Category: Articles

Maryam Namazie wins the NSS Irwin prize for Secularist of the Year award

Yesterday, October 8, 2005 Maryam Namazie, adjudged to have made the most significant contribution to the promotion of secularism in the preceding year, was awarded the National Secular Society’s (NSS) first Irwin Prize for “Secularist of the Year” in London. The £5,000 annual prize, sponsored by NSS member Dr Michael Irwin, was presented by Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee at a lunch at the Montcalm Hotel in London. The event also featured cutting edge cabaret from stand-up comedian Stewart Lee, who is also co-author of the controversial “Jerry Springer – the Opera”.

In introducing Namazie, Keith Porteous Wood, NSS executive director stated: ‘Maryam is an inveterate commentator and broadcaster on rights, cultural relativism, secularism, religion, political Islam and many other related topics. The present revival of Islam has heightened interest in Maryam’s work, and at last her writings are gaining a mainstream audience. She has spoken at numerous conferences and written extensively on women’s rights issues, particularly violence against women.’

In her acceptance speech, Namazie acknowledged Mansoor Hekmat’s role in inspiring an entire generation of secularists and spoke of the rise of the political Islamic movement and its attempts to dupe and silence opposition using rights language. She went on to say: ‘We need an uncompromising and shamelessly aggressive demand for secularism but again this is only a minimum if we are to ensure that human values are safeguarded and that the human being is put first and foremost. Today, more than ever, we are in need of the complete de-religionisation of society as well.’

Namazie is a well known campaigner for secularism and refugee and women’s rights and against political Islam. She is host of TV International, a Central Council member of the Organisation of Women’s Liberation, and director of the International Relations Committee of the Worker-communist Party of Iran amongst others.

Seven others had been nominated, including the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has highlighted violence against Muslim women, and Nicholas Hytner, director of Britain’s National Theatre, who came under fire for staging the musical “Jerry Springer — The Opera”, which many Christians regard as blasphemous.

For more information, contact Maryam Namazie, m.namazie@ukonline.co.uk, 07719166731.

Keith Porteus Wood’s introduction of Maryam Namazie

Maryam Namazie was born in Tehran, but she left Iran with her family in 1980 after the establishment of the Islamic Republic. She then lived in India, the UK and then settled in the US where she began her university studies at the age of 17.

After graduating, Maryam went to the Sudan to work with Ethiopian refugees. Half way through her stay, an Islamic government took power. She was threatened by the government for establishing a clandestine human rights organisation and had to be evacuated by her employer for her own safety.

Back in the United States, Maryam worked for various refugee and human rights organisations. She established the Committee for Humanitarian Assistance to Iranian Refugees in 1991. In 1994, she went to Turkey and produced a video documentary on the situation of Iranian refugees there.

Soon after her return to the US, she was elected executive director of the International Federation of Iranian Refugees, an international organisation with 60 branches in nearly 20 countries. As director of the refugee-run organisation, she campaigned on behalf of thousands of Iranian asylum seekers and refugees, intervening successfully on many cases. Some successes include preventing the deportation of over 1000 from Holland, including having spoken at a parliamentary meeting on the issue; and a successful campaign to persuade the Turkish government to extend the period in which asylum seekers can apply for asylum.

Maryam Namazie has also been a member of the Organisation of Women’s Liberation Central Council since its establishment; there she has worked on numerous campaigns, including against stoning, executions, sexual apartheid, and women’s rights violations particularly in Islamic societies. Some successes include the Homa Arjomand-led campaign against the Sharia court in Canada. She was a speaker at its first public meeting in Toronto and continued supporting and highlighting the issue and mobilising support.

Other campaigns she has worked on include preventing stonings and executions in Islamist societies, opposing the veiling of children, opposing Sharia or religious laws, defending the banning of religious symbols from schools and public institutions, opposing the incitement to religious hatred bill in the UK, and calling for secularism and the de-religionisation of society not only in Iran but in Britain and elsewhere.

Maryam is an inveterate commentator and broadcaster on rights, cultural relativism, secularism, religion, political Islam and many other related topics.

The present revival of Islam has heightened interest in Maryam’s work, and at last her writings are gaining a mainstream audience. She has spoken at numerous conferences and written extensively on women’s rights issues, particularly violence against women.

More recently, Maryam has been hosting a weekly programme on International TV. This is broadcast via satellite to the Middle East and Europe and can be seen on the Internet. TV International focuses on issues pertaining to the Middle East from a progressive, left-wing perspective. The programme promotes secularism amongst other values and has developed a considerable following amongst people in Iran and the Middle East as well as in Europe and the west.

The issues raised in the programme provoke much correspondence, and she has been roundly criticised by Islamists, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and even Ken Livingstone after his invitation to this country of Yusuf Al Qaradawi.

So she must be doing something right.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are sure you will agree with us that Maryam Namazie is a worthy and noble winner of this first Irwin Prize.

Maryam Namazie’s speech

Receiving the Secularist of the Year award is a great honour, particularly given the National Secular Society’s long outstanding work in the promotion of secularism and reason.

Whilst there are so many who have worked closely with and supported me in the fight for secularism, there is one – Mansoor Hekmat – who must be commemorated today for having shaped and inspired myself and generations of secularists in Iran and the Middle East. Many of them are at the forefront of the fight for secularism there as well as in countries they have fled to. A good case in point is Homa Arjomand and her successful campaign against the Sharia court in Canada.

The National Secular Society’s continued works as well as the newly established Irwin Secularist of the Year award reveal that the fight for secularism is once again one of the most significant battles for the liberation of humanity from the yoke of religion.

This battle, however, is slightly different from the one fought in centuries past. Though political religion is facing a revival, it is the political Islamic movement which is spearheading this.

And this rise is taking place within a new world order in which universal norms and values taken for granted only decades ago can no longer be taken so.

In this climate of cultural relativism, Islamists and their apologists have perfected the use of rights language to dupe and silence any opposition. And of course when that doesn’t work, they issue their death threats and fatwas.

In this context, the ban on conspicuous religious symbols in public schools and institutions in France – the most basic separation of religion from the state though no where enough – is called ‘discriminatory’ a ‘restriction of’ ‘religious freedoms’ or ‘freedom of belief’, even ‘a violation of women’s and girls’ rights’ by Islamist groups in Britain. They have attempted to revise and reverse the meaning of very basic concepts.

Tolerance is another catch phrase they often use. Again they are turning the concept of tolerating human beings – which deserve much more than mere tolerance in my opinion – into one of tolerating all beliefs and ideas, particularly theirs.

Also, they often speak of fairness and equality. The proponents of a Sharia court in Canada and the incitement to religious hatred law or Islamic schools in Britain say they merely want what other groups already have. Preposterously, the basis for equality is not the highest standards available in society as one would expect but the most regressive and reactionary ones!

And don’t get me started on Islamophobia. It is now even deemed racist to criticise beliefs and ideas and movements associated with them. And – silly me – all along I thought racism was aimed at individuals and groups of people not beliefs and political movements.

Needless to say, even their topsy turvy concepts of rights and equality go out the window when they actually gain power. In Iran, Iraq and elsewhere, they kill and maim indiscriminately, tolerate nothing and no one, and say it is their divine right to do so.

Of course the tide is slowly turning, thanks to the work that we all have been doing and the fact that the religious movements’ vile face is becoming more familiar to people across the world.

But much more needs to be done as you know better than anyone else. We need an uncompromising and shamelessly aggressive demand for secularism – a ‘bulldog’ approach – but again this is only a minimum if we are to ensure that human values are safeguarded and that the human being is put first and foremost.

Today, more than ever, we are in need of the complete de-religionisation of society as well.

This is truly a necessity of our times.

From B&W’s Letters page, a discussion of Freud, Webster, Masson, the unconscious, the seduction theory. Allen Esterson is the author of Seductive Mirage: an Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud.

Richard R. Warnotck, 25/09/2005

Understanding history may not be absolutely essential to understanding psychology but it is at least very helpful. The truth is that Webster gets some of Freud’s ideas just wrong, so his arguments are directed not so much against Freud as against his caricature of Freud. Consider the issue of ‘unconscious emotions’.

Here is Webster, page 250:

“One of the central objections to Freud’s methodology, however, is that by positing the existence of an Unconscious he effectively deepens the very mysteries which he claims to unravel. For the Unconscious is not simply an occult entity for whose real existence there is no palpable evidence. It is an illusion produced by language – a kind of intellectual hallucination.

Of course there are occasions when it is tempting to claim that a person has an ‘unconscious memory’ of a particular incident or that somebody feels ‘unconscious rage’ towards another person. Yet although the terms ‘unconscious memory’ and ‘unconscious rage’ may seem expressive and useful, we should recognize that they are semantically trecherous. A memory is something you have remembered and it defies logic to characterise as a memory something whose salient characteristic is that it has actually been forgotten. A similar objection applies to the term ‘unconscious rage’ since to use this term is to apply a word denoting the uninhibited expression of anger to a situation defined by the fact that no anger has been expressed.”

You’ll notice that Webster doesn’t quote Freud saying that there is ‘unconscious rage.’ We’re to accept that Freud believed in it just on Webster’s say-so, apparently. The closest Webster comes to discussing what Freud actually wrote about ‘unconscious emotions’ is on page 275. Webster quotes Freud telling a story about a girl who was in love without knowing she was in love, or maybe without knowing very clearly that she was in love.

That Freud grants that the girl may have known she was in love a bit weakens Webster’s claim that Freud thought one could be in love without having any idea one was in love. Webster seems not to notice this and doesn’t address the note of uncertainty in this passage. Webster’s argument that one cannot be in love without knowing it is weak. Love is surely a fairly complicated thing that one needs to make careful arguments about. Yet the only thing Webster offers in support of his view of love is the claim that most people agree with it. No evidence is offered that most people do agree with Webster (odd, coming from a man who damns Freud for making claims without evidence), nor is it explained why it would prove Webster right if they did.

I think that if one can mistake something that isn’t love for love (and believe me, this happens; perhaps I’ve had a more interesting life than Webster), there may be no reason one cannot be in love without realising it.

Turning to other passages in Freud, one finds evidence that he thought something different from what Webster claims he thought. Probably the first indication that Freud didn’t accept ‘unconscious emotions’ is on page 46 of the Introductory Lectures on psychoanalysis: “It [psychoanalysis] defines what is mental as processes such as feeling, thinking and willing, and it is obliged to maintain that there is unconscious thinking and unapprehended willing.” Conspicuously, feeling is the only one of the three mental processes mentioned in the first half of that sentence left out in the second half. Freud seems to implicitly reject or at least question ‘unconscious emotions’ right from the start.

Freud returns to the issue pages 458-459 of the introductory lectures:

“As you will recall, we have dealt with repression at great length, but in doing so we have always followed the vicissitudes only of the idea that is to be repressed – naturally, since this was easier to recognize and describe. We have always left on one side the question of what happens to the affect that was attached to the repressed idea; and it is only now that we learn that the immediate vicissitude of the affect is to be transformed into anxiety, whatever quality it may have exhbited apart from this in the normal course of events. This transformation of affect is, however, by far the more important part of the process of repression. It is not so easy to speak of this, since we cannot assert the existence of unconscious affects in the same sense as that of unconscious ideas.”

There is a long discussion of the question of whether there are unconscious feelings in Freud’s paper on The Unconscious, pages 179-182 of Volume 11 of the Penguin Freud library, the most interesting part of which begins with:

“We should expect the answer to the question about unconscious feelings, emotions and affects to be just as easily given. It is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it, i.e. that it should become known to consciousness. Thus the possibility of the attribute of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions, feelings and affects are concerned. But in psychoanalytic practice we are accustomed to speak of unconscious love, hate, anger, etc., and find it impossible to avoid even the strange conjunction, ‘unconscious consciousness of guilt, or a paradoxical ‘unconscious anxiety.’ Is there more meaning in the use of these terms than there is in speaking of ‘unconscious instincts’?

The two cases are in fact not on all fours. In the first place, it may happen that an effective or emotional impulse is perceived but misconstrued. Owing to the repression of its proper representative it has been forced to become connected with another idea, and is now regarded by consciousness as the manifestation of that idea. If we restore the true connection, we call the original affective impulse an ‘unconscious’ one. Yet its affect was never unconscious; all that had happened was that its idea had undergone repression. In general, the use of the terms ‘unconscious affect’ and ‘unconscious emotion’ has reference to the vicissitudes undergone, in consequence of repression, by the quanitative factor in the instinctual impulse. We know that three such vicissitudes are possible: either the affect remains, wholly or in part as it is; or it is transformed into a qualitatively different quota of affect, above all into anxiety; or it is suppressed, i.e. it is prevented from developing at all. (These possibilities may perhaps be studied even more easily in the dream-work than in the neuroses). We know, too, that to suppress the development of affect is the true aim of repression and that its work is incomplete if this aim is not achieved. In every instance where repression has succeeded in inhibiting the development of affects, we term those affects (which we restore when we undo the work of repression) ‘unconscious.’ Thus it cannot be denied that the use of the terms in question is consistent; but in comparison with unconscious ideas there is the important difference that unconscious ideas continue to exist after repression as actual structures in the system Ucs., whereas all that corresponds in that system to unconscious affects is a potential beginning which is prevented from developing. Strictly speaking, then, and although no fault can be found with the linguistic usage, there are no unconscious affects as there are unconscious ideas.”

(The point of all this seems to be that sometimes we confuse one emotion for a different emotion, or fail to develop emotions we ought to develop, not that emotions can be unconscious).

Freud was well aware that there is a problem with talking about ‘unconscious emotions’, something Webster would have acknowledged were he an honest or credible scholar. Some reviewers of WFWW pointed out that Webster got this issue wrong (eg, Timothy Kendall). Kendall is not strictly correct when he says that Freud is clear that ideas can be unconscious but emotions cannot; Freud is actually somewhat ambiguous on this point, but as far as I can see ‘unconscious emotions’ aren’t used as anything more than a figure of speech. So what Webster says Freud ought to have said about unconscious emotions was almost exactly what Freud did say about them.

Allen Esterson, 26/09/2005: Richard Warnotck writes: “Kendall is not strictly correct when he says that Freud is clear that ideas can be unconscious but emotions cannot; Freud is actually somewhat ambiguous on this point, but as far as I can see ‘unconscious emotions’ aren’t used as anything more than a figure of speech.”

As Richard Warnotck says, there are ambiguities (and, I would add, inconsistencies) in what Freud wrote on this subject. In Studies on Hysteria he inferred that the source of Elisabeth von R.’s leg pains was her repressed love for her brother-in-law: “This girl felt towards her brother-in-law a tenderness whose acceptance into consciousness was resisted by her whole moral being” (1895, SE 2, p. 157). As she was not consciously aware of this supposed love, this sentence implies that her feelings towards her brother-in-law were unconscious.

More generally, he wrote about dream censorship that prevented an individual’s conscious access to various “lusts” and “hatreds” which reside in the Unconscious (1915-16, SE 15, pp. 142-143). Whatever he wrote elsewhere, it is difficult not to interpret this as indicating the existence of unconscious emotions.

Regarding the section of Webster’s book with which Richard Warnotck is taking issue, the central thrust (Chapter 11) relates to Freud’s extending a widely-accepted view that there are mental processes of which we are unaware by introducing an entity called “the Unconscious” which he treated as an autonomous region of the mind with its own wishful impulses, its own mode of expression and its peculiar mental mechanisms. Regardless of his understanding of specific details about the workings of this inferred Unconscious, Webster’s central contention here is that its use in psychoanalytic writings is semantically treacherous. This remains the case regardless of what Freud wrote in his theoretical discussions. Einstein wrote of physicists something like: don’t listen to what they say [of a philosophical nature], watch what they do. Likewise, whatever Freud wrote here or there, his application of abstract entities such as the Unconscious and its constituent processes is often dubious.

In that same chapter Webster rejects Freud’s claim that his psychoanalytic technique enables the adept to uncover the contents of this subterranean Unconscious. Essentially Webster argues (p. 251-253) that the introduction of the psychoanalytic Unconscious, and the techniques that supposedly enabled him to access its contents, enabled him to provide his own hypotheses and theoretical speculations with a pseudo-empirical basis. This is what I believe is central to the chapter in question, not arguable details of what precisely Freud maintained about the workings of the Unconscious, of which he was himself sometimes confused. William McDougall’s dissection of Freud’s attempts to explain the workings of the Unconscious led him to assert that Freud’s writings on this subject resemble “a great tangle in which Freud lashes about like a great whale caught in a net of his own contriving” (1936, p. 60). (W. McDougall, Psychoanalysis and Social Psychology, Methuen, 1936.)

Richard R. Warnotck, 28/09/2005: In response to Allen Esterson, I have to insist that the problem with Webster’s criticism of Freud’s theory of the unconscious is not that he is confused about some minor details of it but that he does not know what it is.

