Excellent. Hazlitt again. Say what you will about the Guardian – they do have a good books section, and they do keep having articles on Hazlitt. More than you can say for the New York Times!

I’ve said it before so why not say it again (especially since the article is saying much the same thing). Hazlitt is the most inexplicable case of undeserved literary obscurity that I know of in the case of an Anglophone author. Absolutely the top one. To be sure, there are Elizabethans and 17th century people who are well worth reading, who don’t get read all that much any more – Sidney, Nashe, Browne, Burton. But the barriers to reading them are easily understandable. But Hazlitt? Hazlitt?? Hazlitt is so readable it’s absurd, and the genre he writes in, unlike the genres that Nashe, Browne and Burton wrote in, is still very much current. He wrote essays and reviews. Big leap, huh? Nobody reads essays and reviews any more!

So why is Hazlitt so damn gone? Why was I made to read Lamb essays in school while I never so much as heard of Hazlitt? Why, why, why? I have no idea. I mean I really don’t – I don’t have a lurking suspicion of something or other; I have no clue; it makes no sense.

Because here’s the thing. He’s a brilliant stylist. Brilliant. Not just pretty good, not just very good; brilliant. One of the very, very best. He makes Orwell look lame. And nobody reads him. It’s tragic! And in case being a brilliant stylist is not enough, he’s no slouch as a thinker. And he’s politically interesting, and he’s good on literature, and he has an interesting mind and personality and take on things. There’s just no downside to reading Hazlitt. But no one does.

A reasonably well-educated friend noticed this book peeping out of my pocket one morning and remarked that it was rather heavy reading for such a time of day, or indeed for any time. I do wish people would stop doing this. Because Hazlitt died 170-odd years ago and is not as famous as Wordsworth or Coleridge, they assume that he cannot be an easy read, or even less of an easy read than W&C, or that to read him is more of a duty than a pleasure.
If you want a depressing lesson in contemporary cultural memory, go to any average-sized branch of a chain bookstore and ask for anything by Hazlitt. You will notice that it will take the person at the counter four or five goes to get the spelling right…

Terrible. Hazlitt rules. Down with archbishops and up with Hazlitt. Happy Easter.

Right. Let’s get down to it. With some help from Polly Toynbee.

But here the usefulness of faith ends, for it is mainly the power of the religious lobby that forces people to die in pain and indignity due to beliefs on the nature of life and death shared by very few. For 20 years now, every poll on the subject shows that 80% of people want the right to be helped to die at a time and in a way of their own choosing. But that kind of “choice” is not on the agenda.

And furthermore, even if the beliefs were shared by very many, even if they were indeed universal, they would still be both wrong (in the sense of inaccurate) and disgusting. (Which is the same problem that always comes up in discussions of for instance ‘honour’ killing and the like. I heard an example on the BBC World Service the other day, talking about the murder of Hatin Surucu in Berlin recently: the reporter said that clerics are telling the people in their mosques that ‘honour’ killing is not in the Koran. Well, clearly that’s one useful precaution under the circumstances, but the fact remains that even if it were in the Koran it would still be disgusting, contemptible, reprehensible. That the question to ask about a social practice that does obvious, radical, extreme harm to some people is not ‘Is it condoned or recommended or mandated in the Holy Book?’ but ‘Is it a good or acceptable or justifiable practice? Is it a cruel savage domineering controlling practice with no shred of justification?’) They would no doubt be much, much harder to get rid of; indeed they would probably be impossible to get rid of, if they were universal; but they would still be bad and wrong.

What kills you in the end if you have cancer or other terminal diseases? Not often the cancer itself. Nor the morphine that people innocently imagine will one day waft them away on a cloudy pillow of dreams to some opium-fuelled nirvana. What people actually die of, like Terri Schiavo, is dehydration when they can no longer swallow enough water to live – and it takes time. Enough morphine to die quickly is very rarely administered these days. Instead, cautious doctors, extra wary after Harold Shipman, give just enough morphine to kill people by degrees. It is enough, in the very end, to render them unable to drink so they die, semi-conscious, of thirst. Hospices don’t put up drips to keep people alive, but they don’t give out death-dealing injections either. The legal compromise is death by dehydration or sometimes slowly and gasping for breath by morphine-induced chest infection – “old man’s friend”. That is the great unspoken truth.

There. That’s nice, isn’t it. Something to look forward to. Read it all. Read about morphine-induced constipation and hallucinations.

Good though palliative care can be – my mother had the NHS at its very best – its own practitioners admit they often watch people die in great mental and physical anguish. People clutch at doctors’ sleeves, begging for an injection: “Can’t you do something?” How easy it is to slip into death-like unconsciousness under an anaesthetic, gone into oblivion before you can count to five. That little death in the operating anteroom is a paradigm for how the good death could be for those who want it.

Let’s hope the law is changed in the UK. And here – though it obviously won’t be any time soon, with these unspeakable bastards imposing their ‘culture of life’ on the rest of us even though we don’t want it. Because of their sick pathetic delusional beliefs.

As the Pope rasps out his last breaths, his bishops are using his final suffering as a testament to the religious requirement to endure whatever quality of life God sends. Both C of E and Catholic archbishops here will fight any attempt to change the law. Politicians have taken their cue from the churches.

The religious requirement to endure whatever quality of life God sends – what complete raving nonsense! If there is a requirement to ‘endure’ then doctors and medicine are illegitimate, right? Or, if the requirement to ‘endure’ somehow means the requirement to endure both illness and what medicine and doctors are able to do about it, then why does it rule out medical decisions that it’s time to put out the light? Because religion is a diseased imposition on human life, that’s why. What requirement? What kind of God is this that wants people to suffer as much as possible at the end of their lives? What is the matter with archbishops that they believe this kind of crap and impose it on everyone else? Serial killers and torturers go to prison (and in the US are executed) for causing that kind of suffering, but archbishops are respected for it.

Do archbishops live outside? Do they shiver in the cold and get wet in the rain? Do they blunder about in the dark, bumping into things? Do they eat all their food raw? Do they abjure clothes, books, transportation, medicine? If they have a headache do they not take aspirin? If you prick them do they not apply a band-aid? What is this hypocritical incoherent inconsistent sadistic mindless drivel about ‘what God sends’?

Go, archbishops, and sin no more.

Oh, Florida, Florida, Florida. What is your problem.

I mean for one thing there’s this winner.

Republicans on the House Choice and Innovation Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to pass a bill that aims to stamp out “leftist totalitarianism” by “dictator professors” in the classrooms of Florida’s universities…According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities.
Students who believe their professor is singling them out for “public ridicule” – for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class – would also be given the right to sue.

