Author: Ophelia Benson

Did you read Jeremy’s article on justice? It’s very good.

One bit reminded me of something else I’d just read. Serendipity kind of thing. This bit reminded me.

If this is right, it does not follow that one cannot account for the existence of retributive feelings. Mackie, for example, employed Darwinian principles in order to explain their ubiquity and persistence. His argument was roughly this: individuals achieved an evolutionary advantage to the extent that resentment of injuries became a deeply ingrained psychological disposition in their personality structures; this disposition was then universalized for broadly sociological reasons, so that certain harms came to be cooperatively resented, which is the mark of retributivism generally.

It reminded me of this article in the New Yorker about the brain and psychology and behavioral economics and neuroeconomics. Especially this bit:

A good way to illustrate Cohen’s point is to imagine that you and a stranger are sitting on a park bench, when an economist approaches and offers both of you ten dollars. He asks the stranger to suggest how the ten dollars should be divided, and he gives you the right to approve or reject the division. If you accept the stranger’s proposal, the money will be divided between you accordingly; if you refuse it, neither of you gets anything. How would you react to this situation, which economists refer to as an “ultimatum game,” because one player effectively gives the other an ultimatum? Game theorists say that you should accept any positive offer you receive, even one as low as a dollar, or you will end up with nothing. But most people reject offers of less than three dollars, and some turn down anything less than five dollars.

See? It’s the same thing. Resentment of injuries, of perceived injustice, trumps economic benefit. I know damn well I’m like that. I’d happily spurn the two or three dollars for the sake of punishing the greedy unfair stranger on the bench. I would probably also pick up a nearby branch or tennis racket and smack the stranger with it then run away.

Cohen and several colleagues organized a series of ultimatum games in which half the players – the respondents – were put in MRI machines…When respondents received stingy offers – two dollars for them, say, and eight dollars for the other player – they exhibited substantially more activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area associated with reasoning, and in the bilateral anterior insula, part of the limbic region that is active when people are angry or in distress. The more activity there was in the limbic structure, the more likely the person was to reject the offer. To the researchers, it looked as though the two regions of the brain might be competing to decide what to do, with the prefrontal cortex wanting to accept the offer and the insula wanting to reject it…Maybe human beings have an intrinsic preference for fairness, and we get angry when that preference is violated—so angry that we punish the other player even at a cost to ourselves. Or perhaps people reject low offers because they don’t want to appear weak.

See? Same thing. It’s interesting. It’s why small children spend all their time measuring the size of each other’s pieces of cake to make sure they’re not getting stiffed – they’re making sure nobody’s dissing them.

Well this is what I keep saying.

It is time to reverse the prevailing notion that religious commitment is intrinsically deserving of respect, and that it should be handled with kid gloves and protected by custom and in some cases law against criticism and ridicule. It is time to refuse to tip-toe around people who claim respect, consideration, special treatment, or any other kind of immunity, on the grounds that they have a religious faith, as if having faith were a privilege-endowing virtue, as if it were noble to believe in unsupported claims and ancient superstitions.

That’s all. It’s quite simple. Faith is not a virtue, and it shouldn’t endow privilege. It’s not noble to believe in unsupported claims, especially in the guise of ancient superstitions. ‘Faith’ keeps insisting on throwing its weight around in public matters, so it can’t reasonably claim kid glove handling at the same time. It does claim exactly that; but not reasonably.

Grayling is forthright.

On the contrary: to believe something in the face of evidence and against reason – to believe something by faith – is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect. It is time to say so. It is time to demand of believers that they take their personal choices and preferences in these non-rational and too often dangerous matters into the private sphere, like their sexual proclivities. Everyone is free to believe what they want, providing they do not bother (or coerce, or kill) others; but no-one is entitled to claim privileges merely on the grounds that they are votaries of one or another of the world’s many religions.

Simon Blackburn said much the same in that article ‘Religion and Respect’ [pdf] that I commented on a year ago.

But, I argued to myself, why should I “respect” belief systems that I do not share? I would not be expected to respect the beliefs of flat earthers or those of the people who believed that the Hale-Bopp comet was a recycling facility for dead Californians, and killed themselves in order to join it. Had my host stood up and asked me to toast the Hale-Bopp hopefuls, or to break bread or some such in token of fellowship with them, I would have been just as embarrassed and indeed angry.

But the rules change for (established) religion. And they not only change, they creep.

People may start out by insisting on respect in the minimal sense, and in a generally liberal world they may not find it too difficult to obtain it. But then what we might call respect creep sets in, where the request for minimal toleration turns into a demand for more substantial respect, such as fellowfeeling, or esteem, and finally deference and reverence.