The quote from WFWW shows that Webster thinks the unconscious equals ‘unconscious emotions’, such that showing that there cannot be ‘unconscious emotions’ means showing that there is no unconscious. Not only does Webster not succeed in showing that ‘unconscious emotions’ are impossible, even had he done so he would not have shown there was no unconscious, since, as the quotes from Freud show, the contents of the unconscious consist mainly of ideas, and only secondarily and metaphorically of emotions.

Webster’s basic criticism of the unconscious is therefore simply wrong, just as wrong as his belief that Plato lived in the first century AD.

The other criticisms are not telling either. If one has not succeeded in showing that the unconscious is incoherent or impossible in principle, and if the complaint that if the unconscious exists then anything goes is correct, it proves only that human nature is incomprehensible, an unsatisfactory outcome.

All this might not be worth pointing out were it not that, a decade after its publication, WFWW is still the most ambitious and wide-ranging critique of Freud ever attempted, and one of the most widely known ones. As a critic of Freud, shouldn’t you be concerned that this critique of Freud is also very poor scholarship?

Allen Esterson, 28/09/2005: Richard R. Warnotck writes: “The quote from WFWW shows that Webster thinks the unconscious equals ‘unconscious emotions’, such that showing that there cannot be ‘unconscious emotions’ means showing that there is no unconscious.”

No it doesn’t. In the passage that Richard quoted previously Webster chooses to discuss the notions of unconscious memory and unconscious emotions. It does not follow that he believes that the Freudian unconscious equals unconscious emotions. In fact in the same chapter Webster writes (p. 245) of Freud’s conceiving the Unconscious as an autonomous region of the mind with its own wishful impulses, its own mode of expression and its peculiar mental mechanisms which are not in force elsewhere.

Richard writes that “the problem with Webster’s criticism of Freud’s theory of the unconscious is not that he is confused about some minor details of it but that he does not know what it is.”

If Webster is confused by the aspects of the Freudian unconscious that he highlights, he is not alone. As Richard himself acknowledges, Freud himself was “ambiguous” (not to say inconsistent) about this aspect of his conceptual schema and the psychoanalyst Timothy Kendall whose review Richard cites is also “not strictly correct” on this matter. In the previously cited critique by McDougall of Freud’s writings on the workings of the Unconscious the author demonstrates that “Freud does not scruple to change his most fundamental propositions, and pull them about in a way which, if they were the foundations of a logically constructed system, would bring the whole structure tumbling upon this mighty Sampson and his devoted followers.”

Richard writes: “If one has not succeeded in showing that the unconscious is incoherent or impossible in principle, and if the complaint that if the unconscious exists then anything goes is correct, it proves only that human nature is incomprehensible, an unsatisfactory outcome.”

The problem with this formulation is the ambiguity in the use of the word “unconscious”. If you mean the Freudian Unconscious, then successful critiques of this concept would mean only that the notion as conceived by Freud is incoherent or invalid. That says nothing about the comprehensibility of “human nature”, or indeed of the human mind.

“All this might not be worth pointing out were it not that, a decade after its publication, WFWW is still the most ambitious and wide-ranging critique of Freud ever attempted, and one of the most widely known ones.”

If by the “most ambitious and wide-ranging” you mean the most comprehensive (which is the most important characteristic of a full-scale critique), then you are simply wrong. The book that is widely accepted among Freud critics as the most comprehensive critique of Freud is undoubtedly Malcolm Macmillan’s Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc (1997 [1993], MIT Press). This covers the whole field of Freud’s writings beyond any other author, and in a way Webster does not attempt. Webster examines Freud’s foundational clinical and theoretical claims as a basis for a highly individual attempt to place Freud’s theories in a particular historical context (as firmly grounded in a “Judaeo-Christian” heritage), and much of the book is devoted to this theme. To my knowledge, Freud critics have not generally endorsed that aspect of Webster’s book, and in a series of exchanges on the letters pages of the Times Literary Supplement Crews took issue with Webster on this. For most of us the most valuable part of Webster’s book is his dissection of Freud’s clinical claims on which the foundations of psychoanalysis rested.

“As a critic of Freud, shouldn’t you be concerned that this critique of Freud is also very poor scholarship?”

Of course there are almost invariably mistakes and factual errors in any book, but I don’t accept that this is characteristic of Webster’s volume.

Richard R. Warnotck, 29/09/2005: Looking at it again, I can see that Allen Esterson is correct that Webster doesn’t say that the unconscious equals unconscious emotions. This does not save Webster from the charge that his arguments against the unconscious fail and misrepresent Freud.

Webster tells us that the unconscious consists of ‘thoughts, memories, and impulses’ on page 245, but five pages later claims that the unconscious is incoherent on the basis of an argument that refers only to memories and emotions. One can only guess why there is no argument against unconscious thoughts. Has Webster somehow forgotten that the unconscious is supposed to include thoughts?

One must also ask after those impulses. Are the impulses of page 245 the same as the emotions of page 250 or are they something different? If they are different, where is the argument against an unconscious impulse?

So my point against Webster remains valid. He is confused not simply by the aspects of the unconscious discussed on pages 250-3, but by all its aspects, since he is not consistent from page to page as to what the unconscious is supposed to be according to Freud. The only other possibility, that Webster thinks he doesn’t need an argument against unconscious thoughts, is even more pathetic.

While I agree with Webster that we should recognize that terms such as ‘unconscious rage’ are semantically treacherous, he is incorrect to imply that Freud failed to understand this. The quotes from Freud I provided show that he pointed this out long before Webster was born. I am inclined to suspect that Webster has taken these criticisms over from Freud without attribution and dishonestly used them against Freud.

Regarding Esterson’s other points, successful critiques of the unconscious would certainly say something about the comprehensibility of human nature. Were it not possible to understand human nature to at least some extent a successful criticism of the unconscious could not be made.

This is because one cannot debunk any theory of human nature without substituting something for it. Richard Webster, to do him justice, recognizes this perfectly well: ‘…no critique of an inadequate scientific theory, including the one I have offered here, can ever be regarded as a complete refutation of that theory. In practice science proceeds not by dismantling old hypotheses and then erecting new ones in their place, but by using new hypotheses to displace old ones.’ p. 440.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think that Webster’s book is entirely without value. Webster gets one other very important thing right: the theories of psychoanalysis are a secularised version of religious doctrines and they do resemble the notion of original sin. Here he is trying to explain not just psychoanalysis but history as well. Placing ideas in their larger context and explainining belief in them is more ambitious and more interesting than dissecting every last detail of psychoanalysis.

There is, however, a far more complex historical and psychological story behind psychoanalysis than Webster realises. I recently found an interesting article about this on the internet. If you register for Topica, which is free, you can find it here.

One may add that to begin to understand the implications of all that, one should consult both Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death and Jeffrey Masson’s The Oceanic Feeling, two very different books that deal with religious mysticism in somewhat similar ways.

Paul Power, 29/09/2005: Richard Warnotck writes: “This is because one cannot debunk any theory of human nature without substituting something for it. Richard Webster, to do him justice, recognizes this perfectly well: ‘…no critique of an inadequate scientific theory, including the one I have offered here, can ever be regarded as a complete refutation of that theory. In practice science proceeds not by dismantling old hypotheses and then erecting new ones in their place, but by using new hypotheses to displace old ones.’ “

This is badly wrong. “one cannot debunk any theory of human nature without substituting something for it” is flat out nonsense. Are we really to be stuck with a theory that is illogical, unscientific and completely at variance with observed reality simply because we have no substitute? Does the quoted claim apply only to theories of human nature? If so why?

(Note that by “a theory that is illogical, unscientific and completely at variance with observed reality” I am referring to any theory of human nature with these characteristics and have no particular one in mind. The quoted claim above is not restricited to Freudianism and so cannot be defended by saying Freudianism does not have these characteristics).

Allen Esterson, 29/09/2005: Richard Warnotck writes: “This does not save Webster from the charge that his arguments against the unconscious fail… Webster tells us that the unconscious consists of ‘thoughts, memories, and impulses’ on page 245, but five pages later claims that the unconscious is incoherent on the basis of an argument that refers only to memories and emotions. One can only guess why there is no argument against unconscious thoughts. Has Webster somehow forgotten that the unconscious is supposed to include thoughts?”

Richard: You give the impression that in the chapter in question Webster is concerned to “disprove” the Freudian Unconscious. The title of the chapter is “Exploring the Unconscious”, and Webster raises some points which he wishes to explore, including, e.g., the processes which Freud posits to lead from repressed memories to symptom formation. He is not formulating a ‘case’ against the Unconscious, but examining some specific features as he understands them. You’re presuming that Webster is endeavouring to ‘disprove’ the Unconscious, when he is simply putting forward some of his ideas about the inadequacies of Freud’s conceptions.

“Regarding Esterson’s other points, successful critiques of the unconscious would certainly say something about the comprehensibility of human nature. Were it not possible to understand human nature to at least some extent a successful criticism of the unconscious could not be made.”

Since this is reply to my writing (28/09/2005): “The problem with this formulation [of Warnotck’s] is the ambiguity in the use of the word ‘unconscious’. If you mean the Freudian Unconscious, then successful critiques of this concept would mean only that the notion as conceived by Freud is incoherent or invalid. That says nothing about the comprehensibility of “human nature”, or indeed of the human mind”,
I can only regard your reply as a non sequitur.

“This is because one cannot debunk any theory of human nature without substituting something for it.”

Why not, if a specific theory is seriously flawed? As Paul Power indicates, am I precluded from rejecting a Catholic/Christian theory of the human personality just because I don’t have a comparably comprehensive (or even any) overarching theory to “replace” it. The fact that I don’t have (or know of) a “theory of everything” about the human mind and human behaviour à la psychoanalysis doesn’t preclude my examining its empirical claims and theoretical contentions and, when warranted in my judgement, rejecting them.

“Richard Webster, to do him justice, recognizes this perfectly well: ‘…no critique of an inadequate scientific theory, including the one I have offered here, can ever be regarded as a complete refutation of that theory. In practice science proceeds not by dismantling old hypotheses and then erecting new ones in their place, but by using new hypotheses to displace old ones.’ p. 440.”

From the fact that this is almost invariably the way science has progressed it does follow that in specific cases a theory cannot be rejected on rational/empirical grounds prior to the development of a comparable alternative. A strong case can be (and has been) made against the Freudian theory of dreams. We don’t (and historically people didn’t) have to wait for a comparably comprehensive theory of dreaming before rejecting Freud’s theories as flawed and unproven speculation.

Re the recommended Topica URL relating to Paglia: I registered at the site, then found I had to subscribe to a specific listserve (and receive around three messages a day) in order to access that URL. That’s something I can do without!

“One may add that to begin to understand the implications of all that, one should consult both Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death and Jeffrey Masson’s The Oceanic Feeling, two very different books that deal with religious mysticism in somewhat similar ways.”

Having perused Norman O. Brown’s speculative ramblings some decades ago I have no inclination to renew my acquaintanceship with his writings. Anyway, I’m not clear what books on religious mysticism have to do with the critical literature on Freud. What is missing from your comments is any challenge to (or even acknowledgement of the existence of) the critical literature examining Freud’s fundamental clinical claims that purportedly provide the foundations for his theorizing. Such critical writing can be found in abundance in the aforementioned M. Macmillan, Freud Evaluated (1997), on a more modest scale in my Seductive Mirage (1993), in Sections II and III of F. C. Crews (ed.), Unauthorized Freud (1998), throughout F. Cioffi, Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience (1998), and, for people who read German: Han Israëls, Der Fall Freud (1999 [1993]).

Richard R. Warnotck, 30/09/2005: I agree with Allen Esterson that this discussion has basically served its purpose. I will however make a couple of parting remarks.

On Richard Webster’s views, let me quote him again, p 250: ‘For the Unconscious is not simply an occult entity for whose real existence there is no palpable evidence. It is an illusion produced by language – a kind of intellectual hallucination.’ This seems to be an unambiguous denial that the unconscious exists, in any sense. I have no idea what else that passage could be understood to mean.

The stuff about religious mysticism is not irrelevant. The article on the Paglia list, which I could e-mail to anyone who really wants it, points out the connection between reincarnation and the unconscious. This has been done before, but not as far as I know with regard to the recovered memory debate.

Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death is part of the criticial literature on Freud and psychoanalysis. There is no contradiction here with the fact that it is also a book about religious mysticism, amongst other things. Brown is one of Webster’s major sources.

Regarding Jeffrey Masson, anyone interested in why he took the direction he did in the 1980s would be well advised to look at his earlier work in psychoanalysis. Masson’s doubts about the seduction theory were raised in the The Oceanic Feeling before being presented in The Assault on Truth. The Oceanic Feeling criticises Freud in several other ways as well, and is therefore also part of the criticial literature on psychoanalysis.

Allen Esterson, 30/09/2005: Just a couple of points on Richard Warnotck’s last posting. He quotes Webster’s writing “For the Unconscious is not simply an occult entity for whose real existence there is no palpable evidence. It is an illusion produced by language – a kind of intellectual hallucination”, and writes: “This seems to be an unambiguous denial that the unconscious exists, in any sense. I have no idea what else that passage could be understood to mean.”

It means that Webster is rejecting the concept of “the Unconscious” as postulated by Freud.

“Masson’s doubts about the seduction theory were raised in The Oceanic Feeling before being presented in The Assault on Truth.”

I think Richard may not have expressed what he really meant here. Far from having doubts about the seduction theory, Masson tried to resurrect it (albeit in the inaccurate terms that he presented it in The Assault on Truth).

Judging by his presentation of the historical facts in that book, Masson either failed to understand the seduction theory properly, or tendentiously misrepresented it in pursuance of his dramatic allegations of Freud’s suppression of the “truth”.

The key omissions in Masson’s presentation are that

(i) he fails to make clear that the supposed memories of the patients had to be unconscious (i.e., they had no memory of the supposed traumas)

(ii) he fails to mention that the supposed traumas had to have occurred in infancy (Freud wasn’t writing about child sexual abuse in general, as one would suppose from Masson’s book)

(iii) he gives the impression that Freud was concerned about the abuse of female children by their fathers. But the seduction theory was about repressed memories of sexual abuse in infancy regardless of the identity of the perpetrators. (In his 1896 papers fathers were not specifically mentioned in the lists of categories of supposed abusers. And one would not know from Masson’s book that one third of the patients involved were men.)

Contrary to the claims in Masson’s book, Freud was not concerned about sexual abuse of children per se, but about what he thought was his epoch-making discovery of the cause of the psychoneuroses, and the indispensable methodology that supposedly enabled him to analytically uncover the deeply repressed memories of infantile traumas.

I spell out more details of the episode in an article on B&W. See also this for an account of how Masson created a false impression of the background to Freud’s positing of the seduction theory in 1895.

Richard R. Warnotck, 01/10/2005: Yes, by ‘Masson’s doubts about the seduction theory’, I meant his doubts about the accepted story of why it was abandoned. I had assumed I would be understood that way.

Allen Esterson, 01/10/2005:

Masson’s explanation for Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory runs as follows: There was outrage against Freud’s child sexual abuse claims and in order to ingratiate himself with his colleagues Freud abandoned the seduction theory, now asserting that the supposed unconscious ‘memories’ of infantile abuse (later called “seductions”) were actually wishful fantasies, products of the Oedipus complex.

This explanation is erroneous in every respect.

1. Freud *concealed* his abandonment of the seduction theory from his colleagues, only making it public some seven years after reporting to his friend Wilhelm Fliess that he had abandoned it.

2. In the first article (published in 1906)in which he intimated that he had abandoned his theory he still maintained that his childhood abuse claims published in 1896 were valid.

3. There was no outrage against Freud’s 1896 clinical contentions (though his highly improbable claims and flawed clinical procedures were not accepted by his colleagues, a few of whom voiced temperate objections in publications over the next few years).
(See: Esterson, A. (2002). “The myth of Freud’s ostracism by the medical community in 1896-1905: Jeffrey Masson’s assault on truth”, History of Psychology, 5 (2), pp. 115-134.)

4. Freud did not publish the “Oedipal fantasies” explanation for the 1896 claims until 1925, some thirty years after the episode. His explanation in 1914 was that the supposed unconscious ‘memories’ of sexual abuse were actually fantasies of “seduction”, the psychical function of which was to “cover up” repressed memories of infantile masturbation.

Richard R. Warnotck, 01/10/2005: In the interests of strict accuracy, Jeffrey Masson’s proposed explanation of why Freud [abandoned the seduction theory] is admittedly speculation: ‘My pessimistic conclusions may possibly be wrong. The documents may in fact allow a very different reading.’ p xxi of the introduction to Assault.

Allen Esterson makes Masson sound dogmatic in a way which he isn’t.

