Author: Ophelia Benson

Correspondents in or from the Netherlands have written to me on the subject of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Views differ. I admire her in many ways, myself – but that doesn’t entail thinking she’s beyond criticism. So I was glad to see this piece by Ian Buruma; it seems fair. (I say ‘seems’ only because I don’t know nearly enough about Dutch politics to judge. I have to take his word for what he’s saying – but I see little reason not to.)

In the name of the Enlightenment, she would do battle against the new counter-Enlightenment, and she found allies among a variety of conservative intellectuals and politicians – and some former leftists, too – who were convinced that multiculturalism had failed, that the Dutch were timid, even cowardly, in the face of the Muslim challenge and that a tough line had to be taken. Rita Verdonk was only a particularly extreme and unimaginative exponent of this new mood…It was she who sent back vulnerable refugees to places like Syria and Congo. It was under her watch that asylum seekers were put in prison cells after a fire had consumed their temporary shelter and killed 11 at the Amsterdam airport. She was the one who decided to send a family back to Iraq because they had finessed their stories, even though human rights experts had warned that they would be in great danger…In this context, Ms. Hirsi Ali’s earlier remarks about the “terror” of “political correctness” have an unfortunate ring. It would have been better if she had taken this opportunity to speak up for the people who face the same problem that she did, of trying to move to a free European country, because their lives are stunted at home for social, political or economic reasons. By all means let us support Ayaan Hirsi Ali now, but spare a thought also for the nameless people sent back to terrible places in the name of a hard line to which she herself has contributed.

There’s more than one kind of tough line. Resisting cultural relativism is one thing, sending refugees back to Syria and Congo is another. So spare a thought.

Julian on the Simpsons. I’m sure he’s right, but I’ve never quite managed to get into it. I realize I ought to, and I feel as if I ought to – not in a moral sense, obviously, but in the sense that I’m sure I’m missing something worth not missing – but usually when I try, I find it irksome; I find I’m forcing myself to keep watching, as a duty, as if it were medicinal, at which I always get impatient and switch to something I like better. Though I also have an ongoing intention to do better some day.

I’m pretty sure I know why I find it irksome, too: it’s so ugly, and the animation is so bad. I’m pretty sure that’s the only thing that stands in the way. (What the hell else would it be? I’ve seen it enough to know I like the content.) I’m sorry, I can’t help it, I just get tired of looking at Homer’s face and Marge’s hair, very quickly. Almost instantly. I’m sure the ugliness is part of the joke, but the joke palls just as fast as the ugliness does, which is pretty much immediately. I can’t help it. I grew up on Warner Brothers cartoons; they’re part of my syntax, my grammar, my earliest mental furniture. Sub-Warner level animation has just never done it for me – it always has to compete with the Warner template, and it can’t do it. Rocky and Bullwinkle could be very funny (they were kind of a premonition of Jerry and Kramer, come to think of it), but man the drawing and animation were crap. Hanna-Barbera were just synoymous with bad animation. So I have this block about the Simpsons. Sad, isn’t it. (Imagine if all editions of Alice came with very ugly, crude illustrations on every page – and there were no plain editions in existence. That would be too bad. On the other hand I have a cartoon edition [yes, really] of Lear [complete text], and it’s brilliant, I love it. But I can’t learn to love Homer. I’m sorry.)

The rabbi has a point. Or part of one anyway.

…the notion that there is no higher authority than nature is precisely what enables people like Mr. Kuklinski – and the vast majority of the killers, rapists and thieves who populate the nightly news. No, no, of course that is not to say that most atheists engage in amoral or unethical behavior. What it is to say, though, is that atheism qua atheism presents no compelling objection to such behavior – nor, for that matter, any convincing defense of the very concepts of ethics and morality themselves.

