The Indisputable Non-Genius of Richard Dawkins

Last night I caught a few nuggets of Richard Dawkins on Channel 4, waxing lyrical about The Genius of Charles Darwin. Dawkins, most well known for his books The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene, was intent on proving to us that kindness, charity and altruism should not be accepted for what they are; no, they have to be explained in terms of evolutionary theory. In other words, we're not nice to each other just because we're nice. We're nice because it confers upon us some evolutionary advantage. We are, as Dawkins so movingly put it, "survival machines".

I'm too weary of Dawkins to even begin deconstructing his loopy logic. What really struck me, more than his argument itself, was the obsessive manner in which he would try to put his beliefs across. He appears to be driven by a desire to prove that everything, all human and social phenomena, can be explained with recourse to evolutionary theory and genetics. That's fair enough, Dawkins. But other people have their own beliefs - just as valid as yours - about the foundations of human existence. By going around like some crazed televangelist, propelled by missionary zeal, you're really no better than the religious fanatic you so despise. Neither of you are able to accept that there are a million different belief systems, each as meaningful as the next. Neither of you can let go of your unshakeable faith in the singularity of your own Truth.

There was one part of the programme where Dawkins speaks to a woman working in a homeless shelter, dishing out hot soup while she explains that it's just the thing they need after a night out in the cold. He asks her where this charitable disposition comes from, and you can see his brain fizzing as he tries to comprehend it. This scene lent further support to my sneaking suspicion that Richard Dawkins is just not a particularly kind or empathetic individual, and last night's show may be better understood as his rather embarrassing attempt to grapple with the fact other people are, in fact, nice.

As for me, I'm quite happy to accept that altruism and compassion exist in our society, for whatever reason. The obsessive attempt to rationalise such behaviour probably tells us more about Dawkins' character than it demonstrates anything useful about our social existence.

The Dark Knight

Why has The Dark Knight grossed such spectacular revenues? Comic book adaptations are certainly reliable box-office fodder these days, and there has been considerable hype surrounding Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in the context of his untimely demise.

But there’s more to it than this. There’s something about film that seems to ring true; something that makes sense, appears apt, that reflects something meaningful about our present condition.

Commentators have already pointed to the political implications of the film: some wondering whether Obama or McCain or Bush or Cheney can be better identified with the Dark Knight; others noting how there are ten minutes in the middle of the film during which the Joker is referred to as ‘a terrorist’ in speech accompanied by all the appropriate rhetoric – “do we want to give in to terrorists?” etc.

Yet on a less superficial level, what can the film’s central preoccupation (i.e. anarchy vs. society’s laws and norms) reveal about the nature of the anxieties gripping modern, liberal culture today?

Perhaps it’s because I worked on the bloody thing for four long months, but I can’t help seeing my dissertation in all this. In it, I tried to investigate the phenomenon of suicide bombing from an unorthodox perspective. Rather than seek to either condemn the practice wholeheartedly or empathise with the plight of the one who explodes him- or herself in most abject desperation, I was concerned with suicide bombing’s place in liberal modernity. How is it a product of the modern; and what does it reveal about our liberalism?

The reason suicide bombing is ensconced within such a polarising discourse, I argued, is that our liberal order operates through a kind of generosity; a gift that cannot be returned. Put very simply, it includes you, even if you don’t want to be included. Your identity is formed, it has a place within this order: it is rationalised.

If, however, you challenge your positioning – if, like the suicide bomber, you challenge the very preconditions of social existence – we will still find a way to rationalise your behaviour. We will call it evil, or illegitimate, or the product of indoctrination, or the result of oppression and injustice. We will insist that it fails, lest we admit to “giving in to terrorists”. We will cast you out, as our inhuman antithesis. (although, as my dissertation argues, this exclusion is simultaneously a kind of inclusion – just as the Joker insists that Batman needs his anarchic other)

In other words, we will understand you, in some form or another. Our biggest fear is that you will continue to defy our logic, our attempts to rationalise what you do. And this is precisely the fear that The Dark Knight articulates. Studies of suicide bombers show that they are very much human, despite the inhumanity of their actions. They are sons and daughters, students, employees, people with emotions and goals and prejudices. Their demonisation perhaps has its culmination in the character of the Joker: a caricature of irrationality and destruction. He cannot be persuaded or bribed, nor can his motivations be rationalised. He simply must be stopped. And yet the most difficult task is to stop the person who doesn’t share such mundane concerns as the preservation of life.

