Month: December 2004

It’s a hard life for educated folk. Earlier this year, the Chinese state newsagency Xinhua reported that the life expectancy of the Chinese intellectual was, at 58, more than ten years lower than the national average. A survey also showed that 76% of the nation’s journalists died between 40 and 60.

Many were surprised by the findings. The insanities of Chairman Mao’s “anti-rightist” campaigns and, worse still, the Cultural Revolution, had by now given way to a kind of modus vivendi. Intellectuals were no longer the “stinking ninth class” of society, some way behind criminals, prostitutes and vagrants in a peasant-led pecking order. By now, in the interests of “stability and economic development”, there would be no more mass persecutions. While freedom of speech would not be tolerated, at least the freedom to earn money had now been firmly established. The network of informers began to disintegrate, the role of the Party in ordinary life began to recede, and something approaching a civil society had begun to develop.

Still, something was obviously not quite right. While intellectuals are no longer being buried alive, as they were during the brutal reign of the Emperor Qin Shihuang, they are marginalized by a Singapore-style authoritarian consumer society and hemmed in by the old-fashioned strictures of the Chinese Communist Party. The recent discussion in the state press about the role of “public intellectuals” is a case in point.

George Steiner once suggested that the persecution of intellectuals in the old Soviet bloc indicated at the very least a kind of respect for high culture. “Writers were persecuted and killed precisely because literature was recognized as an important and potentially dangerous force,” the old polymath wrote in his 1961 essay, The Writer and Communism. The role and influence of the intellectual was enhanced by the fact that he was being oppressed, and the ultimate compliment a government could pay to its grand penseurs was to lock them up. After all, in bourgeois democratic countries, intellectuals had been sidelined, and their attempts to enrich cultural life had been smothered by the mass media, where thoughtless gratification was the norm.

In his memoirs, Steiner described his sense of intoxication while listening to classical musical recitals and watching the staging of “serious plays” by Sophocles and Brecht in the former East Berlin. After the Wall fell, he said, “virtually overnight, freedom reclaimed its inalienable right to junk food.” The liberated masses rushed not to dissident poets, but to adult cinemas and MacDonalds.

It was no doubt reassuring for the likes of Blok, Mayakovsky and Akhmatova, and the great Chinese playwright Lao She, hounded to his death by the Red Guards, that at least the government was paying implicit homage to the power and influence of intellectuals.

Steiner did at least concede that the inculcation of love for Bach fugues and the more recondite poems of Goethe came at a high price, and was hardly worth the gulags. But he could not hide his regret. Modern capitalist democracies were obeisant at the twin idols of “Madonna and Maradona”, Steiner wrote, and swamped with porn and filth and fast food. Rare book shops in Prague were being ripped up and replaced by smut sellers and burger joints.

China, it seems, has the worst of both worlds. One veteran China watcher once described the post-Mao reforms as a Leninist velvet prison with consumer characteristics. Trash and kitsch remain easy to find, and while you might be able to attend the occasional recital of ancient pipa compositions, should you so wish, the sound of that delicate instrument is invariably drowned out by mobile phones.

“To get rich is glorious,” the late leader Deng Xiaoping urged. Render unto Caesar what should be rendered, and leave everything else to Mammon. We now have a nation where the fairy light is the most prominent cultural symbol, and where the quest for riches has become the simplest avenue of achievement.

The recent debate about the role of public intellectuals began when the relatively liberal weekly magazine, Southern People’s Weekly, published a list of the 50 most influential cultural figures in China, led by the exiled poet, Bei Dao, and including the veteran Beijing rocker Cui Jian, who was at the height of his subversive influence in the years immediately after the Tian’anmen Square crackdown in 1989. The magazine noted that the market economy had led to the marginalization of public intellectuals, but they had never been more necessary.

And so, facing marginalization by the market, they now had to face another salvo from the Propaganda Ministry. Two months later, the Shanghai-based government organ, Liberation Daily, published a characteristically reactionary editorial mocking the “imported” notion of “public intellectuals” and accusing the figures on the list of being estranged from the Party and the masses. “Public intellectuals” are arrogant and elitist, and trying to monopolize debate with their own views, it said.

Communist Party watchers might have been reminded of the case of the Hungarian writer, Tibor Dery, condemned for leading an “organization hostile to the state” in the wake of the Soviet crackdown in 1956. What might this hostile organization be, the joke ran. It was the Hungarian people.

In any case, in its bilious doctrinal carping, the editorial was quite exemplary, a sinister, jargon-ridden spasm of Stalinesque nastiness. Out of touch, certainly, but beneath its cod-Marxist babble, there were signs that a renewed assault on press freedom was on its way.

It quickly drew the attention of the foreign media – themselves anxious, in these confusing times, to find evidence that the core values of the CCP had not changed, and that the whole Party edifice tottered precariously on a huge wave of socioeconomic transformation and was now returning, reflexively, to its roots. The Economist was particularly scathing, and attributed the latest government assault to the freedom afforded to the modern Chinese thinker by the internet. According to the Christian Science Monitor, which broke the story, the Propaganda Ministry had now ordered newspapers to refrain from compiling such lists and from paying too much attention to the assortment of poets, writers, environmental activists and other critical voices now on its “gray list” of troublemakers.

Meanwhile, Chinese newspapers, driven for the first time by market pressures, are filling their pages with the blathering of TV celebs, with salacious tales involving ménages a trois or cocaine busts, failed bank heists and kidnappings, tawdry trysts in saunas and karaoke houses, and the sort of titillating tabloid fodder that attracts readers of every stripe in every country. The papers have been anxious to boost their circulation, and the readers themselves rarely want to read editorials issued by the Propaganda Ministry.

