Author: Ophelia Benson

Another point about this strawman argument we keep getting from rabbis and bishops, this ‘argument’ that boils down to claiming that non-theists have a ‘belief that the only things that are real or can be known are those that can be empirically observed and measured’ and then following that absurd claim with the equally absurd claim that love, morality, beauty and god are all ‘face[s] of human experience that [are] not subject to empirical verification.’

The other point (see above) is that that endlessly repeated pseudo-argument is a crap argument from two directions, not just one. It’s bad and stupid first, as I mentioned, because it dishonestly or woollily or confusedly makes a truth-claim about the existence of an entity, a being, in the view of theists a person, equivalent to evaluative thoughts and emotions such as love, ethics, awe, beauty, when they are quite different kinds of thing. That amounts to a large and glaring category mistake. On the one hand you have questions, controversies, discussions about whether Napoleon, King Arthur, Achilles, Marco Polo, Paul Bunyan, Mata Hari was or was not a real person who actually existed. On the other hand you have discussions of what we mean when we talk about love, beauty, good, bad, better, worse. Those are different kinds of thing. I think we can all agree on that? Am I right? Napoleon did or did not exist; a yes or no question; an empirical question. Napoleon was good or bad; a complicated question, not a yes or no; a question with empirical elements but also with other elements.

That’s one reason Lerner’s argument is a bad one, but there’s another reason, that comes from another direction. It’s bad because it relies on a claim that questions about the evaluative as opposed to the factual category are absolutely and entirely non-empirical questions, and I think that’s nonsense, and stultifying nonsense at that. It is not the case that there is nothing empirical to say or to discover about love or ethics or beauty (though it may be the case about god, though not about religion or belief). It is not necessary to think that statements such as ‘beauty is an excitation of this particular set of neurons’ are all there is to say on the subject, to think that they are some of what there is to say on the subject. The idea that empirical inquiry is completely beside the point and even profanation is just a way of sealing off one whole useful way of exploring the subjects; what would be the point of that? Why not inquire into both what is going on in the brain when we watch the sun set over mountains and what we experience when we watch the sun set over mountains? Rabbis and bishops don’t get to monopolize whole areas of life such as emotions and judgments merely because they want to assimilate them to their fuzzy ideas of what god might be. They also don’t get to wall them off from close examination merely because they want to protect that fuzzy god who tends to melt away into nothing when people look at it too hard.

Read any Dwight Macdonald? If not you should. He’s a good one.

I take exception to all this.

But you can’t dine on clippings and the bones of old controversies, so what did his versatile output amount to after decades of pounding the typewriter? For years…Macdonald had been…frustrated, fatigued and plagued by the feeling that he had failed to climb the masthead of his talent by writing a major, original work – bringing out a real book, not just a basket of articles.

That’s a stupid opposition – a real book as opposed to a ‘basket’ of articles. As if there is some Platonic Ideal length, as if there is some magic that makes sixty thousand words on the same subject a Real Book while six ten-thousand word articles are a mere basket. Some articles are worth more than some books, and there is no magic ideal Platonic length. Ask Hazlitt, ask Orwell, ask Montaigne.

Well, at least he gets there in the end.

More of an odd-jobber and instigator, Macdonald harbored no creative cravings, courted no muse, left behind no masterpiece to keep his legacy warm at night…Yet sometimes the most important thing a critic leaves behind is a singular, wised-up, cant-free voice that is pure intelligence at play, and at its best Macdonald’s voice shoots off the page as if he were broadcasting live and cutting through the static.

Yes it does. That singular, wised-up, cant-free voice is more worth reading than a lot of full-length books I can think of, so fret not after the unwritten ‘masterpiece’.

Martin Jacques has some thoughts on globalization, or on one version of globalization anyway. He starts with Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

Benedict, a cultural anthropologist, was assigned by the US office of war administration to work on a project to try and understand Japan as the US began to contemplate the challenge that would be posed by its defeat, occupation and subsequent administration. Her book is written with a complete absence of judgmental attitude or sense of superiority, which one might expect; she treats Japan’s culture as of equal merit, virtue and logic to that of the US. In other words, its tone and approach could not be more different from the present US attitude towards Iraq or that country’s arrogant and condescending manner towards the rest of the world. This prompts a deeper question: has the world, since then, gone backwards? Has the effect of globalisation been to promote a less respectful and more intolerant attitude in the west, and certainly on the part of the US, towards other cultures, religions and societies?

But that’s a silly question, at least the way Jacques puts it. Of course the approach of a cultural anthropologist will be different from ‘the present US attitude towards Iraq’ – if by that he means either the attitude of the Bush administration or that of the US people in general – because neither entity consists entirely of cultural anthropologists. Cultural anthropologists are necessarily professionally cultural relativists, in a technical sense that is a little different from the more colloquial sense in which Guardian columnists and B&W and other chatters use it. Cultural anthropologists take a value-neutral approach to other cultures in order to study them properly; that does not entail endorsing or agreeing with everything (or in fact anything) about other cultures, it simply entails understanding that other cultures have their own internal logic. If Jacques just means that the Bush administration would have done well to get more information about Iraq (preferably from people who knew a lot more about Iraq than Benedict knew about Japan – her book has its critics, who think it oversimplifies rather seriously), then of course he’s right, but he seems to be making a much larger claim.

In contrast, the underlying assumption with globalisation is that the whole world is moving in the same direction, towards the same destination: it is becoming, and should become, more and more like the west. Where once democracy was not suitable for anyone else, now everyone is required to adopt it, with all its western-style accoutrements…At the heart of globalisation is a new kind of intolerance in the west towards other cultures, traditions and values, less brutal than in the era of colonialism, but more comprehensive and totalitarian. The idea that each culture is possessed of its own specific wisdom and characteristics, its own novelty and uniqueness, born of its own individual struggle over thousands of years to cope with nature and circumstance, has been drowned out by the hue and cry that the world is now one, that the western model – neoliberal markets, democracy and the rest – is the template for all.

Note, as Norm does, the equation of intolerance with the idea that ‘democracy…is the template for all’. Note the oddity of that thought; note how insulting it is. Note the fatalism of the idea that ‘each culture is possessed of its own specific wisdom and characteristics’ and therefore some ‘cultures’ don’t want or need democracy, and nor do the people inside those cultures. Note the assumption that idea rests on, which is that cultures are monolithic and dissent-free and that therefore there is not so much as a hair’s width room for disagreement with or criticism of any aspect of that culture including its tyrannical or dictatorial or unaccountable and unrepresentative form of governance. But if a culture is undemocratic, how can Jacques be confident that all the people within that culture approve of its undemocratic character? Since, by definition, they haven’t been asked, how does he know that?

And how does he know they all think alike? Why does he assume that Other Cultures have no disagreement or dissent? Why does he assume that Other People are incapable of looking around them and thinking about their situations and wanting something different? Why does he assume Other People are incapable of saying No?

It would be interesting to know why he assumes that. Someone ought to assign a cultural anthropologist to study Martin Jacques and figure it out.