“Religious fictionalism”: The TLS argues that you should pretend to believe in God even if there’s no evidence for him

February 22, 2019 • 9:30 am

I used to write quite a bit for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), but my interest in that has waned—as, I suspect, has theirs in me—as they’ve become ever softer on religion. (As I recall, they even got a theologian to review Faith versus Fact, which is like having the Pope review The God Delusion).  Although the UK is far less religious than is the U.S., much British media still shows an unaccountable weakness for religion, perhaps abiding by the paternalistic “Little People’s Argument” that faith, even if unwarranted, is good for society. (I’m talking to you, BBC.)

And that’s the argument made in this execrable piece by Philip Goff in the new TLS (h/t: Michael). Click on the screenshot to read it:

My main research project is trying to work out how consciousness fits into our overall theory of reality. I argue that the traditional approaches of materialism (consciousness can be explained in terms of physical processes in the brain) and dualism (consciousness is separate from the body and brain) face insuperable difficulties. On the basis of this I defend a form of panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. It sounds a bit crazy, but I try to show that it avoids the difficulties faced by its rivals .

Ooookay, well, that’s not propitious, and yes, it does sound a bit crazy. In fact, a whole lot crazy. I’ve criticized Goff’s view of panpsychism (and panpsychism in general) three times on this site (here, here and here), and you can read those posts to see where he goes off the rails.

Further, I’m not sure what “the insuperable difficulties of materialism” are, for there are innumerable pieces of evidence showing that consciousness has a material (and naturalistic) basis. But let’s leave that aside and pass on to Goff’s arguments for why we should be religious even if there’s no evidence for God.

Goff makes two arguments why doubters should be religious. The first is that religious “faith” isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be by atheists. It is, in fact, not “belief without evidence”, as most of us think it is (and as the Bible defines it!), but a form of cheerleading, of hope that something is true without having much confidence that it’s true. It’s like having faith (in the case of Matthew Cobb), that Manchester City will lead the Premier League. Here’s part of Goff’s lucubrations:

Separating “faith” from “belief” also makes sense outside a religious context. Suppose a loved one is seriously ill and the prognosis is not good. You might say to that person, “I have faith that you’re going to live”. This does not necessarily mean that you believe that your loved one will live; you might be entirely realistic about the chances of survival. What you mean is that you are rooting for that possibility: you are personally committing to living in hope that the illness will be overcome. Faith is a matter of hopeful commitment. To take another example, anyone taking a cold hard look at the facts must accept that the odds of humans preventing climate catastrophe do not look great; certainly, it is more likely that we will fail than that we will succeed. Nonetheless, many continue to have faith that our species will rise to the occasion. Again, this is not a matter of believing, against all the evidence, that climate change will be dealt with. It rather means committing to live, and more importantly to act, in the hope of a better outcome. Such leaps of faith are not irrational; they are what give life meaning and significance. It would be a sad world if everyone apportioned their aspirations for the future in the manner of an insurance broker.

This, of course, is connected with the claim that religious people don’t really take as true foundational statements such as “God exists” or “Jesus was the son of God/God sent to Earth to redeem humans”, “Jesus was resurrected,” “there is an afterlife” or “God dictated the Qur’an to Muhammad through Gabriel”. These aren’t beliefs, avers Goff, but simply hopes.  

That, of course, is bullshit, and you don’t have to know much about the history or sociology of religion to see that. People were killed for not signing onto these beliefs, and they continue to be killed. And that kind of extermination of those who didn’t have the same “hopeful commitment” as you has been going on for millennia.

This is connected with Goff’s familiar but erroneous claim that, in the old days, believers didn’t really think that religious claims were strictly true, and that that’s a recent change in the nature of religion:

According to conventional wisdom, religions are systems of belief. Religious people are “believers”. Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead; Muslims believe that Mohammed was the final prophet; Jews believe that the creator of the universe has a special affection for the children of Israel. These beliefs of the religious are often taken to be unsupported by, or even inconsistent with, available evidence. Indeed, many understand “faith” as a matter of believing without any evidence at all.

However, this belief-orientated – or “doxastic” – conception of religion is not universally accepted. According to the historian of religion Karen Armstrong, the doxastic conception of religion is a relatively recent development, shaped by the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Armstrong goes so far as to argue that our modern doxastic conception of religion is largely the result of mistranslation. In terms of Christianity, one difficulty with translating the Greek of the New Testament into English is that the English word “faith”, unlike the Greek equivalent “pistis”, does not have a verb form. Hence what should really be the verb “to faith” comes out as “to believe”. When the Bible was first rendered in English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was not a bad translation. The word “bileven” in middle English meant to prize or to hold dear (related to the German “belieben”) and when the King James Bible was published, “believe” was close in meaning to the Greek pistis, which has connotations of engagement and commitment. As one piece of evidence for this, Armstrong offers a line from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (written shortly before the publication of the King James Bible) in which Bertram is urged to “believe not thy distain”; in other words, he is being told not to engage his contempt (in this case for the low-born Helena) and let it take root in his heart.

