Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Infantile Leftism, all Gestures and Outrage

    ‘Foucault was not just wrong; he erased any possibility for proving himself to be right.’

  • Yet Another Love Letter to James Wood

    ‘…not the bitter pill of theory, that cocktail of mixed motives and obfuscation practiced in the academy.’

  • Where are the Rock Stars?

    Lists are always good fun. Top ten this, favourite fifty that, best one hundred the other. A few years ago when a US publisher issued a list of the best 100 English-language novels of the past century, there was quite a frenzy of discussion and disagreement. We all had quite a good time shrieking at one another ‘Tobacco Road?!? Are they kidding??’ Then a few weeks or months later there was a piece in the NY Times Book Review (I think) by A S Byatt (one of the judges) who pointed out how limited the pool of books was they had to choose from, and how further limited their choices were by the rules of the judging. The upshot was that they were forced to pick books that more of the judges had read as opposed to ones the judges thought were actually good. So yes, they were kidding. The Siege of Krishnapur (say) was not chosen because not enough of the panel had read it, and various mediocrities or worse were chosen because a lot of the panelists had read it. So the criterion was (it turned out) not actually best at all, but simply ‘read by the most members of this particular set of people, regardless of whether they’re any good or not’ – quite a stupid criterion, really, and not how the list was billed. So lists can turn out to be even sillier than they look.

    But that’s no reason not to discuss them, is it. So let’s discuss the Prospect list of Top intellectuals. Or maybe not so much the list as someone else’s discussion of the list. It starts off well, and goes on for several paragraphs well – simply noting what sort of intellectual is not on the list, as opposed to hand-wringing about it. (Not that hand-wringing about it is necessarily a bad thing – it depends on what sort of intellectual, or indeed ‘intellectual’, is in fact not on the list, doesn’t it.) There’s even one bit of quite good news.

    Perhaps even more spectacular is the demise of literary and cultural theory from its high point in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Eagleton (again) is the sole survivor on this list. Otherwise, theory remains isolated in its academic tower, cut off from the general culture by jargon and obscurantism.

    And by a third thing, perhaps, which is their tendency to think they know quite a lot about every conceivable subject and ought to say so on every possible occasion. Anyway, it’s cheering to find that there aren’t great preening crowds of them on the list.

    And this is a good sign too –

    Another strong group are the social and political essayists. Again, the variety is noticeable. Instead of “isms” or Orwell’s “smelly little orthodoxies,” we have diverse styles and approaches. The personal voice stands out – Michael Ignatieff, Timothy Garton Ash, John Gray, AC Grayling, Christopher Hitchens, Ian Buruma, Noel Malcolm. They have other features in common: a strong sense of political morality, internationalism and most of them are first-class writers. They are Orwell’s children, taking on big issues in good prose.

    I’m not keen on John Gray and don’t know Noel Malcolm, but I like the rest, some of them a lot. And I like the genre. I like essays and essayists, and social and political essays and essayists in particular. I like writers who actually have something to say. I would disagree with the ‘Orwell’s children’ line, because I think they’re better than Orwell. I’ve been coming to the conclusion that Orwell is over-rated. I used to over-rate him myself, but I’ve been re-reading him lately, and frankly a lot of his writing was just plain tired and flat. Hack writing. Hitchens writes rings around him even on a bad day. But that’s a quibble, and I agree with the paragraph overall. But then things get strange.

    The list may also seem curiously old-fashioned. It offers little room for the new “isms” that have broken through in recent decades: feminism, multiculturalism, postmodernism. There aren’t many young voices: few under 45, hardly anyone under 40. It is very middle-aged, and also very male and very white.

    Well is it really all that surprising that a list of public intellectuals is heavy on people over forty? Intellectualism is a cumulative thing, after all, because knowledge is. And for that matter so is fame, and reputation, and the CV. The people on the list have been doing their intellectual stuff for enough decades so that people recognize them as public intellectuals. A few people can manage that by age thirty or thirty-five, but it usually takes longer. (I agree about the male thing though, if only because the first name I looked for was Marina Warner’s, and I was annoyed not to find it. It’s absurd that she’s not there.)