Is that a clever idea? I mean…what if students believe ‘God’ made the earth a few years before their parents were born? What if they believe 11 plus 2 equals 957,853? What if they believe Napoleon invented the automobile and Hitler was a Notre Dame football star?

What do students go to university for at all, if it’s not to have their beliefs not respected? They go there to find out that some of the things they believe are wrong. Dang – they even go there to find out that beliefs aren’t about ‘respect’. Well, except in Florida, maybe. (And, if Horowitz has his way, in Ohio and a few other states and pretty soon all fifty and I have to go pack my trunk now.)

And then there’s the Jebster.

Mr Bush’s brother, Jeb, meanwhile, has suggested doctors might have misdiagnosed Mrs Schiavo’s condition, which he says might be one of minimal consciousness rather than vegetative.
According to the Associated Press news agency, the governor and the state’s social services agency say they have filed a petition with a Pinellas County trial court seeking to take custody of Mrs Schiavo.

Mr Bush’s brother suggested that based on what, exactly? His own medical knowledge and familiarity with the case and personal examination of the patient? Intuition? Something he saw on tv? A fairy whispering in his ear? Hmm. I wonder if I can do that. [closes eyes, thinks hard] Okay, let’s see. There’s a car in the shop in Wichita, Kansas, that the mechanics have said has transmission problems, but I, sitting at my desk here in Seattle, suggest that the mechanics might have misdiagnosed that car’s condition, and actually what it has is ugly upholstery. I mean, my opinion is as good as theirs, right? It’s disrespecting my beliefs to say it’s not. It’s hell’s own arrogant for those stupid doctors to think they know more about Terri Schiavo’s condition than Jeb Bush does, just because they’ve examined her and he hasn’t and they know how a brain works and he, to put it mildly, doesn’t.

Well, great. What the hell. Let’s let legislators decide what college teachers should teach, and let’s let governors decide when doctors have made boo-boos. Peachy. Three cheers for minimal government. Not only micromanaging hospital care and university teaching, but also claiming universal competence. Brilliant.

Whatever. Maybe when Jeb gets custody of Schiavo he’ll have his parents move in so they can babysit for her and give him some time off. That would be sweet. Family values kind of thing.

This is a dispiriting read. They win. Bullying wins, death threats win, force wins, violence wins, pushing people around and beating them up and killing them wins. Interesting situation, isn’t it. People who have some capacity for moral reflection and awareness make some effort not to oppress and dominate and bully other people; people who don’t, don’t; so the people with some capacity lose to the people who have none. Familiar paradox. People who don’t give a rat’s ass about the freedom and rights of anyone but themselves are, of course, at a similar sort of advantage over people who do. People who think, like Callicles in the Gorgias, that people who can win because they’re stronger should go right ahead and do just that, often get their way. (Would he have thought so if he’d been small and puny and weak and sickly? Probably not. Hence the use of the Veil of Ignorance. But of course the Callicleses of the world don’t mess around with any old veils of ignorance, because they’re not small and puny and weak and sickly, so why should they.)

The decision by Wilders and Hirsi Ali to reveal their secret lives, one in a jail cell, the other on a naval base, has raised a question that is troubling many Dutch: is it acceptable for legislators in a Western democracy to be forced to go into hiding, to live like fugitives on the run in their own land?
Abram de Swaan, a prominent sociologist, said: “Of course this is an outrage. It’s not bearable. The government must come up with better solutions, like putting them in protected homes. That’s the way it happens in other countries.” The NRC Handelsblad, a leading daily newspaper, ran an editorial recently headlined “Unacceptable”. A situation in which legislators are “hampered in carrying out their tasks puts democracy in question and makes terror successful…”

Is it acceptable? That’s an easy question to answer. No, it’s not.

It was Hirsi Ali, though, who first decided to go public with her own and Wilders’ hiding places, out of frustration at the government’s seeming foot-dragging over finding appropriate housing. Her own proposals were regularly rejected as unsafe, she said.
Her bodyguards, she said, have deposited her on many weeknights on a naval base in Amsterdam, or hustled her off to sleep in different hotels. “They are keeping me alive, but I cannot concentrate on my work,” she said. “I need a place where I have my desk, my books, my papers, a home where I can meet with people.”…Hirsi Ali concedes she is struggling with the question of how long she can continue in politics, denouncing what she regards as the excesses of Islam. In the past she has shown she is not easily cowed, but she said a deep fatigue was setting in. “I am willing to sacrifice a great deal, but I don’t know if I can live like this for a lot longer.” She put her inexorable quandary this way, “The real problem is, I cannot stop because that will only serve and stimulate the terrorists.”

I find that dispiriting because I can imagine it so well – I can imagine going stark raving mad being forced to live in hotel rooms or on a naval base all the time, away from my desk, books, papers, own living space. Hirsi Ali is tired of it. She doesn’t want to live that way. And why the hell should she? How could she? So they’ve already won – even if she does persist. They’ve won by spoiling her life and making her work impossible. The mindless sexist bullying thugs who can’t stand to see women who are not under the thumb of a man, get to win. It makes me crazy.

And another thing.

By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient’s family’s wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother’s wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.

I didn’t know that until I read it on a blog. It doesn’t surprise me – of course Bush would sign a law like that. What else would he do, support ‘socialized medicine’? That would take away the whole point of being rich, talentless, lazy, and well-connected. It doesn’t surprise me, but it does disgust me that little bit more. All that sanctimony – that crap about the presumption in favour of life. What did he do, whisper so softly that the mikes didn’t pick it up ‘if you have the money, that is‘? Mark Kleiman has more.

I know. Why’s she so quiet all of a sudden? you’ve been thinking. What’s the deal? Did something very heavy sit on her or what? Has she gone prancing off on a trip again? Is she at the mall shopping for new spring outfits? Getting her hair done? Training for a marathon? In prison? What?

Since it’s not as if I fall silent in the normal course of things, is it. No. No, it’s none of those, just a death struggle with my computer. So I finally shot it (I had to) and got a new one. Which means I have to go from three meals of cat food a day to two, for the rest of my life – either that or get an actual paying job, and we wouldn’t want me to do that, now would we.

So I’m not going to say a lot about it, because I gather the right-wing talking heads have pretty much talked themselves into puddles of exhausted steam doing so. But I do want to say just one thing. It’s this business of ‘only God can decide.’

The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, on Monday condemned the withdrawal of the feeding tube, saying only God can decide whether a person should live or die. “Who can judge the dignity and sacredness of the life of a human being, made in the image and likeness of God? Who can decide to pull the plug as if we were talking about a broken or out-of-order household appliance?” the paper said in a commentary. A year ago, Pope John Paul II said that feeding and hydrating a patient in a persistive vegetative state was “morally obligatory” and called withdrawal of feeding tubes “euthanasia by omission.”

