Month: March 2006

Good, someone else besides Richard Dawkins and PZ and me who thinks science and religion are not compatible.

At an August 2005 City College of New York conference featuring a panel of Nobel Laureates, one scientist created a stir by arguing that belief in God is incompatible with being a good scientist and is “damaging to the well-being of the human race.”…Hauptman: The only significant negative reaction came from Cornelia Dean, a reporter from The New York Times. I was later told by several of the other Nobel Laureates that they agreed with me, but for reasons of their own, they just did not respond…[O]bviously this view is unpopular in this overly religious society. People who are outspoken about it are more than just regarded as cranky, they are deeply disliked…I spoke out because of this frustration I have only lately begun to feel about the religiosity in our society.

In other words the pressure of public opinion and social conformity silences a lot of people. I think it is really necessary to resist that pressure and that trend. That’s why I keep yapping about it – I’m applying social pressure from the other direction. (Not that that’s much use, with the NY Times doing its bit for the wrong side.)

The interviewer asks if he thinks there is a relationship between being a good scientist and being a religious skeptic.

What are religions based on? They are not based on evidence but on faith. On the other hand, a good scientist insists that, before one assents to a claim, there must be good evidence for that claim…I think we would be better off if scientists were more open about their lack of belief in God.

So do I. I’ll tell you who doesn’t, though, and that’s Steve Fuller. He would accuse Hauptman of ‘demonizing’.

The contributors to this volume consist of some veterans of the Science Wars over the past fifteen years, including the editor, Gerald Holton, and Paul Gross. Some pieces demonize the quite different senses of “fundamentalism” on offer in contemporary Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism – each of which supposedly threatens the future of science.

Gosh, why would anyone think Christian, Islamic or Hindu fundamentalism would threaten the future of science? There’s no possible reason, therefore those horrid blood-spattered veterans of the ‘Science Wars’ have to resort to demonization. Some people will stop at nothing!

While it is relatively harmless to insist that mastery of a scientific specialty requires training in certain techniques, it is more problematic (pace Kuhn) to insist that all such specialists share the same disciplinary narrative – and still more problematic to require that they pledge allegiance to the same philosophical world-view, say, what the US National Academy of Sciences calls “methodological naturalism.” It makes for bad philosophy, bad science, and bad politics. Yet, we seem to be sliding down this slippery slope, which in the past has led to loyalty oaths and in the future could lead to the genetic profiling of people as unfit for scientific endeavors because of their propensity to belief in, say, the supernatural.

‘Disciplinary narrative’ – right. It’s just a story. And methodological naturalism is a ‘philosophical world-view’ coercively forced on all aspiring scientists. That’s a line that the defense (the ID side) tried to push at the Kitzmiller trial, the one where Steve Fuller covered himself with glory by helping his side to lose the case (by giving his ‘expert’ testimony that ID is indeed religion, when the defense was trying to claim that it wasn’t – boy, I bet they were sorry they’d invited him to the party). Barbara Forrest wouldn’t play.

Q. And methodological naturalism is a convention that’s imposed upon scientific inquiry, is it not?

A. Forrest: No, it’s not a convention that is imposed upon scientific inquiry. Methodological naturalism is a methodology. It’s a way of addressing scientific questions. It reflects the practice of science that has been successfully established over a period of centuries. It’s not imposed upon science. It reflects the successful practice of science.

So now Fuller is setting the record straight, now that there’s no pesky judge to interfere.

Perhaps the volume’s strongest suit is that it does not feature arguments to the following effect:…(b) That the research and educational agendas of democratic societies should be turned over to scientific specialists, by virtue of their superior knowledge, so to prevent society from egregious error…To this reviewer, the absence of (b)-style arguments is the surest sign that the contributors, despite their uniformly establishmentarian scientific sympathies, are still republicans – and not authoritarians. It will be interesting to see whether a successor volume still holds fast to this ideal, since some contributors seem to be chomping at the bit to grant authorized scientists unilateral control over the science curriculum.

How dare they. How dare they want to grant ‘authorized’ (what does that silly dig mean?) scientists ‘unilateral’ (what does that mean?) control over the science curriculum? How dare they not want to include lots of those unfairly ‘demonized’ fundamentalists along with lots of clued-in sociologists of science and lots of, um, baseball players? How dare they not want to hand control over the science curriculum over to The People at large, to do with it as they will? Is this a democracy, or is it not? It is a democracy. Therefore all curricula should be under the control of unauthorized democratic unauthoritarian non-specialists, because that’s democratic and the other thing isn’t. Scientific specialists who have (ew, ew, ew) ‘superior’ knowledge (can’t you just see them, those bastards, sitting around their labs in their horrible white coats fawning on each other for having so much ew superior knowledge and specialistism?) and establishmentarian sympathies are bad, bad, bad people who don’t belong in a democracy, they should all be locked up in missile silos or something, we hates ’em.

