You know the rules. Here’s the quote. After last week’s entry I’m running the risk of seeming as if I intend to use this gimmick as an outlet for all the Andrea Dworkin quotes that I find particularly apropos at the end of the week. I already have a running feature for that, but the fact is that other than fiction and material that I’m already transcribing for the Fair Use Repository, Dworkin’s most of what I’ve been reading for the past two weeks — in part as a result of a sometimes rather combative editing process over at WikiPedia:Andrea Dworkin, and in part because the stuff is nearly impossible to put down for long once you start reading parts of it. So rather than break the rules by picking up some item just to read it at the last minute to pick out another quote in the name of avoiding repetition, here we have some bus reading from earlier this afternoon: a passage from the Preface to the 1995 edition of Intercourse (first edition 1987).

My colleagues, of course, had been right; but their advice offended me. I have never written for a cowardly or passive or stupid reader, the precise characteristics of most reviewers–overeducated but functionally illiterate, members of a gang, a pack, who do their drive-by shootings in print and experience what they call the street at cocktail parties. I heard it onthe street, they say, meaning a penthouse closer to heaven. It is no accident that most of the books published in the last few years about the decline and fall of Anglo-European culture because of the polluting effect of women of all races and some men of color–and there are a slew of such books–have been written by white-boy journalists. Abandoning the J-school ethic of who, what, where, when, how and the discipline of Hemingway’s lean, masculine prose, they now try to answer why. That decline and fall, they say, is because talentless, uppity women infest literature; or because militant feminists are an obstacle to the prorape, prodominance art of talented living or dead men; or because the multicultural reader–likely to be female and/or not white–values Alice Walker and Toni Morrison above Aristotle and the Marquis de Sade. Hallelujah, I say.

Intercourse is a book that moves through the sexed world of dominance and submission. It moves in descending circles, not in a straight line, and as in a vortex each spiral goes down deeper. Its formal model is Dante’s Inferno; its lyrical debt is to Rimbaud; the equality it envisions is rooted in the dreams of women, silent generations, pioneer voices, lone rebels, and masses who agitated, demanded, cried out, broke laws, and even begged. The begging was a substitute for retaliatory violence: doing bodily harm back to those who use or injure you. I want women to be done with begging.

The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works. Men often react to women’s words–speaking and writing–as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men–control, violence, insult, contempt–that no threat seems empty.

Intercourse does not say, forgive me and love me. It does not say, I forgive you, I love you. For a woman writer to thrive (or, arguably, to survive) in these current hard times, forgiveness and love must be subtext. No. I say no.

Can a man read Intercourse? Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she uses language without its ever becoming decorative or pretty? Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she, the author, has a direct relationship to experience, ideas, literature, life, including fucking, without mediation–such that what she says and how she says it are not determined by boundaries men have set for her? Can a man read a woman’s work if it does not say what he already knows? Can a man let in a challenge not just to his dominance but to his cognition? And, specifically, am I saying that I know more than men about fucking? Yes, I am. Not just different: more and better, deeper and wider, the way anyone used knows the user.

Intercourse does not narrate my experience to measure it against Norman Mailer’s or D. H. Lawrence’s. The first-person is embedded in the way the book is built. I use Tolstoy, Kobo Abe, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Flaubert not as authorities but as examples. I use them; I cut and slie into them in order to exhibit them; but the authority behind the book–behind each and every choice–is mine. In formal terms, then, Intercourse is arrogant, cold, and remorseless. You, the reader, will not be looking at me, the girl; you will be looking at them. In Intercourse I created an intellectual and imaginative environment in which you can see them. The very fact that I usurp their place–make them my characters–lessens the unexamined authority that goes not with their art but with their gender. I love the literature these men created; but I will not live my life as if they are real and I am not. Nor will I tolerate the continuing assumption that they know more about women than we know about ourselves. And I do not believe that they know more about intercourse. Habits of deference can be broken, and it is up to writers to break them. Submission can be refused; and I refuse it.

Of course, men have read and do read Intercourse. Many like it and understand it. Some few have been thrilled by it–it suggests to them a new possibility of freedom, a new sexual ethic: and they do not want to be users. Some men respond to the radicalism of Intercourse: the ideas, the prose, the structure, the questions that both underlie and intentionally subvert meaning. But if one’s sexual experience has always and without exception been based on dominance–not only overt acts but also metaphysical and ontological assumptions–how can one read this book? The end of male dominance would mean–in the understanding of such a man–the end of sex. If one has eroticized a differential in power that allows for force as a natural and inevitable part of intercourse, how could one understand that this book does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape? Equality in the realm of sex is an antisexual idea if sex requires dominance in order to register as sensation. As said as I am to say it, the limits of the old Adam–and the material power he still has, especially in publishing and media–have set limits on the public discourse (by both men and women) about this book.