Thus illustrating yet again why one doesn’t turn to god-botherers for clarity of thought. I mean…if only ‘God’ can decide whether a person should live or die, then Terri Schiavo died fifteen years ago, remember? As did a great, great many of the rest of us and our parents and grandparents and so on. If only God can decide then we’re not supposed to do anything, right? Somebody has a fever, an infected cut, TB, cholera, tetanus, whatever – we’re supposed to just let God do what it will. Or else we’re not – but then the Vatican doesn’t get to pick arbitrary points where we’re obliged to let the deity do the deciding. Either humans intervene all along the way or they don’t.

This business about the appliance. The Vatican newspaper seems to think this God of theirs issued Schiavo with a feeding tube – a special feeding tube, apparently, that materialized only after she’d had the brain damage. But it must have looked to bystanders as if humans were involved with the appearance of the feeding tube. So why couldn’t it work the other way? This God of theirs dematerializes the feeding tube, and to bystanders it looks as if humans are involved in the process but in fact it’s the deity doing it all. That makes just as much sense as the other version, in which humans are perfectly entitled to perform medical interventions, they’re just not permitted to decide to end them when (actually, long after) it’s clear that the upper cortex has been destroyed.

And what is all this crap about compassion. (Oh look, I said I would only say one thing. But – oh well, two then.) Compassion. Is it. Is that why sane people are so filled with dread? Is that why we’re all imagining ourselves lying around like department store mannequins, bodies without minds, propped up like dolls, dead but still kept hanging around? Right to life my ass. It’s not right to life, it’s no right to death.

I try to be reasonable (sometimes) but this country looks like such a loony bin these days. It scares me.

Okay, I know I’m being bad. But some nonsense is just so nonsensical it just cries out for it. ‘And if the children cry out for rebuke shall we walk on the other side?’ I bet you don’t know what part of the Bible that’s from. Neither do I.

Anyway. They’re schlepping around with their tongues hanging out, begging us to laugh at them. So let’s laugh at them. First let’s laugh at Jesus-sniffing.

You can find candles with just about every fragrance imaginable, from blueberry to ocean mist to hot apple pie. Now there’s a candle that lets you experience the scent of Jesus, and they’ve been selling out by the case…”You can’t see him and you can’t touch him,” says Bob Tosterud. “This is a situation where you may be able to sense him by smelling. And it provides a really new dimension to one’s experience with Jesus.”

Next let’s laugh at the hilarious idea of a Catholic cardinal worried that people will believe lies and fables and things that aren’t true not nohow.

Mr Arcolao confirmed that the cardinal told an Italian newspaper: “It astonishes and worries me that so many people believe these lies.”
The archbishop told Il Giornale: “The book is everywhere. There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true.”

The book is everywhere! The president of the US has a group to study it every day in the White House! The Gideons give it away free in motels so that everyone will have one! Oh, wait, that’s a different book with fables in it. Still, it’s good that the cardinal is so vigilant, isn’t it.

And then there’s all the risible (and rather disgusting) drivel from the French Jesus-sniffers. (What price laïcité eh.)

The display was ruled “a gratuitous and aggressive act of intrusion on people’s innermost beliefs”, by a judge…Italy’s advertising watchdog said the ad’s use of Christian symbols including a dove and a chalice recalled the foundations of the faith and would offend the sensitivity of part of the population…”When you trivialise the founding acts of a religion, when you touch on sacred things, you create an unbearable moral violence which is a danger to our children,” said lawyer Thierry Massis.

So they can’t even tease doves and chalices? The Church has a monopoly even on them? So…if I say rude unkind things to the pigeons in Trafalgar Square next time I’m mincing and plodding around central London, and some little tiny Catholic children on their way to the National Gallery under the protection of their teacher overhear me – what will happen to me? Will I be extradited to France for punishment? Yet another thing to worry about.

And finally there’s an item that isn’t actually funny, but quite…blood-chilling. Eugene Volokh, whom I never read but whom I’m always seeing linked to and quoted as a rare example of the reasonable, rational conservative. Saying some very strange things.

I particularly like the involvement of the victims’ relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he’d killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging…I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.

That ‘but’ after ‘I like civilization’ is interesting. Sometimes a ‘but’ can say such a lot.

Well. There’s not much to say. I’ll just quote a little. From International Spiegel Online.

Hatin’s crime, it appears, was the desire to lead a normal life in her family’s adopted land. The vivacious 23-year-old beauty, who was raised in Berlin, divorced the Turkish cousin she was forced to marry at age 16. She also discarded her Islamic head scarf, enrolled in a technical school where she was training to become an electrician and began dating German men. For her family, such behavior represented the ultimate shame — the embrace of “corrupt” Western ways.

And because ‘her family’ own her, it’s not enough just to dislike or disapprove of her behavior – they have to turn her into nothing. She can’t just decide what to do with her own life, because it doesn’t belong to her, any more than she belongs to herself.

Tens of thousands of Turkish women live behind these walls of silence, in homes run by husbands many met on their wedding day and ruled by the ever-present verses of the Koran. In these families, loyalty and honor are elevated virtues and women are treated little better than slaves, unseen by society and often unnoticed or ignored by their German neighbors. To get what they want, these women have to run. They have to change their names, their passports, even their hair color and break with the families they often love, but simply can no longer obey.

And from BBC News.

“Women must make their own decisions,” read one of the banners at her shrine. Mrs Surucu’s killing has led to an unusually strong public reaction – with Turkish women taking to the streets to protest. “This tragedy has shaken us awake. We’ve been very surprised by the response,” says Eren Unsal from the Association of Secular Turks.

But don’t get too optimistic.

But not everyone shares the outrage. On a school playground, just yards from where the killing occurred, children were heard praising it. The victim, they said, had lived like a German…”I heard a young Turkish lady said on a Turkish radio station ‘she deserved it because she took off her headscarf’. This is incredible,” says Ozcan Mutlu, one of the few Turks sitting on the Berlin city council.

See? See why I’m not rejoicing that Shabina Beghum won her case? See why I’m not convinced when people claim that the hijab is a matter of choice and freedom? Because it isn’t, that’s why. It’s mandatory, and seen as mandatory, and seen as grounds for murder if treated as optional.

