Andrew Sullivan, enlightenbed conservative?

US Democrats became accustomed long ago to trying to frame their programs and policies in conservative-sounding terms.

Now with Trump as President, many Democrats are eager to embrace conservatives critics of Trump. And seem to often do so in an overly-credulous manner.

Andrew Sullivan, conservative former editor of The New Republic is one well-known commentator who pitches himself to Democrats as one of the Respectable Conservatives. Sullivan argues for a enlightened conservatism, the Democratic dream that never seems to die, in America Desperately Needs a Healthy Conservatism New York 09/14/2018.

He cites a book, Conservatism: An Introduction to the Great Tradition, by Roger Scruton, who Sullivan lauds as "arguably the most acute conservative thinker of his generation." Yes, that could be considered a low bar to clear.

But it wouldn't be entirely fair to judge Scruton by Sullivan's praise of him in this column. And the account of the history of conservatism that Sullivan gives here with reference to Scruton isn't especially impressive. Sullivan takes Edmund Burke as the founding spirit of modern conservatism. although Burke's famous polemic against the French Revolution situates him as a reactionary in the context of the time, as Corey Robin describes in The Reactionary Mind (2011).

Sullivan conjures a Goodie-Two-Shoes version of conservatism that bears little relationship to the lobbyist- and white-supremacist-driven reality of "conservatism" in the real existing Republican Party of 2018:

[Conservatism] saw all too well how the good intentions of liberalism could lead to its unraveling. It abhors war as the ultimate change-maker and disrupter; it despises concepts of race or gender that eradicate the uniqueness of the individual; it defends high culture against philistinism and mediocrity; it cherishes norms. It values the particular over the general, prefers present laughter to utopian bliss, relishes humor in all its forms, defends art as an apolitical force, and respects religion as a separate avenue for the search for ultimate truth, and a critical component of the civil and moral society that enables government to be small and limited. [my emphasis]

But the real point of Sullivan's article seems to be that the Mean Libruls are just as bad as the Trumpian conservatives. Which is what Republicans always argue to justify Trump's latest outrage.

And the bolded passage above is stock Republican rhetoric used against affirmative action and antidiscrimination laws. He goes on to list among more saccarhine goals he presents as his version of conservatism:

I also believe we need to slow the pace of demographic and cultural change. It is happening too fast, even for America, to sustain our society’s coherence and cohesion. The elite indifference to mass immigration — especially the illegal kind — is an ugly pact between Republican elites, eager for cheap, exploitable labor, and Democratic elites, who cynically encourage it because they think it will give them a reliable voting bloc.

In other words, his supposedly enlightened conservatism lines up with Trump and the TrumPutinists in European politics presenting immigration as a "demographic and cultural" menace to the Homeland.

I don't mind if Sullivan complains about Trump. But I don't find any reason to see his politics as enlightened conservatism. Or enlightened at that all, for that matter.

Should gubment be run like a bitness?

John Harvey shot down one of my most-disliked common cliches in Why Government Should Not Be Run Like A Business Forbes 10/05/2012:

To reiterate, the key issue is this: not everything that is profitable is of social value and not everything of social value is profitable. The proper role of government is the latter. Those arguing for a business model for government must necessarily be ready to shut down all government functions that do not earn a profit, regardless of their contribution to our well being. And, if the public sector is being run properly, that should mean every single one. If it’s profitable, they shouldn’t have been doing it in the first place. There is no need for the government to start a chain of hamburger stands, hardware stores, or coffee shops. Rather, they run child protective services, the National Park Service, and the Air Force. Profit is the realm of business, while unprofitable but socially useful tasks is the responsibility of government.

This is not to say that every government agency is actually performing a useful public service or that it is not wasting resources (by whatever standard). Nor am I arguing that there are not many private sector activities that add greatly to our well being. The point, however, is that saying that government is inefficient because it does not turn a profit is the equivalent of saying that Peyton Manning is a poor quarterback because he doesn’t hit enough home runs. He’s not supposed to. [my emphasis in italics]

Reagan speeches to explain conservatism?