But as the enlightenment progressed, the word “belief” came to be associated with a cold-blooded intellectual assent to a hypothetical proposition, before eventually coming to have the meaning it has today. The result is that reading the New Testament in modern English one has the impression that Jesus is very much concerned with which hypotheses about reality one accepts. We even learn that salvation depends on it. However, as the philosopher Daniel Howard-Snyder has argued in detail, the contexts in which Jesus talks of “faith” make it quite clear that he was concerned with the resilience of the religious commitment of the people around him rather than with their abstract theories of reality; in other words, with “belief” in the sixteenth-century rather than the twenty-first-century sense.

Umm. . . Karen Armstrong’s apophatic theology is hardly the be-all and end-all of religious thought.  Yes, if there are dissenters like her, then literalism isn’t “universally” accepted. But it is very widely accepted. Muslims, for example, are mostly Qur’anic literalists, as are many Americans (see these two polls). Here, for instance is a 2014 Pew graph on Americans’ “rooting for God”. 63% of them are rooting VERY HARD. LOL!

A recent Gallup Poll. I guess a lot of Americans are also rooting for Hell and Satan!

A 2013 Harris poll. Americans are rooting hard for EVERYTHING religious! Note, though, that they’re not rooting as hard for Darwin. . .

These data are enough to put paid to Goff’s claim. (The good news is that belief is declining while acceptance of evolution is on the rise. These two trends are, of course, connected.) Would Goff want to venture to, say, Saudi Arabia, and tell Muslims that they don’t really believe that the Qur’an is Allah’s word, or even that Allah really exists? If he wouldn’t do that, why not?

As for the history of religion, just read Aquinas and Augustine and see if you think they didn’t really have a literal belief in the truth claims of Christianity. Of course they did! And they believed in the same way that we construe belief: the Church Fathers, with very, very few exceptions, thought that the whole Jesus story was real, that there were angels, that there was a literal hell, and so on. For them, and the medieval believers, these weren’t just hopes. They were convictions. The firm belief that religious truths were real facts about the Universe is not recent!

I hate to say this, but Goff, in trying to coddle religion, though he may be an atheist, is crossing the border into idiocy.

And then Goff plants himself firmly in Idiotsville. His second claim is that even if we’re pretty sure that there is no God, and that religious truth claims are bogus, we should still believe because, well, it’s good for us. This is, of course, the Little People’s Argument, which is patronizing and condescending.

Goff:

But suppose you think the arguments for the existence of God fail entirely. Or suppose you think we have very good reason to think that God does not exist, such as is arguably provided by the familiar problem of evil: the difficulty in reconciling God’s existence with the evil and suffering we find in the world. Could you still have some grounds for taking religion seriously? One might think not. Yet there is a philosophical position that combines out and out atheism with a positive commitment to religious practice; this is the view known as “religious fictionalism”.

Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. To put it simply: God is a useful fiction. In fact, fictionalism is popular in many areas of philosophy. There are, for example, moral fictionalists and mathematical fictionalists, who think that there are pragmatic benefits to using moral/mathematical language even though such discourse fails to correspond to a genuine reality (there are, on these views, no such things as goodness or the number 9, any more than there are dragons or witches). Religious fictionalists merely extend this approach to the statements of religion.

What is the pragmatic benefit for the atheist of using religious language? The religious fictionalist Andrew Eshleman proposes that religious discourse can be understood as mythological, by which he means “a meaning-loaded narrative that has been adopted by a particular community to give expression to and foster a form of life defined by its guiding ideals”. The religious community is bound together across space and time by its stories, rituals, regular meetings and celebration of rites of passage. At a time when globalization has fractured communities and weakened our shared forms of life, there is arguably a real need for institutions that bring people together around a shared moral purpose. The rise of nationalism around much of Europe may, in part, speak to a deep human need for shared structures of meaning.

This is ridiculous, and I’m surprised that the TLS would put such nonsense on their pages. You don’t have to profess belief in Jesus or God or anything divine to have a sense of community. We know this because there are countries that lack religious belief but retain a sense of community, with citizens banding together to take care of each other and build a better society. Exhibit A: Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

And seriously, can people really find meaning in their lives while only pretending to pay obeisance to people and tenets that they know aren’t real? How does that work? Maybe other people can worship mythological people and thereby find a sense of community, but I’ve always found it impossible to profess belief in things I don’t think have much of a chance of being true.

