William Vollmann’s seven volume work is swept away on a flood of logorrhea.
Author: Ophelia Benson
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Hemingway at his Most Eloquent
Bulls are great – they don’t write, they’re not queer, they’re not old women, and you can kill them.
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That’s an Accomplishment?
‘one of literary theory’s accomplishments…has been its bid to protect “the privacy of its language.”‘
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Chris Mooney on ‘Sound Science’
The phrases ‘sound science’ and ‘peer review’ may not mean what you think.
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Ah, Sweet Mystery
Popular science books ought to help nonspecialists distinguish sense from nonsense.
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Some People Disapprove of French Ban
US State Department, al Qaeda frown at ban on religious attire.
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What We Don’t See
What was that I was saying only a day or two ago about smelly little orthodoxies and the hijab? This article from the BBC certainly gives a good illustration of what I mean. Two mentions of Muslim opposition to the ban, and no mentions at all of Muslim support for the ban. If you don’t already know a little about the subject, and read that article, you’ll be left with the impression that Muslims who have any opinion on the matter are opposed. But that is simply not true. Forty percent of Muslim women support the ban, according to news reports I’ve seen.
Most of France’s political parties, and around 70% of the population, support the ban which some Muslim leaders say risks being perceived as intolerant…Some French MPs, backed by Muslim leaders and rights groups, have warned that the new law could be seen as intolerant and undermine the integration of France’s Muslims. They say young Muslim women are being forced to wear the headscarf, though the few hundred who have turned out for demonstrations against the new law say they wear it of their own free will. Many governments and human rights groups have criticised the bill – including the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights and the US-based advisory group, the Commission on International Religious Freedom.
That’s it, those are all the places the word ‘Muslim’ is used. It says ‘some’ Muslim leaders in that first sentence, but doesn’t bother to point out that other ‘Muslim leaders’ are not merely indifferent or neutral or not bothering to say anything, but are in fact in favour of the ban. Sly, subtle, sneaky, and not a very forthright form of reporting, I would say. Though it may not be deliberate. The malodorous orthodoxy may be so well internalized that the reporter wasn’t even aware of giving a partial (incomplete) account. It may be so taken for granted that all Muslims love the hijab, and that a school dress code is an interference with religious freedom, that the fact that some Muslims don’t see it that way simply fails to register. As does the fact that many of the people who favour the hijab and oppose the ban are not just nice pious people but extremely reactionary, are well to the right of your Jerry Fallwell and your Pat Robertson, are in fact the kind of people who beat up and rape women for not ‘covering up.’ That’s how smelly little orthodoxies work, isn’t it, they just get dug in until people stop noticing them and stop being able even to see alternatives. A good reason to point them out then.
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Elephants Can Be Irritating
There are good reasons why Africans don’t view their fauna with the same sentimentality that Europeans do.
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A Basin of Nice, Thin Gruel
I want to talk just a little more about this question of morality and motivation. The more I think about it the more of a wall it seems. A dead stop, an aporia, a permanent undecideable. A six of one half dozen of the other. Norm Geras put it very well:
I have read that in the Nazi camps, those who did best at maintaining their moral bearings, at not going to pieces in face of the horrors they daily had to experience, were people of very firm and definite convictions: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jewish rabbis, hardened communist militants. On the other hand, intellectuals, liberal and professional people, sometimes suffered a precipitous moral collapse…To have had to get used to conditions of life and death in places where there was no why would have been hard enough for anybody; but it may have been especially testing and cruel for those educated in the norms of a sceptical rationality. Would we want to say, though, that the religious or quasi-religious forms of certainty which have helped to save some people in such conditions are, on that account, to be given an unqualified pass as ethical motivators, when we know what else, what horrors, such certainties can themselves lead to?