Elesha Coffman, a history professor at the Baptist-affiliated Baylor University (where the legendary Deplorable, Ken Starr, was President until recently), tells an interesting story about she went searching for a different speech to use in a lecture about 1980s conservatism for her students, Which One Is "The Speech"? Religion in American History, accessed 11/19/2016. She had previously been using a speech of Ronald Reagan's from August 1980 to a group of evangelicals. She wanted to stick with a Reagan speech, I suppose because the image of St. Reagan has become so prominent in the US conservative "imaginary," as the academics say these days. And, more obviously, he was such a prominent conservative figure in the 1980s. She finally settled on one:

I ended up bringing before my class a different speech, the Neshoba County Fair "states' rights" speech of August 3, 1980. I found this speech (video and transcript here) useful less for its content--it's more folksy than forceful--than for the way it shows (1) how political dog whistles work, and (2) why interpretations of history matter. In 2007--27 years after the event!--David Brooks wrote for the New York Times that Reagan was falsely accused of racism on the basis of this speech. Four days later, Bob Herbert wrote for the same paper that the speech was absolutely evidence of racism, and to argue otherwise was "woefully wrong-headed." I read my students portions of both NYT columns and asked, how might both of these perspectives contain elements of truth, and why is an inability to agree on what constitutes racism a huge problem? (Incidentally, my favorite piece on that last question also comes from the NYT, "The Easiest Way to Get Rid of Racism? Just Redefine It.")

One landmark Reagan speech I didn't go over in class was 1987's "Tear Down This Wall." The irony was so thick, I choked on it.

Anti-feminism and the Republican Right

Another reminder that Trump and his crass sexism is not at all a major departure from the Republican trajectory of the last several decades. In a 1994 article, Alan Brinkley discussed the role of Christian fundamentalism in the Republican right (The Problem of American Conservatism American Historical Review 99:2 Apr 1994):

... the most powerful single strain within fundamentalist conservatism through much of the 1970s and 1980s may have been its assault on the efforts of modern feminists to redefine gender roles. Battles over abortion, birth control, the Equal Rights Amendment, and other gender-based issues (and, more recently, battles over homosexuality) have mobilized the fundamentalist Right more successfully and energetically than any other issue. Anti-feminist women were especially active in the revival of the fundamentalist Right. And they were instrumental in tying it to two important and related claims: that a family structure rooted in traditional notions of gender is the basis of a stable, moral society, and that a moral consensus in society is, in turn, essential to the stability of the family. "The family is the core institution that decisively determines the nature of society itself," one pro-family activist wrote in 1980. It is, she insisted, "the primary source of moral authority for the developing individual. The moral authority anchored in the family is by its very nature dependent on a consensus of core values within society." In that light, the social changes of the 1960s and 1970s appeared a menacing threat to what anti-feminists believe were once universally accepted norms. [my emphpasis]

Brinkley also addressed the drastic contradictions and hyprocrisies in movement conservatism and the Republican Party - not that there is much if any difference between the two now:

American conservatism is not easy to characterize, even for those who view it sympathetically. Conservatism encompasses a broad range of ideas, impulses, and constituencies, and many conservatives feel no obligation to choose among the conflicting, even incompatible impulses, that fuel their politics. Individual conservatives find it possible, and at times perhaps even necessary, to embrace several clashing ideas at once. Conservatism is not, in short, an "ideology," with a secure and consistent internal structure. It is a cluster of related (and sometimes unrelated) ideas from which those who consider themselves conservatives draw different elements at different times. This ideological juggling makes the American Right particularly baffling to many of those historians who (as most do) stand outside it and try to make sense of it.

