It’s outrageous. Something ought to be done about it. ‘College’ in the US apparently has the unmitigated gall to teach things that conflict with Christianity. Isn’t that illegal?

Spend a couple of days at the workshop and it becomes clear that, for many of these students, college is fraught with peril. There is the pressure to party, to drink, to have sex. There is also the subtle pressure to conform to a non-Christian worldview. There are biology courses that ask students to accept evolution, which workshop organizers and most of the students reject as untrue and ungodly. There are literature courses that see any text, including the Bible, as open to multiple interpretations. And there are philosophy classes that view absolute truth as nothing more than an illusion.

The subtle pressure to conform to a non-Christian worldview – meaning, the expectation that students will give rational answers to questions. That if asked to write an essay on the Renaissance, they won’t begin every sentence with ‘God made it come about that’. That they will read secular books on secular subjects and think about them in rational, empirical, non-supernatural ways. Yes, no doubt such a pressure is there – but how can university subjects be taught properly if it’s not? How can you have biology courses that don’t ‘ask students to accept evolution’? How can you have philosophy courses that view ‘absolute truth’ as revealed by a deity and passed on by authority, when that’s not philosophy but religion? The problem seems to be basic, in fact downright foundational.

Even though he is a devout Christian, Mr. Thomas chose to attend a secular college because it will “make me a more well-rounded person.” Still, he is worried about what he will encounter in the classroom. “You always hear horror stories about professors treading on students’ beliefs,” he says. “I hope they won’t ignore my point of view.” When a professor or fellow student asserts something that runs contrary to Christianity, Mr. Thomas intends to speak up. And now, thanks to the workshop, he knows what to say.

He wants to be a more well-rounded person – which is a very good idea, especially for a ‘devout’ Christian – but he is also determined to reject anything ‘that runs contrary to Christianity’ – thus assuring that he can’t possibly (unless he fails in that project) become a more well-rounded person. It’s basic. You can’t do both. You can’t both get a real education – which involves asking genuine questions, not ones with predetermined answers; which involves following the evidence wherever it leads; which involves learning things you didn’t know before; which involves learning things that don’t conform to what you want to believe – and reject in advance anything ‘that runs contrary to Christianity.’ That’s not education – that rules out education. Vocational training, yes, but education, no.

Columbia undergraduates study the Bible not as divinely inspired scripture, but as literature. For Ms. Keyes this was distressing. But, she says, Summit taught her that the Bible is “historically accurate,” and this knowledge kept her from believing that it belonged on the same plane as Homer or Aeschylus. “It equipped me to think through things and not accept everything I was told,” she says.

Except of course when that everything is told to her by the people at camp. Summit taught her something that is not true, and that equipped her to accept everything she was told provided the tellers are Christian.

It’s sad, really.

You might as well know. I don’t usually spill these things, I don’t just blurt them out, I keep myself to myself. I don’t make everyone a present of my secrets. I don’t bore you with my passions and adorations. I don’t feel it necessary to go public with everything. I don’t ‘share’ my every emotion. But you might as well know – there are few people I like as much as I like Alan Bennett. Not that I know him or anything – but everything I’ve read and seen by him, everything I know about him, everything I’ve heard him say; his voice, his plays, his journals, his readings, his performances – well, I just like them intensely, that’s all. And this review of his new book in the Times simply refreshes or reinforces that liking, and also creates new branches of it.

Bennett does not tell it as a success story, and doubts, in glummer moments, if it is one; “Living is something I’ve managed largely to avoid.” Rather, he inspects his past to discover how he came to be himself — fastidious, buttoned-up, an inveterate outsider…Being categorised at all is what he resists. He laments his constant sense of being shut out, but when he looks at those he might be shut in with, being shut out is clearly his preference. “I have never found it easy to belong. So much repels.”

Oh, dear – come over here and sit by me, as Dorothy Parker said. Those three little words – dalling, they are so very me. So much repels. Yes.

Like most lower-middle-class couples at the time, they believed in keeping themselves to themselves and avoiding anything “common”, articles of faith their son has inherited. It would do, he suggests, as a definition of what has gone wrong with England in the past 20 years, to say that it has got common. Unfashionably ready to call vulgarity and stupidity vulgarity and stupidity, he picks out, in an anti-paedophile mob on a Portsmouth housing estate, a tattooed mother with a fag dangling from her lips and a baby in her arms, proclaiming how concerned she is for her kiddies.

So much repels.

His father taught him to distrust affectation (“splother”, he called it), and Bennett proved all too apt a pupil…He has an unerring ear for verbal falsity — the archbishop of Canterbury at the Queen Mother’s memorial service referring to her as “someone who can help us to travel that country we call life”…The modern jargons we invent to keep reality at bay arouse his scorn. You sense the struggle when he refers to Rupert Thomas, who now lives with him, as “my partner, as the phrase is”. He has trained himself, or maybe it was just a gift, to hear and see what is actually there, not what convention dictates…

Well that’s why, then – he has an unerring ear for verbal falsity. I do value that quality – so naturally he’s a hero.

Elsewhere his incisiveness is less alarming, and often pleasingly sceptical. Puncturing reputations is a speciality. He comments wryly on the “canonisation” of Iris Murdoch, whose famed unworldliness somehow did not prevent her accepting umpteen honorary degrees and a damehood from Mrs Thatcher. Sir Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova are also put through the mill — the one not much good at thinking, the other not much good at poetry, and both too pleased with themselves.

Yeah, yeah, yeah – more, more.

I have never read a book of this length where I have turned the last page with such regret. It is intelligent, educated, engaging, humane, self-aware, cantankerous and irresistibly funny. You want it to go on for ever.

So much repels; what a good thing there is Alan Bennett, who doesn’t.

At some point in the past day or two, while pondering the latest upsurge in the Freud debate, I was inspired to look up ‘hysteria’ in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. I was a little surprised at what I found.

A form of neurosis for which no physical diagnosis can be found and in which the symptoms presented are expressive of an unconscious conflict. In conversion hysteria, the symptoms usually take a somatic form (hysterical paralysis, irritation of the throat, coughs)…Hysteria has been explained in many different ways over the centuries; the most influential aetiology or causal explanation to have been put forward in the twentieth century is that supplied by Freud’s psychoanalysis.