Forrest’s effectiveness was reflected in the presiding judge’s interpretation of the US Constitution’s separation of Church and State doctrine in Puritanical rather than Whitmanesque terms: He went beyond ruling that a religiously inspired viewpoint should not dominate the public school curriculum to pronouncing that no such viewpoint whatsoever should ever be introduced into scientific matters. Why science, as opposed to other subjects in the curriculum, should be treated so preciously remained unaddressed. However, it would make sense if a certain self-consciously non-theological conception of science were treated as a secular religion of a civic republican polity, as Dewey seemed to wish for the United States.

Oh, gawd, what a pile of steaming ordure. What a horrible, sly, insinuating, eelish way of deploying rhetoric instead of argument he has. How annoying he is. How I wish he would give it all up and become a church warden instead.

And more again. It seems worth trying to figure all this out and get clear what we’re talking about (I think discussions about free speech tend to be surprisingly unclear). With clarity goes honesty, rather than the hypocrisy that cartoon-offended Muslims accuse defenders of ‘blasphemous’ cartoons of, in some ways with justice.

To repeat, or restate. I’m claiming that disputes like the ones over the prophet cartoons and over Irving and Holocaust denial are not simply a matter of Free Speech full stop, or of Free Speech unless there is imminent danger of physical harm. They’re also not a matter of either-or, all or nothing; not a matter of: either criminalization or unqualifed Right; it’s a matter of what lies between: of the broad marshy territory of oughts and shoulds, practice and custom, the tacit, the unwritten, the familiar, the accepted, codes of ethics, morality, implicit agreement. Also of vocational norms – which are very strong, often constraining (for good and ill), and enforceable by firing. Just ask Jayson Blair!

It’s important to keep all this in mind – because if we don’t we will just fall into the hypocrisy, double standard trap – of protecting this free speech but not that, and of failing or refusing to give any arguments for doing so. What it amounts to is that we do have (mostly tacit, implicit, customary, intuitive, so hidden and unnoticed and unaware) principles of selection.

One: consider: we don’t actually think newspapers or broadcasters have a ‘right’ to for instance replace the word ‘black’ with nigger, or ‘woman’ with bitch or cunt or ho, or ‘Arab’ with raghead. We don’t think people should be either arrested or imprisoned for doing so, and we don’t think they have a ‘right’ to do it. (That is, we think they have a narrowly-defined legal right, but not any other kind of right.) You don’t (well, maybe among shock jocks you do, but apart from that) hear people resoundingly defending that right. It’s a legal right, but in practice, it’s not a real right, because no one to the left of Fred Phelps would want to exercise it. Imagine Anderson Cooper or Andrew Marr getting a memo from the brass telling them to make such a vocabulary change. Imagine the New York Times or the Telegraph suddenly adopting such a practice – every article and comment full of whores and niggers and kikes and faggots and kikes and towelheads. What would we think? ‘They have a right to do that, and that is all there is to it, there is nothing more to be said’? I don’t think so!

Two: consider again: we also don’t think newspapers and broadcast media have a right to tell us a pack of lies in reporting the news – I don’t mean differences of interpretation, getting it wrong, selection, I mean gross blatant whoppers. Telling us China has invaded Taiwan, an earthquake has killed ten million people in Argentina, India has nuked Islamabad, Mugabe has resigned, the genocide in Darfur has ended – when none of them are true. We don’t necessarily think they should be arrested or imprisoned (though we may wonder, if the false reports do enough damage – retaliatory nuclear strikes, for instance) – but we don’t think they have a right to do that. In fact we think they have no right to do that, and we’d be outraged. We’d all be running around telling each other ‘They have no right to do that!’ I can hear us now.

These fences are perhaps invisible because they’re generally so well heeded. We don’t think about newspapers telling huge whoppers, because they don’t. (Well, except items like the National Enquirer, but that’s a different genre. Again, the convention is generally understood. Serious broadsheets don’t tell gross lies; tabloids need some caution.) But the fact that we’re not aware that we don’t think the Times has a ‘right’ to lie doesn’t mean we think it does have that right. (In fact the more reputation a newspaper has, the greater its [implicit, moral] obligation to tell the truth – because it’s what we expect, so it has the power to do more damage by lying, because we’ll believe the lies. Authority and reputation entail increased responsibility.)