But, he notes, "conservatism is no more inchoate than liberalism, progressivism, socialism, or any other broad political stance that describes a large and diverse group of people." I'm not sure that observation is accurate. The Republican Party's need to rally a mass base behind plutocratic policies produces some remarkable incoherence from a rational point of view.

But Brinkley's argument in that article also echoes to some extent the whiny-white-people's complaint that the Mean Libruls look down on the salt-of-the-earth Real Americans:

It has not been easy or comforting for liberal, secular Americans to assume (as many have done) that the fundamentalist Right is an irrational, rootless "lunatic fringe," plagued by cultural and psychological maladjustments. But it may be even more difficult and less comforting for secular intellectuals (and hence for
most historians) to accept that fundamentalists can be rational, stable, intelligent people with a world view radically different from their own.

Passages like this tend to ignore the difference between substantive reason and technical rationality. Hitler's concentration camps ran on rational organizational principles. Even the Holocaust itself employed operational rationality in its task. That didn't make it any less psychotic.

As Max Horkheimer put it in a much more philosophical mode, the Western tradition of Reason was much more than valuing instrumental rationality (Eclipse of Reason, 1947):

This concept of reason never precluded subjective reason, but regarded the latter as only a partial, limited expression of a universal rationality from which criteria for they too are reasonable in the subjective sense, i.e. that they serve the subject's interest in relation to self-preservation - be it that of the single individual, or of the community on whose maintenance that of the individual depends. The idea that an aim can be reasonable for its own sake-on the basis of virtues that insight reveals it to have in itself without reference to some kind of subjective gain or advantage, is utterly alien to subjective reason, even where it rises above the consideration of immediate utilitarian values and devotes itself to reflections about the social order as a whole.

There is a fundamental difference between this theory, according to which reason is a principle inherent in reality, and the doctrine that reason is a subjective faculty of the mind. According to the latter, the subject alone can genuinely have reason: if we say that an institution or any other reality is reasonable, we usually mean that men have organized it reasonably, that they have applied to it, in a more or less technical way, their logical, calculative capacity. Ultimately subjective reason proves to be the ability to calculate probabilities and thereby to co-ordinate the right means with a given end. [my emphasis]

Taking conservative ideas seriously isn't easy

Political scientist David Ricci points to a trend that illustrates how scholars can let an "ivory tower" perspective in which a focus on methodology and obscure topics to provide originality in research can seriously limit the ability of their discipline in understanding the world we actually live in. Ricci writing in the June 2009 Journal of Political Ideologies, "Political science and conservative ideas: the American case", indicates that during decades of conservative political ascendancy in both the US and Britain, the leading political science journals in both countries published very few articles devoted to the real existing conservative thinking.

He cites four reasons that contribute to the fact that conservative ideology doesn't lend itself easily to conventional scholarly analysis. He's too polite to be so blunt as to say that much of it is so flimsy that it's hard to take it seriously upon close scrutiny, even for conservative political scientists. And, in the United States, the political science profession has a reputation for being more conservative or at least more Establishment-friendly leaning than other social sciences. The four reasons Ricci cites include: the fact that the primary sources are exceedingly abundant and therefore much less subject to tight scholarly generalizations than the work of a particular non-living conservative philosopher of the past; actual conservatism is a fluid set of beliefs driven in major ways by electoral needs of the moment; "conservatives tend to embellish their talk with persuasive anecdotes rather than with the sort of data that political scientists are accustomed to analyzing in empirical research"; and, conservatives rely heavily on arguments based on asserting false correlations of a kind that don't stand up to minimal technical scrutiny.