He says the problem has been exacerbated by the German authorities turning a blind eye to it.
“For instance, when a Turkish man beat his wife, he didn’t get the same punishment as when a German did it. They tried to explain it with the culture, the traditions, and with the religion.
“That’s stupid, you cannot do that. There is no cultural or religious excuse for beating women, and there can be no less punishment for honour killings. But in Germany it was the fact in the past years.”

Go, Ozcan Mutlu. You rock.

Honour killings are, she says, just the most extreme form of repression faced by the people who come to her. “All these girls who come to us are locked in, in the house, by their families. They only go to school because they have to by law – otherwise they wouldn’t be allowed. They have to stay at home and cook, and care for the sisters and brothers. The parents don’t accept that the girl decides anything by herself.”

And it’s not only the Berlin cops who turn a blind eye. As we’ve noticed, it’s also a lot of fuzzy lefties – who mean well, but who for some reason seem to be immovably convinced that it’s more important never to say a critical word about Islam or the practices of some Muslims than it is to criticise the murder and total subordination of women. I can think of some fuzzy lefty blogs that will, I can predict with fair confidence, never say a word about all this. Not a syllable. Hatun Surucu will not be mentioned. I find that chronically depressing. (You know who you are. Go on, prove me wrong. I’d love to be wrong.)

I hope you’ve all read the interview with Rebecca Goldstein – because it’s so good, and interesting, and full of ideas. Not my doing, obviously, but Goldstein’s. I’ve been an admirer of her fiction for years – ever since The Mind-Body Problem came out, in fact, I think, which is more than twenty years ago. It’s a brilliant novel. I’ve always thought so, so I was pleased to see Steve Pinker tell her “Your first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, is a classic among people in my field” in that conversation between the two of them I posted in Flashback a few days ago. I hope you’ve also read that, because it’s fascinating. I hadn’t read it before I wrote the interview questions, so I was interested to see Steve Pinker asking some of the same ones. For instance about storytelling and empathy.

SP: We are getting less cruel, and the question is how. The philosopher Peter Singer offers a clue when he notes that there really does seem to be a universal capacity for empathy, but that by default people apply it only within the narrow circle of the family or village or clan. Over the millennia, the moral circle has expanded to encompass other clans, other tribes, and other races. The question is, why did it happen? What stretched our innate capacity for empathy? And one answer is mediums that force us to take other people’s perspectives, such as journalism, history, and realistic fiction.

RG: Storytelling does it.

SP: By allowing you to project yourself into the lives of people of different times and places and races, in a way that wouldn’t spontaneously occur to you, fiction can force you into the perspective of a person unlike yourself, who might otherwise seem subhuman.

RG: There’s a fundamental role that storytelling is always playing in the moral life. To try to see somebody on their own terms, which is part of what it is to be moral, is to try to make sense of their world, to try to tell the story of their life as they would tell it. So in our real life, just in making sense of people’s actions and in seeing them in the moral light, we’re involved in storytelling.

SP: So you agree that fiction can expand a person’s moral circle?

And then – Pinker talked about much the same thing last week on Start the Week. The idea of the expansion of empathy from the immediate circle to include larger and larger proportions of Other People. So, read the interview, read the conversation, listen to Start the Week, and you’ll see how it all joins up.

It’s everywhere. Well it would be, wouldn’t it. Tocqueville said as much, and Mill reviewed both volumes of his book, each as it came out, and was as worried as Tocqueville, and wrote On Liberty as a result. But they might as well have saved their breath to cool their corn flakes. Only yesterday I was expressing some reservations about the idea of the of the ‘self-conscious reorganisation and administration of scientific disciplines for democratically chosen goals’ – and here we are again. This time at the Supreme Court, of all places where it doesn’t belong, or shouldn’t belong.

A number of the justices declared–dispositively, as they like to say–that “we are a religious nation.” The implication was that there is a quantitative answer to a philosophical question. But what does the prevalence of a belief have to do with its veracity, or with its legitimacy? If every American but one were religious, we would still have to construct our moral and political order upon respect for that one. In its form, the proposition that “we are a religious nation” is like the proposition that “we are a white nation” or that “we are a Christian nation” or that “we are a heterosexual nation,” which is to say, it is a prescription for the tyranny of a majority.

Well said, Mr Wieseltier. What indeed does the prevalence of a belief have to do with either its veracity or its legitimacy. And isn’t that the kind of distinction that Supreme Court justices are really supposed to be particularly sharply aware of? Isn’t that what they’re there for? To protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority? Not that they’ve always done anything like that, of course – the little matter of slavery leaps to mind, what with Dred Scott and all – but that is what they’re supposed to do. They’re not supposed to say things like ‘we are a religious nation.’

The morning’s disputations confirmed me in my view of Antonin Scalia’s lack of intellectual distinction…Scalia does not recognize the difference between a denunciation and a demonstration. At the court last week, he dripped certainties. “Government draws its authority from God.” “Our laws are derived from God.” “The moral order is ordained by God.” “Human affairs are directed by God.” “God is the foundation of the state.” These are dogmas, not proofs. Scalia simply asserts them and moves on to incredulity and indignation. But how does he know these things?

He doesn’t, of course, he just asserts them. That’s why religious people of that type are so exasperating and also why they are such a danger when they are in positions of power – because not only do they have a huge excess of certainty, they also consider that a virtue rather than a disastrous handicap. So it’s not possible to reason with them, because they know they’re right and they don’t even think they ought to pay attention to conflicting opinions. And that’s a Supreme Court justice. Perfect. Absolutely ideal.

This is a good read. At least if you’re interested in social constructivism – and how could you not be? It’s quite reflexive – a review of a book about Steve Fuller’s social epistemology. So we have three levels here: the reviewer, the book being reviewed, and the subject of the book being reviewed, which is the work of Steve Fuller. You need to know that to understand the quotations.

The framework of the book is outlined in the Introduction and further elaborated in Chapter 1. “Kuhn’s questioning of legitimation has become a central problem for discussion in the philosophy of science. The question that arises from Kuhn’s work is: What legitimizes scientific knowledge claims if science does not have a method to yield truth?” (2) Needless to say, this is a tendentious way of putting matters: what is meant by “if science does not have a method to yield truth”? Unobjectionable if it were to indicate the mere fallibilism of knowledge claims, discussable if it were to suggest instrumentalist anti-realism towards theoretical entities, interpretations become highly problematical when they deny the applicability of epistemological standards to the cognitive efforts of scientists.

Yup, that’s a tendentious way of putting matters all right. I wonder if social constructivists ever put matters in any other way. ‘If science does not have a method to yield truth’…Feh. Yeah I could put it better but Thomas Uebel did it for me, so I’ll just go with Feh.

