The rhetoric of evasion revisited: strange logic in the gender segregation debate

The other day I was bemoaning the absence of Madeleine Bunting from the pages of The Guardian. Regular readers of Normblog will remember Our Maddy of the Sorrows (© Norman Geras circa 2005) as the leading exponent of a certain kind of world-weary, anti-Enlightenment 'liberalism', which often included a perverse desire to understand (what Norm, in her honour, dubbed ‘mbunderstanding’) the actions of religious fundamentalists.

But hey, who needs Madeleine Bunting when we’ve still got Priyamvada Gopal? Like Bunting, Gopal, a lecturer in English at Cambridge University, has a reputation for writing Guardian columns in which she ties herself in rhetorical knots defending the indefensible. Norm wrote about her efforts here, here, here, here, here and here, while my own humble attempts to understand Gopalian logic can be found here, here and here.

It was only a matter of time, surely, before Ms Gopal weighed into the debate about gender segregation in British universities. If you’ve ever wondered how a secular, liberal feminist might end up supporting the right of religious fundamentalists to segregate men and women in a place of higher learning, then you need look no further than her article about the issue, published earlier this week, not in the Guardian for a change, but (perhaps surprisingly) by the New Humanist.

Actually, the article is really an object lesson in how to avoid engaging with a contentious issue. Rather than taking on the arguments of the anti-segregation campaigners, or suggesting counter-arguments, Gopal uses some familiar rhetorical strategies to ensure that she doesn’t have to, which include:

Delegitimising the opposition

Gopal takes up a lot of space in this short piece, and certainly expends a great deal of linguistic energy, portraying those who campaigned against gender segregation in a negative light. She argues that the campaign has taken place in a context ‘heavily shaped by an intolerant Western 'liberalism’ passing itself off as ‘secular’, ‘enlightened’ and more knowing-than-thou.’ One wonders who she is talking about here: who exactly are these liberals who are somehow also ‘intolerant’ (how does that work?), who are only pretending to be secular and enlightened (so what are they really: religious, and living in the Dark Ages?), and who claim superior knowledge? Can we have some names, perhaps?

Having erected this straw man, Gopal moves on to specific accusations against those involved in the recent campaign. Her main target is Student Rights, which we learn is ‘an offshoot of the bullishly paternalist Euro-American think tank, the Henry Jackson Society’ and a ‘reactionary and opportunistic formation’ which has ‘cynically’ seized on this issue. Elsewhere she describes their campaign as ‘aggressive’, though she doesn’t substantiate this accusation. In fact, Student Rights was only one of a number of organisations taking part in the campaign, and hardly played a leading role, but it makes a very convenient scapegoat, especially as it can be tarnished with the brush of being both pro-American and right-wing. Never mind that many of those arguing against the ruling by Universities UK were non-western feminists. Later in the article, Gopal characterises the anti-segregationists as ‘so-called "muscular liberals" (generally, in fact, deeply conservative white males with a commitment to the idea that West is Best)’.  This will come as a surprise to Maryam Namazie and the other left-wing, non-white, female activists who played a leading role in the campaign. And once again there’s that completely unfounded suggestion that liberals who oppose religious fundamentalism are somehow patronising and superior, when there’s not an iota of evidence to support this.

By falsely linking her opponents with everything that her intended audience can be assumed to be against – America, conservatism, a certain kind of sexist masculinity (‘bullish…muscular…paternalist’) – Gopal seeks to undermine their arguments without ever having to confront them.

Changing the subject

Rather than take on the arguments of the anti-segregation campaigners, Gopal hurriedly moves the discussion on to a different set of issues. She claims that ‘the group’ – presumably she means Student Rights – ‘has not addressed greater gendered problems on campus, such as the pay gap or sexual violence’ and has been ‘silent about far more widespread forms of gender and economic segregation including the private, often single-gender schools for the wealthy’.  But Student Rights was set up explicitly to combat extremism on campus, not to tackle these other issues. Nevertheless, many of the other activists involved in the current campaign do have a good record of fighting against wider institutional sexism and inequality. But even if they didn’t, would that mean they weren’t allowed to discuss this example of gender discrimination? It's rather like criticising Rosa Parks for highlighting the issue of racial segregation on buses in the American South in the 1950s, rather than focusing her attention on the 'real' issues of black poverty and inequality. It’s a strange and self-serving kind of logic. 

