Author: Ophelia Benson

Say what you will, but having the top underrated book of the year according to Prospect is pretty good fun. Also a little surprising. We’ve tended to think of it more from the other direction. Not that it was overrated! No no – don’t run away with that idea. But that we were (modest to a fault as we are) rather surprised that it got such good reviews. So good that it wasn’t like trying to find an eyelash on a football pitch to pick out extracts for quoting in advertisements. We had spares. We had more than enough. And that was a surprise. (Why? I don’t know, exactly. Maybe partly just because it’s hard to tell how a book one has written oneself comes off.) So we think of it, or at least I do, as kind of heaped with praise, rather than underrated. And as doing pretty well – it’s in its third printing. But if people want to say No, it’s even better than that, it should get even more good reviews and be read by even more people and go into even further printing – well far be it from me to disagree. Far, far, far, far, far. Miles be it. A day’s walk. A long way off.

William Skidelsky’s little dig is funny (he’s one of those men who are more funny than women, probably).

We thought we could detect one or two schools of thought at work – Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom’s anti-postmodernism polemic Why Truth Matters struck a chord with liberal neocons such as Johann Hari and Oliver Kamm.

Liberal neocons; cool. You got your Blitcons and your liberal neocons. Liberal neocons go with bipedal quadrupeds and red bluebirds and vanilla chocolate and sour sugar. But whatever. I didn’t even know Oliver Kamm had read the dang book, much less that he thought it should be more widely known.

The Carnival of Citizens is December 17th. Deadline for submissions is December 15th. It’s hosted at Siris. It’s the brainchild of Richard at Philosophy Etcetera.

All righty. I was told to read Hitchens’s ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny’ more carefully, so I did, and was unsurprised to find more silly stuff, which I feel like poking a stick at. (You may say that he’s being ironic throughout. He’s not though. I recognize some of the thoughts from other work and from interviews; the stuff about childbirth and war for instance; he means it.)

While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition.

Oh, is it? I must be a man then. (Mind you, I often think that, when I read journalism about what women are and what men are. When I read that women are caring and co-operative and warm and fascinated by Relationships, I conclude that I’m a man; when I read that men are indifferent and argumentative and cold and bored rigid by Relationships, I conclude that I’m a man. So it goes.) Angst and self-deprecation are male? Come on. I’m in a permanent state of angst, usually about a minimum of seventeen different things, and my dial is also stuck on self-deprecation. Yes yes, I know I’m conceited, I don’t deny that, but I’m also self-deprecating, dammit! Furthermore – I don’t know if Hitchens is aware of this (I would suspect not) but men are often more pseudo-self-deprecating than really self-deprecating. They pretend to self-deprecate but do it in a subtly self-flattering way. They tell stories about their own rudeness or social ineptitude or jokes that everyone misunderstood, so that it seems as if they’re deprecating the old self but in fact they’re reporting on how unconventional and zany and clever they are. So there, Hitch – you do that yourself; you know you do.

Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone’s expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with—and often a joke in extremely poor taste. Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough…Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.

Well, there we are again – I must be a man then. But besides that, preference is one thing and understanding is another. Preferring life to be unfair is not incompatible with understanding that it’s not. Aren’t men supposed to be good at logic? Come on, Hitch, pull your socks up.

Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals.

Okay, he got that bit right. Well done. (Except he could have pointed out that we believe we become threatening to men if we appear too bright as a result of experience. It’s not just some superstition.)

For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle.

Bullshit.

Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can’t afford to be too frivolous…I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor.

Oh look, it’s the bottom of the barrel! It is males who are the non-rank-and-file mainstay of religion, after all, so why pin the humor-enmity of religion on women?

Okay, I read it more carefully, and found that it’s a lot more riddled with bad arguments than I had realized.

Hitchens makes a very silly opening argument in this conspicuously silly piece, winsomely titled ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny’. (Is this part of his Kingsley Amis shtick? KA was brilliant, but the routine misogyny was hardly his funniest or most interesting bit.)

However, there is something that you absolutely never hear from a male friend who is hymning his latest (female) love interest: “She’s a real honey, has a life of her own … [interlude for attributes that are none of your business] … and, man, does she ever make ’em laugh.” Now, why is this? Why is it the case?, I mean. Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

Come on. The fact that men don’t say their latest female love interest is funny doesn’t mean that women aren’t funny. Surely that ought to be obvious enough. Consider – someone tells you about her recent trip to Chicago, and doesn’t mention the Art Institute; that doesn’t mean that she didn’t go to the Art Institute. Someone tells you about her new car and doesn’t describe the back seat; that doesn’t mean her car doesn’t have a back seat. Someone tells you about her hike on Mount Rainier and doesn’t mention seeing an eagle; that doesn’t mean she didn’t see an eagle. The fact (if it is a fact) that men don’t say their newest girlfriends are funny could have nothing to do with the women and everything to do with what men notice and care about and talk about to other men. As long as we’re making sweeping generalizations, here’s one to sit next to Hitch’s: men don’t care whether women are funny or not, they care about other, more practical features. Or here’s a different and even unkinder one: men don’t like women who have senses of humour; men want women to laugh at their jokes, not say funny things themselves. Here’s another: men are threatened by women with senses of humour.

Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

Atheists are mean, says Nicholas Kristof. No they’re not, say Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett; you just think so because you’re used to religion’s special immunity. As Dawkins puts it:

Mr. Kristof has simply become acclimatized to the convention that you can criticize anything else but you mustn’t criticize religion. Ears calibrated to this norm will hear gentle criticism of religion as intemperate, and robust criticism as obnoxious.

Which is really not an ideal situation: it really does make it difficult for people to discuss the subject honestly. It’s a little worrying how many people are eager to join the chorus urging atheists to shut up – or to be less ‘obnoxious’ and ‘militant’ and ‘in your face,’ which amounts to the same thing. Dennett notes:

There is nothing “dogmatic” or “fundamentalist” about Dawkins’ tone; he is simply speaking truthfully about matters that most people have trained themselves not to mention, or else to allude to in mealy-mouthed terms.

That self-training is not such a good idea.

Mary Riddell skipped that lesson, fortunately:

[T]he bishops are on the prowl…The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, announces that ‘illiberal atheists’ and ‘aggressive secularists’ have stolen Christmas. On a point of semantics, secularists do not wish to harm religion or deny its great cultural influence. They simply want it to know its place. Which, in the view of many bishops, is in every corner of the public realm…On 1 January, laws protecting gay people in Northern Ireland will be tightened. Ruth Kelly…has bowed to religious leaders complaining that the pillars of Christendom will totter unless Christian adoption agencies, bookshops and hotels are allowed free rein for prejudice…[T]he harmonious society Mr Blair desires is not best served by Christian leaders passing themselves off as a persecuted minority and the whipping boy of multicultural Britain. This is purest fallacy. The might of bishops trickles down from the House of Lords, where they sit without a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy…Mr Blair is right to be fearless in giving necessary offence. At a time when religion fills the vacuums hollowed out by fear and uncertainty, he should spread his criticism more widely. Tell the Christian churches that their inroads into the public domain are unacceptable and their twisting of the truth sometimes despicable. This is the opportunity to defuse the public power of all gods, to ban religious schools of every hue, to end the cross-contamination of faith and policy and to move towards a secular state.

Terry Sanderson does the ‘aggressive secularist’ thing:

So now the spotlight is turned on “the fundamentalist secularists” who, according to the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, are the real villains of the piece. Sentamu opportunistically put out an overblown and hysterical statement, pointing the finger at “illiberal atheists”. “There is a worrying trend to be seen where illiberal atheists have combined with aggressive secularists to create a ludicrous situation where those who don’t believe in God have decided that a Christian festival is offending other faiths,” he said…Is the man fully in control of his faculties? Who are these “aggressive secularists” who want to rob Christians of Christmas? Come on, Johnny, name names. And don’t trot out Richard Dawkins, because he has never said any such thing. Nor has anyone at the National Secular Society…The Christian push to incite resentment against non-Christians is dishonest and very dangerous. At a time when the term has become extremely loaded, Sentamu’s usage of “multiculturalism” – whose only proponents, in his view, are these “aggressive secularists” with their censorious political correctness – will be understood in many quarters as code for an attack on ethnic minorities and other non-Christian religious groups.

Oh but he’s a Christian, so surely he can’t be inciting resentment. That’s just the kind of thing Christians don’t do…isn’t it?

Some more on the conceptual issues involved in ideas such as equality, equal treatment, civil rights, public accommodation, and so on. Some comments by a dissenting justice in the Civil Rights Cases decision of 1883, in which the court killed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, an act by which Congress attempted to elaborate on and enforce the Fourteenth Amendment – Section 1 of which turned the US world upside down:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Room for conceptual questions there, of course (even apart from the baffling fact that the late 19th century Supreme Court chose to define corporations as ‘persons’, contrary to the intent of Congress in passing the amendment and to the normal meaning of the word); what is meant by privileges or immunities? What is meant by equal protection? Not much, was the answer of the Court in 1883. But Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented.

Congress had intended [in the Fourteenth Amendment], Harlan noted, to wipe out all discrimination against blacks and ‘to secure and protect rights belonging to them as freemen and citizens; nothing more. He took aim at [Justice] Bradley’s formalistic distinction between ‘state action’ and private discrimination. ‘In every material sense applicable to the practical enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment,’ he wrote, ‘railroad corporations, keepers of inns, and managers of places of public amusement are charged with duties to the public, and are amenable, in respect of their duties and functions, to governmental regulation.’ On that issue, Harlan relied on the common law principle that ‘when private property is devoted to a public use, it is subject to public regulation.’ [Irons, People’s History of the SC, p 214]

That’s one view, and on that court at that time it was a minority view; but it is a view. It’s a little unnerving to see Anglican archbishops siding with the court majority that killed off the Civil Rights Act and left blacks without redress against the most brutal kinds of treatment* until the Brown decision overturned Plessy in 1954. I wonder if they completely grasp the kind of thinking they’re messing with.

*read Worse Than Slavery for detail on this