Author: Ophelia Benson

Back to Fuller. Same thread at Michael’s place. Notice a certain tension in the main post. Third para:

In particular, I am a little disturbed by the ease with which humanists and social scientists justify deference to scientific expertise, almost in a ‘good fences make good neighbours’ vain [he means vein] (Stanley Fish comes to mind in criticism, but analytic philosophy and sociology of science have their own versions of this argument). In this respect, ‘our’ side pulled its punches in the Science Wars when it refused to come out and say that the scientific establishment may not be the final word on what science is, let alone what it ought to be. I guess we just never got over the embarrassment of the Sokal Affair.

Never mind for now all there is to wonder at in that passage. Just consider these from para four and para seven:

You might want to read what I actually say – in print, in the trial, and in the written expert report I submitted before the trial…I should say that my status as an expert in the trial had nothing to do with the textbooks under scrutiny.

He seems happy enough about referring to his own putative expertise, but curls the lip at ‘deference’ (loaded word) to scientific expertise.

(Something else I noticed, just in passing – he certainly doesn’t write very well on the fly. Compare his comments with P Z Myers’s, for instance. Both were writing quickly, but one did it well and the other pretty badly. In fact often very badly – leaving out crucial words that are needed to make sense of what he is saying, for instance.)

Some other weird items.

Frankly, I think the public disposition of the Dover case is over-influenced by hatred of Bush and especially fear of the role of fundamentalist Christians in shaping the Bush agenda. (I have in mind here the propaganda campaign being waged on webpages associated with the ACLU: Don’t they have more important civil rights violations in the US to worry about?) I’m certainly no fan of Bush, and have never even voted for a Republican, but I don’t think that this trial is the right place to ‘send a message’ to Bush. Why not work instead toward getting an electable Democrat – perhaps even one that can relate to the vast numbers of religious folks in the US, as the liberal evangelist Jim Wallis (‘God’s Politics’) suggests?

Er? What’s he talking about? Why not who ‘work instead toward getting an electable Democrat’? Us? Instead of talking about what was wrong with his testimony at Dover? Because that’s not what we’re doing, we’re doing something else. What’s the point of asking why not do something completely different?

In fact, the scientists these days who most loudly flaunt their anti-Christian, atheist colours can’t escape smuggling some kind of theistically inspired thought, including James Watson’s desires to play God…But even evolution’s staunchest defenders have remarked on the strong iconic role that Darwin continues to play in this field, which is quite unusual in the natural sciences. An important reason is the politically correct lesson that his life teaches: the idea that science causes you to lose your faith. Newton, unfortunately, thought his theory confirmed his reading of the Bible. Not very politically correct.

Whaat? Politically correct? When did Bill O’Reilly enter the discussion, and why? Politically correct where, according to whom, in which circles?

In the next century, historians will marvel at the ease with which we assume that it’s psychologically credible to think that religious and scientific views can be so neatly separated from each other. This is just our old Catholic friend, the double truth doctrine, dressed up in political correctness.

Same again only more so.

And so on. As you’ll have seen if you read it – as some or perhaps all of you already have – it’s all like that – along with a thick frosting of ineffable condescension poured over everything, which is quite surreal given the quality of the comments from the opponents compared to his own. He gives the impression, on top of everything else, of being a thoroughly unpleasant character.

Quick thing. I just want to note it. I have noted a dislike for Joseph Epstein before. I’m going to do it again. I dislike a remark in this article in Commentary – which Arts and Letters Daily for some reason quoted in its teaser (which is why I saw it in the first place). Why flag up such a – well, here is the remark:

Wilson at his meanest shows up in Dabney’s account of his marriage to the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy—a marriage made in 1937 when he was forty-two and she was twenty-five. “I was too young,” McCarthy would later claim, and “I was too old,” Wilson would counter. It would be closer to the truth to say that both were too selfish and wanting in the least human insight. McCarthy always mistook her snobbery for morality; Wilson mistook life for literature. Dabney, summing up this wretched partnership, writes: “American letters has not seen another alliance so flawed and so distinguished.” So flawed and so distinguished – what a way to characterize the union of a true bitch and a genuine bully.

That’s disgusting. I’m not going to bother saying why, because I think it’s obvious. I’m tempted to call Epstein all sorts of foul names, but I won’t, because I’m better than he is. I will, however, point out that he has a mediocre intellect and McCarthy did not. Maybe that’s why he calls her foul names.

How funny – a harmonic convergence, or something. The very day that I noted the oddity of Steve Fuller’s comment on Meera Nanda’s book at Amazon, in view of his testimony at Dover – Michael Bérubé commented on exactly the same thing.

