Author: Ophelia Benson

Nice.

The ordeal of ill-fated Irshad Bibi, who suffered burns in an acid attack by her husband, seems far from over despite generous offer by an NGO as her very own people blocked her way to accept the help and go for the treatment…[H]er family and relatives stopped her from going to Islamabad for treatment at the expense of the NGO on the plea that “such organisations have the reputation of committing immoral activities and they will use her also for their nefarious designs”…A resident of the area to which the victim belonged defended the family’s stance, saying: “The NGOs are involved in un-Islamic activities and it is a sinful act to get treatment from them”.

Therefore, Irshad Bibi should simply be left untreated. Good thinking.

[Irshad Bibi] said Mukhtar Mai had telephoned her and expressed sympathy with her. “I am very thankful to her. I am also thankful to the media and the NGO which has extended me help”. Sobbing out her ordeal, Irshad Bibi said she wanted to visit her parents and asked her husband, Ajmal, to send her to their place. “Ajmal, however, stopped me saying he will give me good news and at night he came and repeated that he had a big surprise for me. The next moment he threw acid on my face and dragged me to a room from where he fled”…She said when she cried out for help, one of the neighbours telephoned her parents and her father reached the house after two hours, broke open the lock and took her to Sanwan hospital.

So her lovely husband not only threw acid in her face, he also locked her in afterwards. Now that’s what I cal uxorious.

Irshad said her husband would routinely beat her and whenever she spoke to her parents about her domestic life they placated her by saying that “a married woman has to live and die at her husband’s house”. She said her hand was given to her husband in ‘watta satta’.

Right. This is the arrangement. A married woman has to live and die at her husband’s house, having been given to the husband by other people with no right of refusal for herself. That’s a fair arrangement. It kind of reminds me of something else…now what is it…it’s right on the tip of my tongue…come on, think…oh yes: slavery.

Michael Ignatieff says something in his article on ‘Getting Iraq Wrong’ that ties up with this discussion of belief and intuition we’ve been having.

Having taught political science myself, I have to say the discipline promises more than it can deliver. In practical politics, there is no science of decision-making. The vital judgments a politician makes every day are about people: whom to trust, whom to believe and whom to avoid. The question of loyalty arises daily: Who will betray and who will stay true? Having good judgment in these matters, having a sound sense of reality, requires trusting some very unscientific intuitions about people.

I’ll buy that. That is one place where intuition mostly does work a lot better than reasoning – which is not surprising, because people aren’t reasonable, so trying to make judgments about people by using reason just…doesn’t fit. That’s another thing that The Curious Incident illustrates so beautifully, of course. Christopher is good at logic and he hasn’t got a clue about people. To understand about people you have to be all sloppy and organic and random and sentimental and selfish and generous and hundreds of other messy non-logical things. You have to have all sorts of feelings and impulses and reactions in order to know how they work in other people; you can’t learn them, you have to have them. You’ll probably still get people wrong all the time, but at least you’ll have a shot. Without all the sloppy soppy unreasonable stuff, it’s hopeless.

There are some excellent things in parts of God is not Great*. I thought I would give you a sample.

Pp. 175-6:

…it is only in the reported observations of Jesus that we find any mention of hell and eternal punishment. The god of Moses would brusquely call for other tribes, including his favourite one, to suffer massacre and plague and even extirpation, but when the grave closed over his victims he was essentially finished with them unless he remembered to curse their succeeding progeny. Not until the advent of the Prince of Peace do we hear of the ghastly idea of further punishing and torturing the dead…[T]he son of god is revealed as one who, if his milder words are not accepted straightaway, will condemn the inattentive to everlasting fire. This has provided texts for clerical sadists ever since, and features very lip-smackingly in the tirades of Islam.

Pp. 203-4:

It ought to be possible for me to pursue my studies and researches in one house, and for the Buddhist to spin his wheel in another. But contempt for the intellect has a strange way of not being passive…[T]hose whose credulity has led their own society into stagnation may seek a solution, not in true self-examination, but in blaming others for their backwardness…A faith that despises the mind and the free individual, that preaches submission and resignation, is ill-equipped for self-criticism.

Page 282:

Religion even boasts a special branch of itself, devoted to the study of the end. It calls itself ‘eschatology,’ and broods incessantly on the passing away of all earthly things. This death cult refuses to abate, even though we have every reason to think that ‘eartlhly things’ are all that we have, or are ever going to have.

Worth at least a selective read.

*There are parts where I disagree with Hitchens, and other parts I haven’t read yet because they look to be familiar territory.

Interesting. I’m told that Why Truth Matters was scheduled to be discussed on Classic FM this evening, on Newsnight. I don’t know though, I tried the Listen Again button but although I got the player and clicked on the sound button, I couldn’t get it to play. In the unlikely event that anyone is interested, there it is. (In the even more unlikely event that anyone would like to transcribe it for me, do feel free!)

Update: dear kind Arnaud did a transcript for me. (Or perhaps he simply made it up; it’s certainly pleasing enough to be a fantasy.) Merci, Arnaud.

John Brunning: Well next stop, Chris, a book on a subject I know is dear to your heart.

Chris Powling: Very much so. It’s called Why Truth Matters. It’s by Ophelia Benson & Jeremy Stangroom. Now, they are a couple of philosophers and they are taking on a subject which I have been turning in my mind for many years now. 25 years ago I took an allegedly, once again that very useful word, literature course which turned out actually to be about cod philosophy. We were talking about deconstructionism and postmodernism and relativism and all these “-isms”, most of which I suspected at the time were codswallop. So do Ophelia and Jeremy, thank goodness, and in WTM they are establishing the case for good, old-fashioned rationality. You need to get your facts right, you need to get your logic right and you need to put the two together in a valid argument. About time too, say I.

John Brunning : So not just a fascinating but also an important one, you’d say?

Chris Powling : I think it’s hugely important because of course what it does, really, is challenge the lazy notion that we can all construct our own truths and they are all equally valid, that a religious fundamentalist for instance is as likely to be right as an Oxbridge philosopher, which I think is an absolute nonsense, a complete nonsense and they expose it for what it is. What this book is, I think, is a redevelopment of that old 18th century enlightenment which had rather gone out of fashion. It’s good to see it back.