Author: Ophelia Benson

The library produced Nussbaum’s Liberty of Conscience for me yesterday so I’ve read some of it and I must say, I was surprised – it’s way worse than I expected. I think it’s terrible – and it’s also extremely irritating. Tooth-grindingly irritating.

We talked about an interview in which she discussed the book with Bill Moyers last April and then we discussed it some more a couple of days later. I was critical of what she’d said then but I also gave her the benefit of the doubt on a lot of things. My mistake. She does mean what I said I thought she didn’t mean. (I see that H E Baber commented on the second post, which is interesting because I was just reading The Enlightenment Project (Baber’s blog) to see if she had commented on Nussbaum’s book, having forgotten that she’d commented here. Baber is not a fan of Nussbaum’s work. I’m feeling pretty inclined to give up on Nussbaum myself now.

The wheels come off on the very first page, where she tells us about the Pilgrims in Massachusetts who faced all those dangers ‘in order to be able to worship God freely in their own way,’ and then says we rarely reflect on the ‘real meaning’ of that story: ‘that religious liberty is very important to people.’

Very pretty, but who says that is the real meaning of that story? I don’t think it is. I think what is very important to people is their own religious liberty, not religious liberty in general. But that’s not what Nussbaum wants us to think, so it’s not what she says, even though she does say on the very next page that the lesson of the pilgrims is easily forgotten and that ‘the early settlers themselves soon forgot it, establishing their own repressive orthodoxy which others fled in turn.’ Nonsense; they didn’t forget it; it was never what they meant; or at least there’s damn little reason to think it is what they meant and a lot of reason to think they meant what I said – their own religious liberty, but not everyone’s. How does Nussbaum know that’s not what they wanted all along? She doesn’t say. Maybe she learned the ‘religious liberty’ thing in the fourth grade and has never noticed how unlikely it is and how badly it fits the known facts.

And the whole damn book is like that, so far as I’ve read (and I’ve sampled as well as reading from the beginning). Pious, sentimental, evasive, and woefully incomplete – and that’s putting it politely. Nussbaum uses the word ‘deeply’ about once on every page, along with words like ‘precious’ and ‘profound’ and ‘meaning’ and ‘noble’ and other slushy emotive words, and she makes claims that are ‘deeply’ unconvincing. Her overall claim is that religious liberty is important because people value religion because it is how they ‘search for meaning.’ But is that why? It seems to be why for some people, but is it for all of them? Not as far as I know. I think lots of people value religion for other reasons. I also think the ‘search’ idea is terribly sentimental and incomplete and manipulative. Not all religious people are engaged in any ‘search,’ to put it mildly: a lot of them are quite convinced that there’s no need to search because they’ve already found, and they’re quite certain about what it is they’ve found, too. This ‘search for meaning’ gives a pretty picture of a lot of inquiring curious open-minded people rummaging around looking for meaning, but that simply ignores the importance of dogma and authority and orthodoxy and literalism and Absolute Truth.

Nussbaum keeps insisting on how respectful she is and how important it is to be respectful (that’s another word that crops up on just about every page), but she oozes condescension.

Not again.

The systematic demonisation of Muslims has become an important part of the central narrative of the British political and media class; it is so entrenched, so much part of normal discussion, that almost nobody notices. Protests go unheard and unnoticed.

No it hasn’t; no it isn’t; no they don’t.

As a community, British Muslims are relatively powerless. There are few Muslim MPs, there has never been a Muslim cabinet minister, no mainstream newspaper is owned by a Muslim and, as far as we are aware, only one national newspaper has a regular Muslim columnist on its comment pages, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of The Independent.

What does it mean to be powerless as a community? What is a community? Who decides? What is not a community? Who decides that? How many dentist MPs are there? Has there ever been an engineer cabinet minister? Is any mainstream newspaper owned by a computer programmer? Or what about chess players? Fans of Herodotus? Bird watchers?

