Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Theological Thickness

    Christian theology has its own sources, insights, methods, and internal logic.

  • Evangelical Bullying at Air Force Academy

    ‘Focus on the Family’ across the street, New Life church up the hill.

  • Public Relations Disaster for Pakistan

    Perhaps the work of ‘more loyal than the king brigade’ around Musharraf.

  • Mill and Russell Speak Up

    And while we’re on the subject of ‘Intelligent Design’ and the people at the ‘Discovery Institute’ and so on – I just feel like aiming another kick at the design argument. I know I’ve done it before, I’m repeating myself, but – but I’m not sure they get shouted at enough about this.

    Okay their big thing is ‘_____ is too complex to have come about without a designer. _____ is irreducibly complex, so a designer must have designed it, because otherwise it wouldn’t be there, being so complex and all.’ Complex things can’t just happen. A hurricane can’t whip through a junkyard and leave a 777 behind. An inebriated chimpanzee can’t shred a pile of old newspapers and end up with a first edition of Tobacco Road. A blizzard can’t produce a snowperson bearing an exact resemblance to Marie Dressler in ‘Dinner at Eight.’ What are the odds that there could be a universe so incredibly carefully calibrated that after some billions of years, what do we find? Us! How likely is that? The odds against it are – there are more numbers in that number than there are atoms in the universe. Therefore, there has to be a designer – that’s the only explanation. Anything else just can’t have happened the way it did.

    Okay, so how did the designer get here? If ______ is too complex to have come about without a designer, then obviously whoever or whatever designed _____ has to be pretty complex too, right? So if the first item is inexplicable without a designer, why isn’t the second? Why is the cell too complex to explain without a designer, while the designer itself is not? Why is the designer, in fact, an explanation? Why is it an explanation at all? Why isn’t it more like a bad joke? (Well, it is, actually, it’s the tortoises all the way down joke. But do IDers get it?) It’s like saying ‘how did this chocolate cake get here?’ and being shown for answer – another chocolate cake.

    No, the reality is, the argument from design is just a shop window thing. It’s just a pretense. IDers don’t want an explanation (that’s obvious, because if they did, by now they would have taken in the fact that ID isn’t an explanation at all) – they want their God, and they think ID is a respectable way to be able to have it. In fact it’s not respectable, because it’s so silly. An explanation that doesn’t explain anything is silly. But they do get people to listen to them. Maybe if the obvious problem with the designer were more widely noticed, they’d have more trouble.

    Bertrand Russell had good blunt things to say about all this, as you might expect. In Why I Am Not a Christian, for instance.

    you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: “My father taught me that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?’” That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”

    Or in another version, ‘You can’t fool me, young person, it’s tortoises all the way down.’ (It’s a nice touch that it was Mill, because Mill was Russell’s secular ‘godfather.’ I find that a very pleasing small fact.)

  • Bad Astronomy Speaks Out

    Okay – so apparently you’re not sick of the sound of my voice even if I am. (Well you wouldn’t be, would you – because if you were, you wouldn’t be here. Unless you’re all a pack of masochists who go out of your way to read stuff that you’re sick of. But that’s not likely either, because in fact if you’re masochistic and want to read stuff you’re sick of, you can find plenty of stuff you’re sicker of than you are of me. I’m quietly confident of that. Really. I happen to know [this is a little-known fact, but I’ll make you a present of it] that there is quite a lot of boring stuff on the Internet, ideal for people who want to read stuff they’re sick of. There is boring, pointless, fatuous, even loony stuff by the yard – whereas here if nothing else you can find interesting links. So this place [sadistically enough] is not the first stop for masochists, or even the second or third. So I think we can safely conclude that if you were sick of it you damn well wouldn’t be reading it.) And if you’re not, I’m not. I’m a sheep, you see, and take all my opinions and reactions and degrees of queasiness and malaise from other people. I don’t have any of my own – I’m a kind of weathervane, or pregnancy test strip – I just react.