This has led to tensions, between mass-market philistinism on the one hand, and the government on the other.

TV stations pile celebrity profiles upon celebrity profiles, regaling us with the eating habits and interests of the latest manufactured Taiwanese pop band or Hong Kong diva, just like western TV, only without the counterweight of serious news and debate. Desperate for advertising revenues, they try filling prime-time with real-life crime shows, and one regional station even introduced bikini-clad weather girls, but they are then rapped on the knuckles for “corrupting the morality of the youth”.

The crisis of Chinese civilization that hit during and after the collapse of the imperial order in 1911 was regarded as a golden age for intellectuals, but their role has always been slightly different from that in the west. They were traditionally the servants of their nation, motivated not by what Graham Greene has called the “duty of disloyalty” but by a genuine desire to serve. And so, thinkers queued up to declare solutions to the national malaise, drawing inspiration from Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Dewey or even the anarchist Bakhunin. After the Bolshevik revolution, they finally turned to Marx.

Intellectuals were always merely functional, instruments of the state. When we shoot a crossbow at a target, we do not praise the arrow, said Mao Zedong in 1942 during a criticism of the writer, Ding Ling. It was a sign of things to come. The intellectuals had played a crucial role in the revolution, but they would quickly come under attack themselves.

In the novelist and essayist Lu Xun, China had at least one great writer and political figure. Lu Xun died of tuberculosis in 1936, but was already thoroughly sceptical about the revolution, suggesting that “the oppressed quickly turn into the oppressors”. After his death, he remained a key figure, both lionized and bowdlerized by the regime, with statues and shrines set up to celebrate him as a “champion of the Party”. The only good intellectual, it seems, was a dead intellectual.

Has Antony Flew ceased to be an atheist?

In a sensationalist campaign in the internet, it is alleged that Professor Antony Flew, British philosopher, reputed rationalist, atheist and Honorary Associate of Rationalist International, has left atheism and decided that a god might exist.

The controversy revolves around some remarks of Prof. Antony Flew that seems to allow different interpretations. Has Antony Flew ever asserted that “probably God exists”? Richard Carrier, editor in chief of the Secular Web quotes Antony Flew from a letter addressed to him in his own hand (dated 19 October 2004): “I do not think I will ever make that assertion, precisely because any assertion which I am prepared to make about God would not be about a God in that sense … I think we need here a fundamental distinction between the God of Aristotle or Spinoza and the Gods of the Christian and the Islamic Revelations.”

This is not the first time that Professor Antony Flew’s atheist position is attacked. In reaction to an internet campaign in 2001 that tried to brand him a “convert” to religious belief, Professor Antony Flew made the following statement. In 2003 he answered yet another campaign in this direction with the same statement. It is still now his latest official position in this regard.

Richard C. Carrier, current Editor in Chief of the Secular Web, tells me that “the internet has now become awash with rumors” that I “have converted to Christianity, or am at least no longer an atheist.” Perhaps because I was born too soon to be involved in the internet world I had heard nothing of this rumour. So Mr. Carrier asks me to explain myself in cyberspace. This, with the help of the Internet Infidels, I now attempt.

Those rumours speak false. I remain still what I have been now for over fifty years, a negative atheist. By this I mean that I construe the initial letter in the word ‘atheist’ in the way in which everyone construes the same initial letter in such words as ‘atypical’ and ‘amoral’. For I still believe that it is impossible either to verify or to falsify – to show to be false – what David Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion happily described as “the religious hypothesis.” The more I contemplate the eschatological teachings of Christianity and Islam the more I wish I could demonstrate their falsity.

I first argued the impossibility in ‘Theology and Falsification’, a short paper originally published in 1950 and since reprinted over forty times in different places, including translations into German, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Welsh, Finnish and Slovak. The most recent reprint was as part of ‘A Golden Jubilee Celebration’ in the October/November 2001 issue of the semi-popular British journal Philosophy Now, which the editors of that periodical have graciously allowed the Internet Infidels to publish online: see “Theology & Falsification.”

I can suggest only one possible source of the rumours. Several weeks ago I submitted to the Editor of Philo (The Journal of the Society of Humanist Philosophers) a short paper making two points which might well disturb atheists of the more positive kind. The point more relevant here was that it can be entirely rational for believers and negative atheists to respond in quite different ways to the same scientific developments.

We negative atheists are bound to see the Big Bang cosmology as requiring a physical explanation; and that one which, in the nature of the case, may nevertheless be forever inaccessible to human beings. But believers may, equally reasonably, welcome the Big Bang cosmology as tending to confirm their prior belief that “in the beginning” the Universe was created by God.

Again, negative atheists meeting the argument that the fundamental constants of physics would seem to have been ‘fine tuned’ to make the emergence of mankind possible will first object to the application of either the frequency or the propensity theory of probability ‘outside’ the Universe, and then go on to ask why omnipotence should have been satisfied to produce a Universe in which the origin and rise of the human race was merely possible rather than absolutely inevitable. But believers are equally bound and, on their opposite assumptions, equally justified in seeing the Fine Tuning Argument as providing impressive confirmation of a fundamental belief shared by all the three great systems of revealed theistic religion – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For all three are agreed that we human beings are members of a special kind of creatures, made in the image of God and for a purpose intended by God.

In short, I recognize that developments in physics coming on the last twenty or thirty years can reasonably be seen as in some degree confirmatory of a previously faith-based belief in god, even though they still provide no sufficient reason for unbelievers to change their minds. They certainly have not persuaded me.

Copyright © 2004 Rationalist International.The recipients of Rationalist International Bulletin may publish, post, forward or reproduce articles and reports from it, acknowledging the source: Rationalist International Bulletin # 137. Copyright © 2004 Rationalist International