Author: Ophelia Benson

So there’s this letter from what the BBC calls ‘Muslim groups’. It’s bizzarre.

Prime Minister, As British Muslims we urge you to do more to fight against all those who target civilians with violence, whenever and wherever that happens. It is our view that current British government policy risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad. To combat terror the government has focused extensively on domestic legislation. While some of this will have an impact, the government must not ignore the role of its foreign policy.

The government must not ignore the role of its foreign policy – and then what? Tell itself that unless it obeys (obeys whom?), hundreds or thousands of people will be murdered, and therefore decide to obey (obey whom?) and – um – withdraw all its troops from Iraq (thus no doubt triggering a bloodbath) and send its troops to impose a ceasefire in Lebanon? Is that it? Is that what obedience (to whom?) would be? Or is it something else the government is supposed to do? But if so, what? Who, exactly, is issuing the instructions? Who is delivering the extortion notes, and what do they say? What exactly is the government supposed to do in order to mollify people who are eager to kill hundreds or thousands of people and cause them to decide not to murder all those people and to be good peace-loving citizens instead? Do the people who wrote that stupid letter know? Does anyone? There are those suicide tapes, of course – are they the instructions? Is that it, will that do? The government should study those tapes and do whatever Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer tell them they should have done? Except of course that was before the Lebanon problem – Tanweer said attacks would continue ‘until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq.’ So would it be okay if the government pulled its forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq but did nothing about Lebanon, would that work? Well, is there anyone the government can ask? Not Khan and Tanweer, obviously, so…who? The suspects maybe? They probably know. But maybe they wouldn’t say. Maybe they’d say the wrong thing, and the government would do that, and then somebody else would murder hundreds or thousands of people anyway, and leave a suicide video saying ‘Ha ha, fooled ya, that wasn’t what you were supposed to do, ha ha.’

In other words what the hell do the people who wrote and sent that stupid immoral letter think they’re talking about? And since when do mass murderers get to decide what a liberal democracy’s foreign policy should be? Since when is it considered reasonable and responsible to look about and say ‘Oh, there are some loathsome thugs bent on killing a lot of people, let us hasten to find out what they want us to do and immediately do that in order to reward them and persuade them not to murder us after all.’

In fact the more you look at that letter, the more presumptuous and (yes) offensive it seems. I beg your pardon? You’re chastizing Blair for not guessing at what a bunch of murderers want and then doing that so that they won’t murder anyone?

Kim Howells and some other people find it irritating too.

Mr Howells denied there was a “rational connection” and said “no government” formulates policy based on a perceived risk from terrorists…”I think it is very, very dangerous when people who call themselves community leaders make some assumption that somehow that there’s a rational connection between these two things.”

And not just self-proclaimed community leaders but also a couple of MPs and three peers.

MP Sadiq Khan, who signed the letter, said British foreign policy was seen by many as unfair and unjust…The letter was also signed by MPs Shahid Malik (Dewsbury) and Mohammed Sarwar (Glasgow Central), and peers Lord Patel of Blackburn, Lord Ahmed of Rotherham and Baroness Uddin. Other signatories include the Muslim Council of Britain, the Muslim Association of Britain, British Muslim Forum and the lobby group, the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain.

Another MP summed it up well.

Liberal Democrats deputy leader Vince Cable agreed there were links with foreign policy but voiced concerns the letter’s message might “give some comfort to the kind of people who say: ‘Well, change your foreign policy or we’ll blow you up’”.

Ya think?

So the jargon has reached Kenya. The aggrieved irritated ‘uncomfortable’ fretful worried Christians know what to say.

Powerful evangelical churches are pressing Kenya’s national museum to sideline its world-famous collection of hominid bones pointing to man’s evolution from ape to human. Leaders of the country’s six-million-strong Pentecostal congregation want Dr Richard Leakey’s ground-breaking finds relegated to a back room instead of being given their usual prime billing…”The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact,” said Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, the head of Christ is the Answer Ministries, the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya. “Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory.”