Allen Esterson, 01/10/2005: Richard Warnotck writes: “In the interests of strict accuracy, Jeffrey Masson’s proposed explanation of why Freud [abandoned the seduction theory] is admittedly speculation: ‘My pessimistic conclusions may possibly be wrong. The documents may in fact allow a very different reading.’ p xxi of the introduction to Assault. Allen Esterson makes Masson sound dogmatic in a way which he isn’t.”

This is absolutely true, but that does not excuse his tendentious and misleading presentation of the evidence for his explanations for Freud’s change of mind (and the omission of crucial evidence against them) that I noted in my previous posting. And while Masson is not dogmatic on this specific issue, there is far more to the book than that. There is nothing tentative in his erroneous account of the historical basis of the story, which is of far greater moment than speculations about Freud’s motivations for his behaviour.

A year and a half ago Catherine Meyer, a bright young Normalienne who had served her publication apprenticeship with the small and daring independent firm of Odile Jacob (their offices are a stone’s throw from the French memorial mausoleum to great writers, Le Panthéon – they braved the French politically correct and intellectually ridiculous classes by daring to publish the decisive opening of the French mind to critical inquiry, Alan Sokal’s and Jean Bricmont’s Impostures intellectuelles) … as I was saying, Catherine Meyer served her apprenticeship at Odile Jacob. The lessons were learnt. She is today a Senior Editor at the newly established adventurous publishing house, Les Arènes and a year and a half ago she conceived the idea of a Black Book of Psychoanalysis on the various misdeeds of its practitioners from Freud on, based on the original Black Book on Communism, possible to write only once the Soviet Union had collapsed and the various archives had been opened up, for the first time, to genuine scholarly inquiry.

Also involved in the origins of this publishing event was the clinical child psychologist practicing at the C.H.U. (Centre hospitalier universitaire) of the University of Toulouse, Dr. Jacques Bénesteau. Jacques Bénesteau had researched and produced single-handedly what probably remains the most wide-reaching piece of research into the origins of Freudian and Jungian analysis and its subsequent adventures throughout the world (including, of course, their “milking” of the big American families of many millions of dollars and the “accidental death” of Dr. Horace Frink so that Freud’s enterprise could benefit from the millions that his second wife might release to “The Cause”).

Bénsteau’s revealing, highly documented work – and, above all (this is still so rare in French academic circles) completely familiar with the hundreds of critical studies in English (whether from Americans, like Frederick Crews; Englishmen, like Allen Esterson; Scandinavians writing in English, like Max Scharnberg; or Australian professors of psychology, like Malcolm Macmillan) is simply and accurately entitled Mensonges freudiens: Histoire d’une désinformation séculaire (Freudian Lies: A History of a Century of Disinformation), Belgium: Mardaga, 2002. Incidentally, this book won the annual prize in 2003 awarded by the Société française d’histoire de la médecine for the best book of the year for serious research into the history of medicine.

You should bear in mind the title of Jacques Bénesteau’s book, Mensonges freudiens: Histoire d’une désinformation séculaire. And one reason for bearing that title and that author in mind is that you will never hear of them again if you become an earnest reader of Le Livre noir de la psychanalyse.

We have been told that there is a grave situation for the future of psychoanalysis in France. There is! And the current uproar between the Freudians, the Lacanians, and their empirical medical critics is just beginning. I am glad to say that it will get very much worse before it gets any better. Metaphorically, it has to do with the painful but necessary lancing of a vicious boil that is causing local and general problems. I have hope that (even in France) sane empirical evidence-based medicine will triumph. It will be a bloody fight – fought to the bitter end by the Lacanians (in particular) who have everything to lose if intelligent, objective medicine wins, and whose victory will set French psychiatry back another whole century.

On Sunday, 25 September 2005, Alex Duval Smith wrote an important news piece in the London Observer about this 800-page volume with 40 international Freud critics as contributors, edited, jointly, by Catherine Meyer (whom you have met) and a former Lacanian-scholar, now reputedly a reformed disbeliever, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. Borch-Jacobsen, a professor of Comparative Literature at Washington University in Seattle, who claims Danish, French, and American nationalities. Apart from his Hegelian incursions into the “thought” of Jacques Lacan, he is mostly known for a little book about the true origins of the Tale of Anna O. How Borch-Jacobsen ever became (or appointed himself) co-editor of Catherine Meyer’s Black Book, I have no idea. I suggested to him (cruelly by not unfairly) that he was the publishing equivalent of the wooden horse of Troy. The remark was not appreciated!

Alex Duval Smith appeared delighted to announce that this 800-page Livre noir sold out within its first two weeks and is now on a second print run. This is — up to a point – good publishing news. Indeed one of the empirical psychiatrists who has invited me to lecture in France in November felt that – for all its faults – the Livre noir had achieved a significant breakthrough in the French medical world. As he wrote to me “people could talk again!” (“les langues sont déliées”) This is what Duval Smith writes (with some exaggeration):

“The book marks the revenge of behavioral psychologists and neuro-scientists, who claim to have been censored by Philippe Douste-Blazy when he was Health Minister.”

This is one of those, alas too frequent, pieces of journalist clap-trap that for understanding requires a lot of information (not readily available to the lay reader of The Observer, for whom it was presumably intended). (1) The book was not conceived in a spirit of “revenge”; (2) The 40 scholars who accepted to have their papers translated into French were not “behaviorists” and indeed most of them were not clinicians at all; (4) Douste-Blazy’s “censorship” as Minister of Health (he was both a doctor and a professor of Medicine before politics called) was his “decision” to wipe off the Internet and place carefully under the carpet the INSERM report requested by his predecessor. A word, or two, is in order here to alert the reader to what had happened: First, “INSERM” stands for Institut National de la Santé Et de la Recherche Médicale; it is an objective medical investigative body, and it concluded that of the various state-funded psychotherapies, psychoanalysis was by far – the most expensive, the most dangerous to patients, the one that took the longest time for the least improvement; Second, what happened was that a “meeting” of Lacanians (led by Lacan’s own son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller — referred to in e-mails to me by Jeffrey Masson as “an intellectual gangster”) was called by Jacques-Alain Miller, Douste-Blazy (a gutless wonder at the best of times) cowered before the massive presence of the Lacanians at the Mutualité building in Paris’s Latin Quarter and agreed, under their duress, to “Bury” the INSERM report quite properly requested by his predecessor, also a doctor and, you may like to know incidentally, a founder of Médecins sans frontières, Bernard Kouchner! Unlike Lacanians, they deal with real medical knowledge to help people in real medical distress.

The famous Livre noir, edited by Catherine Meyer & Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen is highly selective in its very careful and pro-Freudian and pro-Lacanian use of quotes. Probably the single most important publication in Freud studies over the last 20 years is the 1985 Harvard University Press translated edition of the integral text of the letters that Freud wrote to the Berlin E.N.T. surgeon Wilhelm Fliess over the long period of 17 years, from 1887-1904 — the very years that ushered in the new-fangled invention that Freud chose to call “Psychoanalysis”. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, who was responsible for putting together this magnificent edition, is allowed a scant three entries in the “Author Index” whereas Jacques Lacan (whom my friend the neurologist, Ray Tallis, has named “The Shrink from Hell”) is given twenty-three entries! To this day – some twenty years after the Harvard publication, the French still have to rely on the skimpy and mendacious ‘edition’ of daughter Anna Freud. The French do not know about Emma Eckstein! The French do not know that the Oedipus complex was the consequence of Fliess and Freud’s misunderstanding of “spontaneous” infantile erections. “Spontaneous” (some things have to be repeated, I’m afraid!) means just that: NO mentation; no fantasizing: JUST a physiological action of the infant. Discussions with Stephanie Ebdon of the London-based Sigmund Freud Copyrights reveal that the French still have access only to the ancient doctored version of Anna Freud published by P.U.F. (Presses Universitaires de France). Stephanie – with a very English kind of understatement – pointed out that P.U.F. had signed a contract with SFC in 1988 for a French translation of Masson’s edition: “thirteen years is a quite remarkable time to wait.” P.U.F. have a section called “Bibliothèque de Psychanalyse” directed by the 80-year-old Lacanian psychoanalyst, Jean Laplanche, and this section was to produce the contracted translated edition. Laplanche wanted no mention of Jeffrey Masson and wanted to eliminate his Introduction and his editorial notes. As Stephanie says “No Deal” — PUF are contracted with SFC to produce a complete French version of the English text “and that’s what we expect of them!” And that’s how matters have stood for the last 13 years! Masson wasn’t even sure if Laplanche was still alive – he is! But he seems more interested in cultivating his vineyards than in fulfilling his part of the contractual agreement.

Borch-Jacobsen (and I am convinced that this is his doing rather than Catherine Meyer’s) has followed the approach of Anna Freud in her highly-censored edition of her father’s letters. This edition (first published in French in 1954 and jointly edited by Princesse Marie Bonaparte, Ernst Kris, and Anna Freud) is all the French STILL have to go on if they wish to inquire into the Origins of Psychoanalysis. Anna Freud’s editorial principle appears to have been to eliminate ruthlessly any document or letter that proved her father to be a liar (in his chosen medical profession as much as in his private life). The pair of them, Father and Daughter, created a travelling-circus illusion that was to last for years: He only spoke the Truth; She showed, via the censored correspondence that he always and only spoke the Truth. Some highly critical philosophers of science, like Adolf Grünbaum, have unhelpfully taken him at his word — and often when his “word” was most unreliable.

Borch-Jacobsen has used material from my research which proves – it really does! – that the opening dream in Chapter Two of The Interpretation of Dreams is an invented piece of whimsy that could not have existed before 1897 (at the earliest) and was full of lies about his eldest daughter’s health. I also included (in both my Freud books) reference to the short letter, “Daimonie, warum schreibst du nicht?..” written to Fliess by Freud on the very day he would later claim (in Die Traumdeutung, The Interpretation of Dreams) that “the secrets of the dream” had been revealed to him — Wednesday, 24th July 1895. In that brief letter there is no mention of the impossible dream of the night before, nor any reference to having grasped “the secrets of the dream” There IS, nowadays incidentally, a deceptive stone plaque erected in the 1970s to the effect that at Bellevue (Vienna) Freud DID, in fact, uncover the “secret of dreams” , just as his book claimed! Needless to say, the brief letter of 24th July 1895 (with NO mention of the supposed dream) was carefully “removed” from the Anna Freud edition. It has now been published — with the rest of the 133 missing letters — in the Harvard edition of 1985. But, to this day, the French have no knowledge of this. And also, needless to say, Borch-Jacobsen plays the Anna-Freud-game and silently removes this evidence against Freud.

What surprises me about the reception of this book is the fierce, hysterical (?) outrage of the Freudians, with the Lacanians taking the lead. If only they realized how kind to Freud Borch-Jacobsen had been by his plentiful trimming of awkward comments by Sigmund! The unvarnished truth about Freud and his obsessively invented nonsense is far worse than anything revealed by this book. In other words,the situation in France is far more serious, medically, than the noisy reception of this book allows. In a sense, it IS – this Livre noir – a valuable first step that may begin to open the flood-gates to Truth. But it is by no means The Black Book of Psychoanalysis. That was written by a clinical child psychologist and published in 2002 and its title, in case you have forgotten, is Mensonges freudiens: Histoire d’une désinformation séculaire. Read it!

Robert Wilcocks is Professor Emeritus of French Literature at the University of Alberta and author of Maelzel’s Chess Player: Sigmund Freud and the
Rhetoric of Deceit.

I’ve been reading Foucault and the Iranian Revolution by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, and the picture it paints is not pretty.

As Afary and Anderson note, although Foucault’s particular fascination with the revolution is well known in France, the full range of his writing about it has never been translated into English. In fact, since much of that writing was originally published by the Italian daily Corriere della sera, and until now was not republished, the full extent of his thoughts has rarely been taken into account even by Foucault’s French readers. Foucault made two, week long trips to Iran in the fall of ’78. He interviewed a number of prominent political actors, wrote nearly a dozen brief journalistic essays, and gave a long interview defending his distinctive views of the revolution. His response, in short, was deeper and more enthusiastic than his more well known, contemporaneous support of Solidarity and of Vietnamese refugees. Yet, the three volume, English language collection of Foucault’s “essential works” (in fact, otherwise uncollected brief essays and interviews) includes only one of the Iran pieces—and the last and most qualified. As Afary and Anderson point out, since that essay came at the end of a prominent political dispute, in which Foucault’s critics on the Parisian left took him to task for his uncritical support of Khomeini and Islamic government, reading it in isolation has been a confusing experience.

Fortunately, Afary and Anderson redress that problem. Their volume reprints all Foucault’s Iran writings, as well as the criticisms leveled against them at the time by, among others, an anonymous Iranian feminist and the prestigious Marxist historian of the Middle East Maxime Rodinson. Those reprints are prefaced by a long, patient depiction of Foucault’s context and by a sustained effort to reconsider the relation between Foucault’s brief enthusiasm for the revolution and his work more generally.

Given the fact that admirers of Foucault in English pay little attention to this aspect of his career and that, until quite recently, some defenders doubted that Foucault was actually enthusiastic about Islamic revolution, this is certainly welcome attention. Unfortunately, so far, it doesn’t look like the book will become much of an event. It’s still quite new, but as of yet, so far as I can tell, there hasn’t been much buzz. In the course of a nearly hagiographic defense of Foucault (“the gentle apostle of radiant uncertainty”), Jonathan Rée gave it a long, eloquent, but I think glibly backhanded dismissal in The Nation. The key lines: “One could hardly have asked for more. One might have asked for less, however.”

According to Rée, in other words, Afary and Anderson are carried away by prosecutorial zeal and make far too much of a minor episode. Although they “have spent ten years working on their book,” he says, “it has not been a labor of love, and their summaries of Foucault’s achievements are consistently hostile and tendentious.”

I think that’s not right. Most basically, Afary and Anderson’s tone is moderate to a fault. They have nothing like the verve and style Rée shares with Foucault, but I suspect that’s deliberate. Their book turns down the flame as low as possible. Likewise, their judgments—though certainly arguable in some cases—are generally plausible and far from extreme. No daring leaps of the sort that Foucault himself practiced.

Their most contestable claim is simply that Foucault’s view of the revolution is integrally related to attitudes displayed consistently throughout his work—in particular to a one-sided hostility to the modernity of the west. (At one early stage in the revolution, Foucault worried that visions of Islamic government too closely resembled “the catchphrases of democracy–of bourgeois or revolutionary democracy. . . . We in the West have been repeating them to ourselves ever since the eighteenth century, and look where they have got us.”) Afary and Anderson believe that attitude blinded Foucault not just to the likely outcomes of Islamic government, but more particularly to the repression it promised women and homosexuals.

More specifically, Afary and Anderson construct an unfamiliar picture of Foucault as not just an anti-modernist, but as a defender of traditional societies. Rée leaps all over this, calling it “preposterous,” and I suspect he’s basically right. But it’s worth noting that, as Afary and Anderson emphasize, in all his major works, Foucault describes the ostensible improvements of modernizing reform as less appealing than what they displaced. That doesn’t seem controversial.

Likewise, Rée dismisses as misinterpretation A & A’s emphasis on the importance to Foucault of “limit experiences,” suggesting that such “notions . . . have no place in his work except as butts of his teasing paradoxes.” This is, I think, simply untrue. Not central perhaps, but there’s no doubt that Foucault spoke several times about limit experiences, and the case can be made, as for example in this essay by Gary Gutting (Project Muse) that they played a significant, though submerged role in his thinking over all.

It would be easy, in short, to overemphasize A & A’s minor stumbles or contestable claims (like their further argument that the last volumes of the History of Sexuality were significantly inflected by Foucault’s interest in the customs of homosexuality in Muslim societies) and to miss the central problem. In my view, the most striking, indisputable, and disturbing claim is simply that Foucault was fascinated by “political spirituality,” and that when his critics and friends pointed out to him its dangers, he was initially indifferent (state repression in Iran after the revolution appears to have changed his mind somewhat) because he was far more concerned about the evils of modernity and the arrogance of the west. At one point Foucault’s Gallimard editor Claude Mauriac worried about the dangers of combining “spirituality and politics”: “we have seen what that gave us.” Foucault’s response was simply to ask: “And politics without spirituality, my dear Claude?”

A & A have a plausible case that Foucault was fascinated by the revolution, not just because it was a challenge to repression or to American imperialism, but because, as he said, it was “an attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics.” They likewise have a colorable claim that this interest depended on a significant blind spot in Foucault’s thinking and further that this blindness was part and parcel of his larger concerns about governmentality, subjectification, etc. Their book deserves to be taken seriously—though on the evidence of Rée alone I suspect strongly that they won’t be.

Update. For a better review than Rée’s, see Wesley Yang’s excellent
piece in the Boston Globe.

This article was first published on The Valve on September 15 and is republished here by permission.