In general women get to say yea or nay to intercourse, which is taken to be a synonym for sex, echt sex. In this reductive brave new world, women like sex or we do not. We are loyal to sex or we are not. The range of emotions and ideas expressed by Tolstoy et al. is literally forbidden to contemporary women. Remorse, sadness, despair, alienation, obsession, fear, greed, hate–all of which men, especially male artists, express–are simple no votes for women. Compliance means yes; a simplistic rah-rah means yes; affirming the implicit right of men to get laid regardless of the consequences to women is a yes. Reacting against force or exploitation means no; affirming pornography and prostitution means yes. I like it is the standard for citizenship, and I want it pretty much exhausts the First Amendment’s meaning for women. Critical thought or deep feeling puts one into the Puritan camp, that hallucinated place of exile where women with complaints are dumped, after which we can be abandoned. Why–socially speaking–feed a woman you can’t fuck? Why fuck a woman who might ask questions let alone have a complex emotional life or a political idea? I refuse to tolerate this loyalty-oath approach to women and intercourse or women and sexuality or, more to the point, women and men. …

–Andrea Dworkin (1995), Preface to the 1995 edition of Intercourse, pp. vii-x.

This may help to shed some light, from a few different directions, on long-standing discussions on this site and elsewhere.

(Via Philobiblon (2006-02-13): Weep for Australia. Weep.)

There’s been some debate in the Ozzie parliament lately over abortion, mostly focusing on abortifacient drugs, and whether to approve the use of Mifepristone (RU-486) in particular. On Tuesday, MP Danna Vale decided that it was time that the real issue in this debate — how many Australians are Muslim and how many are Christian — got a hearing.

AUSTRALIA could become a Muslim nation within 50 years because we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence, a Government backbencher says.

The former minister Danna Vale is one of five Coalition women proposing an amendment to the private member’s bill that seeks to remove ministerial veto over abortion drugs such as RU486. At a news conference called by the five yesterday, she said it was important politicians considered the ramifications for the community and the nation we become in the future.

I have read ... comments by a certain imam from the Lakemba Mosque [who] actually said that Australia is going to be a Muslim nation in 50 years’ time, said Mrs Vale, MP for the southern Sydney seat of Hughes.

I didn’t believe him at the time. But ... look at the birthrates and you look at the fact that we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence by 100,000 abortions every year ... You multiply that by 50 years. That’s 5 million potential Australians we won’t have here.

… The Liberal member for the Sydney seat of Greenway, Louise Markus, said no one wants as many abortions as there are now. The other two women supporting the amendment are the South Australian Liberal Trish Draper and the Queensland National De-Anne Kelly.

— Stephanie Peatling, Sydney Morning Herald (2006-02-14): Abortion will lead to Muslim nation: MP

In an unexpected development, Ms. Vale, Ms. Markus, Ms. Draper, and Ms. Kelly. did not volunteer to bear the 5,000,000 potential [non-Muslim] Australians that they think it’s so overwhelmingly important to bring into the world.

But there’s always the advantage of sitting in Parliament: if you’re unable or unwilling to volunteer your own womb for the sake of the demographic cause, you can always volunteer other women’s wombs — whether the other women like it or not.

For example, by using bureaucratic red tape and parliamentary stall tactics to force women not to buy abortifacient drugs when they want them.

The Senate has already voted to remove the minister’s veto, but if the amendment succeeded, it would have to be returned to the Senate to be voted on again.

Debate on the bill will begin in the House of Representatives today. Jackie Kelly said she was confident her amendment would be successful.

Another amendment is being proposed by the Queensland Liberal Andrew Laming.

But members are understood to be concerned that the amendment would mean Parliament would be forced into a de facto debate on abortion every time an application was received.

— Stephanie Peatling, Sydney Morning Herald (2006-02-14): Abortion will lead to Muslim nation: MP

Nay-sayers might call that forced pregnancy; they might even cast aspersions on the high-minded public spiritedness of volunteering other women to bear the children you’re not willing to, and making them do it when they’re not willing to. But you could also think of it as a sort of Reproductive Eminent Domain — a sort of polite request that women who don’t want to be pregnant put aside their selfish interests and petty little lives for a while in the name of a Christian Australia. A request which will, of course, be enforced if necessary. All for the good of The People, of course.

Pro-choice feminism is the radical notion that a woman’s uterus is not public property.

Around the web in the past couple weeks. Some of the news that’s fit to link.

• Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-02-03): Petting =/= Popularity: A Shocking Look At The Sex Lives Of Our Children takes on professional anti-feminist Caitlin Flanagan (for background reading, see the profile in Ms.) and her latest foray into the teensploitation genre — a hand-wringing and voyeuristic article about a non-existent teenage oral sex craze amongst our Troubled Suburban Youth, and touches on feminism, amnesiac nostalgia, privileged suburban angst, and Judy Blume in the process.

  Thinking back on my own privileged adolescence, I can remember girls who performed oral sex on boys on a more or less casual basis, girls who denied rumors that they did the above, girls who did it with their boyfriends and related the experience the next morning with a mix of panic and excitement, girls who didn’t think it was a big deal, girls who thought it was a big deal, girls who talked about it loudly at lunchtime and did seductive poses with every potentially phallic food product in sight (including CapriSun straws and granola bars) but had no more than a vague idea what it actually involved, girls who thought it was the grossest thing ever, EVER, oh my God, girls who had no qualms about doing it (it in italics) but thought oral sex was unnatural, girls who tried to freak out self-consciously innocent girls like me by saying, Luke Lepinski is SO CUTE. Don’t you just want to put his DICK in your MOUTH? and then laughing like maniacs at my genuine bafflement, Christian girls who plugged their ears and shrieked if you tried to talk about any kind of genital-related program activity, even in the most abstract and theoretical language, girls who had heard you could get pregnant that way (and might have a cousin who knew someone who did,) and myself. My opinions on the matter were all based on my strong and growing aversion to boys, and were not particularly well-formed, nor did I have occasion to put them into practice. I recite this autobiographical litany as a way of illustrating the complex nature of that steady decline in morals called growing up, and to suggest that gnashing one’s teeth about the unexpected depravities of our formerly delicate rosebud-like daughters may not be the best response thereto. What is the best response? I don’t know, but Caitlin Flanagan is a bit too eager to put down Planned Parenthood for its attempts to give sane and sensible advice on the matter ….

  — Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-02-03): Petting =/= Popularity: A Shocking Look At The Sex Lives Of Our Children

  … and don’t miss the response to Flanagan’s closing remarks — an employment of the old Double Standard so overt and so uncritical that it leaves no avenues of criticism open other than something stodgy like rank sexism:

  Frankly, I’d rather have a daughter who gives out a few undeserved blowjobs of her own volition than a son who thinks sex is his right and privilege as a Hot-Blooded American Male. Oops, there I go slandering men with my insane expectation that they take responsibility for their own desires! Damn insidious radical feminist influence! What won’t it disfigure with its toxic fumes of seething, sulfurous hatred?

  — Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-02-03): Petting =/= Popularity: A Shocking Look At The Sex Lives Of Our Children

  Read the whole thing

• Sarah Goldstein at Broadsheet (2006-02-03): New hope in the fight against domestic violence gives a shout-out to a new program for rehabilitating men who batter women, called Resolve to Abolish Violence Everywhere. The plan? Stop focusing on anger management, and start tackling male entitlement:

  What’s exciting about this approach to combating domestic abuse is that it tackles the institutionalization of male dominance, looking at the offender’s action within a larger system of violence. Women’s eNews reports, Staffers [in Austin] say this program assumes that violence arises from a decision based on deeply-held beliefs of male dominance, not a flash of uncontrollable emotion. Whereas most anger management classes are just three or four weeks long, this program works with the offender for an entire year after his release.

  — Sarah Goldstein at Broadsheet (2006-02-03): New hope in the fight against domestic violence

  Of course, there’s no magic bullet for ending battery, and this program, like any others, has limitations to worry about (like the institutional limitations imposed on any program run by cops, or the fact that it only catches men once they’ve already tortured one or more women to the point that it reached the criminal justice system). But insofar as there are going to be court-mandated rehabilitation programs, this is certainly a step forward, and I wish them the best.

  Read the whole thing.

• Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy (2006-02-07): To Be Hot And Nuts points out a story from this month’s Prospect that will make you want to tear your hair out and then run out in a blind rage and bury the entire psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex under a library of Women and Madness and the collected works of Thomas Szasz.

  But then tragedy strikes. The drug that works also makes her fat. This a horror the doctors find intolerable. Her beauty is destroyed. So they take her off that drug because in a patriarchy a hot girl cannot be fat. So Nia immediately goes nuts again because the new drug, though it does not make her fat, also doesn't work. She is nuts again, but at least she's still a babe. Whew. That was close.

  But she is so nuts that, after a month of hell, doctors reluctantly put her back on the fat drug. The crazy part is that Nia doesn't give a crap about being fat. She's happy as a clam to get rid of the voices. Yet the doctors assume that, because she isn't crying herself to sleep every night over her lost beauty, she isn't really getting well at all. Any 17-year-old in her right mind would be bulimic and wanna slice herself up with razors under these circumstances, right?

  — Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy (2006-02-07): To Be Hot And Nuts

  Selections from the first five or six comments: Oh give me a fucking break, I don't know what to do besides shout obscenities. Good fucking god, This makes me so mad I can't see straight. That last paragraph … is insulting in about 10 THOUSAND different ways and makes me want to slap the authors and Nia's dr's repeatedly about the head and face, etc. That’s just about right.

  Read the whole damn thing. But only on an empty stomach. Then write a letter to the editor.

• Amanda at Pandagon (2006-02-02): Vacuums, internalized sexism and yes, that invisibility of privilege looks at the politics of housework, as one of the arenas of in which anti-feminists love to point out how women themselves are deputized as the primary enforcers of sexist standards. Shockingly, she finds that this looks more like classic male privilege than it does some kind of self-imposed drudgery that women have ended up with by being naturally the Fairer Sex.

  You see this sort of thing a lot, where women are judged by a different standard than men, but the appointed judges are technically other women, so the whole thing can be written off as women being weird instead of women trying to adapt to a patriarchal system. That way, not only can men benefit from the thing women are supposed to do to fit into a standard, they have the added bonus of acting like they are simply above such female nonsense. In the case of housework, men can benefit from having a clean home without either working or appearing so uncool as to care if the house is clean, since the work is done by invisible female hands.

  … It's true–make-up, shoes, exercise, dieting, the whole routine is developed by and enforced by women while being sneered at all too often by the very men the entire routine is developed to benefit. The complaint is not so much that women do all these things, of course. It's that men might accidentally be exposed to these things; in the good old days, I suppose, women worked harder at the conspiracy to shield men from having to perceive their own privilege. (For a really great example of this, read Pink Think by Lynn Peril–she excerpts an advice book to women that suggests that women should rise before their husbands to do their make-up and preserve the illusion that they never look any different.)

  … That's the basic argument behind choice feminism, and it's whipped out to explain away every instance of women's second class status, from breast implants to domestic service. And that's the argument that EricP is resorting to when explaining away the difference between expectations on men and women for level of cleanliness. It's easy to look at how women are expected to police ourselves for adhering to a patriachal standard and say that it's our fault. But it's not the cops that are the ones to look at when the laws themselves are suspect.

  — Amanda at Pandagon (2006-02-02): Vacuums, internalized sexism and yes, that invisibility of privilege

  Read the whole thing. I’d also like to add a note from Andrea Dworkin that I came across the same day that I read Amanda’s post. This is from In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson, in Life and Death (41–50):

  While race-hate is expressed through forced segregation, woman-hate is expressed through forced closeness, which makes punishment swift, easy, and sure. In private, women often empathize with one another, across race and class, because their experiences with men are so much the same. But in public, including on juries, women rarely dare.

  –Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death, pp. 49–50

  Maybe one way to gloss the essential goal of feminism is to create a platform from which that private empathy can erupt into public solidarity and action.

• BB at Den of the Biting Beaver (2006-02-10): Friday Fun with Sitemeter offers a guided tour to the kind of Google searches that you get when you run a radical feminist anti-pornography website.

• Roderick at Austro-Athenian Empire (2006-02-03): Tarzan’s Burden mentions Hollywood popcult’s mutilation of the character of Tarzan, and points to an interesting four-part essay by F. X. Blisard on race relations in the Tarzan novels and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ work in general — fairly enlightened for Burroughs' era, it turns out, and far superior to Hollywood's treatment. Read the whole thing.

• Ken Gregg (2006-02-08) at CLASSical Liberalism: It Usually Begins With… takes another look at Jules Verne, his literary accomplishments, his prescience, the way his politics have been excised from bowdlerized English translations until very recently, and what those politics were (in short, a mixed bag):

  Verne’s novels have contrary trends: support for national liberation movements such as the Irish and Polish, but also a strong pacifist streak; paternalism toward colonial peoples, but a hatred of slavery and imperialism (especially British); sympathy for utopian experiments, but resentment toward state power; affirmation of free enterprise, but assaults on big capitalism (especially American); a celebration of loyalty and community, but sympathy for militant individualism.

  — Ken Gregg (2006-02-08) at CLASSical Liberalism: It Usually Begins With…

  Read the whole thing.

• media girl (2006-02-10): Spying on Americans is for kids! takes a look at the NSA’s ongoing attempts at cute, furry cartoon outreach to children, which is either a very funny comment on bureaucratic rationality or else a daring new form of avant-garde surrealist theater.

• The Dominion (2006-01-16): CBC’s true colors discovers that the government-owned CBC is solicitous of the party in power in the government to the point of altering their logo to match the party color scheme. Surprised?

