Author: Ophelia Benson

A couple more thoughts on Dabashi, because they tie into other things, into larger subjects. (Which, come to think of it, is part of what he is claiming about Nafisi and RLT. It’s a reasonable enough thing to claim, it’s just that he does such a terrible job of it. It could for instance be the case that RLT, whether intentionally or by accident, did something to increase US hostility toward the Iranian regime; but that’s a rather different thing from claiming that, for instance, ‘there is no difference between Lynndie England and Azar Nafisi.’ You’ll notice I haven’t been claiming there is no difference between Hamid Dabashi and Iran’s religious police. That would be because I think there’s a difference.)

There is some inconsistency, especially in the interview.

…my critique is almost entirely directed at the substance of RLT, with a very minimum attention to its context. The fact that the author of RLT is a well-known, well-connected, and well-funded neocon, employed by the principle doctrinaire of neo-conservatism Paul Wolfowitz (when he was the head of SAIS), endorsed by the most diabolical anti-Muslim neocon alive Bernard Lewis, and promoted by a scandalous PR firm like Benador Associates, and many other similar indications are all entirely tangential to the substance of my critique…

Well if all that is ‘entirely tangential’ why does he mention it so often and so emphatically and hyperbolically? The tangential doesn’t get hammered on that way.

I am not privy to any information whether this has been a conscious or unconscious choice…Of course I do not mean “recruitment” literally. How would I know if she was or was not recruited to do anything? I am not privy to any such information—whether she is or is not recruited…The accoutrement of neoconservative power that has purchased and promoted that book is entirely tangential and rather irrelevant to the substance of that book and the relevance of my criticism…I am not in the least interested in how her career opportunism has led her to corridors of power without an iota of scholarly credentials to her name…What I am interested in is understanding how the inner dynamics of this vulgar empire works—and how comprador intellectuals like Azar Nafisi and her ilk proceed to manufacture consent for it…Fouad Ajami and Kanaan Makiyyah had made a very powerful case for the US invasion of Iraq…these people disappear from the public scene and there is no court or public forum where one can take these criminal comprador intellectuals and hold them accountable for their deeds. The same is now true about the neocon cohort of Fouad Ajami, namely his SAIS colleague Azar Nafisi.

He doesn’t know, he’s not interested, and yet he does know, and he is interested.

As you rightly document this, I am not “suggesting” anything. I am saying that chapter and verse people like Azar Nafisi have been actively involved in asking the United States officials for what inside the Beltway they call “regime change”—and now there are reports that she and her ilk…are actually on a frequent flier program to and from DC, with regular visits to the White House, the State Department, and Almighty only knows what other doors Elliott Abrams (“the Neocons Neocon”) is opening for them. I am afraid Azar Nafisi’s “friends in Washington,” as she calls them, are precisely people like Paul Wolfowitz, Foad Ajami, Bernard Lewis, and Elliot Abrams.

But, but, that is all tangential to his critique of her book; that’s why he’s so bashful about it all.

What you have in such figures as Azar Nafisi and Foad Ajami is really a band of politically pestiferous career opportunists, peanuts really in the grand scheme of things, utterly illiterate, but at the service of exceedingly powerful people who waste millions of our tax money trying to put a spin on a reality that keeps exploding in their barefaced barbarity. I have said before and I have argued that here is an organic link between what Lynndie England did in Abu Ghraib and what Azar Nafisi did in RLT—and what holds these two underlings in the service of George W. Bush’s war on terror…etc etc

Diffident, tentative, careful, scholarly stuff, befitting a tangential subject that he isn’t interested in and (by his own account) wouldn’t know about. What would he have said if he had been interested and had known, one wonders.

One thing that’s interesting about all this is the hyperbole. Dabashi makes Nafisi sound extremely powerful, barely less powerful than Wolfowitz or even Rumsfeld. On the face of it that’s just silly. She’s a writer, and a literary writer at that; how powerful can she be? But then, Dabashi is a teacher of comparative literature. If he makes a literary writer sound immensely powerful by giving an interpretation of her work, he makes himself sound immensely powerful at the same time. Nafisi is the wicked powerful writer, Dabashi is the good powerful literary critic who explains her wicked designs. No one would have known, no one would have understood, all would have proceeded in secret, had it not been for the brave perceptive righteously angry teacher of comparative literature at Columbia. What a great, wise, impassioned, ardent, benevolent and powerful man he must be.

