And another thing. That idea that Dennett mentioned in the Spiegel interview.

…the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. You’ll never see a spear making a spear maker. You’ll never see a horse shoe making a blacksmith. You’ll never see a pot making a potter. It is always the other way around and this is so obvious that it just seems to stand to reason.

That’s the idea that ‘Intelligent Design’ is all about, of course. The argument from incredulity – we just can’t believe that something as complex as a cell could have turned up without being designed. The argument from nonexplanation – natural selection just can’t explain how something as complex as a cell, and birds and flowers and humans, could have turned up without being designed. But what’s odd about that, along with the regress problem, is the way it goes backwards. It goes farther and farther and farther away from explanation, rather than getting closer and closer and closer to it. Which means surely that it’s not all that credible or explanatory itself – in fact it’s less so.

What needs explaining is all this apparent design. The human mind, cells, eyes, all that. Find a watch, must be a watchmaker, all that. Okay so what kind of designer would that be? Quite a proficient one. Right? Quite skilled. To design all this, it has to be quite a lot more skilled than anyone we’ve ever met or seen or heard of. And to be that much more skilled, it has to be quite a lot more complex. In fact – you could say that it’s simply incredible that it could be for instance made of the same basic constituent parts that we are made of, and yet be able to design us and everything else. It has to be so immensely skilled and complex that we can’t even really imagine its skill and complexity – we can only fling vague superlatives in its direction.

Well, okay, so you see the problem. If it’s that complex, then how do we explain it? We explain our complexity by pointing to it, and then we explain its complexity x [vast number of your choice] – how? If the problem is, if the source of incredulity is, that a complex thing needs explanation other than brute natural processes, then whatever made the complex thing that needs explaining, needs explaining a trillion or so times more than the complex thing at the first level. Oh dear. And the problem doesn’t stop there, because the next thing up will be more complex again, and so on with every level we go up. It’s not just a regress, it’s a regress that gets astronomically more insoluble with each step. If you need a big fancy smart thing to make this world, what kind of big fancy smart thing must you need to make that big fancy smart thing? Very big fancy smart indeed. So big fancy smart that you might as well give up, since otherwise the process just keeps on going forever, and makes no kind of sense. Of course we’re all at liberty to think that’s exactly how it is, if we want to – that there is an infinite series of infinitely big fancy smart things that have designed each other all the way down. But as for calling it an explanation – I don’t think so.

Well great. Just great. Wonderful. Brilliant. Meera’s in India right now, and she was going to be presenting a paper at a science conference. Well, I hope to hell it wasn’t this one!

A gunman has burst into a science conference in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, opening fire and injuring at least five people, police said. The gunman escaped after firing his automatic rifle at the Indian Institute of Science…The victims were said to be scientists and laboratory technicians attending the conference.

Good move. Well done, gunman – that’s the ticket. Don’t want any pesky scientists cluttering up the place in India, do we. No – what possible use could scientists and lab technicians be in India?!

God damn it. I hope all the injuries are superficial. I hope millions of Indian schoolchildren, outraged by this assault on the hope of a better life, are fired with determination to become scientists themselves, and proceed to do exactly that – thus thwarting the plans of obscurantist thugs everywhere.

Well isn’t B&W up to date. Yes, it is. No sooner do I find Daniel Dennett’s comment on the Kitzmiller decision in my email and rush to post it, than I find a Spiegel interview with Daniel Dennett on evolution and ID.

Spiegel asks why evolution is so particularly troubling to religious people, compared with other scientific theories.

It counters one of the oldest ideas we have, maybe older even than our species…It’s the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. You’ll never see a spear making a spear maker. You’ll never see a horse shoe making a blacksmith. You’ll never see a pot making a potter. It is always the other way around and this is so obvious that it just seems to stand to reason.

And then pesky Darwin gummed up the works.

And he shows, hell no, not only can you get design from un-designed things, you can even get the evolution of designers from that un-design. You end up with authors and poets and artists and engineers and other designers of things, other creators — very recent fruits of the tree of life. And it challenges people’s sense that life has meaning…We are the only species that knows who we are, that knows that we have evolved. Our songs, art, books and religious beliefs are all ultimately a product of evolutionary algorithms. Some find that thrilling, others depressing.

Spiegel asks about Michael Ruse…

Michael is just trying to put the implications of Darwin’s insights into soft focus and to reassure people that there is not as much conflict between the perspective of evolutionary biology and their traditional ways of thinking.

Then they get on to the implications for religion and the deity.

One has to understand that God’s role has been diminished over the eons…When God is the master of ceremonies and doesn’t actually play any role any more in the universe, he’s sort of diminished and no longer intervenes in any way.

Spiegel offers the usual bit of boilerplate. ‘Natural science talks about life whereas religion deals with the meaning of life.’

Yes but does it? (I would have said had I been there, elbowing Dennett aside in my impatience to talk.) Does it really deal with the meaning of life? If so, how? If none of its truth claims are true, then what does it bring to the discussion of the meaning of life, or the dealing with it, that non-religious ideas can’t bring? That’s what no one who offers that bromide ever really seems to explain. At least not that I see.

So then Spiegel says the thing about moral standards – the other bit of boilerplate.

If that’s what religion does, then I don’t think it is such a silly idea. But it doesn’t. Religions at their best serve as excellent social organizers. They make moral teamwork a much more effective force than it otherwise would be. This, however, is a two-edged sword. Because moral teamwork depends to a very large degree on ceding your own moral judgment to the authority of the group. And that can be extremely dangerous, as we know.

Indeed we do.

At B&W he put the matter this way:

Gods have been given many job descriptions over the centuries, and science has conflicted with many of them. Astronomy conflicts with the idea of a god, the sun, driving a fiery chariot pulled by winged horses – a divine charioteer. Geology conflicts with the idea of a god who sculpted the Earth a few thousand years ago – a divine planet-former. Biology conflicts with the idea of a god who designed and built the different living species and all their working parts – a divine creator. We don’t ban astronomy and geology from science classes because they conflict with those backward religious doctrines, and we should also acknowledge that evolutionary biology does conflict with the idea of a divine creator and nevertheless belongs in science classes because it is good science.

The deity is just going to have to find other work. If steelworkers and blacksmiths have to, why shouldn’t the deity?

I think that what the expert scientists may have meant was that the theory of evolution by natural selection in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine . . . prayer-hearer, or master of ceremonies, or figurehead. That is true. For people who need them, there are still plenty of job descriptions for God that are entirely outside the scope of evolutionary biology.

There’s also the thing about turning up on cinnamon rolls and old pieces of cheese on toast. That’s good honest work, and the deity is just the right person to do it.