• Paganarchy (2006-02-04): Serious Organised Crime? Ha Ha Ha! — a squad of clowns takes to the street to protest restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly around Parliament, and a copper stops them from entering Parliament to talk with their MPs:

  Our first port of call was to visit our MPs in the House Of Commons. Just through the security gate and whoa — the duty sergeant stopped us from going in. Alas, we were deemed not dignified enough by a copper calling himself the chief arbiter of style.

  As opposed to the grave dignity of a copper who has appointed himself the chief arbiter of style for the House of Commons and taken it upon himself to make sure the dress of visitors is up to his sartorial standards.

  Read the whole thing.

• The North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists posts links to left-anarchist debate over the iterative Five Year Plan participatory economics.

• Kevin Carson at the UnCapitalist Journal (2005-09-22): What Can Bosses Know? looks at mutualist anarchism, worker self-management, and the knowledge problems that afflict corporate as well as government bureaucracies. (Yeah, I know it’s from last September. But it’s good, and I just found it in the past couple weeks. Also, you may find it relevant in connection with the debate over Five Year Planning by iterated collective bargaining between the deputies of several massive federations in an appropriately participatory bureaucratic forum.)

  As Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3) of the Movement of the Libertarian Left said somewhere (I can’t find it–little help?) organizational inefficiency starts when you have one supervisor taking orders from another supervisor: that is, the point at which hierarchy replaces market contracting.

  … The central problem is that, since the costs of tracking the results of individual decisions becomes prohibitively expensive in a large organization, market incentives must be replaced by administrative ones. Milton Friedman pointed out long ago that people do a better job of spending money on themselves than on other people, and do better spending their own money than other people’s money. That’s the standard, and correct, libertarian argument for why government is so inefficient. It’s spending other people’s money on other people; and unlike a private firm not only can it not go out of business for inefficiency, it gets rewarded with more money. Well, the very same incentive problems apply to the decision-maker in a corporate hierarchy. He’s a steward of other people’s money, and the costs and benefits of any decision he makes can be determined only badly, if at all. Unlike a self-employed actor whose relations with others are mediated by the market, he is motivated by purely administrative incentives.

  — Kevin Carson at the UnCapitalist Journal (2005-09-22): What Can Bosses Know?

• Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek (2006-02-09): We Don’t Make Anything Anymore takes on the factory protectionists over the state of industry in America. The worriers like to complain that we don’t make anything anymore. America is being hollowed out. Soon we’re going to be left doing one another’s laundry. Boy, will we be poor then. The problem is an old one: the heavy-industry hand-wringers are measuring the inputs, not the outputs. When you look at the stuff actually being produced, rather than the number of people employed or the size of the pile of resources invested in producing it, you’ll find that we’re making more stuff than ever. (I’d add that there are lots of reasons to worry about what happens to heavy-industry workers as they lose their jobs. And that Roberts’ summary and selective swipes at the unions are unwarranted. But the basic point is well-taken. Our aims should not be to prop up an elaborate industrial make-work program.)

• David Friedman, Ideas (2006-02-09): Unschooling: The Advantage of the Real World: One point raised in comments on my recent unschooling post was that you sometimes have to do things you don’t like, a lesson we can teach our children by making them study things they are not currently interested in studying. It is an interesting point, and I think reflects a serious error. Friedman challenges would-be educators to help students expose themselves to the natural consequences of effort and fortitude, rather than imposing make-work punishments and rewards on them in order to teach them a lesson where the incentives bear no natural relation to the task at hand. Read the whole thing.

• Tim Bray, ongoing (2006-02-10) asks, What Do GNU and Linux Mean? in a free software world where the user experience is (praise the Good) further and further removed from the technical wotsits of the kernel, where Firefox, OpenOffice, and GNU software provide an increasingly standard software environment, and where the choice between GNU/OpenSolaris and GNU/Linux is going to be a strictly technical choice with basically no impact on the end-user environment? What should you even call what’s emerging? Tim suggests some deliberate provocations: So you've got the combination of a Solaris or Linux kernel with a mish-mosh of GNU, Mozilla, OpenOffice and other random software, and calling it Linux or Solaris is misleading. I think Sun could legally ship something like this under the name GNU/Unix. Which would be concise, descriptive, accurate, and funny. (Because GNU stands for Gnu's Not Unix and Solaris, after all, is.) I think maybe we should just call it GNU, and encourage ordinary users to leave the worries about what comes after the slash to people who have reasons to care about kernels.

• August Pollak (2006-02-08): As a white guy, did you just throw up right now? and Mikhaela Reed (2006-02-09): The so-called conservative Doonesbury … mention Chris Muir’s imaginary Black friend and the excellent opportunity that having one provides white cartoonists to lecture African-Americans about how they should think of themselves in early 21st century America. A Touch of Ego offers some background context on Muir and Day By Day. Amanda at Pandagon (2006-02-08) calls for fixes to help Chris Muir write a funny strip. My favorite repair job is from Ampersand at Alas (2006-02-09).

