Author: Ophelia Benson

This is a highly interesting interview with Christopher Hitchens by Johann Hari. It’s discomforting in some ways – but discomforting things often are interesting, aren’t they. At any rate, Bush or no Bush (and it’s some of the people around Bush he respects, rather than the W-man himself, apparently), Hitchens says some outstanding things, things that need saying. And saying and saying and saying.

The world these fascists want to create is one of constant submission and servility. The individual only has value to them if they enter into a life of constant reaffirmation and prayer. It is pure totalitarianism, and one of the ugliest totalitarianisms we’ve seen. It’s the irrational combined with the idea of a completely closed society…I just reject the whole mentality that says, we need to consider this phenomenon in light of current grievances. It’s an insult to the people who care about the real grievances of the Palestinians and the Chechens and all the others. It’s not just the wrong interpretation of those causes; it’s their negation…Does anybody really think that if every Jew was driven from Palestine, these guys would go back to their caves? Nobody is blowing themselves up for a two-state solution. They openly say, ‘We want a Jew-free Palestine, and a Christian-free Palestine.’ And that would very quickly become, ‘Don’t be a Shia Muslim around here, baby.’

Nor, of course, an atheist – they’re the first to go.

He is appalled that some people on the left are prepared to do almost nothing to defeat Islamofascism. “When I see some people who claim to be on the left abusing that tradition, making excuses for the most reactionary force in the world, I do feel pain that a great tradition is being defamed. So in that sense I still consider myself to be on the left.”

And then this bit, which is just about word for word what I posted in a comment at CT awhile ago, when someone (not a CT-er) immediately after Beslan said that such extreme acts were a sign that the people who perpetrated them had very deep grievances:

Hitchens was on a TV debate with the leader of a small socialist party in the Irish dail. “He said these Islamic fascists are doing this because they have deep-seated grievances. And I said, ‘Ah yes, they have many grievances. They are aggrieved when they see unveiled woman. And they are aggrieved that we tolerate homosexuals and Jews and free speech and the reading of literature.’”

Exactly. Exactly exactly exactly. Of course they have grievances. Al Qaeda has grievances – feminist atheist women running their own lives, for example: that’s an enormous grievance, worth blowing up any number of people. It’s so elementary, isn’t it – a grievance is not necessarily a reasonable grievance, or one that anyone ought to respond to or sympathize with, or a sign that the person who has it is right-on and a brutha. Dang – how hard is that to grasp? Hitler was a mass of grievances, so was Timothy McVeigh (he was really pissed, man), so was the Ku Klux Klan, so were the guys who murdered Emmet Till, and the ones who murdered Medgar Evers. So the hell what. People can feel horribly aggrieved if they are prevented from pushing other people around, if they are unable to extort labour and obeisance from people they consider their inferiors, if someone looks at them without sufficient awe and submissiveness. So what. Grievance shmievance. Hitchens nailed that one.

Update: Normblog has a post on the Hitchens interview. Norm has some pointed things to say on the matter.

That discussion below in the comments on ‘Memory Tricks’ about memory and how reliable it is or is not, is highly interesting (I think) and suggests a number of other thoughts and subjects. There is for instance the matter of Elizabeth Loftus and her work and what it suggests: that memory is highly unreliable, easily manipulated and changed, a dubious source for evidence, testimony, and information-gathering generally. Not that that was completely unknown before Loftus’ work (defense attorneys have, I believe, long had a heightened awareness of it, for instance), but her research did add some new elements to the picture, and that at a time when memory and its fallibility were in the news, so to speak. That was the time of all those allegations of child abuse, Satanic ritual abuse, recovered memories, etc etc etc – all those allegations that sent people to prison for very long terms on the basis of what seem likely to have been fabricated or reconstructed memories. That poor sad guy just sixty miles south of where I sit typing this, for example, who (it appears) invented a whole stack of memories of his own participation in grotesque ‘Satanic’ abuse of his own daughters, later expanded to include his son. It seems unlikely that any of it ever happened at all – but he was convicted.

And then there is the large subject of how memory plays into the matter of Freud – of Freud’s role in making memory and ‘recovered memory’ seem vastly more credible and reliable than it ought to be and otherwise would be, because so many people were raised on the idea that repression happens often and routinely and can be undone by the right kind of analysis, rather as one might rewind a videotape. Our friend Frederick Crews has an excellent book on that, Memory Wars.

