I find the murder of Theo van Gogh quite disturbing, upsetting, disgusting, infuriating, etc. As I’m meant to, of course; as we all are – all we unrepentent atheists and secularists and women who wander around in the world without asking anyone’s permission. Killing him is meant precisely as a message – to people like him, to people like his co-producer of the film ‘Submission,’ Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to people who criticise or resist Islamism in general.

Some of the coverage of the murder is slightly peculiar. It seems somewhat – cowed. Hesitant. Apologetic. It seems to want to say or signal that van Gogh kind of sort of asked for it. That he shouldn’t have said such mean things about Islamism. This article for example.

People of Moroccan Muslim descent make up the largest single ethnic minority group in the Netherlands and their representatives had been on the frontline in van Gogh’s frequently harsh war of words on extremist Islam. This war reached a height with the recent broadcast on Dutch TV of his short film Submission, a film that protested van Gogh’s view of Muslim treatment of women…Co-produced by the Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an activist of Somali origin who has blamed Islamists for fostering repression and domestic violence in the Netherlands’ immigrant communities, the film provoked an outcry. Both Hirsi Ali and van Gogh received death threats.

‘Frequently harsh’…Well the reporter is there and I’m not, and I haven’t seen the movie, I haven’t seen van Gogh’s work. But I have to wonder. What’s wrong with saying ‘harsh’ words about ‘extremist Islam’. Why wouldn’t Ayaan Hirsi Ali blame Islamists for fostering repression and domestic violence (to put it more forthrightly, oppression of women)? Is it a secret that ferocious control of women is one of the chief goals of Islamism? Is that some sort of Western or Orientalist myth? Homa Arjomand and Maryam Namazie and their colleagues, women from Iran and other ‘Muslim’ countries, would say no, as would (and did) Ishtiaq Ahmed in this column a few weeks ago. So why the tip-toeing? Multiculturalism run amok or plain fear of another jihadi with a knife and a gun. Who knows. But it’s a tad creepy.

And now that we’ve given the charitable reading room to breathe, let’s take it back again. Let’s say the hell with the charitable reading – it can hold its breath. Because the problem with the possible feelings of superiority thing (besides the ones I’ve already mentioned) is that it just isn’t necessarily true, and it’s destructive (and often hostile and unkind) to assume that it is. Sure, it’s always possible that The Subject likes [Shakespeare/Bach/Whatever] for invidious reasons, just as it’s always possible that The Subject does anything for invidious reasons, but that’s not quite good grounds for assuming that she does. What the feelings of superiority explanation overlooks is the possibility that The Subject just really does like [Shakespeare/Bach/Whatever] and finds a lot of joy, interest, meaning and the like in doing so – that The Subject is genuinely, passionately, self-forgetfully absorbed in [Shakespeare/Bach/Whatever] and is not thinking about her superiority or inferiority at all, that her liking for [Shakespeare/Bach/Whatever] has nothing to do with presentation of self or jockeying for position or display or competition or looking down on people. That could be true even if The Subject is delusional and wrong to like [Shakespeare/Bach/Whatever], even if she is merely slavishly conforming to conventional tastes, even if she is merely obediently liking what the culture has told her to like.

So that’s the problem with the possible feelings of superiority thing, and the problem with the anti-elitism campaign that it feeds into is that anti-elitists have a tendency to like to shame and humiliate people for being putative elitists. It’s easy to do. It always is easy to shame and humiliate people who are excited and enthusiastic about something – just wait until they’re maximally involved in talking about whatever it is they’re enthusiastic about, and then interrupt to tell them they’re elitists for being enthusiastic about that. It’s a familiar old schoolyard trick, of course – just let old four-eyes get going on atoms or poetry or algebra or whatever sucky nerdy geeky thing it is he likes to get going on, and then pounce and tell him how nerdy and geeky and sucky he is, and maybe beat him up for good measure. I’ve mentioned before here a very interesting, indignant, poignant passage Stephen Jay Gould wrote on this subject in Bully for Brontosaurus – the quantity of intellectual curiosity and excitement that gets teased and beaten out of children in school playgrounds in the anti-intellectual culture of the US. (The apotheosis of George W Bush is unlikely to make that kind of thing more scarce.) John McWhorter writes about a very similar phenomenon in black culture – an incident in his childhood when a boy held his younger sister up so that she could repeatedly hit McWhorter because he had spelled a word correctly on request. It’s depressing, in fact heart-rending, that kind of thing – kind of like ‘The Office’, where people spent so much of their energy ripping each other to shreds.