• Claire Wolfe (2006-02-13): Back from the meditation workshop reviews the good, the bad, and the ugly of her two-week long meditation retreat in silence. One of the good things about the retreat was the distance it allowed from the hot air of professional blowhards that passes for News and Views these days: The omnipresent Information Flow also became irrelevant. I worried at times about what was happening to Steve Kubby and Cory Maye, but could have cared less about the monotonous, inevitable sturm und drang that passes for Vital News. Funny, too. They call it news, but the same rot was being broadcast and podcast and web-posted when I left and when I returned. Nothing new about the news. … Time to live. Time to think deeply, rather than think in quick brain bytes between rushed emails and frequent checks of LewRockwell.com, Rational Review, Google News, and TCF. Read the whole thing.

• Carnival is two weeks from today. In honor of the liturgical occasion, be sure to read up on the latest weblog Carnivals. In particular, the inaugural editions of the Radical Women of Color Carnival and the Big Fat Carnival are up at Reappropriate and Alas, A Blog respectively. Not to mention the eighth Carnival of the Feminists at Gendergeek. Enjoy!

If there is no God, then She cannot answer our prayers, even if we make them with all our heart. That seems intuitive. (Maybe God doesn’t answer prayers even if She does exist; but we can be sure that She doesn’t if there is no God.) Call this the God-Dependence of Prayer.

As it happens, I don’t pray. This is an empirically verifiable fact. Call this the Impiety Thesis.

But if we suppose that both the Impiety Thesis and the God-Dependence of Prayer are true, is that enough to prove that God does exist? That would seem awkward; especially for the impious, since it’s their very impiety that proves the existence of God. cabrutus (2006-02-09) and Scottish Nous (2006-02-12) think that it might. Let’s start with the following propositional constants:

G =def. God exists
P =def. I pray
A =def. God answers my prayers

We can formalize GDP by saying If God does not exist, then it’s not the case that God answers my prayers if I pray, i.e., ~G !!!@@e2;2020;2019; ~(P !!!@@e2;2020;2019; A). We can formalize IT by saying It’s not the case that I pray, i.e., ~P. Now here’s a formally valid argument from those two premises to prove that G, i.e., that God does exist:

1. ~G !!!@@e2;2020;2019; ~(P !!!@@e2;2020;2019; A) (given: GDP)
2. ~P (given: IT)
3. ~P !!!@@e2;2c6;a8; A (logical addition 2)
4. P !!!@@e2;2020;2019; A (material implication 3)
5. ~~(P !!!@@e2;2020;2019; A) (double negation 4)
6. ~~G (modus tollens 1, 5)
7. G (double negation 6)

Therefore, God exists. Q.E.D., hosanna, and amen.

I’m pointing this argument out not because I think it’s convincing, but rather because Scott and cabrutus each pointed it out as a puzzle. I think the puzzle is extremely easy, and that it simply wouldn’t exist for someone who hasn’t been drilled in the canons of 20th century propositional logic. (Which is not to say that there’s something deeply wrong about the canons of 20th century propositional logic, just that the training tends to have a few odd side-effects.) So here’s the solution, as I see it: we need to use the symbol !!!@@e2;2020;2019; to mean material implication (p!!!@@e2;2020;2019;q =def ~(p & ~q)) if we are going to make the step from premise 3 to premise 4. But if we’re consistently using the symbol !!!@@e2;2020;2019; to mean material implication, then premise 1 (GDP) is false, or rather, it’s false wherever premise 2 (IT) is true. But didn’t we agree above that the God-Dependence of Prayer seems intuitively true (whether I pray or not)? Yes, but that’s because we were thinking about what it intuitively means, before we formalize it into premise 1 using truth-functional logical operators. The following is intuitively plausible whether I pray or not:

If God does not exist, then it’s not the case that if I pray, my prayers will be answered.

The following, however, is not:

~G !!!@@e2;2020;2019; ~(P !!!@@e2;2020;2019; A)

… because that’s logically equivalent to:

~G !!!@@e2;2020;2019; (P & ~A)

… i.e., If God does not exist, then it’s true both that I pray to God and that my prayers are not answered. Material implication, by definition, can only be false when the antecedent is true and the consequent is false, so denying a material implication is the same as affirming, among other things, the antecedent. But there is no reason to believe that if God does not exist, then it’s true both that I pray to God and that my prayers are not answered unless I do, in fact, pray to God. If I don’t, then I pray to God materially implies that my prayers are answered is true–as is I pray to God materially implies that my prayers are not answered–a false statement materially implies all statements. (There is some reason to believe If it’s true both that God does not exist and I pray to God, then my prayers are not answered, i.e. (~G & P) !!!@@e2;2020;2019; ~A. But that’s logically equivalent to ~G !!!@@e2;2020;2019; (P !!!@@e2;2020;2019; ~A), not ~G !!!@@e2;2020;2019; ~(P !!!@@e2;2020;2019; A).)

