Year: 2010

Oh Jesus – I give up. Taner’s taken leave of his senses. He’s not ambivalent about liberalism, he’s ditched it entirely.

I don’t know if the institutional forms that constrain communities have to have to take the shape of an external arbiter, a Bureau of Individual Rights in Communities or something. Quite possibly, given our governmental habits. Say it’s so. But then, I would also expect such a Bureau to be sensitive to political negotiations between particular communities concerning what kind of exit procedures will be realized. It wouldn’t just be imposition of a liberal individualist superstructure.

Fucking hell. The human rights body has to be ‘sensitive’ about whether or not the communities will let people leave…

It’s crazy. It’s crazy and it’s scary. People like this would let me be locked up for life if they could! They would demand ‘senstivity’ and ‘negotiation’ before I could be allowed to escape – and maybe they would reluctantly say that the community simply wouldn’t have it, and I couldn’t be permitted to leave. This is madness!

And it gets even worse.

Presumably a multicultural regime in modern times would try to negotiate a balance between (partial, permeable) community autonomy, and (nonabsolute, constrained) individual autonomy. That is, short of life and limb, a community would still be able to impose significant costs on members violating internal norms. (Again, the extent of these costs would presumably be up to particular political negotiations.)

I should stop commenting, because I’m really disgusted, and I’ll get myself in trouble.

Taner – here’s a thought. Just read Shirley Jackson’s famous story ‘The Lottery.’ You need it.

And another thing. I replied to Taner’s “We do have proposals to this effect, and they come down to communities having a good deal of autonomy in regulating their own affairs…” with “But again, that treats ‘communities’ as if they were people. ‘Communities’ don’t have affairs; people do, one at a time.” Taner replied with “I find it perfectly sensible to talk about the interests of a corporation, the affairs of a university, or the internal rules of a bridge club. And so with communities.”

Ah yes – but there is a difference. It’s not ‘and so with communities,’ because ‘communities’ are different from corporations and universities and even bridge clubs. The difference is part of what makes them so risky, so difficult to deal with, so potentially and sometimes actually oppressive. The difference (the one I’m thinking of anyway) is that corporations and universities are specifiable, and precise, and explicit; they have rules and contracts, in writing; you know where you are with them. ‘Communities’ are not any of those things, they don’t have any of those things, you don’t know where you are with them. Communities are all about the tacit, the implicit, the understood, the unwritten – which means they are opaque to outsiders and unaccountable to insiders. This means that if you decide that ‘communities’ should be free to make and enforce their own rules, you’re left with no real way to call them to account, and you’ve left their members helpless.

And ‘communities’ are different from corporations and universities in having no real borders or definitions, too. ‘Communities’ are notional, and it’s really anybody’s guess who belongs and who doesn’t. Who decides who belongs to what community? Who decides who doesn’t belong? Is everyone allowed to decline to belong to any particular community?

The answer to that last question, at least, seems pretty obviously to be ‘no’ – especially in the case of ‘the Muslim community,’ which does not encourage leaving Islam. Some people are going to be considered to belong to some communities whether they consent or not – and they will be treated accordingly. Corporations and universities don’t operate that way. The ‘communities’ Taner has in mind are non-liberal and non-secular ones, since liberal secularism is exactly what he is departing from in this series of posts. But in that case, he is arguing that non-liberal non-secular ‘communities’ should have power over people who might very well have no desire whatsoever to belong to said ‘communities.’ This isn’t a contrived worry, either, to put it mildly – secular Muslims decidedly are subject to social pressure from ‘the Muslim community.’ If they don’t have the liberal state to turn to – they’re sunk. This ain’t no game of bridge.

Good old Beeb – make sure not to be too polite to atheism, won’t you. Yes of course you will.

Headline: ‘Atheists meet in Melbourne to celebrate lack of faith.’ Subhead: ‘More than 2,000 atheists from around the world are gathering in Melbourne, Australia, to celebrate their lack of religious belief.’ They couldn’t be there to talk about it, to explore issues related to it, to meet people who are interested in it; no, they’re there to celebrate it, and the thing they are celebrating is a lack, which makes them doubly stupid and pathetic.

All 2,500 tickets were sold out earlier this year, but a religious gathering at the same venue in December attracted three times as many delegates.