I used to work with someone who was a classic case, in one of the many menial jobs I’ve had (elitist that I am). He was quite a bright guy, I thought, and I also thought that was probably why he was so hostile – frustrated intelligence. He had it in for me. I had the audacity to read sometimes at lunchtime, so he never missed an opportunity to taunt me. I didn’t much care, because I was indifferent to his opinion, but it was irritating. But the thing is, he had two young children, and he was proud of how smart they were – but he was also threatened by it. He said truculent things from time to time about not letting them get too smart, about teaching them to be real boys, blah blah. God how that depressed me – he wanted to make sure they would end up as frustrated as he was. No doubt he’s succeeded by now. Well at least they won’t be any damn elitists using high-falutin’ big words and thinking they know everything. That’s a relief.

Okay, first, to be fair, let’s try to make a case for anti-‘elitism’. Let’s try to figure out if people who stake out claims to the anti-elitist moral high ground have any good reasons for such claims – let’s try to figure out if there is anything going on here besides one-upsmanship and a paradoxical (not to say ironic) kind of elitism via reverse-elitism. (It is kind of funny from that point of view. It can be seen as nothing but an endless silly regress. ‘You’re an elitist and I’m not, therefore I’m better so I’m in the elite and you’re not…um…wait…’) Let’s try to do the charitable reading thing, just this once.

The moral core of the idea seems to have to do with feelings of superiority. The thought is that people who like or profess to like (or who know something about or profess to know something about) certain cultural products – literature, art, classical music – as opposed to others – tv shows, movies, pop music – think they are better than people who don’t like or know about such products. That, in short, people who prefer or claim to prefer ‘Hamlet’ to ‘Titanic’ think they are better than people who prefer ‘Titanic’ to ‘Hamlet’.

There’s still some unpacking to do there, such as asking how the word ‘better’ is defined or used or meant in such a context, and then asking some (doubtless unanswerable but still pertinent) factual questions about whether people really do think they are ‘better’ in all possible senses of the word or only in a pretty narrow sense and whether that makes any difference and whether the whole thing isn’t drastically muddied and qualified and complicated by the possibly infinite other criteria for ‘better’ that could be relevant. That is, even if it is true that everyone who prefers ‘Hamlet’ to ‘Titanic’ thinks she is better than ‘Titanic’-preferrers in the sense of having better taste of a certain kind, does it follow that all Hamlet-preferrers think they are better in every possible way? What about ‘Titanic’-preferrers who are also brilliant astronomers or cooks or mountaineers or (as Mike said) plumbers? At least some people who like artifacts such as Hamlet have enough sense to know that there are many many criteria for what’s ‘better’ among humans and that no one is likely to be decisive.

And so on. But that’s a large subject, one we might go into another day, but for the moment let’s give the charitable reading room to breathe.

Okay, here’s the room to breathe. Sure – it’s true – preferences in the matter of literature, music and the like can prompt and foster feelings of superiority. Definitely. Thorstein Veblen made the point quite wittily a century ago, and people have gone on making it ever since. It’s a fair cop. I certainly had such feelings when I was a teenager, and possibly more recently. I may even have them still, although I do think they’re very attenuated if they exist at all, because I’m so sharply and permanently aware of all the things I don’t know – but then that’s a self-serving thing to think, so treat it with due caution.

But now – we’ve given the superiority-feelings room to breathe, so now what? What follows from that? That liking ‘Hamlet’ or the equivalent can lead to feelings of superiority therefore – what? No one should ever read ‘Hamlet’ again? Everyone should look around and figure out what is the most popular cultural artifact of the moment and then consume only that and nothing else lest feelings of superiority might be aroused? But then what would stop people deciding they had a more profound or refined or sophisticated or enlightened appreciation of the given cultural artifact? So – what? No one should read or listen to or look at anything ever lest feelings of superiority might be aroused? But then wouldn’t people just decide their appreciation of food or sex or breathing was in some way better than other people’s? So – what? People should blindfold themselves, wear ear-muffs, cut off their genitals? Or just jump off a cliff and have done with it?

Nope. This is a mug’s game, obviously. Or at least it’s obvious to me. Yes, things like a taste for literature can cause feelings of superiority and smugness, but then, so can just about anything else. Or not. People are very resourceful, and can find reasons to feel superior almost anywhere. That’s even a good thing in some ways – a source of ego-strength, motivation, energy, commitment, and the like. So we kind of have to live with it, don’t we. This one is smug because she is keen on Wordsworth, that one is smug because he can run a marathon in two hours and twenty minutes; she works hard at learning about medieval agriculture, he works hard at playing squash. R is thin and disdains fat people, Q is rich and disdains poor people, L is idealistic and disdains materialistic people, and so it goes.