In support of the “No Religious Arbitration Coalition”

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Dear Mr. McGuinty:

An important tenet of Canadian democracy hangs in the balance of your response to the matter of religious arbitration in the province of Ontario. While many Canadians may assume that we are all governed by one system of laws, created by publicly elected officials who are accountable to the electorate, your government is poised to shift the ground under this cornerstone of liberal democracy.

While our public system of law is not always perfect, it is designed to recognize the realities of all citizens and is open to public scrutiny and improvement. Such is not the case with private systems of law, such as religious laws.

The public may identify this issue from media reports as “Sharia law in Ontario,” but they, and you, need to understand that this is a matter of the formal separation of all religious matters from the business of the state. This is in no way an infringement on religious freedom, which we endorse as an equally important tenet of Canadian democracy. Religion should simply remain an important part of the lives of citizens but not of public law.

Surely the separation of church and state is understood by today’s politicians to be the fertile ground upon which modern, rights-based democracies such as that in Canada have flourished. Arbitrariness, petty theocracies and selective — rather than universal — access to public law await us if we simply treat this issue as a detail in the daily business of government.

Ontario’s commitment to religious freedom, anti-racism and multiculturalism are very important to us and to all Ontarians. Some have argued that to deny arbitration based on religious laws is a breach of these commitments.

We do not agree.

Allowing the use of religious arbitration will lead to divisiveness, the ghettoization of members of religious communities as well as human-rights abuses, particularly for those who hold the least institutional power within the community, namely women and children.

We urge you to speak strongly in favour of Ontario’s commitment to one system of laws for all, as well as for freedom of religion and anti-racism. Prohibit the use of religion in the arbitration of family law disputes through appropriate amendments to the Arbitration Act. The eyes of the world are quite literally watching Ontario at this time to see if we have the courage to move forward on this issue in a way that preserves our common bond and is inclusive and respectful of all.

Sincerely,

Margaret Atwood

Maude Barlow

June Callwood

Shirley Douglas

Michele Landsberg

Flora MacDonald

Margaret Norrie McCain

Maureen McTeer

Sonja Smits

Lois Wilson

In support of the “No Religious Arbitration Coalition”

The ‘Islamic Institute of Civil Justice’ or what has become known as the Sharia Court has been heralded by proponents as a multi-cultural way of determining personal and family disputes for those who ‘choose’ to abide by Sharia law in Ontario, Canada. We are told it will promote ‘minority rights’ and that it is equitable, tolerant, and fair. We are told that if it is not established, the ‘Muslim minority’ will be marginalised and discriminated against. That anything less is racism pure and simple.

This is not the case.

Deceptively sugar-coating an Islamic Court in civil rights terms cannot and will not conceal the stark realities of Sharia law and its regressive implications for human beings and Canadian society.

To begin with, Sharia law is inherently unjust and unfair even if it’s only being implemented in the area of what some call mundane civil disputes. In fact, discriminatory family and personal status codes are important pillars in the oppression of women in Islamist societies. Much of the struggle for women’s rights has taken shape in countries like Iran vis-à-vis these very aspects of Sharia law. Discrimination and gender-based persecution in areas of marriage, divorce, child custody and so on are in fact reasons why many women flee Islamist societies and seek refuge in Canada and the west. These so called ‘mundane’ disputes have cost many a woman and girl her rights and life in the Middle East and North Africa. Now, it aims to do the same in Canada.

Yes we know. Those who avail of the court will ‘choose’ to do so; it will be completely voluntary. It is interesting how pro-women’s choices the political Islamic movement becomes when it is vying for power in the west. Where are the choices for women in Iran and Afghanistan under Sharia law and Islamic states? Where is it for women of Iraq or Saudi Arabia? The political Islamic movement is renowned for threatening, intimidating, mutilating, maiming and killing all those who refuse and transgress. Women and girls are always its first victims.

The very sham concept of its voluntary nature becomes clearer when you hear Mumtaz Ali who spearheaded the initiative say: ‘Once the parties have agreed …they will be committed to it by their prior consent. As a consequence, on religious grounds, a Muslim who would choose to opt out at this stage, for reasons of convenience would be guilty of a far greater crime than a mere breach of contract–and this could be tantamount to blasphemy-apostasy.’ The penalty of which by the way is execution under Islamic law in places like Iran. Clearly, then, even a limited Sharia Court in Canada will increase intimidation and threats against innumerable women. It will open the way for further conquests by this reactionary movement.

Now some say that the Islamic Court will promote ‘minority rights’ and ensure the fair and equitable treatment of ‘minorities’. In fact, it is just the opposite.

It is discriminatory and unfair to have different and separate systems, standards and norms for ‘different’ people. The concept of an Islamic Court adheres to a principle of separate but equal similar to that promoted by the former Apartheid regime of South Africa. It was clear then as it is clear now that separate is not equal. In fact it is a prescription for inequality and discrimination. It is the Canadian state’s justification for shrugging its shoulders and excusing itself from its responsibility towards all citizens living in Canada. It maintains fragmented ‘minority communities’ leaving members of the so-called community, particularly women and children, at the mercy of reactionary and parasitical elders and imams. It increases marginalisation and the further ghettoisation of immigrant communities. It makes immigrants and new arrivals forever minorities and never Canadian citizens equal before and under the law.

And that is exactly the problem with the racist concepts of multi-culturalism and cultural relativism. It promotes tolerance and respect for so-called minority opinions and beliefs, rather than and often times instead of respect for human beings. Human beings are worthy of the highest respect but not all opinions and beliefs are worthy of respect and tolerance. There are some who believe in fascism, white supremacy, the inferiority of women. Must those beliefs be respected? There is a big difference between the two.

Multi-culturalism always gives precedence to cultural and religious norms, however reactionary, over the human being and her rights. And it always sees communities as having one homogeneous belief and opinion – often times taking the most reactionary segment of that community – the imams and elders’ beliefs – as the belief and culture of the whole.

Multi-culturalism’s promotion of respect for beliefs and opinions is so strong that even when rights are violated, women mutilated and killed, girls victimised, respect for those beliefs and norms take precedence over individual and universal rights. There is a real contradiction between cultural relativism and multi-culturalism on the one hand and individual rights on the other.

The Canadian state is duty-bound to defend the rights of all human beings living in Canada equally often times despite differing opinions and beliefs. Even if it is the individual’s belief. Just as it intervenes when a woman refuses to press charges against an abusive spouse. Just as it intervenes when parents abuse their children. Everyday, the state intervenes to protect people. Not necessarily because it likes to but because civil society and established norms force it to. It must do so here as well.

And there are some who say opposing the Sharia Court and Islamic laws is racist.

It is not.

Opposition to or critiques of or even ‘phobias’ of ideologies, religions, cultures, laws or political movements are not racism. Islamophobia is not racism. Only phobias against people because of their race are racism. It is only under the New World Order’s multi-culturalism that Islamophobia has been increasingly and deceptively given legitimacy as a form of racism. The political Islamic movement labels it such only to silence those who critique it or stand up to it.

In fact it is racist to create a Sharia Court. It is racist to discriminate against so-called minorities and deny them universal and equal rights and standards and the secularism fought for and established by progressive movements over centuries. It is racist to justify and ignore violations of civil rights and misogyny under the pretext of multi-culturalism. It is racist to deny equality of all citizens before the law. It is racist to create separate legal, social, cultural, religious systems for people deemed different.

Enough is enough! The Sharia Court in Canada is an extension of that movement that stones women on streets and hangs apostates from cranes on city squares in Iran. It is an extension of the same movement that has threatened to kill Yanar Mohammad of the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq for defending women’s rights there. It is an extension of the same movement that imprisons women in burqas in Afghanistan. It has no right to speak of civil rights and justice. It is itself a pillar of injustice and rightlessness in the world today. A Sharia Court in Canada? No way! No How! We will not allow it. Enough is enough!

Due to the sensitivity of this subject I will start by making a distinction between Islam and Muslims. Islam can be described as a civilization, as a source of spiritual guidance, as a way of life and so on. Most of all Islam is a moral framework, and central to this moral frame is the decree that a believer or follower submit his will to Allah. How this submission should be practiced is worked out in the Qur’an and hadith.

A Muslim is any one – regardless of race or sex – who subscribes to or testifies to believing, among other things, that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet. Besides accepting god as Allah, and his prophet, a Muslim also believes in a host of other things like the existence of angels, a hereafter with a range of different heavens and hells, more prophets, and the view that the world will come to an end as predicted in the holy Qur’an.

Islam as compiled in the Qur’an and Hadith could be viewed as static. The way Muslims believe or practice their religion is dynamic. The individual Muslim can choose to change. As humans they are endowed with reason and, if free, Muslims can, as Christians and Jews have done in the past and still do, progress by means of critical self-reflection. I regularly criticize Islam and especially the treatment of women as prescribed in the Qur’ an and Hadith. By doing that I have annoyed many Muslims, some of whom actually want to hurt me. Despite this, rejecting some of the teachings in Islam is not the same as rejecting Muslims. Muslims deserve to be and should be viewed in Europe and elsewhere like all other humans. What I ask is not to fear Muslims or persecute them for their beliefs. What I expect – both from Muslims and their non-Muslim supporters – is to have the opportunity to think, publish my ideas and engage in societal discussion about Islam as a moral framework without having to fear for my life.

Having said that, I would like to defend the proposition that in Islam women are subordinate to men. The sexual morality propagated in Islam leads, when put into practice, to cruel violations of the rights of women and girls. By making a statement like this one I know that I am inviting disagreement. I am most interested in the arguments of my critics. Let me demonstrate this inequality. According to Islamic teachings in the Qur’an and hadith: Muslim men are free to go where they want while most Muslim women are confined to their houses. Muslim men do not need permission to leave the house; women do. Muslim men are not obligated to veil their beauty but Muslim women must. A man may divorce his wife as easily as repeating the words “I divorce you” three times in the presence of two witnesses. A woman who wants to leave her husband must prove at least that he does not meet her material needs. She must prove that he is impotent. She must prove that he cannot make her pregnant. She must have the approval of her wali (or guardian). A man may inherit twice as much as a woman. His testimony in matters of conflict is worth twice hers. Just in case there is a hereafter, women know from the prophet that their sort is over-represented in hell, while men can look forward to 72 virgins and companionship with their men folk. It is demanded in the Qur’an that a woman obeys her husband indefinitely. For the man conforming to the wishes of his wife is an option. A man may have sexual intercourse with his wife when and how he wants. Her refusal will invite the curses of angels and the wrath of her husband. If a man rejects his wife in bed the angels are silent and her disappointment may lead her husband to think that she is in the grip of the devil, who fills her with uncontrollable desires. Even though a man may marry four wives provided he promises to treat them equally, a woman has the right to only one man. And even this right is limited by the fact that she cannot do so without permission from her guardian (father, brother, or paternal uncle).

Some of the Muslims who disagree with me say that I am confused by the way Islam is practiced in war-torn and backward Somalia, my country of birth. According to them I should look at the way millions of Muslims practice their religions in more peaceful and modern countries.

I acknowledge that there are indeed areas in the world such as the large cities of Indonesia (the world’s largest Muslim country), Turkey, and some North African countries where Islam has somehow found a compromise with modernity. I also recognize that there are thousands of Muslims who treat men and women, boys and girls in an equal manner. However I invite those who disagree with my statement on inequality between the sexes in Islam to compare the consistence between the teachings in the Quran and hadith and real life circumstances in the majority nations with large Islamic populations and especially those whose state of affairs are regulated according to the model of the prophet Muhammad.

Is one who takes note of the daily suffering endured by girls and women in Saudi Arabia and Iran (two countries based on the sharia) deranged and traumatized? Or is the reality of the Sharia difficult to endure when enforced by those who will tolerate no criticism of Islam?

Is the high rate of illiteracy among girls and women in the UNDP report on Human Development in 22 Arab-Islamic countries an outcome of the lowly position women and girls are accorded in their religion and culture, or is the report only meant to defame and insult the countries researched?

Why are Muslim girls and women over-represented in the shelters of the abused and the crisis houses for teenagers who run away from home? Is it a coincidence, or is the strict virginity required in Islam a possible explanation of why these girls are haunted by their families: their fathers, brothers and husbands, the very people who should be protecting them from external harm?

In order to reject the statement that women are subordinate to men in Islam, my opponents will have to answer disturbing questions like these honestly.

An argument often heard in defence of Islam is that the cruel treatment of Muslim women is not so much the outcome of the Qur’ an and hadith as God originally meant them to be, as a narrow and opportunistic abuse of these holy sources by men in patriarchal societies. This argument is not convincing because Islam was founded by a man in a patriarchal society. Islam is a tribal religion, founded under tribal conditions and a moral framework whereby those virtues held high in the Arab tribe are made divine. I do not intend to deny that the prophet Muhammad may have improved the position of women in the 7th century AD. For example he contributed to abolishing the custom of burying girls alive at the age of 7 and the right of men to marry as many wives as they wished. But let’s not forget that while these improvements may have seemed revolutionary 14 hundred years ago, now they are horribly outdated.

Continual reference to the improvements made so long ago does not make the current suffering of women abused in the name of Allah more bearable. All it does is divert the attention from the inhuman treatment of Muslim girls and women today and the fear they live in.

That, among other reasons, is why it is so important to take a moral stand against those teachings and practices in Islam that degrade women to a species between human and animal. For those Muslims who agree with me, and for those Europeans who do not wish to look away, taking this moral attitude means that we should take action. Debate with Muslims living in Europe, and through words and pictures challenge the sexual morality in Islam held by so many European Muslims; Provide protection from honour killing for Muslim women who are on the run. Introduce a control system as an instrument to eradicate female genital mutilation. (There is controversy on whether this is Islamic. It is remarkable however that many Muslim countries practice FGM. Indonesia, is an example of a country where FGM came with the Muslim missionaries). Interfere through the schools and day care centres with the way Muslims in Europe start their families and bring up their children. Stop financing faith based schools.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Dutch Member of Parliament and author of the film ‘Submission.’

I am very pleased to be here amongst you all, next to Ayaan Hersi Ali and Irshad Manji. It is hard to find opportunities such as this; to be able to share the idea of having a better life for all and identify with the supporters in an audience such as yourselves. So I will make the most of these moments by giving the focus of this discussion to the topic of this conference, Sharia Law and the Globalization of Political Islam.

I need to emphasize that I am talking about political Islam as a movement. As a movement it is very active in politics and is after its own state. Other aspects such as culture and laws serve its political desire and its political needs.

I also need to highlight that Islam, as an ideological, theoretical and ethical religion, has enough resources available not only to sustain itself, but also to expand its activities globally. I also will discuss the relation between Islamic terrorism and political Islam. I will then expand my discussion to the move for the establishment of Sharia court in Canada and its relation to political Islam.

The movement of political Islam has its own characteristics. It differs from fundamentalism and radical Islam; these terminologies do not describe the movement that I am about to discuss.

Fundamentalism is a name given to certain groups that act as sects and focus on returning to original values and beliefs in personal and social life. If this is so, then all Islamic groups can be called ‘fundamentalist’ because no changes have been accepted in Islam since its coming into existence. Also, any social group which has tendencies to rely on pre-historic origins can be called fundamentalist yet not be involved in politics at all. The reality is that most Islamic groups are very involved in society.

We call this movement political Islam simply because it precedes a political power. It has a varied and wide ranges. After the revolution of Iran in 1979, this movement organized itself as a state, realizing that it is able to achieve its goals socially, culturally, and religiously on a macro level.

This movement rides on the mass of people who are oppressed and isolated. The ones who are out of patience with discrimination and oppression and have no hope for social improvement by parties in power and have no hope for modern and progressive alternatives. This movement appears as anti-western, not necessarily anti ‘western government’, but rather anti ‘western values and standards’. Their conduct is primarily in the form of opposition to the freedom of women, women’s civil liberties, and freedom of expression. It is misogynistic and goes against modernism. It is extremely anti-secular and anti-socialist.

This is a movement that will not hesitate to do anything in order to push back its opposition and gain recognition by the states in the West. This is sometimes done through terrorizing people by implanting bombs in the busiest streets, cinemas, subway stations, hospitals and schools. This creates a parallel power structure within the surrounding societies. This movement will do anything to penetrate the legal system, whether it uses a bad piece of legislation such as the Ontario Arbitration Act 1991 or by taking the law into its own hands by preaching upon complete different human relations within society. This is done by removing civic culture where citizens are free and equal, and replacing it with ethics laid down in the Sharia.

This movement has no actual economic or social plan, but it is aware that any form of democracy in countries such as Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Egypt would end up in a mass secular uprising and the growth of labor movements. Even in Saudi Arabia no sheik could survive more than a few days if true democracy were allowed to exist. This movement was nourished by Western governments during the cold war and its purpose was to suppress and neutralize the increasing people’s movement, which it only achieved by violence and the enforcement of brutal laws and traditions. Now political Islam has taken on international dimensions. The notion of fundamentalism was put forward in order to rescue sections of political Islam that still have some use in the Middle East.