There’s a problem with that. It inexplicably omits necessary phrases like ‘once thought to be’ and ‘it was thought that’ and ‘but increased knowledge of diseases of the brain and nervous system have rendered such explanations nugatory.’ The phrase ‘for which no physical diagnosis can be found’ ought to read ‘for which no physical diagnosis could be found until researchers discovered organic diseases such as multiple sclerosis and motor neurone disease, and developed a better understanding of the effects of closed-head injuries and spinal injuries’. And note the sly word ‘influential’ about the aetiology put forward by Freud. Not accurate, not correct, not well-founded, but influential. Note further that it doesn’t say influential on whom. Not on neurologists it wasn’t – fortunately.

There’s another absurd bit:

It was only in the nineteenth century that the phenomenon of ‘railway spine’ (a psychosomatic syndrome observed in the victims of the frequent railway accidents of the 1880s) led to the recognition that men too could suffer from hysteria.

Umm…railway spine? Spine? Frequent railway accidents? Does that suggest anything to you? Like, for instance, the possibility that the syndrome was not psychosomatic at all, but, you know, spinal injury? Isn’t it kind of an odd coincidence that it was specifically railway accidents that caused men to develop ‘hysteria’?

No, it doesn’t suggest that to the writer of this dictionary. Very odd. Causes me to ponder the ways of epistemic functioning.

I’ve also been browsing in Frederick Crews’ excellent, indispensable anthology Unauthorized Freud, which has been causing me to mutter darkly about credulity and suggestibility. Credulity is an interesting and often puzzling phenomenon, which turns up in places (and people) where one doesn’t expect it, sometimes.

I’ve been discussing these things with Allen Esterson lately, too – in particular the entrenched misconception that a lot of people have via Jeffrey Masson’s book The Assualt on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory: that the problem with Freud is that he concealed what his women patients told him about being sexually molested by male relatives. In fact Freud’s patients didn’t tell him they were molested or ‘seduced,’ he told them – and then he changed his mind and suppressed the theory. But try explaining that to people who are convinced of the first account. Go on, just try. I have, and I know: it is impossible to get them to believe you. They think you’re part of the cover up crimes against women crowd, or else just ill-informed and out of touch and not up to speed. I expostulated on this point to Allen, and he remarked in his reply:

What is extraordinary is that the indications that there is something odd
about Freud’s story is staring the reader in the face even in the most
commonly cited version of the story, in “New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis”: “In the period in which my main interest was directed to
discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me
that they had been seduced by their father….” But why should almost all
his female patients have reported these ‘seductions’ only during the period
when he was actively seeking infantile traumas? As is not uncommon when
Freud is misleading his readers, he gives himself away — at least to
someone who has acquired sufficient knowledge to see what he is up to.

That’s good, isn’t it? It made me laugh. “In the period in which my main interest was directed to
discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me
that they had been seduced by their father….” Oh did they! My, what a coincidence! And in
the period when my main interest was directed to discovering the secret
role of the Illuminati in European history, almost all the people I sat
next to on the bus told me that they had been abducted by Illuminati.
Fancy!

Yes, life works out so neatly sometimes, you know? You develop a main interest in discovering something, and by golly, all of a sudden you start discovering it everywhere you go. In some cases, this happy outcome is called paranoid schizophrenia, and in other cases, it is called one of the great intellectual adventures of the 20th century. You just never know. It all boils down to prestige, and whether your ideas are ‘influential’ or not.

Part two of this review of Simon Blackburn’s Truth says some peculiar and rather ill-natured things, and also some silly ones. Some of the things are all three at once.

In Truth, the hostility to the unnamed relativist so overflows at points as to make her sound more like a solipsist, a nihilist, or even a willful and demented child. I spent a number of years in and around English departments and certainly met plenty of nudniks and witnessed my share of bizarre seminar discussions. But never once did I meet the shameless knave that Blackburn describes.

Well – bully for you, one feels like saying. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, does it. (Black swans! Dingdingding!) We don’t know what ‘a number of years in and around English departments’ means, do we. Nor do we know what ‘plenty of nudniks’ or ‘bizarre seminar discussions’ means. We don’t really even know what ‘in and around English departments’ means. But we do know that your not encountering X does not mean that X does not exist. So the snotty, de haut en bas tone of your review might be a tad out of place.

Anyone currently in academia in any capacity knows that the prestige of hard and semihard disciplines (notably economics) has never been higher, while the prestige of soft disciplines—those aided over the previous 25 years by the allure of “theory,” such as English, Comp Lit, Art History—has never been lower.

Well, pal, that depends what you mean by ‘prestige.’

Blackburn’s Truth Wars would pit right-brain adepts of the math and sciences against the left-brain adepts of the humanities, but this is a tendentious morality play meant to fret the public imagination without taking into account the actual intellectual or institutional history of the American university.

The right-brain adepts of math and science?? And for that matter, the left-brain adepts of the humanities?? And then…um…why is Blackburn supposed to take into account the actual intellectual or institutional history of the American university? Why the American university? (This is very like my writing a comment on a problem in democracy and being told by way of reply that the American people distrust powerful institutions. Hello? As Coriolanus said, there is a world elsewhere.) Blackburn is at Cambridge – the one up the M11, not the one across from MIT – so why is he expected to concentrate on the American university? Who knows.

One philosopher above all has chronicled the decline in prestige of analytic philosophy and the corresponding rise in interest in literary theory; and not coincidentally, this is the one enemy Blackburn troubles to identify by name. This is a review-essay, and any attempt to justify the American philosopher Richard Rorty’s conclusion, that truth is human-centered and consensual and not alien and extrinsically imposed, would require at least a book. But it is possible to identify, merely by quoting Rorty, the wound to the ego that seems to have motivated Blackburn to write a screed in response to him.

The wound to the ego. That seems to have motivated Blackburn. Seems? Seems to whom? On what basis? On what evidence? You mean ‘seems’ because you don’t like the book and so cast about for a concealed motivation? I’ve said it before, and no doubt will again – that one little word ‘seems’ can do a lot of work. Dirty work, often.

Being told that you are ill-read, or better yet, a “time-serving bore,” as Rorty has dubbed analytic philosophers, would fuel anyone’s bafflement and annoyance, and these are the twin engines behind Truth. As a helpless rejoinder to Rorty that only serves to prove his case, the book would be harmless if it didn’t also take energy from a trend darkening the culture at large.

