Author: Ophelia Benson

The opening of Steven Weinberg’s review of The God Delusion made me muse on something, not for the first time.

Of all the scientific discoveries that have disturbed the religious mind, none has had the impact of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. No advance of physics or even cosmology has produced such a shock…[A]mong the natural phenomena explained by natural selection were the very features of humanity of which we are most proud. It became plausible that our love for our mates and children, and, according to the work of modern evolutionary biologists, even more abstract moral principles, such as loyalty, charity and honesty, have an origin in evolution, rather than in a divinely created soul.

There is something both immensely fascinating, and highly disconcerting, about that possibility or likelihood or near-certainty. It is, really (and I think religious believers are missing something very rich if they reject this), genuinely interesting to consider the fact that the same kind of natural forces (predators, climate, availability of food or water) shaped whales’ ability to dive, and raptors’ ability to spot prey from a great height, and chimps’ ability to strip grass stems in order to fish for termites, and Bach’s Cello Suites and ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Las Meninas’. Really – it’s enthralling. Tracing it backwards is enthralling, and following it forwards is enthralling. Our minds are an adaptation. Thinking is adaptive. It’s a tool; it has survival value; if it didn’t, we wouldn’t have it. It has a lot of survival value; it has to in order to be worth its colossal expense. That’s what it is first of all; the poetry and music and charity and justice came later. That’s fascinating, and one could think about the implications for years. (It occurred to me just a couple of weeks ago how strange and in a way sad it is that humans didn’t know this about themselves until a little more than a century ago. Imagine – they just had no idea of even the possibility that human qualities and characteristics are shaped by selective pressures. To us now it seems such a basic thing to be unaware of.)

Yet as well as being fascinating it’s also disconcerting. In that sense it is not difficult to understand the resistance of religious believers. That’s because (I think) we want to think the things we think are good really are good, that what we think is better really is better. Realizing they’re all the product of a mind that is the activity of a brain that is what it is because of selective pressures seems inimical to that. Survival of course isn’t about good or better, it’s just about survival; it’s about what works. We don’t want to think that poetry or kindness ‘work’ – we want them to be more than that, and different – we want them to be special. Not just special because we think they’re special, special because we say so, special to us – really special, special in themselves, absolutely special.

Poignant, isn’t it.

So tell me something I don’t know.

A report of the American Psychological Association (APA) released today found evidence that the proliferation of sexualized images of girls and young women in advertising, merchandising, and media is harmful to girls’ self-image and healthy development…Sexualization was defined by the task force as occurring when a person’s value comes only from her/his sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics, and when a person is sexually objectified, e.g., made into a thing for another’s sexual use.

How could it not be harmful, for chrissake? What would it be, beneficial? How could it possibly be beneficial? Unless of course your dearest ambition from infancy on is to be a prostitute, and you never once deviate from that burning ambition. But barring that, how could it be beneficial?

In a way this is just a variant of that horrible (albeit evasive, cautious) pronouncement of Tariq Ramadan’s: ‘But the body must not be forgotten…In Islamic tradition, women are seen in terms of being mothers, wives or daughters.’ That’s an evasive, cautious way of putting it because what he means is ‘and nothing else,’ but he presumably didn’t want to say that to Ian Buruma or in the New York Times. At any rate, the outcome is the same: a person’s value comes only from her sexual appeal or behavior, or from her maternal or sexual function; she is, in short, a thing for the use of other people – primarily, of men, since if she produces daughers, they’re in the same situation, while sons are not. Women and girls are for others, men are for themselves and others and a range of other possibilities. This is the problem with the sexualization of girls.

I see that as a problem even in the absence of any reports from the APA. It’s a problem because of the implicit message, which is that females are supposed to be hotties, that that is by a very wide margin their chief obligation, that that’s what they’re for, that’s what they’re about, that’s what they do. I think this is a kind of death in life. The death of alternatives, of other possibilities, of hope, of breadth, of wide horizons, of a range of choices. It’s a horrible nasty pouty flicky twisty curvy silky little box. It’s the obverse of the niqab, but it’s pretty damn confining itself. It’s as if there is one and only one job open to women: that of lap dancer. There was one and only one job open to Jane Fairfax and Jane Eyre; I’m not sure the horizontal move to lap dancer is much of an advance.

Nigel Warburton’s comment on an article about philosophical blogging that I wrote for the current TPM is amusing, at least to me.

