Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Dawkins Meets (and Reviews) Hitchens

    America is far from the know-nothing theocracy that two terms of Bush had led us to fear.

  • Boys Do Ruin Schools for Girls

    Boys benefit from being in a classroom with girls, but girls do not benefit from being in a classroom with boys.

  • Extract from Natalie Angier’s The Canon

    Science is huge, a great ocean of human experience; it’s the product and point of having the most deeply corrugated brain of any species this planet has spawned.

  • Exam Plans are a Betrayal

    Royal Society of Chemistry head criticizes plans to make science questions easier.

  • Italy Asks UK not to Deport Emambakhsh

    The case of Pegah Emambakhsh has become front-page news in Italy while going almost unreported in Britain.

  • Women’s Rights? What Are They?

    Proposed law forbids abortions without written permission from the father of the fetus.

  • The New Islam project

    Meet Tahir Aslam Gora.

    Tahir Aslam Gora is a Canadian-Pakistani writer, novelist, poet, journalist, editor, translator and publisher…In 2005 Gora translated into Urdu Irshad Manji’s book, The Trouble with Islam. He is currently translating Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel. Gora writes a column for The Hamilton Spectator and is currently working on two manuscripts; one on Canadian multiculturalism, the other on Islam and the need for its transformation into “a humane theology.” In Pakistan he was a noted critic of religious intolerance. He fled to Canada in the spring of 1999 following threats to his life.

    A critic of religious intolerance who received threats to his life by people keen to show what religious intolerance really is.

    [M]any Muslims have for centuries excluded non-Muslims from their orbit. In addition, the traditional script of the Qur’an exhorts repulsion of ‘others’ much more than acceptance. Many Muslims are unwilling to realise that the Qur’an was written and compiled by the pioneers of Islam through different political stages. Instead, many take the book as the final verdict of God…Now, for many, the whole essence of Islam is repulsion of others.

    Hence the popularity of death threats and fatwas, no doubt.

    Liberal Muslims are not only silenced by literalist Muslims, but also by those non-Muslims who have developed the hollow pattern of being ‘fair’ and ‘tolerant’ to every religion. The existence of ‘political fairness’ among large circles of non-Muslim activists is actually a much bigger obstacle than extremist Muslims because those non-Muslim activists dominate the media outlets across the world and often ignore genuinely liberal Muslim voices.

    Don’t they just. Well, good luck, Tahir Aslam Gora; let me know if I can do anything to help.

  • Thinking about writing

    Funny stuff from Jo Wolff.

    Why is academic writing so boring? I am impatient by nature, easily irritated, and afflicted with a short attention span. That I ended up in a job where I have to spend half the day blinking my way through artless, contorted prose is a cruel twist of fate. But the upside is that it gives me plenty of opportunity to reflect on why reading academic writing is so often a chore and so rarely a joy…As far as I know there has been little, if any, literary analysis of academic writing…But, by chance, I recently read a short piece of literary theory, and, to use one of the two metaphors academics allow themselves, the scales fell from my eyes. (If you are wondering, the other metaphor is deftly deployed in the following: “In this column I shall view academic writing through the prism of literary theory”.)

    I love that last bit because it includes the academically-obligatory and nonacademically-poisonous trope that Julian always cites as what The Philosophers’ Magazine (being a magazine not a journal) doesn’t want – that ‘In this column I shall’ item. Part of my job as deputy editor is telling contributors that we want a magazine style not a journal style, and explaining what that entails (and then sometimes explaining it again when we get a journal style anyway and have to ask for revisions). And in much the same vein, in writing Why Truth Matters we had to combine a decent amount of rigor with a style appropriate for a trade book. There were times when we actually got into quite detailed discussions of that – is this too much? Is this too academicky? Is this not academicky enough? We had disagreements about what we could assume people would understand – we have different starting ideas about that: I tend to think that people don’t like being talked down to too much, don’t like explanations of things they already know, and do like to be asked to reach a little; JS thinks people don’t like being made to feel stupid, and don’t like to be asked to reach too much. We were probably both right – some people fit his version better, some fit mine. We have had plenty of comments to the effect that the book is hard work, including some saying it’s a little too much hard work, or much too much hard work. But we’ve had others saying it was a workout but that that’s enjoyable. It’s worth thinking about this in case we write another book some day – and also just because the subject is interesting. Style is interesting; the question of what is interesting and what is boring is interesting.

    The secret, apparently, is that good writing captures its reader by means of creating a tension between the plot and the story. The reader is shown enough of the narrative sequence to get an impression of what is going on, and to whet their appetite for more, but much is hidden. Suspense is created, and the reader is hooked until it is resolved…A very simple and effective technique…[I]t makes perfect sense to me, and also explains why academic writing is generally so much easier to put down than it is to pick up again. At least in my subject, we teach students to go sub-zero on the tension scale: to give the game away right from the start. A detective novel written by a good philosophy student would begin: “In this novel I shall show that the butler did it.” The rest will be just filling in the details.