Off-limits to outsiders

Gopal’s third rhetorical avoidance strategy is to suggest that those who campaign against gender segregation don’t really have the right to do so. Having established her own cultural street cred (‘I grew up in a context where gender segregation in many public spaces is common’) she adds: ‘It did not take the proverbial "decent, nice, liberal" Europeans to get us to ask what segregation meant in both ideological and institutional terms’. It sounds like Gopal is saying that western liberals and feminists should keep quiet about discrimination within minority communities. She bolsters this by characterising criticism of cultural practices – such as segregating men and women – as ‘selective attacks on our communities’. Elsewhere, Gopal accuses the anti-segregation lobby of ‘targeting’ Islamic student groups – when of course, these are the only groups that are actually enforcing segregation. Somewhere, buried in the dense and tortuous final paragraph of her article, is an appeal to women from minority communities to ‘express a dissenting view’ from religious traditionalists. At least I think that’s what she’s saying. But it's so wrapped up in qualifying clauses, and tangled up in the message to outsiders to mind their own business, that it gets lost in the thickening rhetorical fog.

Gopal’s smearing of the anti-segregation campaigners as a bunch of condescending white male conservatives is given the lie by two other contributions to the debate that appeared this week – both  written by women, one a secular white feminist, the other a liberal Muslim. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown offered her critique of the pro-segregation ruling here and celebrated its defeat here. Ophelia Benson takes Pryamvada Gopal’s arguments apart here and here. Ophelia ends with this appeal to Gopal:

Liberal universalists are not your enemy. We’re not the ones who think you should be at home instead of teaching at Cambridge … Why… are you ignoring Maryam Namazie and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Abhishek Phadnis and focusing on Student Rights who had nothing to do with the protest against gender segregation? Why are you ignoring the very possibility of international solidarity, and the reality of it that is so conspicuous in everything Maryam does? What the hell do you think that accomplishes? Why not drop the fake accusations of imperialism and just join Maryam and the rest?

Why not, indeed.

Looking for common ground on abortion

I've been working up to writing a post about abortion, but I've been held back, mainly by my own conflicted feelings about the issue, but also (to be honest) by a fear of alienating those with whom I usually find myself in agreement. I've been mulling it over since President Obama's speech at Notre Dame University, in which he sought to identify common ground between the 'pro-life' and 'pro-choice' camps, arguing (rightly, I think) that nobody is actually 'pro-abortion' and suggesting that both sides should work together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. I've also been reading Sean Michael Winters' book, Left at the Altar: How the Democrats lost the Catholics and how the Catholics can save the Democrats, which I hope to discuss more fully another time, and which (among other things) charts the ways in which the issue has driven a wedge between the Democratic Party and their 'natural' constituency among Catholic voters.

Even so, I wasn't going to add my modest contribution to the debate, until the shocking murder of Dr. George Tiller at the weekend, and the reaction to it by people on both sides of this most divisive of issues. The shooting of Tiller - in church, in front of his wife and other members of the congregation - defies superlatives of outrage: it was a cold-blooded act of domestic terrorism, a sacrilege, even (if you believe in such things). Those who encourage such actions by their rhetoric, or seek to minimise their horror, should look to their consciences. Winters argues that the use by anti-abortion campaigners of the 'sanctity of life' argument would be more convincing if they were equally outraged by the death penalty. How much more should they condemn murder in the name of religion?

However, I think it would be a huge mistake to conclude that Tiller's murder means Obama's attempt to find a middle position on the issue is foolhardy, though some on both sides have sought to dismiss it as such. After the Notre Dame speech we saw his valiant effort scorned by some pro-life commentators, and in today's Guardian, it's treated with equal disdain by Sara Paretsky, speaking for the other side. I've been an avid fan of Paretsky's Chicago-based crime novels, though they did become rather predictable after a while: something of the suspense was lost when you realised it was always going to be capitalism that was ultimately to blame. But I think her column today, which employs specious arguments and rhetorical sleight-of-hand, demonstrates that it's not only anti-abortionists who stand in the way of mutual understanding.

I have no quarrel with the title of Paretsky's piece - 'Terror in the name of Jesus' - as I think it's important to give things their rightful name: and Tiller's murder was as much an act of terrorism as the actions of Islamist extremists. But the article's sub-heading, whether the author's fault or that of an attention-seeking subeditor, is unnecessarily confrontational, suggesting that this event 'underlines that there is no common ground with anti-abortion zealots'. This is a red herring: it's not with the extremists who firebomb clinics that Obama is hoping to find points of agreement, but with the majority of Americans who polls tell us are against abortion. 

After an opening paragraph in which Paretsky points out that the killing of Dr Tiller was the climax of a long campaign of violence against him and his clinic, she begins her second paragraph with this sentence: 'The National Council of Catholic Bishops, the National Right to Life Committee, Operation Rescue, and other groups opposed to women's reproductive health and privacy are almost all headed by men.' Maybe the piece has been heavily edited, but this reference to the gender of those who disagree with her is a complete non sequitur. And the claim that all of these groups are motivated by a hostility to women is tendentious in the extreme. Paretsky then compounds this rhetorical sloppiness by going on to enumerate the violent acts committed 'by followers of these and other groups'. Is she really saying that murder and arson can be blamed on 'followers' of the Catholic Bishops' Council? That's like saying that the violent protests in this country against Jerry Springer: The Opera were carried out by 'followers' of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It's a dishonest attempt to pin the most heinous crimes of extreme anti-abortion militants on the thousands of ordinary religious people (and many non-religious people) who have reservations about abortion.