Ho yus. Baffled, helpless, annoyed – fuming with irritation at the superior ‘prestige’ of Rorty – is the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, holder of Wittgenstein’s chair, author of the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, best-seller, frequent radio commenter – yes indeed, that’s a plausible account, Mr Metcalf.

How vast the bad faith, and the hoodoo powers of left-wing conspiracy! To which one can only reply: Physician, heal thyself. As in his beef with Rorty, Blackburn has let a personal distaste overwhelm a basic respect for the facts. To have been lectured to at length by this man, on just this score, and in a book so clumsily soldered together, lies beyond even poor taste; it is perverse. It requires reminding, then, that “Philosopher” isn’t a job description, but an honorific. And in this instance, it might better be revoked.

The guy’s clueless. He thinks Blackburn is right-wing! That’s downright funny. Basic respect for the facts, dude? Physician – oh never mind.

Anyway. Not an impressive review, frankly. Reminiscent of Vollman on Nietzsche.

Slate has a history of this kind of thing. It published a lame two-person dialogue review of an earlier Blackburn book, Being Good, four years ago. It’s a supremely irrelevant review. If you read it and go to the bottom you’ll see a reader comment on the review followed by a comment on the comment by Blackburn. Here’s an amusing factino: I wrote that comment. ‘Kassandra’ c’est moi. That was a long long time ago – way before B&W.

This review of Harold Bloom’s latest bit of vatic wisdom is good fun. I like and value Bloom’s efforts to preverve and convey enthusiasm for literature, but I find the actual books in which he does so unendurably irritating. He’s irritating in the same kind of way Paglia is; I wonder if he taught her to be irritating in that way, or if she taught him, or if they taught each other, or if they’re both that way by nature. They both make flat unargued unsupported assertions when they ought to be arguing. Take it or leave it. Yeah, I’ll leave it, thanks.

In spite of his popularity and productivity, however, Mr. Bloom remains an odd candidate for the mantle of Mortimer Adler, Daniel Boorstin, and Jacques Barzun. He completely lacks the good teacher’s humility before his subject and the good popularizer’s ability to make a complex subject clear. Mr. Bloom is an impatient and mannered writer, unwilling or unable to take trouble over his prose or to follow an argument from premise to conclusion. Like a lazy gardener, he lets the seeds of his insights fall where they may, never lingering to make sure they have sprouted into an actual thought.

And they haven’t. The thing about Shakespeare’s characters changing their minds right before our eyes, which he thinks is such a staggering insight – I don’t buy it. I don’t believe Shakespeare invented the idea, which is part of Bloom’s claim, and I don’t believe all the other eye-goggling stuff Bloom says about it either. He doesn’t say a thing to make it convincing – he just keeps repeating it. Repetition doesn’t do it.

In “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human” (1998), he wrote about the playwright in terms befitting a god, considering him the creator of the modern human mind, as God was the creator of the original human species. This is a metaphor, of course, and a Wildean paradox, reminiscent of the aesthete’s observation that the fogs in London were beginning to imitate Impressionist paintings. But Mr. Bloom did not treat it as a metaphor; he wrote as though, through some means he did not even attempt to explain, our consciousness was actually created by Shakespeare’s representations of consciousness.

Just so – ‘through some means he did not even attempt to explain.’ Well, an idea that sweeping needs some explanation, doesn’t it.

It is a shame that…the reader must wade through so much of the usual Bloomian detritus – irrelevancies, digressions, careless repetitions, grand pronouncements. Is it vain to hope that, in his next book, Mr. Bloom will stop hiding his intellectual light under a bushel of mannerisms?

Probably. Bloom seems to be well entrenched in his mannerisms. Pity.

Women, eh. What is their problem? Why do they keep insisting on being born women? Isn’t it kind of obvious what a bad career choice that is? So why do they keep doing it? It’s so stupid that no punishment can be too severe for it. This being a woman thing has got to be stamped out. And by golly in some places in this world people are doing their best. Widows starve along with their children, because obviously they can’t be allowed to do anything else, because that would be immodest, and violate someone’s honour. So starve, bitch.

In a bleak and run-down part of eastern Kabul, aid workers call out to a group of poor women waiting for food handouts. One by one, they collect a ration of flour, salt and cooking oil. It is supposed to last them and their children for the next month because they all have something in common – they are widows. In Afghanistan, losing your husband can mean destitution for women. Many are abandoned by their families. Unable to work, they depend on support programmes like this one run by the aid agency Care.

And women are beaten up by their brothers for being women, so they run away, which means they’ve been Out Alone, which of course means they deserve to be beaten even more.

Fatima – not her real name – describes how she was beaten regularly by her brothers, while a refugee in Iran. She fled, but then returned home – only for the beatings to get worse. Because, Fatima says, her family believed their reputation had been damaged by having a daughter who had been out alone…”They were beating me but they don’t understand that and now they saying: ‘You are guilty.’ Because of their honour they don’t want to be faced with other family members. They want to kill me.”

Well of course they do. How dare you not want to be beaten regularly by your brothers? How dare you run away? How dare you sully your brothers’ ‘honour’? The honour of aggressive thugs who beat up their sisters regularly is a precious thing. Die, bitch.

Such cases are far from unusual – in fact they’re commonplace. “It’s complete impunity,” says Rachel Wareham, Afghan director of the charity Medica Mondiale, which cares for women who suffer domestic violence. “There is no established mechanism for men who are violent to be brought to justice.”

Naturally not. Men aren’t the ones who made the stupid and shameful mistake of being born women. All women by being born women and going on being women are a standing risk to the honour of men; therefore they must be beaten regularly, as a minimal precaution, and in cases where that is not enough to keep them permanently cowering under the furniture, killed.

This article by Ishtiaq Ahmed raises an issue I fret about a lot. It’s one which doesn’t get discussed much, especially not in unequivocal and non-euphemistic terms. The issue is: democracy is widely seen as a good thing, and in many ways it is a good thing, but – there is a problem. The problem is that there is no magic mechanism that prevents majorities from voting to take away or deny the rights of some people – of even a majority, such as for instance women. The disputes over the Iraqi constitution are all about that problem, obviously, and yet the problem is seldom put in quite those terms. But it is a very real problem, which is why constitutions and bills of rights are also seen as good things. Democracy is seen as a good thing, constitutions and bills of rights are seen as good things; it’s not always quite in the front of everyone’s awareness that the two are more in tension than they are complementary – that bills of rights are needed to correct democracy at least as much as to collaborate with it.

