Author: Ophelia Benson

Interesting. I’m told that Why Truth Matters was scheduled to be discussed on Classic FM this evening, on Newsnight. I don’t know though, I tried the Listen Again button but although I got the player and clicked on the sound button, I couldn’t get it to play. In the unlikely event that anyone is interested, there it is. (In the even more unlikely event that anyone would like to transcribe it for me, do feel free!)

Update: dear kind Arnaud did a transcript for me. (Or perhaps he simply made it up; it’s certainly pleasing enough to be a fantasy.) Merci, Arnaud.

John Brunning: Well next stop, Chris, a book on a subject I know is dear to your heart.

Chris Powling: Very much so. It’s called Why Truth Matters. It’s by Ophelia Benson & Jeremy Stangroom. Now, they are a couple of philosophers and they are taking on a subject which I have been turning in my mind for many years now. 25 years ago I took an allegedly, once again that very useful word, literature course which turned out actually to be about cod philosophy. We were talking about deconstructionism and postmodernism and relativism and all these “-isms”, most of which I suspected at the time were codswallop. So do Ophelia and Jeremy, thank goodness, and in WTM they are establishing the case for good, old-fashioned rationality. You need to get your facts right, you need to get your logic right and you need to put the two together in a valid argument. About time too, say I.

John Brunning : So not just a fascinating but also an important one, you’d say?

Chris Powling : I think it’s hugely important because of course what it does, really, is challenge the lazy notion that we can all construct our own truths and they are all equally valid, that a religious fundamentalist for instance is as likely to be right as an Oxbridge philosopher, which I think is an absolute nonsense, a complete nonsense and they expose it for what it is. What this book is, I think, is a redevelopment of that old 18th century enlightenment which had rather gone out of fashion. It’s good to see it back.

Rape is used as a weapon of war. Cath Elliot thinks bishops and their churches ought to ponder that fact a little more deeply.

What the bishop and his church fail to understand is that forcing a woman to continue with a pregnancy against her will is a continuation of the violence against her. It doesn’t matter how much empathy and support is on offer, at the end of the day it is the woman, not the church, who is faced with the reality of an unwanted child…When they occur as part of an armed conflict, forced pregnancy and forced maternity are regarded as war crimes and are breaches of the Geneva convention.

But no matter – there’s always someone around to give them a nice soothing pat, so that’s all right then.

Why should Amnesty now leave its traditional focus and take up a position supporting abortion? It is not a hands-on welfare body dealing with cases on the ground. Those women who have suffered the horror and indignity of rape will not be short of pastoral care from a range of humanitarian groups.

So no problem about forcing them to carry and bear a child implanted in them by their attacker. They won’t be short of pastoral care, so that takes care of that.

Unborn children also have human rights. In a country like ours, in which almost 200,000 unborn growing children are killed every year, there should be a debate about abortion. It has to be and is a very serious moral issue, not just for Catholics.

There are no ‘unborn children’; there’s no such thing as an unborn child; mawkish language-manipulation is no substitute for argument. Notice the bluntness where it serves the purpose and the triple mawkish denialism where it suits that purpose – unborn growing children are killed. No; foetuses are aborted; not the same thing as killing growing children. If it’s such a serious moral issue, then address it seriously, not with tricks.

And it’s not all that serious anyway. It’s worked up, rather than serious. A serious moral issue is what happens to women and girls in DRC and Darfur, not what happens to foetuses. Get your priorities straight.

But with the Vatican’s example at hand, how can Catholics get their priorities straight?

The gravity of the problem comes from the fact that in certain cases, perhaps in quite a considerable number of cases, by denying abortion one endangers important values to which it is normal to attach great value, and which may sometimes even seem to have priority. We do not deny these very great difficulties. It may be a serious question of health, sometimes of life or death, for the mother…We proclaim only that none of these reasons can ever objectively confer the right to dispose of another’s life, even when that life is only beginning.

Even if it’s a question of life or death for the mother. She has no right to choose her own life over that of an embryo or a foetus. Furthermore –

The movement for the emancipation of women, insofar as it seeks essentially to free them from all unjust discrimination, is on perfectly sound ground…But one cannot change nature. Nor can one exempt women, any more than men, from what nature demands of them.

Really? What if nature demands of them that they get infected by a virus or a bacterium, and die? Can one not exempt women, or men, from that demand? Do all Catholics abstain from all medical treatment? What if nature demands of them that they be cold because it’s cold, or wet because it’s raining, or hungry because there’s no food nearby? In other words what a stupid smug selective sonorous bit of claptrap. Tell that to the women in the Democratic Republic of Congo gang-raped by a bunch of soldiers – tell them that’s nature’s demand and that no one can exempt them from it. Then go empty the Vatican’s bank account to fund hospitals in DRC to repair all the fistulas that leave the women incontinent and stinking and shunned by their families and friends.

Jean has a post about belief at Talking Philosophy*. I find myself unconvinced, and I’m curious as to what other people think.

The idea is that ‘faith’ in the sense of belief without evidence is okay, and it’s belief in belief that is pernicious.