“If science does not have the right method, a method that would guarantee access to truth, then it does not have privileged authority.” (11) That’s like saying that unless knowledge entails certainty, any belief is as good as any other. Yet no better argument for taking the radical problematic seriously is ever given

That ‘privileged authority’ trope is very popular. As, for that matter, is the slide from fallibilism to anything goes.

Again it is hard to discern an argument in Remedios’ review of Fuller’s tu quoque responses to various critics beyond the insistence that “normatively constituted groups” lie behind the “‘oversocialized individual who is a microcosm of the entire social order to which she belongs” (18). Instead, things begin to fall into place when Remedios observes that Fuller is not interested in “traditional problems of knowledge such as justified true belief” but rather “in how texts become certified as knowledge” (ibid.) and in “the material embodiment of knowledge”(19)…[I]ssues pertaining to epistemological justification are simply dropped from the discussion. Certainly Remedios’ affirmation that Fuller pursues the normative project as a “rational knowledge policy” with the goal of the “self-conscious reorganisation and administration of scientific disciplines for democratically chosen goals” (20) and his defense of Fuller against criticisms that he fails to address epistemological concerns do not allay the worry.

Uh oh. ‘self-conscious reorganisation and administration of scientific disciplines for democratically chosen goals’ is it. Have people like Fuller never heard of little items like ‘Intelligent Design’? Do they not realize that if it were put to a vote in the US, ID would replace biology in a great many public schools? Or do they know that perfectly well and think it’s only fair? Social constructivists are scary…

Remedios is aware that “philosophers may find Fuller’s rhetoric of inquiry unsatisfactory, for they may accuse Fuller of changing the subject to sociology and leaving problems of epistemic justification unanswered.” His response in Fuller’s voice, however, is equally unsatisfactory: “traditional notions of knowledge and justification are contested notions and cannot be assumed to be valid”. (7) The paucity of this response should be readily apparent. Calling notions contested does not absolve us from the task of providing defenses of the alternatives put forward. It is no good, therefore, to dismiss demands for explanations of why the replacement of epistemological concerns with political ones should help answer the original problem.

Especially since they’re the ones doing the contesting. That move is way too easy. Hey, I contest the traditional notion that the moon is a satellite of the earth, so it’s a contested notion, therefore the traditional notion that it is a satellite of the earth cannot be assumed to be valid. Period. On my say-so alone.

There’s a lot more. Check it out.

So we see that the combination of rural isolation and fundamentalist religion is, shall we say, rough on women in more places than Pakistan and in religions other than Islam.

The license the Amish have been granted rests on the trust that the community will police itself, with Amish bishops and ministers acting in lieu of law enforcement. Yet keeping order comes hard to church leaders…Once a sinner has confessed, and his repentance has been deemed genuine, every member of the Amish community must forgive him. This approach is rooted in the Amish notion of Gelassenheit, or submission. Church members abide by their clergymen; children obey their parents; sisters mind their brothers; and wives defer to their husbands (divorce is taboo). With each act of submission, the Amish follow the lesson of Jesus when he died on the cross rather than resist his adversaries.

One can spot a built-in problem with that right away. Much of the time, especially in a life based on agriculture, the chain of submission is going to stop with one person. There isn’t going to be anyone else around for that one person to submit to – so that one person can have things his own way. He’s supposed to ‘abide by’ the clergymen, apparently, but the clergymen aren’t around all the time, and he is. So for girl children and for women, even apart from the fact that they are the target of sexual predation not the perpetrators of it, there is simply a built-in disadvantage. They have to defer to brothers, fathers, husbands. Brothers have to submit to fathers, but fathers and husbands are where it stops. So if the father has a habit of raping his daughter or daughters – that’s that. And that’s even before you get to the part about permanent forgiveness.

It is sinful for the Amish to withhold forgiveness—so sinful that anyone who refers to a past misdeed after the Amish penalty for it has ended can be punished in the same manner as the original sinner. “That’s a big thing in the Amish community,” Mary said. “You have to forgive and forgive.”

You have to forgive and forgive, while male relatives rape and rape. Uh oh.

When their trust is betrayed, women like Kathryn and Sally see themselves as having little recourse…Sally didn’t call the police because she’d been taught to defer to the men in her household, even if they were her sons, and because she belongs to a community that believes the greater threat comes from without, not within.

So…not to belabour the obvious, but one implication is that teaching women always to defer to men has drawbacks that even some non- and anti-feminists might be able to perceive.

The relatively light sentences meted out to these men stand out at a time when sex offenders are punished with increasing harshness. The fear that many pedophiliacs can’t be stopped has led Congress to lengthen sentences for child sex offenders and has persuaded some states to use involuntary civil commitment laws to keep them behind bars indefinitely. Why did these Amish, by contrast, receive only mercy?

I’ll give you one guess.

Read the nice part about Anna, whose mother told the Amish dentist to pull all her teeth out for punishment. He complied. “After he had pulled the last tooth,” Anna remembered, “my mom looked at me and said, ‘I guess you won’t be talking anymore.'” Pretty. What price forgiveness and forgiveness now eh? Apparently it’s the victims who are supposed to do all the forgiving, and the bullies who get to go on bullying – as Jane Eyre pointed out to Stoical Helen Burns at Lowood. There was a lot of forgiving to be done there, too; a lot of children taught to be exceedingly deferential, a lot of bullies coasting along on all that deference and treating the deferential people like dirt.

“They don’t believe it’s any of our business,” said Roberts, Anna’s Ohio social worker, of the Amish attitude toward child abuse investigations. But it’s the job of social workers, police, and prosecutors to make child abuse their business. The state’s duty to push past the barriers thrown up by parents and the community can’t hinge on the religion they practice. Its role becomes more essential, not less, when adults wall off children from the outside world.

Exactly. That’s one place where the phrase ‘it’s their job’ makes sense. It is their job and the state’s duty. Deference to religion allows horrors to go unchecked.

We’ve been talking about passion, commitment, feeling, grievance, sincerity – about the whole idea that intensity of feeling is some sort of index of validity. Eve Garrard put it clearly: ‘do you think that one possible reason why Eagleton and (many) others are so impressed by the passion and commitment of suicide bombers, and think it must be in the service of justice and freedom, is some deep underlying moral subjectivism, ie the belief that moral claims just are validated by the sincerity and passion with which they’re held?’ I do think that, along with thinking that most people who hold that belief don’t hold it with full awareness. That it’s perhaps not so much a belief (properly so called) as a vague association, an absent-minded linkage. I’m not at all sure of that. I’m also not at all sure if that’s a charitable reading, or on the contrary an uncharitable reading that rests on the thought that people who believe anything so damn silly are the kind of people who don’t examine their beliefs carefully enough to have beliefs properly so-called.