It’s possible to read all sorts of things into The Dark Knight, and I don’t know how much of it was intentional. But what’s clear to me is that whilst the ‘terrorist’ receives nothing more than an extreme caricature, the film reveals rather more about the specifically modern, liberal anxiety presently gripping American and European societies.

Tree in Wandsworth

On travel; and the dangers of the non-place

This article was first published in Poda Poda. I'm not sure I still agree with what I wrote...

I

It’s pretty much taken for granted that to travel is to enrich the mind and soul; to create a more sophisticated, more open-minded kind of person; and to enable a better understanding between people of diverse cultures.

II

Yet I fear that the reality of travel may be far more sinister than the individual traveller may have cause to suspect – and that the very developments which have brought human beings into greater contact with each other are in fact the symptoms of a supermodernity which will only    i s o l a t e   us further.

* My contention is this:
it is possible to travel – to Cairo, Siem Reap, Goa, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Santiago – all without once setting foot in a real place.

III

This requires some explanation. I use the word place in the anthropological sense, to denote an organically social space, existing in a historical and spatial context of its own. The proliferation of non-places, endemic in our time, is the inverse of this – the negation of place.

[For example, a grocer’s or local butcher in a small English town is a place; it naturally engenders social interaction, and possesses its own identity which is distinct from other shops in other small English towns. Regular customers come to recognise and know each other, as well as the staff and owner of the shop. A visit to a Tesco superstore, by contrast, seems to prohibit social contact by using text to instruct, direct, and attract the customer, and by using technology to mediate all monetary transactions. Customers become familiar not with the staff, who appear interchangeable, nor with the owner, which is some remote and impersonal entity. Rather the customer becomes familiar with logos, text, brands. The enforced solitude of this experience makes Tesco a non-place.]

These non-places exist as you stand passively before an ATM machine, as you insert your ticket passing through the barriers at a London Underground station, as you seek the symbols of instruction in an airport, and as you wait to board your plane. In each of these situations your identity has been reduced to simply one among many users of a particular service; the texts you see are addressed directly to you, and yet directly to all other potential users. Meaningful social interaction is discouraged.
Such space is the antithesis of place.

IV

As the anthropologist Marc Augé suggests, “the traveller’s space may be the archetype of non-place”. Consider, if you will, the archetypal traveller of our time. He/she is invariably Western (Western being the paradigm of wealth and ‘development’, i.e. Japanese counts too), and will have selected their destination(s) based on a combination of personal ambition; the recommendations of others; and the prerequisite Rough Guide or Lonely Planet advice. His/her expedition is contextualised within specific life-circumstances: the well-spent gap year, the well-deserved holiday, etc. “Places” and events are recorded on camera, and completion of the itinerary is accompanied by a feeling of accomplishment, a satisfaction at knowing one more “place” which had previously meant no more to him/her than any other random name on a map. In other words: the experience is a manifestation of the traveller’s EGO, rather than being a meaningful, equal encounter with another culture. This relationship is one inevitable consequence of a skewed global tourist industry (how many Indian youths do you see backpacking around Devon, taking in the local sites of interest?). Our traveller is encouraged to avoid place.

Yet this is not an indictment of the individual traveller, who means well, who means to immerse himself in a strange civilisation not like his own. It’s not all his fault!!! It is hard for him to encounter the other on the other’s own terms.
The problem is partly structural.

