Author: Ophelia Benson

But why aren’t these guys just summarily arrested without bail as a threat to public safety? You can’t put out public hits on people! Can you? Except in failed states, and in violent hidden enclaves (where ‘public’ is only semi-public). You can’t just get together in a cozy pally group and say ‘Kill this person and we’ll give you a lot of money’ and be reported in the newspapers as saying that and just go chuckling about your business – can you?

Muslim clerics in Kolkata issued a “death warrant” against controversial Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen on Friday, threatening her life if she did not leave the country where she lives in exile. The threat came after a meeting of dozens of clerics from prominent mosques in Kolkata – where the writer lives – who said she had invited their wrath through her “repeated criticism” of Islam in her books and speeches. While one prominent cleric said Nasreen had a month to leave, another said she had 15 days. Anyone who killed her would get a cash reward of 100,000 rupees ($2,400), they said. “Anyone who executes the warrant will also be given additional rewards,” said Nurur Rehman Barkati, a cleric of one of the biggest mosques in Kolkata.

So there they all are, with names, mosques, amounts offered all given. So why aren’t they all occupying a Kolkata jail cell? Why isn’t their ability to offer anyone a monetary reward for murdering a novelist severely compromised by their occupation of a room nine feet by six with bars on the window and door? Why don’t ‘clerical’ thugs who put out hits on people get instantly busted for incitement to murder?

Answers on a postcard.

Chris Dillow reviewed Why Truth Matters the other day. He said nice things about it, but he also made some claims that I respectfully disagree with – claims that are mostly about truth rather than about the book, so I hope my respectful disagreement doesn’t look too self-serving.

Many interesting “truths” might be merely fashionable beliefs; if the last 500 years are any guide, today’s “truth” is the next century’s nonsense.

Yes but the subject isn’t “truth” but truth. That is of course part of the point – that “truth” is one thing and truth is another, and that conflating the two is one way of claiming that truth doesn’t matter or doesn’t exist or is merely a rhetorical pat on the back. We’re not pretending to say why “truth” matters, but why truth matters. Truth is not mere belief, fashionable or otherwise.

One [problem] is their attempt to privilege truth because of its links with what makes humans unique.

We’re not attempting to privilege it, we’re attempting to explain why it matters, having already conceded that we don’t have a knock-down argument for that. We don’t really think there is such a knock-down argument; we say it comes down to preferences; then we try to explain possible reasons for the preferences.

Animals can grasp reality, in some senses, better than us: if you want to find the truth of where a mouse is, a cat is better than a human. Where humans are unique – insofar as we know – is in being able to problematize the truth, to tell stories, to mix myth with “reality.” It’s postmodernism that’s uniquely human, not the notion of an external truth.

Well, no. Reality isn’t the same thing as truth. Animals may well be able to grasp some particular bit of reality in a particular place at a particular instant better than any human could with the aid only of human senses – but that’s not the same thing as saying animals can ‘grasp’ or find or think about truth better than we can. Sure humans are unique in being able to tell stories, but they are also unique in being able to think and talk about truth. Both abilities depend on language (cognitive scientists think that animals can’t fantasize or imagine at all because that ability depends on concepts which depend on language). Both postmodernism and the notion of an external truth are uniquely human – along with a great many other things.

More seriously, Benson and Stangroom duck the real problem presented by relativism and scepticism. It’s trivial that “fire burns” is a universal truth. But what about “humans have rights”, or “democracy is the best government”? Are these universal truths? If so, how can we tell.

No. That’s the facts-values gap, the is-ought gap. The claim that humans have rights or that democracy is the best government are claims about values or oughts, not about facts; they’re ethical claims, not ontological claims. We don’t duck the problem, it’s just that it wasn’t the subject of this book.

Vast numbers of claims – “this £20 note is more valuable than a piece of paper”, “it’s 10 past 11”, “I have a right not to be tortured” – are “true” only because others agree that they are. Such “truths” are social constructs. Benson and Stangroom don’t adequately tackle the many problems this raises, not least for liberal interventionism.

Again – just a question of subject matter and space. Note (again) the scare-quotes on “true” – the subject of this book wasn’t “truth” but truth, so “truths” that are social constructs weren’t the subject matter of this book; the distinction between the two was part of the subject matter and it does get discussed, for instance in chapters 2 and 4.

