Author: Ophelia Benson

Another excellent article from Fred Halliday.

Amid the unconscionable violence, targeting of civilians, and appeals to unreason and ethnic identification that such modern wars entail, it is all the more necessary to retrieve the example of those who sought to defend core values that crossed boundaries of prejudice and narrow partisanship. I have already honoured one of those in this openDemocracy series of columns: the great French scholar of the Muslim world, Maxime Rodinson. Two more such figures were formative in articulating an internationalist position – one (Isaac Deutscher) within a Marxist framework, the other (Hannah Arendt) within a broadly liberal perspective.

And two very long-standing intellectual heroes and influences of mine.

Soon after the 1967 war, Deutscher gave an interview to three editors of the London-based Marxist intellectual journal New Left Review…In it, Deutscher struck a note that has diminished to near-invisibility in more recent debates, where claims of identity prevail over universal principle, where identification with one side or the other predominates, and where the atrocities and callous political blunders of each combatant readily find their intellectual defenders…Deutscher built on these premises an argument – couched in tones of anti-clerical, universalist disdain, something all too lacking in these days of grovelling before “identity”, “tradition” and “faith communities” – that was clear in its rejection of the invocation of the sacred, the God-given, in political debate. Deutscher rejected Talmudic obscurantism and bloodthirsty Arab calls for vengeance alike.

These days of grovelling before “identity”, “tradition” and “faith communities”…Oh yeah.

The work of the German philosopher Hannah Arendt…was not directly related to the Arab-Israeli question, but her liberal internationalist outlook does have immense relevance to it. This is especially true of Eichmann in Jerusalem…Much more controversial (and neglected) is Arendt’s critique of the legal and moral case made by the Israeli prosecutors against Eichmann. For, whereas the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war criminals had been conducted under what at least purported to be some form of “international” law…Adolf Eichmann was prosecuted for the taking of Jewish lives and in a Jewish court. A case that in 1946 had been (if weak in some points of principle) confident in its universalist aspirations, had by the early 1960s been converted into something derived from the ethnicity of the victims. And this ethnicisation of the victims was, at the same time, deemed to convey a particular right, if not responsibility, on the state that lay claim to representing those victims, namely Israel. This was what Hannah Arendt identified.

Identified and sharply criticized, which is one reason I keep re-reading Eichmann in Jerusalem. She didn’t do any grovelling before ‘identity’ and ‘faith communities.’

There is an enormous historical regression involved here. It involves seeing membership of a particular community, or claims of affinity, ethnicity or religious association with others, as conveying particular rights (or particular moral clarity) on those making such claims. In purely rational terms, this is nonsense: the crimes of the Israelis in wantonly destroying Lebanon’s infrastructure, and the crimes of Hizbollah and Hamas in killing civilians and placing the lives and security of their peoples recklessly at risk, do not require particularist denunciation. They are crimes on the basis of universal principles – of law, decency, humanity – and should be identified as such.

We’re in – we’re well and truly stuck in – a period of enormous historical regression. Here’s hoping we can claw our way out of it very soon.

So there’s this letter from what the BBC calls ‘Muslim groups’. It’s bizzarre.

Prime Minister, As British Muslims we urge you to do more to fight against all those who target civilians with violence, whenever and wherever that happens. It is our view that current British government policy risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad. To combat terror the government has focused extensively on domestic legislation. While some of this will have an impact, the government must not ignore the role of its foreign policy.

The government must not ignore the role of its foreign policy – and then what? Tell itself that unless it obeys (obeys whom?), hundreds or thousands of people will be murdered, and therefore decide to obey (obey whom?) and – um – withdraw all its troops from Iraq (thus no doubt triggering a bloodbath) and send its troops to impose a ceasefire in Lebanon? Is that it? Is that what obedience (to whom?) would be? Or is it something else the government is supposed to do? But if so, what? Who, exactly, is issuing the instructions? Who is delivering the extortion notes, and what do they say? What exactly is the government supposed to do in order to mollify people who are eager to kill hundreds or thousands of people and cause them to decide not to murder all those people and to be good peace-loving citizens instead? Do the people who wrote that stupid letter know? Does anyone? There are those suicide tapes, of course – are they the instructions? Is that it, will that do? The government should study those tapes and do whatever Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer tell them they should have done? Except of course that was before the Lebanon problem – Tanweer said attacks would continue ‘until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq.’ So would it be okay if the government pulled its forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq but did nothing about Lebanon, would that work? Well, is there anyone the government can ask? Not Khan and Tanweer, obviously, so…who? The suspects maybe? They probably know. But maybe they wouldn’t say. Maybe they’d say the wrong thing, and the government would do that, and then somebody else would murder hundreds or thousands of people anyway, and leave a suicide video saying ‘Ha ha, fooled ya, that wasn’t what you were supposed to do, ha ha.’

In other words what the hell do the people who wrote and sent that stupid immoral letter think they’re talking about? And since when do mass murderers get to decide what a liberal democracy’s foreign policy should be? Since when is it considered reasonable and responsible to look about and say ‘Oh, there are some loathsome thugs bent on killing a lot of people, let us hasten to find out what they want us to do and immediately do that in order to reward them and persuade them not to murder us after all.’

In fact the more you look at that letter, the more presumptuous and (yes) offensive it seems. I beg your pardon? You’re chastizing Blair for not guessing at what a bunch of murderers want and then doing that so that they won’t murder anyone?

Kim Howells and some other people find it irritating too.

Mr Howells denied there was a “rational connection” and said “no government” formulates policy based on a perceived risk from terrorists…”I think it is very, very dangerous when people who call themselves community leaders make some assumption that somehow that there’s a rational connection between these two things.”

And not just self-proclaimed community leaders but also a couple of MPs and three peers.

