Author: Ophelia Benson

Robert Wright is reliably vulgar. He shows us how it’s done in a throwaway little piece in The American Prospect – one that’s smug, thought-free and pandering all at once. Rather like a piece of political advertising.

He didn’t like nerds when he was in high school. (No, I bet he didn’t.) Then somebody told him about B F Skinner.

As intellectuals go, Skinner was pretty dismissive of intellectuals — at least the ones who blathered unproductively about “freedom” and “dignity,” the ones he considered insufficiently hard-nosed and scientific.

Look, he said, people are animals. Kind of like laboratory rats, except taller.

And I stopped trying to read it. What a cheap mind, what an impoverished vocabulary, what a stale way of writing and thinking.

He became “an ardent Skinnerian.” He would. If you don’t read many books or learn about many ideas, you’re vulnerable to bad ones. If he had known more nerds in high school he might be a less bumptious writer today.

He sums up with a punchy final paragraph.

I’ve held on to the essential spirit of Skinner — which, I now see, was also the spirit of my father. By that I don’t mean anti-intellectualism as much as a bedrock pragmatism. Got a problem? Analyze it as cleanly as possible, and then, having seen its roots, solve it. And don’t waste time dropping the names of any fancy French philosophers. This is still my basic view.

Good, isn’t it – he’s so pragmatic and so butch that he hasn’t got time for pronouns, but he does have enough time to sneer at the very idea of French philosophers – “fancy” ones at that. He sounds like a parody of Archie Bunker.

Russell says Aikin and Talisse have portrayed themselves as accommodationists when they seem in fact not to be accommodationists. I thought I would corroborate that – they’re not accommodationists. They say so in their book.

[W]e do not consider ourselves to be accommodationists. We think that the religious believer’s core commitments are simply false; we also hold that adopting religious beliefs often has bad moral consequences. We stand, really, in firm opposition to religious belief and to the very idea of a supreme deity. As subsequent chapters will make clear, we are not just atheists (people who reject religious belief), but antitheists (people who think that religious belief is morally bad. [p 92]

There you go. You’ll never find an accommodationist saying that. That’s exactly the kind of thing an accommodationist won’t say, for fear that all believers will promptly enlist in the Tea Party in response.

They have “accommodationism” a bit wrong, in my view, but that doesn’t make any difference to the above avowal. They’re not apologizers; they’re not royalists; they’re not embarking on a campaign to go “tut tut tut tut tut” at atheists who think religious belief is morally bad.

They get how the bullying is done, too, which also makes them very different from accommodationists and royalists.

…the popular discussion about atheism is nearly exclusively fixed on the demeanor of the atheist. And the presumption is that openly rejecting religious belief is itself an uncivil act, and thus to be avoided. [p 70]

Not spoken like an accommodationist; do admit.

The 3Q article is really a bit misleading.

Good evening.

What does Anthony Shadid mean?

There is a fear in the West, one rarely echoed here, that Egypt’s revolution could go the way of Iran’s, when radical Islamists ultimately commandeered a movement that began with a far broader base. But the two are very different countries. In Egypt, the uprising offers the possibility of an accommodation with political Islam rare in the Arab world — that without the repression that accompanied Mr. Mubarak’s rule, Islam could present itself in a more moderate guise.

What does he mean “an accommodation with political Islam”? And why does he couple that with the different subject of a potentially moderate Islam?

Political Islam means theocracy. It means government by Islam and according to sharia; it means religion and state are one and the same. A potentially moderate Islam means just that – in this context it means that most Muslims in Egypt could adhere to a moderate version of Islam. The two things don’t go together. Theocracy can’t be “moderate”; political Islam can’t be moderate. You can have more and less vicious political Islam, but you can’t have moderate political Islam any more than you can have moderate political Catholicism or Southern Baptistism.

The Arab world has a spectrum of Islamic movements, as broad as the states that have repressed them, from the most violent in Al Qaeda to the most mainstream in Turkey. Though cast for years as an insurgent threat by Mr. Mubarak, the Brotherhood in Egypt has long disavowed its violent past, and now has a chance to present itself as something more than a force for opposition to Mr. Mubarak’s authoritarianism.

But Islamic movements are Islamist movements, and they shouldn’t be prettied up by being called “mainstream.” There is more to fear from the Muslim Brotherhood than what Shadid seems to mean by “its violent past.” (There’s the “Brotherhood” aspect just for a start. To belabor the obvious: it excludes women.)

“The people are aware this time,” said Essam Salem, a 50-year-old resident there. “They’re not going to let them seize power. People aren’t going to be deceived again. This is a popular revolution, a revolution of the youth, not an Islamic revolution.”

