Author: Ophelia Benson

Another miscellany, because there is an ever-growing backlog of items I want to point out and perhaps say a few words about – and I only have six hands you know. Be reasonable. I’m going as fast as I can, here, but I can’t do everything. And besides I have this mosquito bite or spider bite or moth bite or whatever the hell kind of bite it is just right at the bend of my elbow, on top where it gets maximal chafing from my sweatshirt, and it itches, dammit! It’s been itching for days and days and days and days. Normally bites stop itching after a few days, am I right? But this one just keeps on going, like the Eveready battery rabbit. Nasty thing. So naturally this interferes with my ability to write an individual N&C for every item I see. Besides I have burnout. No I don’t, that’s a joke. P Z Myers mocked bloggers who whinge about blogger burnout at Pharyngula yesterday.

There is another excellent post at Black Triangle on quackery and suckery. Anthony also quotes from an article which is one of the items in that backlog I mentioned, about Prince Charles and his presumptuous advice on medical matters. The doctor who gives the Prince what-for makes exactly the point I made about both P.C. and Juliet Stevenson a few months ago – the fact that they and people like them abuse their fame and influence. They ought to recognize that they are famous out of all proportion to their actual importance, for one thing, and that they are famous for things that are entirely separate from any kind of medical expertise, for another, so they really ought, morally speaking, to use immense caution before making the world a present of their opinions on such subjects. In cases where people can do real harm by getting things wrong, celebrity non-experts ought to think and think and think again before going on Radio 4 or talking to journalists about what vaccinations to get and how to cure cancer.

Your power and authority rest on an accident of birth. Furthermore, your public utterances are worthy of four pages, whereas, if lucky, I might warrant one. I don’t begrudge you that authority and we probably share many opinions about art and architecture, but I do beg you to exercise your power with extreme caution when advising patients with life threatening diseases to embrace unproven therapies. There is no equivalent of the GMC for the monarchy, so it is left either to sensational journalism or, more rarely, to the quiet voice of loyal subjects such as myself to warn you that you may have overstepped the mark.

Exactly.

And speaking of Stevenson, it was the MMR ‘debate’ she was opinionating on, and Harry’s Place has an interesting post on a Washington Post article on that subject. There’s a fair bit of silly verbiage at the beginning of that article, talking about Wakefield’s charisma and so on, but it settles down after awhile, and it does make the point that media coverage of this kind of thing tends to be grotesquely distorted – to pretend that it’s a 50-50 thing, that expert opinion is split, when that’s not the case at all.

And finally I thought this post at Brian Leiter’s about the state of Nietzsche scholarship was worth a read. I haven’t the slightest idea whether he’s right or not, but the look at the way institutional necessities can distort things is interesting.

Leiter thinks I’m a prat, by the way. But I’m not sure he’s chosen a very good example of my prat-hood. He just doesn’t like an article I linked to in News, that’s all. But I didn’t write it, after all, I only linked to it, and I don’t invariably agree with every single word of every article in News. If I had to go by that standard, our front page would be a tad dull.

So why are they posting prominent links (this used to be on B&W’s front page) to tabloid trash like this, which misstates Foucault’s views from top to bottom, and offers no rational criticism of any view he actually held, while offering up a series of fallacious arguments (ad hominems primarily–you would think Ms. Benson of B&W might notice that references to Foucault’s homosexuality do not refute his ideas).

Huh? Of course they don’t, but who says I think they do? The author of the article itself doesn’t even think they do, as far as I can see, and even if he did it wouldn’t follow that I do. A small point, but then I specialize in making small points.

There is a common element in the two examples of political rhetoric about religion we’ve been looking at recently – Steven Waldman’s last weekend and David Blunkett’s this past week. Both of them argue at least partly from perceived alienation or resentment or anger or grievance, or all those, of religious groups or ‘communities’. Alienation and resentment of religious believers at being ignored by secular Democrats or Democratic secularists, and alienation and grievance of Muslims at not being protected by the Race Relations Act, because it doesn’t cover religion. ‘While Jews and Sikhs are covered under the existing law, those of Islamic faith and Christians are not,’ as Blunkett put it on the ‘Today’ programme. One interesting thing about that argument is that grievances and alienation can be manufactured and constructed. As there is manufactured consent, so there can be manufactured grievance, manufactured anger, resentment, outrage, indignation, offense. So all these claims and announcements that voters will be alienated by candidates who don’t, or don’t appear to, or don’t obviously enough appear to, share their religious beliefs – all these claims are doing more than describing a situation, they’re also calling the situation into being. They are in fact doing their best to create the very situation they purport to be predicting and warning against. Of course, all political discourse does that to some degree – but it’s as well to be clear that that’s what’s going on.

Also of course that’s emphatically not necessarily a bad thing. It can be an excellent thing, even the best thing. Waking people up out of their apathetic slumbers, bringing injustices to their attention, inspiring them to want and demand changes – that can be one of the most moving and valuable things humans can do. Think William Lloyd Garrison, John Stuart Mill, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. But it can also be the other thing – think Pope Urban II, Savonarola, Luther, Hitler, Paisley, Khomeini, bin Laden. Sometimes apathetic slumber is infinitely preferable to wakefulness. So one ought at least to be attentive to such things, and not simply to assume that all mentions of the indignation of some ‘community’ or other is automatically justified and righteous.

I have a profound inner knowledge of all this, a source of deep insight and intuition and wisdom, on account of how I’m a genius at manufacturing and then wallowing in grievance myself. To put it another way, I’m a petulant brat. Perhaps it comes from being the youngest child – hmm? (Of course if I were the middle child I would say it came from that, and if I were the eldest, that it came from that. Anything will do.) I mean after all, you know – my sister and brother did get to put their feet on the sofa when I didn’t. Therefore I get to whine and pout whenever I feel like it for the rest of my life. Right? Of course.

It’s the old Smothers Brothers (yes I know hardly any of you will know what that is, never mind that) recurring line ‘Mom always liked you best,’ which for some reason always made me laugh like a drain. I suppose because it’s about sibling rivalry, and as I said, I have this deep insight into sibling rivalry. It’s a useful corrective, the line is. Whenever I have a bad manifestation of Adult Onset Transferred Sibling Rivalry-Positional Jealousy Syndrome, I simply say to myself, ‘[Insert name here] always liked you best,’ laugh maniacally, and become magically sane again.

Well maybe not sane, exactly, that’s probably expecting too much, but in the manner of Bertha Rochester, a little quieter.