Month: August 2009

Often, when one cites Millian views on liberty, open discussion and the like, it emerges that people think Mill was talking only about legal rights. He wasn’t.

The fourth paragraph of On Liberty:

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant–society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it–its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

What does it all matter? I’ve been engaging in a couple of blog discussions of that question – about why people get so riled about Mooney and Kirshenbaum, what’s at stake, whence comes all the heat. (I’ve also lost a friend over it, a price I resent paying.)

One way of explaining is to quote a little of the preface to The God Delusion. It starts with Lalla Ward’s misery at school and her parents’ asking why she never said she wanted to leave and her reply: ‘But I didn’t know I could.’

Lots of people don’t know they can, and it is worth letting them know: you can. (You can even invoke ‘Yes we can’ if you want to. Why not?)

Dawkins goes on to talk in particular about the US and its religiosity:

There are many people who know, in their heart of hearts, that they are atheists, but dare not admit it to their families or even, in some cases, to themselves. Partly, this is because the very word ‘atheist’ has been assiduously built up as a terrible and frightening label…The status of atheists in America today is on a par with that of homosexuals fifty years ago…The reason so many people don’t notice atheists is that so many of us are reluctant to ‘come out’…Exactly as in the case of the gay movement, the more people come out, the easier it will be for others to join them. [pp 3-4]

There: that’s part of why. It’s because of that. It’s because of social pressure, majoritarian pressure, the pressure of public opinion and rhetoric and ‘framing.’ It’s easy for me to be an atheist, but I’m a nerd living in a big coastal city; the fact that it’s easy for me doesn’t mean it’s easy for everyone. It’s not. It’s hard for a great many people – it’s not a live option – or if it is it’s one with a huge price tag attached. And that’s bad because there is nothing wrong with being an atheist. It’s not a crime, not even a thought-crime. So Dawkins is right – people in the US at least need to know they’re not weirdos marooned on Planet Theism, and the only way for them to know that is for it to be true, and the only way for it to be true is for more and more atheists to be openly atheist as opposed to bashfully apologetically silently atheist.

This has started, partly thanks to Dawkins’s book. Sure, there’s a lot of irritating bluster along the way – but that’s not the end of the world. There is also a fair amount of worthwhile discussion of what we know and how we know it, and that makes a nice change from legless chat about what ‘God’ wants us to do. M&K have a fixed idea that all this will cause Americans to hate science, or to fail to stop hating science, or to hate science more than they already do, or something like that – but M&K have yet to offer a coherent argument for exactly why they think that and why the rest of us should think it too. Nothing daunted by the lack of an argument, they are trying very hard to persuade everyone that they are right and that atheists should go back to being bashfully apologetically silent. But we don’t want to do that. That’s the whole point – we want to stop doing that and do the other thing instead. We think M&K need a much, much more compelling argument than anything they’ve offered yet to convince us to go back into our little pens.

So that’s what it all matters.

From David Lodge’s novel Paradise News. The protagonist is a theologian who was once a believer but is not any more.

‘He sat at his desk and took out his notes on a book about process theology he was reviewing for Eschatological Review. The God of process theology, he read, is the cosmic lover. “His transcendence is in His sheer faithfulness to Himself in love, in His inexhaustibility as lover, and in his capacity for endless adaptation to circumstances in which his Love may be active.” Really? Who says? The theologian says. And who cares, apart from other theologians? Not the people choosing their holidays from the travel agent’s brochures…It often seemed to Bernard that the discourse of much modern radical theology was just as implausible and unfounded as the orthodxy it had replaced, but nobody had noticed because nobody had read it except those with a professional stake in its continuation.’ [p 29]

That’s good, isn’t it? The quoted bit sounds exactly like Terry Eagleton drivelling away about his left foot and Chekhov and toasters, and the commentary sounds exactly like – well, me, asking how the hell Terry Eagleton knows all that about ‘God’ and what it’s supposed to mean anyway.

And the good news is that now somebody has noticed, lots of people have, because Terry Eagleton and Karen Armstrong and Madeleine Bunting and other windbags have been telling us about it.

A bit more, later on. He’s musing on the Penny Catechism and reciting it to himself then gets creative.

‘When did you cease to believe in this God?

Perhaps when I was still training for the priesthood. Certainly when I was teaching at St Ethelbert’s. I can’t remember, exactly.

You can’t remember?

Who remembers when they stopped believing in Father Christmas? It’s not usually a specific moment – catching a parent in the act of putting your presents at the end of the bed. It’s an intuition, a conclusion you draw at a certain age, or stage of growth, and you don’t immediately admit it, or force the question, is there a Father Christmas? into the open, because secretly you shrink from the negative answer – in a way, you would prefer to go on believing in Father Christmas…

Are you equating belief in God with belief in Father Christmas?

No, of course not. It’s just an analogy. We lose faith in a cherished idea long before we admit it to ourselves. Some people never admit it.’ [p 47]

Quite.

Michael Rosch at Examiner suggest that Mooney and Kirshenbaum suffer from a problem he calls ‘the paradox of paradise’:

They call for a non-confrontational approach to things and desire an ideal world where everyone just gets along, but they themselves create conflict with their own critics because they realize their ideal world can’t co-exist with dissenting views. So those most advocating non-confrontationalism pick fights with those who disagree with their philosophy and see merit in certain conflicts. Hence the fact that in addition to criticizing Dawkins, M&K go after their other favorite targets, PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne, each of whom wrote scathing reviews of M&K’s book. So they gave your book bad reviews because they found your conclusions superficial and naive? Get over it already.

Actually in their case I think it’s not so much a paradox as just not noticing their own inconsistency. As several people have been pointing out, they’re saying something along the lines of ‘God damn it be nice and get along you miserable piece of crap!’ They’re talking about peace and harmony but they’re performing combativeness and truculence. But anyway, it’s the part about the ideal world being unable to co-exist with dissenting views that’s the kicker, I think. It’s sad and alarming that they don’t know this, but that really is the fascist dream. But it’s the liberal nightmare.

Thanks to Jerry Coyne for the link.

And here we go again.

Cowing under pressure from the Hindu Janjagruti Samiti (HJS), the police on Monday served notice on reputed Goan artist Subodh Kerkar to “desist from getting involved in such activities which may insult religious feelings or religious beliefs”. SP (North) Bosco George said Kerkar “should keep in mind the sentiments of the community and avoid creating a law and order problem. We will soon take a decision on whether or not the artist’s graphics hurt sentiments. If it is found to hurt religious sentiments, we will initiate legal action against him,” he said. HJS had petitioned the police last week alleging that Kerkar had published “drawings of Lord Ganesh in various positions”, thereby insulting religious beliefs.

So that’s how it is in India – it is, in practice if not in law, illegal to ‘insult religious feelings or religious beliefs,’ and the police can order people to ‘keep in mind the sentiments of the community’ and can make it their responsibility to ‘avoid creating a law and order problem’ meaning not do anything which religious zealots might take amiss and might get violent about. If somebody draws something, ‘thereby insulting religious beliefs,’ then you call the cops.

What more is there to say?