This again. I seem to have this argument every ten days or so. The issues are just never framed properly – instead they’re framed evasively and euphemistically, and how can anything be discussed properly when the air is clouded by evasion and euphemism? I ask you.

What argument? The free speech one. The one that swirls around the thought that free speech is not about the easy cases but about the hard ones. One version of that is the discussion of hypocrisy and double standards, as in Mark Steyn’s inaccurate whinge about Hampstead big guns who ‘lined up’ to defend Rushdie but wouldn’t (according to Steyn) line up to defend Lynette Burrows, and as in this one about Orhan Pamuk and David Irving. Why are people making free speech noises about Pamuk and not about Irving?

Two European writers have recently fallen foul of European governments for expressing their views about genocide. Both are threatened with trial and imprisonment for something they said or wrote. Yet one is supported by EU politicians and the international literati – who have rallied around to defend him from censorship and to champion the right of writers to speak freely – while the other has been ignored, or even told that he got what he deserved.

Yes. That’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. It leaves a great deal out. It oversimplifies – drastically. The two writers didn’t say or write the same thing, about the same subject, in discussing the same genocide, with the same implications. That paragraph tries to make it look as if they did, but they didn’t. Just saying ‘for expressing their views about genocide’ and ‘for something they said or wrote’ is not good enough. You might as well say both Martin Luther King and Timothy McVeigh went to jail for protesting against the government. You might as well say that both Osama bin Laden and Irshad Manji are controversial. Both are true statements, but incomplete – to put it mildly.

This is bad news, because when it comes to free speech it’s all or nothing: we either have it or we don’t. And if we were to have free speech for one writer but not for another, then we wouldn’t have free speech at all.

Is that true? It seems to me to be quite untrue. It seems to me to be a rather stupid oversimplification, and unargued besides. Why is free speech all or nothing? Why do we either have it or not? Why can’t we have it in some things and not in others? As in fact we already do – for good or ill, or both. And why do we not have free speech at all if we have it for one writer but not another? What if one writer’s entire output consists of exhortations to murder certain groups of people? If that writer does not have free speech, does it follow that none of us do? I don’t offhand see why.

Brendan O’Neill does finally get around to saying that the two writers ‘could not be more different’. But then –

Yet their cases are the same: both could be incarcerated, not for physically harming another person or for damaging property, but for the words they spoke; both could have their liberty removed because they expressed views that the authorities – in Turkey and Austria – decree to be distasteful.

But that is not the point. That just evades the real point, which is much less easy to deal with. And that’s what is so irritating – free speech absolutists are so predictably apt to do that: to evade the real difficulties in their position by resorting to adjectives like ‘distasteful’ – or controversial, offensive, shocking, objectionable, or the like. As if the only issue were emotional reactions. But that is not the only issue, and it’s very dishonest to shove the real issue behind the sofa and hope no one will notice. Austria doesn’t make Holocaust denial illegal merely because it is ‘distasteful’ but because, rightly or wrongly, they think it is dangerous. Obviously there is plenty of room for argument on that: it’s an empirical question as well as a question of principle, and there’s a lot to say. But that is the issue, not anything so silly and trivial as distaste.

A tag by Norm. Sevens.

Seven things to do before I die:

1) Go to Italy. 2) Write a book. 3) Participate in electing a rational, non-corrupt, thoughtful, educated, articulate, disciplined adult as president of the US. 4) Refrain from running a marathon. 5) Convert the pope to atheism. 6) Read all those books I should have read by now and haven’t. 7) See women achieve full and ineradicable human rights and equality everywhere on the planet.

Seven things I cannot do:

1) Play the cello. 2) Rock-climb. 3) Let it go. 4) Chinese calligraphy. 5) Help it. 6) Fly. 7) Keep things tidy.

Seven things that attract me to blogging:

1) It’s like writing in a notebook except that people read it. 2) The rate of injury is lower than in rock-climbing. 3) It’s international. 4) It’s much less fatiguing than running a marathon. 5) It’s a way to get attention for things I think should get attention. 6) Blogging is a form of essay-writing, and I think essays are an undervalued medium. 7) It’s a good way to irritate people who hate blogs.

Seven things I say often:

1) You just can’t get it right, can you Basil. 2) She only does it to annoy, because she knows it teases. 3) Well they would, wouldn’t they. 4) Ice cream, Mandrake? Children’s ice cream? 5) That’s not what I said. 6) Hang up. 7) No.

Seven books (or series) that I love:

1) Hamlet 2) Lucky Jim 3) King Lear 4) Emma 5) Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass 6) Memories of a Catholic Girlhood 7) Wuthering Heights

Seven movies I watch over and over again:

Actually I don’t, but I can come up with a few that I would if I did, I think…1) Dr Strangelove. 2) The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner. 3) Bringing Up Baby. 4) Lone Star. 5) Little Dorritt. That’s about it – and I’m not sure I would watch them over and over; I think there’s a limit. I used to be able to do that but now I get bored quickly.

I’m skipping the last one, because I’m too shy.

What was that we were saying about theocracy?

More than half the secondary schools in Wales inspected in the past four years break the law by failing to pray every day, a BBC survey has revealed. All state schools should hold an act of worship each day, either for all pupils in assembly or as a class-based prayer…The 1944 Education Act promised lessons for children up to the age of 15, created grammar, technical and secondary modern schools – and also placed worship at the heart of school life. The 1988 Education Reform Act strengthened the legislation, further defining worship in schools as wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character.

Well there’s liberty of thought for you. There’s being treated like potential future rational autonomous beings. There’s education. There’s respect for reason and science and probabilities.

There’s an odd illustration on the page – of a looming crucifix with light from church windows flooding in on it. It’s no doubt meant to look inspiring, or something, but in the context it looks far more threatening than inspiring. It looks like a bloody great bludgeon, is what it looks like.

But Archbishop of Wales Barry Morgan said instead of changing the law, schools should have more support to enable them to provide worship.

Provide. Provide. Do you mark that. Man I get tired of religious tyrants resorting to pious sanctimonious self-flattering euphemisms for what they’re doing. They’re not providing worship, they’re forcing it on people. Say what you mean, you archepiscopal bastard. Since it’s not optional, ‘provide’ is the wrong word. Tying someone down and stuffing cheeseburgers down her throat is not ‘providing’ lunch, is it.

It’s not just the hard religious sell in acts of worship, it’s asking questions about the meaning of life. It’s asking questions about what it means to live in a society where you respect others. Now all those, it seems to me, are religious virtues – tolerance, forgiveness, compassion.

