Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Ishtiaq Ahmed on a Difficulty in Democracy

    What if a parliamentary majority wants to take away other people’s rights?

  • Another Mock Dictionary

    Leadership: An undefined quality attributed to bosses on public occasions.

  • Scott McLemee Reads the Classier Tabloid

    How does anyone keep up with all the secondary literature, let alone the two-headed alien babies?

  • Religion Doesn’t Make People Sweet After All

    Well, obviously. This is what we keep saying. No, godbothering does not always and necessarily make people better.

    Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today. According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems. The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

    Or at least it counters the view that religion is a guarantee of a healthy society.

    Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills. The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports…“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

    Correlate. Correlation is not causation. But still, even the correlation is worth noticing. (Of course godbotherers still have the option of saying Yes but you see without religion, US rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion would be thousands of times higher, whereas in the other, nongodbothering prosperous democracies, with religion the rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion would be much lower. That’s the thing about correlation: that option is always available. But anyway.)

    The New Republic gives us a nice glimpse of religion making people and societies better.

    There was a lot of traffic, and he started to maneuver between the cars as though he were on a race track going for first place. I couldn’t keep up. My strength flagged, I stopped the car, and I cried. I saw him pulling away from me and drawing nearer to his target. His heart grew still to tear out the criminal hearts. He will be blessed, and the criminals will face hardship; he will rise, and they will fall. I saw a column of smoke rise 20 meters into the sky amid a deafening roar. He felled 50 infidels.

    That’s one of the things religion does right there: make its adherents think of non-adherents as infidels. Not always, certainly, and fortunately, but the potential is always there.

  • Writer’s Choice: Christopher Hitchens

    A life of solidarity on the part of a defeated nation and an oppressed class.

  • Psychological Warfare Over le Livre Noir

    Critics say Freudian techniques have been elevated to an ‘untouchable dogma’.

  • Weird Choices

    Hollywood leery of comedy with ‘Muslim’ in title, happy with sexist displays and penis jokes.

  • Religion Not Necessary to Morality After All

    New research says religious belief can contribute to social problems.

  • ‘Inspiring’ Biographies of Suicide Jihadists

    Biographies of jihadists contain many elements of the mythic cult of martyrdom.

  • Tate Defends its Decision; Artist Says it’s Daft

    ‘You can’t act stupidly and not make the opposition feel that they have a case.’

  • Imaginary Offense and Real Censorship

    So it turns out that Sacranie isn’t all that gleeful after all. Or perhaps he is but thinks it politic to pretend not to be. Or perhaps he is but wants to throw his weight around some more anyway – yes that could be it, that seems to fit.

    The Muslim Council of Britain told the BBC News website: “We have not received any complaints about this piece of artwork. We would have preferred to have been consulted by Tate Britain before the decision was taken to remove John Latham’s piece. Sometimes presumptions are incorrectly made about what is unacceptable to Muslims and this can be counter-productive.”

    Ah – is that what you would have preferred. Is it really. Yes well I would have preferred to have been consulted by a great many people about a great many things before they did them. Gosh, that would be a long list. Crap books, ugly houses, crap movies, stupid policies, ugly clothes, silly names. But oddly enough people mostly don’t consult me before they do things. Maybe if I started a Council they would? I’d better get busy and do that then. Let’s all start Councils so that everyone will have to consult everyone before doing anything. Let’s just spend all our time asking various assorted groups and ‘communities’ for permission to write anything, say anything, think anything, sculpt anything, act anything, tease anything. Let’s devote every bit of our time and energy to pre-emptive consulation and judgment and permission-seeking and no-saying and offence-taking and sensitivity-respecting, and that way we’ll never have to actually do or produce anything and pretty soon we’ll all starve to death or die of boredom and everything will be fine.

    But really. The self-importance of that statement is pretty remarkable. The assumption that the MCB knows ‘what is unacceptable to Muslims’ and is the bod to consult on the subject, when in fact lots of Muslims find the MCB itself ‘unacceptable.’ And the BBC’s continued ongoing fostering of that very assumption by itself ‘consulting’ the MCB. And of course even more, the calm, smug, authoritarian assumption that Muslims or any religious group should be able to tell a secular national museum what not to display.

