Author: Ophelia Benson

More on Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal and consensus, agreement, universalism, and how to think and argue about them. I basically agree with it, but there are places where I think it could use some expansion, or some further stipulation, or both. I think there are some lurking unacknowledged tensions; once they’re pointed out all will go swimmingly. Page 260:

I don’t think I’m asking for all that much in the way of intellectual conformity, consensus, or (gasp) tyranny. The version of universalism I’m proposing does suggest that it might be good and useful to say, “No matter how or what you think, you fellow human, you are entitled to food and shelter and health care and education and political representation.” You can be a Christian Scientist, a secular-humanist professor, or an avant-garde poet/sculptor/dancer, and we can let all those language games flourish. But underlying that commitment to parlogy and dissensus, let’s imagine provisional agreement about human entitlements…

Yes, let’s, but there’s a problem there, an unacknowledged tension. It’s helpful of Michael to have placed the Christian Scientist so close to health care in that passage, because that’s the tension. We can say “No matter what you think, you are entitled to health care,” because that doesn’t amount to forcing health care on the reluctant Christian Scientist. But what about the Christian Scientist’s minor daughter? That’s where the tension bites. We can tell the Christian Scientist “you are entitled to health care” without being coercive, but we can’t tell the Christian Scientist “your daughter is entitled to health care” without being at least potentially coercive. The Christian Scientist, if she is a dedicated Christian Scientist, won’t want her daughter to get health care as commonly understood – she will in fact want precisely to deny her daughter the entitlement to health care that we have in mind when we talk about entitlements to health care. And that’s a problem. That’s the problem.

Because of course it applies to a lot of cases. Not just the Christian Scientist who doesn’t want her daughter to be entitled to health care, but also the parents who don’t want their daughters to be entitled to education, the parents who don’t want their daughters to be entitled to freedom, the parents who don’t want their daughters to have the right of refusal in marriage, and so on. It also applies to men who don’t want their wives to have various entitlements; it applies to men who don’t want their wives, daughters, sisters, mothers to have any entitlements. It applies to people who have power over intimates and dependents, because such people generally do have both de facto and de jure power to deny entitlements to said intimates and dependents, a power which it can be anything from difficult to impossible to interfere with, especially without coercion – without what the people in question would indeed see as tyranny. That’s the problem. That’s the problem and it means that saying “No matter what you think, you are entitled to [various things]” won’t untie this knot between universalism and difference.

It’s a knot that keeps turning up in the newspapers day after day. It turns up in the father who wouldn’t let his daughter have surgery to drain an abscess in her head because ‘traditional healers’ advised him not to. It turns up in a new domestic violence law in India:

Every six hours, a young married woman is burned, beaten to death or driven to commit suicide, officials say. Overall, a crime against women is committed every three minutes in India, according to India’s National Crime Records Bureau. Despite the scale of the problem, there had been no specific legislation to deal with actual abuse or the threat of abuse at home.

Again, this is coercion – depending on which person we’re talking to. If we’re talking to women, we’re saying “No matter what you think, you are entitled not to be subject to violence.” But if we’re talking to men, we’re not saying anything parallel, we’re saying something opposite – we’re saying “No matter what you think, you are not entitled to subject your wife to violence.” And Michael says so very clearly on p. 254 – a student asks if we can’t just say denying education is wrong, and the answer is yes, it’s just that it’s not helpful to say it in a foundationalist way. All this boils down to, I think, is perhaps a small disagreement about how much we’re asking for in the way of intellectual conformity, consensus, or (gasp) tyranny. I don’t think we’re asking for too much, certainly, and I think we’re asking for it on good grounds, but I also think that some of the people we’re asking it of are indeed going to think it’s tyranny.

Okay so what’s the big deal. Everybody lighten up a little. So the guy compared women to uncovered meat, so what – it’s his sincere opinion, and that’s his culture, so take a chill pill. Anyway is he wrong? Is he?

If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside…without cover, and the cats come to eat it…whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat’s? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.

Obviously he’s not wrong. Come on, be honest – you know he’s not. The analogy is watertight. If you take out a piece of chicken, and put it outside stark naked with nothing on top of it, and the cats sashay over and eat it – it is of course the piece of chicken’s fault. Who would say otherwise? No one! Not the most Eurocentric Westoxic secularized modernized colonialist heretic infidel would say otherwise. There lies the piece of chicken on its plate, swaying seductively back and forth, twitching its hips, flicking its hair, pouting its lips, goggling with its eyes, rubbing its thighs together, waving its legs in the air, showing off its cleavage – doing everything it can to seduce those innocent honest godfearing hardworking cats to come over there and nibble and suck and lick and eat. That piece of chicken is a harlot, that piece of chicken is out to ensnare and deceive cats and distract them from their duty to Allah. That piece of chicken should be beaten by its brothers and then stoned to death, not pleasantly gobbled up by cats.