After World War II when the United Nations proclaimed peace, democracy and human rights as antidotes to tyranny and war, it was assumed that as the new states developed and modernised, they would also embark upon the road to democracy…A problem which was never resolved in the UN Charter or the UDHR was that of people voting into power a government which would abolish private property or institute racial laws or religious dogma as state ideology.

Just so. A problem that was never resolved, and still plagues the world.

Would Islamists become good democrats if they take part in elections and gain power? Some people think that if the FIS had been allowed to assume power in Algeria it would have become a moderate party. On the other hand, critics point out that Abbas Madani, one of the leaders and ideologues of FIS, had declared that they will not take away women’s right to vote but would convince them to transfer it to their husbands or fathers!

And some women in Iraq took part in counter-demonstrations when women’s rights campaigners demonstrated for women’s rights in the constitution – carrying placards that said ‘No Equality!’ That’s it in a nutshell. What if a majority agrees that all women should be deprived of rights? Would I think ‘That’s democracy’ and feel obliged to submit? I damn well wouldn’t. A majority once thought slavery was a fine institution. They were wrong. It’s important to be clear about that. Majorities can be wrong, tyrannical, unjust – there is no God of Democracy seeing to it that that never happens.

Under the circumstances, we need to ponder upon the prospects for democracy in the Muslim world. There can be no denying that Islamists are now a major constituency in all Muslim states. Can one establish democracy by excluding them? Equally, the question is why should I support the right to vote for Islamists if I fear that they will undermine my freedom to think and write and express myself? These are dilemmas that we face at present when discussing democracy in the Muslim world. I believe a middle path can be found. One should in principle allow all parties to take part in elections if they do not openly advocate violence and intolerance and commit themselves to respecting the equal rights of women and non-Muslims. However we need to develop mechanisms which ensure that a parliamentary majority is not abused by Islamists or any other extremists.

And the question is why should I support the right to vote for Islamists if I fear that they will undermine my freedom to leave the house without permission, to leave the house at all, to be independent, to be autonomous, to own myself? I shouldn’t, I can’t, I don’t. I don’t support the right of anyone to vote to take away anyone’s basic rights. I don’t.

Well, obviously. This is what we keep saying. No, godbothering does not always and necessarily make people better.

Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today. According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems. The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

Or at least it counters the view that religion is a guarantee of a healthy society.

Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills. The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports…“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

Correlate. Correlation is not causation. But still, even the correlation is worth noticing. (Of course godbotherers still have the option of saying Yes but you see without religion, US rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion would be thousands of times higher, whereas in the other, nongodbothering prosperous democracies, with religion the rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion would be much lower. That’s the thing about correlation: that option is always available. But anyway.)

The New Republic gives us a nice glimpse of religion making people and societies better.

There was a lot of traffic, and he started to maneuver between the cars as though he were on a race track going for first place. I couldn’t keep up. My strength flagged, I stopped the car, and I cried. I saw him pulling away from me and drawing nearer to his target. His heart grew still to tear out the criminal hearts. He will be blessed, and the criminals will face hardship; he will rise, and they will fall. I saw a column of smoke rise 20 meters into the sky amid a deafening roar. He felled 50 infidels.

That’s one of the things religion does right there: make its adherents think of non-adherents as infidels. Not always, certainly, and fortunately, but the potential is always there.

So it turns out that Sacranie isn’t all that gleeful after all. Or perhaps he is but thinks it politic to pretend not to be. Or perhaps he is but wants to throw his weight around some more anyway – yes that could be it, that seems to fit.

The Muslim Council of Britain told the BBC News website: “We have not received any complaints about this piece of artwork. We would have preferred to have been consulted by Tate Britain before the decision was taken to remove John Latham’s piece. Sometimes presumptions are incorrectly made about what is unacceptable to Muslims and this can be counter-productive.”

Ah – is that what you would have preferred. Is it really. Yes well I would have preferred to have been consulted by a great many people about a great many things before they did them. Gosh, that would be a long list. Crap books, ugly houses, crap movies, stupid policies, ugly clothes, silly names. But oddly enough people mostly don’t consult me before they do things. Maybe if I started a Council they would? I’d better get busy and do that then. Let’s all start Councils so that everyone will have to consult everyone before doing anything. Let’s just spend all our time asking various assorted groups and ‘communities’ for permission to write anything, say anything, think anything, sculpt anything, act anything, tease anything. Let’s devote every bit of our time and energy to pre-emptive consulation and judgment and permission-seeking and no-saying and offence-taking and sensitivity-respecting, and that way we’ll never have to actually do or produce anything and pretty soon we’ll all starve to death or die of boredom and everything will be fine.

But really. The self-importance of that statement is pretty remarkable. The assumption that the MCB knows ‘what is unacceptable to Muslims’ and is the bod to consult on the subject, when in fact lots of Muslims find the MCB itself ‘unacceptable.’ And the BBC’s continued ongoing fostering of that very assumption by itself ‘consulting’ the MCB. And of course even more, the calm, smug, authoritarian assumption that Muslims or any religious group should be able to tell a secular national museum what not to display.

It’s all meme-work, self-fulfilling prophesy, thought-shaping. The more the MCB is treated as coterminous with ‘Muslims’ the more the MCB gets to shape what all but consciously skeptical or rebellious Muslims do think. And the more institutions defer to predicted ‘offended’ ‘sensitivities’ the more sensitive people will think they ought to be offended by everything. And the more institutions like theatres and museums (and no doubt publishers) censor themselves in advance, as a precaution, just in case, because oh dear you know maybe – the more emptied-out everyone’s mental world will become.

It’s appalling.

Brilliant. Perfect. Let’s let worries about ‘offending’ religious sensitivities determine what art we’re not allowed to see. What a good idea! Why didn’t someone think of it sooner? It would save such a huge amount of trouble, for one thing – we would all have to spend so much less time in museums and at the theatre and reading blasfeeemous books. Think how much more efficient we would be. We would be able to put new colours on the stripes in toothpaste. We would make the world a more beautiful (and of course less blasfeemous) place.