The latter two are related aspects of the fact that the implementation of favorite conservative policies like weak safety regulations in the workplace or steadfast opposition to universal health insurance actually damage the interests of the large majority of the public. So the policies have to be packaged in deceptive ways. Anecdotes and false correlations are two of the most popular. Ricci gives some examples of the anecdote tactic:

Ronald Reagan was a master of this tactic, promoting a folksy vision of 'morning' coming again to America, lining up small stories in his overall narrative as poignantly as Norman Rockwell painted morality tales for Saturday Evening Post covers. While introducing a typical right-wing book, Russell Kirk explains why telling anecdotes is a preferred rhetorical device: 'The authors' method of rousing the great sleepy public is the true narration… [or] illustrative anecdotes extracted from our newspapers and magazines…. From these vignettes of what has been done to our neighbors, we learn what may be done to us, and soon'. Looking for the same effect, Steve Forbes notes that 'The statistics [on family life] are grim enough. But the anecdotal evidence hits home'.

To assure rhetorical impact, then, many conservatives enliven their writings with anecdotes relating to various public policy realms. For example, against officialdom, 'Someone once estimated that there are 502 taxes of one sort or another on a pair of shoes; each one levied at a different stage of production and distribution and sale by a different governmental agency' [Rus Walton]. Or, against coddling judicial detainees, 'It is indicative that Janet Reno, [President] Clinton's Attorney General, devoted more public comment to the rights of criminals than to defending the legitimate rights of crime victims and the community at large'. [Grover Norquist]

Or, against socialism, 'In the climactic hours of the Communist fall [1989-1991], someone - Boris Yeltsin perhaps - remarked that it was a pity Marxists had not triumphed in a smaller country because “we would not have had to kill so many people to demonstrate that utopia does not work”' [David Horowitz]. Or, against welfare, 'In the last years of the Clinton administration, 26 000 very special Americans received $8.5 million in food stamps. The reason that these Americans were special is that they were dead at the time the food stamps arrived' [Bill O'Reilly]. Or, against environmental regulation, 'Dr. Bruce N. Ames ... recently commented on the proposed ban on commercial pesticides by the EPA. I didn't record his exact words, but the gist was: There are more carcinogens in a cup of coffee than in all the foods you eat in an entire year' [Larry Burkett].

Or, in favor of 'tort reform', one rightist reports that 'a gymnast missed his one-and-a-half rollout in a trampoline, hurt himself on landing, and sued the manufacturer of the mat. He was awarded $14.7 million in the initial case' [George Roche]. Or, against 'humanism' defined as disregard for traditional decency, another rightist tell us that 'A father, dying of kidney failure, artificially inseminated his 16-year-old daughter with the help of her physician. Seven months into her pregnancy, the child was taken from her uterus by Cesarean section. The newborn baby's kidneys were removed surgically and transplanted into the father. Then the innocent new infant was cruelly left to die of uremic poisoning' [John Ankerberg].

And as anyone discussing politics has seen in practice, many rank-and-file conservatives pick up such claims and repeat them as Gospel truth. Ricci doesn't analyze or debunk these particular claims. That's why it would be helpful if the stenographers who in America call themselves TV "journalists" would make it a practice of calling their guests on the carpet if they try to pass off dubious anecdotes as arguments. It would be even better if they regularly debunked phony but popular claims and anecdotes.

Here's an example of a journalist actually researching one of these dubious-on-the-face-of-it claims - although this one is based on a bogus statistic rather than a bogus anecdote - this one pimped by our allegedly "moderate" California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger: Schwarzenegger's fraud allegation tough to pin down by Susan Ferris Sacramento Bee Online 07/10/09. This is a good example of how a journalist actually practicing journalism can call b******t on what is obviously a hokey claim that Schwarzenegger himself couldn't back up. The bold and tough "Governator" backed off the claim when challenged on it. But he still got it "out there", which for much of our broken-down press corps means that it should be incorporated into their this-side-says, the-other-side-says stenography without challenge. Susan Ferris describes this very process in her article; good on her for committing an act of journalism here.

There is often a short-term advantage in lying. Which is mostly why people do it. So if someone in a conversation pulls out some bogus anecdote and you don't know the actual background of the claim, you're often left either raising vague doubts about the claim or citing more general information. Unless you are very familiar with the particular subject or are willing to make up your own, you may not have a competing anecdote on the topic. And stories are persuasive and can create strong and lasting images that systematic statistics do not. It helps to develop a sense of what kinds of stories smell more like urban legends (or outright fabrications) than accurate accounts.