Why are people supposed to be powerful as a community and what does that mean and who decides and what are the criteria? Is it possible that this way of thinking is stupid and parochial and ill-advised? Swap ‘Christian’ for ‘Muslim’ and it can look downright insane. So why is it any saner when used of a different religion? Why is it considered right-on to conflate one religion with a ‘community’ when it’s not at all right-on to conflate a different religion with a ‘community’? Or, in short, why don’t people think about what they’re saying?

Islamophobia – defined in 1997 by the landmark report from the Runnymede Trust as “an outlook or world-view involving an unfounded dread and dislike of Muslims, which results in practices of exclusion and discrimination” – can be encountered in the best circles: among our most famous novelists, among newspaper columnists, and in the Church of England.

That’s the key move, of course, but it’s also the stupidest. The landmark report from the Runnymede Trust can define any old thing any old way it wants to; that doesn’t make it a valid definition; and people have been pointing out and pointing out and pointing out that that’s a bad and deceitful and misleading definition. If you want a word for ‘an unfounded dread and dislike of Muslims’ then it would have to be Muslimophobia, not Islamophobia; Islamophobia means – this is too obvious even to say, but there’s the Mail columnist (eh?) getting it wrong – dread and dislike of Islam.

Its appeal is wide-ranging. “I am an Islamophobe,” the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee wrote in The Independent nearly 10 years ago. “Islamophobia?” the Sunday Times columnist Rod Liddle asks rhetorically in the title of a recent speech, “Count me in”. Imagine Liddle declaring: “Anti-Semitism? Count me in”, or Toynbee claiming she was “an anti-Semite and proud of it”.

No, no, no, no, no, no. Bad Peter Oborne. No. It’s not the same thing, it’s not comparable, it’s not parallel. Surely you understand that. Islam is a religion, with particular ideas and rules; we are all allowed to dislike it. Semitism is not a religion. Don’t. be. silly.

Its practitioners say Islamophobia cannot be regarded as the same as anti-Semitism because the former is hatred of an ideology or a religion, not Muslims themselves. This means there is no social, political or cultural protection for Muslims: as far as the British political, media and literary establishment is concerned the normal rules of engagement are suspended.

No it doesn’t. It’s quite common to distinguish between Muslims and Islam. Go play war games with your Martin Amis and Ian McEwan dolls.

There was a call for papers on the Women’s Studies List yesterday, for a Women’s and Gender Studies conference in March 2009 in conjunction with an Association I hadn’t heard of before, called the Association of Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, Metaphysics, and Science Studies. That’s a lot of things to be in one Association, especially when they’re all plural. Out in the conventional world of course there’s just epistemology, but this Association gets to have lots of them (of the Feminist variety). One wonders how that works. One also wonders what this Association is like.

FEMMSS (Feminist Epistemologies, Metaphysics, Methodology and Science Studies) continues to be concerned about the importance and difficulty of
translating knowledge into action and practice. Ours is a highly interdisciplinary group of feminist scholars who pursue knowledge questions at the interstices of
epistemology, methodology, metaphysics, ontology, and science and technology studies.

Ah, that’s what it’s like. Wordy, jargony, self-admiring, and – clueless. It apparently doesn’t even know what ‘interstices’ means – it seems to think it’s a more elegant version of ‘intersections.’ Anyway, what the hell would an intersection or an interstice ‘of epistemology, methodology, metaphysics, ontology, and science and technology studies’ be? What on earth is that absurd formula supposed to mean? Anything? Does this highly interdisciplinary group of feminist scholars know anything about all those subjects, or is it just deploying vocabulary?

FEMMSS 3 seeks to deepen the understanding of the politics of knowledge in light of the increasing pressures of globalization, neoliberal
restructuring, and militarization. Calling an array of theoretical frameworks including transnational feminism, post-colonial theory, cultural studies, epistemologies of ignorance, feminist epistemologies, and feminist science studies, this conference works to understand the ways in which knowledge is politically constituted and its material affects on people’s lives. The politics of knowledge can be discerned through the allocation and the appropriation of intellectual and natural resources, through the allocation of research funding, the control and commodification of the health sciences and health care by multinational corporations, and the
dominance of Western knowledge over that of the Two-Thirds world. Furthermore, the politics of knowledge can be seen in the way groups and
communities actively resist troubling affects (sic) of knowledge production through grass-roots organizations such as the Third World Network, community
action groups, the citizens’ science movement, environmental justice groups, and the various women’s health movements.