That’s just it, you see. It’s precisely the qualities that enable people to maintain their moral bearings in an unspeakable situation, that also enable people to eliminate doubt, ambiguity, complexity, uncertainty, caution. That can be a good thing, even a splendid thing – but it can also be a bloody nightmare. Maybe overall, thin gruel is really a safer dish than stronger meats. Maybe all those lions with blood dripping from their jaws, all those dedicated impassioned righteous soldiers (one thinks of Opus Dei, and shudders slightly), are simply too dangerous, for all their courage and self-sacrifice. Especially since the things they believe in, the things that motivate them, are not testable or investigatable, not questionable or revisable. If they get it all wrong there is no one to tell them so; no one they’ll listen to anyway. Thin gruel is not an exciting dish, that’s for sure, but it doesn’t scald your insides, either.
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Tougher Penalties for Genital Mutilation
Up to 14 years in prison for parents who allow their children to undergo female circumcision.
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MMR Researchers Issue Retraction
Ten doctors who co-authored the MMR health fears study have said there was insufficient evidence to draw that conclusion.
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GM Crops Can Help the Poor
The strongest argument in favour of developing GM crops is the contribution they can make to reducing world poverty, hunger and disease.
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Science in the Arab World
What are the factors that contribute to the low level of scientific research?
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Science Journal Publishers Defend Profits
Journal bosses claim that academic institutions would suffer if the system were changed.
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Motivation
I now think I inadvertently conceded a little too much in that last post. Through not paying quite enough attention to the first part of Chris’ comment – the ‘at its best, religion succeeds in a symbolic articulation of universal moral concern’ part. My attention was grabbed by the parenthesis, by ‘motivation,’ because motivation is exactly what I had it in mind to talk about. I do think religion can be a powerful motivator, for both good and ill. But that symbolic articulation I take to be a separate question, and that one I’m much more doubtful about. I for one simply don’t find its articulations all that impressive, or at least no more so (at best) than secular articulations. There’s a bit of Isaiah I love with a passion – the one about the lion and the kid lying down together – but it expresses a thought that a secularist could (and does) easily have just as well. It’s probably a thought that humans have had as long as they’ve been human.
To put it another way – I’m not sure it really is the ‘symbolic articulation’ that does the motivating. That’s why I take the two to be separate. I think the motivation actually comes from somewhere else. From the tangle of idealization, fantasy, imagination and so on that makes up the deity. That’s pretty much the point of a deity, after all. To provide a focus for all those longings and imaginings, to make up for all the terrible lacks of human beings, to be anything and everything we want, desire, need, long for. We need it and miss it and want it; we imagine and conjure it up; we love it. Of course we love it – what’s not to love? What are we going to imagine, a crappy tiresome inadequate deity that’s just as imperfect and frustrating as real people are? As boring, or bad-tempered, or lazy, or more interested in self than in us, as real people are? What would we do that for? What would be the point of that? No, our deity is like all the nicest things in the people we like and entirely without all the nasty bits. That’s the motivator, surely. (That doesn’t describe the all-too-human Greek deities, or the god of wrath, to be sure, but the effect is the same. Either extreme love or extreme fear: both gut-level motivators.)
Religious morality is not particularly original, and a lot of it is disgusting. Even Jesus, that we’re encouraged to think is all about love thine enemy and turn the other cheek and little else, is made to say some appalling things by the writers of the gospels, especially John. It always horrifies me to read of, say, Muslim feminists explaining that the Koran does not in fact require female genital mutilation or the hijab or whatever other piece of female subordination is being discussed. Good, glad to hear it, but what if it did? Would you then bow your head and submit? Or would you find a better way to decide your morality.