So there! Everybody hates you, you poxy whiny lacking stupid celebrating unpopular faithless losers! Neener neener neener. The Beeb had space to mention that, but not to mention that the ‘religious gathering’ got state funding while the atheist gathering did not.

There is a determination to avoid what one session calls Atheistic Fundamentalism, says our correspondent. Participants will be urged to avoid “missionary zeal” in their determination to promote their non-religious message to the world.

Same old atheism, the Beeb says with a sneer. Only people who don’t ‘lack faith’ are allowed to show missionary zeal, one gathers.

And also – Danny Postel on the role the Iranian Left played in its own immolation:

An account of this self-defeat can be found in Maziar Behrooz’s book, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran, a salutary and, indeed, definitive reconsideration of the history of the pre-revolutionary Iranian Left.

As Maziar explains, the Iranian Left, or at least certain key fractions of it, helped fashion the noose the Islamists ultimately hung them with. According to Behrooz, the Khomeinites were able to do this in large part because the Tudeh party, the Fadaiyan Majority, and many other Iranian Marxist parties, whatever their differences with the Islamists, shared with them a profound hostility toward liberalism. Like [Ruhollah al-Musavi] Khomeini’s followers, dominant trends on the Iranian Left viewed democratic rights, civil liberties, and women’s rights as no more than elements of what they described interchangeably as “western,” “colonial,” or “bourgeois” ideology.

Oh did they – well how familiar, and how reckless, and how insane. Do democratic rights, civil liberties, and women’s rights seem like no more than elements of “western,” “colonial,” or “bourgeois” ideology now? There’s nothing like seeing democratic rights, civil liberties, and women’s rights yanked violently away to make one realize what nice things they are to have. Of course the first two, at least, weren’t abundant under the shah, but that’s a different story.

For the genuinely leftist project of internationalism and human emancipation, the profoundly authoritarian, repressive, reactionary, and proto-fascist regime that emerged out of the Revolution and has ruled Iran ever since is certainly tragic but also, and more accurately, catastrophic…

Khomeini’s gang may have disdained professedly secular, rational socialists, but on the Left the argument went that, because they were anti-American and anti-imperialist, the Khomeinites were “objectively progressive.”
We now know that the Left’s was a demented, disfigured, ultimately catastrophic argument, one that had lethal consequences for those who propounded it. There was nothing progressive about Khomeini’s anti-imperialism. It was authoritarian and regressive, as is [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad’s anti-imperialism today. Whether Khomeini’s rhetoric was truly anti-imperialist is open to debate—but to the extent it was, it amounted to no more than an anti-imperialism of fools.

Quite. Let us have no messing around – no anti-imperialism of fools, no anti-secularism of fools, no anti-liberalism of fools, no multiculturalism of fools. There is nothing progressive about authoritarian regressive theocratic communalism. The hell with it.

Via Norm.

Further to the discussion of multiculturalism and autonomy for ‘communities’ and family law – Martha Nussbaum’s ‘The Feminist Critique of Liberalism’ is relevant throughout, and particularly relevant in this bit (Sex and Social Justice, pp 63-4):

[A]s many feminists have long pointed out, where women and the family are concerned, liberal political thought has not been nearly individualist enough. Liberal thinkers tended to segment the private from the public sphere, considering the public sphere to be the sphere of individual rights and contractual arrangements, the family to be a private sphere of love and comfort into which the state should not meddle. This tendency grew, no doubt, out of a legitimate concern for the protection of choice – but too few questions were asked about whose choices were thereby protected. This means that liberals too often failed to notice the extent to which laws and institutions shape the family and determine the privileges and rights of its members.

Compare that to, again, Taner’s

[The state] leaves the internal affairs of communities alone. Particularly areas such as family law become the domain of quasi-autonomous communities. After all, if devout Muslims feel that the ability to communally follow sharia law is essential for them to live their religious commitments properly, well, why not? Why interfere?

Because families, especially in ‘communities’ that feel that the ability to communally follow sharia or ‘Catholic teachings’ or other religious ‘law’ is essential for them to live their religious commitments properly, can have differences in power and hence in rights, freedom, ability to choose, and all such liberal shibboleths.