Or at least so it always can go. It doesn’t absolutely have to, or it doesn’t absolutely have to loom large, I don’t think. Such feelings can be background feelings, there when needed for self-defense or a spur to energy, but otherwise shrunk very small and stuffed in a corner. It is possible for people to talk about subjects that happen to interest them, even if they are things that don’t interest most people, without preening or self-congratulation, merely because the subjects in fact interest them. Elitism wars can cause people to think dark thoughts about moving to a desert island or a mountaintop cabin or central Greenland and talking to seals or bats or palm trees but not human beings any more. Could be quite good fun, provided it’s a really superior bit of central Greenland, one that most people have never heard of.

I’m just going to ignore it. That’s okay isn’t it? Just pretend it’s not there. Or at least that I don’t particularly have to talk about it. I mean, what is there to say, and everybody else is already saying it anyway. I don’t have to chime in. (It’s not even just the politics. It’s more basic. It’s the thing about minimal competence. It’s like having a choice between a grown-up and a not very bright child to do a difficult job – designing a bridge, doing research into a new killer virus, figuring out how to get cookies right-side-up on a plate, that kind of thing – and choosing the child.) I don’t have to chime in so I’m not going to. I’m just going to bracket the whole damn thing for as long as it takes – the rest of my life, probably, and everyone else’s too. The gerrymandering thing makes it look as if the bastards are going to be there forever, busily drawing Congressional districts that look like pretzels or corkscrews or the finest old Brussels lace or a game of spillikins so that there will always always always be a Republican majority until Ozymandias returns from the dead and asks what –

Sorry, sorry, I said I was going to ignore it. And I am.

Actually Ozymandias is a good way to make the transition from what I don’t want to talk about to what I do. I didn’t mention him on purpose, he just came into my head, I suppose because I was thinking about eternity and forever-and-ever and metaphors and phrases for same – so there was Oz, sitting there smirking at me. ‘You wantcher metaphor for eternity? I’m yer man.’ So I grabbed him and stuck him into the sentence. I didn’t plot or plan it (that’s what I mean about ‘on purpose’ – not that it was an accident, but that there was no forethought involved), I didn’t form a deep design to mention a name that will be less familiar to some people than Lisa Simpson or Posh and Becks in order to make myself feel clever and grand and learned. I didn’t. But there are people who might suspect that I did. Or who might even firmly believe I did, and say so, and laugh uproariously and tease and mock and demand how many people I think will have the faintest idea who Ozymandias is. People who [voice rising like Tweedledee’s when he was so fussed about his nice new rattle] themselves refer often to names and concepts that I know nothing whatever about, but do I take it for granted they’re showing off and being pretentious and playing one-upmanship? Do I? Hah? Do I not rather simply think that I don’t know much and ought to know more and ought to do better and ought to fill in some of these gaps? Do I call them

elitist?

No, I don’t, but they call me it, and when I flap my arms around like a heron and say I’m not I’m not, they draw diagrams that they claim show that I am. Hmph. What could be more elitist than that? I can’t draw diagrams that show people are what they say they aren’t, so therefore someone who can when I can’t must be an elitist. Obviously. Since that’s the definition in play.

Except actually it’s not, it’s a highly selective version of that definition that’s in play. It goes like this [I would draw a diagram if I could, but I can’t]: Anything that X mentions that might not be common knowledge is a symptom of elitism and anything that I mention that might not be common knowledge is a symptom of the fact that I know some things that are not common knowledge but I do it in an anti-elitist way. That has to be the case, a priori, because I’m anti-elitist and X is elitist, by nature. X has an elitist personality and I have an anti-elitist personality; these things are hard-wired.

I’m being slightly outrageous here, but only slightly, because that is pretty much how the argument goes. It’s a slightly outrageous argument, it seems to me (not to say waspish), so it seems only fair for me to be slightly outrageous too.

Anyway elitism and charges of elitism and resistance to perceived elitism are all subjects that interest me a lot and also that seem relevant to much of fashionable nonsense. Therefore I think the whole subject is worth exploring, and I intend to – I intended to make a start right here, but I got sidetracked into some mocking and teasing first and now this N&C is more than long enough and I have to run off, so this will have to do for the moment. Actually it’s not a bad way to start, despite the peculiar tone, because it does bring up some of the issues involved. What does make one kind of subject matter ‘elitist’ when another that is at least equally obscure or little-known or erudite is not? What makes one word (‘quotidian,’ say) elitist when others (teleology, contingency, sentient, omniscience, say) are not? That’s a real question. I have a feeling I know the answer (that nothing does, because they’re not different), but I could be wrong, and maybe you have some thoughts. If so, enlighten us – go on, it will take your mind off the vegetation in the White House.

Yo, I’m back! Out of the outhouse, into the inhouse, back at the desk, back to work. I’ve left the bright lights and whirling crowds of Bedford Square for the quiet backwater of Seattle. I came in, dropped all my cases and bags and excess sweatshirts in the middle of the living room, grabbed a water bottle, and rushed out to vote. Saw a friend on the way in; did not have to stand in line; saw another friend on the way out. You see what a quiet backwater it is. That wouldn’t happen in Bedford Square.

