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Sacramento, California, March 1 2006 : The intense struggle over the content of Indian history in California textbooks ended Monday afternoon at 2 p.m. with the special committee of the California State Board of Education [SBE] voting unanimously to overturn a majority of contentious changes proposed by Hindu right-wing groups to California school textbooks. This decision is a victory for community organizations such as Friends of South Asia (FOSA), the Ambedkar Center for Peace and Justice, the Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America, and the Coalition Against Communalism (CAC), who have worked diligently to ensure that ahistorical and sectarian content proposed by Hindu right-wing groups is removed from California textbooks. Hundreds of South Asian scholars from across the United States and nearly fifty internationally renowned Indologists had repeatedly written to the Board as well, protesting the changes proposed by the Hindu nationalist groups.

At a public hearing on February 27th, the SBE special committee heard testimony from scores of people, regarding controversial edits for 6 th grade history-social science textbooks proposed by two Hindu Nationalist Indian American groups, the Vedic Foundation (VF) and the Hindu Education Foundation (HEF). These organizations have provoked outrage from a broad spectrum of South Asian community groups for pushing sectarian agendas and revisionist histories which whitewash references to the oppression of women and Dalits (formerly known as “untouchables”), and present Hinduism as a monotheistic religion and Aryans as indigenous to India, despite overwhelming scholarly evidence to the contrary.

Parents, students, working professionals, faculty, first and second generation immigrants, and representatives of many community groups eloquently stressed the importance of presenting children with accurate, scholarly information on all aspects of ancient Indian history. Some of the most moving testimony before the SBE came from individuals who had personally experienced caste oppression. Representatives of Dalit organizations urged the SBE to restore references to Dalits and the caste system, which had been deleted from the textbooks on the HEF’s and VF’s recommendations. “The caste system is the single most important repressive social phenomenon that has been unique to Hinduism for over 3,000 years and should therefore find a place in the textbooks,” reminded Rama Krishna Bhupathi of FOSA and a Dalit himself. Speaking for the Federation of Tamils of North America, Thillai Kumaran, a concerned parent who stated his lower-caste origins during his testimony, strenuously objected to the textbooks’ suggestion that the caste system is no longer relevant in modern India. “Hinduism continues to affect the social status of people in India, and has condemned millions of Dalits as social outcasts,” he said. Hansraj Kajla, also a parent and representative of the Guru Ravi Dass Gurdwara (a Dalit group), suggested that the deletion of references to the caste system and the word “Dalit” in the textbooks was tantamount to “wiping out the histories of more than 160 million people in India.”

The powerful and stirring testimony from Dalit groups was met with outright denial from the HEF and VF supporters. One speaker claimed that there was no oppression against lower castes in India and indeed it was only higher classes in India that faced discrimination due to the affirmative action programs, while another argued that the very fact that some Dalits had migrated to California is evidence enough that Dalits are a privileged community in India.

While supporters of the VF and HEF claimed that references to negative aspects of Hinduism such as the caste system and the oppression of women damage the self-esteem of their children, others strongly disagreed. Speaking from her experiences of learning about caste and gender oppression in middle school, Veena Dubal, a joint law and doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, explained, “Like many of my European-American classmates whose ancestral histories could be traced to a time before women and people of color were given independent legal identities and allowed political participation… I was painfully embarrassed to read about the injustices committed in my parents’ homeland. Yet it was precisely these lessons that taught me about the necessity for universal civil liberties and human rights.” Simmy Makhijani, who also remembers facing racism and sexism in American classrooms while growing up, challenged the attempts by HEF and VF to sanitize Indian history. She asked, “My concern is why should history be (re)written to make us feel better?”

One of the most contentious edits that received considerable attention at the meeting was one where the HEF sought to replace the original text, “Men [in ancient India] had many more rights than women” with one that read “Men had different duties (dharma) and rights than women.” The staff of the California Department of Education recommended against making this edit yesterday, in keeping with the demands of groups such as FOSA, CAC and others who insisted on a historical approach to ancient India. As Kasturi Ray, a specialist in Gender and Women’s studies in UC, Berkeley, and herself a Hindu-American parent said in her letter to the Board, “This sentence also equates difference with what were actually systematically-denied duties and rights based on gender. With this sentence, we lose the opportunity to understand what women really had to do (and continue to do) to win equal duties and rights.” Angana Chatterji, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, concurred that an accurate understanding of history can inspire individuals to become better citizens. In her letter to the SBE, Chatterji observed, “We must make distinctions between a national pride that wishes to put forward a uniform and glorifying version of history and the scholarship of history, which seeks to present the complexities of societies. Fiction as history does not benefit Indian-American and other California school-goers.”

Speakers at the special committee meeting also pointed out the VF and HEF have organizational ties to militant Hindu groups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in India that have been linked to large-scale violence against religious minorities. Others underscored the pluralistic nature of Hinduism. Sanjeev Mahajan challenged the Hindu Education Foundation’s claim that the Vedas constitute the source of Hinduism. “Popular Hinduism, as it is practiced today,” he pointed out, “is a complex set of practices, which has little to do with the Vedas.” He claimed that the VF and HEF promote the views of high-caste Hindu elites “who view culture in terms of neat, boxed, and segregated religious categories and feel threatened by practices that are egalitarian and tolerant of other religions.”

Raju Rajagopal, an organizer for CAC, marveled at the overwhelming community mobilization against the VF’s and HEF’s campaign to insert sectarian material into California textbooks. He also highlighted that this controversy was not just abstract debate but had immediate social relevance. “Hindu right wing historians claim that the Taj Mahal in Agra and the Kaaba in Mecca and some 1000 mosques in Ahmedabad were once Hindu temples. This was clearly on the mind of VHP/RSS rioters in 2002, when they destroyed or converted into temples over 270 mosques during the massive Gujarat pogroms. Rewriting history the Hindutva way – as suggested by many of the edits by VF/HEF – is designed and destined to lead to more communal conflicts in India.”

The SBE is slated to make its final decisions regarding textbook adoption on its meeting on March 8-10, 2006.

Press release by Friends of South Asia. For backbround on textbook controversy go here.

$1000 reward to anyone who can produce a published case of “repressed memory” (in fiction or non-fiction) prior to 1800

Our research suggests that the concept of “repressed memory” or “dissociative amnesia” might be simply a romantic notion dating from the 1800s, rather than a scientifically valid phenomenon. To test this hypothesis, we are offering a reward of $1000 to the first person who can find a description of “repressed memory” in any written work, either nonfiction or fiction (novels, poems, dramas, epics, the Bible, essays, medical treatises, or any other sources), in English or in any work that has been translated into English, prior to 1800. We would argue that if “repressed memory” were a genuine natural phenomenon that has always affected people, then someone, somewhere, in the thousands of years prior to 1800, would have witnessed it and portrayed it in a non-fictional work or in a fictional character.

To qualify as a bona fide case, the individual described in the work must: 1) experience a severe trauma (abuse, sexual assault, a near-death
experience, etc.); and 2) develop amnesia for that trauma for months or years afterwards (i.e. be clearly unable to remember the traumatic event as opposed to merely denying or avoiding the thought); where 3) the amnesia cannot be explained by biological factors, such as a) early childhood amnesia — in which the individual was under age five at the time of the trauma, or b) neurological impairment due to head injury, drug or alcohol intoxication, or biological diseases. Also, the individual must 4) “recover” the lost memory at some later time, even though the individual had previously been unable to access the memory. Finally, note 5) that the individual must selectively forget a traumatic event; amnesia for an entire period of time, or amnesia for non-traumatic events does not qualify.

There are numerous examples of “repressed memory” in fiction and nonfiction after 1800. A literary example that fulfills all of the above criteria is Penn, in Rudyard Kipling’s 1896 novel, Captains Courageous, who develops complete amnesia for having lost his entire family in a tragic flood. He later goes to work as a fisherman on a Grand Banks schooner. On one occasion, after a tragic collision between an ocean liner and another schooner at sea, Penn suddenly recovers his lost memory of the flood and the death of his family, and recounts the story to other members of the crew.

At present, we have been unable to find any cases of “repressed memory,” meeting the above criteria, in any work prior to 1800. We offer a prize of $1000 to the first person who can do so. Please contact us with any questions or candidate cases at harrisonpope@mclean.harvard.edu

The first successful respondent, if any, will receive a check for $1000 from the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory, and the successful case will be posted on this website. In the event of any dispute (i.e., a respondent who disagrees with us as to whether a case meets the above 5 criteria), Scott Lukas, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry (Pharmacology) at Harvard Medical School, has agreed to arbitrate. Dr. Lukas has no involvement in the debate surrounding “repressed memory” and has never published in this area; thus he represents an impartial arbitrator. We have agreed to abide by Dr. Lukas’ decision in the case of any dispute.

Harrison G. Pope, Jr., M.D., M.P.H.
James I. Hudson, M.D., Sc.D.
Directors, Biological Psychiatry Laboratory
McLean Hospital
Belmont, MA 02478

The New York Times has opted not to publish this letter from Daniel Dennett, so B&W is pleased to make it available. Judith Shulevitz’s review is here.

Thanks to Judith Shulevitz [“When Cosmologies Collide,” NYTBR January 22] for unwittingly exposing the serious flaw in Michael Ruse’s attempt to distinguish the science of evolution (of which he approves) from the more far-reaching implications of “evolutionism,” which he characterizes as “a metaphysical world picture.” Since she grants that those who expound “evolutionism” “may well be right” in the cosmological implications they see flowing from contemporary biology, she recommends teaching “evolutionism in religion class, along with creationism, deism and all the other cosmologies that float unexamined through our lives.” By the same reasoning, as soon as any science has implications that suggest that we should do something fast about global warming, say, or an impending meteor collision, it should be banished from the science curriculum and shunted into the religion class, alongside treatments of Judgment Day and other myths about the end of the world. Yes, the theory of evolution by natural selection has implications that upset many traditional religious ideas, but that doesn’t turn it from science into religion. When Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth went around the Sun, that contradicted traditional religious cosmologies, but his work still belongs in the astronomy curriculum.

Evolutionists have an obligation to inform the world about all the implications of their science, and when they overreach or make mistakes – as they often do – they should be carefully rebutted by other scientists who know better. The suggestion by Michael Ruse that this activity of extending the reach of science is tantamount to turning science into a religion is a transparent example of a well-known cheap trick: when you don’t like the implications of some science, and can’t think of any proper scientific refutation, call it ideology – then you don’t have to take it seriously! On the contrary, it is crucial that we scrutinize these candidate implications with scientific intensity, so that we can figure out which are true and which are false. They are too important to be treated as mere differences of “faith.”

Daniel C. Dennett

Daniel Dennett’s latest book is Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

Distasteful, absurd, offensive, insulting, abusive, infamous, frivolous, grotesque, unfunny and plain stupid are some of the most common adjectives that have been used to describe the cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper a few months ago. Sense and sensibility are apparently the main virtues that an editorial cartoonist should now possess. So it seems that newspapers all over the world will soon need to hire new more ad hoc cartoonists. Therefore I took the liberty of writing the following job posting to help them find the “ideal” candidate.

Well-reputed newspaper looking for sensitive and sensible cartoonists

General description:

Individuals with high moral and aesthetic standards who conform with generally held views of what is acceptable, and who can make people with little or no sense of humor laugh.

Main skills/ characteristics

• We want people who can put themselves in the other’s shoes (think for example what a monkey feels every time it is portrayed as George W. Bush. So the rule is: if you don’t like being offended don’t offend others).
• We are looking for candidates who have something important to say and that if they don’t they just shut their mouths and use their pens to do something useful like scratching our editor’s back. *Note: Of course, by “important” what we really mean is TRIVIAL and/or NOT CONTROVERSIAL.
• We need thoughtful individuals that can take full responsibility for their drawings and know when and how to apologize in case they hurt somebody else’s feelings (we like the kind of guy that sends flowers or a box of chocolates with an “I’m sorry” note before things get out of hand).
• We want well-mannered artists who don’t need to use offensive words in order to convey an idea, words such as “bastard”, “jerk” or “fluffy” for instance (YES “fluffy” can be an insult in some Central American cultures you ignorant fools!) **Note: We apologize to all the ignorant fools reading this posting for calling them ignorant fools. We also apologize to anyone who has felt offended in any way by the use of the words “bastard”, “jerk” and/or “fluffy” in this ad. You’ll soon be receiving a box of chocolates with our sincere compliments.
• Last but not least, we need objective persons with a proper sense of proportion and perspective who never exaggerate situations and other peoples’ defects and/or mistakes (NO large noses, fat buttocks and/or overstated remarks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).
• PLEASE ABSTAIN FROM APPLYING: People who have a tendency to make caricatures about touchy subjects such as religion, politics, football or knitting. Portfolios containing criticism of senseless violence would not be considered (remember terrorists are very sensitive folks and it is our editorial policy to avoid hurting other people’s feelings). Portfolios with work relating to scientific, gender, ethnic and/or race issues would also be disqualified (for instance, we are not allowing anything having to do with evolution or the “real” age of the Earth, and we consider characters such as Speedy Gonzalez to be racists and degrading for Third World mice. ***Note: Winnie-Pooh/Bambi kind of characters will be considered, although subjected to revision by a special editorial committee as these days anything could fire political radicalism and/or become a threat to authoritarian, yet friendly, regimes).

Educational requirements:

Ph. D. (we want “smart” people only). Any field will do although fine arts and social anthropology are preferred.

Experience:

At least 5 years of self-censorship experience.

Bonus points for:

Fluency in Arabic.

Candidates interested please send your resume and portfolio to our offices. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Freedom of speech is again under attack. And not just by Islamic extremists as everybody assumes. A more subtle although lethal assault is coming from an unexpected source: Western liberals. Yes, in the past weeks, I’ve heard many so-called “progressive minds” (not to mention the main “leaders of the free world”) talking about the responsibility that comes with freedom of speech. Why? Because apparently symbols matter more than actions. Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American soldiers and similar violations of human rights can trigger a few protests but mess around with sacred symbols and global outrage follows. Hell unleashes.

Lack of sense and sensibility is then the novel form of censorship and self-censorship being conspicuously promoted in the West. Thanks to fear this new constraint on freedom of speech is quickly becoming acceptable.

People have the right to feel offended and protest. Let them burn flags and shout. After all, those are also forms of expression, flags are only symbols, and threats are only words. Of course there’s also violence and that should be condemned. But we shouldn’t feel frightened. And if we do we still mustn’t shut our mouths. Freedom of speech can be inopportune, incommodious, distressing and unpleasant, that’s why it needs to be protected. Protected from the restrictions imposed by authoritarians and fundamentalists, by progressive minds or world leaders, by violence and fear, by you or by me.

From Why Truth Matters by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, Continuum 2006, pp. 18-20.

But does it really matter? Is it worth bothering about? Academic fashions come and go. Dons and professors are always coming up with some New Big Thing, and then getting old and doddering off to the great library in the sky, while new dons and professors hatch new big things, some more and some less silly than others. Casaubon had his key to all mythologies, Derrida had his, someone will have a new one tomorrow; what of it.

Yes, is our answer; it does matter. It matters for various pragmatic, instrumental reasons. Meera Nanda discusses in Prophets Facing Backward the way Hindu fundamentalists in India have drawn on postmodernist scepticism and hostility to science in “Hinduising” Indian science, education, textbooks and the like. Richard Evans argues in his book In Defense of History that postmodernist scepticism about historical evidence and truth, along with valuable insights, also has dangerous implications.

Nazi Germany seemed to postmodernism’s critics to be the point at which an end to hyperrelativism was called for…There is in fact a massive, carefully empirical literature on the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Clearly, to regard it as fictional, or unreal, or no nearer to historical reality than, say, the work of the ‘revisionists’ who deny that Auschwitz ever happened at all is simply wrong. Here is an issue where evidence really counts, and can be used to establish the essential facts. Auschwitz was not a discourse. It trivializes mass murder to see it as a text. The gas chambers were not a piece of rhetoric. Auschwitz was indeed inherently a tragedy and cannot be seen as either a comedy or a farce. And if this is true of Auschwitz, then it must be true at least to some degree of other past happenings, events, institutions as well.[1]

That passage is in a book published in 1997. Three years later Evans saw his point enacted in a court of law.

In the David Irving libel trial held two years ago, in which I served as an expert witness for the High Court in London, Irving was suing Penguin Books and their author Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier and a falsifier of history. It was not difficult to show that Irving had claimed on many occasions that no Jews were killed in gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp. He argued in the courtroom, however, that his claim was supported by the historical evidence. The defence therefore brought forward the world’s leading expert on Auschwitz, Robert Jan Van Pelt, to present the evidence that showed that hundreds of thousands of Jews were in fact killed in this way. Van Pelt examined eyewitness testimony from camp officials and inmates, he looked at photographic evidence of the physical remains of the camp, and he studied contemporary documents such as plans, blueprints, letters, equipment orders, architectural designs, reports and so on. Each of these three kinds of evidence, as the judge concluded, had its flaws and its problems. But all three converged along the same lines, creating an overwhelming probability that Irving was wrong.

Just as important as this was the fact that it was possible to demonstrate that Irving’s historical works deliberately falsified the documentary evidence in order to lend plausibility to his preconceived arguments, principally his belief that Hitler was, as he said on one occasion, “probably the best friend the Jews ever had in the Third Reich”. Falsifying documents involved not just leaving words out from quotes but even putting extra words in to change the meaning. For example, quoting an order from Himmler that a “Jew-transport from Berlin” to the East should not be annihilated as if it were a general order that no Jews at all, anywhere, were to be killed, by the simple expedients of adding an “e” to the German word Transport, making it plural, and omitting the words “from Berlin”, and hoping that other researchers wouldn’t trouble to check the source, or if they did, wouldn’t be able to read the handwriting (which is actually very clear and unambiguous). Or by adding the word “All” to the note of a judge at the Nuremberg Trial in 1946 on the testimony of an Auschwitz survivor which actually said “this I do not believe”, after a small part of her testimony, to make it look as if he did not believe any of it. If we actually believed that documents could say anything we wanted them to, then none of this would actually matter, and it would not be possible to expose historical fraud for what it really is.[2]

Notes

[1] Richard Evans, In Defense of History, W.W. Norton and Company 1999 pp. 106-7

[2] Richard Evans, Contribution to the ‘Great Debate on History and Postmodernism’, University of Sydney, Australia, 27 July 2002, published as “Postmodernism and History” at Butterflies and Wheels, October 22, 2002.

Deborah Lipstadt looks at the decision by the editors of the student newspaper of Northwestern University, The Daily Northwestern, to publish an article by Arthur Butz.

Things at Northwestern seem to be going from bad to worse. Electrical Engineering Professor Arthur Butz has, after many years of total obscurity in anything but the world of Holocaust deniers, once again grabbed headlines by praising Iranian President Ahmadinejad for his Holocaust denial. Mr. Butz has as much expertise on the history of the Holocaust as I do on building bridges. But he has tenure and this means that, as long as he does not introduce this false information into his classroom, he cannot be fired.

But Butz is an old story. He just manages to roil the waters periodically. What is surprising is the lack of common sense shown by the editors of the Daily Northwestern. They recently decided to run a column by Butz in order, they said, to “facilitate a more educated debate over Butz’s beliefs.” After being subjected to serious criticism for doing so, they defended themselves in an editorial in which they said that they took “considerable care before publishing [Butz’s] column. All the facts used were all verified.”

They want to facilitate a more “educated debate” over Butz’s beliefs? That is akin to facilitating a debate between flat earthers and scientists or between people who said there was no slavery and historians of slavery. Butz’s beliefs are documented lies. Don’t take my word on it. Take that of the Royal High Court of Justice and two different Courts of Appeal. I spent over six years defending myself against David Irving, once the world’s leading Holocaust denier. He sued me for libel for calling him a Holocaust denier in one of my books. He waited until the book appeared in the U.K. where the burden of proof is on the defendant.

I do not believe history belongs in the courtroom. Historians conduct their “battles” in scholarly journals and at conferences. Mr. Irving thought otherwise and due to the nature of British law I had no choice but to defend myself. Had he won, my books would have been pulped and his version of the Holocaust would have been declared legitimate.

Rather than face any legal obstacles, Irving freely repeated his – and by extension Butz’s – arguments in court. The world press reported on them daily. No one faced any legal obstacles. A dream team of historians closely examined Irving’s claims about the Holocaust. They found his work to be a “tissue of lies.” Many of Irving’s claims come straight from Butz’s work and from that of other deniers Butz praises in his article in the Daily Northwestern.

Yet these editors protest that “all the facts” in Butz’s article, including his claim that there were no gas chambers, “were verified.” What are they talking about? Butz cites Fred Leuchter’s findings that that “the alleged gassings were not possible at the alleged sites.” He describes Leuchter as “our foremost execution technologist.”

Leuchter, who falsely claimed to be an engineer, is not an execution technologist but a scam artist. He told different penitentiaries that if they did not hire him to check their execution facilities he would offer his “expertise” to the condemned person and testify that the execution process at these prisons was faulty. The Alabama Attorney General [now a Federal judge] warned other states about his scam.

Moreover, Leuchter’s findings were all proven by scientists and forensic specialists to be utterly wrong. Even the lab which did the testing for him said his conclusions are all wrong. His mistakes were so fundamental that a high school student would not make them.

All this information is available in the transcripts of my trial and in Richard Evans Lying about Hitler, Robert Jan van Pelt’s The Case for Auschwitz and my History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving.

Let the likes of Butz and Irving go on talking to neo-Nazis and other deniers. That is their right. Neither the Daily nor any other paper has an obligation to publish such lies. Then let them all slip into the obscurity they so well deserve.

And let the Northwestern student body decide whether the student editors at the Daily are to journalism as Arthur Butz and David Irving are to history. Of these editors, the best that can be said is that their minds were so open their brains fell out.

This article was first published by Deborah Lipstadt at History on Trial and is republished here by permission. Deborah E. Lipstadt is Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. Her book, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving, was rated by Amazon.com as the 4th best history book of 2005. Professor Lipstadt, who is currently teaching at the Gregorian Pontifical Institute in Rome, can be reached at her blog ‘History on Trial’.

The New York Times has done it again: they’ve enlisted an ignorant reviewer to review a philosophical book. The reviewer is Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor at The New Republic. The book is Daniel Dennett’s latest book, a “naturalistic” account of religious belief. Whatever Mr. Wieseltier knows about philosophy or science, he effectively conceals in this review. The sneering starts at the beginning:

The question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett’s book. “Breaking the Spell” is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.

Perhaps it is correct that the “question of the place of science in human life” is a philosophical, not scientific question, though I wish I could be as confident as Mr. Wieseltier as to how we demarcate those matters. But “the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical” is not a “superstition,” but a reasonable methodological posture to adopt based on the actual evidence, that is, based on the actual, expanding success of the sciences, and especially, the special sciences, during the last hundred years. One should allow, of course, that some of these explanatory paradigms may fail, and that others, like evolutionary psychology, are at the speculative stage, awaiting the kind of rigorous confirmation (or disconfirmation) characteristic of selectionist hypotheses in evolutionary biology. But no evidence is adduced by Mr. Wieseltier to suggest that Professor Dennett’s view is any different than this. Use of the epithet “superstition” simply allows Mr. Wieseltier to avoid discussing the actual methodological posture of Dennett’s work, and to omit mention of the reasons why one might reasonably expect scientific explanations for many domains of human phenomena to be worth pursuing.

But onward with the sneering of the ignorant:

Dennett flatters himself that he is Hume’s heir. Hume began “The Natural History of Religion,” a short incendiary work that was published in 1757, with this remark: “As every enquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning its origin in human nature.” These words serve as the epigraph to Dennett’s introduction to his own conception of “religion as a natural phenomenon.” “Breaking the Spell” proposes to answer Hume’s second question, not least as a way of circumventing Hume’s first question. Unfortunately, Dennett gives a misleading impression of Hume’s reflections on religion. He chooses not to reproduce the words that immediately follow those in which he has just basked: “Happily, the first question, which is the most important, admits of the most obvious, at least, the clearest, solution. The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion.”

So was Hume not a bright? I do not mean to be pedantic. Hume deplored religion as a source of illusions and crimes, and renounced its consolations even as he was dying. His God was a very wan god. But his God was still a god; and so his theism is as true or false as any other theism. The truth of religion cannot be proved by showing that a skeptic was in his way a believer, or by any other appeal to authority. There is no intellectually honorable surrogate for rational argument. Dennett’s misrepresentation of Hume…is noteworthy, therefore, because it illustrates his complacent refusal to acknowledge the dense and vital relations between religion and reason, not only historically but also philosophically.

Has Dennett misrepresented Hume? Mr. Wieseltier might have availed himself of a fine on-line essay on Hume’s philosophy of religion by someone who actually knows something about Hume. Paul Russell (Philosophy, British Columbia) writes (with some emphases added in bold):

In 1757 Hume published “The Natural History of Religion”, a work that proposes to identify and explain the origins and evolution of religious belief. This project follows lines of investigation and criticism that had already been laid down by a number of other thinkers, including Lucretius, Hobbes and Spinoza. Hume’s primary objective in this work is to show that the origins and foundations of religious belief do not rest with reason or philosophical arguments of any kind but with aspects of human nature that reflect our weaknesses, vulnerabilities and limitations (i.e., fear and ignorance). Related to this point, Hume also wants to show that the basic forces in human nature and psychology that shape and structure religious belief are in conflict with each other and that, as a result of this, religious belief is inherently unstable and variable. In arguing for these points, Hume is directly challenging an opposing view, one that was widely held among his own orthodox contemporaries. According to this view (e.g., as presented by Cleanthes), the evidence of God’s existence is so obvious that no one sincerely and honestly doubts it. Belief in an intelligent, invisible creator and governor of the world is a universal belief rooted in and supported by reason. From this perspective, no person sincerely accepts “speculative atheism”. Hume’s “naturalistic” approach to religion aims to discredit these claims and assumptions of theism.

Dennett’s naturalistic approach, even with its different speculative explanatory mechanisms, aims to do the same thing. What Mr. Wieseltier confidently pronounces Hume’s theism is, alas, not so clearly ascribed to Hume according to those who actually know something about Hume. There has been misrepresentation of Hume, I fear, but not by Professor Dennett.

Mr. Wieseltier’s confident ignorance extends beyond Hume scholarship, unsurprisingly. He continues:

For Dennett, thinking historically absolves one of thinking philosophically. Is the theistic account of the cosmos true or false? Dennett, amazingly, does not care. “The goal of either proving or disproving God’s existence,” he concludes, is “not very important.” It is history, not philosophy, that will break religion’s spell. The story of religion’s development will extirpate it. “In order to explain the hold that various religious ideas and practices have on people,” he writes, “we need to understand the evolution of the human mind.”

Just as scientific questions are clearly different from philosphical ones in Mr. Wieseltier’s simple world, so too are historical and philosophical questions. He does not seem to realize that an account of the historical genesis of a belief can have bearing on the epistemic status of that belief, that beliefs with the wrong kind of etiology are epistemically suspect. But quite apart from the banal epistemic point, the material quoted by Mr. Wieseltier suggests that Professor Dennett’s concern is not purely epistemological, but also rhetorical and psychological: namely, how does one get people to give up on religion? Like Nietzsche (and perhaps, in a different way, Hume), Dennett apparently puts his hopes in a convincing historical narrative.

As to Dennett’s speculative natural history of religion, Mr. Wieseltier observes, fairly enough, that “it is only a story. It is not based, in any strict sense, on empirical research. Dennett is ‘extrapolating back to human prehistory with the aid of biological thinking,’ nothing more. ‘Breaking the Spell’ is a fairy tale told by evolutionary biology.” He does not observe that religion is also, by the same criteria, “only a story,” a mere “fairy tale,” and one which can’t even pretend to continuity with explanatory paradigms we have reason to deem reliable. To call Dennett’s story “a pious account of his own atheistic longing,” is I think shameless projection: it is Mr. Wieseltier who has genuinely pious longings, which is why he is reduced to sneering at Professor Dennett while spewing out a tissue of confusions and misrepresentations.

That we are in the presence of the pious (and the very confused) becomes even clearer later in the review when Mr. Wieseltier complains:

It will be plain that Dennett’s approach to religion is contrived to evade religion’s substance. He thinks that an inquiry into belief is made superfluous by an inquiry into the belief in belief. This is a very revealing mistake. You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content.

It is true that you cannot show a belief to be false by explaining its origin, but it is clear you can show that holding the belief is not warranted by explaining its origin. (This is an important topic I have dealt with elsewhere.) If you believe buying stock in High Tech Miracle, Inc. is a good investment based on recommendation of your broker, and then you discover that your broker recommended it because he is an investor in the company and a beneficiary of its rising stock fortunes, you no longer have a reason to believe it’s a good investment–though it might turn out to be one, of course, but you no longer are warranted in believing that. Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, Dennett and many others exploit this form of argumentation, without making any mistakes, let alone abandoning “reason,” as Mr. Wieseltier–whose arrogance may even outstrip his ignorance–remarkably claims.

There is more one could say about the muddled particulars of this display of mindless anti-intellectualism and feeble apologetics for religion, but other work beckons this Sunday afternoon. Mr. Wieseltier concludes that Professor Dennett’s book is “shallow and self-congratulatory.” Perhaps it is, but on the evidence of this review one is actually warranted in applying those adjectives only to the review’s author.

This article first appeared on The Leiter Report on February 19 and is republished here by permission. Brian Leiter is Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Law & Philosophy Program at the University of Texas at Austin. The Leiter Report is here.

The images of terrifying and agitated mobs attacking centres and embassies, burning them down and threatening people to murder and decapitations are the cruel face of political Islam.

Obviously governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and other reactionary states together with Hamas and Islamic terrorist gangs are behind these demonstrations, which are all to familiar to us. They have no way other than killing, slaughtering, stoning to death and destroying to gain a share of power or to remain in power.

Wherever they are in the power, they eliminate anyone who thinks differently and won’t submit to their reactionary and inhumane sacred beliefs and wherever they are not, they intimidate in order to score points.

This time round, the publication of a few caricatures has given them an excuse to show their inhumane and destructive capacity for the world to see. This time, the debate is on the freedom of speech.

Some have been intimidated and retreated. There is talk of the limits to freedom of speech and of self-censorship.

This is complete regression. They have put the gains of a century long struggle against church and religion, and dictatorial states up for sale. There are few who dare to defend human principles against this brutal wave.

We must unite against this reactionary wave. Don’t let some mercenaries and gangsters, led by reactionary Islamic states and terrorist gangs, blackmail humanity into a retreat! Don’t be intimidated!

Let us unite and loudly proclaim our defence of humanity and its gains. Let’s defend unconditional freedom of speech. Caricaturists and artists should be free from any limitations and constraints. Political Islam should be pushed back everywhere. This is the task of progressive and secular people. This is the task of millions of oppressed people and victims of political Islam. This is the task of women, youth and people in Islamist countries and of all those against political Islam and Islamic terrorism. Western states cannot (and do not want to) defend freedom of speech. They are intimidated and apologising to terrorists and criminal gangs.

It is up to us. Let’s stand up to them and shape a vast secularist front in defence of freedom of speech.

