Month: May 2005

We have yet to see what’s at the root, if anything, of the Newsweek story. But I think it’s telling that some bloggers have devoted much, much more energy to covering the Newsweek error than they ever have to covering any sliver of the widespread evidence of detainee abuse that made the Newsweek piece credible in the first place. A simple question: after U.S. interrogators have tortured over two dozen detainees to death, after they have wrapped one in an Israeli flag, after they have smeared naked detainees with fake menstrual blood, after they have told one detainee to “Fuck Allah,” after they have ordered detainees to pray to Allah in order to kick them from behind in the head, is it completely beyond credibility that they would also have desecrated the Koran? Yes, Newsweek bears complete responsibility for any errors it has made; and, depending on what we now find, should not be let off the hook. But the outrage from the White House is beyond belief. It seems to me particularly worrying if this incident further intimidates the press from seeking the truth about what the government is doing in the war on terror. It is not being “basically, on the side of the enemy,” as Glenn Reynolds calls it, to resist the notion of government-sanctioned torture and to report on it. It is patriotism and serving the cause that this war is about: religious pluralism and tolerance. The media’s Abu Ghraib?? When Mike Isikoff is found guilty of committing murder, give me a call. Austin Bay still insists that Abu Ghraib did not constitute “deadly torture.” The corpses found there (photographed by grinning U.S. soldiers) would probably disagree. (Will Bay correct?) Three factors interacted here: media error/bias, Islamist paranoia, and a past and possibly current policy of religiously-intolerant torture. No one comes out looking good. But it seems to me unquestionable that the documented abuse of religion in interrogation practices is by far the biggest scandal. Too bad the blogosphere is too media-obsessed and self-congratulatory to notice.

My thoughts about the risks – and upsides – of the looming clash.

CHILL, GUYS: Pejman and Althouse need to get a grip. Have bloggers become that touchy? I thought David Greenberg (disclosure: an old friend) got a lot about blogging dead-on. It’s harder to do well than it looks; and you need a skin as thick as a dinosaur’s. Or mine.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Now we are forced to do something that societies often do when people can’t control their desires. We have to pass laws to stop their desires.” – Rick Santorum, in a quote that basically sums up his position on most topics. (This time it was about the filibuster.)

CPAP UPDATE: In the last installment in my apnea-drama, I complained about facial imprints and bruises from the attachment to the mask. Well, it turns out I had the straps on inside out. I’m not that big a dope. The guy who trained me in its use – he was sent by the CPAP company – put the straps on the wrong way round; and it wasn’t till I was washing the mask Saturday night that it occurred to me to reverse them. Now there’s barely a mark. I should withdraw my gripe.

Newsweek doesn’t quite retract its story on alleged desceration of the Koran at Gitmo. But it adds:

Last Friday, a top Pentagon spokesman told us that a review of the probe cited in our story showed that it was never meant to look into charges of Qur’an desecration. The spokesman also said the Pentagon had investigated other desecration charges by detainees and found them “not credible.” Our original source later said he couldn’t be certain about reading of the alleged Qur’an incident in the report we cited, and said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts. Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges, and so will we.

Maybe we will have some sort of resolution of this soon, but I doubt it. I reiterate what I wrote Saturday: “Even if this incident turns out to be false, our previous policies have made it perfectly plausible.” That’s the deeper issue here.

“With all due respect to Prof. Lilla, I wonder if he read the same Himmelfarb book that I read. Himmelfarb’s argument that some British members of the Enlightenment were more sympathetic to religion than French members of the Enlightenment is questionable. How do David Hume, the author of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and Edward Gibbon, the author of the vehemently anti-Christian Decline and Fall, become sympathetic to religion? Himmelfarb’s treatment of attitudes towards religion among English members of the Enlightenment is contradictory. She actually spends part of her book attacking sincerely religious English Radical members of the Enlightenment like Richard Price and Joseph Priestly, both of whom were Protestant clergymen. As for the French, while the popular image, shared by Himmelfarb and many intellectuals, of the French Revolution is the de-christianization campaign, people tend to forget that the initial and ultimately most damaging response of the Constituent Assembly was an effort to markedly reform the French Catholic Church on liberal, rationalistic, and democratic (elected priests and bishops) lines. The initial revolutionaries couldn’t imagine the state without the support of the Church and a liberal and republican society required a liberal and republican church. Their mistake was to try to impose this from above, in keeping with the long history of French monarchial control of the Church.