Could that be what’s going on here? Could that be a large part of the reason for this unpleasant and unwarranted outburst? Why yes, I think it could. I think it’s a vulgar and nasty bit of careerism and cv-polishing along with a healthy dose of ego-inflating. I think Dabashi was posturing and showing off and bigging himself up, I think he was splashing some red paint on his radical credentials. It’s like Xenophanes’s observation – if cattle and horses or lions had gods, they would look like cattle and horses or lions. To a teacher of comparative literature, literary writers and their interpreters look like the center of the universe.

Speaking of respect for religion…There’s Adele Stan in The American Prospect:

In positions it takes on other issues, Feminists for Life is indeed “pro-woman,” whether in regard to its stance on the Violence Against Women Act or support for mothers on welfare. But it’s hard not to wonder if those positions aren’t just a beard, along with the term, “feminist,” for the hard-core, misogynist agenda of the Vatican. The organization’s no-exceptions anti-abortion position follows Catholic doctrine to the letter, a doctrine that has always demanded of women that they bear whatever burden men place upon them, and that they not soil the altar with the very bodiliness they represent by virtue of the means by which children are born.

If you want a contrast, drop in on Cristina Odone. She’s annoyed – or perhaps I mean ‘offended’. She’s also a tad shifty.

[W]earing a cross has become as controversial as wearing a single earring or going bra-less used to be. No one would seize upon gays or feminists for expressing their allegiances today, yet in institutions as British as the BBC and British Airways, wearing a cross is now tantamount to throwing down a gauntlet.

That’s shifty because it’s a bad analogy. To put it as briefly as possible, when gays or feminists ‘express their allegiances’ (whatever that means) they are not declaring belief in a magical invisible friend; people who wear crosses are. (There’s also the seldom-noticed fact that the cross is in fact an odd symbol to wear in the first place: it’s a torture device; it stands for an ancient and very cruel form of execution. I understand that that’s just why it’s meaningful for Christians, but all the same, it is a symbol of sadism. I wonder if Odone keeps that aspect firmly in mind enough.)

Diktats against the cross are fuelled not by concern for minorities, but by a secularism so rampant that it prefers a cross-dresser to a cross wearer, a plumber’s bum to a veil.

Yes. And?

Yes, the cross and veil brigade are different. They believe in eternity, sacrifice, humility and obedience, concepts as alien as equal pay and gay rights used to be.

Ah – shifty again. Eternity is the magical bit, but the rest of it is about ethics, and also raises instant questions. Sacrifice by whom, for whom, of what? Humility on whose part, toward whom? Obedience of whom, by whom? Sacrifice of autonomy and ownership of their own bodies by women? Extra helpings of humility and obedience for women? All three by humans for – the magical invisible friend? We know what’s meant by equal pay and gay rights, but sacrifice, humility and obedience are loose baggy flexible notions. You don’t want to sign a contract that commits you to sacrifice, humility and obedience with no further stipulations or limitations – you could find you’ve just signed yourself into lifelong irreversible slavery with torture. What business does Odone have throwing the terms around in that carefree way? This is why atheists tend to be a little wary of cross-wearers. We think they’re sometimes a little evasive about their plans for us.

Belief, even if its tenets are as innocent as turning the other cheek and self-sacrifice, is frowned upon as too subversive.

Bollocks. Turning the other cheek and self-sacrifice are not belief, they are ethical stances, and they’re not frowned upon as too subversive. That’s whiny self-pitying inaccurate crap. This is another reason atheists tend to be a little wary of cross-wearers – the way they wrap themselves in the altar cloth and whine about how persecuted they are and tell whoppers to get the point across.

If you want a contrast again, Francis Sedgemore cleans the palate.

What is happening here is that some very pissed-off atheists, agnostics and couldn’t-care-less-ists are finding their voice in a debate set up and manipulated by religious forces, and the latter are on the whole reacting hysterically to forthright criticism from the godless heathens. But this is something that religious believers will just have to live with, and that includes insult and ridicule.

That’s better.

Did you read Jeremy’s article on justice? It’s very good.

One bit reminded me of something else I’d just read. Serendipity kind of thing. This bit reminded me.

If this is right, it does not follow that one cannot account for the existence of retributive feelings. Mackie, for example, employed Darwinian principles in order to explain their ubiquity and persistence. His argument was roughly this: individuals achieved an evolutionary advantage to the extent that resentment of injuries became a deeply ingrained psychological disposition in their personality structures; this disposition was then universalized for broadly sociological reasons, so that certain harms came to be cooperatively resented, which is the mark of retributivism generally.

