Discovery that water once flowed on Mars is the winna.
Author: Ophelia Benson
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Knowledge Wars Rage Over Israel v Palestine
Part clash of genuine entrenched positions, part dishonesty.
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The Standard Blog Critique
Chris has a good post at CT on some of the omissions and blind spots in the ‘standard blog critique’ (cf. ‘Standard Social Science Model’) of the proposal to criminalize incitement to religious hatred. We’ve been talking past each other for some time, B&W and CT, but in this post I at least see Chris’ point, or rather points. The part about media ownership and access to the airwaves as a crucial part of free speech I completely agree with and always have. It’s always irritated me when free speech is defined in an such an impoverished way that it just means a cop doesn’t handcuff you for saying something. The next part, about hate speech and intimidation, I’m not so sure about, because the law itself seems like such a form of intimidation.
But then in item 2, I think he does point out some genuine problems for the SBC (not that I necessarily agree that B&W’s critique is a ‘standard’ one, on account of I’m far too vain and conceited to think I’m standard and predictable – but never mind that).
Many advocates of the SBC write about religion being a matter of choice, or religion consisting of a body of doctrine which ought to be open to critique etc. I basically agree, though I think people sometimes overstate the chosenness of religion. But their insistence on these points amounts to an almost wilful neglect of another, namely that even if religion is a matter of choice, religious identity may not be. There are societies where “Are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?” is a sensible question…
I think that’s a fair point about overestimating how chosen religion is. I’ve been discussing religion (and its chosenness) as a system of ideas that adults can rationally consider and accept or reject – which of course it is, but equally of course that’s not all it is. It’s also what your parents teach you (or don’t), what you grow up in, your history and past and memory bank. And looked at in that way, it’s obvious enough how extremely difficult it can be to choose to reject it. Just for one thing it’s bound to be all tangled up with issues of class and education and upward mobility, with abandonment and loyalty and love. Especially for people from marginalised or underprivileged or impoverished or excluded groups – immigrants, the poor, the working class. The parents work and slave to get the children an education, and then the educated children become alienated from the parents: it’s a familiar pattern, and a heart-breaker. How can the children reject the religion of the parents without implying that the parents are stupid and just don’t know any better? Not easily. So that is one factor that makes the chosenness of religion a lot less easy or automatic than I’ve been saying. I needed brackets or something, or an automatic ceteris paribus or some such stipulation. Religion is chosen considered in the abstract as a set of ideas independent of family history and affective ties. (The argument applies to football, as well. A guy I used to work with once informed me that one can’t choose not to support a football team one has always supported, from earliest childhood; it’s simply impossible. Thus so is free will, I think he added, but I could be misremembering.)
The point about religious identity is also true, I think, but there are complications. For instance there’s a difference between our internal ideas of our own identity, and what other people take to be our identity (though of course the one can reinforce or even create the other: one may not think about one’s own identity in such terms at all until other people make an issue of it). Yugoslavians used to think of themselves as Yugoslavians, and then they started (or reverted to or revealed that they always had been) thinking of themselves as Serbs or Bosnians, and look what good came of that. It seems to me at least possible that the proposed law would reinforce the conflation of race with religion that’s already prevalent, and that that would just promote a sort of Bosniazation. That’s going on anyway, but the law and the way it’s being viewed and discussed could help that process along, and make it more entrenched and hard to counter. At least I think so.
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Eagleton Reviews Furedi on Intellectuals
Snap definition of an intellectual: more or less the opposite of an academic.
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Little Bitty Steps to Change Science Standards
The Kansas Board of Education is considering ‘intelligent design’.
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Full Many a Plagiarist is Born to Blush Unseen
It’s not only the famous scholars who lift other people’s work.
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Gödel, Einstein, Heisenberg
Three fundamental scientific results established profound and disturbing limitation.
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Oh No, What’s That?
And now for another little trip to la-la land. This time not an angel book, but Essential Wicca. Like the angel book, it is packed full of opportunities to squeal with undignified uncontrollable laughter. As in the angel book, they simply leap off the page. Here’s a bit in a chapter called ‘Working the Sacred’ where we are being told how to do a Working (here’s a hint: it takes place in a Circle, which is Sacred Space, and capital letters appear quite a lot):
It’s good to remember that little children and cats are generally much more sensitive to the psychic/spiritual world than most adults, so they may be a rough gauge of how things are going. If, for instance, your previously content sleeping pussy-cat takes off at a dead run for parts unknown, or every baby within earshot starts screaming, you might want to check what’s going on.
