Author: Ophelia Benson

The waiting socialists have a bit more on the hijab issue and our disagreement on same. (That link goes to the right post; Marcus at Harry’s Place pointed out that the waiters in fact do have Permalinks; I just overlooked them.) One comment caused me to ponder a bit.

We won’t go over the same ground again here, as we’ve responded in the comments section attached to her post, and she’s responded to us. Guess what? She hasn’t changed her mind, and neither have we changed ours. What that might say about blogging in general we’ll leave to people better able and more willing to generalise about blogging than we are.

What caused the pondering is the ‘Guess what?’ That seems to imply that non-changing of minds is not surprising, hence that we generally don’t change our minds in the course of these discussions – but I’m not sure that’s true. It seems to me I do sometimes change my mind when I see new evidence or arguments (new to me, I mean). But I don’t change my mind every single time – I don’t develop a new set of ideas with every post I read. If I did, B&W would be a pretty chaotic thing to read, wouldn’t it!

I do go into the discussion with some fairly firm presuppositions – that is to say, with plenty of opportunities for confirmation bias. I probably pay more attention to the articles that fit my presuppositions. I have frames through which I understand things, just as we all do. So I thought I would mention some of them, by way of clarification and full disclosure (or rather, partial full disclosure). I see the hijab as a badge of inferiority, as men controlling women, as misogynist and oppressive. I am aware that there are other ways to see it, but I’m not as sharply aware of that as I am of the first view. Then, I also see the hijab as having a lot of baggage – baggage that it wouldn’t have had twenty-five years ago. Wearing it now, after the Taliban, after what’s been going on in Iran, seems to me a different thing from wearing it before that. And not only wearing it, but being around people who are wearing it. It seems to me it can be seen as a poke in the eye to secularists, feminists, women who do not want all of that, who want to escape it, in a way that it wouldn’t have to such an extent before 1979. It’s a statement, a political statement, and in my view it’s a very reactionary, even brutal one. That means I’m less sympathetic to ideas about tradition, identity and so on – that’s my bias. And then, a third frame, I’m intensely hostile to religion (partly because of the history of the past twenty-five years), so I tend to favour efforts to keep it out of the public or secular realm. I’m not very good at seeing religion as a refuge from an alien culture, as the heart of a heartless world.

But another point is a bit different. I’m not convinced that I ought to do any mind-changing here, because I haven’t actually been arguing flatly that the ban on the hijab would be an unequivocally good thing and that’s all there is to it. I’ve been arguing against the view that it would be an unequivocally bad thing and that’s all there is to it. The people I’ve been disagreeing with are the ones who deny that there is any rational or non-racist reason at all to favor a ban. But if that position were accurate, there would be no such group as ‘Ni Putes ni Soumises.’ But the group exists. That is to say, there are French women of Muslim background who do support the ban. It seems to me opponents ignore them and their reasons. Surely arguing that there are people on the other side is not something I ought to change my mind about. I’m not so much arguing for the ban as I am arguing for taking all factors into account.

Following on from the last N&C on the way the Bush administration listens to developers rather than to environmental scientists in its own agencies – there is a post on corruption, and the history of attempts to limit the effects of money on political culture at Cliopatria. It is highly frustrating to see the open, unembarrassed acceptance of the role of money in politics in the US, and to see how little that changes, what a non-issue it is, how easily it keeps going, how cheerily everyone accepts it. Bribery and corruption are usually considered bad things, but the fact that huge corporations give enormous wads of cash to US political campaigns and parties is, for some reason, just taken as normal. The wads of cash are called ‘donations’ instead of ‘bribes’ and that makes all the difference. But they’re not donations, they’re quid pro quos, and everyone knows it. Yet no one cares. It’s very odd, and it’s maddening.

There is a very good article by Jonathan Chait in the New Republic last November that does something to explain the lack of outrage. The article is about bad press coverage in general, rather than about corruption, but the last section deals with both – and needless to say, they are closely entangled: the corruption survives and thrives on massive public ignorance and indifference. It seems reasonable to think that if more people were more aware of the matter, there would be a lot more pressure to do something about it. To, in fact, stop it.

Republicans now expect lobbyists to support them all the time, even on issues of ancillary concern. In return, Republicans will take unpopular positions on issues like the environment and health care that benefit those same lobbyists. Yet this enormous shift, which impacts much of the domestic agenda, has not been woven into the narrative of political journalism. That omission, too, stems from the strange conventions of Washington reporting. It’s not that journalists fail to report on business influence; it’s just that such reportage tends to get segregated. One place it lands is the lobbying beat…It’s not that the press is shilling for Wall Street fat cats. It’s that money in politics is its own, distinct beat with its own, dedicated reporter (or set of reporters).

