Author: Ophelia Benson

Time for a little religion-bashing. (A former acquaintance once kindly informed me that he didn’t like B&W because of the religion-bashing. Ruined my day. Or month, or year.) This bishop again. I want to look at what’s worrying him, once more.

The seven “sacraments” of their secular culture are abortion, buggery, contraception, divorce, euthanasia, feminism of the radical type, and genetic experimentation and mutilation…The toleration of sexual perversions among inverts, widespread contraception, easy access to “no fault” divorce, the killing of the elderly, radical feminism, embryonic stem cell research…

I want to look at the remarkable, and rather shameless, distortion of some of those. Especially that “the killing of the elderly.” The…killing of the elderly? Libbruls and Democrats want a new law to mandate the execution of everyone over 80? 70? 60? Funny – I wasn’t aware of that campaign. I read the Nation, The American Prospect, Dissent, Harper’s, the Progressive regularly and I’ve never seen a word about that campaign. That of course would be because it don’t exist. The episcopal bastard means (of course) laws that would permit voluntary euthanasia or assisted suicide (with many safeguards) for people who are terminally ill and suffering and want to end it – and for no one else. They have nothing to do with the elderly: here’s why: terminal illnesses are not restricted to elderly people, and not all elderly people get terminal illnesses, and those who do don’t always suffer much, and those who do don’t necessarily want to end it. So – what’s the bishop doing calling voluntary assisted suicide “the killing of the elderly”? He’s violating one of the ten commandments, that’s what. I won’t say which one, in case he’s a litigious bastard as well as a [coughcoughcough] one.

The other striking thing is how agitated he is about embryonic stem cell research and abortion and contraception. Why do bishops and popes and priests get so agitated about cells and leave much of suffering existing human beings unmentioned? Why do they spend so much energy and discourse on cells instead of on actual people? Why the disproportion? Why the fretting over trivia? It’s a top-down thing, I gather; the Vatican sets the tone and the priests and bishops follow, but why is the Vatican so worried about trivia? I don’t know, but I suspect. (What? Oh, that it’s basically about keeping women down. If embryos become all-important, women become incubators; that kind of thing.)

There. Yet another reason to dislike B&W.

Here’s another thing I’m curious about: this idea (if it is an idea, as opposed to a mere ad hoc ploy snatched up for the purposes of evasive argumentation) that rational argument is the same thing as cultural relativism. Is that an idea? In the sense that several or many people think that, as opposed to one idiosyncratic person commenting on a Note and Comment?

Well I suppose it is an idea, yes, come to think of it, but surely it’s an idea that belongs to the, how shall I say, the fervent moral majoritarian fundamentalist right wing crowd, not the multiculti diversity-celebrating Islamophobia-spotting crowd. That’s a favourite ploy with the fundies: doing things by contraries, declaring opposites to be identical and themselves to have won the argument. They like to say atheism is a religion, and secularism is another, and “Darwinism” another, and “radical feminism” another, and fill in the rest of the blanks. The gentle and reasonable Bishop of Rockford sees things that way, or pretends to for the purpose of firing his flock to rush out and tell lies about Democrats and libbruls. ‘The seven “sacraments” of their secular culture are abortion, buggery, contraception, divorce, euthanasia, feminism of the radical type, and genetic experimentation and mutilation.’ Same kind of thing. “Secular culture” has sacraments, atheism is a religion, and rational argument is cultural relativism. Sure: coercive domineering theocratic types do like to claim that rational argument is identical to relativism and boils down to saying anything goes, everything’s good, all must be tolerated, if it works for you it’s groovy, there are no rules, take your pants off and stick around for awhile. But they like to claim that for their own nasty coercive theocratic reasons: they like to claim it so that they can claim that there is nothing between authoritarian inarguable Holy Book-ratified take it or go to hell dogma, and whoopee let’s bugger all the infants. They like to claim that (apparently this needs spelling out) so that everyone will pale with terror and cling to the dogma for dear life lest they find themselves copulating with a newborn. But that is a tactic, a ploy, a trick, not a genuine or legitimate argument, and it’s not true. Rational argument is not the same thing as relativism. That’s common knowledge, isn’t it? I’d have thought so, but perhaps I’d have been wrong. But take a look at, oh, I don’t know, Mill’s Subjection of Women, or Rawls’s Theory of Justice, or Sen’s Argumentative Indian; they’re none of them examples of cultural relativism, but you can find traces of rational argument here and there in all of them.