    So Bad Astronomy has a few words about Creationism and the ‘Discovery Institute.’ In particular he says one thing that made me sit up straight and stop slouching.

    Many people like to say that science and religion are compatible. I find that to be a monumentally naive statement. Perhaps science and some religions can be reconciled, but if your religion says that Jupiter is really made of pixie dust, or that the Earth is flat, or that 1+1 =3, then your religion is wrong. It’s really just that simple. The Universe knows what it’s doing, and the reality of it is what science seeks. If your religion cannot be reconciled with that reality, then your religion is wrong…

    Exactly. Funny how reluctant many people are to say that, even if it is what they in fact think. Funny how they prefer to hem and haw, or change the subject, or talk about different kinds of reality, instead. That’s why I wrote that In Focus on Science and Religion a couple of years ago: in order to make that point as bluntly as possible. I’ve had some emails about the bluntness, and there are places where I should add a footnote saying something like ‘yes I realize there are arguments that can be made about this’ – but I wanted to get as far away as possible from the ‘different kinds of reality’ line of talk. And the Bad Astronomer has the same kind of idea.

    Over the course of time, you’ll be seeing more rebuttals — no, debunking — of creationist claims here. I’ve had enough, and this threat is real. They want to turn our classrooms in a theocratically-controlled anti-science breeding ground, and I’m not going to sit by and watch it happen.

    Yeah.

  • ‘Bad Astronomy’ on Creationist Astronomy

    The Discovery Institute looks beyond biology…

  • Today Reporter Tells How He Got the Story

    Why Sita Kisanga agreed to talk to BBC about the ‘witchcraft’ child abuse case.

  • But Mai Needs Her Passport

    Mukhtar Mai has told the BBC her passport has been confiscated.

  • Pakistan Lifts Travel Ban on Mukhtar Mai

    Mai welcomed decision, had been planning to travel to US at invitation of human rights group.

  • Pakistan Lifts Travel Restrictions on Rape Victim

    US State Department and human rights groups objected.

  • Microsoft Criticized Over China Censorship

    ‘Human rights’ forbidden in subject line but allowed in text.

  • Untitled

    I’m sick of the sound of my own voice.

  • Vatican Wins in Referendum Boycott

    Failure of attempt to liberalise law on IVF treatment called ‘the great revenge.’

  • India Muslim Divorce Code Disappoints Women

    Code silent on minimum marriage age for women, triple talaq still there.

  • Woman Ordered to Marry Rapist

    Indian woman ordered by Muslim council of community elders to marry father-in-law.

  • “Theory’s Empire”

    This spring, Columbia University Press published an anthology of literary and cultural theory, a 700-page tome entitled Theory’s Empire and edited by Daphne Patai and Will Corral. The collection includes essays dating back 30 years, but most of them are of recent vintage (I’m one of the contributors).

    Why another door-stopper volume on a subject already well-covered by anthologies and reference books from Norton, Johns Hopkins, Penguin, University of Florida Press, etc.? Because in the last 30 years, theory has undergone a paradoxical decline, and the existing anthologies have failed to register the change. Glance at the roster of names and texts in the table of contents and you’ll find a predictable roll call of deconstruction, feminism, new historicism, neopragmatism, postcolonial studies, and gender theory. Examine the approach to those subjects and you’ll find it an expository one, as if the job of the volumes were to lay out ideas and methods without criticism (except when one school of thought in the grouping reproves another). The effect is declarative, not “Here are some ideas and interpretations to consider” but “Here is what theorists say and do.”

    If the theories represented were fresh and new, not yet assimilated into scholarship and teaching, then an introductory volume that merely expounded them would make sense. The same could be said if the theories amounted to a methodological competence that students must attain in order to participate in the discipline, or if the theories had reached a point of historical importance such that one studied them as one would, say, the utopian social theories surrounding communist reform, no matter how wrongheaded they were. But Theory lost its novelty some two decades ago, and many years have passed since anybody except the theorists themselves took the latest versions seriously. And as for disciplinary competence, the humanities are so splintered and compartmentalized that one can pursue a happy career without ever reading a word of Bhabha or Butler. Finally, while the historical import of Theory remains to be seen, indications of oblivion are gathering. Not only are the theorists largely unread outside of graduate classrooms, but even among younger scholars within the humanities fields the reading of them usually doesn’t extend beyond the anthologies and a few landmarks such as Discipline and Punish.

