Month: March 2003

  • Aggressive Contempt for Popular Opinion

    But what makes the journo think he has a right to look at the kitchen when he’s been refused permission? Which is the rude one here?

  • Complacent superiority

    "When asked "How often do you have sex?" Horne replied, "Every
    orgasm is a sacred offering to the universe." When asked if she believed
    in life after death, she replied, "The energy that we are has to go somewhere."
    A witch’s wisdom or wacky Wicca waffle? I’ll let you be the judge."
    Julian Baggini, Bad Moves: The Is/Ought Gap, butterfliesandwheels.com

    Who do we think we are, we guardians of good sense and rationality? In this
    series, I claim to "detail the various ways in which arguments or points
    are made badly, but often persuasively." Presumably, that must mean I think
    my own arguments are made well. Is that confidence or arrogance?

    Butterflies and Wheels itself risks hubris when it sets out to "fight fashionable
    nonsense". It had better be right about what it claims is nonsense and be
    sure not to add to the mass of intellectual trash in the world with its own outpourings.
    And how can it be sure that it is effectively opposing "pseudoscience that
    is ideologically and politically motivated?" Is it claiming its editors are
    not themselves motivated by politics or ideology, or that if they are they can
    nonetheless distance themselves from it?

    The point of raising such doubts is not the non sequitur that no argument is more
    or less rational than any other, or that ideological commitments cannot be at
    least partly set to one side. It is rather a reminder that the pursuit of noble
    ends, such as truth or goodness, is difficult and bound to be accompanied by error.
    However, when one puts oneself on the side of the angels it is all too easy to
    start believing that one has sprouted wings. The result can then be complacent
    superiority: the belief that one is "good" or "rational" and
    therefore immunised against wickedness or poor reasoning. If one starts to believe
    that, or adopt it as an unconscious assumption, then one is in danger of falling
    into just the kind of badness or ignorance one is supposed to be against.

    There are two important things to remember if we are to avoid falling into this
    trap. The first is simple vigilance. Never assume your arguments are rational;
    always scrutinise your own reasoning for signs of sloppiness. The second is recognising
    that the lines which divide the clever and the stupid, the good and the poor argument,
    are rarely sharp.

    Hence the example of my own treatment of Fiona Horne in a previous Bad Moves.
    The raison d’etre of Bad Moves is to distinguish good arguments from pure rhetoric:
    bad arguments which are nonetheless persuasive. However, it has to be admitted
    that even the most rational of arguments are not free from rhetorical flourish.
    It is simply false to claim that in my critiques of rhetoric I myself never resort
    to the use of techniques which are not in fact rational arguments.

    In the example above, for example, I indulge in a little fun-poking. I would defend
    this by pointing out that the rhetorical move of gentle mockery employed here
    is neither disguising poor reasoning nor masquerading as good reasoning. It also
    works merely by presenting albeit selective quotes from Ms Horne and inviting
    the reader to judge their merits. But this invitation is not made neutrally: I
    am nudging and winking to the reader to indicate that I think what she says is
    ridiculous.

    There is nothing wrong with this. Apart from anything else, our texts would be
    very dry if they always aspired to be as neutral and humourless as is humanly
    possible. The only danger is if we imagine that we are reading or writing material
    which is entirely free of all rhetorical content. Rhetoric when in the service
    of good reasoning is a good thing: it makes good arguments more persuasive and
    following such arguments more enjoyable. It is only when rhetoric is in the service
    of poor reasoning that it becomes a problem.

    Nonetheless, rhetoric is not the same as rational argumentation, so those who
    aspire to be on the side of reason need to remember not just that they are fallible,
    but that they too use some of the tricks of persuasion they are only too keen
    to criticise in their adversaries.