So then there is the question of how belief works, and how skepticism works, and how the two interact, or fail to interact. I’ve been thinking hard about this lately anyway, because of a chapter I’m working on for this book JS and I are writing. I might talk further about this later. For the moment, suffice it to say that I’ve been thinking about the fact that some people learn to be cautious about forming beliefs in the first place, while other people don’t, and that this difference is an important one. It is a good idea to be cautious about forming beliefs. It’s a good idea to be sharply aware that beliefs can always be wrong, that one, we, I, can always be wrong. One step toward that awareness is to recognize various ways that false or unfounded beliefs can be formed. One of those ways, is to have unwarranted confidence in one’s own memory. That’s one of the things I learned from reading Elizabeth Loftus – actually it’s two of the things: how easily we can get our own memories wrong, and how obstinately people refuse to believe that. It’s as if memory is somehow sacred. That’s understandable in a way – memory feels accurate, it feels real and like our own. But if one thinks a little harder, it seems to me, one can realize that that’s an illusion. For instance by comparing a fantasy with a memory, and then trying to specify how they differ. Surely the first thing one notices is that they don’t. And that being the case, how can we be sure we know the difference? We can’t, it seems to me. (Another way might be to consider all those experiments with the guy running into the lecture hall and doing something dramatic and running out again, and then the way everyone’s written answers to questions about the incident give different accounts. Ought to give one pause, that kind of thing. What – everyone else misremembers and only I don’t? Unlikely, don’t you think?)

So maybe it’s relevant that the guy who had such a predictable, generic, Identikit memory of conversations with Bush that took place thirty years ago*, is not a scientist or some other kind of inquirer but a professor in the Business school. Maybe it’s not, maybe I’m just being rude in saying that. But scientists and other empirical inquirers do get quite a lot of training and then experience in, at least, knowing that evidence is not transparent, that it doesn’t interpret itself nor offer the right interpretation of itself written in letters of fire across the sky.

Large subject, as I said. More later.

*Go on, remember a conversation you had thirty years ago, word for word, with some guy you barely knew. Go on, let’s see you.

Timing is everything. At least when it is, it is. I say that because in a few days my colleague is going to be in a place with several of our contributors and/or fans and supporters. People I have had energetic email correspondences with, people I admire, people who have a high opinion of B&W which they have conveyed to me with enthusiasm. I would love to be there. These are people I would really love a chance to talk to, to discuss ideas and events relevant to B&W with. In fact I would give a couple of limbs to talk to them. Meera Nanda, for instance, whom I have quoted here so often and who has written several brilliant articles for us. Alan Sokal, whose title we helped ourselves to and whose hoax is a permanent inspiration to us. Latha Menon, who told me about Romila Thapar and then wrote that wonderful article for us. Kenan Malik, who wrote an excellent review of Meera’s book as well as an article for us (roundly disagreeing with my colleague, who is therefore confidently expecting they will engage in fisticuffs). A.C. Grayling, who is the only one I don’t have an email acquaintance with but who is against FN and N generally, so a sort of ally all the same (otherwise he wouldn’t be there). And of course good old Julian Baggini, who writes Bad Moves for B&W and does one or two other things on the side.

And the final refinement of the torture is that if this confluence of people were taking place a mere three weeks later…I might be able to go. Though I might not, because, er, I haven’t been invited. But I could perhaps loiter around in the street and be able to chat with people as they left. Or I could perhaps just pitch a loud fit until someone invited me – I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, because it’s not taking place three weeks later. Timing is everything. In three weeks (near enough) I’ll be there, but for now I’m here, and that’s that. So let that be a lesson to you. Always be in the right place at the right time.

Everybody’s favourite Rottweiler, Mr Leiter (maybe it’s Dr Leiter; then again…), cites some Harvard Law professor talking about his experiences of teaching G. W. Bush.

Here’s some of it:

[Bush] was totally the opposite of Chris Cox. He showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him.

[In a discussion of government aid for retirees, Bush] “made this ridiculous statement and when I asked him to explain, he said, ‘The government doesn’t have to help poor people — because they are lazy.’ I said, ‘Well, could you explain that assumption?’ Not only could he not explain it, he started backtracking on it, saying, ‘No, I didn’t say that.’

Whatever memory-pill the Harvard Prof has been taking; I want some of it. I used to find it difficult to remember what my students had said five minutes previously, let alone thirty years after the event. Admitttedly, I didn’t encourage them to talk too much. Well, at all, really.

But, in the spirit of democracy and mass participation, here’s a task for you all.

Rearrange the following words in the correct order:*

Memory

Reconstructed

*Okay, I don’t want to claim that these memories are necessarily false. But really, at least a modicum of wariness is sensible here. It’s all just a little too convenient…