Author: Ophelia Benson

That Sen interview in the Bangladeshi paper.

Sen remains a strong exponent of free will as expressed in terms of freedom of choice, even if influenced by circumstances and constrained by what’s permissible and what one is capable of. By way of identity, for instance, he chooses to assert the identity of an economist or a philosopher (among other things) depending on what is relevant for that particular discussion. “These are choices, among others, open to me, as are similarly relevant choices for anyone else.” As are the positions he takes on issues of politics, parties, ideologies and so on. “When choices exist, and not to recognise they exist is an epistemic mistake and also a root of irresponsibility – if we attribute our choices to others.”

It’s the kind of epistemic mistake that can distort whole large territories of thought – such as assuming that people of certain kinds have no choice about what will matter to them most; such as assuming for instance that for all Muslims, being a Muslim is what matters most, and that there is no choice about it. That’s a strange thing to assume. We all know plenty of tepid-to-cool and nominal Catholics and Protestants and plenty of secular and atheist Jews; why assume that all Muslims are as if another species and unable to make similar choices? Why assume that all Muslims are ‘devout’ Muslims? Because to do otherwise seems assimilationist and oppressive and Eurocentric? Probably, but the overcorrection is pretty oppressive too.

If Sen’s book makes a proposition to the individual reader, it’s with a similar sense of clarity: choose your identity of your own free will. But it also says something to the current world order, as it were: don’t slap single-identity labels on people. As Sen elaborates, he may think it very important in some specific context to assert the identity of an economist, a professor and of somebody left-of-centre…but anyone trying to predict his choices on the basis of any one single description to the exclusion of others would be making an error. Further, “Nor is every moral argument an identity-based idea.” And trying to squeeze him into any of those discrete boxes would thus be futile, both because there are many identities a person has and also because a person is not guided only by identity. But even civilisations are being put into boxes these days, with scientific rationality itself coming to be portrayed as something of an “immaculate Western conception”, to use a term from the book.

A person is not guided only by identity – that’s such a crucial idea to hang onto, I think. Without it we’re just – stuck; we don’t get to change or expand or experiment or escape or learn or explore novelty.

To be continued.

Harry’s Place reports that Reza Moradi is being (will be, I think) prosecuted for holding a Motoon poster. I don’t know if that’s based on what Maryam said in a bracket in her speech or whether it’s new information, but ‘Pangloss’ from the New Humanist says in the second comment, “Funny, have just been speaking to Maryam about this. Yes, he has been charged. As regards the bloke who complained – I haven’t a clue who he is, but the WPI have their suspicions.” He has been charged – with what? With carrying a cartoon with a poster on it. Commenters at Harry’s figure he’ll be charged with something under the public order act. I remember my shock when I found out – quite recently it was – that there is such a thing as the public order act. It came up here around the time of the guy who told a cop his horse was gay, and a woman was questioned by the police for saying on the radio that gays shouldn’t adopt children – that was only a few months ago. And then dear Sacranie was questioned for saying on the radio that gays shouldn’t do anything at all because disease bad ew – which serves him right in one way, but is still outrageous; and now this. Bad stuff.

Later – at 4:00 p.m. – Pangloss said:

What irritates me about this is the fact that this guy (who may or may not be an agent of a certain state which would have an interest in making life uncomfortable for the WPI)can actively seek out offence, and then have his complaint taken seriously by the police. I attended both the al-Muhajiroun and Hizb cartoon protests. Didn’t occur to me to tell the police that I found them offensive, but hey, maybe I should have.

Oh, great. And Moradi is being prosecuted as a result! David of mediawatchwatch said at 12:37:

I was a steward at the march and I was standing right in front of the bloke in the pictures. I heard and saw him make his complaint to the policewoman. Our head steward intervened and offered to personally protect the man, but the complainer was adamant. He also did a fair bit of video-ing of the speakers and crowd.

As I said on Sunday – start embroidering those ‘Free Reza Moradi’ banners. Start penning those notes to the Home Office.

And then there’s more Bunting (more Bunting? more Bunting?!) on the – well, on some ridiculous brainworm she has that she thinks is called ‘the Enlightenment’.

