Author: Ophelia Benson

I’m just going to ignore it. That’s okay isn’t it? Just pretend it’s not there. Or at least that I don’t particularly have to talk about it. I mean, what is there to say, and everybody else is already saying it anyway. I don’t have to chime in. (It’s not even just the politics. It’s more basic. It’s the thing about minimal competence. It’s like having a choice between a grown-up and a not very bright child to do a difficult job – designing a bridge, doing research into a new killer virus, figuring out how to get cookies right-side-up on a plate, that kind of thing – and choosing the child.) I don’t have to chime in so I’m not going to. I’m just going to bracket the whole damn thing for as long as it takes – the rest of my life, probably, and everyone else’s too. The gerrymandering thing makes it look as if the bastards are going to be there forever, busily drawing Congressional districts that look like pretzels or corkscrews or the finest old Brussels lace or a game of spillikins so that there will always always always be a Republican majority until Ozymandias returns from the dead and asks what –

Sorry, sorry, I said I was going to ignore it. And I am.

Actually Ozymandias is a good way to make the transition from what I don’t want to talk about to what I do. I didn’t mention him on purpose, he just came into my head, I suppose because I was thinking about eternity and forever-and-ever and metaphors and phrases for same – so there was Oz, sitting there smirking at me. ‘You wantcher metaphor for eternity? I’m yer man.’ So I grabbed him and stuck him into the sentence. I didn’t plot or plan it (that’s what I mean about ‘on purpose’ – not that it was an accident, but that there was no forethought involved), I didn’t form a deep design to mention a name that will be less familiar to some people than Lisa Simpson or Posh and Becks in order to make myself feel clever and grand and learned. I didn’t. But there are people who might suspect that I did. Or who might even firmly believe I did, and say so, and laugh uproariously and tease and mock and demand how many people I think will have the faintest idea who Ozymandias is. People who [voice rising like Tweedledee’s when he was so fussed about his nice new rattle] themselves refer often to names and concepts that I know nothing whatever about, but do I take it for granted they’re showing off and being pretentious and playing one-upmanship? Do I? Hah? Do I not rather simply think that I don’t know much and ought to know more and ought to do better and ought to fill in some of these gaps? Do I call them

elitist?

No, I don’t, but they call me it, and when I flap my arms around like a heron and say I’m not I’m not, they draw diagrams that they claim show that I am. Hmph. What could be more elitist than that? I can’t draw diagrams that show people are what they say they aren’t, so therefore someone who can when I can’t must be an elitist. Obviously. Since that’s the definition in play.

Except actually it’s not, it’s a highly selective version of that definition that’s in play. It goes like this [I would draw a diagram if I could, but I can’t]: Anything that X mentions that might not be common knowledge is a symptom of elitism and anything that I mention that might not be common knowledge is a symptom of the fact that I know some things that are not common knowledge but I do it in an anti-elitist way. That has to be the case, a priori, because I’m anti-elitist and X is elitist, by nature. X has an elitist personality and I have an anti-elitist personality; these things are hard-wired.

I’m being slightly outrageous here, but only slightly, because that is pretty much how the argument goes. It’s a slightly outrageous argument, it seems to me (not to say waspish), so it seems only fair for me to be slightly outrageous too.

Anyway elitism and charges of elitism and resistance to perceived elitism are all subjects that interest me a lot and also that seem relevant to much of fashionable nonsense. Therefore I think the whole subject is worth exploring, and I intend to – I intended to make a start right here, but I got sidetracked into some mocking and teasing first and now this N&C is more than long enough and I have to run off, so this will have to do for the moment. Actually it’s not a bad way to start, despite the peculiar tone, because it does bring up some of the issues involved. What does make one kind of subject matter ‘elitist’ when another that is at least equally obscure or little-known or erudite is not? What makes one word (‘quotidian,’ say) elitist when others (teleology, contingency, sentient, omniscience, say) are not? That’s a real question. I have a feeling I know the answer (that nothing does, because they’re not different), but I could be wrong, and maybe you have some thoughts. If so, enlighten us – go on, it will take your mind off the vegetation in the White House.

Yo, I’m back! Out of the outhouse, into the inhouse, back at the desk, back to work. I’ve left the bright lights and whirling crowds of Bedford Square for the quiet backwater of Seattle. I came in, dropped all my cases and bags and excess sweatshirts in the middle of the living room, grabbed a water bottle, and rushed out to vote. Saw a friend on the way in; did not have to stand in line; saw another friend on the way out. You see what a quiet backwater it is. That wouldn’t happen in Bedford Square.

Ohio. Pennsylvania. Michigan. Florida. Well, we’ll see. I don’t dare let myself think about how I long to be rid of Bush.

More tomorrow. I’ve been awake for more hours than you would believe, so there’s no sense trying to say more now. Especially since my eyes seem to be trying to secede from the rest of my head.

Okay, so I have to post something so that November isn’t just a blank page (yes, I should have been cleverer when I programmed this thing). But unfortunately I have so little going on in my head that I’m really struggling here…

I did have a thought – a couple of weeks ago now, whilst running over a golf course – about Michael Ruse. In his book, The Evolution Wars, he claims:

I am arguing what history has shown: there is really no reason why a Christian should not be a Darwinian, and there is really no reason why a Darwinian should not be a Christian.

At first thought, this doesn’t seem an unreasonable claim. But it does raise a number of interesting issues.

1. If you’re a Christian, have you got to think there’s a kind of teleology in evolution? Were things set-up so that humans were necessarily going to evolve?
2. But that’s a bit problematic. Maybe something like humans had to evolve, but it does seem that there is contingency in the precise form that humans take (well certainly someone like Gould would think so; and when I asked Ed Wilson whether he’d expect us to emerge again if evolution were re-run, he said he wouldn’t).
3. However, if one thinks about this even vaguely closely, there are some possible responses that a Christian could offer.(a) Maybe what appears contingent to us, isn’t contingent at all. I can buy that, but it leads to further puzzles: why, for example, would God have set things up so that the emergence of the human species reeks of contingency? That’s bizarre. (b) Or maybe it didn’t matter too much to God exactly what form human beings took; it’s enough that we’re sentient, have a moral sense, etc. Not sure about this one either. If nothing is contingent to God, then she can’t but help know how evolution was going to end up (given omniscience). So she would know exactly what form humans were going to take from the beginning (to the extent that ‘from the beginning’ makes sense when talking about God).
4. And then there’s a further thought here that maybe this whole puzzle is just a version of the old Calvinist, predestination thing. Perhaps what’s key here is that God is atemporal; that there is genuine randomness in the way that evolution unfolds (maybe it’s allowed by the laws of nature), but because God is somehow present at all stages in the unfolding, any such randomness is not an impediment to her knowing how things were going to turn out. But I’m not sure that this even gets off the ground as an argument. Would it mean that God did a number of different evolutionary experiments, and then kind of stopped when she got humans from initial conditions which had randomness built in? Or perhaps somehow she would know exactly how the randomness would turn out, so she wouldn’t need more than one? I’m not sure I can make sense of either of those possibilities.
5. And then there is the possibility the whole idea of randomness, or contingency, doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’ve never really been able to understand what it means to claim that things could have turned out other than they did. No doubt this is some limitation on my part.

I had other thoughts about all this; but I’ve bored myself outlining just these few. Anyway, OB can’t complain now that I’ve let down the side by posting nothing on November 1st. Okay, it isn’t November 1st yet, but I’m going to cheat on the timing!