A couple of paragraphs later, Paretsky has this to say about Obama's approach to the issue:

In Barack Obama's commencement speech at Notre Dame – preceded by protests from Roman Catholic bishops because he is pro-choice – the president urged pro-choicers to find common ground with anti-abortion zealots. I do not know how you find common ground with someone who says you deserve to die. For such people, women are not as deserving of rights as the foetuses they may carry .

Once again, this is specious and underhand. Yes, Obama's speech was preceeded by protests from some Catholics, but many others supported the invitation and it received a warm response from its mostly Catholic audience. And again, he didn't say anything about finding common ground with 'zealots', but with people of good faith on both sides. Ramping up the rhetoric, Paretsky accuses abortion opponents of believing that women 'deserve to die'. As for the last sentence, it's completely illogical. Most thoughtful people would concede that the abortion issue is a difficult one because it entails a clash of competing rights: the supposed right of the foetus / unborn child to life, and the apparent right of a woman to control her own fertility. To suggest that all pro-lifers think women have no rights in the matter is as misleading as dismissing pro-choicers as not caring about the rights of the unborn.

Towards the end of the article Paretsky says she hopes that the death of Dr Tiller 'begins a real search for common ground', though she is not optimistic. It has to be said that her own style of argumentation hardly helps, and serves to demonstrate that pro-choice campaigners can be as one-sided and irrational (if not as lethal) as some of their pro-life opponents.

As proof that the two sides can find common ground, here are pro-choice secular liberal Keith Olbermann and pro-life Catholic conservative Andrew Sullivan sharing their horror at Tiller's death and the extremist rhetoric that encourages such crimes:

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A second helping of Fish

I'm not sure I can be bothered with this, and those with a better philosophical training will probably make a better job of it, but here goes anyway:

Stanley Fish has written a sequel to his casuistical article in defence of 'faith'. As in the first instalment (and like the shifty rhetoric of his inspiration, Terry Eagleton), Fish's argument once again twists and turns, refusing to be tied down to supporting an actual position, and firing scatter-gun insults at assorted secularists and rationalists. Reduced to its bare bones, his argument seems to be that the 'evidence' against religion put forward by Dawkins, Hitchens et al can't be taken seriously, not because it's faulty, but because:

Evidence, understood as something that can be pointed to, is never an independent feature of the world. Rather, evidence comes into view (or doesn’t) in the light of assumptions ... that produce the field of inquiry in the context of which (and only in the context of which) something can appear as evidence.

This is the standard post-modernist, anti-realist position: there are no facts 'out there', only different ways of looking at the world, shaped by the assumptions and world-views of those who hold them. As I've noted before, this relativism enables you to trash the views of those you disagree with, not by disproving their arguments, but by showing that their opinions are influenced by the wrong kind of world-view, as Fish does in this paragraph:

But suppose, you think (in the manner of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault) that the idea of the individual author is a myth that emerges alongside the valorization of property and property rights so central to Enlightenment thought? Suppose you believe that the so-called author is not the source of the words to which he signs his name, but is instead merely a site transversed by meanings neither he nor any other so-called “individual” originates? 

This is the familiar po-mo 'guilt by association' move again: Enlightenment notions of individual freedom and autonomy are discredited because they had the misfortune to come to the fore at the same time as nasty capitalist individualism. Note the weak, unsupported causality of 'emerges alongside', and the reductivism involved in claiming that the author is 'merely' a 'site traversed by meanings'. Of course, Fish would never do anything as straightforward as state that this is his view of the world: 'I am not affirming this view', he goes on, 'I am just observing that there are many who hold it' . (Of course you are.)

So faith can't be subjected to the cold light of reason, since 'reason' is just another kind of faith (neat). The way Fish goes on to develop this argument is both simplistic in the extreme, and at the same time wrapped up in the kind of post-modern verbal trickery that makes it look as though he's saying something clever. Rather than responding to his critics by arguing for the validity of religion's claims, Fish sidesteps their arguments by casting doubt on all notions of objective reality. Falling back on philosophical relativism is a strange way of defending belief systems that claim to hold the key to Absolute Truth, and the anti-rational evasions of Eagleton and Fish discredit the very cause they claim to defend.

Update

As before, Fish's rhetorical contortions have sparked a lively debate - see the comments below, and over at Butterflies and Wheels, in addition to a mention of my post, you can find a link to Brian Leiter's dissection of Fish's philosophical incompetence. And see here for John Casey's analysis of Fish's equivocations.

...and there's more from Norm here.