The crux here is my “The “up to a point” has to be defended and defensible, it has to be justifiable, it can’t be just a because God says so” answered with “NAMBLA are certainly prepared to have an argument about whether it’s bad to have sex with 12 year old boys, and the reason that they can’t is going to have to depend on some absolute statement of (im)morality.”

Why? Why is the reason going to have to depend on that? Any more than, for instance, the arguments for gay marriage do? It’s noticeable that most of the arguments against gay marriage are not very good, are not conspicuously rational*, and that’s probably why they’re not thriving all that well with rational people. They flourish with theocrats (maybe partly because they don’t flourish with rational people: it’s part of the whole anti-“elitist” schtick that fundamentalists go in for) but they don’t flourish with people who are at least somewhat reachable by rational argument. Surely it would be the same with NAMBLA’s projected argument about whether it’s bad to have sex with 12 year old boys, or any other moral issue. Either they’re rationally arguable, or they’re not, in which case they’re arbitrary, and their force becomes extremely questionable. Since I’m arguing here that precisely such arbitrary unjustifiable unarguable moral commands are coercive and should not be automatically respected or tolerated or celebrated or deferred to merely on the grounds that they belong to another culture, I fail to see why or how that makes me a cultural relativist, and I’m curious about the whole idea, and curious about leftists who apparently think their view is progressive and mine is conservative. Very curious.

*Harry Brighouse posted a request for “a really good article, by someone philosophically sophisticated, which argues against gay marriage” at Crooked Timber the other day, because he didn’t have much. That would seem to indicate it’s not an abundant commodity.

Just in case we ever go thinking the Southern Baptists or the redemptionists or the other protestant flame-throwers have a monopoly on being as disgusting as they can possibly manage to be – here’s the bishop of Rockford.

We know, for instance, that adherents of one political party would place us squarely on the road to suicide as a people. The seven “sacraments” of their secular culture are abortion, buggery, contraception, divorce, euthanasia, feminism of the radical type, and genetic experimentation and mutilation. These things they unabashedly espouse, profess and promote. Their continuance in public office is a clear and present danger to our survival as a nation.

Well if they would place us squarely on the road to suicide as a people it sounds more as if their continuance in existence is a clear and present danger to everyone and everything. In other words – the bishop is playing with some dangerous language there. Lynch mob language.

The toleration of sexual perversions among inverts, widespread contraception, easy access to “no fault” divorce, the killing of the elderly, radical feminism, embryonic stem cell research — all of these things defile and debase our human nature and our human destiny.

Radical feminism defiles and debases our human nature and our human destiny – while guys like the bishop purify and elevate it, I suppose. No, I think not.

Thanks to George Scialabba for sending me a link to the bishop’s gentle musings.

George reminds me that I ought to have mentioned our engagement. Fair point. You know I favour the impersonal note, but there is a limit. George got his first look at B&W recently, and naturally his first thought was to say let’s get hitched, and naturally I said why not old bean.

And so begins a happy life.

Yanti greeted her future husband with a handshake and the merest flicker of a smile as he arrived with relatives. He gave a nod and quickly moved on to the next person in line…They were disinclined to cuddle up, even when cajoled by the photographer. The truth behind the frostiness is a sinister and sad indictment of the traditions that persist in many parts of Indonesia. Not only had Yanti, 22, a restaurant cook, and Tri, 24, a maize and sweet potato farmer, just met, they barely knew anything about each other.

Oh well – what’s to know? What need is there to know something about someone you sign up to live with and have sex with and probably have children with and go on living with for the rest of your life? One person is much like another, surely; what difference can it make?

It is impossible to know how many Indonesians end up in such marriages. Saman, the cleric who married Yanti and Tri, said ‘extreme’ stories such as theirs, where the couple had not even met, accounted for perhaps 1 per cent of marriages. ‘But there are many marriages organised by the parents where the children do what they’re told,’ he said. Tini, a maid in Jakarta who ran away for three days after her parents tried to force her, at the age of 15, to marry a 28-year-old, reckons about a third of all unions in her district are undertaken without the participants’ full consent. ‘It’s not as bad as it was but from what I hear it is still very prevalent in rural areas,’ she said. World Vision, an international aid agency, describes the practice as ‘still common’ and experts say it is unlikely to die out soon. ‘It’s the tradition and it’s hard to go against traditions,’ said Gadis Arivia, the executive director of the women’s group Jurnal Perempuan…A significant contributing factor is that in many communities traditions and religious leaders are more highly respected than national legislation.

