Offend, sensitivity, intrusion, innermost beliefs, sacred things.
Author: Ophelia Benson
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Cardinal Plans to Defend Historical Truth
Jesus did not have a baby with that woman! He did walk on water and rise from the dead though.
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What Would Jesus Smell Like?
You can’t see him or touch him, but light a candle and you can smell him.
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Women Must Take Their Own Decisions
Well. There’s not much to say. I’ll just quote a little. From International Spiegel Online.
Hatin’s crime, it appears, was the desire to lead a normal life in her family’s adopted land. The vivacious 23-year-old beauty, who was raised in Berlin, divorced the Turkish cousin she was forced to marry at age 16. She also discarded her Islamic head scarf, enrolled in a technical school where she was training to become an electrician and began dating German men. For her family, such behavior represented the ultimate shame — the embrace of “corrupt” Western ways.
And because ‘her family’ own her, it’s not enough just to dislike or disapprove of her behavior – they have to turn her into nothing. She can’t just decide what to do with her own life, because it doesn’t belong to her, any more than she belongs to herself.
Tens of thousands of Turkish women live behind these walls of silence, in homes run by husbands many met on their wedding day and ruled by the ever-present verses of the Koran. In these families, loyalty and honor are elevated virtues and women are treated little better than slaves, unseen by society and often unnoticed or ignored by their German neighbors. To get what they want, these women have to run. They have to change their names, their passports, even their hair color and break with the families they often love, but simply can no longer obey.
And from BBC News.
“Women must make their own decisions,” read one of the banners at her shrine. Mrs Surucu’s killing has led to an unusually strong public reaction – with Turkish women taking to the streets to protest. “This tragedy has shaken us awake. We’ve been very surprised by the response,” says Eren Unsal from the Association of Secular Turks.
But don’t get too optimistic.
But not everyone shares the outrage. On a school playground, just yards from where the killing occurred, children were heard praising it. The victim, they said, had lived like a German…”I heard a young Turkish lady said on a Turkish radio station ‘she deserved it because she took off her headscarf’. This is incredible,” says Ozcan Mutlu, one of the few Turks sitting on the Berlin city council.
See? See why I’m not rejoicing that Shabina Beghum won her case? See why I’m not convinced when people claim that the hijab is a matter of choice and freedom? Because it isn’t, that’s why. It’s mandatory, and seen as mandatory, and seen as grounds for murder if treated as optional.
He says the problem has been exacerbated by the German authorities turning a blind eye to it.
“For instance, when a Turkish man beat his wife, he didn’t get the same punishment as when a German did it. They tried to explain it with the culture, the traditions, and with the religion.
“That’s stupid, you cannot do that. There is no cultural or religious excuse for beating women, and there can be no less punishment for honour killings. But in Germany it was the fact in the past years.”Go, Ozcan Mutlu. You rock.
Honour killings are, she says, just the most extreme form of repression faced by the people who come to her. “All these girls who come to us are locked in, in the house, by their families. They only go to school because they have to by law – otherwise they wouldn’t be allowed. They have to stay at home and cook, and care for the sisters and brothers. The parents don’t accept that the girl decides anything by herself.”
And it’s not only the Berlin cops who turn a blind eye. As we’ve noticed, it’s also a lot of fuzzy lefties – who mean well, but who for some reason seem to be immovably convinced that it’s more important never to say a critical word about Islam or the practices of some Muslims than it is to criticise the murder and total subordination of women. I can think of some fuzzy lefty blogs that will, I can predict with fair confidence, never say a word about all this. Not a syllable. Hatun Surucu will not be mentioned. I find that chronically depressing. (You know who you are. Go on, prove me wrong. I’d love to be wrong.)
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Harvard Faculty Vote No Confidence in Summers
Cite management style and that terrible thing he said about women.
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‘Honour’ Killings Shock Berlin
Ozcan Mutlu, Berlin city councillor, complained German authorities ignore the practice.