One of Britain’s leading conceptual artists has accused the Tate gallery of ‘cowardice’ after it banned one of his major works for fear of offending some Muslims after the London terrorist bombings. John Latham’s God Is Great consists of a large sheet of thick glass with copies of Islam, Christianity and Judaism’s most sacred texts – the Koran, Bible and Talmud – apparently embedded within its surface. The work was due to go on display last week in an exhibition dedicated to Latham at London’s Tate Britain, but gallery officials took the unprecedented decision to veto it because of political and religious sensitivities.

Well that certainly sounds offensive and blasfeemous. I can see why the Tate was all in a swivet.

Tate Britain says that it had to take the ‘difficult decision’ to avoid its motives being misunderstood given the attacks, which killed 52 people in July, and the present political climate. However, it admitted it had not consulted the Metropolitan Police or the Muslim Council of Britain.

What? It hadn’t what? It hadn’t ‘consulted’ the cops or the Muslim Council of Britain? The MCB is running things now? People are supposed to ‘consult’ it? People who are wondering if a given piece of art might or might not be ‘offensive’ to Muslims are supposed to ‘consult’ the MCB? Because – what? They have such a good record on that kind of thing? What with boycotting the Holocaust, and thinking death is too good for Salman Rushdie?

Why are they the people to consult? Why, why, why? They’re just a self-appointed group, they’re not elected, they’re not representative, they’re not ‘the Muslim community’ – why are they given some kind of de facto official role? Not that anyone should be given such a role, but that goes double for the MCB.

Last night Latham, 84, who insists that the piece is not anti-Islamic, told The Observer: ‘Tate Britain have shown cowardice over this. I think it’s a daft thing to do because if they want to help the militants, this is the way to do it.’

Yeah you could say that! Flop down on the floor and show your belly, cringe, whine, cry, pee on the floor, sweat, faint, and then send the Tate’s entire inventory to a secret vault in Kidderminster lest something might someday offend someone. That’s what I call curating!

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, supported the artist. ‘We share his concern,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what precise thought processes were going on at the Tate but I am concerned about the signal this sends at a time when we see free speech quite significantly under threat. I think that after 7 July we need this kind of artistic expression and political expression and discourse and disagreement more than ever, which is why this is worrying. Is three holy books in a piece of glass going to incite controversy? Frankly, whether it does or doesn’t, controversy is what we have in a flourishing democracy.’ She added: ‘I ultimately level my criticisms against legislators and certain lobby groups who’ve allowed free speech to be put in such peril and are making the climate that leads the Tate to have this kind of nervousness.’

Exactly. It’s that wretched religious hatred bill – plus the media’s bad habit of treating the MCB as some sort of official Spokesgroup.

Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, defended the gallery’s decision to hold back the piece…’It was a very difficult decision,’ he said, ‘but we made it due to the exceptional circumstances of this summer and in the light of opinions that we value regarding religious sensitivities.’

Why? Why do you value those opinions? And especially, why do you value them so much that you grovel before them and let them influence what you do? Why?

The Muslim Council of Britain was not consulted on the issue. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, its secretary, said: ‘I’m not aware of this particular exhibition, nor I am aware of any Muslim group that has protested. However, if the art gallery itself felt the display of the divine and holy books in such a manner would be deeply offensive to the believers of the three religions and therefore withdrew it, then I respect their decision.’

Yes I bet you do! I bet you’re just hugging yourself with glee. I bet you feel that the MCB has really arrived at last – that along with the K, getting the Tate to withdraw a sculpture without even asking it to must mean the MCB has some pretty impressive clout.

Well I don’t respect their decision. I hope they get a torrent of outrage and mockery and contempt that makes their fears of an imagined ‘offended’ Muslim community look like a pack of butterflies out for a waltz. That’s what I hope.

Dogmatism, we were talking about the other day. Via this remark by Simon Blackburn in Truth.

Today’s relativists, persuading themselves that all opinions enjoy the same standing in the light of reason, take it as a green light to believe what they like with as much conviction and force as they like. So while ancient scepticism was the sworn opponent of dogmatism, today dogmatisms feed and flourish on the desecrated corpse of reason.

A day or two after posting that I read a related comment by Hume.

You propose then, Philo, said Cleanthes, to erect religious faith on philosophical skepticism; and you think that if certainty or evidence be expelled from every other subject of inquiry, it will all retire to these theological doctrines, and there acquire a superior force and authority. Whether your skepticism be as absolute and sincere as you pretend, we shall learn by and by, when the company breaks up: We shall then see, whether you go out at the door or the window; and whether you really doubt if your body has gravity, or can be injured by its fall…

That’s from the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and it’s the epigraph to chapter 4 in Francis Wheen’s Mumbo Jumbo.

There’s another thing I quoted from Blackburn.

In the intellectual world, toleration is the disposition to fight opinion only with opinion; in other words, to protect freedom of speech, and to confront divergence of opinion with open critical reflection rather than suppression or force.

Yesterday I re-read this article on Islamophobia-phobia by Piers Benn.

The real lesson of tolerance is that disputes should be settled by reasoned dialogue rather than abuse or violence, and that we should always accept that we may have much to learn from people whose beliefs initially appear strange. But these virtues are a far cry from the sentimental pretence that all claims to religious truth are somehow ‘equal’…

There, you see? It all ties up. Skepticism and relativism can be hijacked to the purposes of dogmatism, and tolerance doesn’t mean never disagreeing with anyone, it means disagreeing by means of reasoned dialogue not by force. Both of those points are quite useful to keep in mind.

Bush said an odd thing on Wednesday.

Mr. Bush said he had been “thinking a lot” about the comparisons between the response to the attacks in New York and Washington, and the storm devastation. “We look at the destruction caused by Katrina, and our hearts break,” he said. Turning the subject to terrorists, he said: “They’re the kind of people who look at Katrina and wish they had caused it. We’re in a war against these people.”

‘We look at the destruction caused by Katrina, and our hearts break.’ They do? We do, and they do? Who’s we? You mean you? Did your heart break? Really? Are you sure? Because that doesn’t seem to be how people remember it. That doesn’t seem to be how people saw it at the time. You may remember some comments to that effect?

What was it that made people think your heart was intact, I wonder. The slowness to cut short your vacation? The telling ‘Brownie’ he was doing a heck of a job? The joke about Trent Lott’s front porch?