  • Some Opinions

    The war is in its 11th day, and it’s clear that the cheery expectation of a Blitzkrieg was ill-founded. Apparently shock and awe have succeeded only in turning Saddam Hussein from a hated tyrant to an admired resister of the invaders, a result fraught with horrible implications for the future, including the future of Tony Blair. It is a profoundly dispiriting thought that this war could well end up entrenching the ignorant callous provincial talentless Bush more firmly in power than ever while it undoes the vastly more worthwhile Blair. Jonathan Freedland comments here on Blair’s backbreaking efforts with the UN and Bush’s smug indifference to the whole matter. There is something intensely degrading about watching a person of Bush’s calibre lording it over someone of Blair’s. (That’s why I don’t watch it.)

    Abdel Bari Atwan here describes the reversal of fortune Saddam Hussein’s reputation has undergone at the hands of the US president.

    President George Bush has at least one achievement to his credit in his war against Saddam Hussein. He has transformed Saddam into a heroic champion in the eyes of many in the region and might elevate his status into that of a mythological figure if he succeeds in killing or capturing more British and American soldiers and in turning Baghdad into an Arab and Islamic Stalingrad…The allies committed a dangerous mistake when they relied on information supplied by the Iraqi opposition regarding the state of affairs within Iraq. They made an even bigger mistake when they spoke of installing a US military governor over Iraq, as this will serve only to stir up patriotic feelings among Iraqis and encourage them to bury their differences with Saddam and unite forces to repel an American occupation.

    Depressing enough. After that perhaps a touch of wit would be refreshing, so try Alexei Sayle’s piece on Bush. There is plenty of sober truth along with the wit though. I was particularly struck by the observation that Bush is a ‘dry drunk,’ because a friend of mine has been fulminating about that (along with the more usual complaints) since long before the election. She is a judge who has decided a great many domestic abuse cases, so she knows what she’s talking about. Sayle tells us the dry drunk is one who has forcibly wrenched himself off alcohol without dealing with whatever caused the alcoholism to begin with, so is forever in pursuit of other outside fixes, such as shopping, religiosity, or military adventures.

    If we look at the nation that President Bush leads, it also behaves in many ways like an addict. The United States is a gigantic John Candy of a country, straining its oversized elasticated pants from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The country is addicted to more or less everything, constantly craving greater and greater quantities of petrol, electricity, pointless sports, empty patriotism, fatty hormone-crammed meat, gigantic pedestrian-crushing four-wheel drive trucks, ever more baseball caps with nonsense written on them and unquestioning obedience from every nation on the planet.

    And finally there is this one about the bottomless horribleness of US hard right politics and the tragedy of Blair’s alliance with it. I know the idea is that Blair has restrained Bush and made him that little bit less dangerous than he would have been otherwise. But surely he has also provided him with a tiny veneer of respectability that he wouldn’t have had otherwise, has enabled him to look that little bit less unilateral than he in fact is. Maybe it will prove to be for the good in the end, but I must say, I’m not very optimistic.

  • What Does Porn Do?

    Well, here’s an intriguing little item by way of a break from war news. The abundance and popularity of porn on the Internet, and what that may do to men’s attitudes to women, and how strangely little attention the subject gets.

    For a political perspective you would have to search to the very margins of feminist debate. It is as if an entire generation of research into the emotional effects of porn has simply been forgotten, leaving us with porn galore and not the faintest idea what it does.

    The most sinister aspect of the whole subject is how inextricably confused lust seems to be with hostility, at least in this kind of pornography. (And is there any other kind?) Judging from the description (I have to be honest: I’ve never looked at this kind of, er, material) it’s not even slightly erotic, it’s more like assault. Slut this and slut that. It appears to be all about treating women as toilets (very literally) and hating and mocking them at the same time. It’s hard to see how that can help poisoning men’s attitudes to women…and the stuff is ubiquitous. Not a happy thought.