    It’s all meme-work, self-fulfilling prophesy, thought-shaping. The more the MCB is treated as coterminous with ‘Muslims’ the more the MCB gets to shape what all but consciously skeptical or rebellious Muslims do think. And the more institutions defer to predicted ‘offended’ ‘sensitivities’ the more sensitive people will think they ought to be offended by everything. And the more institutions like theatres and museums (and no doubt publishers) censor themselves in advance, as a precaution, just in case, because oh dear you know maybe – the more emptied-out everyone’s mental world will become.

    It’s appalling.

  • Political Spirituality

    I’ve been reading Foucault and the Iranian Revolution by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, and the picture it paints is not pretty.

    As Afary and Anderson note, although Foucault’s particular fascination with the revolution is well known in France, the full range of his writing about it has never been translated into English. In fact, since much of that writing was originally published by the Italian daily Corriere della sera, and until now was not republished, the full extent of his thoughts has rarely been taken into account even by Foucault’s French readers. Foucault made two, week long trips to Iran in the fall of ’78. He interviewed a number of prominent political actors, wrote nearly a dozen brief journalistic essays, and gave a long interview defending his distinctive views of the revolution. His response, in short, was deeper and more enthusiastic than his more well known, contemporaneous support of Solidarity and of Vietnamese refugees. Yet, the three volume, English language collection of Foucault’s “essential works” (in fact, otherwise uncollected brief essays and interviews) includes only one of the Iran pieces—and the last and most qualified. As Afary and Anderson point out, since that essay came at the end of a prominent political dispute, in which Foucault’s critics on the Parisian left took him to task for his uncritical support of Khomeini and Islamic government, reading it in isolation has been a confusing experience.

    Fortunately, Afary and Anderson redress that problem. Their volume reprints all Foucault’s Iran writings, as well as the criticisms leveled against them at the time by, among others, an anonymous Iranian feminist and the prestigious Marxist historian of the Middle East Maxime Rodinson. Those reprints are prefaced by a long, patient depiction of Foucault’s context and by a sustained effort to reconsider the relation between Foucault’s brief enthusiasm for the revolution and his work more generally.

    Given the fact that admirers of Foucault in English pay little attention to this aspect of his career and that, until quite recently, some defenders doubted that Foucault was actually enthusiastic about Islamic revolution, this is certainly welcome attention. Unfortunately, so far, it doesn’t look like the book will become much of an event. It’s still quite new, but as of yet, so far as I can tell, there hasn’t been much buzz. In the course of a nearly hagiographic defense of Foucault (“the gentle apostle of radiant uncertainty”), Jonathan Rée gave it a long, eloquent, but I think glibly backhanded dismissal in The Nation. The key lines: “One could hardly have asked for more. One might have asked for less, however.”

    According to Rée, in other words, Afary and Anderson are carried away by prosecutorial zeal and make far too much of a minor episode. Although they “have spent ten years working on their book,” he says, “it has not been a labor of love, and their summaries of Foucault’s achievements are consistently hostile and tendentious.”

    I think that’s not right. Most basically, Afary and Anderson’s tone is moderate to a fault. They have nothing like the verve and style Rée shares with Foucault, but I suspect that’s deliberate. Their book turns down the flame as low as possible. Likewise, their judgments—though certainly arguable in some cases—are generally plausible and far from extreme. No daring leaps of the sort that Foucault himself practiced.

    Their most contestable claim is simply that Foucault’s view of the revolution is integrally related to attitudes displayed consistently throughout his work—in particular to a one-sided hostility to the modernity of the west. (At one early stage in the revolution, Foucault worried that visions of Islamic government too closely resembled “the catchphrases of democracy–of bourgeois or revolutionary democracy. . . . We in the West have been repeating them to ourselves ever since the eighteenth century, and look where they have got us.”) Afary and Anderson believe that attitude blinded Foucault not just to the likely outcomes of Islamic government, but more particularly to the repression it promised women and homosexuals.

    More specifically, Afary and Anderson construct an unfamiliar picture of Foucault as not just an anti-modernist, but as a defender of traditional societies. Rée leaps all over this, calling it “preposterous,” and I suspect he’s basically right. But it’s worth noting that, as Afary and Anderson emphasize, in all his major works, Foucault describes the ostensible improvements of modernizing reform as less appealing than what they displaced. That doesn’t seem controversial.