One is tempted to mutter about want of nails and wars being lost. Such a trivial reason, for such an important matter. The way jurisdictions are carved up among reporters helps to account for why political corruption is not a front page issue.

Another enclave of superb, but underexposed, coverage about the relationship between lobbyists and policy is the financial press. The Wall Street Journal, for example, has covered the nexus between K Street and the GOP particularly well. And shortly after the 2002 elections, the Post business section ran a terrific piece observing that “it’s payback time for the distributors and other business groups whose pent-up demands for policy changes, large and small, will soon burst into public.” The reason financial reporters can be so blunt, and therefore accurate, is that they could not do their job–conveying information about which businesses are succeeding in winning legislation that will impact their bottom line–if they didn’t convey the unvarnished truth. Political reporters play by a different set of rules. If a story like that ran on page one, it would have to be filtered through the lens of “evenhandedness”–“Democrats charge that Republicans are carrying water for their donors; Republicans disagree”–even if one side were demonstrably wrong. That’s why the practice of unbiased reporting, as journalists understand it, can actually impede the truth.

Isn’t that interesting. Just read the financial pages, and all will become clear. As a matter of fact, my brother told me that about the New York Times’ financial pages many years ago. Now, if only someone could persuade the political reporters to quote their colleagues on the financial beat…mabe word would begin to get out.

There is a very interesting article about the Bush administration’s interference with science in the Christian Science Monitor. I was a little distracted while reading it, because I kept thinking I had posted an article on the same subject fairly recently, but not so recently that I could remember when, or what it was called, or where it was from. But luck was with me (or perhaps it was my guardian angel, or baby Jesus, or both, one on each shoulder), and I found it anyway. It’s here. It’s well worth reading both: they are related but quite different. The Monitor article treats science in general; the Grist one discusses cases where the Bush administration forced federal agencies to adopt policies developers and other industries wanted in place of scientifically-based findings, with nasty results for the Missouri river and Florida’s wetlands.

From the Monitor article:

Nevertheless, several science-policy experts argue that no presidency has been more calculating and ideological than the Bush administration in setting political parameters for science. President Bush’s blunt rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and his decision restricting stem-cell research are only the most obvious and widely publicized examples of what has become a broader pattern across the administration.

From the Grist article:

As we’ve seen before, this administration’s M.O. is simple: If you don’t like the science, change the scientist. That same motto could have been scrawled atop a resignation notice submitted in late October by Bruce Boler, a former U.S. EPA scientist in Florida who quit in protest when the agency accepted a study concluding that wetlands can produce more pollution than they filter. “It’s a blatant reversal of traditional scientific findings that wetlands naturally purify water,’ Boler told Muckraker. ‘Wetlands are often referred to as nature’s kidneys. Most self-respecting scientists will tell you that, and yet [private] developers and officials [at the Corps] wanted me to support their position that wetlands are, literally, a pollution source.’

Scientists who don’t obey are fired and replaced with more biddable ones, and the EPA muzzles its own employees. Pretty story.

It’s odd to discover that sometimes readers know more about what I’m doing than I do. I’d actually forgotten that I’d commented on the hijab-headscarf-veil issue all the way back in October, but Socialism in an Age of Waiting reminded me.

The issue of Muslim girls wearing, or not wearing, hijab in state schools in France has given rise to extensive comment and debate all over the blogosphere. We’d cite as the most interesting discussions so far the posts, and the comments, at Butterflies and Wheels, where Ophelia Benson has been blogging about it, on and off, since October and at Harry’s Place, where the debate was taken up in December partly in response to the news that “a government-appointed commission on secularism [had] recommended drafting a new law banning all conspicuous religious symbols from French state schools”.

Why so I have. What a terrible memory I have to be sure. I wonder what else I’ve been blogging about that I’ve forgotten. Monetary policy? Weaving? The Crimean War?

Then SiaW link to another discussion of the hijab issue, saying it cuts through the knot – which I find odd, since the post in question leaves so much out. There is this question, for example:

There are fashions that annoy the hell out of me, but by what possible logic are headscarves more offensive than, say, big hair? Is there any way in which headscarves are more oppressive to women than mini-skirts?

