A coherent and cogent explanation of the growth of belief in creationism by Timothy Burke over on Cliopatra.

“One tentative hypothesis that requires thinking in rich and subtle ways about the history of the United States over the last century is this I’d offer is this: evolution and creation science have become over many decades symbolic compressions of much wider, more complex and more difficult to articulate social and cultural cleavages. They’re containers for a wide variety of resentments, conflicts, fears and misrecognitions. In this reading, you have to learn to look below the surface of the ocean for the rest of the iceberg.”

Also in today’s Times (unfortunately needing a subscription if you are outside the UK), an attempt to explain why more people in Britain say they believe in ghosts.
A sample:

“Psychologically, the death of others is a highly emotionally, challenging experience,” he [Philip Corr, a psychologist at the University of Wales Swansea]says.
“The belief in ghosts and religion in general may well have a strong Darwinian basis in natural selection. Individuals who had coping strategies, albeit irrational ones such as believing in the existence of spirits, might have been better able to deal with these negative health consequences. So we should not be surprised to find the widespread acceptance of such beliefs that protect us against the realisation that death is inevitable and final.”

I was interested in both of these because I’ve been recently musing on a claim that a fundamental turning point in intellectual discussions – when religion was forced on to the defensive, as the position that had to be fought rather than the automatic belief – came in John Stuart Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy of 1865.

Berman says: “In a discussion of atheism, Hobbes had asked: ‘Upon what confidence dare any man, deliberately I say, oppose the omnipotent?’ Mill had the confidence to do this ‘on the acknowledged principle of logic and of morality’, and he did so openly and boldly and with devastating effect … He broke a spell and … opened up a new irreligious era”.*

This site appears to some degree to share this view. (And there’s a solid exploration of Mill the philosopher here.)

I’m trying to decide if Berman was right, at least about this being a tipping point, and about whether we are still going forward or indeed in recent years, at least in Britain and Australia, the two countries with which I am most familiar, we have at some times gone backwards, or indeed are going so. Certainly the academic in The Times is happy to proclaim his atheism, but I think most news sources are careful not to address the issue, although if you dig deeply enough you’ll find an underlying assumption of atheism.

It makes sense for newspapers no doubt, to avoid offending readers (and many still run lists of church services, weekly columns from religious figures etc), but is it good for public discourse to dodge the issue?

*From D. Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell, London, Routledge, 1990, p. 237.

Apparently for Dr Johnson, women writing poetry enacted a “tribadic lust” by forcibly raping the female muse.

… I diagnose an overactive, and undersatisfied, imagination.

Complaints about the dangers of poetry for women go back a long way. In 1589 George Puttenham worried about the “poesies and devises of Ladies and Gentlewomen-makers, whom we would not have too precise poets lest with their shrewd wits, when they were married they might become a little too fantastical wives”.

(From Subjectivity and Women’s Poetry in Early Modern England, L. McGrath, Ashgate, 2002, Aldershot, p. 4)

But if you’re still interested in Dr Johnson – and I have been looking forward to reading Norma Clarke’s Dr Johnson’s Women – I’d recommmend a visit to his house, which is just down the road from me. It is a remarkable survivor run on a volunteer basis – they need your support!

After posting a couple of days ago on some lesser-known Byzantine empresses, I thought I had to put together something on my favourite, Theodora, wife(and spine-stiffener) to Justinian.

I’ve found for her some wonderful resources on the web, most notably Justinian, Theodora and Procopius, “a web directory about 6th-century Byzantium and its greatest historian”. It includes a complete text, with a commentary to which you can add, of Procopius’s Secret History, so called because he wrote it for posthumous publication, while in the meantime writing more or less sycophantic stuff for earlier consumption.

There’s an excellent introductory biography here and the famous Ravenna mosaic portraits.

I’ve posted elsewhere about how certain sorts of women attract certain sorts of sexual slanders, and Justinian as the powerful empress who might have originally been an actress was open to the hottest accusations that antiquity could come up with, which was pretty hot indeed. Gibbon, of course, had to repeat them in his Rise and Fall, but did so in the classic “scholarly” way. In the text he wrote: “Her murmurs, her pleasures, and her arts must be veiled in the obscurity of a learned language.” His footnotes, in Greek, revealed all.

As for the spine-stiffening, well that’s why she’s my favourite empress. After the five-day Nika revolt in 532AD, and the proclamation of Hypatius as emperor in Byzantium, Procopius (no friend of hers), quotes her as saying as Justinian and all of the couriers, locked in the palace, plan to flee:

“As to whether it is wrong for a woman to put herself forward among men or show daring where others are faltering, I do not think that the present crisis allows us to consider whether we should hold one view or another.
“For when a cause is in the utmost peril there seems to be only one best course–to make the very best of the immediate situation. I hold that now if ever flight is inexpedient even if it brings safety.
“When a man has once been born into the light it is inevitable that he should also meet death. But for an emperor to become a fugitive is a thing not to be endured . . .
“If you wish to flee to safety, emperor, it can easily be done. We have money in abundance; yonder is the sea; here are the ships.
“However . . . as for me, I hold with the old saying that royalty makes a fine winding sheet'”

They stayed, and re-established control. There was a massacre of the other side. Of course.

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greyhound, originally uploaded by natalieben.

(or thereabouts)… and as a reward, I offer you a lovely greyhound, thanks to Scribbling Woman, and the Victorians.
It goes to show that there’s nothing new about “novelty” books. Last year it was Eats, Shoots & Leaves; what will it be this year?

Today, 25 November, is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

“By resolution 54/134 of 17 December 1999, the General Assembly designated 25 November as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and invited governments, international organizations and NGOs to organize activities designated to raise public awareness of the problem on that day. Women’s activists have marked 25 November as a day against violence since 1981. This date came from the brutal assassination in 1961, of the three Mirabal sisters, political activists in the Dominican Republic, on orders of Dominican ruler Rafael Trujillo (1930-1961).”

From this UN site, where there are more links and reports.

Browsing around the topic, I found the BBC has a sensible-looking advice site on domestic violence here.

The Home Office says two women a week on average are killed by their partners, and on average a woman is assaulted 35 times before she calls police.

I was having a conversation recently where someone said: “is it really two a week? You never hear about them.”

If you want to find the murders in newspapers look in the “in brief” columns of the national papers on Mondays. You’ll usually find a paragraph or two saying “The body of a woman was found in a house in XXX. A man aged x is helping police with their enquiries.” (The stories only make it into the papers on Monday when there’s little other news.)

To the theatre last night for Becket.

The reviews were far from good, and it is a flawed production, but still I thought a powerful one. The play, by Jean Anouilh, works well in places but not in others (Becket seems to go in the second act from embracing God to being angry at Him, without a transitional scene). And, while this translation by Jeremy Sams might work in a “modern dress” production, it grates horribly with the entirely traditional staging: “I see you’re a man I can do business with”, says Henry early on.

But it is in places very funny and played for laughs, particularly the strongly anti-Church scenes, and some of the political manouevres (although the audience seemed disinclined last night to be amused). (The script is not, however, very female-friendly, with Henry’s wife and mother mere caricatures.)

It could be very easily slanted into an anti-war, anti-abuse-of-power vehicle that commented on recent events (as with Iphigenia at Aulis at the National – a fine production); I wonder why it wasn’t?

But Dougray Scott as Becket is really spectacular, strong, coherent, and utterly believable. Jasper Britton is good as Henry in spoiled brat mode, but works rather less well as tortured soul. In the final “whipping” scene he really looks like a drama student miming agony, sad to say.