Author: Ophelia Benson

Here is a review of what sounds like a very strange book by a ‘New Democrat’ (i.e. a Democrat so conservative he might as well be a Republican) and adviser to Clinton named William Galston. He wraps himself in the cloak of Isaiah Berlin, the reviewer Stephen Macedo wittily remarks, in an effort to make a case for ‘value pluralism’; but it sounds more like Balkanization and desecularization. Particularly bizarre and indeed alarming is the fact that he condemns the U.S. Supreme Court for striking down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was written so broadly as to give religious groups the ability to challenge any law that imposed an ‘undue burden’.

The review is particulary sharp with the all-too fashionable idea that the US is too secular and not accomodating enough to religion.

Galston and others who support RFRA evidently believe that liberals have not been sufficiently respectful and accommodating toward religious groups and other kinds of cultural communities…As a general proposition, this claim seems to me astonishing. America is an extraordinarily religious country by any plausible measure. Politicians fall over one another in affirming their religious faith and courting religious voters.

Indeed they do, until one begins to think that atheists are the only truly insufficiently respected group in the country. Perhaps I’ll write a book.

This is an essay that talks (among other things) about the convergence of two subjects (if not more) that keep coming up here: the fashion for biographies of intellectuals–poets, philosophers, historians, scientists–that dwell lovingly on prurient personal details and skip lightly over the ideas and thought and books that are why the people are interesting to begin with; and the dominance of identity politics over every other kind.

The fixation on biography, particularly when it is mixed with interpretive suspicion, suggests a retreat from philosophy’s aspiration to truth; we wallow in the particular and revel in salacious detail, whether it be Wittgenstein’s homosexuality, A. J. Ayer’s promiscuity, Foucault’s “sadomasochistic” experimentations in the gay subculture, Dewey’s sexual shyness, or Hannah Arendt’s affair with Martin Heidegger. The ease with which moral judgments are passed on the lives and passions of others and the titillation derived from cutting intellectual giants down to size are indicative of our own culture. Citizens in a republic of voyeurs, we are intent on microscopic moralism, incapable of appreciating more gracefully the contradictions, tensions, and ragged edges of all lives and unwilling to take ideas seriously, as something more than bandages for personal wounds.

Just so. There is a very interesting passage where Benhabib questions the way Richard Wolin takes his subjects to task for being ‘assimilated’ Jews, for not being ‘authentic’ Jews, and says that his analysis suggests a disturbingly fixed idea of ‘authentic’ Jewish life. Indeed. It is after all possible to be Jewish, or a woman or a Muslim or gay or Nicaraguan or what you will, and still not be consumingly interested in the fact. It is possible, in fact, to be intensely interested in other things, in a wider world than one’s own race or gender or religion, to be fascinated with stars or rocks or molluscs or maps or Louis XIV or Keats or topology, instead of being interested in one’s own parochial roots. It is a terrible claustrophobic oppressive stifling ghettoization that the identity-enforcers want to thrust on everyone, a narrow Balkanized world they want us all to live in, brandishing our ‘identities’ at each other and boring each other to death.

Here is a very silly essay from Slate. Note the rhetoric, for one thing, the talk of atheists ‘trumpeting’ their beliefs, and the truculent demand for an explanation, as if atheism required more explanation than theism does. Note the failure to define what is meant by ‘God’. Note the default assumption that belief is normal and that it’s unbelief that requires justification. Note the circularity of the argument that non-believers have some ‘splaining to do because Garry Wills doesn’t agree with them. And note the resort to the often-cited ‘cosmic deists’ such as Paul Davies. Holt doesn’t trouble to point out that Davies is very much in a minority among physicists in drawing deist conclusions from his work. And then there is the even more obligatory mention of quantum something (theory, here, but almost any abstract noun will do). A nice little exercise in mass market PoMo for the holidays, how festive.

Confused and unfounded guesswork. Crude and offensive speculation.

So says the RC Bishop of Portsmouth, the Right Reverend Crispian Hollis, about a BBC documentary focussing on the life of The Virgin Mary.

But, alas, the really not right at all, Mr Hollis, is not talking about the nonsense of the virgin birth, the resurrection, Angels, wise men and talking snakes, but rather the questioning of these things.

Confusion indeed.

Rhetoric everywhere. You can’t let your guard down for an instant, no rest for the wicked, hypervigilance is the price of accuracy, and so on. Just tweak one or two little words and you can guide your readers so very subtly in what they’re meant to think, without having to come right out and tell them. This is a story from the Observer about genetics.

The nature versus nurture debate revived from the Sixties, when it had revolved around IQ and had bitter, racial overtones. This time around, it was less to do with race but no less bitter, with genetic fundamentalists such as Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins arguing that ‘the answer lies in our genes’. Opponents, such as media psychologist Oliver James, defended more flexible accounts of human behaviour.

See how it’s done? Just call the people you disagree with ‘fundamentalists’ and the other people ‘flexible’. Simple really. Dawkins and Pinker are in fact not ‘fundamentalists’, they’re just orthodox, middle of the road Darwinians. And Oliver James’ refusal even to listen to genetic explanations (witness his one-man shouting match on Radio 4 in October) is not conspicuous for its flexibility. Ah well. It’s all grist for the rhetoric guide.

Here is an interesting little item I turned up in my never-ending quest for material for Butterflies and Wheels. The author is a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, which is a somewhat staggering fact in light of this article. He is also the author of a highly unfavorable 1997 review of The Flight From Science and Reason in the American magazine Science, which provoked such outrage that the book editor of Science resigned. So we know what to expect, and we get it. Rhetoric, rhetoric, and more rhetoric, and a procession of outrageous assertions. I am tempted to quote and quote, but you can read the piece for yourselves. Perhaps just one or two…

…the more sophisticated paladins of transcendent science…recognize their want of ‘affirmative defenses’ of the quintessential truth of scientific facts and concepts, and for this very reason have limited themselves largely to ridiculing particular expositions and expositors of a heresy that they are unable generally to refute. When, rarely, they do come forth with an argument to demonstrate the innate superiority of the knowledge produced on their side of the chasm, it is invariably an appeal to the wondrousness of contemporary technology.

Needless to say, in turning away from that unconditioned “scientific truth” so prized by Clark Kerr’s Berkeley scientists, away from unconditioned truth generally, postmodernity ceases to regard Truth as a prime value. No longer is truthfulness expected anywhere in our culture, and its breach is regarded as excusable in any circumstance covered by a moral intent and guided by a sense of responsibility.

It’s funny, I don’t recall ever reading a scientist calling truth ‘transcendent’, or even capitalizing it; it seems to be only the critics who ever do either of those, as if sneering could do the work of argument. But maybe that’s yet another of the joys of our ‘step into postmodernity’.

There was an interesting article in the New York Times a few days ago about the way the human mind constructs explanations for everything, frequently out of whole cloth. Mood shifts that are caused by diurnal changes in hormone levels are explained as job stress and evening relaxation or alternatively as job interest and evening boredom. Whatever works. Stimulate a piece of the brain electrically to cause a laugh, and the laugher will find something amusing in the environment. Tell Freud a story, any story, and he’ll concoct a sexual etiology for it.

The article is written by a therapist who frankly admits that therapists “are, after all, hardly exempt from the need to create satisfying cause-and-effect story lines. Quite the contrary.” True enough, and the side effects of some of those stories have become well known in recent years. It is interesting to get an idea of how the confabulation process works, and refreshing to see a therapist admit to it.