… we live in an age where we see a resurgence of the idea that some people are fundamentally less intelligent than others

Resurgence? Beyond Ms Power’s collegiate circle-jerk, it’s never gone away. But what’s the justification for the idea that we are all equally intelligent?

That’s the sinister bit: there isn’t one. In fact, the lack of rationality in the argument is seen as a positive virtue:

The work of Jacques Rancière, who never tires of repeating his assertion that equality is not just something to be fought for, but something to be presupposed, is, for me, one of the most important ideas of the past decade… the axiomatic assertion of the equality of intelligence… On the basis of this assumption…

(emphasis added)

Presupposition, rather than argument, is “one of the most important ideas of the past decade”. The reason why this might be attractive to some could be their inability to argue at all. Take this, for example:

The reason why we can relatively quickly understand complex arguments and formulae that have taken very clever people a long time to work out lends credence to Rancière’s insight that, at base, nothing is in principle impossible to understand and that everyone has the potential to understand anything.

No, it doesn’t. It demonstrates that it’s much harder to have an original insight than to communicate it. This is the difference between exploring uncharted territory and travelling with a map. In fact, there’s almost complete general ignorance about “complex arguments and formulae that have taken very clever people a long time to work out”. Rigorous study of “crunchy” subjects is the province of a vanishingly small minority.

But if we are to ignore the need for rational thought and merely “assert” the things we’d like to believe, whose assertions win? Those of the best connected, the most conformist, the most aggressive and violent?

What if we find public policy is based on incorrect assertions?

Oh. I’ve just described the opening decade of the twenty first century.

It would be good to prevent the vast suffering and countless violent deaths caused by predation.  There is therefore one reason to think that it would be instrumentally good if  predatory animal species were to become extinct and be replaced by new herbivorous species, provided that this could occur without ecological upheaval involving more harm than would be prevented by the end of predation.  The claim that existing animal species are sacred or irreplaceable is subverted by the moral irrelevance of the criteria for individuating animal species.  I am therefore inclined to embrace the heretical conclusion that we have reason to desire the extinction of all carnivorous species, and I await the usual fate of heretics when this article is opened to comment.

McMahan disposes of some trivial objections to the idea (playing God is wrong, it’s none of our business what wild animals do). He also shows some understanding of evolutionary biology:

What, after all, are species?  According to Darwin, they “are merely artificial combinations made for convenience.”  They are collections of individuals distinguished by biologists that shade into one another over time and sometimes blur together even among contemporaneous individuals, as in the case of ring species.  There are no universally agreed criteria for their individuation.  In practice, the most commonly invoked criterion is the capacity for interbreeding, yet this is well known to be imperfect and to entail intransitivities of classification when applied to ring species.

The problem is, what he doesn’t understand is that predation is life. At least, it is complex life. Even the origin of eucaryotic cells (cells that consist of membranes enclosing a bunch of stuff) was likely the result of predation (pdf):

ABSTRACT—Predation, in the broad sense of an organism killing another organism for nutritional purposes, isprobably as old as life itself and has originated many times during the history of life. Although little of the beginningsis caught in the fossil record, observations in the rock record and theoretical considerations suggest that predationplayed a crucial role in some of the major transitions in evolution. The origin of eukaryotic cells, poorly constrainedto about 2.7 Ga by geochemical evidence, was most likely the ultimate result of predation among prokaryotes.Multicellularity (or syncytiality), as a means of acquiring larger size, is visible in the fossil record soon after 2 Gaand is likely to have been mainly a response to selective pressure from predation among protists. The appearance ofmobile predators on bacteria and protists may date back as far as 2 Ga or it may be not much older than theCambrian explosion, or about 600 Ma. The combined indications from the decline of stromatolites and thediversification of acritarchs, however, suggest that such predation may have begun around 1 Ga. The Cambrianexplosion, culminating around 550 Ma, represents the transition from simple, mostly microbial, ecosystems to oneswith complex food webs and second- and higher-order consumers. Macrophagous predators were involved from thebeginning, but it is not clear whether they originated in the plankton or in the benthos. Although predation was adecisive selective force in the Cambrian explosion, it was a shaper rather than a trigger of this evolutionary event.

