I read something this morning in Frank Cioffi’s essay* ‘Was Freud a Liar?’ that grabbed my attention. It reminded me of something. I knew what, too.

Freud did not fall into the seduction error through believing his patients’ stories; he did not fall into it through ignorance of the fact that persons sexually molested in infancy may, nevertheless, not succumb to neurosis; he did not fall into it through underestimating the frequency of seduction in the general population. Freud fell into the seduction error through the use of a procedure which to this day remains the basis of the psychoanalytic reconstruction of infantile life: the attribution to patients of certain infantile experiences because they appear to the analyst to be living “through them with all the appropriate emotions.”

What did that remind me of? John Mack. You know John Mack? I’ve talked about him a little, but not enough, not yet. I’ve had it in mind to talk about him more though. He’s the Harvard psychologist who thought there was something to the whole alien abduction thing – not ‘something to’ it in the sense of as cultural phenomenon or symptom of mass lunacy, but in the sense of maybe real aliens really abducting real people and taking them onto real alienships and really impregnating them and doing medical exams on them. For real. And why did he think this? His main reason was that they had such strong emotions when they talked about it. They seemed (they appeared to the analyst) really really really frightened, upset, disturbed, traumatized.

And what is so interesting about that – or one thing, at least, that is so interesting about it – is that it seems so obvious that people having very strong emotions about something isn’t necessarily a reason to think that something refers to a real event. It seems so obvious 1) that there are other possible explanations and 2) that the other possible explanations are a great deal less unlikely than the alien abduction [of just a few people who can produce no physical evidence] scenario is. It’s interesting that such a bizarrely faulty bit of reasoning could be perpetrated by a Harvard psychologist. (Harvard thought so too. Harvard blushed. Harvard was not altogether pleased.) Credulity on that scale is surprising in an academic. Well, maybe it’s not. I know several people who would immediately tell me that that’s just the kind of person it’s not surprising in. They could have a point.

*Originally a radio talk for BBC 3 in 1973, published in The Listener, and in 1998 in the Frederick Crews edited collection Unauthorized Freud.

I wanted to make more easily available the useful work Allen Esterson has done on the changes Hizb ut-Tahrir has made on its website, which he posted in comments on the previous N&C.

It is significant that some of the language the organization has had on its website has been removed, or toned down, presumably to make it more amenable for Western consumption. For instance, the statement that “There is no middle position or compromise solution in Islam” used to appear on the website, along with the statement: “The terminology of compromise did not appear amongst Muslims until the modern age. It is a foreign terminology and its source is the West and the Capitalist ideology. This is the ideology whose creed is based upon a compromise solution.”

I think we all know what is meant by a severe punishment under Sharia law.

It’s funny about this piece by Ziauddin Sardar – it gave me quite a turn when I read it a few days ago, because I’ve been writing an article that talks about exactly, but exactly, an issue he discusses. It’s a rather important one, too, and one in need of as much clarity of thought as possible. Getting it wrong causes suffering all over the place.

The bearded and elegantly attired supporters of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), the fundamentalist Muslim group, like to emphasise the non-violent nature of their party. As a recent press release put it, they “have never resorted to armed struggle or violence”. This is correct as far as it goes. While HT has openly engaged in the politics of hatred, particularly towards the Jews, it has not, strictly speaking, advocated violence. But this does not mean that it is not a violent organisation.

Bingo. That’s an evasive tactic that a lot of groups and individuals resort to: saying a group has never resorted to violence or never injured or harmed anyone – which is true as far as it goes – but is therefore highly misleading. Violence isn’t just clouting someone with a two-by-four; injury isn’t just slicing someone up with a machete; harm isn’t just running over someone with a lawn mower. Therefore, it is not good enough to say that a group is non-violent if, for instance, it doesn’t commit violence itself but does encourage and praise and validate and romanticize it in others; or if it trains other people (who are officially not part of the group in question) to commit violence; or if it writes propaganda for violent groups while not telling the complete truth about those groups’ activities; and so on. It has been deeply exasperating seeing defenses of Hizb ut-Tahrir that insist on the group’s non-violence as if direct literal physical violence were the only possible reason to criticize HT. But there are other reasons. Groups that, for instance, want to take some people’s rights away by peaceful means, may be non-violent but they’re not therefore beneficent.

But this does not mean that it is not a violent organisation. During a recent debate on PTV, the Pakistani satellite channel, a prominent member of HT told me emphatically: “The idea of compromise does not exist in Islam.” This is standard HT rhetoric, and it explains why the group is deemed dangerous and worthy of being proscribed. Intolerance of that kind is a natural precursor of, and invitation to, violence.

Exactly. Well said Mr Sardar. If only more people would see that.

In fact, violence is central to HT’s goals. Its primary objective is to establish a caliphate. It seeks, I have been told on numerous occasions, a “great Islamic state” ruled by a single caliph who would apply Islam “completely to all Islamic lands” and eventually to “the whole world”. What would be applied “completely” is the sharia, Islamic law. No wonder they recognise no compromise. Their ideology argues that there is only one way Muslims can or should be ruled, that those who form this caliphate have the right to rule, that all others must submit unconditionally and that only this political interpretation of Islam is valid and legitimate. In other words, the caliphate of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s vision can be established only by doing violence to all other interpretations of Islam and all Muslims who do not agree with it – not to mention the violence it must do to the rest of the world, which also must eventually succumb.

Violence isn’t just one guy punching you in the face, or even just one guy blowing up the bus you’re riding in. It’s also a bunch of guys enforcing a narrow sexist punitive theocratic law on you and on everyone. That’s a very thorough-going, far-reaching kind of violence – that’s why it’s called totalitarian. It governs everything – ‘completely’ – and permits no escape. That’s real violence.

A couple of amusing items sent by readers – by readers who are the creators of said amusing items.

John Emerson has a little rumination on Freud – possibly scurrilous, he says, but surely that’s a good thing.

Read Civilization and its Discontents lately? Remember the part about men peeing on fires to put them out? And why women like to weave? (Hint: it has to do with pubic hairs. Funny old women.)

So John pondered.