    One wouldn’t realize the diminishing value of Theory by perusing the anthologies, though. In fact, one gets the opposite impression—and rightly so. For, while Theory has become a humdrum intellectual matter within the humanities and a nonexistent or frivolous one without, it has indeed acquired a professional prestige that is as strong as ever. This is the paradox of its success, and failure. Intellectually speaking, twenty-five years ago Theory was an adventure of thought with real stakes. Reading “Diffèrance” and working backward into Heidegger’s and Hegel’s ontology, or “The Rhetoric of Temporality” and sensing the tragic truth at the heart of Romantic irony, one apprehended something fundamental enough to affect not just one’s literary method but one’s entire belief system. No doubt the same was true for an earlier generation and its interpretation of Wordsworth or T. S. Eliot. But this time it was Derrida and Baudrillard, and the institution was starting to catch up to it with “Theory specialist” entries in the MLA Job List, Introduction to Theory and Interpretation courses for first-year graduate students, and press editors searching for theory books to fill out their next year’s catalogue. In an inverse way, the public seemed to agree when William Bennett initiated the academic Culture Wars with To Reclaim a Legacy, an NEH report that decried Theory for destroying the traditional study of literature with politicized agendas and anti-humanist dogma. He was right, and a public outcry followed, but that only confirmed to junior theorists the power and insight of their practice.

    Ten years later, however, the experience had changed. As theorists became endowed chairs, department heads, series editors, and MLA presidents, as they were profiled in the New York Times Magazine and invited to lecture around the world, the institutional effects of Theory displaced its intellectual nature. It didn’t have to happen, but that’s the way the new crop of graduate students experienced it. Not only were too many Theory articles and books published and too many Theory papers delivered, but too many high-profile incursions of the humanities into public discourse had a Theory provenance. The academic gossip in Lingua Franca highlighted Theory much more than traditional scholarship, David Lodge’s popular novels portrayed the spread of theory as a human comedy, and People Magazine hired a prominent academic feminist as its TV critic. One theorist became known for finding her “inner life,” another for a skirt made of men’s neckties, another for unionizing TAs. It was fun and heady, especially when conservatives struck back with profiles of Theorists in action such as Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, sallies which enraged many academics and soundly defeated them in public settings, but pleased the more canny ones who understood that being denounced was better than not being talked about at all (especially if you had tenure).

    The cumulative result was that the social scene of Theory overwhelmed the intellectual thrust. Years earlier, the social dynamic could be seen in the cult that formed around deconstruction, and a comparison of “Diffèrance” with the section in The Post Card in which Derrida ruminates over a late-night call from “Martini Heidegger” shows the toll celebrity can take on a brilliant mind. By the mid-Nineties, the social tendencies had spread all across the humanities, and its intellectual consequences surfaced in the desperation and boredom with which Theorists pondered the arrival of The Next Big Thing. When a colleague of mine returned from an MLA convention in Toronto around that time, he told a story that nicely illustrated the trend. One afternoon he hopped on a shuttle bus and sat down next to a young scholar who told him she’d just returned from a panel. He replied that he’d just returned from France, where he’d been studying for a semester.

    “What are they talking about?” she asked.

    “Hmm?”

    “Is there any new theory?”

    “Yeah, in a way,” he answered. “It’s called ‘erudition.’”

    “What’s that?” she wondered.

    “Well, you read and read, and you get your languages, and you go into politics, religion, law, contemporary events, and just about everything else.” (He’s a 16th-century French literature scholar who comes alive in archives.)

    She was puzzled. “But what’s the theory?”