    Then it gets worse. A lot worse.

    The absence of new cultural forms and the media may surprise some. Why does this list smack of the common room and the think tank and not Britart and cool Britannia? Two names from television, none from advertising and no film directors. Of these, film is perhaps the most striking absence. There are some first-rate British film critics (David Thompson, Mark Cousins and Anthony Lane among them), and major British directors (Mike Leigh and Ken Loach among an older generation, Roger Michell and Michael Winterbottom among the next)…Youth culture is another striking absence. Instead, we have the traditional intellectual: scientists and historians, social theorists and policy advisers. It feels very grown-up and sane, maybe even dull. Perhaps the problem lies in the definition of “public intellectual.” Are the criteria which inform this list now out of date, part of a vanishing intellectual culture that disappeared with Noel Annan’s dons and the Third Programme? Is that why there are so few representatives from popular culture?

    Advertising? Advertising?? Since when is advertising anything to do with being a public intellectual? It’s public all right, but what’s intellectual about it? It takes some verbal skills, to be sure, but that doesn’t equate to being an intellectual. And advertising’s close connection with lying for profit surely disqualifies it. And as for directing movies – isn’t that an art or a craft or both rather than an intellectual activity? I would have thought so – unless we’ve suddenly re-defined the word when I wasn’t paying attention. And then youth culture. Huh? Again, what’s that got to do with intellectualism or intellectuals? All of this might be mere observation, except for that word ‘problem’. ‘Perhaps the problem lies in the definition of “public intellectual.”‘ Or perhaps it doesn’t, because perhaps there is no problem. Perhaps what you see as dull because grown-up and sane, other people see as interesting because grown-up and sane. Lunacy and childishness are not absolutely always fascinating, as a matter of fact they can both be immensely boring. So if you long for the young and the hip and the consumerist, start your own list, and don’t call it a list of public intellectuals.

  • Theism Mandatory for Kerry, David Brooks Says

    Doesn’t have to be a saint, but does have to be ‘engaged in a personal voyage toward God.’

  • Hitchens is Mildly Critical of Michael Moore

    Yes, movies need a POV, but they don’t need to omit disconfirming material and throw in any old rubbish.

  • The Actual List Itself This Time

    Vote for the top five, and add one.

  • Presentism Defended: Part 2

    John Milton, who in his Paradise Lost selflessly gave the world the image of hell as a lake of fire, was also the 17th century’s greatest proponent of freedom of speech: as long as you were a Puritan (like Milton) or an Anglican (like the king) you should be able to say anything you like–as long as you did not attack Puritanism or the Anglican Church. Catholics, on the other hand, were but the puppets of a Satanic pope, disloyal British subjects who therefore should be allowed no such rights. John Locke, another Puritan and one who greatly influenced the founders of the American republic, held similar views.

    This is all mildly interesting from an historical point of view, but presents the moralist with certain problems, such as whether Milton and Locke’s anti-Catholic views should diminish their high historic reputations as champions of the rights of man. Fortunately historians do not meddle with morality, nor do they sit in judgment of historical figures, at least not those historians who follow Henry Steele Commager, the Amherst don who preached that the duty of the historian “is not to judge but to understand.” In his essay “Should the Historian Sit in Judgment?,” Commager writes:

    …when we come to pronounce judgment on slavery, we are met at the very threshold with the most intransigent consideration: generation after generation of good, human Christian men and women not only accepted it but considered it a blessing … Clearly we cannot fall back on the simple explanation that all of these men and women …were bad … It is absurd for us to pass moral judgment on slaveholders, absurd to indict a whole people or to banish a whole people to some historical purgatory where they can expiate their sins.

