not parallel, they are on the most crucial issues, opposites. So it seems very silly to try to treat them as parallel.

Lot of people around saying weird things today. Is there something in the water?

Andrew Brown for instance. He seems to change direction with every paragraph, and much of what he says in the process seems snide and silly.

It is hard being an atheist with a sense of proportion. No one in this country will persecute you and it’s not really very hard to disbelieve in God, but the temptation to strike attitudes in front of the universe persists…Thus, Daniel Dennett writes early in this book: “I for one am not in awe of your faith. I am appalled by your arrogance, by your unreasoning certainty that you have all the answers” – and he’s not talking about Richard Dawkins.

Oh, ha ha, that’s so amusing. But what is so dang arrogant about Dawkins? He’s sometimes blunt (and a good thing too), but arrogant? Not particularly, not unless you simply assume that it’s arrogant to think there’s not much reason to believe religion gets things right. But why assume that? And why call Dawkins arrogant when one could call Ted Haggard arrogant instead? But there’s this dopy truism that Dawkins-is-arrogant, so it has to be trotted out to strike attitudes whenever religion is criticised. Temptation to strike attitudes yourself.

So, after the preliminary pep-talk to the choir, he gives a very forceful and lucid account of the reasons why we need to study religious behaviour as a human phenomenon: apparently this programme comes as a tremendous shock to those Americans who have never heard of Hume, William James, or even Terry Pratchett.

Yes – and? Your point is? Surely not that such Americans don’t exist? So what, then?

Dennett understands there are vast differences between primitive or animist religions and the sophisticated beliefs of a modern Jesuit.

Sophisticated – hmm. Sophisticated in what sense?

Richard Dawkins might regard Romney’s professed beliefs as evidence of simple insanity. Dennett sees that their status is more complicated and interesting than that.

Did Richard Dawkins once give Andrew Brown a decayed olive at a dinner party or something? What’s his problem? What’s with all the straw man stuff? Dawkins might regard Romney’s professed beliefs as delusional (and so would I), but as evidence of simple insanity? That looks like a silly spiteful canard, to me.

Few of us in this culture are in favour of fanaticism; but it is obviously possible to be a fanatical atheist, so it turns out to be fanaticism that’s the problem, not religion.

Uh – what? Where does that ‘so’ come from? For that matter, what does that entire sentence mean? It seems to say three quite random unconnected things, while pretending they are somehow linked. The ‘but’ doesn’t make any more sense than the ‘so’ does. Well, who knows, maybe Brown has been chatting with Michael Ruse.

Consider Azam Kamguian in Ibn Warraq’s Leaving Islam, for instance. Page 216.

The very fact that people are forced to abide by laws based on something some god or prophet is reported to have said somewhere is a form of mental violence.

Page 219.

When I came to the West in the early 1990s, I was faced with the fact that the majority of intellectuals, mainstream media, academics, and feminists, in the name of respecting ‘other cultures,’ were trying to justify Islam by dividing it into fundamentalist and moderate, progressive and reactionary…For people like me, the victims of Islam in power, it was suffocating to listen to and have to refute endless tales to justify the terror and bloodshed committed by Islamic movements and Islamic governments in Iran and in the region.

She was tortured in Iran, while verses from the Koran were played in the torture chambers.

Western liberal and left-wing intellectuals have a strong sense of guilt about the West’s past colonial history and are apologetic to the Third World as such. They consider the Third World a given entity, where people are keen to suffer under the rotten rule of Islam, are happy to be deprived of the human civilization in the twenty-first century. To them, women desire sexual apartheid, girls love to be segregated, people hate civil rights and individual freedom in the Third World.

She calls that ‘inverted colonialism.’ One wonders if it’s also inverted colonialism that is causing all this communalism, this insistent shoving of people into certain communities and keeping them out of others, by labeling them as ‘members’ of some and not of others. One wonders, and one wishes people would notice what they are doing, and stop.