Oh really – those are religious virtues, are they. Living in a society where you respect others, tolerance, forgiveness, compassion. Why? Why does it ‘seem to you’ that those are ‘religious virtues’? What reason can you possibly offer for such a stupid idea? Do you seriously think that atheists universally have no truck with such virtues? Or that all religious people are saturated with them? (Talk to the ‘Rapture’ crowd and then explain to us how full of forgiveness, compassion, tolerance and respect for others they are. I can’t wait.)

It would be idiotic to leave out faith in God in a school when that’s part of our society and when it’s part of the Christian foundation of this country

No it wouldn’t. For one thing, lots of things are part of your society that are left out in school. Same for things that are ‘part of the Christian foundation of this country’. And for another thing, ‘faith in God’ can be part of your society and part of the Christian foundation of your country and still be entirely mistaken. School is primarily for education, and it’s not educational to force people to ‘worship’ an entity that there is no evidence for. It’s no more educational to force people to ‘worship’ a deity than it would be to force them to ‘worship’ Cinderella or Elmer Fudd or Zeus.

In a statement on Friday, Welsh Education Minister, Jane Davidson, said she expected “all schools to meet their obligations under the law”. She added: “All registered pupils attending a maintained school should take part in collective worship and it is the head teacher’s duty to secure this. The systems are in place to identify any shortcomings and to ensure that the appropriate action is taken.”

And that’s that.

Some more Pharyngula.

He’s exactly right about one thing: all the people on his little enemies list say terrible things about religion. Speaking for just myself, I don’t like it at all—I think it’s a bad idea to afflict a society with an institution dedicated to opposing critical thinking, the acceptance of dogma, and belief in unsupported and frankly, ludicrous claims. I’m going to express my detestation often and without reservation here, as the others in that list have done in their own venues. So? Is this an opinion we are not allowed to have? Does it make us unfit to speak on science or philosophy? Is it more offensive than the frequently stated and rarely questioned Christian opinion that we unbelievers are damned to spend all of eternity suffering in agonizing torment?

Well, yes, of course this is an opinion we’re not allowed to have. We know that. We also know that it’s less legitimately offensive than the opinion that we’re all going to fry, and that that’s just too damn bad, because it’s Be Kind To Theists century. Get used to it, as the saying goes.

I was talking yesterday in ‘Abdication not the Way to Go’ about this asymmetry between religion and non-religion. It’s a real problem, you know, because it handicaps one side and gives a boost to the other. Quite unreasonably. The inhibition or taboo on challenging religion – ‘other people’s cherished beliefs,’ you know – doesn’t operate at all in the other direction. No one ever has the smallest hesitation in challenging rational, secular, non-theist beliefs on grounds of tolerance or sensitivity or kindness or respect or diversity. The presumed touchiness and ‘sensitivity’ of believers is not matched by presumed anything of non-believers. (And nor should it be. Who wants to be such a delicate flower that she can’t stand to hear her ideas or beliefs challenged? Yet apparently believers are perfectly happy to be thought of that way – in fact they get very indignant and outraged if you don’t think of them that way. Odd.) This means that one side has an immense advantage and the other side has an immense handicap. One side is awarded a large shield or wall, and the other side has its weapons taken away.

And the joke is that this is precisely backward, in the sense that the first party has the weaker case – that is, the worse case, qualitatively. It’s not that it’s disabled or handicapped, injured or damaged, so that we ought to give it an advantage out of fairness – it’s that it has no standing, no warrant, no evidence, no good argument. It ought not to be given extra compensatory help – but it is. This second problem is rooted in the first, which is nonsensical. It amounts to: because the ‘faith’ team has no evidence and no good arguments, it feels stupid when challenged, therefore the reason team is required not to challenge it – so the faith team gets to make its unwarranted assertions unimpeded.

Do a thought experiment: put that in other contexts, and see how ridiculous it is. X declares that aliens from another galaxy are living among us and that the income tax and national health are alien inventions, and that we should execute all the aliens immediately to save ourselves. The rest of us are strongly discouraged from challenging this assertion, because X has no evidence, these are X’s personal subjective opinions.

If it doesn’t fly in normal everyday contexts – in courtrooms, laboratories, newsrooms, police stations – why does it fly anywhere? Especially given the fact that these supposedly personal subjective beliefs and opinions are allowed to influence, shape, determine public policy and law? Why are religious beliefs exempt from challenge? What is the justification?

Another item from Pharyngula. About the fact that scientists talking about the details of a scientific subject can quickly bore an audience.

It’s true: we aren’t trained to be showmen. We are very good at talking to other scientists – I’m sure Wesley’s talk would have been a pleasure for me to listen to, and I would have learned much and been appreciative of the substance – but most of it would have whooshed over the heads of a lay audience. I wrestle with this in my public talks, too. There’s always this stuff that I am very excited about and that I know my peers think is really nifty and that gets right down to the heart of the joy and wonder of biology, but it’s so far from the perspective of the audience that it is well nigh impossible to communicate. And I know that when I try, I usually fail.

And the important thing to notice there is that we’re the ones who are missing out. Necessarily; we can’t know everything, and we’re all always going to have subjects we don’t know enough about to follow detailed discussions with interest, let alone excitement and joy – but I think it’s really important to keep always in mind that that means we are missing out. There’s something there, and it’s joy and excitement to people who understand it. This is kind of basic to the running argument I’m always having with ‘anti-elitists’. With people who accuse me of 1) thinking I know a lot (which is a joke; I know damn well I don’t know a lot; I know damn well I wouldn’t be able to get the joy and excitement in PZ’s public talks) and 2) thinking that means I’m Special. But that’s not it. That’s completely point-missing. No, what I think is that there is joy and excitement to be had in many kinds of knowledge and intellectual exploration, and that the more ‘anti-elitists’ insist that easy obvious poppy stuff is every bit as good as more challenging subjects, the more they encourage people never ever in the whole of their lives to find that out. ‘Anti-elitism’ pretends to be somehow sticking up for ‘ordinary people’ or some such amorphous group, but what it’s really doing is just encouraging them to remain permanently shut out from intellectual excitement. With friends like that who needs enemies, kind of thing.

The two creationists in the series, on the other hand, are simple and clear (and the young earth creationist has the advantage of being entertainingly insane). They don’t have any complex data to explain, so they aren’t tempted to try, and they put everything in terms everyone can follow. An absence of evidence can be an advantage in a talk, because then everything rests on well-honed rhetoric; the scientist’s reliance on actual information means we often skimp on the presentation. I’ve heard Johnson speak, and he’s smooth and confident, and slyly appeals to his audience’s prejudices. Of course, he also lies like a [censored] . It simplifies lecture preparation if you can simply make up glib lies to fill in the holes, another strategy to which scientists will not resort.