    Moral considerations then should be left to ethicists and moral philosophes. But donning the robes of the moralist presents problems of its own, notably the problem of Presentism, that is judging historical figures by contemporary moral standards. The popular view is that contemporary man is morally superior to his ancestors, and given time, he will reach a state of moral perfection, or something very near. This despite the knowledge that today and for the past three thousand years the West’s Judeo-Christian moral principles have been largely set in stone beginning with Moses’ climb up Mt. Sinai.

    The charge of Presentism seldom prevents the non-historian from reconsidering the evidence and handing down his own brand of retroactive justice. Such reconsiderations have led some Native Americans, for example, to regard Columbus as a genocidal maniac akin to Hitler. Some African-Americans regard Washington and Jefferson as greedy Neolithic slavemasters. But mostly Native and African Americans object to the continuing deification of men they regard as cretins and villains. Time does not necessarily heal historical wounds, and around the globe peoples and races continue to maintain hostilities going back hundreds, even thousands of years, regardless to what extent moral standards and notions of right and wrong have changed or “evolved.”

    When we read of some great intellectual humanist posthumously accused of anti-Semitism we are surprised and shocked–surprised because no matter how distant their era we know these men to have been mainly of sound mind and principles. Indeed many of these accusations by contemporary biographers seem rather weak and are often based on little more than a single dubious public statement such as Erasmus’, “If it is Christian to hate Jews, then we are all good Christians.” Interestingly many of these Reformation-era intellectuals accused of anti-Semitism turn out to belong to the group of Northern Humanists closely linked with the Catholic Church (the bible translator Erasmus, and the saintly Sir Thomas More), or those who considered themselves holier than the Roman Church (Luther and Calvin).

    Though I use the acid test of anti-Semitism to examine their moral bona fides, I might just as well ask whether these men were particularly superstitious, if they, like Luther and Calvin, condoned burning witches and heretics, if they considered Africans to be nothing more than potential property and held women scarcely a step above indentured servants. It is something of a relief then to find that most of the pre-eminent intellectual thinkers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (a time of fierce anti-Semitic violence and expulsions) were not anti-Semitic, nor did most advocate burning heretics and witches. Among those artists and intellectuals who seem to have had little or nothing hateful to say publicly against Jews, Protestants, Catholics or women one finds Abelard, Bacon, Cervantes, Copernicus, Dante, Da Vinci, Descartes, Galileo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Newton, Petrarch, Rabelais and Shakespeare, to cite but a few examples. There are exceptions. Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta often gets tagged as anti-Semitic because, even though it is peopled with unpleasant characters, the Jew Barabas is the most unpleasant of all. Chaucer likewise is written off as anti-Semitic because of a story included in his Canterbury Tales. “The Prioress’ Tale” tells the story of a Christian boy killed by ghetto Jews (Jews had been expelled from England some 100 years before Chaucer’s writing). It was an old anti-Semitic tale by then, but whether the anti-Semite is Chaucer or the Prioress-Narrator is still a matter of debate. Some scholars suspect Chaucer was satirizing the anti-Semitism of ignorant peasants and church leaders. To me it seems unlikely that a satirist and social critic as brilliant as Chaucer would have meant a poem as loathsome, melodramatic, and ham-fisted as “The Prioress Tale” as anything but a satire of Christian hypocrisy and the Blood Libel, and the fact that most of the other tales satirize some smug, self-righteous group or other only bolsters that opinion.

    We know that many Greek and Roman intellectuals (Seneca, Juvenile, Horace) were critical of Jews, largely due to the latters’ refusal to convert and worship the Greek or Roman gods, and this in turn led to periodic persecutions and subsequent revolts, and the occasional accusation of ritual murder. During the Reformation these remained among the reasons Christians persecuted Jews, the major change being the appearance on the scene of Christian rather than pagan persecutors. Imagine then some Middle Age moralist, say a Dante, suggesting that the Classical Romans and Greeks were not anti-Semitic because they were a primitive people who lacked the progressive values of the Medieval Dutch peasant.