    That did make me laugh. And now I think about it…I realize there is a certain amount (a small amount) of tension in WTM. The first chapter doesn’t give the game away – the first chapter is slightly coy – the first chapter sets things up for the last one. I didn’t know that was a literary secret at the time, but I did it that way anyway. I suppose I simply figured I had to leave something for the last chapter to say, or else why have a last chapter?

    Anyway – somebody just the other day found it ‘a delight to read’ – which to someone who herself likes to be delighted by what she reads is the kind of comment that makes writing worthwhile, and the attempt to figure out the difference between boring and interesting also worthwhile.

  • Secularism is an ‘Ideology Inimical to Religions’

    ‘Secularists have a right to have a voice but not a voice to denigrate or relegate religions to a non-space.’

  • Morris Dickstein on the Critical Landscape

    Books are still read and enjoyed, but the pleasure is had at the expense of analysis and criticism.

  • Why is Academic Writing so Boring?

    A detective novel written by a good philosophy student would begin: ‘In this novel I shall show that the butler did it.’

  • John Allen Paulos on Goddy Math

    We read more about the intrusion of pseudoscience into school science curricula in the US.

  • David Thompson Interviews Tahir Aslam Gora

    ‘I cannot understand how Islam or any religion could be a complete way of life.’

  • Simon Caterson Reviews Grayling on Freedom

    It is only in the past few centuries that any human beyond a tiny ruling class had any expectations.

  • Murder in Amsterdam

    My father lived in Amsterdam for five years. Every time I went over to see him I was asked by friends if I was intending to smoke large amounts of dope and/or have sex with large amounts of prostitutes. Amsterdam’s image is of a party town. English stag parties descend on the city every weekend to take advantage of a supposed liberalism which many of them would abhor if it were introduced in their home country.

    The image is misleading, though. The red light is confined to a few areas of the city. People work hard in the Dam. My father wrote, ‘For sure, they don’t like freeloaders. It’s pump or drown. Do what you want otherwise, but take your turn at the pump.’ He described what he saw as a ‘deeper coldness in the Dutch character.’

    Perhaps it’s this coldness that accounts for the seething resentments towards immigrants and immigration. But then, this exists in every country. In Britain, my homeland, people sit in pubs and go on about how the asylum seekers are milking our benefits system while at the same time taking all our jobs – a nice little conjuring trick if you can manage it.

    In Holland there are concerns regarding integration. The Dutch right claims that Muslim immigrants are living in Holland with no intention of integrating with Dutch culture. They set up little dish cities on the edge of town, sign on for state subsidies and spend their time watching Turkish and Moroccan soap opera. There is a conspiracy theory that Muslim immigrants compromise a fifth column aimed at turning Europe into Eurabia and installing a new Caliphate. Once confined to the fevered edges of political debate, this paranoid lie has seeped into the mainstream. Thanks to Bat Ye’or, Oriana Fallaci and Melanie Phillips, the Eurabia theory is gaining ground.

    Then in November 2004 a Dutch-Moroccan man, Mohammed Bouyeri, shot and killed the film director Theo van Gogh. He then took out a letter addressed to the then Dutch politician Aayan Hirsi Ali and pinned it to the corpse’s chest. The letter explained that van Gogh had been murdered because he had directed Submission Part 1, a film critical of Islam. The letter warned that Hirsi Ali would be next.

    Into the fallout stepped Ian Buruma. His book, which was shortlisted for this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize, reads like a novel. He brings the main players from the sterile objectivity of reportage to the full-blooded life of fiction. Like many good fiction writers, he starts with first impressions, then goes back through the roots of his character’s past. Pim Fortuyn, the camp and egotistical rightwing politician, appears as a strange and enigmatic outsider who mocks the ruling classes while desperate to join them. Theo van Gogh comes off as an overweight, bellowing, crazily funny car-crash of a man, a Boris Johnson for the art world. Only Hirsi Ali appears as she does in standard accounts; a calm and collected beauty with a powerful mind. Going back through decades of Dutch history, Buruma reminds me of Stephen King in the manner in which he shows that the lives of disparate and opposed people – Fortuyn, Bouyeri, van Gogh – cross and change each other in small yet significant ways.

    Buruma himself comes across as a private eye, coaxed out of retirement for one final case. He pounds the streets of Amsterdam and Utrecht, trying to find the answers, and interviewing everyone from the friends of Theo van Gogh to Moroccan immigrants to Islamist historians. What made Bouyeri kill van Gogh? Multiculturalism? Islamophobia? Mental illness? Why?