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Outrage at Murder of Hatun Surucu
‘This tragedy has shaken us awake,’ says Eren Unsal from Association of Secular Turks.
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It’s Not Easy to Invent Nationalism
What is it to be English? And is group identity a good thing anyway?
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Intersections
I hope you’ve all read the interview with Rebecca Goldstein – because it’s so good, and interesting, and full of ideas. Not my doing, obviously, but Goldstein’s. I’ve been an admirer of her fiction for years – ever since The Mind-Body Problem came out, in fact, I think, which is more than twenty years ago. It’s a brilliant novel. I’ve always thought so, so I was pleased to see Steve Pinker tell her “Your first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, is a classic among people in my field” in that conversation between the two of them I posted in Flashback a few days ago. I hope you’ve also read that, because it’s fascinating. I hadn’t read it before I wrote the interview questions, so I was interested to see Steve Pinker asking some of the same ones. For instance about storytelling and empathy.
SP: We are getting less cruel, and the question is how. The philosopher Peter Singer offers a clue when he notes that there really does seem to be a universal capacity for empathy, but that by default people apply it only within the narrow circle of the family or village or clan. Over the millennia, the moral circle has expanded to encompass other clans, other tribes, and other races. The question is, why did it happen? What stretched our innate capacity for empathy? And one answer is mediums that force us to take other people’s perspectives, such as journalism, history, and realistic fiction.
RG: Storytelling does it.
SP: By allowing you to project yourself into the lives of people of different times and places and races, in a way that wouldn’t spontaneously occur to you, fiction can force you into the perspective of a person unlike yourself, who might otherwise seem subhuman.
RG: There’s a fundamental role that storytelling is always playing in the moral life. To try to see somebody on their own terms, which is part of what it is to be moral, is to try to make sense of their world, to try to tell the story of their life as they would tell it. So in our real life, just in making sense of people’s actions and in seeing them in the moral light, we’re involved in storytelling.
SP: So you agree that fiction can expand a person’s moral circle?
And then – Pinker talked about much the same thing last week on Start the Week. The idea of the expansion of empathy from the immediate circle to include larger and larger proportions of Other People. So, read the interview, read the conversation, listen to Start the Week, and you’ll see how it all joins up.
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Tyranny of the Majority, Cubed
It’s everywhere. Well it would be, wouldn’t it. Tocqueville said as much, and Mill reviewed both volumes of his book, each as it came out, and was as worried as Tocqueville, and wrote On Liberty as a result. But they might as well have saved their breath to cool their corn flakes. Only yesterday I was expressing some reservations about the idea of the of the ‘self-conscious reorganisation and administration of scientific disciplines for democratically chosen goals’ – and here we are again. This time at the Supreme Court, of all places where it doesn’t belong, or shouldn’t belong.
A number of the justices declared–dispositively, as they like to say–that “we are a religious nation.” The implication was that there is a quantitative answer to a philosophical question. But what does the prevalence of a belief have to do with its veracity, or with its legitimacy? If every American but one were religious, we would still have to construct our moral and political order upon respect for that one. In its form, the proposition that “we are a religious nation” is like the proposition that “we are a white nation” or that “we are a Christian nation” or that “we are a heterosexual nation,” which is to say, it is a prescription for the tyranny of a majority.
Well said, Mr Wieseltier. What indeed does the prevalence of a belief have to do with either its veracity or its legitimacy. And isn’t that the kind of distinction that Supreme Court justices are really supposed to be particularly sharply aware of? Isn’t that what they’re there for? To protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority? Not that they’ve always done anything like that, of course – the little matter of slavery leaps to mind, what with Dred Scott and all – but that is what they’re supposed to do. They’re not supposed to say things like ‘we are a religious nation.’