I heard a commentary on NPR this morning on the effect of Katrina on Bush’s poll numbers, which said that the above speech was an attempt to improve his situation by emphasizing his ‘leadership’ qualities. That was supposed to be one of his strong points – strong and decisive leadership. I would like to know why. Even apart from that ridiculous juxtaposition above (terrorists would cause hurricanes if they could, so we’re at war with them, so I’m a tough guy), I would like to know why Bush’s ‘strong and decisive leadership’ is seen as a virtue, or as leadership.

Leadership, and strength, and decisiveness, are only as good as the purposes for which they are being strong and decisive and leader-like. That’s not a big newsflash, is it? Hitler was a strong decisive leader, so was Stalin, so was Pol Pot. Strength and decision on their own are not necessarily virtues, are they.

Bush’s ‘strength’ and ‘decisiveness’ can be and have been described with other words. Obstinate, unreflective, unwilling to think again, incurious, uninformed, indifferent to being uninformed. Furthermore, he thinks he was chosen by god to be president. Such a belief is almost a guarantee that one will assume one’s every thought is divinely inspired and therefore good. But it’s not likely to be a true belief, so its immunity from criticism and correction is not necessarily a good thing.

Political rhetoric and political advertising are carefully designed to give the impression that ‘character’ is the most important thing about a candidate, and that various military virtues are (along with conjugal and parental and pet-owner virtues) both necessary and sufficient for a political candidate. This impression is quite incorrect. It would be good if people started to realize that, and so be able to resist the manipulations of the peddlers of ‘strong, decisive leaders.’

This whole thing is…intolerable. Just intolerable.

A bus carrying elderly evacuees out of the path of Hurricane Rita has caught fire on a gridlocked motorway, killing up to 24 people…Television pictures showed the entire bus alight, with explosions sending plumes of thick black smoke billowing into the sky. Officer Peritz said the blasts were apparently caused by oxygen containers for the elderly on board the vehicle…The passengers were being evacuated from a nursing home in Bellaire, south-west Houston, when the accident happened…Officer Peritz said the driver, who survived the fire, repeatedly went back onto the bus to try to rescue passengers.

I can’t read that without wanting to blub. Hell and damnation – what next. You’re old and ill and you can’t breathe well, you have to get on a bus to escape a hurricane, you have to sit on that bus in a colossal traffic jam for – what? Many hours, certainly. News reports last night were saying 15 hours. You have to sit in misery for hours and hours – and then the oxygen that some of you need in order to breathe – explodes and burns most of you to death. Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.

And then there is Templeman 3, one of the New Orleans city jails.

As Hurricane Katrina began pounding New Orleans, the sheriff’s department abandoned hundreds of inmates imprisoned in the city’s jail, Human Rights Watch said today…These inmates, including some who were locked in ground-floor cells, were not evacuated until Thursday, September 1, four days after flood waters in the jail had reached chest-level…According to inmates interviewed by Human Rights Watch, they had no food or water from the inmate’s last meal over the weekend of August 27-28 until they were evacuated on Thursday, September 1. By Monday, August 29, the generators had died, leaving them without lights and sealed in without air circulation. The toilets backed up, creating an unbearable stench…As the water began rising on the first floor, prisoners became anxious and then desperate. Some of the inmates were able to force open their cell doors, helped by inmates held in the common area. All of them, however, remained trapped in the locked facility…Some inmates from Templeman III have said they saw bodies floating in the floodwaters as they were evacuated from the prison. A number of inmates told Human Rights Watch that they were not able to get everyone out from their cells…Many of the men held at jail had been arrested for offenses like criminal trespass, public drunkenness or disorderly conduct. Many had not even been brought before a judge and charged, much less been convicted.

More flies, more sport.

A long review-article on books on atheism by Ronald Aronson. It starts with Alister McGrath’s Twilight of Atheism.

Just like the postmodernist claim that modernity is over, the retrospective stance implied by terms like twilight is the book’s main idea and does double duty as a weapon in the battle against atheism. The “rise and fall” metaphors are tools of a brilliantly clever religious writer against the movement he seeks to undermine…But for the most part he argues broadly that the rational argument between religion and atheism can never be resolved, comments on the rise of interest in spirituality and the growth of Pentecostalism, and brings out as uncontested fact the postmodern verdict on modernity, grafting it onto his case against atheism…A more self-conscious theology professor might have explored the paradox of a proclaimed “reinvented” Christianity in league with postmodernism, at least to consider the potential conflicts between the two worldviews on issues of authority and truth.

We’ve seen this ploy so many times – postmodernism used to argue against rationality and for traditional authority-based ‘revealed’ truth or for irrational and anti-rational leaps of faith and the will to believe. It’s as Simon Blackburn said –

Today’s relativists, persuading themselves that all opinions enjoy the same standing in the light of reason, take it as a green light to believe what they like with as much conviction and force as they like. So while ancient scepticism was the sworn opponent of dogmatism, today dogmatisms feed and flourish on the desecrated corpse of reason.

Relativists of that stripe often wrap themselves in the flag of postmodernism to do it.

Aronson finds Sam Harris’ book far too dogmatic, and much prefers Atheism: A Very Short Introduction by some guy named Julian Baggini.

Baggini’s excellent little book is intended not as an attack on religion but to give a positive explanation of a word, atheism…In a highly accessible style, Baggini (who writes for The Guardian and is editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine) covers what have become familiar themes…His final chapter is a masterpiece in trying to understand the impulse behind religion, the inevitable gulf between believers and nonbelievers, and the fact that since both will continue to share the world for a long time to come, the wisest path to coexistence is through genuine openness and the willingness to be proven wrong.

Then Aronson discusses Erik J. Wielenberg’s Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe and Daniel Harbour’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Atheism. Jerry S reviewed Daniel Harbour’s book for the New Humanist a few years ago – I’d link to the review but it’s not online.

Wielenberg’s carefully developed main argument is that a moral framework totally dependent on God’s will “is not a moral framework at all.” Plato’s Euthyphro provides the key question: Does God endorse acts that are already moral or do these become moral because God commands them? Even among Christians, he points out, morality turns out to be objective and independent—it is “part of the furniture of the universe” and does not require God to make it right.

We’ve discussed that idea here a few times.

Harbour’s recently reissued Guide to Atheism aspires to show the intellectual and practical superiority of a secular, scientific worldview to a religious one. At stake is not simply the question “Does God exist?” but rather “the whole worldview to which we subscribe.”…The first worldview he considers, based on the scientific paradigm of rational inquiry, operates by constant “reexamination, reevaluation and rejection” of its assumptions and results, which continually must prove themselves, while the second introduces starting points that are elaborate and are not subject to question or testing. Religion falls under the second category because “all attempts to explain observations about the nature of the world must be consistent with, or subservient to, the unrevisable starting assumptions.”

