Month: November 2006

Tom Freeman at Fisking Central also disputed with Theo Hobson and his rather idiosyncratic account of what atheism is. He points out that Hobson isn’t altogether consistent.

This atheist, believing that religious claims are factually untrue, is naturally likely to prefer others to reject these untruths. It is also possible, though, for an atheist to believe that (some) religion can (in some circumstances) have (some) social or cultural benefits. And Hobson knows this: less than a week ago, he wrote about the atheist philosopher Julian Baggini, who “agrees that dogmatic atheism is unattractive: ‘to think there is nothing to be learned from religion is extremely arrogant,’ he says. And he acknowledges the appeal of religion, even to a hardened atheist.” If Hobson still accepts – as he did a few days ago – that Baggini is an atheist, then this rather undermines his current argument that atheism is a matter of intolerant zealotry.

He wrote about the atheist philosopher Julian Baggini? thought I. He did? I was unaware. I was also amused. ‘The atheist philosopher Julian Baggini’ – mmph – that’s no the atheist philosopher, that’s just Julian. No no, no no, I don’t mean it (Julian doesn’t read this, fortunately, so I can tease a little); I know he is the atheist philosopher really; it just sounds funny. It’s the ‘the,’ I suppose.*

So I was inspired to read Hobson’s post. Here’s the bit he quotes from an interview of Julian in a Christian magazine:

For example, there are certain things that I think are quite valuable which the religious mindset finds easier to accommodate. I’d call them ‘religious attitudes’. Thankfulness is one example. I think it’s very good to have a sense of gratitude – for being alive, for being well. I think that the lack of it lies at the root of a lot of modern dissatisfaction. People no longer feel a sense of gratitude, they feel a sense of entitlement, and so they’re always unhappier about what they don’t have than they are thankful for what they do … I think [thankfulness] comes more naturally in a religious mindset. For a start, you have an object of gratitude. There’s nothing for me to feel thankful to. And also you have rituals of gratitude. A religious person can say grace, they can pray. Now, you can try to create these little rituals in atheist settings if you like, but I tend to think they wouldn’t work.

I agree with most of that, and I’ve been thinking about it lately. I have this idea about a possible connection between irrational or arational belief or faith, and certain qualities like generosity and compassion. I think there may be a sense in which irrationality can be a kind of virtue – because it may be better at selflessness, at not being calculating and cautious, at just going all out for other people. That could be considered a religious attitude. I want to jaw about that some time; meanwhile, I completely agree with the part about ritual, and I’m pretty sure I’ve said that here. I think the ritual problem is really regrettable.

But once we get off Julian and back onto Hobson, things don’t go so well.

Baggini is right to move the discussion away from the tired philosophical argument over the existence of God, and to think about the attitudes that define faith. For faith in God is not a matter of believing certain unlikely propositions about the universe. The question of whether or not he exists is a massive category error. It is the supreme non-question. In practice, to have faith in him is to be involved in a certain way of speaking and feeling. And gratitude is a key aspect of this rhetorical tradition. The believer learns to feel indebted, grateful, dependent. He or she learns to see God as the source of all goodness, all life, and to see him or herself as infinitely lucky.

Uh…how do you go about seeing god as the source of all goodness, all life if you don’t believe god exists? How can god’s existence be a non-question if you’re going to have gratitude to that god for being the source of all goodness, all life? Sorry, but I don’t quite follow.

*Oh honestly. I no sooner type that than I read a comment on my previous post on Hobson, which takes a jokey comment I made on Julian’s comment with deadly seriousness and tells me to hold off on the snark, so I guess I should spell out that that stuff is [loudly] jokey. No doubt it’s all very unbecoming of me to make jokes about atheist philosophers and everything, but dang, it’s just Notes and Comment, it’s not the front page of the Times. I make the odd joke now and then. I mean no disrespect. I deeply respect all philosophers without exception, I promise.

Canada’s talking about it too.

In recent weeks, the debate in Britain over the wearing of the niqab or face veil has crossed the north Atlantic to Canada. It came on the heels of claims that the leaders of the large Indo-Canadian population in British Columbia were turning a blind eye to widespread domestic violence. Last year saw an acrimonious dispute in Ontario over whether Muslims could use Islamic sharia courts to settle family disputes.

