Author: Ophelia Benson

Some more on this stipulation problem. On why ‘this pleases Allah’ and ‘this angers Allah’ are not the best criteria for what should go in a constitution – any more than ‘what would Jesus do’ is the best question for a 21st century polititian to ask himself.

Because it all depends on one’s conception of Allah or Jesus, for one thing. And guess what – people (my, what a suprise) have a tendency to conceptualize Jesus and Allah according to their own existing wants and opinions and deficits. If they don’t score all that well on the altruism or fairness or humility scale, well, their god is going to have a tendency to arrange things so that they get what they want and people who are in their power get screwed – and then they will call that outcome ‘what pleases Allah’ thus making it not just the way powerful men have arranged things to their own advantage, but Holy and Sacred and Right – so that not only will it never change, but everyone will respect it and worship it and revile anyone who criticizes or questions it. Quite a nice little racket.

And there’s no appeal, which is another reason those are not the best criteria, and why religion should be kept firmly out of government and politics. Because there is no one to file a grievance with and no way to second-guess the results. That’s how it works when you have a Book written 1500 years ago and a god who is never around to ask for updates. Very damn convenient, isn’t it!

‘Sorry – we’d love to let you have basic rights, like being allowed to walk around in the world without asking anyone’s permission, but it would anger Allah, so it’s out.’ ‘Oh yeah? You sure that’s not just your idea? Let’s ask Allah.’ ‘No can do. He’s not here. We can ask the imam.’ ‘I don’t care what the imam says, the imam will just say what you said, you probably asked the imam before you said it – you guys are all in this together. I want to take it to the top!’ ‘Not possible. Unless you want to get yourself one of those rucksacks, of course…’

Very very convenient. He makes the rules, according to what pleases him or pisses him off – but he’s never around to corroborate. There really is a serious design flaw with this whole arrangement. It’s just not the way to do things. You don’t set up a rule-system with a yes-no, on-off mechanism involving one guy when the one guy in question is someone who is never available for consultation – do you! Not in the real world you don’t. Dickens novels sometimes work that way, but other than that, it doesn’t fly.

That’s the problem with the whole supernatural thing. It’s such a perfect alibi, such an excuse, such a cop-out. Imagine other people trying that. The boss, the landlord, the merchant. ‘Hey! Where’s my paycheck? My roof just collapsed! Where’s that shipment of éclairs?’ Silence. ‘Hey!! Where do we go to file a grievance? How do we re-negotiate the contract?’ Some guy in a mitre strolls up. ‘You don’t, of course. The CEO is transcendent, the CEO is supernatural, the CEO is ineffable, and dwells in a region apart. Obviously you can’t re-negotiate anything. Have a nice day.’ Guy in mitre strolls away again. You’re screwed.

And people sign up to this arrangement voluntarily. It’s staggering. ‘Yes, please be the boss of me and tell me what to do based on outdated oppressive rules and hierarchies and never let me think rationally about any of it because that would be Displeasing to The Great Absent One. Thank you so much, now would you please kick me as hard as possible? Thank you and come back soon.’

Transcendence is a beautiful thing.

So ‘Iraqis back women’s rights’ – with a stipulation. A stipulation that renders the whole idea pretty much worthless.

A survey conducted by Iraq’s constitution drafting committee showed that 69 per cent of respondents support full rights for women – as long as the freedoms don’t contradict Islam…

The survey I think is not all that reliable because of the methodology, but never mind, because what I want to look at, and poke with a stick, is the basic idea: that women’s rights are okay as long as they [why does the article shift without notice from rights to freedoms? they’re not interchangeable] don’t contradict Islam.

That’s a problem. That’s a big problem. Imagine if you were told – ‘Yes you are entitled to human rights – provided they don’t contradict Christianity/Taoism/Wicca.’ You’d feel pretty anxious and worried about what does and what does not contradict whichever religion was in question, wouldn’t you. Does your allotment of rights include the right not to be sacrificed to the gods without written consent of the sacrificee, or not?