Another way to be silly.

[S]ome credible scientists contribute (knowingly or not) to fuelling irrational, mystical tendencies in public life. The fact this is so often done in the name of making science attractive to non-scientists only makes the damage harder to repair…The genre originated with the publication in 1975 of Fritjof Capra’s book, The Tao of Physics, which suggested that the equations of quantum-field theory were somehow related to ancient, mystical Indian texts. This book struck me then (and still does) as a monumental joke…What these books do is try to wrap modern scientific discoveries in an illusory shroud that insinuates a link between cutting-edge science and solutions to the mysteries of life, the origins of the universe and spirituality. They depend on cultivating ambiguity and a sense of the exotic, flirtatiously oscillating between science and the paranormal. This is X-Files science – and The X-Files is science-fiction.

It’s all wrapping and shroud and insinuation, ambiguity and exoticicism and the paranormal – aimed at people who get little thrills of significance from ambiguous paranormal exoticism wrapped in illusory insinuating shrouds. There are a lot of people like that.

[T]he idea of an association between science and mysticism is now promoted by respected scientists rather than by journalists or charlatans – guaranteeing it more credibility than these earlier authors ever had…[F]or a well-known physicist to use science to feed the popular hunger for re-enchantment is – without doubting the sincerity of his beliefs or his project – to lend credibility to irrationalism…Scientists should challenge the indulgence of mysticism in their own backyards. For example, the journal Science devotes one-and-a-half pages to a review of The Physics of Immortality which offers no critical perspective on its fundamental thesis, and neglects to point out that its dozens of pages of equations (incomprehensible for most readers) are mere “fluff” that have nothing to do with the soul’s immortality; they serve only an attempt to “blind the reader with science”. It seems to me that scientists involved in popularisation have an obligation to present science as the naturalistic enterprise it is, instead of attempting (cynically or naively) to stimulate interest in science by associating it with vague spiritual or religious notions…The essence of science is a naturalist vision of the world that makes it understandable without any appeal to transcendental intelligence, be it Zeus, Poseidon or any other God.

Not even Karl Rove.

So Steve Paulson asks Taner Edis how he would assess the state of scientific knowledge in the Islamic world.

Dismal. Right now, if all Muslim scientists working in basic science vanished from the face of the earth, the rest of the scientific community would barely notice. There’s very little contribution coming from Muslim lands…Especially in military and commercial areas, they have put their emphasis on applied science rather than basic science. So there are lots of medical doctors and engineers in the Muslim world. But the contribution to scientific research is much lower.

Does it matter? Can’t they just import basic science from the rest of the world?

It permanently locks the Muslim world into a subordinate position in those aspects of modern life that depend on creativity in technology and science. And this is a huge swath of modern life…This is not a controversial statement in the Muslim world. Even the most conservative Muslim realizes that the Islamic world is at a severe disadvantage right now in science and technology. The West has done a much better job. And somehow, Muslims are going to have to do better.

This bit is really interesting and suggestive.

It was harder for science to achieve intellectual and institutional independence. This was not restricted just to science. In the Western world, the institution of law achieved a kind of autonomy from religion early on. Some historians argue that this was really a precursor to science achieving autonomy as well. In the Muslim world, law was never entirely disentangled from religion. Islamic culture has not been as supportive of intellectual independence for different areas of life.

Intellectual independence…It’s probably hard to exaggerate the importance of that for both personal flourishing and for healthy public goods of all kinds.

One of the features of medieval Islamic science that some modern Muslim thinkers want to revive is the way of perceiving the universe as a spiritual, God-centered place. This tends to work against the independence of science from religious institutions. It’s precisely this autonomy that helped science make the breakthrough in the Western world. In the Muslim world, this is still a relatively controversial concept.

If you see the universe as a spiritual, God-centered place, then you can’t have real intellectual independence – not if you take that idea seriously. If the universe is a God-centered place, then God calls the shots.

They talk about the ‘scientism’ charge – “There are a lot of people in the United States…who also complain about what they call “scientism” — the idea that science explains all there is in the world.”

You can find Muslim thinkers making similar pronouncements. “Scientism” and “reductionism” have become stock accusations in religious circles. I don’t know if there’s much more content here than saying, “I don’t like naturalistic ideas.”

Snicker. Yeah.