    “To be honest, there isn’t any theory,” he said.

    “That’s impossible.” He shrugged. “Okay, then, give me the names, the people heading it.”

    “There aren’t any names. Nobody’s heading it.”

    A trivial exchange, yes, but it signals the professional meaning and moral barrenness Theory accrued in the Nineties. The more popular Theory became, the less it inspired deep commitments among searching minds. The more Theory became enshrined in anthologies ordered semester after semester, the more it became a token of professional wisdom. The only energy Theory sustained during those years issued from a non-philosophical source: the race/gender/sexuality/anti-imperialism/anti-bourgeois resentments tapped by various critics giving different objects of oppression theoretical standing.

    This raises another discrepancy between Theory’s intellectual content and its institutional standing. Theory in its political versions claimed to be subversive, egalitarian, anti-hegemonic, and ruthlessly self-critical, but in their actual working conditions theorists presided over one of the most hierarchical, prestige-ridden, and complacent professional spaces in our society. Theory promised to bring a fruitful pluralism to the field, yet the proliferation of outlooks created the opposite, a subdivision into sects that didn’t talk to one another. Theory purported to supply intellectual tools to dismantle the contents of humanities education and undo the power structures of institutions, but while the syllabus and curriculum changed, the networking, factionalism, and cronyism only intensified. No doubt the infusion of corporate approaches into the university, along with the growing isolation of humanities professors from American society, played a role in the process, but while Theorists critiqued moneyed interests and bourgeois conventions, they enjoyed the perks of tenured celebrity as much as anyone. One can’t blame them for that, but one can blame them for enlisting Theory in the service of social justice while insulating themselves from genuine social problems.

    The personality rituals, the routine discoveries of radical approaches, the abhorrence of dissent, the discordance of word and deed—they enervated Theory and the intellectual stakes evaporated. The outcome shouldn’t surprise anybody. It isn’t the first time a philosophy rose to prominence in an institution at the same rate that it lost its power to inspire. But only recently, and far too late, have theorists begun to admit it, for example, at the April 2003 Critical Inquiry symposium in Chicago. Even their hesitant admissions, though, differ from previous reactions to criticism, for while others have made these points for years, Theorists and their votaries managed to make their charges look random and eccentric, outside the principal scholarly dialogue. Theory may appear at first to be a diverse collection of psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and the like, but while the different schools were allowed to spar with one another (feminists criticizing psychoanalysis, political critics chastising deconstruction, and such), whenever a non-theorist tackled a Theory (Fred Crews on psychoanalysis, John Searle on deconstruction), his or her arguments were denounced as anti-intellectual bile. Theory quickly seized the vanguard terrain and cast its detractors as merely anti-Theory—retrograde, bitter, superseded.

    What the latter group lacked, among other things, was a potent and lively volume such as Josué Harari’s best-selling early collection of programmatic and illustrative essays, Textual Strategies, or a bulky anthology suitable for a survey of all the reigning approaches such as The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Individual critiques such as Eugene Goodheart’s Skeptic Disposition might punch holes in one theoretical premise and another, but the institutional might of Theory remained firm. Only when an anti-or counter-Theory expression found a medium with sufficient institutional heft would the lock of Theory upon the humanities begin to loosen.

    This is, of course, a heavy burden to place upon Theory’s Empire. The purpose of the anthology, however, is not to replace existing collections but to complement and contrast with them. Despite its apparent pluralism, Theory has become a set of Establishment factions, and while in ordinary circumstances factions maintain their vitality by rivaling one another for influence, the protections of the academy permitted academic sects to coexist and turn inward. The loss of real intellectual challenge followed the time-tested laws of human nature; as John Stuart Mill put it: “Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field.”

