Author: Ophelia Benson

Russell wrote a terrific, exhilarating post about the solar system and Pluto and changing knowledge today. (It looks as if he wrote it tomorrow, but that’s because Metamagician is on Oz time even when Russell isn’t.)

Until very recently, astronomy needed no formal definition of a planet, but this has changed as our knowledge of the Solar System has increased. During the 1990s we discovered a toroidal region of space known as the Kuiper Belt, which contains not only Pluto but many other objects of similar composition and with similarly unusual orbits when compared to those of the eight larger planets. With a better understanding of the Solar System, astronomers came to understand Pluto as the largest of these Kuiper Belt objects, all of which are very different from any of the other eight planets, and much smaller. Astronomers began to find large objects even beyond the Kuiper Belt, all contributing to what I call the Grand Opening Up of the Solar System.

See…that’s interesting. In our own lifetimes, just in the past couple of decades, astronomers have expanded what they (and thanks to them, we, if we learn) know about the Solar System. It’s interesting that they discover new things, and the news things they discover are interesting.

There is an exciting story to be told about the Grand Opening Up of the Solar System, how it led to efforts in 2006 to develop a definitions of such categories as “planet”, and how it still goes on. A well-informed science journalist with good publishing connections could get a wonderful book out of this story, in the process telling the public much about contemporary astronomy and why the study of our own Solar System is currently in such a wonderful ferment. I’d like to read that book…Unfortunately, I can’t imagine Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum writing that book. Where I see excited astronomers responding rationally and reasonably to the Grand Opening Up of the Solar System – refining the categories and definitions that they use in their work – they see a bunch of mean scientists taking an opportunity to give the public a poke in the eye by taking away its beloved ninth planet. This is a pity. They could have done some positive communication here, in the opening chapter of Unscientific America. Instead, they produced a dull and inaccurate narrative that is meant to support their theory that out-of-touch (or even mean-natured and anti-populist) scientists are largely to blame for America’s alarming degree of scientific illiteracy. What a waste of a great opportunity to practice what they preach, and improve the public’s understanding of what is really going on in science.

Exactly. Isn’t it sad. That brief post of Russell’s is exactly the kind of thing that M&K want, if they only knew it.

This is an irritating piece of crap.

By Allah, we’re an arrogant lot. By “we”, I mean modern western feminists, a group among which I am generally proud to be included. Except when we’re full of ourselves. Western feminism is not the only ideology exquisitely sensible of gender injustice.

It’s not clear what that is supposed to mean – feminism is universalist, not ‘Western,’ and there are of course feminists all over the globe. But if Geraldine Brooks means that feminism itself is not the only (or best) way of talking and thinking about and demanding gender justice – well I just have no idea what she means, because talk of gender justice is feminism, and vice versa, so what other ‘ideology’ would there be?

Nor are western feminists the only ones willing or able to speak up about it. Muslim women have been doing this themselves for decades, loudly and often effectively.

That’s interesting, but ‘western feminists’ don’t claim to be the only ones willing or able to speak up about it, and we’re thrilled when non-‘Western’ (which here apparently means Muslim, which is a tad simplistic) women speak up. (And when they do speak up – they’re doing a feminist thing. That’s the ‘ideology’ that’s in play. There’s no point in looking around for a different one, because that’s the only one there is.)

In Iran, on the other hand, a young generation of Koranically-literate Islamic revolutionary women sparked a national conversation on personal status issues, using Islamic jurisprudence rather than legislative measures. By educating women in the use of Islamically sanctioned pre-nuptial agreements, for example, an Iranian woman can secure for herself the right to divorce in set circumstances, to continue study or work after marriage and to establish her share of property if the marriage is dissolved.

Oh wow – so if she uses an Islamic pre-nup she can get some very limited rights, and as for just being entitled to such rights and more simply because she’s an adult human – well that’s just some pesky Western ideology, so she doesn’t need it – according to Geraldine Brooks, who is all right Jack.

What I am recommending is a little humility. Western feminists with a genuine desire to raise the status of oppressed women in Afghanistan or elsewhere should call their nearest mosque and make an appointment to talk to the sisterhood there…[I]n the majority of mosques they will learn of efforts long afoot to reclaim the positive messages about women’s rights in the Koran, messages obscured for too long by patriarchy and oppressive social customs. It is those efforts that we western feminists should support if we care about the women, and not the sweet sound of our own politically correct bleatings.

Our own politically correct bleatings – politically correct where, exactly? In many circles what Brooks says is far more politically correct than what universalist feminists say, so bleatings yourself, comrade.

You may remember that Julian Baggini wrote a piece about the destructiveness of the ‘new’ atheists a few months ago and then another urging them (or us) to turn down the volume at Comment is Free. I disagreed with him at the time in more than one post. He sounds like a new atheist himself in a new piece for C is F.

It’s another C is F ‘belief’ question: how did you find or lose your faith? Julian starts off by saying that people who lose their faith ‘do come to see as absurd beliefs which once seemed clearly true, or deeply mysterious.’

That was certainly true for me. As a teenager, I increasingly had questions about religion to which I found no good answers. For example, I was baffled by the role of intercessory prayer in church services. Surely, if God were good, and it was good to help someone recover from illness, he wouldn’t wait until someone asked him to do so. Yet no one gave me a decent answer to even this simple question…Questions like these tend to be dismissed as simplistic, but that kind of response is no answer at all. It’s like when people roll their eyes when you raise the problem of evil: how can a good God allow so much suffering in the world? Yes, the problem is old, but it’s not the challenge that’s tired: it’s the person who has given up trying to give it a decent answer.

Yes, quite. But isn’t this Basic ‘New’ Atheism? Isn’t this just the kind of thing we keep being chastised for?

Julian went to some kind of Methodist youth jamboree at the Albert Hall and it started making him feel sick as soon as he got off the bus, so he was feeling ill and out of it while he watched the Sunday worship.

Instead of being caught up in the emotion, I was observing at a distance. That confirmed the perceptual shift from believer to non-believer was now complete. For what from the inside had looked like the holy spirit at work, looked from where I now stood like a humanly-constructed exercise in mass hysteria…To simplify a little, the convert adopts a religious faith because he or she comes to inhabit it from the inside. The infidel rejects it because she or he comes to see it from the outside. And the further you zoom back from religion and see the big picture, the more absurd it seems.

Again – yes, quite, and isn’t that just the kind of thing that ‘New’ atheists are scolded for saying? So…welcome aboard, or welcome back, Julian, but do admit – either the ‘New’ atheists aren’t all that naughty after all, or you are yourself a ‘New’ atheist.