I imagined a band of cave men gathered around a fire like the one I saw, incontinently and ecstatically squirting their tiny streams of urine in the futile effort to extinguish the raging fire, while at the same time their resentful, feminist wives tried furiously to weave themselves little fake penises even more useless than the men’s real penises. And became convinced that the human race, deluded as it was, wasn’t going to make it. We are, as a species, like Lewis Carroll’s “bread-and-butterfly”, incapable of survival.

The other item, from Dan Green, is a nice new guru with a happy message for us all. I feel more hopeful already.

I like this, so I thought I’d share. There’s this job interview for a prospective philosophy teacher, see…

Other candidates should create distractions. One man illustrated proper logic with this syllogism:

All men are mortal.

Socrates is mortal.

Therefore, Socrates is a man.

I raised my hand. “Birds are mortal too, aren’t they?” I asked, hoping he would correct his error.

“Yes,” our teacher agreed.

“So Socrates could be a bird?”

He smiled benignly. “No. Socrates doesn’t have feathers.”

I was somewhat cryptic in that post ‘Interpretation’ yesterday. Deliberately, I suppose, because I wasn’t trying to make a flat assertion, but rather to point out possibilities – areas of murk, of darkness, of fog, of confusion. Of more than one possibility. Of epistemic uncertainty. Also because that post was only preliminary; I thought I would probably try to look at the subject further, later.

So, one thing I’m not saying is that there’s no reason for people in the banlieues to be angry. Hardly. No – but it’s not a choice between ‘people in the banlieues have every reason to be angry therefore the riots are political rebellion and nothing else’ and ‘people in the banlieues have no reason to be angry therefore the riots are the same kind of thing as suicide bombing or just plain criminal assault.’ Nope. There’s a huge amount of territory in between those two items. One possibility – among many, be it noted – is ‘people in the banlieues have every reason to be angry but the particular people who are out rioting are more caught up in the fun of group violence than they are rebelling in a political way.’ That’s just one possibility, remember – but surely it is no less than one possibility. It seems to me it’s not on the face of it so outlandish and implausible that it should be ignored completely.

There are hints, after all. There are complications. Where is everyone else? Where are the women? Where are the non-youth? Why is this a young guy thing? Well, duh – for the same reason war is a young guy thing. Yes, but that’s my point. It’s probably also for the same reason that most violent criminals are young men, and that most football players are young men. Because they’re fit, energetic, muscular, all that, yes, but also because (on average) they’re more aggressive than they ever will be again. It’s because they’ve got testosterone leaking out of their eyeballs. It’s because they like doing things like this. (There, there’s a flat assertion for you. Standing there all naked and vulnerable. Go on, knock it down.) That aggression can be compatible with political rebellion, with dedicated work of all kinds, it can be admirable and useful and courageous – but it can also be compatible with much worse things. Can be, has been, often is.

So it’s just not self-evident that what’s going on for instance in the riots but in other areas too is not at least partly just plain aggressive group-driven violent sadism. It can’t be. It can’t be self-evident – it’s happened too many times before. Lynch mobs, race riots, religious riots, the New York draft riots that were part race riot – and so on. Remember the video of what happened to Reginald Denny during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles? Because I do – it seared itself into my memory. Why? Because it was so obvious that the guy who kicked Denny in the head was having fun – was enjoying himself. And, I think, in a particular way – a self-righteous way. A way that was backed up or validated by self-righteousness. In other words a different kind of fun from the fun of a more routine, furtive criminal assault – of beating someone up in an alley. This was broad daylight, with an audience – and a ’cause’ – of sorts. (By which I mean, a very valid reason to be angry, but a non-useful way of expressing the anger.) So the guy felt good about it – you could tell, from the way he threw his arms up in the air. (That’s another naked assertion. I think it’s true, but I don’t know. I’m interpreting.) Maybe the reason it seared itself into my memory is partly because I could so easily imagine how he was feeling – I could imagine feeling that way myself. On another day, maybe that guy would have joined another crowd to rescue people from a collapsed freeway after an earthquake, the way people did in Oakland when the Nimitz freeway pancaked.

These things can be all mixed up together. People can have a valid grievance, and also have cruel sadistic vindictive urges. They can have both, and they can act on both. The one doesn’t rule out the other. It would be nice if it did, but it doesn’t.

If you read French, do explore the website for le livre noir de la psychanalyse. It’s highly interesting. There is this page where Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen answers ‘internautes’ for instance. Maybe I can translate a little…

Internaute: Can one say that religion, psychoanalysis, and Coke are products that work and that sell well? MB-J: Thomas Szasz wrote a luminous, decisive book on that question. in which he compares the marketing of psychoanlysis to that of Coca-Cola. I’m entirely in agreement with his analysis.

Religion, psychoanalysis, and Coke – I like that. (Appropriate, too, since Siggy was a coker.)

Sometimes it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that people can’t always see what’s in front of them. However obvious it is. However frantically it jumps up and down right in front of them. However hard it punches them in the face, however red and dripping the clothes it wears, however loud it screams, however charred the flesh, however choking the smoke.

Not that they don’t notice that something is there. But what they – some people, sometimes – have a hard time making out in the fog is a possibility about what the something is. They see the something there – all red and jumping and punching as it is – and they notice it – but they don’t always do a very good job of figuring out what it is, or what it might be – they don’t do a very good job of figuring out that it might not be what they think it is. In other words they think they recognize it, and they don’t stop to consider that the light is bad, that they’re not wearing their glasses, that it’s the middle of the night, that they’re sound asleep. All those courtroom things. ‘I suggest to you that you could not possibly have identified the defendant from two miles away during a blizzard while wearing a blindfold.’

It’s not just the riots. It is those, but it’s other things too. It’s also suicide bombers, and animal rights campaigners, and people who make death threats over plays and movies and novels that ‘offend’ their religion. The possibility that seems to escape a lot of people’s attention is that all these things are far less a matter of protest, and alienation, and revolt, and justified anger, and understandable resentment, than they are just plain old pleasure in sadistic violence. No more edifying than that. Just joy and pleasure and delight in frightening people, and hurting them, and smashing them up, and making them suffer. That can happen, you know. (Read a little Thucydides or Euripides, if you don’t know – it’s all right there. There was no need to wait for Nietzsche or Freud or Foucault; it’s all right there.) People can just plain get off on beating up on people or leaving fake bombs on their porches or stealing the bodies of their relatives from cemeteries or setting fire to the buses they’re sitting in.