The above was translated by Arash Sorx.

Silent but deadly is a phrase most often used to describe the effects of a quiet crepitation that is extremely potent in its olfactory impact. It could as well refer to the phobias of many concerning the deadly forces of modern life. These are the forces of modern life that allegedly pervade our environment and threaten our very existence. Vying for the top of the list are those all-pervasive chemical carcinogens that allegedly saturate our food and every other aspect of our environment. Competing
for phobic primacy is all that deadly radiation emanating from nuclear power plants. When old phobias begin to lose some of their power to frighten, there are people skilled at heightening our sensitivities to newly emerging dangers such as transgenic or genetically modified food or food irradiation. Like the old soldiers who never die, some old phobias seem to linger on: the dangers of immunization or the connection between electric power lines and cancer (a fore runner to the mobile phone-brain cancer phobia), or even the harm from pasteurization. Unlike the old soldiers, however, old phobias never quite seem to fade away.

Being unseen and silent makes the threats of modern life ever more frightening. Our unawareness of these dangers means that we need sentinels who shoulder the
responsibility for constantly alerting us to them while seeking our contribution to their organizations. Little evidence is ever required for the validity of this danger, and as belief builds upon belief, each new danger seems to validate beliefs about the older ones, with an emerging consensus among the nervous that modern life is dangerous. Dangers that one can see or hear can eventually be verified or falsified – and so can the unseen dangers, but this is a matter of scientific evidence, a notion which is not universally accepted.

Modern life has protected us from so many of the dangers that were once a frequent scourge to the very young and the old and many between, that the very safety of modern life has relieved us of the fear of them. This seems to have opened a niche to be filled in with new fears. The very success of modern life in allowing us to live longer, healthier lives should, in aggregate at least, stand as a massive refutation of those whose livelihood is fear -mongering. Like the “curious incident” of the dog that didn’t bark in Conan Doyle’s Silver Blaze, the story of our time might be told in terms of cancer epidemics or other disasters that many people believe happened but didn’t.

I often ask my students to guess how many of them would be here if the birth and death rates of 1900 had prevailed throughout the century. Based on the study of Kevin M. White and Samuel H. Preston (1996), if 1900 birth and death rates had prevailed throughout the century, half of them would not be here. This half extends across all age groups. For the older among us, we might well have been born but would have likely already died. For my students, half of them would also not be here, having
died at birth or in childhood, or never having been born because a parent or grandparent did not live long enough to have children. It is easy to cite the various infirmities that took their toll before the arrival of modern public health and/or
pharmaceuticals. For citizens from the developing world, without the changes in mortality in just the last half century, one quarter of them would not be alive had 1950 death rates prevailed (Heuveline 1999). Statistically, this is even a more extraordinary feat than the one-half for the century. How many of them realize that they or a pre-reproductive parent would have been the Grim Reaper’s prize, without the last
century’s scientific and technological changes that have transformed modern life? A few might have been the beneficiaries of some heroic life-saving procedure, but the vast majority of those of us now alive simply do not know whether or not we would be among the living or the dead without the life-saving capabilities of modern life.

Most of us are the beneficiaries of the
silent but life-saving forces that have emerged
over the last century. Factors such as clean
water and immunization are taken for granted –
except when scares arise about their alleged
dangers. Our children can be immunized with up to
eleven injections at an age that they can no
longer remember when they become adults. Even I
as a beneficiary of the 20th century have to
marvel at the fact that these eleven
immunizations contain fewer antigens than the one
smallpox vaccination that I had as a boy. Yet the
fears about immunization grow louder and more
strident as the immunizations become ever safer.

We benefit from the advances of our time,
memories of which often lie in the hidden
recesses of our minds – until we are called upon as
parents to have our own children protected by
immunization or cured with an anti-biotic.
Equal in importance to the benefits of what is
there, are the benefits from what is no longer in
our operating environment or which is at least
reduced to levels more manageable by our immune
system. It is the unseen micro-organisms that are
no longer in our food or water (at least
not in the concentrations that can be life
threatening) that allow us to safely partake of
the food and drink that quite literally sustain
our life; or it is the carcinogenic smoke that no
longer fills the indoor atmosphere of our homes
as a result of not cooking and heating with open wood
fires. In other words, our lives are sustained by
all the things that are unseen because they are
no longer there, or those life-saving items like
immunization and antibiotics that are not always
visible. For antibiotics or immunization, it is
not only the protection that we receive when we
contact the disease but also the protection we
receive from not getting ill because others are also protected.

A recent article and editorial in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
illustrated a silent but life-saving factor
of modern life (Pfeiffer et al. 2005 and
Rosenberg 2005). It concerned the results of the
1998 mandating of folic acid fortification.
“Mandatory folic acid fortification of cereal
grain products was introduced in the United
States in 1998 to decrease the risk that women
will have children with neural tube defects”
(Pfeiffer et al. 2005). The study demonstrated
that “every segment of the US population appears
to benefit from folic acid fortification”
(Pfeiffer et al. 2005). The earlier scientific
study “of folic acid fortification as an approach
to prevent neural tube defects is a latter day
example of the application of meticulously
controlled scientific trials to insightful
previous hypotheses and observational studies.
These controlled trials led the FDA to mandate
folic acid fortification of the diet” (Rosenberg 2005).

The decision for the folate mandate was
taken in a very open democratic way with
opportunity for informed support or criticism. It
would not have been difficult for some activist
group to campaign against it on the ground that
we were surreptitiously experimenting with
pregnant mothers, infants and children without
fully understanding the unknown dangers lurking
menacingly in the background. With the folate
mandate, there was no thought of consumer choice.
No doubt groups skilled in public advocacy would
have found it easier to frighten people than
scientists would have found it to inform them.
Fortunately, no major group opposed it. Few
outside those professionally interested (and
informed) knew about it. One can guess – and it is only a
guess on my part – that those most in need of the
folate supplementation are likely to be the poor
and least educated, who would also most likely
(another guess) be least aware of the mandate or
that folate had been added to their bread.

Vitamins were first identified in 1914, and
the first vitamins were commercially available in
the 1920s. “The synthesis of folic acid by
Lederle Labs in 1947 was one of the milestones
achieved during the era of discovery of vitamins
in the first half of the 20th century. This
stable and unreduced form of folate has served
wonderfully in preventing and treating folate
deficiency and for much of the study of folate
biology” (Rosenberg 2005). It should be noted, for
those who are willing to pay a premium for a
vitamin if it is labeled “all natural” that “folic
acid is not the natural form of the vitamin as it
exists in food” (Rosenberg 2005). In a sense,
most vitamins in pill form are unnatural
(to the extent that that means anything), as we get most of our
vitamin intake as part of complex proteins.
“Although folic acid is not the natural food form
of this vitamin (6), folic acid fortification has
resulted in a profound improvement in nutritional
status and has had a substantial effect on the
original target – neural tube defects” (Rosenberg
2005). It should also be noted that excessive
intake can be harmful, which should be of
interest to those who pop mega-doses of
vitamins and other substances in the belief that
they are somehow following Nature’s path to a longer life.

The efficacy of “folic acid supplementation during the
periconceptional period for the prevention of
spina bifida and related neural tube defects” has
been demonstrated, as has “food fortification as
the most feasible approach to increasing folic
acid intakes in women before conception”
(Rosenberg 2005). There are other
studies which find that increased folate intake
during the periconceptional period leads to a
reduction in childhood leukemia, and others again
which indicate that increased folate intake may
help in delaying the onset of Parkinson’s
disease. How many of the beneficiaries of this
intervention even know that they are beneficiaries, and how many
of the rest of us even know that a “silent”
life-saving product has been added to our
bread? How many parents of a healthy baby know
that the nutritional status of the mother would
have resulted in a newborn with spina bifida
and related neural tube defects if it had not
been for the mandated folate fortification?

Following the publication of the study
showing the benefits of the 1998 folate
enrichment mandate, another peer-reviewed report
was announced, which argued that even more lives would
be saved from deadly disease with a larger dose of
folate in flour. Even our most beneficial
interventions can be subject to further debate,
though in this case, the dispute concerns the
possibility of even greater benefit, not whether
there is benefit. This does reflect the difference
between science and non-science. No human action
of any kind is ever totally free of
risks. In some instances perceived risks are very
real, but dwarfed by the magnitude of the
benefits. The realized risks become a new
problem to solve by means other than foregoing
the massive benefit. In the case of folate, there
is the risk that folate intake can mask a severe
vitamin B-12 deficiency until irreparable nerve
damage results from it. In cognizance of that,
vitamin B-12 deficiency was examined in the study
and others are arguing for vitamin B-12 enrichment along with the folate.

Even with a great success story, some
scientists will undoubtedly find ways that it
might be made even better. Other scientists who
accept the benefits of folate enrichment might
disagree that more is needed, or even that more
would be beneficial. In modern interventions in
science and technology, there is always room for
improvement and even more room for disagreement.
What is too often not recognized is that those in
the most heated disagreement may in fact be in
agreement (along with others in their profession)
about basic principles, and be arguing about their
interpretation or about peripheral issues which
may have important applied implications.

Unfortunately the professional anti-science
practitioners will seize on these disagreements,
magnify them, and use them to argue against
established scientific theories and often against
scientific inquiry itself. Given that PhD
scientists number into the hundreds of thousands,
activists will have no difficulty rounding up a
few who support their anti-science agenda.
Science is a form of open inquiry in which every
belief can be subject to challenge by those who
might have a better theory, and evidence in
support of it, that is better than what is
currently believed. This is one of the ways in
which progress is maintained. But some theories
are so solidly established in terms of the
supporting evidence and the effective use to
which they are being put, that criticism of them
carries a significant burden of necessary
evidence. By creating a public belief that there
is a “controversy” in an area of scientific
inquiry and that scientists are “divided” on the
issue, activists use “mythic” controversy to
further an agenda such as opposition to
beneficial endeavors such as genetically modified
(technically, transgenic) agriculture and food
production, immunization of various kinds, and the
teaching of evolution. Let’s face it, though they
may be poles apart politically and hold each
other in utmost contempt, there are striking
similarities between those who oppose modern
biotechnology or modern science and technology in
general, and those whose advocacy of
creationism/intelligent design pits them against
modern biology. Some of us might argue that
though the superficial rhetoric may be different,
the underlying belief systems of the two groups are virtually identical.

By vociferously and convincingly denying
the benefits of a practice, critics claim no
obligation to offer an alternative except to
abandon the practice. Or they endless repeat
clichés such as “we have enough food in the world
to feed everyone” without having to answer how
could we have gotten enough food in the world to
feed everyone without the Green Revolution
technologies that they also opposed,
and how will we feed another possibly 3 billion
people by 2050 without new yield improving technologies?

Given the extraordinary gains that we have
made over the last century in life expectancy, it
would seem obvious that we must be doing
something right. In the
20th century, in the United States we added
nearly 30 years of life expectancy and reduced
infant mortality by over 90%. Other advanced
countries did even better, in some cases much
better that we did. In developing countries,
about 20 years of life expectancy have been added
in the last 50 years. Changes of these magnitudes do not happen for no reason at all. To
repeat, we must be doing something right. We
therefore have a right to ask critics if they are opposing the very processes that
brought us these gains? If there is a problem
such as an adverse reaction to an immunization
that is otherwise beneficial, are they advocating
that we seek a solution to the problem or that we
simply forego the process entirely, benefit and
all? Do they have an alternative that produces
more benefit with less risk, and what is their
evidence for it? In other words, we have as much
right to demand answers from the critics as the
critics have to demand answers from the rest of
us. Too many critics seem to be operating under
the assumption that we were better off in some prior time.

No matter how far we advance, there will
always be errors and potential harm, and there will always be a vital need to
have those who seek out problems and to
publicize and seek to remedy them. It is critics of
this kind that have been an essential element in
getting us where we are today. There is much
more than a semantic difference between those
whose criticism springs from a basic acceptance
of the gains that we have made, and the
criticism that seeks to recapture that which we
have lost or that finds ideological solace and
vindication in every failure in science,
technology and modern life. The latter will
opportunistically seek fault where ever they can
find it, whether it be real or imaginary. To some
of us, their seeming joy in every failure is mean
spirited and anti-human. For critics to escape
this Luddite trap, their critique of any aspect
of modern life has to be cognizant of the silent
but powerful forces moving in the background that
have so dramatically transformed our lives for the better.

Dr. Thomas R. DeGregori is a Professor of
Economics, University of Houston. He is widely
published – his most recent books include:
Origins of the Organic Agriculture Debate; The
Environment, Our Natural Resources, and Modern
Technology and Agriculture and Modern Technology:
A Defense (Blackwell Publisher for all three) and
Bountiful Harvest: Technology, Food Safety, And
The Environment (Cato Institute). Author’s
homepage is http:www.uh.edu/~trdegreg and email address is trdegreg@uh.edu.

References

ASSOCIATED PRESS. 2005. ‘Vitamin B Pills May Not
Stop Heart Attacks’, The New York Times, 6 September.

Brent, Robert L. and Godfrey P. Oakley, Jr. 2005.
‘The Food and Drug Administration Must Require the
Addition of More Folic Acid in “Enriched” Flour
and Other Grains’, Pediatrics 116(3):753 755, September.

Heuveline, Patrick. 1999. ‘The Global and Regional
Impact of Mortality and Fertility Transitions,
1950-2000’. Population and Development Review 25(4):681-702, December.

Mestel, Rosie. 2005. Study Says Folic Acid
Additive Cut Defects’, Los Angeles Times, 6 September.

Pfeiffer, Christine M; Samuel P Caudill; Elaine W
Gunter; John Osterloh and Eric J Sampson. 2005.
‘Biochemical indicators of B vitamin status in the
US population after folic acid fortification:
Results from the National Health and Nutrition
Examination Survey 1999-2000’, American Journal of
Clinical Nutrition 82(2):442 450, August.

REUTERS. 2005. ‘Adding Folic Acid to Grain
Reduces Birth Defects, Study Finds’, The New York Times, 6 September.

Rosenberg, Irwin H. 2005. Editorial: ‘Science
based micronutrient fortification: which
nutrients, how much, and how to know?’, American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition 82(2):279 280, August.

Tanne, Janice Hopkins. 2005. ‘US study shows that
folic acid fortification decreases neural tube
defects’, BMJ 331(7517):594, 17 September.

White, Kevin M. and Samuel H. Preston. 1996. ‘How
Many Americans Are Alive Because of
Twentieth-century Improvements in Mortality?’
Population and Development Review 22(3):415-429, September.

Williams, Laura J.; Sonja A. Rasmussen; Alina
Flores; Russell S. Kirby, and Larry D. Edmonds.
2005. Decline in the Prevalence of Spina Bifida
and Anencephaly by Race/Ethnicity: 1995-2002.

Last week this article in the Indian magazine Frontline reported that the Hindu Right’s attempts to rewrite California school textbooks on India and Hinduism were meeting with strong resistance from renowned historians and scholars in the U.S. and abroad. Steve Farmer is one of those scholars; he reported on that resistance and the smear campaign against another of them, Michael Witzel, on a listserve last December, and gave B&W permission to publish a slightly updated version. There is recent news here.

Part I: The California Textbook Issue

The smear campaign aimed against Michael Witzel is meant in retaliation for
the critical role he has played since early November – in
collaboration now with hundreds of Indian and Western researchers and
S. Asian minority groups – in helping block massive changes in
California 6th-grade textbooks demanded by Hindutva political-religious
groups. Some of these groups, as noted below, have long-time
connections with rightwing groups in India, whose attempts to project
Hindutva political-religious ideology into Indian textbooks have been
turned back since 2004 (after the rightwing BJP party lost national
power) by India’s National Council of Educational Research & Training
(NCERT). (NCERT is the closest thing in India to a national ‘Board of
Education’.)

The upshot is that the current US Hindutva moves in California, begun
not long after the BJP fell from power, can be tied (along with related
moves in Great Britain, involving the BBC) to a much broader
international plan to rebuild the declining Hindutva movement in India.

Before November 9th, the Hindutva groups involved in the US had managed
to convince the California State Board of of Education and the
Department of Education staff – few if any of whom had even heard
before of Hindutva (and they say that ignorance is bliss) – that they
spoke for what they represented as a homogenous American-Hindu
community. In the early months, the Board did not hear from Dalit
groups, mainstream Hindu organizations, Tamil Hindus, or any of the
many non-religious Hindu groups that have obvious reasons for opposing
the Hindutva agenda.

The fictional notion presented to the California Board of Education
that the highly fragmented Hindu-American community is homogenous has
certainly come as a surprise to the Tamil, Dalit, and other Indian
minority groups in the United States with whom we have contacts.

No matter how the final act of the California drama plays out (in
March), by now the California Board of Education is acutely aware
that the three main groups involved in the California affair – the
Vedic Foundation (VF), the Hindu Education Foundation (HEF), and the
Hindu American Foundation (HAF) (on these groups, see Part III) – do
not, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, speak for all
Hindu-Americans.

While the research community, mainstream Hindus, and Indian minorities
were initially caught sleeping by events in California – none of us
knew about events there until November 5th, four days before what was
to be the final Board of Education meeting on this textbook issue – in
the last seven weeks hundreds of non-Hindutva Indian-Americans, a solid
base of specialists in South Asian History (one recent letter from
such a group has over 130 signatures), and an ever expanding list of South
Asian minority groups, including those representing Dalit and tribal
groups, have informed the State of California in very clear terms that
the three organizations noted above do not represent their interests
or opinions.

The role that Michael helped play in awakening non-Hindutva
Indian-Americans to events in Sacramento helps explain the vehemence of
the attack currently aimed almost exclusively at him personally. The
rightwing’s strategy consists in attempting to divert attention from
resistance to the Hindutva agenda within the Hindu-American community
by representing the setbacks to their California plans as being due to
the efforts of one fictional “Aryan Supremicist” Harvard Professor with
Nazi roots, etc. – rather than to the efforts of many non-sectarian South
Asians and Westerners who have long opposed the Hindutva program.

The first and still most critical battle in California took
place on November 8-9th, when a letter endorsed by Michael and
approximately four dozen other researchers from India, Pakistan, the
United States, Europe, Australia, Taiwan, and Japan (many of them on
this List) first alerted the California State Board of Education to the
religious-political motivations behind Hindutva attempts to alter
history textbooks. The letter was sent out within 48 hours of the time
that we first learned of the involvement of Hindutva groups in the
textbook affair.

The letter informed the Board about the successful recent NCERT battle
over Hindutva alterations of Indian textbooks, which were made when the
BJP was in power. It also provided the California Board of Education
with links to U.S. State Department papers issued in 2003 and 2004
explicitly warning against the influence of Hindutva groups in
education. The importance of the letter and what was going on in
California was underlined at the Board of Education meeting in
Sacramento on November 9th by James Heitzman, of the University of
California at Davis. Heitzman came to the Board meeting armed with an
analysis of the full list of proposed edits by the Hindutva groups.

Far from just being the ‘Witzel letter’ (Dr. Heitzman didn’t even know
about the letter until after it was submitted) – as the Hindutva
organizations like to characterize it – this original letter from the
scholarly community to the Board of Education (there have been others
since) was endorsed by a long list of mainstream archaeologists,
linguists, and historians, including specialists on ancient India from
every part of the world.

A few of the international signers whose work is well-known in the
field include Patrick Olivelle (who is a native S. Asian), of the
University of of Texas; Harry Falk, of Free University, Berlin; Madhav
Deshpande of the University of Michigan; Muneo Tokunaga of Kyoto
University in Japan; Maurizio Tosi, of the University of Bologna in
Italy; Richard Meadow of Harvard University and Mark Kenoyer of the
University of Wisconsin (Co-Directors of the long-running Harappa
Archaeological Research Project); well-known Indian researchers
including Romila Thapar, Shereen Ratnagar, D.N. Jha, and others;
Hartmut Scharfe and Stanley Wolpert, both emeritus professors of UCLA;
Asko Parpola, of Helsinki University; and so on.

The endorsers are a highly diverse international group that represents
many opposing research perspectives: but despite these differences, all
are uniformly opposed to Hindutva fabrications of history, with which
they are all familiar. As a group they don’t have even a faint
resemblance to the imaginary group of “Harvard leftists” fantasized in
the Hindutva slander campaign directed at Michael Witzel (see Part II,
below).

As a result of this first letter, the massive rewrites of the
chapters on India submitted to the Board of Education by the Vedic
Foundation for the submitted textbooks were rejected in toto by the
Board – and have remained off the table ever since.

That was our first victory, and it’s a lasting one.

If it hadn’t been for the November 8th letter sent out by international
scholars, things could have turned out very badly at the November 9th
meeting. If the Vedic Foundation rewrites had actually made it into the
textbooks, the absurdity of their positions would have eventually
forced those textbooks to be withdrawn – as was recently the case in
India – at an estimated cost in the case of California of several
hundred million dollars. (Those figures are not given lightly, and are
drawn directly from publishing industry estimates.)

The textbook-issue waters became murkier at a meeting in Sacramento on
December 1-2 – held not by the State Board of Education, as
misreported in the India press, but by a subsidiary (and totally
advisory) body known as the Curriculum Commission (CC). Events at the
December 1-2 CC meeting were far more chaotic than at the November 9th
State Board of Education meeting, due largely to the fact that the
audience was packed to the walls with Hindutva supporters.

The fact that no South Asian opponents of Hindutva were at the meetings
involved some miscalculation on our part: no one expected much to
happen at the CC meeting, since the Board of Education had explicitly
directed the CC (with legal force) on November 9th to judge all
proposed edits solely on the basis of historical accuracy, and not on
religious grounds. To this end, the Department of Education staff had
drawn up a report based on a full review of previously proposed edits
(from the VF and HEF) made by Stanley Wolpert, James Heitzman, and
Michael Witzel, who were officially appointed as a Content Review Panel
(CRP) specifically to fulfill this task. The original expectation was
that the CC meeting would end quickly with acceptance of the Department
of Education staff report.

Against those expectations, the meeting was chaotic – we’ll publish
some funny eye witness accounts at some point – with the result that
after much wrangling with the Department of Education staff, several
conservative members of the CC took control of the meeting and largely
ignored the Department of Education staff report. The result, after
hours of arguing and confusion, was that a number of blatantly
religious edits were left in the history books and several new edits
(breaking all historical precedents and the explicit directive of the
Board of Education) were stuck into them ‘on the fly’. The result, as
everyone on all sides recognized at the end, was an inconsistent mess
that has left everyone involved in a quandary about what to do next.

As one publishing insider puts it: “California is a mess.”

For now, let it be noted that it is clear to everyone (1) that the
advisory CC, whose role in the vetting process is finished, violated
the Board of Education’s legal directive from November 9th that stated
that issues of historical accuracy alone must determine what makes it
into the ancient India edits; and (2) that the publishers, the
Department of Education, and everyone else involved knows that the
current gross mess of inconsistent edits has to be cleaned up before
anything goes to press.

But all that said, one key point by now is crystal clear. Recently
Hindutva forces have begun to claim publicly (as in the Pioneer
article; see below), apparently to rally their sagging troops, that
what happened on December 1-2 in the CC meeting was some kind of
victory for their side. This is a radical about-face from their
reactions at the end of the CC meeting on December 2, when (as on
November 9th) they again went away furious that the massive Vedic
Foundation rewrites of the publishers’ texts – which are as comical as
they are absurd (e.g., placing the Buddha and Asoka in the early 2nd
millennium BCE) – didn’t make it into California textbooks.

Those rewrites weren’t accepted by the California Board of Education on
November 9th; those rewrites weren’t supported by even the most
conservative of the CC members on December 2; and now that academic and
anti-Hindutva forces have been awakened by what almost happened in
California, no rewrites like this will make it into US textbooks the
next time this little drama plays out in some new state with adoption
processes. (The next really big battle will not be until Texas, and
that won’t occur until the end of the decade.)

Part II: Recent Smears against Michael Witzel

When other things fail, Hindutva groups traditionally try slander. And
that’s what they are now trying with Michael Witzel.

The Hindutva misinformation campaign, which started several weeks ago,
reached new heights with publication of a
grotesquely distorted article on Christmas day in the rightwing New
Delhi newspaper, The Pioneer.

Its many inaccuracies will be obvious immediately to those who have
read the background materials presented in Part I, above. Other
inaccuracies will be noted below.

The timing – and at points even the exact language – of this
blatantly defamatory piece overlaps with an Internet petition aimed at
Harvard University (my copy arrived on Christmas eve), which among much
else calls for the disbanding of Harvard University’s Department of
Sanskrit and Indian Studies (not coincidentally, Michael’s department).

The cover letter of the petition – all of it that many people will
probably see before signing it – starts with what appears at first to
be a progressive agenda, perfect for Christmas eve:

To defend the best liberal traditions that we all hold
dear, I hope you will take a moment to please sign the
petition at the url below, to support our effort to
get the religious hate groups (you know which ones..)
from using Harvard facilities and resources. The
Petition is developed by well-wishers of Harvard
university, concerned over the increasing intrusion by
religious hate groups into our environment. I am sure
you will agree with us.

The inside of the petition, which is several clicks away, drops the
‘liberal’ facade. A few highlights:

• Our Indo-Eurasian Research List is characterized (just as it is in
  the Pioneer article) as an “Internet hate group”.
• Harvard is linked with supposed “anti-Semitic Nazi groups”, and
  Michael is characterized as “Harvard’s Aryan Supremicist Sanskrit
  Professor.” (The irony of the fact that real historical links existed
  in its formative years between Hindutva and the Nazis is apparently
  unknown to the petition’s authors.)
• I’m characterized as Michael’s “assistant”, apparently working with
  him at Harvard, despite the fact that I live in California, many of
  thousands of kilometers away from Harvard, on the opposite side of the
  United States.
• One choice quotation from the petition pictures Michael as an “Aryan
  Supremicist” – the writers apparently have blond blue-eyed Germans in
  mind – and me as a “Creationist”, which I suspect would please my
  relatives, who have long suspected that I harbor irreligious
  evolutionary tendencies:

Witzel’s screeching against the community is often part of his
marketing of the ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’ (AIT), now re-packaged as
“Aryan Influx Theory”. This marries Farmer’s Creationist dogma, with
Witzel’s Aryan Supremacist requirement that all civilization must have
emanated from his ‘Aryan’ Caucasian roots. Devoid of intellectual
substance, this gang personally abuses anyone who cites the growing
scientific evidence debunking ‘AIT’. The evidence points to
distributed local evolution of civilization, independent of any
Caucasian influx.

Back to the Pioneer piece :

Just a few points on one scientific issue and on various defamatory
materials in the text: it would take a book to straighten out all half
truths and lies in this hatchet job:

1. The idea that DNA studies support the Hindutva view that there was
no movement of Indo-Eurasian speakers in antiquity into India, ascribed
in the article to S. Metzenberg (one of the conservative members of the
advisory CC, who is not on the Board of Education) is ludicrous. For
every study that makes such claims, as another CC member (the physicist
C. Munger) accurately pointed out to Metzenberg, others can be cited
that ‘prove’ exactly the opposite. As is well known to every researcher
in population genetics, such studies are based on modern genetic data
back-projected into historical times using very iffy theoretical models
of genetic drift. The result is that the error bars are literally
thousands of years long in every such study.

2. The idea that Michael has “contempt for Indians who live and work in
the US” is ridiculous: he works with them daily, and counts them among
his best friends and students. (Obviously many of them have also
endorsed the Board of Education letters, and many others are on this
List.)

3. Michael is the last person I would ever think of as a ‘racist’.
Anyone who knows his immediate family, which is more Asian than
Caucasian (!), in fact, would be more than a bit startled to hear such
claims.

4. The quotations ascribed to Michael in the Pioneer article are
consistently ripped out of context and reformulated to make it appear
that they involve hate or ridicule aimed at the S. Asian community. It
would take a lot of time to show this quotation by quotation, but to do
so would be intellectually trivial. There isn’t an ounce of hate that
I’ve ever seen in Michael Witzel, after knowing and collaborating with
him on many articles and projects now in the last half decade.

5. Previous idiocies in publisher-submitted textbooks have absolutely
nothing to do with Michael and have in fact been sharply criticized by
him in discussions with both the publishers and the California
Department of Education. Historical inaccuracies arising from corporate
ignorance, however, are obviously quite distinct from Hindutva groups
trying to stick politically and religiously inspired edits into US
kids’ 6th-grade textbooks.

6. The fictionalized account in the Pioneer article that makes it
appear that Michael appeared before the Board of Education (which the
article confuses with the Curriculum Commission), which subsequently
rejected his views as “unscholarly, insensitive, biased and devoid of
facts – heaping ridicule on the Harvard brand” never happened. Michael
never went to California, never appeared before the Board, and
certainly wasn’t at the CC meeting. Far from having his views rejected
by the Board of Education, he was specifically charged by the Board of
Education (as part of an official ‘Content Review Panel’ with Dr.
Wolpert and Dr. Heitzman) with vetting the earlier edits submitted by
the VF and HEF.

7. Just as in the petitions aimed at Harvard, the
Indo-Eurasian Research list is once again misrepresented in The
Pioneer as an “Internet hate group.” Opposing attempts to rewrite
history for political and religious purposes does not qualify us or any
other group for such a label. These rightwing groups have had a
terrible effect on research in premodern fields, and correcting the
false image they present of history is an unfortunate (and obviously
thankless) part of our job.

Part III

There are three Hindu groups involved closely in the California
proceedings. We’ve said a bit about them before, so here
I’ll just give the quickest of summaries:

1. The VEDIC FOUNDATION in Texas. Their proposed edits to California
textbooks are the most ridiculous of all of them. This is no wonder,
given their views of ancient history, which have it (in webpages now
largely removed) that Indian civilization reaches back 1,972 million
years – over 1.7 billion years before the age of dinosaurs.

From Internet Archives for one of their rapidly disappearing webpages.

(Don’t miss this little gem if you haven’t seen it before!)

For those of you who don’t recognize the political significance of the
standard Hindutva claim that ‘Aryans’ are homegrown in India, please
pay close attention to the first item on their “Do You Know” list!

2. The HINDU EDUCATION FOUNDATION, in Silicon Valley. This is a much
more politically oriented group than the VF. It arose as a “project” of
the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) (as noted in an HSS webpage now only
available to password holders, though as usual a copy lives on in our
files). The group was set up specifically for projects like the
California campaign. Its “Advisors” include infamous Hindutva
propagandists including S. Kalyanaraman and David Frawley – the latter
the American adherent of “Vedic Astrology” and the “Out of India”
theory who claims in his books that American Indians came from India.

3. The HINDU AMERICAN FOUNDATION. This is the most problematic of the
groups, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, since their public persona has it
that they are a “Human Rights Organization” representing 2 million (!)
Hindu Americans. Please note that according to US census figures this
is far more than the total number of Indians (Muslims, Dalits, and
Tamils included) living in the US, let alone conservative Hindus.

You won’t find a visible trace of Hindutva anyplace on their webpage,
but when you dig beneath the surface, you’ll soon find that the
President of HAF, Mihir Meghani, has a long history of links with the
rightwing in India. See, e.g., his famous manifesto from 1998 –
“Hindutva: The Great Nationalist Ideology” – which is still found (at
this minute, anyway) on the official BJP website in India.