Or not finally; there’s another step: obedience and submission, along with silencing and censorship. In some places and on some subjects, we’re already there.

Grayling concludes:

But no organised religion, as an institution, has a greater claim to the attention of others in society than does a trade union, political party, voluntary organisation, or any other special interest group – for “special interest groups” are exactly what churches and organised religious bodies are. No one could dream of demanding that political parties be respected merely because they are political parties, or of protecting them from the pens of cartoonists; nor that their members should be. On the contrary. And so it should be for all interest groups and their members, without exception.

Yup. Time for the worm to turn.

Hmph. I’ve been too busy lately – I’ve missed some great Jesus and Moze (it’s hard to make a plural Jesus and Mo in writing). Such as this one. Haw. What’s he going to do, sit on us? Haw!

And this one. I love the barmaid. Can I play the barmaid in the movie? Can I, huh, huh? I’d be perfect.

And this one. Catchy. Violent, and catchy.

And this one. ‘That laws-of-physics-defying explanation never even occurred to me.’ Try to keep up, Mo.

And the niqab one is brilliant. Oh, Mo, I feel so liberated.

Polly Toynbee says a secular state would be a good idea.

Here is a conflict between two principles – respect for a religious minority and respect for women’s equality…The veil turns women into things. It was shocking to find on the streets of Kabul that invisible women behind burkas are not treated with special respect. On the contrary, they are pushed and shoved off pavements by men, jostled aside as if almost subhuman without the face-to-face contact that recognises common humanity.

She’s right you know. That’s how it works. You can’t have the one without the other – you can’t have the concealment without the reification – the concealment is reification. That is essentially what it’s all about: erasure of every recognizable attribute of the human, leaving only anonymous amorphous colourless interchangeable blocks of fabric that look more like upended sofas or nonfunctional lampshades than like people. Well big surprise that they’re treated with contempt and hostility instead of respect. People who have to be buried in yards of upholstery so that they can’t be seen are, pretty obviously, objects of some form of loathing and suspicion, not of admiration and respect. Why else do we hate the things so much? Why do you think? It’s because they’re such an obvious, blatant, hyper-visible sign of intense ineradicable unappeasable loathing.

The veil is profoundly divisive – and deliberately designed to be. No one need be a Muslim to understand the ideology of the veil, because covering and controlling women has been a near-universal practice in Christian societies and in most cultures and religions the world over.

Of course the veil is divisive and designed to be. Dividing is what it does. It’s a portable form of gender segregation; segregation is, obviously, divisive. It’s only relatively recently that women haven’t been formally and informally segregated in ‘the West’ too; it’s only relatively recently that we’ve been allowed to mix with the world at large. We understand what segregation is, and most of us don’t want it reimposed, formally or informally.

No citizen’s face can be indecent because of gender…It was left to Harriet Harman to make the unequivocal case for women’s rights: “If you want equality, you have to be in society, not hidden away from it,” she said. “The veil is an obstacle to women’s participation on equal terms in society.”

Just so; because that’s what it’s for; that’s the point of portable segregation. It’s not just a neutral religious symbol, it’s not just a sign of devoutness, it’s not just a ‘choice,’ it’s a barrier between women and the wider world. That’s why sensitive liberals need to give up pretending otherwise.

Harman is astute about the way choice is culturally determined: do women really choose the female roles societies assign them? She is not alone in meeting Muslim woman who are appalled that their own daughters might adopt the veil as a political gesture. It’s a danger to other women’s “choice” if all “good” Muslims are forced to prove their faith by submission.

By submission to the imperative to be things. Don’t do it. Be people.

More on Dabashi’s article. I’ve gritted my teeth and read it all now. It’s bad all the way through – it doesn’t take a surprise turn for the better on page 7 or 10.

One thing he wants us all to get is that literature is crucial to empire; in fact it pretty much makes it happen and keeps it going. Without literature – none of it would have happened. Therefore people who teach comparative literature are immensely important. Right? Right.

From Edward Said to Amy Kaplan and Gauri Viswanathan, we now have a sustained body of scholarship, extended from the US, through Europe, to India and by theoretical implication all around the colonised world, a persuasive argument as to how the teaching of English literature has historically been definitive to the British, and now by extension American, imperial proclivities.

Ooh, all the way from one person to two more people, we now have a ‘sustained’ body of scholarship about how – mmph – the teaching of English literature has historically been definitive to imperial proclivities. Hahahahahahahaha! Oh, that’s a good one. (As for what it means, well, don’t press these questions. Surely you know what being definitive to proclivities means, don’t you? All sophisticated scholars know that.)