And that’s the end of the paragraph, and the next one changes the subject. One is left wondering (with the sweat beading on one’s brow) what kind of thing might be going on. But the book doesn’t say. It’s like that. It drops hints but then doesn’t go into detail.
Not to mention of course the other hilarities. Especially the cat thing. Notice the absence of dogs. Well fair enough. Dogs would just lie there happily snoring and farting while six kinds of devils turned up and started peeling everyone present with a very blunt carrot peeler. But what about parrots? Eh? The parrots I’ve known have been very god damn sensitive to the psychic/spiritual world. But they just get ignored in favour of those histrionic fakers, cats. I blame Andrew Lloyd Webber.
There’s more scary stuff. Really scary. It gets just a little more specific. This is on the next page (59) where we’re learning about pentagrams and elemental crosses.
You might not want to use a pentagram, because a pentagram can create a strong resonating signal on the astral plane. It calls attention to you for anything or anyone who cares to come and investigate.
Oh my god! Oh jeezis! Did you get that? Anyone or [shudder] anything! Ow, ow, ow, I’m really scared now. I won’t sleep for a month. I mean – damn – so there are anyones and anythings out there, all the time, and the reason they haven’t come in and yanked our heads off and eaten the rest of us on rye bread with mustard is because we haven’t called attention to ourselves? Yet? But we could anytime? Just by using a pentagram? Well hell on wheels. Life is even more precarious than I’ve always thought. (So what are these stupid people doing drawing pentagrams on the pages of their book then? Huh? I mean, brilliant! Tell us how to draw pentagrams and then in the next breath casually remark that if we use them we might call attention to ourselves for the benefit of who knows what ravenous dribbling Thing that’s lounging around in the munchosphere. Do these people have no sense of responsibility? Or is it that they’re actually working for the hungry creatures. That’s probably it. The warning is just a bluff, of course, as well as a way of protecting themselves against lawsuits by the very distant relations of the gobbled-ups. They know damn well that half the people reading this book will be using those pentagrams the very instant they see the warning. Oh well, maybe that’s good. If the gobblers are eating the pentagram users, that means they’re leaving the rest of us alone, at least for now.)
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Dearly Cherished Beliefs
Polly Toynbee has a very good column today on the religious hatred law.
The natural allies of the rationalists have decamped. The left embraces Islam for its anti-Americanism. Liberals and progressives have had a collective softening of the brain and weakening of the knees. While they have a sympathetic instinct to defend harassed minorities, they prefer to abandon some fundamental principles and prevaricate over some basic freedoms than to face up to the damage religions do, the wars they fuel and the rights they deny.
Exactly. What I keep saying – to the point of tedium. Mushy language about ‘the right to lead a life in which one can peacefully practise one’s own religion without fear’ is designed to do exactly that – to overlook and skirt around and pretend out of existence, ‘the damage religions do, the wars they fuel and the rights they deny.’ Peacefully practicing one’s own religion to some people means peacefully bullying women into wearing the hijab, staying home, always being in the possession and control of a man. To others it means keeping lower castes in their place. To others it means an invisible guarantee that all their instincts are sound and all their decisions are right because God wants them to do what they take God to want them to do.
Iqbal Sacranie of the mainstream Muslim Council of Britain said that linking the Prophet’s name with this crime “will have shocked Muslim readers” who are “calling for safeguards against vilification of dearly cherished beliefs”. And there it is. He expects the new law to protect “cherished beliefs”, while David Blunkett in the Commons assured his critics it would do no such thing. Dead prophets and holy books would be as open to criticism and ridicule as ever. The law will protect the believers, not their beliefs.
And there it is indeed. That’s one problem with a law like this, even if it really is true that it might, carefully applied, prevent some incitement to group hatred that otherwise would go ahead. It reinforces the assumption of religious people that their ‘dearly cherished beliefs’ ought to have some kind of special immunity. Of course they have the assumption anyway, but the fact that the state agrees with them would just entrench it that bit more.
That’s what I keep getting at with those repeated questions about why religious ideas should have special protection or respect or tact or forebearance when other ideas don’t and shouldn’t. I’ve suspected all along that I knew what the answer was, but I wondered if other people would think so too. My suspicion is pretty much what Iqbal Sacranie said – that the beliefs are ‘dearly cherished’ and therefore they should be immune. That’s an understandable reason, but it’s also an absolutely terrible one. It’s a recipe for permanent blindness, illusion, submission to authority, and inability to think. Humans have to be able to think. It’s as simple as that. The reasons are blindingly obvious – things like nuclear weapons being only one.