Read this one carefully: it is another gem, although not very funny.

Finally, for anyone not acquainted with Michael’s writings on Indology,
see this bibliography, where you can download many of his
works as PDF files. See also his personal homepage.

• Besides holding the Wales Chair in Sanskrit at Harvard University,
  Michael was elected as a Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and
  Sciences in 2003.
• He is the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Oriental Series, the oldest
  continuous Western publication series in the field, which first
  appeared in 1891.
• Michael is editor-in-chief of Mother Tongue, one of the most
  innovative research journals devoted to comparative and historical
  linguistics. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Electronic Journal
  of Vedic Studies, which has published a long series of important
  studies in the past decade.

Michael’s own writings in the past several decades have fundamentally
altered the way that all of us, both in Indology and comparative
history (my field), have viewed ancient India in particular and ancient
history in general. One of the most influential of his studies appeared
in a ground-breaking book that he edited in 1997, Inside and Outside
the Texts: New Approaches to the Vedas, which contains major essays
not only by Michael but by Joel Brereton, George Cardona, Tatyana
Elizarenkova, Harry Falk, Hans Henrich Hock, Asko Parpola, Wilhelm Rau,
and many others. Michael’s essays in this volume have fundamentally
changed the way we picture historical data in Vedic texts, and they
have had a long lasting effect on my own research. (The two of us are
now extending part of this work in dimensions that reach far beyond
India.)

Finally, it should be mentioned that the 1989 workshop that gave rise
to Inside and Outside the Texts grew eventually into the increasingly
important yearly Harvard Roundtables on the Ethnogenisis of South and
Central Asia, which is now entering its 8th year. (This year’s
conference was held in Kyoto, Japan, and next year’s will again be held
in Asia, at a very exciting location still not publicly announced.)

The Indo-Eurasian Research List is an off-shoot of those Roundable
meetings. Certainly no one who works through our archives with any
care, starting at the beginning, will end up concluding that we are an
“Internet hate List”.

Let me end on a personal note: Michael Witzel is one of the most
intelligent, most humanistic, and also one oif the very funniest men I
know. He is a wonderful collaborator to boot, and it has been a
privilege to work with him.

The smear campaign aimed at him is obscene – it is the first word that
comes to mind thinking about it – and I hope and expect that a lot of
other people will speak out in his public defense.

Hundreds of striking bus workers of the state-owned Vahed bus company are still in detention in Tehran today, 30th January, following the vicious attack by thousands of members of the security forces on their strike last Saturday.

The exact number of the detainees is still unknown. Anywhere from 500 to 700 workers may have been arrested – according to union officials speaking on foreign-based radio stations. Further arrests have been reported today, with pressure being put on the detained workers to sign pledges to give up their fight or risk losing their jobs. In a statement issued today, the bus workers’ union has called for a stoppage on 3rd February.

The arrests started on Friday 27th January, the eve of the strike, during police raids on the homes of the strikers and union leaders. The management of the company and the Islamic Council (handmade organisations of the regime in the workplaces) worked hand in hand with the security forces to help identify the workers and assist in the arrests.

On Saturday, as the workers arrived at the picket lines, they were rounded up. Many were verbally abused, threatened and beaten up to force them to drive the buses. Those who refused were taken away. Some buses had been moved the night before, and replacement drivers had been enlisted from among the military and mercenary Baseej militia.

‘Indescribable brutality’

Union officials said the brutality of the security forces was indescribable. The wives and children of some union executive members were also arrested. They were taken out of bed and beaten up during raids on Friday night. The beatings continued in detention. 2-year-old daughter of Yaghoub Salimi, substitute member of the union’s executive board, was injured on her face in the attack, when she was thrown into a waiting patrol van. Her 12-year-old elder sister, Mahdiye, described the ordeal in detail in an interview yesterday with a radio station abroad.

She said they raided their home while they were asleep, pulled away the blankets and started hitting them with their “hands and feet”. They used their boots to kick their mother “around the heart” and Mrs Razavi too was badly beaten up. They tried to spray her sister in the face. Her mother still bears the bruises from the beatings she received.

Yaghoub Salimi gave a last interview to a radio station shortly before turning himself in. This was the condition for the release of his wife and children, who were being used as hostages.

The majority of the detainees are now in the high security Evin Prison, along with seven members of the union’s executive, including the leader of the union Mansoor Ossanlou. This prison is notorious for being the centre for the jailing, torture and execution of thousands of political prisoners.

‘Even greater resolve and unity’

In a letter to world labour and progressive organisations, issued on Saturday, the union said that in the light of what the Islamic Republic regime had done, they had no option but to continue their fight with even greater resolve and unity. It thanked international labour and progressive organisations for their solidarity so far and appealed for continued support:

“We ask you our colleagues and fellow workers throughout the world … to condemn this action of the Iranian state. We trust that you will call for the immediate and unconditional release of all the detainees, for the recognition of our union and for the meeting of our demands. We expect that you will condemn the assault on our strike and demand the prosecution and punishment of all those who stormed workers’ picket lines…. We have a hard and long battle ahead of us and urge you to continue your support”.

The Worker-communist Party of Iran (WPI) has called for a powerful and immediate response to the bus workers’ appeal by all possible means.

A hard and long battle

The strike has had the overwhelming backing of the 17,000 employees of the state-owned company, who have been battling the management and authorities since last year. Their demands include a decent pay increase, introduction of collectively negotiated agreements and recognition of their union. Since the arrest of the leaders of the union, the bus workers have been fighting for their release too. The head of the union, Ossanlou, has been in jail for over five weeks.

The present protest was triggered when on 22nd December a dozen members of the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (Sherkat e Vahed) were arrested in armed police raids on their homes. The arrests led to a powerful strike on Sunday 25 December, widely supported by the people of the capital. Further arrests were made during the strike itself. In all, around 40 workers were detained. However, the workers succeeded in securing the release of all but Ossanlou.

The fight for the release of Ossanlou and all the original demands continued. In the meantime the workers were subjected to all kinds of harassment – from unpaid salaries and frozen bank accounts to direct threats made to individual activists by the Intelligence Ministry. Negotiations with the Mayor, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, produced no results; all the demands remained unmet. Ghalibaf asked for 15 days by which time to respond. The deadline passed without any action.

On 7th January the bus workers held a day of action by putting up a poster on their screens with the words ‘Mansoor Ossanlou must be released’ and drove their buses with their lights on all day.

Meanwhile, concerns grew about Mansoor Ossanlou’s health, in particular the condition of one of his eyes, as he was due to be operated on before being arrested. He sustained the damage to his eye during a vicious attack in May 2005 on a meeting of the bus workers’ union by vigilante thugs of the Government-set up and run “Islamic Councils of Labour” and “Workers’ House”. Dissolution of these mercenary organisations has been a key demand of the workers throughout.

As the workers called for an all-out strike on Saturday 28th January, six more members of the union’s executive were summoned, questioned and then arrested. The government issued further threats and prepared to crush the strike.

A fight for all workers in Iran

The brave bus workers of Tehran are leading a fight that concerns all the workers in Iran. Their demands – the right to organise freely and independently of the state, dissolution of the hated Islamic Councils, introduction of collective bargaining and a substantial increase in the minimum wage (to US$600) – are the demands of all Iranian workers. The bus workers have put these demands high up on the banner of the whole labour movement in Iran. Despite coming under such a vicious and overwhelming attack, the strike has already shaken up the regime. Indeed the sheer scale of the Islamic regime’s reaction was an indication, not of its power and stability, but, rather, of its fear and vulnerability. The bus workers’ struggle is the prelude to more decisive battles to come.

All the detained workers must be immediately freed. The Islamic Republic must be condemned for this outrageous attack. Islamic councils – as anti-labour government-set up and run bodies in the workplaces – must be thrown out of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The bus workers’ union (Syndicate) must be recognised. All the workers’ demands must be met.

Support the Tehran bus workers! Send you protest letters to Ahmadinejad, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran at dr-ahmadinejad@president.ir.

Let’s be brutally honest. To describe FAITH as a “failure of reason” is a half-truth at best.

There are those who assert that their religious convictions are grounded in reason and evidence alone. But I’ve never actually met such a rare creature myself. Even the most cunning Jesuitical sophistry seeking to rationally justify religion does not entirely leave out faith as a component. And not faith in the sense of “hope” or “confidence” or any other wishy-washy alternate definition. By “faith” in this context, I mean (and honest believers also mean) believing something because one chooses to believe it, without regard to the absence of evidence/reasons to believe. (Sometimes, faith even entails believing something without regard to the presence of counter-evidence/reasons to believe otherwise. But the absence of positive evidence is quite problematic enough, so let’s leave the presence of counter-evidence aside.)

Faith is not a mere failure of reason: Faith is the willful abdication of reason. Faith isn’t a mistake along the same lines as a logical error such as affirming the consequent. It is not simply an oversight of evidence that ought to be under consideration. Faith is the declaration that reason may be all well and good in other areas, but reason ends here where the believer says it does! No argument can conceivably be given for not adhering to the standards of reason on any given subject, because argument itself must adhere to rational standards. Otherwise, it isn’t argument – it’s shouting, empty noise, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.

Let me more-or-less directly quote various things I’ve actually heard people say along these lines:

“This isn’t about reason. You have to feel it.”

“Believing isn’t about reason or argument. You can’t argue about God because God is beyond all arguments.”

These need not be statements from rabid fundamentalists, but from the sweetest, kindest-natured and live-and-let-live believers you can imagine. But the statements still embody a willful abdication of reason. From where I sit, the only possible response to any such statements is to point out clearly that the speaker has left the fold of reasoned argument entirely – something like the following: “Oh yeah! And what are the reasons why I have to feel it? Can you possibly give me an argument for why I should believe this claim in the absence of any argument for it?” Or, “Explain what you could possibly even mean by saying God is ‘beyond all arguments.’ Whatever it means, are you declaring that to be a fair move in our discussion? Because my desire for you to give me money isn’t about reason or argument. It’s beyond all arguments. So give me your money! If you don’t buy that move when I make it, why should I accept it when you make it?”

These aren’t rhetorical questions. Okay, the tone is snarky. But what tool is left but mockery when someone has abdicated reason entirely? Clearly, further exercises of reason are not much of an option. That ship has sailed as soon as someone adopts any belief or claim as a matter of faith.

The reason this is so important isn’t simply that people who embrace faith will have ill-formed beliefs. Reason is not normative solely in the minimal sense that there are strictures within which it must operate or it is no longer reason. There is an ethical component to reason as well, because one’s beliefs are intimately connected to one’s actions. Some of one’s beliefs are themselves normative – beliefs about what is good and right, about whose life is valuable and why and in what manner (see abortion and euthanasia debates). And factual beliefs are also important, since how we understand the world in which we are acting shapes our actions every bit as much as our values and ends.

If one gives up reason in the formation of some of one’s beliefs, one gives up the only access to truth we have. Humans don’t have any perceptual capacity to immediately discern truth, the way we immediately discern color and shape (if the lighting is good and our eyesight is in good order). The closest we can get is to justify our beliefs. Faith is not justification, it is the suspension of all standards for justification. Faith declares that some beliefs – these important ones right at the center of my world-view that shape how I see many other things – need not be justified at all.

If one’s beliefs cannot be justified, and if one’s actions are shaped and motivated by one’s beliefs, then one’s actions cannot be justified. Oh, the actions of the faithful might accidentally be consistent with justifiable actions – but that would be pure luck, really, and could just as well have turned out otherwise.

Those who live by faith are not intellectually inferior. One could even say that it takes a certain brilliance, or at least extraordinary mental flexibility, to engage in the mental gymnastics required to apply reason in most areas of life and then suspend it entirely on other areas. So this isn’t really about intellect. And to say that faith is a failure of reason or abdication of reason is just to name it, not to explain what’s wrong with it. I think something stronger can be said.

Faith is a moral failing. The abdication of reason is the abdication of justification. When people stop even trying to rationally justify their actions in the world – when they decide to act from faith instead – then they might just do anything at all and call it right and good.

George M. Felis is a bipedal primate with ill-adapted feet and an over-
developed neocortex. He is also a Ph.D. student in philosophy at The University
of Georgia and a philosophy instructor at Georgia Perimeter College. Religion
and himself are two of the many things he doesn’t take all that seriously.

B&W is asking various rationalists, scientists, biologists, zoologists, philosophers and the like for their reactions to the Kitzmiller decision. New ones will be added as they come in, so keep reading.

Susan Haack

GOOD SENSE IN DOVER

The question before Judge Jones, of course, was not whether “Intelligent Design Theory” should be taught in Dover public schools, but whether the School Board’s proposed “evolution disclaimer” is constitutional. His arguments on this point were, for me, a lesson in the complexities of Establishment-Clause jurisprudence. His belt-and-braces approach results in a convincing argument that the proposed evolution disclaimer constitutes an improper state endorsement of religion, and that both its purpose and its effect would be improperly to advance religion.

But what I have most admired in my reading so far is Judge Jones’s unremittingly common-sense scrutiny of the relevant facts: his comparison (following the testimony of plaintiffs’ expert Dr. Forrest) of pre- and post-Edwards versions of the ID text to which students were to be referred, Of Pandas and People, revealing unmistakably that though there had been changes in wording, there were no real changes in content – so that what the current version of the book presents is nothing but a thinly-disguised form of creationism; his patient dissection of the irregularities and shenanigans at School Board meetings to get the disclaimer through; his shrewd comments about the effect on students of being told of the theory of evolution, but not of anything else they are taught in science classes, that it has “gaps and problems”; and his staunch resistance to that false dichotomy of evolution vs. ID, and to that misleading use of “theory” to suggest “mere opinion or hunch.”

But inevitably there are some points on which I have reservations.

Section 4 of the ruling is headed “Whether ID is Science.” I wished the “problem of demarcation” – which was, in my opinion, a pointless preoccupation of too much twentieth-century philosophy of science (and now, since Daubert, has been something of a preoccupation of U.S. courts) – was less prominent. From a constitutional point of view, after all, the issue is whether the evolution disclaimer represents an improper entanglement of the state with religion (YES); and from the educational point of view, the issue is whether – science or not – ID “theory” is sufficiently well-warranted to be taught to schoolchildren (NO).

It is the preoccupation with demarcation that tempts Judge Jones into describing naturalism as “a self-imposed convention” of science. Besides running the risk of using “science” purely honorifically – as if to classify a proposed explanation as “not scientific” is ipso facto to show that it’s no good – this seems to me to miss an important point. A supernatural “explanation” of some phenomenon (flagella, blood-clotting, or whatever) posits that it is the work of a Designer neither in space nor in time, but tells us nothing about how such a designer is supposed to execute his design in the physical world. But this is no explanation at all; it’s just “God spake; and it was done” in a new vocabulary – and equally mysterious.

Judge Jones is clear that talk of an Intelligent Designer is intended, and will be understood as, a reference to God I wished he had added how implausible it is to think that this world was designed by an omnipotent, benevolent, and omniscient deity. As shrewd old David Hume wrote long ago, if this world was designed, it looks much more like the work of a baby god just starting out in the creation business, or perhaps a squabbling committee of gods…

Judge Jones several times adverts to the fact that Intelligent Design Theory has not generated peer-reviewed scientific publications. That’s true, and not insignificant. But I think he over-stresses peer review as an indication of reliability. (Though it was one of the indicia of reliability suggested by the Supreme Court in Daubert, the Court was clear that peer-reviewed publication doesn’t guarantee reliability, nor lack of peer-reviewed publication unreliability. And only last month we learned that several deaths had been omitted from the data presented in a peer-reviewed article in The New England Journal of Medicine on cardiovascular risks of Vioxx; and the editor explained that it isn’t feasible for the journal to do more than a cursory check of the material submitted.)

Still, these reservations aside, my reaction is: what a splendidly thorough, searching, and reasonable ruling this was – well worth the effort of reading all 139 pages twice!

Susan Haack is Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Law at the University of Miami. Her books include Defending Science – Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism and Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays.

Barbara Forrest

One of the greatest gestures of respect for one’s fellow Americans is to tell them the truth. To do otherwise is the height of disrespect. In Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District, Judge John E. Jones III demonstrated his respect for his fellow Americans and the Constitution by being receptive to the truth the plaintiffs presented to him and then making that truth the foundation of his written opinion. Judge Jones himself has not been accorded similar respect from the creationists at the Discovery Institute, who have not suffered their loss graciously.

Accusing Jones of “judicial activism with a vengeance,” John West, associate director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, asserts that Jones merely “wanted his place in judicial history.” But West’s most inexcusable affront is that “Judge Jones’ repeated mistatements [sic] of fact and his one-sided recitation of the ‘evidence’ reveal not only a judicial activist, but an incredibly sloppy judge who selects the facts to fit the result he wants.” In other words, according to West, the judge wilfully ignored the truth. West says this despite the fact that the Discovery Institute creationists had their golden opportunity during the trial to properly inform him–just as they have had fourteen years to get Dembski’s promised “full-scale scientific revolution” in gear. They have failed utterly on both counts.

Unfortunately for the Discovery Institute, the facts are crystal clear. Upon learning that William Dembski, ID’s leading intellectual, actually defines ID as “the logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory,” there was no other conclusion for Judge Jones to draw except that intelligent design is not only a religious belief, but a specifically Christian one. Upon learning that Phillip Johnson, the leader of the ID movement, actually defines ID as “theistic realism,” i.e., the idea that “God is objectively real as Creator, and that the reality of God is tangibly recorded in evidence accessible to science, particularly in biology,” Jones accurately reasoned that “ID is nothing less than the progeny of creationism.” The judge understood fully and accurately the overwhelming body of similar evidence presented to him, and he decided the case accordingly. Judge John Jones’s decision in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District is the stark, unadorned truth. That’s what makes it so powerful. No unnecessary rhetoric, no florid prose – just the truth.

Barbara Forrest testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District (2005) and is co-author with Paul R. Gross of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design.

Matt Ridley

Perhaps the resounding victory for common sense in Judge Jones’s
courtroom, the powerful words of the judge himself and the electoral
fate of the ID members of the Dover school board will now embolden
publishers of school text books to reconsider their abject policy of
gradually cutting the word evolution out of every book they publish.

There is one sentence that troubles me and it’s the same one that Dan
Dennett picked out: `Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific
experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good
science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific
community…’ My concern is different from Dennett’s, though I
share his view about creators. Mine is about scientific consensus.
In this case I find it absolutely right that the overhwelming nature
of the consensus should count against creationism. But there have
been plenty of other times when I have been on the other side of
the argument and seen what Madison called the despotism of the
majority as a bad argument. On climate change, for example, I
used to argue fervently that the early estimates of its likely extent
were exaggerated, that the sceptics raising doubts should be heard
and answered rather than vilified. Yet this minority was frankly
`bullied’ with ad hominem arguments. Again, the reaction of many
environmental scientists to Bjørn Lomborg’s splendid and
thought-provoking book was to pour scorn rather than assemble
counter evidence. Scientists are no better at coping with
disagreement than anybody else.

So what’s the difference? I agree with the scientific consensus
sometimes but not always, but I do not do so because it is is a
consensus. Science does not work that way or Newton, Harvey,
Darwin and Wegener would all have been voted into oblivion.
Science must allow for minority views. Intelligent Design is
wrong because it is dishonest, not because it is outvoted.

Matt Ridley’s many books include Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human and The Origins of Virtue : Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation.

Steve Jones

Well done the Joneses – I knew they would come up trumps in the end: and
this decision seems to me an eminently rational one. If I were religious
(which I am not) I would welcome it on the grounds that the Judge has put
paid to an undignified piece of intellectual dishonesty which does far more
harm to religion than it does to science. We in Britain should not gloat,
though: remember that we have state-funded schools that tell lies to
children about evolution and the best our Prime Minister can do to defend
that disastrous situation is to whimper that “I think it would be very
unfortunate if concerns over that were seen to remove the very, very strong
incentive to make sure we get as diverse a school system as we properly
can”. This country needs another Jones!

Steve Jones is Professor of Genetics at University College London. His books include Almost Like a Whale: The ‘Origin of Species’ Updated and The Single Helix: A Turn Around the World of Science.

Paul Kurtz

Much as I herald Federal Judge John Jones’s landmark decision in the over Dover Area School District case, we should make it clear that questions of scientific validity cannot be decided by politically motivated school boards, legislatures or even courts of law. The truth of scientific hypotheses and theories can only be settled by objective inquirers working in the laboratory or doing field work, using mathematical measurements, and testing them experimentally by their predictive power and explanatory coherence.

Judge Jones himself points out that the controversy between evolution and Intelligent Design can best be decided on scientific grounds. His decision is a credit to the judiciary in the United States, and it is especially pertinent to those who insist that judges should be fair-minded, interpret and not make law. The fact that Judge Jones is a Bush appointee and a Republican should hearten those who are frazzled by the assault on the judiciary by conservative activists who are opposed to activist judges, yet are willing to impose a religious agenda on scientific curriculums.

The Dover decision can be significant if it helps to stem the tidal wave of attempts by the Religious Right to emasculate the teaching of science in classrooms. Currently there a great number of school boards and State legislatures considering similar measures.

It is to the credit of the Creationist-Intelligent Design faction on the Dover school board, however, that they attempted to justify their efforts by saying that students need to develop “an open mind” and “critical thinking” Yet they did a disservice by attempting to inject the non-falsifiable theory of Intelligent Design in science classes. It is clear that occult causes have no place in scientific explanations, as Judge Jones recognized. Would the Intelligent Design school board faction (who fortunately lost in the most recent election) defend the teaching of astrology in astronomy courses or faith healing in medical schools as bona fide science? I hope not, especially given the fact that scientific literacy is declining among American students and that many formerly third world countries such as India and China are now outpacing our efforts in science education. Bravo to Judge Jones for recognizing that attempts to mandate theological doctrines in school curriculums is a violation of the anti-Establishment clause of the Constitution!

Paul Kurtz is editor-in-chief of Free Inquiry magazine and Chairman of he Council for Secular Humanism. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy of New York at Buffalo and author or editor of 44 books, including Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? (2003) and Skepticism and Humanism: The New Paradigm (2001).

Daniel Dennett

Judge John E. Jones’s opinion in the Dover Area School District case is an excellently clear and trenchant analysis of the issues, exposing the fatuity and disingenuousness of the ID movement both in this particular case and in general. However I found one point in it that left me uneasy. In the Conclusion, on page 136, Jones says “Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator [emphasis added].” I have not read the scientific experts’ testimony, and I wonder if Judge Jones has slightly distorted what they said. If they said that the theory of evolution in no way conflicts with the existence of a divine creator, then I must say that I find that claim to be disingenuous. The theory of evolution demolishes the best reason anyone has ever suggested for believing in a divine creator. This does not demonstrate that there is no divine creator, of course, but only shows that if there is one, it (He?) needn’t have bothered to create anything, since natural selection would have taken care of all that. Would the good judge similarly agree that when a defense team in a murder trial shows that the victim died of natural causes, that this in no way conflicts with the state’s contention that the death in question had an author, the accused? What’s the difference?

Gods have been given many job descriptions over the centuries, and science has conflicted with many of them. Astronomy conflicts with the idea of a god, the sun, driving a fiery chariot pulled by winged horses – a divine charioteer. Geology conflicts with the idea of a god who sculpted the Earth a few thousand years ago – a divine planet-former. Biology conflicts with the idea of a god who designed and built the different living species and all their working parts – a divine creator. We don’t ban astronomy and geology from science classes because they conflict with those backward religious doctrines, and we should also acknowledge that evolutionary biology does conflict with the idea of a divine creator and nevertheless belongs in science classes because it is good science.

I think that what the expert scientists may have meant was that the theory of evolution by natural selection in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine . . . prayer-hearer, or master of ceremonies, or figurehead. That is true. For people who need them, there are still plenty of job descriptions for God that are entirely outside the scope of evolutionary biology.

Daniel Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. His many books include Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and Freedom Evolves.

Richard Dawkins

Judge John Jones has given the Founding Fathers the first really good reason to stop spinning in their graves since the Bush junta moved in. It would have been a scandal if any judge had not found against the ID charlatans, but I had expected that he would do so with equivocation: some sort of ‘on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand’ consolation prize for the cavemen of creationism. Not a bit of it. Judge Jones rumbled them, correctly described them as liars and sent them packing, with the words “breathtaking inanity” burning in their ears. The fact that this splendid man is a republican has got to be a good sign for the future. I think the great republic has turned a corner this week and is now beginning the slow, painful haul back to its enlightened, secular foundations.

Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His many books include The Blind Watchmaker and The Ancestor’s Tale.

Our anthology, Theory’s Empire, appears at a moment when not only have theoretical discussions of literature become stagnant but articles and books are published in defense of the conceptual stalemates that have led to this very immobility. In the early years of the new millennium, theorists are busily writing about the impasse in which theory finds itself, discoursing on the alternatives as portentously as they once wrote about the death of the novel and of the author. But there is one revealing difference between the predictably cyclical revisions of theoretical notions before structuralism and those present developments that can today be referred to simply as Theory, emblazoned with a capital T: the proponents of the latter tend to avoid acknowledging their own role in creating and dispersing the very theorizing that increasingly seems to lead to a dead end. To be sure, the nineties witnessed the beginning of a few mea culpa. But this repentance has yet to distinguish between “a theory” as one approach among many, “theory” as a system of concepts employed in the humanities, and Theory as an overarching “practice” of our time. This failure, in turn, has led to endless reassertions as critics vie for recognition that they are still “doing theory,” understood as a superior and demanding labor. A few years ago Christopher Ricks wrote that “Theory’s empire [is] an empire zealously inquisitorial about every form of empire but its own…,” and that is where we still are in 2006.

From its inception, what is now called Theory aroused strong reactions. As early as the 1960s, caveats were heard regarding its foundations and practices. Yet such was the excitement generated by Theory as it promised to revitalize first literary study and, then, other humanistic fields that skeptical and dissenting voices went largely unheard, or created no more than a brief stir destined soon to fade as the march of Theory continued. This was the milieu teachers of literature inherited, and that still surrounds them in this new century.

In the past few decades, however, vigorous critical challenges have been raised to Theory as it has come to be routinely practiced and taught. So numerous are these objections that it is impossible to represent in a single volume all the incisive and sensible adverse views that have surfaced since at least the time of the Picard-Barthes controversy of the 1960s. Yet so little impact has this dissidence had that compendia celebrating Theory continue to be published and to function as important vehicles for conveying to new generations of readers reigning ideas of what literature is and how it should be studied. These volumes are defined by the presumption that theory matters more than the literature it once interpreted, and that certain key figures, concepts, movements, and texts are beyond question. Meanwhile, the challenges that have been offered to this presumption are widely scattered in scholarly journals, books by individual authors, and a few small and little-known collections; hence they have been practically unavailable to students and teachers.

Hazard Adams, one well-known critic and anthologist, wrote in the preface to the 1992 revised edition of his Critical Theory since Plato of “the tendency among recent academic critics to spend far less time discussing what . . . used to be called ‘literary’ texts and more time debating each other’s theories.” As if to bear out this observation, a conference on the present state of theory, held in April 2003 at the University of Chicago, saw some of the founders and promoters of Theory at pains to reinvigorate their propositions, including, in particular, their claims to be politically relevant. Their attempts to either absolve themselves of responsibility for their own excesses or to marshal forces to allow them to continue to claim centrality for the ideas they have long espoused simply confirmed our sense of the by-now entirely established nature of assertions about Theory. As Emily Eakin points out in her report for The New York Times (April 19, 2003) on the Chicago meeting: “If theory’s political utility is this dubious, why did the theorists spend so much time talking about current events?” The recent Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (the first major compendium of this century) corroborates our perspective of Theory’s still grandiose ambitions when it ends its introduction with the following assertion:

There are very good reasons that, as Jonathan Culler observes, contemporary theory now frames the study of literature and culture in academic institutions. Theory raises and answers questions about a broad array of fundamental issues, some old and some new, pertaining to reading and interpretive strategies, literature and culture, tradition and nationalism,
genre and gender, meaning and paraphrase, originality and intertextuality,
authorial intention and the unconscious, literary education and social
hegemony, standard language and heteroglossia, poetics and rhetoric,
representation and truth, and so on.[1]

If even recent handbooks and reference works such as The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Modern Criticism and Theory (2002) fail to acknowledge views opposing such inflated expressions of the purview of theory, it should come as no surprise that existing anthologies rarely include or even mention work that contests not only the applicability but also the very foundations of the theories presented and the claims made in their name. This failure is evident in most anthologies currently in use in theory classrooms, and now persists in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, whose aspirations are evident in the absence of the limiting term “literary” from its title. In his review of the Norton Anthology for The Kenyon Review (Spring 2003), Geoffrey Galt Harpham addresses the great gaps, arbitrariness and presentism of that volume, noting the tendentious introductions to the essays included and the celebratory tone of the risky business of Theory. Harpham also includes a list of omitted critics and theorists, and it is interesting to note who the major missing figures are. While his list in some particulars varies from our own, what can one say about the exclusion of Shklovsky, Empson, and Trilling from a volume of over 2,500 pages in which ample space is given to a host of trendy but ephemeral contemporary figures? Certainly a truly comprehensive survey of theory would contain essays by Booth, Abrams, Ellis, Tallis, and Vickers (all absent from the Norton Anthology), critics whose work appears in the chapters of Theory’s Empire.

Readers of the standard anthologies would not know that, since the late 1960s and in particular from the 1980s to the present, forceful efforts have been launched by scores of scholars to identify and analyze the gaps and wrong turns in the reigning approaches to criticism and theory. When noted at all, these critics have usually been dismissed with personal attacks and political tags designed to discredit them.

Far from responding with reasoned argument to their critics, proponents of Theory, in the past few decades, have managed to adopt just about every defect in writing that George Orwell identified in his well-known 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” It is worth noting that Orwell was writing at a time when criticism seemed incapable of giving “an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” as he said about political language. By the early 1980s, self-appointed to the progressive side of the political spectrum, theorists projected a nihilistic tone for which “everything is language” became a central tenet.

The result is that we continue, today, in a state that M. H. Abrams described more than three decades ago:

Each critical theorist, it can be said, pursuing his particular interests and purposes, selects and specializes his operative and categorical terms, and in consequence sets up a distinctive language-game whose playing field overlaps but doesn’t coincide with that of other critical language-games and which is played according to grammatico-logical rules in some degree special to itself.[2]

The ensuing language games have usually been played by people lacking the necessary philosophical foundations but nonetheless eager to participate. One of the major lacunae we have encountered in the conventional theory anthologies of today is a direct discussion of the problem described by Abrams, specifically in terms of the contradictions between poststructuralist nihilism and the political agenda of much contemporary theory. If language creates reality, then we need only change our language to bring about political change. But, obviously, the proponents of postcolonialist, feminist, and queer theorizing do not endorse such a view in practice. The contradiction should be plain to all.