The terror that this movement has committed outside its region, presents just a fraction of its aggression towards humanity. Imagine its aggression and its hostility towards people in places where this movement runs its own state and has absolute control of law and regulations. Imagine what will happen to its opposition in places where it has its own army and police! In those places anyone who shows opposition, in any way possible, will be arrested, tortured and executed. No one will be safe at work, school, on the street or in their home.

I would like to strongly stress the point that one needs to know about the characteristics of political Islam in order to be able to identify its active members and separate them totally from the people whose faith is Islam. We should not put these very different groups into one category. To make my point clear, Political Islam is similar to fascism in Germany. Have you ever heard of German people in general being identified as Fascist?

There should be no connection made between political Islamic groups and people whose faith is Islam.

Another point that needs to be emphasized is that of separating the idea of a country from the religion of the people living there. No one calls Canada a Christian country, although Christianity may be the religion of the majority. In the same way no-one should call Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan Muslim countries . It is a huge political misdirection that is done intentionally in order to mislead the whole world about the real situation in the Middle East and North Africa. By calling them Islamic, people in those countries are blamed for the inhuman actions of States, of reactionary groups and of the Political Islamic movement. By lumping them into one category, it makes it appear as if all people in those countries hate the secular nature of society. It is as if women in Iran and Afghanistan love the “veil” being imposed on them and love to be disfigured by a jar of acid to honour their culture. The stark reality is that this type of mis-identification is legitimizing the oppressive governments and reactionary movements. If left unchecked, this mis-identification will create a comprehensive social, legal, intellectual, emotional, geographical and civil apartheid.

Islamic terrorism is a military section of Political Islam. This movement works by causing fear among people and aims to solidify its position in the Middle East. In fact, it is a power struggle for more recognition. It is telling the western governments to leave the Middle East and Africa and to validate political Islam by supporting Islamic states. Political Islam with its terrorist action clearly says that if you don’t recognize Islamic states, terrorism is what people in the West will face. The September 11 terrorist crimes against humanity that slaughtered thousands of innocent people in the USA was not an isolated act.

The reality is that terrorism is an act to push the parties in power in the West to choose between the “Bad” and the “Worse”. It should come as no surprise to anyone if they see another dictatorial and backward regime after the Taliban in Afghanistan or after Saddam Houssein in Iraq. As I said, the Western states need to choose between bad and worse.

The establishment of Shari’a court in Canada is part of a global political move by Islamists. This has nothing to do with people’s personal faith. As I have said before, this move to be recognized and to gain credibility needs to get involved socially, culturally, and legally. It needs to put pressure on the parties in power in the West to get involved and to play a role in the social metabolism, especially in education, economics and law. So it should not come as a surprise that Sharia law has come to the University of Toronto where two professors have been hired to teach sharia law and regulation. The more this movement gains credibility, the more it can attack secularism and our progressive achievements. There should be no doubt that their first attempt is to target women’s hard earned accomplishments. Once more I need to emphasize the fact that the establishment of Sharia court is the next step towards further ghettoizing and isolating a section of society. In the name of “respect for multiculturalism” and the shameful ideas of cultural relativism which leave people at the mercy of their own culture, the state has left the doors wide open for religions and adherents of old traditions to promote religious schools and centers; to legalize arranged and forced marriages; to segregate boys and girls at a very young age in school, on school buses and in playgrounds; to prevent girls from obtaining equal opportunities in all aspects of their lives; to see but to ignore honor killings, and so on. In reality the initiators of Sharia court would never say that they want sharia court in order to oppress women and children or to attack today’s norms and standards; instead they claim they are practicing their religious rights because their number have grown to 600,000.

What is the solution?

I can’t issue a specific prescription to get rid of this monster, but I know that the guiding principle of our movement, that we should not allow humanity to suffer more than it has to, is totally removed from political Islam. Don’t forget that today we are challenging a Political movement which has no respect for life.

It is our duty to cherish humanity and respect it dearly, irrespective of class, nationality, race, gender or religion. Values such as freedom, well-being and the happiness of all must be put at the centre of our Universe. We should stand for equal and universal rights, and freedom for all human beings. Secularism should come forward in full force for the separation of religion from the state and from education. Any attempt to undermine freedom of religion must be prevented. Any law and regulation that is in violation of the principle of human equality must be immediately repealed, and all cases of discrimination by any individual, authority or institution, should be voided. We must denounce this policy of multiculturalism that keeps the minority community from playing a major role in society. This policy keeps the minority community in a cultural, political and intellectual quarantine. Instead we must promote integration.

Finally I invite you to join us in this campaign and build a strong power to oppose Sharia /faith based court in Ontario. The first step in this regard is to compel the government of Ontario to withdraw this discriminative legislation and become more loyal to secular law.

Thank you.

TORONTO – Canada, August 12th, 2005 – Over 400 people filled the ‘Earth Sciences Centre’ at the University of Toronto on August 12th. Despite three changes of venue leaving less than a week to sell tickets with no proper ticket selling process, people eagerly came to hear three brave women speak about how Sharia law is used to oppress Muslim women in Canada, Holland and around the world.

Sixty-six media people attended the press conference. Some of the news organizations present were CBC, CTV, Global TV, Omni TV, PBS, Globe and Mail , NOW magazine, Reuters, Toronto Star and Vogue.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who must live under police protection in a safe house in the Netherlands, took the risk of coming to Canada because she wanted to show her support for Homa Arjomand’s International Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada.

Ayaan explained that in the Netherlands, her government plans to specifically remove family legal matters from the Dutch Arbitration Act.

Irshad Manji made a point about how the Arab cultural tradition of ‘honour’ was often behind the abuse and killing of Muslim women. She believes Muslim men use their rights as defined in Sharia law to restore their sense of honour.

Homa Arjomand, the Coordinator of the International Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada, explained how each day in her work as a transitional counselor, she helps seven Muslim women a day to leave their abusive relationships. These experiences, plus her human rights work in Iran during the 70’s and 80’s are what motivated Homa to start her campaign. In twenty-two months, this political movement has grown from a handful of supporters to a coalition of 87 organizations from 14 countries with over a thousand activists.

The ten minute film ‘Submission’ was shown and a lively and informative question period followed. There were a couple of questions from people who supported the use of Sharia law in Canada.

At the end, all three women vowed to remain united and focused in their fight against Sharia law in Canada and around the world.

The conference was hosted by Ernie Enola.

A review of a Nietzsche book in The New York Times is rare, and even rarer, it seems, is the decision to enlist a reviewer competent in the material. Although Curtis Cate’s biography of Nietzsche appeared nearly two years ago, just today the Times has run a lengthy review of the book by the writer and novelist William Vollman, who, best I can tell, has no expertise in the subject, and who certainly displays none in the review.

The review – predictably, I suppose, for the Times – concentrates mostly on gossip about Nietzsche’s personal relations, and although there are breathless references to Nietzsche’s “bravery,” his “savagely independent intellect,” and “his incomparable mind,” there is almost no actual discussion of his philosophical ideas. The one exception comes towards the end, where Mr. Vollman bizarrely ascribes to Nietzsche “a ‘realism’ which asserts that cruelty, being innate, can be construed as moral,” a view which Nietzsche does not hold (and, of course, no text or passage is referenced in support). Is it really too much to expect that a lengthy review of a biography of a philosopher might say something (accurate) about the philosopher’s ideas?

Our first hint that Mr. Vollman is well out of his depth comes early on, when he praises Cate’s summary of “the relevant aspects of Schopenhauer, Aristotle and others by whom Nietzsche was influenced and against whom he reacted.”

Aristotle?

Many figures from antiquity – Thales, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Phyrro – loom large for Nietzsche (as both targets and inspirations), but as every serious student of Nietzsche knows, Aristotle is notable for his almost total absence from the corpus. There are a mere handful of explicit references to Aristotle in Nietzsche’s writings (even in the unpublished notebooks), and no extended discussion of the kind afforded Plato or Thales. And apart from some generally superficial speculations in the secondary literature about similarities between Aristotle’s “great-souled man” and Nietzsche’s idea of the “higher” or “noble” man – similarities nowhere remarked upon by Nietzsche himself–there is no scholarship supporting the idea that Aristotle is a significant philosopher for Nietzsche in any respect.

Perhaps aware that the waters he has entered are too deep and turbulent for his feeble stroke, Mr. Vollman declares immediately after this peculiar Aristotle reference that Mr. Cate’s summaries are “asking the world to pick nits. Nits will be picked. No matter.” But thinking Aristotle matters for Nietzsche is no nit: it’s the difference between knowing something about the subject matter (about the formative intellectual influences on the philosopher) and knowing next to nothing. Nits do not matter, but having some idea what one is talking about does in the life of the mind.

Lack of real familiarity with the subject is manifest at other places in Mr. Vollman’s review, in between the People magazine speculations and meaningless philosophical name-dropping (the silliest instance of the latter follows upon Mr. Vollman’s quoting Lou Salome accusing Nietzsche of wanting a physical menage-a-trois with her and Paul Ree; Mr. Vollman adds: “Well, why not? Nietzsche would ultimately reject Plato.”). Mr. Vollman repeats the standard story about Nietzsche’s syphilis, apparently unaware of the detailed (and rather convincing) debunking of that explanation of Nietzsche’s final collapse by a medical doctor, Richard Schain, in his 2001 book The Legend of Nietzsche’s Syphilis. On the question of anti-semitism, Mr. Vollman says, oddly, that “Nietzsche was plentiful in his praise of individual Jews,” though such references to individuals are few and far between by comparison to Nietzsche’s praise not for individuals, but for the Jewish people and Jewish culture.

So, for example, in the course of discussing “the anti-Jewish stupidity” of the Germans, he writes (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 251) that “the Jews are without a doubt the strongest, purest, most tenacious race living in Europe today,” adding that given their virtues, “the Jews, if they wanted…could quite literally have control over present-day Europe–this is established. The fact that they are not working and making plans to this end is likewise established.” Elsewhere, he remarks on the importance of logic and reason among early modern Jewish scholars, who needed these tools to overcome prejudice, adding that “Europe owes the Jews no small thanks for making its people more logical, for cleaner intellectual habits–none more so than the Germans, as a lamentably deraisonnable race that even today first needs to be given a good mental drubbing” (Gay Science, sec. 348).

None of this is to deny that there are spectacularly harsh attacks on Judaism in Nietzsche’s corpus, but Mr. Vollman nowhere mentions the most pertinent fact about these attacks: namely, that the grave crime with which Nietzsche repeatedly charges the Jews and Judaism is giving birth to Christianity! (As Nietzsche quips in The Antichrist [sec. 24], “even today the Christan can feel anti-Jewish without realizing that he himself is the ultimate Jewish consequence.”) In the annals of European anti-semitism, this charge would, of course, be unrecognizable as a contribution to the genre. And, indeed, more often than not–for example in the Genealogy – he uses “Jew” and “Judea” interchangeably with “Christian” and “Christianity,” and for an obvious reason: he objects to the morality for which these religions stand, not anything particular to the religious cosmologies, let alone the “race” of people who embrace them (in the Genealogy, he goes so far as to invoke the Catholic Pope as evidence of the triumph of Jewish values). (For discussion, see pp. 195-197 of my Nietzsche on Morality [London: Routledge, 2002].)

To be fair, Mr. Vollman’s review is more empty than pernicious; his ignorance is palpable if one knows something, but he does not do too much damage to serious reading of Nietzsche. The broader issue, though, is about the responsibilities of newspapers, like The New York Times, that aspire to be serious and intellectual. If a decision is made to commission a long review of a book, why not enlist someone who actually knows something? It’s true, to be sure, that Nietzsche attracts more than his share of intellectual tourists and sophomoric misreaders, but a publication that aspires to provide intellectual uplift to its non-scholarly readers ought to undertake to do better. The nepotism (by blood and by social circle) of The New York Times is, of course, notorious, but even in New York and vicinity, I count a half-dozen folks who, if asked, would have been able to say something intelligent, instead of trite or simply mistaken. The public culture in the United States is debased enough that one might be forgiven for entertaining the modest hope that a high-profile review of a book on a philosopher might be written by someone who knows something about the philosopher and his philosophy.

But perhaps Sartre is right, and we must live without hope.

This article first appeared on The Leiter Report and is republished here by permission. Brian Leiter is Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Law & Philosophy Program at the University of Texas at Austin. The Leiter Report is here.

Has information technology arrived in India? I doubt it has.
Notwithstanding the booming software exports, burgeoning BPO services
and mushrooming software parks.

Let us climb out of our fantasy balloons and do a reality check.

Information technology has not affected people’s lives in any
significant way. Apart from a small e-lite segment of the digirati,
most people have no access to a PC and the internet. Nor has
information technology enhanced the quality of their lives. Other than
remix music, Bollywood stunts and special effects, online train
reservations and a few pilot projects in telemedicine, precious little
has happened that touches people’s lives. E-governance has just not
taken off. Public servants and services remain as inaccessible as they
were two decades ago. Information still lies hidden behind a wall of
red tape.

The gloomiest scenario is afforded by our institutions of higher
education. It is ludicrous but true that in most of these institutions
information technology integration has stopped at word-processing,
web-surfing and e-mail. At the level of their structure and
functioning, these institutions have not really assimilated the
technology in a way that would enable them to develop futuristically
and contribute more substantially to the enrichment of people’s lives.
One obvious reason is the apathy of a proverbially conservative
academia and the want of incentives to prompt it to explore the
potential of information technology.

The long-term consequences of this evolutionary arrest could be rather
bad because it is in the universities that the future is supposed to
be shaped. But with most universities sleeping over their foundational
mandate, India may not any time soon outgrow being a digital
post-colony of the West, a softcolony that is geared to directly
benefit the West but not its own people.

And who is to blame? A whole bureaucratic-academic culture (or is it
the lack of one?) that will not see beyond its nose. For instance, no
structures are yet in place to encourage the conception and execution
of long-term transdisciplinary collaborative projects at national and
international levels. More than a tool of information, information
technology has to be an instrument of innovation and leadership. Are
we tapping its immense potential? Aren’t we instead going gaga over
the mere absorption of educated labour?

The extent of assimilation of information technology in a society can
be gauged by the uses to which it is put outside its own domain. In
the social sciences and the humanities, for instance. A distinctive
feature of information technology today is that it nullifies the
distinction of domains between the arts and the sciences, unleashing
with equal force the potential transformative energies in both. But
look at the state of our curricular organization: we firmly keep IT on
the side of the sciences instead of letting it flow freely over the
borders. We have carved out no institutional spaces to accommodate
both the computer programming skills and the expertise in the
humanities and social sciences. Why?

Let us not raise walls where the spontaneous logic of technology has
breached all old boundaries.

In fact, we have yet to systematically begin creating digital archives
of our long and rich heritage and history, which once prepared would
not only redefine the scope and quality of research but also enable
the deployment of intellectual capital more productively and with the
least wastage. Similarly, we have not yet devised a comprehensive plan
for future studies aided by the technologies of simulation and
virtuality in the context of social change, particularly urban
expansion. In disaster management and environmental monitoring too we
have got little to show.

The realization of India’s dream of a pre-eminent position in the
globalised world will depend on more than the quantum of software
exports and the numbers of BPO workforce. It will depend on the
innovative uses to which information technology is put. And it will
depend on information management and the society’s assimilation of
information technology.

The indicators are not bright as of now.

The most visible signs of the unchanging India are the dusty, mildewed
library and the classroom with its good old blackboard with a box of
chalk-sticks. Teaching and learning remain unruffled by electronic
winds. The paradigmatic shift in the modes of learning has not sunk
in. On account of a widespread ignorance of the potential of
information technology for pedagogic practices, the question of
reorganizing learning in the era of information society has not been
confronted.

The wages of dereliction are visible already. The world electronic
arts and literary scene has no Indian signatures.

Does it prove the cynics’ point that we have got trapped in
reproducing cyber-coolies only? When shall we father cyber-creators?

Or shall we withdraw into the false comfort that in a global world all
are equal and that digital class disparities are only virtual, not
real?

Rajesh K. Sharma teaches literature and theory in the Department of
English, Punjabi University, Patiala (India). His interests include
technology, philosophy and education also. Some of his work can be
seen here or here.

I agree with Frederick Turner on what he writes about creationists in his article “Darwin and Design: The Evolution of a Flawed Debate”. However, his critique on evolutionists seems rather unfair. My impression is that his opinions were built on several myths and false assumptions. Since most “evolutionists” are scientists, or at least science supporters, and since most scientists are atheists (Larson J. E. & Witham L. 1999), these myths and assumptions can be characterized as follows:

Scientists are dull people who lack imagination and creativity.