I’m working on something that I’ll explain more fully next week (when, I hope, it will be done), but in the course of my work on it I found that sociologist Steve Fuller blurbed Meera Nanda’s 2003 book, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India by writing, “This first detailed examination of postmodernism’s politically reactionary consequences should serve as a wake-up call for all conscientious leftists.” Right, well, it so happens that I’m down with much of Nanda’s argument myself, as I explain in a bunch of things I’ve been writing lately. But wait! This Steve Fuller is that Steve Fuller, the author of Social Epistemology (and much, much more) who showed up in Dover, Pennsylvania this past October to testify that Intelligent Design is a legitimate science…

Snap. All the more interesting because Michael has told me that it was reading Meera’s articles here (at B&W) that caused him to worry about these politically reactionary consequences himself, and that’s why he’s writing about the subject now. Which is good since he’s an influential fella, on account of being such a damn brilliant writer (well, on other accounts too, but the writing is like some kind of atomic magnet). So that means B&W is useful, in its plodding little way, and it’s always good when I get to think that B&W is useful, because it keeps me going when discouragement over hackers and my inability to fix things that need fixing threatens to cause me to run away from home and become a confectioner.

So then, to add to the interest, Steve Fuller commented on Michael’s post, and Michael turned that into a new thread with comments from a lot of knowledgeable people like P Z Myers and John Emerson. There is also a comment at the Valve. And there’s a post from October at Panda’s Thumb.

I’ll just offer a few of Fuller’s…stranger remarks.

It’s not clear – at least not to me – that there is some psychologically credible line to be drawn between ‘revelation’ and ‘reason’. This distinction exists, if at all, at the public level of how you would have your ideas tested: By calculations? By experiments? By the Bible?

And

But in my circles people don’t talk much about their religious beliefs, so I just go on my reading and intermittent outbursts of others. I do wonder what might be the motivation for atheists to do science in the grand unifying sense: Why do they believe there’s sufficient order in the universe to merit the systematic efforts at inquiry?

Because they think there can be order without design, and because there’s an immense amount to find out about that if so (or, in another way, if not). That question is oddly reminiscent of Nicholas Buxton saying in that Guardian article that the only rational thing for people who think the universe is uncaused to do is jump off a cliff.

And

Actually if you’re a Darwinist ‘all the way down’, you should say that life began as some random collocation of micro-units of matter that happened to stabilize long enough to reproduce and then mutate: i.e. the self-bootstrapping theory of life. However, Darwinists don’t want to commit to this because it’s not empirically provable – which means it allows room for more feint-hearted Darwinists to believe that God kicked off the whole process.

Provable – oh dear. That’s a very basic mistake for someone in this field, especially when he does such a lot of de haut en bas condescending to everyone else on the thread.

Now that the nonsense is out of the way – on to a very interesting article in the NY Times that starts from the murder (the ‘honour killing’) of Hatun Surucu and the trial of her brothers which began in September, and moves on to the large and familiar subject of women in Muslim immigrant enclaves in Germany.

Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun Surucu’s capital crime was that, living in Germany, she had begun living like a German…It’s still unclear whether anyone ordered her murdered. Often in such cases it is the father of the family who decides about the punishment. But Seyran Ates has seen in her legal practice cases in which the mother has a leading role: mothers who were forced to marry forcing the same fate on their daughters. Necla Kelek, a Turkish-German author who has interviewed dozens of women on this topic, explained, “The mothers are looking for solidarity by demanding that their daughters submit to the same hardship and suffering.” By disobeying them, the daughter calls into question her mother’s life – her silent submission to the ritual of forced marriage.

That makes a horrible kind of sense. If their daughters don’t want to do what they did, what does that say about what they did? That’s a familiar situation with parents and children in general. The intrinsic sadness of what is known as upward mobility is that parents often see their children educated out of their reach, or at least out of easy communication.

When a broader German public began concerning itself with the parallel Muslim world arising in its midst, it was primarily thanks to three female authors, three rebellious Muslim musketeers: Ates, who in addition to practicing law is the author of “The Great Journey Into the Fire”; Necla Kelek (“The Foreign Bride”); and Serap Cileli (“We’re Your Daughters, Not Your Honor”)…Taking off from their own experiences, the three women describe the grim lives and sadness of Muslim women in that model Western democracy known as Germany.

There were signs, but the author (a German man himself) didn’t worry about them much.

For a German of my generation, one of the most holy legacies of the past was the law of tolerance. We Germans in particular had no right to force our highly questionable customs onto other cultures. Later I learned from occasional newspaper reports and the accounts of friends that certain Muslim girls in Kreuzberg and Neukölln went underground or vanished without a trace. Even those reports gave me no more than a momentary discomfort in our upscale district of Charlottenburg. But the books of the three Muslim dissidents now tell us what Germans like me didn’t care to know. What they report seems almost unbelievable. They describe an everyday life of oppression, isolation, imprisonment and brutal corporal punishment for Muslim women and girls in Germany, a situation for which there is only one word: slavery.

Tolerance of what, is always the question. One we’re finally remembering to ask.