Because these and other paradoxical strands have not been untangled, many alert students of Theory have realized the arbitrariness of readings based on the theorists they study. When students notice that some theories work much better than others on particular texts, they will suspect that these theories aren’t really theory but approaches, among which they – like the books that serve them as models – can pick and choose. True, dictionaries often list “idea” as the last definition of “theory,” but clearly it is not this weak sense that proponents of Theory have in mind. Terms such as “approaches” or “perspectives” don’t suggest the scope, explanatory power, or level of generalization one expects from a theory. Most theory anthologies and guides to the practical application of Theory, do not address the incoherence of their use of the operative term. And, indeed, the incoherence exists only if one takes the work of theory seriously. If one replaces “theory” by “approach” — a word that lacks grandiose connotations — the problem vanishes, though the question of the legitimacy of a particular approach certainly remains. But if one uses the word “theory” in all its present high signification, and believes its power to be on a par with (or superior to) that of theory in the sciences, then it’s absurd to think one is free to pick and choose among theories, each of which purports to explain the same sort of object (a “text”).

In our experience, independent-minded students can sense that something is amiss with these shifting applications of theory to literary works. They detect the overdetermination in the selection of poems. In the case of novels and plays, students perceive how the critic strains to make the text compatible with each theory in the list of –isms (occasionally skipping one if the task seems too difficult). They quickly catch on to the truth of an observation made by Frank Lentricchia a few years ago in his “Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic” (1996). Having decided to read literature as literature instead of as a vehicle for Theory, Lentricchia noticed that the Theory game was played by the formula “Tell me your theory and I’ll tell you in advance what you’ll say about any work of literature, especially those you haven’t read.”

* * *

A quarter of a century ago Christopher Ricks, in his search for a thoughtful alternative to literary theory as practiced around 1980, wrote an illuminating review for the London Review of Books (April-May 1981) of several books by Geoffrey Hartman and Stanley Fish. Ricks noted an interesting contradiction. Theorists insist that we all do theory whether we recognize it or not (a point exemplified by Paul de Man’s convenient statement that the resistance to theory is theory). At the same time, they are so eager to spread the Theory gospel that, as Ricks put it, they “practice baptism with a hose” — which suggests there aren’t enough theorists to go around. Ricks was proved right: the inevitability of Theory persists as an article of faith, and the proselytizing spirit nonetheless continues as well. The result has been the publication of ever more reiterative and derivative theories.

The sheer mass of this self-perpetuating glut has had the result that scholars skeptical of particular theorists (whether the latter are French maîtres à penser or their younger successors such as Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler), or of entire schools of them (such as New Historicists) have been largely dismissed as politically conservative and out of touch, traditional, self-interested, exclusionary, and – ironically (given the generally unyielding tone of Theorists) — intransigent. Labeling them thus has functioned, in turn, as a pretext for neglecting a whole range of complex, scrupulous, and often inspiring writings on theory, some examples of which appear in the chapters of Theory’s Empire.

We believe that in the thirty years between the publication of the first edition of Hazard Adams’ Critical Theory since Plato and the appearance of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, much has been lost with respect not only to theory and criticism that actually illuminate literary texts, but also to the appreciation of criticism’s actual contributions to academic discourse. That time span also saw the dissemination of theoretical principles in innumerable books aiming to ease readers’ way into the arcane world of Theory, while in no way encouraging a love of literature. In Teaching Literature (2003), Elaine Showalter reminds us of the result of these developments: “These days you need the chutzpah of a Terry Eagleton to have a stab at defining ‘literature’ at all, and even he concedes that ‘anything can be literature, and . . . any belief that the study of literature is the study of a stable, well-definable entity, as entomology is the study of insects, can be abandoned as a chimera.’”

The essays included in Theory’s Empire do not propose a return to an ideal past (non-existent, in any case) of literary studies. Nor do we support a retrogressive or exclusivist view of a canon, classics, traditions, or conventions (the predictable charges hurled against critics of Theory). Rather, we have selected essayists who see the need – more urgent now than ever – to question today’s theoretical orthodoxies and to replace them with open discussion and logical argumentation. Our authors also thoroughly examine the background and tenets of currently accepted Theory, and do so in language most readers will understand. They do not represent a new version of what Harold Bloom has called a “School of Resentment,” nor do they chime in with what Robert Hughes examined in 1992 as the “culture of complaint.” Indeed, what is particularly noticeable in our authors’ writings is the general lack of ad hominem attacks, even when confronting some of the more preposterous and unreadably convoluted theories. They focus not on personality – as central an issue as Theory’s stars have made this in cultivating their public personae – but instead on logic, reason, and evidence, concepts without which it is impossible to have any sort of fruitful intellectual exchange. They are mindful of the point made by some of our contributors that the habit of many theorists to make claims without showing any awareness of the highly contentious nature of their premises and reasoning is a symptom of the poor standard of argumentation prevailing in modern literary theory.

* * *

When we began graduate work in literature in the late 1960s and 1970s a Marxist or, more generally speaking, sociological approach to literature was a new and promising area of study, excitingly different from the linguistic models of structuralism and formalism. North American scholars were (belatedly) discovering Gramsci, Brecht, Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin, and similar theorists, who quickly became icons of a critical establishment that pervaded literature departments and, to a lesser extent, related fields. In the years that followed, figures such as Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and Jameson (an intellectual “client of Europe,” according to his fellow Marxist holdout, Terry Eagleton) became touchstones of the craft of literary analysis. “Power,” “hegemony,” “the Other,” “the mirror stage,” “deferred meaning,” “the logic of late capitalism,” and similar terms and phrases – by then inseparable from the authority of Theory – turned into the preeminent themes for exploration in and through literary texts.

At the same time, a feminist perspective became indispensable for literary scholars, starting with the work of such figures as Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone, and passing through French feminist critics, mainly Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigaray. Putting such figures on pedestals, however, also led to the elevation of lesser lights whose contributions were not so much to theoretical issues as to the promulgation of increasingly abstract (and often abstruse) forms of expression. Over the years, this tendency has grown apace.

In the 1970s and well into the 1980s, reception aesthetics, narratology, critical theory (basically the Frankfurt School), postcolonialism, and an all-encompassing preference for political approaches (grounded in the theorists’ own presumptively correct opinions), became the norm. Though not often cohering with an accelerating postmodernist rhetoric that saw the whole world as a “text,” these approaches devolved into specializations and sub-fields such as subaltern studies, cultural studies, and, more recently, queer theory – all of which have spread beyond the area of literature – as is only to be expected once most everything has been reconceived as a “text.”

What theorists of all these persuasions have in common, whatever their individual differences, is a decisive turning away from literature as literature and an eagerness to transmogrify it into a cultural artifact (or “signifying practice”) to be used in waging an always anti-establishment political struggle. This view of theory as practice, rooted in the political activism of the 1960s and acclaimed repeatedly in Theory texts from that time on, has by now found its way even into such standard anthologies (published by presumably capitalist publishers) as the Norton, as we shall see below.

At the same time an unmistakable grandiosity entered the discourse of literary theory. Professors trained primarily in literature began to claim for themselves a commanding position from which to comment importantly on any and all aspects of cultural and political life (and even on scientific research, which stood as the last bastion untouched by Theory), and thereby rise to stardom in the academic firmament. The eminence of these celebrities helps explain why little scrutiny is given to propositions articulated by fashionable theorists whose terminology has been embraced and reiterated by their many followers. Claims to postmodernist relativism notwithstanding, the Theory world is intolerant of challenges and disagreement, which is perhaps why its rhetoric has been so widely parroted in the academy. A very recent demonstration of such intolerance is the irate protest against Jonathan Kandell’s critical obituary of Derrida (in the New York Times, 10 October 2004), By late November, just as our book was going to press, more than four thousand individuals, ranging from graduate students to senior theorists, had signed on to the protesters’ website, affirming their unqualified faith in the theorist’s work and objecting to the tone of the article (actually, one of many), which they found blasphemous. Evidently, proclamations of the death of theory are premature.

The results of these developments have been unfortunate in many ways. As intellectual claims that at one time seemed new and exciting became ossified – reduced to the now-predictable categories of race, class, gender and, later, sexuality – criticism and theory turned endlessly repetitive and hence otiose. A style of reading emerged that, when not denying meaning altogether or seeing literary texts as inevitably about themselves, condensed complex works to an ideological bottom line drawn on their authors’ perceived “subject position” and on the political leanings that could be teased out of, or imported into, their texts. By now this has become a pervasive mindset, producing interpretations that invariably end at the same point: a denunciation of authors for their limitations vis-à-vis the orthodoxies of our historical moment and its preferred “voices,” or, alternatively, a celebration of authors or texts for expressing the favored politics or for merely embodying the requisite identity. In view of all this, it is worth recalling a sane observation made by Frank Kermode (also a contributor to our volume) in a recent essay entitled “Literary Criticism: Old and New Styles,” now collected in his Pieces of My Mind (2003): “Despite the carping and the quarrels, despite the great variety of critical approaches that were becoming available – the American New Criticism, the Chicago Critics, the maverick Winters and the maverick Burke and the maverick Frye – there was still a fundamental consensus: literary criticism was extremely important; it could be taught; it was an influence for civilization and even for personal amendment.”

Most graduate students, we believe, and even many undergraduates, in literature programs today would have little truck with such a viewpoint. For they have not failed to pick up some of what Theory is purveying. Even as newcomers in graduate programs, they have little difficulty producing the anticipated analyses in short order. Meanwhile, they acquire scant or no knowledge of formalist or stylistic criticism and have no acquaintance with aesthetics. Even if they suspect that not everything they are taught is beyond question, they are too often caught up in a mimicry of the contemporary theorists whose views they accept with more blindness than insight. Pondering such impoverishment in the study of literature, even theory enthusiasts such as Elaine Marks (who more than two decades ago was among the first to introduce French feminist theorists to an American audience) was writing toward the end of her life with alarm and disappointment about what has happened to the academic study of literature (her essay, published in 2000, is among our selections).

The fantasies underlying much that goes on in the name of Theory are readily detectable in the declarations found in Theory anthologies. The preface to the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, on its very first page stakes its claim to relevance by equating theory with “engaging in resistance.” And Rice and Waugh, coeditors of Modern Literary Theory, inform their student readers, in an introduction to one part of their book, that “scientific knowledge can be no more ‘objective’ than aesthetic knowledge.” These are typical assertions made in major Theory anthologies.

Yet such claims have been subjected to criticism for decades. More than twenty years ago, in an article entitled “On the Teaching of Literature,” published in Philosophy and Literature (October 1984), D. G. Myers, one of our contributors, concluded that “If we are serious in believing that the role of theory is to oppose cultural authority, if we are sincere in our objective of putting self-evident certainties under interrogation, what better way than by leading our students to struggle against the authorities that we ourselves have placed in their hands?” Instead of which, as another contributor, Mark Bauerlein, puts it in his Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997), today’s political criticism is distinguished from earlier variants merely by the “broad methodological shift it brings about. Specifically, what political criticism does is center criticism on political content and render formal, disciplinary, methodological considerations secondary.” Frank Kermode makes a similar point in the essay cited earlier, comparing criticism half a century ago with what is written at the present time. Today’s criticism, he notes, involves principles that “actually prevent it from attending closely to the language of major works (in so far as that description is regarded as acceptable) – to the work itself, rather than to something more congenial, and to some more interesting, that can be put in its place.”

Geoffrey Galt Harpham, in the review mentioned above, notes that even ostensible critics of Theory, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Barbara Christian, and Jane Tompkins, who appear to have found the theory-obsessed academic scene to be repressive and alienating, do not actually suggest a turn to literature. To make their escape, Harpham points out, they chose “to focus on other things, such as themselves, the way it feels to be them, how people ought to be if they want to be like them.” Nonetheless, they typically attempt to remain within the glow of Theory by expanding its definition so as to include the writings of their favorites (mostly themselves and/or hitherto “marginalized voices”). Thus, poems, journals, commentaries, novels – when created by the right identity group — become “theory.” In other words, Theory today is something everybody can lay claim to be “doing”; just expand its meaning, to suit your predilections.

* * *

More than eighty years ago, Boris Eichenbaum expressed the fear that formalism might degenerate and become the work of academic second-stringers who “devote themselves to the business of devising terminology and displaying their erudition.” At least in the United States, this state of affairs (although unrelated to formalism, of course) is now commonplace. We think it is telling that critics such as Frank Lentricchia, Edward Said, and Terry Eagleton in recent years started to question the practical implications of the theory they once preached and promoted. For despite the surface diversity, the many schools of thought, the variety of sexual and textual politics, what we really encounter today is the routine busy work of “dismantling,” “unveiling,” “demystifying,” and so on, whether of the “unwitting” biases of an author, a group, or an entire culture, or of the spurious nature of disinterest and objectivity.

Part of our sense of urgency about the need for Theory’s Empire comes from our participation in academic searches to fill faculty positions, ostensibly in literature, over the past few decades. We see applicant after applicant present dossiers, dissertations, and job talks that are interchangeable and entirely predictable (in the last few years preferred themes have been the “construction of national identity,” “globalization,” “epistemic violence” and various versions of “border” crossings, while “transgressive sexuality,” has remained in favor only by extending its boundaries to include ever new identity groups it purports to speak for and to). Largely untrained in historical method, sociology, philosophy, and other human sciences, these young scholars often produce distressingly reductive readings – when they turn their attention to literature, that is. They may call their approach multi- or interdisciplinary or label it “cultural studies.” But their writing is strong primarily on up-to-the-minute theory rhetoric, dutifully paying homage (if only in passing) to their chosen theory or theorist, while resolutely displaying political commitment and zeal. Such performances rarely suggest that these future teachers are inclined, or even equipped, to question their own conceptual templates, or that they have made themselves aware of the problematic aspects of the theory they have embraced.

In various essays published in France and in his Le Démon de la théorie: Littérature et sens commun (1998) Antoine Compagnon has addressed students’ fear of being out of fashion, noting the grave consequence of thereby producing generations of conformists. This is a point that many of our contributors also make as they observe how the inexact and rushed oscillation among disciplines creates a “drifting” (the term is Compagnon’s) that jettisons expertise for opinions that sound far more substantial than they actually are.[3] A phenomenon seen by many humanists and social scientists as a major source of today’s theoretical drifting is the spread of postmodernism’s aggressive vocabulary of subversion, demystification, transgression, violence, fissures, de-centered subjects, fragmentation, dismantling master narratives, and so on. This lexicon may promote an illusion of revolutionary upheaval (though in the name of what cause remains notoriously unclear). But it is hard to see how such militant rhetoric contributes to an understanding, much less to the solution, of the real political and social struggles going on in the world. Perhaps because it is so gratifying to display, this sort of political grandstanding seems to have no end. Thus, in the proceedings of the Chicago meeting referred to above, we read that one participant said: “What I’m suggesting is that the apparent collapse of theory and the distrust of cultural studies was already prefigured by endorsements that sought to place it within the system and make it a part of normal professionalization that had, and would have, no relationship to the world outside of the academy.”[4] Apart from the clotted prose, this statement is a problem for innocent readers of Theory, because its author seems to think he has invented the wheel while in fact he can offer nothing beyond the weary charges of scholars’ “complicity” in the problems they seek to expose. Reading “outside the box” of incestuous journals, books, and conferences would reveal that similar “discoveries” have long been thoroughly scrutinized by other critics, among them our contributors J. G. Merquior, Brian Vickers, John Ellis, and Stephen Adam Schwartz.

Our volume, however, is not making an appeal to readers on political grounds – as has been done in recent years by Martha Nussbaum (in her criticisms of Judith Butler), Terry Eagleton (on Fish, Bloom, and Spivak), and others who have grown impatient with the kind of theorizing they find politically ineffective or plain frivolous. We believe that intellectual work in the humanities needs no strained justification – least of all the pretense that it can solve the problems of globalization or gender identity or racial divisions. But something larger is at stake here than the futility of such political pretenses. What the languages of present-day criticism and theory unmistakably do is undermine what should be a protected intellectual space – that of classroom teaching and learning – in which ideas can be explored and tried out with an extraordinary measure of freedom and safety. Such an environment, for the few short years that it is available to students, ought to be cultivated and cherished, rather than turned into an arena for waging ersatz politics. From frequent journalistic reports, and our own and many of our colleagues’ observation of the prevailing modes of instruction and critical writing in the humanities, it is evident that today’s theoretical vocabulary has led to an intellectual void at the core of our educational endeavors, scarcely masked by all the posturing, political zealotry, pretentiousness, general lack of seriousness, and the massive opportunism that is particularly glaring in the extraordinary indifference to or outright attacks on logic and consistency. In fact, the necessity of a common, direct language in learning has been pointed out throughout the last half century by humanists such as Jacques Barzun in his 1959 essay “The Language of Learning and of Pedantry.”

* * *

Nothing we have written above should be taken to express an expectation, on our part, that Theory as currently conceived will meekly go out of fashion. Indeed, its status as accepted doctrine is pretty well secure. This in itself, however, creates a situation in which change is both inevitable and desirable. One sign of changes underway is the fact that, as we and some of our contributors observe, more and more students these days approach theory as a tedious obligation, no longer as an exciting subject they wish to explore. In other words, theory in the classroom is, today, often little more than a routine practice, as predictable and dull as cafeteria food. Many professors, on the other hand, are still so wedded to the arcane rhetoric and turgid terminology that have characterized the Theory scene (and that, as some of our contributors suggest, account in no small measure for the mystique it exudes) that they are reluctant to let go of it. We strongly believe that the next decades will see the emergence of more and more open criticism of sanctioned theory in academic settings, and we hope Theory’s Empire will contribute to it.

Having culled from a wide range of available sources materials that can help readers break out of the passive assent to established routines, we have brought together an intelligent and intelligible collection of essays, to be used as primary readings for those interested in theory debates, and as a complement and corrective to anthologies such as the ones whose conceptual faults and gaps we have summarized above. Our chief aim is to provide students and interested readers with effective intellectual tools to help them redeem the study of literature as an activity worth pursuing in its own right. By subjecting Theory to sustained critical examination, they will – we believe – acquire a much more realistic sense of the place of theory in the world of intellectual and creative endeavors.

Our contributors do not conceal the strong passions and deep commitment to reason and logic they bring to their critiques. Some take on the invocatory rhetoric of Theory; some provide historical and cultural explanations for its dominance; others analyze the problematic philosophical foundations on which much fashionable Theory rests. Many point out the contradictions, the paucity of evidence, the address to particular constituencies, the flagrant identity politics, and the ultimate incoherence of certain fashionable theorists. Some express their own second thoughts about theories that they had embraced at an earlier time; still others vigorously defend reason and science. And a few even reopen the subject of aesthetics, so neglected by Theory. All share an affection for literature, a delight in the pleasures it brings, a respect for its ability to give memorable expression to the vast variety of human experience, and a keen sense that we must not fail in our duty to convey it unimpaired to future generations.

This article is a slightly shortened version of the Introduction to Theory’s Empire which is republished here by permission of Columbia University Press. Theory’s Empire was extensively discussed at The Valve in July 2005. Daphne Patai is professor of Brazilian literature and literary theory at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of a number of books on literature, utopian studies, and the culture wars, most recently Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies, Revised Edition (with Noretta Koertge). Will H. Corral teaches Spanish American literature and culture at California State University, Sacramento. He is the author or editor of several books in Spanish, the most recent of which is El error del acierto (contra ciertos dogmas latinoamericanistas); he lives in Davis, California.

1. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 28.

2. M. H. Abrams, “What’s the Use of Theorizing about the Arts?” [1972] In Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Fisher (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), pp. 48-49.

3. Antoine Compagnon, “La traversée de la critique,” Revue des Deux Mondes 173:9 (Septembre 2002), pp. 71-83. For Compagnon la French Theory has delegitimized literature outside France and within it. François Cusset’s French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux États-Unis (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2003) arrives at similar conclusions and expands on them by tracing the paradox of how what he calls “intellectuels français marginalisés dans l’Hexagone” (p. 11) could become extremely successful in America, whereas in France their ideas were used to point out the dangers of “la pensée 68.”

4. Harry Harootunian, “Theory’s Empire: Reflections on a Vocation for Critical Inquiry,” Critical Inquiry 30:2 (Winter 2004), p. 399.

This blog has a rather lengthy compendium of links pertaining to yesterday’s court decision. The New York Times, meanwhile, has run a pleasingly direct editorial:

Judge Jones’s decision was a striking repudiation of intelligent design, given that Dover’s policy was minimally intrusive on classroom teaching. Administrators merely read a brief disclaimer at the beginning of a class asserting that evolution was a theory, not a fact; that there were gaps in the evidence for evolution; and that intelligent design provided an alternative explanation and could be further explored by consulting a book in the school library. Yet even that minimal statement amounted to an endorsement of religion, the judge concluded, because it caused students to doubt the theory of evolution without scientific justification and presented them with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory.

The case was most notable for its searching inquiry into whether intelligent design could be considered science. The answer, after a six-week trial that included hours of expert testimony, was a resounding no.

The judge found that intelligent design violated the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking supernatural causation and by making assertions that cannot be tested or proved wrong. Moreover, intelligent design has not gained acceptance in the scientific community, has not been supported by peer-reviewed research, and has not generated a research and testing program of its own. The core argument for intelligent design – the supposedly irreducible complexity of key biological systems – has clear theological overtones. As long ago as the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas argued that because nature is complex, it must have a designer.

The religious thrust behind Dover’s policy was unmistakable. The board members who pushed the policy through had repeatedly expressed religious reasons for opposing evolution, though they tried to dissemble during the trial. Judge Jones charged that the two ringleaders lied in depositions to hide the fact that they had raised money at a church to buy copies of an intelligent design textbook for the school library. He also found that board members were strikingly ignorant about intelligent design and that several individuals had lied time and again to hide their religious motivations for backing the concept. Their contention that they had a secular purpose – to improve science education and encourage critical thinking – was declared a sham.

Less pleasing is the intervention by Albert Alschuler, a distinguished criminal law expert at the University of Chicago, whose ill-informed and misleading comments on this decision have already been picked up with glee by the Discovery [sic] Institute shills. (The first commenter on the Chicago site corrects some of the errors in Professor Alschuler’s presentation as well.) Professor Alschuler writes:

The first amendment makes intelligent design unmentionable in the classroom.

But that is not what the decision held at all: it held that it violates the Establishment Clause to include Intelligent Design as part of the science curriculum or to teach it to schoolchildren as though it were in competition with Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

While professing to offer no opinion concerning the truth of intelligent design, the court consistently reveals its contempt for this theory.

But the theory warrants the contempt appropriate to misinformation and deceit, and which the court’s opinion detailed: it has generated no research program or results; it is supported by no evidence; it is creationism for those who have consulted a lawyer and a public relations expert. (See the summary at 64 of the opinion, which is then amply documented in the subsequent pages. The court could have put the point about supernatural causation more effectively, but otherwise the claims are sound.)

Most of the Dover opinion says in effect to the proponents of intelligent design, “We know who you are. You’re Bible-thumpers.” The opinion begins, “The religious movement known as Fundamentalism began in nineteenth century America as a response to social changes, new religious thought, and Darwinism. Religiously motivated groups pushed state legislatures to adopt laws prohibiting public schools from teaching evolution, culminating in the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ of 1925.” When the Fundamentalists (the court often capitalizes the word) found themselves unable to ban Darwinism, they championed “balanced treatment,” then “creation science,” and finally “intelligent design.” According to the court, the agenda never changed. Dover is simply Scopes trial redux. The proponents of intelligent design are guilty by association, and today’s yahoos are merely yesterday’s reincarnated.

There is no guilt-by-association argument in the court’s opinion, and this is a serious misrepresentation of the court’s methodical approach in this case, one that can not be rationalized by saying “in effect”. The court did not, in fact, “begin” with a discussion of fundamentalism; that discussion began on page 7 of the opinion in the context of establishing the constitutional standards governing adjudication of the controversy. To that end, the court, quite correctly, reviews the history of efforts to impose versions of creationism in the public schools and the constitutional standards that evolved in response to legal challenges. The court’s (uncontroversial) interpretation of the “effect” prong of the Lemon test (for Establishment Clause violations) leads it to conclude that to determine whether or not the Dover Board policy “endorses” religion the policy must be considered from the standpoint of an informed, objective observer–an observer who is informed, among other things, about the relevant historical and cultural context in which the policy is adopted. (See esp. 15-19 of the opinion.) Because the meaning or “effect” of the Dover Board’s actions can only be evaluated against the background of fundamentalist efforts to inject religion into the public school classroom, the court has to attend to that background. (A technical sidenote: the court, in fact, distinguished the “endorsement” test from the “effects” test, though noting that “the Lemon effect test largely covers the same ground as the endorsement test.” For reasons of simplicity, I’m just going to refer to the two interchangeably.)

If fundamentalism still means what it meant in the early twentieth century, however — accepting the Bible as literal truth — the champions of intelligent design are not fundamentalists. They uniformly disclaim reliance on the Book and focus only on where the biological evidence leads.

There is one irrelevant truth here and one falsehood. It is true, but irrelevant, that the ID proponents are not committed to the literal truth of the Book of Genesis: that is what they learned won’t fly from the last round of successful constitutional challenges in the 1980s. (As the court demonstrated (p. 33): “The weight of the evidence clearly demonstrates…that the systemic change from ‘creation’ to ‘intelligent design’ occurred sometime in 1987, after the Supreme Court’s important Edwards decision. This compelling evidence strongly supports Plantiffs’ assertion that ID is creationism re-labeled.”)

It is false, however, that proponents of ID “focus only on where the biological evidence leads,” and false for two reasons: first, no inference to the best explanation of the evidence would support positing an intelligent designer (as the court nicely puts it, “ID is at bottom premised upon a false dichotomy, namely, that to the extent evolutionary theory is discredited, ID is confirmed” [71]); and second, the ID proponents routinely misrepresent the biological evidence, finding inexplicable complexity where there is none; all of this was amply documented at the trial and in the court’s opinion (see esp. 76 ff.). All of this is old news to anyone who has followed these tiresome debates. All of it, alas, is absent from Professor Alschuler’s version.

The court’s response – “well, that’s what they say, but we know what they mean” – is uncivil, an illustration of the dismissive and contemptuous treatment that characterizes much contemporary discourse. Once we know who you are, we need not listen. We’ve heard it all already.

Unfortunately, the only party to this dispute saying “that’s what they say, but we know what they mean” is Professor Alschuler, who simply ignores page after page of the court’s opinion detailing the expert testimony and the evidence in the record as to the Dover Board’s purposes and the scientific standing of ID, and instead says that what the court “really means” is some version of the “guilt-by-association” argument it nowhere makes.

The court offers convincing evidence that some members the Dover school board would have been delighted to promote their old time religion in the classroom. These board members apparently accepted intelligent design as a compromise, the nearest they could come to their objective within the law. Does that make any mention of intelligent design unconstitutional? It seems odd to characterize the desire to go far as the law allows as an unlawful motive. People who try to stay within the law although they would prefer something else are good citizens. The Dover opinion appears to say that the forbidden preference taints whatever the board may do, and if the public can discern the board’s improper desire, any action it takes also has an unconstitutional effect.

This confusing paragraph seems to conflate the “effect” and “purpose” prongs of Lemon, which are clearly distinguished by the court. The court argues that the Dover policy had the “effect” of endorsing religion (see esp. 38-42 of the opinion–or the summary at 49-50 [or at 63, for the case of the “effect” on adult members of the commmunity]); that dooms the policy quite independent of anyone’s purposes. The court also argues that, as an independent matter, the Dover Board’s policy fails the purpose prong of Lemon (90 ff.), and it reaches that conclusion on the basis of dozens of pages of evidence adduced at trial showing the clear religious objectives of Board members, as well as their attempts to cover-up those religious objectives. As the court concluded (132): “Any asserted secular purposes by the Board are a sham and are merely secondary to a religious objective.” That someone might have had a secular purpose for promoting a policy like Dover’s is irrelevant to what purposes state actors actually had in this case. (Of course, the problem is worse than that: all the evidence adduced in the context of analyzing the “effect” of the policy suggests that there could be no secular, scientific purpose for adopting the policy.)

Professor Alschuler’s intervention into this well-travelled terrain is not as bad, to be sure, as some other law professors who’ve written foolishly on this subject, but it is perhaps more troublesome because Alschuler is so much more prominent. Already, as we noted, the Discovery [sic] Institute folks are touting his remarks. Because the opinion is long, and most will not read it, the potential for unsuspecting readers to take Professor Alschuler’s inaccurate presentation of the opinion at face value is real. Here is hoping he will do better by the court’s opinion the next time around!

This article first appeared on The Leiter Report on December 22 and is republished here by permission. Brian Leiter is Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Law & Philosophy Program at the University of Texas at Austin. The Leiter Report is here.

Spirituality at Faith’s Funeral

There is something decidedly weird about this business of spirituality. Just say the word “spiritual,” or, if you prefer more gravitas, “mystical,” and you will witness a strange phenomenon. You will find many tough-talking, God-is-dead rationalists morph into Mahesh Yogi lites, peddling sweet-nothings about merging the “self” into the universe, and promoting world peace and reason while they are at it.

In his much acclaimed The End of Faith, Sam Harris declares the death of faith, only to celebrate the birth of spirituality. He wants to convince us of the proposition that “Mysticism is rational…religion is not” (p. 221). Traditional Judeo-Christian and Islamic conception of God who heeds your prayers is a mere leap of faith, “an epistemological black hole, draining the light out of our world”(p. 35). Faith in a personal God is “intellectually defunct and politically ruinous” (p. 221). It is time to grow up, Harris tells us, and trade faith for spirituality or mysticism, which is “deeply rational, even as it elucidates the limits of reason” (p. 43). Unlike religion, mysticism is only a “natural propensity of the human mind, and we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it” (p. 221).

To my skeptical ears, though, this sounds like a clarion-call to leave the frying-pan and to step bravely into the fire. It is easy to debunk faith. Faith, by definition, is a “leap of faith,” a relationship of trust regardless of evidence. In contrast, spiritualism has learned to dress up its metaphysical abstractions in the clothes of empiricism and neuro-physiology. But the empiricist pretensions of mysticism do not make the experience itself any more reasonable and empirically justified than the faith of those who believe in God. Consistent empiricists can hardly afford to take the scientistic rhetoric of mystics at face value, as Harris, a practicing spiritualist himself, ends up doing.

But in order to understand Harris’s celebration of spiritualism, it is important to understand what he is pitting it against.

A Rationalist Jihad against Jihad

The End of Faith is a response to religious extremism from a rationalist extremist perspective. Disturbed by the rise of religious violence around the world, especially the 9-11 attacks on America, Harris has taken on the traditional theological beliefs about God and afterlife that motivate some to kill innocents. Brushing aside all political and historical factors that have contributed to religious extremism in the contemporary world, Harris singles out theological beliefs as the primary and pretty much the sole cause of religious violence. He indulgently turns a blind eye on the “spiritual” teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism, both of which have a proven track-record of justifying nationalistic wars and ethnic cleansings. Instead, he saves all his venom against the Koran, condemning it as if it were a manual of war. His analysis of religious extremism goes on these lines:

Question: Why do Islamic terrorists do what they do? Why has Osama bin Laden chosen the path of violence against the West, especially against America?