That possibility, at least, is part of these events and activities, but it doesn’t always get as much explicit attention as it should. Too often it’s just tactfully swept out of sight and ignored, or never even noticed in the first place. That’s unfortunate. Think of Gladys Wundowa. Think of the driver of the bus she was on, who instead of running away ran upstairs to help his passengers. Think of the woman on crutches who was set on fire in Sevran, outside Paris, on Friday. Think of the driver of the bus she was on, who suffered smoke inhalation in helping her to escape the bus instead of running away. Think of the woman leaning out the window on a high floor of a block of flats where some ‘youths’ had just set fire to a rubbish bin inside the lobby, calling down that she was frightened. Consider possibilities – that’s all.

Small point. Very small. Small, picky, fussy point. Obsessive point. Small, minor, not that important in the great scheme of things point. So sue me, I make small points sometimes. So I’m not cosmic.

Guy named Sebastian Rotella in the LA Times, an article on Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Minor point.

Working into the evening in a well-guarded office in parliament, Ali retains the elegance and charisma that propelled her from refugee to political star. She wears a black pantsuit and sweater on a small, slender frame. She has oval eyes in a long, delicate face set off by pearl earrings.

Okay okay okay, it’s a minor point, I’m sorry, but god it sounds so stupid. And in sounding that stupid it also sounds patronizing and point-missing and trivializing and – just plain fokking stupid. It should go like this:

Working into the evening in a well-guarded office in parliament, Ali retains the elegance and charisma that propelled her from refugee to political star. She wears a black pantsuit and sweater on a small, slender frame. She has oval eyes in a long, delicate face set off by pearl earrings. So I asked her to go out for a drink with me, and when she declined, I tried to stick my hand down that sweater I mentioned, and when she told me to stop it, I tried to push her against the wall, and those guards I mentioned threw me out. So much for that interview.

And then a word connoting a female dog, if not a word for the female genitalia.

I mean – come on – how much smarts does it take to interview a woman MP with strong views on women’s rights without going into dribbling raptures on her frame and the shape of her face and her earrings?! I ask you! I know this is a familiar, yawn-inducing question, but all the same, it does kind of jump out at you – would anyone describe a male MP in such a ridiculous way?

It’s a good article otherwise, so it is a small point. Good luck with the work, Ayaan.

John Judis says Alito may be not a ‘prudent conservative’ but a ‘determined reactionary.’

Samuel Alito’s position on abortion, evidenced in his dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, may turn out to be an accurate barometer of his overall judicial philosophy. First, Alito’s dissent in the 1991 case may be indicative of his position on the larger question of women’s liberty and equality, and more broadly still, of how he views the changes the feminist movement made in our understanding of liberty. In this opinion and others, Alito appears, as Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas often do, to be standing athwart history, yelling stop.

And what is the chief thing people who seem to stand athwart history yelling stopstopstop probably most want to stop? Women having (more than nominal, rhetorical, purely verbal) liberty and equality. People like that know they have to say they want equality for women. But they do whatever they can to keep them from having it.

Planned Parenthood v. Casey came in response to an act that Pennsylvania passed in 1982 and later amended. The law imposed conditions on women seeking abortions: They had to endure a 24-hour waiting period; minors had to have the consent of a parent; and wives had to sign a statement that they had notified their husbands of their intention…in 1991 the appeals court on which Alito sat affirmed two of the three conditions but threw out the spousal notification requirement. Alito dissented, arguing that spousal notification was constitutional.

Because married women give up the right to own themselves by getting married. Otherwise – it’s time to start yelling stopstopstop.

Lawyers for Pennsylvania had argued that the state had an interest in promoting the integrity of marriage and protecting the husband’s interest in the fetus. While recognizing these as relevant, O’Connor argued that the liberty of a woman, as a separate individual, took precedence. She saw spousal notification not just as a threat to abortion rights, but as a challenge to women’s rights as they had evolved in the twentieth century and had been embodied in a succession of Supreme Court decisions. O’Connor drew a sharp contrast between an earlier view of a woman as wife–articulated in an 1872 opinion that “a woman had no legal existence separate from her husband, who was regarded as her head and representative in the social state”–and the Court’s modern understanding, in Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972, that the “marital couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of two individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional makeup.”

See – that’s such a large step, and a lot of people still can’t stand to take it. It’s such a large step to think that women are people just as men are people, that women are individuals just as men are individuals. That it’s just not the case that you have people, men, and half-people, semi-people, quasi-people, kind of blurry fuzzy nebulous incomplete blobs of vapour and milk and sex who mean nothing on their own but make perfect sense if attached to a person – a man.

Alito’s reasoning in his dissent did not rise to the level of political, or even judicial, philosophy…With a modern definition of liberty created by the feminist movement at stake, Alito affirms the old against the new. In defending spousal notification, Alito doesn’t weigh women’s liberty and independence against other factors; instead, he fails to acknowledge them. Alito’s reasoning is also sufficiently contorted to suggest that he is rationalizing an ideology rather than faithfully interpreting existing law.

And then the most depressing bit of all:

Alito seems to argue that when O’Connor interpreted an “undue burden” as a “severe” limitation, she meant that it affected a great percentage of women seeking abortions. Spousal notification, he wrote, “cannot affect more than about 5 percent of married women seeking abortions or an even smaller percentage of all women desiring abortions.”…But in her opinion on Casey, O’Connor, without singling out Alito by name, was understandably contemptuous of Alito’s argument about numbers. “Legislation is measured for consistency with the Constitution by its impact on those whose conduct it affects,” she wrote. “The proper focus of Constitutional inquiry is the group for whom the law is a restriction, not the group for whom the law is irrelevant.” Alito’s reasoning flies in the face of the Bill of Rights…Arguments like this were sometimes made in the early 1950s by Yale political scientist Willmoore Kendall and other conservatives to justify McCarthy-era restrictions on free speech–and, more generally, to defend a prevailing way of life against political or social deviations. The philosophy was at the time called “majoritarianism”; it was abandoned after Brown v. Board of Education turned conservatives’ attention to a defense of state’s rights.