    In the past, yes, Theory thrived on enemies, the “anti-Theorists,” but they were conveniently interpreted as outsiders. Theory needs new antagonists whose intelligence is unquestioned—not the conservative and (classic) liberals in the public sphere who unite in despising academic Theorists for their posturing and abstractedness, and not the isolated traditionalist professors who lament the hijacking of their profession with cartoon jibes on their office doors. Essays by a broad array of critics, philosophers, social scientists, and public intellectuals who question Theory’s logical and empirical contents and diagnose its institutional status, gathered into a single, course-friendly volume, will restore some respect and vigor to the field. The second thoughts of preeminent theorists of the past are inadequate, and we require more to make metacriticism interesting once again.

    Theory’s Empire is a start. It is weighty enough to preempt the anti-intellectual tag and count as more than idiosyncratic musings on the subject. The contributors are diverse enough in their interests, training, and politics to escape the standard labels applied to critics. The contributions are informed and broad enough to bring a wider perspective to fundamental problems. Some of Theory’s premises will be expelled, some names discredited, but others will be strengthened. That is the natural and healthy evolution of a discipline, and Theory has been able to resist it for too long. In a few weeks, the anthology will be the subject of a weblog discussion at The Valve, where several distinguished voices and lots of commentators shall initiate a process long overdue.

  • Qu’est-ce qu’il a dit?

    A little from Foucault himself, since it’s available. Some wisdom and insight from M. Discipline and Punish.

    One thing must be clear. By “Islamic government,” nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control.

    Shrewd, ain’t it! Noooo, nobody meant that! Clerics? A role? A role of supervision or control? Oh, hell no! That’s not what anybody meant.

    He did go to Iran, right? He wasn’t confused? He didn’t, like, get off the plane a stop or two early? In Marseille or someplace? He didn’t accidentally say ‘Stockholm’ to the ticket clerk when he meant to say ‘Tehran’?

    To me, the phrase “Islamic government” seemed to point to two orders of things. “A utopia,” some told me without any pejorative implication. “An ideal,” most of them said to me. At any rate, it is something very old and also very far into the future, a notion of coming back to what Islam was at the time of the Prophet, but also of advancing toward a luminous and distant point where it would be possible to renew fidelity rather than maintain obedience. In pursuit of this ideal, the distrust of legalism seemed to me to be essential, along with a faith in the creativity of Islam.

    Very old and also very far into the future – so far that it comes back around and meets itself? Or what. Because that business of coming back to what Islam was at the time of the Prophet – well, let me put it this way, I’ve never learned anything about the 7th century in any part of the world that made me want to live then. Really not. So I have to wonder why Foucault thought that sounded ‘luminous’. And then that crap about fidelity rather than obedience. Oh yeah? Tell that to the women who got beaten up for not concealing themselves thoroughly enough. And then to top it all off, like the rotting fish head on top of the ice cream sundae – ‘faith in the creativity of Islam.’ Right. Three hooray-words, three sexual-arousal words, three mental-shutdown words – faith, creativity, and Islam. Bad idea, Foukers – faith not a good way to go, creativity really beside the point here, and Islam – well, not quite what you seem to have thought.

    But one dreams also of another movement, which is the inverse and the converse of the first. This is one that would allow the introduction of a spiritual dimension into political life, in order that it would not be, as always, the obstacle to spirituality, but rather its receptacle, its opportunity, and its ferment…I do not feel comfortable speaking of Islamic government as an “idea” or even as an “ideal.” Rather, it impressed me as a form of “political will.” It impressed me in its effort to politicize structures that are inseparably social and religious in response to current problems. It also impressed me in its attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics.

    One person’s dream is another person’s nightmare.

  • He Had Seen the Future and it Worked

    So Foucault went to Iran in 1979, to see what he could see.

    While many liberals and leftists supported the populist uprising that pitted unarmed masses against one of the world’s best-armed regimes, none welcomed the announcement of the growing power of radical Islam with the portentous lyricism that Foucault brought to his brief, and never repeated, foray into journalism…Foucault’s Iranian adventure was a “tragic and farcical error” that fits into a long tradition of ill-informed French intellectuals spouting off about distant revolutions, says James Miller, whose 1993 biography “The Passion of Michel Foucault” contains one of the few previous English-language accounts of the episode. Indeed, Foucault’s search for an alternative that was absolutely other to liberal democracy seems peculiarly reckless in light of political Islam’s subsequent career, and makes for odd reading now as observers search for traditions in Islam that are compatible with liberal democracy.