Goff’s whole argument hinges on the fact that worshiping God and professing belief gives you a sense of community that is inaccessible by any other route. He’s wrong, and I suspect he knows it. As the world loses its faith, it’s getting more moral: exactly the opposite of what you expect if a sense of community must be tied to religious beliefs. This is because religious belief foster not inclusiveness but divisiveness, and much religious “morality” is counterproductive in today’s world. What is productive is an empathic humanism: the kind of ideology that creates the kind of communities that exist in secular places. And yes, France and Germany and Denmark do have citizens with a sense of community. Imagine going to church and saying the Nicene Creed if you’re an atheist! But that’s what Goff would have us do. I suppose he thinks of the Nicene Creed, which repeats “I believe” over and over again, is just like the kind of chants that British soccer fans make at matches. It’s a hope!

Goff’s Big Finish:

If God’s nature cannot be captured in human language, it follows that talk of God as having personal characteristics – such as “wisdom” or “omnipotence” – although perhaps essential for regular practice, is strictly speaking a fiction. The crude literalism at which atheists such as Richard Dawkins take aim has never been the full story of religious faith.

Contemporary society tells us we must choose between secular atheism and dogmatic certainty. Those who find themselves unable to adopt either of these stark options label themselves “spiritual but not religious”. But it is hard to nurture spirituality in isolation, without a community and without a tradition. In fact, the liberal wing of traditional religion provides plenty of opportunity for a non-dogmatic approach to spirituality, one that is consistent with uncertain faith, with non-traditional belief and even with outright atheism.

Which church, then, should we “outright atheists” join? The Unitarian Universalists? The Quakers? Buddhism? That may be fine for some atheists, but I suspect that most of us don’t need it.

As Rebecca Goldstein told me when she read this article and gave me her take (quoted by permission):

The lengths that people will go to say: “Yeah I’m an atheist but isn’t religion rather lovely.”

THAT’S a bee!

February 22, 2019 • 7:30 am

JAC: In lieu of Reader’s Wildlife Photos today, I’ll take a break and importune you to keep sending me photos (I have a reasonable backlog, but I get nervous. . . .). In its place Greg has contributed a short piece about an enormous bee just rediscovered after several decades.

by Greg Mayer

There are many rare species, especially among invertebrates, that would not be encountered very often, even if they were not in decline. It is thus hard to know some species’ conservation status. Wallace’s Giant Bee (Megachile pluto) has not been seen since 1981, but the New York Times reported on Thursday that it has been rediscovered on one of the islands in its Northern Moluccas range. [Be sure to click on the photo, to get the full effect.]

Wallace’s Giant bee, with a honeybee for scale. Photo by Clay Bolt from The New York Times.

Note the insect in the upper left of the picture. “That’s not a bee.” The insect below it– “THAT’S a bee.”

The species had also not been seen between its discovery by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1859 and 1981, so it is perhaps not surprising that it was some time until a third encounter. Simon Robson, of the University of Sydney, reports that only a single individual was found, and photographed and filmed by Clay Bolt. They were part of a team that was part of an effort to search for other species that have not been seen for sometime. A previously unreported specimen of the Giant Bee was sold last year for $9100 on eBay, so there is concern that a market could develop that might make this apparently naturally rare species artificially rarer. That, combined with ongoing deforestation in Indonesia, creates concern for the species’ future.

JAC: I’ve added one photograph (with credits) that I found on another site:

Photograph of a specimen of Wallace’s Giant Bee © NJ Vereecken In Wildlife

No more comments with “Anonymous” authors

February 22, 2019 • 7:06 am

As of today, I’m no longer allowing comments to be posted whose authors are “Anonymous”, which is what the website does by default if you don’t fill in your name. As I’ve said before, while I don’t require that people give their real names (or their real email addresses in the submitted comments, addresses that are never shown but which I sometimes use to contact a reader), each commenter should have a unique name so that we can follow a given person over time. You can’t do that with an author called “anonymous.”  In the past several days there have been about ten such comments, and I’ve binned them.

PLEASE make sure your name and an email address are filled in when you make a comment. It may take an extra two seconds, but that’s not much trouble, is it?

Thanks.

Friday: Hili dialogue

February 22, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Friday again: February 22, 2019, and less than a month to go until Spring, when I can start hoping that my ducks will return. It’s National Margarita Day (I prefer a daiquiri) as well as Eric Liddell Day,  a day celebrated by the U.S. Episcopal Church on the day after Liddell’s death (he died on February 21, 1945).