In a recent article in The Philosophers’ Magazine (1st quarter 2007, no.37, p.12-14) Ophelia Benson (recently interviewed for Virtual Philosopher), opens up with the question of whether weblogs are somehow incompatible with ‘the rigour, discipline, and seriousness of real, grown-up philosophy?’ To me this is a bit like asking whether ink on paper is compatible with philosophy – apart from Socrates, most philosophers have agreed that it is.

I know. It was meant to be. In fact I think that’s almost obvious, especially given the ‘real, grown-up philosophy’ – that’s not a perfectly straightforward bit of reportorial phrasing. I was doing a combination of teasing Julian and acknowledging his view of the matter in the opening of the article, which seemed to make sense since he would be the first person to read it, it was his suggestion that I should write it, and he would either approve it or not. I suppose part of what I was doing in the article was giving my view (mostly via the view of the four blogging philosophers I interviewed) of why Julian’s view of blogs was not quite right. He gave his view via a parody blog on his site, but I can’t link to it as he seems to have taken it down. Well actually he didn’t give his view of blogs in general, he gave his view of what his blog would be like if he did one, he explained to me; I misread it as his view of blogs in general. But I’m not the only one who read it that way, and I think the reading was the most obvious one. A great fan of his read it the same way:

Julian Baggini has got to be one of my favorite living philosophers; he’s a least on a top twenty list of some kind…I recently visited his website, looked through some of his materials and came across a link his blog. The strange thing was that Dr. Baggini’s blog contained only one entry explaining why he thought blogging was a waste of time…His first claim was that it was unhealthy for someone to spend too much time reading the ‘ramblings’ of any one person. His second claim was that he thought it was a waste of his and the reader’s time.

See? That’s what it sounded like to two people, anyway.

Nigel makes many of the same points I would make (some of which I did make in the article).

I suspect Ophelia’s opening angle was a reaction to her editor’s parody blog that she mentions where he remarks ‘Blogging would waste my time and yours. Go read something I or someone else has put some prolonged thought into.’ Apart from the informal fallacy of assuming that more prolonged thought = better results (the Protestant Work Ethic Fallacy?), this seems confused. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, one of the best ways of conceptualising blogs is as published commonplace books. Once you see them that way, anything goes – including philosophy of any kind. For an example of a philosopher doing philosophy on a blog, see Stephen Law’s new blog with his ongoing discussions about relativism: the medium allows musings, links to articles, comments, responses to comments, and revisions…philosophy in action.

I know one person who really hates blogs; I probably also had him in mind when writing the article. I must say I find that a very odd view, because as a medium they seem to me to be full of potential. Of course, like so many things, they’re only as good as they are; bad ones are bad; but good ones enable people to do things they can’t do in other media.

To be continued, perhaps.

Alok Jha on a failure of rationality.

You wonder sometimes if government ministers get special training to cling to the daftest ideas. The dogged attempts of Caroline Flint, the public health minister, to ban the creation of animal-human hybrid embryos for stem cell research is a case in point. Her opposition, based on a biased public consultation that was hijacked by lobby groups, presupposes that the public feels ethically dubious about it.

That’s a pretty familiar phenomenon, I think – you get it in journalism a lot too. Caring reporters on NPR and the BBC often simply take it for granted that all this kind of research [caring voice] ‘raises serious ethical issues’ – even when it’s not a bit obvious why it should or in fact that it does. They just assume it does; that is, like the health minister, they presuppose it. It’s as if they’ve had special training to presuppose it. Why is that? one wonders.

I heard a particularly exasperating example on the World Service a few weeks ago, when one of the reporters talked to a researcher about cloning. The reporter kept asking about the risks of eating cloned animals and the researcher kept, patiently, correcting him: it’s not cloned animals that would be eaten, it’s the offspring of cloned animals. The reporter finally said yes yes, he got it, then as soon as the interview was terminated he recapped: issues about eating cloned animals. Journalists are really terrible about this stuff – they get it wrong to begin with and then they apparently can’t even absorb corrections. So we can be quite assured that all these controversies and issues are based on garbled reports of the subject at best. At worst they’re based on distorted or tendentious reports.

The science minister, Malcolm Wicks, warned against basing important policy on inaccurate public polls. He told the inquiry: “If certain lines of inquiry are not pursued, that has to be on rational scientific grounds; it must not be for other factors which lack rationality.”…Will this self-proclaimed pro-science government go with rationality, or will it allow the hysteria of the anti-science brigade to hobble a critical part of our medical future?

