Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Knowing the Accusation is False is Traumatic Too

    ‘Why couldn’t I withstand the pressure? I still search for that moment I gave in.’

  • Selective Hostility to Bias and Judgmentalism

    Eve Garrard on the real reason for not using the T word.

  • The Sleep of Reason

    The embrace of relativism by many leftist intellectuals in the United States, while it may not be politically very important, is a terrible admission of failure, and an excuse for not answering the claims of their political opponents. The subordination of the intellect to partisan loyalty is found across the political spectrum, but usually it takes the form of a blind insistence on the objective truth of certain supporting facts and refusal to consider evidence to the contrary. So what explains the shift, at least by a certain slice of the intellectual left, to this new form of obfuscation?

    When I was an undergraduate I volunteered to go door to door for Zero Population Growth to promote the liberalization of abortion laws. I thought that, as a philosophy major, I was just the person for the job: I had read Locke on personal identity and could explain to people that even though fetuses were human beings, living organisms of species homo sapiens, they were not persons. I was prepared to expand on this in great detail.

    I was told that this was not a good idea. At the training session for volunteers, we were cautioned not to get into “philosophical arguments.” If a contact attempted to argue we were to repeat (as many times as it took) that abortion was simply an issue of women’s rights, and that was that. If we allowed ourselves to be drawn into arguments of any kind, we were warned, we were lost.

    It was the same thing whenever I tried to work for the political causes I supported–argument was out. I don’t know whether this was peculiar to leftist causes (since I never supported any others) or a feature of politics as such but the idea was that sloganeering and manipulation were sophisticated while argument was, at best, naive. But it did seem especially entrenched in the Left: it was a commonplace that you couldn’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.

    When, I wondered, had rationality become a partisan issue and, in particular, when had reason, objectivity, science and all the tools of the Enlightenment come to be seen as part of the Right’s kit?

    Anti-intellectualism, the religion of the heart, the exaltation of rustic simplicity and old-fashioned virtue along with scorn for arid logic-chopping and rationalism broadly construed-has always been a feature of American life. Yet “only yesterday,” when the Scopes Monkey Trial was in progress, the Left was the party of science and socially conservative Middle Americans were scandalized by the tough-minded rationalism of progressives. Since yesterday political polarities have shifted and, as with the magnetic field’s periodic flip-flops indelibly imprinted in the geological record, we know when it happened but not exactly why.

    It happened during the late ’60s and ’70s when the Baby Boom generation came of age. Arguably it happened then because that was when Baby Boomers, the largest American generation, came of age and, by sheer force of numbers, dominated the social landscape. Their fashions, behavior and ideologies became iconic and forged the link between the politics of the Left and the romanticism of adolescence in the American mythos.

    The sources of the youth culture of the period were manifold. First, on the political side, there was Marxism, committed to the doctrine that ideology was epiphenomenal and rational reflection was escapist. This was the theme that I heard rehearsed incessantly as I participated in the anti-war movement and the politics of the Left. Rational argument was a sham, a power play by our adversaries: to respond in their terms was to fall into their trap.

    Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, there was the revolt against cultural masculinity, sparked by resistance to the Vietnam War and centering on the refusal of young men to meet the two traditional core male obligations, work and warfare. It spilled over into a distaste for everything socially coded as male, from meat-eating to contact sports. Peace, love and gentleness, fruits, nuts, grains and little herbal teas, intuition, emotion and all the stuff of stereotypical femininity were glorified; “male” rationality was, at best, suspect.

    This was not feminism, indeed the second wave of feminism was largely a reaction against it. Within the Counterculture, which liberated men from the burden of traditional male role obligations without depriving them of the benefits, women were doubly cursed: while locked more firmly than ever into femininity by the earth mother cult and expected to provide sexual services to their men with no strings attached, they could no longer get the traditional compensations for meeting their role obligations: male protection and financial support. The position of women in the Movement was prone.