The C word, of course, but also the doctrine thing. ‘Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes.’ Well no, of course it’s not, and the doctrine of Goddesses is – whatever they feel like making up at any given moment. What of it? What’s anyone’s doctrine got to do with anything? The bones are there; that’s not doctrine, that’s bones; a doctrine that requires a museum to hide them in a back room is a pretty feeble doctrine, if you ask me.

Richard Leakey isn’t much impressed either.

Dr Leakey said the churches’ plans were “the most outrageous comments I have ever heard”…Calling the Pentecostal church fundamentalists, Dr Leakey added: “Their theories are far, far from the mainstream on this. They cannot be allowed to meddle with what is the world’s leading collection of these types of fossils.”

Well yes but you see, the museum murmured, you see it’s like this…

The museum said it was in a “tricky situation” as it tried to redesign its exhibition space to accommodate the expectations of all its visitors. “We have a responsibility to present all our artefacts in the best way that we can…But things can get tricky when you have religious beliefs on one side, and intellectuals, scientists or researchers on the other, saying the opposite.”

Yes, but museums are not churches, and religious beliefs ought not to trump evidence-based findings in educational institutions like museums; on the contrary, in educational institutions like museums (and zoos, aquariums, schools, libraries), evidence-based findings ought to trump religious beliefs, and that’s that. Leakey won’t bring his bones into your churches, so you don’t get to tell the museums to hide the bones. But of course that won’t stop you.

And people wonder why I’m such a noisy kind of atheist. Pffffff.

Some rather disheartening boilerplate on the merits of multiculturalism and identity and groups and communities from – surprise surprise – a university chancellor.

At the end of the day, the hope of these two kinds of projects – internal multicultural dialogue and external multicultural collaboration – is that we all come to value diverse groups, not just diverse individuals.

Well, as always, that depends on which groups we’re talking about, and what we mean by ‘value’, and what aspects of those diverse groups we are expected and hoped to value. It also depends on what happens when valuing groups is in tension with valuing individuals. What about individuals who want to leave or dissent from or change their groups, for example? Are we expected to refrain from valuing them in order to value their groups instead – in order to value ‘their’ groups as static entities that must not change and must not respond to the wishes of, for instance, subordinated people within the groups? If so, why? Or to put it another way, if so, forget it.

The comments are worth reading, as the comments at Inside Higher Ed often are. See especially H E Baber’s.

More of the usual multicultural bs, in the usual long-winded, jargon-ridden style…It’s amazing that, resisting all empirical evidence, multiculturalists like the author of this article are still promoting the communitarian group identities line. Since the end of the Cold War every major armed conflict, from the Balkans to Sri Lanka to Darfur to the current war in the Middle East has been a tribal war between groups affirming their cultural/ethnic identities. Women and people of color with stature as public intellectuals, including Amartya Sen, Anthony Appiah, Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have spoken out against this communitarian, multicultural ideology and in favor of cosmopolitanism.

Indeed they have. H E writes about multiculti at the Enlightenment Project sometimes. (B&W has published some of her E.P. articles.)

Bill Condon’s comment is also good. The comments on this article are better than the article.

Ohhhhhhh lordy. Look at this. It’s called ‘Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism.’ Isn’t that just the best title? But the content is even better.

Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena.

Microfascism! Yelp! What will happen when those evidence-based movement bastards turn to macrofascism? Will they get even more outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative on our asses? Or will they just kill us? Let’s ask Deleuze and Guattari; they’ll know.

The philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari proves to be useful in showing how health sciences are colonised (territorialised) by an all-encompassing scientific research paradigm – that of post-positivism – but also and foremost in showing the process by which a dominant ideology comes to exclude alternative forms of knowledge, therefore acting as a fascist structure.

