Stanley Fish:

Back in June, I wrote three columns (”The Three Atheists,” “Atheism and Evidence” and “Is Religion Man-Made?“) about the recent vogue of atheist books, books that accuse religion of being empty of genuine substance, full of malevolent and destructive passion, and without support in evidence, reason or common sense.

The authors of these tracts are characterized by professor Jacques Berlinerblau of Georgetown University as “the soccer hooligans of reasoned discourse.” He asks (rhetorically), “Can an atheist or agnostic commentator discuss any aspect of religion for more than thirty seconds without referring to religious peoples as imbeciles, extremists, mental deficients, fascists, enemies of the public good, crypto-Nazis, conjure men, irrationalists … authoritarian despots and so forth?”

In a similar vein, Tom Krattenmaker, who studies religion in public life, wonders why, given their celebration of open-mindedness and critical thinking, secularists “so frequently leave their critical thinking at the door” when it “comes to matters of religion?” Why are they closed-minded on this one subject?

But my question for you is: why can’t the likes of Stanley Fish go three paragraphs without insulting his opponents and adding injury in the form of the worst sort of brazen ‘why are they still beating their wives’ question? Riddle me that.

I would also like to request a moratorium on critiques of liberalism that consist entirely of a flourish for effect – with accompanying air of discovery – of the familiar consideration that liberalism is inconsistent with blanket, categorical tolerance of absolutely every possible act and attitude. That is, liberalism is incompatible, in practice, with any form of illiberalism that destroys liberalism. If something is inconsistent with liberalism, it is inconsistent with liberalism. Yes. Quite. We noticed.

Also, it might not be a half-bad idea to notice that liberalism is not incompatible with religion, merely with illiberal forms of religion. Just as liberalism is incompatible with illiberal forms of secularism. Which suggests that there may be a need to revisit Fish’s title: “Liberalism and Secularism: One and the Same”.

(Also, the sentence, “in liberal thought, ‘reasonable’ is a partisan, not a normative notion,” is conspicuously confused.)

I’m not a big fan of the academic interview, perhaps having been put off it by attending “A conversation with Jacques Derrida” while I was in graduate school (better, perhaps, than the “Rudolph Bahro interviews Himself” that’s in one of the Socialist Registers in our downstairs loo). So I only read Political Questions: Five Questions in Political Philosophy (UK) because Adam Swift twice told me to do so (three times including his enthusiastic blurb on the back of the book). It’s really very interesting: 18 political theorists and philosophers of varying eminence give their answers to 5 questions:

Why were you initially drawn to political philosophy?

What do you consider your most important contribution to political philosophy and why?

What is the proper role of political philosophy in relation to real, political action? Can there ever be a fruitful relation between political philosophy and political practice?

What do you consider the most neglected topics in late 20th century political philosophy?

What are the most important unsolved questions in political philosophy and/or related disciplines, and what are the prospects for progress?

Obviously the responses vary in their level of interest. There are no shocking revelations – William Galston doesn’t renege on his pluralism; Amy Gutmann doesn’t come out in favour of dictatorship. And there is an unevenness in how fully people answer the questions; some are too lengthy and others, frankly, too terse (I’d have liked to hear more from Allen Buchanan and Phillippe Van Parjis in particular). And there are missing characters – I’m not going to propose anyone for elimination, but it would have been nice to hear from Elizabeth Anderson, Loren Lomasky, and Norman Daniels. (I presume that some people refused to be interviewed — how else to explain the absence of G.A. Cohen, for example?).

I was most interested in what people had to say about question 3.

[click to continue…]