Furthermore, family law, which is what Taner specifies, is not a private sphere of love and comfort; it’s what people resort to when there is disagreement. If all is well, family law is not needed, and it’s beside the point. Family law is there to adjudicate who gets what. It’s there for when the members of the family can no longer agree – so it is no longer an area of voluntary agreement or commitment or choice – it’s an area of coercion. People have a cognitive bias to be over-optimistic; people can be blithe about agreements and commitments when starting out to establish a family, but that doesn’t mean they stay blithe forever. A liberal state will attempt to treat all members fairly; religious law is a different kind of thing. That’s ‘why interfere.’

Remember that story on ‘Islamic marriage contracts’?

Why do Pakistani women agree to marriage contracts without scrutinizing them first and making sure they won’t be sorry later?…My soon-to-be husband had been briefed by the religious scholar presiding. He had also read the marriage-contract papers in detail, making the additions and cancellations he wanted. But I hadn’t seen the document. When I had asked to, my mother had rebuffed my request, saying there was no need, since she had already gone through it. When I told my fiance I wanted to discuss the contract with him, he wondered why I didn’t trust him to do what was best for us.

Nussbaum goes on (p 65):

Liberal reluctance to interfere with the family has run very deep; dispiritingly, many liberal thinkers have failed to notice that the family is not always characterized by a harmony of interests. No model of the family can be adequate to reality if it fails to take into account competition for scarce resources, divergent interests, and differences of power…

But notice that, as Mill already argued, what we see here is not a failure intrinsic to liberalism itself. It is, in fact, a failure of liberal thinkers to follow their own thought through to its socially radical conclusion. What is wrong with the views of the family endorsed by [Gary] Becker, Rawls, and others is not that they are too individualistic but that they are not individualistic enough…[T]hey fail to ask rigorously their own question, namely, how is each and every individual doing?

Taner is making the same mistake.

The latest from Taner Edis on multiculturalism.

Liberal language about “choice” and “force” is very misleading here. No one chooses who they are. Our choices take place in a context of unchosen circumstances, and unchosen but organically acquired loyalties. Particularly conservative religious people (a pretty large chunk of the human species) are very much embedded in unchosen traditions and communities. It’s not so much that they are forced into anything as that belonging to a community is an integral part of who they are.

Yes, but again, they don’t all simply accept everything that results, and they don’t all want simply to accept everything that results. We’re not obliged to just assume that everyone is happy with whatever slot she was born to. On the contrary, it’s better, more humane, more progressive, more just, more reasonable to assume that other people are like me and are capable of wanting more, or less, or better, or different. This applies doubly or triply to people who are ’embedded in unchosen traditions and communities’ that consider them underlings. That is, obviously, not to say we should kidnap all such people and force them to be more like us, but it is to say that we should be concerned about their ability to choose what to be.

A good number of secularists seem to have a model of religion as an authoritarian, top-down imposition. Devout religious people who perceive themselves as freely living their faith do not see things the same way. Not because they are brainwashed, but because they routinely experience their community as a place full of negotiation and give-and-take. Religious people are agents. They are shaped by their traditions, but they shape their traditions in turn.

Some are; some do; but not all. Some can’t, because they’re not allowed to. Some don’t, because they’ve never had the opportunity even to develop the thought. Not all religious people get the chance to ‘shape their traditions in turn.’

[G]iven the much fuzzier boundaries between communities than persons, I would expect any sane communitarian view should make plenty of allowances for interference. Slavery, for example, may well be a point where enough is enough.

‘May well be’??

Here is some nice community life for you.

A woman Muslim councillor says death threats and sexual harassment calls have made her change the way she dresses and reconsider being in politics…The mother of four said: “It’s really horrible. A male voice said ‘We are going to get your parents out of their grave and put you there’ and ‘We know where you and your kids live and we are going to show you!’…One talked about how he liked my western clothes, my tight jeans, my body parts and sexual acts he would like to do to me.”…Last year Rania Khan, another of Tower Hamlets’ women Muslim councillors, received hate mail after photos were taken of her without headscarf at an Eid party.

Well? So? The councillors and their tormentors are all ‘in a context of unchosen circumstances, and unchosen but organically acquired loyalties’; they ‘routinely experience their community as a place full of negotiation and give-and-take’; they are agents; they are shaped by their traditions, but they shape their traditions in turn; so there is no problem, right? They live in a community, and living in a community is good, so if women who have the gall to be councillors and dress as they see fit are subject to sexist sexual threatening phone calls, that’s just part of community life.

I don’t actually think Taner thinks that – yet it is what he’s saying. What can I tell you?