That’s one reason it’s hard for people like me to be as undogmatic and tolerant as Aronson thinks we should be. It’s because of the unrevisable starting assumptions and the resulting chronic imbalance in arguments between (dogmatic) theists and atheists. The claims to know what they can’t know, the special pleading, the shifting back and forth between claims that God is supernatural and ineffable so shut up and claims that they know all about this God so shut up – the having it both ways, the heads I win tails you lose, the certainty, the cheating. There are undogmatic theists…but they seem to be getting scarcer and scarcer.

The Vicar of Putney thinks Salman Rushdie is too dogmatic.

But more important still, the novel has the rare capacity to nudge us out of our ideological trenches into a more sympathetic engagement with the moral universe of those we consider the enemy.

Maybe so. But sympathetic engagement is one thing, and agreement is another. The overall import of the vicar’s article seems to be disagreement with Rushdie’s opinion itself. Well, he’s a vicar and Rushdie is an atheist. Rushdie could write a novel engaging with his moral universe, but that doesn’t require him to agree with its unrevisable starting assumptions, and nor does it require him to be a novelist and nothing else. He can be a novelist and a polemicist, or essayist, or pamphleteer, or campaigner, or all those. He can do both – lots of people do. The vicar talks as if Rushdie is betraying the novel or his work as a novelist by doing both.

The tragedy is that Rushdie the novelist has increasingly been overtaken by his public crusading. The vocation of the novelist is to pluralism. That’s why the novel is sacred. Unfortunately, it’s a sanctity in which Rushdie now seems to have lost his faith.

Well, maybe that’s the problem right there. Being a vicar, he thinks in terms of sacred and sanctity. That’s a narrowing, limiting, simplifying way to think. If the novel is ‘sacred’ then it mustn’t be polluted by profane things like articles – then the novelist must be pure, and unadulterated, and one thing only. Puritanism, in short. People who think in terms of purity and pollution can be very dangerous, and even at the best they are simple-minded.

Norm talks about the vick here and here, where he cites that Simon Blackburn quotation.

Lists are always strange. Lists of 100 best novels in English that include some of the worst novels ever written – that kind of thing. They’re always strange. That list of UK public intellectuals that was then augmented by a female version, both of them including some very odd ‘intellectuals’ – movie stars, advertisers, publicists. Strange. So of course this list is strange. But all the same, I have to bleat at a couple of inclusions. Why so many clerics? The pope, al-Qaradawi, al-Sistani? Those are intellectuals? And then there’s Paglia, and Thomas Friedman. But these lists are always strange, so whatever.

So whodja vote for? I’ll tell you mine. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Sen. I’d already chosen them before I noticed that at least three of them have some connection with B&W. Two have articles here, another has sent email comments for quoting. But I voted before I thought of that.

I was a little amused to see a letter on the letters page rebuking B&W (actually, me) for ‘perpetuating the fashionable nonsense of minimum-wage laws.’ No. Minimum wage laws may be nonsense, but they’re hardly fashionable. They’re too old for that, for one thing, at least in the US. And they’re not fashionable anyway, any more than unions are. Are you kidding? Unions? The minimum wage? Yeah, right, they’re about as fashionable as poodle skirts, or peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches on Wonder bread, or Maxwell House coffee made in a percolator, or zootsuits. No. The word class is fashionable, provided it’s accompanied – chaperoned, as it were – by the words ‘race’ and ‘gender’ – but that’s it. The thing itself is fashionable only if you’re in one of the right ones, and that doesn’t include the working class.

I would say hostility to the minimum wage is more fashionable than the minimum wage itself is – fashionable in the same sense and the same circles in which libertarianism is fashionable, that is. Libertarianism is not quite as hot as it was during the bubble, but it’s still a lot hotter than the boring old minimum wage is. You might as well say health and safety laws are fashionable.

But, we are sternly told, the minimum wage is bad, because it costs jobs. Sometimes it does, though there is dispute about how often, how invariably, how much, and so on. But even if it does, that doesn’t make it bad, full stop. Not all by itself. What it does is make it bad in one way, but not in another. There are fewer jobs, but the jobs there are pay more. Some people have no jobs, but other people work for – too little, instead of much too little.

It’s interesting that even in raving-right-wing Murka, there is a high level of political support for the minimum wage, and for raising it more often and higher than it gets raised. Even here, it is widely thought that people who do a job should actually be paid decently for it. The fans of the unregulated market don’t agree, of course; they think the market should decide. They also think the market should be helped to decide by always being oversupplied with unskilled labour, so that wages will always be as low as possible.

One of the odd things about the argument that the minimum wage costs jobs, in fact, is that full employment is not a goal anyway, and the government takes steps to prevent full employment any time the unemployment rate falls ‘too’ low. We heard about that a lot during the bubble. The unemployment rate was 4% – oh dear, uh oh – time to raise interest rates and hope it goes up again quick like a bunny. Well, if full employment is not the goal, is in fact not permitted, then why is it a problem that the minimum wage costs jobs?

Iqbal Sacranie in the Guardian yesterday:

Across the globe there is a widespread view that we in the west practise double standards and devalue the lives of non-westerners. The former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohammad, earlier this month, said of our actions in Iraq: “There is no tally of Iraqi deaths, but every single death of a US soldier is reported to the world. These are soldiers who must expect to be killed. But the Iraqis who die … are innocent civilians who under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein would still be alive.”

Hmm. Does Sacranie talk much about the tally of Iranian deaths during the Iran-Iraq war? Or other tallies of Muslims killed by other Muslims? Does he have a thoroughly single standard himself?

There is no shortage of Jews – including Leslie Bunder, editor of SomethingJewish.co.uk and Rabbi Schochet – who recognise that the memorial day in its present format is morally problematic. Still, the MCB recognises that this is enormously sensitive territory and if widening the scope of the day – while ethically right – is not politically feasible currently, then we should consider establishing a separate and truly inclusive genocide memorial day.

Truly inclusive? Truly? How truly? Inclusive of whom?