    Finally, the national disgrace of an immoral war followed by political scandal engendered an unprecedented level of cultural self-hatred, amplifying the perennial romantic theme that the exotic Other, especially the primitive Other, was better. Undergraduates like myself consumed Margaret Mead’s South Sea fantasies and innumerable books by lesser lights who had established through sociological research that American society was “sick,” damaged by consumerism, conformity, and shallow, calculating, soulless rationalism.

    None of it was new. Ever since adolescence became an institution-when boys were no longer apprenticed to their fathers’ trades at a tender age and girls were no longer married off at puberty-adolescents have been romantics. The difference was that in 1969 there were so many of us that we were taken seriously: instead of dismissing us, middle-aged pundits hailed us as the vanguard of a new era. So theologian Harvey Cox, in his dithyramb on the resurrection of Dionysus, applauded us for ushering in a new age and celebrated the demise of the man in the gray flannel suit, “rational, Apollonian plane-catching man.”(1)

    Because of the war and the draft we were caught up in politics and wedded to the Left; because we were iconic our rendition of the politics of the Left became iconic. Adlai Stevenson was dead. Bertrand Russell, for decades the symbol of Leftist politics and anti-war activism, was off the radar. Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, the most progressive politicians to occupy positions of national leadership in US history, had become the Left’s demons. Americans across the political spectrum began to identify the Left with our preoccupations, including our disdain for the rationality of Apollonian plane-catching man.

    That disdain for rationality, skepticism about the possibility of objective truth and the unshakable conviction that Life is bigger than Logic is not peculiar to the French “intellectuals” Sokal and Bricmont exposed or to academic literati-it is a feature of popular culture and has persisted even after the collapse of the Left as we knew it because it is preeminently a feature of adolescent romanticism. I get it from students all the time. Every year the freshmen in my intro logic classes, where I devote the first 3 weeks to “critical thinking” and debunking, rehearse the theme. Many are superstitious and almost all buy some version of mellow relativism. Most don’t think logic broadly construed is important–in the words of one haunting course evaluation comment: “What’s the good of being logical if no one else is?”

    Talking to upperclassmen, who were more articulate and reflective, I got a better idea of their views. Even though the politics of the Left had largely disappeared from the undergraduate subculture, like most Americans, students were convinced that rationality, insofar as it was important at all, was exclusively the business of business and the political right. They had learnt in their required intro econ course that rational behavior was, by definition, self-interested. Rationality was appropriate in the workplace and public life; it was irrelevant, and inappropriate, in the private sphere where relationships, “values” and beliefs were based on feelings, culture, faith and brute personal preference. The trouble with Liberals, well-meaning though they were, was that they just didn’t understand this division of labor.

    Conservative ideologues in my ethics classes believed that “rationality” was coextensive with the Market, which was perfectly efficient–any objections to the free operation of the Market was ipso facto irrational. Some were convinced that not only I, but Rawls and everyone on the syllabus apart from Nozick were warm-hearted sentimentalists who didn’t know how the real world worked and that Sen just didn’t understand economics. Most of the others believed that rationality was a matter of arbitrary convention–a matter of memorizing and following arbitrary rules. To be rational was to be blinkered and constrained, conventional, obedient, rigid, simplistic and dull.

    In less than a week I’ll be back to teaching after my sabbatical–I’ve got a lot of work to do. On the whole I’m not a great enthusiast about teaching. But I do get a kick out of it in intro logic classes when students have their satoris and realize that the stuff makes sense–and I can say (it usually gets a laugh) “Hey–that’s why they call it ‘logic’!”

    (1)Psychology Today interview with Harvey Cox c. April 1971

    H.E. Baber (PhD Johns Hopkins) is a professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego, specialising in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. An earlier version of this article appeared on her blog The Enlightenment Project.

  • Elephants, Foxes and Pigs

    The discussion continues to continue. Norm has more, so does Harry, so does David T. Plus I had a long talk with Polly Toynbee on the phone earlier. No I didn’t, that’s just one of my jokes. (Or irony? No, just a joke. I don’t know from irony.) There’s quite a lot of agreement this time around. This from Harry’s –

    For what it is worth I am not a supporter or defender of fox hunting nor am I opposed to a ban. I accept Ophelia Benson’s criticism of Polly Toynbee’s phrase “Liberals should always be wary of banning people from doing as they like”. There clearly need to be some qualifications added to such a statement although wary does not mean should never.