And of course the ‘dearly cherished beliefs’ reason is a bad one also because it’s not consistently cited. Other dearly cherished beliefs are not respected, obviously, so it’s still not clear why some should be when others are not.
Foreign Dispatches has a post on Toynbee’s column and also on a couple of Crooked Timber’s comments on related matters.
Update: I re-worded that last sentence, since I put it clumsily.
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Blunkett Resigns
Chief Whip flings biography across Commons; gesture seen as expressing frustration.
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An Iconoclastic History of Scientific Endeavour
Review of John Waller’s Leaps in the Dark: The Making of Scientific Reputations.
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Children Taught Falsehoods in Sex Education
Federally funded abstinence-only programs get some facts wrong.
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BNP Leader Held by Police Over Racist Remarks
Griffin claimed the government was trying to demonise the BNP.
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Nick Griffin Arrested
BNP leader being questioned by police investigating racism in the organisation.
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The Stinking Ninth Class
It’s a hard life for educated folk. Earlier this year, the Chinese state newsagency Xinhua reported that the life expectancy of the Chinese intellectual was, at 58, more than ten years lower than the national average. A survey also showed that 76% of the nation’s journalists died between 40 and 60.
Many were surprised by the findings. The insanities of Chairman Mao’s “anti-rightist” campaigns and, worse still, the Cultural Revolution, had by now given way to a kind of modus vivendi. Intellectuals were no longer the “stinking ninth class” of society, some way behind criminals, prostitutes and vagrants in a peasant-led pecking order. By now, in the interests of “stability and economic development”, there would be no more mass persecutions. While freedom of speech would not be tolerated, at least the freedom to earn money had now been firmly established. The network of informers began to disintegrate, the role of the Party in ordinary life began to recede, and something approaching a civil society had begun to develop.
Still, something was obviously not quite right. While intellectuals are no longer being buried alive, as they were during the brutal reign of the Emperor Qin Shihuang, they are marginalized by a Singapore-style authoritarian consumer society and hemmed in by the old-fashioned strictures of the Chinese Communist Party. The recent discussion in the state press about the role of “public intellectuals” is a case in point.
George Steiner once suggested that the persecution of intellectuals in the old Soviet bloc indicated at the very least a kind of respect for high culture. “Writers were persecuted and killed precisely because literature was recognized as an important and potentially dangerous force,” the old polymath wrote in his 1961 essay, The Writer and Communism. The role and influence of the intellectual was enhanced by the fact that he was being oppressed, and the ultimate compliment a government could pay to its grand penseurs was to lock them up. After all, in bourgeois democratic countries, intellectuals had been sidelined, and their attempts to enrich cultural life had been smothered by the mass media, where thoughtless gratification was the norm.
In his memoirs, Steiner described his sense of intoxication while listening to classical musical recitals and watching the staging of “serious plays” by Sophocles and Brecht in the former East Berlin. After the Wall fell, he said, “virtually overnight, freedom reclaimed its inalienable right to junk food.” The liberated masses rushed not to dissident poets, but to adult cinemas and MacDonalds.
It was no doubt reassuring for the likes of Blok, Mayakovsky and Akhmatova, and the great Chinese playwright Lao She, hounded to his death by the Red Guards, that at least the government was paying implicit homage to the power and influence of intellectuals.
Steiner did at least concede that the inculcation of love for Bach fugues and the more recondite poems of Goethe came at a high price, and was hardly worth the gulags. But he could not hide his regret. Modern capitalist democracies were obeisant at the twin idols of “Madonna and Maradona”, Steiner wrote, and swamped with porn and filth and fast food. Rare book shops in Prague were being ripped up and replaced by smut sellers and burger joints.
China, it seems, has the worst of both worlds. One veteran China watcher once described the post-Mao reforms as a Leninist velvet prison with consumer characteristics. Trash and kitsch remain easy to find, and while you might be able to attend the occasional recital of ancient pipa compositions, should you so wish, the sound of that delicate instrument is invariably drowned out by mobile phones.
“To get rich is glorious,” the late leader Deng Xiaoping urged. Render unto Caesar what should be rendered, and leave everything else to Mammon. We now have a nation where the fairy light is the most prominent cultural symbol, and where the quest for riches has become the simplest avenue of achievement.