Turner writes:

The evolutionists’ sin, as I see it, is even greater, because it is three sins rolled into one.
The first is a profound failure of the imagination, which comes from a certain laziness and complacency.

I can’t think of anybody with less imagination than those who believe that God is the ultimate answer to every question. Scientific discovery is largely based on creativity and imagination. From Einstein’s thought experiments and Crick and Watson’s beautiful double helix structure to Edison’s technological innovations, science is full of inspiration and inventiveness.

If someone can be accused of laziness and complacency it is in fact those who believe only what they are told to believe or those who think they already know the answer to all the mysteries of the universe. Scientists are constantly questioning their assumptions and challenging their own findings. Religious fundamentalists, on the other hand, can only survive in a question-free environment. So, the real couch potatoes are those who claim to have the truth but don’t bother to go out there, do the research, and find some real evidence to support their claims. These people tend to be satisfied with what they already know “in their hearts” and will never experience the kind of restlessness, anguish, excitement and joy that comes along with scientific quest.

Science takes the meaning and the value out of things. Scientists can’t appreciate beauty.

Somehow people, who should, because of their studies in biology, have been brought to a state of profound wonder and awe at the astonishing beauty and intricacy and generosity of nature, can think of nothing better to say than to gloomily pronounce it all meaningless and valueless.(F.T.)

Somehow, artists and religious people think they have a monopoly on beauty and meaning. I can’t think of any biologist who feels that nature is meaningless and valueless. Even if they say that it all comes down to matter that doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is worthless or empty. There’s a lot of poetry within science. In fact, some of the most profound and evocative lines that I’ve read about nature come from biologists, not poets. Where we see an annoying mosquito they see a fascinating creature full of complexity; where we see a simple rock they see the footprints of time; while we are wondering why Brad and Jennifer broke up they are wondering what consciousness is all about.

Hence, it can be said that scientists tend to be curious people who spend their lives precisely doing that: wondering about nature’s most intricate mysteries. That’s what they do for a living. Unless they have no respect for their own time and work I don’t see how they could treat their subject matter as insignificant. It doesn’t matter if they believe in God or not. In fact, those who don’t, have repeatedly claimed that their disbelief is precisely what makes them find nature and life so meaningful and worth living. If there isn’t an afterlife or a soul, if what you’ve got is all there is, then you tend to value it all the more.

So, in short, you don’t have to believe in God to appreciate the splendor of nature. Empirical knowledge, facts and evidence don’t automatically make scientists insensible. But, of course, their admiration for nature doesn’t necessarily make them blind.

Scientists are ungrateful and arrogant.

The second sin is a profound moral failure — the failure of gratitude. (…) Our lives and experiences are surely worth more than a billion dollars to us, and yet we did not earn them and we owe it to someone or something to give thanks. And to despise and ridicule those who rightly or wrongly do want to give thanks and identify their benefactor as “God” is to compound the sin.”(F.T.)

I think the despising is not directed towards those who want to thank God for their existence, but towards those who want us to believe that this kind of gratitude is grounded in scientific fact. Anyway, making fun of somebody who is grateful doesn’t mean that you are ungrateful yourself. In fact, it can be argued that only by acknowledging what tiny and improbable creatures we are, as science reveals, we can fully appreciate (and even feel grateful about) how lucky we are for being alive.

On the other hand, although it is true that for many of us our own life is worth a billion dollars, for most people in the world, like the children who live with less than a dollar per day or have to watch every member of their family die from AIDS, life may not seem indeed that worthy. They should be looking for someone to blame, not to thank. Those who can really make a difference to improve their existence are scientists. And if they do, we should remember to thank them for that.

Now yes, some scientist can be very arrogant, especially when they know they are right about something. However, how will you call someone who believes that we are made in a perfect being’s image? Or somebody who thinks we are the center of the universe or God’s special creatures?

There’s no morality without religion.

If there is no God, what authority, if any, guarantees the moral law of humankind? (F.T.)

(…)some evolutionary partisans cannot be trusted because they would use a general social acceptance of the truth of evolution as a way to set in place a system of helpless moral license in the population and an intellectual elite to take care of them.(F.T.)

There are Christian murderers and decent atheists. Not believing in God has nothing to do with not knowing the difference between right or wrong, good and evil. In fact, it appears that it is religion which sometimes fails to make this distinction. Horrible massacres and crimes are frequently committed in the name of God. Questioning the need to have a God in order to be moral creatures isn’t necessarily “an unworthy purpose”. Taking morality out of the realm of religion has really helped us agree on universal values and design a set of basic human rights free from the relativistic principles of each faith. God and religion don’t guarantee “the moral law of human kind”. Remember it was Allah who “guided” the planes into the Twin Towers.

Evolutionists want to replace religious authority with state authority. The State discriminates against believers.

The controversy over intelligent design and evolution is, like many current quarrels, largely artificial, a proxy fight between atheists and biblical literalists over the existence and nature of a divine authority and the desirability of state authority as a replacement for it.(F.T.)

…laws must be not for religious believers alone, they must also be not for unbelievers alone either (F.T.)

The controversy is not artificial at all. It is so real that Intelligent Design is now being taught in several U.S. schools. I don’t think that evolutionists want to replace religious authority with state authority, they just want the former out of the science classroom. I’m sure catechists would also protest if they were forced to teach genetics along with the Old Testament. In fact, the problem is not the teaching of “rival theories” in addition to Darwinism, but the demand to treat them as if they were true scientifically speaking. That is equivalent to lying. Moreover, while evolution doesn’t necessarily rule out the existence of God, Intelligent Design does preclude Darwinism.

The way to decide between rival theories is to examine the evidence. And the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution. Thus, it’s not just the fact that Intelligent Design is taught as if it were science (or evolution as if it were only a “story” or a religion), but also that it claims to be the one that is right. The issue here is that if you’re not going to pay attention to the evidence, then why not give the same treatment to every possible “rival theory” in order “to avoid discrimination”. That will include, along with Intelligent Design, Lamarckism, the creation myths of Native Americans or Amazon Indians, and a theory that claims we are the product not of intelligent design but of the clumsy experimentations of aliens. Pick the one you like: if evidence doesn’t count in science then they are all “equally valid”. That’s why you need an impartial authority (such as the State) that can guarantee some of objectivity on this respect. The best way to avoid discrimination is precisely by learning to discriminate between facts and fiction.

REFERENCES

Larson J. E. & Witham L. 1999, ‘Scientists and Religion in America,’ Scientific American Digital www.sciamdigital.com

Pick your myths carefully. Your battles won’t be won in the scholarly community as much as on the opinion pages of the Sunday newpapers, so you will need to develop a fine nose for the political relevancy of your “research”. Particularly historical linguistics is interlocked with identity politics to such an extent that you might consider making this your stomping ground. But choose the right kind of historical linguistics. A solid piece of research that draws theoretically interesting conclusions about the semantics of the perfective aspect of Old Church Slavonian will have people questioning the wisdom of financing academia with taxpayers’ money. A piece of total junk connecting nation A with glorious past civilization B will, if you play your cards right, make you a superstar.

Now, exercise some tact in choosing your “field” of “research”. Claiming that, say, the Germans are the closest living relatives, linguistically and genetically, of the ancient Indo-European master race might raise a bit too many eyebrows (besides, it’s been done already). Don’t wander off into excessively obscure directions either: you won’t be able to buy your way to stardom uncovering the ancient linguistic relationships of the Vaupes region in Brasil (least of all as accessible and therefore abusable literature about those languages is hard to get, and might actually require, well, work. So that’s an obvious no-no). Best to choose a somewhat plucky language, whose speakers have no overly recent associations with genocide, and have just that slight little touch of “Otherness” that might endear you to fuzzy-headed progressives.

To help you on your way – suggestions for modern languages might be Irish, Finnish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Basque and Hopi; ancient civilizations to use include the Sumerians (absolute favourite: no linguistic relatives, so the field is wide open), Ancient Egyptians, the Megalith builders, the Lemurians, Ys, Lyonesse and Atlantis.

You might think you want to avoid trying to get through peer-review altogether, but believe me, pulp machines are regularly fed unsold editions of self-published breakthrough work connecting Cornish and Uto-Aztec. Moreover, getting rejected by peer-review is a victory. It means the secret cabal of conservative scholars see you as a threat to their comfortable ivory towers which they have built with taxpayers’ money, and thus are trying to censor you.

Particularly if your ideas are not quite as far-flung as Alpha Centauri, there may be possibilities for you to get yourself published, by hook or by crook, in even quite prestigious journals. The following advice may help you:

• Never refer to primary sources. Don’t refer to secondary sources either. Choose tertiary sources for support for questionable assertions, particularly references that are so brief that they might be easily interpreted in your favour.
• You might think you won’t be able to get away with referring to “manuscripts” or “handouts” of your buddies that don’t exist. But you can.
• Remember that your reviewers will be disinclined to believe that you have blatantly misinterpreted a reference, or even lied through your teeth. If you are confident enough, you might even get them to think they have been reading things wrong. This is some elementary psychology you must remember and use to your advantage: people will generally be more inclined to let absolute bullshit pass than to take the risk of missing some very deep, profound point and being made to look very stupid. Note that usage of absolutely inappropriate quantifications, pseudo-mathematics and nonsensical terminology hijacked from the natural sciences will serve well to make a very shallow statement look very profound and intimidate your reviewer. Also take the academic culture of the country you’re in into account. Anglo-American reviewing tends to be very mild. The Germans are positively savage: avoid them.

The next trick deals with exploiting the differences between the natural sciences and disciplines like linguistics, properly part of the humanities. Because (pace a whole lot of linguists) those differences are vast. For starters, rocks in outer space, to name something, move according to laws that have been the same since the dawn of time, and which we expect to remain the same for the lifetime of the universe. Linguistic change is not even a properly causal process, but a teleological one. In any event, it is best to ignore those differences as much as possible and employ a pseudo-exact methodology with lots of mathematical symbols. Make some up yourself. Also, the rate of linguistic change is not constant, and linguistic change cannot be quantified. Linguists have known this for more than a century (despite some serious but doomed attempts in the 60s to quantify language change). Therefore, think up some worthless formula to quantify linguistic change. You get the picture.

Remember also that linguistic change means that linguistic relationships become irretrievably obscure within a timespan of, say, 6,000 years. Ignore this, and do not deal with anything more recent than the end of the Last Ice Age (this will deter your opponent from trying to disprove your assertions, as no evidence whatsoever happens to exist). Do not be daunted in this by details such as the date of the Sumerian civilization (3,000 BC). Use words such as “Pre-Sumerians” where appropriate.

In all of these, the method is the same: find some area where linguistics is by the nature of its subject, restricted in what it can and cannot claim, and ignore those restrictions. If it’s not too obvious that you’re fooling everyone, you might just raise the interest of sister disciplines such as archaeology and population genetics, where there is some frustration with the unavailability of linguistic evidence for most of the timespan in question. Do not assume that scholarly journals in other disciplines (archaeology or even the natural sciences) won’t publish bad linguistics. You’ll be surprised.

Anyway, now it’s time to stuff your publication list a little. First, publish every review or discussion note four or five times, in different languages, in different journals. Second, don’t waste your time writing something you’ve already written: simply cut and paste whole swaths of your past articles. Third, and most important, don’t be picky. Don’t sulk if you can’t get into Language or Antiquity. Who reads those journals, anyway? Quite a few more people might read the door-to-door monthly magazine of the local energy corporation – and, yes, they will publish bad linguistics if you dumb down enough, and even add a photograph of you.

Finally, liberally use quotations of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Learn the lingo: paradigm shift, incommensurability; and rub it in.

There are few, too few, working linguists who have a good command of the various subdisciplines of the field, such as psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, theory of grammar, etc. Let alone people who can competently handle population genetics, archaeology and historical linguistics. At the same time, when the field becomes more and more professionalized and fractured, “interdisciplinary” research is in vogue more than ever before. This when the decline of secondary and higher education, in Western Europe at least, means that it’s quite possible to get a Master’s degree, in quite a few disciplines, without knowing the meaning of the word “empirical”, without having a clear idea about the methodological similarities and differences between the Humanities and the Natural Sciences, etcetera. So, you won’t meet much opposition, and the opposition you will meet is all too easy to dismiss as a hoary old clique, unable, because of the incommensurability of scientific paradigms, to even comprehend the importance of your revolutionary insights.

The future is yours.

Merlijn de Smit would like to emphasize that the practices criticized here
are all over the place, and not pertaining to any single individual or group
of individuals.

This article was first published at Normblog in the continuing series ‘Writer’s Choice’. It is republished here by the kind permission of Norm Geras and Nick Cohen.

[Norm Geras]:Nick Cohen is a columnist for The Observer and The New Statesman. He has also written for The Guardian. He is the author of Cruel Brittania and Pretty Straight Guys, available in a fine bookstore near you. Here Nick writes about Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism.

Although I like to present myself as an open and rational chap, I can remember very few times when I’ve admitted being in the wrong. Not wrong in detail, but wrong in principle. In my experience the politically committed rarely do that. We change imperceptibly and grudgingly, while all the time pretending we haven’t changed at all but merely adapted to altered circumstances.

Actually, ‘very few’ is a self-serving exaggeration. The only time I realised I was charging up a blind alley was when I read Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism. I didn’t see a blinding light or hear a thunder clap or cry ‘Eureka!’ If I was going to cry anything it would have been ‘Oh bloody hell!’ He convinced me I’d wasted a great deal of time looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I was going to have to turn it round and see the world afresh. The labour would involve reconsidering everything I’d written since 11 September, arguing with people I took to be friends and finding myself on the same side as people I took to be enemies. All because of Berman.

The bastard.

Terror and Liberalism is an essay rather than a history and its arguments come from the almost forgotten tradition of the anti-totalitarian left. Its central point is that Islamism and Baathism are continuations of Nazism and communism, not only in their fine points – founders of the Muslim Brotherhood and Baath Party were admirers of Hitler and Franco – but in their fundamentals. Once again we had the promise of earthly paradise, but now the paradise wouldn’t be the paradise of unexploited labour or the paradise of an Aryan Europe, but the paradise of the early days of the prophet or a reunified Arab nation, pure and free. Once again there were great leaders who were semi-divine as they led the faithful into cosmic struggles. And once again their programmes were insane.

Berman begins by evoking Albert Camus and other leftish writers of the mid-twentieth century who had broken out of the prison of Marxism to examine the deranged movements which had turned Europe into a charnel house. Cleverly, he treats his targets very sympathetically. Readers who want to disagree with him, as I did, are seduced because he understands why they believe what they believe and more often than not expresses their ideas better than they can. He follows Camus by showing how the original Russian terrorists who began the violence which finished with the slaughters of the communists were morally scrupulous, decent and brave. They wouldn’t throw a bomb into the coach of the Grand Duke Sergei, because there were children on board, or risk the deaths of passers-by. True, they had no ideas beyond death, their own and others, no plan for society which could possibly succeed, but that didn’t hide the desperation which had driven sensitive and high-minded young men and women to rebel. Similarly, Berman is so angry about the collapse of European civilization into the barbarism of the First World War that you could imagine him joining the communist party or becoming a Nazi, and he is so sympathetic to the intellectual currents buffeting Sayyid Qutb that Qutb’s transformation into the intellectual founder of a cult of death appears the most natural of developments, one you might make yourself in the circumstances.

His avoidance of the usual polemical style has a purpose which is obvious on a second reading. Berman is trying to overcome the resistance of Western readers who have watched the Iranian revolution and the murder of millions and the enslavement of whole African tribes in the Sudan and the destruction of every last remnant of freedom in Afghanistan and not understood that what they’ve seen is a totalitarian movement going about its business.

A chapter – ‘Wishful Thinking’ – explains why so many are reluctant to see clearly and in their blindness end up on the far right. It deals with the Chomskys and the creeps who were to dominate the anti-war movement; but to my mind the best part of the chapter and the book is when he uses the history of the French Socialist Party in the 1930s as a parable for our time.

Leon Blum, the leader of that party, knew that the Nazis had to be fought. But a large faction, supported by the teachers’ unions and many left-wing intellectuals, was horrified by the prospect of a conflict which could exceed even the carnage of the First World War.

If they had looked the Nazis in the face, they would have realized that war was inevitable. Rather than see clearly they allowed the best of motives to convince them that the German people hadn’t fallen for an insane cult. Why would they? Wasn’t it almost racist to believe that they were anything other than as rational and decent as the French?

Take Hitler’s demands to expand the German Reich. In a certain light these could be seen as a menacing expansion of the Nazi state, but (the anti-war socialists asked themselves) was it not the case that the Treaty of Versailles had imposed punitive conditions on Germany at the end of the First World War? Was it not reasonable for Hitler to ask that Germans should be freed from control by the Poles and the Czechs and returned to their mother country? Hitler may have been from the extreme right and they may have been from the democratic left, but an argument wasn’t necessarily wrong just because Hitler made it.

