If you can ignore it, it’s not a nuisance.
Author: Ophelia Benson
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Deeply Though Subtly Subversive
The aim was to replace unexamined religious belief with empirical knowledge and reason.
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Extract From Dawkins’ New Book
Echolocation has evolved at least four times, eyes more than forty times.
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Manifesto of Freedoms
And then as soon as I posted that, I found this rather inspiring Manifesto at Jonathan Derbyshire’s blog. And the thing is…it seems to me that people in the US and the UK who side with the pro-hijab side against the ban don’t quite realize the extent to which they’re siding against people like those who wrote that Manifesto. Against people like Azam Kamguian and Maryam Namazie and Ibn Warraq. People who are not arrogant Westerners, not Eurocentric, not colonialists, not Orientalists, not hegemonists keen to trample on the Other, but people who want to get rid of the regressive, punitive, subordinating aspects of their own cultures, just as we all want to get rid of those aspects in our own. I wish Western liberals would pay less attention to pro-hijab protests and more to things like this Manifesto and the Bulletin of the Committee to Defend
Women’s Rights in the Middle East and Ibn Warraq’s Secular Islam site. They’re the ones who need and deserve support. -
Not That Again
Damn – it’s one of those days. Horrible sectarian fights breeding violence everywhere you look. What a disgusting world. Schoolchildren and teachers held hostage by Chechen rebels, mosques burned and people injured in Nepal after a group of Nepalese workers are murdered by Islamic militants, two French journalists held hostage by more Islamic militants and threatened with death because of a French law against wearing conspicuous religious symbols in schools. It’s hard not to think that a good deal more secularism would be a helpful vitamin for a lot of people.
It pains me to say it but I don’t agree with Normblog on this issue. At least, not with the way he states it. I think it’s reasonable to disagree about the ban, because there clearly are irreconcilable tensions in it. It feels like a violation of rights, an interference with basic freedom, to both sides. But I think it’s less reasonable to come down on one side or the other by denying those tensions. So I don’t think this is right: ‘The law forbidding it is an unjust and illiberal one, preventing people from affirming their identity in ways that don’t harm others.’ But there is a claim that the presence of the hijab in the classroom does harm others. That’s the whole point. So it’s too easy just to say that it doesn’t.
No doubt I err in the other direction. But I do at least realize that people who want to wear the nasty thing (now stop that) feel unfairly treated.
I do think the hijab a nasty thing though. Very. So I do think that talking about ‘preventing people from affirming their identity’ is a too-emollient way of referring to it. If some people wanted to wear slave-chains, or signs proclaiming them Untouchables, or yellow stars or striped concentration camp uniforms to school, should that be called ‘affirming their identity,’ especially when people in the same ‘group’ found that very identity-affirmation profoundly degrading and subordinating? The whole problem with the hijab is that it does far more than merely affirm the ‘identity’ of the person who wears it. To some extent that’s potentially true of any clothes. I have to say, I’m damn glad that I went to school in the 19th century so that I didn’t have to be surrounded with girls poking their stomachs and buttocks out of their pants all day. They look stupid and kind of pathetic, and I think I would have felt stupid and pathetic by association. (Therefore I think school dress codes are a good thing on the whole, and that is after all all the French law is – a school dress code.) But it’s more true of the hijab because of its history, especially its recent history – because of its connection with Islamism and violence against women. That’s one reason it’s not an exact equivalent of crosses – because people don’t get beaten for not wearing crosses (as far as I know anyway). Furthermore, both sexes wear crosses. They’re just not a badge of subordination in the way the hijab is (even though of course a lot of Muslim women don’t see the hijab as a badge of subordination – but on the other hand a lot do).
I damn well hope those two journalists don’t get murdered as a result of the law though. But no doubt they will. That seems to be the way things fall out these days.
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All the Way Back
The rest of it…
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Experiment
Just trying something out, here…
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Paper by Creationist in Real Science Journal
Someone from the Discovery Institute got one past the editors.
