Author: Ophelia Benson

I spent most of the past three days working on a sudden rush job. Now I’m all speeded up like something in a cartoon. Hurry hurry hurry, do it as fast as possible. I should do some big long-delayed project like, um, tidying my desk; I’d probably get it done in two minutes. But…nah. I’m not in the mood. All rushed out.

Well, Ash Kotak talks good sense, at least.

As for the “Brick Lane community” response, Greer is assuming a community speaks with one voice; it is patronising and arrogant. Any community is made up of a group of individuals. However a community together tries to protect and uphold common values, not everyone will support them all the time. This Brick Lane media-generated controversy has reinforced the truth that a community which has little voice – and some of those within it who have no voice – will continue to remain invisible.

Eg-zacktly. And the dang Guardian and the dang BBC don’t help by calling twenty people ‘the community’ all the time. Which surely they must be beginning dimly to realize, since people keep telling them and telling them and telling them – you think some day they’ll stop?

For some people living within such communities, that place is their entire world. There is little reason to “escape”, especially when you consider the outside, alien world to be hostile – examples of which are keenly sought by the protectors/oppressors within. Even though the protesters, generally, have been marginalised, a few self-appointed community leaders have perpetuated the stereotypical belief of the limited and inward thinking by “them” in the minds of the British public. To publicise their views is the same as giving one of the self-appointed Sikh community leaders a platform on Bezhti, the play that prematurely closed in Birmingham, and representing it as the voice of the community.

Isn’t it just. Ash Kotak, you rock.

Read the whole letter; it’s spot on.

They’re ba-ack. The dear Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Discouragement of Vice is making a comeback. Nostalgic, innit.

Behind a desk in a spartan government office, a bearded official says he is swamped with job applicants for a proposed department to promote virtue and discourage vice, which would send out religious monitors to uncover and correct un-Islamic behavior in the populace.

I bet. I bet he’s swamped with applicants who want to go out to uncover and correct things that other people are doing – laughing, singing, talking to friends, going outside; sinister stuff like that. Uncover it and correct it, quick, before everything goes to hell.

The cabinet also approved reviving the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Discouragement of Vice…It became notoriously punitive under Taliban rule, from 1996 to 2001, when turbaned enforcers whipped women if their veils slipped and arrested men for wearing too-short beards or playing chess…”We would be as different from the Taliban as earth and sky,” said Sulieman Hamid, an official of the Ministry of Hajj and Religious Affairs who would oversee the virtue and vice monitors. “They used Islam for political purposes. We only want to stop people from committing bad acts and help maintain the honor of Islam.”

Ohhhh, well then – nothing to worry about. Yes indeed. I know if I learned that the government was going to set up a Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Discouragement of Vice and it assured us that it only wanted to stop people from committing bad acts and help maintain the honor of Christianity, I wouldn’t be worried at all that it might be ever so slightly intrusive and coercive and that its ideas of ‘bad acts’ and ‘honor’ might be different from mine. Nope, that wouldn’t be an issue. Everything would be fine.

“We would not beat people or force women to wear scarves. But we have to do something to protect society, to tell people they should not drink alcohol or smoke hashish or kill their Muslim brothers.”

Tell people? Just, gently, softly, in a nice voice, tell them? Or…something a little firmer than that? And then – drinking alcohol and killing are the same kind of thing? ‘Dear sister, you should not drink that vodka martini, it is un-Islamic. Dear brother, you should not kill that Muslim brother, it is a bad act.’ And then – it’s only Muslim brothers people will be told not to kill? So it’s okay to kill women and it’s okay to kill infidels? And then – isn’t killing people against the law anyway, so isn’t a Virtue Committee to amble out and whisper to people that they ought not to, a bit superfluous? Or could it be that the final item was thrown in to make up the numbers, so that the alcohol and hashish ones wouldn’t look quite so footling? Hey, all we’re going to do is tell women they shouldn’t let their faces stick out and they shouldn’t murder people – is that so harsh?

If the parliament takes up the issue, it is likely to pit factions led by Islamic clerics and former militia leaders against others composed of professionals, women and Western-educated figures. These groups represent major competing strains in Afghan society as it charts a path between traditional Islamic values and modern democratic norms.

That’s a rather stupid and confused opposition, the one between traditional Islamic values and modern democratic norms – because traditional Islamic values can perfectly well be democratic: as long as a majority prefers them, that’s what they are. What the writer probably means is ‘modern secular norms’ – but that’s not really an acceptable thing to say in US mass media. It might be okay in The Nation or Mother Jones, but not a big newspaper; so journalists say ‘democratic’ instead, even though it makes the argument a little meaningless. But it’s interesting that (if I’m right) ‘secular’ is not an acceptable word here – interesting and somewhat alarming.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown reviews Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism in the Indy.

Cosmopolitanism, in its reconstructed meaning, says Appiah, provokes attacks from the left for whom it is dilettante and elitist. The right despises it because cosmopolitans make bad nationalists and patriots. All authoritarians detest the internationalist spirit. Hitler and Stalin launched regular invectives against “rootless cosmopolitans”.

