Author: Ophelia Benson

Speaking of Keats and Wordsworth and Bronte – speaking, in short, of books – I was going to do that Ten Books that changed my thinking list. So now I will. It’s not a literary list – more of an argumentative list. And it’s also not really a top ten or ten best or ten favorites list. It’s not definitive. That list would have to be much longer, and more fluctuating. But this is a sample of that list.

1. Montaigne’s essays.

2. Hazlitt’s essays. That’s cheating in a way, because they’re not all in one book (whereas Montaigne’s are). But just think of them as one huge super-book.

3. Keats’ letters.

4. On Liberty. Same what Norm said. I’m really, really partial to Mill. It seems we all are. That contest or quiz or whatever it was that people were chatting about last week (I didn’t look at it myself), the one about ‘which philosopher are you?’ The people I saw who’d taken it – Anthony at Black Triangle and – was it Norm? – both had Mill at the top. Martha Nussbaum in a recent interview when asked who her favorite philosopher was, said Mill. I should just throw in his autobiography and On the Subjugation of Women for 5 and 6, but that would be a little dull. Take all three as one book then, and throw in his essay on Coleridge, and –

5. Walden. A more rhetorical On Liberty.

6. The Flaubert-Sand letters.

7. Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.

8. Eichmann in Jerusalem.

9. Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition.

10. Martha Nussbaum’s Sex and Social Justice.

Whew. That’s better. The weather has changed. It’s been blisteringly hot for three days, the kind of hot where it’s still blistering after sunset, and still hot at midnight, and still very warm at dawn – in other words, the kind of hot where it never gets a chance to cool off. That’s rare around here. (I know, I’m spoiled.) Most of the time even in summer it cools off sharply around 8 p.m., and a breeze kicks up, and you can go for a nice sunset walk and cool off. Except for a few days here and there every summer. The statistical average here is, I once heard, to get three days per summer when the temperature is over 90 degrees. We’ve just had two of them, and very nasty they were. So it was very pleasant to wake up to clouds and nice cool air. Yesterday the air smelled foul, dry and hot and exhaust-laden; today it smells damp and faintly of trees. Offshore flow, it’s called. It blows from the west and the ocean, rather than the east and the desert. Offshore flow is a beautiful thing.

So. Now that I’m not all hot and cranky, a few items. There is this profile of Numero Uno atheist Richard Dawkins, for instance. Not a very good piece, actually; it looks as if someone cobbled it together in a hurry because of the Prospect poll. Well that’s all right, I guess, they were just providing some background; that’s a service. But the sub-head is really silly: ‘Now the scientist who calls himself the ‘devil’s chaplain’ has been voted Britain’s top intellectual …’ But he doesn’t call himself that, and if you know where the phrase comes from, that’s an absurd thing to say. It’s a quotation from Darwin, in a letter to a friend –

What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature.

The point is that natural selection is hideously cruel. That’s not Dawkins’ self-description as a sort of anti-priest, it’s Darwin’s sardonic view of the idea that nature or its putative designer is kind and benevolent.

Jonathan Derbyshire has an interesting comment on the Observer piece, and a comment in it about Dawkins’ hatred of Bush.

The formulation is apposite: like many soi-disant “public intellectuals”, Dawkins doesn’t so much have a politics as a pathology – “hatred” of Bush and Blair. Those “streams of anti-war letters” are mostly lacking in the reasoned argument for which his scientific work is justly celebrated.

Hmmyes, I suppose. I’ve only seen one or two of those letters, but those were thin on argument. But I detest Bush so much myself, I may have a touch of the same pathology. Be that as it may, I was interested that Jonathan quoted from Julien Benda, La Trahison des clercs. I’ve thought of that book and phrase several times lately.

Les hommes dont la fonction est de défendre les valeurs éternelles et désintéressés, comme la justice et la raison, et que j’appelle les clercs, ont trahi cette fonction.

To bluntify it a bit: people whose job it is to defend eternal disinterested values like justice and reason, ‘intellectuals,’ have betrayed that job. He’s right you know. We keep running into it. People whose job it is to defend reason and critical thinking, arguing that we shouldn’t use them on other people’s cultures, for instance. I do keep finding myself thinking that intellectuals just aren’t doing their job. They’re doing some other job, instead. And it is a betrayal. It’s like all those Democrats who changed party after they’d been elected as Democrats after the Republicans took Congress in 1994. I simply couldn’t believe that when it happened – it’s an outrage! People vote for a Democrat who wins and they find themselves lumbered with a Republican anyway? It ought to be illegal. And it’s the same thing with intellectuals. Being woolly and sweet and understanding and nonjudgmental just is not their job.

And finally, for dessert, I liked this brief comment by Eve Garrard at Normblog. I’m a landscape junky myself. Always have been – I mean literally always, from the age of three if not earlier. I know that because when I was three we moved from a house in the country to one in town, and I spent the next five years driving my mother and brother and sister crazy, asking ‘when are we moving back to the country?’ I pined, I longed, I yearned. I still remember the day we moved back when I was eight – the bliss of it. One result is that I’ve always known exactly what Wordsworth and Emily Bronte and Thoreau, for example, were talking about – known it on my pulses, as Keats would say.

For this group, landscape is much more than a source of pleasing aesthetic or nostalgic experiences; it’s a haunting passion (as one of its most famous, and longwinded, representatives noted); it’s something which shapes a whole life. For these people, every natural scene, every fall of land or changing colour of the sea, speaks its own unique, intense, significant word – as they keep telling us, at frankly tedious length.