Notice what all three of those examples have in common.

In themselves, fights over cultural practices and symbols are nothing new in Canada…What is new about the latest arguments is an underlying tension between some cultural practices of recent immigrants and the mainstream values of Canadian liberal democracy, such as sex equality.

It’s too bad pols and journalists so often frame the issue that way. It seems to me the point isn’t that the values are mainstream or that they’re Canadian (or British, or Dutch, or German, or French, or Italian), but that they’re egalitarian, universalist, justice-based, and the like. ‘Mainstream’ is the wrong word to invoke, because sex inequality is mainstream in many other places, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing in those places. It’s funny how popular those coercive conformist majoritarian words tend to be – as if no one had ever heard or known of a case where the majority was simply wrong. Majorities can get the facts wrong, and they can be morally wrong; ‘majority’ isn’t an inherently moral term. I suppose it’s natural for everyone to get confused about this in democracies, because it is the case that we are all subject to majority will; but the fact remains that number of votes doesn’t equate to accuracy on the one hand or justice on the other.

Multiculturalism has since sunk deep roots in government, reflected in everything from broadcasting to education policy…Almost half believe that immigrants should be free to maintain their cultural and religious practices. But a poll published this week reflected the new disquiet: when asked whether those practices should be tolerated if they infringe women’s rights, a large majority said No.

Well, there you go. Exactly. Free to maintain cultural and religious practices, good, but if they infringe women’s rights, not so good. That’s why it’s so misleading for people to keep churning out bromides about tolerance and cultural yakyak – because it depends. It depends on which cultural and religious practices we’re talking about, obviously, so blanket ‘yes lovely all should be permitted Kumbaya’ is not helpful. That awareness is starting to sink in, which is good. Maybe somebody should write a really good book about religious and cultural practices and how they affect women.

An excellent look at the Theo Hobson-Mark Vernon school of argument from Obscene Desserts.

He then suddenly changes direction and – accompanied by the wrenching sounds of screeching, overloaded gears and, moreover, ignoring Grayling’s definition of atheism – alleges that atheism

>>entails a certain narrative about historical progress: we can move to a new and better age once we have dispensed with superstition. Atheism is more than the rejection of religion as false: it is the belief that religion is an evil that holds back human history. (Empahsis added)

Huh? Really? Atheism entails (‘to have, impose, or require as a necessary accompaniment or consequence’) a certain narrative about historical progress? All atheists have the same view of history without which atheism would be impossible? Gosh. I’m an atheist. I’m also a historian who – like most of my colleagues – holds to a quite different narrative of history than the ‘it’s getting better all the time’ version which Hobson imagines. Does this make me a logical impossibility? Or, perhaps not a ‘true’ atheist (on the ‘no true Scot’ model). Or perhaps I’m not a ‘true’ historian. Which would be worrying…if this whole argument weren’t so obviously ridiculous.

Indeed. Ridiculous and yet all too familiar – the ever-popular ‘define atheism as any old thing you feel like and then triumphantly explain why that atheism is all wrong and silly and besides it’s a “faith” itself so ha’ trick. It’s one of those things that is so drearily familiar, so endlessly recycled however often it is shown to be wrong and self-serving and tendentious, that it should have its own ‘foul’ flag that we could just wave whenever it turns up. ‘Foul!’ Ten years of silence while you contemplate your sins.

J Carter Wood then goes on to Hobson’s (also familiar) claim that ‘atheism itself is the product, not as you might expect of the Enlightenment or the development of science, but rather of….protestantism.’

Now, it’s true that no idea comes from nowhere and, thus, ‘derives from’ something else; however, there seem to be several major intellectual steps missing between Christianity and ‘the atheist narrative’ (what, only one?) which Hobson decries. The Reformation was certainly an important precursor to the Enlightenment (and even after that a lot of ostensibly secularist thinking has remain influenced by religious assumptions or frameworks), but Hobson’s relentless effort to detach atheism from science and link it with a blind, naive optimism about the human condition is bizarre…Hobson’s argument here relies rather heavily, and awkwardly, on the history of Positivism – which did certainly have a startlingly teleological and progressive view of history – which Gray presented in Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern. By casting all secularists into that bizarre mould (which is a mistake which Gray himself – for all his worth as a thinker – all too often makes…while all positivists might have been atheists, the equation doesn’t work equally well in the opposite direction), Hobson is confusing two very different things: the scientific, secular worldview and a very specific (though in its time influential) intellectual movement which did, at times, develop certain cult-like trappings…If anything, it is a skeptical, secular and scientific outlook which tends against most kinds of fundamentalist optimism.

