Author: Ophelia Benson

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Dan at Muscular Liberals cites Why Truth.

Considering the response of some to what can only only be described as Hezbollah propaganda dressed up as reporting called to mind a passage in Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom’s “Why Truth Matters”, a great book I read whilst on my travels a couple of weeks ago.

Well – that’s pleasing, because I suppose that was the idea. That generally is the idea in books of the ‘let’s all try to think just a little bit carefully’ variety: the hope is that things will link up that way, so that the abundant examples of propaganda dressed up as reporting the world is blessed with will seem not like bizarre one-offs but like examples of a nameable phenomenon such as propaganda dressed up as reporting. Sometimes patterns are illusory but other times they’re very useful; sometimes connections are merely paranoiac imaginings but other times they make sense of apparently random mistakes.

This is the passage he quotes (emphasis his):

There is a frivolity, a lack of responsibility, an indifference to canons of coherence, logic, rationality and relevance – which are reminiscent not of the Left or progressivism, but, as Richard Wolin argues, of counter-Enlightenment and reaction.

That is not an accidental association, it is what counter-Enlightenment and reaction are all about: the rejection of reason, enquiry, logic and evidence, in favour of tradition, religion, instinct, blood and soil, The Nation, The Fatherland. That is the sort of thing that remains standing once canons of coherence and relevance are stripped away. The Left is not well-advised to discredit or undermine reason and respect for truth, because those are ultimately the only tools the Left has against the irrationalist appeals of the Right.

Well, thanks, Dan. I quite like that passage myself.

And it’s pleasantly revelvant to the running argument over cultural relativism and rational argument that’s been going on here lately.

Another museum caves.

A Bangladeshi-British photographer is complaining that her work has been censored by the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. A documentary work made in Bangladesh by Syra Miah and shown as part of the museum’s Art and Islam exhibitions was removed because it contained an image of a semi-naked woman.

Update: See these comments at Mediawatchwatch for more. A reader wrote to the museum, and the museum replied with a different take. It explains the decision, which sounds less loopy than the Guardian account did, and adds “The gallery discussed the matter with Syra Miah, and the photograph was
removed on 18 July with her full agreement. Our understanding following
these discussions was that Syra Miah said that she understood the reasons
for the removal and accepted the decision. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery
had not heard from the artist about this matter since the time the work was
removed 7 weeks ago in July.”

I had amused myself composing a good old fulimination, but since it may have been inaccurate and hence unfair, I snarled gently and then decided that truth matters, so it’s gone.

The Archive

The Interrogations Archive

What about healthy invigorating sport?

But is everyone getting excited about sport? Not according to the organisation Sport England which encourages nationwide participation of sporting activities. Its figures show that Muslim women are significantly less likely to take up exercise compared to other groups.

Wait, you said sport first, then you made it exercise. Different thing. But never mind that’s not the part that caught my attention.

In addition, there are cultural barriers involved in the take up of sport as a professional career option for many Muslims, both male and female…Shahid Saleh, a young British Muslim who has five sisters, explains how he does not like the idea of them playing games. “I wouldn’t want them to play sports,” he said. “You’re not allowed to uncover yourself like wearing tracksuit bottoms and all that, and play football or badminton, you have to cover yourself.”

Oh, mind your own business, Shahid. Get your mind out of the gutter and leave your sisters alone; they’re not your property. But that’s not the part that caught my attention either.

Cultural barriers remain in taking up a career in sport. Twelve-year-old Zahir Ahmed says that his parents encourage him to study hard rather than to waste time playing.

That’s the part. Wait – studying hard is a ‘cultural barrier’ to taking up a career in sport? For one thing, careers in sport aren’t just lying around littering the streets ready to be ‘taken up,’ they’re extremely rare, especially at the big money level. But for a more basic thing, studying could be construed as something other than a cultural barrier to sport. It could, actually, be regarded as a good in itself as well as an instrumental good; it could be regarded as both a source of enrichment, expansion, understanding, critical thinking, skill, excitement, and as a tool necessary for a very wide range of jobs, such as for instance being a BBC reporter. So frankly it seems a little twisted to look at it as merely a ‘cultural barrier’ to sport. Some cultural barriers have a lot to be said for them.

Sam Harris has harsh things to say about Francis Collins’s book. “His book, however, reveals that a stellar career in science offers no guarantee of a scientific frame of mind,” he observes, then he quotes from the book:

As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as Creator; you are right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold fast to the conclusion that science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence; and you are right to hold fast to the certainty that the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted….

You are “right”? What does he mean? Morally right? To “hold fast” to truths that aren’t truths? To hold fast to certainty? Not much sign of a scientific frame of mind there, all right.

