Author: Ophelia Benson

Okay, I give in. I’ve had a conversion experience. I’ve recognized the error of my ways. All these people who have been telling me what a horrible elitist I am have worn me down. I’m convinced. It’s true, I am an elitist, and that makes me a terrible person, so I have to stop. Okay. I’ll stop. I’ll become a better person. I won’t like anything that is not extremely popular, and I won’t dislike anything that is extremely popular. (God, for instance.) I won’t do anything that lots of people don’t do, and I won’t refrain from doing anything that lots of people do. I’ll become as humble and modest and unassertive as the people who tell me what a horrible elitist I am – and they are very modest and humble and unassertive indeed, and never do anything at all that a majority of their fellow humans don’t also do. From this moment I shall take such people as my role model, and be just like them.

So the first thing I have to do – even before I give away all my books and replace them with different ones (but perhaps I shouldn’t give them away? Perhaps that would only be passing the corruption on to other people, encouraging them to be elitist in my place? Perhaps I should simply throw them all in the bin?) – is stop making judgments between good and bad. Because that’s where the harm lies, I’m told. That’s where it gets me, that’s what makes an elitist a terrible person – it’s this business of making judgments. At least in aesthetic matters, and the like. In areas where judgments can’t be grounded. It’s okay (I take it) to say one hammer is better than another, because you can show that it does the job better (pounding the nail in, breaking the window, whatever). But you can’t say one poem or play or song or concerto is better than another because none of those things can pound nails or break windows – you can’t show a job that a good one can do better than a bad one, therefore when you say one is better than another you’re just hand-waving. Except you’re not just hand-waving, it’s worse than that, and that’s where the terrible person thing comes in. I’m told.

Here’s how the argument goes, if I understand it correctly. Judgments of quality in aesthetic matters cannot be grounded, therefore they are simply rhetoric – there is nothing else they can be; therefore they are necessarily power plays. So, if that’s right, every time I say or even think that, say, Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ or Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is better as poetry than, say, Pinter’s anti-war poem, I’m making a power play and nothing else.

Now, I’ll admit, I resisted that idea at first. I thought it was wrong. In fact I was sure it was, because, if nothing else, of my own inner experience of the matter. Naturally that can’t be conclusive to anyone else, on account of how my mind is my mind and not anyone else’s, but it was convincing to me. My sense of the difference between poetry I think good and poetry I don’t think good doesn’t feel like a power play, it feels like something to do with thinking about the poetry as poetry. The truth is, it seemed to me that the act of telling me that my opinions are elitist power plays itself looked far more like a power play than my opinions do. In fact it kind of felt like a power play in the same way that a full-scale invasion by an army would, or a loud knock on the door at 3 a.m. followed by shouts of ‘Police! Open up!’ would. I felt quite skeptical that my mere opinions or reading habits could have quite the same effect.

But that was then. As I say, I’ve had a conversion experience. I’ve realized that all this resistance and disbelief of mine is just a sign of how thoroughly corrupt all my thinking is. I’m considering entering a convent. But in the meantime there is much that I can do, starting, as I said, with ceasing to make judgments between good and bad.

Of course, this will result in something of a change in the nature of B&W. I’ve realized it will mean I’ll have to stop writing these N&Cs, for one thing. That may seem a little drastic, but it’s not – because what I’ve realized is that it is quite impossible to write at all without constantly making an endless series of tiny imperceptible sub-aware judgments of quality. It’s obvious if you think about it. I mean, what else am I doing every time I use one word rather than another? Eh? I’m making a judgment! Oh, shit! Think of it! With every single word I type, I’m rejecting tens of thousands of other words I don’t write! Godalmighty – why have I never thought of this before? I’m so ashamed. All those hurt feelings, all those tens of thousands of words turning sobbing to their pillows every single time I type a word. Oh noooo – I’m so sorry guys. I’ll stop. I’ll just finish this one and then I’ll stop.

And the words are just the beginning. There are ideas, thoughts, links; there’s organization, paragraph breaks, punctuation. One judgment after another. So you can see: N&C is quite impossible. And then News links will be different, because I will have to just pick them at random. And Articles will be different, because I won’t read them, I’ll just accept everything sight unseen, and of course I won’t do any editing or proofreading, because what does that involve other than judgments? Well I suppose I could proofread, because there are some rules one can follow. That needn’t be entirely subjective. But could I do it in a purely objective way? Could I do it without any element of judgment (and thus, remember, power play) creeping in? I’m not at all sure. Especially since I now realize I’m an almost insanely judgmental person. No, it’s too risky, I can’t proofread, and I certainly can’t edit. So Articles will just be whatever turns up in the Inbox. In Focus – I think I’d better just delete the whole of In Focus, because it’s completely corrupt, and I don’t see how I could do any new ones.

And then there’s other editing work I do, which is also suffused with aesthetic judgments. I guess I’ll have to stop doing that too. And as for writing books – ! Well it’s obvious how hopeless that is. Okay…let’s see. I could be a janitor (and have in the past, so that’s cool). I could do yard work. No gardening, because that’s full of aesthetic judgments too, but I could cut grass. There are a lot of lawn-service outfits around here, I’ll just try one of them.

