Politblogo

Veiled complexity

Jill at Feministe has a good post on the problems with Western excitement over the Muslim hijab:

Feministe - Uncovering Iran: At the same time, though, we have to recognize that we are operating within a highly patriarchal social context, and I think we need to do what we have to in order to make sure that women from all backgrounds and walks of life can be heard. In my personal opinion, this does not mean making the hijab, or any sort of clothing, mandatory — but it also doesn’t mean banning the headscarf or other religious symbols in certain contexts, like France did a while back. It simply means recognizing women as people, not as coat-hangers or symbols. And it demands looking at things like the hijab as fully as possible, and seeing the many paradoxes that crop up when modesty is mandatory.

Now, I certainly think there are often problems with the motives of some people who don it.  But in Western media, there's a whole other lurid dimensions to the consternation over it, one which infantilizes Muslim women and papers over the complexity of the debate for propaganda purposes.  I wrote about this very effect before my most recent long blog-hiatus.

Actually, the very nature of the attitude and coverage of the hijab as a symbol of the frightening and mysterious nature of Islam, itself almost seeming analogous in presentation to the fear of the feminine, has the very effect of inducing the kind of identity politics one finds played out in the behaviour of many young Muslim women living in the West.  When one is told that one's very existence is a contradiction, one can either repudiate the contradiction or embrace it more fully, defiantly.  There are multiple paths to the hijab, but the latter is an motive that many who choose the hijab very likely hold.

You might think that I am feeling irony-impaired today

I am not entirely certain of the meaning of this post:

The London Fog: Men should wear burkahs too: The United Nations, in collaboration with the World Mental Health Organization and the Women's Universal Suffrage organization, in collaboration with the Homeless Coalition and the Diversity and Anti-Discrimination co-operative, in collaboration with local White Male support groups overlooked by the environmental friendly are advocating mandatory burkahs for all.

I am sure this "Lisa" person is being sarcastic about something, but I'm not sure what.  Is she mocking advocates for women's equality or is she mocking conservative Muslim cultures?   I mean, if she's in favour of women's liberty, then I can easily surmise that she is mocking the mandatory imposition of the burqa under Taliban rule.  But then she uses a trope like "White Male support group" (usually a sarcastic reference to equality-seeking politics) and then refers to "equal opportunity" in a sarcastic way (and not the sarcastic way I would use).  The two propositions contained in Lisa's post are simply too difficult for me to reconcile.

And that is only the beginning of my confusion.  Can someone explain to me what this woman means to tell us?

Boston Globe article on the cartoon riots

Via a commenter on Brad DeLong's blog, this excellent opinion piece in the Boston Globe re the Danish cartoon violence and its overall context:

Boston Globe - Misunderstanding Muslims: The economics of oil, including the creation of an oppressive local class of Western-sponsored oligarchs, locked the grievous insult in place. As if to be sure it was more sharply felt than ever, Europe imported ''guest workers" from the Islamic world, openly consigning them to an underclass that is as religiously defined as it is permanent.

And then the United States launched its wars. One of the major disconnects in the present conflict is the way in which European and American analysis obsesses with the apparently anarchic outbursts of violence in the ''Arab street" without taking in how brutally violent the post-9/11 ''coalition" assault has been, not only physically but psychologically.

Mobs throw stones through the windows of European consulate offices, and the legion of CNN watchers recoils with horror. Meanwhile, unmanned drones fly across stretches of desert to drop loads of fire on the heads of subsistence farmers in their villages; children die, but CNN is not there.

Billions of dollars are being poured each month into the project of imposing an American solution on an Arab problem, and increasingly the solution looks, from the other side, like annihilation. Muslims, that is, understand the new reality far better than non-Muslims do -- the state of open cultural warfare that ''the West" imagines is a narrowly targeted war against ''terrorism." Muslims, as Muslims, experience themselves as on the receiving end of a savage -- but, alas, not unprecedented -- assault.

Are they wrong? In the argument over ''Enlightenment" values, sparked by the cartoons, some champions of free expression have fallen into the deadly old mistake that led, in the 20th century, to a grotesque betrayal of those very values -- the over-under ranking of human beings, with the lives of some being counted as cheap.

Why are we killing them? As with multiple problems today, this one comes back to the misbegotten American war. It threatens to ignite the century, and must be stopped.

Like I've been saying---abstract worries over Free Speech are a luxury that is, in any case, a red herring. 

North, Women, South, Media

Twisty Faster writes:

I Blame the Patriarchy - European Honky Dudes Whacking Wives At Alarming Rate: I say this because our racist conceits are more thoroughgoing than we care to admit. As I have oft opined, Americans display a notably high tolerance for the suffering of others, especially when those others are brown. Like white dudes and their birthright of male privilege, Westerners are indoctrinated from birth with a sort of first-world entitlement. This allows us to keep “exotic” cultures at arm’s length, to luxuriate in a cavalier unfamiliarity with their strange, primitive ways, and ultimately, to think of them as ideas rather than people, as less real than we are, and therefore less important. My own unscientific, blog-centric survey, based on the much-lower-than-average number of comments generated by posts that focus on violent misogyny in “third-world” countries, is that even seasoned patriarchy-blamers are rather less outraged by ritual stonings in Pakistan or mass rapes in Rwanda than they are by Dove soap’s attempt to pass off skinny white models as fat girls.

A lot of very good comments ensue about how women are represented in developing countries and the relation to women's rights in the West and matters of imperialism, colonialism, and violence.  Most of the commenters understand why Western feminists commenting on developing countries can be a bit of a minefield.  I'd like to point one very important thing out, though, at least regarding the usual subject of Western handwringing.