On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains … the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.

Because…JC put the waterfall there? And froze it? And arranged that it should be a beautiful fall day when this one particular guy saw it? But what about this other time when someone else rounded a corner on a cold rainy windy day and couldn’t see the waterfall at all because she was too wet and miserable and busy wishing she were home with a brandy and some out of season strawberries?

Harris comments:

One would hope that it would be immediately obvious to Collins that there is nothing about seeing a frozen waterfall (no matter how frozen) that offers the slightest corroboration of the doctrine of Christianity. But it was not obvious to him as he “knelt in the dewy grass,” and it is not obvious to him now. Indeed, I fear that it will not be obvious to many of his readers. If the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus really is the son of God, then anything can mean anything.

Collins rhapsodizes:

No, this God, if I was perceiving him at all, must be a theist God, who desires some kind of relationship with those special creatures called human beings, and has therefore instilled this special glimpse of Himself into each one of us. This might be the God of Abraham, but it was certainly not the God of Einstein…. Judging by the incredibly high standards of the Moral Law … this was a God who was holy and righteous. He would have to be the embodiment of goodness…. Faith in God now seemed more rational than disbelief.

Oh, right. The special moral goodness of humans shows how specially moral god is, and thinking so is more rational than not thinking so.

The Big Bang cries out for a divine explanation. It forces the conclusion that nature had a defined beginning. I cannot see how nature could have created itself. Only a supernatural force that is outside of space and time could have done that.

Well, bud, I tell you what, if you cannot see how nature could have created itself, I cannot see how a supernatural force could have created itself, so there. I know, the idea is that it did it by being supernatural, but, see, that’s not actually an explanation, it’s just a hand-wave. When you come to something you can’t see how it happened, the right answer is not ‘magic’ or ‘supernatural’ but just ‘I don’t see how.’ That’s because they come to the same thing, but ‘I don’t see how’ is more honest.

There’s more. More recycled bad arguments from Collins and protests from Harris. Worth reading.

Salman Rushdie has noticed.

Spiegel asked him, “Leading British Muslims have written a letter to British Prime Minister Tony Blair claiming that the growing willingness to engage in terrorism is due to Bush’s and Blair’s policies in Iraq and in Lebanon. Are they completely wrong?”

There are always reasons for criticism, also for outrage. But there’s one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn’t one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.

Spiegel protested a little, “And yet there must be reasons, or at least triggers, for this terrible willingness to wipe out the lives of others — and of oneself.

Well obviously there must be reasons; these things aren’t causeless eruptions; but that doesn’t mean there must be sane or reasonable or sensible or genuine political reasons; that doesn’t mean there must be reasons that anyone is obliged to take at all seriously, much less so seriously as to credit them with being a criticism of UK-US foreign policy. One might as well say football hooliganism is a criticism of UK-US foreign policy, one might as well say gang-rape is a criticism of UK-US foreign policy.

Upbringing certainly plays a major role there, imparting a misconceived sense of mission which pushes people towards “actions.” Added to that there is a herd mentality once you have become integrated in a group and everyone continues to drive everyone else on and on into a forced situation. There’s the type of person who believes his action will make mankind listen to him and turn him into a historic figure. Then there’s the type who simply feels attracted to violence. And yes, I think glamour plays a role too.

Spiegel protests again, even more foolishly. “Do you seriously mean that terrorism is glamorous?” Do you seriously mean you think it isn’t? Come on. All that media attention, those glam “martyrdom videos,” the outfits, the drama, the “courage,” the self-importance? How could it possibly not be glamourous? This is what I meant after 7/7 by saying everyone should make fun of them and call them bedwetters and pathetic attention-seeking dweebs. I mean that.

Yes. Terror is glamour – not only, but also. I am firmly convinced that there’s something like a fascination with death among suicide bombers. Many are influenced by the misdirected image of a kind of magic that is inherent in these insane acts. The suicide bomber’s imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other peoples lives. There’s one thing you mustn’t forget here: the victims terrorized by radical Muslims are mostly other Muslims.

Absolutely. It’s a little scary and depressing that so many people don’t get that and don’t even find it plausible. Look: terrorists are young men: that’s probably the most crucial fact about them. This is young guy stuff; it’s the same stuff that fills prisons with young men; it’s a lot more about young guyism than it is about serious political criticism. The foreign policy is mostly a fig leaf, a smoke screen, a pretext, a pseudo-explanation. It’s the glamour and the herd mentality that really crank thing up. (No, you’re right, I don’t know that for a fact, I’m just saying it as if I do. But like Rushdie, I’m convinced of it.)