Month: September 2006

Did you read this? I put it in News a few days ago. It’s Danny Postel’s openDemocracy comment on Hossein Derakhshan’s article, also in openDemocracy, about Ramin Jahanbegloo’s release from prison. It’s interesting. I thought Derakhshan’s article was quite worrying and depressing and discouraging, and Postel says that and a good deal more.

Derakhshan asserts that Jahanbegloo’s “confession” was authentic – Indeed even “the possibility of it being imposed on him by his interrogators” is, according to his logic, “rule[d] out”. The most obvious and immediate question involved is: how in the world could Derakhshan lay claim to such knowledge, let alone rule out the very possibility that Jahanbegloo’s “confession” was coerced or imposed?

Well, yes. One does wonder.

Essential to Derakhshan’s assertion is his view that Jahanbegloo is in fact guilty. Of what? Of “indirectly helping the Bush administration in its plans for regime change in Iran through fomenting internal unrest and instability.” And how, precisely, did Jahanbegloo do that? By conducting “comparative analysis of socio-political change in contemporary east-central Europe and the Islamic Republic of Iran” with “financial support” from American think-tanks.

That was the really depressing and discouraging bit. I have some reformist contacts inside Iran as well as outside, and I started to fret that perhaps I ought not to have such contacts, lest I contaminate them or implicate them or generally mix up their work with Bush’s plans. That’s a horrible thought: it would mean no one could try to reform or improve anything for fear of helping the colonialists. So I’m glad to see people rejecting Derakhshan’s argument with energy. Samira Mohyeddin for instance in an article at Iranian.com.

First, let me begin by saying that I will not comment on Ramin Jahanbegloo because as far as I am concerned Jahanbegloo’s comments or retractions upon being released from prison are of no consequence and should be taken with a grain of salt, particularly while the government holds the deed to both his house and his mothers. It is unbelievably naive and audacious of Derakhshan to say that Jahanbegloo saw the error of his ways thanks to his interrogators. “Thanks to the work of the reformists who governed the country until 2005, Iran has passed the stage of state terror.” – Derakhshan…[T]his is an apalling statement at best, and a slap in the face to all those Iranians who have given their lives for the cause of freedom both in and outside of Iran…Would Hossein dare make such a statement to the son of Zahra Kazemi, who was indiscriminately raped, tortured, and murdered while in Evin prison? Would he have the audacity to make such statements to the family of Akbar Mohammadi who died in Evin just last month? Or to the family of 16 year old Atefeh Rajabi who was hung in the Iranian town of Neka for “engaging in acts incompatible with chastity”? Or to the family members of the thousands of prisoners of conscience who have perished in the jails of the Iran of the Islamic Republic over the past twenty-seven years?

La lutte continue.

I’m reading Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts. John Holbo at the Valve sent it because they’re doing one of those Valve events on it in a few weeks. It is, to put it succinctly, very good. (That Alan Wolfe review is all the more irritating once one actually reads the book. It’s irritating independently of the quality of the book reviewed, because of certain qualities intrinsic to the review, but it’s also even more irritating because of the quality of the book.)

I thought I would share a bit with you, because it strikes me as being right on the money, and well worth saying. Pages 120-1. He’s been describing political affiliations among students – liberal, conservative, libertarian, and so on.

‘Another bunch, further off to the left, finds figures like Noam Chomsky so persuasive when it comes to American wickedness at home and abroad – not capriciously, either, for that wickedness is often real enough – that they become utterly indiscriminate about “dissent,” valuing even its most counterproductive forms. While I admire these students for informing themselves about the history of Central America and East Timor, I watch with dismay as they embrace the conclusion that practically any form of “resistance” to US world hegemony is worth their support, and the conviction that if the US takes up arms in a cause, any cause, the real cause is probably unuacknowledged and nefarious. This conviction has been borne out quite frequently in the past, and will undoubtedly be borne out again, but it is not axiomatic, and it disturbs me to find young people identifying with “the left” in such a way as to suspend their critical judgment about leftists who do take it as axiomatic. The wholly uncritical Chomsky fans seem to me to have abdicated some of the tasks of critical thinking in precisely the same way that the wholly uncritical Bush worshippers have done, and I wish the campus left, especially, could be a domain without gurus and icons – a domain of ideas, where every citizen is obligated to scrutinize every idea on its merits.’

