Author: Ophelia Benson

Here’s the one I wanted to comment on no matter what. In a discussion of that perennially popular subject, why are there so few conservative academics. I simply wanted to point out (actually I want to frame in gold leaf, and embroider, and carve in stone, and issue in a limited edition with illuminated initials and gold binding) this comment, which pretty much sums up a lot of what B&W is about and what prompted it in the first place:

The labels ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ take on new and peculiar meanings in Academia. For instance, I believe in affirmative action, increasing taxes on the rich, socialized medicine, I am pro-legalized abortion, hold Christianity to be institutionalized ignorance, and donate to the ACLU. In all you could say I am pretty left wing. Except when I was a grad-student in Classics. Then I was called at various times a Nazi, a Fascist, compared to the French Aristocracy prior to the revolution, and labelled ‘arch-conservative’ more than once. Why? I rejected relativism, ridiculed deconstructionism, was in favor of the traditional Canon as core reading in the Humanities, had the audacity to point out the many egregious historical errors that certain Black Studies and Women’s Studies professors made (the former blatantly making stuff up about Egypt, the latter Crete). I also ‘proved’ I was a right-winger by explaining the etymology of the word ‘history’, after someone used the term ‘herstory.’ Intellectual conservatism and political conservatism are quite different things.

There it is. The day the left became associated with anti-rationalism and left rationalism to conservatives – that was one bad day.

It’s fascinating to see Stanley Fish saying something similar. I don’t know if this is a clarification or a change of views. I had thought he was a fairly Rortyish (or do I mean Rortyesque) pragmatist, but this doesn’t seem very Rortyesque:

It’s hard to see how anyone who believes (as I do) that academic work is distinctive in its aims and goals and that its distinctiveness must be protected from political pressures (either external or internal) could find anything to disagree with here. Everything follows from the statement that the pursuit of truth is a — I would say the — central purpose of the university. For the serious embrace of that purpose precludes deciding what the truth is in advance, or ruling out certain accounts of the truth before they have been given a hearing, or making evaluations of those accounts turn on the known or suspected political affiliations of those who present them.

But either way, it’s a very eloquent statement of a very important point. Where is that gold leaf…

It’s going to be one of those days when there’s more to comment on than time to comment in. ‘More offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.’ There’s a very interesting piece by Stanley Fish in the Chronicle of Higher Ed that I want to say something about; there’s a quite fascinating comment at Crooked Timber that I’m going to say something about, come what may; there’s the rest of that rumination on wishful thinking I wrote yesterday that I want to add; there are other odds and ends; and there’s also another interesting discussion at Crooked Timber which I ought to point out. It discusses the religious arguments and disagreements we’ve been discussing here lately. It made me laugh a good deal in a startled sort of way when I first clicked on CT, but then I wasn’t expecting it. Plus I’m easily amused.

One of the odds and ends I mentioned was the discussion at What Happens When You Tell a Lie. Marijo thinks the tone of my post on wishful thinking was contemptuous and trivializing, so I thought I would clarify. It wasn’t. What I said was in fact dead serious. I really do wish I could just wish away pain and death and sorrow. Of course I do! But I can’t. I’m well aware that fantasy can be highly consoling, and in many forms I think that’s perfectly harmless and indeed beneficial. How many lonely children have been comforted by their imaginary friends? Probably billions. In one way you could think of the deity as an imaginary friend. But that gets more dangerous, because the fantasy starts getting confused with reality, and that confusion is socially encouraged and even sometimes mandated. And then things can go badly wrong. But that is not at all to say that I have no use for fantasy. I spent my entire childhood in a fog of the stuff, and I’m firmly convinced that was a fine thing.

I wrote a column for TPM Online about some of these issues recently. I offer it by way of showing that contempt was not what I was expressing in that Comment below.

If wishes were horses, if pigs had wings. The world is one way, our desires are another. Hence the joy of fantasy, daydreaming, fairy tales – magic. The book I want is upstairs – how I wish it were here in my hand. The food is in the refrigerator, uncooked – how I wish it were cooked, on plates, on the table. The dishes are dirty, I wish they were clean. X, Y and Z are dead, how I wish they were alive. A and B are ill, I wish they were well. The world is full of suffering, I wish it were not. The suffering is useless, I wish it were useful. Bad things happen, I wish they didn’t.

We want to believe the universe encodes our idea of meaning. But it doesn’t. We have to content ourselves with self-created meaning – projected meaning. Invented, assumed, dreamed up. Applied, pasted on, added, painted, stage-set meaning. Upper floor meaning – pretend, make believe. Applicable only to us. Contingent, subjective, made.

And made by us. Not by a deity, not by chemical processes, but by us. Shabby shambling little primates on a smallish insignificant planet. One animal species among the millions that live and have lived on this planet – how could its notions of meaning be inscribed in the cosmos? But we so want to think they are – so we pretend that religion somehow underwrites our claims.

