Author: Ophelia Benson

And here we have an exhilarating opinion piece. Exhilarating I suppose because the things it says are both so obvious and so non-trendy. (Though there’s some danger in that line of thought – or perhaps I just mean some discomfort. The woods are all too full of people who are all to willing to make you a present of their bravely unfashionable opinions. You know the kind of thing. Defiant racism and sexism, defiant urges to trample on people, defiant calls to get rid of the minimum wage. Go away.) But that being said, the fact remains that this is great stuff, and should be said more often and more loudly, especially to people who don’t know it yet:

The problem is that the cultural relativists exaggerate the supposed consensus prevalent in a culture…What is usually defined as the culture of a people is in reality the interpretation and discourse put forth by the ruling class and its allied intellectual elite. For example, the interests of the Brahmin priests and Thakurs cannot reasonably be the same as that of the lower orders of Hindu society. Similarly the Islamic message cannot be identical for the decadent class of landlords and the landless tenants and rural proletariat, but since official religion is always defined by the rich and powerful the voices of the oppressed classes and sections of society within a culture are seldom heard and rarely allowed to assert an alternative interpretation.

Just so. All that guff about Eurocentrism and respecting the Other and what a bad idea the Enlightenment was really just plays into the hands of the rich powerful male Other, not the society as a whole.

Thus if this observation be granted that cultural relativism is a poor and unconvincing basis for objecting to modern human rights, we need to establish on what basis can a non-Western culture retain its historical identity while simultaneously incorporating and internalising modern human rights within its modern identity? Undoubtedly outmoded religious practices will have to be discarded and the core universal ideas of each culture retained.

How promising that does sound.

Well here’s a piece that strikes me as completely bizarre. As if one should stare at a landscape buried under three feet of snow and say ‘How come it never snows around here?’ Or go for a nice walk in Death Valley and comment on how wet and cold it is, or eat some vanilla ice cream and say it’s too spicy. It’s like a kind of dyslexia. I suppose it’s really just the usual: confirmation bias, seeing what one expects to see and ignoring what one doesn’t. No doubt I’ll just be doing the same thing but in reverse – Elshtain sees the photograph and I see the negative or vice versa. But all the same, it does seem perverse to me to claim that we (in the US) hear more of people like Frank Lentricchia than we do of ‘serious reflection on religion.’ Excuse me? We do? Where would that be exactly?

As a result of the suppression of serious discourse about religion in many activist circles, we grow less able to appreciate what is going on in the war on terrorism. Issues of religious liberty, separation of church and state, the possibility that one might have a secular state in a society in which religions flourish, the dignity and status of women-all these matters and more can be seen clearly only if we take religion seriously, on its own terms.

Ah. Notice that final sly proviso, the last four words of the piece, slipped in at the last possible second, perhaps in the hopes that we won’t notice it. On its own terms. Oh is that how we’re allowed to discourse about religion – on its own terms. Well what if we want to discourse about it on our own terms? What then? Does that fail the test? Does that then become ‘suppression’ of serious discourse about religion? Is it serious only if done in religion’s own terms, whereas if we do it in secularists’ or atheists’ terms then it’s frivolous? If so, why?

In short here we are again, with religion demanding that everyone else take it ‘seriously’ despite its flat refusal to take non-religion seriously, and then to top it all off pretending that we don’t hear much about religion in the US. A counter-factual if I ever saw one.

What was that I was just saying the other day about people translating ‘evidence’ into ‘proof,’ thinking the two words are interchangeable, just plain confusing the two? You’d think at least science journalists would know the difference, wouldn’t you? Well you’d be wrong, apparently.

Sir Patrick said scientists used peer review “almost exclusively” to publicise findings. But he said researchers could still attract publicity “for highly questionable results even when they offered no evidence that their research had been checked”. This was evident earlier this year when the Raelian sect announced the births of human clones. The only proof the sect’s US-based company Clonaid produced to support its assertion was a photograph of one of the children alleged to have been born in Japan.