In other words, though he has some idea of some of the understanding we have gained from evolutionary biology, it’s a trivial and shallow understanding, not unlike that of a young-earth creationist. Instead of the entangled, messy, constantly adapting reality of life, the professor seems to think of it as a steady-state phenomenon, or at least capable of becoming so, with just herbivores contentedly grazing on the unchanging prairies and in the antediluvian forests. He doesn’t mention omnivores, bizarrely, so we don’t know whether these are to be exterminated or converted to veganism. And how about bacteria and viruses? Are they predators?

I suppose that as new predators evolved, the professor would wish to see them killed too – so I’m not sure the professor has succeeded in his desire to think up an idea that would eliminate suffering: we’d be exterminating entire classes of animals and plants for ever.

And let’s hope that steady-state lasts for ever, because if there were any rapid environmental change, we’d see mass extinction without the selective pressure of predation, that engine of rapid evolutionary change.

This is an increasingly severe problem. Without a reasonable knowledge of biology and physics, you’re unlikely to have anything interesting to say about the things that have traditionally been the province of philosophy and religion.

(See also this related piece at Counting Cats).

AVIVA-Berlin: How do you feel about the accusation that you have perhaps taken an anti-Semitic position concerning your statement about the Hamas and the Hezbollah as progressive social movements? (On: http://radicalarchives.org/2010/03/28/jbutler-on-hamas-hezbollah-israel-lobby/) Does that bother you more as a philosopher or on a personal level?
Judith Butler: Unfortunately, that clip was cut short and did not include all of my response. What I actually said was that although groups like Hamas and Hezbollah should be described as left movements, that like all left movements, one has to choose which ones one supports and which ones one refuses. They are “left” in the sense that they oppose colonialism and imperialism, but their tactics are not ones that I would ever condone. I have never supported either group, and my very public affiliation with a politics of non-violence would make it impossible for me to support them. The editing of my response was obviously an effort to distort my view, and I am very sorry that the distortion has been able to circulate as it has. Thank you for giving me the chance to clarify what I actually said and what I have always thought.

I’m starting to find this sort of thing rather charming. There’s only one movement today that seeks to establish a genuine, non-metaphoric, empire, colonising the whole world in the process. It’s lovely to see Judith say, of two of the most prominent members of this movement, that they “oppose colonialism and imperialism”.

And look! She’s channelling the strapline of Howard the Duck:

As for vulnerability: it seems clear to me that in being named “a boy” or “a girl” we are vulnerable to the language that others use to describe us. We are brought into the world by being named by others, and that primary vulnerability is there, before we have any power to name ourselves. Do we ever escape the social interpellations of others? Do we ever escape the social imprint? Or do we struggle with and against that legacy we never chose?

Lovely, lovely, lovely.

The piece is educational too. Setting aside for a moment the struggle for the basic human right to be born spontaneously, into a vacuum, without parents or language, she explains an important concept to her German interviewer:

So if we fight for the rights of gay people to walk the street freely, we have to realize first that some significant number of those people are also in jeopardy because of anti-immigrant violence – this is what we call “double jeopardy” in English.

Yes, “double jeopardy” is what we call – in English – facing two different types of threat. Double, as in two; jeopardy, as in danger. See?

Does the professor genuinely not know that double jeopardy means being tried twice in court on the same set of evidence (and is widely prohibited around the world), or is this performance art? Does it matter? Can it affect our delight at her suggestion that war might be prevented by dance?

Of course not. For people of my age – which is roughly the same as that of Butler, these Cretaceous feminists are as comforting, and irrelevant as a long-lost ball of darning wool: a reminder of one’s childhood, completely useless today.

Let’s end with the sight of her wibbling away about overcoming “otherness”, contentedly oblivious to the irony that her entire life seems devoted to creating a sense of “otherness” and the denial of human commonality – a commonality that makes it completely proper, a duty even, to apply the same standards to everyone, regardless of race, colour or gender, even though Ms Butler thinks of such universalism as racist.

AVIVA-Berlin: In an interview with Jill Stauffer you said that getting to know “the other” is connected to the challenge of reacting non-violently. But to what extent is it possible to understand the other? Is it important to admit a certain “opacity”?
Judith Butler: Yes, we have to move away from the idea of “knowing” as mastery. Perhaps there is a way to think about “acknowledging” the vulnerability of the other, the equal rights of the other, and to pursue the question, “who are you?”. The question is a direct address, a way of entering into relation, but it is not the same as trying to possess the other through knowledge or relegating the “Other” to some permanent site of unknowability.