Either the morality is good, in which case the deity is surplus to requirements, or it isn’t, in which case the deity is one we should reject. But…the point about thin gruel remains. It’s hard to think of a substitute for religion as a motivator. Literature, as with Arnold and Leavis? Rock concerts? Football? Sometimes political movements can do it. The Civil Rights movement in the US was like that, and the struggle against apartheid. Which prompts baffled thoughts about the fact that we get inspired to be our best, dedicated, self-sacrificing selves when there is a glaring injustice to be corrected…So does that mean it’s good that there should be glaring injustices? Hardly. And yet the inspiration is precisely bound up with the injustice. This is a familiar thought, but one that doesn’t get discussed much. But it’s well-known that veterans of the Civil Rights movement, like veterans of the Spanish Civil War, are nostalgic for the Cause and the ‘beloved community.’ We’re all like Don Quixote, wishing we had something noble to work for. Making a little more money isn’t quite it.
Norm Geras has a very interesting post that’s also on this overall subject. And I have a good deal to add. It’s like a hydra, all this. Every N&C suggests three or four more. Get comfortable; we may be here for awhile.
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Bonfire of the Bourgeois Vanities
In China, people of a certain generation will tell you stories about an era that might as well be a millenium ago. There are thousands of children, amassed in Shanghai’s train station, waiting for the beginning of what feels to them to be a big and important adventure. Their parents are weeping, watching their children bound towards the carriages on their way to the countryside, where – as part of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – they will spend their formative years learning from the peasants.
The kids who participated in this vast exodus are now in their forties and fifties, and most complain of the gap in their education and the wasted decade lasting from 1966 to the death of Chairman Mao in 1976. Others, usually slightly older, have been forced to live with their complicity in the Cultural Revolution, and their part in the Red Guard movement.
Those in the next generation are also the products of the Cultural Revolution. Many Shanghai residents, now approaching thirty, were born in the remote farms of northwestern and southwestern China after their parents were forced into exile. While many are reluctant to talk about it, or even unaware of its main precepts, the Cultural Revolution remains a central fact in their lives.
Near the Three Gorges Dam, there is a mausoleum to Zhang Fei, a general who fought in the Three Kingdom era about 1,700 years ago. On the first floor of the mausoleum, visitors wander through the burning incense into a room lined with lacquered wooden blocks covered in gold inscriptions. Turning the banners around, you see that the blocks have been painted red, and chipped into the paint are the litanies of the Cultural Revolution and the quotations of Mao himself. When the Red Guards marauded through the Temple in 1966, the curators sought to pre-empt them by disguising the antiquities as revolutionary documents. They sought to vandalize the relics to prevent them from being destroyed. Those were the choices that had to be made.
The items at the Zhang Fei Mausoleum survived, but many did not. Matching anything the Taliban did during its reign of terror, a swarm of revolutionaries sacked and destroyed temples, smashed sculptures to pieces and drove writers – including the great Lao She – to their deaths. This was the bonfire of bourgeois vanities, and Mao was its Savonarola. Righteous anger – the sense that you are inflicting damage and committing violence in the name of a higher good – emerges in all societies and in all ages. But why, on occasion, does it spread so widely? Why does the lynch-mob become the pogrom, or the unmarked grave become the killing field?
Much of the Mao era was dominated by unfathomable economic hardship and unbreakable political hallucination. In the higher echelons of the government, mass man-made famines were overshadowed by a surreal alternative world designed by state planners and their faked statistics. The planners were desperate to convince each other, and their superiors, that black was white and red was true and that the Revolution, by harnessing the will power of nearly a billion people, was working. The old slogan of Chinese pragmatism, “seek truth through facts”, was subordinated to the higher truth of Chairman Mao himself, the morning sun of the Chinese people. It didn’t matter that the lessons drawn from centuries of agricultural production were based on empirical experience because Maoism referred to something bigger than mere experience.
After the failure of the Great Leap Forward, that harebrained attempt to galvanize the economy and overtake the West through the establishment of thousands of communes capable of producing steel as well as grain, Chairman Mao was gradually elbowed out of the reckoning by a clique of Communist Party pragmatists led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Mao, still the symbol of the revolution, was reluctant to go, and the pragmatists no doubt hoped that if they allowed Mao to do his thing in the world of books and plays and newspapers – a purge here, a criticism there – they could then get on with rebuilding the nation’s economy after the devastating Great Leap famines. It proved, however, to be their undoing.