The problem here is that we take GDP to be plausible because when we say If God does not exist, then it’s not the case that if I pray, God will answer my prayers, we’re reading the if-then nested in the consequent to express something like a logical entailment, or a causal connection, or a counterfactual conditional, all of which can fail to be true without the antecedent being true. (The counterfactual if I were the King of England, I would be very poor is false; if I were the King of England, I would be very rich. But I am the King of England does materially imply I am very poor; I am the King of England is false, and a false statement materially implies all other statements.) The solution, then, is simply to point out that if !!!@@e2;2020;2019; is being consistently used to express material implication, then 1 is false, and only seemed to be true because we formalized GDP incorrectly. And if !!!@@e2;2020;2019; is not being used consistently to express material implication, then the attempt to infer 6 from 1 and 5 commits a fallacy of equivocation.

I point this out because I think the fact that it even seemed like an interesting puzzle to modern philosophers is itself interesting. I suspect that if you walked someone through the argument who hasn’t been drilled in introductory modern logic, or who doesn’t remember the drilling very well (those of you who haven’t, or don’t, can correct me if I’m wrong), they’d object at the step from 3 to 4 (from It’s true that I don’t pray or that God answers my prayers to If I pray then God answers my prayers), and the only justification we could give is by drawing out a truth-table for material implication and asking them to accept, on stipulation, that that’s what we mean by If-then. That’s because material implication is a logically useful notion, but (deliberately!) leaves out a lot of what’s meant when we say If this is true, then something else is true. The danger is that we have a distinct tendency to start by meaning what we mean by an ordinary language if-then, and end up formalizing it with material implication, and then shaking our head at the results.

As a historical side note, back in 1894, Lewis Carroll (yes, that Lewis Carroll) wrote an article on logic for Mind, in which he pointed out A Logical Paradox involved in nested hypotheticals of the form If C is true, then if A is true, B is not true (C !!!@@e2;2020;2019; (A !!!@@e2;2020;2019; ~B)), when combined with a second premise that If A is true, B is true (A !!!@@e2;2020;2019; B). You can read through the paradox (and accompanying vignette about three barbers) yourself; the reason I mention it here is because modern logicians would tend to be baffled that anyone ever found this puzzling at all: Carroll’s paradox is easily dissolved if you interpret hypotheticals according to the modern notion of material implication. In particular, Carroll suggests the following two very interesting questions in connection with his argument: Can a Hypothetical, whose protasis is false, be regarded as legitimate? and Are two Hypotheticals, of the forms If A then B and If A then not-B, compatible? Most modern logicians would instinctively answer Yes; in fact, it’s always true, and Yes, as long as A is false, because if you read the If A then B as material implication (as modern logicians have been drilled to do), then If A then B is just logically equivalent to It’s not the case that both A is true and B is false, which can be true (indeed, always is true) when A is false, and, as long as A is false, is also perfectly compatible with It’s not the case that both A is true and B is not false. Once you admit both of these two answers, Carroll’s paradox disappears, apparently as nothing more than a relic of an obsolete method of logic and its primitive unclarity about implication. (Carroll, of course, could not be blamed, since the notion of material implication wasn’t current in English mathematical logic until it was introduced by Bertrand Russell a decade or so later, after Carroll had already shuffled off this mortal coil.)

But — to come back to the point, somewhat — solving one technical puzzle is no guarantee that you’ve solved them all, and in this case it turns out that training in the solution that makes it instinctively easy to dismiss the Carroll paradox (based on A !!!@@e2;2020;2019; (B !!!@@e2;2020;2019; ~C)), makes it instinctively hard to see why you should dismiss the Impiety Paradox here (based on A !!!@@e2;2020;2019; ~(B !!!@@e2;2020;2019; C)). Hammers are good for pounding in nails, but there is always the danger that they will make everything look like a nail, when in fact the world is full of strange and un-nail-ish things. In light of that, it may be a lot less easy to dismiss logical paradoxes as mere obsolete artefacts of primitive logical notation than some philosophers in the last century thought. It is certainly the case that Carroll’s questions about Hypotheticals remain very interesting questions after all this time, in spite of the supposed march of technical progress in logic:

Several very interesting questions suggest themselves in connexion with this point, such as

Can a Hypothetical, whose protasis is false, be regarded as legitimate?