We don’t want our meaning to have been made, and especially not by us. We know we’re not good enough. So we assert that it’s been done by someone much grander – and yet like us – only more so. Like us only perfect – the way we would be if we were perfect. Which seems like a contradiction in terms – if we were perfect we wouldn’t be like us. Being imperfect is the very essence of being like us. It’s hard to know what we would be like, really – as soon as you start to think about it it makes no sense. What would perfect arms be like, for example. Longer? Shorter? Extendable? Retractable? Equipped with blades? Infinitely long?

That’s the great thing about religion. It doesn’t need to bother with such things (unless it’s Aquinas, but it’s common or garden religion I’m talking about here, the religion of the newspapers and The New Republic and the pundits), it just asserts, and ignores contradictions and impossibilities. That’s the whole point. It’s a mechanism for making wishes into horses. A wish-to-horse conversion device.

I’ve had one or two more thoughts about hipness – or at least fashion. The two are not identical, in fact I suppose you could argue that they’re often opposites – and yet they’re not, are they. They’re both about being Correct in some pathetically slavish way. One a majoritarian sort of way, the other in a minoritarian sort of way – but in each case, slavishly other-directed. Either one involves looking anxiously around the room all the time to check what everyone else is doing. Both involve not wanting to be dorky or geeky or nerdy or out of it; both are all about presentation of self, which has some limitations as an organizing principle for how to live and what kind of person to be.

But those weren’t the thoughts I had – those were the thoughts I had as I typed. The thoughts I had were about the fact that fashion (and possibly hipness) was a Hot Topic in 5th century Athens, too. Aristophanes’ ‘The Clouds’ for example – all about the silly fashion for philosophy and for that loony Socrates fella. In ‘Protagoras’ all the youth are just mad for the sophists. And even in ferocious Thucydides – or not even but especially – the young men all had an ‘eros’ to go to Sicily. Wanting to invade Sicily was all the fashion. And so were the terrible ways of thought that resulted from the prolonged war – the increasing brutality and cynicism and treachery.

Well, nothing surprising here. Humans influence each other. Gather them close together in cities, and they have many more opportunities to influence and be influenced by each other than they did back on the dear old Sabine farm. That’s much of what Rousseau didn’t approve of, as Scott McLemee points out, about civilization. It’s bad for people, makes them inauthentic.

But fashion can be useful too. It can draw our attention to good and useful new things, as well as bad and harmful or merely silly and pointless ones. We have to use our judgment to decide whether the things that have grabbed our attention are any good – but the initial grabbing is not always a bad thing. Sometimes a lot of people, or a small number of attentive people, can like something for good reasons.

This is an interesting opinion piece from the New York Times yesterday. There are a great many like it out there – the point it makes is of such obvious relevance at the moment.

Our current dispute over the intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq seems to be yet another illustration of this eternal principle: presidents and other decision makers usually get the intelligence they want. This doesn’t mean that intelligence reports should be ignored, but that they must be viewed with skepticism. And in my years in government service, I had the misfortune to see desire win out over skepticism too many times.

The intelligence they want, you see. The verb is important. It indicates a priority, and a distortion which follows from the priority. They want a particular intelligence, so that is what they get. It would be better if they could refrain from wanting any particular intelligence, so that they might have a better chance of getting intelligence that was not shaped by that want. So that desire would not win out over skepticism.

Those now trying to figure out what went wrong before the war in Iraq should bear in mind a simple truth: we are more likely to “know” what we want to know than what we don’t want to know. That human flaw is built into the very process of making intelligence estimates.

Yes. And into almost every other human thought process one can think of. It’s so very difficult to avoid. It’s so very pervasive, and natural, and knitted into the fabric of our mental operations, that most of the time we don’t even know we’re doing it. It just feels like the only possible way to think. I’m looking for X, so naturally, I’ll see and notice and remember the evidence for X, and since I’m not looking for Y, I’m not going to bother seeing and noticing and remembering the evidence for Y, am I. Why would I? That’s not what I’m doing right now.

And when we’re looking for our keys so don’t bother to notice all the other things we see in the process of looking, that’s not a big problem. But when we’re looking for WMD, or justice or equality or improved agriculture or a murderer, or a deity, things are not so simple. The first step is to be aware of the problem and how huge and pervasive it is; otherwise there is no hope of correcting it.

I see that Scott McLemee has a link to B&W on his site – on account of how I had links to his site. It’s like ping-pong. No but really, I feel like mentioning it because he mentions the hipness thing.

We share a distaste for that “hipness unto death” which has become such a nuisance of urban life. Maybe it always was? I don’t know. On reflection, it does seem that Rousseau was complaining about it, quite a while back.