The morning’s disputations confirmed me in my view of Antonin Scalia’s lack of intellectual distinction…Scalia does not recognize the difference between a denunciation and a demonstration. At the court last week, he dripped certainties. “Government draws its authority from God.” “Our laws are derived from God.” “The moral order is ordained by God.” “Human affairs are directed by God.” “God is the foundation of the state.” These are dogmas, not proofs. Scalia simply asserts them and moves on to incredulity and indignation. But how does he know these things?
He doesn’t, of course, he just asserts them. That’s why religious people of that type are so exasperating and also why they are such a danger when they are in positions of power – because not only do they have a huge excess of certainty, they also consider that a virtue rather than a disastrous handicap. So it’s not possible to reason with them, because they know they’re right and they don’t even think they ought to pay attention to conflicting opinions. And that’s a Supreme Court justice. Perfect. Absolutely ideal.
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A Moratorium on ‘Public Intellectuals’ Opining About Nietzsche?
Might we declare a moratorium on “public intellectuals” with no relevant scholarly competence opining about Nietzsche? The latest to embarrass himself is John Gray in the pages of the New Statesman. While Gray (on the Politics Faculty at the London School of Economics) may be most notorious among philosophers for his spectacular hostility towards John Rawls, it seems, on the evidence of this review, that he may be more qualified to talk about Rawls than Nietzsche. The parade of errors packed in to just a couple thousand words is quite remarkable; I’ll single out just five examples, ones that suitably betray the breadth and depth of Professor Gray’s ignorance of the subject matter:
(1) Professor Gray says the “aim” of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality “was to consider what became of morality once its support in religion was taken away.” One would had to have not actually read the book to describe that as its aim, and not only because Nietzsche specifically denies (GM II: 21) that the absence of religious faith would have any impact on the moralized guilty conscience of we moderns. The book’s aim, as Nietzsche himself says, is to contribute to a critique of morality, and to do so by examining the various psychological mechanisms (ressentiment, internalized cruelty, and the desire for feelings of power) that account for its development into its modern form.
(2) Professor Gray notes, correctly, that “Nietzsche’s prinicpal achievment as a thinker lies in his contributions to moral psychology,” but then describes that achievement as “developing the introspective method of French moralists such as La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort [in order to] analyse[] and unmask[] the Christian virtues, showing them to be sublimations of other, often “immoral” passions.” It is true enough Nietzsche sometimes employs the method of La Rochefoucauld on this score, but it is equally true, and more important, that he specifically distinguishes (Dawn 103) La Rochefoucauld’s approach to morality from his own. The significance of that is nowhere in evidence in Professor Gray’s presentation.
(3) Professor Gray says Nietzsche’s “natural mode of expression was the aphorism.” Perhaps, depending on what “natural” means, but it was not his primary mode of expression, as Alexander Nehamas correctly emphasized twenty years ago in calling attention to Nietzsche’s multiple styles and rhetorical devices. If the “aphorism” was, in fact, his “natural mode of expression,” it is surely odd that it almost completely ceases to be his mode of expression in his final, major works: On the Genealogy of Morality, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo. Were these works “unnatural”? What would that even mean?
(4) According to Professor Gray:
Nietzsche rejected his first mentor, Schopenhauer, claiming that the latter was too much influenced by Christianity. In truth, Schopenhauer turned his back on Christianity more decisively than Nietzsche ever did, and it was partly for this reason that Nietzsche was compelled to break with him. For Schopenhauer, deeply soaked in Indian philosophy, it was self-evident that – contrary to the secular version of the Christian belief in providence propagated by Hegel – history as a whole is without meaning. If there is such a thing as salvation, it lies outside time, and presupposes shedding the illusion of personal identity. For Nietzsche, as for anyone who retains the humanist faith bequeathed to the world by Christianity, this vision of human life was intolerable.