Are two Hypotheticals, of the forms If A then B and If A then not-B, compatible?

What difference in meaning, if any, exists between the following Propositions?

1. A, B, C, cannot be all true at once;
2. If C and A are true, B is not true;
3. If C is true, then, if A is true, B is not true;
4. If A is true, then, if C is true, B is not true.

–Lewis Carroll (1894), A Logical Paradox, ¶Â¶ 49–56

You know the rules. Here’s the quote. This is from Andrea Dworkin’s Preface to the British edition of Right-wing Women (1983). It’s reprinted for American readers in Letters from a War Zone, pp. 185-194. I re-read the essay (along with a great deal of Andrea Dworkin’s stuff) in the process of following citations and culling material for expansions to WikiPedia: Andrea Dworkin — partly on its own merits, and partly because I’ve had to spend some time on it dealing with crusading anti-Dworkin editor / vandals. This is unrelated to anything that was under discussion in the article, but it caught my eye as I was flipping through, so I slowed down to re-read it in full:

The political concepts of Right and Left could not have originated in England or the United States; they come out of the specificity of the French experience. They were born in the chaos of the first fully modern revolution, the French Revolution, in reaction to which all Europe subsequently redefined itself. As a direct result of the French Revolution, the political face of Europe changed and so did the political discourse of Europeans. One fundamental change was the formal division of values, parties, and programs into Right and Left–modern alliances and allegiances emerged, heralded by new, modern categories of organized political thought. What had started in France’s National Assembly as perhaps an expedient seating arrangement from right to left became a nearly metaphysical political construction that swept Western political consciousness and practice.

In part this astonishing development was accomplished through the extreme reaction against the French Revolution embodied especially in vitriolic denunciations of it by politicians in England and elsewhere committed to monarchy, the class system, and the values implicit in feudalism. Their arguments against the French Revolution and in behalf of monarchy form the basis for modern right-wing politics, or conservatism. The principles of organized conservatism, in social, economic, and moral values, were enunciated in a great body of reactionary polemic, most instrumentally in the English Whig Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Written in 1789 before the ascendancy of the Jacobins–and therefore not in response to the Terror or to Jacobin ideological absolutism–Burke’s Reflections is suffused with fury at the audacity of the Revolution itself because this revolution uniquely insisted that political freedom required some measure of civil, economic, and social equality. The linking of freedom with equality philosophically or programmatically remains anathema to conservatives today. Freedom, according to Burke, required hierarchy and order. That was his enduring theme.

I flatter myself, Burke wrote, that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty. Manly liberty is bold, not effeminate or timorous (following a dictionary definition of the adjective manly). Manly liberty (following Burke) has a king. Manly liberty is authoritarian: the authority of the king–his sovereignty–presumably guarantees the liberty of everyone else by arcane analogy. Moral liberty is the worship of God and property, especially as they merge in the institutional church. Moral liberty means respect for the authority of God and king, especially as it manifests in feudal hierarchy. Regulated liberty is limited liberty: whateveri s left over once the king is obeyed, God is worshipped, property is respected, hierarchy is honored, and the taxes or tributes that support all these institutions are paid. The liberty Burke loved particularly depended on the willingness of persons not just to accept but to love the social circumstances into which they were born: To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and mankind. The French rabble had noticeably violated this first principle of public affections.

To Burke, history showed that monarchy and the rights of Englishmen were completely intertwined so that the one required the other. Because certain rights had been exercised under monarchy, Burke held that monarchy was essential to the exercise of those rights. England had no proof, according to Burke, that rights could exist and be exercised without monarchy. Burke indicted political theorists who claimed that there were natural rights of men that superseded in importance the rights of existing governments. These theorists have wrought under-ground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. They have rights of men. Against these there can be no prescription… I have nothing to say to the clumsy subtility of their political metaphysicks. In Burke’s more agile metaphysics, hereditary rights were transmitted through a hereditary crown because they had been before and so would continue to be. Burke provided no basis for evaluating the quality or fairness of the rights of the little platoon we belong to in society as opposed to the rights of other little platoons: to admit such a necessity would not be loving our little platoon enough. The hereditary crown, Burke suggests, restrains dictatorship because it gives the king obeisance without making him fight for it. It also inhibits civil conflict over who the ruler will be. This is as close as Burke gets to a substantive explanation of why rights and monarchy are inextricably linked.

–Andrea Dworkin (1983), Preface to the British Edition of Right-wing Women, reprinted in Letters from a War Zone, 187–189.

For some similar points, partly influenced by Dworkin’s comments here and elsewhere in the preface, see GT 2005-02-03: By George, I think he’s got it!