And that’s another important thing to keep in mind. Part of the appeal of the religious side is that it’s easy. It’s easy. Never forget that. In fact it ought to play a much bigger part in the rhetorical toolkit. Religion is for lazy thinkers, because there is literally nothing to do. No evidence-finding, no argument-improving, no illogic-detecting. It’s easy. Easy, easy, easy. It’s like lying back in a soft chair watching tv while the cat gently spoons chocolates into your mouth. Got that? Easy. Couch-potato thinking, lazy thinking, easy easy easy. Not impressive. Not buffed. Not butch. Easy.

They won’t like that!

I was surprised to read this about Panda’s Thumb at Pharyngula yesterday. I didn’t know any of it. I don’t read Panda’s very often, whereas I do read Pharyngula almost daily, because I love PZ’s steady flow of irascible atheism. I now realize that the absence of irascible atheism is not absence of mind but intentional. No wonder I’ve never formed a habit of reading it.

The Panda’s Thumb has done a terrible job of covering the Mirecki situation. F-. Total flop. Nosedive into the latrine pit…No names, no details, but let’s just say that there are a few people in the group who would be more comfortable with Michelle Malkin’s innuendo or John Altevogt’s slanders than with supporting an academic critic of fundamentalism…Another lesson I’ve learned, that might be reassuring to some, is that the group as a whole is far more religion-friendly than you might think from reading creationist sites. Criticizing “fundies” is a bad, bad thing, and will cost you the support of many of the Panda’s Thumb gang. Mirecki should be grateful that he isn’t an atheist; I definitely got the feeling that there’d have been anti-Mirecki diatribes publicly washing our hands of him if that had been the case. At least, I don’t feel particularly welcome there, and definitely perceive that I’m a third-class citizen in the hierarchy (heck, I didn’t even know there was a hierarchy until recently). I don’t feel bad enough about it to start going to church to win the prize of being a valued theistic evolutionist, though.

Oh. Oh dear. How unfortunate. See, I think criticizing fundies is one of the more urgent tasks out there right now. What else can we do? Just lie down and let them take over?

While I’m a flaming liberal atheist, most of the people there are not, and they’re actually a diverse bunch; it’s too bad there’s less interest in seeing that diversity expressed than in maintaining a bland front of tepid inoffensiveness. The Panda’s Thumb is a great resource for science and focused critiques of creationism, and everyone should keep reading it, but we should also be clear on what it is not. It is not ever going to address the root causes of creationism in our country: the virulent, pathological brands of fundamentalism that are growing in our midst. That would be…rude.

That’s just it – the root causes problem. They have to be addressed, because the alternative is just submission.

One of the PT people commented on PZ’s post, and said something I find very strange and somewhat worrying.

As a biologist, I can claim some expertise in my area of study. I also have strong views on politics and religion. But no matter how strongly felt my views of religion and politics are, in these I’m just another citizen. As a biologist, I’ll happily tell you when your facts about science are wrong. As a citizen, I don’t believe I have the same warrant to make pronouncements about the personal, individual, subjectively held beliefs of whole classes of people.

But we’re all just other citizens in our views on religion and politics. Why would it follow that we don’t have warrant to make pronouncements about everyone else’s views – whether they belong to whole classes of people or not? That’s just a total abdication of argument, thought, and rational discussion, isn’t it? And if we do that – if we just throw up our hands and say we don’t have warrant to make pronouncements on people’s ‘beliefs’ then we just give the irrationalists a free hand. And that’s the worst thing we can do. The worst. We’re all citizens (if we’re lucky, if we don’t live in dictatorships), we live in democracies (those of us who do), and public matters are for public discussion. Public discussion rests on reasons rather than authority or revelation – it has to – those are the only alternatives. If you give up on reasons and reason, then authority and revelation is what takes over. So the idea that citizens should abstain from challenging one another’s beliefs merely because they are personal, individual, and subjectively held – is a dangerous idea, in my view. It’s just locking up the only tools we have, in the face of a determined, aggressive, hostile, totalitarian enemy. Why would we want to do that?

It’s hard to tear oneself away from The Panda’s Thumb today. They are having one hell of a party over there. And writing one great post after another while they’re at it.

One on our friend Steve Fuller for example.

Professor of Sociology Steven Fuller may not know much about the history or content of science (see his recent confusion — just like Linus Pauling’s! — between protein and DNA at Micheal Berube’s blog) but he is good the kind of jargoneering that the Discovery Institute and its allies use to confuse the public about science…Fuller proved to be quite compliant generally, but Judge Jones seems not to to have heard his pleas to institute in Dover a kind of affirmative action program for ID. Instead, it was the repeated acknowledgement that Intelligent Design is, in fact, creationism, that Judge Jones took away as the salient point of Fuller’s testimony…What the TMLC failed to appreciate when they booked Fuller as a witness was that he doesn’t believe in any kind of science. In the pomo view, science is all about social relationships and power dynamics. Whatever privileged role science has in society is fraudulantly obtained. Scientific authority is a sham…Calling an expert witness who doesn’t believe in science to a trial about an idea’s scientific status was probably a mistake. Certainly, Steven Fuller wins second place (behind Michael Behe) in the race for the title of “Best Defense Witness for the Prosecution.”

Pretty funny! Also satisfying – especially after the display of condescension mixed with confusion he gave at Michael’s.

And Tim Sandefur does a great one on the judge’s reasoning, full of interesting stuff.

In summary, the disclaimer singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text as though it were a science resource, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere. Furthermore…introducing ID necessarily invites religion into the science classroom as it sets up what will be perceived by students as a “God-friendly” science, the one that explicitly mentions an intelligent designer, and that the “other science,” evolution, takes no position on religion…. [A] false duality is produced: It “tells students…quite explicitly, choose God on the side of intelligent design or choose atheism on the side of science.” Introducing such a religious conflict into the classroom…forces students to “choose between God and science,” not a choice that schools should be forcing on them.

This could turn into something of an education in science and epistemology for a lot of people.

Avoiding magical explanations is “a ‘ground rule’ of science,” which some call “‘methodological naturalism,’ and is sometimes known as the scientific method.” (at 65). This approach is not arbitrary. It is based on the demands of epistemology as well as the proven superiority of this approach in producing usable results. “[O]nce you attribute a cause to an untestable supernatural force, a proposition that cannot be disproven, there is no reason to continue seeking natural explanations as we have our answer.” (at 66). ID proponents, Judge Jones notes, (and we might mention Beckwith by name here) are trying “to change the ground rules of science to allow supernatural causation of the natural world” to factor into the analysis. (at 67) But this approach would “embrace astrology,” (at 68), among other things. And, in any case, the fact that ID proponents seek “to ‘defeat scientific materialism,’” and “‘replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God,’” (at 68) demonstrates that ID at least cannot qualify as science, whatever “merit” it might have (at 65). Since the current “essential ground rules…limit science to testable, natural explanations,” only changing those rules would allow ID to qualify as science. But “[s]cience cannot be defined differently.” (at 70).

