Author: Ophelia Benson

I like what Jack Szostak, Nobel laureate, wrote to the NAS about its hosting of the Templeton prize party.

It is inappropriate and counter-productive for the NAS, a scientific organization, to interact in this way with an overtly religious group such as the Templeton Foundation.

We are not a faith-based organization – we ask questions and seek the answers in evidence. In a country plagued by ignorance and superstition, the NAS ought to be a beacon of coherent rational thinking and skeptical inquiry. If science is, as George Ellery Hale stated, our guide to truth, then religion is clearly incompatible with science, as should be apparent from considerations of faith versus inquiry.

But since it’s one of their own who won, they probably won’t be much moved. That’s unfortunate.

Religious belief thought experiment still stuck in the same place. The author isn’t dealing with the real objections.

…is it “reasonable” for the fella to believe in the monster (if it is then it shows that epistemic warrant is not a necessary condition of reasonable belief). Too right it is… You say that the perception is real, but it does not follow there’s a physical correlate to that perception. Well, of course, it doesn’t follow (how could it given the possibility of hallucination, etc). Our fella is well aware of this point (he is a good sceptic, after all). But the point is that it also doesn’t follow that something doesn’t exist simply because there is no epistemic warrant to support a belief in its existence. And this, of course, is crucial. Our fella believes because his experience is verdical, the monster is not ruled out by logic, and the belief is of pressing and utmost personal sigificance (he cannot take evasive action unless he believes). This is reasonable – i.e., not contrary to reason.

Suddenly ‘you’ are a fella, which is odd, because in the post ‘you’ are just ‘you.’ But anyway – all of that simply ignores the distinction between whether it is reasonable to believe the monster is real during the experience of its crashing through the bathroom window, and whether it is reasonable to go on believing the monster is real after the experience is over. (We were never told how it ended, by the way. What happened? Did it crash back out the window? Did it fade from view? Did it open the bathroom door and exit, closing the door behind it? Did ‘you’ swoon dead away and awake to find it gone? Did ‘you’ simply close your eyes and open them to find no monster, no broken window, no smell, no nothing? This all makes a difference, frankly.)

Over here, at least, I think we’ve all agreed that it’s reasonable to believe the monster is real while it seems to be sharing the bathroom with you – not that anything really deserving the name ‘belief’ is involved, but call it belief for the sake of argument. We get that. But what we don’t buy is that it goes on being reasonable afterwards. As I said, apart from anything else, it would be a good deal more reasonable to worry about a giant brain tumor and try to find a good neurologist. All the questions about physical evidence and inquiry and what floor the bathroom is on and whether, on reflection, ‘you’ might not wonder if a real monster would have avoided contact – all those have been ignored.

I guess ultimately people might just have different intuitions about what’s reasonable in that situation.

No. It’s not a matter of just having different intuitions – it’s a matter of perfectly reasonable (yes reasonable) questions about physical evidence and objections about believing hallucinations forever as opposed to at the instant they occur.

As a side-note: two or three days ago (I can’t remember if it was before I wrote the first post on this or not) I was reading an old New Yorker from last August and found a Barsotti cartoon that might as well have been done to illustrate the thought experiment. Two little guys are racing down the street followed by a large toothy monster; the guy in front is saying, ‘You’re the therapist – you make it go away.’ Is that apt or what?!

Aha – you’re in luck. I assumed the postcolonial article on (re)production of bullshit was unavailable online, but in fact it is, so you get to find out who the author is and you also get to read the whole dang thing if you want to.

So. Since a flood of people, which is to say, two people, have requested more extracts, I shall oblige.

At the heart of the relationship between feminism and imperialism is an
Orientalist logic that posits Western women as exemplary and emancipated in relation to
“Other” (Afro-Asian/colonized) women, thereby charging the former with the
responsibility of saving the latter from their backwards (i.e. Muslim), uncivilized
cultures.

Right. Tell that to the little girls in Ethiopia who don’t want to be raped into marriage at age eight. Tell them it’s an Orientalist logic that thinks they should have something better. Tell Boge Gebre.that – if you have the gall.

By deliberately
attempting to mask the problems that are always associated with representation, 9and the
inconsistencies that inevitably arise within categories of experience, CW4WAfghan’s use
of personal anecdotes both confirms and conceals their own ideology. Reproducing the
oppressive gesture of imperialist feminism, their homogenous image of Afghan women
reduces them to the role of “generalized native informants”, who Spivak asserts, “sometimes appear in the Sunday supplements of national journals, mouthing for us the answers that we want to hear as our confirmation of the world.”

I repeat. Tell that to the little girls of Ethiopia, and the women who used to be little girls and remember what happened to them. Tell them they are ‘mouthing for us.’

There. That’s only page 16, and it’s only a selection. It’s all like that. It’s arrogant patronizing crap. It’s insulting. I wish you joy of it.

Once again, some people in the UK seem to have a shaky grasp on the concept of free speech.

A Tory MP was investigated by police after he said in Parliament that the niqab and the burqa is the ‘religious equivalent of going around with a paper bag over your head with two holes for the eyes.’ He was questioned over the telephone by officers and a file was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service, but he was later told that no action would be taken.’ That’s nice, but how odd that he was questioned at all. It was the Northamptonshire Rights & Equality Council that thought he needed to be shopped.