Ohio. Pennsylvania. Michigan. Florida. Well, we’ll see. I don’t dare let myself think about how I long to be rid of Bush.

More tomorrow. I’ve been awake for more hours than you would believe, so there’s no sense trying to say more now. Especially since my eyes seem to be trying to secede from the rest of my head.

Okay, so I have to post something so that November isn’t just a blank page (yes, I should have been cleverer when I programmed this thing). But unfortunately I have so little going on in my head that I’m really struggling here…

I did have a thought – a couple of weeks ago now, whilst running over a golf course – about Michael Ruse. In his book, The Evolution Wars, he claims:

I am arguing what history has shown: there is really no reason why a Christian should not be a Darwinian, and there is really no reason why a Darwinian should not be a Christian.

At first thought, this doesn’t seem an unreasonable claim. But it does raise a number of interesting issues.

1. If you’re a Christian, have you got to think there’s a kind of teleology in evolution? Were things set-up so that humans were necessarily going to evolve?
2. But that’s a bit problematic. Maybe something like humans had to evolve, but it does seem that there is contingency in the precise form that humans take (well certainly someone like Gould would think so; and when I asked Ed Wilson whether he’d expect us to emerge again if evolution were re-run, he said he wouldn’t).
3. However, if one thinks about this even vaguely closely, there are some possible responses that a Christian could offer.(a) Maybe what appears contingent to us, isn’t contingent at all. I can buy that, but it leads to further puzzles: why, for example, would God have set things up so that the emergence of the human species reeks of contingency? That’s bizarre. (b) Or maybe it didn’t matter too much to God exactly what form human beings took; it’s enough that we’re sentient, have a moral sense, etc. Not sure about this one either. If nothing is contingent to God, then she can’t but help know how evolution was going to end up (given omniscience). So she would know exactly what form humans were going to take from the beginning (to the extent that ‘from the beginning’ makes sense when talking about God).
4. And then there’s a further thought here that maybe this whole puzzle is just a version of the old Calvinist, predestination thing. Perhaps what’s key here is that God is atemporal; that there is genuine randomness in the way that evolution unfolds (maybe it’s allowed by the laws of nature), but because God is somehow present at all stages in the unfolding, any such randomness is not an impediment to her knowing how things were going to turn out. But I’m not sure that this even gets off the ground as an argument. Would it mean that God did a number of different evolutionary experiments, and then kind of stopped when she got humans from initial conditions which had randomness built in? Or perhaps somehow she would know exactly how the randomness would turn out, so she wouldn’t need more than one? I’m not sure I can make sense of either of those possibilities.
5. And then there is the possibility the whole idea of randomness, or contingency, doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’ve never really been able to understand what it means to claim that things could have turned out other than they did. No doubt this is some limitation on my part.

I had other thoughts about all this; but I’ve bored myself outlining just these few. Anyway, OB can’t complain now that I’ve let down the side by posting nothing on November 1st. Okay, it isn’t November 1st yet, but I’m going to cheat on the timing!

I have sent OB on a mission to count copies of The Dictionary. Her base of operation is a sumptuous residence in Bedford Square (though she only gets to use the outhouse). Unfortunately, it has no internet access (not the kind of thing which is required for the servant quarters). This means that there will be a blogging hiatus. Unless I can think of something to say in the meantime. Which I can’t. Hang on, let me think – what have I been irritated about over the last few days? Hmmm. Oh yes. The soccer player Adrian Mutu got caught with traces of cocaine in his body; so he has to undergo a course of psychological counselling. There are so many levels of stupidity with this idea that I’ve exhausted myself thinking about them, so I’m shutting up.

Further travel news.

More travel news.

I just wanted to call your attention to this post on Normblog. It’s his reaction to yet another of those helpful lectures on how impoverished and pathetic secularism is and how we have to give up and admit that we ‘need’ religion. Of course, as always, the writer makes the case by 1) pretending that religion is the only possible source of things like meaning and solidarity, and 2) by redefining religion. Okay. At that rate – if there’s enough taking away combined with enough redefinition – I could be brought to agree with that idea too. But what of it? Of what use is it to assume that secularism is something it isn’t and that religion isn’t what most people take it to be? Of what use is an argument that depends on a bunch of fictions?

Enabling dreams of Paradise, a world where swords will be beaten into ploughshares, a counter-reality which glimpses an alternative republic of heaven on earth, where peace is built on justice rather than conquest… this, not virgin births, second comings, holy wars and infallible books, is the real stuff: hard-core religion in action. And we have a basic need for that, even if we know the need can never be wholly satisfied, the itch never healed.