Lilla is also likely incorrect about the influence of German theologians on the second Great Awakening in the USA. This movement, with its Arminianism and emphasis on human perfectability, was well underway prior to the work of Schleiermacher. The latter’s work may have found a sympathetic reading in the USA but to regard it as a driving force is a mistake.

Finally, its an error to see us in the middle of another Great Awakening. While the USA is the most religious of all industrialized nations, religious participation by some important measures is actually falling in the USA and the number of atheists and agnostics has grown significantly in the past 2 generations. Open religious indifference has gone from a tiny to a significant minority. The anti-intellectual elements cited by Lilla have always been present and are nothing new. What is different is the commitment of the so-called religous right, with its spine of evangelical Protestants, to political action. This commitment, like the radical Islamic movements, is not the action of a confident and secure group. It reflects rather a response to an insecure position. The USA is no longer a Protestant country in its historic sense. Catholicism is now the largest Christian denomination in the USA. While Jews were once the only significant religious minority in this country, we now have significant numbers of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and other religious traditions. The number of people indifferent to religion in the USA is only going to grow and our liberal immigration policies guarantee increased religious diversity. The days of Protestant cultural dominance are over and what we are seeing is in large measure a reaction to this irrevocable change in American life.”

I sure hope this piece about comic genius, Dave Chappelle, is on the mark. It certainly seems so to me. The whole idea of a man who is on a direct flight to vast money and fame stopping to ask himself who he is and what he’s doing strikes me as a phenomenally fresh moment in the culture. No, I’m not going to defend his apparent failure to live out certain contractual responsibilities (although I’d see it as eminently within the usual rights of an artist of any kind). What I am going to praise is what appears to be his conscience – even, and perhaps especially, in comedy. His integrity means more to him than going ahead because the money is in control. If that means slowing down, escaping the headlights of fame, taking time, so be it. Here’s a beautiful quote:

I don’t normally talk about my religion publicly because I don’t want people to associate me and my flaws with this beautiful thing. And I believe it is a beautiful religion if you learn it the right way. It’s a lifelong effort. Your religion is your standard. Coming here I don’t have the distractions of fame. It quiets the ego down. I’m interested in the kind of person I’ve got to become. I want to be well rounded and the industry is a place of extremes. I want to be well balanced. I’ve got to check my intentions, man.

That first sentence – which combines great faith with great humility – is what we need so much more of. In Islam, it is currently close to priceless. Thank God, then, for Chappelle. Literally.

The debate in the blogosphere just went up a notch.

“The leading thinkers of the British and American Enlightenments hoped that life in a modern democratic order would shift the focus of Christianity from a faith-based reality to a reality-based faith. American religion is moving in the opposite direction today, back toward the ecstatic, literalist and credulous spirit of the Great Awakenings. Its most disturbing manifestations are not political, at least not yet. They are cultural. The fascination with the ‘end times,’ the belief in personal (and self-serving) miracles, the ignorance of basic science and history, the demonization of popular culture, the censoring of textbooks, the separatist instincts of the home-schooling movement – all these developments are far more worrying in the long term than the loss of a few Congressional seats.
No one can know how long this dumbing-down of American religion will persist. But so long as it does, citizens should probably be more vigilant about policing the public square, not less so. If there is anything David Hume and John Adams understood, it is that you cannot sustain liberal democracy without cultivating liberal habits of mind among religious believers. That remains true today, both in Baghdad and in Baton Rouge.” – Mark Lilla, one of the most discerning public intellectuals of our time. The Weimar analogy is particularly disturbing. The struggle for open minds within our churches is critical to the maintenance of a liberal democracy in an increasingly fundamentalist era.