So – the point about all these people who say ‘of course free speech, but‘ – is not that there never is any but, or that there never is any but except in cases of imminent danger – it is that they have the wrong but. There are buts and then there are buts, and there is no alternative to evaluating them on the merits. To judging each but, each exception, each ‘ought’, on the merits, on the substance, as opposed to waving the Free Speech flag and thinking that does the job. It doesn’t.

And by the way Holocaust denial is not the right retort to Motoons. That would be Mosestoons or Jesustoons. Holocaust denial is parallel to denying what happened in Gujarat, Bosnia, Chechnya.

Another thought or two on free speech and lying.

Part of what I think I disagree with is Norm’s implication that there are only two possibilities, protection of lying as free speech or criminalization of it.

Now, even though Ophelia puts the point interrogatively and not as a conclusion, one can only assume she does so to leave open the possibility that falsehood, lying and such shouldn’t be protected under norms of free speech, and therefore may in certain circumstances be criminalized.

I’m not sure that ‘therefore’ is a therefore. I’m not sure that failure or refusal to protect X translates to a belief that X should or may be criminalized. It seems to me it can fall well short of that. Are we (logically, or morally, or both) obliged to protect everything we don’t think should be a crime? Surely not. Surely there’s a whole mess of things, a whole choppy sea of them, that we disapprove of and think wrong and wouldn’t dream of actively protecting, without therefore thinking they should be felonies, or even the equivalent of parking tickets.*

And I suppose this is how I look at the whole issue. I don’t see it as all or nothing, as free speech or nothing, as a blanket endorsement of free speech or a blanket criminalization of everything that’s not an explicit right. I suppose I look at it in a ceteris paribus way, and I often think other things aren’t equal. I suppose I see blanket or unconditional endorsements of free speech as a pre-emptive move similar to that executed by words like ‘respect’ and ‘blasphemy’. I think I’m going to write a book about this.

It’s not that I don’t think free speech is a good, and a tremendously important good at that, it’s just that I think 1) that it’s often a competing good and 2) that the things it competes with have to be evaluated on their merits rather than just dismissed by the trumping-power of free speech and 3) that as Stanley Fish and Onora O’Neill (among others) point out, pretty much everyone else thinks that too. If that’s true, if pretty much everyone else does think that too, then the blanket endorsement of free speech would seem to be functioning as a rhetorical tool.

Dave put it neatly in comments:

This is, of course, why politics is inevitable. There is no foundational response to the issue, other than to continue the clash between differing viewpoints over what constitutes a ‘correction’ and what a ‘falsification’, and to hope that those who defend freedom do not sell the pass one day…

There is no foundational response to the issue. Free speech is one good, but truth, accuracy, scholarship, reliable scholarship, the reliable universality and intercommunicability of scholarship and research and knowledge, methodological reliability, evidence, standards, trust – are also goods. It is by no means self-evident that free speech should protect a putative right to falsify history at the expense of all those very real and important goods. Research, inquiry, the steady accumulation of reliable, warranted knowledge would become impossible if everyone came to believe that free speech meant the right to simply invent one’s findings – to cheat, as Robert Pennock called it during the Kitzmiller trial. But – that doesn’t cash out to saying that scholars who lie should be hauled off to prison.

Onora O’Neill put it this way:

Yet even committed liberals don’t seriously think that rights to free speech are unlimited or unconditional, although they seem to be unsure about which limits should be set. They are often torn between an aspiration to justify free speech as minimal and uncontroversial, and a contrary belief that free speech matters because it is not minimal but powerful…Rights to free speech have always been seen as limited by other serious considerations, and must often be so restricted if we are to respect other rights. Nobody thinks that a right to free speech confers an unconditional licence to intimidate, to incite hatred, to defraud, to deceive or the like, and nobody thinks that the law should protect speech acts that harm, injure or put others at risk.

That’s what I’m saying. I don’t think Irving should be in prison (although I have to admit I don’t think it with much intensity or passion or even conviction, and I don’t mind much that he is there, especially after listening to Radio 4’s documentary on the trial last week) but I don’t think he has a right to falsify published history, either.