    Conservatives love to accuse others of Presentism, but are they any less guilty each time they praise a Copernicus, Edison, Bell, Newton, or Magellan? When lauding Luther, contemporary Lutherans do not put themselves in the role of a 16th century German peasant and conclude that Luther was a brave and brilliant man. Rather they view him from our own modern perspective where Brother Martin remains brilliant and brave. Then, without detecting a note of hypocrisy, they ignore or dismiss Luther’s sins as quite common and normal for the moral standards of his time and place. But as author Ibn Warraq says of Mohammed and other early Muslim leaders, “if we cannot condemn [their] faults according to contemporary standards, then neither can we hold them up as the wise and tolerant lawgivers whom contemporary moderates praise.”

    In order to really comprehend the hypocrisy of Presentism’s critics, one must put one’s self in the boots of the same Medieval Jew so mercilessly victimized by Luther and the Catholic Church. Perhaps Luther honestly did not think persecuting Jews was evil (though in his earlier writings–before he despaired of converting Jews–he preached religious tolerance), but the persecuted Jew knew it well enough. Many theologians and conservative historians maintain that it is quite possible that Luther, et. al., could be blissfully ignorant of the evil of anti-Semitism, but is not this the equivalent of excusing Nazi soldiers for massacring Jewish civilians since the soldiers truly believed it was fine to kill untermenschen? If anything Luther is more to blame because he was the equivalent not of some Bavarian foot soldier, but of a Goebbels or Himmler. Presentism, it seems to me, is simply a convenient way of letting Luther, Jefferson, Washington and their ilk off the hook for crimes against humanity. I doubt you will find one intellectual who will honor as heroes the settlers who gave American Indians blankets tainted with small pox. But are not these intellectuals guilty of Presentism, for at the time were not tainted blankets just another legitimate weapon to be utilized in the Indian Wars?

    The reputations of Luther, Calvin, Jefferson, Washington, (though not Columbus), have survived the evils they committed. Perhaps rightly so, for it may be argued that the good they did outweighed the bad. (On the other hand, some scholars have noted that the fact that Washington and Jefferson owned slaves gave a legitimacy to Southern slaveownership that allowed the practice to continue through the Civil War.) More, many of the writings and teachings of these men continue to influence the actions of our contemporaries. Luther’s anti-Semitic writings were used in our own lifetime as highly effective Nazi propaganda, including his “Last Sermon” containing the infamous “Warning against the Jews” used by the Nazi Bishop Martin Sasse as a means of stirring racial hatred and inciting good Lutherans to persecute Jews. One may excuse Luther and blame the Nazi propagandists, but one cannot escape the fact that the Nazi propagandists were inspired by Luther’s vitriol and bile, or that in the days following Kristallnacht German newspapers published statements by Lutheran theologians who announced they were pleased that the persecution began on Martin Luther’s birthday.

    The danger comes when we use the charge of Presentism to excuse these sins. Next time some know-it-all comes at you with the charge of Presentism, why not ask him or her why if the slave knew slavery was wrong, the slaveowner didn’t? Why if the Jew knew anti-Semitism was wrong didn’t the Christian? If the heretic being roasted at the stake knew he was innocent, why didn’t the Inquisitors?

    Much of the opposition to Presentism seems to rest heavily on the contention that contemporary man is far more morally advanced than was, say, Renaissance man, though there seems scant evidence to support this. Today Jew-hatred remains curiously strong in Eastern Europe, even though few Jews survive there. (On a recent trip to Poland I noted a disturbingly vast amount of graffiti reading “Jews to the gas” and “Jews out, Poland for Poles” even though there are but a handful of Jews remaining in the country.) Americans and West Europeans seem as divided as ever over race. Whites still flee areas the moment blacks move in, while sending their children to majority white private schools—though admittedly other factors play into this phenomenon including the prevalence of crime, drugs and the disgraceful conditions in many city public schools. Today women are largely equal to men before the law and outnumber them in universities and schools of law, but it was largely something women had to force down the throats of men like bad medicine. Gays and lesbians remain second-class citizens, and drug addicts are treated as criminals instead of the sick individuals they are.