It reminded me of this article in the New Yorker about the brain and psychology and behavioral economics and neuroeconomics. Especially this bit:

A good way to illustrate Cohen’s point is to imagine that you and a stranger are sitting on a park bench, when an economist approaches and offers both of you ten dollars. He asks the stranger to suggest how the ten dollars should be divided, and he gives you the right to approve or reject the division. If you accept the stranger’s proposal, the money will be divided between you accordingly; if you refuse it, neither of you gets anything. How would you react to this situation, which economists refer to as an “ultimatum game,” because one player effectively gives the other an ultimatum? Game theorists say that you should accept any positive offer you receive, even one as low as a dollar, or you will end up with nothing. But most people reject offers of less than three dollars, and some turn down anything less than five dollars.

See? It’s the same thing. Resentment of injuries, of perceived injustice, trumps economic benefit. I know damn well I’m like that. I’d happily spurn the two or three dollars for the sake of punishing the greedy unfair stranger on the bench. I would probably also pick up a nearby branch or tennis racket and smack the stranger with it then run away.

Cohen and several colleagues organized a series of ultimatum games in which half the players – the respondents – were put in MRI machines…When respondents received stingy offers – two dollars for them, say, and eight dollars for the other player – they exhibited substantially more activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area associated with reasoning, and in the bilateral anterior insula, part of the limbic region that is active when people are angry or in distress. The more activity there was in the limbic structure, the more likely the person was to reject the offer. To the researchers, it looked as though the two regions of the brain might be competing to decide what to do, with the prefrontal cortex wanting to accept the offer and the insula wanting to reject it…Maybe human beings have an intrinsic preference for fairness, and we get angry when that preference is violated—so angry that we punish the other player even at a cost to ourselves. Or perhaps people reject low offers because they don’t want to appear weak.

See? Same thing. It’s interesting. It’s why small children spend all their time measuring the size of each other’s pieces of cake to make sure they’re not getting stiffed – they’re making sure nobody’s dissing them.

Well this is what I keep saying.

It is time to reverse the prevailing notion that religious commitment is intrinsically deserving of respect, and that it should be handled with kid gloves and protected by custom and in some cases law against criticism and ridicule. It is time to refuse to tip-toe around people who claim respect, consideration, special treatment, or any other kind of immunity, on the grounds that they have a religious faith, as if having faith were a privilege-endowing virtue, as if it were noble to believe in unsupported claims and ancient superstitions.

That’s all. It’s quite simple. Faith is not a virtue, and it shouldn’t endow privilege. It’s not noble to believe in unsupported claims, especially in the guise of ancient superstitions. ‘Faith’ keeps insisting on throwing its weight around in public matters, so it can’t reasonably claim kid glove handling at the same time. It does claim exactly that; but not reasonably.

Grayling is forthright.

On the contrary: to believe something in the face of evidence and against reason – to believe something by faith – is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect. It is time to say so. It is time to demand of believers that they take their personal choices and preferences in these non-rational and too often dangerous matters into the private sphere, like their sexual proclivities. Everyone is free to believe what they want, providing they do not bother (or coerce, or kill) others; but no-one is entitled to claim privileges merely on the grounds that they are votaries of one or another of the world’s many religions.

Simon Blackburn said much the same in that article ‘Religion and Respect’ [pdf] that I commented on a year ago.

But, I argued to myself, why should I “respect” belief systems that I do not share? I would not be expected to respect the beliefs of flat earthers or those of the people who believed that the Hale-Bopp comet was a recycling facility for dead Californians, and killed themselves in order to join it. Had my host stood up and asked me to toast the Hale-Bopp hopefuls, or to break bread or some such in token of fellowship with them, I would have been just as embarrassed and indeed angry.

But the rules change for (established) religion. And they not only change, they creep.

People may start out by insisting on respect in the minimal sense, and in a generally liberal world they may not find it too difficult to obtain it. But then what we might call respect creep sets in, where the request for minimal toleration turns into a demand for more substantial respect, such as fellowfeeling, or esteem, and finally deference and reverence.

Or not finally; there’s another step: obedience and submission, along with silencing and censorship. In some places and on some subjects, we’re already there.

Grayling concludes:

But no organised religion, as an institution, has a greater claim to the attention of others in society than does a trade union, political party, voluntary organisation, or any other special interest group – for “special interest groups” are exactly what churches and organised religious bodies are. No one could dream of demanding that political parties be respected merely because they are political parties, or of protecting them from the pens of cartoonists; nor that their members should be. On the contrary. And so it should be for all interest groups and their members, without exception.

Yup. Time for the worm to turn.