‘Majoritarianism’ – yes – just the beast that Tocqueville and Mill were so worried about. Defending a prevailing way of life against deviations – and heresy, and apostasy, and all those bad things. And above all, against women wandering around free and unrestricted. Stopstopstop.

I’ve been meaning to say: sorry about the weekly update. I’ve been getting emails from readers who miss it, and who try to resubscribe only to get an error message. It’s broken. Sorry. I wish I could fix it – I would if I could – but I can’t. Sorry. It’s probably the hacker who broke it. I miss it too – apart from anything else, it sold a few copies of the Dictionary every time it went out, which meant that in five years or so there might be a tiny royalty. Thanks, hacker.

I think B&W is probably on its last legs. I don’t have the tech skills to fix things, so as more things break, they will stay broken, until the whole thing falls apart. Sorry about that. I’m a bit gloomy about it – and somewhat bitter, too. Thanks, hacker.

I’ll keep it going while possible, of course, but it won’t be what it was, and as more of it breaks, more of it will not be what it was. Sorry. So it goes.

Jon Pike on Ted Honderich is well worth reading. Studying, even.

To begin with, he doesn’t just think that affluent westerners are collectively guilty for their omissions in respect of bad lives. He asserts that this explains and justifies anti-Western hatred…The book is, as I will show, chock full of sloppy arguments and non-sequiturs but this is perhaps the worst, and is the hinge with which Honderich gets from bad lives to terrorism.

That’s an important hinge, I think. It’s a hinge that other people use in other causes, or ’causes.’ There is suffering or deprivation or injustice in X place or situation; some set of people are collectively guilty for their omissions or their ‘complicity’ (remember that word? it’s a hinge-word); this justifies hatred of said set of people, which in turn justifies tormenting them in some way.

Here is a point worth keeping in mind:

First, there is a standard, ordinary language distinction between having a right to do X and X being the right thing to do. For example, it makes ordinary sense to say that Joe has a right to vote for the (fascistic) British National Party, but that he is not right to do so. This ordinary language distinction can be philosophically cashed out as the right to do wrong.

Pike makes this in comment on a key (and somewhat notorious) passage of Honderich’s:

I myself have no serious doubt, to take the outstanding case, that the Palestinians have exercised a moral right in their terrorism against the Israelis. They have had a moral right to terrorism as certain as was the moral right, say, of the African people of South Africa against their white captors and the apartheid state. Those Palestinians who have resorted to necessary killing have been right to try to free their people, and those who have killed themselves in the cause of their people have indeed sanctified themselves.

There is a slippage there, Pike points out – from having a moral right, in the second sentence, to having been right, in the third. Once again we see the crucial importance of close reading.

Then he points out that even if we accept a whole absurd chain of arguments about bad lives and omission and moral equivalencies, there is still a consequentialist argument (and Honderich is a consequentialist of sorts) to consider, that terrorism will help the Palestinian cause – which Honderich doesn’t do. Instead he just says it is possible to think so.

But, as philosophy markers often say, that wasn’t the question. It is possible to think all sorts of silly things, it is possible not to doubt them, even not to doubt them seriously. It is possible to have great confidence in them, to be convinced by them. More: it is possible to write them down, and sometimes, quite often, sadly, it is possible to get them published. That doesn’t stop them being silly.

No. It doesn’t. There’s quite a lot of evidence of that scattered around B&W.

At first sight, it seems that Honderich thinks that it is the strength with which he holds his view that makes a difference. He tells us that he hasn’t changed his mind, that he is unrueful, that he is more convinced than ever. It seems that he thinks this ought, in some way, to be persuasive. Perhaps his uncertain reader just needs to be convinced – ‘well, Ted, if you’re sure…’

Uh oh.

But, since not even the first year undergraduate sees anything in truth by conviction, perhaps there is something else going on. Perhaps it’s not the strength of convictions themselves that matters, but the fact that they are Honderich’s convictions. Honderich is a Philosopher, after all, and an eminent one at that. He used to be the Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at UCL. He has thought about these things a lot, (as if time, on its own, mattered) and his conclusions are controversial. But he is an Authority, so perhaps the persuasive force is supposed to come from some strange mix of truth by conviction and truth by authority. It’s an odd conclusion to come to, because the very basis of doing philosophy, especially critical political philosophy is a rejection of all of these notions. In order to do serious critical political philosophy, you shouldn’t care about someone’s credentials, or the strength of his or her convictions.

Ouch.

Michael Walzer’s judgement of this sort of view can’t be bettered: in Just and Unjust Wars he compares people like Honderich unfavourably to early IRA volunteers and to the Stern gang, who drew lines between combatants and non-combatants.

That’s worth knowing, because I have seen at least one philosopher who is not Honderich cite Walzer and just war theory as justification for intimidation tactics against civilians – for arguably terrorist tactics.

And then Pike winds up.

Here is my own, somewhat rueful postscript. I’ve argued here that Honderich’s book is terrible, not simply because it is an apology for suicide bombing, but because it presents a sloppy, lazy, dishonest argument that fails in its own terms. There is, to my mind, a lot wrong with those terms, and we should remember what is at stake, in these calls to understand ‘their’ hatred, and ‘our’ guilt, ‘their’ necessary terror and ‘our’ complicity.

We should remember what is at stake.

On the 7th July this year, after hearing about the London bombings, my first thoughts, like those of many others, were for friends, family and acquaintances living and working in London. First, my brother, on his way to give a lecture at Imperial College, then a friend who works for the Aristotelian Society, people at the London Review of Books, in Tavistock Square, and philosophers at UCL. I heard soon from my brother. Brian Leiter’s blog and Crooked Timber quickly contained news that the UCL philosophers were safe, and people were able to make one or two black jokes about the chances of catching a philosopher on a tube train in the rush hour. It looked as if UCL, close to the scene of the bombings had escaped unscathed.

Same here, same with a lot of us.

Over the next few days, though, it became clear that an employee of UCL was killed in the suicide bombings that day. Gladys Wundowa, a Ghanaian cleaner at Honderich’s college, a charity worker and a student of housing management at Hackney College was blown up on the Bus in Tavistock Square. The logic of Honderich’s position is, I think (though it’s hard to be absolutely certain) that the 7th July bombings are to be condemned. But I wonder how much truth the Emeritus Professor thinks there is in the answer that Gladys Wundowa had it coming?