From the MCB’s news release on its decision not to attend Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2001:

In a letter to the Home Secretary, the Secretary General, Yousuf Bhaliok said that whilst they fully condemn the Nazi Holocaust and sympathise with the families of the Holocaust victims, they have reservations about the actual ceremony…It includes the controversial question of alleged Armenian genocide as well as the so-called gay genocide. In view of the above concerns the MCB believes that it would be inappropriate for them to be present at tomorrow’s ceremony.

So – truly inclusive? Well, no, then, not if the well-attested Armenian genocide is disallowed.

And another thing. The press release concludes with this familiar quotation:

The letter concludes, ” I need hardly say that our reservations concern only the ceremony and not the Nazi holocaust per se. The Qur’an (Al-Maidah 5:32) tells us that the murder of one man is as if one had slain all mankind and he who saves a life shall be as if he had given life to all humanity.”

Not true. That’s a truncated quotation – a vital piece has been left out, as Irshad Manji has been pointing out lately. The real quotation is translated for instance as ‘if anyone killed a person, not in retaliation for murder, or to spread mischief in the land, it would be as if he killed all mankind.’ Irshad Manji usually gives it as something like ‘except as punishment for murder or villainy in the land.’ At any rate, there is a very crucial escape clause – which actually renders the whole thing worthless. Because guess what, anyone who wants to kill someone is perfectly well able to come up with some ‘villainy in the land’ that the prospective murderee has spread, and there you go: carte blanche to commit murder. For instance of rebellious Armenians, who were not murdered in an act of genocide at all, but were killed as enemy combatants or rebels or opponents in a civil war or what have you. Well…that’s what Eichmann said, too. The Jews were enemies of the Reich. That’s what he was told, and that’s what he told the Jerusalem court in 1961. That’s what the Hutus said – repeatedly, insistently, urgently, over the airwaves on Radio Mille Collines – about the Tutsis: they were enemies, rebels, insurgents, and had to be killed before they killed all the Hutus. That’s what happens in genocides. People don’t just say ‘Let’s kill all the Jews now because we don’t like them.’ They use the ‘villainy in the land’ clause.

So the MCB’s fastidiousness about Holocaust Memorial Day is a bit suspect.

These people piss me off.

Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution. They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.

That’s not a group of people seeking understanding or enlightenment or further education or information or an interesting discussion – that’s a group of aggressive over-confident truculent aggrieved fools who think they have a special pipeline to certainty and a right to challenge people who both know more than they do and eschew certainty. That’s a pack of hostile theocrats out to dismantle every secular institution and branch of education in existence. Nothing will make them shut up, nothing will make them understand that their pipeline to certainty is a short rusty tube leading nowhere. Nothing will even make them perceive the irony of the fact that it is science, which actually revises its findings on the basis of evidence, that disavows certainty, while it is know-nothing zealots like them who do not, ever, revise their obstinate beliefs excuse me ‘faith’ who claim to ‘know’ that someone made the universe and who the someone is.

They piss me off.

…science museums and other institutions struggle to contend with challenges to the theory of evolution that they say are growing common and sometimes aggressive. One company, called B.C. Tours “because we are biblically correct,” even offers escorted visits to the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. Participants hear creationists’ explanations for the exhibitions.

Biblically correct. And people in museums have to waste their time answering hostile questions from imbeciles like that. It pisses me off.

Instead, he told the volunteers that when they encounter religious fundamentalists they should emphasize that science museums live by the rules of science. They seek answers in nature to questions about nature, they look for explanations that can be tested by experiment and observation in the material world, and they understand that all scientific knowledge is provisional – capable of being overturned when better answers are discovered.

Unlike religion – which does not overturn its ‘knowledge’ when better answers are discovered. Ever, ever! No, instead it just causes people to keep insisting more and more loudly, more and more stupidly, more and more self-righteously, on the inarguable certain truth of the fairy tales they grew up on!

It pisses me off.

There is more than one type of creationist, he said: “thinking creationists who want to know answers, and they are willing to listen, even if they go away unconvinced” and “people who for whatever reason are here to bother you, to trap you, to bludgeon you.” Those were the type of people who confronted Dr. Durkee, a former biology professor at Grinnell College in Iowa. The encounter left her discouraged. “It is no wonder that many biologists will simply refuse to debate creationists or I.D.ers,” she said, using the abbreviation for intelligent design, a cousin of creationism. “It is as if they aren’t listening.”

No wonder indeed.

More Blackburn on truth. (Maybe in a few months I’ll give you a passage or two from Stangroom and Benson on truth. That will be fun for you!)

He points out that it is important to distinguish between relativism and toleration.

In the intellectual world, toleration is the disposition to fight opinion only with opinion; in other words, to protect freedom of speech, and to confront divergence of opinion with open critical reflection rather than suppression or force…Relativism, by contrast, chips away at our right to disapprove of what anybody says. Its central message is that there are no asymmetries of reason and knowledge, objectivity and truth…It is not only that we must try to understand them, but also that we must accept a complete symmetry of standing.

So, we have a Western view of the universe, they have theirs, we have Western science, they have theirs, and so on.

And then, once the symmetry of standing takes possession of the relativist, other things may come to fill his head, and they need not involve toleration at all. The dogmatic faith in homeopathy quickly leads to intolerant rejection of double-blind tests for the efficacy of treatments, or intolerant campaigns for the diversion of funds from medicine that works to medicine that does not…The faith that wisdom and the recipe for living are written in one text or another rapidly brings cries of death to the infidel.

Eloquent, isn’t he.

From Simon Blackburn in his new book Truth. He compares skeptics, who suspend judgment on undecideable questions, with relativists.

Today’s relativists, persuading themselves that all opinions enjoy the same standing in the light of reason, take it as a green light to believe what they like with as much conviction and force as they like. So while ancient scepticism was the sworn opponent of dogmatism, today dogmatisms feed and flourish on the desecrated corpse of reason. Astrology, prophecy, homeopathy, Feng shui, conspiracy theories, flying saucers, voodoo, crystal balls, miracle-working, angel visits, alien abductions, management nostrums and a thousand other cults dominate people’s minds, often with official backing. ‘Faith education’ is backed by the British Prime Minister, while Biblical fundamentalism, creationism and astrology alike stalk the White House.

This is the problem. Skepticism that leads to caution about dogmatism is one thing, and relativism that leads to inflated, robust, blimp-like dogmatism is quite quite another.