Answer: Because men like bin Laden actually believe in the literal truth of the Koran. And because the literal truth of Koran is “intrinsically” violent and intolerant, they have no choice but to commit acts of violence.

In short, it is the theology stupid!

In his rationalist Jihad on Jihadi theology, Harris’s motto seems to be (with due apologies to Barry Goldwater): “Extremism in the defense of reason is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of secularism is no virtue.” Harris can barely curb his enthusiasm for George Bush’s disastrous wars, announcing gleefully that “we are at war against Islam” – not at war against violent extremists, mind you, but against the very “vision of life prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran” (p. 109). He finds tortured justifications for torturing suspected terrorists in America’s Gulag. He goes even further:

some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them….Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.” (p. 53, emphasis added.)

The villains who are beyond the pale of reason and who deserve to die are all Muslims. While he has some harsh things to say about Christians and Jews as well, he spares them the wars and the torture, for unlike the Muslim barbarians, they have had their reformations and their enlightenments.

This bilious attack on faith only sets the stage for what seems to be his real goal: a defense – nay, a celebration of – Harris’s own Buddhist/Hindu spirituality. (He has been influenced by the esoteric teachings of Dzogchen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta and has spent many years practicing various techniques of meditation, Harris informs his readers). Spirituality is the answer to Islam’s and Christianity’s superstitions and wars, Harris wants to convince us. While he is quick to pour scorn on such childish ideas as the virgin birth, heaven and hell, the great rationalist has only winks and nods to offer when it comes to such “higher” truths as near-death experiences, ESP and the existence of disembodied souls, all of which he finds plausible. Our fearless crusader against faith puts his reason to sleep when it comes to the soul-stuff of the Eastern faith traditions that he himself subscribes to.

Harris has made a name for himself as an uncompromising and fearless champion of reason. His The End of Faith has made it to the New York Times best-seller list, and he is being feted by secularist organizations and thinkers in America and around the world. I am sure that Hindu nationalists in India, who have long condemned “Semitic monotheisms” (their preferred label for Islam and Christianity) as irrational and superstitions as compared to Hinduism’s rational mysticism, will find much to celebrate in Harris as well. Be that as it may, if being a rationalist has come down to declaring a war against those who we deem beyond the pale of reason in the name of “higher” truths of mystics, then at least this rationalist wants no part of it.

One disclaimer before we go any further. I grew up as an observant Hindu in my native India. My critical engagement with Hindu spirit-centered metaphysics and Hindu nationalist politics is often painted by my Indian critics as an act of disloyalty to Mother India and, even more weirdly, as a sign of my hidden sympathies for Christianity and Islam! Not unlike Harris, these critics can not imagine that one can be a consistent, equal-opportunity skeptic and materialist, rejecting faith in both, a creator God and the subtle spiritual “energy” that is supposed to animate the entire world. Unlike Harris, who seems to have found a shelter in spirituality after the found faith wanting, I insist upon subjecting both to an equally rigorous test of reason and evidence, and I find them both equally wanting. I have no axe to grind, for or against, any particular religious tradition. If I have any axe to grind at all, it is for a naturalistic worldview which denies all forms of supernaturalism, regardless of whether they are located in God in heaven or spread out in all of cosmos.

What I find particularly galling about spirituality is its pretensions of “higher” rationality, its false and dangerous claims of being “empirical” and “scientific” in the sense of being testable by “experience” (which invariably means non-sensory experience). Western converts to Eastern spirituality, along with Eastern apologists themselves, end up presenting an air-brushed, sanitized picture of the real thing. That is the reason why I felt that Harris’s brand of rational mysticism had to be examined carefully and challenged.

New Age Mystifications

Spiritualism is not just good for your soul, Harris wants to convince us, it is good for your mind as well: it can make you “happy, peaceful and even wise …by searching for truth” (p. 215). Results of spiritual practices are “genuinely desirable [for they are] not just emotional but cognitive and conceptual as well,” and Harris wants us to actively seek them out (p. 40).

In the rest of this essay, I want to examine these cognitive and social virtues that are supposed to follow from spiritualism or mysticism. (Harris uses the two interchangeably. I will follow the practice as well.) I will use Harris’s own criteria of rationality of beliefs to ask if the existence-claims routinely made by mystics can stand up to the demands of empirical evidence. Likewise, I will use Harris’s own diagnosis of dualism between subject and object as the source of all the evils of faith to ask if ending dualism is really the path to peace.

But let us first look at what Harris means by spirituality.

Harris offers a standard characterization of the mystical/spiritual experience. He describes it as tuning, or focusing, the mind through meditation, fasting, chanting, sensory deprivation or using psychotropic drugs, that enables it to overcome, or dissolve, the sense of the self that stands separate from the objects of its consciousness. The goal of spiritual experience is to “experience the world perfectly shorn of self… to lose the subject/object perception …to continue to experience the world, but without the felling that there is a knower standing apart form the known. Thoughts may arise, but the feeling that one is a thinker of these thoughts vanish.” (p. 212-213) The goal is to dissolve the ego-bound, individuated subject by ending its separation from the object itself. Harris is describing the classic all-is-one and one-is-all experience that mystics and spiritual adepts tend to report.

For Hindus, this attempt to divest the ego by consciously realizing its identity with the ground of the entire macrocosm – what the Hindus call the Brahman – is the very essence of what the Vedas and Upanishads teach: “Thou art That,” “all this Brahman” and the atman (self) in you is the Brahman. Brahman, the Vedas teach, is the sole, truly existing, non-material, eternal reality which is beyond space, time and causation. Once you experience the sense of being beyond space, time and causation through yoga, breath control and meditation, you will realize the truth of the Vedas, namely, the self in you (atman) is identical with Brahman, your consciousness encompasses the entire macrocosm, and that you are, in fact, God. Once you reach this state of mind, you are not held back by fears or tempted by desires: the here and now of the material world become illusionary and lose their grip on one’s mind. Thus, the achievement of the sense of one-ness with the universe is a central commandment of Hindu and Buddhist teachings. While Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions have their mystics, only the Eastern traditions provide a doctrine that can make sense of the mystical experience of unity or one-ness.

I would have no argument with Harris if he were only recommending spiritualism as means for mindful relaxation, and the delight and even ecstasy that sometimes accompany the sensation of losing one’s sense of space, time and self. Indeed “wise mystics” have long realized that the mystical experience does not confer existential status on its content. Rather than construct metaphysical systems, wise mystics have learned to simply enjoy and value the experience itself.[1] There is enough data to believe that meditation, if done consistently and over many years, does bring about a deep state of relaxation, with dramatically lowered heart rate and brain activity. If the goal is to reduce stress, even the most militant rationalist will have to admit that meditation does provide some benefits. (It does not follow, however, that all the claims of yoga and pranayam, must be accepted. There is very little rigorous controlled testing of the more extravagant claims of those who believe in the power of the mind to cure everything from blindness to cancers).

Unfortunately, Harris is not one of the wise mystics. He loads spiritual practices with metaphysical baggage, all the while claiming to stand up for reason and evidence. By the end of the book, I could not help thinking of him as a Trojan horse for the New Age. While Harris tries to distance himself from the more extravagant Whole Life Expo type fads (crystals, colonic irrigation and the like), he ends up endorsing fundamental New Age assumptions as rational alternatives to traditional religiosity. Here are three of his assumptions, in an increasing order of obfuscation:

To begin with, there is this nugget, tucked away in the end notes, which celebrates the prospect of revival of occult: “ Indeed, the future looks like the past… We may live to see the technological perfection of all the visionary strands of traditional mysticism: shamanism, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Hermetism and its magical Renaissance spawn (Hermeticism) and all the other Byzantine paths whereby man has sought the Other in every guise of its conception. But all these approaches to spirituality are born of a longing for esoteric knowledge and a desire to excavate …the mind –in dreams, in trance, in psychedelic swoon – in search for the sacred” (end note 23, p. 290).

It is hard to believe that the author of this stuff is the most celebrated rationalist of our troubled times.

Secondly, Harris rejects a naturalistic understanding of nature and the human mind. He sets consciousness free from such mortal things as brains and bodies, allowing the possibility of pan-psychism, the doctrine of immanence of awareness or consciousness throughout the universe. For someone studying to be a neuroscientist, Harris holds rather unconventional views. He scoffs at the physicalism of the mainstream of scientists who believe that our mental and spiritual lives are wholly dependent upon the workings of the brain, treating it as an irrational “article of faith” which methods of science can neither prove nor disprove. He gives full credence to reports of near death experience and leaves open the possibility that disembodied soul can survive the death of the body, claiming that we don’t know what happens after death. After denying that consciousness is a product of our physiology, he presents it as a fundamental ingredient of nature, “a far more rudimentary phenomenon than living creatures and their brains” (p. 209). This is nothing but the good old mind-matter holism, the first principle of all New Age beliefs.

Again, the problem is not that Harris holds these beliefs. The problem is that Harris wants to convince us that it is the very height of rationality to hold these beliefs.

Thirdly, and I examine this more closely in the next section, Harris believes that spiritual experiences are knowledge experiences, or as he puts it, altered mental states induced by spiritual practices can “uncover genuine facts about the world” (p. 40). Investigation of our own subjectivity, Harris believes, is a “proper and essential sphere of investigation into the nature of the universe, as some facts will be discovered only in consciousness.” (p. 209). Again, as before, he tries to distance himself from the more extravagant metaphysical schemes. But he buys into the basic idea that what mystics see in their minds actually has an ontological referent in the world outside their minds. Or to put it in the vocabulary he prefers, when the gap between the subject and object vanishes, “pure” awareness of one’s subjectivity can tell us something about the objective reality.

Here, Sam Harris is not all that far apart from Mahesh Yogi, Deepak Chopra and others who claim that spiritual practitioners have the most objective view of the world because they can see it “directly,” just the way it is, completely “shorn of the self,” and the many biases and dogmas that “I-ness” brings.

How Rational is Mysticism?

In loading spirituality with ontological baggage, Harris is making, let us say, a leap of faith. He is falling in the noetic, or intellectualist, trap that William James identified in The Varieties of Religious Experience when he noticed how mystical experience has the quality of a profound knowing: “although similar to the states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance… and as a rule, they carry with them a curious sense of authority” (emphasis added).[2]

At their peak, meditative experiences invariably bring about a feeling of having touched something far deeper and far more real than what is normally experienced by the five senses in our ordinary lives. And this conviction itself becomes a source of validation of the of the objective reality of what they have seen: what they see in their minds, they assume, must exist outside. Vision gets fixed into metaphysical systems built on super-sensory entities and processes. The experience of losing the boundaries of one’s ego, the feeling of having transcended time and space, gives the feeling of becoming one with the universe, of “seeing” the entire macrocosm in one’s own mind. It is not a coincidence that the teaching of Vedanta – “Thou art That” – has been interpreted by so many as implying that I (the enlightened one) am Brahman, that I am the universe, that my mind is the mind of the entire cosmos and by controlling my mind, I can control the cosmos. Contrary to Harris’s attempt to rationalize it, the mind-matter unity has been the metaphysics underlying the search for paranormal powers and extra-sensory perceptions. It is not a coincidence that rational mystics like Harris who subscribe to the thesis of mind being an element of matter end up making excuses for paranormal phenomena such as ESP, near death experiences (see p. 41).

This noetic propensity to make existence claims with absolute certainty is not a metaphysical excess or a delusion: It is part and parcel of the mystical experience. Neurosciences are revealing the biological grounds for why mystical experiences feel as if they are actually uncovering genuine facts about the world. Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, in their well-known Why God will Not Go Away, offer a clue. They believe that the ontological fallacy stems from the process of reification – “the ability of the brain to convert a concept into a concrete thing, or more succinctly, to bestow upon something the quality of being real or true. Reification refers to the power of the mind to grant meaning and substance to its own perceptions.” On this account, meditative practices slow down the transmission of neural information to the posterior superior parietal lobes of the brain, which controls spatial orientation, resulting in the sensation of pure awareness which is incapable of drawing boundaries between the limited personal self and the external material world. This sensation gets reified into the image of “reality of as a formless unified whole, with no limits, no substance, no beginning and no end.”[3]

What neurosciences seem to be telling us is that while the neurological processes that give rise to mystical experiences are real, they prove nothing about the ultimate nature of reality or God. Just because we can study the neuro-physiology of mysticism in a scientific manner, does not make the experience scientific or rational in any way. (We can study schizophrenia in a scientific manner, but that does not mean that schizophrenics are rational). Harris has a tendency to confuse the fact that spirituality can be taught and studied in a rational manner, with the rationality of the beliefs about the world that such experiences engender.

Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience, hardly needs a primer on these matters. He realizes, of course, that reification works on all experiences, sensory as well as non-sensory. The sights and sounds we hear, Harris tells us, are not raw data from the world outside, but are processed by the higher centers of the brain. The brain is not a mirror to the world outside, but more like a radio or TV receiver that is “tuned to deliver a particular vision of the world” (p. 42). Harris wants us to believe that mysticism is only a matter of tuning your brain differently so that it receives signal from an altered, boundary-less relationship between you and the world (p. 41-42). The information that this altered state of mind is “tuned” to receive is nevertheless rational because it “uncover[s] genuine facts about the world” (p.40) and discloses closer interconnections in the universe than are apparent to us in our ordinary sates of consciousness. (One cannot help wondering, why faith in God is not just such a method of “tuning the brain differently” for those who believe in the personal God of the Bible and the Koran? Neurologically speaking, why is God a “delusion,” if mysticism is “astute”?)

But Harris can defend the rationality of mysticism only by completely contradicting himself, by forgetting the criteria of rationality which he applies so energetically when he is eviscerating faith in God. If he were to apply these same criteria to spirituality as rigorously as he applies them to faith, he will have no choice but to admit that mysticism is as much of an “imposter” as faith. He will have to admit that mysticism, like faith, is an “act of knowledge that has a low grade of evidence” (p. 65). He will have to admit that mystics, like believers in a personal God, “seize upon extraordinary phenomena” and extraordinary experiences, as confirmation of the beliefs which have gripped their imagination and filled them with a sense of awe (pp. 65-66). Mysticism fares no better, and no worse, than “mere” faith, when judged against the demands of evidence. Here is why:

What do people mean, Harris asks, when they say that they believe a certain proposition about the world? What they mean is that the proposition “faithfully represents some state of the world (51).” When someone says he believes that God exists, he means that God’s existence is the cause of his belief. Likewise, when someone says he believes in consciousness suffusing the whole world, he means that the consciousness suffusing the world is the cause of his belief.

The obvious next question is: how do we know if our beliefs, however real they feel to us, are in fact faithfully representing the world? For beliefs to faithfully represent some state of the world, they must have some kind of a hook into the world: there must be “some mechanism that guarantees that the regularities in our nervous system consistently mirror regularities in the environment…something in our experience must provide a causal link to the actual state of the world (p. 58, emphasis added).

Harris rejects God because none of the traditional justifications for belief in God – spiritual experiences, the authority of the Bible and/or the church— have an adequate hook into reality: none of them can assure that God exists, or that “belief in god is a consequence of the way the world is” (63). God has to go, because the experience of God cannot be shown to be caused by anything that actually exists.

But by this standard, spirituality is no less irrational, for it is no less lacking in a hook into the reality. Harris has to tell us what “casual links” does spiritual experience offer into “the actual state of the world”? What assurance there is that the “deeper connections” mystics see in their mind, actually “mirror the regularities in the environment”? All we have is the mystic’s word that he has been able to vanquish the constraints of his “self,” and has come to see world “directly” by becoming one with it. There is no independently testable reason for non-mystics – for the vast majority of people who find their non-altered states of consciousness to be perfectly adequate and satisfying – to accept the mystics’ word as evidence. I don’t find the usual analogies with consensus in natural sciences very persuasive at all (p. 220). In science (Thomas Kuhn notwithstanding) anyone with functioning senses, adequate training and right apparatus can see the same star, the same DNA molecule, the same electron. But not everyone with adequate training in meditation techniques, and the right atmosphere, sees the same mystical reality: some see God, some see nothing at all and some, without any meditation at all, see what the mystics see. I believe that William James had it right:

mystical states… are absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come. But mystics have no right to claim that we ought to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences…. Non-mystics are under no obligation to acknowledge in mystical states a superior authority (p. 460, 645).

In sum, Sam Harris is right in that “mysticism is a natural propensity of the human mind.” But he is dead wrong when he claims that mysticism does not demand that we “believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it” (p. 221).

Why does it matter?

The attitude of many moderate rationalists on matters of spiritualism has been of benign neglect or even indulgence. It all appears so harmless and it might even have some positive contributions to make to one’s health and tranquility of mind. What is more, the attacks by feminists and environmentalists on the sins of “reductionist Western science” have created a positive aura around “holistic science” which overcomes the gap between the subject and the object. The notion that the reality and our knowledge of it depends upon how we see it has gained many adherents in the postmodern academe.

But what kind of claims is made by spiritualists and how they justify these claims matters a great deal. It matters because, beliefs matter. What we believe in is of utmost importance, as Harris himself so correctly emphasizes, because “beliefs are actions in potentia, as a man believes, so he will act” (p. 44). I am in full agreement with Harris when he says that “Even apparently innocuous beliefs, when unjustified can lead to intolerable consequences” (p. 46).

Mysticism matters because beliefs matter. And for this reason, metaphysical claims that follow from mystical experiences cannot be given the appearance of rationality, as books like The End of Faith are wont to do. As Harris himself admits, while mystical experiences can are rational, they can become “irrational when people begin making claims about the world which cannot be supported by empirical evidence” (p. 210)

I have indicated, above, the neurological and philosophical reasons why mystical experiences show a pronounced tendency to erect metaphysical systems. I have also indicated why these metaphysical systems lack a causal link, a hook, into reality and therefore escape the reach of empirical testing.

These issues are not of theoretical interest alone. In countries like my native India where yoga and spiritualism enjoy the blessings of the highest religious authorities, metaphysical beliefs that follow from mystical experiences exert a great deal of social influence. (While India has a fairly large and advanced scientific workforce, science has not succeeded in displacing the authority of metaphysical truths from the cultural sphere. If anything, science has been largely co-opted into Hindu spiritualism.[4]) These beliefs do not only structure the worldview of ordinary people, they also serve as their paradigm of knowledge and truth.

As a Western follower of Buddhism and Hinduism, living and working in the USA, Harris can afford to pick and choose what he likes and downplay what he doesn’t. But the fact is that, in situ, Eastern religious traditions have encouraged beliefs about nature which, if accepted, would completely contradict just about every known scientific theory about life on earth. I am referring to the family of metaphysical tenets of Hinduism which support a vitalistic, pan-psychical conception of life and biological evolution, including such familiar ideas as rebirth and karma, the belief in a subtle (i.e., inaccessible to all human senses) life-force, or prana, which is supposed to animate all that exists and the belief in innate moral qualities in nature. Add to that the doctrines of spiritual evolution – call them Vedic theories of “intelligent guidance,” if you will – that see spiritualization of all life until the emergence of “supermind” that merges with the Brahman.

Now we come to the crux of why mysticism matters and why the kind of scientist gloss Harris offers is not helpful. Each and every element of Hindu worldview described above makes an existence claim about the workings of nature, especially living beings, their birth, death and destiny. And each and every element of this worldview is defended as an actual “fact” that the authors of the Vedas, the rishis, actually “saw” in their minds in a state of Samadhi, the state of mystical one-ness. The defense of mystical seeing as experience-based and therefore scientific serves to present poetic, existential and philosophical speculations as if they are actual facts of nature, empirically accessible to minds tuned to a different frequency by yoga and intense meditation.

Take for example, the concepts of kundalini and chakras, popular among the yoga-Ayurveda crowd. Kundalini is often taught by modern gurus and yogis as if it were a real biological entity, a “coil of power” that lies at the bottom of a hollow canal called “sushumna” that is supposed to run through the spinal column. An explicitly realist description of kundalini first appeared in Swami Vivekananda’s lectures on Raj Yoga which introduced the ancient Yoga Sutras of Patanjali to the West sometime in the waning years of the 19th century. Vivekananda describes kundalini as if it were a real physical force that “forces a passage through this hollow canal [the non-existent Sushumna, that is], and as it rises step by step, layer after layer of the mind becomes open and all the different visions and wonderful powers come to the yogi. When it reaches the brain, the yogi is perfectly detached from the body and the mind…”[5] According to those who have studied Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in the original, kundalini and chakras were never intended to be referential: they were meant to be imaginary aids to help in yogic meditations. The “subtle body” of the yogis was never meant to be some kind of a “quantum mechanical body,” made up of morphic fields or unified fields. It was a body image, an abstract image that a yogi could focus his mind upon. Likewise, chakras, which are often presented as actual nerve centers, were “rungs on an imagined ladder for the yogi to check his progress.”[6] Clearly, Vivekananda and his countless neo-Hindu gurus, were reifying imaginary concepts into actual physical entities.

How is this feat accomplished? Vivekananda’s writings set the tone and every modern guru advertising the “scientific” nature of Hinduism has followed Vivekananda’s lead. Vivekananda essentially presented mysticism as scientific in spirit and content: whereas scientists see “merely” with their senses, yogis were seeing the universe in a “supersensory” state of consciousness. Thus the existence of kundalini gets translated into an objective fact of human anatomy on the testimony of the mystics. Just like science, mystics’ vision was also based upon “experience” and was therefore scientific and commanded rational consent (as compared to the faith-based consent of Christians and Muslims). One finds exactly similar arguments, dressed up in quantum mechanical terms in the writings of modern gurus like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Deepak Chopra.

When I picked up The End of Faith, I did not expect to find a very similar defense of mysticism coming from such a militant rationalist as Harris. Harris concedes the basic point that the Hindu gurus cited above are making, that mystical experience is a knowledge experience, and that mystical seeing tells you something about the objective world.

I believe that Harris is making the same two mistakes that neo-Hindus routinely make: They confuse the method and rigor of meditation with the rigor of its conclusions, and they confuse the mystical “seeing” with ordinary seeing that takes place in science. They forget that empiricism in science is class apart from the spiritual empiricism of the mystics. Not all experiences qualify as scientific: to forget that is to open the door to all kinds of pseudo-sciences.

Will spirituality end all wars?

At the root of all wars, Harris tells us, lies the separateness, or the dualism, between human beings, between the “I” and the non “I”: “Every problem we have can be ascribed to the fact that human beings are utterly beguiled by their feeling of separetness” (p. 214). He ascribes this separateness – as have so many theosophists and mystics, many of whom held deeply anti-Semitic views, before him – to the Abrahamic tradition itself which has demanded faith in a God who is Himself separate from his creation.

Recall that for Harris, it is the content of religious ideas that alone motivates religious violence. His working principle is “as a man believes, so shall he act.” Those whose faith tradition teaches them separateness will be intolerant, aggressive and always fighting wars.

If it is all about theology, stupid!, it follows that the solution to wars will also be theological. Harris’s solution is simple: shed the “I.” The more ordinary people can divest themselves of the feeling they call “I”, Harris tells us, the more they will divest the feeling that they are separate from the rest of the universe (p. 40). And the more they feel themselves connected to the universe, the less they will have the feelings of fear and anger. Love and compassion will follow (p. 219-220). Mahesh Yogi could not have said it any better!

But even if one played along with Harris’s badly flawed, theology-centered diagnosis of religious extremism, it is simply not true that spiritual, non-dualistic Eastern religions are free from violence. And is simply not true that shedding the “I” makes for a free and peaceable society. Streaks of violence and authoritarianism run deep in societies which worship at the altar of “one-ness.” Harris, who is so alert to the “inherent” violence of the Koran, is completely blind to the religious sources of violence in the “spiritual East.” (Having said that, I don’t want to turn around and start pinning the social problems of the East on to Eastern religions alone. I reject the very premise that any religion is inherently violent or inherently peaceful. One simply cannot brush away the social and political context in which religious ideas express themselves for the good and for the bad.)

The Jains of India may not be committing acts of suicide bombings, as Harris reminds us repeatedly.[7] But can one honestly say that Jains and pious Hindus, many of strict vegetarians, have shown any compassion and “one-ness” for the Muslims, Christians and other religious minorities in India? Has their Hinduism prevented Tamil Tigers from conducting suicide bombings against the equally “spiritual” Buddhists of Sri Lanka? (And conversely, has the Buddhism of the Sri Lankan majority prevented their vicious discrimination against the Tamils? ). Didn’t Zen Buddhists actively and enthusiastically support the violent ultra-nationalism of the Japanese people in Japan’s brutal imperialist wars against China and Korea? Were the Japanese kamikazes not motivated by the teachings of Buddhism? Don’t some Hindus interpret the Bhagvat Gita to support violence in defense of their dharma? There is a complex history of nationalism, religion and racism behind each one of these historical episodes. Critical scholars have begun to question the image of peace and harmony that is supposed to be the hallmark of the non-dualist Eastern religions. Harris would do well to study this emerging literature to bring some balance to his faith-bad/spiritualism-good fairy tale.[8]

Moreover, Harris is completely oblivious to the authoritarian implications of the one-ness he worships. Shedding one’s “I-ness” is a recipe for group-think and authoritarianism. The individual in her everyday life, with her everyday sensory knowledge of here-and-now is treated as an illusion of no consequence when seen from the mystical high of one-ness. The Gnostic vision of one-ness, mind you, is not supposed to be available to the hoi polloi, who are supposed to be weighted down by the “gross matter” of their bodies and fooled by their senses. The enlightened have always constituted a spiritual aristocracy in Eastern societies. The holism of caste society is what you get when one-ness is made into the highest religious ideal.

To conclude this review: Mysticism is not a rational alternative to faith. Dissolving our sense of individual self in a larger spiritual one-ness will not end wars and oppression. Those who cannot accept a personal God on faith alone can’t hide behind mysticism or spiritualism either. Reason bars them both, and human good transcends them both.

Meera Nanda is a biologist and philosopher of science; she has written many articles for Butterflies and Wheels. She is the author of Prophets Facing Backward

1. This distinction between wise and unwise mystics comes from a very wise mystic, Agehananda Bharati, a Viennese who became a Hindu monk. See his The Light at the Center: Context and Pretext of Modern Mysticism. Santa Barbara: Ross-Erikson, 1976. I count Susan Blackmore, the ex-ESP researcher and now a major exponent of naturalistic view of consciousness and a serious practitioner of Zen meditation among wise mystics. John Horgan’s exploration of rational mysticism is far wiser than Harris’s. See John Horgan, Rational Mysticism: Dispatches between the Border between Science and Mysticism, New York: Hougton Mifflin, 2003.

2. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Modern Library Paperback Edition, 2002, p. 414-415.

3. Andrew Newberg, Eugene D’Aquili and Vince Rause, Why God won’t go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, New York: Ballentine Books, 2001.pp 149-152.

4. I look at the co-option of science into religion in India and America in a comparative perspective in a recent essay, “Godless States in God Lands: Dilemmas of Secularism in America and India,” in Axess, 2005, no. 8. See also, Is India a Science Superpower? Frontline, Sept. 10-23, 2005.

5. Swami Vivekananda, Raj Yoga, in The Collected Works of Swami Vivekananda, Mayavati Memorial Edition, Vol. 1 (Kolkatta: Advaita Center), p. 160.

6. See Agehananda Bharati, note 1, p. 164-165.

7. Established in the sixth century BCE by Mahavira, Jainism is one of the oldest religious traditions of India and shares Hindu beliefs in reincarnation and karma. Jains reject belief in a creator god and seek release from endless reincarnation through a life of strict self-denial. In addition, Jainism places a special emphasis on ahimsa (“non-injury”) to all living beings. Monks and nuns are sometimes seen with muslin cloths over their mouths to keep out flying insects, and they are enjoined to use small brooms to gently sweep away living creatures from their path, so as to not accidentally crush them. See beliefnet.com for more details.

8. Some important writings include: Brian Victoria, Zen at War, New York: Weatherhill, 1997. Robert Sharf, “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism,” in Donald S. Lopez, Jr. ed, Curators of the Buddha, Chicago University Press, 1995. Denis Vidal, Gilles Tarabout and Eric Meyer (eds.) Violence/Non-Violence : Some Hindu Perspectives, New Delhi, Manohar, 2003.

God and Politics in America and India

This essay tells the tale of two religious nationalisms: Christian nationalism in America that has found a welcome home in the Republican Party and George W. Bush’s two administrations, and Hindu nationalism in India which always had a welcome home in BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), the party that ruled the country, off and on, through the 1990s until 2004. Christian nationalists declare the United States of America to be a Christian nation, its land God’s New Jerusalem, and its destiny to spread liberty around the world. Hindu nationalists, for their part, proclaim India to be a Hindu nation, its land the body of the mother Goddess, and its destiny to spread spiritual enlightenment around the world.

Despite vast differences – even rivalries – in their theologies and global ambitions, the two seek very similar goals for their own societies: to replace the secular underpinnings of laws with religious values of their “God Lands.”[1]They may or may not have lists of “fundamentals” to defend, but they share the religious maximalist mindset of any card-carrying fundamentalist, that is, they insist that religion ought to permeate all aspects of social and political life, indeed, all of human existence. The religious maximalists are not shy about harnessing the power of modern technologies and global capitalism to revitalize and popularize their religious traditions with an eye on acquiring political power, and in turn, using that political power to further religionize their civil societies. What makes religious nationalists exceptionally powerful – and dangerous – is their ability to transfer people’s unconditional reverence for God to the nation, and to use people’s religiosity to sanctify the nation’s policies, even including those condoning violence against presumed enemies of the nation and God.[2]

As a secular woman of Indian origin who has called America home for many years, I have had the unenviable experience of witnessing the slow drift toward religious nationalism in both of my countries. Just as I was getting ready to celebrate the unexpected defeat of Hindu extremists in my native country in the spring of 2004, I had to contend with election rallies that looked like revival meetings in my adopted country.

God, of course, did not have to wait until 2004 to get a starring role in American politics. American presidents from both parties have routinely invoked God while conducting their official duties. But this election was different. The unabashed electioneering for George W. Bush by churches stunned even the most seasoned observers of American politics. Evangelical leaders held weekly meetings with Bush’s re-election committee (which was led by none other than Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition), and thousands of churches encouraged their congregations to “vote their Christian values,” which Bush made a great show of wearing on his sleeve. (In all fairness, Bush did not start this trend. He was following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan who actively wooed Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority through his two terms). Bush’s re-election in 2004 was decided by a large turn-out of born-again Protestants who joined hands with the most conservative elements of Catholics, Jews and other “people of faith” to wage a war against the Islamic “evil-doers” abroad, and the godless secularist-humanists, feminists and gays at home. Even though Bush has personally refrained from calling America a Christian nation, he has appointed men and women in key positions who would be only too happy to have the Good Book dictate the laws of the land. Recently, he has endorsed the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, adding to the many attempts of his administration to let faith decide matters of science policy.[3]

Having only recently observed the political machinations of the Hindu right in India, I can’t avoid a strong sense of déjà vu. Bush Jr., it seems to me, is the genial face of Christian nationalism, just as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the former Indian prime minister, was the poetic face of Hindu nationalism. The Republican Party is fast becoming a political front of the Christian right, while the BJP has always been the political front of the Hindu right party, RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh). The Protestant ministers and Catholic priests who actively engaged in political campaigns form their pulpits, were no different from the “holy” men and women who rallied for Hindutva causes in countless political “pilgrimages.” The Christian right’s enthusiasm for bringing intelligent design into public schools is not much different from the Hindu right’s successful bid to introduce Vedic astrology in colleges and universities. What is more, the slow erosion of America’s Great Wall separating faith and politics is sowing the seeds of same kinds of religious strife that have festered under India’s wall-less model of secularism: India’s dismal record of religious discord is what lies ahead for the America of “faith-based initiatives.” (While free from the overt Hindu nationalism of BJP, at least for now, India is far from free from the faith-inflected politics that even the supposedly “secular” parties routinely indulge in. The Hindu right lost the last election due to shifting political alliances with regional parties, but the cultural wellsprings that feed Hindutva have not ceased to exist and grow.)