    Likewise, Rée dismisses as misinterpretation A & A’s emphasis on the importance to Foucault of “limit experiences,” suggesting that such “notions . . . have no place in his work except as butts of his teasing paradoxes.” This is, I think, simply untrue. Not central perhaps, but there’s no doubt that Foucault spoke several times about limit experiences, and the case can be made, as for example in this essay by Gary Gutting (Project Muse) that they played a significant, though submerged role in his thinking over all.

    It would be easy, in short, to overemphasize A & A’s minor stumbles or contestable claims (like their further argument that the last volumes of the History of Sexuality were significantly inflected by Foucault’s interest in the customs of homosexuality in Muslim societies) and to miss the central problem. In my view, the most striking, indisputable, and disturbing claim is simply that Foucault was fascinated by “political spirituality,” and that when his critics and friends pointed out to him its dangers, he was initially indifferent (state repression in Iran after the revolution appears to have changed his mind somewhat) because he was far more concerned about the evils of modernity and the arrogance of the west. At one point Foucault’s Gallimard editor Claude Mauriac worried about the dangers of combining “spirituality and politics”: “we have seen what that gave us.” Foucault’s response was simply to ask: “And politics without spirituality, my dear Claude?”

    A & A have a plausible case that Foucault was fascinated by the revolution, not just because it was a challenge to repression or to American imperialism, but because, as he said, it was “an attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics.” They likewise have a colorable claim that this interest depended on a significant blind spot in Foucault’s thinking and further that this blindness was part and parcel of his larger concerns about governmentality, subjectification, etc. Their book deserves to be taken seriously—though on the evidence of Rée alone I suspect strongly that they won’t be.

    Update. For a better review than Rée’s, see Wesley Yang’s excellent
    piece in the Boston Globe.

    This article was first published on The Valve on September 15 and is republished here by permission.

  • Tate Bans Work for Fear of Offending Muslims

    ‘The Muslim Council of Britain was not consulted on the issue.’

  • London Does Not Need Art to Tiptoe Around

    Consider, rather, the rest of us who demand, now more than ever, intelligent, challenging thought.

  • Tate Cites Cutting of Books as Causing Concern

    Sacranie wishes MCB had been consulted first on what offends Muslims.

  • Science Can’t Produce Instant Answers

    A single year’s observation does not permit the divination of a long-term trend.

  • Richard Wolin on Jürgen Habermas

    Are contemporary philosophers up to explaining post-secular societies?

  • Sensitivity is Today’s Soft Despotism

    The notion of sensitivity led to less toleration rather than more.

  • The Tate Did What?

    Brilliant. Perfect. Let’s let worries about ‘offending’ religious sensitivities determine what art we’re not allowed to see. What a good idea! Why didn’t someone think of it sooner? It would save such a huge amount of trouble, for one thing – we would all have to spend so much less time in museums and at the theatre and reading blasfeeemous books. Think how much more efficient we would be. We would be able to put new colours on the stripes in toothpaste. We would make the world a more beautiful (and of course less blasfeemous) place.

    One of Britain’s leading conceptual artists has accused the Tate gallery of ‘cowardice’ after it banned one of his major works for fear of offending some Muslims after the London terrorist bombings. John Latham’s God Is Great consists of a large sheet of thick glass with copies of Islam, Christianity and Judaism’s most sacred texts – the Koran, Bible and Talmud – apparently embedded within its surface. The work was due to go on display last week in an exhibition dedicated to Latham at London’s Tate Britain, but gallery officials took the unprecedented decision to veto it because of political and religious sensitivities.

    Well that certainly sounds offensive and blasfeemous. I can see why the Tate was all in a swivet.

    Tate Britain says that it had to take the ‘difficult decision’ to avoid its motives being misunderstood given the attacks, which killed 52 people in July, and the present political climate. However, it admitted it had not consulted the Metropolitan Police or the Muslim Council of Britain.

    What? It hadn’t what? It hadn’t ‘consulted’ the cops or the Muslim Council of Britain? The MCB is running things now? People are supposed to ‘consult’ it? People who are wondering if a given piece of art might or might not be ‘offensive’ to Muslims are supposed to ‘consult’ the MCB? Because – what? They have such a good record on that kind of thing? What with boycotting the Holocaust, and thinking death is too good for Salman Rushdie?