    But the emotional consequences of casual porn use, or the effects of its cultural ubiquity, are completely ignored. Whether porn might be harmful to a non-addict is never even examined…Here is some evidence. Experiments were carried out on ‘normal’ men, not addicts, for research by Edward Donnerstein, a prominent academic and author. ‘On the first day,’ he reported, ‘when they see women being raped and aggressed against, it bothers them. By day five it does not bother them at all. In fact, they enjoy it.’…Even porn which wasn’t violent made the men twice as likely to say they felt aggressive towards women. This is not to say that porn turns men into rapists; it doesn’t need to, for it trespasses on the mind more subtly. The evidence proves that porn invites its audience to view women differently – as inferiors, as objects, only good for sex. This is the problem with pornography; it alters the way men look at women…and it even alters the way women look at themselves.

    And this isn’t even Fashionable Nonsense. In fact if the author is correct it’s only ‘the very margins of feminist debate,’ which can be fertile territory for FN, that notice at all. That’s one of the worst aspects of FN: the way it can discredit useful, necessary, original lines of thought and inquiry. I used to like those margins of feminist debate, until they got cluttered up with touchy-feely irrationalists and earth mothers and science-haters.

  • Cultural Relativism

    There are times when, do what we will, we are confronted with goals, values, moral preferences, that are in flat contradiction. We have to choose one and reject the other. Much as we would like to, we can’t blend or compromise or harmonise or take a little from this pot and a dab from that and come up with a nice mix. Doing one thing simply rules out doing the other and that’s all there is to it. Digital not analog, yes or no.

    So for instance reasonable and desirable goals of tolerance, understanding, cosmopolitanism, and cultural relativism can clash with equally reasonable and desirable goals of preventing harm to others, criticising unjust laws and customs and traditions, exposing exploitation and oppression, and advocating an end to asymmetrical, unfair, cruel, punitive and destructive instituitions. Sometimes those institutions and practices and customs are in Third World countries, and then attempts of First World people to reform or abolish them will conflict with the laudable goal of not being a cultural imperialist or Eurocentric or self-righteous or intolerant. And then one has to choose.

    One obvious (yet strangely easily overlooked) way to deal with this problem is to ask ourselves what we mean by ‘culture’. If we think and say that women shouldn’t be murdered by their fathers and brothers for, e.g., resisting an arranged marriage, only to be told that that’s their culture and it’s arrogant and Eurocentric to judge other cultures by Western standards, then surely the thought is available: what do you mean ‘their culture’? Whose culture? And what follows from that? Is it the culture of the women who are murdered? Or is it only the culture of the men doing the murdering. If the latter, why should their culture be privileged?

    In fact it’s quite strange the way a line of thought that’s intended to side with the oppressed often sides with oppressors in the name of multiculturalism. A great many practices could be put in the box ‘their culture’. Dowry murders, female infanticide, female genital mutilation, slavery, child labour, drafting children into armies, the caste system, beating and sexually abusing and witholding wages from domestic servants especially immigrants, Shariah, fatwas, suttee. These are all part of someone’s ‘culture’, as murder is a murderer’s culture and rape is a rapist’s. But why validate only the perpetrators? Have the women, servants, slaves, child soldiers, Dalits, ten-year-old carpet weavers in these cultures ever even had the opportunity to decide what their culture might be?

    And this is where the hard choice comes in, where the competing goods have to be sorted out. One can decide that tolerance and cultural pluralism trump all other values, and so turn a blind eye to suffering and oppression that have tradition as their underpinning, or one can decide that murder, torture, mutilation, systematic sexual or caste or racial discrimination, slavery, child exploitation, are wrong, wrong everywhere, universally wrong, and not to be tolerated.

    So in this In Focus we provide links to arguments in favor of moral realism and universalism, including this one by Simon Blackburn here on Butterflies and Wheels, and also to information about areas where it is needed.

    OB

    Internal Resources

    The Politics Behind Cultural Relativism: an interview by Maryam Namazie

    Azam Kamguian on why Sharia should be opposed by everyone who believes in human rights.