It would be hard to imagine what text Professor Gray thinks could be cited on behalf of ascribing the views in question to Nietzsche. Nietzsche certainly did not think history had a meaning, and he recognized, correctly, that Schopenhauer shared with Christianity and Buddhism the view that human suffering presented a fundamental objection to and problem for existence in this world. It was in Nietzsche’s revaluation of this attitude towards suffering that Nietzsche broke decisively with Schopenhauer and Christianity–points that are well-explicated in Bernard Reginster’s forthcoming Harvard U Press book on Nietzsche (which I recently had the pleasure of refereeing and which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the issues that Gray is mangling here).
(5) Professor Gray, however, is attached to his distinctive idea, and so concludes:
Like innumerable, less reflective humanists who came after him, Nietzsche wished to hold on to an essentially Christian view of the human subject while dropping the transcendental beliefs that alone support it.
A “Christian view of the human subject”? Nietzsche denies that people’s wills are causal, that they have free will or choice, and that they are morally responsible for their actions, and he claims that their conscious life is a largely epiphenomenal manifestation of their unconscious lives and their physical natures. Which teachings of Christianity on the subject does Professor Gray think shares these views? (There may be an answer here, though it is evident from what Gray says he is not thinking of this particular possibility: namely, aspects of Lutheranism, which Nietzsche knew intimately. That is a scholarly topic that still awaits thorough treatment, and even then I expect we will find that the similarities are not as extensive as might first seem. In any case, it is clear Nietzsche himself thought of his view of the subject as a repudiation of the Christian one, which, for most major Christian denominations, it plainly is.) Professor Gray continues:
It was this impulse to salvage a religious conception of humankind, I believe, that animated Nietzsche’s attempt to construct a new mythology. The task set by Nietzsche for his imaginary Superman was to confer meaning on history through a redemptive act of will. The sorry history of the species, lacking purpose or sense until a higher form of humanity came on to the scene, would then be redeemed. In truth, Nietzsche’s mythology is no more than the Christian view of history stated in idiosyncratic terms, and a banal version of it underpins nearly all subsequent varieties of secular thought.
Unfortunately for Professor Gray, the “imaginary Superman” never appears again in Nietzsche’s corpus after Thus Spoke Zarathustra, except briefly in Ecce Homo when Nietzsche discusses the former book. That means the “imaginary Superman” and his “mythology” Professor Gray presents as central to Nietzsche’s thinking, in fact, plays no role in any of his major mature works: Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morality, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist. (It is not a significant presence in earlier works either, but we’ll leave that aside for purposes here.) It plays the role it does in Zarathustra precisely because–as Professor Gray apparently doesn’t recognize–that book is a parody of The New Testament, with Zarathustra preaching an anti-Christian gospel. That the requirements of the parodic form dictate the construation of an anti-Christian mythology for paralellism with the Christian mythology Nietzsche rejects simply doesn’t show, in the absence of further textual evidence, that Professor Gray’s ascription to Nietzsche of a Christian view of history is correct. In fact, the crucial issue, as noted above (and as is well-explicated by Reginster), is the revaluation of the Christian attitude towards suffering. That central theme, somewhat remarkably, never captures Professor Gray’s attention.
At one point in his review, Professor Gray says, “It is received wisdom among philosophers that writers such as Nietzsche are best understood by breaking down their thought into a number of discrete propositions and arguments. Of dubious value in the history of ideas [where lack of argument is preferred???], this conventional methodology is completely inept when applied to Nietzsche.” In fact, of course, Professor Gray’s wide-ranging confusions illustrate the opposite. Perhaps if he tried to tie his discrete propositions to actual texts of Nietzsche’s, and had actually paid any attention to Nietzsche’s many arguments, he might have managed to make fewer errors in so little space.
This article first appeared on The Leiter Report March 14 and is republished here by permission. Brian Leiter is Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Law & Philosophy Program at the University of Texas at Austin. The Leiter Report is here.
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Religious Right Using its Power to Push ID
First Amendment, respect for beliefs, persecution by liberal establishment.