Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Evasiveness Breeds Conspiracy Theories

    When otherwise dependable cynics believe nonsense, there may be a reason.

  • Review of Defending Science

    Says ‘Differentialism’ when he means ‘Deferentialism,’ but oh well.

  • ‘Our Anguish at the Wanton Destruction’

    Indian historians condemn attack on Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.

  • Hindutva on the Attack

    Optimists like to think, and say, that religion and secularism can co-exist peacefully. That each has its own realm – its Nonoverlapping Magisterium, as Stephen Jay Gould so mistakenly called it – and there is no need for rivalry or conflict. That ‘science’ (which is never defined when such assertions are being made) can answer the questions in its realm, and religion can answer the questions in its. Of course, that raises the obvious question, can it really? Can religion really answer the questions that ‘science’ (i.e. rational inquiry) cannot? ‘Answer’ in what sense? In the sense of saying something? No doubt it can do that, but then so can anyone else. In the sense of saying something true? But how do we know the ‘answer’ is true? Because religion says so? But that just goes around in a circle. Because it’s written in a book? But there are other books that give different answers. Because we evaluate the answers in a rational manner as we do with any other form of rational inquiry? But then we’re in that other realm. Is there a fourth possibility? Because – what? Religious people have some special wisdom or insight? If so, where does it come from? And so on. The questions are endless, and the claim for religion’s jurisdiction over the questions that science and rational inquiry cannot answer rests on very shaky premises.

    Perhaps that is why pessimists disagree with optimists about the possibilities for peaceful co-existence. Perhaps it is because we are reluctant to accept claims that are based on mere assertion and authority and tradition, and we know from experience that that reluctance makes many religious people very angry. Perhaps it is because we know that claims that rest on shaky premises are just the ones that people tend to enforce with violence.

    Ill-founded claims are the ones that get backed up with sticks, car antennas, guns, threats, petitions, calls for silencing, fatwas. There is a lot of that sort of thing around. The anger at the American scholar of mythology James Laine and his book about the Hindu king Shivaji is one example. A mob attacked and vandalized the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in January, destroying books and irreplaceable manuscripts. Scholars sat in tears among the wreckage afterward. In March the state of Maharashtra where the BORI is located sought the help of Interpol in arresting and extraditing James Laine. Other scholars of mythology such as Wendy Doniger and Paul Courtright are the object of threats and worse. ‘Vedic’ science and mathematics are introduced into the public school curriculum and history textbooks are altered without the consent of their authors, as the articles by Meera Nanda and Latha Menon for Butterflies and Wheels tell us. The war against research, inquiry, secularism, independent thought, scholarship and rationality goes on and indeed intensifies. It is a trend that needs watching.

    Apposite Quotations

    The fury with which untenable beliefs are defended is inversely proportional to their defensibility.
    Richard Dawkins: The Annual Edge Question 2004

    Internal Resources

    Latha Menon on the Saffron Infusion

    Meera Nanda on Postmodernism and Fundamentalism

    Meera Nanda on Postmodernism and ‘Vedic Science’

    Meera Nanda on Postmodernism and ‘Vedic Science’ Part 2

    External Resources

  • Outrage

    Well, really. I’ve probably said this before…but I’ll simply have to repeat myself then. This is one of those times I just have to shake my grizzled head and croak with the Wicked Witch of the North, ‘What a world, what a world.’

    A kind and helpful reader, Chris of the blog Intelligent Life, alerted me to this horrible story in a comment on another story about gangs of religious thugs terrorizing people. There’s just no end to it, it seems.

    Sanika Bapat, another post-graduate scholar merely questioned, ‘‘Why did they tear a Shivaji manuscript from this library? Are they Shivaji worshippers or patriots? They are worse than any militia. We are another Taliban now.’’ People sitting outside the library were at a loss for words. Said Dr M A Mehendale, ‘‘What can I say in the face of this destruction? Words really fail me.”

    Everyone’s worst nightmare, or most people’s anyway. ‘We are another Taliban now.’ The worst kind of ignorant, narrow, aggressive, righteously-enraged, violent, destructive, red-eyed zealots breaking down the doors and smashing everything they find. Bullying, punishing, beating up, imprisoning women; destroying books and manuscripts; demolishing the Bamiyan Buddhas; smashing airplanes and heavily-populated buildings; burning down mosques; murdering publishers and translators; blackening the faces of women on billboards; threatening, threatening, threatening.

    Another reader alerted me a few months ago to the matter of Romila Thapar – another historian that the Hindutva brigade doesn’t like.

    While 72-year-old Thapar’s appointment was greeted with applause by serious students of history, little did anyone realise that acolytes of the Hindutva brand of politics, primarily those in the Indian diaspora, would unleash a vitriolic campaign against her built on name-calling and the disparaging of her professional qualifications. Claiming that “her appointment is a great travesty”, an online petition calling for its cancellation has, as of the last week in May, collected over 2000 signatures. Thapar, according to the petition, “is an avowed antagonist of India’s Hindu civilization. As a well-known Marxist, she represents a completely Euro-centric world view”. Protesting that she cannot “be the correct choice to represent India’s ancient history and civilization”, it states that she “completely disavows that India ever had a history”. The petitioners also aver that by “discrediting Hindu civilization” Romila Thapar and others are engaged in a “war of cultural genocide”.

    At this rate, I’m going to have to put together an In Focus on Religious Outrages on Scholarship, or something. I certainly have more than enough material.

