Author: Ophelia Benson

Religious believers can be weird. Very, very weird. I know it’s not considered polite to say that – and that’s why I tend to avoid them rather than engage them in dialogue. Precisely because there is so much that it is not considered polite to say about religious believers, that yet becomes so glaringly obvious when one does try to engage them in dialogue. It’s kind of a You can’t win situation. You simply can’t say certain things, and yet the things you can’t say are at the center of the whole discussion – so the discussion is lamed and hobbled and disabled before it ever starts. It’s a stalemate. So the familiar and much-repeated idea that discussion on this subject is possible and desirable (and even useful and productive) seems to me to be absurd. And every time the subject comes up, fresh confirmation is offered. Religious believers like to say ‘You can say anything you like! Of course you can! Do you think we’ve never heard anyone say “There is no God” before? How naive! Go on, say whatever you like!’ So you do (if you’re very stupid and credulous, at least) – and you are immediately greeted with yells of rage, with blatant misinterpretations of what you say, and with aspersions on your capacity for moral reflection. Oh. So when you say ‘You can say anything you like!’ you mean I can say anything I like provided I don’t mind having what I say translated into something else and being called immoral. Oh, okay, that sounds good.

I suppose ‘You can say’ in that context means ‘You are physically able to say’ as opposed to ‘You can without risk of having to deal with frothing intemperate dishonest reactions say.’ Okay. But that’s not what I mean by ‘You can say.’ However, I have learned through years of irritating experience that that is often what other people mean by it, so I don’t always take it at face value. Thus I choose to avoid discussions of religion with religious believers – when I can. It’s not always possible, because sometimes they pursue me back to my secular lair, and insist on having their productive dialogue anyway. This can be a trifle dispiriting. One wants to ask them to go away, but one doesn’t like to be quite that rude – so one sighs heavily and attempts to answer – and is immediately greeted with yells of rage and blatant misinterpretations of what one says. One really can’t win. One can make firm resolutions not to get drawn into such discussions to begin with, of course, but that doesn’t always work either – because one doesn’t always know in advance that they are going to happen. It’s not as if every time an invitation arrives in the mail, there is a notice at the bottom – ‘Warning: There will be one or more religious believers present who will insist on talking about God and prayer and higher authority, whether you like it or not.’ If invitations were always so equipped, one would know what to do, but they’re not.

It’s unfortunate that they’re not, though, because one result is that once such a discussion does start, and the skeptics remember an urgent appointment elsewhere and try to sidle away – what do you suppose happens? They are accused of censorship, that’s what. They are accused of not knowing how to tolerate freedom of speech and thought, of wanting to ban religion. That’s quite a leap – a leap of faith, one might say. A similar leap, and one even more popular with religious believers, is to equate non-adherence to their belief in a deity with absolute, unequivocal, irrevocable, undiluted, without doubt certitude, and then to marvel at such a degree of certitude. One religious believer I’ve encountered here and there accused me of exactly that just today. But of course that’s stark nonsense – I don’t have that kind of certitude about anything – I don’t even have one of those adjective’s worth of certitude. It doesn’t require certitude simply to decline to believe in something. And, of course, believers often display a fair amount of certitude themselves, which is exactly what makes discussions with them so unproductive – the secularists and atheists tend to hedge their assertions while the believers say what they know. As with this remark, which came from the very same believer who attributed all that certitude to me – ‘It’s about understanding that divine authority stands in judgment on all human agency.’

So. That’s what I said – religious believers can be very weird.