Still, the fact that conservative arguments don't hold up well to scholarly scrutiny or may be dull to read if you're not already a partisan true believer, their ideas have a very practical importance. As Ricci puts it:

Yet whatever our preferences might be, it seems to me that we should study conservative ideas because they impact importantly on modern society. Between 1980 and 2004, conservatives captured the Presidency five times; they repeatedly controlled one or both houses of Congress; and they appointed a series of right-leaning judges to various federal courts including the highest. In the same years, they scaled back or cancelled signature programs of the New Deal and the Great Society; they fostered deregulation and globalization rather than a deliberate social contract; and, in February of 2003, they propelled the nation into a war in Iraq that has taken tens of thousands of lives and will probably cost $3 trillion before it is over.

Ricci's appeal is directly specifically to scholars of political science. Within the blogging orbit in which I normally write, we've been grappling with these ideas for a long time. But it does strike me that the reluctance of political scientists to dissect present-day conservative claims in the context Ricci discusses may be part of the wider problem that gives us leading lights of the national media like NBC's Chuck Todd who are far more eager to talk down the whole idea of investigating Bush-era crimes - crimes whose occurrence is not seriously disputed in the case of the torture program - than they are in pursuing that alleged purpose of journalism by pursuing such stories actively.

Tags: conservatism, conservative movement

Sympathy for (white) Southerners from Jonah Goldberg

Which of the two major American parties do you think of when you see this flag?

Dave Neiwert reports on one of Jonah Goldberg's hissy-fits about those nasty libruls in About Republicans And Race Firedoglake, 07/09/08.

In this one, Goldberg says, "bigotry aimed at the South never ceases to amaze me." The context makes it clear that he means aimed at the white South.

Goldberg is just horrified that libruls think racism might have something to do with Republican politics. Lordy, bring out the smelling salts! The brave (verbal) warriors against Islamunocratofascism are fainting away by the dozens to hear such a shameless claim by those wicked libruls.

Neiwert writes:

So, a brief reality check: Goldberg does not cite any liberals who actually say that "the essence of conservatism is and always has been Dixiecrat-ism" because, frankly, there aren't very many of them. Most liberals and other critics of the American right take a much more nuanced and realistic view - essentially, that not every conservative is a racist, but rather that every actively practicing racist is a conservative; and that this is the case in today's context not just because racists always have been conservatives, but because the conservative movement has made constant accommodations and appeals to them.

This has been so for a long time, but has become even more self-evident as the Republican Party became the party of the Dixiecrats. The Southern Strategy (note that Goldberg evades any mention of this whatsoever) not only was designed to provide wink-and-nudge acknowledgment to racists that the GOP was on their side but to blunt the advancement of minority interests. (my emphasis)

And he continues with an able summary of the consequences of the Nixonian "Southern Strategy". Which, by the way, was a white Southern Strategy.

Neiwert even indulges in a bit of purple prose, uncharacteristic for him, but I'm a real fan of creative purple prose: "Were it not for the ministrations of the GOP to their withering corpse of an ideology, white supremacy would have vanished from the political scene many years ago." And that's not all:

There may have been much more to Jesse Helms - but his bigoted approach to race revealed a narrow, pinched, and mean-spirited mind dedicated ultimately to primitive racial nationalism and willing to inflict injustice and harm on those he considered his lessers, and that manifested itself in a broad array of policy choices. And that, in the end, is exactly what we can say about the Republican Party, too.