V

Late-capitalist society has constructed a means (the international tourist INDUSTRY) by which people from Europe and North America pass through foreign spaces whilst transforming these spaces into spectacle, to be itemised, viewed, consumed, and discarded, like so many baked bean tins. [In extreme cases, foreign societies begin to construct themselves in accordance with Western conceptualisations, dictated by economic necessity. When we think of Thailand we probably conjure up images of temples, stunning island beaches and seedy red-light sex tourists, rather than the predominantly rural, 66 million-strong padi-growing population. Yet this fantasy, this imagined place, is gradually becoming more accurate as reality adapts to imagined reality.] The opportunities for travel, like the capital to do so, are concentrated in the hands of a few. This global framework denies us the mechanisms by which we can encounter the other on equal terms; it inhibits our capabilities to truly experience another place.

VI

HOWEVER: the scenario described above is a horrible paradigm, and no traveller travels solely through non-place. It is easy to skip from airport to hotel to train station to bus station to church to temple to other “local sites of interest”. But organic, meaningful place has a habit of creating itself within non-place; when you get off the tour bus and befriend the noodle vendor because she reminds you of your mum; or when you discard your plans and end up smoking weed with a Balinese surfer boy on the floor of his one-room apartment…

Yes, we may be inhibited by the inequity of the global system, but WE ARE AGENTS within this structure – we can choose to reproduce it or to rebel against it. So go! Go away, but seek out place when you get there, make no plans, discard your EGO, and realign yourself to another rhythm.

Poda Poda spring/summer 2007

"So, what's next?"

“So, what’s next?”

The question that cannot be answered.

I don’t know what’s next. I wish people would stop asking me.
My recently completed degree, I have discovered, is nothing more than a stepping stone; a thing that will enable me to achieve greater and more substantive things. A Career. Bad news for a girl who shudders at the words graduate programme,vibrant and self-starter.

I know that someone is coming at education from a wildly different angle to mine when they ask: “Oh, International Relations. What can you do with that?” As if it were a bionic arm. In fact I studied International Relations not because, as some will immediately assume, I desire to become a diplomat. Nor did I become involved in any extra-curricular activities because, as many have commented, they “look good on your CV.”

No, I made my academic choices based on a commitment to understand inequality, a naïve desire to do good in the world, and a significant element of narcissistic self-reflexive interrogation. “I am an international relation!” I rather embarrassingly wrote in my UCAS statement. My two dissertations – the culmination of nearly three years of study – were essentially attempts to grapple with the contradictions of my own identity. (The first being an investigation into being Liberal and being Muslim; the second being ostensibly an examination of the power relationships implicit in travel from rich countries to poor, which ended up being an examination of my own personal crisis, or, How to be half English and half Malay, half rich and half poor, half guilty and half innocent.)

“So, what’s next?” Implicit in the question, of course, is the notion that each of our individual lives is a trajectory with its own telos. I am heading somewhere. In order to get there I must accumulate skills and qualifications to then list on my CV; a document that is really nothing more than a brochure with which I can sell myself to prospective employers.

“So, what’s next?” smacks of an underlying careerism that is not new, but certainly appears more potent at present than it was in the past. I see it as part of a broader trend towards the neoliberalisation of educational institutions and, concomitantly, of our understanding of education’s place in society. The development of universities, increasingly a process directed by those at the managerial level, has begun to take a more sinister turn. Resources are poured into income-generating departments (i.e. those that attract the most international students) at the expense of less profitable ones; and research becomes subject to a competitive logic that diminishes both academic autonomy and teaching quality.

At the level of individual students, tuition fees are recast as a reasonable ‘investment’ in one’s future, redefining education in the process. No longer a pursuit inspired by the noble spirit of academic enquiry; education is now understood in instrumentalist terms according to a logic of competition and profit. What will give the best returns on my original investment? Which degree is the most employable? Which will provide me with the most marketable skills?

“So, what’s next?”

I don’t know. And I’m keeping it that way.

Me with a beak

Clock poem

A clock in my kitchen

always kept the time

until one day

the clocks went back

and left my clock behind.

Neglected and ignored,

its numbers were inaccurate.

The family favoured the newer clock;

its timekeeping was immaculate.

