Author: Ophelia Benson

A couple of passages from the president of the Royal Society’s valedictory speech because they are so B&W.

In short, I guess that the same ill-understood circumstances that allow complex human societies to arise and persist also – and perhaps necessarily – have elements that are strongly antithetic to the values of the Enlightenment. What are these values? They are tolerance of diversity, respect for individual liberty of conscience, and above all recognition that an ugly fact trumps a beautiful theory or a cherished belief. All ideas should be open to questioning, and the merit of ideas should be assessed on the strength of the evidence that supports them and not on the credentials or affiliations of the individuals proposing them. It is not a recipe for a comfortable life, but it is demonstrably a powerful engine for understanding how the world actually works and for applying this understanding.

See – ‘and above all recognition that an ugly fact trumps a beautiful theory or a cherished belief’. That’s where we came in.

I end this valedictory Address much as I began my first one, by again reminding us that the Royal Society was born of the Enlightenment. Everything we do embodies that spirit: a fact-based, questioning, analytic approach to understanding the world and humankind’s place in it…Many people and institutions have always found such questioning, attended often by unavoidable uncertainties, less comfortable than the authoritarian certitudes of dogma or revelation…Today, however, fundamentalist forces are again on the march, West and East. Surveying this phenomenon, Debora MacKenzie has suggested that – in remarkably similar ways across countries and cultures – many people are scandalised by “pluralism and tolerance of other faiths, non-traditional gender roles and sexual behaviour, reliance on human reason rather than divine revelation, and democracy, which grants power to people rather than God.” She adds that in the US evangelical Christians have successfully fostered a belief that science is anti-religious, and that a balance must be restored, citing a survey which found 37% of Americans (many of them not evangelicals) wanted Creationism taught in schools. Fundamentalist Islam offers a similar threat to science according to Ziauddin Sardar, who notes that a rise in literalist religious thinking in the Islamic world in the 1990s seriously damaged science there, seeing the Koran as the font of all knowledge.

Because people refuse to recognize that an ugly fact trumps a cherished belief. Because as far as a great many people are concerned, it is very much the other way around – a cherished belief trumps pretty much everything, and certainly anything so small and petty and trivial as a mere fact or piece of evidence. And because deference is paid to them and witheld from the other team – because it’s considered bad manners to tell the cherished-belief-first crowd that they’re mistaken and not thinking clearly, while it’s not in the least considered bad manners to tell the evidence-first crowd that we are shallow, cold, boring, heartless, unimaginative, trivial, shallow, and mistaken and deluded and going to burn in hell forever. An unfortunate arrangement.

Another brief item. Something I noticed yesterday when coding Meera’s wonderful article – on the Amazon page for Prophets Facing Backward there is, of all things in the world, a recommendation by (wait for it) Steve Fuller. What does he say?

This first detailed examination of postmodernism’s politically reactionary consequences should serve as a wake-up call for all conscientious leftists.

Uh…hello? This is the same Steve Fuller – the very same Steve Fuller, my darlings – who testified for the defense – for the ID side – at Dover a few weeks ago. So – uh – uh – what can one possibly wonder other than ‘why didn’t he heed his own advice?’ Why didn’t he hear his own wake-up call? If he went back to sleep again, why didn’t he set the alarm? I mean – yo, talk about ‘postmodernism’s politically reactionary consequences’.

Oh well hang on, there’s no date on the reviews. Maybe he just wrote that. After Dover. Maybe he’s sitting at home all pink about the ears, having just read Meera’s book and feeling like a damn fool. Or…maybe he doesn’t include himself among conscientious leftists? Or maybe he thinks ID is about epistemically reactionary consequences but nothing at all to do with politically reactionary ones? Oh who knows. But anyway, it’s a puzzle.

A small point, one I wanted to make the other day but I was out of time and had to run off. The Bobby J Collitch of Knollitch textbooks again. The one called Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, to be specific.

Twain’s skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth but the deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel…Throughout her [Emily Dickinson’s] life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life.

Okay – so what do these bozos – Ronald Horton, Donalynn Hess and Steven Skeggs – mean by ‘the honest questioning of a seeker of truth’ then? Is ‘honest questioning’ the kind of questioning that knows ahead of time what the right answer is and honestly diverts itself with whatever intermediate activity it takes to get there? Is ‘honest questioning’ the kind that knows with cast-iron certainty what the answer to any given ‘question’ is and will accept no other no matter what the evidence or logic or sumptuous bribe? Is it honest and legitimate to use the honorific ‘honest questioning’ about a questioning that is required to find a particular answer no matter what? No, my brethren, I would say that it is not. I would say that it is ludicrous and self-flattering and a gross example of having it both ways to label ‘honest questioning’ the kind of pseudo-questioning (if indeed any) these buffoons – Horton, Hess and Skeggs – have in mind.

Or to put the matter more bluntly – what do they mean by it? What do they mean by upbraiding Dickinson for viewing ‘salvation’ as not a certainty and at the same time curling their Christian lip at Mark Twain’s skepticism for not being honest questioning? Eh? What do they mean by ever using the phrase ‘honest questioning’ at all in the same book in which they rebuke Dickinson for not ‘accepting’ the Bible as an ‘inerrant’ (!!) guide to life? For that matter what do they mean by writing a book at all, when their thinking is so flabby and fatuous and absurd? They shouldn’t be writing so much as a schedule of their favourite tv shows for the next week, let alone a book for tragically deprived high school students to read.

Normblog’s Writer’s Choice was by Pamela Bone the other day. I’ve linked to several of her columns in the Age here. She’s another one of these eccentrics who think women’s rights shouldn’t be just for the lucky people of the developed world.