I have very little time for blogging at the moment, so I’m going to abandon a plan I had to write an extended post about Byron Rogers’s The Man who Went into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas . Thomas, referred to by Larkin as “Arsewipe Thomas” was, as most of you probably know, one of the very best poets in the English language in the twentieth century. He was also an Anglican vicar in a Wales where most of the population was chapel and a fierce advocate for the Welsh language despite speaking a variant so academic that his parishioners struggled to understand him. He sometimes refused to speak English at all (except through an interpreter), yet he wouldn’t let his own family learn Welsh and couldn’t write a decent poem in his adopted language. His son tells of being packed off to boarding school in the hated England and of listening to sermons in which Thomas denounced fridges and vacuum cleaners as the paraphenalia of modernity. He barely showed any affection for his talented artist wife but after he death composed supremely tender love poems. With her he lived a life of dour austerity in sub-arctic temperatures, but then he remarried a fox-hunting reactionary and was seen queuing for lottery tickets at Tescos. He was a priest with distinctly unorthodox views about the nature of the deity (of whom he had an almost Newtonian conception). He carried out the duties of a vicar with conventional conscientiousness, but felt awkward talking to parishioners and once vaulted over the churchyard wall after a funeral service to avoid conversation with the bereaved. He had a reputation for grim humourlessness with some, but at least one person compared him to Lenny Bruce and Ken Dodd. And then there’s his feeling for nature and landscape … I could go on and on about this extraordinary man with many many personas and a capacity for repeated personal reinvention. But you should buy the book, you really should.

I’m enjoying Bryan Talbot’s new – not exactly a graphic novel, is it? Alice in Sunderland [amazon]. Subtitled: ‘an entertainment’. Visit the official site of this ‘dream documentary’, call it what you will.

Anyway, it is set in the Sunderland Empire – that is, a theater – and the rabbit onstage explains to the lout in the audience, who is, oddly, a George Formby fan:

George Formby played here, and his father before him, from whom Chaplin steals his stick-twirling routine. All great northern comedy is drawn from tragedy. One of the biggest ever Music Hall stars, George Formby Senior – the Wigan Nightingale – is born into dire poverty and learns his trade as a singing beggar. His songs and jokes are punctuated by a hacking cough – a symptom of the tuberculosis that kills him in his forties – which he cleverly works into his act.

That’s fairly black. To be a tubercular Music Hall performer, hacking away on stage. The book says Formby, Sr., invented ‘Wigan Pier’ – see also, George Orwell – as part of a running gag to the effect that Wigan was a classy seaside resort, as opposed to a landlocked mining town. I never knew that. (Is it true? Talbott warns us that everything in the book is true except for one, which will be revealed at the end. I haven’t got to the end yet.)

Anyway, YouTube has some fine George Formby (Jr.) material: “When I’m Cleaning Windows”; “Fanlight Fanny”. So that’s where the Beatles learned to sound like that.

A few weeks ago, I noticed this piece saying that the mortgage problem in the UK might be worse than that in the US. The reason given (also applicable to Australia) is that the UK boom or bubble in house prices has been much more dramatic than in the US. One statistic quoted in the piece was that there were 14 000 foreclosures in the first half of 2007 a statistic that, as the author notes, makes grim reading. It’s striking then, to read this piece in the NYTimes, predicting 2 million foreclosures in the US this year (since most mortgages are taken out by couples, many with children, the number of people affected is probably more like 4 million). Even allowing for the larger population in the US, this is a huge difference. It now appears that foreclosure has taken over from bankruptcy as the primary mode of financial catastrophe. (Bankruptcy rates plummeted after the “reform” of 2005, but seem certain to rebound in coming months).

Link. Truly, Freakonomics has now entered the mainstream/jumped the shark. Hustlenomics tips from Yung Joc on YouTube (1, 2, 3).

I’ve been meaning to write a post on the political chaos in Belgium – but my absence on CT in the last weeks already revealed that I haven’t had a decent chunk of time yet. For those of you in countries where there hasn’t been any reporting – it’s day 82 after the federal elections, and the Flemish and Walloon parties are so bitterly opposed to each other’s demands, that commentators are talking aloud of “the end of Belgium” (which is not going to happen soon, since neither of them wants to give up Brussels – but there are signs that the crisis between the Dutch/Flemish-speaking and Francophone regions is deeper than it has been in decades).