No it isn’t. That is not the real stuff of religion. Religion has no monopoly on dreams of peace and justice, and plenty of religion has nothing whatever to do with peace and justice. I do wish if people are going to try to make a case for religion they could manage to do it honestly.

Travel news.

I love this. There are those who think that people like me who insist, whether petulantly or earnestly or flintily, that Shakespeare (as it might be) is quite a good writer and better in many ways than quite a few other writers, are ‘elitist’ and snobbish and mindless enemies of all of popular culture. But ’tis not so. It’s just that I insist in the same kind of way there too – some of it is better than other of it, that’s all. I don’t love all of popular culture. But then I don’t love all of the putative ‘canon’ either – some of it I think is over-rated. Gatsby, for instance.

But one bit of popular culture I do love, though I hadn’t given it much thought for some years, or decades, is Pogo. This article in the Boston Review attracted a post at Crooked Timber and the post has attracted fans, fans with more knowledge and better memories than I have, and both the article and the comments have made me all in a sweat to read it again. It’s hilarious stuff, and very American – but in a good way. Not the usual sappy mushy silly goggle-eyed irony-free way that people seem to think is so typical of us – no, in a Twainish, Menckenish, W C Fieldsish, Grouchoish, Ring Lardnerish, self-mocking way. Not bad for red paint.

Now that’s funny. Made me do one of those loony blurts of laughter at the computer screen that solidify one’s feeling of creeping insanity. No but really, it is funny. The Guardian has a really exceptionally irritating smug knowing comment in a leader on our debt to Derrida. My point is not to quarrel with the late Derrida, whom I haven’t read; my point is to quarrel with this particular remark in this particular rather silly piece in the Guardian.

What was important was that deconstruction held that no text was above analysis or closed to alternative interpretation. It is no coincidence that it came into vogue in the 1960s and 1970s, when many cultural and social institutions were being challenged. As a result, Derrida became popular among those willing to question the sterile idea of a “western canon” who wanted to expand literary discourse so that writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon could sit alongside the Brontes. Thanks to Derrida, many new voices were heard.

Sterile? Sterile?? Sterile in what sense, you, you [takes deep breath, starts over]. For one thing, there is no ‘western canon’, that’s a straw man. Yes yes, I know, Harold Bloom called a book that, but that’s because of all the people droning about the sterility of this non-existent western canon. There is no fucking canon. Okay? There isn’t. What there is, is a lot of reading lists for university literature surveys, especially in the US where people don’t get much of the kind of thing in secondary school. But that’s not a ‘canon.’ That’s a pejorative people came up with to get people to stop reading Shakespeare and read other people instead. Reading other people is fine, if they’re good (and if they’re not, if that’s what you want to do), but actually discouraging people from reading Shakespeare, by sneering about canons, is another matter. For a second thing, if there were a ‘western canon’ (which there isn’t), why would it be sterile? What’s sterile about reading, say, Homer and Euripides and Thucydides and Montaigne and Byron and Austen and Hazlitt? Eh? And for a third thing, what does ‘could sit alongside the Brontes’ mean? Anything? No, but it implies something – that thanks to Derrida, we now get to think that Mary Elizabeth Braddon is as good as Emily Bronte (not ‘the Brontes,’ since they are two different writers, after all, not a unit). Well guess what – she isn’t. Not even close. I haven’t read Derrida but I have read some Braddon, and she is mildly entertaining, but she is not within shouting distance of the author of Wuthering Heights.

The funny bit is that I was going to do a N&C to say exactly that, and then I saw that A C Grayling had got there first. Good.

Your leader express a gratitude to Jacques Derrida for impugning the idea of a literary “canon” (October 11). What deconstruction and its postmodern allies, in theory, actually do is abandon standards of judgment, describing these as tools of snobbery and exclusion, and thereby making it a criterion of excellence that a work’s author (his or her intentions, of course, aside) has an appropriate gender, ethnicity, or geographical origin.

The good reasons why these latter considerations should count in giving a hearing to traditionally suppressed voices should not be confused with the question of what constitutes the highest critical standards: it is part of the damage done by Derrida and his kind that the latter have been replaced almost wholesale by the former.

Exactly. The bit about snobbery and exclusion is what really gets up my nose. That’s the bit of cultural work that word ‘sterile’ is doing – that’s what I mean by ‘discouraging’ people from reading Shakespeare. It’s false, it’s stupid, and it’s harmful, and I wish people would knock it off. It is not ‘elitist’ to read or to like Shakespeare, and the sooner that idea gets drummed out of the ‘canon’ of right-on ideas, the better. Go, Anthony – tell ’em!

It was also amusing to see the Guardian’s idea of key thinkers. snicker, snort. Alain de Botton and Julie Burchill? gasp, wheeze.

Anyway, when I spotted the article, the first thing I thought was, I wonder if that Baggini fella we keep running into is one of their key thinkers. So I hit the down button, and sure enough. He’s everywhere, that guy. Even here.