The publication of Azar Nafisi’s [RLT] is the most cogent contemporary case of yet another attempt at positing English literature yet again as a modus operandi of manufacturing trans-regional cultural consent to Euro- American global domination. [geddit? manufacturing consent] The factual evidence of the connection of Azar Nafisi to the US leaders of the neoconservative movement [he means she has some neocon friends] and her systematic deprecation of Iranian culture,…glorifying instead a canonised [ooh, canonised – she’s one of those canon people – that’s bad] inner sanctum for an iconic celebration of “Western literature,” [eww] are additional factors in placing her squarely at the service of the predatory US empire–the service delivered via the most cliché-ridden invocation of the most retrograde Oriental fantasies of her readers in the United States and Europe.

Right. She has neocon friends and she writes a book about reading in a small private group, and that places her squarely at the service of the predatory US empire. Case proven; take her away.

I find it prophetic, were it not so obscene, that in the space of the front and back covers of [RLT] we have an updated pedophiliac Orientalism documented so succinctly: on the front cover the picture of two veiled Iranian teenage “girls” and on the back the endorsement of Professor Humbert Lewis of Orientalism himself.

That’s the first of three times he does that – he calls Bernard Lewis Humbert: either Humbert Lewis or (throwing caution to the winds) just plain Humbert Humbert. Because? Well, he hates him; isn’t that a good enough reason?

And now he buckles down to some serious abuse.

The cover of [RLT] is an iconic burglary from the press…In the age of “the end of history,” as Azar Nafisi’s fellow neocon Francis Fukuyama has theorised it…Here again, Azar Nafisi proceeds to crop the picture she portrays inside her book in a fashion similar to the visual burglary she and her publisher commit on its cover–stealing a part of truth to tell a bigger lie.

Nafisi is not in fact a neocon. She has neocon friends; she’s not a neocon herself. But Dabashi feels entitled to go from innuendo about her ‘connections’ to simply calling her something she isn’t – in the very same breath ranting about a cropped picture and burglary, stealing, and a bigger lie. He’s a nasty piece of work.

Decades into a sustained struggle against the domination of Eurocentric curriculum in the US academy, fighting to restore democratic dignity to the world literary scene, Nafisi once again pushes the clock back for about half a century by a singular and exclusive praise for the Eurocentricity of the literary imagination. Promoting the racist cause of a singular literary canon in the United States and Europe goes hand in hand with denigrating, dismissing, or ignoring the existence of non-Euro-American literary and cultural traditions. No one will ever know, reading [RLT], that Iranians, like all other nations, have a literature of their own…

Okay stop right there. What’s on page 6 of RLT? “We read Persian classical literature, such as the tales of our own lady of fiction, Scheherezade, from A Thousand and One Nights…”

Oh never mind that, she’s still trampling the democratic dignity of the world literary scene, and by golly she’s certainly still promoting a racist cause, because that’s an automatic fifty points for Dabashi, even if it doesn’t happen to be true.

But joining the neocon takeover of the democratic institutions of the US by a band of militant renegades, and thus helping build a literary canon for a predatory empire, is an entirely different matter. In the former project you restore dignity and hope to a nation and its cultural resistance to imperial domination; in the latter you seek to steal such dignity and hope from them.

Well he’s already told us, or ‘demonstrated’ as he keeps asserting of scholars he approves of, that Nafisi (or her publisher) is a burglar who steals bits of pictures; clearly she steals everything that’s not nailed down.

Nafisi has never taught at any liberal arts college or university in the US. She is entirely ignorant of or indifferent and hostile to the decades of struggle that racialised minorities and women’s and minority studies have endured to make a dent in the vacuum-packed curricular terrors of the white establishment. At a time when the entire nation is engaged in a radical debate about the necessity of curricular diversity, Azar Nafisi joins ranks with the worst reactionary elements singing the praise of the “Western masterpieces.” After decades of consistent struggles, native-Americans, African-Americans, Latin-Americans, Asian-Americans, feminists, and scores of other denigrated and disenfranchised communities, have successfully engaged the white male supremacist canon of the US higher education…

Translation: Nafisi is not a hotshot at Columbia like me, so it’s an outrage that people bought her book. She’s entirely ignorant, unlike brilliant erudite but radical me, and she’s hostile to minorities, unlike radical anti-racist wonderful me (did I mention I teach at Columbia?) and she’s in cahoots with the curricular terrors of the white establishment (what terrors? You know what terrors!) and she is not one of the Good People who have fought a bloody war with the white male supremacist canon (those canon wars, they’re the worst). She’s clueless and out of it because she doesn’t realize that the entire nation is engaged in a radical debate about the necessity of curricular diversity – how can she not know that? Because she’s evil, and I’m good. Stern, but good. End of translation.

Imagine taking a class with that guy.