Samizdata

Nature seems rather inventive in the creation of parasites. Virtually every species on the planet has several and they can be specialized to the point where a single species is almost an eco-system unto itself.

Life requires energy and there are quite a number of ways to get it. There are primary producers that take solar or chemical energy and use it to create biomass; there are species which eat the primary producers and others which in turn eat them. The most common terms for these are plants, herbivores and carnivores. There are animals which feed on dead plants or animals and there are animals which have discovered the trick of extracting energy from their host without quite killing it.

Parasitism has a number of advantages to a species. The host does all the work. Since the parasite does not kill the host like a carnivore it can continue feeding for so long as the host lives. It is clear the host would be better off without the parasite in the vast majority of cases, but since all of its neighbors are also hosts, it has no particular relative disadvantage to them.

As in any other biological niche, there will be competition. If a parasite extracts too little from its host, another which takes more will produce more offspring and take over. On the other hand, if it extracts too much, the host will weaken and a competitor who takes just a little bit less will again be able to extract more energy and produce more offspring.

In economics we call this the Laffer curve.

In all the acres of commentary in the press and elsewhere on those cartoons (death toll at time of writing, five, which is getting beyond a joke), I have not seen anyone mention this point, so I will get it in before I get bored of the whole affair.

There are two distinct reasons given in hadith why an image of Muhammad might be forbidden.

First, there is a general ban on images of living things as an attempt to rival God’s creative power. That can not be what is at issue here, since it is generally ignored outside mosques, even in Saudi Arabia (though the Taliban appear to have gone more or less the whole hog, to use about the least appropriate possible metaphor).

Second, reinforced by the prophet’s deathbed injunction not to set up a shrine or mosque over his grave, there’s the idea that religious worship through icons of saints, in the manner of the christian churches familiar to the early Muslims, constitutes an idolatry, or worship of the saint rather than God directly. So images of the prophet are banned in Islam because they may be revered idolatrously.

So the objection to the cartoons cannot really be founded in the Islamic image-ban. They are clearly neither idolatry nor invitations to it. On the contrary, the insistance that a mocking representation amounts to a gross insult to the prophet is much more like idolatry in that sense: a demand that the man be revered as incapable of representation as God.

Is what is really happening that the ‘insult’ is actually felt by individual Muslims (either at first hand, or in reaction to hearsay)? Those who feel themselves outraged are themselves threatened by the mockery, but wrap themselves in religiosity as a defence. In effect they are setting themselves up in the prophet’s shoes, attributing to him either primitive notions of honour that his disavowal of a shrine rather suggests he had surpassed, or God-like equivalence with the religion itself.

Now, remind me, who was insulting Islam?

There seems to be a lot of it about at the moment, as the late British comic writer and broadcaster Spike Milligan might have put it. “It” being atheism. The biologist Richard Dawkins, known in some quarters as “Darwin’s Rottweiler”, takes aim at religion in a current television series on Britain’s Channel 4 station. And only a few weeks ago I watched a programme on BBC 2 with Jonathan Miller, praising the tradition of skepticsm and outright atheism.

What is going on? We live at a time when our post-Enlightenment civilisation is threatened by religious fundamentalism in the guise of radical Islam. It seemed for a while after 9/11 to be bad form to make harsh attacks on religion per se but now it appears some restraints are coming off.

Of course this may only apply to Britain. In the United States, notwithstanding the theoretical separation of religion and state, it is, as Salman Rushdie has said, all but impossible for any declared atheist to hold down a public office more senior than that of a dog-catcher. This may of course change in time. Such things sometimes move in cycles.

“If you’re determined to be altruistic about it, the only way you can be of any good to others is for you to be self-sufficient. The biggest burdens in a crisis are those who were so concerned about the welfare of everyone else that they never provided for themselves.”

Harry Browne, How You Can Profit From the Coming Devaluation, pp. 199-200, Arlington House Publishers, Westport, Connecticut. I also recommend this classic by Browne.

Mick Hume has me worried, not for the first time. If I want to be gently scared, much rather a challenging column than a horror film (generally much less alarming than, and approximately as soporific as, the Shopping Channel).

He is describing Spiked!’s political position:-

We stand on the left as it was originally named, after those who stood on that side of the National Assembly during the French Revolution to champion reason, science, liberty and the secular values of the Enlightenment. We don’t want to return to the past, but to see those gains of humanity defended and developed in the changing context of the twenty-first century.

Well that certainly sounds attractive. Except for the word “left”. I have been defining myself as right-wing, by default, for 30 years. Any adherence to policies promoting human freedom (from atheisim to legalising cannabis to banning torture) out the conventional Left have always seemed to me adventitious, adopted only as markers of difference from reactionary traditionalists, not springing from principle. The basic principle, of subordinating individual lives to wiser-than-thou ruling class&#8212and catering to the velleity of the mob&#8212was always repulsive. Better identify, then, with the limited, pessimistic, ambition of the Right and find both a space to live and scope for pragmatic arguments for liberty.

The truth is, of course, the Left-Right division never made sense. It ought to be politics for the simple-minded, who can think only in one dimension. But everywhere serious, bright people are mentally enslaved by it.

My guess is Mr Hume has had a mirror of my experience: he has thought of himself as opposed to repulsive “right-wing” things throughout his life, and therefore is comfortable being Left, which I could never be. An acquaintance on The Salisbury Review once described me as having gone so far right to have come out the other side and being “practically a communist”—but I don’t feel it. Red flags (red ties even, Mr Bush) make me shudder.

The truth is, of course, that the rationalists on Spiked! and the rationalists on Samizdata are both too sentimental to abandon the political labels they have had imposed on them and have grown up with. A bit of explicit redefinition of those terms, which we indulge ourselves with, will not help us.

The point of politics, and therefore of political labels, is not to explain the world, but change it. Meanwhile the utterly unsentimental are doing just that, by appeal to popular sentiment, and by changing the language implicitly. They do not worry about coherence or clarity of definition, because social reality is defined in institutional power, and in the popular stories that make up “common sense”. It is not what we call ourselves that matters. It is what other people call us—and whether they can be persuaded to notice us at all.

Wanted: A new banner.