A person who was willing to believe nothing “on faith” would have a rather scanty store of beliefs. He or she would be missing some beliefs I take to be very important. For example—the belief that every human being matters. Exactly why does everyone matter? No doubt you could say a few intelligent things about it, but you’d soon find yourself not quite sure what the basis for the belief is.

I argued that moral commitments are different from beliefs about the world (and that I take belief that God exists to be a belief about the world); others argued that things are not so simple. I brought up Francis Collins.

I suppose I do think Francis Collins is blameworthy in some sense for interpreting his experience of the waterfall as a reason to believe in Jesus. I suppose my thinking is that surely he wouldn’t accept a non sequitur like that in genetics, so it seems blameworthy to accept it elsewhere, and especially blameworthy to try to use it as a public argument in a book.

Jean agreed with that, but considered it not relevant.

This is really about cognitive virtue and vice–how to manage your own set of beliefs, what to let in without full reasons, what not to let in. “Waterfall, therefore Jesus.” That certainly seems like bad mental self-management. Smart religious people surely have something a bit more intelligent going on in their heads. (In my experience there are tons of those…including some very smart, wise and authentic rabbis I know…)

But if so, what? Isn’t that the point? Not about their heads in general, of course, but on the subject of belief that God exists – the point is that some people just have a gut feeling that God exists and that that’s okay. But is there much of a difference between a gut feeling and ‘Waterfall, therefore Jesus’? Well there is of course the fact that Collins put that in a book, and I think the claim is about personal beliefs rather than proselytizing ones. But all the same…the problem with just assuming that smart religious people have something more than ‘waterfall’ is that that perpetuates the default respect for religion, and that perpetuates religion’s ability to keep on convincing people because it’s been going on so long and so everywhere that surely there must be something to it. It’s the Ponzi scheme aspect. We’re skeptical about new religions and cults, but the ones that have been around for centuries, that’s different, because, well because they’ve been around for centuries. But they’ve only been around for centuries because they’ve been getting away with it; so we keep letting them get away with it because they’ve been getting away with it. At some point that begins to seem like a not very good reason.

It’s not (of course) that I think people who just have a gut feeling that there is a God should be punished, but it is that I’m (obstinately perhaps) unwilling to agree that that’s cognitively okay or on all fours with other beliefs we have without being able to give good arguments for them.

*I wish I could contribute to Talking Philosophy, but I can’t; I’m not invited. The door is barred against me. The powers don’t want me polluting its crystalline purity with my – whatever: stupidity, probably.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown talks better sense this time.

You hear these outpourings of grief and hopelessness a lot these days. Ignorance is not bliss, it is oblivion, wrote the American novelist Philip Wylie. Ill-educated, volatile, easily led, despised by millions, Muslims the world over are falling into that void, into oblivion. Some are and will be annihilated by external foes and enemies within, including the demon cheerleaders inside the heads of suicide bombers, but many more will be consumed by their own terror of the modern world.

There is discrimination, she notes, but there is also self-limitation.

In nearly all universities in this country, including the elite establishments, there are cells of well organised Muslim obscurantists who entice or bully fellow Muslim scholars seeking to liberate their minds. They write to me, bright and ambitious students who feel spied on, coerced, hounded and tormented because they do not wear a hijab, or are seen meeting diverse mates in the student union bars, or choose “haram” subjects such as creative writing, art, drama or even European languages. One young Muslim woman at the LSE actually had a novel snatched from her hand, and says she was then held and harangued by her hijabi assailant who left a bruise on her arm. I pity both. What makes a university undergraduate this appallingly afraid of fiction? Who got into her head to distort it so?

Maybe she read Infidel? Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks about the subversive power of reading novels there – including merit-free romance novels. She felt liberated and inspired by the good stuff and even by the schlock. Page 69:

We imagined the British moors in Wuthering Heights and the fight for racial equality in South Africa in Cry, the Beloved Country. An entire world of Western ideas began to take shape…Later on there were sexy books: Valley of the Dolls, Barbara Cartland, Danielle Steele. All these books, even the trashy ones, carried with them ideas – races were equal, women were equal to men – and concepts of freedom, struggle, and adventure that were new to me.

Page 79:

In school we read good books, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, and Daphne du Maurier; out of school, Halwa’s sisters kept us supplied with cheap Harlequins. These were trashy soap opera-like novels, but they were exciting – sexually exciting. And buried in all of these books was a message: women had a choice.

Page 94:

Inwardly, I resisted the teachings, and secretly I transgressed them…I continued to read sensual romance novels and trashy thrillers, even though I knew that doing so was resisting Islam in the most basic way…A Muslim woman must not feel wild, or free, or any of the other emotions and longings I felt when I read those books. A Muslim girl does not make her own decisions or seek control. She is trained to be docile. If you are a Muslim girl, you disappear, until there is almost no you inside you.

Pity the poor LSE hijabi, training herself to be docile, to disappear, to have no self inside her; and hope the novel-readers prevail and take their sisters with them.