Update: You know the best thing about Derrida? People who read him learn not to be so dogmatic! So they tell us, anyway.

My colleague and I have been talking in an inconclusive back-and-forth way about the subject of certainty, the revisability of scientific claims, the difference between in principle and in reality or in practice or in fact, transcendence, labeling, rhetoric, the difference between what can be imagined and what is a live possibility. We’ll talk about it further in a couple of days (well, three) when we’ll be able to do it with the useful accompaniment and assistance of gestures, grimaces, thrown objects, slaps, pinches, what my brother always called as he administered it to me an ‘Indian rope burn’ but which must be called something else now but I don’t know what, table-thumping, brow slapping, eye rolling, hair tearing, and food throwing. That is our rigorous and aerobic notion of collaboration. It has always been liberally laced with insults, taunts, mockery, and rude suggestions, and physical violence will be a welcome addition and enrichment of this tradition.

It comes up of course because of this book we’re writing, and because of thinking about the claims of people like Bloor and other Strong Programmistas. It’s impossible (naturally enough) to think about such claims without thinking about epistemology, and of course it’s impossible to think about epistemology without immediately getting lost in a bog of Yes but how do we know we know we know? and similar penetrating questions. Which is why people like Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus made such big names for themselves and why Montaigne inscribed ‘que scais-je?’ into the roofbeam and why Hume woke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers and why Derrida expanded on the point and why Rorty and Fish enjoy irritating everyone and why Douglas Adams thought of the mouse experiment and 42 and whoever thought of The Matrix thought of The Matrix. It’s not as if they’re wrong, it’s not as if there’s nothing problematic about knowledge. What one does with that thought is another matter, but the thought itself is a real thought.

My colleague’s real thought has to do with the fact that science is revisable in principle but, about some things, not in reality. That scientists may say that all scientific knowledge is revisable but there are plenty of things about which they don’t actually believe it. They don’t really believe that the fact that the earth goes around the sun is revisable. I’ve been putting up an argument. I think either that they do believe it, or that the fact that they don’t doesn’t really have any particular force. Or both of those – that they’re the same thing. They do believe it’s revisable, provided there is evidence. The difficulty of imagining what that evidence could be and how it could be reconciled with all the other evidence does make the belief very thin, or formal, or ‘merely’ verbal, I suppose – but then that’s how it is. That particular ‘if’ is a very big if – but some ifs are very big ifs. That’s the nature of ifs, and thought experiments and counter-factuals in general. So we argue about transcendence and certainty. Is it reasonable to say that some of science’s truth claims are in fact transcendent, or certain, because of this difficulty of real belief in revisability? Well, yes, in a sense, I suppose, but it’s also true that such words are used in rhetorical contexts and for rhetorical purposes – to attribute much greater certainty, and smugness and blindness and refusal to question, to science and scientists than they in fact have about a lot of their own work. They know from daily practice, from life at the coal face, how tentative theories can be, so…it seems to me that that’s enough to foster the kind of uncertainty and awareness of revisability that’s required. But then I’m the one writing this Comment, so I’m giving myself the last word. Followed by a few thrown apple cores.

Actually not. Jerry S typed and sent this extract from E O Wilson’s autobiography, Naturalist (pp 319-20) by way of commentary, so I’ll give that the last word.

I picked Hamilton’s paper out of my briefcase somewhere north of New Haven
and riffled through it impatiently. I was anxious to get to the gist of the
argument and move on to something else, something more familiar and
congenial. The prose was convoluted and the full-dress mathematic treatment
difficult, but I understood his main point about haplodiploidy and colonial
life quickly enough. My first response was negative. Impossible, I thought:
this can’t be right. Too simple. He must not know much about social insects.
But the idea kept gnawing away at me early that afternoon, as I changed over
to the Silver Meteor in New York’s Pennsylvania Station. As we departed
southward across the New Jersey marshes, I went though the article again,
more carefully this time, looking for the fatal flaw I believed must be
there. At intervals I closed my eyes and tried to conceive of alternative,
more convincing explanations of the prevalence of hymenopteran social life
and the all-female worker force. Surely I knew enough to come up with
something. I had done this kind of critique before and succeeded. But
nothing presented itself now. By dinnertime, as the train rumbled on into
Virginia, I was growing frustrated and angry. Hamilton, whoever he was,
could not have cut the Gordian knot. Anyway, there was no Gordian knot in
the first place, was there? I had thought there was probably just a lot of
accidental evolution and wonderful natural history. And because I modestly
thought of myself as the world authority on social insects, I also thought
it unlikely that anyone else could explain their origin, certainly not in
one clean stroke. The next morning, as we rolled on past Waycross and
Jacksonville, I thrashed about some more. By the time we reached Miami in
the early afternoon, I gave up. I was a convert, and put myself in
Hamilton’s hands. I had undergone what historians of science call a paradigm
shift.