I need some help. I’ve been getting increasingly disturbed at the way in which the Enlightenment gets invoked by the self styled ‘hard liberals’ as if it amounts to their tablets of stone. Something didn’t seem to be adding up to me when they waxed lyrical about the Enlightenment legacy of rationality, secularism, belief in progress, the rule of law and the basis of all we know and love in western democracy and individual human rights.

Invoked? Self-styled? Hard liberals? Tablets? Of stone? Waxed lyrical? Belief in progress? All we know and love? Do you think she packed enough silly sarky jeer-words into that one paragraph? Can you tell that she thinks the Enlightenment is probably a load of old kack?

Then I began bumping into the subject with Muslim intellectuals who were acutely aware of how this legacy was being used (implicitly or explicitly) against Islam.

Ah – did you. Well that would explain it. So would the ‘implicitly or explicitly’ bit – that pretty much covers all the possibilities, doesn’t it: if the legacy isn’t used (by whom, exactly? who is the subject omitted by this passive construction? this passive-aggressive passive construction?) explicitly, well, you can be damn sure it is being used implicitly – there they go now, don’t let them escape, after them, run! And then of course there are the decisive final two words – ‘against Islam’. Well then – we know something very very very wrong and wicked is afoot. We don’t know what, exactly, but we know it’s bad. Somebody is using something (albeit perhaps implicitly) Against Islam. Nobody must ever use anything Against Islam, because Islam must be beyond reproach or criticism of any kind. Therefore no form of rhetoric is too silly or too manipulative.

These Muslims then argue that the Enlightenment was a process of European definition in the face of the Ottoman Empire; it was shaped in opposition to Islam and hence has an inbuilt anti-Islamic bias. Montesquieu’s ‘Persian Letters’ is a good example of this.

Uh – no it isn’t. Try reading it, Madders.

The bit which most intrigues me is whether a new understanding about rationality emerged in the eighteenth century and if so, how was it then positioned vis a vis religious belief? Since then, we’ve had Freud, Foucault and Nietzsche – all of whom have contributed to the understanding that we are profoundly irrational and that rationality is a social construction – a way of reasoning which we believe to be objective, but never can be. I’m no philosopher – hence the need for help – but I have a few questions: a) why do people think an understanding of rationality which is over 200 years old is useful now?

Oh, gosh, I don’t know! What a good question. Isn’t that odd? People can be so funny – thinking an understanding of anything at all which is over 200 years old (imagine it! in this day and age!) is any good at all, let alone useful now! Well – wait, wait – except religion of course. Except religion, and Catholicism, and Islam, and religion. I don’t mean them of course. But an Enlightenment understanding of rationality which is over 200 years old? Pee-ew! Might as well keep a 200-year-old fish around.

And then there’s Faisal Bodi.

Nobody likes a turncoat. Whether it’s a scab crossing a picket line, or a footballer joining his club’s arch rivals, the consequences of defection will usually haunt them for life. It’s a cross that Abdul Rahman, the Afghan convert to Christianity, is currently having to bear. Charged with apostasy for abandoning Islam, a crime that carries the death penalty in Afghanistan, he was handed a reprieve at the weekend while judges examine the validity of the case against him.

That’s an interesting way to put it – ‘nobody likes a turncoat.’ That is in fact a very tendentious way of putting it. It’s also not true even in Bodi’s terms, since at least some of the people in the group the ‘turncoat’ joins will like the turncoat, because they won’t think of the ‘turncoat’ as a turncoat but as someone who has seen the light or become sane at last or developed good taste or come along to help or found a conscience. But never mind about in Bodi’s terms, because those terms are stupid and bullying. Ideas are not the same kind of thing as, for instance, having or adopting children, where one has taken on responsibilities that one cannot abandon without harming people. Ideas aren’t dependent or needy, ideas don’t feel abandoned or forlorn, ideas don’t grow up to be depressed or fearful; ideas don’t require our blind unthinking unchanging allegiance, and it’s a terrible way of thinking to pretend they do: it’s a loathsome form of mental imprisonment and extortion. Changing religions is not the same kind of thing as crossing a picket line, and it’s intellectual bullying to pretend it is.

At 8:54 this morning Bodi commented on the comments.

As far as the ban on proselytism in Muslim states goes, it is an understandable response from people who cherish the religious basis of their societies to protect them, and its weaker and more vulnerable members, from the damage that an inferior worldview can wreak. May I suggest that a lack of similar conviction in Christianity is what led to liberal secularism coming to hold sway over western European societies.