    Perhaps the reason we relate so well to men like Jefferson and Luther is that we well understand where they are coming from. Perhaps it is not such a stretch to put ourselves into their shoes and adopt their way of thinking. Perhaps their values are not that different from ours, no matter how much we like to pretend they are. And perhaps that is why we are so eager to defend them.

  • Delicate Regard

    This is a brief but interesting interview with Richard Dawkins. (My colleague did a longer and of course much more thrilling one which is included in What Philosophers Think.) For one thing, he talks about a subject we too are interested in, as you may possibly have noticed. He answers the very odd question ‘Another of your pet peeves is Post-Modernist scholarship, and you satirize a few writers from this school in your book, A Devil’s Chaplain. Isn’t your problem with these academics simply that they are poor writers?’

    I don’t think they are poor [writers] at all. They are dominant alpha males in the academic jungle and, in some cases, are ruining the careers of honest scholars who would make an honest contribution.

    To be fair, or do I mean strictly accurate, a lot of ‘Post-modernist’ writers are very bad writers indeed – but they are not necessarily the ones Dawkins has in mind, and others are indeed good writers but crappy thinkers. All rhetoric and no thought. You can find traces of such ‘scholarship’ in various corners of B&W.

    But even more, I like his reply to a question about his ‘polemic voice’ –

    I do it because I feel strongly about things … especially about double standards, hypocrisy, failure to think clearly…I am very hostile to religion because it is enormously dominant, especially in American life. And I don’t buy the argument that, well, it’s harmless. I think it is harmful, partly because I care passionately about what’s true.

    Well, same here. No doubt that’s one reason Dawkins is one of my favourite writers. The double standards problem is one we’ve been noticing a lot lately. I was a bit shocked to find a glaring example of double standards – of explicit, declared double standards, which is to say a declaration of ‘special’ status, of need for special protection, on the part of religion – in Martha Nussbaum’s new book (Hiding from Humanity). I shouldn’t have been shocked, because I’ve read such an argument from her before, in her reply to Susan Moller Okin’s ‘Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?’ – and I think I did a N&C on my shock at the time. But I was shocked anyway, even though I shouldn’t have been. Nussbaum admires John Stuart Mill, and bases much of her argument in this book on On Liberty – but she also takes him to task for not being ‘respectful’ enough of citizens’ comprehensive doctrines:

    But to claim that freedom of speech promotes truth in metaphysics and morals would be to show disrespect for the idea of reasonable pluralism, and to venture onto a terrain where one is at high risk of showing disrespect to one’s fellow citizens. Mill is totally oblivious to all such considerations. He has none of the delicate regard for other people’s religious doctrines that characterizes the political liberal…In On Liberty he does not hesitate to speak contemptuously of Calvinism as an ‘insidious’ doctrine…One may sympathize…without feeling that he understands the type of mutual respect that is required in a pluralistic society. I agree with Rawls: such respect requires (in the public sphere at least) not showing up the claims of religion as damaging, and not adopting a public conception of truth and objectivity according to which such claims are false.

    I hate to say it, because I admire much in Nussbaum, but I find that idea truly staggering. I did read and re-read, and go back and forth between the various places where she discusses all this, to try to clarify whether she is talking about laws and the state, or about writing and public discourse. Some of the time she is talking about the former, but not all of it. She really is – as far as I can tell – saying that Mill should not have written what he did about Calvinism, and that no one should say such things ‘in the public sphere at least.’ That ‘such respect requires (in the public sphere at least) not showing up the claims of religion as damaging, and not adopting a public conception of truth and objectivity according to which such claims are false.’ So people ought (in order to be decently respectful) to ‘adopt’ a public conception of truth that will not contradict religious claims. People ought to choose their ‘conceptions’ of truth on the basis of whether they are respectful enough of the sensitivities of other people as opposed to – well, you know, whether they in fact think they get at the truth or not. That’s a pretty good description of just exactly what B&W was set up to oppose: deciding what is true on the basis of extraneous factors like ideology or whose feelings might be hurt, rather than on the basis of one’s best understanding of the evidence and logic of the matter.

