Author: Ophelia Benson

Jerry Coyne’s post on Francis Collins versus Primo Levi on theodicy prompted me to read Survival in Auschwitz again. So I am. I read this passage earlier today, on p 41, in which Levi reports something another prisoner told him:

…precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent.

A couple of days ago I read a passage in Lauren Slater’s Inside Skinner’s Box. The book is about various famous experiments in psychology, and it starts with probably the most famous of all, the Milgram experiment. Slater talks to two men who took part in the experiment in the early 60s, one who didn’t fully obey but stopped at 150 volts, and one who went all the way to the end. The latter, when he was debriefed at the end of the experiment, was horrified. “You thought you were really giving shocks, and nothing can take away from you the knowledge of how you acted. There’s no turning back.”

So Slater asks him, “I would guess you think the experiments were essentially unethical, that they caused you harm.”

No, he replies. No. “Not at all. If anything, just the opposite.”

She stares at him.

“The experiments,” he continues, “caused me to reevalute my life. They caused me to confront my own compliance and really struggle with it. I began to see closeted homosexuality, which is just another form of compliance, as a moral issue. I came out. I saw how important it was to develop a strong moral center. I felt my own moral weakness and I was appalled…I saw how pathetically vulnerable I was to authority, so I kept a strict eye on myself and learned to buck expectations.” [p 60]

Those two passages seem to me to be saying essentially the same thing, and a very important thing it is.

Poor bishop. He may have just meant something like ‘Take the Taliban seriously,’ but he said more than that.

There’s a large number of things that the Taliban say and stand for which none of us in the west could approve, but simply to say therefore that everything they do is bad is not helping the situation because it’s not honest really. The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other.”

Yes but…pretty much everything they do that is relevant to this discussion is bad. They probably manage to sleep and scratch itches in ways that are not bad, but their public activities are bad. They do bad things. They treat people badly. Life under them is harsh and deprived and subject to violence.

And they cannot and should not be admired for their conviction to their faith, because their faith is narrow and cruel and misogynist, and because it motivates them to treat people like so much dust for a god to sweep. They cannot and should not be admired for their loyalty to each other because that is simply the obverse of their muderous hatred of everyone else. It’s slightly bizarre to see a bishop failing to understand this – it seems so obvious and elementary and essential to understand.

“To blanket them all as evil and paint them as black is not helpful in a very complex situation.” Bishop Venner said that everyone in Afghanistan, including the Taliban, would have to be included in discussions to find a solution to the conflict. “Afghanistan is going we hope in the end to find a way to live together with justice and prosperity for all. In order to do that we have to involve all the people of Afghanistan to find it.”

Yes, we hope, but if the Taliban are part of that, ‘justice’ will be ruled out, so pious hopes are worth nothing. Maybe some or many or most current Taliban can be turned, can become reasonable and fair and peaceable – but they have to be turned. A Taliban that remains the Taliban is not going to lead to a way to live together with justice and prosperity for all. That would be like (as many people have been telling the bishop) like expecting Nazis to do that. It’s not a question of painting people as black, it’s a question of understanding what a particular ideology is. An ideology that is centrally about coercion and bullying and death-for-the-noncompliant isn’t one that is going to become its own opposite merely because the bombing stops.

Sad.

[T]he Qur’an’s message of equality resonated in the teaching that women and men have been created from a single self and are each other’s guides who have the mutual obligation to enjoin what is right and to forbid what is wrong. But, then, there are those other verses that Muslims read as saying that men are better than women and their guardians and giving men the right to unfettered polygyny and even to beat a recalcitrant wife. To read the Qur’an in my youth was thus to be caught up in a seemingly irresolvable and agonizing dilemma of how to reconcile these two sets of verses not just with one another but also with a view of God as just, consistent, merciful, and above sexual partisanship.

Right. And the solution is to realize that the Qur’an is a book like other books, and that one is free to take from it what one admires and ignore or dispute the rest; that, indeed, one is free to ignore all of it. That is the only real solution, because anything short of that commits one to paltering with bad harmful unjust ideas.

It has taken the better part of my life to resolve this dilemma and it has involved learning (from the discipline of hermeneutics) that language–hence interpretation—is not fixed or transparent and that the meanings of a text change depending on who interprets it and how.

It’s too bad that it took so long, and that so much effort was wasted, but anyway, yes, of course. Language and interpretation are human, and therefore fallible and subject to change, and there is no requirement to take any of it as sacred and beyond criticism or alteration. That’s all there is to it – so there’s really no need to fret about how to interpret the Qur’an, or any other book.

Most Muslims, however, are unconvinced by this argument and it may be because viewing God’s speech (thus also God) as patriarchal allows the conservatives to justify male privilege…

Ya think? But at any rate, that is why all this hermeneutics is a waste of time and effort. Believe in a just god if you like, but don’t waste your energy trying to reconcile a centuries-old patriarchal book with your own view of sexual equality.

Pathetic that the New Statesman thinks it’s worth wasting time and effort on such an enterprise.

The archbishop is miffed. He’s irritated, he’s annoyed, he’s wounded, he’s upset. He thinks it’s all a mistake. He can’t understand, he just can’t understand.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has accused the Government of treating all religious believers as “oddities” and “eccentric”. Dr Rowan Williams said ministers were wrong to think that Christian beliefs were no longer relevant in modern Britain and he criticised Labour for looking at religious faith as a “problem” rather than valuing the contribution it made to society.

But whether religious beliefs are ‘relevant’ or not is not the only issue, nor is it necessarily the most important one. ‘Relevant’ is notoriously a weasel-word anyway – it’s really just a stand-in for majority will. Christian beliefs may or may not be ‘relevant,’ but that has nothing to do with whether or not they are true, or justified, or reasonable. Truth and reason are also still ‘relevant’ in modern Britain, and Christian beliefs are in considerable tension with both. The archbishop could pay more attention to that fact, but of course his job calls for him to conceal it rather than address it.

Dr Williams told The Daily Telegraph: “The trouble with a lot of Government initiatives about faith is that they assume it is a problem, it’s an eccentricity, it’s practised by oddities, foreigners and minorities.”

The archbishop has glimpsed a truth here, but of course it is part of his job to conceal the real nature of that truth. ‘Faith’ is an eccentricity in the sense that it is a flawed way to think and inquire. It’s not an eccentricity in the sense of being a minority practice, but it is an eccentricity in the sense of being off-center, mistaken, wrong. Naturally the archbish doesn’t want to admit that – but he could just keep quiet, instead of trying to bully the government into coddling this mistaken way of thinking.