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Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Value of the Printed Word

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

In the book of Genesis Adam works the garden of Eden, maintaining it for God. He lives a blissful, perfectly righteous and innocent life, albeit a lonely one. So God makes him a suitable partner in Eve. Adam and Eve have it all. They have thousands of trees from which to eat, harmless animals to co-inhabit the beautiful garden with, and no shame or evil. Eve is then tempted by the Serpent to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Traditionally most people look at this story as representing the folly of mankind. But was Adam not a slave to God in that garden? A slave with limited knowledge and thus limited ability to make decisions for himself? Did the serpent not tempt humankind into a wold filled with knowledge and free will? Likewise, in Greek mythology the hero Prometheus is condemned to eternal torture because he stole the knowledge of fire from Zeus and gave it to mankind. Again a mythical character gave the world knowledge and was punished. After reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book Infidel I realized that she too has been punished for the transmission of vital knowledge. This is a brief outline of her story and its relation to knowledge and power.

Childhood

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Somalia. During her childhood and young adult life her family would move from Somalia to Saudi Arabia, to Ethiopia, and then to Kenya. Although her father was a rather liberal political activist (by Somalian standards) she was raised under strict Sharia law, which led to a tormenting youth. Her genitals were mutilated by female circumcision, she was not allowed outside of the house without a male, her sexuality belonged to the head of her family, she went through an unwanted arranged marriage, and she suffered the humiliation of losing her virginity on marriage night – the penis of a man was violently forced into her sewn-shut vagina. She had no freedom and was subject to do all of the cleaning and cooking that her brother did not have to do, simply because he was male. If she refused chores, or spoke out of line, she was beaten. On one such occasion she disobeyed her Ma’alim- whom her mother had hired to teach her more about the Quran – by locking herself in her room. The Ma’alim came back later and whipped her with a sharp stick, ending the assault with the smashing of her head into a wall, cracking her skull. The next morning she was in too much pain to do chores so her mother beat her. Several days later, in much pain, her head had swollen. When taken to the hospital for immediate surgery the doctors said that if she had not received surgery that day then she would have surely died. At school she learned only Islam, math, the Quran, and “all the evil things Jews have done and plan to do against the Muslims” (47 Hirsi Ali). One of her teachers even beat her. Suffice to say, her childhood was violent and lacked freedom, most of which was due to strict Sharia law. Childhoods like hers were common among most other children she knew.

Religious Control of Knowledge

In her childhood Ali was taught nothing outside of Islam; everything she knew was viewed through a fundamentalist Muslim mindset. It is clear that the clerics and Imams had control over what she read. This type of religious control of knowledge has been around since the start of religion. It is no wonder that the development of the printing press brought about the banning of books by religious institutions. The first example of religious censorship of the printed word came in 1517 when Pope Leo X condemned Martin Luther’s Ninety Five Theses (15 Foerstel). Then, in 1564 the Papacy set into motion its Index Librorum Prohibitorum, defining books which Catholics were not allowed to read nor print (15 Foerstel). It has progressed into 1989 when Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding for publishing The Satanic Verses because Ayatolla Khomeini of Iran put a one million dollar bounty out to anyone who killed him. Most recently, Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion was nearly banned in Turkey after Harun Yahya filed a complaint that it was insulting to Islam and Sherry Jones’ novel The Jewel of Medina was dropped by publishers Random House – the same company that published the Satanic Verses – for fear of violent Muslim reactions.

The banning of books in developing countries is an effective means of controlling knowledge because these countries lack a robust information society full of newspapers, magazines, television, and the internet. How could a young girl like a Ayaan Hirsi Ali gain any new knowledge if she had no way of obtaining it? The reading of books leads to new insights, ideas, and opinions. It expands the mind to think outside of narrow mindsets. That is, of course, if one is reading books with a view that is not within their dominant meaning structure. The knowledge gained through reading leads to freedom, both philosophically and in real life situations. Daniel Dennet describes this acquisition of freedom by getting his readers to imagine a straight line traveling across a page. This line represents time. If you have no new knowledge your line will continue straight, but as you gain knowledge new lines branch off of the main line. It is now your choice which line you want to take. As more knowledge is attained more branches emerge, thus leading to more choices, until your world of freedom looks like an immense tree with intertwining branches of possibility.