Another commonality that troubled me was how easy it was for the religious right to substitute faith for evidence, and to manipulate public discourse in a manner worthy of Orwell’s 1984. In his second inaugural address, for example, George Bush invoked “freedom” 27 times and “liberty” 12 times, all the time turning them into God’s chosen destiny for America and the world.[4] Bush’s paean to Americans’ God-given love for liberty hid the dismal reality of creeping curtailments of civil liberties at home and the shameful abuses of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. The situation reminded me of the flowery rhetoric we heard in India celebrating the “innate tolerance” and “natural secularism” of Hindus, even when Hindu mobs were tearing down the Babri masjid in Ayodhya or killing Muslims in riots in Bombay and Gujarat.

The blatant mixing of god and country in America woke me up from my intellectual slumbers. I had already seen the bankruptcy of the Indian “wheel-of-law” model of secularism. But now I had to accept that the American “wall-of-separation” was not as sturdy as I had once imagined.

Christian and Hindu Nationalism: Differences and Similarities

These concerns led me to undertake this rather unusual comparative study of secularism, secularization and Enlightenment in the United States and India. Why is it, I began to ask, that secular constitutions in both countries have been unable to prevent overt religionization of the public sphere? Why is it that all the forces of modernization, notably the growth of scientific education and research – India, after all, boasts of third largest scientific work force in the world – have not led to a commensurate growth of secular cultures in these societies, as compared to others at similar levels of development? Is it even realistic to expect elected representatives to keep religion out of the public sphere where large majorities of citizens profess fairly high levels of conventional, super-naturalistic religiosity? These are some of the questions I try to answer in this essay.

I admit that comparing India and America is a bit like comparing apples and oranges: the two societies are at different levels of economic and technological development, and their cultures, religions and histories are entirely different. America was born new, without any history of feudalism: respect for individual liberties and civic egalitarianism have deep roots in the religious and cultural heritage of American society, even though ideologies of racism and “manifest destiny” prevented the extension of liberty and equality to Black slaves and Native Americans. India, on the other hand, has had to contend with a heavy burden of caste, feudal and colonial hierarchies, overlaid on each other: even the most professionalized, contract-based, technologically modern sectors of Indian society continue to exhibit caste-like master-servant relations.[5] And then there are the obvious differences in socio-economic development. While India is fast becoming a major player in the global economy, 83 percent of its people still make a living in the informal sector, where work and social relations are largely regulated through customary laws of caste and gender.[6]

But, despite these very substantial differences, religious nationalism has come to play a significant role in the politics of both the countries. American nationalism can be, and often is, incredibly ugly in its self-righteous belief in its own innocence and nobility in serving the cause of “freedom.” But it is also incredibly attractive in its ability to assimilate people from all over the world into an American creed of individual liberties, democracy, rule of law and cultural-political (but not economic) egalitarianism. Christian Coalition and other like-minded groups do not reject the American creed but attribute its greatness and exceptionalism to Judeo-Christian values. Unlike the old racist, anti-catholic WASP American nationalists like the Ku Klux Klan, today’s Christian nationalists welcome Black, Hispanic and Asian Christians, Catholics, Jews and even people of other faiths who are willing to stand with them against modern, secular and humanistic ideals. What is more, they attribute the cultural malaise in America to the godless-secularist cabal of Darwinists and multiculturalists who have imposed their supposedly hedonistic and immoral values on the rest of the society. They want to “take back” America for Christianity in order to restore its greatness.[7]

In comparison to the universalistic, melting-pot image of the American creed, Hindu nationalism may appear as too parochial and too driven by ancient ethnic and religious rivalries. But under the surface of religious hatreds – which are real– there is another dimension of the cultural war in India which is not very different from the Christian undercurrents in America. Hindu nationalists want to defend the invented myth of India as the cradle of democracy, tolerance, science and spiritualism, and they are committed to the view that this “Indian exceptionalism” is due to Vedic-“Aryan” Hindu culture and values. Conversely, they ascribe all the many problems of backwardness of Indian society to the non-Vedic, “Semitic monotheistic” religions (Islam and Christianity) which came to India from outside. To that end, they stridently declare that “the Hindu society is the national society of India… Any culture that is not prepared to come to terms with Hindu culture has to go… There is no place for Islam or Christianity… Indian Muslims and Christians will have to be rescued from the prison-house of Islam and Christianity, form the dark dungeons of deadening fanaticism ….and brought back into the Hindu fold.”[8] The monotheistic “outsiders” can live in India if they accept Hindu culture as their own: thus, Hindu fanatics are willing to accept those Muslims and Christians who adopt upper-caste Hindu cultural tastes in vegetarianism, yoga, classical music and such. Like their Christian counterparts in America, moreover, Hindu nationalists want to “take back” India for Hinduism from a cabal of “colonized minds” of secularists, liberals and Marxists who they see as traitors to the Hindu nation.

Sources of Religious Nationalism: The God Gap between States and Citizens

There is one feature of the polity of both countries that can explain the emergence and the appeal of religious nationalism: both are deeply religious societies with secular constitutions that forbid the state from adopting any official religion. If America is “India governed by Sweden,”[9] well, then, so is India! How the “god-gap” between the political doctrine and the worldview, the constitutional laws and the cultural mores, has allowed religious nationalism to flourish is what I have tried to explain in this essay.

All available data clearly show that the citizens in both countries remain literally awash in faith. A recent World Values Survey reported an identical proportion – 94 percent – of those surveyed in both countries professing belief in God.[10] As countless travelers will attest, the first thing that strikes visitors to both countries is the large number of places of worship dotting the landscape. The recent census in India reports 2.4 million places of worship, against only 1.5 million schools and half as many hospitals.[11] Thanks to constitutional freedoms, moreover, both countries have thriving spiritual marketplaces, where all kinds of new religious movements continue to blossom. India now has a new generation of “tele-yogis” who can more than match American televangelists in their sales pitch for god and country.

But, for all these exceptionally high indicators of popular religiosity, the state is supposed to indifferent to religion altogether (as in the US) or to any one religion over others (as in India). The Jeffersonian wall of separation promised in the First Amendment of the American Constitution is well known. But what is less well known is that India provides a competing model of secularism which also promises complete freedom of religion and conscience to all citizens, but does that without erecting a wall of separation between religion and the state. Indian Constitution allows the state to promote and interfere with the secular aspects of religious laws, practices and institutions, as long as it does not play favorites among different religious faiths. (More on the Indian model in the next section).

This well-known god-gap between the citizens and the state is largely treated as a non-issue in the social science literature. The conventional wisdom is that secular states can emerge, and even thrive, in deeply religious societies. A secular state, we have been told, should not be confused with secularization of the civil society and the consciousness of the citizens. According to a much-cited definition by Donald E. Smith, state is considered secular as long as it “guarantees individual and corporate freedoms of religion, deals with the individual as a citizen irrespective of his religion, is not constitutionally connected to a particular religion, nor seeks either to promote or interfere with religion.”[12] As long as a state is constitutionally committed to these ideals, and has legal and political safeguards to enforce them, it is technically a secular state. Religiosity of the citizens in their private lives is taken to be irrelevant to the functioning of such states. What is more, classical sociologists of religion, from Max Weber, (the early) Peter Berger to Steve Bruce more recently, have suggested that once a state in a modern industrial society (capitalist or socialist) adopts a secular constitution, the social significance of religion begins to decline which, in turn, erodes the plausibility of the supernatural in the minds of individuals. The infrastructure of modernity is supposed to create, pretty much by its own accord, as Peter Berger put it in his classic, the Sacred Canopy, “a liberated territory” populated by “an increasing number of individuals who look upon their world and their own lives without the benefit of religious interpretation.”[13]

I find this neat and tidy distinction between secularism as a constitutional principle and secularization of the worldview not very satisfying. Yes, I can see that deeply religious people can agree to give themselves Godless constitutions for purely strategic-political reasons: indeed, creation of modern democratic nation-states which respect the equality of all citizens before the law requires a privatization of faith. I can also agree that societies with deeply religious people need not necessarily become authoritarian theocracies: religious beliefs can help sustain a regard for justice, human rights and democracy. In itself, religiosity is not the enemy of good, peaceable and just societies.

But while religious beliefs do not necessarily breed theocracies, religious maximalist movements do seem to have a better chance of taking root in societies with high levels of popular religiosity. Societies where significant majorities (as in our two cases) claim to derive their sense of rights and wrongs from their conceptions of God can be more easily mobilized to support the religious maximalist agendas of true believers who want to solve the perceived problems of their societies by bringing this higher power to bear on the laws and policies of the land. For example, would such a large proportion of American public have supported Bush’s “faith-based initiatives” or voted for public referenda barring gay marriages without a faith-based view of society and personal relationships? Would so many middle-class Indians have supported state funding for astrology, religious ceremonies in public places, temple building and such if they did not believe in the religious merit of such rituals? As long as divine revelations or spiritual laws continue to be invoked as the basis for morality in the private sphere, it is unreasonable to expect a diminution of God-talk from the public sphere. In other words, the care and maintenance of secular states requires secularization of culture. Without deep enough roots in secular civic cultures, secular states will remain at a risk of being hijacked by traditionalist and nationalist forces.

In the rest of this essay, I will defend the priority of secularization of the civil society over secularism as the operating principle of the state. The first section will examine how secularism and science were co-opted into the dominant religious commonsense. The next section will look at how high levels of popular religiosity provide a fertile soil for religionization of politics and politicization of religions. In the final section, I will argue for a new Enlightenment that respects the legitimate rights of conscience and freedom of religion, acknowledges the place of religion in the public sphere, but denies it any special claim on morality, knowledge and public policy: Religion can enter the public sphere provided it answers to the same rules of publicly accessible evidence and reason that apply to all other participants in the public sphere.

Secular States, Religious Citizens: The Co-option of the Enlightenment

The creation of secular states marked a break from the state control of churches in America and from the institution of caste in India. But in both cases, this revolutionary innovation in politics was not accompanied by a corresponding revolution in beliefs. Rather, both witnessed a “village enlightenment” in which Enlightenment ideals of anti-supernaturalism, empiricism and religious toleration were used to validate, rather than challenge, the traditional religious beliefs in the existence of supra-sensory power that lies beyond this world but yet intervenes in it.[14] In both countries, moreover, the votaries of a skeptical, rationalist tradition who believed that the affairs of human beings should be governed by a reliance on reason and evidence adduced from the natural world – the “freethinkers,” to use Susan Jacoby’s felicitous name for them[15] – have remained in a minority. The quiet assimilation of rationalist/secularist impulse into religious metaphysics is the key for understanding the paradoxical phenomenon of secularism without secularization of beliefs.

Many misconceptions abound regarding the origin of the secular state in America. Liberal origin-stories describe the American Constitution as the fulfillment of the Enlightenment, while conservatives see its lack of reference to God as proof that religious faith was so “self-evident” and so firmly entrenched in the American society to require any imprimatur of government.[16] Indians have their own misconceptions about American-style secularism. There are well-known Indian social scientists who believe that the American model of separation of state and society is a “gift of Christianity” and therefore unsuited for a Hindu India. And then there are notable Hindu ideologues who argue that only intolerant, superstitious “creeds” like Christianity and Islam need to be kept out of the affairs of the state, but not the “innately” tolerant and rational Hinduism.[17]

Far from being a straightforward “gift” or a “curse” of Christianity, there were equally devout Christians on both sides of the debate over church-state separation in America. A careful reading of the US history reveals a complex alliance of the more numerous devout evangelical Christians (Baptists and Methodists, mostly) with the handful of freethinkers (deists and Unitarians, mostly). While the evangelicals detested the rationalist and deist Christianity of Thomas Jefferson and condemned Thomas Paine as an atheist, they nevertheless helped to ratify the Constitution which barred a religious test for office holders (Article 6 of the US Constitution) and prohibited the state from any direct interference and/or promotion of religion (the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights). They favored disestablishment in part out of their theological belief that it was blasphemous for the state to do God’s work, and partly out of a fear of persecution from a church backed by state power. (Baptists had good reason to champion the separation of church and state for they had been persecuted by the Anglican Church back in England and were not much liked by the Puritans who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony). Whereas Jefferson, Madison, Paine and other more secularist founders were more concerned with the corrupting influences of faith on politics, their evangelical supporters were more worried about the power of the state to regulate their religion. While Baptists, Methodists and other evangelicals championed the cause of the American Revolution against the British, and worked hard to ratify the Constitution, they understood the Jeffersonian wall of separation as a one-way wall, meant to keep out the “wilderness of the state from the garden of religion.”[18]

The irony is that the same groups of evangelical “awakeners” who helped to ratify the secular constitution also turned out to be one of the most influential and lasting sources of anti-intellectualism in the new republic. In his 1962 classic, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter has given a vivid description of how the two Great Awakenings led by Baptists and Methodists led to an “uprising” against the designated freethinkers and the tradition of science and learning that existed in the mainline Protestant churches (which were at that time, the patrons science at Harvard and Yale). The evangelicals taught a simple religion of the heart: all you needed to be saved was to be “born again” and to read the Bible. Anyone could do that without getting bogged down in learned disputations in theology or metaphysics.

This form of Christianity spread widely because it was more conducive to the anti-authoritarian and anti-aristocratic sensibilities of the farmers and craftsmen settling the Westward frontier. The slave population in the south responded especially well to the Baptist revivals as they gave them an opportunity to establish their own churches, led by their own preachers. The revivals changed the religious geography of the country: by the end of the eighteenth century, Baptists and Methodists far outnumbered the Puritans and the Anglicans. The trend has continued into the present era: evangelical churches are growing more rapidly than the more liberal, mainline denominations.

However, even as they encouraged religious enthusiasms, often aided by faith-healing and miracles, evangelical preachers proclaimed a great love for science of their times (that is, the period between the American Revolution and the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859). As long as the mechanical philosophy that informed Newtonian science was not used to propagate skepticism and secularism, American churches remained enthusiastic in its support. Here they were following in the long tradition of Protestant scientists (including Newton and Boyle), who believed that by studying nature they were revealing God’s laws. What is more, their Protestant belief in omnipotence of God led them to oppose the Aristotelian scholasticism which assigned quasi-divine intelligence to matter. This helped to them to accept a purely naturalistic, mechanical understanding of matter and forces on religious grounds. Through most of the 18th and 19th centuries, leading Christian scientists and ministers in America were able to accept perfectly secular, naturalistic explanations of disease (small pox), natural disasters (earthquakes), and creation of the solar system and geology of the earth, while interpreting the natural laws as creation of God. A two tiered worldview remained the norm, with laws of nature below, supporting super-natural beliefs above: God became the creator not of individual objects found in nature, but of the laws which nature followed on its own. Thus even when a Creator God became irrelevant to the actual practice of science, He was retained as the ultimate source of nature’s laws.[19]

This apologetic natural theology suffered serious setbacks through the so called “golden age” of secular thought (roughly the period after the Civil War to the end of the First World War). This was the Gilded Age when America underwent large scale industrialization and urbanization. And it was also when Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species (1859). Most mainline churches fitted Darwin into their two-storied theology: they accepted natural selection as the mechanism that God chose to create the living world. But Darwin had created serious doubts in the minds of leading intellectuals and scientists about the need for God as the ultimate creator of natural laws. Highly regarded public intellectuals like John Dewey, George Santayna, John Herman Randall and Robert Ingersoll tried to popularize a new conception of knowledge that substituted the metaphysical absolutes of received traditions with an empirically adequate, albeit uncertain and forever changing conception of truth.[20]

The current upswing of intelligent design and theistic science is a reaction against the thinning of the supernatural and the fraying of the two-storied model of accommodating naturalistic science with God. It is a throwback to the old habit of using science in an apologetic mode. In the present context, when the religious conservatives are aggressively seeking political power to enforce their theological views on public policy, there is a great danger of God entering science classrooms where He does not belong.

Indian secularism, too, bears the marks of strategic alliances between secular humanists, and those who derive their view of secularism and democracy from neo-Hinduism. What makes the Indian case interesting is how neo-Hindu reformers have borrowed modern ideals of democracy, secularism and modern science, but claimed – against all known historical facts – that far superior, “holistic” versions of these modern values had always existed in the “Golden Age” of Vedic Hinduism, dating back to the beginning of time itself. For example, the historical fact that the original Vedic Hinduism was a religion of caste hierarchy – the very obverse of what we today understand by democracy – is countered by neo-Hindus who insist that the “integral humanism” of the institutions of Varna or caste is a “deeper” form of democracy that avoids the class warfare and alienation of the West. The objection that Vedic Hinduism, in fact, valued mystical intuition over sensory knowledge – the very obverse of empiricism that is the hall mark of modern science – is denied by claiming mysticism to be a “higher” more “holistic” form of empiricism. Thus, while neo-Hindu nationalists have happily borrowed liberal-secular ideas from the West, they have knitted them into the traditional weltanschauung to create a potent myth of Hinduism’s “innate” democratic and pluralistic spirit, and its “inherent” rationality. This cultural habit of strategically laying a priority-claim for “the Vedas” on whatever is considered prestigious in the West is the key to understanding both the success of India’s brand of secularism, and the Hindu chauvinism that it perpetuates.

If a “wall of separation” is the metaphor for the American model of negative secularism, the “wheel of law,” is the metaphor for India’s positive secularism. The Indian model allows the state to both censor and promote the many religions of the land, as long as it does not play favorites. It is neutrality and even-handedness – dharma nirpekshta – and not indifference to religion that makes India secular. This principle is literally embossed on the Indian flag in the form of Dharma Chakra, or the wheel of law, which symbolizes the idea of sarva dharma sambhava, or “equal respect for all religions.” The idea is that just as a wheel moves because all the spokes are of equal length, the Indian state will be even-handed and impartial toward different religious faiths.[21] Within this requirement of impartiality, the Indian state is free to rewrite religious laws of all faiths if their social consequences contradict the principles of democracy: the institution of caste, which has religious sanction, for example, was declared unconstitutional at the founding of the republic. On the “positive” side, the Indian government is allowed to provide funds – equally, for all religions– for pilgrimages, maintaining places of worship and running schools and other social-service agencies operated by “faith-based” organizations.

The Indian model was a hybrid product of secular humanism and neo-Hindu revivalism. On the secularist side were democratic socialists like Jawaharlal Nehru and B. R. Ambedkar and radical humanists like M.N. Roy who believed that a rational reform of Hindu worldview as a prerequisite for social progress. The revivalists were inspired by neo-Hindu ideas of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi and others, who believed that a regeneration of the supposedly tolerant and benevolent Vedic “Golden Age” was a prerequisite for social progress.

The Indian version of secularism satisfied the need for social reform, without distancing the state from it and without encouraging a rational critique of religion through public schools and other cultural agencies. The Indian constitution gives the state the right to censor those secular aspects of religious practices that interfered with the fundamental right of equality of all citizens (especially caste, which stood in the way of creating a democratic nation state), while continuing with the old Hindu tradition of state acting as the protector and promoter of faith. Any remaining doubts about the essential Hindu-ness of the new constitution were assuaged by presenting the principle of “equal respect” as a modern version of ancient Hindu tolerance for, and belief in, the equal worth of all religions.[22]

The Indian model of secularism has worked, after a fashion. Probably because secularism was presented as a part of Hindu heritage, Hindu religious leaders (to their credit) did not resist the constitution’s disestablishment of the Hindu institution of caste. But the price has been enormous: the Indian state has happily played vote-bank politics with religion. For all the pious professions of neutrality, Hinduism has served as the de facto civil religion of the state, including the well known cases of Indira Gandhi, Jayalalitha and other political figures routinely worshipping in temples in their official capacity, and in turn, getting ritually worshipped in temples as divine incarnations. Politicians continue to indulge in conspicuous acts of ritualistic religiosity, and yet retain their “secular” credentials by indulging the religious rituals and superstitions of all faiths. On the other hand, it is an undeniable and shameful fact that the state has given in to conservative Muslim opinion and refrained from intervening in the retrograde elements of the Islamic personal law. This has given a good excuse to the Hindu right to rage against “pseudo secularism” and to demand the creation of a Hindu state which will withdraw all constitutionally granted freedoms for Islam and Christianity by declaring them “alien political ideologies.”[23]

The problem with equating secularism with “innate” Hindu “tolerance” is that in reality Hindus have never treated other religions to be as true as Hinduism. Instead predominant Hindu creed has been, to quote Achin Vanaik, an astute critic of Hindutva, “you have your truth, and I have mine, but mine is the deepest truth.”[24] While Hinduism allows different levels and approaches to truth, it places the pantheistic God of Vedanta at the top. While Hindu nationalists continue to make much of Hindu pluralism, they have lately begun to openly assert the doctrinal superiority of Hinduism over “Semitic” monotheistic faiths. They want the Indian state to openly embrace the traditional role of “dharma rakshak ” (protector of dharma), to promote Hinduism at home and around the world so that India can fulfill its destiny as the “jagat guru” (guru to the world).[25]

If secularism has been subsumed into a romanticized version of Hinduism’s hierarchical pluralism, modern science – one of the most important forces for secularization – has been subsumed into the spiritual metaphysics of the Vedas and Vedanta. It has become an article of faith among modern Hindu intellectuals that Hinduism is the “universal religion of the future” because it is “not in conflict with modern science,” or better still, is “just another name” for modern science. Indeed, this myth has become one more reason to condemn Islam and Christianity as faith-based and irrational “creeds” as compared to the reasoned, evidence-based, “scientific” truths of Hinduism. Whereas the assimilation of science into a natural theology in America was primarily motivated by a concern to fight disbelief and skepticism, the assimilation of science into Hinduism has always had a strong nationalistic impulse to establish the superiority of Hinduism.

The problem is that the picture of the world that the Hindu apologists defend as having anticipated and/or being affirmed by modern science has nothing that any respectable, mainstream scientist would recognize as scientific at all. What is being affirmed is the idealistic metaphysics of Vedanta which views the objective world of matter as a by-product, or an epiphenomenon, of disembodied, immaterial consciousness that Hindus call “Brahman.” This is a world where natural objects have a quasi-divine intelligence and purpose embodied in them, and where, in the words of Deepak Chopra, “human desire or intention is a force in nature, just as gravity is a force in nature, or electromagnetism is a force in nature”[26] (Deepak Chopra has amassed a fortune by teaching that we can literally will our bodies to stay ageless and healthy). Finding parallels between this supra-natural or paranormal worldview and quasi-mystical interpretations of modern quantum physics, neo-vitalistic biology of mavericks like Rupert Sheldrake, holistic theories of Gaia and other New Age fantasies has become an abiding preoccupation of Hindu apologists. Unfortunately, the postmodernist vogue of alternative sciences, the feminist and deep ecologist championing of re-enchantment of science have played a negative role by giving legitimacy to the worldview of Vedic sciences.[27]

To conclude this section, disestablishment in India and the US was not accompanied with disenchantment thanks, in part, to the assimilation of science into the religious commonsense of both societies. The assimilative, “village enlightenments” in both societies have contributed to the persistence of super-naturalistic worldview, even while allowing advanced scientific research to go on unhindered by the religious establishment. God has been kept in play by turning science into a prop for Him or It (Vedantic Brahman being an impersonal force). Because the religious establishment presented itself as the guardian and champion of science, educated middle classes in America and India, including scientists, engineers and other professionals, did not develop a vested interest in combating the super/supra-naturalistic worldview that science was being absorbed into. The result has been a compartmentalization between high science and technology in the labs, without any significant displacement of unscientific beliefs and practices in the rest of the society.

Popular religiosity and religionization of politics

Having established that secularism without secularization is possible, I now want to demonstrate that it is not sustainable. Contrary to social theorists who support secularism as a sound constitutional principle but who are suspicious of any critique of religion as disrespectful of the common people’s faith, reason and courage,[28] I believe that a critical engagement with the content and logic of religious metaphysics is a necessary condition for the long-term survival of secular states. As the experience of the world’s largest and the world’s oldest democracies shows, democratic elections alone, without a concomitant decline in religiosity, can deliver power to conservative and nationalistic religious movements. In societies like India and America where capitalist technological modernization has not brought about a corresponding decline of the level and intensity of religiosity, secular public intellectuals and scientists may have a special responsibility to argue on behalf of a secular worldview.

The role of religiosity in religious political movements has been highlighted by Nikki Keddie, the well-known historian of Islam. Why is it, Keddie asks, that Canada, so close to its southern neighbor culturally and economically, is relatively free from an aggressive Christian fundamentalism? And why is China, a non-Christian emerging economy, not very different from India, relatively free from strong religio-political movements? She believes that the difference lies in the levels of popular religiosity:

Significant religious political movements …tend to occur only where in recent decades (whatever the distant past) religions with supernatural and theistic contents are believed in, or strongly identified with, by a large proportion of the population…Either … a high percentage of the population identifies with the basic tenets of its religious tradition regarding its god or gods, its scriptural texts and so forth.. or/and there is a widespread quasi-nationalistic identification with one’s religious community as against other communities.” (emphases in the original)[29]

The 2004 presidential elections in the US provide strong support for Keddie’s hypothesis that religiosity, or faith, can act as a political force in its own right. According to the influential Pew Center’s Trends 2005, neither class, nor ethnicity or denominational affiliation, but the degree of religiosity decided the voting pattern:

the political fault-lines in the American religious landscape do not run along denominational lines, but cut across them. That is, they are defined by religious outlook rather than denominational labels…. Traditionalists, whether evangelicals, mainline or Catholic, are more likely to be Republicans, while those who are eager to adapt their faith to modern beliefs or who are secular are more likely to be democratic ” (Emphasis added).[30]

All available data shows that traditionalist trends have been gaining ground in American Christianity in recent decades. The more conservative evangelical churches have been growing at the expense of more liberal denominations. A higher proportion of believers are beginning to profess faith in the afterlife, divine judgment, possibility of miracles and the efficacy of prayer. Not only have traditional religious beliefs grown in intensity through the 1990s, the faithful also seem to have lost their earlier inhibitions about keeping faith out of the public sphere. In 1996, a significant majority (54 percent over 43 percent) believed that churches should take a stand on political issues, a complete reversal of the response for the same question in 1968. The new alignment in religious landscape of America is that of the religious intense in all traditional faiths against the secular culture. In that fight, the more traditionalist believers are only too keen on allowing the churches to get involved in the affairs of the state.[31]

The growth in the intensity of traditional beliefs obviously does not automatically mean a growth in the fundamentalist style of religiosity. Indeed, more in-depth interviews with believers of varying religiosity show that most American still prefer a “quiet faith,” which shies away from religious extremism and values toleration and individual freedom in matters of conscience: even the most devout are not about to establish a state-supported church that enforces Christian piety on all.[32] But the growing intensity of traditional religiosity does suggest a greater sympathy for conservative social values, including a faith in America’s Manifest Destiny. The Pew Foundation’s Trends 2005 clearly shows that those who attend church more frequently are significantly more opposed to gay marriages and stem cells research, two of the hot-button social issues that George Bush pushed with great deftness in the 2004 presidential campaign.

Observers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Samuel Huntington in our own times have noted, to quote Huntington, “countries and individuals who are more religious tend to be more nationalistic.”[33] The polling data reported by Trends 2005 confirm a far greater level for support for the Iraq war and the “war on terror” among the more devout, as compared to the less committed and liberal Christians. There is a long history of Americans seeing their country in messianic terms with a sacred mission to save the world. It is for this reason Americans have by and large bought into George Bush’s equation of 9/11 terrorists as enemies of civilization itself. This self-image of their nation as a redeemer nation, as literally doing God’s work of spreading the light of liberty around the world constitutes the one of the deepest irony of American history in which the impulse for the good turns into a force for imperialism and militarism.

India is another country where popular religiosity tends to merge seamlessly into national pride, both of which are crassly exploited by the Hindu right to stoke the flames of a blood-and-soil variety of nationalism. Hindu nationalists literally deify the landmass of “Greater India” (which includes all of South Asia and parts of South-East Asia as well) as the homeland “Vedic Aryans,” to whom the universal and eternal laws of the cosmos were revealed. This hardcore “Hindu nation” ideology has appropriated and encouraged public worship of the idols and images of Bharat Mata (Mother India) in which the geographical contours of India merge into the body of a traditional Hindu goddess. It is commonplace in “secular” India – even under the “secular” Congress – to see such starkly Hindu nationalist imagery openly and proudly displayed in government offices, police stations and even on university campuses. In public spaces so over-charged with Hindu symbols, the promise of equal citizenship without regard to creed becomes meaningless.[34]

Hinduization of the public sphere is the “Operation Slow Poison,” an every-day “indoctrination amidst bhajans (hymns), seduction in the midst of festive processions” to use Meena Kandasamy’s very apt description.[35] Bharat Mata is only a recent goddess, whose invention dates back to the early 20th century anti-colonial nationalism. Hindutva forces have systematically targeted popular religious festivals celebrating old and beloved gods like Ganesh, and Ram and goddess Durga for political purposes. The agitation that led to the demolition of the mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 was given the trappings of a religious pilgrimage. The festival celebrating Ganesh, which used to be a popular but private affair in Tamil Nadu, for example, has become a massive public spectacle. The castes and tribes long considered “unclean” and “uncivilized” are being inducted into public worship of Ganesh, Ram and other deities and then deployed as foot-soldiers in the periodic riots that break out against Muslims and Christians.[36]

The link between religiosity and Hindutva is not limited to idol-worship and popular festivals. The more elite, “intellectual” Hindus who prefer gurus with more eclectic mix of old and new Hindu doctrines were no less supportive of Hindutva’s cultural agenda, or immune from its chauvinism. Charismatic gurus including Sat Sai Baba, Amritanandmayi (Amma), Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, to say nothing of numerous tele-yogis, all lent their full support to the Hindu nationalist agenda when they were in power.[37]

It is an article of faith among progressive intellectuals in India to defend the religious beliefs of ordinary people (good) while condemning the religious nationalist expressions of the faith (bad). To question the content of the myths and the metaphysics that underpin popular religiosity is considered to be in bad taste, a sign of the “colonial mind” of the critic. Rationalists are exhorted to counter “bad Hindutva” with “good Hinduism,” as if popular Hindu beliefs and practices have nothing to do with Hindu nationalism.