On this day in 1632, Galileo’s heretical Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was published. In 1819, by treaty, Spain sold Florida to the U.S. for a measly $5 million.  On this day in 1862, Jefferson Davis, provisional President of the Confederate States of America, was inaugurated for a six-year term as real President. He was not, of course, able to finish that term. After the war, he spent two years in jail and then was released in 1867, got a Presidential pardon.  On February 22, 1915, the German Navy began its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. That involved, of course, the sinking of the Lustiania without warning, killing 1,198 people.

On February 22, 1924, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge gave the first Presidential radio address from the White House. Since he was known as “Silent Cal” for his laconic persona, I’m surprised he said anything.  In 1943, three members of the White Rose Nazi-resistance organization, Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, and Christoph Probst. were executed in Nazi Germany. More on this below.

On this day in 1980, in a huge upset, the U.S. hockey team beat the powerhouse Soviet Union team in the Olympics by a score of 4-3. This “Miracle on Ice”, which I watched live (it was in Lake Placid, New York), was a semifinal game, but the U.S. went on to win the gold medal.  Here’s the thrilling final minute:

On this day in 1997, British scientists announced the cloning of Dolly, an adult sheep. She lived six more years and then died of a disease unrelated to her cloning. She was the first adult mammal ever cloned from a somatic (body) cell. Finally, it was eight years ago on this day that a deadly earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 185 people. The city still has not completely recovered despite the healing presence of Jerry Coyne the Cat 1, who lives there.

Notables born on this day include George Washington (1732), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788), Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell and Heinrich Hertz (both 1857), Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892), Edward Gorey (1925), Ted Kennedy (1932), Robert Kardashian (1944), Julius Erving and  Miou-Miou (both 1950), Steve Irwin (1962), and Drew Barrymore (1975)

Today’s Google Doodle (click on screenshot) honors Steve Irwin’s birthday in a series of six successive drawings:

Edward Gorey was a diehard ailurophile. Here’s a picture contributed by reader Jon, who calls it “the best author photo ever.” I can’t say I disagree!


Those who took the Big Nap on February 22 include Amerigo Vespucci (1512), Charles Lyell (1875), Stefan Zweig (1942), Christof Probst, Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl (1943; executed White Rose members), Eric Liddell (1945), Felix Frankfurter (1975), Florence Ballard (1976), David Susskind and Andy Warhol (both 1987), Chuck Jones (2002), and Sonny James (2016).

I have read a lot about the White Rose group, as I admire their courage in opposing the Nazi regime, and the stoicism with which the Scholls went to their deaths. Here’s the entirety of the film, “Sophie Scholl: The Final Days“, made in 2005. The two really distressing scenes are the courtroom scene, around 1:23:00, when the White Rose trio appear before the notoriously vicious Nazi judge Roland Freisler, and then the execution scene of Sophie at the end. Both are, as far as I can see, extremely accurate (the trio was guillotined, but nothing gory is shown).

Freisler was, as I said, a nasty piece of work, the chief judge of Hitler’s Volksgericht, or People’s Court.  As Wikipedia notes:

Freisler chaired the First Senate of the People’s Court wearing a blood scarlet judicial robe, in a hearing chamber bedecked with scarlet swastika-draped banners and a large black sculpted bust of Adolf Hitler’s head upon a high pedestal behind his chair, opening each hearing session with the Nazi salute from the bench. [see this below]  He acted as prosecutor, judge and jury all in one, and his own recorder as well, thereby controlling the record of the written grounds for the sentences that he passed.

The number of death sentences rose sharply under Freisler’s rule. Approximately 90% of all proceedings that came before him received sentences of death or life imprisonment, the sentences frequently having been determined before the trial. Between 1942 and 1945, more than 5,000 death sentences were decreed by him, 2,600 of these through the court’s First Senate, which Freisler controlled. He was responsible in his three years on the court for as many death sentences as all other senate sessions of the court combined in the court’s existence between 1934 and 1945.

Freisler became in this period notorious for berating in a personalized injudicial manner from the bench the steady stream of defendants passing before him on their way to their deaths, often shouting and occasionally yelling at them – particularly in cases of resistance to the authority of the Nazi state – in an enraged, glaringly clarion but dramatically controlled harsh voice, using a mastery of the art of professional legal courtroom performance artifice.

