Author: Ophelia Benson

Okay, this morning I found out that I’m a complete fool, that I’ve wasted my life, that I’ve been walking around with blinders on, that I’ve done what amounts to going to a five-star French restaurant and eating a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich on Wonder bread, or going to the Grand Canyon or the Monterey Peninsula or the Lake District or the Bernese Oberland or the fjords or Umbria and spending the whole time indoors doing crossword puzzles.

I haven’t read Proust.

Think of it. I could have been run over by a skateboard at any moment and died without ever reading Proust. I’m a fool, I tell you, a fool, a fool, a fool! This kind of thing shouldn’t be allowed. A well-governed state ought to prevent it. Someone should have told me – and by ‘told’ I don’t mean just mentioned it in passing, I mean grabbed me by the throat and shaken until I swore to drop everything and begin. I did that to myself with Shakespeare back in the late ’80s, and a good thing too. I also did it with a good many other people, but somehow I didn’t get to Proust. Until this morning. I was re-reading* a section of Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought, which gives extended quotations from Proust which I liked so much I went and found the first volume of the three-volume version, which I’ve had for awhile, in preparation for that vague day when I would get around to it. Found it and found the right page and read and

and was struck all of a heap. Why didn’t you tell me?! You bastards! You’ve all read Proust, right? I know you have. Of course you have; you’re all more sensible than I am, and you’ve read Proust, and yet you didn’t bother to make sure that I had. Well really! Some friends you are.

I knew, though, actually. Hitchens was going on about it last summer, at the Hay festival and other places he talked about the new book (Love, Poverty and War), and the fact that Proust is someone you need to be somewhat old to appreciate but that once you are, you’re staggered. I should have gotten busy then. I did think of it. And in fact people have done the grabbing by the throat thing. People have sat me down, and put a hand on each shoulder, and looked fiercely into my face, and said very slowly and distinctly, you have to read Proust. But I just pushed their hands off and jumped up and ran outside to play with my hoop. I’m a fool.

I’ve never read anything like it. It’s the most amazing stuff…

Here’s part of one bit that Nussbaum quoted and that I typed out earlier today…

If we thought that the eyes of such a girl were merely two glittering
sequins of mica, we should not be athirst to know her and to unite her life
to ours. But we sense that what shines in those reflecting discs is not due
solely to their material composition; that it is, unknown to us, the dark
shadows of ideas that that person cherishes about the people and places she
knows [..] and above all that it is she, with her desires, her sympathies,
her revulsions, her obscure and incessant will. I knew that I should never
possess this young cyclist if I did not possess also what was in her eyes.
And it was consequently her whole life that filled me with desire; a
sorrowful desire because I felt that it was not to be fulfilled, but
exhilarating because, what had hitherto been my life having ceased of a
sudden to be my whole life, being no more now than a small part of the space
stretching out before me which I was burning to cover and which was composed
of the lives of these girls, it offered me that prolongation, that possible
multiplication of oneself which is happiness.

Isn’t that amazing?

I get to read more. Life is good.

*So, in fact, I had been told, since I’d read that section before.

Norm has a new poll, this one on favourite names of US states. I gave him a dig in the ribs yesterday for stacking the deck by comparing Colorado and Tennessee with Surrey and Essex – and he promptly conceded that stacking was exactly what he had done to the deck. But still, he’s right of course – US state names are a joy. I mentally run through some of my favourites myself at odd moments. (Mind you – Bourgogne, Umbria, Cataluña – the US isn’t the only place with some good names. Saskatchewan. Connemarra. Okay I’ll stop.)

So I’ve picked my five. I’m not spoiling anything by giving them now, because Norm compiles stats, so we don’t know whose favourites are which, and I’m sure you long to know which are mine. So I’ll tell you. These are names, remember, nothing to do with the quality of the states themselves.

Missouri. Delaware. Florida. Mississippi. Montana.

This speaks to me.

In a globalised, consumerist society, identity seems much less something we inherit and increasingly something we can choose, shape or discard…On the one hand, we have an urge to affirm our own individuality and differentiate ourselves from some of the more suffocating aspects of our traditional identities. On the other, this is offset by a continuing human need to belong, to remain anchored in something collective.

That’s that alternation or ambivalence between attachment and autonomy again. We want both, and since they’re pretty fundamentally opposed, we often find ourselves tossed back and forth between them. ‘I love you go away’ syndrome. There’s no place like home when can I leave. I feel so secure, I’m suffocating.

