Author: Ophelia Benson

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.

Phyllis Chesler and Maryam Namazie are (you should pardon the expression) singing out of the same hymnbook.

Chesler:

Chesler’s experiences in Afghanistan have helped shape her thoughts about the failure of feminism to engage with what she sees as the oppression of women in Islamic countries…looking at mainstream feminism in the west – in the universities, in the media, among academics and the socalled intelligentsia – there is a moral failure, a moral bankruptcy, a refusal to take on, in particular, Muslim gender apartheid. So you have many contemporary feminists who say, ‘We have to be multiculturally relativist. We cannot uphold a single, or absolute, standard of human rights. And, therefore, we can’t condemn Islamic culture, because their countries have been previously colonised. By us.’

Maryam

For her commitment to a Marxism that values human rights above paper selling she has become the bane of those ‘right-thinking, left-leaning people’ who Nick Cohen in the Observer claims have backed away from her because she is just as willing to tackle their tolerance of oppression as the oppressors themselves…Her stance on cultural relativism is equally uncompromising, which she has lambasted as ‘this era’s fascism.’ ‘It promotes tolerance and respect for so-called minority opinions and beliefs, rather than respect for human beings. Human beings are worthy of the highest respect, but not all opinions and beliefs are worthy of respect and tolerance. There are some who believe in fascism, white supremacy, the inferiority of women. Must they be respected?’

Chesler

Western feminism’s failure to confront the problems raised by Islam, Chesler believes, is a result of the creation of a hierarchy of sins, “an intellectual culture in which racism trumps gender concerns”…The result, she argues, is that “instead of telling the truth about Islam and demanding that the Muslim world observes certain standards, you have westerners beating their breasts and saying, ‘We can’t judge you, we can’t expose you, we can’t challenge you.’ And here in the west you have a dangerous misuse of western concepts such as religious tolerance and cultural sensitivity so that one kind of hate speech is seen as something that must be rigorously protected…Chesler will not accept the Islamophobe label. She claims it is a blanket term used to silence those who portray Islam accurately…

Maryam:

She flags up a range of practices that reveal a nefarious dimension to cultural relativism…’Cultural relativism serves these crimes. It legitimizes and maintains savagery. It says that people’s rights are dependent on their nationality, religion, and culture. It says that the human rights of someone born in Iran, Iraq, or Afghanistan are different from those of someone born in the United States, Canada or Sweden.’…She ridicules those cultural relativists who seek to conceal their tolerance for oppression by arguing that universal human rights are a western concept. ‘How come when it comes to using the telephone or a car, the mullah does not say it is western and incompatible with an Islamist society?’…Namazie also sees political Islam attempting to impose restrictions on the rights of women in Western societies…’Here the Islamists are generally more ‘civilised’…[T]hey demand the ‘right’ to veil for women and children in France when in the Middle East they impose compulsory veiling by throwing acid in the faces of those who refuse and resist. In Britain, they cry racism and Islamophobia against anyone who speaks out against Islam and its political movement, whilst in Iran and its likes they hang ‘apostates’ and ‘Kafirs’ from trees and cranes…In Europe, they call for tolerance and respect of their beliefs, when it is they who have issued fatwas and death threats against anyone who they deem disrespectful and intolerable.

That should keep Islamophobia watch busy for a day or two.

It’s good to know that whatever happens, whatever the conditions, whether it rains or sizzles, at midnight and at noon, whether things are going well or badly, in peace and war, in poverty and plenty, whether there are too few women or too many, the result is always the same – women are treated like dirt. Women are grabbed, pushed around, sold and bought, beaten and killed, raped and enslaved, exploited and used, thrown away and swapped around. Women are treated like livestock, like farm machinery, like incubators, like any old possession except worse because they have to be broken and forced and violently bent to the will of other people. Incubators and ploughs don’t argue, but women – well, you never know. However hard you’ve hit them, for however long, you just never know when they’re going to open their mouths.

They have a good system going in India, don’t they. First step: devalue women; second step: create a dowry system and then keep making it more and more exorbitant, so that every female born means her parents will have to spend more money than they have for her dowry; third step, selective abortion of females; fourth step, drastic decline in the female population and imbalance between females and males so that males have a much harder time finding mates. And bob’s your uncle! You’ve set up a new hell on earth for women. Kaloo kalay.

Anwari Khatoon came visiting a relative in the northern Indian state of Haryana eight months ago, but ended up getting married against her will to a local man with six children from a previous marriage. A man from her village in eastern Jharkhand state had accompanied the 22-year-old woman on her journey to Haryana. When she arrived in the village, Anwari found the man and her relative pressuring her to marry the man with six children, a middle-aged truck driver. Her new husband paid 10,000 rupees ($220) to the man who brought her to the village. “Can a young, single girl get married to a father of six willingly?” asks Anwari.

Well that’s an interesting way to make a living. Accompany a woman from your village to another village, and when you get there sell her (though she isn’t actually yours to sell, but no matter) to some guy and pocket ten thousand rupees. Not bad. Money for jam. You get a nice trip to a distant village as well – what larks!

