Over at B&W, Ophelia makes the following point re Shirley Williams’ dismal performance on Question Time and what appear to have been her underlying assumptions:

“What people apparently do with these ‘offended’ claims is reverse engineer: they reason backwards: they look at the magnitude of the ‘offence’ and then assign guilt accordingly – but that’s wrong. If that rule held no one would ever criticize or dispute or tease anything because of the risk of ‘offence’ out of all proportion to the intent and to the harm done. Instead what people should be doing is coldly examining the merit of the putative grievance, independent of the quantity of fuss made.”

Indeed. What was curiously missing from Williams’ calculation was whether one party is remotely entitled to such rage, or to anything at all, and whether riots, death threats and howls of indignation are a legitimate response to a novel that hasn’t been read or the knighting of its author. To question the proportion of the affront being claimed, the honesty of the claim, and the assumptions on which that claim is based would risk undermining the premise of this particular manoeuvre.

Williams was, it seems, trying to appear “even-handed” while actually being craven and rather stupid. By which I mean she seems to have imagined that between these two positions there must be some admirable middle point that it must be “fair” to champion. So if you have screaming, tantrums and demented theocrats on the one hand and a rational British novelist on the other, both must be “extremes”, and thus the “even-handed” thing to do is to “compromise” and support some position roughly halfway in between, irrespective of what that position actually entails. Hence Williams’ ramblings about “Muslims” being offended “in a very powerful way” and Rushdie’s knighthood being a “mistake”, “badly timed”, etc. The actual moral issue – of whether umbrage, violence and the threats thereof are justified or opportunist, or even sane – was not a discernible part of Williams’ calculation.

As the audience applause for Williams demonstrated, this is a remarkably common assumption – that the most “fair” and “even-handed” position is halfway between calm argument and homicidal thuggery, or halfway between intellectual freedom and a visceral fear of speaking. Well, that would leave us somewhere near the absurd dissembler, Lord Ahmed, who equated Rushdie’s knighthood with rewarding terrorism. This is the moral calculus favoured at various times by Karen Armstrong and Tariq Ramadan, both of whom “balanced” real intimidation, aggression and murder on the one hand with “tyrannical” free speech and “aggressive” cartoons, published “aggressively”, on the other. By this contorted reckoning, the “compromise” solution is to avoid publishing “aggressive” cartoons, or novels, or films, or plays, etc. And, by implication, to avoid stating inconvenient facts or honouring those who happen to point them out.

And thus the engine of human progress, the testing of ideas – and of bad ideas in particular – grinds to a halt. All in the name of “fairness” and being “even-handed.”

Those of you who missed last night’s Question Time may enjoy this brief extract, courtesy of DSTPFW. On the subject of Salman Rushdie’s knighthood, Christopher Hitchens challenges Shirley Williams’ prostration in the face of intimidation and thuggery. (An act the Baroness subsequently – and dishonestly – denies.) One of Hitchens’ more charming qualities is his willingness to take on an audience that applauds Williams’ blathering and to tell that audience it should be ashamed for doing so.

Someone give Hitch his own show. Related: this and this.

In response to this post on Muhammad Abdul Bari, a commenter noted this cartoon and asked the following question:

“The cartoon lists a bunch of problems that it claims Muslim societies have. Will Western government and society mocking the most sensitive issues of Islam make those problems better or worse?”

Variations of this question are raised on a fairly regular basis, usually with no expectation of an answer – for example see here. Another version of the same was voiced by Pakistan’s Religious Affairs Minister, Ijaz-ul-Haq, who asked, apparently in all seriousness:

“How can we fight terrorism when those who commit blasphemy are rewarded by the West?”

This question should, I think, be turned around, quite emphatically. Given jihadists pointedly cite Muhammad’s purported ‘revelations’ as their mandate and motive, how can the spread of Islamic terrorism be resisted if Muhammad and his teachings remain beyond criticism? How does one respond when the Bali bombing ‘mastermind’ Mukhlas Imron asks his captors: “You who still have a shred of faith in your hearts, have you forgotten that to kill infidels and the enemies of Islam is a deed that has a reward above no other?” – and then quotes Muhammad’s own exhortations as his license for atrocity?

In his book, The Truth About Muhammad, Robert Spencer stresses the same key point:

“If the terrorists are correct in invoking his example to justify their deeds, then Islamic reformers will need to initiate a respectful but searching re-evaluation of the place Muhammad occupies within Islam… If peaceful Muslims can mount no comeback when jihadists point to Muhammad’s example to justify violence, their ranks will always remain vulnerable to recruitment from jihadists who present themselves as the exponents of ‘pure Islam’, faithfully following Muhammad’s example.”

Spencer’s book – and the question it raises – has, of course, been banned in Pakistan, supposedly for containing “objectionable material.” Viewed in this light, the blasphemy laws of which Mr ul-Haq is so enamoured, and which so often serve as a license to intimidate and extort, are very much part of the problem. Blasphemy laws exist in order to make people afraid of saying certain things and, by extension, afraid of thinking certain things. And it’s hard to see how such a fundamental problem will be solved if people are afraid to think about it.

By all means, fund my blasphemy. 

Further to the recent post on Vanessa Engle’s Lefties documentaries, here’s another curio from a bygone age. The People’s Cube highlights video, probably from around 1984, of KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov explaining psychological warfare and the demoralising effects of Marxist-Leninist ideology. It isn’t clear exactly how much is boasting and embellishment, and it isn’t clear whether the word “demoralise” is intended to mean “destroy the morale of” or “render morally impotent.” Both would seem to apply. Of particular interest is the KGB’s apparent focus on influencing the “soft” brains of Western students and rendering them impervious to inconvenient facts.

Make of it what you will.

More at Roborant. Related: this and this. 

Readers with an interest in philosophy will probably know Richard Rorty died last week. Of the summaries of Rorty’s thinking, two in particular caught my eye. Their connection to each other, and to recent posts, is, I think, pretty obvious.

Norman Geras wrote:

“Rorty’s anti-foundationalism, his refusal of the idea of an objective realm beyond the language in which we try to apprehend it, leaves us intellectually defenceless in the face of a cognitive relativism for which any view must be just as good as any other. Rorty denied this consequence of his own arguments, but the denial struck me as one example among many of his tolerance for internal contradiction.”

Roger Scruton had this to say:

“[Rorty’s] venture into political theory took [him] in new and unforeseeable directions, as he tried to reconcile his view that some versions of political order are superior to others, with his belief that there is no trans-historical perspective from which any such judgment can be made. It is a testimony to his literary skills that he was able repeatedly to stare refutation in the face, and to go on staring…

Undoubtedly he was the most lucid of the postmodernist philosophers – though that is, given the competition, no great achievement… Rorty was paramount among those thinkers who advance their own opinion as immune to criticism, by pretending that it is not truth but consensus that counts, while defining the consensus in terms of people like themselves.”

Rorty was a learned man, to be sure, but, like so many of his postmodernist peers, he tried to deform logic to fit a political prejudice.

Related: On Derrida’s clotted prose.