    Indeed. But I’m wary even of ‘wary’ – at least as it’s stated there. As Harry points out, it’s the missing qualifications that cause the wariness.

    Actually, of late, I have been giving a lot of thought to the whole issue of our treatment of animals and meat-eating given that my six-year-old daughter has woken up to where her meat comes from and was horrified by the fact. Her reaction (and I am being literal with the term horrified) has me contemplating vegetarianism again.

    Yeah. That made me think of a not very fond memory of my own. As you may remember if you’ve ever read ‘About,’ I used to be a zookeeper. (Funny, that ‘used to be’ came up earlier today, too. There is a passage in Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense about how one reacts to seeing someone come screaming out of a lecture hall, shouting that there is a herd of elephants stampeding inside. One cautiously looks, and if one sees no elephants or trail of elephantish destruction, one calls the police and the psychiatrists; if one sees elephants, one [runs away and] calls the police and the zookeepers. Ah yes, thought I, I’ve been there. I have. The elephants did get out a time or two, and I was called. ‘Get back in there right now you bad elephants!! Boo, Tote, Chai, Sri: Corner!!’ I was muy macho in those days.)

    But that’s another story. I once had to go to a slaughterhouse. I bet you’ll never be able to guess why – it sounds quite odd. To get blood for the vampire bats. True. It was a weekly job for the commissary keeper, which I wasn’t, but I suppose Rachel was sick that day or something – anyway I was deputed to go. A pig slaughterhouse. It was absolutely horrible. A nightmare – literally. They scream. They line up, they’re forced down a chute, and as they get to the end, they start to scream, and they go on screaming until they’re killed. And of course since it’s a production line, there are always pigs in the chute and pigs getting to the end and pigs being killed and pigs screaming – so they hear the screaming long before they get there. It’s horrible.

    I’ve upset myself writing about it. But it is horrible. And disgusting – it could have been done another way, surely, if anyone could have been bothered.

    Thank goodness for Temple Grandin. She designs chutes for slaughterhouses that work so that the animals do not know what’s happening and are not stressed. They’re still killed, but they’re not made to watch it all beforehand. She’s high-functioning autistic, Grandin is, and she thinks the autism is the reason she understands what’s going on with animals. Interesting, that. Also doesn’t say much for ‘normal’ human intelligence.

    A change of subject; but not really. The basic subject is suffering, and how to think about it and what to do about it.

    Update: Dave at Backword asks a good question:

    Factory farming also has utility, but I’d get rid of it if I could. I hadn’t heard of Temple Grandin until I read this Butterflies and Wheels post, but why aren’t her slaughterhouse designs compulsory?

    Why indeed.

    Update 2: Dave’s post inspired me to Google, and I discovered that Temple Grandin has a web page, with a lot of information on humane slaughter (and its absence). Remarkable what a lot of difference one person can make.

  • You’ll Never Ever Guess in a Million Years

    Maybe I should do one before anyone else does.

    I was just thinking, while staring out the window in a daze and scratching, that books are one thing and people are another. How about that.

    People don’t like science. What’s up with that?

    Multiculturalism – hmm – one sees the point, and yet.

    I’ve been reading this book. Here are some quotations from it.

    Here are some more quotations from that book I’ve been reading.

    Richard Dawkins rocks.

    I’ve read another book. Here are some quotations from it.

    Here are some more quotations from aforementioned book. Aren’t you thrilled?

    People say silly things sometimes. Here’s an example. Here’s why it’s silly. I never say silly things.

    I agree with my colleague about that. [Okay that one’s pure fantasy.]

    Secularism rocks.

    My colleague is always right about everything. [Okay more fantasy.]