So perhaps it does matter after all, what the truth is, who is telling the truth and who is lying, who has it right and who is deceived, what pictures are authentic and what are fake. Is that possible? It looks that way. It looks as if in fact we do care whether on the one hand soldiers of a certain regiment did abuse Iraqi prisoners, or whether on the other hand someone faked up some pictures that purported to show that but in fact (being faked) did not, and gave said pictures to a large newspaper. You can see where it would make a difference. We can all think of other pictures that matter – pictures that we would be shocked, outraged, disoriented to discover had been faked. Pictures of famine victims, massacres, mass graves, rivers full of bodies; pictures from wars, genocides, prisons, crime scenes, riots. Pictures of perpetrators and victims, just as in the Daily Mirror pictures. We don’t want to be deceived about such pictures. We don’t want to get outraged and demand that something be done about a war crime or a violation of the Geneva Convention or an act of stupid brutality, if it didn’t happen. Do we. No. Nor do we want to fail to get outraged and demand something be done if war crimes or acts of brutality did happen and we are deceived about that. We don’t want a tour of Theresienstadt or a Potemkin village, thank you. We don’t want either one of those. We want the truth.

We don’t want a situated truth or a perspectival truth. We don’t want a community’s truth. We don’t want US truth and UK truth and Iraqi truth. We don’t want my truth and your truth and their truth. We want the truth, period. We don’t want the truth the army is happy with, and the one the government is happy with, and the one the newspapers are happy with, and the one the prisoners of war are happy with, and the one the voters are happy with. Do we? I don’t think so. I think we want just the one. The single, general, universal, global, true-for-everyone truth about what did happen and what did not. That truth may or may not be available; that’s a separate issue. But we don’t look placidly at faked pictures and say ‘Well that was true for the people who made the pictures, no doubt, so that’s good enough.’ We don’t conclude that the pictures made something to talk about for a few days and that’s good enough. Sometimes playful irony about the truth just doesn’t butter any parsnips.

A reader raises some interesting objections, in Letters and then at my suggestion in a comment, on our Freud-skepticism.

For example, there may be an alternative explanation for Jedlika’s finding that children of mixed race couples are more likely to marry someone of the same race as the opposite sex parent, but it is prima facie evidence for oedipal feelings that cannot be ignored.

I haven’t read the study in question – but just to deal with what is said in that sentence, I have to say I am not convinced. I am in fact quite skeptical. It seems to me that it is not at all obvious that oedipal feelings are the only possible explanation for why children of mixed race couples would tend to marry someone of the same race as the opposite sex parent. Other explanations leap to mind – for instance the idea that marriageable people in general are of the same race as the opposite sex parent. Of course one can by fiat simply equate notions of what makes people ‘marriageable’ with oedipal feelings, but again, that’s not the only possible conclusion. And in any case, the basic disagreement with Freud’s Oedipus complex is not mostly to do with sexual feelings for the opposite sex parent, but with such feelings in infancy. It’s the infancy part that Freud was adamant about, and that many colleagues disagreed with him about. Freud wasn’t just saying that everyone has sex on the brain, he was saying that everyone has sex on the brain starting with infancy. Would Jedlika’s findings as described above seem to corroborate the Oedipus complex in infancy? I don’t see why they would.

I googled Fisher and Greenberg, and found a review by Richard Webster. Not a fan of Freud’s, of course – but let’s see what he says all the same.

Once again, they have failed to recognise that Freud was at least right about one thing: that psychoanalytic theories, being based on the psychoanalyst’s unique access to the hidden realm of the unconscious, are not susceptible to empirical investigation.

And they are both clinical psychologists themselves, so the same problem arises in their own line of work. Clinical psychologists have an as it were vocational skepticism about the value of empirical investigation.

In an effort to discover whether Freud’s penis=baby equation was correct, and whether it is indeed true that some women have babies to supply themselves with the penises that they lack, Fisher and Greenberg tell us that they ‘reasoned that if pregnancy is somehow a penis equivalent for women, they should have increased unconscious phallic sensations or feelings at that time’. Omitting to consider the equally plausible Freudian hypothesis that pregnancy, by supplying a ‘real’ phallic substitute, might lead to a decrease in phallic fantasising, our intrepid researchers go on to devise a ‘phallic scoring system’ based on a count of responses to the Holtzman Inkblot Test involving ‘projections, protrusions and elongations’ that Freud would have deemed phallic. Having administered this remarkable test to a group of presumably puzzled pregnant women, they concluded that (though no data are given) ‘the findings were nicely congruent with the hypothesis’. No doubt they were also nicely congruent with all manner of other hypotheses that Fisher and Greenberg, intent on looking at the world through Freudian spectacles, never paused to formulate.