I would put Wicks’s point somewhat differently, since ethics can’t be purely rational. There has to be a combination of rational scientific grounds and ethical consideration, is what I would say. You could have rational scientific grounds for, say, preferring freshly-killed children for a certain kind of research, which would be trumped by ethical considerations that are not purely rational. They’re not purely rational but they have a rational component, and that’s why the rest of us find the purely irrational objections of some religious critics to (say) stem-cell research so frustrating – there is no rational component. The missing rational component is replaced by a Yuk factor that, Leon Kass famously claimed, we should respect, because it’s pointing at something real even if we can’t articulate it. The hell it is. A puddle of cells in a dish does not have the same kind of ethical standing that a child (or an animal) does. There are rational scientific grounds for saying that: the puddle of cells has no nervous system, no consciousness, no awareness. That fact is a component of well-conducted ethical thinking, which has to take facts into account. That’s probably what Wicks meant…

You can keep your Tariq Ramadan. I’d much rather hear from Gina Khan.

Gina Khan is a very brave woman. Born in Birmingham 38 years ago to Pakistani parents, she has run away from an arranged marriage, dressed herself in jeans and dared to speak out against the increasing radicalisation of her community…The trouble is, says Khan, that many of the Pakistanis who have come to Birmingham are all too easily swayed. “Most of them are ignorant, uneducated, illiterate people from rural areas. It is very easy for them to be brainwashed, very easy. These are people who have been taught from the beginning that our religion is everything, it is the right way. You are going to Hell simply because you were not born a Muslim.” Khan is far too independent-minded to accept these beliefs wholesale…”I had too much rubbish fed in me that I would be too Westernised. I was told to keep my distance from you because I am a Muslim. It is still really hard to explain to you how you are conditioned. From a young age those thoughts are put in your head: ‘I am a Muslim. I do not mix with those people’. I would honestly say that we are more racist and more prejudiced than the English.”

Being conditioned is one thing, and being independent-minded is another. The difference is crucial. Some conditioning is of course useful. (Don’t hit. Don’t touch that, it will burn/cut you. Look both ways. Don’t bite. Say please. Don’t push.) But it should be minimal, and it should be good in itself. Some independent-mindedness is of course harmful. (I will hit. I will take what I want and the hell with everyone else. I will push, I will not say please.) But if it is coupled with decent minimal conditioning (or teaching, if you prefer), it is mostly preferable to the alternative, especially when the alternative is really bad conditioning, such as ‘keep your distance from those people because you are a Muslim’.

What has been done to her — and so many other Muslim women — is what incenses Khan most, and has emboldened her tospeak out. Muslim society, she says, is based on male domination and the oppression of women. The mosques are run entirely by men, the Sharia councils are run by men, the “voice” of the Muslim community is always male. And it is women who suffer as a result.

Well exactly. That’s why the long love affair with the MCB was so mystifying.

Khan herself was pressurised into marriage at the age of 16 by her father, against her mother’s wishes. “I was manipulated by my dad’s side of the family into a teen marriage – you know, you are a passport for someone from Pakistan. My mum wanted me to study and make something of my life because she knew what this country had to offer.” Khan married and became pregnant, but after her baby died she says that she suffered terrible postnatal depression and left the marriage. Her family disowned her, as did the Muslim community…She is full of praise for the instruments of the British state: social services, the police, job centres. If she were prime minister, she says, the first thing she would do is ban teen marriages. “They are still being pulled out of the local girls school here and taken back home, aged 16 or 17, not allowed to get an education.”

Creepily, yet not surprisingly, that exactly echoes what happened to girls at Goldenbridge. They were pulled out of school to do domestic chores, and not allowed to get an education. I sense a pattern here…

[A]lthough polygamy is illegal in Britain, it is still, says, Khan, being practised with a Muslim seal of approval. The “marriages”, after all, are being sanctioned in the mosques. “My mum would turn in her grave if she knew Sharia was here. This is England, how can this be happening, how in this country? People in Pakistan are fighting for it not to happen there.”Khan is also vociferous on the subject of the veil, which is not, she says, a religious requirement: “It’s a 7th-century garment that should not be in this country.”

Read it all. It’s hard to extract bits, because it’s all good. Don’t miss it. Go, Gina Khan.