Author: Ophelia Benson

Michael Ruse. [shakes head] I don’t know, I just don’t know. I simply can’t agree. I think he’s wrong. I think it’s bad (or at least dubious) tactics and I think it’s even worse morality and epistemology.

But those are two different things. I know, I know. Is and ought; facts and values. But lying about the one takes you into questions about the other. Which is a roundabout way of saying that even if it were good tactics I don’t think it’s morally respectable to tell lies about what you take to be the truth for tactical reasons. At least not on the whole; not in general; not as a rule. In life and death situations (a murderer with an axe asks you where the little girl with the dear little puppy is because he wants to sell her life insurance, that kind of thing) it’s different; but as a general principle, we shouldn’t go around saying the stork brings babies and there is a thriving colony of utopian hemp-farmers on a planet behind the Hale-Bopp comet, simply to appease and mollify a lot of damn fools who think so and will get all offended and bent and slit-eyed if we contradict them. Especially, frankly, people who are educators, shouldn’t do that. Especially people who occupy chairs that are actually named ‘for the public understanding of science.’ People like that just have an occupational duty not to pretend to believe in a nice man in the sky who makes all our boo-boos go away simply because a lot of sentimentalists want to go on thinking so forever and ever amen and if we don’t let them then they’ll trash science education. Therefore I find it highly irritating that Ruse keeps telling them they should. I’ve upbraided him about it before, and he’s still at it.

Virtually every prominent Darwinian in recent decades has eschewed social Darwinism, and most believe that evolution itself, while responsible for the increased complexity of organic forms over time, cannot be regarded as a linear process driving toward a particular endpoint. But Ruse asserts that popular contemporary biologists like Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins have also exacerbated the divisions between evolutionists and creationists by directly challenging the validity of religious belief – Dawkins by repeatedly declaring his atheism (”faith,” he once wrote, ”is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate”), and Wilson by describing his ”search for objective reality” as a replacement for religious seeking.

But what are they supposed to do? What the hell is wrong with Dawkins’ ‘repeatedly’ declaring his atheism? And what is he supposed to do instead – lie? Shut up? What? And why should he do either one? When theists get to go on the radio and talk everyone else into the ground – why are atheists supposed to zip it? Oh, it makes me tired, this kind of thing. And there’s always more of it. It’s just an unending flood. It’s all the more depressing when people like Ruse join in.

Ruse, a self-identified agnostic, acknowledges the ”thrilling quality” of Dawkins’s writing but says he objects to adamantly anti-religion statements coming from a scientist. ”I don’t have any more belief than Dawkins,” he says. ”But I do think it matters that he is making it very difficult for those of us who care about evolution to put forward a reasonable face to the reasonable portion [of the public] in the middle.”

But there again. That just seems to be saying people should lie either explicitly or by omission, merely for tactical reasons. It’s appeasment, that’s all, and it doesn’t even work. The more people mollify religious zealots, the more the zealots demand. That’s all there is to it. There’s no such thing as satisfying them by just kind of moderating the tone. If you’re not completely on their team, you’re one of the lost, to be turned into pools of unsavory liquid when Jeezis comes back with his ray-gun or whatever it is. And the more they are appeased, the more they go on bullying, and the more likely atheists are to think that they are the only atheists on earth and they’d better not say anything lest they be sliced up with a dull razor.

And then he ends up asking exactly the question I’m asking.

”What am I supposed to do?” he asks in response. ”I’m an academic. I believe in freedom. I believe the most important thing you can do is criticize your own ideas.”

Eh? You’re an academic, you believe in freedom, so you’re spending your energy telling other academics not to say what they think is true, so that they won’t make creationists even angrier than they already are? Does that compute? What are they supposed to do, I keep wanting to know.

And by the way. When are newspapers going to start making their reporters take that course in elementary thinking straight. What’s wrong with this beginning?

In states from Alabama to Pennsylvania, supporters are attempting to restrict the teaching of evolution – and introduce their current favorite theory, Intelligent Design, into the classroom…And such efforts may be having an effect. According to a Gallup survey released last November, only about a third of Americans believe that Darwin’s theory is well supported by the scientific evidence, while nearly half believe that humans were created in more or less their present form 10,000 years ago. What accounts for this revival?

See it? See the problem? What revival? What effect? We can’t tell. We haven’t got a clue. The reporter just gave us one survey; we don’t have anything to compare it to. For all we know the figures ten years ago were 100% One survey is not useful for comparative purposes or for deducing a ‘revival.’

Wow. If you can read this story without getting choked or moved or stirred or some other way shaken, you’re a stronger man than I am, Gunga Din. But then I’m a sucker for resurrection stories.