Yeah. And identitarians hate it, which is one reason it is worth trying to dispute identitarianism, especially of the solitarist variety, John Gray notwithstanding. Cosmopolitanism is a good thing. Cosmopolitanism is Sarajevo before everything went to hell.

The Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Human Values, Princeton no less, is not as bold as he could have been. A crucial treatise is rendered impotent by neat self censorship and a surfeit of facts. He elegantly turns away from the implications of his advocacy, in particular for the US…This volume ends up being a nice book for good people. He confesses: “This book is not a contribution to the debates about the true face of globalisation. I’m a philosopher by trade and philosophers rarely write useful books.” And that’s the pity of it all.

Well I don’t agree with him about that, actually, I think Cosmopolitanism is a useful book. I admire useful books. Jerry and I are working on a book that we think could be useful. We’re not philosophers, so we plan to be as bold as we can be.

John Gray is not entirely convinced by Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence, despite his admiration.

Impassioned, eloquent and often moving, Identity and Violence is a sustained attack on the “solitarist” theory which says that human identities are formed by membership of a single social group…There is a deeper unrealism in Sen’s analysis, which emerges in his inability to account for the powerful appeal of the solitarist view…Along with many liberal philosophers, he seems to think human conflict is a result of intellectual error. But if the error of solitarism is so blatantly obvious, why do large numbers of people continue to believe in it and act on it? Sen refers repeatedly to manipulation by malevolent propagandists…But are people really so stupid? Or is the failure of understanding actually in the liberal philosopher?

I’m very interested in that question, because I share in the failure of understanding (if it is one), at least partially. I think I understand the appeal of the solitarist view, up to a point, but I do have trouble understanding why it doesn’t break down fairly quickly under pressure from non-solitarist views. In other words, I see the temporary appeal of identifying with other (whatevers) – women, Muslims, Americans, Jews, gays, blacks, Asians, whatever – but I don’t fully see how one item on the menu manages to trump all the others all the time. I don’t. I extrapolate from myself, and so I don’t see it. I think of myself as a woman (and a feminist) some of the time, and I certainly don’t ever think of myself as not a woman (or a feminist), but I don’t and don’t want to think of myself as primarily a woman all the time; in fact I hate it. It bores me and it makes me feel claustrophobic and above all it makes me feel diminished. If the most important thing about me is that I Am A Wooman along with some 3 billion other people on the planet – well I might as well decide that my identity is all wrapped up in being a mammal, or a vertebrate. I might as well be a grain of wheat in a thousand-acre field (as of course I am, but I don’t particularly want to make that a Badge of Identity). I want to think about other things, and that precludes always uninterruptedly obsessing over and massaging my identity as a woman – or as anything else. So that’s my blind spot, that’s why I have trouble understanding the solitarist view: why do other people want to hug just one identity? Why don’t they get bored?

What does Gray tell us on this point?

For Sen, as a good liberal rationalist, it is an article of faith that the violence of identity is a result of erroneous beliefs. He cannot accept that its causes are inherent in human beings themselves…The people who knifed the day-labourer in Bengal and who dragged off the man to his death in Petrograd made no error. They did what they did from fear, desperation or cruelty. Such atrocities express deep-seated human traits that are not going to be removed by the kind of conceptual therapy offered by Sen.

That answer seems to me a good deal less satisfactory than anything Sen writes. Just for a start – the people who knifed the day-labourer in Bengal did make an error, because whatever fear, desperation or cruelty prompted them to do it, it certainly didn’t gain them anything. That is an error – an error is exactly what it is. To be so crazed with fear, desperation or cruelty that you murder someone of the ‘wrong’ religious or ethnic (or both) group just because he is of the wrong group and is in ‘your’ neighbourhood – is a big fat error. It’s not an error in arithmetic or spelling, but it’s still an error. So what does Gray mean saying it isn’t? In other words – I think he’s right that the appeal of solitarist identity has to be explained, but I don’t think he did anything at all in the direction of explaining it, and I think he made an error besides.

This is Jerry, so don’t blame OB for this post.

I’ve just returned from my protest against the awful anti-Israel, pro-Hizbullah march in London. Here are four pictures from the march.

Draw your own conclusions.

Interesting. Mediawatchwatch points out that Germaine Greer’s defense of her article on the Brick Lane ruckus slightly adjusts what she said in the first article. It’s right there for all to see…

July 24:

The community has the moral right to keep the film-makers out but they cannot then complain if somewhere else is used and presented to the world as Brick Lane.

August 5:

I have been accused of saying things I never said about Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane and the campaign to prevent its filming in the East End of London…Natasha Walter, writing on these pages, claims not to know what I could possibly mean by saying that the residents of Brick Lane have a “moral right” to refuse to cooperate with the people making the film of Monica Ali’s book.

Come on, GG – play fair.

The irony is, she has grounds for her defense: after all, she immediately goes on to say ‘There is only one remedy available if your reality is being recycled through a writer or a movie-maker, and that is to write your own novel or make your own film – and accept ostracism as your just desert.’ She could have just said that was her basic point; but massaging what she actually did say is an error.