Yes of course there is. What an absurd question. There is no equivalent of the Taliban or the religious police of Iran forcing women to wear mini-skirts by beating the shit out of them if they don’t. There is no real, literal, physical, violent, bone-breaking coercion of women to wear short skirts. There is that kind of coercion of women to wear the hijab or the chador or the burqa. The problem with the hijab is not that it’s ‘offensive.’ (That’s a sub-topic I want to go into some day – another branch of the translation problem – the way people hear ‘offensive’ when offense is not the issue at all and no one said it was. Odd, that.) Or that it’s ‘annoying.’ Read or talk to some women who have lived through a transition from not having to wear the nasty things to being forced to by violent packs of men. Talking about annoyance and offense just trivializes the issue, but it’s not damn well trivial.

And the rest of the post is along the same lines. It ignores far too much to be useful, it seems to me. I agree that there are problems with the ban; that it may be counter-productive, that it violates the freedom of some people, that in a sense it discriminates against Muslims. But there are also problems with the absence of the ban, as I said last month. A discussion that just blithely ignores those is a bit beside the point, I think.

Well my questions have been answered – the ones I asked a couple of days ago, about Why is Judith Butler a superstar and who the hell thinks comp lit teachers are superstars anyway and why don’t they embarrass themselves talking that way? Well no, I didn’t ask that last question, but it’s what I was thinking.

I should have realized. Silly me. The subject is a whole field, a discipline, it has an anthology and everything. The excellent Scott McLemee, of the Chronicle of Higher Education as well as other publications, dropped a word in my ear to the effect that he wrote a few words on this subject a couple of years ago. And sure enough, he did, and very good words too. The whole thing is pretty hilarious, frankly.

“I want to debunk the usual idea that this is some kind of illicit importation [into university life] from Hollywood.” The phenomenon owes less to popular culture, he argues, than to processes taking shape within academic culture. In particular, it is a side effect of the dominance of theory within literary studies. The steady growth of literature programs stimulated what Mr. Williams terms “the theory market.” By the 1980s, thinkers who offered powerful, capacious, and stimulating models of critical analysis were becoming household names.

Household names?? Household names?!? In what households, sport? Do you get out much? I don’t get out much myself, but I get out enough to know that Stanley Fish and Gayatri Spivak are not instantly recognizable in your average American household. No, not even good old Eve or Cornel or Skip is that famous, whatever their colleagues may tell them.

But even better than that household name thing is that ‘powerful, capacious, and stimulating models of critical analysis’ bit. Oh, please. More ‘powerful, capacious, and stimulating’ than anything you will find in physics or history or sociology or philosophy or economics or psychology or cognitive science departments, for example? You know – I really, really, really don’t think so.

As Mr. Williams notes in an interview, the discussion of academostardom emerged in earnest during the 1990s — a time of transition for the humanities, during which the academic profession underwent painful restructuring, despite the overall economic boom. In “Name Recognition,” his essay for the journal’s special issue, the editor underscores how scholarly celebrity met a basic psychological need during this wrenching period. “Against the common academic anxiety of ineffectuality, especially in the humanities,” he writes, “the star system heightens the sense of the academic realm as one of influence, acclaim, and relevance.”

Ah – now I understand. It’s a kind of comfort food. Or magical thinking. ‘I am, or will be someday, or could possibly become someday maybe if I’m very lucky and very hip, influential and acclaimed and, by golly, relevant, because of my powerful, capacious, and stimulating models of critical analysis which are more powerful, capacious, and stimulating than almost anyone else’s. I can push down trees with them, I can store all of Manhattan in them, I can bring whole conferences to a frenzy with them. I am – Megacademostar!!’

Well I made good on my threat, and did that In Focus. I’ll be adding a lot more links, since it’s a large subject.

I also posted again at Cliopatria, about Romila Thapar. There are more interesting comments there, from people who know far more about history and historians than I do. Timothy Burke makes this excellent point:

This is one of those junctures where the tragic confusion of some scholars in the US and England about where their sympathies should lie potentially becomes pretty dangerous if not corrected. It strikes me that Hindutva’s self-representation is actually pretty fair in one respect: it is more genuinely popular, “from-below”, and less obviously “Western” than scholarly history practiced in Indian academies (though in the end, I’d say it’s actually quite resonantly “Western” in the same way that most forms of romantic anti-modernity modernism ultimately are). For some scholars, the mere notion that something is meaningfully “from-below” accords it instant moral legitimacy, particularly if it involves non-Westerners refusing or rejecting something that can be reasonably tagged as Western. But Hindutva is systematically repellant, and any intellectual or morally conscious person anywhere in the world ought to recognize it as such.

Just so. The old ‘from-below’ trap. It’s well-meaning, it’s understandable, but – it is such a mistake.