Well, first of all, that’s a somewhat tricksy claim, because of course ‘atheism qua atheism’ presents no anything about behavior, since opinions on behavior are not what atheism is. Neither is theism, in and of itself; it’s the superstructure that gets built up on top of it – or, to put it another way, the nature of the deity that people decide to believe in; the way people choose to describe the deity they have decided to believe in, rather than their belief that a deity of some sort does exist, that provide the opinions on behavior and the defense of morality. So it’s no good claiming that theists get to assume that the moral views are inherent in the theism while they are not inherent in atheism; in fact they’re inherent in neither. But just for the sake of argument, let’s let him get away with that. Let’s be generous. And having given him that we might as well let him have the ‘compelling objection’ and the ‘convincing defense’ claims – even though he really chose the wrong adjectives there. He should have chosen something like irrefutable, or decisive, or absolute, or knock-down, because if he meant that atheists are unable to work up a compelling or convincing superstructure of moral ideas, as opposed to an irrefutable one, in the absence of a deity, I think that’s just a silly claim, with mountains of historical evidence (to say nothing of other kinds) to contradict it. But never mind; let him have that too. Let’s look farther.

To a true atheist, there can be no more ultimate meaning to good and bad actions than to good or bad weather; no more import to right and wrong than to right and left. To be sure, rationales might be conceived for establishing societal norms, but social contracts are practical tools, not moral imperatives; they are, in the end, artificial. Only an acknowledgement of the Creator can impart true meaning to human life, placing it on a plane above that of mosquitoes.

Of course. Of course social contracts are in the end artificial – but what the rabbi unaccountably fails to notice is that so is what he is saying. It’s exactly as artificial. He’s arguing that theism is a good thing because it compels us to be good – rather than because it’s true. He’s giving a (very old and very familiar) consequentialist argument for the social utility of religion and theist belief. And there is much truth in what he says, but that certainly doesn’t make the whole set-up any less artificial, does it. In fact what’s funny about what the rabbi says (and about these arguments in general, and the way they keep cropping up) is that it could actually undermine religious belief. People could read it and think a little bit and recognize that the rabbi is making a consequentialist argument, which could imply that he doesn’t actually believe in the moral guarantor in the sky himself – oops. Totter, shake, tremble, fall. Consequentialist arguments for actual belief in the real existence of a deity are a tad self-undermining – that’s why one is not supposed to make them in front of the servants. Cicero and Polybius both pointed that out a longish time ago. Oh well – better luck next time, rabbi.

Update: as Don pointed out, PZ has a great post on the rabbi’s thoughts at Pharyngula.

How do people manage to believe strange things? One way is simply to conclude that they have Special Powers, of course; but apart from that? Skeptical Inquirer discusses it via a review of Susan Clancy’s Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens.

…no one wakes up in the morning with a full-blown abduction experience. Sometimes, the experience is created and molded from the starting point of a dream or hypnogogic/hypnopompic hallucination experienced during sleep paralysis. Other times, it starts with just a vague feeling that something had happened that needs to be explained. According to Clancy, all of the abductees she studied “had sought out books, movies, researchers, and hypnotists in an effort to understand the things that were troubling them” (143). Since sleep paralysis and its related hallucinations are almost unknown to the general public, the real explanation is not available. Thus, when someone who has had such an experience reads one of the books touting the reality of alien abductions or hears such claims on television or elsewhere, it seems the only explanation available.

Up to a point. I always wonder why people don’t ask themselves why the aliens drop in only when the dropped in on have just woken up from sound sleep. Why don’t they knock on the door at 3 in the afternoon and ask for lemonade? Why don’t they show up at noon and help make lunch? Why don’t they show up right after dinner and pass the mints? Why don’t they show up when everyone for miles around is wide awake and alert and dressed and walking around and thinking straight? Eh? Why is it always when people are lying there in fetid heaps wondering what woke them oh it’s an alien? You would think they’d wonder. Not, maybe, if it were something only a little bit strange, something absurd but not physically impossible – (I have to say that because I once had an auditory hallucination after being woken up at 3 a.m., and I didn’t realize it was a hallucination until years later, reading about hypnogogic sleep. But what I heard wasn’t aliens, or god rehearsing a speech, or The Great Unicorn humming a tune. It was odd, even socially impossible, but not supernatural.) – but if it were aliens? Barney and Betty aliens, mashed potato aliens, sperm-head aliens? I would think that would make people look a little harder for other explanations. But then of course some do; it’s just that others don’t. That’s not all that surprising. It’s a big world.