Escape to Freedom

In her young teens Hirsi Ali would finally be presented with new branches of knowledge when she attended a school in Kenya that had a library full of books written in English.
“Once I had learned to read English I discovered the school library. If we were good, we were allowed to take books home… We began with Nancy Drew adventures, stories of pluck and independence. There was Enid Blighton, the Secret Seven, The Famous Five: tales of freedom, adventure, of equality between boys and girls, trust, and friendship” (64 Hirsi Ali).
This started a new path in her life – “An entire world of Western ideas began to take shape” (69 Hirsi Ali). She started to become interested in experiencing the same romance, equality, and adventure she found embedded in her ragged paperbacks.
“All of these books, even the trashy ones, carried with them ideas – races were equal, women were equal to men – and concepts of freedom, struggle, and adventure that were new to me” (69 Hirsi Ali).

As she progressed into early adulthood Hirsi Ali would start to rebel and disobey her mom. She went to cinemas and experienced new food. She even secretly married a man she liked. Her marriage was short lived as her father soon after arranged a marriage with a man he had met only for several minutes. He was a Somali from Canada who she was set to marry in a weeks time. She was utterly disgusted by her new husband to be. After a short while he moved back to Canada and left her money for her flight to join him there. Instead of a direct flight she stayed a few nights in Frankfurt, Germany with relatives. She went out alone and roamed the streets – something she was never allowed to do back home. She walked without a man at her side, without other males calling her names, and without the fear of being called a bad Muslim. And she could go anywhere she wanted without restraint…she was free.

“I felt as though I had been thrown into another world, calm and orderly, as in the novels I’d read and certain films, but somehow I’d never really believed them before” (185 Hirsi Ali).

People had always told her that the rest of the world was dirty and filled with violence because it was not under Muslim rule. She was amazed that they were not just wrong, they were completely wrong. In fact, it was the opposite. From her young teen years reading trashy romance and adventure novels that spoke of a beautiful world of passion, freedom, equality, and romance to these few days in Germany, Hirsi Ali had reached a climactic decision about her future.

“I could disappear here. I could escape it all, hide, and somehow make my own way, like someone in a book” (187 Hirsi Ali).

And so she did. She packed her bags and boarded a train to Amsterdam to find Asylum in the Netherlands.

Death of Van Gogh

After a short stay in a refugee camp she received full Dutch citizenship in 1992 and stayed in municipal housing where she worked several menial labour jobs to save up for schooling. After Hirsi Ali finished University she found interest in Dutch politics and won a position in 2003 in the Peoples’ Party for Freedom and Democracy. This same year she co-wrote and produced a short film with Theo Van Gogh (a descendent of Vincent Van Gogh) entitled Submission, which focused on the poor state of woman’s rights in Islam. After the film aired on Dutch national television both Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh received death threats, which they both ignored. In November of 2004, Van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim radical in broad daylight. After the murderer had shot Van Gogh in the back 8 times, then slit his throat, he stabbed a knife with a letter attached into his chest. In this letter was a call for Ayaan Hirsi Ali to be murdered next. She has been in hiding ever since.

Knowledge secures power. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s acquisition of freedom came from knowledge of that freedom. She understood the importance of knowledge and attended university as soon as she could, where she solidified her view that the reading of ideas leads to empowerment. She then used this knowledge – this kernel of information so important to the flourishing of a free and democratic society – and wrote an autobiography entitled Infidel. Like the condemned serpent and the heroic Prometheus, Hirsi Ali has stolen knowledge from her oppressors, empowered herself with this knowledge, and used it to teach others the value of knowledge. I highly suggest you read Infidel. It is a beautiful book that puts a voice to the values of freedom and knowledge.