But it is not so clear at all that popular religiosity itself is so politically innocent. For all their differences, the psychological and behavioral manifestations of Hinduism and Hindutva are nearly identical. Yes, of course, Hindutva is not a religious movement, for it is not in the business of salvation of souls, or in the business of spreading god-awareness. It is in the business of acquiring power in order to bring its version of militant Hinduism as a blue-print for state policies. But to an average Hindu, the religious iconography, allegories and millenarianism (Ram Rajya) that Hindu nationalists use in their political mobilizations appear indistinguishable from the real thing. Conversely, the scriptural beliefs and myths of popular Hinduism make the Hindutva ideology to appear plausible, noble and worthy of defense to a vast majority of Hindus. This does not mean that ordinary believers are full of nationalistic passions, or that they can only be aroused to political action on religious grounds. All it means is that traditional religiosity of the voters remains a potential resource that political parties can freely mobilize for electoral gains.

Secular culture for secular democracies

What is to be done? It is easy for secularists to despair, as in America these days, or to celebrate too soon, as in India where the Hindu right lost the last election. There is also the temptation to mobilize a “religious left” that can invoke sacred books for social justice, peace and the environment. The idea is to use “good’ religion to wean people away from “bad” religion, invoke the “real” faith to challenge those who would turn it into an “ideology” for war and hatred.

There is no doubt at all that the secularists need to get religion right, but that does not mean that they must get religion. It is time for all thinking people to take religion seriously, not as false consciousness, not as a left-over superstition from the past, but as a necessary dimension of human life which answers a nearly universal need for finding transcendent purpose in life and death. This need for meaning that can dignify existential struggles of everyday life, and overcome the fear of death, is integral to human existence. Secularists must learn to respect this need for sacred meaning, and not rush to condemn every expression of religiosity as a sign of backwardness or superstition.

But while it is important to give faith its due, faith, too, must give reason its due. A secular society must respect religion, but only within the limits of reason. The reach of reason must extend to all empirical claims that derive from faith in the super-natural/spiritual entities and the sacred teachings derived from them, everywhere, whether in the public or in the private sphere, in the labs but also in the temples and churches. A wall of separation between reason and faith must go up in the minds of citizens first, in order for the wall of separation to work in society.

In practical terms, this means a revival of the forgotten rationalist-skeptical elements of the secularist project represented by Jefferson, Paine and the later pragmatist-secularists in America and by Nehru, Ambedkar and Roy in India. Their secularist project was not just a matter of laws and rules, but a matter of intellectual conviction. It was born of an inquiring attitude toward religion, aware of the great harm dogmatism in the name of God or the “eternal truths” of dharma has caused through history through the wars of conquest and colonialism or through the passive-aggressive violence aggression of caste institutions.

Secularism as a worldview does not mean rejecting all sense of the sacred that transcends the profane world of here-and-now. But it does mean divesting the sacred of the right to make existence claims about entities which supposedly act in nature – soul, spiritual “energy,” reincarnation, miracles, to name a few. Or to put it more precisely, secularism means reserving the right to demand the same level of evidentiary support we demand for other empirical beliefs for religious propositions which claim to represent some actual entities or processes in the actual world. As long as the God of religions is supposed to be present in the world of space and time accessible to ordinary human senses, He/She/It has to be able to stand up to the same level of scrutiny as any other claim about empirical phenomena like chairs, or DNA or atoms.

The defense of secularism in our times must start with a defense of scientific reason itself. In recent times, modern science has come in for harsh and unwarranted criticism from the postmodern left for serving the ends of colonial and patriarchal powers that oppress the marginalized social groups. Modern science, according to its “radical” critics, is a social construct that makes the dominant interpretations of nature appear as if they were facts of nature. This radical skepticism toward the content of modern science has resulted in calls for “alternative sciences” which will produce benign and socially progressive picture of nature form the standpoint of the non-dominant social groups. This enterprise of social construction of alternative accounts of nature has been a terrible diversion from the task of confronting the growing forces of reactionary religiosity. What is worse, this postmodernist deconstruction of science is very hospitable to the defenders of intelligent design in America who have been using very similar arguments to condemn naturalism of Darwinian evolution as a social construct of secular elites. And as I have been arguing, the spread of postmodernist, anti-Enlightenment ideas in India have left Indian critics of Hindu nationalists with no tools to counter the Hindu nationalist propaganda for “Vedic sciences.”[38]

In conclusion, the future of secular societies depends upon the cultivation of secular culture. Scientists and freethinkers have no choice but to get more deeply engaged with the religious commonsense of our times.

This article was first published by the Swedish magazine Axess in an issue on Enlightenment and is republished here by permission. Meera Nanda is a biologist and philosopher of science; she has written many articles for Butterflies and Wheels. She is the author of Prophets Facing Backward.

1. Conor Cruise O’Brien, God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988).

2. For fundamentalism as religious maximalism, see Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion after September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For fundamentalism as strong religion, see Gabriel Almond, R. Scott Appleby and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalism around the World. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For religionization of politics, see Mark Jurgensmeyer, The New Cold War?: Religious Nationalism confronts the Secular State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

3. On the 2004 US elections, see Barna Organization, “Born-again Christians were a significant factor in President Bush’s re-election” http://www.brana.org. See also, “Evangelicals say they led charge for the GOP,” Washington Post, Nov. 8, 2004. Deborah Cladwell, “Did God intervene?: Evangelicals are crediting God with securing the re-election of George W. Bush,” http:///www.Beliefnet.com. On the influence of religious right on the Bush administration, Chris Mooney, “W.’s Christian Nation,” The American Prospect, Vol. 14, no. 6, June 1, 2003; Karen Tumulty and Matthew Copper, “What does Bush owe the Religious Right? Time, Feb 7, 2005. On the influence of religious right on Bush’s science policy, see Esther Kaplan, With God on Their Side: How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy and Democracy in George Bush’s White House. (New York, Free Press, 2004).

4. For an annotated transcript of Bush’s inaugural speech, see Deborah Caldwell, “Decoding Bush’s God-Talk” on Beliefnet.com.

5. To quote Pratap Bhanu Mehta: “Master-servant relationship, rather than being superceded, is the paradigm of most social relations in India.” See his The Burden of Democracy (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2003), p. 89.

6. Barbara Harriss-White, India’s Market Society: Three Essays in Political Economy (New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2005).

7. For the many contradictions of American nationalism, Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (New York, Oxford University Press, 2004).

8. Sita Ram Goel, India’s Secularism: New Name for National Subversion (New Delhi: Voice of India, 1999)pp. 64, 67.

9. Quoted here from Gregory Treverton et al, “Exploring Religious Conflict” (The Rand Corporation: National Security Research Foundation, 2005) available at http://www.rand.org.

10. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). p. 90. The World Values Survey (1981-2001) asked the question “Do you believe in God?”

11. Data quoted here from Pavan Varma, Being Indian (Delhi: Penguin India), p.96.

12. Donald Eugene Smith, “India as a Secular State,” in Secularism and Its Critics, Rajeev Bhargava, ed. (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 178.

13. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Doubleday, 1967). Pp. 129, 108. Steve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).

14. Craig James Hazen, Village Enlightenment in America: Popular Religion and Science in the 19th Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

15. Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).

16. For two competing accounts, see Issac Kramnick and R. L. Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case against Religious Correctness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997) and Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads of Modernity: The British, French and American Enlightenments (New York: Knopf, 2005).

17. T.N. Madan, “Secularism in its place,” in Secularism and its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New Delih: Oxford University Press, 1998), See also, N.S. Rajaram, Secularism: The New Mask of Fundamentalism (New Dehli: Voice of India, 1995).

18. For a comprehensive account of the religious history of early America, see George Marsden, Religion and American Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1990).

19. See Ronald Numbers, “Science without God: Natural Laws and Christian Beliefs” in When Science and Christianity Meet, eds., David Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), George Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William Eerdmans Co., 1991).

20. For a critical appreciation of the influence of naturalism on American religion, see William Shea’s The Naturalists and the Supernatural (Mercer University Press, 1984).

21. Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn, The Wheel of Law: India’s Secularism in Comparative Constitutional Context. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Jacobsohn points out that the Dharma Chakra was modeled after the Emperor Ashoka’s (b. 256 BCE) use of the charka on his famous pillar at Sarnath.

22. A more detailed treatment is available in my book, The Wrongs of the Religious Right: Reflections on Science, Secularism and Hindutva (New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2005).

23. Sita Ram Goel, India’s Secularism: New Name for National Subversion (New Delhi: Voice of India. 1999), S. Gurumurthy, Eternal India and the Constitution (New Delhi: India First Foundation, 2005).

24. Achin Vanaik, Communalism Contested: Religion, Modernity and Secularization (New Delhi: Vistaar), p. 149.

25. Frank Morales, “Does Hinduism Teach that All Religions Are the Same?: A Philosophical Critique of Radical Universalism,” at the www.dharmacentral.com.

26. Interview with Deepak Chopra in John David Ebert, Twilight of the Clockwork God (Tulsa: Council Oak Books, 1999), p. 135.

27. This is a very large subject. I have examined some aspects of Vedic science in my previous work, especially the Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodernism, Science and Hindu Nationalism (New Bruswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

28. Rajeev Bhargava, “What is secularism for?” in Secularism and its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,1998), pp.486-543. See also Stephen Carter’s God’s Name in Vain. (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

29. Nikki Keddie, The New Religious Politics: Where, When and Why do “Fundamentalisms” Appear? Comparative Study of Society and History, 40(1998): 696-723.

30. Pew Center for Religion and Public Life, 2005. Religion and Public life: A Faith-based partisan divide, Trends 2005. Available at http://www.pewforum.org.

31. Andrew Kohut et al. The Diminishing Divide: Religion’s Changing Role in American Politics. (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000). See also, see Jeffery Rosen, “Is Nothing Secular?” New York Times Magazine, January 30, 2000.

32. See Alan Wolfe’s One Nation After All (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).

33. Samuel Huntington, “Dead Souls: the Denationalization of American Elite.” The National Interest, March 22, 2004.

34. For India as the cradle and/or nursery of the “Aryans,” see Vasant Kaiwar, “The Aryan Model of History and the Oriental Renaissance” in Antinomies of Modernity, eds. Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar, (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005). For the cult of Bharat Mata in contemporary India, see Lise McKean, Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

35. Meena Kandasamy, “Dangerous Cacophony,” Communalism Combat, Nov.-Dec. 2004, Vol. 11, No.103, pp. 22-34.

36. Chris Fuller, The Renewal of the Priesthood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). See also Kandsamy for a vivid description of many newly minted “timeless traditions,” note 35.

37. See John Harriss, “When a Great Tradition Globalizes: Reflections on two studies of the “Industrial leaders” of Madras, Modern Asian Studies, 37 (2003): 327-362.

38. For how postmodernism aids theistic science, see Robert Pennock, The Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against New Creationism (Boston: MIT Press, 2000. For a demystification of social constructivist relativization of natural science, see Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense, Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York: Picador USA, 1998).

Abstract How do his interpreters explain and justify Jacques Lacan’s baroque and unintelligible rhetorical strategies in Ecrits and the Séminaires? Many philosophers, cultural critics and psychoanalysts begin their project of elucidating Lacan with explanations and justifications of their master’s obscure voice. I argue that all these arguments are either circular, unsound, inconsistent or – what is perhaps the worst feature they all share – that his readers are taken hostage: ‘Only if we take what he says as revealing the truth about the unconscious will we understand Lacan’ seems to be the conclusion of many scholars desperate to ‘understand’ Lacan. [1]

‘Parfaupe orecluspa nannanbryle anaphi ologi psysoscline ixipad anlana – égnia kune n’rbiol’ ô blijonter têtumaine ennounç…’ [2]

Countless readers of Jacques Lacan, fascinated by their Master’s voice and gestures, have offered explanations and justifications of the forbidding character of both style and content of Ecrits and the Séminaires – mostly heavily edited transcripts of lectures attended by psychoanalysts, philosophers and the intellectual chic of Paris in the sixties and seventies of the past century. Pondering their justifications, one inevitably gets the impression that before they had to convince themselves (and their readers), on the brink of an expedition into the heart of an impenetrable conceptual darkness, that the man really had something interesting to say, and that that deep insights about the human mind and man’s vicissitudes (‘the subject’) were lurking behind constantly shifting meanings, sophisticated jeu de mots, and sweeping claims and theorems borrowed from or modelled after formal approaches in mathematics, linguistics, cybernetics and structural anthropology. Although the explanations and justifications of Lacan’s sleight of hand techniques do not seek to directly defend the existence of such a hidden treasure, they certainly suggest that if the impenetrability of Lacanian discourse were given a reasonable explanation or justification, it could, at a minimum, hint at productive ‘readings’ of Lacan that offer a chance of approaching its hidden kernel (if any). Lacan writes as if ‘the hidden message is just out of reach’ (‘just as the satisfaction of le désir is always just out of reach’, a Lacanian might add) – and the explanations suggest appropriate hints and methods that will reveal its ‘true meaning’. [3] Many explanations are grounded in his theory of language, or based on extrapolations of Freudian claims, hence offer interesting perspectives on the way central claims in that framework can be put to use.

Many justifications have, perhaps unsurprisingly, the character of classical Freudian sublimations. They are attempts to explain manifestly surrealistic trains of thoughts and quasi-mathematical bric à brac, often reached by completely revising the standard meaning of mathematical concepts or by justifying conceptual constructions that owe more to écriture automatique than serious thinking. The weakness of these conceptual revisions is so obvious that self-deception must be in play. And the fact that they are repeated over and over again reveals a pattern: Lacan is ultimately ‘the subject that is supposed to know’ (le sujet supposé savoir) – a slogan his interpreters, unfortunately, misunderstand, for the ‘supposé’ in that description carried, according to Lacan, the Gricean implicature that the designated subject didn’t know. Lacan, qua theorist, was of course not willing to apply that description to himself – he never doubted that he knew.

Some explanations are simply ludicrous (although definitely not meant to be ludicrous by their inventors). The ‘complexity of his theories’ can hardly be considered ‘a protective measure against bad interpretations’, as Dylan Evans suggests in his Dictionary of Lacanian Terms. [4] Why should a theory protect itself from misinterpretations by being deliberately complex? (One would think the opposite true: accuracy, truthfulness and argumentative strength usually prevent
misinterpretations.) Sometimes, it is claimed that the stylistic complexity of the theory should prevent an easy, ‘superficial’ reading of the theory (The unintended side-effect was of course the reverse: hundreds of incompatible interpretations saw the light of day.) But who would want to write opaquely to prevent superficial interpretations? That intention is as irrational as the intention to write absolutely clearly with a view to protect oneself against bad interpretations. (Morale: no-one can protect herself from bad interpretations.) A less respectful explanation – not mine! – is that Lacan wanted to protect himself from criticism by being ‘difficult’. Fact is that Lacan always had a difficult time when dealing with critics and adversaries. [5] The history of French psychoanalytics is infested by ideological conflicts, sectarian moves and endless feuds with Lacan as their main protagonist.

In her introduction to Alain Vanier’s Lacan, Judith Feher-Gurewich stresses the ‘revolutionary character’ of Lacan’s thoughts; his ‘brilliant’ wordings are often misunderstood because of the many ‘prejudices’ of his readers. [6] Unfortunately, she doesn’t tell us what those prejudices are. Perhaps she has in mind students who think that if you claim to develop a theory and not just a series of associatively connected thoughts, certain intellectual virtues proper to theorizing (like accuracy, consistency, precision, intellectual honesty, courage…) should be respected. And there is of course no interesting theoretical reason to think that the subject matter of Lacan’s theoretical interests – roughly speaking: the Freudian unconscious – is a sufficient reason to abandon the pursuit of these virtues when developing a theory of these phenomena.

Or perhaps the ‘misunderstandings’ that so frequently bedevil readers of Lacan have to do with the abundance of references to logic, topology, Russell’s paradox and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems in Lacan’s work. Susanne Barnard suggests that

‘(…) his arguments often revolve around relatively obscure philosophical references (e.g., Bentham’s Theory of Fictions) and theories (e.g., number theory, set theory, topology) that are inaccessible to the one uninitiated into the idiosyncrasies of Lacan’s later work’ [7]

which presupposes that the ‘idiosyncrasies’ are accessible to the initiated. But note, first, Barnard is obviously mistaken to confine the excursions into mathematics to Lacan’s later work, which even Lacan’s admirers do not take very seriously. The references are there already from the very beginning of his mature work. [8] The real problem with the ‘idiosyncrasies’ is that understanding his use of logic and mathematics, his ‘formulae’ and ‘mathèmes’, requires that one abandons, leaves behind, standard interpretations of symbols and first order formulae and trust the strange distortions. Logic, set theory and topology are perfectly transparent disciplines – except in the hands of Lacan. Even among seasoned readers and interpreters there is absolutely no consensus over what, for example, the famous ‘formulas of sexuation’ mean. [9] (Joël Dor, a famous Parisian psychoanalyst, urged us to completely abandon classical logic in view of Lacan’s logical ‘insights’.) [10] And why should a strange and inconsistent ‘formalization’ of the difference between man and woman in first order logic create an insight? Why should a weird re-interpretation of a mathematical theorem (Gödel’s theorem, for example) clarify a psychoanalytic claim?

And perhaps someone should have reminded Barnard that the references to logic, mathematics, structural linguistics and anthropology were the cornerstones of Lacan’s self-declared ambition to turn psychoanalysis into a ‘science of the subject’ (science du subjet). To quote just a few relevant passages:

‘Rien ne paraît mieux constituer l’horizon du discours analytique que cet emploi qui est fait de la lettre par la mathématique. La lettre révèle dans le discours ce qui, pas par hasard, pas sans nécessité, est appelé le grammaire. Le grammaire est ce qui ne se révèle du langage que par l’ecrit. Au-delà du langage, cet effet, qui se produit de se supporter seulement de l’écriture, est assurément l’idéal de la mathematique’ [11]

and elsewhere in the same Séminaire:

‘La formalisation mathématique est notre but, notre idéal. Pourquoi? – parce que seule elle est mathème, c’est à dire capable de se transmettre intégralement’. [12]

‘Integral transmittability’ is, of course, an important meta-theoretical property of scientific theories. Their content is communicable, translatable, and intended to clarify and explain the observed phenomena. Are the results of the ‘psychoanalytic experience’ objective? Lacan asks. Yes, he claims in 1966:

‘Ai-je besoin de dire que dans la science, à l’oppose de la magie et de la religion, le savoir se communique? Mais il faut insister que ce n’est pas seulement parce que c’est l’usage, mais que la forme logique donnée à ce savoir inclut le mode de la communication comme suturant le sujet qu’il implique’ [13].

But in the hands of Lacan transmittability gets a totally different intra-psychoanalytic content:

‘Ses résultats (the results of the psychoanalytic experience, FB) peuvent-ils fonder une science positive? Oui, si l’experience est contrôlable par tous. Or, constituée entre deux sujets dont l’un joue dans le dialogue un rôle d’idéale impersonalité…, l’expérience, une fois achevée et sous les seules conditions de capacité exigible pour toute recherche spéciale, peut être reprise par l’autre sujet avec un troisième. Cette voie apparement initiatique n’est qu’une transmission par récurrence.’ [14]

Whilst it was initially suggested that communicability pertains to the central theoretical claims and explanations in psychoanalytic theory, it suddenly transpires that we are dealing here, in fact, with the transfer of the psychoanalytic experience, possible only if one gets, via an analysis, access to that experience and is then in a position to transmit (i.e. induce) that experience into others (by analyzing them). Transmission and communicability, in the hands of Lacan, has nothing to do with objectivity and communicability of theories but with the passing on of a kind of experience and technique – the infamous and notoriously controversial Lacanian passe everyone has to undergo in order to be accepted as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. [15]

A more intriguing line of defense directly appeals to an intra-Freudian claim – Freud’s conception of dreams as decypherable rebuses in the Traumdeutung
(1899)– a work of which Lacan said: ‘Cet ouvrage ouvre avec l’oeuvre sa route royale (via regia, says Freud in ‘über Psychoanalyse’) à l’inconscient’. [16] Call this the Rebus Argument. We are told that Lacan’s work is a ‘rebus’, just as dreams, at least according to Freud, are rebuses: underneath a manifest dream content is hidden a latent dream content the correct reconstruction of that hidden meaning, when discovered (and not invented, as Freud repeatedly stressed), will reveal a hidden, repressed desire that casts a shadow over the dreamer’s life. [17] Freud’s onirology can be applied to Lacan’s writings:

‘It does not seem unfair to characterize Lacan’s writings in this way [as a rebus, FB] …(f)or their substance deals with the nature of the unconscious as Freud understood it, hence with that dimension of human experience that lies beyond the kernel of conscious, rational discourse and emerges into awareness only through a din of diffraction that may assume many forms – in the case of dream, for example, the form of a rebus. By saying, then, that Lacan’s work, in terms of its substance, is a rebus, we mean to suggest that it is dealing with a theme that of its very nature escapes the constriction of rational exposition.’ [18]

Ecrits and the Séminaires are

‘essentially a concrete demonstration in verbal locution of the perverse ways of the unconscious as he experiences it’ [19]

But why should someone with the ambition to develop a theory about an intrinsically difficult and opaque subject like the unconscious, decide to write in an obscure fashion? No theory about phenomenon X needs to adopt or simulate features of X to be verifiable, falsifiable, consistent or correct, or to offer theoretically important insights about its subject matter. A theory about colors doesn’t have to be colorful or be written down in colorful ink. And note that, if this justification were correct (the subject matter of the theory is obscure, so the theory itself must reflect that obscurity by being somehow obscure itself), we can no longer explain and appreciate why Sigmund Freud, the founding-father of psychoanalysis, wrote crystal-clear prose. The explanation is so strong that it implies that Freud could not have developed an adequate theory of the unconscious!

The crux of the problem is the Freudian rebus-metapher, which already presupposes that dreams have meanings or ‘solutions’, like real rebuses or crosswords (it is as if your metaphors reveals your hidden expectations and assumptions – an insight Lacanians would be proud of). But isn’t that what had to be proved? Dreams, for all we know, are not products of subconscious intentional processes, for there cannot be such processes. The idea that dreams have a hidden content that reveals the dreamer’s repressed wishes is as unproven and implausible as the ancient belief that the hidden content of a dream was a prediction, pace
Freud and his countless followers.

Madan Sarup exploits the metaphor in the Imitation Argument:

Lacan’s writings are a rebus because his style mimics the subject matter. He not only explicates the unconscious but strives to imitate it. The unconscious becomes not only the subject matter but, in the grammatical sense, the subject, the speaker of the discourse. Lacan believes that language speaks the subject, that the speaker is subjected to language rather than master of it. [20]

The central premise in this explanation appeals to Lacan’s theory of the subject as constituted by language or discourse: ‘language speaks the subject’ and ‘the subject is not the master of its discourse’. Lacan, we are told, serves as mouthpiece of the unconscious; his discourse is a perfect (and therefore instructive) imitation of the unconscious. [21] In a recent paper Dany Nobus seems to confirm this view:

‘(Lacan) modeled his own discourse on the very rhetoric of the unconscious which he believed to have discerned in Freud’s foundational accounts of dreams, slips of the tongue and jokes’ [22]

If Lacan’s language or discourse is a deliberate imitation of the unconscious (‘he strives to imitate it’, Sarup claims, he ‘models his own discourse on the very rhetoric of the unconscious’, we are told by Nobus), it must be presupposed that Lacan has an adequate conception of the unconscious, or at least his unconscious. A successful imitation of a phenomenon, like a good impersonation, requires that the imitator have a reliable conception of the object or person imitated or impersonated. But what if Lacan’s impression of the unconscious was false? [23] And where does imitation of the unconscious end and explication and theorizing begins? And why should an imitation amount to a theory?

Secondly, the allegedly inscrutable character of the subject matter of a theory and and structure of the theory cannot be so intrinsically connected as Sarup suggests, for it would entail that every effort to present Lacan’s conception of the unconscious in more or less streamlined fashion will eventually end up as a fatal distortion of the theory. Any attempt to present his thoughts in a systematic, orderly way will fatally misinterpret him (and the unconscious) if the Imitation Argument were sound.

Thirdly, the Imitation Argument reveals an unfounded sweeping generalisation. Remember that the argument explains Lacan’s opacity on the basis of theory-internal claims: ‘Language speaks the subject’, ‘The subject is constituted by language’. The argument then runs as follows: from the fact – if it is a fact! – that ‘language speaks the subject’, it follows that Lacan’s theory is ‘spoken by’ the language of the unconscious. Since the unconscious is a rebus – Freud’s claim, embraced and further developed by Lacan himself – Lacan’s writings will themselves be a rebuses. But can a theory’ be ‘spoken’ by one’s unconscious (even if that unconscious is ‘structured like a language’? Does not every theorist intend to say something when he says something? Isn’t the choice of words, the structure of arguments, the precise formulation of ideas the core of an intentional activity called ‘theorizing’? Isn’t Lacan himself insisting that he intends to develop a scientific version of Freudian psychoanalysis? How could that intention be squared with a discourse which merely mimics the unconscious? A claim that was initially intended to describe the patient’s free associations turns out to be applicable to all forms of intentional behaviour, including the presentation of a theory.

The objection that these claims (‘language speaks the subject’, etc.) are defended by Lacan is worthless, for it merely shows that Lacan’s obscure style and content is consistent with what he says about language and the subject. [24] Consistency with Lacanian claims is insufficient as a legitimation of theoretical obscurantism. Finally, if, as Nobus suggests, Lacan had the intention to present his theories in a baroque way, he made a conscious (yet not very reasonable) choice; the presence of such an intention suggests, moreover, that there are occasions where he choose to speak about the unconscious (and psychoanalaysis in general) in an orderly fashion. [25] It was clearly not an option for him to speak and think the way he spoke and thought.

The central problem with the Imitation Argument, however, is its very structure: we are in fact told that it is a necessary
condition for understanding the theory – the central, philosophical or psychoanalytical assertions – that we must assume it is a correct imitation of its subject matter. (Remember: if we are to understand Lacan, we must assume that his discourse is the expression of his unconscious which is itself structured like a language). [26] If Sarups argument were sound, readers are taken hostage: the Lacanian insights reveal themselves only if (not: if) you take the theory to be a correct imitation of the unconscious. By contraposition: if you reject that Lacan’s simulation is faithful to the nature of the unconscious, the theory will not reveal itself to you. But isn’t it a minimal requirement that the content of a theory must be accessible even when it turns out to be false? The hermeneutic circle drawn by Sarup is too tight to leave space for rational dissent.

A slight variation on this theme is offered by Samuel Weber. [27] According to Weber (thereby echoing Lacanian claims about language and ‘the play of the signifiers’), the signification of ‘signifiers’ (signifiants) can only be determined ‘retroactively’, their meaning is ‘contextually’ determined. It is of course notoriously difficult to get a precise grip on the signification of the central Lacanian concept of a signifier – Lacan tends to use it as meaning symbol, concept, sound pattern, referent, propositional content, linguistic sign, or contextually determined referent. Be that as it may, Weber’s sweeping explanation directly appeals to the ‘the retroactive character of the fixation of meaning or signification’ to explain its extremely polysemous character.

‘This suggests that the term ‘signifier’ – formally considered: a word – has neither a simple nor a clearly determinate meaning, since what it designates and points toward – as configuration of differences – engenders meaning only retroactively, as the result of the ‘pointing’ as it were. (….) If this process designated by the signifier forms a condition of possibility of the word, qua meaningful unit, which in turn is an indispensable constituent of the concept, the signifier cannot be grasped in terms of a particular content, but instead can be represented only formally, by what Lacan calls ‘an algorithm’; this unspeakable formula must be written: f(S)1/s’ [28]

The strategy can easily be generalized for other Lacanian concepts: whenever central concepts in Lacan’s framework are vague, ambiguous or cryptic – in this case: the central concept of signifier (signifiant) – his interpreters immediately mobilize theory-internal claims: the signification of the concept becomes clear, reveals itself ‘in a signifying chain’ , in a ‘system of differences with other signifiers’. We retroatively interpret and re-interpret the central signifiers of Lacan’s theory. And so it goes. If we want to understand Lacan’s central assertions, we should apply its central claims to his own theory. But that entails that we could never come to the conclusion that the central claim could turn out to be false (if the claim is false, you will suddenly come to recognize that you don’t understand the theory). Musn’t we allow that even on a holistic understanding of a theory one could come to the conclusion that one of its theoretical claims was false? [29]

The basic flaw in Weber’s argument is based on a deep and widespread extrapolation of Lacanian claims (almost certainly induced by Lacan himself). The claim that the meaning of signifiers had to be reconstructed retroactively was specifically intended not to apply to theories, but to the psychoanalytic patient’s free associations (Freud’s freier Einfall) during psychoanalytic sessions! It may well be that significant patterns in those associations are discovered retroactively, but it surely doesn’t follow that the same approach works for the interpretation of theories – intentional products of rational agents. Theories are not samples of free associations. And if the meaning of the concept of ‘signifier (signifiant)’ eludes us, how can it be that a semi-mathematical ‘unspeakable’ formulae captures its content?

Theories always leave out something, many authors happily conclude when on the verge of giving up the search for meaning in Lacan. Malcolm Bowie’s ‘minimal’ interpretation of Lacan (he wisely puts aside Lacan’s phantastic excursions into mathematics and shaky linguistics), tells us that

‘Lacan is a theorist of the human passions who maintains a steady hostility to the language of ‘theory’. Desire is the subject matter of psychoanalysis, but something is always left out when the analyst writes about it…. However hard he tries to ‘articulate desire’ – by constructing a theory of it, say- desire will always spill out from his sentences, diagrams or equations. But theories should not be silent on that which eludes them, Lacan insists.’ [30]

Bowie’s elegant formulations are a specimen a family of explanations that appeals to the elusive, strange or obscure character of his particular object of inquiry. The recurrent theme is that however precise one wants to write about desire, the unconscious, the ‘Name of the Father’, the phallus, the Other,…, the essence of the subject-matter of the theory will always ‘escape us’. Psychoanalytic theories cannot but continue to ‘circle’ around ‘the unspeakable kernel of the subject’, it tries to articulate ‘a desire which constantly eludes and escapes us’.

It bears repeating that these observations never constitute a reason to abandon
the virtues and values of proper theorizing, for it is a feature of every theoretical account that it necessarily formally abstracts away from many aspects or properties of its subject matter. For example, it is not a requirement on the adequacy of neurological or cognitive theories of pain and other phenomenal experiences that they are ‘complete’ ‘adequate’ only if they contain a perfect evocation of what it is like to be, say, in pain. No theory can provide its reader with a a recognitional conception of what it is like to be in pain or what it is like to hear voices in one’s head, or what it’s like to feel depressed. [31] Similarly, a theory of Lacanian desires need not convey to the reader a phenomenal conception of what it is like to live with a desire to, say, seek revenge for paternal abuse. No theory can achieve that impossible goal. [32] Richard Boothby seems to have something like this in mind when he writes:

‘Lacan aims to produce in the reader an experience that bears some likeness to the encounter with the unconscious. His style is an appropriate reflection of the fact that, as he says, ‘obscurity is characteristic of our field’ [33]

There is no need to think that what a theory ‘leaves out’ must be recovered or captured in the style, the form, the conceptual structure of the theory. And it certainly doesn’t follow that intellectual virtues of serious theorizing must be abandoned. And note that the claim that Lacan speaks and writes qua analyst and is therefore not tied to the demands of theory, contradicts his explicit ambition to present a scientific theory.