    Azam Kamguian points out that human rights and the Sharia are irreconcilable and antagonistic.

    Azam Kamguian on what the hijab does to young girls.

    Homa Arjomand reports on meeting with Ontario official regarding Shari’a Court

    Apposite Quotations

    One thing I want to say to all who would dismiss my feminist criticisms of my culture, using my ‘Westernization’ as a lash, is that my mother’s pain too has rustled among the pages of all those books I have read that partly constitute my ‘Westernization,’ and has crept into all the suitcases I have ever packed for my several exiles.
    Uma Narayan: Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism

    In general, people seek not the way of their ancestors, but the good.
    Aristotle: Politics

    [W]e must ask how far cultural diversity really is like linguistic diversity. The trouble with the analogy is that languages, as such, do not harm people, and cultural practices frequently do. We could think that Cornish or Breton should be preserved, without thinking the same about domestic violence, or absolute monarchy, or genital mutilation.
    Martha Nussbaum: Women and Human Development: the Capabilities Approach

    Cultures and religions are not harmless concepts. They are institutions; a part of the organisation of society. Usually, people who advocate those views, reduce it to an individual level and individual choice. But in reality, culture is part of the institution of the ruling class. Religion is an establishment that practises and advocates a certain way of life.
    Fariborz Pooya: ‘The Politics Behind Cultural Relativism’

    When you talk about the West, it is accepted that there are political differentiations, that people have different value systems, that there are political parties. You don’t talk about one uniform, homogeneous culture. But why is it that when it comes to the rest of the world, suddenly the standards change?
    Bahram Soroush: ‘The Politics Behind Cultural Relativism’

    Sadly and unfortunately, the setting up of the Sharia tribunals in Canada will be given validity, due to the reactionary politics of multi-culturalism. This is yet another fruit of a policy that causes fragmentation; apartheid based legal system and racism.

    Azam Kamguian: Islamism & Multi-culturalism: A United Camp against Universal Human Rights in Canada

    External Resources

  • Can a Pre-emptive War Be Ethical?

    It can, says a BBC panelist familiar to our readers.

  • Mismatch? Growing? Gulf?

    Carol Tavris asks a great many skeptical questions of a new book on the gulf between women and men, and whether the cure might be worse than the disease.

  • Scientific American on DU

    In a careful account, SciAm concludes that DU is somewhat toxic but no more so than other kinds of ammunition.

  • Depleted Uranium

    A January, 2003 report by the World Health Organization on the health effects of DU.

  • Gulf War Syndrome?

    Elaine Showalter on an elusive disease or syndrome that generates a lot of scare headlines and not much evidence.

  • Pompously Fondling his Crucifix

    The Bishop versus the Pythons. The Bish couldn’t be bothered to do his homework, and the Pythons were better-behaved.

  • Affirmative Action and the War

    Yale Political Scientist Jim Sleeper on the complexities and contradictions of identity politics.

  • Hans Morgenthau on Killing Civilians

    An excerpt from a book by the late scholar of international relations, on the history of the status of civilians in war.

  • Fear and Confusion

    It is fear of the Fedayeen Saddam, not nationalism, that is keeping Iraqi civilians on the sidelines, says this reporter.

  • Eurosneering

    Cowboys on one side of the pond, castrated girly pacifists on the other.

  • Sauce for the Goose?

    Correspondents to the Guardian wonder how the US can appeal to the Geneva convention.

  • Analysis of Impunity Agreements

    Why would a country seek blanket immunity from the international criminal court?

  • The Awkward Squad Asks Sharper Questions

    Staging, spin, starstruck questions from US journalists, rationed information. But then Chinese and Arab journalists may have their own blinders.

  • Blackburn contra Rorty

    If Truth and Reason are over, what about the maps and timetables you used to get here to say so?

  • Sectarian Slaughter in Kashmir

    The body-count is 24 in the latest chapter of Hindu-Muslim fight over Kashmir.