If ties to party, class, faith and nation can no longer be relied upon to generate the foundations of a cohesive society, it is also not clear that the flexible, consumerist approach to identity is an adequate replacement…We already know a great deal about why our encounter culture is so valuable. The American sociologist Mark Granovetter captured it well when he spoke of “the strength of weak ties.”…Having the right mix of strong and weak ties is an essential component of people’s quality of life, no matter where they lie on the income scale…Granovetter’s work has greatly influenced subsequent research on social capital – the social ties, bonds, values and loyalties that we hold in common and which help knit our society together…Further evidence of the value of encounter culture comes from social psychology. Fifty years since it was first expounded by Gordon Allport, the so-called “contact hypothesis” has shown that under the right conditions, increasing the level of contact between different groups is enough to generate more favourable relationships between them…We need to recognise the vast swathes of potential encounter culture that exists within the arts, sport and culture.

Read the whole thing, as the saying goes.

There’s a lot of kack in this piece on religion in the New Statesman. This particular sentence especially caught my eye, for sheer quantity of kack in one sentence.

“So far, the response of the government has been mostly correct: dismissing the crude secularism of the French ban on the hijab, allowing for the establishment of Muslim schools and working closely with the leaders of the Muslim community.”

One, the word ‘correct’, as if political decisions were as clear-cut as arithmetic. Two, that much-recycled bit of obfuscation: the French ban on the hijab is not a French ban on the hijab, it’s a French ban on the hijab (and other conspicuous religious symbols and garments) in state schools. It is stacking the deck in one’s own favour to call a state school uniform code a ‘ban’ without qualification. Three, ‘the leaders.’ In what sense are they leaders? Are they elected? Are they accountable? Are they self-appointed leaders? Four, ‘the Muslim community.’ Is there such a thing? Five, the combination, ‘the leaders of the Muslim community,’ which more than doubles the effect of making it sound as if all Muslims think as a block and as a block appoint leaders. The whole sentence is a throbbing example of the kind of covert thought-herding that communitarians go in for. Pure operant conditioning. Pure kack.

I posted a comment on Dennett’s reply to Ruse and Bunting this morning – and since the idea I was commenting on is (I think) a fairly pervasive one, and related to this whole question of ‘shut up about your atheism, they might hear you,’ I thought I might as well post it here too. The first para, in italics, is someone else commenting.

on the subject of Dawkins getting up ones nose, it would be all well and good if he was just another academic. He does however hold a position called ‘The Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University’ (according to wikipedia) which means he has the task of communicating his subject to us, the unwashed masses. If people feel he’s getting up your nose, then he’s not doing this right is he.

But having the task of communicating his subject to us is not quite the same thing as not getting up anyone’s nose. It may be that communicating a particular subject is of the very essence of getting up people’s noses – or at least some people’s noses. That’s just how it is, surely. It’s not possible or reasonable to assume that increased understanding of anything will automatically or necessarily pleasing to absolutely everyone. Increased understanding of anything may lead to feelings of displeasure and consequent hostility. In short, understanding is one thing, and liking is another. So it’s just not necessarily true that Dawkins isn’t doing his job right if he irritates some people (we know he doesn’t irritate all people, since he has a good many admirers).

And I think that his arguing that science and religion are in fact not as compatible as ‘let’s all get along’ people like to claim they are, is part of explaining science. The reasons he gives for thinking they are not compatible (in the first part of ‘The Root of All Evil?’ for instance) make part of an explanation of what science is. The fact that science is always in principle revisable and that religion is not is an important difference between them, and understanding that is, surely, part of understanding science.

That’s what I said at Comment is Free. It has since occurred to me that the whole thought is also part of the understanding of science. The understanding that there is a difference between understanding and being pleased is part of the understanding of science, and perhaps the reason science is not compatible with religion. Science by definition doesn’t adjust its findings to make them more pleasing – to make them less likely to get up anyone’s nose; if it does that, it’s not science. Arguably that’s one of the first things one has to get a firm grip on in order to have an Understanding of Science: that it is not and cannot be a popularity contest. Other systems of thought can be, but science can’t.

Mind you – to be fair – the commenter probably meant merely that irritating people can make it difficult to communicate with them, which is a reasonable point. But it also relates to the whole question of tactics, and I think it’s fair to point out that Dawkins is not being perverse in thinking that explaining how science and religion are incompatible is part of increasing public understanding of science.