Well…you see what I mean. If that’s Fisher and Greenberg’s idea of an empirical investigation, then – I remain unconvinced.

Art, shmart. Oh dear, I’ve gone all philistine – but people do talk such nonsense about ‘art’ sometimes. Here’s some nonsense on stilts – a lecture by Helen Vendler.

I want to propose that the humanities should take, as their central objects of study, not the texts of historians or philosophers, but the products of aesthetic endeavor: architecture, art, dance, music, literature, theater, and so on. After all, it is by their arts that cultures are principally remembered. For every person who has read a Platonic dialogue, there are probably ten who have seen a Greek marble in a museum, or if not a Greek marble, at least a Roman copy, or if not a Roman copy, at least a photograph.

And – ? Because ten people have seen a photograph of a Greek marble for every one who has read some Plato, therefore the humanities should center on art rather than philosophy or history? Er – why? The reductio is certainly all too obvious. By the same token, for every person who has read a Shakespeare sonnet, a thousand (ten thousand? a hundred thousand?) have watched ‘Survivor’. So what?

But it gets worse – it gets into territory that always sets my teeth on edge.

The arts bring into play historical and philosophical questions without implying the prevalence of a single system or of universal solutions. Artworks embody the individuality that fades into insignificance in the massive canvas of history and is suppressed in philosophy by the desire for impersonal assertion. The arts are true to the way we are and were, to the way we actually live and have lived–as singular persons swept by drives and affections, not as collective entities or sociological paradigms.

Oh, bollocks. That only makes even a little sense if you substitute the word ‘novel’ for ‘the arts’ in that passage, and even then it doesn’t make much sense. There are plenty of novels that don’t do any such thing, and most of the rest of ‘the arts’ don’t either. It’s all just sentimental bilge.

There’s a lot of sentimental bilge about ‘art’ and ‘the arts’ out there. I probably used to believe a little of it myself – at least about literature, if not about all the arts. I don’t any more. I gave it up. For one thing I’ve read or started too many vacuous pretentious ‘literary’ novels, and I’ve talked to too many people who think all ‘serious’ novelists, no matter how ignorant and unthinking, are ‘creative’ and somehow important and significant in a way that no writer of ‘non-fiction’ can possibly be. Oh I see – so one kind of writer knows a lot and writes about it well, and the other kind just writes well, and the second one is better? Hmm.

Brian Leiter quotes from an anonymous (to us) poet who puts it this way:

As to poets giving insight into life (or whatever the words are), I have been struck time and again at how plain dumb sentimental religious (‘spiritual’) so many well-regarded poets are. Do they understand life, humanity? Through a glass barely. People like Vendler live in a political vacuum and worship purity and refinement of sensibility which is fine if joined with social responsibility and authentic concern for the victims of injustice.

Just so. I’ve talked to a good many plain dumb novelists, too. I don’t think they suddenly become less dumb just because they write stories, and I don’t believe they have more insight or wisdom or ability to be ‘true to the way we are and were, to the way we actually live and have lived’ than philosophers or historians, or psychologists or sociologists, either.

This is relevant to what we’ve been talking about lately because of the ‘Freud was a novelist’ line of defense. Of course the main problem with that is that he wasn’t, that he was in a completely different kind of work, and that calling him a novelist is basically just a face-saving ploy. But even apart from that, I think there is a further problem in the sentimentality about novels and novelists in that defense which is related to the sentimentality about Freud himself. There is some underlying idea about the power and insight of novelists-and-Freud – about profundity and depth and complexity that are considered unique to fiction-writers. I don’t buy it. I like and admire really brilliant novelists as much as anyone, but I don’t think they’re magic. I don’t think they necessarily do tell us more than really brilliant writers and thinkers in other fields do. And in fact I think it’s a form of anti-intellectualism to claim that they do. So I may be a philistine but I’m not an anti-intellectual.