And the more I thought about what I should write, the more it became clear that it’s a complicated issue to write about. One problem is that the interpretations of the political events differ dramatically between the Dutch-language and the Francophone Belgian press – truly as if they are from two different planets – so any (foreign) journalist/reader who masters only one of those two languages will almost inevitably get a distorted or one-sided pictured. Then there is the question whether, as a Flemish person, I can write sufficiently neutral about this. One of the many dimensions of the Belgian drama is the historical disrespect of Francophone Belgians for the Flemish, especially their language; and part of the interpretational differences is whether this is still the case today, and whether one should bother. I’ll keep my own views for another time, but one thing that I noted in international conversations is that it seems hard for most non-Flemish to appreciate why language can be such a big deal (this francophone Belgian philosopher is the Great Exception, and he’s writing a book on linguistic justice). I don’t know what would work as good international comparisons, but in any case there are plenty of other national political sensitivities that are not always easy to understand for outsiders, and where one does need to have some minimal historical knowledge to appreciate present-day sensitivities.

So I will try to write a piece next week trying to explain, as neutrally as I can, the facts and background info; and, if I have some time left, I’ll give my views in another post. But now I first have to mark the essays of my Walloon students.

I missed this earlier this week. No more MaxSpeak as of September 3rd. Boo. Max’s posts felt like a very pure form of blogging: his prose style had a way of temporarily wiring you in to his thought process as it was happening. Not many people can convey that feeling well, either because there’s too much post-processing (and it all gets polished up) or there’s not enough (and its incomprehensible). Max hit the sweet-spot a lot more than most. The results weren’t pretty, but they were usually dynamic, direct and right on target more often than not. Soon, the interwebs will be just a bit more boring.

Here are the things most people would happily pay for at an international transit airport:
– a shower
– clean underwear (for those of us who habitually forget to pack it)
– daylight
– an exercise facility to help with the jetlag and minimise DVT
– nutritious but not too heavy food
– a nap, lying flat, somewhere quiet.

And here’s what is generally available:
– Gucci
– Chanel
– l’Occitane
– Bodyshop
– Lacoste
– Nike
– a few plastic seats
– McDonalds, dougnuts, and the local variety of fried, sugary dross to add a sugar hangover to your jetlag.

Sometimes there’s a shower, and I’ve even heard of napping capsules – though never in the terminal I’m in. But generally, the big transit airports totally mismatch the actual desires of travellers, and instead lay on miles of the same over-priced globalised tat (Swarovski, anyone?) for the miserable and jetlagged to wander about in.

Is the idea that we’ll buy a Cartier watch because we’re so tired and addled? Or are ‘we’ such wealthy and time-poor businessmen that we’ll buy any shiny expensive thing we see for our neglected wives and mistresses? At Bangkok airport recently, most of the travellers were wearing tracksuits and carrying babies. Chanel, Prada and the rest of them were completely empty. Though at least there are showers and a spa in that airport. But all I wanted to buy was clean knickers and a mobile phone – and the result was 2-nil to the airport. At least I didn’t succumb to those silk and wool scarves they have in every airport in the world, but that only French women wear.

So why the complete mismatch of trapped and exhausted consumers to luxury goods? Surely the airports have woken up to the fact that travelling is mass market. Or are travellers such a captive market that airports can completely ignore what they actually want…?

Or perhaps rather, _Clash of the Titans_; only Ray Harryhausen could properly depict a stand-off of such magnitude – intellectual (and I use the term in its _very_ broadest sense) fisticuffs between Dinesh D’Souza and Alan Wolfe.

Now, D’Souza says Boston College is withholding videotape of a debate on the book he conducted there with the scholar Alan Wolfe — because it shows that the college’s “intellectual emperor has no clothes.” …But the producers of the video maintain that it was an embarrassment for both debaters. “It was uncivil, they talked over each other, they … cast aspersions on each other’s character, they made jokes at each other’s expense, it was a snipe job, it was a street fight, it was a brawl. And frankly it doesn’t meet Boston College’s intellectual standards,” said Ben Birnbaum, the executive producer of Front Row. While it was clear that the taping was intended for an online audience, the written agreement with the debaters left the decision on what to do with the video in the college’s hands.