  • Matt Ridley Reviews Richard Dawkins

    A philosopher of evolutionary process, explaining bodies as vehicles for propagation of genes.

  • Banned in Lebanon

    Catholic leaders call Da Vinci Code offensive to Christians, so it’s off shelves.

  • Holy War Against the Infidel, love, Taliban

    Taliban leaves ‘night letters’ to intimidate voters.

  • But What Do They Like?

    Ah. That’s reassuring. Perhaps I’m not so confused after all, since Norm makes a similar point. Not an identical point, because he doesn’t focus on the Toynbee column, he merely mentions it; but a similar one. The basic disagreement with what she said and with what Harry said at his place I take to be the same.

    Harry endorses a piece by Polly Toynbee in which she belittles the importance of the fox hunting issue relative to the ‘things that really matter’, like social injustice. In response to which I offer the following.

    (1) One should care about the suffering of other sentient beings. Indifference to the suffering of others is part of the definition of cruelty.

    (2) Putting the interests of human beings above those of other species is all right as a general principle, but it doesn’t by itself settle all particular cases where these interests compete. Otherwise you would have to allow that someone who mildly enjoyed beating an animal to death with a club every morning should be allowed to do so. But one shouldn’t allow that, and in fact as a community we don’t.

    Exactly. What I said. Cases where these interests compete. It’s no good just saying liberals shouldn’t stop people doing what they like, because people like doing all sorts of horrible things. And if it were any good saying that, then you would have to allow that someone who mildly enjoyed beating an animal to death with a club every morning should be allowed to do so. Yes, factory farming and battery farming are horrible too, but since I’m a vegetarian (okay apart from a little fish now and then) I’m not being hypocritical in being against fox hunting as well. But I’m even more against saying vaguely that people should be allowed to do what they like.

  • Guess that Blog!

    First off, a personal message: stop reading now Fryslan, you’re not going to like this.

    I realise that there is nothing people like more than a game (except maybe chocolate); so here’s the first in a new regular spot on the B&W blog (I hate that word).

    Guess that Blog

    All you’ve got to do to win – and the person who gets the most right at the end of the series will win a copy of The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense – is to guess, on the basis of the (imaginary) subject titles below, which blog I’m talking about. Answers on a postcard; or using the comments facility below.

    Here we go:

    1. Republicans are fascists.

    2. Bush stole the election in Florida (yes, I’m still going on about this).

    3. Bush kills cats.

    4. Professor Smith takes up new position at Not As Good As Mine University.

    5. Bush eats babies.

    6. Republicans stole election in Delaware (surely, they must have done).

    7. People who disagree with me are wrong, have never achieved anything in
    their
    lives, and have no qualifications (Part 1).

    8. Republicans are aliens from Mars.

    9. I’m great.

    10. Professor Jones – who admires my work – takes up new position at Really Quite Good University.

    11. Bush bribed nun to forge election results.

    12. Bush sighted wearing suspicious black shirt (shock).

    13. People who disagree with me are wrong, have never achieved anything in
    their lives, have no qualifications, and they’re hopeless in bed (Part 2).

    14. Bush eats babies whilst they’re still alive.

    15. I’m really great.

  • Eco Against Occultism and Fundamentalisms

    Science progresses by correcting itself and admitting its own mistakes.

  • Alexander Chancellor on Andrew Marr

    Marr admires responsible journalism – the conscientious and honest reporting of facts.

  • Liberty Hall

    I’m confused – I must be, because I really don’t understand this at all. I usually like Polly Toynbee (not that I read everything she writes), but this seems to me to be a very odd thing to say:

    The countrysiders in the Lords will oppose the hunting bill again, but others will oppose it for good liberal reasons – proving the need for a second chamber. Liberals should always be wary of banning people from doing as they like. There needs to be an overwhelming case for the serious harm done: hunting just doesn’t meet that criteria (killing a few foxes is not more cruel than battery farming).