See? You’d think it would be obvious, wouldn’t you. The juxtaposition is right there, evidence in one sentence, proof in the next but one. You’d think it would be all the more blindingly obvious given the nature of the example – given the fact that supporting an assertion (and a highly improbable one at that) is precisely the subject at issue. You’d think the writer would notice – that if a photograph of a child hardly qualifies as evidence that said child was cloned, the idea that it’s proof is even more nonsensical, so nonsensical that, hey, wait, I have the wrong word here. But no. No, clearly people really do think the two words are interchangeable, think it so automatically that they don’t even know they think it. But it’s so basic! The difference between the two, and between the claims for the two, is so extremely basic! And yet apparently most people aren’t even aware there’s a difference. Which means that most people don’t have a clue how science and inquiry work. Which is a pretty alarming thought.

Yet another enthralling Start the Week, this one from June (I don’t listen to them in any sort of coherent order, rather I listen to the ones that sound most interesting first, in case I get run over by a bus before I get a chance to listen to them all). It’s interesting in general, but especially for the moment when, after everyone else has expressed great enthusiasm for a film about a charismatic Los Angeles preacher at a gospel church, Norman Finkelstein dissents from the general applause. He thinks it’s all an irritating exercise in white primitivism, and that the preacher in question is an embarrassment. It takes a bit of nerve to say that!

Another thing irrationalists like to do is translate. Well I suppose all arguers translate, but irrationalists are especially fond of doing it. But then that’s not surprising, is it. Irrationalists are woolly by definition, so naturally they think one word is as good as another, vague approximations of meaning will do well enough, clarity is not necessary between friends.

One translation that’s especially popular – I may even have droned about this in a N&C before, I don’t remember, it certainly comes up a lot – is from evidence to proof. They seem to think the words are interchangeable – only they never say evidence instead of proof, no, it’s always the other way around. I suppose they have themselves so convinced that skeptics and secularists and atheists are claiming greater certainty than we in fact are that they just take it for granted we’re talking about proof and certainty even though we never use the word.

So that’s how it goes. I say something like ‘Why should we believe something if there is no evidence for it?’ and the irrationalists earnestly assure me that ‘the so-called scientific method of rigorous proof is a myth,’ and then go on about light’s being both wave and particle or quantum mechanics. But the ‘so-called scientific method of rigorous proof’ is a red herring, scientists don’t talk about proof, they talk about evidence. Proof is the province of math and logic, not science as a whole, and I didn’t say proof in any case. I said evidence. Evidence. Evidence. But confirmation bias is a powerful thing, and they apparently can’t hear me.

Well to be sure it is a waste of time arguing with irrationalists, but on the other hand I did find out something I’ve been wanting to know, which is what they mean when they say that rationalists and atheists define evidence too narrowly. That seems to be a fashionable thing to say, I keep hearing it and seeing it, but the discussion always seems to go off in another direction before I can pin down what they mean by it. But this time after I asked about fifteen times, the irrationalist (who claims to have a PhD in cognitive science, which I hope is a bit of Walter Mittyism) finally said what he meant: ‘In terms of “evidence”… it can be non-material, non-phenomenological, but impinge upon an individual’s consciousness.’

Oh that. Is that all. Wanting to claim that something that happens inside my head (or your head, or X’s head) is evidence of something, not in my head, but in the external world. That’s what broadening the definition of evidence amounts to; I see. ‘I really really feel that Jesus loves me, therefore Jesus exists.’ In short, a piece of pure Humpty Dumptyism: words can mean whatever I want them to mean. It’s a question of who’s to be master, that’s all. If we can all decide that anything we can dream up in our own dear little minds constitutes evidence, why, what a fun world we can all create. Of course, that will mean we’ll have to come up with a new word which means what ‘evidence’ means now, and then the irrationalists will hijack and redefine that one too, so that we’ll have to come up with another one, and –

This could go on awhile.