I posted the news about Gladys Wundowa at Brian’s blog on that thread about UCL – not because everyone else had been callous, just because the news had just come out and I was the one who saw it and posted it. Brian thanked me for the tragic update. Gladys Wundowa made me lose it. She had worked all night at the cleaning job, you may remember, and was on the bus because she was on her way to Hackney College for that housing management course. Did those four stupid infatuated self-admiring men have Gladys Wundowa in mind? Probably not. But that’s where ‘sloppy, lazy’ arguments about collective guilt get you.

Catherine Bennett is amusing.

It is strange, isn’t it, to think that this fine-looking couple, recently seen experiencing spiritual ecstasy in East Grinstead, presumably believe in Scientologist founder Ron L Hubbard’s story of Xenu, the galactic tyrant who froze his victims and stored them in the Earth’s volcanos?

Yeah? I didn’t know that. I don’t keep up with Scientology (too busy keeping up with Feng shui, I guess), and I didn’t know that. The galactic tyrant! Froze his victims! Stored them in earth’s volcanoes. Very cool. Almost as cool as playing football in pyjamas with no goal and no crossbar and no hugging.

If, as Madonna says, she has been ridiculed for professing her beliefs, her best expedient would be to stop professing them, at length, to a British public that is already wearied by haranguing, complaints and demands from rival believers whose only common ground is their indifference to the fact that most other people don’t share their faith…Concerning religion, we can only hope she soon alights on the joys of trappism, and subsequently takes all the other faith communities in this country with her.

Just so. There has been a hell of a lot of haranguing, complaints and demands from rival believers lately, hasn’t there, as well as lashings of indifference to the fact that most other people don’t share their ‘faith’. We get the same thing here, of course, multiplied by approximately 500. It seems to be creeping across the Atlantic. We’re all doomed.

Was there really a time, not so long ago, when Thought for the Day, with the Rabbi Lionel Blue maundering about his mum was the most egregious irritant to this country’s non-believers? If so, it is fast taking on the look of a golden age of secularism, when one likes to think that Tony Blair, had he shared his vision of a new medieval country in which no one spoke ill of religion and where state schools would be handed to unyielding members of mutually contradictory faiths, would either have been escorted to Hyde Park Corner or locked up as a danger to himself and others.

And another thing. It’s this Lewis ‘Tricycle’ Libby thing. What’s up with that?

Mr Libby, who was chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, faces five counts of perjury, making false statements and obstructing justice…Mr Libby faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted but it is widely believed that, if jailed, Mr Libby would be pardoned by President George W Bush when he leaves office.

Is it. Why would that be? Because they’ve done it before, no doubt. Because Republican presidents have a history of pardoning other top Republicans. So…why are Republicans supposed to be the party of ‘values’ then? Seriously. I don’t understand that. Because they get all tied in knots about HoMoSekShuals but are serenely unworried about little things like perjury and obstruction of justice? Well, yes, I suppose that must be it. But…it seems strange. Even stranger than Xenu the Galactic Tyrant.

There must be a mole at the Guardian. Prince Charles would frown wonderingly in the manner of Ned Welch if he read this article – HRH would be most unamused. But that’s his problem.

As part of a government drive to eliminate frivolous fatwas, the Saudi newspaper Al Watan recently published a stone-cold sober one on football. If you can read it without collapsing in helpless laughter – I have bad news for you: you seem to be deceased.

International terminology that heretics use, such as “foul,” “penalty”, “corner,” “goal”, “out” and others, should be abandoned and not said…Do not follow the heretics, the Jews, the Christians and especially evil America regarding the number of players. Do not play with 11 people. Add to this number or decrease it…Play in your regular clothes or your pyjamas or something like that, but not coloured shorts and numbered T-shirts, because shorts and T-shirts are not Muslim clothing.

Okay. I’m beginning to form a picture. Teams of either five people or eighty seven people wearing pyjamas gather together in a field and mill aimlessly around because they have abandoned the word and with it the concept ‘goal.’

Do not play in two halves. Rather, play in one half or three halves in order to completely differentiate yourselves from the heretics, the corrupted and the disobedient.

Yeah! Nothing more disobedient than talking nonsense about two halves. Talking about three halves so much more obedient and submissive. And pure, too.

If neither of you beats the other, or “wins”, as it is called, and neither puts the leather between the posts, do not add extra time or penalties. Instead leave the field, because winning with extra time and penalty kicks is the pinnacle of imitating heretics and international rules.

Oh that’s how you say it! You ‘put the leather between the posts.’ Cool. Except when you don’t, whereupon you leave the field, because doing the other thing is the pinnacle of heretic-imitation. Got it.

You should spit in the face of whoever puts the ball between the posts or uprights and then runs in order to get his friends to follow him and hug him like players in America or France do, and you should punish him, for what is the relationship between celebrating, hugging and kissing and the sports that you are practising?

Ah. That’s a nice touch – a pretty thought. Spitting in people’s faces – yes, that’s always pleasant and sporting, that always goes down well. Very festive, very enjoyable, very athletic and wholesome and fresh air-enhancing. Miserable lousy stinking America and France. Ptah! Ptooie! Hkkkkkkkfwop! Take that, heretic hugging bastards.

You should use two posts instead of three pieces of wood or steel that you erect in order to put the ball between them, meaning that you should remove the crossbar in order not to imitate the heretics and in order to be entirely distinct from the soccer system’s despotic international rules.

And the two posts should not be straight in the manner of despotic international posts but they should be crooked and skywompus so that they fall down a lot. And the ball should be triangular in shape and made of fava beans, so that it falls to bits as soon as it is kicked, because a ball that stays in one piece is despotic and international, both.

Do not do what is called “substitution,” that is, taking the place of someone who has fallen, because this is a practice of the heretics in America and elsewhere.

No. No no no no no. No, if someone has fallen, you should spit in his face, and then all of you jump up and down on him until he is dead (read him this fatwa to make sure – if he doesn’t laugh, you’ve done a thorough job). Then you should leave the field, declaring victory as you go, because to do anything else would be heretical and French and American and just plain crazy, man.

The Vicar of Putney is sounding off again.