I’m becoming less terrible already, I think. Hope you guys don’t mind too much about the changes to B&W. I’ll do it after work – will be much quicker now, without all that judging to do.

Go, Manchester City. Go, Paula Radcliffe.

Update. She went.

Religion again. Or rather, still. It never does go away, does it. Funny how people keep urging us to have more of it when its consequences so often seem so very…unpleasant.

Jonathan Derbyshire has a couple of posts on the subject – one about the fallacy that atheists and materialists lack a sense of wonder or awe and the other a review of what sounds like a very irritating book on atheism. Theists have the most remarkable way of assuming that only they are capable of an enormous range of human qualities and aspirations – morality, imagination, dreams, commitment, wonder, honesty, dedication, kindness, mercy, courage, putting the cap back on the toothpaste, virtue, monogamy, not picking their noses in public. Hey, I hate to tell you, but non-theists are capable of all those too, and in the meantime they don’t bore everyone to death talking about some non-existent geezer in the sky who tells everyone not to use condoms or not to let women leave the back room or not to let Adam and Steve get married. Two for the price of one. We can have good qualities and we don’t dress up all our sadistic controlling exploitive impulses by pretending God told us to beat the crap out of this woman or to shoot this Dutch guy six times and then cut his throat and run away.

Garry Wills had an interesting Op-ed in the NY Times a couple of days ago.

The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies. Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein’s Sunni loyalists.

Well, frankly, I don’t understand that fundamentalism either. At all. It’s beyond me. There are some aspects of religion that (I think) I do understand, but there are others I don’t. I knew a fundamentalist once – someone I worked with. He was one angry dude, man. All his religiosity seemed to express itself in rage at people who didn’t share it. (In fact he once got suspended for half a day for threatening to kill a co-worker for – well for saying exactly what I’m saying: ‘Jim, for a religious guy, you sure seem to have a lot of anger.’) That’s what religion seems to be for a lot of people – a hell of a good pretext to be in a frothing rage all the time. About what? About people who don’t share their loathsome narrow rage-filled punitive view of the world, that’s what.

Maybe that’s not fair. Maybe in some circumstances and settings they are sweet and kind and compassionate. Only that’s not what the rest of us see – I suppose because we’re the spawn of Satan. But then that’s the problem. Religion is just another way of creating ingroups and outgroups, and it sanctions much worse treatment for the outgroups than is normally considered reasonable.

A third post of Jonathan’s touches on this point.

Now I was reminded of all that when I read this in Mark Schmitt’s post:

“The right question, I think, is not whether religion has an undue influence, but why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice? Why is its public phase so exclusively focused on issues of private and personal behavior? Is this caused by trends in the nature of religious worship itself? Is it a displacement of economic or social pressures? Will that change? What are the factors that might cause it to change.”

If Schmitt is right in his characterization of what he calls, following Robert Fogel, the “Fourth Great Awakening” in American Protestantism, what implications does this have for Sandel’s attempt to connect religious belief with a certain form of public life – with being a citizen with certain responsibilities?

Good question. And no, I haven’t the faintest idea what the answer is.

Here is a handy, or at least hilariously funny, page of atheist quotations. Well not all that funny, but it certainly made me burst out laughing.

I find the murder of Theo van Gogh quite disturbing, upsetting, disgusting, infuriating, etc. As I’m meant to, of course; as we all are – all we unrepentent atheists and secularists and women who wander around in the world without asking anyone’s permission. Killing him is meant precisely as a message – to people like him, to people like his co-producer of the film ‘Submission,’ Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to people who criticise or resist Islamism in general.

Some of the coverage of the murder is slightly peculiar. It seems somewhat – cowed. Hesitant. Apologetic. It seems to want to say or signal that van Gogh kind of sort of asked for it. That he shouldn’t have said such mean things about Islamism. This article for example.

People of Moroccan Muslim descent make up the largest single ethnic minority group in the Netherlands and their representatives had been on the frontline in van Gogh’s frequently harsh war of words on extremist Islam. This war reached a height with the recent broadcast on Dutch TV of his short film Submission, a film that protested van Gogh’s view of Muslim treatment of women…Co-produced by the Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an activist of Somali origin who has blamed Islamists for fostering repression and domestic violence in the Netherlands’ immigrant communities, the film provoked an outcry. Both Hirsi Ali and van Gogh received death threats.

‘Frequently harsh’…Well the reporter is there and I’m not, and I haven’t seen the movie, I haven’t seen van Gogh’s work. But I have to wonder. What’s wrong with saying ‘harsh’ words about ‘extremist Islam’. Why wouldn’t Ayaan Hirsi Ali blame Islamists for fostering repression and domestic violence (to put it more forthrightly, oppression of women)? Is it a secret that ferocious control of women is one of the chief goals of Islamism? Is that some sort of Western or Orientalist myth? Homa Arjomand and Maryam Namazie and their colleagues, women from Iran and other ‘Muslim’ countries, would say no, as would (and did) Ishtiaq Ahmed in this column a few weeks ago. So why the tip-toeing? Multiculturalism run amok or plain fear of another jihadi with a knife and a gun. Who knows. But it’s a tad creepy.