You've got to feel sorry for poor Jonah Goldberg, not understanding how those bad libruls get such ideas. I mean, I'm sure the following was just a coincidence, as historian C. Vann Woodward described it in the third revised edition of The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1974):

Civil rights was not the only issue in the Presidential election of 1964, but it was the most powerful issue. Johnson's opponent, Barry Goldwater, in savage attacks on the Civil Rights Act left no doubt about his stand. He expected support from the much predicted 'backlash' vote of Northern whites and segregationist South. Riots broke out during July and August in New York, Rochester, Chicago, Philadelphia, and three New Jersey cities. They were not of the magnitude of riots to come in later years, but the looting and violence did augment the 'blacklash' [sic] vote. Nevertheless, Goldwater carried only the five states of the lower South plus Arizona, his own. On the other hand, in spite of a landslide victory, Johnson carried only one state of his native South, his own. (my emphasis)

The Goldwater campaign is generally credited as having given birth to the "conservative movement" as we've known it the last four decades plus. But I'm sure that result had nothing to do with white racism, oh no. It was probably devotion to the abstract principle of "states rights". Sure, that must have been it!

Tags: conservatism, conservative movement, david neiwert, racism, republican party

The eternal conservative argument against social progress

Most everybody has probably already heard that Jamie Lynn Spears had a baby girl today. So I won't do a separate post on that quite yet. Congratulations, Jamie Lynn!

Carolyn Jones and Charles Burress of the San Francisco Chronicle reported today on the latest turn in a battle between tree-huggers and the University of California-Berkeley over a new athletic center: Cal, tree-sitters both happy after judge rules 06/19/08.

I happened to be driving by a different part of the campus today and saw that the tree-sitters were perched on Piedmont Ave not far from the frat houses, for those who may know the area. It was a pretty tame scene. Several police were standing around and for some reason they seemed to have closed off a parking lot.

I knew the tree-sitters were protesting but I don't really have any strong opinion one way or the other on this particular issue. It's fairly specific to the particular campus. But I can still appreciate the creative protests on behalf of the environment.

Also in today's Chronicle is an op-ed about tree-sitters (A message to the destroyers by Doug Kaplan 06/19/08) that caught my attention mainly because it uses about the stalest conservative argument in the book: we live in the best of all possible worlds and how can you criticize any part of it? Or, we the stodgy-minded led by the greedy are the true friends of goodness, truth and health and you dirty hippie tree-huggers want to destroy it all!

I guess it's such a popular form of argument because even someone who has, say, pickled their brain in OxyContin can manage for formulate it.

Tags: conservatism, environmentalism, jamie lynn spears

Ideological mixes

As those who have read my other posts on the subject know, I don't have high hopes for the emergence of "principled conservatives" to present a serious challenge to the dominant religious-authoritarian consensus in today's Republican Party. I think of people like John Dean and Andrew Bacevich as being live versions of the scarce "principled conservative" species. But it is likely to take some crushing defeat on the scale of 1964 to jolt the Grand Old Party into taking such principles as theirs seriously again.

But outside the dark regions of FOX News, OxyContin radio and the Republican Party, one can still encounter corners of the world where various ideologies are mixed together. Or at least co-exist side-by-side.

I was reminded of that today when I got the 2008 catalogue from Prometheus Books. Without researching the exact business set-up, Prometheus is a publishing house associated with Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry magazines. SI focuses on debunking popular pseudoscience. In recent years they've found themselves needing to give a lot of attention to trends like creationism/intelligent design and quack medicine, though they still find plenty of space to debunk haunted houses, sea monsters, Bigfoot and psychic predictions of the future. SI tends to go mild on criticism of religion. FI, on the other hand, is explicitly an atheist journal, the name harking back to the euphemism "freethinker" of a century ago.

Prometheus presents an interesting variety of titles. They have books addressing current scientific issues such as Nanofuture: What's Next for Nanotechnology by Eric Drexler or Glowing Genes: A Revolution in Biotechnology by Marc Zimmer. In current events, they have selections like The Ruses for War: American Internventionism since World War II by John Quigley and The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America into a Dictatorship, Elliot Cohen and Bruce Fraser, eds.