    Big events like this always prompt a call for a ‘debate about multiculturalism,’ as if multiculturalism is this new thing that was invented by some liberal think tank in the 1990s. The subtext is that multiculturalism is something that can be reversed. Yet every society is multicultural, and always has been; America, in particular, owes its economic success to generations of diverse labour. With the exception of isolated tribes, there has never been a complete monoculture – and attempts to establish one generally end in the death camp.

    However, Buruma’s explorations around this idea are interesting. A psychiatrist shares his theory that people who come to very liberal societies like Holland from very closed and theocratic countries like Iran succumb to a kind of cultural schizophrenia that manifests as real mental illness. Holland is probably the freest society in the world, and religious societies the most repressive. Muslim immigration into Holland made Amsterdam the city where the Apollonian and Dionysiac halves of the human psyche come together and do battle. Freedom can be scary. Aayan Hirsi Ali’s sister Haweya told Aayan that living in the West was like being in a room without walls.

    Now we come to a notable flaw of Murder in Amsterdam. Buruma is a fair man and will bend over backwards to see your point of view. He distrusts strong opinions and covers the text in layers of ambiguity and nuance. There’s nothing wrong with that; nuance is a fine quality in a political writer. But Buruma lets himself slide into a fashionable moral equivalence between religious fundamentalism and people who are against religious fundamentalism. Nick Cohen picked up on it immediately:

    Anxiety about causing offence, however, brings with it the danger of creating an imaginary, communalist bloc – the Muslims, in our case – and betraying the very people who have most right to expect your support.
    For all his subtlety and seriousness, Buruma falls into the trap and is uncomfortable with brown-skinned people who take ideas of human freedom too literally. When Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose film for van Gogh on the treatment of Muslim women provoked his murder, tells him that there can be no colour bar on feminist freedoms, Buruma says that “one can’t help sensing that in her battle for secularism, there are hints of zealousness, echoes perhaps of her earlier enthusiasm for the Muslim Brotherhood”. There is a revealing slipperiness in that sentence: the use of “one can’t help sensing” instead of “I think”; and the deft deployment of a “perhaps” to slip in the slur that those who believe in the emancipation of women are the moral equivalents of those who would keep them subjugated. Murder in Amsterdam is well written, well researched and often wise, but a faint whiff of intellectual cowardice rises from its pages none the less.

    Accompanying this is the sense that Buruma would rather jump through hoops of burning flame rather than commit himself to a coherent opinion. Bouyeri, at his trial, explained his crime this way:

    He was obligated to ‘cut off the heads of all who insult Allah and his prophet’ by the same divine law that didn’t allow him ‘to live in this country, or any country where free speech is allowed… ‘You can send all your psychologists and all your psychiatrists and all your experts, but I’m telling you, you will never understand. You will never understand. And I’m telling you, if I had the chance to be freed and the chance to repeat what I did on the second of November, wallahi [by Allah] I’m telling you, I would do exactly the same.

    Buruma knows that wallahi means ‘by Allah,’ and yet he can’t acknowledge that religious faith was a factor, if not the factor, in Bouyeri’s actions. He is not alone. Good and intelligent people, who know politics inside out, will go to any lengths to avoid criticising religious faith – or even discussing it altogether.

    Islamism is a religious movement that is not supported by most Muslims and that counts Muslims as the bulk of its victims. Yet people talk about terrorism and extremism without ever conceding that the terrorists and extremists may actually mean what they say. I used to think, like Cohen, that this sprang from a well-meaning desire not to be seen as discriminating against Muslims. Now I think it’s mostly down to fear. The opponents of the religious hatred bill in Britain said that the new law, essentially an extension of the blasphemy laws, would lead to a culture of self-censorship. They were too late. It’s already here. There are whips in the liberal soul.

    If you have a house party, what do you do when people gatecrash the party, tell you that they hate the party and everything it stands for, that the women in the house should cover themselves from head to toe in sackcloth, that the homosexuals and Jews at the party should leave immediately on pain of death, and that all your drink should be poured away – and that if you argue with them, they’ll kill you?

    A friend of van Gogh’s told Buruma that the party of Amsterdam had finally died.

    What distressed him, more than anything, was the end of a particular way of life, a kind of ‘free-spirited anarchism’ full of ‘humor and cabaret’, a life where it was possible to make fun of things, to offend people without the fear of violence. ‘A kind of idyll,’ he sighed, had come to an end.

  • Site of the week

    Here’s a fan of Point of Inquiry and also of Butterflies and Wheels. Here’s someone with good taste, in other words.