That’s why it’s a problem when religion is allowed to trump ‘rights’ – because you just can’t trust religions to come up with rights-compatible systems, or Books. Especially not religions that were started a good few years ago, before notions like women’s rights had gotten much of a foothold. It’s really not such a great idea to tie modern legislation and constitutional protections to a set of ideas worked up two or three or five thousand years ago.

You can get an idea of the kind of thing from the Hizb ut-Tahrir site.

The work of Hizb ut-Tahrir is to carry the Islamic da’wah in order to change the situation of the corrupt society so that it is transformed into an Islamic society. It aims to do this by firstly changing the society’s existing thoughts to Islamic thoughts so that such thoughts become the public opinion among the people, who are then driven to implement and act upon them. Secondly the Party works to change the emotions in the society until they become Islamic emotions that accept only that which pleases Allah (swt) and rebel against and detest anything which angers Allah (swt).

That’s the basic framework – what pleases Allah is good and acceptable, what angers Allah is bad and detestable. Only – how do you know? Or how do they – the people in charge – know? By consulting the Book. But – sometimes there are conflicting interpretations. What do you do then? Oh – whatever. You ask the approved ‘scholars’. But then how can you be sure the scholars are right? How can you be sure you actually know what does please or anger Allah? Doesn’t it look as if there’s room for error or trickery or both here? How can you tell that someone somewhere along the line has not simply written down what he wants and called it the word of Allah? Put it this way – if someone had done that – how would you know? What would you accept as evidence that someone had in fact done that? Anything?

Well, we know the answer to that question, which is the point Irshad Manji has been making. Let’s hope she makes headway. But meanwhile, women’s rights in Iraq look to be headed for the memory hole.

Look, if you’re going to talk about bullshit, you should at least be thorough about it, am I right?

In a paper published a few years ago, “Deeper Into Bullshit,” G. A. Cohen, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, protested that Frankfurt excludes an entire category of bullshit: the kind that appears in academic works. If the bullshit of ordinary life arises from indifference to truth, Cohen says, the bullshit of the academy arises from indifference to meaning. It may be perfectly sincere, but it is nevertheless nonsensical. Cohen, a specialist in Marxism, complains of having been grossly victimized by this kind of bullshit as a young man back in the nineteen-sixties, when he did a lot of reading in the French school of Marxism inspired by Louis Althusser. So traumatized was he by his struggle to make some sense of these defiantly obscure texts that he went on to found, at the end of the nineteen-seventies, a Marxist discussion group that took as its motto Marxismus sine stercore tauri—“Marxism without the shit of the bull.”

I do so sympathize. I’ve read a good many defiantly obscure texts myself, and it can indeed be traumatizing. It’s kind of like getting on the slow train from Bangor to Ketchikan via Amarillo and discovering that your assigned seat mate (No Exchanges, No Refunds, No Alterations, No Seat Re-assignments) is a talkative semi-deaf Baptist with 427 great-grandchildren and a wealth of anecdotes. That of course is why the Dictionary was written – to get revenge on all those talkative anecdotal Baptists. So I do sympathize with G. A. Cohen. There’s even a poltergeist who haunts the corridors of B&W topping up our supply of defiantly obscure texts by depositing turgidly opaque comments back here at odd intervals, apparently worried that we might run short. So I do sympathize.

Simon Blackburn’s Truth is one of the books reviewed in this article. It’s about relativism, among other things.

In its simplest form, relativism is easy to refute. Take the version of it that Richard Rorty, a philosopher who teaches at Stanford, once lightheartedly offered: “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.” The problem is that contemporary Americans and Europeans won’t let you get away with that characterization of truth; so, by its own standard, it cannot be true. (The late Sidney Morgenbesser’s gripe about pragmatism—which, broadly speaking, equates truth with usefulness—was in the same spirit: “The trouble with pragmatism is that it’s completely useless.”)

Blackburn put the joke a little differently.

Rorty…has a robust debunking attitude to the norms of truth and reason. Indeed, he once wrote that ‘truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with’. That is a shocking thing to say, outlandish even by philosophers’ standards. In fact, it is shocking enough to be something Rorty’s contemporaries wouldn’t let him get away with (and unsurprisingly, they didn’t). So again, if it is true then it is false – by its own lights it is false.

That made me laugh when I read it this morning.