So, of course, it’s exactly the same with women. Identical. Because they’re like meat. Cat smells meat, cat wants to eat it; man smells woman, man wants to fuck it. It’s exactly the same. A woman outside is exactly like a plate of chicken with nothing on top of it: wide open, smellable, unprotected, rape bait. Who can deny it? No one. So if the woman is outside and some men come along and rape her, it’s her fault – because she’s not supposed to be outside any more than the meat is, is she! Meat belongs inside the house, inside the fridge, or inside the stomach of the men who have eaten it; it’s not supposed to be outside, walking up and down and doing whatever it likes. It’s only men and cats that are allowed to be outside doing what they like. Meat and women are supposed to be locked up. Got that? Of course they are. Women are supposed to be in their rooms, at home, in their hijabs, just as Sheik Hilali said. Each woman is allotted a room, in a home, where she is supposed to spend her entire life; if she comes out, she does it to entice rapists, and she deserves everything she gets. Am I right? Okay I know it’s not popular, but you know it’s true.

Much of Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts is relevant to all this – not surprisingly: it’s about higher education (and education more broadly), Bhattacharyya’s piece is about higher education (and education more broadly), and Dawkins’s work is partly about higher education (and education more broadly).

He talks in chapter 6 – ‘Postmodernism’ – about the difficulties of grounding moral intuitions, via Lyotard’s disagreement with Habermas about consensus and difference, and via feminist epistemology and local and ‘situated’ knowledge (with a reference to Meera Nanda), and Rorty’s antifoundationalism (about morality rather than epistemology). He quotes (page 256) from an essay of Rorty’s that I’ve always liked, despite disagreeing with much of it, ‘Wild Orchids and Trotsky’:

The democratic community of Dewey’s dreams is…a community in which everybody thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than knowledge of something not merely human, that really matters.

I don’t buy it. I think I might have, once, but I don’t now. I’ve become too suspicious of all those words – too aware of the need to ask for further details on all of them: democratic, community, and solidarity. Democratic – well, it depends: is this a democratic community of narrow parochial authoritarian people who hate fags and independent women and ruffians and atheists and elitist intellectuals? Is it the kind of community that expects and demands that everyone fit in and conform? Is it the kind of solidarity people feel when they unite against a putative enemy who is in fact merely different in some harmless way? Perhaps it’s the kind of democratic community that finds solidarity in voting to make the public high school teach ID in its biology classes.

Human solidarity is only as good as it is. Sometimes human solidarity can be murderous, even genocidal; often it can be coercive and limiting. And to at least some people, it is knowledge of something not merely human that really matters – cosmologists, physicists, artists, geologists, poets, musicians, mountaineers; many people. It’s of course true that grounding morality is very difficult, but recourse to solidarity is…dubious.

Michael makes a similar point himself earlier, on pp 222-3, in discussing Lyotard’s disagreement with Habermas:

Habermas imagines the “ideal speech situation” as something oriented not merely toward understanding, as I said above, but toward consensus. This…basically says, “We will all sit down and deliberate as equals – and then, when we’re done deliberating, we will agree.”…[I]n suggesting that consensus is the goal of the discussion, Habermas has left himself wide open to the charge that he does see universalism as the eradication of difference – that universalism will have done its job only when there is no one left to dissent from it. And that, Lyotard insists, puts us right back on the road to Terror.

Same thing. Consensus, too, is only as good as it is. So is agreement; so is universalism. They’re all – democracy, community, solidarity, consensus, agreement, universalism – only as good as they are. They’re all capable of being merely agreement to do bad things, consensus that outsiders are the spawn of the devil. Bertrand Russell’s grandmother was fond of the Biblical saying, ‘Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.’ I quite like that myself.

Gargi Bhattacharyya considers the relationship between education and religion.

Universities in this country broadly champion secular ideals. Whatever the circumstances of their formation, higher education institutions value their independence from state and church (and temple and mosque and synagogue and gurdwara). This is part of what we think universities are – spaces of free debate and enquiry, free from the strictures of doctrinal thought. According to this view, good education cannot belong to any one tradition. There is no benefit to being taught among people like yourself, in fact this is a disadvantage to the interrogatory processes of higher education…There may be unspoken norms, but broadly, doctrinal thought is frowned upon and is considered insufficient to a proper education.

There it is again, as with the Edwards piece, Group A and Group B, rational inquiry versus unfalsifiable dogma. (Merlijn and John M point out that there are religious people who as Merlijn put it ‘have a certain degree of critical distance between them and their beliefs’ – religious people who are not dogmatic and who do value rational inquiry and belong to Group A rather than B, or perhaps to Group C. A fair point. Not all religious people are dogmatic. But to the extent that they’re not, their allegiance isn’t really to Group B. They’re not so much an exception to Group B as they are members of Group A with some B inclinations. In short, we can consider them as part of Group A if they like, because any dogmatic beliefs they are loyal to or fond of, are safely bracketed and/or put in question. The opposition remains the same. The point is not so much how to allocate all religious people, as it is how to think about doctrinal thought as doctrinal thought.) Good education, as Bhattacharyya says, needs ‘ interrogatory processes’ rather than doctrinal thought. Just so.

[T]he ideal of the university as a place of free thought is not a bad model for understanding how people might learn things…[T]he university ideal suggests that the most important thing in relation to education is access – to learning resources, to informed and inspiring teaching, to a variety of ideas and ways of thinking and to a mixed and unpredictable bunch of others who are all curiously trying to learn as well…The catch is that all must learn to hear and consider unfamiliar and, perhaps, unpalatable views and beliefs, not because becoming educated demands adherence to any particular view, but because becoming equipped to contemplate all views is what makes you educated.

Which is why ‘faith’ education is not education but something else.