QUOTE OF THE DAY II: “Our military authorities are investigating these allegations fully. If they are proven true, we will take appropriate action.” – secretary of state Condi Rice. I feel the same way about this statement as I did about the president’s recent reaffirmation that atheists are as patriotic as Christian citizens. To put it bluntly: has it come to this? It is perfectly conceivable, given the torture policies promoted and permitted by this president, that desecration of the Koran has taken place in Guantanamo. Many other insane and inhumane interrogation tactics have turned out to be true. Remember smearing fake menstrual blood? We are in a critical war for world opinion. A critical part of our message is that this is not a war against Islam as such, but against Islamo-fascism and terror. And yet we see the religious right co-opting air force academies, and we hear of incidents like the alleged toilet-flush of the Koran. Since no one is ever held responsible for anything in the Bush administration, we can be sure this incident will be lied about, covered up or blamed on some poor military grunt who can be easily scapegoated. But at some point, we will have to confront the severe damage this administration has done to American prestige and credibility in a critical global battle of ideas because of its interrogation policies. These are self-inflicted wounds. Even if this incident turns out to be false, our previous policies have made it perfectly plausible. That is the shame – and the terrible gift from this administration to Osama bin Laden.

WHAT PLAN B IS: Not as simple as my stern emailer yesterday. Here’s the FDA’s formal description:

Plan B works like other birth control pills to prevent pregnancy. Plan B acts primarily by stopping the release of an egg from the ovary (ovulation). It may prevent the union of sperm and egg (fertilization). If fertilization does occur, Plan B may prevent a fertilized egg from attaching to the womb (implantation). If a fertilized egg is implanted prior to taking Plan B, Plan B will not work.

And here:

How does Plan B work (mechanism of action)? Plan B is believed to act as an emergency contraceptive principally by preventing ovulation or fertilization (by altering tubal transport of sperm and/or ova). In addition, it may inhibit implantation by altering the endometrium.

Here’s a broader account of the issues involved. I don’t think “abortifacient” is therefore an accurate description, unless the female body itself is an abortifacient as well.

THE FUNDAMENTALIST AS NARCISSIST: Here’s an email worth pondering:

“What you define as doubt would be better thought of as humility, a recognition of one’s own fallibility, a genuine modesty in one’s own power to know and understand truths both empirical and inferential. And the converse of the virtue of humility is the sin of pride, an overestimation of the value of one’s thought and being. In modern psycho-speak we refer to pride as narcissism or egotism and that gets to the root of the flaw of the fundamentalist – it is a fault of character, not conclusion. The supreme being they honor is the one staring back in the mirror and it’s the word and law of that being they seek to uphold. While they cite the primacy of the individual as part of the damaging heritage of liberalism, the current variety of fundamentalist is, ironically, very much a product of a lifetime of liberal overvaluation of their personal beliefs for no reason other than it is their personal beliefs. Somewhere along the line, mommy should have told them that, yes, they’re special but not that special.”

I wouldn’t be quite that harsh. But some fundamentalist certainty about political matters in which no certainty is possible is, to my mind, a form of spiritual arrogance and intolerance.

“Your description of the real faultline in American politics is right on the money. What’s troubling is that so many people on the left have lined up with the Theocrats on the same side of the faultline without even realizing it. By deeming empirical and inferential truth as ultimately subjective, the postmoderns and multiculturalists have essentially conceded that all values constitute a leap of faith. Logic and reason have been effectively removed from public debate. This plays right into the hands of fundamentalists, who are perfectly willing to wage the battle on these grounds: If the left is only willing to offer a kind of watery faith in a secular welfare state, the religious right is happy to rebutt them with a profound faith in Judeo-Christian tradition. Individual freedom then becomes a kind of collateral damage: In arguments of faith, neither side brooks heretical points of view. The real key, as you suggest, is a return to the healthy skepticism of liberal democracy. Damned if I know how to accomplish that, however. There are so few of us on this side of faultline. Every time I try to steer discussions over to skeptical ground, the two faith camps accuse me of spying for the other side.”

“I believe in family values,” – a Florida county Republican chair, complaining about a slander that he had married six times. It was only five. Hey, but as long as the gays are kept in their place, who’s counting?

“I am trying not to let it affect my love for you that you use the term ‘morning-after contraceptive,’ which is used by nobody with any basic knowledge of biology, with the exception of those who rely on talking points from Planned Parenthood. It’s morning-after, alright. But it’s post-conception, which makes it an abortifacient, not a contraceptive. Don’t quibble over implantation; it’s fertilization that matters. And so what if lots of fertilized eggs are “spontaneously aborted,” naturally failing to implant? There’s a difference between letting someone die and killing her, you know. Long and short: support Plan B, if you like; insist that it be airlifted to Africa even. But don’t call it contraception.”