But what if it’s a Deleuzoguattarian ideology that is dominant, does it exclude alternative forms of knowledge and thus act as a fascist structure? I bet I’m not supposed to ask that question, am I. I have to go sit on the microfascist stool for four minutes.

Because ‘regimes of truth’ such as the evidence-based movement currently enjoy a privileged status, scholars have not only a scientific duty, but also an ethical obligation to deconstruct these regimes of power.

You understand, don’t you? It’s clear, isn’t it? Dominant ideology excludes alternatives and it enjoys (whee! woopah! heehee!) privileged status so it’s a regime of power and a fascist structure. The only liberatory and truly fair thing to do is to have evidence-free health science; that’s an ethical obligation.

This thing is so ridiculous that it’s hard not to suspect it’s another Sokal hoax. Hey – [tap tap] – are you another Sokal hoax? Hello?

I like William Empson. Don’t try to talk me out of it.

As a poet who had written anti-Fascist propaganda for the BBC during the war and had taught ‘English literature’ in China both before and afterwards, he didn’t want writers or readers to trade in emotive, ineffable or overly abstract (i.e. religiose) language. Literature was there to alert us, to make us think rather than assent; close reading was the preferred antidote to indoctrination. The consequences of listening or reading inattentively, and of not seeing how language can be used to sustain inattention and sponsor cruelty, were Empson’s abiding preoccupations.

Well, you probably won’t bother trying to talk me out of it, because you can see right there why I would like him, and how futile such an attempt would be. Anyone who isn’t keen on ineffable or religiose language is going to be someone I am going to like. (Emotive language is a little different. I like emotive language [used sparingly] as long as it’s clear that everyone knows that’s what it is. It’s emotive language that’s smuggled in that I can’t stand; emotive language that pretends to be neutral. I don’t know what Empson would have thought of that.)

There were two related things that Empson as a literary critic could not abide. One was submission to authority, and the other was torment, both the wish to inflict it and the wish to suffer it. Empson was criticised and indeed ridiculed for this hatred, which was directed mostly against Christianity and ‘neo-Christian’ literary critics, but these are things one is unlikely to be casual about if they matter to one at all.

Well, yes. If you mind them at all you tend to mind them a lot. Thus the Rapture-fans, who revel in the thought of being snatched up into the clouds to watch the left behind be tortured, repel me and shock me quite intensely, just as the students at Patrick Henry who sign up (literally sign up, in writing) to the doctrine that the unsaved will be tormented in hell for eternity, and then go cheerily about their business, repel me and shock me. It’s bad stuff. I don’t see any way to get around that.

Empson, who believed in the ‘straddling’ of contraries rather than their resolution, who found ambiguity in literature more truthful than conviction, could not avoid unequivocally taking sides when it came to the Fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, and what he took to be the virtual fascism of the Judeo-Christian God. His letters, like all his critical writings, show that he was as unambiguous as he could be in his hatred of the haters of variety. He wanted a variety of sorts of feeling and an unendable clash of different philosophies. So by his own lights he couldn’t and didn’t create his own orthodoxy…‘What else does one write criticism for except to win agreement?’ he asks in a letter to Christopher Ricks, and yet the winning of agreement – or perhaps the winning of too much agreement, the way literature coerced assent instead of opening argument – was the very thing that troubled Empson.

Which is very like a running argument (or discussion) that’s been going on around here about consensus. Very like it indeed. Suggestive stuff.

Indeed, the thing Empson seems to have been most at odds with himself about was conflict…Empson believed that disagreement was often the more adequate response; to say where you think someone is wrong is to be on the side of variety…The possibility of disagreement was, I think, mostly evidence for Empson that one was not at anyone’s mercy. The writer could be at the mercy of his conflicts, just as the critic could be at the mercy of the text, or the institution that employed him. So the Empson who believed that the most morally disreputable thing a writer could do was suppress the conflicts that animated him, the Empson who preferred a clash to a consensus…

Was a very interesting fella.