Since there aren’t enough local women to marry, Haryana’s men pay touts to bring women for them to marry and to work on their farms. Social activists reckon most of these women end up being used as sex slaves and then resold to other men in what looks like a flourishing market in trafficking of women…Social activists say Haryana exemplifies the vicious cycle of exploitation of women and represents a society which does not respect women.

Yeah, that sounds right. Paying kidnappers to bring women for them ‘to marry and to work on their farms’ does sound like a sign of a society which does not respect women. It’s pretty clear what those women are for – sex, and farm work. It’s quite a good deal, isn’t it – a twofer. You pay ten thousand rupees and you get a thing you can poke whenever you want to, and when you’re not poking her, she’ll work on your farm. What a tool! It puts the Veg-O-Matic to shame. Talk about design – it’s just the right length, it’s about the right temperature, it has two legs with a hole between, and it has arms and hands that can do farm work. Cheap at the price! Too bad it has a part that can talk, of course, but a good punch will usually fix that.

However, despite Sutherland’s inexplicable resort to Islamophobiawatch as a source, it was pleasing to see Daniel Dennett reply to Bunting and Brown. I replied to them myself here and here but I was just filling in the time until Dennett got around to it.

I find it amusing that two Brits – Madeleine Bunting and Michael Ruse – have fallen for a version of one of the most famous scams in American folklore. When Brer Rabbit gets caught by the fox, he pleads with him: “Oh, please, please, Brer Fox, whatever you do, don’t throw me in that awful briar patch!” – where he ends up safe and sound after the fox does just that. When the American propagandist William Dembski writes tauntingly to Richard Dawkins, telling him to keep up the good work on behalf of intelligent design, Bunting and Ruse fall for it!

Yes, well, Bunting isn’t famous for staying upright for these things – but what caused Ruse’s pratfall, is an interesting and puzzling question.

A few evolutionists, such as Ruse and Eugenie Scott, the director of the national centre for science education, favour the tactic of insisting that evolutionary biology doesn’t deny the existence of a divine creator…Many others, such as Dawkins and myself, fear that the evasiveness of this gambit fuels suspicion and so contributes to ongoing confusion in the US.

And anyway this whole notion that tactics and gambits and evasion are a good idea (or, in Ruse’s apparent view, more like mandatory) depends on the idea that whatever the tactic is supposed to further is more important than whatever the tactic puts second or last. But maybe it isn’t. Teaching science instead of religion in science class is very important, but it’s not automatically or self-evidently more important than, say, telling the truth, or resisting the general idea that atheism is shameful and something to be hidden or apologized for.

Bunting says: “All protagonists in a debate have a moral responsibility to ensure that the hot air they are expending generates light, not just heat.” I agree, but Bunting goes on: “It’s a point that escapes Dawkins” – and I wonder how she cannot see that it is not Dawkins but Ruse, whom she justly describes as reckless, whose hot air ought to be allowed to vent harmlessly in the shadows, not featured in a major newspaper. I tried to do just that with my private reply, “I doubt you mean all the things you say”, to Ruse’s email. Bunting calls this “an opaque one line”. Could she not see that I was trying to bring Michael to his senses in private, before he made an ass of himself in public?

No, clearly she couldn’t – because she was too busy making common cause with the brave atheist-challenger. She couldn’t be bothered to read carefully – hence the failure to remain upright. Splat. And note what Dennet said there, twice – ‘private’. You may remember (probably not, but you may) that I have always said ‘as far as I know’ he didn’t give Ruse permission to send their correspondence to Dembski – but that ‘in private’ seems like a pretty clear sign that he didn’t give permission and wouldn’t have if he’d been asked. Not that I had any doubt on the subject, but I didn’t want to claim to know when I didn’t.

It didn’t work, but I’m glad I tried. I wish she, and Andrew Brown (When evolutionists attack, March 6), had followed my example, but I suppose that once Ruse went public, the spectacle of him calling Dawkins and me names was irresistible. It is not just the protagonists who have a moral responsibility; those who report on them have a moral responsibility to direct the public’s attention to real issues, and to avoid being complicit in publicity stunts by the likes of Dembski. If Bunting and Brown get emails from Dembski saying “Keep up the good work!”, they should search their souls.

A hit, a very palpable hit.

John Sutherland is a little worried that Phyllis Chesler may have an Islamophobia problem. He cites a very weighty and authoritative source to back this up:

The blog Islamophobia Watch suggested that this signalled “the point of total dementia”.

The blog Islamophobia Watch? Has he read it much? It equates any criticism of or dissent from Islam at all with ‘Islamophobia’ and (of course) it equates ‘Islamophobia’ with hatred of Muslims which it equates with or simply considers identical to racism – so, criticism of Islam (including of course by people from Iran, Pakistan, and other ‘brown’ countries) amounts to racism. That’s stupid, and it works to stifle criticism and dissent, and it works to stifle them in advance of consideration of the substance of the criticism or dissent – it stifles them sight unseen, as racism. This is not intelligent or thoughtful stuff, and it seems peculiar that someone as clever as Sutherland would refer to it in that breezily uncritical way.