But what resources of self-criticism has atheism developed? Little, it seems. Rarely is a critical lens directed inwards. Once the campaigning atheist has seen the light, they remain on-message, keen to convert all unbelievers. Last week, as Maryam Namazie picked up her award for Secularist of the Year, she proposed “an uncompromising and shamelessly aggressive demand for secularism. Today, more than ever, we are in need of the complete de-religionisation of society.”

What’s his point? What does he mean? What does he think he means? He doesn’t say, he just gives another example of what he takes to be self-evident atheist non-self-criticism. Well, that’s stupid. The fact that a given atheist is a strong advocate for atheism doesn’t (at all, remotely, by any stretch even of the twisted vicarious imagination) mean that she is not self-critical. What an absurd conclusion to draw. Behold. One can be a strong advocate of atheism and be very cautious, skeptical, uncertain, tentative, gradualist about every other subject under the sun. Furthermore, one can be a strong advocate of atheism and be scrupulously, even obsessively self-critical, self-deprecating, self-mocking, self-correcting. The two are independent.

What he probably means is something like ‘atheism doesn’t consider what’s wrong with atheism enough.’ But too bad – that’s not what he said, so he doesn’t get any points for it.

Part of the problem is that many born-again atheists remain trapped in a 19th-century time warp, reheating the standard refutations of religious belief based on a form of rationalism that harks back to an era of fob-watches and long sideburns. One Oxford don has called the website of the National Secular Society a “museum of modernity, untroubled by the awkward rise of postmodernity”. Ignoring the fact that at least three generations of thought have challenged an uncritical faith in rationality, the society continues to build its temples to reason, deaf to claims that it is building on sand.

Attababy, Vic! You tell ’em! You tell those pesky old-fashioned boring dreary old hat modernists how yawn-inducing they are, how unhip, how deaf, how sandy. Above all tell them how bad it is to have ‘uncritical’ ‘faith’ (geddit? faith? he’s a vicar?) in rationality. You betcha. Let’s all have more uncritical faith in irrationality, and see how much better everything will be.

This commitment to Victorian philosophy turns to farce when campaigning secularists describe themselves as freethinkers. In truth, atheism is about as alternative as Rod Stewart. The joke is that many who were converted at university via Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene think of themselves as agents of some subversive counterculturalism. This is ridiculous to Da Vinci Code proportions. Contemporary atheism is mainstream stuff.

Grooooan. He’s arguing from fashion! He’s using the argument from hipness! He’s trying to make atheists feel silly and pathetic because we’re not ‘alternative’ enough. What an idiot. What (again) is his point? God-bothering is hipper than atheism therefore God exists? No? Well what then? God-bothering is hipper than atheism therefore we should believe in God despite the non-existence thing? Yes, apparently. Well why would that follow?

As religion returns to the geopolitical scene with frightening malevolence, secularists ought not to be handing out awards and congratulating themselves. They must first try to understand religious belief. That means dispensing with their own self-congratulatory piety: it’s the only route to an effective challenge.

That’s not funny, that’s just downright disgusting. He means Maryam. Yeah, right, that’s all Maryam does, is sit around congratulating herself – in between being imprisoned and fleeing Iran at the risk of her life, and working for women’s rights in Sudan and having to flee for her life from there, and working for women’s rights and secularism in the UK and being systematically ignored by a media that’s too busy fawning on Iqbal fucking Sacranie to phone her up for an opinion now and then, so the National Secular Society has the almightly gall to try to get her just a little more mainstream attention via this award – only for the Vicar of god damn Putney to come along and drivel about handing out awards and congratulating themselves. That pisses me off!

Sod off, Vicar of Putney. Go be Vicar of Morden for awhile – that would show you.

Back to Emptier I mean Fuller. From the morning session this time.

It is, in fact, very easy, as it were, for
things to fall out that, in a sense, the boundary
between science and non-science isn’t something one can
ever take for granted. It is actively being negotiated
at all times because there are all kinds of people who
are trying to make claims that what they’re doing is
scientific. Insofar as science is the most authoritative body
of knowledge in society. So in that respect, there’s a
kind of policing, you might say, and an occasional
negotiation of the boundary that takes place.

Yes, very true. There certainly are all kinds of people who
are trying to make claims that what they’re doing is
scientific. And there are also all kinds of people who amuse themselves by trying to create suspicions about the whole arrangement via words like ‘policing’ and ‘boundary’ and ‘authoritative’. (No doubt the next generation of Science Studies whizzers will be talking in terms of handcuffs and cells and torture and lethal injections. Why not.)

Q. Does the text Governance of Science speak to the
role of peer review in science?

A. Well, yes. And one of the things that it says is
that, while the scientific community is nominally
governed by a peer review process, as a matter of fact,
relatively few scientists ever participate in it. So if one were to look at the structure of
science from a sort of, you might say, political science
standpoint, and ask, well, what kind of regime governs
science, it wouldn’t be a democracy in the sense that
everyone has an equal say, or even that there are clear
representative bodies in terms of which the bulk of the
scientific community, as it were, could turn to and who
would then, in turn, be held accountable.
There is a tendency, in fact, for science to be
governed by a kind of, to put it bluntly, self-perpetuating elite.

Now what I want to know is, why would one want to look at the ‘structure’ of science from a political science standpoint? Is science supposed to be a form of politics? Is political science a relevant way to study the structure of science? It doesn’t seem very relevant to me – at least not in the usual sense of political science. I can certainly believe there is plenty of ‘political’ maneuvering and manipulation in science, as in any vocation, profession, workplace, group of people; and that that kind of thing is eminently worth looking at. But is that what’s meant by political science? I don’t think so. I think political science is about governance, and government. That’s a different subject. (So we have here another example of mission creep, and of changing the subject.) And that matters, because the reality is that science isn’t supposed to be ‘a democracy in the sense that everyone has an equal say’. For obvious reasons. Scientific results aren’t supposed to be reached by a vote; scientific questions aren’t supposed to be decided by majority rule. (Except on juries. Which can be a real problem…a problem which illustrates the problems with the basic idea.) Mistakes don’t turn into non-mistakes simply because a lot of people think they should.