Boston College’s media people should be warmly congratulated for protecting us from this abomination. On the one hand, not much can be said about Dinesh D’Souza that hasn’t been said already. On the other, it seems to me that Alan Wolfe doesn’t come in for anywhere near as much flak as he deserves. Not that he’s a D’Souza, or anything like him, but he _is_ Gertrude Stein’s Oakland in human form, a sort of Lowest Common Denominator of liberal wuffle. Wolfe is the source of relentless waves of book reviews, opinion articles, magazine squibs and monographs; in short, of ideas journalism of all kinds except the kind that actually has ideas. I have a friend whose cure for writer’s block is to pick up the latest Wolfe emanation in the _New York Times Book Review_ or wherever it might be, and use it as a class of a purgative. As he reads it, he gets increasingly furious that this sort of guff can _get published_ by apparently serious journals; this anger serves to clean out the system. It may be that sometime, somewhere, Alan Wolfe has said something that is both interesting and true; if so, I have yet to see it (readers who believe that they have spotted insightful Wolfe articles in the wild should of course feel free to link to them in comments).

For those inclined to think that a willingness to grind up real people’s lives in the pursuit of grand political causes is a distinctively left-wing vice, we present Mr Bill Kristol.

So, was Gonzales’ resignation yesterday specifically timed to happen just as the _Daily Show_ started a two week hiatus? Inquiring (and very disappointed) minds would like to know. Not even to mention the revelations about Larry Craig’s bathroom misdemeanours. It’s _very suspicious_ that the court judgment should have been handed down on August 8 – but that _Roll Call_ should only have published the details yesterday. I seem to recall that the last time the _Daily Show_ went on holiday, there was a similar outbreak of political scandals (the Libby case judgement etc). As they say, developing …

One bit of the Snyder, Shapiro and Bloch-Elkon paper that I linked to last week was overshadowed by the discussion of the Iraq war. They report survey evidence saying that:

Since September 11, there is not only a wider gap between Republicans and Democrats across a broad range of foreign policy issues, but their views have moved in opposite directions in response to new information. In 1998, 31 percent of Republicans believed that the planet was warming, but by 2006
only 26% did, whereas Democrats increased from 39 to 46% and Independents from 31 to 45%.¹

To my mind this suggests² some interesting connections between new information, the dynamics of opinion change and partisanship. This same period saw an unmistakable convergence of scientific opinion, as many scientists who had previously been agnostic or skeptical came to accept mounting evidence that climate change was occurring. It also saw a clear convergence between Democratic voters and independents. But Republicans, if anything, would appear to have become _less_ likely to believe strongly that climate change was happening during the same period. Either they weren’t getting the same information as scientists, Democrats and independents, or they were interpreting this information in different ways. My best guess (and I am not a public opinion specialist by any stretch of the imagination) is that two things are going on here. First, some Republicans _are_ being exposed to different information than other voters, through talk radio, targeted mailings, frothing-at-the-mouth blogs and other media. Second, even those Republicans who _aren’t_ (or who are only minimally exposed to this information) are increasingly coming to treat global warming as a partisan issue, where conceding that it is happening is in some sense giving ground to ‘the other side.’

¹ A summary of the poll evidence is available in PDF form here.

² The one proviso I have here, is that the summary only reports differences over whether Republicans, Democrats and Independents are ‘sure’ that global warming is happening. They don’t report differences over whether people with different partisan alignments think that global warming is ‘probably’ happening. If there aren’t major differences in the ‘probably happening’ figures, then obviously there is much less going on here.

A website run by the neocon thinktank the Center for Security Policy (members include Frank Gaffney, Richard Perle and Doug Feith) has published (then removed) a piece calling for Bush to use his military powers to become “the first permanent president of America” and “ruler of the world”. Along the way he suggests that the population of Iraq should have been wiped out. The website Family Security Matters also runs pieces by Newt Gingrich, Judy Miller and other luminaries.

The full piece is preserved here at Watching the Watchers. I found it via Wikipedia.

As someone would say (though maybe not in this case) “read the whole thing”. It’s impossible to tell if this is satire by someone who has cleverly infiltrated FSM over a lengthy period (quite a few other pieces by the same author, Philip Atkinson were also removed), a sudden outbreak of insanity (unlikely since Atkinson previously published stuff almost as extreme as this, with the endorsement of FSM), or the actual views of CSP/CFM, accidentally revealed and clumsily concealed.

As things stand, there’s a presumption in favor of the last of these views. The piece was published by CSP/FSM and constitutes, at present, their last word on the subject. If they repudiate Atkinson’s views they should say so openly, and live with the embarrassment of having published him and praised his ideas until now.