    So in short that is a very forthright statement of exactly the idea I’ve been puzzling over for a few months now: the idea that religion ought to have some sort of special, protected status that no other kind of human thinking gets to have. But what it doesn’t do is say why. Why religion should be immune from challenge when socialism and capitalism, for example, are not. Why religion should not simply accept public discussion and disagreement and argument on the same terms as any other set of human ideas. For the sake of ‘respect,’ yes, she does say that, but she doesn’t explain why that should apply to some kinds of ideas and not others. Because religion is consoling? But so are other ideas and beliefs that are not protected, so that’s not it.

    But for my part, I have to agree with Dawkins. I don’t think double standards and ‘special’ protection and delicate regard and ‘not showing up the claims of religion as damaging’ (especially not that!) are a good idea at all.

  • David Herman on The List

    ‘Youth culture is another striking absence.’ What’s striking about it?

  • Historians and Scientists on List of Intellectuals

    And this is surprising because?

  • Interview with Richard Dawkins

    ‘I feel strongly about things – especially about double standards, hypocrisy, failure to think clearly.’

  • 48 Nobel Laureates Endorse Bush Opponent

    Unusual step for Nobel winners indicates disquiet at Bush policies on science.

  • Trio

    A few items related to religious-nonsense item I commented on yesterday. Richard Chappell quotes from another amusingly (or irritatingly, depending on what sort of mood you’re in and how many people there are on how many construction sites in your immediate vicinity and earshot running power saws, jackhammers, cement mixers, anonymous grinders and roarers and screamer-mechanisms – I myself have three such sites and who knows how many people and deafening pieces of equipment, so I’m not sure I’m entirely sane today) bit of religious confusion on his blog:

    A lot of New Zealanders, I think, are very nervous of the word ‘religion’ because they think it’s indoctrination, but the danger is if you miss that whole dimension of intellectual debate out, you deprive young people of the opportunity to engage with some of these really important issues, such as genetics, or the war in Iraq.

    Eh? One can’t talk about the war in Iraq or genetics – genetics?! – except under the auspices of religion? Really! That will come as a suprise to a lot of people – geneticists, for example. Apparently the danger is if you miss that whole dimension of learning to think clearly out, then you confuse religion with intellectual debate and intellectual debate with religion, and the next thing you know you’ve turned into a sheep and are being chased by a lot of horrible slavering men in running shorts.

    And Pulp Movies has a comment on the same Mary Kenny piece.

    So there you go. Religion good. Secular bad. No thinking. No understanding of the range and subtlety of moral choices. Just a simple black/white dichotomy. Mary Kenny seems to be frighteningly unable to recognise that any values other than her own have any worth whatsoever.

    It’s good to find allies, and it may be that if enough people squawk about this kind of thing – this blithe assumption that you can’t have morality or moral thinking without religion – people will eventually become just a little more aware of how absurd it is, and even stop saying and thinking it and start saying and thinking more sensible things instead. Or maybe not, but it’s something to shoot for anyway.

    And there’s an entertaining item at Pharyngula that indicates religion may not be so good for ‘family values’ after all. Personally I don’t care much, because I’m not keen on family values to begin with, but since the religious side often likes to claim a monopoly on the things, it’s fun to see the claim gainsaid. And no one can dispute PZ’s final point:

    The actual numbers unfortunately show that there is a bit more to marriage than just godlessness, though—I guess atheism is no panacea. All it does is give a substantial boost to one’s charm, wit, intelligence, health, and beauty.

  • Europe Tackles ‘Honour’ Killings

    European police officials meeting to find ways to combat rising incidence.

  • Pakistan to Treat ‘Honour’ Killings as Murder

    Government taking practical steps to end custom of murder and other crimes against women.