What does ‘X works’ mean? What does it mean to say that something ‘works’? It means different things, which need to be sorted out, and it’s not ground-shifting to say so. It’s not ground-shifting to make necessary distinctions and to clarify definitions. It’s just not. It’s an essential requirement for critical thinking and for coherent discussion, not ground-shifting. Look at Steve Fuller’s testimony (which I will be doing more of later, if I can steal the time) for example after example of fuzzy language allowing someone to make absurd claims – absurd claims that could do their bit to sabotage the education of a lot of students. Fuzzy language does that kind of work all the time; it is far from a trivial issue; and it is not ground-shifting to make an issue of it. That’s why there is a new dictionary of euphemisms and obfuscations on B&W, only it’s invisible.

Alister McGrath likes the word – as theists and their admirers so often do. Theism ‘works,’ you see.

Hopelessly overstated arguments that once seemed so persuasive – such as “science disproves God” – have lost their credibility. Anyway, our culture’s criterion of acceptability is not “Is it right?” but “Does it work?” And the simple fact is that religious belief works for many, many people, giving direction, purpose and stability to their lives – witness the massive sales and impact of Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life. Atheism, already having failed to land the knockout punch by proving that God does not exist…

Hopelessly overstated arguments that no one but silly people made in the first place. Non-silly people don’t say ‘science disproves God’ so that’s a straw argument. Try to do better. But that’s a separate issue; the question here is about ‘works.’ ‘Our culture’s criterion of acceptability is not “Is it right?” but “Does it work?”’ Boy is that ever debatable, and boy does it depend on a lot of fuzzy words. Our? Culture? Acceptability? Right? And especially ‘work’?

McGrath does implicitly say what he means by the word – ‘it’ works in the sense of giving direction, purpose and stability to the lives of many many people. True. But the fact that theism (for theism is the it that McGrath has in mind) works in that sense does not mean that it is true. So if McGrath means ‘true’ when he says ‘right’ in that sentence, then he’s wrong – but no doubt that is exactly why he was careful to say ‘right’ instead of ‘true.’ That’s how fuzzy language does its work. That’s how it ‘works.’

Simon Blackburn tells a joke that also hinges on the word ‘works.’

It concerns a friend of mine, who was present at a high-powered ethics institute which had put on a forum in which representatives of the great religions held a panel. First the Buddhist talked of the ways to calm, the mastery of desire, the path of enlightenment, and the panellists all said ‘Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great’. Then the Hindu talked of the cycles of suffering and birth and rebirth, the teachings of Krishna and the way to release, and they all said ‘Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great’. And so on, until the Catholic priest talked of the message of Jesus Christ, the promise of salvation and the way to life eternal, and they all said ‘Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great’. And he thumped the table and shouted: ‘No! It’s not a question of it if works for me! It’s the true word of the living God, and if you don’t believe it you’re all damned to Hell!’

And they all said: ‘Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great’.

Same thing, you see? It works for you. Great. It’s all bullshit, of course, but it works for you.

Okay, it works for you. It’s useful for you in some narrow sense – but that is not the same thing as saying it’s true.

It’s also not even the same thing as saying it’s right, but that’s another and large subject. Later.

More Fuller. I’ve been reading the transcript (and so has Stewart, see his comments on I Employ Methods). It’s time to share.

A. Well, you might say as a philosopher I’m
professionally dissatisfied with all explanations that
claim to be final. And so there is going to be a
special suspicion sort of drawn toward the
taken-for-granted theories in any given discipline.

Q. So you’re not saying that intelligent design
is the correct or the better explanation for
biological life?

No, I’m not. I’m certainly not. They’re
not – they haven’t developed it enough to really be
in a position to make any kind of definitive judgment
of that kind…I want to see where
intelligent design goes, frankly. I mean, you know, again, it’s hard to make a judgment. But I do think
that when you get to a situation in science where one
theory is very dominant and so taken for granted that
people don’t even feel they have to, you know, defend
it anymore, then that’s kind of bad news
epistemologically, just generally speaking.

Well, it seems to me this (along with a lot of other places) is where the lack of expertise gets to be a problem. Which is no doubt why the plaintiff’s lawyer asked him about his expertise in some detail – got him to say No he’s not a scientist, not a biologist, not an expert on irreducible complexity, or on Behe, or on Dembski, or on complex specified information, not familiar with the textbooks that are being used, not familiar with Of Pandas and People. And this is where that shows up. The explanation doesn’t claim to be ‘final’. And then there’s the ‘it’s hard to make a judgment’. Well, yes, of course it is, because you don’t know anything about the subject! Therefore – therefore – you really ought not to be meddling in it. You ought not to be proffering your valueless opinions and hunches in a courtroom in a situation in which the vast majority of people who do know something about the subject think the side you are defending is utterly, bottomlessly wrong. That’s exactly why you should shut the hell up.

It says, Third, ID’s
rejection of naturalism and commitment to
supernaturalism does not make it unscientific. Did I
read that correctly?

A. Yes…But I do believe that ID is open
to supernaturalism. But it’s not exclusively
supernatural, it’s just with respect to this
dichotomy.

Q. But it has a commitment to supernaturalism
and to introducing it into the scientific community?[…]So if it’s not naturalistic, what else could
it be?

Yes, but the thing here is, what
supernaturalistic boils down to — I mean,
supernaturalistic just means not explainable in the
naturalistic terms. Right? It means involving some
kind of intelligence or mind that’s not reducible to
ordinary natural categories. Okay?
So that’s the sense in which I’m using
supernaturalistic. I’m not saying, you know, they’re
committed to ghosts or something. See, I’m not sure
what exactly — but that’s how I — I understand
supernaturalistic in this fairly broad sense…Well, as not naturalistic, given what we
take to be naturalistic now in science. Because in
the past, things that we now consider to be
naturalistic in science were not regarded as such.
Right? So that’s the basic point I’m trying to make
here.

But that’s not supernatural, you fool. That’s ‘not discovered yet’ or ‘not understood yet’, which is a completely different thing. As surely you know! You an expert in the rhetoric of science – surely you know perfectly well what ‘supernatural’ means. It means above, beyond, outside natural, it doesn’t mean natural but not fully understood yet.

Q. The goal is to have a supernatural designer
considered as a possible scientific explanation?

A. Well, it’s intelligent designer, and I think
the idea here is that intelligence is something that
cannot be reduced to naturalistic causes. Right? So
there is a sense in which the idea of intelligence
itself is taken to be somewhat supernatural here.