Anjona Roy, the REC’s chief executive, said she contacted police by email after her organisation received complaints about the MP’s comments. She also said that the incident had been raised at a meeting of the County Hate Incident Forum, whose members include local authority and police representatives, and it had been agreed that a complaint was appropriate. Ms Roy said she took offence at Mr Hollobone’s likening of the head-to-toe Muslim covering known as a burka to a paper bag. “I think the majority of people would find that quite offensive. If you disagree with people wearing burkas, there are other ways of putting it.”

[through gritted teeth] Yes but ‘quite offensive’ is not a police matter. Mere ‘offensiveness’ is not illegal. The fact that the majority of people would (according to one person) find something ‘quite offensive’ is not enough to make that something a matter for the Crown Prosecution Service. If the only free speech is speech about which no one will say ‘I think the majority of people would find that quite offensive’ then there is no free speech at all. Speech that has to pass the test that no officious head of a so-called Rights & Equality Council will call it offensive is about as far from free as speech can get. ‘Quite offensive’ speech is not against the law except in benighted oppressive stupidity-ridden theocracies and tinpot dictatorships.

When people who don’t get that, but in fact think the very opposite – think that speech that they find ‘quite offensive’ should be reported to the police – are the heads of Rights & Equality Councils, then there’s a problem.

Religious bodies have been demonstrating their virtue again. They’ve quit Labour’s ‘advisory group on religion’ in a huff because the secularists there resisted their demands to be allowed to ignore equality laws.

Muslims had already stopped attending the group…Hindus, Baha’is and secularists are still represented but the Church of England, Salvation Army, Methodist Church and Roman Catholic Church have all left.

Because they don’t want no stinkin’ equality. How impressive.

Peter Vlachos, the National Secular Society delegate, said he was appalled and accused the church groups of “abusing” the forum. He said: “Rather than supporting and championing equality and human rights, the Churches have tried to use the consultative process to try to gain further exemptions from equalities legislation. They wanted the freedom to discriminate and they didn’t get it so now they’ve walked away.”

So – generosity, compassion, justice, equality – all spurned by the churches. So that’s what they’re like, is it? Well I knew that, but I’m a little surprised they’re so open about it.

The Pope recently intervened in the debate over equality legislation in Britain. Benedict XVI is expected to use his visit to Britain in September to preach moral virtue. Leaders across the churches continue to defend the right of Christians and other religions to discriminate against women, gays and others according to their religious beliefs.

Right. The pope, who spent years enforcing secrecy about child abuse in his church, will be preaching ‘moral virtue,’ which takes the form of defending the ‘right’ to discriminate against various groups of people ‘according to one’s religious beliefs.’ Well the hell with that – that’s not moral virtue. The pope wouldn’t recognize moral virtue if it grabbed him between the legs.

I’ve been reading an article called ‘Canadian Women and the (Re)Production of Women in Afghanistan.’ I do not like it.

From the abstract, so that you can get the big picture:

Focusing on
the prominent group Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan), this
paper looks at the role its advocacy assumes in the context of the “War on Terror”. In
Canada as in the United States, government agencies have justified the military invasion
of Afghanistan by revitalizing the oppressed Muslim woman as a medium through which
narratives of East versus West are performed. While CW4WAfghan attempt to challenge
dominant narratives of Afghan women, they ultimately reinforce and naturalize the
Orientalist logic on which the War on Terror operates, even helping to disseminate it
through the Canadian school system. Drawing on post-colonial feminist theory, this
paper highlights the implications of CW4WAfghan’s Orientalist discourse on women’s
rights, and tackles the difficult question of how feminists can show solidarity with
Afghan women without adhering to the oppressive narratives that permeate today’s
political climate.

Then from the main body:

Building on Krista Hunt’s analysis of feminist
complicity in the War on Terror (Hunt 2006), this essay draws attention to Canadian feminists’ role in (re)producing neo-imperialist narratives of Afghan women. Focusing specifically on the NGO Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan),
it shows how their use of feminist rhetoric and personal first-hand narratives, together
with national narratives of Canada as a custodian of human rights, add to the productive
power of the Orientalist tropes they invoke.

If within Canada, constructions of Afghan women remain one of the most
powerful means by which knowledge about the “War on Terror” is produced,
CW4WAfghan are among the most active and powerful disseminators of such
knowledge. CW4WAfghan express the importance of this role in their twofold mandate:

1) to raise awareness in Canada of the need to secure and protect human rights
and opportunities for Afghan women and, 2) to support the empowerment
efforts of Afghan women in education, health care and skills development
(CW4WAfghan 2008a).

By explicitly focusing on how the second half of this mandate is pursued, my aim is not
to discredit what CW4WAfghan may have accomplished in Afghanistan, but rather, to
see how this work might be undemiined by becoming part of the War on Terror’s neo-
imperialist project of knowledge construction.

And so she does. She wants to get her Master’s degree, so she proceeds with her project of saying invidious things about an NGO working for Afghan women’s rights, for another forty pages. She leans heavily on Foucault and Said, she talks much of knowledge-power and Orientalism, and she ploughs her academic furrow. Meanwhile the women who work for CW4WAfghan do that. I know which I admire.

I might give you more extracts later. It’s replete with interesting items. The sad part is it was published in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.