Author: Ophelia Benson

An interesting (at least in places) discussion at Pharyngula of Eagleton on Dawkins. One of the interesting bits is the one where Andrew Brown drops by to comment. He notes that he reviewed The God Delusion for Prospect with a follow-up at Comment is Free (I put both in News here, and I think commented on one or both; they’re not new). He draws a rather irrelevant analogy.

The shortest form of all these objections is this analogy: Suppose that I, knowing nothing about economics, write a book saying that the world would be better off without money: that money has led people to terrible crimes, and may even be thre root of all evil — “and besides, when you look at it money doesn’t even exist: who is this ‘I’ who promises to pay the bearer on demand? Why should we believe in dollars when no one believes in Reichsmarks or in cowrie shells?” Would this be a scientific work? Would it advance our understanding of money, or of economics?

But religion isn’t economics, and it’s not like economics. Religion is not an expert subject. That’s why I find all these questions about theology beside the point. Religion of course can be an expert subject, but it isn’t of its nature an expert subject, especially not in the form of the various Protestant denominations. Religion is public, and democratic, and inclusive, and all-embracing; furthermore, people are constantly making us a present of their religious beliefs in all sorts of public media, from newspapers to political campaigns to radio shows to tv dramas. It is a perfectly legitimate and indeed necessary undertaking to look at and dispute with that form of religion – public religion – everybody’s religion – Bush’s religion, Blair’s religion, Cristine Odone’s religion. That’s why economics is beside the point.

Brown goes on:

There are lots of us who believe that religion is primarily a social reality. The way to study social realities, and to understand them, is not to ponce around saying “Nyah nyah nyah it’s all just an illusion.”

Well, there are also lots of us who believe – for good reason, I would say – that religion is a social reality that rests on particular supernatural beliefs – to wit, that there is a personal omnipotent benevolent omniscient god who is real but out of our reach and who is transcendent but nevertheless answers our prayers and is involved in our world. One way to study and also criticize a social reality that is based on those beliefs is indeed, surely, to ask whether there is any reason to believe all that. Why wouldn’t it be? When we’re always being urged to believe all that ourselves, and urged or commanded to respect people who believe it, and told to be quiet about our opinion of it, and having plays and museum exhibits closed down before we can see them because of it. It’s our business, isn’t it; it’s everyone’s business. Economics isn’t.* I wouldn’t apply for the job of chairman of the Federal Reserve, because I quite agree that I don’t know enough about economics, but religion isn’t like that (not that I plan to apply for the job of archbishop of Canterbury either).

I can see saying that approach is not terribly interesting or challenging, I can see not wanting to bother with it, but Brown seems to be saying that it’s illegitimate, and I don’t buy that. I don’t think an approach that disputes religion as it is commonly (and often) presented is in the least illegitimate, in fact I think it needs doing.

*Well, economics is, but not in the sense of being able to criticize it cogently merely because we know how to spend money.

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.