But ‘intelligent’ is just an adjective to apply to a process that, to the ID crowd, looks deliberate and planned and intentional – and ‘intelligent’ – instead of like a dull algorithm of reproduce, change, select, reproduce, change, select. But it seems pretty circular to take that adjective – ‘intelligent’ – that is the crux of the disagreement, and say that it’s something that cannot be ‘reduced’ to naturalistic causes. Why can’t it be, and how do you know, and are you sure you’ve looked hard enough? Maybe there’s some very ‘intelligent’ entity hiding somewhere that you just haven’t found yet. Go back and look some more and then come back – say in nine hundred years or so – and tell us what you’ve learned. In the meantime, get out of our school systems.

Steve Fuller. I’ve been browsing in some of my books, leafing through indexes, consulting bibliographies. Steve Fuller.

Here is a passage from Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense pp. 97-98:

Let us read it as a methodological principle for a sociologist of science who does not himself have the scientific competence to make an independent assessment of whether the experimental/observational data do in fact warrant the conclusions the scientific community has drawn from them. In such a situation, the sociologist will be understandably reluctant to say that ‘the scientific community under study came to conclusion X because X is the way the world really is’ – even if it is in fact the case that X is the way the world is and that is the reason the scientists came to believe it – because the sociologist has no independent grounds to believe that X is the way the world really is other than the fact that the scientific community under study came to believe it. Of course, the sensible conclusion to draw from this cul de sac is that sociologists of science ought not to study controversies on which they lack the competence to make an independent assessment of the facts, if there is no other (for example, historically later) scientific community on which they could justifiably rely for such an independent assessment. But it goes without saying that Latour would not enjoy this conclusion.

The passage is about Bruno Latour, you see; the ‘it’ in the opening words refers to Latour’s Third Rule of Method: ‘Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature’s representation, not the consequence, we can never use the outcome – Nature – to explain how and why a controversy has been settled.’ (Science in Action) They add a footnote to the observation that Latour would not enjoy this conclusion:

Nor would Steve Fuller, who asserts that ‘STS [Science and Technology Studies] practitioners employ methods that enable them to fathom both the “inner workings” and the “outer character” of science without having to be expert in the fields they study.’

Is that not hilarious? Oh do they! They employ methods, do they?! What kind of methods would those be then? Magic? Electro-mesmero-polycrypto salutations de mains? Pyramidal veridical saltations? Hyperosperical croptyflangial resonical fleering? No matter. No problem. We’ll just take their word for it. They say they have methods, so they must have methods, right? Of course. Because they wouldn’t say they have methods if they didn’t have methods – therefore they must have methods. Right? Right. So we’ll take their word for it. Same way, if some academics come tripping down the pike saying they have methods of resurrecting Shakespeare or turning back copies of the New York Times into gold necklaces, we’ll take their word for it, because why not? That’s what I call Sociology of Science.

Could be another sweatshirt slogan. ‘I employ methods.’

Bush is being especially irritating today. No he’s not, he’s always this irritating, but there are a lot of examples of that around today and recently. I feel like gathering a few of them together.

He didn’t get to appoint his friend to the Supreme Court – no fair.

Harriet Miers, the US president’s nominee for the supreme court, announced today she had withdrawn her name from consideration. Ms Miers, who is George Bush’s former personal lawyer, had been facing growing opposition amid questions about her qualifications and claims of cronyism.

Gee, I can’t imagine why. Just because she’s never done any judging. Just because she’s totally unqualified, and wouldn’t be nominated for even the smallest localest judicial post if she weren’t friends with Bush (just as Bush wouldn’t be elected lunch monitor if he weren’t his father’s son), and refuses to tell Senators what they need to know on account of how that would violate executive privilege – that’s no reason!

Both Mr Bush and Ms Miers said that the decision to withdraw followed a concerted attempt by senators to gain access to internal papers about her work at the White House…Mr Bush, who has insisted publicly in recent weeks that he did not want her to step down, said today: “It is clear that senators would not be satisfied until they gained access to internal documents concerning advice provided during her tenure at the White House, disclosures that would undermine a president’s ability to receive candid counsel.

No, senators would not be satisfied, and why should they be?! What are they supposed to do, just take Bush’s word for it? ‘She’s nice – I like her – she’s an evangelical.’ ‘Oh well in that case, no further questions.’ If he didn’t want senators asking to see the papers, it wasn’t very smart of him to nominate – of all the possible lawyers in the country – his own lawyer, was it! Ridiculous crybaby.

Then there’s the reinstatement of the Davis-Bacon Act. Remember last month, when we were treated to outraged diatribes on the subject of Davis-Bacon and the minimum wage? Oddly, even some Republicans found Bush’s suspension of Davis-Bacon a bit much. Even some Republicans don’t feel like stooping that low.

The White House yesterday reversed course and reinstated a key wage protection for workers involved in Hurricane Katrina reconstruction, bowing to pressure from moderate House Republicans who argued that Gulf Coast residents were being left out of the recovery…Conservatives strongly backed the waiver. But a group of moderate Republican members of Congress – many from districts in industrial areas populated by blue-collar workers – lobbied the White House and the congressional leadership for the prevailing-wage provision to be reinstated.

But – no such luck for the minimum wage.

U.S. senators – who draw salaries of $162,100 a year and enjoy a raft of perks – have rejected a minimum wage hike from $5.15 an hour to $6.25 for blue-collar workers…The minimum wage was last increased in 1997.

And, finally, Bush covers himself with glory by seeking an exemption from a ban on cruelty to terrorism suspects for the CIA.

The White House wants the CIA to be exempted from a proposed ban on the abusive treatment of terrorism suspects being held in United States custody. The Senate defied a threatened presidential veto three weeks ago and passed legislation that would outlaw the “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” of anyone held by the US. But the Washington Post and the New York Times, both quoting anonymous officials, said the vice-president, Dick Cheney, proposed a change so that the law would not apply to counter-terrorism operations abroad or to operations conducted by “an element” of the US government other than the defence department.

Impressive, isn’t it. Impressive how very seldom he does anything even minimally admirable – impressive how consistent he is. Make the rich richer, keep the poor poorer, appoint hacks to important government jobs, and seek to abuse suspects. Lovely fella.