Oh why not. Please? Pleasepleaseplease? Can’t we define science differently just a little bit just for this one time just for awhile if I’m really really good? Can’t we just pretend a little tiny bit that an untestable supernatural force is a good answer can’t we please please?

The judge is a Republican. Which doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. This has nothing (inherently) to do with left and right, it’s an epistemic issue. Making evidential questions into political ones is a mug’s game.

None of this should have happened in the first place, but since it did, at least the judge said what’s what. At least he didn’t do a lot of grovelling and respecting and protected space-providing and beseeching and apologizing. At least he came right out and said that the creationist side lied – and lied repeatedly at that. And since he said it, we can repeat it. A judge said it, in a decision, so no one can accuse us of libel if we say what the judge said. So: they told lies! Repeatedly! And they got caught doing it! Nyah!

Said the judge: “It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.”

It is, isn’t it. Very ironic. Not at all surprising, since we see the bizarrely truth-avoiding way they characterize atheists and atheism in whingeing article after whingeing article in newspapers and magazines – but very ironic. How satisfying it is for a change to see someone in a position to do something about it, point that out.

As P Z says at Panda’s Thumb, the judge’s decision is joyful reading for us on the side of science.

First, while encouraging students to keep an open mind and explore alternatives to evolution, it offers no scientific alternative; instead, the only alternative offered is an inherently religious one…Second, by directing students to their families to learn about the “Origins of Life,” the paragraph performs the exact same function as did the Freiler disclaimer: It “reminds school children that they can rightly maintain beliefs taught by their parents on the subject of the origin of life,” thereby stifling the critical thinking that the class’s study of evolutionary theory might otherwise prompt, to protect a religious view from what the Board considers to be a threat.

There it is, you see – that idea of protection again. Well, the only way to ‘protect’ ideas that have no evidence and no good arguments to back them up, is via various kinds of suppression and distortion, is via stifling critical thinking. That’s why it’s a bad idea to protect weak ideas. But those are just the ideas that a lot of well-meaning fools are keen to protect. But you can’t have the one without the other. You can’t have the bad idea-protection without the damage to the beneficiaries’ ability to think properly. That’s what protection means in this context. It means protection from critical thinking, which means protection from any kind of real thinking, as opposed to daydreaming. It means protection from having one’s ‘beliefs’ ‘attacked’ as the fatuous Guardian editor put it – ‘attacked’ meaning questioned, disputed, argued with, challenged. In other words protected from every process that enables people to learn how to think clearly. What a tragic, pathetic idea of protection.

To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions. The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

Yes, I do particularly like that bit. I do indeed.

…this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

Utter waste? When they got to spend a whole day listening to Steve Fuller’s incoherent ravings? How can that be?

No, of course that’s a joke. Having to go to court to prevent nonsense from being taught in the science classrooms is indeed an utter waste of resources, just as it would be a waste to have to go to court in order not to have flat-earth cosmology taught in the science classrooms. If people want to protect their beliefs, they should swap their brains for small piles of cotton wool, and let it go at that.

Mush. Most people can’t seem to think or talk about this subject without resorting to mush. To inaccurate assumptions and woolly language and category mistakes and undefined terms that need defining. To mush.

Editing it today – 33 years later under the same title – is the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent, Stephen Bates. He defends it enthusiastically. He said: “I am by no means averse to including humanist or secularist writers but I tell all would-be contributors that the column is intended, in my opinion, to be a space for non-polemical or philosophical reflection. This means not attacking the beliefs of others. In my experience, humanists and atheists find this very difficult…”

Well maybe that’s because they’re profoundly puzzled by the idea that philosophical ‘reflection’ ‘means’ not attacking the beliefs of others. Oh yeah? Ever talked to or read any philosophers has he? But that’s where the mush comes in. He probably has some special – i.e. mushy – meaning for ‘philosophical reflection’ in mind. That it means just kind of dozily dreamily driftily pondering this and that, with one’s eyes unfocused and mouth hanging open and a little bit of drool trailing down one’s chin. He also no doubt has a special meaning for the word ‘attack’ by which it means point out the great gaping holes in someone’s ‘reasoning’ or ‘argument’. And a special meaning for ‘beliefs’ by which it means that which must never be questioned unless of course it is the ‘beliefs’ of non-theists in which case of course anything at all may be said however dishonest.

Even more, the mushy idea throughout the piece is that religion and non-religion are the same sort of thing, in the same way that ginger ice cream and coffee ice cream are the same kind of thing. The truth of course is rather that religion is a set of badly-warranted ideas while non-religion is abstinence from that particular set of badly-warranted ideas, so that in fact they are opposites rather than two flavours of the same kind of thing. So all the way through there is this silly assumption that atheists have no business saying religion is epistemically feeble.

Who qualifies to speak from this small platform is, in the end, he points out, a matter for the editor. The editor, when I asked him about this, said he believed there was still a good argument for preserving Face to Faith as, to use his term, “a protected space”.

Right. A protected space. Protected from what? From the bad mean people who ask what all this is based on? From cruel heartless people who ask what the evidence is? From savage unfeeling people who ask who designed the designer then? Or just from the winds and turmoil of the everyday world? But either way, why is a ‘protected space’ considered necessary or useful or a good idea? Why should religion be protected? Why shouldn’t it be expected to take care of itself by this time? Why does it need Guardian editors bending over it and tucking it in and telling it not to fret? (Not to mention allowing it to talk unmitigated drivel week in and week out.)

Well, I don’t suppose the Guardian will answer those questions, but I would love to know.

The decision in Dover will be handed down soon.

Legal experts said the big question was whether Judge Jones would rule narrowly or more broadly on the merits of teaching intelligent design as science. Proponents of the theory argue that living organisms are so complex that the best explanation is that a higher intelligence designed them.