In chapter 5, “Who gets abducted?”, she reports the results of her own research on dozens of abductees, whom she interviewed and gave psychological tests. In general, these people are quite normal. They are certainly, with an exception or two, not “crazy,” as so many first suspect upon hearing their tales. They are, however, more imaginative, creative, and fantasy-prone than the general population.

Sure. It’s not at all about being crazy, I should think, it’s about being credulous, uncritical, mentally passive. All of which are natural! Those are pretty much default mode; it takes learning to be the other thing. Skepticism and caution and logic, poking at inferences, realizing the difference between correlation and causation – all those are learned behaviour. Lots of people never do learn it. And there are masses of influences teaching the opposite.

It may surprise you to know that my co-author has Special Powers. He’s been telling me about them lately. He was considering telling you about them too, but he may have decided not to profane the mysteries. He has a faint hope that telling me about his Special Powers will convince me that he is by definition always right about everything, but I have roundly assured him that it won’t. I defeated him in argument six times earlier today; he was merely too stiff-necked to concede as much.

Did you read the excerpts from Rebecca Clarren’s article about near-slave labour in the Mariana islands and the sterling work Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff did to block all legislative attempts to reform the situation? That’s the far right for you, revealed in all its squalid glory – peel away all the heavy breathing about culture of life and family values and Christian nation, and what you find is the reality: destitute Asian women worked practically to death for execrable wages and in execrable conditions while fat prosperous happy safe white men collect huge payments to bribe each other and take each other on junkets all in aid of preventing those overworked underpaid Asian women from being paid the minimum wage. It’s bottomlessly disgusting.

30,000 “guest workers” — predominately women — from China, the Philippines and Thailand sew clothing for top-name American brands, which are then allowed to label them “Made in USA” because the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) is a U.S. territory. But workers in these factories are not covered by U.S. minimum-wage and immigration laws. Coming from rural villages and the big-city slums of poor Asian countries, these garment workers arrive in Saipan with a huge financial debt, having borrowed money (at interest rates as high as 20 percent) to pay recruiters as much as $7,000 for a one-year contract job. In a situation akin to indentured servitude, workers cannot earn back their recruitment fee and pay for housing and food without working tremendous hours of overtime…Abramoff and his team brought in nearly $11 million in fees from the Northern Marianas government and Saipan garment manufacturers to block congressional efforts to raise the minimum wage and eliminate the islands’ exemptions from U.S. immigration laws. His efforts focused on the House Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over U.S. territories. And he also cultivated powerful allies in the House leadership — notably Tom DeLay, who, as Majority Whip at the time, could keep a bill off the House floor even if the Resources Committee voted in its favor.

Could, and did. And then apparently slept well at night. A pretty picture, is it not? Powerful rich men keeping powerless poor women in wretched grinding poverty, because they’ve been paid to do so.

Update: Terri Gross interviewed Rebecca Clarren, the reporter who wrote the story, and Katherine Spillar, the editor who commissioned it, on Fresh Air last Tuesday. They say more about DeLay’s work to block legislation than appears in the extracts at Alternet and TomPaine. I’d link to the full article but it appears not to be online. The interview is pretty gripping.

Well, no, since you ask, I couldn’t resist; of course not. What do you take me for? It would take a saint, or rather a hero, to resist, and I’m not either of those things, nor a martyr neither, I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger – no, wait, that’s a song. I’m just a poor shlub at a keyboard, and I don’t resist stuff. I don’t have the grit and the fibre and the steel it would take to resist hooting with laughter at New Statesman readers voting for Thatcher as one of their top heroes. Snerk, snort, shriek. She’s in the top five.