At any rate, it all reminded me of what Mill said about his father.

For passionate
emotions of all sorts, and for everything which bas been said or
written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt.
He regarded them as a form of madness. “The intense” was with him a
bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of
the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients,
the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered
to be no proper subjects of praise or blame.

Also of a remark of Hume’s in a letter.

For the purposes of life and conduct, and society, a little good sense is surely better than all this genius, and a little good humour than this extreme sensibility.

And Yeats’ familiar line ‘the worst are full of passionate intensity.’

Arguing (or at least speaking) for the other side, there is Keats’ ‘the excellence of every art is in intensity’. But then he was talking about art, not political thought.

This is also the argument between Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility – the novel, not the fillum. Marianne would be a suicide bomber. And yet – she has her good qualities. Intensity and passion do have their good qualities. But – ah well. Just ‘but,’ that’s all.

A little unfinished business. I meant to add something to that N&C about Terry Eagleton’s comment last month – and then I forgot. Now I’ve remembered again.

Like hunger strikers, suicide bombers are not necessarily in love with death. They kill themselves because they can see no other way of attaining justice; and the fact that they have to do so is part of the injustice…People like Rosa Luxemburg or Steve Biko give up what they see as precious (their lives) for an even more valuable cause. They die not because they see death as desirable in itself, but in the name of a more abundant life all round. Suicide bombers also die in the name of a better life for others; it is just that, unlike martyrs, they take others with them in the process. The martyr bets his life on a future of justice and freedom; the suicide bomber bets your life on it. But both believe that a life is only worth living if it contains something worth dying for. On this theory, what makes existence meaningful is what you are prepared to relinquish it for. This used to be known as God; in modern times it is mostly known as the nation. For Islamic radicals it is both inseparably.

“Suicide bombers also die in the name of a better life for others”. That’s what I wanted to say more about. No they don’t. Not all of them. Some may, but certainly not all. Some die in the name of, or for the sake of trying to attain, a much much worse life for others. Orders of magnitude worse. Specifically, some suicide bombers die for the sake of trying to attain among other things a much, much worse life for women. All women. All women on the planet. If some suicide bombers got what they ‘martyred’ themselves for, every single woman on earth would be walled up indoors under the ownership of a man, forbidden to go outside, forbidden to work, to go to school, to learn at home, to get medical attention. Subject to beating by armed gangs of thugs if she does venture outside and accidentally allows a piece of hair or a bit of wrist to show. Subject to being buried up to the neck and killed by having large rocks thrown at her head if she is accused and convicted of adultery; subject to being convicted of adultery (and thus stoned to death) if she charges a man with rape and he is acquitted – which must happen a lot since she is required to produce witnesses of the rape in order to make the charge stick. This is the ‘better life for others’ that some suicide bombers dream of. A regime of unmitigated hatred, contempt, violence, control, confinement, and stultification for all women.

“The martyr bets his life on a future of justice and freedom; the suicide bomber bets your life on it.” No, he does not. Justice and freedom? Justice and freedom? Under what perverse definition of justice and freedom? I would be charitable and suggest that Eagleton must have forgotten the suicide bombers of September 11, and the ones who blew up the two African embassies – but he mentions the people who jumped from World Trade Center to escape the fire, in the column, so he can’t have forgotten it. So does he think those suicide bombers were betting anyone’s life on a future of justice and freedom? Does he even think they thought that? They were betting other people’s lives (as well as their own) on a future of purity and submission, not one of freedom and justice. (Justice by their definition, maybe. But I earnestly hope their idea of justice is not Terry Eagleton’s.)

What’s going on here? What did Eagleton even think he was saying? I don’t know, but I’m guessing that he was confusing commitment and passion and a sense of grievance with something else. With legitimate or valid or halfway decent commitment and passion and sense of grievance. A lot of people seem to get confused about that. Seem to think that sincerity and authenticity are some kind of sign of virtue and altruism. They can tell the difference (usually) when the passion and grievance are neo-Nazi or otherwise fascist in some familar way, but they seem to lose the ability when the fascism is in some way mixed up with postcolonialism. At least, that’s my guess, although I find those two re-quoted remarks pretty baffling.

But this kind of thing is why the ruling in the Shabina Begum case is not good news, and why the right to manifest her religion cited in one article on the subject does not say it all. Because in the current context it’s more than just a manifestation of religion. Political Islam is political. Backword Dave has good comments on the subject here and here. The second one discusses Azam Kamguian’s ‘Why So Much Fuss About a Piece of Clothing?’.

It’s international women’s day. Here’s hoping we can start to figure out what a better life for others actually means, before too long.

Harry at Harry’s Place on the Shabina Begum case.

Those who blame the judge for not making a political decision or who attack the Human Rights legislation for this ruling miss the point. It is clearly Britain’s lack of secularity, the absence of a written constitution and the religious character of our schools that have allowed such a verdict by creating the conditions in which it has been taken. But as long as we are allowing religions or beliefs to be displayed in schools then it is simply unjustified to discriminate. Those of us who would prefer schools to be free of such religious battles and identity conflicts, need to be aware that we are fighting a losing battle unless the fundamentally unsecular nature of the British constitution and its institutions are changed. Which, given the state of our major political parties, all busy enthusing about ‘faith schools’, is highly unlikely.

And Mona Eltahawy says some very good things.

I felt like screaming with anger and frustration when I heard about Shabina’s case because once again a Muslim woman is in the headlines only because of what she wears…Shabina chose to go beyond a uniform that was deemed acceptable for the other Muslims and denied herself the ability to continue attending her school. She claimed that her school’s refusal to allow her to attend classes in a jilbab was a result of post-9/11 bigotry. I assert that Lord Justice Brooke’s ruling is a classic example of liberal guilt over the ugly Islamophobia that many Muslims have faced since 9/11. Instead of standing up to a growing conservatism among some Muslims, many liberals will simply give in rather than appear prejudiced. Sadly, most of the points they give in on have to do with Muslim women. This is nothing short of the racism of lower expectations – they expect Muslims to be extreme, they expect Muslim women to be covered. The Guardian newspaper, which I reported for from the Middle East, committed a grave error in reporting Shabina’s story. It did not interview a single Muslim woman who could have told them there is more to being a Muslim than a jilbab and that such a jilbab was over and beyond what is deemed modest.

That error sounds very familiar. The BBC did a pretty limited job of interviewing people for that article I commented on the other day.