  • Oh not that again

    And another thing. As long as I’m quarreling with Alibhai-Brown – I get tired of this familiar chunk of doggerel:

    Some aspects of our nature are not susceptible to scientific enquiry, cannot be dissected, categorised and validated in terms that would satisfy the “rational” disbelievers, whose intellect is colossal but imagination puny. There are no experiments and tests to explain love, empathy, longing, the agony and ecstasy of the heart, the wild and wonderful creativity of the brain…

    That is such kack – yet people go on trotting it out as if it were transcendent and indisputable wisdom. Of course there are experiments and tests to explain love and the rest of it – experiments and tests, theories and evidence, as well as centuries of stories and personal accounts. They’re not a black box, they’re not immune to inquiry and even experiments and tests, and the findings of experiments and tests are highly interesting. It’s not the brash fanatic zealous hysterical atheists who are trying to rule knowledge out of order, it’s obscurantist epithet-hurling Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Give her a zero for the course.

  • A temperate remonstrance

    Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has a few very gentle words to say to her friends in the atheist community – the

    rowdy and brash God bashers [who] fulminate like demented fire-and-brimstone preachers [and who] know it all, don’t listen, and presume to judge people they won’t ever understand…the fanatic atheists…the “rational” disbelievers, whose intellect is colossal but imagination puny.

    You know the ones, right? Quite unlike saintly Alibhai-Brown, they are; she says so herself.

    Having faith makes me humble and self-questioning, unlike the unbelievers who know they are always right.

    Ah yes – obviously – here she is humbly questioning herself all over the place. What would she sound like if she were arrogant and dogmatic, I wonder?

    To these zealots, believers are mostly naive or stupid…The hysterical imagery is objectionable. But much worse is the dishonesty.

    Oh, gosh, Yasmin, I know what you mean. All that hysteria and dishonesty; it’s quite shocking.

    Fundamentalist atheists want to replace old religions with their own. To them all previous prophets were false. Their fervour makes them as blind and uncompromising as those following the religions they detest. Science gave them no immunity – they too are infected by the virus of faith. Only, they would say, theirs is the only true path, and all other roads lead to damnation. Of course.

    Oooookay. Whatever you say. Humility and self-questioning on your side, fundamantalist religion and blind fervour and faith and damnation on our side. Well demonstrated.

  • Mother Teresa couldn’t find Jesus, which proves that he was there

    Susan Jacoby takes a look at those doubt of Mother Teresa’s (thanks to Frederick Crews for pointing the article out to me).

    The media frenzy over Teresa’s apparently unending crisis of faith offers a spectacular and comical example of the irrationality, credulity, and unwillingness to face facts that inform all conventional wisdom concerning religion and holiness…I have no doubt that excerpts from the letters will appear in future case studies of well-known individuals who combine masochism with narcissism…I would think that someone who observes extreme human suffering on a daily basis would have more doubts than most about the existence of a benevolent deity. But what is striking about Teresa’s doubt is that it is all about her: it has nothing to do with the dissonance between belief in a loving God and the suffering she sees.

    Ah – that would explain the policy on painkillers then.

    In a reverential and sanctimonious cover story in last week’s issue of Time magazine, psychonanalysts and priests are quoted. Guess what? Both the shrinks and the reverends think that Teresa is even holier because of her overwhelming doubts.

    Ah again – so…doubts make you holy, and ‘faith’ makes you holy, so…what would make you not all that holy? (No, wait, don’t tell me, I know – militant atheism! That’s it!)

    The agreement of priests and psychoanalysts is not, after all, very surprising. Both Freudian psychoanalysis and Roman Catholicism are faiths whose central tenets have nothing to do with evidence.

    Nothing to do with evidence! What can she mean? There was all that evidence that Freud collected – when he told people what they were fantasizing about and then wrote it all down in a book. Completely different from Roman Catholicism.

    What does a rational person, as opposed to someone who has a deep need to believe in the unprovable or the obviously false, do when doubt raises its insistent head? When a rational human being is confronted by evidence that contradicts his or her beliefs, then the belief must be modified…An irrational person–let us say, for the sake of argument, someone dedicated to becoming a saint who suffers for eternity–refuses to acknowledge that there may be good reasons for her doubts.

    That’s the advantage of being an irrational person, see – you don’t have to modify your beliefs when you’re confronted by evidence that contradicts them. You think that’s not convenient? Think again.

    Her “Home for the Dying” in Calcutta provided no modern medical care–not even modern painkillers–for the terminally ill. Indeed, Teresa’s true mission seems to have been the glorification of suffering…Teresa never showed any concern, in India or elsewhere, about the root causes of poverty – including lack of education, corrupt dictatorships, inequitable distribution of wealth, bigotry against social, ethnic, or religious underclasses, and contempt for women.

    Wellll…so she was a little myopic; nobody’s perfect.

  • Review of Frederick Crews’s Follies of the Wise

    Reports on a zone where political preferences often determine fact claims.