Tags: freedom, hirsi ali, knowledge, print
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The Incoherent Spheres, or the Need to Be Understood

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

The story of Medea is something of a “classic” of philosophical investigation, if such things as classics could exist in such a sphere. The focus in Eurpides’ play centres around the daughter of King of Colchis, Medea, in a dilemma. “Dilemma” is somewhat of an understatement, since it rests in deciding whether to murder her children or not. The tragedy of this play lies in the central human need to be understood– in Medea’s case it is the need for her blinkered husband, Jason, to understand all she has been through to marry him. She has watched her family ties be defenestrated; she has endured the ousting from her country of birth. Yet, Jason has decided, being the brutish man he is with his horrible Y-chromosome, to leave Medea and their sons for something sleeker and sexier (and no doubt something without umbilical attachments). Medea of course is in outrage, having gone through much strife to simply be with Jason – yet in the blink of a Grecian eye, Jason has tumbled headlong into the comforts of someone else. Our sympathy is hardened into protracted vengeance and we yearn for Jason to feel some pain as recompense; thus we can at least identify with Medea’s need to make Jason feel the pain she has gone through.

We understand her.

But its her actual decision which is philosophically interesting. Her decision is to literally severe the umbilical ties which unite Jason to her. That is, she decides to murder her sons to allow their hot blood to raise the heat of outrage within their uncaring, ossified father.

Stoics, Epicureans and sceptics have gazed upon this dilemma till their eyes were sore with wonder. Professor Julia Annas, in her broad outline of the various responses to Medea’s dilemma, states that the Stoics would have disagreed with Medea herself who thought that anger was dominating her reason. There are no “two parts” to Medea – she was a unified whole. Plato perhaps – we don’t know his actual position on most things since he spoke through characters and not from an official standpoint, like Aurelius – would have said there is a conflict, relating to different parts in Medea. Namely her passion and her reason really are in conflict. Someone like Galen, a late Platonist, would have thought that reason and anger were battling in the “soul” of Medea and eventually anger won.

Medea of course eventually kills her children.

What has this story or this investigation got to do with anything? As I stated in the beginning, it rests mainly in the need to be understood. Medea has an urgent need for Jason to understand her – post hoc, of course, but it seems that if he had understood what she had been through and (more importantly) appreciated it, he would not have left her so suddenly. The need to be understood is perhaps the central problem of philosophy, or at least an echo of the whole human enterprise, often called the “human condition”.

I don’t rightly kno what if anything is the human condition but I imagine it is this: What we consider internally often finds no harmony with what occurs externally and our need to reconcile these two incoherent and disharmonious constitutions leads to all manner of problems, with ourselves, others and the world as a whole. This we might consider a possible definition of the “human condition” (though I will be the first to say it is not a resolute or final one).

For example: We consider ourselves to be central to our lives, since the events and people we affect and focus orbit our sphere of knowledge. Yet to the universe at large and the earth as a whole, we are merely infinitesimal, insignificant bundles of perception, moulded by the fingers of nature and given a spark of consciousness as a cruel joke. We die and rot and amount to dust, which the closing fist of the universe will drive home into meaninglessness. We create meaning and yet we are largely meaningless, to the large expanse of time that has come before and will arise after. Meaning is meaning made in the face of meaninglessness.

For further illustration: We struggle and fight for things we believe in. We find certain books, careers, people important. Yet to most people, these important people (to us) are to most others unimportant because they do not know them.

These are illustrations of the incoherent nature of considerations between what occurs within our minds and what exists independently of our thoughts of them (I here take it for granted that, like GE Moore, I have two hands). This is labelled “absurdity” by many philosophers, like Mark Rowlands, and is thus central to all interesting and “important” dilemmas.

Absurd is of course another reason for the problem of lying; lying is thought to be bad for the simple reason that it is an echo of insanity. You are presenting reality as it is only to you, but reality does not actually exist like that. You lie and tell your parents that there is no girl in your bedroom, but there is one. Or perhaps you lie to your friends and say you were with a girl, when you were not. Both, if believed seriously by the speaker, would constitute madness since the girl is either there or not – independently of whether you assert it or not. Thus it only takes your parents checking in to confirm your statement. This makes lying, according to some philosophers, a resemblance to insanity, which is not a good thing if one is trying to formulate a coherent picture of reality. The only difference is that one is aware that the world is not as one says when one is lying; insanity, one does not know – or, rather, one believes the uttered falsehood.