Here we are back at that legs question. That sentence does look so very silly. ‘Proponents of the theory argue that living organisms are so complex that the best explanation is that a higher intelligence designed them while somehow not being so complex that it itself requires explanation.’ ‘Proponents of the theory argue that living organisms are so complex that the best explanation is that a higher intelligence designed them which means that it requires explanation even more – in fact orders of magnitude more – than the living organisms it designed, but we’re not going to mention that because it would complicate things.’ ‘Proponents of the theory argue that living organisms are so complex that the best explanation is that a higher intelligence designed them which means that an even higher intelligence designed the first higher intelligence which means that an even higher higher – oh look, is that a turtle?’ ‘Proponents of the theory argue that living organisms are so complex that the best explanation is that a higher intelligence designed them which makes absolutely no sense because if the organisms need explanation because they are so complex then obviously so does the intelligence that designed them, being more complex, but let’s not talk about that, because the fact is simply that we find it easier and more cozy to think of the whole thing having happened because a big person made it happen rather than because it just happened, and of course that’s good enough for a court of law, woo! woo! woo!’

And there is this horrible item. Part of the heart-warming series ‘how can we make women’s lives more helpless and deprived and nasty than they already are?’

Taliban insurgents in southern Afghanistan have executed a school teacher in front of his pupils for refusing to comply with warnings to stop educating girls.

Well of course they have, because that kind of behavior interferes with the whole project. Sets it right back. What good is is for the Taliban to keep valiantly struggling to take away every single right and capacity and freedom and pleasure and opportunity and chance that women have, if evil thugs like this teacher are going to come along and educate them? Is he crazy? The whole point with women is to shove them into a corner and then everybody gather together and get on top of them until they are squashed down into something about the size of an acorn, and can’t talk or move anymore. Not to educate them! Duh.

“He had received many warning letters from the Taliban to stop teaching, but he continued to do so happily and honestly – he liked to teach boys and girls.”

How sickening. He liked to teach boys and girls, he liked to give them something, and make them bigger, and more able to make choices and expand and grow. What he should have liked to do, of course, is to stamp all that out, and make them smaller and more hopeless. That’s the right thing to do, that’s virtue and purity.

Under the Taliban interpretation of Islamic Sharia law female education was banned, along with female employment. Since the overthrow of the Taliban government by the US-led invasion of 2001, the Afghan government claims six million Afghan children have returned to school, many of them girls. However, Taliban insurgents in the south have repeatedly targeted schools, burning many to the ground at night or issuing beatings or warnings to teachers.

Good, good, good. That’s the way. High priority, burning down schools. Great. Afghanistan’s a poor country, it can’t just go re-building schools every ten minutes, so burning the nasty things down is the way to go. Very spiritual. Three cheers for religion.

What a lot of nonsense the hooray for theocracy crowd does talk. Distortions, omissions, fantasies, strawmen, non sequiturs, aimless babbling – no trick is too cheap, apparently.

Resistance to politically correct attempts to expunge Christianity from our culture – the conversion of Christmas into “winterval” is symptomatic – should be encouraged, but one can push the defence of Christianity farther by imagining what Western society would be like without it…It was and is a highly cosmopolitan and egalitarian religion, recognising neither Greek nor Jew, bond nor free. That, in addition to such novel ideals as charity, compassion and peace, and the status attached to women, differentiated Christians from a surrounding society based on cruelty, hedonism and organised slavery. Imagine yourself as a slave, rather than Caesar or Cicero, in Ancient Rome, and you’ll get the hang of it.

That is absolute crap. Self-serving self-flattering crap. It is not true. That word ‘cruelty’ for instance – that’s key. It’s a great myth now that Christianity has always been the enemy of cruelty above all, but that is not true. Cruelty is not, for instance, one of the seven deadly sins, and Montaigne’s great book was put on the Index partly because he argued against the cruel torture of heretics before their execution. And as for ‘imagine yourself a slave’ – well imagine yourself a slave in ancient Alabama, too! And then when you’ve done that, read what Seneca has to say about slaves, and ponder.

And then we move on to the ‘hedonism-materialism-consumerism’ moan that seems to be the last refuge of fools like this.

The stressed-out workaholic is a slave to work and the material things labour buys. Mindless hedonism, which Christianity once successfully eradicated or sublimated, is endemic on TV. As audiences, rather than commissioning editors, grow bored with images of sexual deviancy, how long will it be before this is replaced by the equivalent of the Roman arena? “Good idea,” thinks a TV Tristram! Dan Brown’s book, consisting of bizarre conspiracy theories, is the best-selling bible of credulous housewives.

Yes, and the actual bible is the best-selling bible of credulous godbotherers. What, exactly, is the difference? There isn’t any. Burleigh just prefers his bible to the other one. Well, fine, but what’s he getting on his high horse about? Where does he get off talking about credulity? And don’t overlook the veiled coerciveness in that bit about Xianity successfully ‘eradicating’ mindless hedonism. Beware of people who like to eradicate things. Especially when they’re theocrats.

Scruffy Irish pop stars and smart chefs are the new moral arbitors, while aspiring politicians vie to demonstrate their knowledge of Radiohead or Franz Ferdinand rather than two millennia of European high culture…blahblahblah whingebleatmoan…Scientists try to cut every corner regarding what Christianity established as the sanctity of human life, or they proselytise atheism with an evangelical fervour.

More coercion. Christianity doesn’t get to ‘establish’ things, especially things that don’t mean much, and it’s crap anyway, given the number of wars and executions that have been carried out on Christianity’s watch. And more ‘you don’t get to proselytise or be credulous or have bibles, only we get to proselytise or be credulous or have bibles.’ More silly childish non-argument.

People with little or no historical knowledge of Christianity are allowed to caricature it as divisive, fraudulent or oppressive.

Er – yes. They are allowed to do that. What do you propose instead, Mr Burleigh? A long term of imprisonment? Whipping?

By the same token, Burleigh is allowed to talk vacuous canting drivel in the Times, and I’m allowed to point out what vacuous canting drivel it is. So it goes.

A couple of brief update items. Azam Kamguian emailed me to tell me what an informant in Norway told her – that there apparently is no reason to think that Samira Munir was murdered. Which is a relief. No less sad for her, of course, but the fewer murders of this kind there are, the better. So that is, in a limited way, good news.

And I was inaccurate in what I said about Michael Bérubé and Meera Nanda and B&W. I thought he’d first read Meera here, but no, he read her 1997 article in Dissent – and, as he put it, realized he was going to have to worry about it sooner or later. Seeing her work on B&W just prompted him to start the worrying process.

Michael’s got a great story about dentistry, needles in haystacks, beef jerky, promises, garbage, pizza and such today.

A spectre is haunting the place. No doubt you’ve already read or heard about the Fulham cops.

…the author Lynette Burrows went on a BBC Five Live show to talk about the government’s new “civil partnerships” and expressed her opinion – politely, no intemperate words – that the adoption of children by homosexuals was “a risk”. The following day, Fulham police contacted her to discuss the “homophobic incident”. A Scotland Yard spokesperson told the Telegraph’s Sally Pook that it’s “standard policy” for “community safety units” to investigate “homophobic, racist and domestic incidents”…”It is all about reassuring the community,” said the very p.c. Plod to the Telegraph. “All parties have been spoken to by the police. No allegation of crime has been made. A report has been taken but is now closed.”