Before the murder of Hatun Surucu there were enough warnings to engage the Germans in a debate about the parallel society growing in their midst. There have been 49 known “honor crimes,” most involving female victims, during the past nine years – 16 in Berlin alone. Such crimes are reported in the “miscellaneous” column along with other family tragedies and given a five-line treatment. Indeed, it’s possible that the murder of Hatun Surucu never would have made the headlines at all but for another piece of news that stirred up the press. Just a few hundred yards from where Surucu was killed, at the Thomas Morus High School, three Muslim students soon openly declared their approval of the murder. Shortly before that, the same students had bullied a fellow pupil because her clothing was “not in keeping with the religious regulations.” Volker Steffens, the school’s director, decided to make the matter public in a letter to students, parents and teachers. More than anything else, it was the students’ open praise of the murder that made the crime against Hatun Surucu the talk of Berlin and soon of all Germany.

Well, a good thing something did. (Well done Herr Steffens.)

For more than 20 years the Islamic Federation of Berlin, an umbrella organization of Islamic associations and mosque congregations, has struggled in the Berlin courts to secure Islamic religious instruction in local schools. In 2001 the federation finally succeeded. Since then, several thousand Muslim elementary-school students have been taught by teachers hired by the Islamic Federation and paid by the city of Berlin. City officials aren’t in a position to control Islamic religious instruction…Since the introduction of Islamic religious instruction, the number of girls that come to school in head scarves has grown by leaps and bounds, and school offices are inundated with petitions to excuse girls from swimming and sports as well as class outings…Councilwoman Stefanie Vogelsang stresses that the majority of the mosques in Neukölln are as open to the world as they ever were, and that they continue to address the needs of integration. But the radical religious communities are gaining ground. She points to the Imam Reza Mosque, for instance, whose home page – until a recent revision – praised the attacks of Sept. 11, designated women as second-class human beings and referred to gays and lesbians as animals. “And that kind of thing,” she says, fuming, “is still defended by the left in the name of religious freedom.”

Just so. And not just in Germany, as we know.

This is the least expected provocation of the three author rebels: a frontal assault on the relativism of the majority society. In fact, they are fighting on two fronts – against Islamist oppression of women and its proponents, and against the guilt-ridden tolerance of liberal multiculturalists. “Before I can get to the Islamic patriarchs, I first have to work my way through these mountains of German guilt,” Seyran Ates complains. It is women who suffer most from German sensitivity toward Islam. The three authors explicitly accuse German do-gooders of having left Muslim women in Germany in the lurch and call on them not to forget the women locked behind the closed windows when they rave about the multicultural districts.

Which is exactly what Maryam Namazie and Azam Kamguian and Homa Arjomand and Ayaan Hirsi Ali – in the UK, Canada, the Netherlands – also say. Multiculturalism, religious freedom, diversity, tolerance, guilt – they leave Muslim women in the lurch.

The fact is that disregard for women’s rights – especially the right to sexual self-determination – is an integral component of almost all Islamic societies, including those in the West. Unless this issue is solved, with a corresponding reform of Islam as practiced in the West, there will never be a successful acculturation. Islam needs something like an Enlightenment; and only by sticking hard to their own Enlightenment, with its separation of religion and state, can the Western democracies persuade their Muslim residents that human rights are universally valid. Perhaps this would lead to the reforms necessary for integration to succeed. “We Western Muslim women,” Seyran Ates says, “will set off the reform of traditional Islam, because we are its victims.”

And they’re doing it now. Best of luck, all.

And then there’s the Narnia thing.

Icky icky ick.

What Pullman particularly objects to about the Narnia series, as it comes to a climax in The Last Battle, is that the children are killed and go to heaven. ” ‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’ “

Yeah okay – sorry, I’m with Pullman here. I hate that medieval (literally medieval) ‘this world is crap boring shadowlands and “heaven” is all joy tralala’ idea. I hate the idea of a modern children’s story that tells them being alive is like being at school and being dead is holidays, that life is the dream and being dead is waking up. What does that give you? Well, at the outermost edge, it gives you people who are so eager to get there that they kill themselves to do it, and so deluded about what is ‘good’ and what their putative deity wants that they do it by killing as many other people as possible. Not just tube-exploders and semi-airplane pilots, either – also the child soldiers in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war: they were given plastic keys and told they were the keys to Paradise, and sent off to be killed. And only slightly removed from the outermost edge, it gives you all the monster raving loonies who believe in the ‘Rapture’ and get pleasure in contemplating the future torture of most human beings on the planet – which means you get morally disgusting human beings. And then you get a lot of people who just waste the lives they do have by failing to appreciate the real world.

Furthermore, to be morally mature will involve acknowledging that reality and living in relation to God, the ground of our being and the goal of our longing. There are different concepts of reality, and following on from that different understandings of what it is to be morally mature. For the atheist, moral maturity must involve rejecting religion. For the religious believer, it must involve acknowledging the supreme reality from whom we draw our being.

That sounds grand, doesn’t it. But it’s just windy nonsense dressed up. What’s morally mature about that?