    Wait – what? ‘Liberals should always be wary of banning people from doing as they like.’ But isn’t that awfully sweeping? ‘Doing as they like’? Doesn’t that cover an awful lot of ground? Underpaying and mistreating employees, abusing children, driving dangerously, vandalising parks or libraries, threatening or stalking people? And all sorts of things. People get banned from doing as they like all the time. Obviously. What does she mean ‘overwhelming case’, what does she mean ‘serious harm’? Overwhelming according to whom, serious by whose measure? My point isn’t about fox hunting, it’s about the generalization itself. I don’t think there should be some presumption that people should be allowed to ‘do as they like’ – it depends very much on what it is they like. Ah well – I must be confused.

  • Books and Personalities

    I was thinking earlier this morning in an idle moment – well not altogether idle, because I was looking out the window, because it was one of those staggeringly beautiful autumnal mornings when it has partly cleared up after rain and clouds and the air is bright and clear and hard like diamonds or ginger ale or I don’t know what, and the sun is at just the right angle so that it makes the windows on the boats in the marina wink and twinkle which they certainly don’t do most of the time, and the light and shadows on the water and the peninsula look much more light and shadow-like than usual – one of those mornings. I was thinking, while staring at all this, about the difference – the subjective difference, the cognitive difference, the difference in our heads – between people one knows in real life and people one knows via the written word. That thought led to the related and equally familiar thought about books and their authors and how we think about them. To what extent we have ideas of their ‘personalities’, and how accurate or inaccurate such ideas may be. How some writers have (seem to have, via their writing) more ‘personality’ than others, and how that does not necessarily correlate with the quality of the books. A writer can have bags of personality and write crap books, or have none at all and write dazzlers. And what do we mean by personality, and how does it differ from character, and does the same apply. Can a writer have no discernable character and write brilliant books? Offhand I would say no – I don’t think so. The brilliance, the brilliant-book-writing, is the character, or part of it. But it’s not the personality, so much. Why? I don’t know why. Because personality is more adventitious, and so more beside the point? More just one of those things, like curly hair or buck teeth? Whereas character is more basic, and more important. But I can’t swear that’s not just a mere matter of labeling, rather than a genuine distinction.

    Emerson and Carlyle met briefly when they were comparatively young, and had an immediate rapport. They sustained this friendship for years via letters; then Emerson made another trip over, and they found they didn’t like each other at all. Emerson found Carlyle a savage misanthropic terror; Carlyle found Emerson full of moonshine and endlessly talking (one knows the type).

    I wouldn’t much want to meet either of them, myself. There are some writers I would want to meet; others I would want to observe but not meet; others I wouldn’t want to meet or observe. But what’s odd about it is that the groups don’t correlate with either favourites or hierarchies. It’s not that I want to meet all the best (in my opinion) writers, or all the ones I like the best. No. There’s something interesting about that fact…but I’m not sure what.

    Shakespeare, Keats, Chekhov. Them I would like to meet. Emily Bronte, Byron, Montaigne – them I would like to watch, but not meet. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, George Eliot, Austen – I don’t even want to observe, let alone meet. And yet Austen is possibly my very favourite novelist and the one I think is the best. And Wordsworth is one of my favourite poets – but I would go out of my way not to meet him. Hazlitt, now – yes, I would want to meet Hazlitt. I would be frightened, but I would want to. Thoreau. I would like to meet Thoreau. Emerson said walking with him was like walking with a tree. He sounds like exactly my kind of person. I’m a tree myself. Two trees taking a walk; it sounds very agreeable, in a chilly sort of way.

  • The Intellectual Content of a Fortune Cookie

    Rorschach, MMPI, Myers-Briggs – ‘personality’ tests are pseudoscientific, intrusive, or both.

  • Serbia’s Education Minister Quits

    Her claim that Darwin’s theory was as ‘dogmatic’ as creationism did not go down well.

  • Books, Humanists, Productivity, Glut

    Nonconformity is good, but people should act normal.

  • The Lopez Affair, Shakespeare, and Shylock

    Shakespeare did something that Marlowe never chose to do.

  • Who Says Murky Ideas Don’t Matter?