The spectacular ivory-billed woodpecker, which was declared extinct in 1920, has been found alive in North America, Science magazine reports. The news has stunned ornithologists worldwide, with some comparing the discovery to finding the dodo…The find has ignited hope that other “extinct” birds may be clinging on to survival in isolated places. “This find is so significant that it is really difficult to describe,” Alistair Gammell, of the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), told BBC News. “We sadly won’t rediscover the dodo, but it is almost on that level.” Frank Gill, of the US National Audubon Society, added: “This is huge, just huge. It is kind of like finding Elvis.”

I love the idea of ornithologists worldwide being stunned. For once I’m not being sarky, I really do. It’s kind of thrilling. (If you’re not careful I’ll tell you about the time I went along on a zoo field trip to release a couple of rehabilitated [after injury] bald eagles into the wild. That was thrilling, if you like.)

The discovery was first made on 11 February 2004, by Gene Sparling, of Hot Springs, Arkansas, who was kayaking in a reserve in Big Woods. He saw an unusually large red-crested woodpecker fly towards him and land on a nearby tree. He said the creature did not look quite like anything he had seen before, so he contacted Cornell University’s Living Bird magazine. After a team of experts interviewed him, they felt they might be onto something special.

See? The suspense builds. There they are, that team of experts, eyeing each other and thinking ‘…Could it be? It sounds like – but surely – but could it be?’ Quaking with excitement, I’ll bet.

John Fitzpatrick, of Cornell University, headed the search party, which included Tim Gallagher, editor of Living Bird. Within a month, Dr Gallagher had seen the ivory-billed woodpecker for himself. Describing the moment he first set eyes on it, he said: “Just to think this bird made it into the 21st Century gives me chills. “It’s like a funeral shroud has been pulled back, giving us a glimpse of a living bird, rising Lazarus-like from the grave.”

Laugh at me if you like, but I love that story! Imagine that moment – when he first set eyes on it! I don’t care what you say. It’s thrilling.

Update. There you are. I wrote that before I saw the Telegraph story.

Tim Gallagher, editor of Living Bird magazine, and Bobby Harrison of Oakwood College, Huntsville, Alabama, interviewed Sparling and they were so convinced that they went back to the same bayou. On Feb 27 a large bird flew less than 70ft in front of Gallagher and Harrison, who together cried “ivory-bill!” “When we finished our notes,” Gallagher said, “Bobby sat on a log and began to sob, saying, ‘I saw an ivory-bill. I saw an ivory-bill.’” Gallagher said he was too choked with emotion to speak.

‘Ivory-bill!’ I was choked just reading the BBC story; imagine what it would have been like to be there and see it. ‘Ivory-bill!’

Really, it is a wonder that anyone goes into teaching, and even more of one that anyone stays. It sounds a hell of a lot worse than being a prison guard.

‘One of the most important things about Classroom Chaos is that the schools were chosen randomly by Thomas’s supply teacher agencies, and most had been identified by Ofsted as being average or better than average,’ he said.
‘The situation was so constant that we can confidently say anti-social behaviour is an everyday reality in classrooms across Britain,’ he added. ‘It is an appalling situation and one which must not be allowed to continue: education is being strangled.’

Lest you think it’s any better in the US, it’s not. I have friends who’ve gone into teaching and gone right back out again, it was so hellish. I have other friends who’ve stayed, but they live with a lot of frustration.

Thomas estimates that, on average, she failed to teach anything at all in four out of six lessons a day. Experienced teachers to whom she spoke confirmed that they lose around two to three months a year of effective teaching through struggling to control antisocial classroom behaviour…Thomas assumed the fault must lie with her teaching methods until she asked heads of departments to visit her classes and found her efforts were praised. ‘It was when I heard lessons being taught by full-time teachers whose pupils were just as loud as mine, and who were having to shout at them just as much as I was, that I realised the state of my classrooms was normal,’ she said.

Teachers comment on this article, one confirmation after another. It’s a depressing read.

Update: link now added. How absent-minded I am…Probably my teachers’ fault.

Michael Lynch has a terrific article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed – about liberalism and passion and communitarianism, and truth, commitment, relativism, Rawls and comprehensive liberalism, and the fact that liberals do in fact have actual commitments, that they can argue and defend with passion.