Speaking of poetry – Norm has a poem by Sophie Hannah. It’s brilliant. I’d quote a bit but that would spoil the effect; read the whole thing.

Poetry rocks.

A little more Bloor for you, in case you’ve been missing him.

The law which is at work here appears to be this: those who are defending a society or a subsection of society from a perceived threat will tend to mystify its values and standards, including its knowledge…[T]he variable of perceived threat operating upon underlying social metaphors explains the differential tendency to treat knowledge as sacred and beyond the reach of scientific study.

This is interesting stuff, because what Bloor means by ‘beyond the reach of scientific study’ is ‘not considered amenable to substantive analysis by people who are not trained in the subject.’ That is, he is claiming (in great detail, e.g. via an extended comparison of Popper and Kuhn and their relationships to the Enlightenment and Romanticism respectively) that scientists treat knowledge as sacred and beyond the reach of ‘scientific’ (by which he means sociological) study – because said scientists are not, for the most part, convinced that sociological studies can analyze the substance of, say, physics or geology or neuroscience. This lack of conviction is labeled ‘mystification’ and attributed to perception of threat. The far more obvious explanation for such a lack of conviction is not discussed.

After a brief discussion of history and its way with knowledge, he returns to the mystification theme:

The case is quite different for conceptions of knowledge which seek to cut it off from the world and which reject the naturalistic approach [by which, again, he means sociological study of the content of scientific research]. Once knowledge has been made special in this way, then all control over our theorising about its nature has been lost.

‘Made special.’ ‘seek to cut it off from the world.’ Again, what he means by those rather paranoid phrases is simply failure to agree that sociologists have something useful to say about the substance of scientific research. In other words, what would appear to be the quite natural opinion of geologists and astronomers that non-geologists and non-astronomers are, pretty much by definition, not likely to be able to judge the content of geology or astronomy, is labeled ‘making it special’ and ‘seeking to cut it off from the world’. Stark staring nonsense. It’s so basic. You don’t know about a subject unless you know about it. I don’t know how to fix a car or a computer unless I learn, do I (and I haven’t learned, and I don’t know). Some subjects take more learning, more time and effort, than others, and most if not all scientific subjects are at the high end of that scale. This is not exactly a secret, is it! It’s why people don’t study the subjects in huge numbers (except perhaps in Germany), it’s why science teachers are rarer than, say, Theory teachers or Media Studies teachers. The stuff is hard! There’s a lot of it and you have to learn it, you can’t fake it by spinning words. So why would we expect people who haven’t learned it to be able to say anything relevant about it? (‘It’ always being understood to mean the actual content, not the social conventions and institutions around it or the methodology or the rhetoric of the reports.) Why would we pretend that it’s ‘mystification’ to think that non-physicists don’t know a great deal about physics?

Who knows. For something to do. For attention. For tenure. Whatever. Anyway, it’s nonsense.

Chris at Crooked Timber points out that it’s National Poetry day in the UK, and gives his favourite Shakespeare sonnet. I don’t have one favourite, because there are too many, though if I did have to pick one I decided it would be either 116 or 29. Either ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment’ or ‘When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes.’ But there are several other top favourites, which I shared with the lucky readers of CT, so I’ll share them with our readers too.

Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore

and

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced

and

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea

and

No longer mourn for me when I am dead

and

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

and

They that have power to hurt and will do none

and

Alas, ‘tis true, I have gone here and there

and

O for my sake do you with Fortune chide

and

Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes

And if you like the Sonnets, and if you haven’t read Philip Sidney’s set, which preceded Shakespeare’s and influenced and inspired them, you oughta. Astrophil and Stella. Great stuff. Not the way the Sonnets are; on a different level; a different kind of level; but great stuff all the same.

Happy Poetry Day.

And sometimes I just waste my time. Inevitable, no doubt – but disconcerting when it happens. There I was this morning reading away at David Bloor, and making notes. Scribble scribble eh Mr Gibbon. I made a longish note about the way he uses the word ‘conventional’ and what a tricky word it can be. It implies a ‘mere’ but convention isn’t always mere. For instance, it’s true enough to say, as Bloor, and Barnes and the Strong Programme in general, do say, that the rules and criteria of science are conventional, but it doesn’t follow that they’re merely conventional. ‘One can have knowledge or findings,’ I pointed out sagely to myself, ‘that are conventional without being mere. In fact the “conventions” of science work (overall, over time, cumulatively etc) to make it more rather than less accurate – rather than to make it more acceptable.’ Fine. But then I turn the page and find –

To say that the methods and results of science are conventions does not make them ‘mere’ conventions.