Yeah. And Elizabethan satirists, too, come to think of it. Ben Jonson had great fun with the subject in ‘Every Man in his Humour’ and Ditto Out of his Humour. He was really interested in fashion, and wickedly funny about it. His friend (and slightly resented rival) Shakespeare was not as interested as he was (to judge by his chosen subject matter at least) but he was interested. Hamlet has some pointed things to say about the fashion for child actors at the Blackfriars Theatre (not surprisingly – they were the competition). ‘There is Sir an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapp’d for ‘t. These are now the fashion, and so berattle the common stages – so they call them – that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills and dare scarce come thither.’ Sounds very hip, doesn’t it? A little kinky? And there’s a fair bit about fashion in the Sonnets, too, especially the dread of more fashionable – hipper – new poets displacing him in the affections of Lovely Boy. And Juvenal had some dyspeptic things to say about fashion and hipness, if I remember correctly – well he must have, it’s such a Juvenal kind of thing, hipness.

It’s not a completely unserious point though. Even apart from the sheer irritatingness of the lust for being hip, there is a real epistemological issue underneath. It’s too obvious to bother saying, of course, and yet it doesn’t seem to be universally understood: hipness is not a good criterion for what’s true. But there are people whose writing would lead one to swear that they think it is. ‘Naive and old-fashioned’ is a phrase that’s used a lot to discredit opponents – a phrase that always makes me feel as if someone has emptied a jar of ants down the back of my shirt. Itchy.

Section 3 of Allen Orr’s review of Richard Dawkins’ A Devil’s Chaplain reminded me of a review of the same book by Michael Ruse. I commented on Ruse’s review last month. Section 3 of Orr’s review deals with Dawkins’ criticisms of religion, and what Orr thinks is wrong with them.

You might argue that what conflicts did occur between science and religion were due to misunderstandings of one or the other. Indeed you might argue that Dawkins’s belief that science and religion can conflict reflects a misconstrual of the nature of religious belief: while scientific beliefs are propositions about the state of the world, religious beliefs are something else—an attempt to attach meaning or value to the world. Religion and science thus move in different dimensions, as Gould and many others have argued.

You might – and a lot of people do. Michael Ruse for example:

People like Dawkins, and the Creationists for that matter, make a mistake about the purposes of science and religion. Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it. Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions. There is no conflict here, except when people mistakenly think that questions from one domain demand answers from the other. Science and religion, evolution and Christianity, need not conflict, but only if each knows its place in human affairs — and stays within these boundaries.

That certainly is a popular argument, or rather assertion, these days, isn’t it. But it isn’t true. Religion does try to tell us about the world – it tells us there’s a supernatural being in charge of it. That is a truth-claim. Religious people do in fact believe in the existence – the real existence, not some fuzzy metaphoric existence – of this supernatural being. They may be vague about the details, but they believe the critter exists – that’s what being religious means. And then, just as I said last time, this business about ‘aiming’ to give a meaning – anyone can aim to do anything. I can aim to give the world a meaning. Does that oblige anyone to accept my attempt? Why are we obliged to be respectful about religion’s ‘aims’ of that kind?

And in any case that claim is a bit of footwork. Both reviewers try to defend religion from Dawkins’ criticisms by changing the definition of religion of the word – but as Dawkins himself points out in one of the essays in A Devil’s Chaplain, that is not the normal meaning of the word. It’s a mere tactic, that kind of thing, and I don’t think it’s respectable.

Christopher Hitchens has some choice things to say about this kind of thing in his Letters to a Young Contrarian:

I have met many brave men and women, morally superior to myself, whose courage in adversity derives from their faith. But whenever they have chosen to speak or write about it, I have found myself appalled by the instant decline of their intellectual and moral standards. They want god on their side and believe they are doing his work – what is this, even at its very best, but an extreme form of solipsism? They proceed from conclusion to evidence; our greatest resource is the mind and the mind is not well-trained by being taught to assume what has to be proved.

So. You might argue that Dawkins’s belief that science and religion can conflict reflects a misconstrual of the nature of religious belief, but you’d be wrong, it doesn’t. It’s the belief of S.J. Gould and Ruse and Orr that it doesn’t that reflects the misconstrual.

Well, we all have our ups and downs. Only natural. Something to do with ions, isn’t it? Or was it ozone? Or the tides? Phases of the moon? Harmonic convergence? Something like that. Or maybe all of them. Who knows.

Anyway, I’m in a pessimistic phase. Or a discouraged one. Nobody reads B&W, I should save my breath to cool my porridge, people who used to like B&W have gone off it, etc. I have a N&C in mind – I have the articles that suggested it at hand, all ready to quote from…But. The brain is on strike. It’s downed tools and is marching up and down with a sign – ‘What am I, a robot?!’ It would write something if I forced it – but I don’t seem to feel like forcing it. I seem to feel more like downing tools myself, and marching up and down along with it. Or perhaps I’ll run away and join the circus.