Many socialists were therefore enthusiastic supporters of the Munich agreement which dismembered Czechoslovakia and brought the German-speaking Sudetenland back under Nazi control.

They believed, says Berman, in the ‘simple-minded optimism’ of nineteenth century liberalism – a liberalism of denial. Human beings were essentially rational. Politicians and polemicists who pretended otherwise were the tools of the arms corporations that were leading France into an unnecessary pre-emptive war.

The anti-war socialists gazed across the Rhine and simply refused to believe that millions of upstanding Germans had enlisted in a political movement whose animating principles were paranoid conspiracy theories, blood-curdling hatreds, medieval superstitions and the lure of murder. At Auschwitz the SS said “Here there is no why.” The anti-war socialists in France believed no such thing. In their eyes, there was always a why.

There was a price to pay for rationalism. Obviously, the socialists couldn’t begin to show solidarity with the German socialists who were being persecuted by Hitler. How could they protest at their treatment or organize parliamentary debates calling attention to their plight when they were making excuses for the Hitler who was doing the persecuting? Then there were the Nazis’ Jewish victims. As good men and women of the Enlightenment, the anti-war socialists couldn’t tolerate anti-Semitism. Yet they were determined not to let their sympathies get out of hand. Weren’t the Jews always showing their wounds and trying to make others feel guilty for their past suffering? Hitler might be going a bit far, but wasn’t it true that a disproportionate number of industrialists and financiers were Jewish? And wasn’t it also the case that their leader, Leon Blum, who was urging France to enter a bloody and worthless confrontation with Germany was, well, Jewish, too?

It was a short step from this line of reasoning to asserting that war was being forced on them by Hitler’s victims rather than Hitler.

In 1940, Hitler gave irrefutable proof of his intentions when he invaded and occupied France. The French extreme right under the leadership of Marshall Pétain proposed a collaborationist government. Blum and some socialists opposed the humiliation of France, but many of their colleagues accepted the occupation and, as Berman concludes, went the whole hog.

Among the anti-war socialists a number of people, having voted with Péýtain, took the logical next step and on patriotic and idealistic grounds accepted positions in his new government, at Vichy. Some of these socialists went a little further too, and began to see a virtue in Pétain’s programme for a new France and a new Europe – a programme of strength and vitality, a Europe ruled by a single-party state instead of by the corrupt cliques of bourgeois democracy, a Europe cleansed of the impurities of Judaism and of the Jews themselves, a Europe of the anti-liberal imagination. And in that very remarkable fashion, a number of the anti-war socialists of France came full circle. They had begun as defenders of liberal values and human rights, and they evolved into the defenders of bigotry, tyranny, superstition and mass murder. They were democratic leftists who, through the miraculous workings of the slippery slope and a naïve rationalism of all things, ended as fascists.

Long ago, you say? Not so long ago.

Indeed not. To see the old process at work, one only has to look at how a large chunk of the world’s liberal opinion has got itself into the position where it can’t support Iraqi and Afghan liberals, socialists and feminists. You think the worst thing in the world is the developed countries because they brought the First World War, which to be fair is a charge worth making, or globalisation and McDonalds, which to be fair is a charge that is infantile. You are confronted with totalitarian movements, which are worse, and your first thought is to blame them on the West. Your second is to make excuses for them. Your third is to betray your comrades. Your fourth is to go up to the totalitarian movements and shake them by the hand.

Because I’d grown up in a time when there was no left worth speaking of, I’d rather blithely assumed that its remnants were filled with decent people and that the worst thing in the world was New Labour.

In part because of the evidence of my senses and in part because of Paul Berman, I know better now.

The following speech was given at the International Humanist and Ethical Union Congress on July 6, 2005 in Paris, France, at a parallel session entitled ‘Women’s rights in religious and secular societies’.

• Sixteen year old Atefeh Rajabi was publicly hanged in the city centre in Neka in Iran on 15 August 2004 for “acts incompatible with chastity”.
• In April this year, Amina was publicly stoned to death in Argu district, Afghanistan after being accused of adultery by her husband.
• This month, physicians have been beaten for treating female patients and women have been brutally attacked for not being veiled in Basra, Iraq.

The list is endless.

These examples are only some of the most visible and heinous aspects of the situation of women and girls living in Islam-stricken societies and under Islamic laws – burqa-clad and veiled, bound and gagged, and without rights.

It is truly the outrage of the 21st century.

But it is no longer only in places like Neka, Argu, or Basra where political Islam and religious rule are wreaking havoc but also in the very heart of the secular west and Europe albeit in different and more subtle ways but outrageous nonetheless.

Here the Islamists are ‘more civilised’.

They demand the ‘right’ to veil for women and children in France when in the Middle East they impose compulsory veiling by throwing acid in the faces of those who refuse and resist. In Britain, they cry racism and Islamophobia against anyone who speaks out against Islam and its political movement, whilst in Iran and its likes they hang ‘apostates’ and ‘Kafirs’ from trees and cranes. Here, they demand the prosecution of those who ‘incite religious hatred’ when everywhere it is they themselves who incite hatred and violence than can be articulated or imagined. Here in the EU, they call for tolerance and respect of their beliefs, when it is they who have issued fatwas and death threats against anyone who they deem disrespectful and intolerable. Here, they call for ‘equal’ rights demanding a Sharia court for ‘Muslim minorities’ in Canada and Britain whilst it is their very Sharia courts that have legalised Islamic injustice and barbarity in the Middle East.

Steadily, political Islam, using rights language, and cries of racism and Islamophobia – and now of incitement to religious hatred in order to silence any opposition and criticism – is gaining ground and hacking away at secularism in Europe, even though criticism or even ‘phobias’ of ideologies, religions, cultures or political movements are not racism.

Even in the heart of secular Europe and the west, women who have resisted political Islam, no longer feel fully safe. We can soon be prosecuted and face up to 7 years imprisonment in Britain for being offensive against or going beyond the ‘legitimate’ criticism of Islam. We are already called racists and Islamophobes whenever we speak for women and against Islam and its movement. It is we who are deemed extremists by the Mayor of London when we oppose the visit of Qaradawi, the so-called Islamic scholar whose support for women’s ‘modesty’ and violence against women and his condemnation of sexual acts as ‘perversions’ are no different from the Islamic laws in Iran.

And even here, women’s rights, our rights, are culturally relative and never universal. Even here each and every one of us is forever the ‘Muslim minority’ who must have Sharia courts, faith schools, the ‘right’ to veil… Never ever citizens equal before and under the law, but fragmented minority communities deserving of the same rules and regulations that we resisted and fled in the first place.

Islam and political religion are constantly repackaged in a thousand ways to make this cultural relativism and appeasement more palatable for the western audience. There is now moderate Islam, Islamic reformism, Islamic human rights, Islamic feminism and Islamic democracy (oxymorons in my opinion).

A hundred years ago, the avant-garde humanity would have laughed at the proposition that human liberation could be achieved through priests, moderation of religion and the emergence of new interpretations from within the church. Today, sadly, ‘professional scholars’ and academics can prescribe that the Iranian woman can for now take secularism to mean the addition of a lighter shade of black to the officially approved colours for the veil”.*

Yesterday’s ridiculed notions are today replacing the human values fought for and taken for granted by modern society.

The rise of religion and the erosion of secularism and universal norms are part and parcel of the New World Order, which has transformed citizenship rights into fragmented communities identified by anything but our common humanity, and human and universal values with cultural, religious and backward ones.

The values of the 18th century enlightenment are slowly being replaced.

Even in France where the ban of conspicuous religious symbols in schools and government offices were important steps, Islamic schools – where child veiling, an abuse of children’s rights, continues unabated – were still deemed permissible.

The urgent question we must all ask ourselves is how can we defend secularism, universalism and values worthy of 21st century humanity? I believe it is only via another transformative enlightenment by this century’s avant-gardes. We must give no more concessions to religion, superstition and cultural relativism; we must no longer respect and tolerate inhuman ideals, values and practices.

An uncompromising and shamelessly aggressive demand for secularism is only a minimum, though, if we are to ensure that women’s rights are safeguarded and that the human being is put first and foremost.

Today, more than ever, we are in need of the de-religionisation of society.

Anyone can have any beliefs, express them, publicise them and organise around them. The question is what regulations society puts in place to protect itself. Today society tries to protect children from the tobacco industry’s advertising. The religion industry’s advertising could be treated in exactly the same way. Smokers have all their rights and can establish any association and institution to advertise the benefits of tobacco and unite all smokers, but this does not mean giving a green light to the tobacco industry. The machinery of Islam and the other main religions (Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, etc.) are not voluntary societies of believers of specific ideas; they are enormous political and financial institutions, which have never been properly scrutinised, have not been subject to secular laws in society and have never accepted responsibility for their conduct. No one took Mr. Khomeini to court for issuing a death fatwa against Salman Rushdie; notwithstanding that inciting to murder is a crime in all countries of the world. And this is only a small corner of a network of murder, mutilation, intimidation, abduction, torture, and child abuse. I think that the Medellin drug cartels (Escobars), the Chinese triads, and Italian (and American) mafia are nothing in comparison to organised religion. I am speaking of a legitimate and organised struggle by a free and open society against these enterprises and institutions. At the same time, I regard believing in anything, even the most backward and inhuman doctrines, as the undeniable right of any individual.*

This avant-garde battle has already begun in Iran where an unprecedented anti-Islamic backlash and the demand for secularism are being championed by society. We are witnessing the beginning of this era’s enlightenment in a place which has been ruled by a pillar of political Islam over the past two decades. In addition to recognising this reality and the historical juncture we are at, this Congress must pick up the challenge for uncompromising secularism and the call for the de-religionisation of society. This is the only way – today – to mark the centenary of the 1905 French law of separation of church and state.

* Mansoor Hekmat, The Rise and Fall of Political Islam

Astrology, Science and Culture: Pulling Down the Moon By Roy Willis and Patrick Curry. Berg, Oxford 2004. ISBN 1-85973-687-4. 170 pages including bibliography and index. GBP15.99 paperback.

The subtitle “Pulling Down the Moon” refers to the women diviners of ancient Thessaly who, Plutarch said, can pull down the moon. Roy Willis is a social anthropologist at the University of Edinburgh. Dr Patrick Curry is a social historian and Associate Lecturer at the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cultural Astronomy and Astrology, Bath Spa University College.

In order of increasing controversy, astrology has been seen as a topic of great historical importance, a useful fiction to promote therapy by conversation, a cloud in which meaningful faces can be seen, an expression of underlying world order, and an independent source of knowledge. Underlying these various views is a single issue, namely the merit of astrology as a source of (1) facts and (2) meaning.

Neglect of the distinction between facts and meaning has led to much unproductive debate between astrologers and critics. To improve the debate, astrology urgently needs (and www.astrology-and-science.com attempts to provide) competent reviews of relevant areas. The title Astrology, Science and Culture seems to promise such a review, but ironically (and, these days, inexcusably) the book fails to deliver, all with an aggressive unreadability that is equally inexcusable. It claims that the only real astrology is horary astrology, or divination, which fills the world with magic and meaning. Empirical findings and contrary views (even astrological ones) are dismissed. These and other points are discussed below.

Postmodern impenetrability

According to astrologer Garry Phillipson’s review in the Astrological Journal (2004, 46(4), pp.36-37), Willis and Curry’s book is “epochal.” In thirty years’ time it “will be seen as a key text from the period when astrology was taking its first, tentative, steps back into academia.” (This refers to the recognition in 2000 of Kepler College in Seattle, and in 2002 of the Sophia Centre in Bath, as academic institutions where astrology can be studied for a degree.)

However, Phillipson does warn us that the book is “frequently abstruse.” And that is precisely the problem. Other than the introduction, each chapter is written either by anthropologist Willis (who focusses on ancient roots) or by astrologer/social historian Curry (who attacks science). Both authors are postmodernists, and they seem to want to outdo each other in being obscure and long-winded. Indeed, there seems to be nothing so simple that the authors cannot make it impenetrable. This is a highly unreadable book. After being told that astrology involves “the human dialogical engagement with divinity”, whatever that means, the reader has constantly to struggle with sentences such as:

Here let us note certain fundamental consequences of our dialogical reading of human nature. In its essential, necessary openness — the inherent duality of dialogue which is also, and most fundamentally, a many-voiced plurality — this reading permanently guarantees us against any possibility of collapse into monolithic solipsism.(p.2)

And this is only 10% into the Introduction! Nobody who writes like this can be accused of clear thinking. Willis and Curry’s ideas can in fact be expressed simply and clearly, but they never are. The problem is that, once the impenetrable overburden is removed, the flaws become obvious and the case falls apart. What should have been a useful and informed discourse ends up as a parade of pretentious inutility. Of which more later.

Key point

The authors’ key point is a simple but profound one. They claim that what most astrologers call “astrology” is in fact bogus. Real astrology is horary astrology, or divination, and can never be other than divination. Thus bogus astrology is popular today because it taps into our ancestral urge for divination. In real astrology the world is filled with gods (ie planets), spirits, and magic, that our minds can become attuned to. It brings back mystery and enchantment into our lives and makes the world seem wonderfully meaningful. To achieve this all we need do is believe.

In other words astrology is to do with meaning, not facts, and the present belief in astrology is explained by an earlier belief in divination. The blurb says “this book not only persuasively demonstrates that astrology is far more than a superstitious relic of years gone by, but that it enables a fundamental critique of the scientism of its opponents.” Ironically it does this by assuming what it sets out to prove, namely that real astrology is real religion, a point that many astrologers would vigorously dispute. But this is to get ahead of ourselves.

Rule 1: Reject quantitative methods

To promote their ideas the authors deliberately reject quantitative methods, “daring to privilege sensory quality over a row of digits” (p.1). There are two problems here. First, if we reject the quantitative testing of ideas, we are rejecting a useful adjunct to purely qualitative testing such as checking an idea for consistency or how it compares with alternatives. For example without quantitative methods we might be hard pressed to decide whether the earth is or is not at the centre of the universe, which might affect how we interpret its enchantment. In effect, and ironically, the authors seem to be rejecting the same pluralism (diversity of values and opinion) that they are advocating as the “touchstone of divination” (p.75), the “inherently pluralistic” basis of astrology (p.80), and the “irrevocably pluralistic” basis of postmodernism (p.133). In short the authors seem committed to dietary diversity while forcing readers to live by bread alone.

Second, the authors support their rejection of quantitative methods by misrepresenting them. For example they dismiss tests of astrology by psychologists as “crude attempts to demonstrate that astrological effects are attributable to something else (usually forms of cognitive error) that psychologists are more comfortable with” (p.4). In fact psychologists test astrology simply to see if its claims are true. Should it fail to deliver useful effect sizes (which for factual claims has invariably been the case) they then ask how astrologers could believe in something that is effectively not true. The answer (because human judgement is good at creating wrong impressions like seeing meaning in Barnum statements, a view confirmed by thousands of published studies and dozens of books, none of them cited by Willis and Curry) is here highly inconvenient, not to say fatal.

As when Willis, unacquainted with astrology other than having fabricated newspaper horoscopes while a trainee journalist, an “exercise in deception” (p.5), had his birth chart read and found it “corresponded remarkably well with my inner perceptions” (p.11). This of course is the usual outcome even when the chart happens to be the wrong chart, which is awkward. Just as awkward is Willis’s devoting seven pages (pp.5-11) to an account of his becoming convinced by precisely the kind of astrology that is dismissed here as bogus. Indeed, Willis does not seem to have visited any horary astrologers, ie the kind he presumes to write about, if only to check Martin Luther’s experience that “the divinations of astrology … are wrong so often that there can be nothing less trustworthy” (Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1983:4). To say nothing of Charles Carter’s experience four centuries later that the horary charts cast for him “have usually been downright wrong and never strikingly right” (Astrological Journal December 1962). For some reason Carter’s experience is not mentioned despite its exemplary relevance (Carter was the leading British astrologer of his day).

Rule 2: Embrace bias

Indeed, anything inconvenient is swept aside or distorted. For example the authors seem to see all scientists as bad scientists, obsessed with “crude reductionism”, always implacably opposed to astrology and always bent on disenchanting the world, which allows any inconvenient scientific finding (and there are many) to be dismissed out of hand. They cite an article in the Astrological Journal (1994, 36, pp.60-68) as providing “a good discussion of scientific double standards … in astrological research”, but fail to mention that a later critique (in 36, pp.258-259) noted how the “good discussion” was itself ruined by double standards, a point evident to any informed reader.