I burst out laughing. Well fine! Just anticipate my objections! I don’t know why I bother!

Mind you. The objection is not entirely invalid anyway, because he does use the word that way in some places, even if he also does forestall the objection on page 44. That’s one way the whole Strong Programme works: by shifting around all the time, by using words one way in one place and another way in another. Fancy footwork, in short. Susan Haack talks about this in Chapter 7 of Defending Science. It’s rather exasperating. One minute they’re simply belaboring the obvious (people can believe true things but for irrational reasons), the next minute they’re deploying rhetoric to assert an absurdity, and the minute after that they’re saying something perfectly reasonable. And all this adds up to a Programme, and a mas macho one at that. ‘Strong’ may be not quite the right adjective.

Time for another of those exercises when I quote a few passages from interesting (if eccentric) thinkers. Today’s examinee is David Bloor, one of the founding whatsits of the ‘Strong Programme’ at Edinburgh University. A few sentences from the opening page of his influential book Knowledge and Social Imagery:

Can the sociology of knowledge investigate and explain the very content and nature of scientific knowledge? Many sociologists believe that it cannot….They voluntarily limit the scope of their own enquiries. I shall argue that this is a betrayal of their disciplinary standpoint…There are no limitations which lie in the absolute or transcendent character of scientific knowledge itself, or in the special nature of rationality, validity, truth or objectivity.

That’s from the first paragraph. One, it’s interesting that he resorts to rhetoric right at the beginning, with the word ‘betrayal’ for example. And the subtle implications or innuendo behind that sentence about voluntarily limiting the scope of their own enquiries. Is ‘voluntarily’ really the right word? Or is it there to suggest things like timidity, conformity, obedience, lack of imagination and daring and scope, and the like. Is the limitation really voluntary, or is it more or less forced by the nature of reality? Is it perhaps the case that sociologists of knowledge who limit the scope of their enquiries do so because they think they don’t know enough about a given scientific field to explain its ‘very content and nature’? That seems quite likely, and not unreasonable. And note how Bloor leaves that explanation out of his list in the last sentence. He seems to mention it, but in fact doesn’t. His list makes a show of exhausting the possibilities, but in fact it doesn’t. The ‘absolute or transcendent character of scientific knowledge itself, or in the special nature of rationality, validity, truth or objectivity’ are not the only inhibiting factors that might make nonintoxicated (to borrow a trope of Susan Haack’s) sociologists ‘limit’ the scope of their enquiries; others would be the nature and complexity of the subject; ignorance, humility, knowledge of one’s own limitations; and especially evidence. The uninebriated sociologists might simply realize that they don’t know enough about the subject at hand to evaluate the evidence, and therefore don’t know how to differentiate between knowledge that is based on evidence and knowledge that is not, or is not completely. It’s not a question of any ‘special’ nature of truth or rationality, it’s simply a question of limited competence.

What is the cause for this hesitation and pessimism?…The cause of the hesitation to bring science within the scope of a thorough-going sociological scrutiny is lack of nerve and will. It is believed to be a foredoomed enterprise.

Lack of nerve and will. Hmm. That’s very reminiscent of that remark of Jamie Whyte’s I quoted the other day – ‘Now mere wilfulness has triumphed. This is what I describe as the egocentric approach to truth.’ One just has to have the will and nerve to decide that one can discover anything, even about subjects that tend to require many years of training to understand. (Mind you, it doesn’t work the other way. Strong programme sociologists don’t often write books wondering why physicists and geologists don’t investigate the knowledge of sociologists.) All very Nietzschean, or at least Riefenstahlian. All it takes is will!

Which of course is why they call it the Strong Programme. I guess.

A small point. But I’m going to make it anyway, because I think it matters. Just the other day (well, September 21, actually, I find upon looking) I was talking about that translation problem – when sensible people say ‘There is evidence/there is no evidence that etc.’ and their hearers translate that (apparently without even realizing that they are translating) into ‘That is proved/proved not.’ I’ve just noticed another example, in a teaser at Arts & Letters Daily (where you would really expect them to know better, frankly, since Denis Dutton is a bit of a shark about Bad Thinking himself).

Capital punishment. Janet Reno says it doesn’t cut murder rates, Orrin Hatch says it does. Who’s right? Easy question? No!

And here is what Reno actually said:

I have inquired for most of my adult life about studies that might show that the death penalty is a deterrent, and I have not seen any research that would substantiate that point.

It’s really not a small point. It’s on journalists’ thinking such re-wordings are small and trivial and don’t matter that so much confusion and misunderstanding gets around. There just is a huge difference between saying ‘I have not found any evidence that X’ and saying ‘X is not.’ And if people are so blind to the difference that they make the translation without even noticing – well they just have no idea how anyone knows or thinks anything about anything, do they, which is an alarming thought.