You can see this monster in action in the documentary below; note how much the actor above resembles him. You can also see Freisler berating those involved in the Stauffenberg assassination plot against Hitler, working himself up into a terrible lather.  And see the following for yourself at 3:55

At one point he yelled at Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, who was trying to hold his trousers up after being given old oversized and beltless clothing, “You dirty old man, why do you keep fiddling with your trousers?” Nearly all were sentenced to death by hanging, the sentences being carried out within two hours of the verdicts.

Freisler was killed in February of 1945 during a U.S. bombing attack on Berlin; a bomb hit the court building.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili tells Andrzej that it’s not all beer and skittles keeping up her nails:

Hili: Every day I have to do the hard work of sharpening my claws.
A: What for?
Jili: On principle.
In Polish:
Hili: Codziennie ciężka praca ostrzenia pazurków?
Ja: Po co?
Hili: Dla zasady.

Here’s another funny “meme” from Facebook:

Reader Beth has had her black Persian cat, Hillary Rotten Kitten, clipped. It now has Ugg boots and a big head:

An excellent cat “meme”:

A tweet from reader Nilou, showing Simon’s Cat having an encounter with a nasty-ass crow (well, all crows are nasty-ass):

From Heather Hastie via Ann German. I can never see enough murmurations. Note that this one swoops down near the water’s surface. Why?

From reader Barry, a discomfiting tweet. EVERY reptile and insect in Australia is dangerous!

https://twitter.com/ZonePhysics/status/1098631846005534720

From Grania. The first one shows a FRICKING SEA TURTLE PARADISE! A veritable buffet of gelatinous noms!

Be sure to watch the video embedded in the tweet below.

Two sarcastic comments about the Jussie Smollett affair (n.b. spelling in first one).

https://twitter.com/LozzaFox/status/1098635871987875841

I found this one from the unsinkable Titania McGrath:

Tweets found by Matthew. The first one has twenty cats from different places, but it omits James Joyce’s Irish cat: “Mrgknao!”

These are among the world’s most beautiful insects:

I suspect Stephen Barnard would be particularly fond of this tweet:

 

 

A gay magazine opposes the administration’s attack on anti-gay laws in other countries; brands intiative as “racist” and “colonialist”

February 21, 2019 • 1:30 pm
This is one more indication of the Left shooting itself in the foot by trying to adhere to woke principles that conflict with even more important woke principles. In this case we have Out magazine, a respected voice in the LGBTQ community, going after the Trump administration’s campaign to decriminalize homosexuality in the many countries—especially Islamic ones—where it’s still a crime to be gay or practice homosexuality.

Now clearly the Trump administration hasn’t been too friendly to the LGBTQ community, but neither has it seriously demonized them—apart from its ban on transgender people in the military. And this initiative may just be a way to get back at Muslim countries, especially Iran, where homosexuality is a capital crime. Further, as we know, Trump detests Iran and scuttled our nuclear deal with it. But so what? If there’s a Trumpian initiative to decriminalize homosexuality in many countries, including Iran, that’s a GOOD thing. The gay community should support it.

But Out magazine doesn’t: they call the plan racist and colonialist. Click on the screenshot below to read it. The upshot is that the magazine would apparently rather see gay people die than say anything good about a plan from the Trump administration. And that is reprehensible.

Here’s one excerpt that gives the tenor of the article:

The truth is, this is part of an old colonialist handbook. In her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak coined the term “White men saving brown women from brown men” to describe the racist, paternalistic process by which colonizing powers would decry the way men in power treated oppressed groups, like women, to justify attacking them. Spivak was referencing the British colonial agenda in India. But Grennell’s attack might be a case of white men trying to save brown gay men from brown straight men, to the same end.

There are several signs that this decision is denoted in a colonial sense of paternalism rather than any true altruism. According to the report, the decriminalization campaign is set to begin in Berlin where LGBTQ+ activists from across Europe will meet to hatch a plan that is “mostly concentrated in the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean.”

That sentence alone should set off several alarm bells. First of all, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean are huge geopolitical entities. Attitudes toward gay people differ greatly among countries and regions within those entities and attempting to gather a room of European activists on how to deal with queer issues in those regions is the definition of paternalism.

In other words, the administration should do nothing. But, as I’ve said before, even a blind pig can find an acorn, and gay rights is a honking big acorn. Remember that if you’re a gay man in Iran and get caught practicing homosexuality, you either get executed or must undergo gender reassignment surgery: a cynical way to pretend that gay men are really women—even when they’re just gay men.