    Yeah. Odd – painful – embarrassing – cringe-making. It’s like watching a putative radical cheering Hitler’s election, or getting misty-eyed while watching ‘Triumph of the Will,’ or putting a lovingly-framed photo of Pol Pot on the wall.

    Foucault was virtually alone among Western observers, Anderson and Afary argue, in embracing the specifically Islamist wing of the revolution. Indeed, Foucault pokes fun at the secular leftists who thought they could use the Islamists as a weapon for their own purposes; the Islamists alone, he believed, reflected the “perfectly unified collective will” of the people.

    Oh, Christ. How fucking stupid can you get. Especially when you’re someone who’s famous for sniffing out the insidious, non-obvious forms of domination and power. ‘The perfectly unified collective will of the people’ – what the hell would that be? Unless they all happen to be pod people, there is no such thing! You’d think anyone with even the most rudimentary acquaintance with actual human beings, let alone a theorist of power, would be well aware of that. No – what there is is the perfectly unified collective will of some people, which is a terrific instrument for tyrannizing over the rest of the people. The more ‘perfectly unified’ i.e. passionately held, unquestioned and unquestionable, mindless, irrational, fervent it is, the more sharp and thorough an instrument it is. It’s something to be terrified of, not something to rejoice at. Especially – especially (did he miss it because it’s so god damn obvious?) – if the people with the perfectly unified enraged collective will are the stronger part of the people – to wit, the men – the adult men, the straight men, the majority-religion men. Along with the collective will thing, they have sticks and whips and fists.

    The Iranian Revolution, Anderson and Afary write, appealed to certain of Foucault’s characteristic preoccupations — with the spontaneous eruption of resistance to established power, the exploration of the limits of rationality, and the creativity unleashed by people willing to risk death…In his articles, Foucault compared the Islamists to Savonarola, the Anabaptists, and Cromwell’s militant Puritans. The comparisons were intended to flatter.

    Savonarola! And what did he think Savonarola would have thought of someone like him?! The limits of rationality, the creativity unleashed by people willing to risk death – oh, hell. He pretty much was getting misty-eyed at ‘Triumph of the Will’ then.

    “We think of Foucault as this very cool, unsentimental thinker who would be immune to the revolutionary romanticism that has overtaken intellectuals who covered up Stalin’s atrocities or Mao’s…But in this case, he abandoned much of his critical perspective in his intoxication with what he saw in Iran. Here was a great philosopher of difference who looked around him in Iran and everywhere saw unanimity.”

    Saw it, and cheered it on. Very clever. Well done.

    Foucault, who died in 1984, refused to engage in public mea culpas, despite the fierce debate that broke out in France over his ideas about Iran…Anderson says that the debate over these 25- year-old writings has relevance when some leftists focus more energy on criticizing an administration they scorn than on speaking against a radical Islamist movement that also violates all their cherished ideals.

    But, some people think Foucault’s view had some merit.

    Other Foucault scholars also see an enduring value in his turn toward political spirituality. James Bernauer, a Jesuit priest who teaches philosophy at Boston College and has written several books on Foucault and theology, sees in the late Foucault’s embrace of spirituality a resource for thinking about how to integrate politics and religion…”Foucault had an ability to see this, to see past the pervasive secularism of French intellectual life, that was quite remarkable.

    Ah, a Jesuit priest! Well in that case. No, I’ll stick with that pervasive secularism deal, thanks. The more pervasive the better.

  • Tulsa Zoo Forced to Post Creationist Signs

    Zoo employees, others said religion shouldn’t be part of scientific institution.

  • Excerpt from Foucault and the Iranian Revolution

    ‘By “Islamic government,” nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control.’