I wish Cherie Booth had defended a Muslim girl’s right to complete her education against a family who was pulling her out of school early to get married, which happens even in Britain. I wish she had defended a Muslim girl against violence at home – a suffering that is too often ignored by the Muslim community in the West because it would prefer girls and women suffer in silence than bring shame to the community by speaking out. And what does Shabina think she has achieved? She told The Guardian that the Court of Appeal verdict would “give hope and strength to other Muslim women” and that it was a victory for all Muslims “who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry”. My response to Shabina is thanks but no thanks. I wore the hijab for nine years from the age of 16 to 25 and do not feel my identity lies in a piece of cloth. I gain my hope and strength by sharing the excitement of ambitious young Muslim women like my sister Noora who loves her university studies. Noora wears the hijab but she knows that it is what is in her head, not what is on it that is more important.

Exactly. And Shabina Begum hasn’t done much to remind people of that perception, I don’t think.

Hmm. A little jest. Well, two can play at that game…

1. Then look up aluminium. Check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it…You will learn that the suffix ‘burgh is pronounced ‘burra’ e.g. Edinburgh. You are welcome to respell Pittsburgh as ‘Pittsberg’ if you can’t cope with correct pronunciation.

16. Last but not the least, and for heaven’s sake…..it’s Nuclear as in clear NOT Nucular.

Yes. But then again…(see me get myself in trouble) –

It’s also tune, not chewn and not chyewwn. It’s news, not nyewws. It’s duke, not jyewk or jyewwk. If you want to pronounce them chyewwn, nyewws, and jyewwk, then you ought to spell them that way.

And it’s drawing, not drawring. If you want to pronounce it drawring, you ought to spell it that way. Furthermore, it’s not Chiner and India or Australier and New Zealand.And there’s jaguar – it’s not pronounced jag you a. Neither is Nicaragua pronounced Nick a rag you a.

I could go on – I could go on for hours – especially after I’ve been listening to Mark Lawson – but that’s enough trouble for now.

Update – to point out that it has suddenly occurred to me that I disagree with Brian Leiter, on whose site I found the extended joke, that it could have been written by John Cleese. Well, it could have been, of course – but I disagree with the implication that it seems likely or plausible, that the joke is Cleesesque. It’s not. It’s far too pedestrian and obvious for that. And not nearly funny enough.

Well. What a lovely story.

Ms Bibi was catapulted to world attention after a panchayat, or tribal council, at the remote Punjabi village of Meerwala in June 2002. Her 12-year-old brother was accused of having an affair with a woman from the higher-caste Mastoi tribe. In punishment, the elders ordered that Mukhtaran be raped. As several hundred people watched, four men dragged her screaming through a cotton field. Pushing her into a mud-walled house, they assaulted her for more than an hour.

Is that pretty or what. It has all the ingredients, doesn’t it. Nothing left out. A higher-caste tribe. The elders. Punishment of A for something B is accused of doing. Rape as punishment, rape as judicial (sort of) punishment, rape as something that elders order to be done, rape as something that a tribal council of old men order to be done to a young woman. Several hundred people (some of them no doubt well known, neighbours) watch. Several hundred people watch a young woman dragged screaming through a field by four men, to be raped, on the orders of the elders of the tribal council.

“Honour” killings and punishments are usually sanctioned through the panchayat system, which has no legal standing but is still prevalent in many rural towns. Last week elders in another Punjabi village ordered that a two-year-old girl be married to a man 33 years her senior. The betrothal was in compensation for an adulterous affair committed by her uncle.

And the brother was framed anyway. In fact he was assaulted himself.

According to the prosecution, the Meerwala council ordered the gang rape of Mukhtar Mai, then 30, as punishment for the alleged illicit sexual relations of her brother Shakoor with a woman from the rival Mastoi tribe. It was later revealed that he had been molested by Mastoi men who tried to conceal it by accusing him of illicit relations with a Mastoi woman. The Mastoi demanded revenge. That was delivered when the council approved the rape of Ms. Mukhtar.

Paul Anderson in Islamabad.

The BBC’s Paul Anderson in Islamabad says most women involved in attacks against them which are designed to restore the slighted honour of a family, clan or tribe, accept their fate, believing that tribal or feudal leaders are too powerful to resist and that the police and judicial systems are stacked against them. The statement said the reason for the increasing violence against women in Pakistan was the fact that men, guilty of assaulting them, were rarely punished. Hundreds of women are killed or injured in honour attacks each year.

Nothing to add.

Right, that does it – a post I’ve just read at Pharyngula has goaded me into doing the post I’ve been meaning to do for a couple of days.

It’s time for a look at credulity and superstition and general soft-headedness in the Mass Media and popular culture.

Here is the Pharyngula post. About a story on MSNBC (hey if it’s partly owned by Microsoft shouldn’t it be all full of rationalist geeky types who would throw heavy rocks at anyone who suggested such a story? No? Why not?) about a ‘legendary Roman stone’ that gets soggy when a pope is about to snuff it that is currently dry therefore the stone ‘says pope will live.’

My item is yesterday’s Front Row, in which Kirstie Lang talks to a sculptor about a ‘curse’ on Carlisle which his sculpture is supposed by some Carlisle councillors to have re-activated. She says something to the effect that one has to be sympathetic, or one sees why they’re worried, or some such. Carlisle has had terrible luck lately, she says earnestly and with her usual irritating over-emphasis; rain, floods. So what? said the sculptor impatiently, you could say the same about the southwest; Devon’s had rain – Yes said Lang but they don’t have that curse.

Duh!!

Jesus H Christ almighty, I remarked pleasantly as I threw a chair through the window. Is that the sort of reasoning skill they teach you at BBC school?

But then to end on a cheerier note. I found this refreshing. (Man, how we clutch at straws in these woolly days.) On CSI, Grissom said about the horrible supervisor guy Eckley, ‘Eckley doesn’t have a scientific bone in his body. He decides what answers he wants and then he asks the questions to get them.’

Yeah! That’s telling ’em. The higher authorities should put Grissom in charge of the BBC and MSNBC.

This is typical. And irritating. Irritating in many ways.

Humera Khan of the An Nisa Society, an organisation that represents the views of women, agreed the school had failed to take into account the huge diversity of the UK’s 1.6 million Muslims. “If you consult on what is Islamic, and you for instance only talk to the Pakistani community, they will say the shalwar kameez is suitable. But other communities would have a different view that then becomes excluded,” she says.

Where to begin. How about with that ridiculous misleading essentially meaningless phrase ‘an organisation that represents the views of women’? The views of women. Does it mean all women, or some women? Notice that you can’t tell. It could mean three women, for all we know.