    Update: I also posted about this at the group history blog Cliopatria which invited me to join them the other day. There are interesting comments from historians there.

  • Samantha Power Reviews Chomsky

    A glib and caustic tone; exaggerated claims not backed up; but worth reading.

  • ‘Activists’ Attack Research Institute

    Vandals attack Bhandarkar oriental research institute, staff, books and manuscripts.

  • Enlightenment Against Empire

    Introduction to Sankar Muthu’s book on 18th century anti-imperialism.

  • Indian Historians Given Police Protection

    OUP withdrew book, author apologized, but protesters attacked anyway.

  • The Dangers of Studying Mythology

    James Laine on why he wrote about Shivaji.

  • Judith Butler Superstar

    Okay, what’s the deal with Judith Butler. Why does everyone who writes about her call her a celebrity or a superstar. A superstar?? Someone who teaches gender studies at Berkeley? A superstar?

    Berkeley’s Judith Butler, a superstar of gender and literary studies, drew a packed house with her analysis of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s bad grammar and slippery use of the term “sovereignty.”

    I’m not making it up, that’s from the Boston Globe, from a story on the MLA convention. Not a very affectionate or over-impressed story, either – and yet Scott Jaschik calls Butler a superstar. Well if she got married in Las Vegas and then had the marriage annulled the next day, would we hear about it? Would it take up time on the BBC World Service’s half-hour news report? If she were arrested for child molestation, would we hear about that, would the World Service consider that important enough to spend a minute or two on? I have to say, I kind of doubt it.

    Well to be sure, Jaschik does call her a superstar of gender and literary studies – not just a superstar tout court. But then further questions arise. Do reporters write about superstars of nursing, superstars of postal work, superstars of meat packing? Do they write about superstars of history or Classics? I don’t think so. So what is it about Judith Butler that somehow hypnotizes people into calling her a superstar? Or is it something about her field that does that – and if so, what? And what does it mean – what does all this vocabulary of stardom and trendiness and hipness and fashion portend? Why is it catching? Why don’t people just laugh when academics are called superstars?

    Even in Israel, even that far away and with other things to attend to, they are susceptible. Witness Ha’aretz.

    Butler is an unusual figure in academia. On the one hand, she is a celebrity who has a community of followers and who exudes charisma. Groups of followers sometimes line up for her lectures, as though she were a rock star; and her major influence on feminism at the start of the 21st century is widely noted. On the other hand, many persons outside of feminist academia have never heard of her; nor have they come across her ideas, or been influenced by them.

    Celebrity? Followers? Charisma? Rock star? Well at least Ha’aretz realizes some of the truth – ‘many persons outside of feminist academia have never heard of her.’ Yes, you could say that. Quite a few, I daresay. In fact I would venture to guess that the non-hearing of Judith Butler outside feminist academia is pretty nearly universal.

    Rock star, celebrity, superstar. How do these rumours get started, I always wonder.

  • Should NGOs be Accountable?

    Who decides, and what are the criteria, and who decides that?

  • Adonis on the Veil

    Arab poet has harsh words for the hijab and its fans.

  • Daniel Mendelsohn on Donald Kagan

    What does the Peloponnesian War mean in a world with only one superpower?

  • Ha’aretz Meets Judith Butler

    She’s a celebrity, she exudes charisma, followers line up for her talks. Hmm.

  • Anthropocentric Conceit

    The creator of the fifteen-billion-year-old, multibillion-star universe thinks we’re just swell. Right?

  • No Thank You

    I read something interesting and even (very slightly) encouraging in a month-old New York Times magazine article on Pakistan by Barry Bearak.

    Government by ”the mullahs” has long been a dreaded prospect by the vast majority of Pakistanis with less doctrinaire views, and the M.M.A.’s unexpected victories intensified fears that ”Talibanization” was creeping its way across the land.

    It is good to know that the vast majority of Pakistanis (which I think is what that not very clear clause means: the vast majority of Pakistanis, who have less doctrinaire views, as opposed to the vast majority of Pakistanis-with-less-doctrinaire-views, which of course could be a much smaller number) dread the prospect of government by the mullahs. But it’s only a little good to know, only slightly encouraging, because superior numbers do not always prevent coups by people like mullahs or generals.

    Seven months later, extremists — shouting the all-purpose invocation ”God is great!” — inflamed those anxieties by marauding through the city of Peshawar. As police placidly looked on, the crowd confiscated CD’s and tapes from stores and burned music and movies in a bonfire. They blackened the faces of women on billboards. In the meantime, politicians in the new government spoke of plans to not only enforce their version of Shariah law but also compel its obedience with patrols of religious constables.

    Blackened the faces of women on billboards did they – yes I just bet they did. Imagining themselves doing the same thing to real live three-dimensional women, no doubt. The maniacal hatred of women among ‘Talibanizers’ is…well, interesting.

    I read a novel by Nahid Rachlin the other day, Married to a Stranger. It was published in 1983 but takes place in Iran in 1975, and refers often to a fanatical religious group called Bandeh Khoda. The group wants women to put the chador back on, and all the rest of the program. The protagonists of the novel dislike and fear them just as much as I would if I were there. Nahid Rachlin no longer lives in Iran.

  • ‘Superstars’ at the MLA

    English professors used to criticize the Taliban, but that was then.

  • Uh, Er, Um, Like, You Know

    Disfluency matters, but wait for tenure before studying ‘like.’

  • Football Coach Millionaires

    ‘Many wonder how healthy it is to pay a football coach more than the president of a university.’