Author: Ophelia Benson

How to get into the newspapers: say something fatuous and self-regarding and preeningly righteous.

Second-year dental student Emily Mackie said the university’s decision to call its inaugural Dundee Christmas Lecture “Why Evolution is Right … and Creationism is Wrong” is badly timed and insensitive to Christians.

And this makes it into a newspaper because…nothing ever happens in Dundee? Too chilly up there is it?

But since it did make it into a newspaper, I can’t resist looking at it.

The lecture is being given by Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College, London, who claims that all biologists support the theory of evolution and that “intelligent design”—the belief that life was created as part of a divine plan—is wrong.

He ‘claims’ that, does he? Goes right out on a limb and claims that? Imagine. (Steve Jones wrote a little something for B&W once you know – he contributed to the group article on the decision in the Kitzmiller case. ‘Up the Joneses,’ he said, amusingly, celebrating Judge John Jones, Bush appointee and sensible judge.)

Miss Mackie, who is also a member of Dundee University’s Christian Union—reckons the lecture will create divisions rather than bring the community together. She said, “I appreciate that the role of a university is to encourage academic debate on a wide range of sometimes controversial issues. However, as a Christian I am offended that the lecture purporting to coincide with such an important Christian festival has so clearly been chosen to antagonise Christians.

‘As a Christian I am offended’ – there’s one of the worst, most repellent formulas in the discourse of complaint we have today – but boy is it popular. Variations of it were all over Nova’s ‘Judgment Day’: one stalwart citizen of Dover after another talking about being offended. I think that was the first thing the awful Bill Buckingham said – ‘I am personally offended by evolution because the Bible etc etc etc’ – the ‘personally’ was a nice annoying touch. So you’re ‘personally’ offended by reality, so what! The world doesn’t revolve around you, so suck it up.

And by the way the ‘such an important Christian festival’ is codswallop, as Mackie ought to know. It’s an important shopping and eating and air travel festival, it’s not genuinely Christian at all; it has nothing real to do with Christianity (surely she’s heard about the ancient solstice festival?), so she has even less business being offended.

“I also feel that the lecture title allows no scope for a balanced debate on the subject. I call on the university to take a moral stand and choose a new title which better reflects the celebration of the birth of Christ.”

What would that be? “Happy Birthday Baby Jesus: Why Evolution is Right … and Creationism is Wrong”?

Dundee University said its decision to book Professor Jones for its Christmas lecture was “opportunistic” as he is a highly sought after speaker who could only be available at this time…“However, I would deny that we have put opportunism over sensitivity as I think this will provide an opportunity for all sides of the argument to be aired.”

That’s another one – it’s like the mirror-image of ‘offended.’ It’s what you’re supposed to run to the closet and fetch when someone is offended – sensitivity. They’re a co-dependent couple, those two words. Offended and sensitivity; they’re like egg and chips, apple and pears, Ben and Jerry’s. But all the same, there is something very stomach-turning about the idea that a university is supposed to deploy ‘sensitivity’ about the organ of offendedness in godbothering students when planning its lectures on academic subjects.

Timothy Garton Ash gets it wrong, I think.

He gets it wrong in one rather specific way.

In the form “Islamofascism”, and with the added spice of references to “totalitarianism”, the label elides two things that need to be kept separate. One is the mentality of death-seeking and death-delivering fanatics. The other is a totalitarian political system…Now, if nuclear-armed Pakistan and oil-rich Saudi Arabia fall the wrong way, we could be there sooner than we think – but at the moment the only serious contender for the title of Islamic-fascist state is the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Has he been paying enough attention to Saudi Arabia? It’s not a whole lot more benign than Iran. In some ways it has a much firmer grip. I would say it’s a contender.

But the other way is broader.

Most Islamic terrorists are, in some sense, Islamists, but most Islamists are not terrorists. They are reactionaries. They propose a profoundly conservative religious vision of society which, in its attitudes to free speech, apostasy, homosexuality and women, is generally anathema to secular liberal convictions (including, emphatically, my own). But for the most part they do so through peaceful political means, not through violence.

It’s very hard not to make a cheap point about the sentimental views of people who are so sheltered and safe themselves that they can’t even see how things are for other people. It is ludicrous to say that religious reactionaries ‘propose’ their profoundly conservative religious vision of society through peaceful political means – of course they don’t! They don’t propose it, they impose it, wherever they have the power to do that, which is of course at home. They don’t just propose that their daughters shouldn’t see the wrong boys or that their sons had better not be fags or that ‘apostasy’ is forbidden to everyone; they impose all those mandates, and if they are not submitted to, the response is indeed sometimes violence. Surely it’s not a newsflash that religious reactionaries do coerce people when they can and do sometimes resort to violence when they’re resisted? In fact violence of that kind is quite explicitly celebrated in some Christianist writing – that’s an important part of what is affectionately called ‘traditional values.’ One of those traditional values is the importance of corporal punishment of children.

Garton Ash is dreaming if he thinks that peaceful political means are compatible with reactionary religion. Reactionary religion is first and foremost about coercion; that is the essential point of it; that is what makes it reactionary. It is not liberal, it is not about choice, it is not about reasoned debate and free speech and leaving each other alone as long as we do no harm; it is about the opposite of all of those. That’s why it’s hell; that’s why we hate and fear it; that’s why theocracy is anathema. It’s a mistake to minimize it.