American universities reject ridiculous call to boycott Israeli universities

December 23, 2013 • 10:22 am

The American Studies Association (ASA), a group promoting the university study of American culture, voted on December 4 to endorse an academic boycott of Israeli universities. You can see their statement here, which cites the Israeli “oppression” of Palestine (supported, as the resolution says, by the U.S.), as a reason for academics to boycott Israeli universities:

Whereas there is no effective or substantive academic freedom for Palestinian students and scholars under conditions of Israeli occupation, and Israeli institutions of higher learning are a party to Israeli state policies that violate human rights and negatively impact the working conditions of Palestinian scholars and students . . .

It is resolved that the American Studies Association (ASA) endorses and will honor the call of Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.  It is also resolved that the ASA supports the protected rights of students and scholars everywhere to engage in research and public speaking about Israel-Palestine and in support of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.

This is absurd. Many Israeli academics, as do I, oppose some of policies of their government that are inimical to a Middle East solution, like constructing settlements on the West Bank. But objections to such acts are not a valid reason for cutting off all academic contact with Israeli universities. In my view, academics, like sports, should be free from political pressures, for academia, like sports, is a worldwide collaborative—and competitive— endeavor.

I wouldn’t call for or participate in an boycott of the Olympics, or of Palestinian, Chinese, or Saudi universities, even though I have strong objections to the policies of those governments. Further, since the ASA cites America as complicit in the oppression of Palestine, why didn’t it call for a boycott of American universities as well?

In the end, this singling out of Israel as opposed to other countries reflects not just anti-Zionism, but anti-Semitism. (I recognize that others will disagree, but anti-Semitism is alive and well, particularly in Arab countries).  It is holding Israel to a standard that doesn’t apply to Palestine or countries far worse than Israel (see below). It is apparently all right for Palestinians to deliberately target Israeli civilians, but those standards don’t apply to Israel. One could even consider this racist: Arabs don’t have to abide by the standards of Israelis. In fact—and people deliberately overlook this—the Hamas charter not only calls for the extirpation of Israel, but cites that old anti-Semitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a bogus plan for Jewish domination of the world. Isn’t that enough to boycott Palestinian universities, too?

Fortunately, American universities aren’t signing on to the ASA madness. As Legal Insurrection notes, on December 20, the Association of American Universities issued a statement opposing the boycott, signed by the AAU’s executive committee:

The Executive Committee of the Association of American Universities strongly opposes a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Three U.S. scholarly organizations have now expressed support for such a boycott. Any such boycott of academic institutions directly violates academic freedom, which is a fundamental principle of AAU universities and of American higher education in general.

Academic freedom is the freedom of university faculty responsibly to produce and disseminate knowledge through research, teaching, and service, without undue constraint. It is a principle that should not be abridged by political considerations. American colleges and universities, as well as like institutions elsewhere, must stand as the first line of defense against attacks on academic freedom.

Efforts to address political issues, or to address restrictions on academic freedom, should not themselves infringe upon academic freedom. Restrictions imposed on the ability of scholars of any particular country to work with their fellow academics in other countries, participate in meetings and organizations, or otherwise carry out their scholarly activities violate academic freedom. The boycott of Israeli academic institutions therefore clearly violates the academic freedom not only of Israeli scholars but also of American scholars who might be pressured to comply with it. We urge American scholars and scholars around the world who believe in academic freedom to oppose this and other such academic boycotts.

William C. Powers, President, The University of Texas at Austin – Chair
Amy Gutmann, President, University of Pennsylvania – Vice Chair
Scott S. Cowen, President, Tulane University – Past Chair
Richard H. Brodhead, President, Duke University
Michael V. Drake, Chancellor, University of California, Irvine
Bernadette Gray-Little, The University of Kansas
Mark A. Nordenberg, Chancellor, University of Pittsburgh
Morton O. Schapiro, President, Northwestern University
Lou Anna K. Simon, President, Michigan State University
David Skorton, President, Cornell University
Hunter R. Rawlings III, President, Association of American Universities – ex-officio

Other statements of rejection have come from Boston University, the University of California at San Diego, Willamette University, the President of Wesleyan University (in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times), the Association of American University Professors, and other universities, including (thank Ceiling Cat) mine:

Brandeis University
Brown University
Cornell University
Dickinson College
Duke University
George Washington University
Harvard University
Indiana University
Michigan State
New York University
Northwestern University
Princeton University
Tulane University
University of California-Irvine
University of Chicago
University of Kansas
University of Maryland
University of Pennsylvania
University of Pittsburgh
University of Texas-Austin
Washington University in St. Louis
Wesleyan University
Yale University

Michael Roth, the President of Wesleyan University, was particularly  outspoken in his op-ed (my emphasis):

. . . the boycott is a repugnant attack on academic freedom, declaring academic institutions off-limits because of their national affiliation.