In fact, the whole plan doesn’t appear to be from Trump, but from one of his officials, who happens to be gay:

The most telling detail of NBC News’ report is that his plan centers homophobic violence in Iran, who NBC News calls the administration’s “top geopolitical foe.” The plan has reportedly been spearheaded by the U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, who is also the administration’s top-ranked gay official, in response to news that a young gay man was hanged in Iran recently. Grenell has had his eyes on Iran for some time and just a week ago, he was trying to get several European nations to pass sanctions on Iran, unrelated to the country’s stance on homosexuality, to no avail.

The good news that the readers of Out aren’t having this ridiculous stand, as evidenced by the comments. Here are several:

 

And there’s some pushback at the site Harry’s Place (“TDS” is “Trump Derangement Syndrome”):

Now I don’t know what Harry’s politics are, and I don’t much care, for he has a reasonable response to the Out stupidity. Here’s an excerpt:

The Out columnist explains:

There are several signs that this decision is denoted in a colonial sense of paternalism rather than any true altruism. According to the report, the decriminalization campaign is set to begin in Berlin where LGBTQ+ activists from across Europe will meet to hatch a plan that is “mostly concentrated in the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean.”

That sentence alone should set off several alarm bells. First of all, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean are huge geopolitical entities. Attitudes toward gay people differ greatly among countries and regions within those entities and attempting to gather a room of European activists on how to deal with queer issues in those regions is the definition of paternalism.

Gosh! Could the simpler explanation simply be that the criminalisation of homosexuality is principly [sic] concentrated in these regions? Apart from these countries and pockets of Eastern Europe, most of the world is on a liberalising trajectory, and throughout most of the West, gay equality has been essentially achieved.

Is it not also ironic that these Left-wing useful idiots don’t seem to mind encouraging ‘paternalistic’ pressure being applied on Israel, or Middle Eastern countries perceived to be US-allies, like Saudi Arabia? Then ‘paternalism’ is just fine. Have you ever heard anyone on the Left, or a Liberal, complaining about international pressure on South Africa to end its racial policies in the 1980s? No. But apparently putting pressure on an African or Middle Eastern country to not arrest, imprison and execute gay people is a Right-wing project to driven by racism.

This reaction is not surprising. The Left has traditionally cried ‘racism’ when gay people attempt to assert their rights against a background of violent homophobia committed by black or Muslim people, even though the victims are almost entirely gay-black and gay-Muslim people. Who can forget the counter attack against Peter Tatchell by former London Mayor Ken Livingstone when Tatchell criticised for his decision to embrace Islamist cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, or the op-eds in the press when gay groups opposed murderously violent lyrics by Jamaican singers like Buju Banton, all insinuating a racist motive?

But this is next-level madness: opposing an initiative aimed at ending the criminalisation, imprisonment and execution of gay people sponsored by the Office of the President of the United States, simply because that president is Donald Trump, and the countries in the spotlight are the Idiot Left’s imaginary allies against “Imperialism”, is a shameful new low.

We’re used to “next-level madness” now, as we see the Authoritarian Left excuse terrorism if it’s against Israel, excuse homophobia if it’s practiced by Muslims, and excuse misogyny and anti-Semitism if it’s practiced by the Nation of Islam. Yes, there are clashes among levels in the hierarchy of oppression, but what’s right in these cases is clear.

Such is the polarization of America, and now the mutual hatred of Right and Left has gotten to the point where neither side can recognize anything decent about the other. Now I bow to nobody in detesting Trump and all he stands for, but it looks like someone in his administration is on the right side of morality—and history. And yes, the Right’s hatred of the Left is just as strong, or maybe even stronger. But if we don’t recognize that some people on the other side can ever stand for simple human decency, how will we ever have any bipartisanship in our government?

 

Can you read difficult German handwriting?

February 21, 2019 • 12:00 pm

by Greg Mayer

WEIT readers are a fairly polyglot bunch, and so I’m calling upon readers to help with a problem. It involves difficult German handwriting—difficult in the sense that the writer was writing in pencil over an irregularly curved and hard surface. The writing is on the outside of the mandible of a Red Deer (Cervus elaphus), one of the two native species of British deer, which is also widespread on the Continent, including in Germany and other German-speaking areas.

Red Deer (Cervus elaphus), exterior of mandible, with handwriting in German. (no flash)

And now with flash (click to enlarge this and the first photo).

Red Deer (Cervus elaphus), exterior of mandible, with handwriting in German. (with flash)

The lower line of writing is, by the interpretation of a more German competent colleague and myself, “Alter 6-7 Jahre.” So it’s a male (we already knew this from the antlers on the associated skull), aged 6-7 years (deer can be aged by the condition of their teeth). But what does the top line, of apparently two words, say? This is what I’m asking readers for help on. There’s clearly an “i”, and I think a “ch” in the second word. My colleague is not fluent in German, and I studied German for a single semester.