On the sidelines, Mao had grown frustrated. Over the next few years, and using culture as his weapon, the quintessence of the Chinese Communist Party had somehow transfigured himself into the rebel par excellence. By 1966, he had gathered thousands of students on Tian’anmen Square with the clarion call, “It is right to rebel!” The forces of counter-revolution are everywhere, he said, even in the highest levels of the Party itself, and so, he set in motion one of the biggest and most disastrous political struggles in history. Schools and hospitals were forced to close, temples and relics were destroyed, “capitalist roaders” and counter-revolutionary “cow demons” were hounded and tortured and forced to sweat out their sins doing years of back-breaking correctional labour. No one could objectively confirm what a revisionist or poisonous weed was, and so, as a result, everyone was a potential target. You might have joined every rally, destroyed every monument, and condemned every manifestation of reaction, but you might still have been denounced as a “rightist in essence”, as Mao put it.
Expertise – in any field – became a sign of decadence and “revisionism”. In the new reality, only Mao Zedong Thought could produce results. Only Mao Zedong Thought – the exaltation of pure revolutionary spirit not only above practical economics but above even nature itself – could triumph. The general will of the people – described as the Mass Line but echoing Rousseau in its assumption that a society was One – could overcome the “paper tigers” of science, nature, and truth itself. Contemporary documents show a world turned on its head, a world where Mao Zedong Thought is used to cure tumours, improve rice yields and defy gravity.
After the launch of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Mao’s supporters sought to outshine everyone else in acts of revolutionary fervour, violence and vandalism. Civil society and all its institutions had essentially collapsed, and the communist state had, paradoxically, become atomized, with marauding bands of Red Guards engaging in street battles in order to prove the strength and uniqueness of their allegiance to the Great Leader. They would compete to tear down government buildings, rip art galleries to shreds, and hold impromptu show trials for local Party officials, teachers or intellectuals. All concepts of sense or best practice went out of the window, as did many teachers, thrown through the glass by dozens of bitter but suddenly empowered adolescents. The Red Guards, desperate to emphasize their zeal, would even turn on each other, as they did at the famous battle in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in 1968, which prompted the army to intervene and restore order.
Mao’s motives were ambiguous. There was self-interest, of course, but like the old Crusaders who robbed and looted Antioch and Jerusalem in the name of the Church, Mao had managed to persuade himself that his own interests and those of the State were identical. Some authors, like Simon Leys, believe that the chaos was a smokescreen that allowed Mao and his cohorts to engineer a coup d’etat against Liu Shaoqi (arrested and left to die) and Deng Xiaoping (purged and exiled to the countryside). In any case, what proved crucial was the large swathes of Chinese youth, suddenly given the go-ahead by the biggest cheese in the land to act upon their resentments against authority figures. Mao had lost control, had let loose a force beyond even his reckoning, and by 1968, the army had to be deployed to put an end to the rioting, the looting, the mass demonstrations.
It needs to be said that the irrationality wasn’t just confined to China. While the idea that revolution could be achieved through sheer force of will was, strictly speaking, a violation of classical Marxism (with its emphasis on the transformation of productive forces), there were – according to many idealistic Leftist academics and China hands writing during the period – genuine ideological reasons behind the Cultural Revolution. The revolution had stalled, an inchoate political bureaucracy had been created, and the inexorable logic of dialectical materialism required that the new ruling class be overturned. All this was, of course, superstitious in itself, and rested on the primacy of Marxist truth. In China, however, the situation was different, and rested not even on the primacy of Maoist truth, but on the primacy of Mao himself – that irrepressible, libidinous, all-consuming Monkey King of Chinese politics. What he said, went, and what happened was extraordinary.