On that drive across town Perowne sees three black figures, women in the body and face-covering burqas, huddled together on a pavement.
“He can’t help his distaste, it’s visceral. How dismal, that anyone should be obliged to walk around so entirely obliterated… And what would the relativists say, the cheerful pessimists from Daisy’s college? That it’s sacred, traditional, a stand against the fripperies of Western consumerism? But the men, the husbands… wear suits, or trainers and tracksuits, or baggy shorts and Rolexes, and are entirely charming and worldly and thoroughly educated in both traditions. Would they care to carry the folkloric torch, and stumble about in the dark at midday?”
I have wondered this too, and why left-leaning women do not protest at such an oppression of women’s rights (even if the women go along with their oppression). The reason, as Fay Weldon has said, is that today racism is seen as a much worse crime than sexism; and many people confuse criticism of religion – especially Islam – with racism. It has, of course, nothing to do with racism.

And so have I. Several million times, at a guess.

Anybody get the Evening Standard? Still got yesterday’s? Hang on to it (and if you feel so inclined, scan an article in it and send it to me). A commenter at Harry’s Place says Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote a searing article yesterday.

She relates how a woman in a burqa recognised her…and having followed her home last week, begged for help. She took off her burqa to reveal horrific injuries to her face and body which were inflicted by her father and brothers in their bid to control her desire for independence (She is a chemistry graduate from Bolton). She claimed that the burqa is being forcibly used to cover the injuries of many women she knows, and that her friend had been killed. “She took off her burqa to reveal a sight I shall never forget. There before me was a woman so badly battered and beaten that she looke painted, in deep blue, purple and livid pink, The sides of her mouth were torn – “He put his fist in my mouth because i was screaming” she explained.” Brown now has 12 letters from young British Muslim women with such allegations. She comments: “The pernicious ideology is propogated by misguided Muslim women who claim the burqa is an equaliser and a liberator.” She made a film for Channel 4 and met an entire class at a Muslim school in Leicester who told her that negating their physical selves in public made them feel great. Last week in Southall, Brown watched a woman in a burqa sit while her family ate – she of course couldn’t put food in her mouth. Brown rails against politicians who dare not speak out against this attack on autonomy and equality, and she finds even more baffling the “meek acceptance of the burqa by British feminists who must be repelled by the garment and its meanings. “What are they afraid of? Afghan and Iranian women fight daily against the shroud and there is nothing “colonial” about raising ethical objections to this obvious symbol of oppression..The banning of the headscarf in France was divisive.but it was also supported by many Muslims. The state was too arrogant and confrontational, but the policy was right.” She concludes: “Thousands of liberal Muslims would dearly like the state to take a stand on their behalf. If it doesn’t, it will betray vulnerable British citizens and the nation’s most cherished principles and encourage Islam to move back even faster into the dark ages, when we all need to face the future together.”

Thousands – I should think that’s a conservative number. More like hundreds of thousands of people who don’t like being brutalized, I should think.

Timothy Garton-Ash talked to Ayaan Hirsi Ali last week. He didn’t think ‘Submission’ was a very good film (I know people who agree with him, including people from the Netherlands), but he thinks it makes a necessary point.

However, I have not a shadow of a doubt that Ali’s script is trying to make an important point about the suffering of women oppressed in the name of Islam – suffering that Ali knows at first hand both from her own experience and from acting as an interpreter for other women from Muslim backgrounds in the Netherlands. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is much more than just a voice for the voiceless oppressed. In person, she is a thoughtful, calm, clear, almost pedantic spokeswoman for the fundamental liberal values of the Enlightenment: individual rights, free speech, equality before the law.

Which makes her the best kind of voice for the voiceless oppressed. The other kind just leave them voiceless.

But her central claim seems to me vital and irrefutable: if being a free country means anything at all, it must mean that people have the chance to criticise freely, and without fear of reprisal, Islam, Hinduism or Sikhism, as they now in practice have the chance to excoriate Christianity (despite Britain’s ridiculous blasphemy laws), Judaism or, for that matter, Darwinism.

That ‘Darwinism’ thing is stupid – it’s like those old ‘which object doesn’t belong’ question on intelligence tests. Ding ding! Not a religion! But anyway.

This right to free speech, which is to an open society what oxygen is to human life, is under direct threat from people whose position is very simple: if you say that, we will kill you. And not just in the case of Islam. Remember that violent protests and death threats from extremists in Britain’s Sikh community forced the playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti into hiding, and her play Behzti off the stage in Birmingham. How does our government react?…By making the right noises about tolerance, peaceful protest and free speech. But also – shamefully, stupidly, cravenly – by itself proposing to restrict that right, in an ill-considered, ill-drafted bill to bar “incitement to religious hatred”. Among the motives behind the reintroduction of this already once rejected bill in Labour’s last election manifesto were appeasement of some self-appointed spokespersons of the Muslim community in Britain and transparent political opportunism…

Exactly. Appeasement of self-appointed spokespersons of the ‘Muslim community’. Pretty craven and stupid all right.

Now here’s what Tony Blair, the home secretary, the attorney general and the rest of the cabinet need to do. First, they should go back and read the magnificent pages in which John Stuart Mill explains why what he calls the “collision of opinions” is vital to the preservation of liberty, and why it is “obvious that law and authority have no business with restraining” attacks on either religion or what he calls “infidelity”…Then they should reflect on the example of a brave Somalian woman who, inspired by authors such as Mill, is risking her life every day to maintain our right to free speech.

Yeah.