The skull and mandible were present in the teaching collection when I arrived in 1992. The skull has two short, unbranched antlers, and I long thought of it as of interest mostly for this feature, thinking it to be a White-tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus), a very common species in Wisconsin and throughout eastern North America. But last year, another colleague, who is a deer hunter, remarked that it was not a white-tail. It was then that I noticed that the writing was in German, and, identifying it by the teeth (instead of assuming it must be a local deer, and hence a white tail), I determined it was Cervus elaphus. This species, under the vernacular name Wapiti, also occurs in North America, but the German writing makes me think this must be the European form. Our teaching collection is mostly of local or at least Wisconsin species, but we do have a warthog (no idea how we got it!), so a German deer doesn’t seem beyond the pale of plausibility.

So, any help greatly appreciated!

The affair of Jussie Smollett

February 21, 2019 • 10:30 am

UPDATE: Reuters reports that Smollett staged the attack because he was dissatisfied with his salary on Empire. (It must have been substantial, though!). This motive apparently comes not from Smollett, of course, but probably from the two “assailants” he hired.

And it gets even weirder. Smollett wrote a CHECK to pay off his assailants, or so this NBC reporter says. HOW CAN YOU BE THAT DUMB?

____________

I think that almost everyone has heard of what happened with Jussie Smollett, who’s fairly well known for playing a musician in the ongoing Fox drama Empire. As Wikipedia recounts the details, Smollett, who lives in Chicago where the series is filmed, claimed that he was attacked on the night of January 19 by two white men who beat him, put a noose around his neck, and dumped a chemical on him. They also apparently called him a “nigger” and a “faggot” (he’s gay and black), and shouted, “This is MAGA country.” (That, of course, stands for the Trump motto, “Make America Great Again.”)

This seemed fishy from the outset. How could these guys have known who he was unless they were tracking him? The shouted motto and noose seemed stereotypical, a bit over the top. More important, Chicago police couldn’t find any evidence of an attack from video surveillance, and when the cops came several hours later, Smollett was still wearing the noose around his neck. Why didn’t he take it off?

As the police investigation continued, with a dozen officers assigned to the case, Smollett’s story began to unravel. It was found that his assailants were both black; why would they attack another black man and use racist epithets? Moreover, both of the supposed assailants, brothers, had tangential connections to the show Empire, and that was deeply suspicious. They both knew Smollett. Finally, it appeared that both men, who were from Nigeria, told the police that Smollett had hired them to conduct the attack.

Now, as the New York Times reports, Smollett, who turned himself in to police this morning, has been charged with faking an accident report, which is a class 4 felony in Illinois—a crime for which he could face up to three years in prison. There’s also a threatening note that Smollett received, and if he’s complicit in that, as seems likely, he faces federal charges on top of the state charges (he used the U.S. Mail).

The story, as the NYT recounts, was initially taken up widely by the media as an example of not just racism and homophobia, but also bigotry inspired by Donald Trump. There wasn’t much skepticism or withholding of judgment, despite the holes in Smollett’s story.

Why did Smollett, though, who was pretty famous and certainly well off, have to concoct an incident like this? Writing in The Atlantic, John McWhorter, an author and professor of linguistics at Columbia University, and also a black man, has a thoughtful answer. Click on the screenshot below to read it.

Now it’s almost too easy to use this incident—and I’m assuming the police allegations are true—to indict not just the social justice crowd but also the credulous media. After all, it plays into the hands of all of us who hate Trump and his administration, and also to that moiety of the Left that sees racism and homophobia as institutionalized in this country (I see this bigotry as a recurring problem to be solved, but not, in general, as an institutionalized one). But there’s another side of the coin: these incidents of false reporting play into the hands of the Right as well, actually strengthening Trump’s supporters and giving people an excuse to dismiss any claim of violence motivated by bigotry. For these reasons we should maintain skepticism from the outset, trying to be compassionate but also looking hard at the evidence.

Still, the question remains: why did Smollett do this?  And that’s the topic of McWhorter’s essay. While noting that racism is still with us, he raises the tropes of “victimhood chic” and “professional martyrs”:

Until this twist [the Chicago police changing the “trajectory of the investigation” after looking at the evidence], smart people were claiming that the attack on Smollett was the story of Donald Trump’s America writ small—that it revealed the terrible plight of minority groups today. But the Smollett story, if the “trajectory” leads to evidence of fakery, would actually reveal something else modern America is about: victimhood chic. Future historians and anthropologists will find this aspect of early-21st-century America peculiar, intriguing, and sad.

