{"id":382,"date":"2003-09-03T20:11:04","date_gmt":"2003-09-04T00:11:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/09\/03\/take-back-the-night-bring-back-enligh"},"modified":"2003-09-03T20:11:04","modified_gmt":"2003-09-04T00:11:04","slug":"take-back-the-night-bring-back-enlightenment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/09\/03\/take-back-the-night-bring-back-enlightenment\/","title":{"rendered":"Take back the night, bring back Enlightenment"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

I still can’t get to dissecting some matters at hand (re. the prior to previous post), but here’s another article that gets to the heart of things: Culture of Shame<\/a> by Matthew Leeming, a review of Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul<\/a>. Leeming attacks (in my view rightly) cultural relativism that would assign to primitive, misogynistic cultures the same value as cultures that espouse Enlightenment principles. He opens his review<\/a> by describing the reception his account of an arranged marriage between a 14-year-old girl and a 38-year-old man got when he described it as “legitimised rape.” His accusers found him guilty of “Orientalism,” or depicting “eastern cultures as strange and inferior to the West, rather than portraying them as both equally bad.” Sorry, I’m with Leeming: as a woman, I cannot be relativistic about human rights, and fundamentalists are no friends of mine. They are backwards and benighted. And so it seems are their relativist defenders in academe.
\n<\/p>\n

Read the whole review, but here’s part of Leeming’s assessment of Seierstadt’s book:<\/p>\n

Feuerbach would have loved this book. I have never read a more convincing exposition of his thesis that all theology is anthropology. Afghan theology simply reflects male insecurities. The Taliban were a back-to-basics conservative political movement, an attempt to recreate the paradise of the Arabian peninsula in the time of the Prophet when men wielded absolute power over their families. There is nothing exclusively Islamic about cretinous attempts to reconstruct a golden age: in Uganda the Lakwenas, Protestant fundamentalists, shoot people found riding a bicycle on Sundays.<\/p>\n

For those of us who think that religious belief is a mental illness, this book provides plenty of clinical detail. The symptoms in Afghanistan are pretty florid.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nHe concludes that the cultural relativists — the “Orientalist witch-smellers and postmodernists at Oxford<\/i>” (the former characterization a nice pointer to a Black Adder I<\/i> episode) have “the Enlightenment in their sights.” Perhaps it wasn’t such a dire thing a couple of decades ago, but it’s fateful now that the benighted have the reigns of government in the West, too.<\/p>\n

Academics and intellectuals of the world unite, we’ve only a fundamentalist apocalypse to avert.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I still can’t get to dissecting some matters at hand (re. the prior to previous post), but here’s another article that gets to the heart of things: Culture of Shame by Matthew Leeming, a review of Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul. Leeming attacks (in my view rightly) cultural relativism that would assign to primitive, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yulelogstories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}