At any rate, it is clear enough from what Khan says that the organisation certainly does not represent the views of all women. So you know what? The article should have said that. It should have used some modifiers before the word ‘women’ – some adjectives. ‘An organisation that represents the views of’ ___ ___ women. Not just women – women of a certain kind, or with certain beliefs. So why didn’t it? Sloppiness? Absence of mind? Stupidity? Who knows. But my guess is that it was out of a (probably vague, semi-formed) intention to make Khan and An Nisa seem less sectarian, parochial, regressive than we might otherwise think them. A well-meaning woolly effort to make An Nisa sound like just some neutral set of boffins like any other. In other words, an effort to make what is at least arguably a regressive attitude to women seem more harmless and reasonable than it in fact is.

Picture the New York Times or Washington Post running an article with a quote from one Hannah Sheep of the Because Paul Said So Society, talking about consulting on what is Christian in the way of clothing for girls and women. If you talk to the Ohio community, she says, they think long skirts and bonnets are good enough, but other communities – those in Utah and Idaho, perhaps – would have a different view that then becomes excluded. Would the Times or the Post call the Because Paul Said So Society ‘an organisation that represents the views of women’? Would they tell their readers that a fundamentalist Christian organization represent the views of women? Just like that, women, without any modification to specify which women? I don’t think they would. Would the Guardian or the Independent or the BBC characterize, say, a women’s branch of Christian Voice that way? I don’t think so.

That’s where to begin. Now to go on. Why didn’t the reporters talk to anyone else? Where are the other women? Where are the women An Nisa does not represent? Why don’t they get to say anything? Why are they just ignored? Talk about different views that then become excluded! If I’m not mistaken, Humera Khan is worried about more fundamentalist, stricter, more traditional views that become excluded. Maybe I am mistaken, maybe she is worried about the other views too, the ones that go in the other direction, but you’ll notice the article doesn’t say so. You’ll notice that the article doesn’t talk to any secularists at all, or consider their views at all. You’ll notice that the article pretty much accepts it as a given that what girls wear is something properly determined by Islamic scholars.

Humera Khan says many Muslims are frustrated that the West had become apparently obsessed with how women express their faith. “The Western world has seen women’s Islamic dress as a sign of oppression. But when Islamic movements reacted against colonialism [in the 20th century] the clothing was a sign of liberation with political connotations.”

Yes but there again – there are other women from majority-Muslim parts of the world who strongly disagree with what Humera Khan says – who in fact strongly agree that ‘women’s Islamic dress’ is indeed a sign of oppression. Maryam Namazie and Azam Kamguian have written eloquently on the subject. But their view just gets systematically ignored – ‘excluded,’ just as Khan says. Unfortunate.

And since you mentioned skepticism – explain something to me. This Intelligent Designer we hear so much about. It’s supposed to answer those questions that atheists and biologists and similar tiresome people can’t answer. But the thing about this Intelligent Designer character is that it raises a hell of a lot of questions that don’t arise if there’s no need to explain the Intelligent Designer. Surely finding the Intelligent Designer a satisfactory answer to questions while finding Designer-free answers unsatisfactory, relies on ignoring a great barnlike stack of questions that trail in the wake of the Intelligent Designer. The most obvious one of course is Okay smartyboots then who designed the Designer? But there are others.

The one that I’ve been pondering today is what did this Designer design humans for?

Amusement? Entertainment? Company? An experiment?

Maybe company. Since the Intelligent Designer is apparently a singular noun, and since monotheism is supposed (by monotheists) to be in some way superior to polytheism – more sophisticated and mature and sort of serious – therefore clearly the Intelligent Designer is solitary. So what does it do when it’s feeling chatty? There’s no other Designer to chat with. So it designs humans?

Doesn’t seem very likely, does it. Would we really be good conversation-companions for a Designer who had the skills, time, energy, and materials to design the universe? Billions of galaxies each with billions of solar systems? I don’t know about you, but I would feel pretty awkward if I got a dinner invitation from the Designer one fine day. ‘Hi, I feel like a good old natter, drop by the house tonight and we’ll talk.’ And the Designer would feel pretty let down if I did. I just don’t think we’d be talking quite on the same level, you know what I mean?

So if that were the reason, why not design something better? Quite a lot better? There would still be plenty of room to design something inferior enough so as not to be afraid of rivals – while having some possibility of some sort of conversation. But with us? Come on. What are we going to do, talk about football or tv with someone who designs galaxies and lice and supernovae and mangoes?

Actually, why not design something better anyway. Even if the reason for designing humans is not in order to have some pals in this big wide empty cosmos. Even if it’s for some other reason, why not something better? I know, the standard answer is free will. But that assumes that the Designer is somehow engrossed in our moral nature, and the truth is, that doesn’t seem very likely either, does it? Why would it be engrossed in that? Why would it be interested at all?

Of course the old idea was that the Designer created us in its image. But that doesn’t make a lot of sense either. In fact, frankly, it doesn’t make any. The Designer – or the deity, we might as well call it, since that’s what fans of the Designer idea really mean by it, except for Anthony Flew – the deity, then, is omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent – we’re told. As with monotheism, that’s supposed to be the sophisticated mature idea of deity: not the silly quarrelsome sexy all-too-human deities of the ancient Greeks or the Hindus, but a philosophical kind of deity that is Perfect. Okay but then we’re nothing like it and it’s nothing like us. So what did it do – design in weakness, limitation, incompetence, lacks of all kinds? Faults, flaws? Why? To see what we’d do? (That’s usually part of the free will defense. The deity wanted to see what we’d do, so it left us free, and told us not to eat this one piece of fruit, and then kicked back to watch.) So it’s an experiment then. Well…why do people find that consoling or satisfactory? One does have to wonder.

The slightly more modern version of the thought is that we’re here to represent Intelligence, or Mind. But the deity already does that – why bother with us? Maybe to see what this exciting stuff, Intelligence, looks like in a lesser entity? But that seems unconvincing. The deity has perfect Intelligence, as much of it as it’s possible to have. We don’t. So – is what we have even the same kind of thing? Isn’t this one of those cases where quantity and quality are mixed up together? The deity has enough Intelligence to design the universe. Jupiter, the Milky Way, earth, atoms, quarks, eyes, mildew. We don’t. Do we really have the same thing the deity has only in a smaller amount? Like soup? The deity has an ocean, we have a quarter-teaspoon?

I wonder if they ever talk about these things at the Discovery Institute. It’s in Seattle somewhere – do you realize I don’t even know where? But if they do talk about them, what on earth do they say? Maybe just the usual guff. The deity is beyond human comprehension, it’s ineffable, we can’t describe it in human terms, we can’t begin to answer such questions, it’s impious to try, blah blah blah. But then – oh well. You see the problem.