Exactly. The conviction may be right, but it’s not axiomatic, and convictions need to be scrutinized on their merits, not assumed to be axiomatic. That’s important, and it’s why the cult of Chomsky gets increasingly on my nerves. And I too wish the campus left could be a domain without gurus and icons; gurus and icons are just the things not to have, just the things that impede careful thinking. Careful thinking, as Michael is indicating there, is not dispensable, not some sort of effete frill or ruffle, but pretty much the first thing that needs doing. Activism isn’t much help if it passionately and commitedly does the wrong thing.

Dammit! Damn, damn, damn.

A leading Afghan official working on women’s rights has been shot dead in the southern province of Kandahar…She had served as head of women’s affairs in Kandahar’s provincial government since the Taleban government was toppled by US-led forces in 2001. An eloquent public speaker, Safia Amajan was fierce in her criticism of what she saw as the Taleban’s repression of women. After the US-led invasion in 2001, the former teacher took charge of women’s affairs in Kandahar’s provincial government. In a conservative region where most families keep wives and daughters cloistered indoors, she was able to attract hundreds of women to schools and vocational courses. Her requests for secure official transport and personal bodyguards had not been granted by the government. At the time of the attack, she was travelling in a taxi.

Damn it to hell. Bullying shits win another round. They win far too many rounds. So a former teacher who was able to attract hundreds of women to schools and vocational courses and who fiercely criticized the Taliban’s repression of women is taken out. Hell and damnation.

Why do people think there is a deity? (Small question. I’ll just knock off the answer in a few hundred words here. No biggy.) Partly (only partly) because of the thought that something must have created the universe – that there must be Mind behind it all. There is the regress problem – what created the mind then? – but many people simply find it more plausible to start with a mind than to start with a brute fact, or a Big Bang. Okay – but then you have to ask what kind of mind is it, and what kind of deity is it?

That’s one place you get the two-step. Mind in the form of an Intelligent Agent must have created the universe, and (unstated premise) the mind and the intelligence must be the kind of thing we mean by mind and intelligence. But that is not actually terribly likely. We think that what we have is Intelligence, generic intelligence, some of the kind of thing that intelligence is and has to be in order to count as intelligence. But maybe that’s all wrong. We would think that, of course, because it’s the only kind we know from the inside, and we’ve seen what it can do, so for us it’s quite natural to think that we have The Thing Itself, as opposed to having a set of faculties that have been adaptive (more or less) in this particular environment, which we call intelligence. In short, it could be that we’re flattering ourselves.

We don’t really know what – if anything – generic intelligence would be, or what it would be like. We think maybe like a computer, but who knows?

Our intelligence, for instance, is saturated in feeling. It’s full of evaluation, it’s always deciding what matters and what doesn’t. But what matters to us is what matters to mortal, reproducing, fragile, short-lived, hungry, greedy, easily frightened, vulnerable beings. Our intelligence is shaped by that, steeped in it. A deity’s would be nothing like that. So why do we think it would recognize us? Why do we think it would care? Any more than a filing cabinet does? It needn’t be cruel to make all this suffering – it could just be a thing that has no chip for recognizing, understanding, caring about suffering, just as (say) we don’t worry about the grains of sand on a beach bruising each other as they jostle about. There seems zero reason to think a universe-designing mind would care about us; zero reason to extrapolate from our best selves and minds to its.

It would have no reason to care about suffering because it is not (if it is for instance a First Cause) mortal or vulnerable. It has no predators, it needs no food, it has no need to choose between good and bad options – so its intelligence wouldn’t have evolved to select for that ability – as ours must have. So there’s not a lot of reason to think it would ‘think’ that way at all. We think it would – but that’s because we think that way. We can’t help thinking of it in our terms, but we have no real warrant for doing that. We have no way to think of it in alien terms (because any terms we can think of are thus our terms), but it is more likely to be thoroughly alien than it is to be reassuringly familiar.

If it doesn’t have a body it’s not like us. If it’s a star it’s not like us. If it’s disembodied intelligence it’s utterly not like us, and we can’t even imagine how it would go about creating a universe. We utter grand phrases about transcendence and unknowability, but we don’t take their implications on board. If it’s as alien as all that (as it pretty much has to be to do what’s claimed for it) why do we worship it and why do we think it’s interested in us? It seems to me that these questions just proliferate; the more you think about the putative deity, the more unanswerable they seem, and the more the confident answers given by religious authorities just seem like passes in the air. A deity as strange as this one would have to be seems to make no difference to anything.