The ASA has not gone on record against universities in any other country: not against those that enforce laws against homosexuality, not against those that have rejected freedom of speech, not against those that systematically restrict access to higher education by race, religion or gender. No, the ASA listens to civil society only when it speaks against Israel. As its scholarly president declared, “One has to start somewhere.” Not in North Korea, not in Russia or Zimbabwe or China — one has to start with Israel. Really?

And, Harvard has just joined the mass rejection. This is from the Office of the President of Harvard University—Drew Gilpin Faust:

Picture 1

Finally, over at The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier (with whom I’ve had my differences about scientism) has written a good piece on the issue, “The academic boycott of Israel is a travesty.” A few excerpts (the quote from the odious Judith Butler is priceless):

A few hours away from Palestine six million people are refugees in their own country, where they are being bombed by their government, and starving in the snow, and fighting polio; but never mind them, they are not Israel’s victims, and it is the turpitude of the Jewish state, not the actually existing misery in the region and the world, that offends the ASA. Compared with Aleppo, Ramallah is San Diego. But one has to start somewhere.

It is true that one cannot care equally about everything, that an ethical action is always concrete and therefore selective. But the ethical quality of one’s action must be measured by one’s standard for selection; and if that standard is not first and foremost determined by an impartial assessment of suffering and need, so that one selects as the beneficiaries of one’s ethical energies not those who are most wretched but those whose wretchedness confirms one’s prior ideological and political preferences, then the halo is a fake.

. . . Lauding the ASA boycott for targeting institutions and not individuals, the saintly Jewish philosopher Judith Butler pointed out in The Nation that “the only request that is being made is that no institutional funding from Israeli institutions be used” for the travel expenses of Israeli scholars. O patria, quanto mi costi! Just how important do these professors think they and their conferences are? But finally there is nothing funny about this. There are first principles at stake in this stunt. Butler instructed that an academic boycott “militates against the spirit of censorship and the practice of calumny that would cut off debate and engage in debased caricatures.” I suggest she put down her Levinas and pick up her Orwell. It is precisely the spirit of censorship, and of conformity of opinion, that animates a boycott of academic institutions. In a sterling letter to the ASA, a group of distinguished American scholars noted this, and protested that “scholars would be punished not because of what they believe—which would be bad enough—but simply because of who they are based on their nationality. … This is discrimination pure and simple.”

Indeed.

Douthat on the rampage against secularism, gets it all wrong

December 23, 2013 • 6:53 am

Are there any conservative columnists who aren’t either mush-brained, filled with unrighteous anger, or both? Even George Will occasionally got it right, but Ross Douthat? Nope. And he writes for the New York Times, which is supposedly the best newspaper in America. Can’t they do better? I would actually want to read a good conservative columnist, just because it’s good not to be complacent and it’s salubrious to have your views challenged. But Douthat ain’t no contender.

Take his column from yesterday, “Ideas from a manger.” The scene is Douthat’s musings on the religiosity of America, inspired, of course, by the ******mas season.  While gazing at a manger scene, his heart palpitating as he sees the baby Jesus, Douthat has an idea: American religious worldviews fall into three categories, one of which is deeply problematic (guess!). I’ll list the categories and what he finds dubious about each (Douthat’s words are indented).

1. Biblical literalism.

The view:

Many Americans still take everything: They accept the New Testament as factual, believe God came in the flesh, and endorse the creeds that explain how and why that happened. And then alongside traditional Christians, there are observant Jews and Muslims who believe the same God revealed himself directly in some other historical and binding form.

The same God? You mean the one that sends Christians to hell if he’s Allah, and Muslims to hell if he’s the Christian God? How can that be the same God?

Douthat’s problem:

The biblical picture has the weight of tradition going for it, the glory of centuries of Western art, the richness of millenniums’ worth of theological speculation. But its specificity creates specific problems: how to remain loyal to biblical ethics in a commercial, sexually liberated society.

Really? The problem is how to keep being a fundamentalist in a “commercial, sexually liberated society?” Curious that Douthat doesn’t mention that literalism is also insupportably wrong. Curious, too, that Douthat doesn’t mention the disparities between adherents of “the same God” who for some reason find their dogmas in conflict.

2. The “spiritual” take.

The view:

But this biblical world picture is increasingly losing market share to what you might call the spiritual world picture, which keeps the theological outlines suggested by the manger scene — the divine is active in human affairs, every person is precious in God’s sight — but doesn’t sweat the details.