Social conservatives have long argued that progressive liberals, in trumpeting individual rights, ignore traditional communities as a source of value…But as the neocons are well aware, traditional family values frequently clash with liberal values…Some traditional communities are rife with intolerant oppression — precisely the sort of thing that enlightenment liberalism is presumably meant to combat. Surely liberals needn’t tolerate intolerance.
Walzer valiantly attempts to deal with that concern. But in the end, his principle argument is resistible. Consider a hypothetical local religious community that does not value equal education for boys and girls. According to Walzer, if we are to compel our traditional community to educate its girls, we shouldn’t appeal to individual rights; we should appeal to the pragmatic demands of citizenship.

No thanks. I don’t want to defend my right to read any books that men read on the basis that I’m more useful to the state that way, I want to defend it precisely on the basis of individual equal rights. I want to defend it on the same basis I used to defend my rights as the youngest of three children: ‘It’s not fair!’ Fairness, and the sense of it and of its lack, is not some kind of gilding or cake frosting; it’s central to having a reasonably healthy sense of how we fit in the world. If we’re systematically and formally given inferior treatment, we either think we deserve it, or become twisted with rage, or both.*

In my view, the reason that liberals are sometimes perceived as passionless isn’t because liberal values are in need of a communitarian correction. The reason is that some liberals misunderstand, and therefore misrepresent, their own values. In particular, they misunderstand their values in a way that has made them wary of describing their own moral position as true. And that is bad. For once you cease thinking of your values — your fundamental moral beliefs — as objectively true, it is hard to even think of them as values at all. And without political values, there simply is no place for political passion.

The worry is that if you think your values are true you immediately turn into Bob Jones III, or perhaps Pope Rottweiler.

In recoiling from that position, some left-leaning thinkers have argued that liberals need to adopt what the philosopher Richard Rorty calls an “ironic” attitude toward our own liberal principles. If we want to be truly tolerant, the thought goes, we need to stop seeing liberal views about equality and tolerance as objective moral truths. Instead, we should see them as morally neutral. Otherwise, we risk being intolerant about tolerance.

Yeah. I don’t want to be truly tolerant. I have no desire to be tolerant of people who throw petrol bombs at marathons because women are allowed to run in them. I want them to stop doing that, and go away and stop telling women what to do. Sometimes tolerance just isn’t the right tool for the job in hand.

As philosophers like Joseph Raz have argued, liberalism isn’t value-neutral, nor should it be. Liberal values like tolerance and equality are just that — liberal values, neither merely “true for us” nor ethically inert. Rather, they are part of a particularly liberal ideal of the good life — an abstract ideal but an ideal nonetheless.

Yup. Ideals are good things. Funny, I just dug up a quotation a couple of hours ago in which Franz Boas called himself (in a letter to his sister) an ‘unregenerate idealist.’ I like unregenerate idealists. Boas’ idealism led to some unfortunate epistemic consequences in anthropology, but he was a mensch. Not an ironic mensch, just a mensch.

*This doesn’t apply to the treatment I received as the youngest of three children. Such gross injustices as not being allowed to put my feet on the sofa, and not getting to sit in the front seat of the car, when my brother and sister were and did, were gradually rectified over the years. I got over it.

Well at least some people are fighting back. I sure do hope they succeed.

Placard-waving women protesting against the “Talibanisation” of Pakistan demonstrated outside the national parliament yesterday after a mob attacked female runners. The attack has spurred worries about the growing influence of Islamic extremists.
A week ago baton-wielding men threw petrol bombs and torched vehicles at a mini-marathon in Gujranwala…

Which was one of the first to allow women to participate. Can’t have that. Women are things, sluts, devils, son-factories, and on all those counts they must not be allowed to – well, do anything, really.

“This has got to stop,” said a protester, Aisha Shaukat, outside parliament yesterday. “These mullahs want us to just stay home, have children and God knows what else.” She stood before a placard that read: “The obscenity is in your mind.” Others handed out leaflets saying: “We the citizens condemn this Talibanisation”. Newspaper columnists and other critics have made frequent comparisons between the social agenda of Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), a powerful alliance of Islamic political parties spearheading the rise of the religious right in Pakistan, and the Taliban.

God know what else all right: nothing. Stay home, have children, and nothing else. That’s the goal. The plan for women is to make them nothing, and their lives nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. That’s what the black bags are all about: to make them look as much as possible like an ambulatory negation. An absence. A blank.

The Gujranwala race was attacked by supporters of the MMA. Since gaining control of the provincial government in North West Frontier Province two years ago, the MMA has banned music and dancing in public, torn down advertising billboards featuring women, and introduced gender segregation on college campuses…”Marathons are not objectionable – as long as the menfolk and womenfolk run separately,” said Syed Munawar Hassan, a senior MMA leader. “Every society is not an American or western society. We have our own package of values.”

Who’s we, bub? Not all Pakistanis want your package of values. That’s why you’re resorting to petrol bombs.