Poor little clock

got a nasty shock -

it plum thought it was three

but this was not to be:

the other clocks said two

and my sad little clock found it quite the catastrophe.

If it had had a voice it would have shouted

"Jammy gits!"

If it had had a fist it would have smashed the new clock's bits.

But it didn't.

It just sat there feeling very small

and pretty soon we had forgotten 

it was ever there

at all.

Kodak building, Hemel Hempstead

Beachy Head

Students, be vigilant!!! …There are fundamentalists among us, and they are dangerous…

by Pia Muzaffar Dawson

this article was first published in The Pulse in 2007

Has anyone else noticed a creeping consensus taking root in our university? A certain sceptical chill in the air? Now, I know that there have been recent reports about campus staff at higher education institutions all over Britain being encouraged by the government to spy on Muslim and ‘Asian-looking’ (!!) students, but I’m advocating that we redirect our suspicions elsewhere. Muslims are too easy to spot; what’s more, they’ll readily admit their faith. No, what I’m talking about is a silent, far more sinister force that has steadily been gaining more and more adherents – but unlike many other cults they wear no visible indicators of their faith, and if you quiz them, chances are they’ll deny they believe anything at all. This stealthy self-denial has proved one of their most effective weapons against detection, and thus against contestation. Yet press them a little more, and you’ll reveal a wellspring of cultural supremacism and badly articulated racism. Yes indeed: these are the secular fundamentalists, and their propaganda is slowly seeping into our institutions, our media and our minds.

Right, what does that mean? Precisely this: despite what is currently propagated by our leaders, our media, our parents, our lecturers (both ‘rightwing’ and ‘liberal’ alike), the greatest cause of hatred and intolerance in fact derives from the secularist myth, and not from any dodgy interpretation of the Bible or Qur’an.

No, hang on, I must have got that wrong. Surely we’re living in an age of increasing threat from “Islamic fundamentalism”? Isn’t there a “clash of civilisations”? That’s right; our secular, modern existence is being jeopardised by people with outdated beliefs trying to drag us back into the Dark Ages! Women are attempting to cover up – god forbid! – their beautiful, liberated bodies. Irrational beliefs and redundant traditions just refuse to go away! What’s wrong with these people?? Don’t they know that we discarded the “God-delusion” decades ago? Aren’t they aware that we’re living in newer, better times, where you can live your life free from the oppressive dogmas of organised religions based on rigid interpretations of ancient texts??

Bollocks, I say. Contemporary Britain remains under the powerful spell of a centuries-old faith: the twin beliefs of rationalism and secularism. Contrary to popular opinion, we are not born atheists with a natural ability to rationally deduce the non-existence of God (or gods) from the assembled evidence until some silly superstitions come along to deceive and flummox us with their threats of eternal pain and promises of everlasting glory. No, we are born into a time and a place, and if that place is Britain and that time is now, the belief system that happens to pervade our social existence is the secularist myth. This myth is based on the notion that we no longer need to turn to religion to explain the fantastic complexity of the natural world; science privileges us with access to the Truth, and Truth need not be mediated by the priest, imam or rabbi. Neither do we need religion to provide us with hope of a better life, since life is better than ever before. We have fridges, for heavens sake!! We can fly to Spain for 99p! Religion has also ceased to be of spiritual use, since we can now fulfil our innermost desires to discern life’s meaning in a multitude of other ways. So we are not, in fact, living in a post-myth, post-religion, post-belief age at all; we have simply replaced the old myth with a new one. We’ve swapped faith in God for faith in ourselves, or in humankind, or music, poetry, surfing – whatever you want really. You get to decide.

Ok, all fine so far, so we’ve moved on from God, so we now believe in other things – where exactly is the harm in that? …This is where the ‘fundamental’ part of secular fundamentalism comes in. Because there’s nothing wrong with being an atheist, nor with believing in the division of church and state, nor with deriving your ethical values from experience and love rather than the Ten Commandments. I myself am a thoroughly secularised Muslim atheist; I see no contradiction there at all. The dodgy bit is when people start asserting that atheism and secular values are somehow… well, a bit more advanced than the old-fashioned religious ones. Though you may not always hear this view expressed in quite those terms, it is nevertheless implicit in more aspects of our daily lives than I, for one, am comfortable with.