Similarly the authors fail to mention that, even in their own anti-materialist camp, it is not hard to find positive views towards science. Indeed the anti-materialist Charles Tart in his book Transpersonal Psychologies (Harper & Row 1975) addresses precisely the same general area as Willis and Curry do, but argues precisely the opposite case with a clarity and open-mindedness that leaves them for dead:

The realm of the spiritual, and the connected realm of altered states of consciousness, is one of the most powerful forces that shape man’s life and destiny. I think attempting to keep these realms and the realm of science separate is dangerous, and I hope we will go on to develop state-specific sciences and similar endeavours that will start building bridges between them. To those who think it can’t be done, I can only reply that we have to find that out by trying, not by limiting ourselves in advance by preconceptions (p.58).

Thus Tart notes the need for “a data base for future sciences is of exceptional importance” (p.27), as is “the need to achieve testability of our theories about spiritual phenomena and ASC [altered states of consciousness] phenomena” (p.35). Which is clearly not what Willis and Curry want to hear.

Similarly the anti-materialist Rupert Sheldrake in his book The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God (Century 1990) argues that new developments in science are leading to “a new understanding of nature in which traditional wisdom, personal experience and scientific insight can be mutually enriching.” Indeed, in his later book The Sense of Being Stared At and other aspects of the Extended Mind (Hutchinson 2003), which is a consciousness-related topic as controversial as horary and of greater antiquity, Sheldrake shows how the scientific approach leads to insights unattainable in any other way. All in plain English, after which Willis and Curry’s paralysing prose might easily be mistaken for another Sokal’s hoax.

(Physicist Alan Sokal’s now-famous and deliberately nonsensical 1996 article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, heavily adulterated with physical clangers and full of incomprensible quotes from postmodernists, was published by the postmodern journal Social Text because, in Sokal’s opinion, it sounded good and flattered editorial preconceptions.)

Despite the privilege supposedly accorded to “sensory quality”, Willis and Curry also ignore qualitative studies of astrology if the outcome is inconvenient. For example sociologists who observe client sessions have noted how astrologers can explain any error via their own infallibility or via a contrary indication previously overlooked. The participants remain unaware of this win-win self-deception, so the end result can hardly fail to reinforce belief in astrology (as in fact happened to Willis). The nearest the authors get to recognising this is “the experience of enchantment does not make it true in an objectivist sense, nor does it need to be” (p.112), which as usual is sufficiently rarefied to obscure what is really happening. More on this later.

Recipe for smokescreens

Even inconvenient philosophical criticisms (for example I.W.Kelly’s “Modern Astrology: A Critique” in Psychological Reports 1997, 81, 1035-1066) are dismissed without examination as “purely ideological” (p.100). Similarly the assertion “science has banished [disembodied spirits], of course, en route to attempting to get rid of human subjectivity too” (p.120) is made with no hint of its conflict with much of the philosophy-of-mind literature. For example philosophers such as Chalmers, Searle, and Nozick would have problems with disembodied spirits but do not deny subjective experience. It seems that readers must be protected from honest discussion of anything that might upset the authors’ ideas.

Ironically, although the authors constantly criticise “reductionist” scientific studies, such studies are made welcome when they seem to support the authors’ position. For example genetic studies are cited to support the idea that we are “all psychically connected, not only to one another, but also to the universe” (p.131); and the idea that we are born with an “innate impulsion to dialogue with a multiverse of intelligent beings, starting with fellow humans and including every animal and plant, every rock and river and ocean; also the clouds in the sky, winds and storms and rain, and all the luminous inhabitants of the starry vault” (p.132). But do we really need genetics to tell us that we interact with our surroundings?

Similarly the authors tend to quote only those philosophers whose views agree with theirs and ignore the rest. In this way all sorts of philosophers including Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, none of whom was interested in astrology, are recruited into laying the groundwork for the authors’ speculations. Furthermore, the selected philosophers are quoted without argument or critical examination of their position, and without noting where we could agree with their position and still not believe in astrology. Readers never get an impartial balancing of views from both sides, which is surely what they are entitled to expect from authors who hold academic positions. In other words the authors are rather like promoters of phlogiston as the only way to think about combustion. (In postmodernist terms phlogiston is as good as oxygen for explaining why fires burn.) Reject quantitative methods, embrace bias, avoid specifics, garnish with impenetrable rhetoric, and the smokescreen is complete.

Varieties of astrology

On pages 65-76 the authors provide a foggy survey of how they see the varieties of astrology, namely sun signs (popular but shallow), horary (divination), neo-Platonic (spiritual), Ptolemaic (astral determinism), scientific (eg Gauquelin), and psychological (currently predominant among working astrologers). The last claims that character/destiny is in our inclining-but-not-compelling stars, so the stars “only ever advise courses of action in relation to a constantly shifting future” (p.75). The authors say the problem with all of these varieties except horary is that they do not engage with gods and therefore by definition lead to disenchantment. That is, they contain a corrupting element of fatalism. Even so, all of them “could best be understood as divinatory [ie engaging with gods], each in its own way” (p.67). So now you see it, now you don’t.

Later (p.122) the authors briefly note that astrologers can have a view of horary precisely opposite to their own. As examples they cite two eminent astrologers of the 1900s, namely Alan Leo (who described it as “the vilest rubbish imaginable”) and Alfred J Pearce (“absurd and unwarrantable”). They could have cited many other astrologers such as Jeff Mayo in 1964 (“sheer nonsense”) and Ingrid Lind in 1962 (“savours of the bead curtain and fortune-telling booth”). These are not your average everyday astrologers — Mayo was principal of the Mayo school, Lind was patron of the Faculty of Astrological Studies, two bodies that were and are reputable and world-famous.

The authors could also have cited Charles Harvey, president of the Astrological Association 1973-1994 and then its patron, who in the Astrological Journal (1994, 36, pp.396-398) condemns the view that almost all astrology is grounded in divination. As usual, Harvey writes with a vigour and clarity (and long experience) entirely missing from Willis and Curry’s book, so he is worth quoting at some length:

Whilst it [the pro-divination view] appears to explain why quantitative research has found so little evidence to support astrologers’ beliefs and experience, it at the same time seems to remove from astrological practice any secure basis for interpretation. … More importantly, we are still left with the question as to how this astrological divination works? How can it be enhanced if the principles upon which its interpretations are based are not true in any testable sense or are of secondary significance? If this were actually the case, then it would be impossible to programme a computer to produce reports which, although imperfect, can often identify many of the key issues in an individual’s life and psychology. Experience shows that some computerised reports can prove remarkably to the point. But perhaps the most potentially problematic and pernicious outcome of allocating an almost exclusively divinatory foundation to astrology is that it encourages the view that there is no systematic way in which astrological interpretation can be improved and enhanced. By such a move the magnificent contributions to astrology this century of, for example, Witte, Ebertin, Addey, Barbault, Liz Greene and Jim Lewis are all too easily marginalised and several whole dimensions of astrology’s universe negated.

Recall also the views of Charles Carter cited previously. One wonders why eminent astrologers should be so hostile if horary were as marvellous as the authors claim.

Divination and consciousness

On horary itself, the authors assert that divinatory chart readings involve “expansive changes in consciousness of both client and astrologer” where they become attuned to the symbolism and “are able to become participants with divine agencies (”daemones“) in a joint negotiation of the client’s destiny” (p.148). Or as Charles Harvey puts it, divinatory chart readings are “not based on anything that is in any normal sense objective, measurable, or factual. [They] do not contain qualities in and of themselves but [are] assigned by the consciousness of the astrologer” (p.397).

Willis and Curry make no attempt to validate their claim except by references to shamanism, ancient beliefs, and any philosopher (no matter how uninterested in astrology) whose views seem even remotely compatible. The result is like supporting the idea of levitation by references to angels and Jules Verne. Incompatible philosophical views (in philosophy there are always incompatible views) are ignored. Human judgement biasses like the Barnum effect are briefly mentioned but are dimissed as irrelevant because astrology is simply the “experience of its truth”, and ascribing it to “something else is not to understand astrology, but to replace it with something else, in keeping with a very different agenda” (p.101). As if ascribing combustion to oxygen is not to understand combustion.

The above “very different agenda” is the supposedly universal aim of all scientists everywhere to discredit astrology by all possible means, as if bona fide scientific study could not possibly occur. On top of this, the authors seem to think we have to accept astrology or not, as if it were impossible to accept part of it and reject the rest. Similarly they refer often to scientists’ rhetoric but never to astrologers’ rhetoric, as if astrologers were incapable of it (any astrology writing will quickly dispel that notion). Nor do they tell us about astrologism, the astrological equivalent of scientism, where for example astrology is the way, the truth and the light, and (given the right technique) is able to explain everything. Ironically, in an article in the Astrological Journal (1994, 36, pp.69-75), Curry uses the same belief in “one way, truth and life” to dismiss both Christianity and the “so-called scientific method.” This is not a book for readers who are expecting credible scholarship.

It boils down to religion

If, as the authors claim, real (ie their) astrology makes the world seem wonderfully meaningful, exactly what does this mean in practical terms? What do paying clients stand to gain? What criteria should we use to compare astrology with its many competitors? Unfortunately the authors do not tell us in a coherent way, as in a shopping list, nor do they tell us how clients might recognise a suitable astrologer (do good outcomes depend on good rapport?). The result is like discussing restaurants without ever visiting one or mentioning food.

However, the authors do say that real astrology is “a specific form of religious life” (p.111) that has no need of “experience of truth in an objectivist sense” (p.112), so it seems that the benefits are generally those of any religion. Real astrology does not need to be true. Like any religion, real astrology values mystery (enchantment) before concrete knowledge (disenchantment), and presumably after priestly status (judging from the authors’ lofty sermonising). Ironically the authors fail to mention that empirical research has already reached the same conclusion about astrology not needing to be true, but no doubt they wished to avoid any hint that such research can actually get it right.

Similarly the authors seem unable to appreciate that both science and religion are responses to our thirst for understanding, so to accept the latter and reject the former (as they do) is hardly reasonable. Which is not to say that others on both sides have not done the same.

Regrettably the authors scarcely mention how the role of divination was hugely disputed in the Renaissance. Thus in 1495 Pico della Mirandola dismissed divinatory astrology as a confusion of real physical planets with stellar divinities. He asked “Shall we accept as divine the things which we have disproved as irrational, imitating the astrologers who refer all the things men do to the stars without reason?”, and so on for twelve volumes (Garin, op cit p.88). In the 12th volume he sees the history of astrology as the progressive influx of ancient religious beliefs into the realm of natural philosophy, a direction that was of course to be reversed two centuries later. In effect Willis and Curry seem to be back in the Renaissance, arguing against Pico in the style of the day. They are of course entitled to see Pico as making a wrong turn, but by the same token readers are entitled to hear Pico’s arguments and their response. No entry on “Renaissance” appears in their index.

Rule 3: Attack via distortion, hypocrisy, and straw men

The chapter on “Science and Astrology” attacks what researchers say in their interview in Phillipson’s Astrology in the Year Zero (Flare, London 2000), also available in expanded form at Astrology and Science. The attack proceeds via the usual selective quoting and distortion. For example the researchers are quoted as asking “Was astrology true?”, which is taken as their “stated starting point” and then dismissed as being impossibly sweeping and akin to asking “is science true?” (p.96). However, their actual starting point, or how they got involved in astrology back in the 1970s, is as follows:

We were intrigued by astrological claims, and by the depth and complexity of the subject. Was astrology true? Could the stars really correlate with human affairs? How could it work? Scientists love challenges like that. The problem was the lack of evidence — a situation no longer true. So we set out to explore the claims in depth. (Phillipson p.124)

In other words a less selective quote tells a different story. Examples of claims to be explored are then philosophised away. For example when the researchers ask “Is it true that positive signs are extraverted?”, testing is dismissed because it ignores context, even though the claim is made not by the researchers but by every astrology textbook. (No matter that the same argument would dismiss the claims of horary astrology such as “first house signifies the querent.”) Similarly, when the researchers note how astrologers show “dramatic disagreement on fundamentals”, this is dismissed because fundamentals also depend on context (p.97). Which is like arguing that traffic accidents can be dismissed because they depend on a particular road and driver.

Ultimately the attack reduces to asserting that real astrology (because religious) is not amenable to the researchers’ scientific approach, which makes the researchers guilty of “naivete, bordering on sheer ignorance, or else hypocrisy” (p.98). But here the hypocrisy lies with the authors, who fail to mention that the researchers insist on exactly the same caveat. Thus when Phillipson asks “Are there some astrological claims to which scientific research might be irrelevant?”, they reply as follows:

Some astrologers claim that scientific research is impersonal or unspiritual or insensitive to deeper truths. … Or they claim that astrology involves subtle factors not yet known to science. In each case they conclude that science is unsuited to astrology, period. But apart from its emphasis on critical evaluation, science requires only that events be observable in some way. … if astrologers can observe the claimed correlations, so can scientific researchers … Does this mean that science must apply to all areas of astrology? Not at all. If no possible observation could rule out a particular claim, then the claim is untestable, and scientific research is irrelevant. It is as simple as that. … Even so, we can still compare astrology to other systems that claim to give direction and purpose to our lives (astrology has no monopoly here), in the same way that we can compare the origin and maintenance of religious beliefs.” (Phillipson p.128)

In other words the scientific approach is relevant only where astrology is testable by observation, or where concrete statements are involved, or where empirical comparisons are being made. Apart from attacking a straw man, Willis and Curry are in effect claiming that real astrology is beyond observation. They are placing astrology on the same level as fantasy, which makes their long-winded obscurities largely redundant. Indeed, having noted that you cannot predict when astrology will successfuly predict, presumably a reflection of stars inclining but not compelling, they add “And being unavoidable, this is no failing!” (p.102), which is placing astrology on the same level as guessing. What took all of 170 paralysing pages could have been said just as plausibly in a few lines. In terms of advancing the debate on astrology, the book adds generously to the noise but little to the signal. Which leads to Rule 4.

Rule 4. Keep well away from the coalface

The authors seem committed to keeping their arguments shrouded in philosophyspeak, like shadow boxing in the blue beyond. Indeed, there seems to be nothing so concrete that they cannot make it vague and abstract, presumably in the hope that this will be mistaken for profundity. For example on page 12 Curry says he “came to astrology early”; it seemed “to offer a Key” and “perfectly suited my character.” But he tired of astrology’s “marginality” and its “lack of certainty.” After several years in academia he realised that science had “as much ultimate uncertainty as astrology” and therefore offered no hope of demystifying it. He then discovered horary, which “contextualized astrology as a kind of divination, a dialogue with the unknown, which opens it up and enlivens it”, whatever that means. In all of this there is no mention of what he actually did to reach that conclusion, or what tests he made or did not make, so readers come away with only impressions and no real understanding. And as with page 12, so with the book. The reader is always kept well away from the coalface by torrents of vagueness and obscurities.

For example (in plain-English translation) the authors argue that science is mechanistic, so it cannot be used to test a non-mechanistic astrology. Conclusion: all existing tests are meaningless. But the argument is implausible. The aim has been to test what an astrologer claims (“people fit their charts”) by asking straightforward questions (“do people fit other people’s charts just as well?”). Or by comparing one view (“what matters is when you think of the question”) with another (“what matters is when I receive your question”). If astrologers can observe support here for their claims then so can anyone including scientists. Issues of mechanism do not come into it. Indeed, a look at any recent well-designed test would be a big help, but the authors seem incapable of being this simple, preferring instead to retreat into obfuscation.

Similarly they never examine an actual study or finding or the various empirical approaches. They never examine how a chart is prepared and interpreted. They never walk you through an actual act of divination. You never get a feel for what divinatory success means, or how frequent it is, yet (as Sheldrake shows for acts of staring) such things should not be difficult. The result is like conducting a war game out of sight of practicalities. The arguments when stripped of their protective fog of philosophyspeak are often ludicrous, as when the authors dismiss the idea of controls because you cannot test astrology if it is absent (p.102), and when they quote the inability of science to determine absolute truth (p.103) as a reason for dismissing the idea that we can tell when an astrology reading is wrong. But the futility does not end there.

Postmodern futility

In the end the authors shoot themselves in the foot. As committed postmodernists they dismiss science as “just one of a plurality of mythological narratives” (p.127). But so is their own view. Didn’t they notice? So their own view can equally be dismissed as a mythological narrative worth no more attention than any other.

For further insight into the futility of postmodernism, listen to what Curry said in 2004 in his Carter Memorial Lecture to the Astrological Association (see Astrological Journal Nov-Dec 2004 pp.7-17): “The researchers will always find a perfectly good reason, in their terms, why your [astrological] result is not valid.” For Curry the reference to “in their terms” allows him to dismiss the reason out of hand, because in postmodernism any set of terms is as good as any other. You can dismiss whatever you want just because you don’t like it, period. Which is like claiming a change of terms will save you if you jump off a cliff. If on the way down you dismiss the researchers as hopeless bigots, and continue to claim your astrological result is valid, then according to Curry the researchers “will simply ignore you.” So what would he have them do, believe that gravity is a silly idea?