Author: Ophelia Benson

No. Wrong. Quite, quite wrong.

Brown responded to the BNP verdict by saying Griffin’s description of Islam as a ‘wicked, vicious faith’ would offend ‘mainstream opinion in this country’. He said: ‘If there is something that needs to be done to look at the law, then I think we will have to do that.’

Brown may have said more than that; the Observer may be being unfair to him; but all the same, that selection from what he did say is somewhat alarmingly (if you’ll forgive a foreigner for saying so) wrong if it is meant as a justification for the selection that follows. If it’s just a statement of fact, it may or may not be accurate but it’s not very alarming; but if the two parts of that passage go together, it’s a mess. “Offend’ and ‘mainstream’ and ‘opinion’ are three of the best words he could possibly have chosen not to cite as reasons for ‘looking at,’ i.e. changing, the law. In other words, liberal democracies aren’t supposed to be in the business of crafting laws to criminalize speech that would ‘offend mainstream opinion.’ Really they’re not. Really. Promise. Believe it or not, speech that ‘offends mainstream opinion’ and causes no other harm is precisely, but precisely, the kind of speech that is meant to be protected in liberal democracies; protected, not criminalized; protected, in fact, exactly from these fretful impulses to make them illegal that trouble the sleep of governments. I realize you guys don’t have the actual slip of paper that spells that out in so many words, but you do have the idea. But some of the people who make the laws apparently don’t, quite. Apparently they actually do think that saying things that would offend mainstream opinion really ought to be illegal. But (a whisper in your shell-like) mainstream opinion can sometimes be wrong. It has been known. So outlawing all speech that would offend mainstream opinion could have some perverse effects. And then, what of all these hymns to richness and diversity? Hm? If we’re going to rejoice at richness and diversity, we can’t very well with the next breath declare that mainstream opinion should have veto power over speech, can we.

That’s not to say that I think threatening speech should be protected. I have mixed opinions about that. But it sure is to say that offensive is not the same thing as threatening, and that the distinction is important.

Anthony Grayling replies to the archbishops.

In the foreword to the confused document produced by the religious thinktank Theos this week the Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster…iterate the claim that “atheism is itself a faith position”. This is a weary old canard to be set alongside the efforts of the faithful to characterise those who robustly express their attitude towards religious belief as “fundamentalist atheists”…We understand that the faithful live in an inspissated gloaming of incense and obfuscation, through the swirls of which it is hard to see anything clearly, so a simple lesson in semantics might help to clear the air for them on the meanings of “secular”, “humanist” and “atheist”. Once they have succeeded in understanding these terms they will grasp that none of them imply “faith” in anything, and that it is not possible to be a “fundamentalist” with respect to any of them.

An inspissated gloaming of incense and obfuscation – that’s not bad. Made me snicker anyway.

People who do not believe in supernatural entities do not have a “faith” in “the non-existence of X” (where X is “fairies” or “goblins” or “gods”); what they have is a reliance on reason and observation, and a concomitant preparedness to accept the judgment of both on the principles and theories that premise their actions…”Faith” – specifically and precisely: the commitment to a belief in the absence of evidence supporting that belief, or even (to the greater merit of the believer) in the very teeth of evidence contrary to that belief – is a far different thing…for faith at its quickly-reached limit is the negation of thought.

Well, yes. It’s considered bad form to say so, but that is after all what the word means. It’s sometimes a good thing in personal relations and in social and political commitments, but it’s never a good thing in epistemology.

Even some on my own side of the argument here make the mistake of thinking that the dispute about supernaturalistic beliefs is whether they are true or false. Epistemology teaches us that the key point is about rationality. If a person gets wet every time he is in the rain without an umbrella, yet persists in hoping that the next time he is umbrella-less in the rain he will stay dry, then he is seriously irrational. To believe in the existence of (say) a benevolent and omnipotent deity in the face of childhood cancers and mass deaths in tsunamis and earthquakes, is exactly the same kind of serious irrationality.

So – never go out without your umbrella, and be careful in the inspissated gloaming.

Listening to the World Service on the gay pride rally in Jerusalem very early this morning, I heard one peculiarly silly remark, to the effect that the conservative religious ‘communities’ that were making such a fuss about the rally are part of the ‘richness and diversity’ of Jerusalem. That was immediately followed by a ‘but,’ because the person who said it was defending gay rights against religious opposition, and yet – the starting point was richness and diversity. Well – you can call it richness and diversity, of course; you can call it jelly beans and dancing and flowers and anything you like. It’s always possible to dress things up in pretty language to make everyone feel cheerful. But all the same it can seem fairly contrariwise to call angry irrational narrow religious bigotry that wants to stop things and ban things ‘richness and diversity.’ You can call anything anything, but if you do it by backwards pretty soon everyone will forget how to say things the right way up. If religious tyrants are richness and diversity, then what would fit the description of poverty and narrowness?

In other words, no, in the normal understanding of the words, religious bigotry that wants to ban things for no real reason it can point to other than a Holy Book is not richness and diversity, it’s the opposite. It’s not just off at an angle, it’s the opposite: it’s a force for smallness and sameness and uniformity and obedience, and there’s nothing rich or diverse about it. (Except maybe the embroidery.) Yet people think there is – that’s the odd thing. Well – in a mostly or partly secular society, it may be unfamiliar, it may seem to have a whiff of the exotic (which would dissipate in about fifteen minutes if you had to live with it), it may look quaint and eccentric and exciting; but it’s not rich and diverse in itself. There’s a difference. Novelty is one thing, and richness is another. It might be as well if more people had a firmer grasp of that distinction, lest they get too infatuated with this idea that fundamentalist patriarchal bullies are attractive merely because they’re different from the crowd at Starbucks.

One reason the Vatican and the mufti of Jerusalem and ultra-orthodox Jews (all of whom opposed the gay pride rally) are not about richness and diversity is because they don’t want richness and diversity themselves, and if they could, they would eliminate them. They’re not fans of cosmopolitanism and patchwork and hodge podge and salad bowls. That’s not their schtick. They’re fans of monochrome – black, usually. They’re not shining ambassadors for richness and diversity for the same sort of reason that Nazis weren’t. Nazis had a pretty clear idea of what kind of thing was okay and what wasn’t; the first category was quite small, and the second was a candidate for steady methodical culling. That’s what zealots want for all of us: not richness and diversity but obedience and uniformity. Call them strawberries or butterflies or rainbows all you like, it won’t change that.

One comment I heard more than once in election analysis yesterday was that corruption was a big factor, and that what are (somewhat sickeningly) called ‘values voters’ here had somewhat shifted their concerns from abortion and gay marriage to corruption. Thank you Jack Abramoff. Well about damn well time, is what I thought. That’s been bugging me for years – why are people who consider themselves concerned about ‘values’ so worked up about such comparatively trivial matters (even if you accept their attributions of wickedness) and unconcerned about, you know, massive bribery? Why is gay marriage such a big whopping deal while retail government is just fine? That’s what I was always asking. So I was very pleased to hear that that worm has turned. Now, will anyone do anything about it? That seems highly unlikely, and the Supreme Court seems highly likely to throw out anything that is done. But – who knows.

And another thing. Pombo is out. Brilliant.