Medea and her choices are “absurd” only to the extent that her inner feelings needed to find a balance or expression externally. This might be a reason for the need for humans to create art; our consciousness – which might be defined as the awareness of the incoherence of our external and internal spheres – allows us to take a full-throated cry of internal silence to a melodious utterance in the outer sphere of reality. (Reality, Nabokov once said, is the only word that was permitted to always be written in between quotation marks).

This is why we struggle to understand one another. We are already struggling to understand our significance in our immediate spheres and their ripples into the wider sphere of the world. Our creation of meaning is forever the building of sand-castles upon a stormy beach; we are fighting against a strong tide of reality, bashing against the rocks which themselves we hope will bleed. Reality will have none of it.

If we take this thought further into the sphere of the social world there are worse problems. Consider: the sphere which you represent, as a lawyer, academic or liberal fighter (for example) is part of a larger group. When you speak, you speak as “we”, which is nothing but a pluralised first-person viewpoint. Thus when you (plural) are fighting against, for example, the oppression of women, you are taking your internalised, important and, according to you, sensible beliefs into another wider sphere. It does not chime, it finds no harmony. Thus we have conflict, we have a forced view of reality thrust upon another sphere. We have the liberal secularist spheres attempting to free those who live under the conservative, Islamic one. For both, the absurdity does not rest with reason or logic or mutual understanding. It rests primarily with each sphere running down the rocks of reality and being pulled in by the tide of the external world.

One way we can begin to change does rest however in the use of reason to justify our beliefs and our ideas. This is why we need to begin to shift our own positions on many things we take for granted, which I will speak about next time. These might be thought of as the target areas of applied ethics, though one is often ignored by many: namely, the creation of new people. But with these thoughts in hand, I hope the reader will be able to follow me as I target key issues next time: things like science, drugs, creating new people and abortion, and animal ethics.

Tags: human nature, Medea, philosophy
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Influenza: Evolution in a Petridish

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

If you’ve ever gone to your local clinic or doctor’s office to get your annual flu shot, you know there is either a line or a few days wait before you can get poked by an ancient nurse with shaky hands and bad eyesight. The trouble of going there, waiting in an uncomfortable chair, and smelling her musty perfume every year tends to get old before your first time. You start to wonder, “Why do I have to come in every year, while other vaccines are guaranteed for multiple years, sometimes even a decade or more?” It must be the pharmaceutical companies wanting all of your hard earned cash or sucking your insurance dry. Wrong.

The influenza viruses are known for their ability to mutate. Any virus is highly capable of doing this at a fast rate, but the flu is infamous for its high rate of mutation, meaning your shot will be pretty much useless ten months from the day you got it. This is due to a virus’ ability to cut, copy, and paste their host’s and their own DNA practically anyway and anywhere they want it. They can swap genes with their host or even other viruses vacationing in the same organism. This means your immunities for last year’s virus is now out of style, and won’t protect you against the new strain. If you are a rich masochist, this is wonderful news. However, if you are like many others who fear pain and/or needles, getting the flu doesn’t sound like such a bad thing after all.

How is this related to evolution? It is the fundamentals of the process. Evolution occurs when one or more mutations change an organism. Over time, these mutations allow the animal to adapt. Some mutations are useful to finches in gathering certain types of food; other mutations help viruses spread faster. The influenza viruses are constantly evolving. Every year the common strain will mutate, leaving the previous vaccine moot and ineffective. Although it has a mutation that can drastically effect the way it works, it is still an influenza virus. This is known as microevolution. A mutation will change the organism’s appearance or function, but it will still be of the same species. Many skeptics of evolution typically have a hard time believing in giant leaps in the process, also known as macro evolution. What many fail to understand is that macroevolution is simply many micro evolutions over time in a population to evolve into a new species. In animals, the process of mutation takes much longer than a virus. It can take hundreds or thousands of years before enough micro evolutions occur and separate a group into its own species.

Viruses are constantly mutating and going through tiny microevolutions, but people hardly ever think of it that way. They just think their vaccine wears off and needs renewed. Remember the next time you go to the doctor to get your shot that it’s well worth the old lady musk and “bee sting” injection, because with every new strain your body has a lower chance of keeping the virus from running its full course.

Tags: evolution, influenza, science
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