    Sovereignty is a mongrel: born in “divine right” theology, incoherent, ambiguous, dangerous.

  • Eye Row Knee

    On a lighter note. (Lighter than what? What could be lighter than Andrew Ross? Okay not lighter then, just different.) I have a staggering piece of news for everyone. Are you sitting down? Because this is a real shocker, and so new and fresh and unfamiliar – you just can’t think how new. Ready? Okay here it is.

    Americans don’t get irony.

    You didn’t know that, did you. You’ve never ever heard that before, have you. That’s not a stupid boring worn-out stale dull flat endlessly-recycled tedious cliché, is it! No indeed. No, you only hear that some three times in every BBC arts programme, that’s all.

    I do beg your pardon. How unbecoming. And unironic. But there it is, you see – I don’t get irony. Never have. It’s a closed book to me. Comes of being born in New York, you see, that well-known haven of flat-footed wide-eyed literalness and naiveté.

    No it’s just that I heard that particular gem of folk wisdom three times in one day last week. It’s just that it’s gotten so I can hear it coming, and prepare to roll my eyes. The minute one of the boffins on ‘Front Row’ or ‘Saturday Review’ comments on a certain sentimentality or fatuity in a new American movie, I know the next sentence is going to be the one about how Americans don’t do irony. Followed by a Tweedle-dum-Tweedledee-esque group hug. ‘Aren’t we cool, aren’t we great, aren’t we swell, we get irony and those poor pathetic dweebs across the pond don’t, not one of them, they’re all Biblical literalists and every other kind of literalists to boot.’

    Gross exaggeration, I know. Well that’s what I do instead of irony, you see – hyperbole. I always do that. (And, I have to admit, a lifelong habit of doing that has revealed to me that some Americans do indeed not get irony, in the sense that I have had people of that nationality owlishly correct or question obvious hyperbole. ‘Was he really ten feet tall?’ Uh – no.) But if other people are allowed to do irony, then I’m allowed to do hyperbole. There’s a law on the books about it. I’d show you but I’m too busy.

    One of the funny (possibly even ironic) things about the three in one day is that one of them was so very old. Two were from ‘Saturday Review’ but the other was from an ancient Morse I happened to watch on tv – one from 1991. Some guy tells Morse he’s going back to Princeton and it will be so nice and restful because Americans don’t do irony. Oh really! Princeton’s an irony-free zone, is it! Well I grew up there, and that’s news to me. In fact it’s bollocks.

    To be fair, one of the two mentions on ‘Saturday Review’ was saying the same thing. Good old Tom Sutcliffe pointed out that it’s not that there’s no irony in the US, it’s just that it’s not evenly distributed. It may be a bit scarce in Nebraska, he said mildly, but there’s a lot of it on the coasts. Well exactly.

    I’ve been slightly touchy about this for years – decades in fact. Ever since reading a long windy pompous self-congratulatory novel by John Fowles, Daniel Martin, which went on and on and on about how Americansdon’tdoirony. Even the clever ones, even the clever and funny ones, even the very clever and funny ones – even they don’t do irony. Whereas, apparently, all Ukanians, however dim and unfunny, do irony like polecats. I hadn’t a clue what he meant by it, which I thought might possibly indicate that it was true and that I too did not do irony. That it was like those notes that only dogs can hear, or sonic thingies that only dolphins can detect – that I simply couldn’t even recognize it, let alone appreciate it or smile at it or deploy it myself.

    Well. That was a long time ago, and I’ve long since realized that Fowles was talking self-flattering crap. (And after that review of his diaries in the LRB the other month, I have serious doubts about his talent in the irony department, frankly.) Yes, granted, of course, a lot of our movies are full of sentimental bilge, but I’m such an ironist that I don’t go see them, so they don’t implicate the whole population, now do they. And granted our presidential campaigns are full of even more sentimental and utterly irrelevant bilge (Vote for me, I have a dog!), but – um – well never mind what. But we can too so do irony. We just don’t always happen to feel like it.