MP Sadiq Khan, who signed the letter, said British foreign policy was seen by many as unfair and unjust…The letter was also signed by MPs Shahid Malik (Dewsbury) and Mohammed Sarwar (Glasgow Central), and peers Lord Patel of Blackburn, Lord Ahmed of Rotherham and Baroness Uddin. Other signatories include the Muslim Council of Britain, the Muslim Association of Britain, British Muslim Forum and the lobby group, the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain.

Another MP summed it up well.

Liberal Democrats deputy leader Vince Cable agreed there were links with foreign policy but voiced concerns the letter’s message might “give some comfort to the kind of people who say: ‘Well, change your foreign policy or we’ll blow you up’”.

Ya think?

So the jargon has reached Kenya. The aggrieved irritated ‘uncomfortable’ fretful worried Christians know what to say.

Powerful evangelical churches are pressing Kenya’s national museum to sideline its world-famous collection of hominid bones pointing to man’s evolution from ape to human. Leaders of the country’s six-million-strong Pentecostal congregation want Dr Richard Leakey’s ground-breaking finds relegated to a back room instead of being given their usual prime billing…”The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact,” said Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, the head of Christ is the Answer Ministries, the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya. “Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory.”

The C word, of course, but also the doctrine thing. ‘Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes.’ Well no, of course it’s not, and the doctrine of Goddesses is – whatever they feel like making up at any given moment. What of it? What’s anyone’s doctrine got to do with anything? The bones are there; that’s not doctrine, that’s bones; a doctrine that requires a museum to hide them in a back room is a pretty feeble doctrine, if you ask me.

Richard Leakey isn’t much impressed either.

Dr Leakey said the churches’ plans were “the most outrageous comments I have ever heard”…Calling the Pentecostal church fundamentalists, Dr Leakey added: “Their theories are far, far from the mainstream on this. They cannot be allowed to meddle with what is the world’s leading collection of these types of fossils.”

Well yes but you see, the museum murmured, you see it’s like this…

The museum said it was in a “tricky situation” as it tried to redesign its exhibition space to accommodate the expectations of all its visitors. “We have a responsibility to present all our artefacts in the best way that we can…But things can get tricky when you have religious beliefs on one side, and intellectuals, scientists or researchers on the other, saying the opposite.”

Yes, but museums are not churches, and religious beliefs ought not to trump evidence-based findings in educational institutions like museums; on the contrary, in educational institutions like museums (and zoos, aquariums, schools, libraries), evidence-based findings ought to trump religious beliefs, and that’s that. Leakey won’t bring his bones into your churches, so you don’t get to tell the museums to hide the bones. But of course that won’t stop you.

And people wonder why I’m such a noisy kind of atheist. Pffffff.

Some rather disheartening boilerplate on the merits of multiculturalism and identity and groups and communities from – surprise surprise – a university chancellor.

At the end of the day, the hope of these two kinds of projects – internal multicultural dialogue and external multicultural collaboration – is that we all come to value diverse groups, not just diverse individuals.

Well, as always, that depends on which groups we’re talking about, and what we mean by ‘value’, and what aspects of those diverse groups we are expected and hoped to value. It also depends on what happens when valuing groups is in tension with valuing individuals. What about individuals who want to leave or dissent from or change their groups, for example? Are we expected to refrain from valuing them in order to value their groups instead – in order to value ‘their’ groups as static entities that must not change and must not respond to the wishes of, for instance, subordinated people within the groups? If so, why? Or to put it another way, if so, forget it.

The comments are worth reading, as the comments at Inside Higher Ed often are. See especially H E Baber’s.

More of the usual multicultural bs, in the usual long-winded, jargon-ridden style…It’s amazing that, resisting all empirical evidence, multiculturalists like the author of this article are still promoting the communitarian group identities line. Since the end of the Cold War every major armed conflict, from the Balkans to Sri Lanka to Darfur to the current war in the Middle East has been a tribal war between groups affirming their cultural/ethnic identities. Women and people of color with stature as public intellectuals, including Amartya Sen, Anthony Appiah, Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have spoken out against this communitarian, multicultural ideology and in favor of cosmopolitanism.

Indeed they have. H E writes about multiculti at the Enlightenment Project sometimes. (B&W has published some of her E.P. articles.)

Bill Condon’s comment is also good. The comments on this article are better than the article.

Ohhhhhhh lordy. Look at this. It’s called ‘Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism.’ Isn’t that just the best title? But the content is even better.

Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena.

Microfascism! Yelp! What will happen when those evidence-based movement bastards turn to macrofascism? Will they get even more outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative on our asses? Or will they just kill us? Let’s ask Deleuze and Guattari; they’ll know.

The philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari proves to be useful in showing how health sciences are colonised (territorialised) by an all-encompassing scientific research paradigm – that of post-positivism – but also and foremost in showing the process by which a dominant ideology comes to exclude alternative forms of knowledge, therefore acting as a fascist structure.

But what if it’s a Deleuzoguattarian ideology that is dominant, does it exclude alternative forms of knowledge and thus act as a fascist structure? I bet I’m not supposed to ask that question, am I. I have to go sit on the microfascist stool for four minutes.

Because ‘regimes of truth’ such as the evidence-based movement currently enjoy a privileged status, scholars have not only a scientific duty, but also an ethical obligation to deconstruct these regimes of power.

You understand, don’t you? It’s clear, isn’t it? Dominant ideology excludes alternatives and it enjoys (whee! woopah! heehee!) privileged status so it’s a regime of power and a fascist structure. The only liberatory and truly fair thing to do is to have evidence-free health science; that’s an ethical obligation.

This thing is so ridiculous that it’s hard not to suspect it’s another Sokal hoax. Hey – [tap tap] – are you another Sokal hoax? Hello?