Judy, baby, the only person trying to relegate the “Other” to permanent unknowability is you.

Plagiarism is fairly common in politics. In 2008, there was an example in Canada:

Stephen Harper has dismissed a second round of allegations that he plagiarized parts of an old speech — this one delivered by a former premier.

The Liberals on Friday accused the federal Conservative leader of stealing ideas from a speech given more than five years ago by former Ontario premier Mike Harris.

The allegations came the same week a Harper staffer resigned for copying sections of a 2003 speech delivered by former Australian prime minister John Howard.

“I think, in the other case, it was clear that large portions of [Howard's] speech had been used and not attributed. That, obviously, is not acceptable and I’m very disappointed that that occurred,” Harper said Saturday in Yarmouth, N.S.

“In this case, we’re talking about a couple of sentences of fairly standard political rhetoric,” the federal Conservative leader added.

If you, a couple of years later, happened to see a side-by-side video of Harper’s speech and the John Howard speech it had copied, what would you think? That it was another case of plagiarism, or that it was proof our Lizard Overlords were giving scripts to conservative politicians around the world?

If you’re Craig Murray, it’s the latter. In a post titled The New World Order At Work, he posted this video. He had seen the clip at a site run by someone with the pseudonym “Scunnert Nation” who, in the comments, displayed a perfect conspiratorial mindset. The obvious explanation? Hah! Too easy:

“Society today is paedophile, that is the problem. So, people easily fall into it.”

And why is it paedophile? Let me guess..

“When sexuality is trivialized, it’s clear that this is going to affect all cases. Homosexuality is such a case. Before, the homosexual wasn’t spoken of. He was discriminated against.

“When we begin to say they have rights, rights to demonstrate publicly, pretty soon, we’ll find the rights of paedophiles,” he said.

In what might have been more of a personal confession than intended, he explained how this comes about:

“We know that the adolescent is spontaneously homosexual. Boys play with boys, girls play with girls,” he said. “If there is no proper guidance, this sticks.”

While he condemned the paedophile priest scandals, he maintained it was right for church authorities not to have contacted the police:

… he said internal punishment of priests guilty of abuse was sufficient and that police should not be involved.

“For the church to go and accuse its own sons would be a little strange,” he said.

Oh, and he’s a holocaust denier (the only proper context for the use of the word “denier”):

In 2003, he argued that only 1 million Jews died in the Holocaust, though a few years later he recanted. Experts say 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust.

Last year, he outraged Jewish groups in Brazil by telling a magazine that “more Catholics than Jews died in the Holocaust, but this isn’t known because the Jews control the world’s media.”

Including as you’ll have guessed, this blog.

But how about this world-beating drivel?

One of my methods of research is to utilise The Akashic Records to access the lives of the people I write about in my novels. I used this resource extensively in the writing of TO DEFY A KING and I wanted to share some of these sessions with my readers.

What are the Akashic Records? I asked my very good friend and Akashic Consultant Alison King for the short version and here is what she says:

When people think, feel or speak, it creates a subtle electrical charge. For example, the brain’s electrical activity (such as when thinking) can be measured by ECG equipment (in fact, it’s a measurement of whether we’re alive or dead).

The electrical vibrations we create all the time are discharged into the environment, where they are impressed onto a subatomic substance which is only just starting to come to the edge of scientific awareness, (think string theory and the environment that would suggest). An analogy of this process might be voice recording techniques, where the vibrations of the voice are impressed upon susceptible material, such as magnetic tape or digital receptor. Once the Akashic recording has been made, it can be read in a similar way to listening to a voice recording or watching a movie, with similar facilities to fast forward or rewind. The huge difference is, the Akashic Record is an organic structure, rather than 21st century technology; it therefore requires an organic reader, such as a human being, who can attune sensitively to the vibrations required. A mundane example of this would be, walking into a room, and being able to pick up on an atmosphere without knowing of any preceding events that have taken place there.

King John, this research tells us, wasn’t very nice. That’s the popular view of John, and it’s unlikely to be accurate.