It’s pretty staggering. All this ‘reassuring the community’ crap – can I be the only one who is developing a violent allergy to the very word ‘community’? A community right now seems to be a very unattractive and annoying specimen. A whining, nose-running, pants falling down, sleeve-plucking, feeble, knock-kneed, spiteful, tattling, nagging, droning, sniveling, self-obsessed pile of ordure. Why is everyone expected to keep reassuring it all the time? Why isn’t it expected to grow up? Why is it allowed – allowed? encouraged, urged – to run screaming to the police and the courts and the monarch and the armed militias every time someone ‘offends’ or ‘insults’ or ‘wounds’ or ‘blasphemes against’ or ‘disrespects’ its horrible poxy tiny closed airless stupid little beliefs? Why does it get to push all the grown-ups around all the time with its high-pitched noisy demands? Why doesn’t everyone with one voice tell it to shut up and piss off?

The community in question is not even a real community, it’s a spectral community, The Community as it exists in the minds of people who think it has to be reassured all the time. That community is not only whiny and covered in snot, it’s also damn dangerous. It’s a shut up device, and it works a treat.

Mark Steyn gets one thing quite wrong though, I think.

Mrs Burrows writes on “children’s rights and the family”, so I don’t know whether she’s a member of PEN or the other authors’ groups. But it seems unlikely the Hampstead big guns who lined up to defend Salman Rushdie a decade and a half ago will be eager to stage any rallies this time round. But, if the principle is freedom of expression, what’s the difference between his apostasy (as the Ayatollah saw it) and Mrs Burrows’s apostasy (as Scotland Yard sees it)?

Well which Hampstead big guns are we talking about? Some of them precisely did not line up to defend Rushdie fifteen years ago, and isn’t that exactly when all this sickening community-reassuring got going? With a good many Hampstead big guns saying Rushdie was a bad fella and that the feelings of devout Muslims ought to be respected? Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. And I strongly doubt that the people who ‘lined up’ (what else should they have done, pushed and shoved?) to defend Rushdie would all approve of the Fulham police work in this case. Hitchens for instance? That seems vanishingly unlikely. Steyn seems to have his enemies confused here (not for the first time).

A little more on the Chronicle’s newsflash that Theory is hardly at all very much influential or mandatory or orthodox any more.

Meanwhile, at the University of California at Berkeley, Ian Duncan, a professor of English and the department’s chairman, reports via e-mail that “postcolonial, national/transnational, race and comparative ethnicities studies are flourishing” while New Historicism “does not exert the hegemony it did 20 years ago, although I think it’s fair to say it’s been digested by many of us and maintains a strong presence.”

And yet a lot of wacko people go on saying that Theorists seem to be interested in everything but literature – it’s staggering, isn’t it? Why would anyone think that? When postcolonial, national/transnational, race and comparative ethnicities studies are flourishing just as they should and all is right with the world?

“We believe in a broad intellectual training,” says Toril Moi, a professor in the literature program and the Romance-studies department at Duke University. “So that means students should know some theory, right?” In practical terms, she observes, theory has become “part of a cultural-social-historical conversation.”

Well of course it has. It’s quite impossible to carry on any kind of cultural-social-historical tragical-comical-pastoral now stop that right now conversation without ‘knowing some theory’ – by which is meant of course knowing the right some theory, as opposed to the wrong some. Some Foucault and Derrida and Butler not some Abrams and Rawls and Nussbaum. Which just goes to show how distant Theory is from conformity and groupthink and orthodoxy – how endlessly unpredictable it is. It’s pure coincidence that all the emails in this article mention the same few names over and over again and ignore all the others. There’s ‘broad intellectual training’ for you!

Mr. Keith, of Binghamton, cautions that “trying to map out alternative ways of knowing is going to be inherently difficult and demanding.” Complex concepts sometimes require complex terminology, and hurling abuse at theory for its “excessive difficulty has been used too often as an overly quick strategy of dismissing and not engaging.”

There there. There there. We know. It’s so unfair. You guys are so deep, and Deeply Informed, and you’re sooo smart, you know how to do such difficult and demanding things, because you’re so smart, and can use complex terminology – and then people just hurl abuse at you. It’s totally unfair. Obviously you can’t map out alternative ways of knowing by endlessly recycling the same ten writers over and over and over again, without using a lot of complex terminology. Can you?! Of course not. This is hard stuff. This is big, important, difficult, complex, grown-up thinking. Not like that simple easy childish shit that people like philosophers and physicists do, but really complex and difficult – and alternative. Therefore needs complex terminology. Much more than boring old positivists like Hume or Bacon or people like that did.

In his essay “Theory Ends,” Mr. Leitch offers up one final definition of theory: “a historically new, postmodern mode of discourse that breaches longstanding borders, fusing literary criticism, philosophy, history, sociology, psychoanalysis, and politics.” The result, he says, is a “cross-disciplinary pastiche” that falls under the increasingly wide banner of cultural studies.

Yeah. Which is great, because it’s six for the price of one. It’s like one of those all-you-can-eat places, or like a garage sale. Where before Theory you just got the one thing, now with Theory (even though it’s over) you get multitudes. You get a literary critic who is also a philosopher, a historian, a sociologist, a psychoanalyst, and a political scientist. Isn’t that great? Six fields in one! Because Theory fuses them all, you see. It doesn’t draw from these other fields, it doesn’t inform itself by reading and thinking broadly, it fuses them, so that it is in fact just as much sociology as lit crit and psychoanalysis as history. One wonders why the people in the other fields don’t do that. Why don’t historians do that fusing thing so that they too can be six things at once? They must not be as clever as Theorists. Or as Theorists used to be before Theory was over.

Mr. Williams points out that as universities lose funds, the humanities have come under more pressure, external and internal, to justify themselves, “not by saying that we do this high-research thing called theory, which nobody seems to care about, but to deliver the goods in a way that engineering does.”

Oh yeah. High-research. You bet. That’s one of the many impressive things about Theory: how research-driven it is. Funny that it all ends up sounding exactly alike then – unless all theorists do their research in the same place? But then wouldn’t they jostle each other over the archives? But maybe the Complicity & Hegemony archives have very very big print, so that there’s room for all.