Sure you may. You bet. It lets us all know what you have in mind, which is useful.

Time to talk about people saying silly things. I know, I know – what an odd activity. What a futile way to spend time. What a bizarre allocation of these golden hours of early 21st century calm and prosperity. I know. One might as well try to give names to all the leaves on the trees (that’s Evelyn, that one’s Marcia, that’s Eric, that’s Deirdre). One might as well try to cook a meal by breathing on it. One might as well dust the living room when it will only get dusty again. I know. But – I can’t explain it somehow, but it seems to call to me – this peculiar avocation of holding public sages up to ridicule and disdain. Oh well what am I saying, of course I can explain it – I’m a petulant rude hypercritical argumentative kibbitzer, and holding public sages up to ridicule is what I do. It is of my essence. What else would I be doing – dusting the living room? Hardly!

There was for instance this irritating mess from Madeleine Bunting via Michael Ruse yesterday.

Michael Ruse, a prominent Darwinian philosopher (and an agnostic) based in the US, with a string of books on the subject, is exasperated: “Dawkins and Dennett are really dangerous, both at a moral and a legal level.” The nub of Ruse’s argument is that Darwinism does not lead ineluctably to atheism, and to claim that it does (as Dawkins does) provides the intelligent-design lobby with a legal loophole: “If Darwinism equals atheism then it can’t be taught in US schools because of the constitutional separation of church and state. It gives the creationists a legal case. Dawkins and Dennett are handing these people a major tool.”

We’ve encountered that part of the mess many times before – but I still don’t understand how Ruse gets there. Dawkins doesn’t claim that, of course, but even if he did, what does atheism have to do with the constitutional separation of church and state? Is Ruse just talking for effect, or what?

Evolution is losing the battle, says Ruse, and it’s the fault of Dawkins and Dennett with their aggressive atheism: they are the creationists’ best recruiting sergeants. Ruse has got to a reckless stage of his career. He prefaced the essay he submitted for Dawkins’s festschrift with the above quote from Dembski and went on to declare that he “felt intensely irritated with Dawkins … It’s bad enough having to fight the enemy without having to watch my back because of my friends.” The editors were horrified and ordered a more deferential rewrite – which Ruse duly provided.

I wouldn’t call that reckless so much as gratuitously aggressive and fight-picking. Ruse seems to be determined to pick fights, and to go about it as unpleasantly as he can.

Even more reckless, Ruse put on the net an email exchange between himself and Dennett in which he accused his adversary of being an “absolute disaster” and of refusing to study Christianity seriously: “It is just plain silly and grotesquely immoral to claim that Christianity is simply a force for evil.” Dennett’s reply was an opaque one line: “I doubt you mean all the things you say.”

He didn’t ‘put it on the net’, he sent it to – of all people – Dembski. Without (to the best of my knowledge) permission. Having initiated the exchange himself. And he’s the one who whinges about having to watch his back? But he’s got Madders putting a nice spin on his story.

But Ruse has got a point. Across the US, the battle over evolution in science teaching goes on…At the heart of many of these local controversies is the firmly held belief that Darwinism leads to atheism, indeed that it is atheism. Across the US, a crude and erroneous conflict is being created between science as atheism and religion.

No, he hasn’t got a point. That situation isn’t ‘the fault of Dawkins and Dennett with their aggressive atheism’ – that’s an absurd thing to say. Does Ruse seriously think that if Dawkins and Dennett didn’t exist, there would be no ‘battle over evolution in science teaching’? Does he think most of the soldiers in that battle have ever even heard of Dawkins and Dennett? Because I don’t.

It’s important that Britain avoids the trap that America is falling into, not just because it endangers good science, but also because there is a fascinating debate worth having about what scientific method can reveal about faith, and what theologians have to say about science…This is the kind of conversation we want to have in this country, but we’re not safe from American-style false dichotomies between faith and science yet…

False dichotomies is it. Okay, MB, go on and explain how ‘faith’ and science are not in tension. Non-overlapping magisteria, perhaps? Different levels? Metaphysical naturalism and methodological naturalism? Worth a try – but not terribly convincing. Even some non-Americans might tell you that.

Update: Dan Jones has an excellent detailed criticism of Bunting’s piece here and PZ has one here.