This is the world picture that red-staters get from Joel Osteen, blue-staters from Oprah, and everybody gets from our “God bless America” civic religion. It’s Christian-ish but syncretistic; adaptable, easygoing and egalitarian. It doesn’t care whether the angel really appeared to Mary: the important thing is that a spiritual version of that visitation could happen to anyone — including you.

I’m curious what the “spiritual version” of a visitation an angel really is.

Douthat’s problem:

The spiritual picture lacks the biblical picture’s resources and rigor, but it makes up for them in flexibility. A doctrine challenged by science can be abandoned; a commandment that clashes with modern attitudes ignored; the problem of evil washed away in a New Age bath.

One senses that Douthat doesn’t really like this point of view: the “New Age bath” seems pejorative. If I were to guess, I’d put him somewhere between #1 and #2. But what really irks him is #3:

3. The secular view.

The view

Then, finally, there’s the secular world picture, relatively rare among the general public but dominant within the intelligentsia. This worldview keeps the horizontal message of the Christmas story but eliminates the vertical entirely. The stars and angels disappear: There is no God, no miracles, no incarnation. But the egalitarian message — the common person as the center of creation’s drama — remains intact, and with it the doctrines of liberty, fraternity and human rights.

Well, that doesn’t sound too bad, save for the idea that atheism is dominant within the “intelligentsia” (it’s not, even in scientists), and our supposed view that “the common person is the center of creation’s drama,” which isn’t true, either. If there is any “drama” in creation, most of it does not involve people at all.  There’s the Big Bang, all those other galaxies, black holes, exploding stars, and, on our planet, evolution, on whose branching bush we are but one tiny twig.  Neverthelss, Doubthat hates secularism:

Douthat’s problem

The secular picture, meanwhile, seems to have the rigor of the scientific method behind it. But it actually suffers from a deeper intellectual incoherence than either of its rivals, because its cosmology does not harmonize at all with its moral picture.

In essence, it proposes a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory. And yet it then continues to insist on moral and political absolutes with all the vigor of a 17th-century New England preacher. And the rope bridges flung across this chasm — the scientific-sounding logic of utilitarianism, the Darwinian justifications for altruism — tend to waft, gently, into a logical abyss.

First, I’m not sure what the man means when he says “cosmology does not harmonize at all” with the moral picture of secularism. Cosmology doesn’t give one iota of evidence for a purpose (it could!) or for God. Most of the universe is bleak, uninhabitable, and cold.  In fact such a cosmology harmonizes far better with a secular moral picture than a religious one. Secularists see a universe without apparent purpose and realize that we must forge our own purposes and ethics, not derive them from a God for which there’s no evidence.

Yes, secularism does propose a physical and purposeless universe, and many (but not all) of us accept the notion that our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.  But although the universe is purposeless, our lives aren’t. This conflation of a purposeless universe (i.e., one not created for a specific reason) with purposeless human lives is a trick that the faithful use to make atheism seem nihilistic and dark.  But we make our own purposes, and they’re real. Right now my purpose is to write this piece, and then I’ll work on a book, and later I’ll have dinner with a friend. Soon I’ll go to Poland to visit more friends. Maybe later I’ll read a nice book and learn something. Those are real purposes, not illusory purposes to which Douthat wants us to devote our only life.

Nor do all atheists insist on moral and political absolutes. Most of the savvy ones, at least, approach their politics and ethics provisionally.  Take ethics.  Sam Harris, an atheist, wrote a book proposing a scientific view of ethics that, he said, was objective. Many atheists objected, and the arguments went back and forth.  Is it okay to torture people if there’s a possibility to saves lives? Is it ever ethical to lie? It is the atheists who argue about such things, not the Christians, whose sense of ethics is either fixed or malleable from the hammer of secularism.  Secularists like Harris and Peter Singer argue about what’s right and wrong using reason, while people like Joel Osteen, William Lane Craig, and other Christians are the absolutists.

But the worst part is this: Douthat’s characterization of secularism as:

. . .the rope bridges flung across this chasm — the scientific-sounding logic of utilitarianism, the Darwinian justifications for altruism — tend to waft, gently, into a logical abyss.

Talk about rope bridges!  What is Christianity but a giant rope bridge flung across the Chasm of Hope. And there’s nothing on the other side.

Utilitarianism may not be a perfect ethical system, but what, pray tell, is Douthat’s? If it’s Biblical, does he give away all his money to follow Jesus, as the Bible commands? Does he think that those who gather sticks on the sabbath, or curse their parents, or commit adultery, should be killed? If not, why not? It’s what the Bible says!  If he doesn’t believe those, then he’s adhering to a secular, extra-Biblical view of ethics, and must then justify it. As for where altruism comes from, who knows? My own suspicions are that it’s partly genetic and partly cultural, but what’s important is that we feel it and can justify it.  I can justify it on several grounds, including that altruism makes for a more harmonious society, helps those in need, which makes a better world, and as a selfish motive, being altruistic makes you better liked.  None of that justification has anything to do with God.