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Stupidest Article You’ll Ever See in the CHE
Dammit, education is for jobs, not just to learn stuff!
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Mob Burns Mosques in Nepal
Violence erupted after slaughter of 12 Nepalese hostages in Iraq by Islamic militant group.
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A Manifesto by People of Muslim Culture
For sexual equality and secularism; against homophobia, the hijab and anti-semitism.
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Ode to September
Have you noticed? It’s September. I love September, and always look forward to its arrival. Because I don’t like summer much, and I do love autumn, and then I don’t have to go back to school, so what do I care.
And since it is September – next month is October. (Seven, eight – that’s how to remember.) And at the end of October, the Dictionary comes out, and you can all rush off to the nearest Waterstones’ and buy armfuls. Yes, armfuls, I tell you – you can give them as Christmas presents. Every single person you give one to will be your friend for life – except for academic pseuds, who will be your enemy for life, so you win either way, you see. And in the meantime you can admire it or even order it here. Since it’s a new month (September, that is) I thought I’d better put the link on this page, for everyone’s convenience. I might do the same thing on October 1. It will be interesting to find out, won’t it.
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Phobia
I’ve been thinking about the puzzling (to me anyway) question of where all this automatic hostility to science comes from. This is not the first time I’ve thought about that question, of course; it’s not even the second, or the fifth. I think about it quite often. It is something of an enigma. There are a lot of people out there who do reliably say very dismissive things on the subject, not as if such things were controversial or debatable, but as if they were obvious and taken for granted and incontrovertible. As if it were just common knowledge among all people who pay attention even slightly, that science is root and branch wicked and harmful and to be condemned out of hand. It’s odd.
The question has renewed force because of reading Sandra Harding. She’s a really good example – paradigmatic, one might say – of this kind of thing. Of just assuming from the outset that science is a terrible thing and that everyone who reads her already knows that. She has to be assuming that, because she sure as hell does a crap job of making a case for it. In fact she does no job at all. She just takes that assumption as her starting point. No evidence, no explanation, hardly even any examples. Just earnest cross-eyed science-hatred. Okay, so why?
There are some obvious reasons. It’s powerful and succesful, it’s difficult, capitalism needs it, it can be smelly and/or dirty, we were bad at it in school. That kind of thing. Compelling stuff, needless to say. But there are other reasons, and those are the ones that it’s interesting to think about. (Irritating, but interesting.) The ones that are less explicit, less ‘theoretical’ and rational, less academic; the ones that are more like fear of snakes or spiders, or dislike of people in suede shoes.
Thinking about those reasons of course risks getting into into armchair-Freudianism territory, and that’s not a territory I want to light out for. But I’ll take the chance anyway. Cautiously. Right: I think one of those background reasons is the fact that science doesn’t give a shit. At all. It’s not just that it’s not all that bothered, it’s that it does not care at all. That’s the problem right there: it’s the realm of what just is, no matter what we think about it. Where our wishes, hopes, plans, fears make nothing happen.
Of course that’s true of life anyway, with or without science. It rains or it doesn’t, the volcano erupts or not. In fact science and technology are our best shot at changing obdurate facts about the world that we don’t like – sickness, weather, hunger. But still, science also makes the independence of what is from what we want it to be, systematic and official, and that’s why people hate it, as if it were a bully wandering around stomping on all our little doll houses and acorn tea sets. We feel beside the point next to it. It’s not democratic, or multicultural, or libertarian, or kind; all those words and all words like them are just the wrong category. We feel more at home in the kind-ought-value-want category. So it feels natural to a lot of people to hate science, and they assume not only that it feels natural to everyone but also that that is the right way to feel, the humane, thoughtful, reflective way to feel. At least, that’s my guess. But it’s not a scientific guess, just an armchair one.
[Update: By ‘we’ of course I mean those who fit the description and not those who don’t.]