Smollett doesn’t need the money he would get from a court settlement, and he isn’t trying to deny someone higher office. So why in the world would he fake something like that attack—if he did indeed fake it? The reason might be that he has come of age in an era when nothing he could have done or said would have made him look more interesting than being attacked on the basis of his color and sexual orientation.

Racial politics today have become a kind of religion in which whites grapple with the original sin of privilege, converts tar questioners of the orthodoxy as “problematic” blasphemers, and everyone looks forward to a judgment day when America “comes to terms” with race. Smollett—if he really did stage the attack—would have been acting out the black-American component in this eschatological configuration, the role of victim as a form of status. We are, within this hierarchy, persecuted prophets, ever attesting to the harm that white racism does to us and pointing to a future context in which our persecutors will be redeemed of the sin of having leveled that harm upon us. We are noble in our suffering.

Indeed, McWhorter argues later on that the fact that being a victim of racist and homophobic bigotry gives you fame and admiration shows that this country has ascended the moral arc for civil right and gay rights, for in the bad old days you would not be a hero if you were a black or gay man who was attacked.

Certainly, the professional martyr is a race-neutral personality type. However, since the civil-rights victories of the 1960s, when whites became open in a new way to understanding black pain, that personality type has been especially useful to black Americans. With positive racial self-image possibly elusive after hundreds of years of naked abuse, the noble-victim position can seem especially, and understandably, comforting. It can also be handy, in a fashion quite unexpected to anyone who was on the front lines of race activism 50 years ago—as a road to stardom.

“Professional martyr” is a useful term for such cases, and there are many incidents in which people have faked attacks like this to either buttress their cause or claim victim status. (I’m not denigrating, of course, those true reports of attacks based on racism and other forms of bigotry.)

As far as what Smollett had to gain, it was this admiration. He already had it, but presumably craved more:

[Rachel] Dolezal, white, spent years with a spray tan, “identifying” as black and even heading a local NAACP branch, and had fabricated episodes of racist discrimination against herself. As Bryan Cranston’s dentist character on Seinfeld adopted Judaism for the jokes, Dolezal, one might say, took on blackness for the victimhood. She felt that her existence was more meaningful while she was “playing” an oppressed black person than living as a white person despite all the attendant privileges. Few news events more perfectly illustrated that in our moment, a claim of victimhood from a black person is a form of power. Only in an America much further past the old days than many like to admit could a white person eagerly seek to be a put-upon black person out of a sense that it looked “cool.” A Dolezal would have been unimaginable until roughly the late 1990s.

One could imagine that Smollett, if he was playacting, had a similar motivation. For Smollett, being a successful actor and singer might not have been quite as exciting as being a poster child for racist abuse in Trump’s America.

Assuming, again, that the reports are accurate, Smollett’s clumsiness would be an especially poignant indication of how deeply this victimhood chic has taken hold—almost as if he thought this was such an easy score that he didn’t even need to think too hard about the logistics.

Now of course McWhorter is psychologizing Smollett here, and we don’t know what was in Smollett’s mind, but, for a rational person, I can’t think of any other motivation. In his last sentence, McWhorter finds a silver lining in this cloud:

. . . Smollett, if the latest reporting is true, was an eager puppy, jumping with joyous inattention into American social politics as he has encountered it coming of age in the 21st century. He would have known that in this moment, very important people would find him more interesting for having been hurt on the basis of his identity than for his fine performance on an interesting hit television show. He would have known this so well that it didn’t even occur to him that his story would have to be more credible than the dopey one he threw together about being jumped in near-Arctic temperatures by the only two white bullies in America with a mysterious fondness for a black soap hip-hopera. (Yet again, I’m assuming the latest reporting is accurate.)

Only in an America in which matters of race are not as utterly irredeemable as we are often told could things get to the point that someone would pretend to be tortured in this way, acting oppression rather than suffering it, seeking to play a prophet out of a sense that playing a singer on television is not as glamorous as getting beaten up by white guys. That anyone could feel this way and act on it in the public sphere is, in a twisted way, a kind of privilege, and a sign that we have come further on race than we are often comfortable admitting.

I don’t feel any Schadenfreude in this incident. Smollett is a figure to be pitied, and, given that his career is ruined, I don’t see why (if he’s found guilty) he needs to spend much time in jail, except perhaps a modicum of incarceration to deter others from the same kind of behavior. No matter how much time he does, he’ll always be known as the bozo who faked his own attack. The lesson, as everybody has already drawn, is to be skeptical of claims like this, and not bruit about the mantra “believe the victim.”

Empathy yes, credulity no. For it is stuff like this that will help Trump in 2020, and contribute to the division of America.