I have run on too long, but I want to give Douthat’s penultimate paragraphs, which are even more misleading:

The second [religious question] is whether the intelligentsia’s fusion of scientific materialism and liberal egalitarianism — the crèche without the star, the shepherds’ importance without the angels’ blessing — will eventually crack up and give way to something new.

The cracks are visible, in philosophy and science alike. But the alternative is not. One can imagine possibilities: a deist revival or a pantheist turn, a new respect for biblical religion, a rebirth of the 20th century’s utopianism and will-to-power cruelty.

Check out the two links he gives. The first is to Tom Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos, which decries evolution as insufficient and posits, without any evidence at all, some non-Goddy teleological force driving the universe. It’s a bad book (I’ve read it), and it’s been roundly trounced by his fellow philosophers (see here, for instance). It’s not a crack, but a crackpot book.

The second link goes to a nice article by Steven Weinberg in the New York Review of Books, “Physics: what we do and don’t know.” It’s a succinct summary of the state of the art of both cosmology and particle physics, highlighting the mysteries that beset those fields, including dark matter, dark energy, string theory, how to unify gravity with the other fundamental forces, and whether there might be multiple universes. We don’t know the answers, but what is science without unsolved problems?

And it’s those unsolved problems that Douthat sees as “cracks.” Presumably 200 years ago he would have seen cracks in the unexplained “designlike” features of organisms, in the origin of the universe, and in the unknown constituents of matter.  These “cracks” are the gaps that Douthat fills with God, trying to persuade the reader that unanswered questions somehow presage the death of naturalism.

He’s wrong. The cracks are not in the edifice of secularism, but in the temples of faith. As Douthat should know if he reads his own paper, secularism is not cracking up but growing in the U.S. He and his fellow religionists are on the way out, and his columns are his swan song. It may take years, but one fine day we’ll look back on people like Douthat, shake our heads, and wonder why they couldn’t put away their childish things.

Monday: Hili dialogue

December 23, 2013 • 3:55 am

It’s the run up to *mas, and I shall be leaving for Poland Friday.  Tomorrow we’ll have a treat: a special Christmas message from Hili to the masses. But today Hili is still pursuing her quotidian duties as editor-in-chief.

Hili: You didn’t write it down correctly.
A: So what did you say?
Hili: That to err is human, not feline.
1461158_10202370691215944_1279233691_nIn Polish
Hili: Źle to zapisałeś.
Ja: A co powiedziałaś?
Hili: Że błąd jest rzeczą ludzką, a nie kocią.

Pinker: If the world is a safer place, why can I still die?

December 22, 2013 • 3:11 pm

UPDATE:  From boston.com via reader roqoco (in the comments): Pinker and David Byrne discuss Byrne’s new book, with Pinkah in kickass footwear (my emphasis):

12-5733-DAVIDBYRNE-120

Former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne (left) and Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker (right) kicked off BU’s new arts initiative Monday with a talk focused on Byrne’s new book, “How Music Works.”

Pinker, taking the reins (appropriately, considering his commanding black cowboy boots), introduced theories and then explained why they’re likely wrong, while Byrne, often through nervous laughter, replied with a few alternate (and equally uncertain) hypotheses.

Is that cool or what?

______________

This short and lighthearted video of Steve Pinker, posted just three days ago, is apparently part of a NOVA web series called “The secret life of science and engineers.” Each scientist has a single secret revealed in his/her clip.

Note that he’s wearing a Western belt; I wonder if there are cowboy boots below.

The show has its website here, and you can listen to dozens of clips from the technocracy (photos arrayed vertically on the left), which apparently are continuing to be posted.  If you’ve found some good ones (I haven’t had time to watch), let us know below.

Make your own atheist billboard

December 22, 2013 • 12:33 pm

Several people have griped about the in-your-face and not-useful nature of the American Atheists billboard in Times Square (see below).  I agree that it’s not well done, though I think it’s better to have some public display of atheism than none.  But that one could have been much better.

So, I suggest that you submit your atheist slogan for a billboard below (you can also suggest layouts, illustrations, etc.). Maybe the FFRF could use some help with their billboards!  If there’s a really good one, I’ll send the commenter an autographed copy of WEIT.

I liked one reader’s suggestion that the best billboards will awaken the somnolent doubts of believers, and maybe put them over the tipping point of doubt. So here’s my suggestion:

Picture 2

What’s yours? (Keep posting; I’ll look at them in a week.)  If you’re a former believer, what would have started your mind working?