The recent debate about the role of public intellectuals began when the relatively liberal weekly magazine, Southern People’s Weekly, published a list of the 50 most influential cultural figures in China, led by the exiled poet, Bei Dao, and including the veteran Beijing rocker Cui Jian, who was at the height of his subversive influence in the years immediately after the Tian’anmen Square crackdown in 1989. The magazine noted that the market economy had led to the marginalization of public intellectuals, but they had never been more necessary.
And so, facing marginalization by the market, they now had to face another salvo from the Propaganda Ministry. Two months later, the Shanghai-based government organ, Liberation Daily, published a characteristically reactionary editorial mocking the “imported” notion of “public intellectuals” and accusing the figures on the list of being estranged from the Party and the masses. “Public intellectuals” are arrogant and elitist, and trying to monopolize debate with their own views, it said.
Communist Party watchers might have been reminded of the case of the Hungarian writer, Tibor Dery, condemned for leading an “organization hostile to the state” in the wake of the Soviet crackdown in 1956. What might this hostile organization be, the joke ran. It was the Hungarian people.
In any case, in its bilious doctrinal carping, the editorial was quite exemplary, a sinister, jargon-ridden spasm of Stalinesque nastiness. Out of touch, certainly, but beneath its cod-Marxist babble, there were signs that a renewed assault on press freedom was on its way.
It quickly drew the attention of the foreign media – themselves anxious, in these confusing times, to find evidence that the core values of the CCP had not changed, and that the whole Party edifice tottered precariously on a huge wave of socioeconomic transformation and was now returning, reflexively, to its roots. The Economist was particularly scathing, and attributed the latest government assault to the freedom afforded to the modern Chinese thinker by the internet. According to the Christian Science Monitor, which broke the story, the Propaganda Ministry had now ordered newspapers to refrain from compiling such lists and from paying too much attention to the assortment of poets, writers, environmental activists and other critical voices now on its “gray list” of troublemakers.
Meanwhile, Chinese newspapers, driven for the first time by market pressures, are filling their pages with the blathering of TV celebs, with salacious tales involving ménages a trois or cocaine busts, failed bank heists and kidnappings, tawdry trysts in saunas and karaoke houses, and the sort of titillating tabloid fodder that attracts readers of every stripe in every country. The papers have been anxious to boost their circulation, and the readers themselves rarely want to read editorials issued by the Propaganda Ministry.
This has led to tensions, between mass-market philistinism on the one hand, and the government on the other.
TV stations pile celebrity profiles upon celebrity profiles, regaling us with the eating habits and interests of the latest manufactured Taiwanese pop band or Hong Kong diva, just like western TV, only without the counterweight of serious news and debate. Desperate for advertising revenues, they try filling prime-time with real-life crime shows, and one regional station even introduced bikini-clad weather girls, but they are then rapped on the knuckles for “corrupting the morality of the youth”.
The crisis of Chinese civilization that hit during and after the collapse of the imperial order in 1911 was regarded as a golden age for intellectuals, but their role has always been slightly different from that in the west. They were traditionally the servants of their nation, motivated not by what Graham Greene has called the “duty of disloyalty” but by a genuine desire to serve. And so, thinkers queued up to declare solutions to the national malaise, drawing inspiration from Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Dewey or even the anarchist Bakhunin. After the Bolshevik revolution, they finally turned to Marx.
Intellectuals were always merely functional, instruments of the state. When we shoot a crossbow at a target, we do not praise the arrow, said Mao Zedong in 1942 during a criticism of the writer, Ding Ling. It was a sign of things to come. The intellectuals had played a crucial role in the revolution, but they would quickly come under attack themselves.
In the novelist and essayist Lu Xun, China had at least one great writer and political figure. Lu Xun died of tuberculosis in 1936, but was already thoroughly sceptical about the revolution, suggesting that “the oppressed quickly turn into the oppressors”. After his death, he remained a key figure, both lionized and bowdlerized by the regime, with statues and shrines set up to celebrate him as a “champion of the Party”. The only good intellectual, it seems, was a dead intellectual.
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Reporting In
Things have been too quiet here. My fault. My computer went funny in the head again, and I’ve been busy whining at it and flinging it about the room until it came back to its senses.
I’ve just found what looks set to be an interesting new blog – belonging to a cancer surgeon with an interest in Holocaust denial (not a friendly or approving interest, I hasten to add) and alternative medicine. It’s always interesting to read informed commentary on alternative medicine, from people like, you know, doctors and researchers, as opposed to future monarchs and prating bystanders (by which I mean me).