Why do I get the feeling that one can figure out in advance what the ‘array of theoretical frameworks’ will end up understanding? I guess because that paragraph pretty much says it will. Why does that paragraph make me feel slightly ill? I guess because I think every single one of the cited ‘theoretical frameworks’ is tendentious bullshit rather than any kind of scholarship or inquiry – that’s why. (What the fuck is ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ you wonder? Google it. I can’t bring myself to go into it. It’s a phrase some guy used in a paper once [no, excuse me, he ‘introduced’ it] that people latched onto with squawks of glee as if it were the key to all mythologies, the way they always do, the sheep.) Because if I really wanted to know something about the politics of knowledge and globalization I wouldn’t go to someone in postcolonial theory or cultural studies to find out.

Whose Knowledge Matters?
How do class, gender, race and ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and other formations of difference shape what counts as expertise, what questions are
considered relevant, and which outcomes emerge from clashes and negotiations between different forms of expertise?
How have epistemologies of ignorance emerged as important conceptual and political approaches to not only reveal patterns of active unknowing, but
also to point to strategies for resistance?

And so on. Do you feel a keen curiosity to know the answer to those questions? I’m guessing you don’t. I know I don’t. I’m confident they’ll be all too familiar, and written in a style all too similar to the style of the questions themselves, and above all predetermined by the questions themselves.

‘Feminist Epistemologies’ is a genyoowine academic subject though, don’t you think it isn’t.

Mainstream epistemology seeks to found universal theories of Truth, to develop the means to achieving objectivity, and to discover a deep structure of human language and an intelligible reality. Feminist epistemologists, on the other hand, argue that knowledge is always partial, situated, and embodied. In this course, we will study several themes and theories of knowledge developed by feminists working out of analytic, pragmatist, continental, queer and postcolonial contexts: standpoint theories, situated knowledges, the matrix of power/knowledge, the workings of epistemic privilege, the pragmatist link between knowledge and action, and the role of emotions, embodiment, and desire in knowledge.

There’s mainstream epistemology, and then there’s Feminist Epistemology (except when there are Feminist Epistemologies). To put it another way, there’s rational and then there’s raving bat-loony. There’s even a course in Feminist Theory: Epistemologies of Ignorance. It’s about reading memoirs. They use the word ‘Epistemologies’ in the title so that it will sound more academic-like. Or something.

You did enjoy the ‘American Family Association’ story I hope. I know I did.

AFA apparently has implemented a policy of substituting “homosexual” whenever the word “gay” appears in wire stories that appear on its website. That resulted in a fantastic write-up of this weekend’s Olympic track and field trials, which were dominated by sprinter Tyson Gay.

Like so:

Tyson Homosexual was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has…Homosexual qualified for his first Summer Games team and served notice he’s certainly someone to watch in Beijing. “It means a lot to me,” the 25-year-old Homosexual said. “I’m glad my body could do it, because now I know I have it in me.”…Wearing a royal blue uniform with red and white diagonal stripes across the front, along with matching shoes, all in a tribute to 1936 Olympic star Jesse Owens, Homosexual dominated the competition.

Heeheeheeheeheeheeheeheehee gasp heeheeheeheeheeheeheehee gasp gigglegigglegiggle choke.

God bless the ‘American Family Association’ and God bless America.

I’m a sucker for sudden releases from captivity. Well who isn’t. I feel sheepish, because it’s so obvious, but what the hell. I’m a sucker for reunions, too. You get your release from captivity and your reunion together – well there you go. I’m glad Bettancourt is free, I’m glad she looks so much healthier than she did last November.

Funny, it was almost exactly a year ago – a year ago tomorrow – that Alan Johnston was suddenly released, and I was a sucker then too.

There are other captives though.