That’s the first hopeful note in the article. I hope it’s true, and in fact it seems highly plausible; it’s not as if the nature of Iran is a secret, nor is the fact that Iran is packed with people who would rebel if they could but prefer not to be thrown into Evin and then hanged.

While [the MB] remains deeply conservative, it engages less in sometimes frivolous debates over the veil or education and more in demands articulated by the broader society: corruption, joblessness, political freedom and human rights abuses.

Yes but that could be a smokescreen. It could be a Trojan horse. Try not to be totally naïve.

The whufflings of the science museum are still sticking in my craw, making me irritable and restless and apt to shy at sudden noises. There’s just something about them…

The fifth floor gallery, you should understand, is divided into 3, like ancient Gaul.

2 large areas called Modern Medicine and Before Modern Medicine and a smaller area called Living Medical Traditions which was updated in 2006. Within this section there is a small area devoted to ‘Personal Stories’ which show how people choose to use medical treatments from different traditions.

That’s where the whuffling begins, you see. Another term for whuffling would be PR-speak. Spot the PR-speak. It is in “how people choose to use medical treatments” and it is in “medical treatments from different traditions.” The cry of the bullshitter echoes across the plain.

You see, “Susannah” (for it is she) is nudging us into having the right attitude to all this. People choose to use bogus medical treatments so how dare we elitist westerners with our fancy westerner cars and our fancy westerner yachts try to tell people what kind of medical treatments they should be forced at gunpoint to use. They choose it, themselves, in their authentic nonwesterner way, and that is rather beautiful, so who are you. The medical treatments they choose to use are from different traditions, just like totems and song lines and the most beautiful baskets you ever saw, so how dare we scientistic westerners with our scalpels and our carbon 14 dating and our slide rules try to say they don’t work. They are from different traditions, which are authentic and nonwestern and beautiful, so aren’t you ashamed. The medical treatments they choose to use from different traditions are medical treatments, because it says so right there between “choose” and “different traditions,” so go back to your penthouse on 5th Avenue and leave the poor Other alone.

See what I mean? It’s that kind of thing. It’s that sly way of smuggling in stupid pseudo-enlightened multicultural vocabulary as a way of signaling to people that they are stomping on about ten taboos. It’s that sly way of conveying that you’re saying something old hat and colonialist and suspect. It’s that sly way of patting themselves on the back for treating woo as if it were genuine medical treatments.

Then there’s the exhibit itself, with its generous display of the same kind of thing.

Around the world, medical traditions coexist, interact, compete and combine.

Here we describe local cases where individuals have chosen treatments from more than one medical tradition. Some visit practitioners who mix knowledge and techniques from different sources.

Individuals choose a practitioner for many reasons.

See it all? There’s a lot. I’ll mark it for you.

Around the world, medical traditions coexist, interact, compete and combine.

Here we describe local cases where individuals have chosen treatments from more than one medical tradition. Some visit practitioners who mix knowledge and techniques from different sources.

Individuals choose a practitioner for many reasons.

On the one hand it’s all totally legit, it’s practitioners with knowledge and techniques providing medical treatment; on the other hand it’s around the world, so the traditions both compete, on account of they’re different, and coexist and combine, on account of they’re compatible (just like science ‘n’ religion you know). Either way it’s all great stuff, and individuals choose it, so don’t you stand there glowering at us for displaying nonsense as if it were sciencey evidence-based medicine. We can if we want to.

The museum’s official statement is even worse.

[W]e take an anthropological and sociological perspective on medical practices. We reflect patient experience in a global setting. We do not evaluate different medical systems, but demonstrate the diversity of medical practices and theoretical frameworks currently thriving across the world.

Which, since the Science Museum is the Science Museum, is a frank and unabashed abdication of responsibility. The “different” “medical systems” aren’t all medical systems and don’t all belong in a science museum, so the museum’s proudly announcing that they don’t evaluate them but just demonstrate their “diversity” instead is…pathetic.

But oh well – I shouldn’t let it annoy me. After all, it’s not as if medicine makes any difference to anything.

Yes but it’s worrying that there were so few women in Tahrir Square.

Cairo is notoriously hellish for women. That’s not a good sign for the future. They need to fix that. Women need to get out there and play their part (and that means half, not a bit part); men need to treat them like fellow citizens and equals, not like flowers or prostitutes. Women need to get out there and make sure this isn’t a revolution run by men.

Women need to grab and keep their share of the power and the conversation. If they have their share, it will be that much harder for clerics and Islamists to take over.

Update: a reader sent an optimistic article:

Egyptian women often shun crowded public places, fearing the pervasive sexual harassment that is the norm here. Simply walking down a Cairo street can be an ordeal of catcalls, pinching and unwanted propositions. But women attending the protests reported being treated with an unaccustomed respect.

Brilliant. That’s how it should work – people treat each other as equals united against the oppressive regime.