In the field of religion, they feature a number of atheist titles in their "Freethought Libarary", most apparently aimed at debunking Christianity. Also, if you happen to be looking for The Encyclopedic Sourcebook of Satanism, they have that, too.

They also have several books on Islam, mostly seemingly of a polemical anti-Islam nature, such as: Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism by Ibn Warraq; The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World by Paul Williams; and, Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation by John Wansbrough. The blurb for the latter reads:

Critiquing the traditional accounts of the origins of Islam as historically unreliable and heavily influenced by religious dogma, Wansbrough suggested radically new interpretations very different from the views of both the Muslim orthodoxy and most Western scholars.

Originally published in 1977, Quranic Studies presents an in-depth textual exegesis of the Quran based on form analysis. Noting the persistent use of monotheistic imagery stemming from Judeo-Christian sources, he interpreted the rise of Islam as the development of what was originally a Judeo-Christian sect. As this sect evolved and differentiated itself from its Judeo-Christian roots, the Quran also evolved and was continuously in flux for over a century. Wansbrough concluded that the canonization of the text that we today call the Quran, and even the emergence of the concept of "Islam," probably did not occur till the end of the eighth century, more than 150 years after the death of Muhammad. (my emphasis)

I don't claim to know how historians and scholars of Islam may have addressed Wansbrough's claims. But it's safe to say that the consensus among even the most secular scholars would not date the concept of Islam to sometime after 782 CE. The Qu'ran was first codified into written for during the caliphate of ‛Uthmān ibn Άffān (644-656). Muhammad died in 632. See John Wansbrough remembered Australian Broadcasting Company 06/26/02 for more on him.

These days, Republican "culture warriors" find it convenient to associate atheists and science advocates with liberalism. But atheists and scientific materialists are also often drawn to libertarian/conservative ideas. Mike Huckabee may identify with creationism, but Dennis Kucinich is a UFO fan and a pal of Shirley MacLaine, who has pushed more esoteric/paranormal causes than most people know exist.

On the other hand, for those who value science, the Republicans' anti-science, Christian fundamentalist turn is alarming.

It is striking to me that their books on Islam tend to look like the kind of thing that advocates of the "clash of civilizations" approach would appreciate. Religions need the challenge of atheism. I mean, if God exists, I'm sure she won't stop existing just because atheists haven't caught on yet.

But it seems to me that atheists often take a "village atheist" approach to debunking religious ideas. And I have to wonder if some of the Prometheus titles on Islam don't tilt in that direction. It's true that Islamic scholars in general do not take what in Western Biblical studies is known as a "historical-critical" approach to the Qu'ran. But some do. It doesn't require someone to stop believing in God or Islam to do so. The Prophet Muhammad claimed to receive the Qu'ranic sayings from the Archangel Gabriel. They circulated in oral form during his time and immediately after his death. But oral recitation of texts was a well-developed skill in Mecca and Medina, and there were professional Qu'ran reciters. The Prophet himself was illiterate. Variations began to develop after a few years, which was a big reason that the caliph ‛Uthmān began the project to create a written version to stablize the text. Whether or not one accepts the story that Gabriel gave the words directly to the Prophet in his visions, in historical terms there is good reason to think that the Qu'ran as we know it substantially reflects the revelations as the Prophet himself recited them.

Also, for a review of another book also published by Prometheus by Paul Williams, the supposed terrorism expert mentioned as an author above, see the rightwing site Newsmax, Author: Al-Qaida Has Nuclear Weapons Inside U.S. by Stewart Stogel 07/14/07. Gee, I wonder if anyone has located those, yet. Maybe they're hidden by the same magical pixie dust that is still concealing Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" that we invaded that country to combat.

Seeing that catalogue reminded me that it pays to be careful in trying to pigeonhole someone into a particular ideological box based on some narrow slice of their opinions.

Tags: conservatism, islam, liberalism, quran, qu'ran, uthman