Someone pointed out earlier that women's rights are a point of conflict between the West and the Muslim world.  I'd like to emphasize that this is very much a two-way street.  Hypocritical Western powers/media/etc use women's rights as a bludgeon against extraneous interests of the Muslim world.  This has caused a lot of the Muslim world to regard women's rights as an instrument of Western domination---a totally predictable effect.  A lot of progress that might have been made has been retarded by this perception. 

In the media, women's lives in the Muslim world are treated like some form of prurient horror show---in relation to the lives of Western women.  I mean, we see an unrelenting parade of misery.  All of my family comes from that part of the world, and, truth be told, there isn't much more misery there as far as I can tell as there is here.  Not THAT much more misery, that's for sure, and in some cases perhaps less (options for women vary a lot by class and geography).  And, unfortunately, even Western women who consider themselves feminists contribute to this, such as, for instance, people like Irshad Manji. 

What it does is provoke resentment about the West, even for women.   Women in my family can do nothing but shout at the TV in frustration when the plight of women in their countries is used essentially for propaganda.  I remember in a CBC TV report about Pakistan (perhaps more than one), some of the women were speaking Urdu, but the translation captions were deliberately skewed to make things sound much closer to Western stereotypes than what was actually said, and some important sentences were simply glossed over.  It's hard to see this as anything but propaganda, and a lot of the Muslim world resents the hypocrisy and associates feminism with it.  And, in any case, it necessarily obscures the search for solutions.

Of course, I am not denying that there aren't problems.  Big problems.  But I can presently count few successes brought about by foreigners, even women, in addressing these concerns.  The best successes are typically brought about by the women who live there, on the ground.  That doesn't mean necessarily that successes can't come from outside, or at least support and honest advice can't come from outside.  But we haven't really seen it that often.

Randomness/divinity

Via the comments in a thread at Pharyngula, I came across this statement by Daniel Dennett:

Butterflies and Wheels - The Kitzmiller Decision: If they said that the theory of evolution in no way conflicts with the existence of a divine creator, then I must say that I find that claim to be disingenuous. The theory of evolution demolishes the best reason anyone has ever suggested for believing in a divine creator. This does not demonstrate that there is no divine creator, of course, but only shows that if there is one, it (He?) needn’t have bothered to create anything, since natural selection would have taken care of all that.

It strikes me that this dichotomy (intended to dismiss theistic evolution) only works if you believe that the creator is "within" and bounded by the physical universe, and hence randomness and divinity are comparable and that A is prior to B is strictly a statement in time. By this I mean the following: if event A is prior to event B, then we have at least two possible explanations for it.  What are these explanations?  Either divinity or randomness.  Dennett is saying that randomness is sufficient and thus divinity is not necessary. This implies, as I said, that Dennett (and, to be fair, apparently many religious positions) assume that divinity and randomness operate on the same "level".

Naturally, both positions must deny any further metaphysics.  This may be already the case for Dennett: that he is uninterested in a metaphysical discussion.  I honestly don't know whether this is the case.  But he is making a claim that randomness defeats theistic evolution even within the framework of theists.  Maybe so for some theists, but I still hardly imagine this to be categorically true.

For instance, to use a more facile example, how is it that randomness exists?  How is it that the thing that makes randomness exist exists?  And so on.  In my opinion, a sufficiently robust metaphysics as a bulwark for a sufficiently robust theology can easily overcome Dennett's argument.  If divinity encompasses conceivable existence rather than merely fills it, then randomness is but one of divinity's extensions and protuberances into the reality we are cognitively and physically capable of experiencing.  In this light, the suitability of random processes as a sufficient explanation for evolution hardly implies the gratuity of theistic evolution.

Guilt, belief, responsibility

Amanda Marcotte writes:

Pandagon: Speaking ill of the dead: I'm tired of feeling forbidden to speak ill of the dead right now. Pope John Paul II was ultimately a wicked man, and he was wickeder still for thinking of himself as righteous. Two simple things were at hand for him to promote that would have done enormous good for his flock--the condom to stop a disease that kills and contraception to make poverty more manageable.

In fact she compares this situation (unwillingness to criticize the Pope during his funeral) to weasel words in an obit about a boxer/domestic-offender's death.  And I agree with her about the Pope's and the Church's behaviour regarding the molested chidren: disgusting.

But this also raises a question that troubles me.  Can someone acting on a belief be wicked simply for the belief?  I agree that the Pope's position on contraception was foolish and wrong, based on a very peculiar metaphysic that I don't really share.  And the issue is far more clear-cut then abortion, since contraception can never be construed to block anything but hypothetical lives.  But the Catholic Church's position is based, as far as I can tell, on the sincere belief that AIDS and so on is caused by sexual immorality as they define it, and contraception is a means to encourage and enable further sexual immorality, and therefore it is not an effective means to get at the root of the problem.

Of course, you have to believe that it is possible to eradicate sexual immorality.  And naturally, they believe that it is possible. Ultra-conservative Catholic web sites like Tradition in Action would have us believe (probably quite incorrectly) that there was a perfect sexual order (perfect relative to their standards) in the height of the Church, that is the medieval period. 

Then in this sincere belief that their position is what will attack the root of the problem, how can one hold the Pope guilty in death?  Of course, lying about the effectiveness of condoms is one thing.  But that the Pope believed condoms weren't the right way to go in principle, another.  It seems to me that Amanda views him as wicked (worse than wrong) for the belief as much as for the lie.

Of course, it's a totally academic question, whether one considers the Pope "wicked" for this belief or not.  He's no longer among us.  But if one is to ascribe these kinds of epithets to people, one has to decide whether or not a sincere belief can be in itself "wicked".  I'm not so sure.