For example: part of the myth of rational secularism involves the assertion that being secular is qualitatively different to being religious – that the denial of God permits a certain objectivity, a scientific impartiality not attainable for those who profess to believe in the invisible and unknowable. Hence our mainstream schools and universities are secular institutions, and religious affiliations are treated as special interests. Here at Sussex, as with many if not most other British universities, you can study International Relations, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Media, Politics, Anthropology, Philosophy, all the Sciences – but you can’t study religion. This systematic and institutionalised bias in favour of the secularist myth inculcates the identification of civilised modernity with secularism, reinforcing the linear conception of progressive human history with ‘us’ at the top, and believers a few rungs further down. This is a subtle kind of racism, of cultural arrogance, since it basically adheres to the view that our belief system is superior to all others, placing us in a unique position to observe and comment on everyone else.

In the media as well as in the university, the distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘rightwing’ is utterly meaningless with regard to the elevation of secularism to a higher moral plane. Even the Independent, which is hardly seen as a bastion of xenophobia and inter-cultural suspicion, recently published an interview with some “smart, articulate, beautifully dressed… brilliant, thoughtful… modern” Muslim women who, according to the writer, are far more representative of the wider “moderate, rational” Muslim community ignored by much of the media. These women all balked at the idea of wearing the veil, comparing it with “attracting attention in the wrong way, like a child." One woman said she finds it “bizarre that a woman who is educated or has a PhD finds it normal to be covered." OH MY GOD!! This article, though superficially a coherent and well-intentioned appeal to non-Muslims to recognise the happy face of Islam we don’t hear about too often, is in fact an appeal to our most basic prejudices – it’s saying: “Yes, there are a lot of basically backward traditions still in force in our society, but if you give these poor Muslims a decent education and teach them how to be rational like us, you’ll soon rid them of their silly attention-seeking habits. Look at these women here! You can’t even tell they’re Muslims, they’re so civilised and articulate!” But here’s a fun fact: you can wear a veil and be an intelligent, modern woman; the two things are not mutually exclusive as this writer would have us believe.

And this subtle prejudice is not only propagated in the media and promoted by the very structures of our education system; the secular fundamentalists are actively recruiting devotees on our very campus too. Just last year our university hosted a debate about the relative merits of religion and secularism at which the journalist Polly Toynbee (winner of the Islamic Human Rights Commission’s "Most Islamophobic media personality" award, 2004) propounded various provocative opinions which refused to engage in a meaningful debate with the other speaker, the Anglican Priest and Quaker Chaplain Paul Oestreicher, and basically amounted to a reinforcement of the mistaken belief that religion’s rightful place is in the past and secularism is synonymous with modernity and civilisation. (The fact that the whole debate took place in the Meeting House, which is both the university chaplaincy and the only place on campus providing the valuable service of coffee and tea for less than 50p – if that’s not contributing to our social wellbeing, I don’t know what is! – was probably lost on Toynbee) Once again, this view can only be described as cultural supremacism. If a fundamentalist is someone who cannot see or comprehend the alternative perspective, and expects to be able to subject all others to their own specific ideology, then ideologues like Toynbee are precisely that: the fundamentalist equivalents to the religious extremists they so despise.

Anyway, try not to get too alarmed by the frenzy of fear over ‘religious extremism’; instead be wary of the other fundamentalists in our midst. Secular superiority is a belief system like any other, and where an ideology claims objectivity there is all the more reason to treat it with suspicion.

Boring lecture

Education/Islamophobia

by Pia Muzaffar

this article was first published in The Badger 28/01/08, volume 18 issue 3

Many Muslims in Britain increasingly consider us an Islamophobic society – and our universities are by no means an exception.