Read the whole thing.

Some quotables in Hitchens’s review of Clive James’s memoir.

James’s strenuous test of the De Vriesian proposition was to try to demonstrate that one could be simultaneously cerebral and on television…I can only say, as someone who doesn’t watch much television, that when Clive James invited me on to one of his shows…I did actually feel that I wasn’t under orders to be stupider than I really am.

It’s irksome, being under such orders. There’s always (or often) that lurking dread when writing books, that some faceless publisher or editor or agent will swear that no no a thousand times no, this book will never make it past your poxy little computer unless you make it readily understandable to the pearly-cheeked virginal four-year-old. (There is also of course the corresponding but rather different dread that one will be under orders to be cleverer than one in fact is. Happily those orders are impossible to fulfill, so there is no conflict; one simply falls on one’s sword. So I imagine, at any rate.)

Of a certain Friday lunchtime group, which now threatens to become a pseudo-legend on an almost Bloomsbury-like scale…, James makes the correct observation that it started out as a self-consciously counter-Leavisite snack, where little if any career-smoothing or back-scratching could even have been attempted. One of the “stars” of that snack, Martin Amis, once rebuked someone for being in want of a sense of humour, and added that by saying this he meant very deliberately to impugn the man’s seriousness.

There – if I’m not mistaken, there is the ‘no truly intelligent’ thing again. To ruin an epigram by explaining it, I would suggest that Amis meant something like what I’ve been claiming: that the want of a sense of humour constitutes such a serious and disabling blind spot that it really is incompatible with (proper, full, complete) intelligence.

Anyway, it’s a great line.

Misogyny wins another round.

Nicaraguan President Enrique Bolanos has signed into law a ban on all abortions, even in cases when a woman’s life is judged to be at risk. Previous legislation from a century ago allowed an abortion if three doctors certified that the woman was in danger…President-elect Daniel Ortega once favoured abortion rights but changed stance after re-embracing Catholicism. Mr Bolanos signed the law in the presence of Roman Catholic bishops and Protestant evangelist leaders.

All of them agreeing, apparently, that a foetus is more valuable than the woman who is carrying it.

I liked this article on the sense of smell. It made me think, as the saying goes.

Mine is a mediocre specimen of a post-lapsarian nose. As a fallen daughter of Eve—or, more accurately, a fallen granddaughter of a sharp-nosed chimpanzee—I am conscious of smell only a few times each day…But for most of the day, it is unusual for me to notice any particular smells. I do eat food, of course, but with the illusory impression that I am tasting rather than smelling the myriad different flavours that make up even an ordinary meal.

Yes, same here, I suppose; but I do value smells, I thought to myself. Then later in the day when I was outside, I thought of the article and began sniffing, trying to see if I could exercise my sense of smell. It was interesting – interesting to find how little I could really smell.

It was a perfect day for it. It’s officially the wettest November on record in Seattle, and the month only half over; it rained heavily and non-stop all day Wednesday and it was also very windy, then it cleared overnight, so yesterday the air was as clean as it can possibly get, plus the ground is saturated, so you would think one would be able to smell it. But I couldn’t, really. I tried, but I couldn’t. Sniff sniff sniff – what am I smelling? Nothing, really – very clean damp air; it’s lovely, it’s a joy to sniff, but it doesn’t really have any specific content that I could name. That seemed odd. I looked around (I was walking) – there was, not surprisingly, wet fallen vegetation everywhere, gently decaying; wouldn’t you think we’d be able to smell that? But I couldn’t. Once or twice I thought I perhaps got a faint hint of wet earth and leaves, but I wasn’t at all sure. Maybe I could have in a forest; maybe the ratio of concrete to earth and grass and leaves in an urban neighborhood makes the organic segment more difficult to smell. I thought about farms, the ocean, eucalyptus groves, other smelly places. Gorillas – gorillas have a very strong, pungent smell; orang utans don’t. That’s interesting. Dogs smell bad; cats smell good; why is that?