    Why are they the people to consult? Why, why, why? They’re just a self-appointed group, they’re not elected, they’re not representative, they’re not ‘the Muslim community’ – why are they given some kind of de facto official role? Not that anyone should be given such a role, but that goes double for the MCB.

    Last night Latham, 84, who insists that the piece is not anti-Islamic, told The Observer: ‘Tate Britain have shown cowardice over this. I think it’s a daft thing to do because if they want to help the militants, this is the way to do it.’

    Yeah you could say that! Flop down on the floor and show your belly, cringe, whine, cry, pee on the floor, sweat, faint, and then send the Tate’s entire inventory to a secret vault in Kidderminster lest something might someday offend someone. That’s what I call curating!

    Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, supported the artist. ‘We share his concern,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what precise thought processes were going on at the Tate but I am concerned about the signal this sends at a time when we see free speech quite significantly under threat. I think that after 7 July we need this kind of artistic expression and political expression and discourse and disagreement more than ever, which is why this is worrying. Is three holy books in a piece of glass going to incite controversy? Frankly, whether it does or doesn’t, controversy is what we have in a flourishing democracy.’ She added: ‘I ultimately level my criticisms against legislators and certain lobby groups who’ve allowed free speech to be put in such peril and are making the climate that leads the Tate to have this kind of nervousness.’

    Exactly. It’s that wretched religious hatred bill – plus the media’s bad habit of treating the MCB as some sort of official Spokesgroup.

    Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, defended the gallery’s decision to hold back the piece…’It was a very difficult decision,’ he said, ‘but we made it due to the exceptional circumstances of this summer and in the light of opinions that we value regarding religious sensitivities.’

    Why? Why do you value those opinions? And especially, why do you value them so much that you grovel before them and let them influence what you do? Why?

    The Muslim Council of Britain was not consulted on the issue. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, its secretary, said: ‘I’m not aware of this particular exhibition, nor I am aware of any Muslim group that has protested. However, if the art gallery itself felt the display of the divine and holy books in such a manner would be deeply offensive to the believers of the three religions and therefore withdrew it, then I respect their decision.’

    Yes I bet you do! I bet you’re just hugging yourself with glee. I bet you feel that the MCB has really arrived at last – that along with the K, getting the Tate to withdraw a sculpture without even asking it to must mean the MCB has some pretty impressive clout.

    Well I don’t respect their decision. I hope they get a torrent of outrage and mockery and contempt that makes their fears of an imagined ‘offended’ Muslim community look like a pack of butterflies out for a waltz. That’s what I hope.

  • Echoes

    Dogmatism, we were talking about the other day. Via this remark by Simon Blackburn in Truth.

    Today’s relativists, persuading themselves that all opinions enjoy the same standing in the light of reason, take it as a green light to believe what they like with as much conviction and force as they like. So while ancient scepticism was the sworn opponent of dogmatism, today dogmatisms feed and flourish on the desecrated corpse of reason.

    A day or two after posting that I read a related comment by Hume.

    You propose then, Philo, said Cleanthes, to erect religious faith on philosophical skepticism; and you think that if certainty or evidence be expelled from every other subject of inquiry, it will all retire to these theological doctrines, and there acquire a superior force and authority. Whether your skepticism be as absolute and sincere as you pretend, we shall learn by and by, when the company breaks up: We shall then see, whether you go out at the door or the window; and whether you really doubt if your body has gravity, or can be injured by its fall…

    That’s from the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and it’s the epigraph to chapter 4 in Francis Wheen’s Mumbo Jumbo.

    There’s another thing I quoted from Blackburn.

    In the intellectual world, toleration is the disposition to fight opinion only with opinion; in other words, to protect freedom of speech, and to confront divergence of opinion with open critical reflection rather than suppression or force.

    Yesterday I re-read this article on Islamophobia-phobia by Piers Benn.

    The real lesson of tolerance is that disputes should be settled by reasoned dialogue rather than abuse or violence, and that we should always accept that we may have much to learn from people whose beliefs initially appear strange. But these virtues are a far cry from the sentimental pretence that all claims to religious truth are somehow ‘equal’…

    There, you see? It all ties up. Skepticism and relativism can be hijacked to the purposes of dogmatism, and tolerance doesn’t mean never disagreeing with anyone, it means disagreeing by means of reasoned dialogue not by force. Both of those points are quite useful to keep in mind.