Sussex Anthropology lecturer Filippo Osella was the first of three invited speakers to talk on Islamophobia to a crowded lecture theatre last week here at Sussex. Unlike recent outbursts demanding, as Martin Amis controversially did, that it is the Muslim community itself that needs to “get its house in order”, Osella redirected attention towards non-Muslim Britain.

He argued that although the current wave of Islamophobia is clearly unique in many ways, there is nevertheless a continuity in the way that the West has historically defined itself in opposition to its Islamic antithesis. Western civilisation projects onto a monolithic ‘Islam’ everything that it is not. Presently, this means that any form of political Islam is demonised as total anathema to secular society.

In this way, Osella pointed out, it is the secularists who get to define ‘proper’ spirituality. They define who is a ‘good Muslim’ (tolerant, apolitical, non-interfering), and who is a ‘bad Muslim’ (fundamentalist, traditional, political).

And this has crept into our educational institutions. It was only in 2006 that it was revealed that lecturers in Britain have been encouraged to spy on Muslim students. According to Osella, they are also being encouraged to run courses espousing a more ‘moderate’ Islam – ‘moderate’ being defined by the liberal establishment.

Academics have also been asked to conduct research on radicalism in specific Muslim communities which would involve supplying actual names and places to intelligence gathering agencies. And at Sussex, there was even talk of introducing an International Security programme. Though he was assured that such a study programme was in no way Islamophobic, upon enquiring as to what it might entail, Osella was told that a combination “with Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic” might be one possibility.

Such proposals are particularly resonant this week, after the Higher Education Minister Bill Rammell was reported on Tuesday as saying that there exists a “serious” threat of extremism on university campuses, with the younger generation being particularly “vulnerable” to radicalisation.

These claims have been tempered, however, by student groups and unions. A Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) spokesman pointed out that “no evidence” exists to suggests that students should become targets of suspicion. NUS President Gemma Tumelty, and the General Secretary of the University and College Union, Sally Hunt, both expressed concern that this government guidance could foster an atmosphere of mistrust between teaching staff and students.

One BSMS student present at the discussion on Islamophobia described how he, along with other Muslim students, had been singled out and warned against taking home any of the routinely used chemicals which could be used to manufacture explosives. He explained that they had been required to fill out reports detailing their use of such chemicals, and that their course coordinator had been visited and interviewed by two Special Branch intelligence officers.

Another student in attendance alleged that Sussex is one of the universities to have recently signed up to a government pilot scheme allowing certain students – particularly members of the Islamic Students Society – to be monitored for suspicious activities.

The second speaker, Assed Baig from the NUS Black Students Campaign, believed that such tactics would prove counterproductive. Turning the glare of the spotlight onto the Muslim community, he said, would not encourage integration. Instead it would create a feeling of victimisation. Drawing on the ‘good’ Muslim/ ‘bad’ Muslim polarisation, he also argued that the distinction currently rests on whether an individual agrees with the government line. “If I disagree with foreign policy, does that make me an extremist?”

This sense of victimisation was the subject elaborated upon by the third speaker, Seyfeddin Kara from the Islamic Human Rights Commission. He presented a recent study conducted by the IHRC on Muslim perceptions of media reporting in Britain. In addition to the fact that a significant majority of respondents believed much media to be Islamophobic or racist, the study also revealed that the more educated the respondent, the greater their perception of anti-Islamic discrimination.

This paralled Osella’s suggestion that the more sinister form of Islamophobia does not come from the typical ‘lay’ racism associated with tabloid hate-mongering, but rather from the liberal establishment. In these ‘higher’ circles, including academia, a consensus has appeared which unites both Left and Right in its assumptions about the conflict between Islam and modern, secular society.

It is undeniably paradoxical that institutions of higher learning, founded upon ideals of freedom of thought and expression, may be entering into suspect contracts with the government that would curtail these freedoms.

Kampung Dato, Sibu

These pictures were taken by Carl in my mum's home town, Sibu, in Sarawak. Carl's pictures are really awesome, look at www.carlbigmore.co.uk