I suppose ‘haunting passion’ is Wordsworth? Tintern Abbey or the Immortality Ode perhaps? I ought to know but don’t. But I do like Wordsworth a hell of a lot more than I would if I didn’t know what he meant. I love the Prelude, and I wouldn’t if it weren’t for that. Twelve long books of what Keats called ‘egotistical sublime’ (though he didn’t mean the Prelude, since he hadn’t read that, since it wasn’t published until 1850) – yes, but if you’re a landsape junky – well, you get the idea.

Well. Aren’t I stupid. How did I manage to miss this? The link is right there on Ibn Warraq’s site. I just didn’t do enough exploring. Well, I’ve done it now, so don’t you miss this one. It’s loaded with great stuff. Look at the articles page for instance. Read There’s no such thing as Voluntary Hijab!. If only I’d had that article to cite during all those arguments about the hijab last winter, with all those people who simply couldn’t see any reason at all why someone might support the ban. Seeing the reasons but still not agreeing I could have understood, but that’s not how it went. It was weird. But none of that crap on this site. Yeah!

The veil is not just another kind of clothing; opposing it is not just defending the right to freedom of clothing even though it is put forward as such. It is not something that a woman decides to put on for a change one day and to take it off the next. It is not a costume put on a young girl who is going to a costume party! Veiling young girls teaches them that they belong to an inferior sex and should be ashamed, and that they are sex objects and must limit their physical movements. By the same token, young boys are taught they belong to the ‘superior’ sex, and that girls are inferior and sex objects. An unbridgeable gap is thus created and institutionalized between the two sexes at the expense of young girls’ deprivation and young boys’ ’empowerment’.

Visit, read, wish them good luck.

Since people kept asking for a RSS feed, I’ve put one together. But it’s kind of at a beta-testing stage, since I programmed it – using Perl – without the faintest real idea about what I was doing. If (when) people find problems with it, if they could email me at j e r r y at b u t t e r f l i e s a n d w h e e l s dot com that’d be very useful.

Thanks.

What was that we were saying about identity, and groups, and being forced into those groups by other people? We were saying a lot of things – so let’s say a few more while we`re at it.

I’ve been re-reading Meera Nanda’s marvelous (albeit horrifying) book Prophets Facing Backward. If you haven’t read it – you’re missing something. I thought a couple of quotations would be apropos. Page 16:

Holist views of nature and society in which the collective is held to be larger than the individual, the orgnaism more than the sum of its parts, are eminently suited for illiberal and totalitarian philosophies. Such philosophies can mobilize individuals to sacrifice their freedom for the sake of the collective good, and to even accept the indignities meted out to them in the name of their duty and destiny.

Can’t they though. And this is one reason – one of many – I’m ever more wary of communitarianism, identity politics, group rights, and ideas about the need to respect groups simply because they are groups. I’m also ever more surprised that these ideas have become so deeply entrenched on the left. I’m not as surprised as I could be, because I used to see more merit in them than I do now (or rather I used to be less aware of the demerits), but I’m still surprised, especially considering all the hideous experiences we’ve had with group hatreds over the last dozen years or so.

Another. Page 27:

Postmodern critiques…seemed to satisfy these intellectuals’ nationalistic and populist urges to resist the West and at the same time, to affirm the traditions of the West’s ‘victims,’ lumped together in one big mass without adequate consideration for internal class and cultural contradictions as ‘the Third World people,’ the ‘subaltern,’ or simply the ‘other.’

Just what I’ve been saying. Of course, when groups are being attacked as groups, then it may make practical sense to defend them the same way, but that’s a different matter from according immense groups consisting of billions of people automatic respect, or affirming their traditions, or really saying much of anything about them at all except that they should be treated decently (or if you prefer to phrase it that way, that they have human rights).

One thing I notice about all this identity-hugging is that people have a tendency to force others into identity boxes whether they want to be put there or not. One of our regular readers, wmr, commented on this under ‘Stand Still, Dobbin’:

IMO, the problem with group identification occurs not when one links oneself to a group, but when others insist on identifying one with some group. “The Metaphysical Club” tells of a talented black student who considered himself primarily a philosopher. Unfortunately, everyone else considered him a black first and foremost. He did not prosper.

And Vikram Chandra has a long, fascinating, irritated essay on the subject in ‘Boston Review’ in 2000 called ‘The Cult of Authenticity.’

I noticed the constant hum of this rhetoric, this anxiety about the anxiety of Indianness, this notion of a real reality that was being distorted by “Third World cosmopolitans,” this fear of an all-devouring and all-distorting West. I heard it in conversations, in critical texts, in reviews. And Indians who wrote in English were the one of the prime locations for this rhetoric to test itself, to make its declarations of power and belonging, to announce its possession of certain territories and its right to delineate lines of control…My purpose is also to give you some sense of the texture of the world in which I live and write, and therefore also a sense of the sheer effort it takes to sustain and drive this censorious rhetoric about correct Indianness, and a sense of the galloping vastness of its elisions. This rhetoric lays claim not only to a very high moral ground but also a deep, essential connection to a “real” Indianness. Despite all their demurrals about not essentializing Indianness, and their ritual genuflections in the direction of Bhabha and Spivak, the practitioners of this rhetoric inevitably claim that they are able to identify a “Real India,” and so are able to identify which art, and which artists, are properly Indian.

It’s all so dreary, so imagination-choking, so thought-smothering, so limiting. Don’t write that, because it’s not authentic. Don’t name your character that, because you’re ‘signalling Indianness to the West.’ Don’t be cosmopolitan, be whatever Identity you were born. Don’t expand, don’t change, don’t grow, don’t learn, don’t become different, don’t leave home, don’t go out into the wide world. Don’t you dare. And this is supposed to be progressive?