So there you are, Theory is over, so it’s time for everyone to stop making fun of it now and let all those nice mappers-out of alternative ways of knowing get on with their high research and their deep informedness and their complex terminology and their fusing of many disciplines. And the sun sinks slowly in the west as we climb the hill, pausing for a last look back at the theorists’ peaceful little village [cue music, fade up]

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education is hilarious. Oh, Theory is so over, what empire, it’s all fragmented, what a silly fuss everyone is making, it says. Then it offers a comment backing up the claim.

First, theory has become so much part of the literary profession that one needs to have some familiarity with the “isms,” no matter which (if any) one embraces most closely. Being labeled a theorist does not advance a career the way it might have 10 or 15 years ago, but theoretical naïveté is a luxury that few aspiring professors can afford. James F. English, chairman and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in an e-mail message that while “it’s become very rare for literature departments to hire so-called pure theorists,” the theoretical movements of the past four decades have “created an intellectual climate in which a whole range of writers (from Kant and Hegel to Lacan and Kristeva) is now part of the conversation within literary study as such.” It is almost impossible to imagine a newly minted Ph.D. going on the job market without some grasp of structuralism as well as of Shakespeare.

Understand? It’s over, but you’re not allowed to not have it – you’re not allowed to wonder what is meant by a ‘range of writers’ that includes Kant – and Lacan and Kristeva. You’re not allowed to have theoretical naïveté – oh god no! But it’s over, you know, so there’s nothing to see here, go home.

Then the article offers example after example after example of how over Theory is.

When she plans her graduate-level classes, Lynn Enterline, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, tends to “organize the course around texts and problems they might raise.” If Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is on the syllabus, for instance, she’ll draw on “theories of the performative” in the work of such thinkers as Derrida and the feminist-psychoanalytic critics Barbara Johnson and Shoshana Felman. “Since I’m interested in questions of gender, sexuality, and the body,” she says, “I tend to work mostly with rhetorical and psychoanalytic theory.”

Ooh! Wish I could take that class! Questions of the body – I do love those. Especially when they got psychoanalytic theory, and the performative, and rhetoric – I can almost hear Judy Butler off in the distance. No theory here, folks.

Her colleagues in the Vanderbilt English department employ a similar strategy in the classroom, she says, even though their research interests vary widely in topic and theoretical affinity. “They’re all deeply theoretically informed,” she says, “but the choices they would make depend on the problems they’re addressing.”

Deeply. Deeply. Because they’re a deep crowd, you know. And informed. Deeply.

Jeffrey J. Williams…calls himself “very topic oriented” when it comes to teaching. Carnegie Mellon has what he describes as a fairly heavy emphasis on theory, and “the students kept coming to me and complaining that they weren’t reading any literature,” he says. His solution? “Now I try to teach hybrid courses.” In a recent course on “narratives of profession,” for instance, he mixed sociology and theories of professionalism with half a dozen novels, and taught Anthony Trollope’s Dr. Thorne alongside a history of the medical profession.

His solution? He declared himself a sociologist pro tem by way of giving the students the more literature they wanted. Of course he did! Because Theorists are all so Deeply Informed that they are experts on all subjects and can teach anything and everything the moment they decide to. Remember Judith Halberstam? Like that.

But those charged with introducing students to theory don’t appear to be trying to throw out Conrad and company. The University of California at Santa Cruz is not known for its aversion to theory. Even there, theory “is never taught in the absence of literary texts, and it’s never taught as if it’s gospel,” says Richard Terdiman, a professor of literature and the history of consciousness. “What we try to do when we teach it is demystify it. Everyone who teaches the intro-theory course required for undergraduates in the major chooses a focus, whether it’s Marxism or queer theory or whatever it is, and tries to get students to see the relevance of the interpretative strategy for their own reading.”

What empire? What empire? Do you see any empire? I don’t see any empire around here. Do you? All I see is a lot of people quietly and omnisciently teaching Theory and sociology and politics and Theory, so where’s the empire?

God, it’s a riot, and it goes on and on like that. I’m out of time, I have to go, but I’ll have to make more fun of it tomorrow. It’s the silliest thing I’ve seen in awhile.

Annals of Thought-crime. Orhan Pamuk goes on trial on Friday.

My crime is to have “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.”…Last February, in an interview published in a Swiss newspaper, I said that “a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey”; I went on to complain that it was taboo to discuss these matters in my country…If the state is prepared to go to such lengths to keep the Turkish people from knowing what happened to the Ottoman Armenians, that qualifies as a taboo. And my words caused a furor worthy of a taboo: various newspapers launched hate campaigns against me, with some right-wing (but not necessarily Islamist) columnists going as far as to say that I should be “silenced” for good; groups of nationalist extremists organized meetings and demonstrations to protest my treachery; there were public burnings of my books.

Most of the ingredients, brought together in one nasty brew. Stupid idea piling on stupid idea until you end up with a great stack of nonsensical absurd hollow pseudoideas. The idea that there is such a thing as Turkish ‘identity,’ the idea that it shouldn’t be ‘denigrated,’ the idea that it shouldn’t be denigrated publically, the idea that doing so is a crime worth three years in prison, the idea that Pamuk should be ‘silenced’ for committing such a crime, the idea that he should be permanently silenced for doing so, the idea that what he did is ‘treachery.’

My detractors were not motivated just by personal animosity, nor were they expressing hostility to me alone; I already knew that my case was a matter worthy of discussion in both Turkey and the outside world. This was partly because I believed that what stained a country’s “honor” was not the discussion of the black spots in its history but the impossibility of any discussion at all. But it was also because I believed that in today’s Turkey the prohibition against discussing the Ottoman Armenians was a prohibition against freedom of expression, and that the two matters were inextricably linked.

Well, yes. What Turkey did some ninety years ago was done by an entirely different set of people (which is one reason ‘identity’ is such a bad idea: it leaves the impression that in fact it’s the same people, but it isn’t), but the people forbidding discussion of it now are the people who are alive now, and if they think they’re buffing up Turkey’s current ‘identity’ by doing so, they’re delusional. If they think preventing freedom of expression in order to suppress discussion of a part of Turkey’s history is a sensible, useful, productive idea, they’re infatuated.

What am I to make of a country that insists that the Turks, unlike their Western neighbors, are a compassionate people, incapable of genocide, while nationalist political groups are pelting me with death threats? What is the logic behind a state that complains that its enemies spread false reports about the Ottoman legacy all over the globe while it prosecutes and imprisons one writer after another, thus propagating the image of the Terrible Turk worldwide?…Last May, in Korea, when I met the great Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe, I heard that he, too, had been attacked by nationalist extremists after stating that the ugly crimes committed by his country’s armies during the invasions of Korea and China should be openly discussed in Tokyo.

They must all have offended someone. Never, never offend anyone – or else.