It’s all about lying, after all. Irving accused Deborah Lipstadt of lying by accusing her of libel – he was accusing her of lying about him, and he wanted the accusation to have an effect: the pulping of her book. He lost the case because he was shown to have lied extensively himself. His right to free speech didn’t trump that verdict – so in that sense it was not protected. It lost out to other, competing rights. Lipstadt won the case not because she had a right to free speech, but because the evidence showed that she told the truth and Irving lied.

Another distinction that I think helps to disentangle this is that between speech (such as speech to political meetings and rallies) and published writing. But that’s enough for now.

*Mind you, a lot of people do make exactly that translation, as I’ve remarked before. They do, oddly, hear strongly-worded disapprobation of, say, a certain kind of tv show or movie or book as a demand for censorship of same. But those are confused people, who are beside the point for the purposes of this discussion.

Norm wrote a post a few days ago on lying as speech, taking off partly from some of my posts on Irving. I’ve been wanting to consider the subject a little more.

I think we may be talking about slightly (or perhaps not so slightly) different things.

Now, even though Ophelia puts the point interrogatively and not as a conclusion, one can only assume she does so to leave open the possibility that falsehood, lying and such shouldn’t be protected under norms of free speech, and therefore may in certain circumstances be criminalized.

Hmm. No, it’s not really criminalization that I’m talking about. I don’t think Irving should be in prison, but I’m not sure I therefore think his falsehoods should be protected. I’m not talking about criminalization so much as about right, and rights. I don’t think Irving should be in prison, but do I therefore think he has a right to falsify history? No, I don’t – at least not a moral right, and that’s part of what I’m saying – that the fact that falsification of history should not (on the whole – there could be exceptions) be an imprisonable offence does not necessarily mean that it’s a right in all possible senses. Is that incoherent? I don’t think so. Look at the Dover school board – they found via Judge Jones’s decision that they don’t have a right to force science teachers to teach religion in the classroom, but they didn’t go to prison.

I cannot imagine there would be an argument for innocuous falsehoods, even where these are deliberate, to be criminalized. Surely people must still be allowed to maintain that the world is flat (whether knowing this to be false or not), to claim – at Hyde Park Corner – Napoleon as a direct blood ancestor when he is not, and to assert that the Romans had mobile phones though no trace of these has survived. The examples may be frivolous, but the point isn’t; it’s that what matters in the present context is not any old false or lying claims for which there is no evidence, but falsehoods which could do grave harm.

Why Hyde Park Corner, I wonder? Why the stipulation, between hyphens, as an afterthought, of Hyde Park Corner? It’s interesting, because I agree with Norm if he really does mean ‘at Hyde Park Corner’ and not in textbooks or history books by reputable (trusted) publishers. But if he means ‘at Hyde Park Corner’ and in textbooks and history books by reputable (trusted) publishers, then I don’t. But he probably doesn’t mean that, or he wouldn’t have stipulated Hyde Park Corner. But this is just where the difficulty (or one of them) comes in. The park soapbox doesn’t matter much, because it’s wide open (like the internet), there are no filters, anyone can stand on a chair and say any old fool thing, and most hearers know that. But in textbooks and history books (for instance) readers don’t know that. So do people have a ‘right’ to falsify the evidence – by mistranslating, dropping a few zeroes from numbers, that sort of thing – in history books? I don’t think they do. And, actually, I’m not sure anyone thinks they do. It’s not usually considered a violation of rights when copyeditors and fact checkers and researchers correct mistakes in manuscripts is it? (Assuming they actually do correct mistakes as opposed to inserting mistakes of their own, which can happen, she said through gritted teeth.) And then consider science. Scientists tend to be really quite harsh about falsification of evidence. Really very sharp indeed, when it comes to their attention. They don’t think their colleagues have a right to fake their experiments, do they? No. In fact fakery is a firing offense, even though not (usually) one that gets you sent to prison.

So – given that Irving was found by the judge at the libel trial to have not merely got things wrong but to have faked the evidence – it’s not clear to me that he does really have a meaningful ‘right’ to do that, even though a prison sentence is probably the wrong way to deal with the matter.

Yet, if rights of free speech on scientific, historical and other such matters are not to be held to cover the assertion – even deliberate – of untruths, then it assigns the task of determining truth to some political authority, and that is surely a danger of its own kind. There is truth and untruth, to be sure, but in the domain we are discussing, the (always provisional) finding of truth is left to processes of free enquiry, the standards set by communities of scholars, public debate and criticism. It is an open-ended and democratic search, and it countenances opposition to and denial even of the most established results. Stipulation of the truth by a political or legal authority does not fit in well with this and it has a bad historical track record.