  • ‘Honour’ Killings to be Reviewed

    UK police re-examining more than 100 cases going back ten years.

  • 13 Greenpeacers Arrested in GM Protest

    Campaigners held after they prevent GM maize-carrying freighter from docking.

  • ‘Iced’ Tea and Potatoe’s

    Misplaced commas, punctuation as technology, the mystery of voice in writing.

  • Kabbalah Madonna

    A kind reader, by which I mean Norm Geras, emailed me to point out this absurd piece by Mary Kenny in the Guardian. Norm has already made some pointed comments about it, so I’ll try not to go over the same bit of ground. But there’s really quite a lot to say, because there’s quite a lot wrong with the piece (and the pervasive way of thinking it typifies), so I think I’ll manage to find a few words.

    But first I’ll point out one of Norm’s most amusing remarks, in reply to Kenny’s utterly ridiculous ‘Faith is a feminine thing.’

    I have some questions here. First, how does Kenny know that faith is feminine? She doesn’t say. But I can think of a few counter-examples: the Pope, Desmond Tutu and a Jehovah’s Witness I once made the mistake of inviting through my front door for a chat. I’m compiling a more comprehensive list but won’t be able to post it till… I’ll have to get back to you on that.

    Yeah, it does take some brain-cudgelling, doesn’t it. Hmm, hmm, let’s see, male-type people in the religion game. The Pope? Oh, Norm already said that. Umm – gosh this is hard – oh, how about the Archbishop of Canterbury? Yes, that’s one. Err – that guy on Oxford Street with the ‘End is Nigh’ sign? Is he still there?

    So anyway. More seriously.

    They want to give their children values. And they quite often feel a stirring of these transcendent values themselves, at about the same time…If you don’t believe me, look at the evidence, and visit a church, chapel or synagogue on a day of worship: you will find that at least two-thirds of the worshippers present are women, and 90% of these are mothers.

    How the hell does she know what percentage of the women she sees in various random (note indirect article: a church, not my church, or St. Boniface-on-the-Green’s church, but any old church) religious gathering places, are mothers? Eh? Do they wear badges? Are they marked in some way? Or is she just extrapolating from statistics on what percentage of women are mothers. But that’s not safe – in fact it’s question-begging. For all she knows all the women in those religious gathering places are not mothers, and have come in either to rejoice at their freedom or to pray for conception. She doesn’t get to assume that 90% of any given gathering of women consists of mothers and then tell us ‘See? Look at all the mothers!’

    But of course I also wanted to quote the stark nonsense about ‘transcendent values’ even though Norm already has. Note the quick assumption that values are ‘transcendent’ values, and also that church or synagogue attendance has some obvious connection with wanting to give children ‘values.’ And then yawn violently and think about something else.

    Then there’s this absurdity:

    It is a fairly well-kept secret that feminism originally arose among religious women in the 19th century: from Hannah More and Josephine Butler in Britain to Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the US, feminism was an offshoot of evangelical Christianity, and that spiritual energy still hovers.

    How could it possibly be a secret? Were there a great many atheists in the 19th century? Especially among women? (No, I’m not making Kenny’s point for her. The rarity of atheism among women in the 19th [as well as earlier] centuries is a contingent historical fact, not nonsense about the inherent ‘spirituality’ of women.) Of course feminism arose among (mostly) religious women in the 19th century – what other kind of women would it arise among? All those emancipated intellectual women living in their own book-lined flats in London and New York? News flash – there weren’t a lot of women like that in the 19th century. Naturally most 19th century feminist women were religious. It doesn’t follow that they have to go on being now.

    For many women, perhaps even most women, some form of religious sensibility is what gets them through the night, and helps them lead the examined life, too.

    Possibly. And possibly the same is true of many, perhaps even most men, too. So what? People can always learn to lead the examined life in a secular manner, after all. People change – even women do.

  • Forget Math or History, Can You Kick a Ball?

    Athletic programs can subvert the integrity of their universities.