It’s hard to go against traditions. Yes. So the world is full of lives that are a lot worse than they might be. That’s too bad.

I’m getting very curious about this advertising question. A couple of commenters on Inquiry have disagreed with my characterization of advertising as having the goal of selling a product as opposed to finding (or disseminating) the truth. I’m becoming increasingly interested in finding out what is controversial about this. Am I just wrong? Have I got my facts wrong? Am I confused? Here I’ve thought all this time, even from earliest childhood, innocently gazing at rice krispies elves and bald giants in T shirts, that the purpose of advertisements was to get people to pay money for the objects the ads were talking or singing or dancing or enacting little playlets about, whether it be spearmint gum or a cleaning product or a sexually exciting automobile. Did I somehow get the wrong end of the stick? Were all those mini-dramas and songs and limpid sylvan landscapes not intended to inspire us to spend money on the cereals and beers and cigarettes in question, but rather to inquire into or convey the truth about said products?

I gotta tell you, I don’t think so. I have to say, I’ve been reliably informed on more than one occasion that the purpose of such entertainments and didactic offerings was and is, indeed, to move the viewer to buy the object of attention. I think I can offer abundant evidence that that is indeed the purpose of advertising. But – but one can always be wrong; I could be wrong; perhaps all my informants were wrong; perhaps it’s all a misunderstanding. Perhaps advertising is in fact a branch of education, and I’ve simply never grasped that. You have your schools, and your universities, and libraries, and museums, and then you have advertising, and they’re all doing the same thing, for the same reasons, with the same motivations, using the same methods and adhering to the same norms. Or perhaps advertising is a branch of research and inquiry; perhaps it’s a giant long-term multi-generational social science experiment that was started in the middle of the 18th century and is nowhere near complete yet. I never realized that.

I don’t think so though. I don’t think advertising is there to educate us, or to do disinterested research. But commenters keep disputing me. For instance: “Actually, being horribly pedantic and all, there is no reason why advertising should not be about truth telling even if it is also about persuasion, it really all depends on the ethical standards of the advertiser, the two things are not mutually exclusive.”

I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think it’s true that “there is no reason why advertising should not be about truth telling.” That is not the same thing as saying that advertising can’t possibly ever tell the truth, although I would argue that advertising can’t really ever be “about” truth telling, because it is in fact “about” something quite different. But the “no reason” thing first. It’s just not true to say there’s no reason to claim that advertising and truth telling are mutually exclusive: there is a reason, a perfectly sensible and widely recognized reason: advertising has an agenda, an axe to grind, a bias, which is different from truth telling and could very well interfere with the motivation to tell the truth. That’s obvious enough isn’t it? Here’s a thought experiment in case it’s not. You’re an advertiser: your new account is this cookie: you taste it: it tastes like shit. Is that what you decide to say in the ad? “Buy new raisin Weezelbronks, they taste like shit!” Put it more objectively: you do marketing research: you give the cookie to lots of people to try: they all say it tastes like shit. Is that what you put in the ad? “Buy new raisin Weezelbronks, everybody says they taste like shit!” Granted, most cookie makers would try to improve the cookie before selling it. But what about cigarettes then? Do cigarette ads say nothing but: “Smoke these, they’re addictive, they’ll make you smell bad, they’re expensive, and they’re highly toxic!”

Now just apply the basic principle to any product and any ad for it and you’ll see what I’m driving at. Advertising is not in fact “about” truth telling, it is “about” selling a product, and the two are not invariably mutually exclusive, but they certainly are in tension. Advertisers have no inherent motivation to tell the complete truth about the product unless they have the rare perfect product with no harmful side effects.

But I’m told I have “a very jaundiced view of corporate ethics” because I make this claim. But I don’t buy it (so to speak). I don’t think that is a jaundiced view, and it’s also not a personal one; it’s simply an observation about the inherent function of advertising. Unless, as I say, I’m completely wrong and confused and misinformed about what that function is. New information sought and welcomed.