Author: Ophelia Benson

I read something this morning in Frank Cioffi’s essay* ‘Was Freud a Liar?’ that grabbed my attention. It reminded me of something. I knew what, too.

Freud did not fall into the seduction error through believing his patients’ stories; he did not fall into it through ignorance of the fact that persons sexually molested in infancy may, nevertheless, not succumb to neurosis; he did not fall into it through underestimating the frequency of seduction in the general population. Freud fell into the seduction error through the use of a procedure which to this day remains the basis of the psychoanalytic reconstruction of infantile life: the attribution to patients of certain infantile experiences because they appear to the analyst to be living “through them with all the appropriate emotions.”

What did that remind me of? John Mack. You know John Mack? I’ve talked about him a little, but not enough, not yet. I’ve had it in mind to talk about him more though. He’s the Harvard psychologist who thought there was something to the whole alien abduction thing – not ‘something to’ it in the sense of as cultural phenomenon or symptom of mass lunacy, but in the sense of maybe real aliens really abducting real people and taking them onto real alienships and really impregnating them and doing medical exams on them. For real. And why did he think this? His main reason was that they had such strong emotions when they talked about it. They seemed (they appeared to the analyst) really really really frightened, upset, disturbed, traumatized.

And what is so interesting about that – or one thing, at least, that is so interesting about it – is that it seems so obvious that people having very strong emotions about something isn’t necessarily a reason to think that something refers to a real event. It seems so obvious 1) that there are other possible explanations and 2) that the other possible explanations are a great deal less unlikely than the alien abduction [of just a few people who can produce no physical evidence] scenario is. It’s interesting that such a bizarrely faulty bit of reasoning could be perpetrated by a Harvard psychologist. (Harvard thought so too. Harvard blushed. Harvard was not altogether pleased.) Credulity on that scale is surprising in an academic. Well, maybe it’s not. I know several people who would immediately tell me that that’s just the kind of person it’s not surprising in. They could have a point.

*Originally a radio talk for BBC 3 in 1973, published in The Listener, and in 1998 in the Frederick Crews edited collection Unauthorized Freud.

I wanted to make more easily available the useful work Allen Esterson has done on the changes Hizb ut-Tahrir has made on its website, which he posted in comments on the previous N&C.

It is significant that some of the language the organization has had on its website has been removed, or toned down, presumably to make it more amenable for Western consumption. For instance, the statement that “There is no middle position or compromise solution in Islam” used to appear on the website, along with the statement: “The terminology of compromise did not appear amongst Muslims until the modern age. It is a foreign terminology and its source is the West and the Capitalist ideology. This is the ideology whose creed is based upon a compromise solution.”

I think we all know what is meant by a severe punishment under Sharia law.

It’s funny about this piece by Ziauddin Sardar – it gave me quite a turn when I read it a few days ago, because I’ve been writing an article that talks about exactly, but exactly, an issue he discusses. It’s a rather important one, too, and one in need of as much clarity of thought as possible. Getting it wrong causes suffering all over the place.

The bearded and elegantly attired supporters of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), the fundamentalist Muslim group, like to emphasise the non-violent nature of their party. As a recent press release put it, they “have never resorted to armed struggle or violence”. This is correct as far as it goes. While HT has openly engaged in the politics of hatred, particularly towards the Jews, it has not, strictly speaking, advocated violence. But this does not mean that it is not a violent organisation.

Bingo. That’s an evasive tactic that a lot of groups and individuals resort to: saying a group has never resorted to violence or never injured or harmed anyone – which is true as far as it goes – but is therefore highly misleading. Violence isn’t just clouting someone with a two-by-four; injury isn’t just slicing someone up with a machete; harm isn’t just running over someone with a lawn mower. Therefore, it is not good enough to say that a group is non-violent if, for instance, it doesn’t commit violence itself but does encourage and praise and validate and romanticize it in others; or if it trains other people (who are officially not part of the group in question) to commit violence; or if it writes propaganda for violent groups while not telling the complete truth about those groups’ activities; and so on. It has been deeply exasperating seeing defenses of Hizb ut-Tahrir that insist on the group’s non-violence as if direct literal physical violence were the only possible reason to criticize HT. But there are other reasons. Groups that, for instance, want to take some people’s rights away by peaceful means, may be non-violent but they’re not therefore beneficent.

But this does not mean that it is not a violent organisation. During a recent debate on PTV, the Pakistani satellite channel, a prominent member of HT told me emphatically: “The idea of compromise does not exist in Islam.” This is standard HT rhetoric, and it explains why the group is deemed dangerous and worthy of being proscribed. Intolerance of that kind is a natural precursor of, and invitation to, violence.

Exactly. Well said Mr Sardar. If only more people would see that.

In fact, violence is central to HT’s goals. Its primary objective is to establish a caliphate. It seeks, I have been told on numerous occasions, a “great Islamic state” ruled by a single caliph who would apply Islam “completely to all Islamic lands” and eventually to “the whole world”. What would be applied “completely” is the sharia, Islamic law. No wonder they recognise no compromise. Their ideology argues that there is only one way Muslims can or should be ruled, that those who form this caliphate have the right to rule, that all others must submit unconditionally and that only this political interpretation of Islam is valid and legitimate. In other words, the caliphate of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s vision can be established only by doing violence to all other interpretations of Islam and all Muslims who do not agree with it – not to mention the violence it must do to the rest of the world, which also must eventually succumb.

Violence isn’t just one guy punching you in the face, or even just one guy blowing up the bus you’re riding in. It’s also a bunch of guys enforcing a narrow sexist punitive theocratic law on you and on everyone. That’s a very thorough-going, far-reaching kind of violence – that’s why it’s called totalitarian. It governs everything – ‘completely’ – and permits no escape. That’s real violence.

A couple of amusing items sent by readers – by readers who are the creators of said amusing items.

John Emerson has a little rumination on Freud – possibly scurrilous, he says, but surely that’s a good thing.

Read Civilization and its Discontents lately? Remember the part about men peeing on fires to put them out? And why women like to weave? (Hint: it has to do with pubic hairs. Funny old women.)

So John pondered.

I imagined a band of cave men gathered around a fire like the one I saw, incontinently and ecstatically squirting their tiny streams of urine in the futile effort to extinguish the raging fire, while at the same time their resentful, feminist wives tried furiously to weave themselves little fake penises even more useless than the men’s real penises. And became convinced that the human race, deluded as it was, wasn’t going to make it. We are, as a species, like Lewis Carroll’s “bread-and-butterfly”, incapable of survival.

The other item, from Dan Green, is a nice new guru with a happy message for us all. I feel more hopeful already.

I like this, so I thought I’d share. There’s this job interview for a prospective philosophy teacher, see…

Other candidates should create distractions. One man illustrated proper logic with this syllogism:

All men are mortal.

Socrates is mortal.

Therefore, Socrates is a man.

I raised my hand. “Birds are mortal too, aren’t they?” I asked, hoping he would correct his error.

“Yes,” our teacher agreed.

“So Socrates could be a bird?”

He smiled benignly. “No. Socrates doesn’t have feathers.”