Yes, ideally, but what about for instance public hearings about textbooks, at which religious campaigners attempt to insert ‘corrections’ that have no scholarly basis? It is in fact a political authority that makes the decision. The issue of falsifications and inaccuracies in books becomes a matter of political or legal authority when state schools are involved – that seems to be inevitable.

Perhaps the relevant distinction is between prevention and punishment. I don’t think Irving should be punished, but I do think he should be prevented, at least from publishing (by publishers rather than by cops). So in that sense, I don’t think he does have a right to protected free speech. I don’t think we’re obliged to make any affirmative efforts to see that his falsifications get placed in the permanent record. I don’t think he should be forcibly silenced, but I don’t think he should be officiously handed a megaphone, either.

This is an immensely irritating article. Very typical, and symptomatic, and all the more irritating for that.

More than half of Americans believe there are more violent extremists within Islam than in any other religion and that the faith encourages violence against non-Muslims, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll yesterday…Analysts blame the surge on a confluence of factors…above all, the riotous protests across the Muslim world against Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad.

Analysts ‘blame the surge’ on ‘riotous protests’ in which a lot of people were killed – killed dead, over some cartoons, the most ‘offensive’ of which was faked. Well, yes, that probably was a factor. In other words analysts ‘blame the surge’ on real events, and people’s awareness of those real events. Well – is that not allowed? Are people not allowed to observe real events and draw conclusions from them? What are we supposed to do? Observe real events and decide on principle not to draw any unpleasant conclusions from them? Are we supposed to observe Fred Phelps and his followers (one of whom gave an interview on the World Service last night that was quite astonishing) and not draw any conclusions about them?

But nearly half of Americans, 46%, said they held unfavourable attitudes towards Islam – compared with 24% in January 2002. The Post quoted analysts as saying that the demonisation of Islam by politicians and the media during the past four years had led to an erosion of tolerance.

So, there’s our answer: yes, we are supposed to observe real events and not draw particular conclusions from them. There are conclusions we’re not supposed to draw, no matter what the evidence for them. There are certain conclusions that are ruled out in advance. There are certain conclusions that are ‘demonization’ and the opposite of ‘tolerance’ (and, no doubt, ‘respect’), and they are forbidden. The only permitted conclusion, apparently, is that all religions (or ‘faiths’) have exactly, and I mean exactly, the same ratio of good to bad, the same number of faults and virtues, the same moral value. That is simply a revealed truth, and it cannot be gainsaid by any amount of actual real-world actions or speech, any amount of facts and evidence. No number of beheadings of schoolgirls, stonings to death of women buried up to the neck while their children are made to watch, exploded tube trains and buses and pizza restaurants and discos, death threats, ‘honour’ killings, riots, fires – no such number is permitted to be taken into account. No. It is simply Forbidden to think that it might possibly conceivably actually be a mere fact that there are more violent extremists within Islam than in any other religion and that Islam does encourage violence against non-Muslims. But what if it is in fact true? If it is in fact true, don’t we want to be able to take that in? Do we want to be forbidden to take it in by being told it is ‘demonization’? I would say no. Again, consider Fred Phelps. I don’t want to be told to ‘tolerate’ Fred Phelps – I want to reject him and everything he says. That principle applies across the board. We need to be able to judge religions and the ideas that animate them, and to say they are bad and harmful if they are in fact bad and harmful. It’s no good assuming anything is good or harmless without looking first. The use of the word ‘Islamophobia’ in the title of course sets the tone, by right from the outset (‘Islamophobia’ is the first word in the piece) telling us what to think: telling us to equate opinions critical of Islam with the loony-sounding ‘Islamophobia’. It was Islamists who came up with that idea, telling followers to use the word whenever possible; it’s pathetic that the Guardian helps out. It’s worse than pathetic.

James Zogby, president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute, told the Post he was not surprised by the poll’s results. Politicians, authors and media commentators have demonised the Arab world since 2001, he said.

And here we just descend into hopeless confusion and inanity. The survey was about Islam, remember? Not Arabs? Islam? What’s the Arab American Institute got to do with anything? What’s ‘the Arab world’ got to do with anything? What are we talking about? Anything? Everything? Whatever comes to hand? Is this just a none-too-subtle ploy to equate criticism of Islam with racism? Similar to the ‘Islamophobia’ ploy? Either that or hopeless confusion. Anyway, classic.