Madan Sarup offers another strategy:

‘An analysis terminates only when the patient realizes it could go on for ever. Perhaps the reader of Lacan’s work should be prepared for an unending struggle rather like the analytic patient’s’ [34]

Does this mean that understanding Lacan is impossible? Or that we stop interpreting when we realize that understanding is impossible? Or when we think we have found an interpretation that fits our needs? And is there such a thing as an intended interpretation of Lacan? Lacan himself promised that ‘it would take ten years before everything will be clear for all’. [35]

The next argument is the Appeal to the reader’s unconscious:

‘Cracking (Lacan’s) difficult writings involves not only the intellectual efforts of readers but also their unconscious processes; comprehension will dawn as reader-analysts recognize in their own work what was expressed in sibylline fashion in the text.’ [36]

Feher-Gurewich’s first argument (in this quote) assumes the central working hypothesis of psychoanalysis: man is not a master in his own house. So, when interpreting (trying to understand) Lacan, it is our unconscious life that is supposed to help us understanding the theory. But why does the theory remain difficult, even if our own unconscious is at work when we try to understand the theory? Or does it understand the theorie but refuses to tellus what the theory says? And if this hypothesis were right, wouldn’t we want to know how our unconscious life assimilates the texts of Lacan and why it refuses to reveal its true meaning to us? And how do I know that my unconscious assmilates the theory? And why should a theory of the unconscious appeal to my unconscious life?

If Feher-Gurewich’s second argument (‘comprehension will dawn…’) were correct, only practitioners would have access to the hidden meaning of the theory; others are by definition excluded from understanding. (I, for one, will have completely missed the point of the theory – a happy consequence for Lacanians.) But let us not complain about the fact that this claim is empirically false (many non-analysts have claimed to ‘understand’ Lacan), for the deeper, conceptual problem with the claim that ‘only practicioners will understand the theory’ is that it equivocates two senses of understanding. There is a distinction between (i) understanding a theory as understanding its central claims and concepts, and (ii) the capacity to recognize symptoms and phenomena on the basis of understanding the theory. The implicit claim in the argument is that one understands a theory (in the first sense of ‘understanding’) only if one recognizes in one’s own work or (psychoanalytical) practice the phenomena and symptoms it accounts for. The second sense of understanding is thus a necessary, condition for the first sense of understanding. But this claim is simply false. Our capacity to recognize and identify phenomena in terms of the theoretical concepts of a theory requires that one grasps or understands, in the first sense of ‘understanding’, the theory. To learn to ‘observe’ the world via a theory, one must first struggle to understand the theory. The latter is a necessary condition for the former, but not vice versa.

In Ecrits Lacan offers an often-quoted defiant explanation:

‘L’écrit se distingue en effet par une prévalence du texte, au sens qu’on va voir prendre ici a ce facteur du discours – ce qui y permet ce resserrement qui à mon gré ne doit laisser au lecteur d’autre sortie que son entrée, que je préfère difficile. Ce ne sera donc pas ici un écrit à mon sens’ (Ecrits, p. 493)

That the psychoanalytical praxis is an intrinsically difficult affair, or at least a kind of practice we do not want everyone to enter it, to have access to it. Hence, ‘entering it should not be made easy’. [37] But no valid argument lies in the offing. Good chess playing is difficult, but it doesn’t follow that one is forced to write in a difficult or obscure fashion about excellent chess-playing. Mathematical theories are difficult, but not because mathematicians are bad writers or intend to write difficultly. Why should a theoretical presentation of the nature and laws of the unconscious be an exception? And note that Lacan in a sense misdescribes his own obscurantism: it’s the content and not just its presentation that makes him so hard to grasp.

Another recurrent argument – Lacan doesn’t present a theory, he’s presenting loosely connected intuitions and associations – is not only contradicted by the intentions of the master but also by his accounts of his interpreters. Even if they begin by conceding that Lacan doesn’t present a theory, they always end up with presenting him as defending a theory (sometimes called ‘a metapsychology’) that lies at the foundation of Lacanian discourse. The concept of a theory of the unconscious is simply ineliminable from their interpretations. Of course, there is a strong conception of theory – a theory als a closed, axiomatic system – a psychoanalytic theory will never attain. The only sense in which I can see value in the claim that Lacan doesn’t present a theory is that he does not present a theory in the strong, reductionist, positivistic sense of the concept – a scientific theory modelled after physics. (Lacan was, admirably, an anti-reductionist about mental concepts!). On the other hand: every theory should, as Aristotle rightly stressed, approach its subject matter with the appropriate concepts. But this concession is not sufficient to describe Lacan as an anti-theorist. We encounter here a structural problem that permeates the whole oeuvre of Lacan: on the one hand the desire to escape from the ‘conventions’ of theoretical writing (which are, of course, not simply conventions! This is clearly Lacanian spin), to deliberately neglect the virtues and values of scientific or theorizing, and, on the other hand, the intention to turn psychoanalysis into a science by employing in its discourse heavily theoretical concepts borrowed from various scientific theories like linguistic structuralism, logic, topology and numerous other branches of mathematics. Unsurprisingly, a project that attempts to realize such contradictory intentions must eventually fail. And note that formalizing certain central concepts (like the notorious objet petit a or the formulas of sexuation in the XXth Séminaire is never sufficient to turn one’s claims into theory. From the fact that we could formalize Madame Bovary in first order logic, it doesn’t follow that Flaubert’s masterpiece turns out to be a theory, let alone a theory about women.

The Conceptual Innovation Argument appeals to the need for conceptual innovation in ‘revolutionary theories’ (note the spin!). Lacan is in constant need for new concepts to be fed into in his scientific enterprise and is therefore forced to forge new ‘signifiers’. Reading Lacan, one learns to understand a new language (Lacanese). The untranslatable signifiants with their ever-floating content are well known (jouissance, le nom du père, the chaîne signifiante) and part of many cultural theorist’s jargon. David Caudill appeals to this phenomenon:

‘Despite these stylistic and contextual difficulties, interest in Lacan continues to grow. To the extent that Lacan challenges entrenched notions of the subject, language and cognition, he will be forgiven (as any critical thinker would be) for running up against the limits of language as well as for disturbing familiar concepts in the process of reconceptualisation.’ [38]

Whilst it is undoubtedly correct that every innovative theory – be it about the unconscious or quantum physics – needs to introduce new concepts (and sometimes new methods) and that genuinely novel concepts are in an important sense not reducible to old, familiar ones (for why would one have introduced them if they were so reducible), expanding one’s cognitive reach by introducing new concepts does not usually lead to deep epistemological problems (in fact, we do it all the time – our conceptual apparatus is constantly in flux). Conceptual innovation requires, of course care, precision and the avoidance of ambiguous or inconsistent use of newly introduced concepts. The problem with Lacan is that these are the kind of intellectual virtues he manifestly neglects, and this is not just a matter of style, for his neglect directly affects the credibility of the ‘revolutionary theories’.

* * *

The last argument amounts the a Complete Denial of Obscurity. Lacan was, we are told, ‘a crystal-clear writer’. The first sentence of a notorious defense of Lacan’s scientific methods, Jean-Claude Milner’s L’oeuvre claire leaves no doubt:

‘Je ne me propose pas d’éclairer la pensée de Lacan. Je n’ai ni autorité, ni qualification pour cela. De plus, le project d’une telle élucidation ne paraît pas spécialement urgent. Lacan est, comme il le dit lui-même, un auteur cristallin’. [39]

A classic example of post-Lacanian bluff: begin with a claim that is completely false (Milner knew Lacan – he has the authority and the qualifications to enlighten us about Lacan), and then do exactly what you just announced you wouldn’t: Milners book is an in-depth analysis of the scientific and methodological foundations of Lacanian psychoanalysis in which many of the absurd and almost surrealistic aims and claims of Lacan’s scientific ideas are ‘explained’ and ‘contextualized’.

I conclude with a case of sublimation verging on blind adoration:

‘Lacan’s careful attention and his painstaking elaboration of a formal structuration of the unconscious make it possible to support any aspect of his thought by randomly choosing from any text and from any point in chronological time. The consistency of Lacan’s epistemology has all the aesthetic beauty of a mathematical theory or the cantos of Dante.’ [40]

In Lacan to the Letter, a recent book by Bruce Fink, a well-known American explicator of Lacan, writes:

‘A great deal of theoretical writing adopts (the) presupposition (that theory has to produce a discrete, discernible object (a turd of sorts) for us to examine (admire or scorn), which is essentially an obsessive bias associated, for the most part, with what we might cavalierly call ‘anal male academic writing’. [41]

I leave it to the reader to assess the last clause (which, I’m sure Fink suggests, certainly applies to this author). Fink continues:

‘Why should this be the standard by which Lacan’s writing is measured? Perhaps we should admire, rather, not the final product but the flow or process of Lacan’s writing: its twist and turns, recursive style, and movement…. To Lacan’s mind, a teaching worthy of the name must not end with the creation of a perfect complete system; after all, there is no such thing’. [42]

There is certainly a trivial sense in which Lacan’s work, like anyone else’s, is (or was) work in progress. But it doesn’t follow from this mundane, unspectacular observation that we shouldn’t strive for carefulness, accuracy, and transparency, – the central virtues of any theoretist. It is obvious that none of these virtues Lacan found attractive. What is presented under the guise of theory is in fact a complex and often fascinating form of conceptual surrealism, sold as a ‘theory’ to a fascinated public. The gestures and presence of Lacan did the rest. As Claude Lévi-Strauss testifies,

‘What was striking was the kind of radiant influence emanating from both Lacan’s physical person and from his diction, his gestures. I have seen quite a few shamans functioning in exotic societies, and I rediscovered here a kind of equivalent of the shaman’s power. I confess that, as far as what I heard went, I didn’t understand. And I found myself in the middle of an audience that seemed to understand.’ [43]

The Lacanian Error

No one promised us that theorizing about the mind and, more specifically, the Freudian unconscious (if it exists) would be easy or forthcoming. Theorists must steer between the Scylla of a purely phenomenal account which precludes integration in a theory and a detached, scientific approach that often results in deplorable reductionism (the famous ‘nothing but’-reflex: mental events are nothing but brain events). The first point of view is enhanced by the following considerations: persons have a phenomenal, first-personal conception of experiences and have first person authority with respect to the contents of their beliefs and other propositional attitudes. It should be obvious that mental disturbances have a phenomenal aspect and we often experience, when we are irrational, a kind of surdness. [44] A theoretical description of the structure of the unconscious, however, cannot have as its central theoretical aim an evocation of such experiences, for it cannot be the purpose of a theoretical inquiry into the nature of a normal or abnormal human mental economy is to transmit knowledge of its phenomenal aspects. No theory can have as its aim the reproduction of essentially first personal, phenomenal and therefore essentially recognitional knowledge of the mental (recognitional knowledge is the kind of knowledge one gains only if one experiences oneself the phenomenon in question). On the other hand, if one’s theoretical account of the mental were restricted to a purely empirical, objective mode of inquiry, having as its central goal a nomological account of the workings of the mind, it would have to employ concepts borrowed from neurology and, eventually, physics. But this approach faces the difficulty that the application of mental concepts is subject to constitutive principles that, as Davidson famously argued, ‘have no echoe in physical theory’. Mental concepts are sui generis: they are irreducible to physical concepts and they cannot figure in lawlike generalizations. Any attempt to approach the mental in a scientific way – an ambition Lacan certainly entertained – will simply miss this anti-reductionist point. It is ironical that Lacan, who himself often appealed to Gödel to evoke the incompleteness of physical descriptions of the mental (at best a bad analogy, but let that pass), thought for himself that the model for a scientific approach to the unconscious was mathematics!

It does not follow from the impossibility to give a reductive account of the mental and, a fortiori, the unconscious, or the impossibility to reproduce the phenomenal character of the mental in theories, that theorizing about the mind is impossible or incoherent. A viable account requires is the right concepts and insight in the nature of the constitutive principles that govern the application of those concepts. For example, it seems essential that an account of belief as a state of mind must be such that it is a rational state that can be rationally connected with other beliefs and which will be updated or rejected when its subject discovers that the state is false. (This is, like all other principles, not a law but a ceteris paribus principle; nevertheless, it reveals part of the nature of belief, just as the transitivity of the relation ‘is longer than’ reveals part of the nature of measuring length.) Similarly, a core aspect of phenomenal experiences must account for the fact that it part of the nature of an experience that it manifests itself to the agent via its essence. The concept of pain is an essential recognitional concept, as Perry and Loar have stressed. [45] Part of what makes the Freudian unconscious – or deeply irrational phenomena and deviant experiences, if you reject Freud’s topology – unfathomable is that we cannot avoid describing it – using conceptual tools borrowed from a rational psychology and mental states the essence of which is that they manifest themselves to the subject. The unconscious neither manifests itself phenomenally, nor is it a rational affair. This partly explains why Freud and Lacan had to introduce new concepts that are neither phenomenal nor answerable to the constitutive principles of rationality.

And now we can locate Lacan’s error. Lacan’s first intention was to present us with a personal phenomenal impression of the unconscious (‘as he experiences it’, it is claimed). We have just seen that that intention cannot reflect a theoretical attitude towards the subject matter of his inquiry. It is, for conceptual reasons, impossible to satisfy a theoretical interest with a purely first-personal, recognitional account of its subject matter. On the other hand, Lacan also had the explicit intention to give us a stringent theoretical account of the unconscious, and he forcefully argues that this requires methodological input from mathematics, logic, linguistics and other formal sciences. But this formalism introduces concepts governed by constitutive principles that are, in an important sense, alien to the concepts we must employ to get theoretical insight in the nature of the mental qua mental. As Lacan himself recognizes, the mental cannot be reduced to the physical (unfortunately, his argument for that claim – based on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, is ridiculous). So, the second intention too cannot be realized. The third element is that his attempts to realize these irrational intentions are constantly mixed up. The result is sometimes amusing conceptual surrealism. Lacan failed to see that neither intentions were necessary to get insight in the nature of the unconscious. Rather than helping us to understand it, his conceptual surrealism leads us away from understanding the vicissitudes of your mental life.

© Filip Buekens
University of Tilburg
Comments sought!
f.a.i.buekens@uvt.nl

1. English not revised! A shortened French version appeared in Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (ed.), Le Livre noir de la psychanalyse, Paris: Les Arènes, 2005. This paper was read (and loathed) at the Rhetorics, Ethics, Politics Conference at Ghent University (April 2005). I thank audiences in Amsterdam, Brussels and Tilburg for interesting and provocative remarks.

2. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris : Seuil, 1966), p. 299, note 1.

3. See J.M. Muller & W.R. Richardson, Lacan and Language. A Reader’s Guide to Ecrits, International Universities Press (s.l.), ‘Introduction’.

4. See Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1996, p. ix. Similar suggestions in Paul-Laurent Assoun, Lacan, Paris: Puf, 2003, p. 10. Evans is an apostate. He no longer takes (Lacanian) psychoanalysis seriously.

5. See E. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, Paris: Fayard, 1993, passim.

6. Judith Feher-Gurewich in A. Vanier, Lacan, New York: The Other Press, 2000, p. viii. (also published in French).

7. S. Barnard, ‘Introduction’, in S. Barnard in Bruce Fink (eds.), Reading Seminar XX. Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002, p. 3. See also Assoun, op. cit., p. 21 who uses the same ‘initiation’-metaphor.

8. Compare the long mathematical addendum to Lacan’s analyses of Poe’s Purloined Letter in Ecrits, usually neglected in interpretations of his famous reading.

9. See Lacan, Séminaire XX: Encore, January 16, 1973.

10. See Joël Dor, Introduction à la lecture de Jacques Lacan I et II, Paris: Denoël, 1986.

11. Séminaire XX, p. 44, also quoted in Roustang, The Lacanian Delusion, p. 94.

12. Séminaire XX, p. 108.

13. Ecrits, p. 876.

14. Ecrits, p. 103. See also F. Roustang, The Lacanian Delusion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

15. More on these matters: Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, Paris: Fayard 1993.

16. Ecrits, p. 509.

17. See Ecrits, p. 470 where Lacan explicitly adopts Freud’s metaphor : ‘Le rêve est un rébus (dit Freud). Qu’eût-il fallu qu’il ajoutât pour que nous n’en attendions pas les mots de l’âme?’. Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated, Cambridge: MIT Press 1997, pp. 660 convincingly shows how an innocent metaphor (dream as rebus) becomes a running rhetorical device that underpins Freudian realism about a dream’s latent content. The meaning of dreams is, according to Freud, discovered, not constructed.

18. J. P. Muller, W. J. Richardson (eds.), Lacan and Language. A Reader’s Guide to ‘Ecrits’, International Universities Press (s.l.), 1982, p. 2.-3. But what about Wittgensteins famous rejoinder that dreams certainly look like rebuses or riddles?

19. Ibid., p. 3. Analogous remarks in Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan, London: Free Association Books, 1986, p. 13 and D. Caudill, Lacan and the Subject of Law, New Jersey: Humanities Press, p. 5.

20. Madan Sarup, Lacan, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992 (Modern Cultural Masters), p. 80.

21. The verbal puns and wordplays in Lacan’s discourse are justified by Stanley Leavy: ‘The theoretical basis of (his) playing with words is found in Lacan’s dictum that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’. In his playful punning this claim is concretized, embodied. The unconscious can speak truthfully, revealing the identity of the logically unrelated, cognitively distorted, affectively confused experiences.’ Stanley A. Healy, ‘The Image and the Word. Further Reflections on Jacques Lacan’, in J. Smith and W. Kerrigan (eds.), Interpreting Lacan, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983, p. 13.

22. Dany Nobus, ‘The Punning of Reason. On the strange case of dr. Jacques L.’, in Angelaki 9 (2004), p. 189-201, quoted from p. 196.

23. And what if Lacan’s unconscious were a-typical for a given population?

24. Nobus, op. cit. p. 197 suggests a ‘strict compatibility’ between Lacan’s account of the unconscious and his rhetorical strategies.

25. See also M. Bowie, Freud, Proust, Lacan: Theory as Fiction, Cambridge: CUP, 1987, p. 104: ‘… Lacan’s main ideas and cherished controversial positions are presented to the reader in a consciously ragged and desultory form’ (my italics). This is followed by a lengthy, courageous defense of Lacan’s glossolalia that recapitulates many arguments discussed here.

26. ‘Le symptôme psychanalysable… est soutenu par une structure qui est identique à la structure du langage… la structure du langage telle qu’elle se manifeste dans les langues que j’appellerai positives, celles qui sont effectivement parlées par les masses humaines.’ And: ‘L’inconscient est structuré comme un langage’, Lacan, Ecrits, p. 444.

27. S. Weber, Return to Freud. Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 63-64.

28. Weber, op. Cit., p. 64. Compare Lacan, Ecrits, p. 502: ‘On peut dire que c’est dans la chaîne dus signifiant que le sense insiste, mais qu’aucun des elements de la chaîne consiste dans la signification dont il est capable au moment même. La notion d’un glissement incessant du signifié sous le signifiant s’impose donc’.

29. Similar arguments can be found in Ellie Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death. From Freud to Lacan, New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 10: ‘Lacan’s concepts always function in a dynamic cadence with his other concepts’. But isn’t that true of all theoretical concepts in every theory? ‘Dynamic cadence with other concepts’ does not explain obscurity.

30. Malcolm Bowie, Lacan, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 1.

31. See Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it Like to be a bat?’, in T. Nagel, Mortal Questions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

32. This point is stressed by, for example, John Perry, Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness, Cambridge (Mass), 2001 and by many who explain our anti-reductionist intuitions about phenomenal concepts.

33. R. Boothby, op. cit., p. 11.

34. Sarup, op. cit., p. 82.

35. J. Lacan, Autres Ecrits, p. 544 (‘Télévision’).

36. Feher-Gurewich in Vanier, op. cit., p. xii.

37. In a more defiant mood : ‘L’écrit, ça n’est pas à comprendre. C’est bien pour ça que vous n’êtes pas forcés de comprendre les miens. Si vous ne les comprenez pas, tant mieux, ça vous donnera justement l’occasion de les expliquer.’ J. Lacan, Séminaire XX: Encore, Paris: Seuil, p. 35

38. David S. Caudill, Lacan and the Subject of Law, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997, p. 6. Analogous remarks in Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. p. 66.

39. Jean-Claude Milner, L’Oeuvre claire. Lacan, la science, la philosophie, p. 7. The sentence is notorious because it famously figured as motto to the chapter on Lacan’s obscure mathematics in Bricmont and Sokal, Intellectual Impostures, London, 1996.

40. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987, p. 220, also quoted in D. Caudill, op. cit., p. 6.

41. Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter, p. 66

42. Idem.

43. Claude Lévi-Strauss, quoted in E. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: a History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 362.

44. See D. Davidson, ‘How is Weakness of the Will Possible?’, in ibid., Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

45. See John Perry, Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness, Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press, 2001.

I’m going to begin by taking you on a personal tour of my own
thinking about intelligent design over the past 60 years.

It began in 1945 when I was a 14 year old at Mt Albert Grammar.
Our Fourth Form English teacher decided we should learn the skills of
debating. The topic chosen was “Creation versus Evolution”. And I, as an
ardent young Baptist, volunteered, along with a Seventh Day Adventist,
to take up the cudgels on behalf of Creation.

But even before the debate began, I found myself cast in the role of
devil’s advocate.

While preparing, it dawned on me that the case against evolution
foundered on an ambiguity between two meanings of the simple word
“creation”: the concept of general creation, and the concept of special
creation.

To believe in the theological doctrine of general creation is merely
to believe in a God who created the universe. Clearly, I could, without
inconsistency, believe in general creation and also believe in the Theory
of Evolution. I simply had to regard Darwinian natural selection as one of
the laws of nature that God built into his creation.

To believe in special creation is to believe in addition that God, in
a series of subsequent acts, created the first living organisms and then, at
different times, each of the different species.

The God of special creation is an intervener in the operations of
nature. The creator in whom I came to believe – for a while – is not.
Making this simple distinction gave me temporary respite from the
intellectual conflict in my mind at that time. I’d already become skeptical
about the Genesis story of God’s recent rapid-fire creation. Like fifth
century St. Augustine I concluded that these biblical literalists deserved
to be “laughed to scorn” for their “utterly foolish and obviously untrue
statements.”

Adopting Augustine’s more figurative interpretation, I was able to
reconcile my belief in intelligent design with belief in evolution.
Renouncing the beliefs of theistic anti-evolutionists I adopted those of
theistic evolutionists.

So far, so good. But other questions soon arose.

How about the doctrine of revelation, belief in which is a defining
condition of being a theist? Could I really accept the Christian view that
God had revealed himself in the words of the Old Testament prophets and
the New Testament “Son of God”? Most of the stories had the quality of
myth, not history. And many portrayed God as worse than Satan
himself, his Son’s doctrine of hell-fire being most repugnant. Besides,
why should I believe in this version of revelation rather than some other?
There were numerous sacred texts, all claiming divine inspiration. If a
supreme being existed and wanted to reveal himself to us, why didn’t he
do so in an indisputably authoritative way? No rational answer being
available to this or other questions I was asking, I soon came to abandon
belief in all forms of revealed religion.

Yet I still wasn’t ready to abandon the gods altogether. For a time I
sought intellectual comfort in the best arguments of natural religion: the
First Cause and Design arguments. Both have appeal to those who don’t
believe in revelation but still believe there must be some sort of Supreme
Being or Higher Power who made the universe the way it is.
Without being aware of the fact, I was embracing the position of
the deists – thinkers like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and
David Hume – none of whose writings I’d yet read.

But that embrace was brief. It didn’t take long to see that both their
arguments faced the horns of a dilemma. Either the universe itself could
exist without being designed or created, or the designing and creating
deity must himself have been designed and created. So either we were left
with the universe where we started or we launched ourselves on the path
of an infinite regress.

My mother, when I was but six years old, was flummoxed by my
question, “Who made God?” Not surprising! You can’t explain why
something exists rather than nothing by postulating the existence of
something else as well. For then you’ve got two things whose existence
demands to be explained. And appeal to a third, then a fourth, and so on,
only increases the burden. Asking for explanations within the universe is profitable. But asking for explanations of the universe launches you on a quest for a cause that eludes you forever.

The last residuum of my supernaturalistic beliefs eroded away
about the same time. Having rejected the gods and devils of religion, I
soon rejected all other beliefs in the paranormal: those countenanced by
the Psychical Research Society – disembodied spirits, and the rest.
Free at last, I embraced a wholly naturalistic ontology – a worldview
that accepted the universe, it contents, and the laws of nature, as
brute facts neither needing, nor capable of, further explanation. I had
become an unabashed atheist (though a closet one while still living with
my parents).

That all occurred before my eighteenth birthday.

Disenchanted with religion, I turned my interests to science and
then to philosophy.

I would happily have followed a career in science – especially
Biology – had not the appeal of Philosophy been still stronger.

The greatest philosophers in the analytic tradition (Aristotle, for
example) aspired to the kind of wisdom that would enable them to put the
competing demands of all belief-systems into some sort of perspective
with a view to adjudicating between them. I shared their aspirations, and
during my subsequent career as an academic philosopher developed some
of the skills required for their achievement.

Science, I came to realize, doesn’t rule out the possible existence of
a supernatural world. It isn’t logically committed to metaphysical
naturalism. But it is committed to methodological naturalism, the view
that, in our attempts to understand how the world works, we should look
for naturalistic explanations rather than taking easy recourse to
supernatural ones. The successes of science in bridging the gaps that used
to be plugged by the gods creates a strong presumption in favour of the
idea that gods not only aren’t needed but don’t exist. It doesn’t prove, but
it does probabilify to a high degree, the truth of metaphysical naturalism.
And by the same token, it makes all supernatural beliefs highly
improbable.

In my own mind the battle over design had been fought and won. I
subsequently looked on in dismay as the intellectual troglodytes of
creationism – referred to as “Scientific Creationism” since the 60s – tried
to resuscitate their old arguments, singling out remaining gaps in our
understanding of biological phenomena as suitable places for inserting
the hand of God. Why pick on the unknowns of evolution, I wondered?
Why not invoke the almighty to explain what yet remained for science to
discover about the precise mechanisms behind the occurrence of
earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes? Or diseases, for that matter? The
Old Testament made God the direct cause of all such dread occurrences.
Yet Creationists were silent on the issue.

Over the years, I have increasingly come to appreciate the extent to
which science gives evolutionary theory credentials as good as any other
scientific theory. It rests on mutually supporting and interlocking
empirical evidence drawn from a host of sciences: not just natural history,
but cosmology, astronomy, physics, biochemistry, geology, plate
tectonics, palaeontology, population genetics, ecology, anthropology,
comparative anatomy, etc. Even Newton’s theory of gravitation and
Einstein’s theory of relativity can’t claim such a broad interdisciplinary
base.

Evolutionary theory itself doesn’t pretend to explain biogenesis,
how the first forms of life began. That is the province of other areas of
science: organic chemistry and molecular biology among them. So far as
I know scientists haven’t yet reached a consensus on which account will
stand the test of scientific scrutiny. But there’s no good reason to suppose
that present gaps in our understanding can’t be filled in future.

Fast forward to the 1990s, and the latest kind of talk about
intelligent design, sometimes referred to as “Intelligent Design Theory”
(as if it were on a par with the grand theories of science) but nowadays
more simply as “ID”.

Contrary to many critics, the new ID movement isn’t merely a
rehash of the earlier Scientific Creationism of Henry Morris and Duane
Gish. ID’s high priests – the likes of lawyer Philip Johnson, biochemist
Michael Behe, and philosopher William Dembski – have introduced new
elements into the old debate.

First, they have introduced an alleged criterion for determining just
which phenomena call most loudly for the agency of intelligence.
According to them the hand of an intelligent designer is needed to explain
what they call the “irreducible complexity” of some organisms – those
whose simpler parts, in their view, would not have had survival value and
hence could not have been put together by the mechanisms of evolution.
Alleged examples include biogenesis, the flagella of E. coli, and the
human immune system.

Second, the new ID “theory” has introduced – perhaps unwittingly –
the possibility of a third theistic position between that of theistic
antievolutionists who reject evolution in its entirety and theistic
evolutionists who accept it in its entirety.

Behe, for example, accepts the broad outline of evolutionary
theory. He accepts the idea “that all organisms share a common ancestor”,
for instance. But he insists that irreducible complexity can only be
explained by the intervention of an intelligent designer. Behe accepts
evolution so long as it is punctuated with acts of creation. His position
can be described as that of a theistic quasi-evolutionist.

The chattering classes seldom explore the details of Behe’s
position. What matters to them is that here we have a biochemist
proclaiming that no-one working in his discipline has managed to
understand how life works at the molecular level. The result of their
cumulative failure, Behe claims, “is a loud, clear, piercing cry of
‘Design’.” Continuing, he writes: “the result is so unambiguous and so
significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements of
the history of science.”

As for just who did the designing, Behe is deliberately vague. His
own candidate for that role is the God of evangelicals. But his highly
generalized talk of a “designer” leaves it open as to which particular god
or gods did the designing. Like his fellow ID proponents, he casts the net
of verbal entrapment wide enough to snare the sentiments of anyone who
merely thinks some “higher power” did it.

Little wonder that ID has beguiled many who should know better.

A case in point is that of Antony Flew, one of the icons of
twentieth century atheism, a fellow-philosopher and – along with me and
Richard Dawkins, Richard Leakey, and others – an Honorary Associate of
the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists.

To my dismay, Flew recently announced that he now believes in
some sort of God. Why? Mainly because the claims of ID had convinced
him that “It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about
constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing
organism.” His conclusion was that “intelligence must have been
involved.”

As for which intelligence did the designing, Flew has vacillated. He
has flirted with a number of different candidates, the gods of pantheists,
of deists, of theistic evolutionists, and of theistic quasi-evolutionists. He
has even given hints of believing in the God of theistic anti-evolutionists
by saying that the book of Genesis “might be scientifically accurate.”

It seemed to me that Flew had lost his bearings. So, as an old
acquaintance from the 1960s, I decided to tell him so. Hence my “Open
Letter to Professor Antony Flew” now available on the Secular Web and
about to be printed in the journal of the NZ Rationalists and Humanists.

I mailed Flew an advance copy of my Open Letter, together with a
covering note. I reminded him that famed Oxford philosopher Gilbert
Ryle had been mentor to both of us and that Ryle used to talk of
Philosophy as an exercise in “conceptual geography”, the exploration of
the “logical liaisons” of various concepts, doctrines and theories. I
therefore enclosed a copy of a logical map which I said “should enable
you to keep clearly in view the way I see the conceptual terrain into
which you have ventured (a terrain in which, I submit, you have lost your
way)”.

Click here for a PDF of the logical map.

CONCEPTS OF DESIGN AND THEIR LOGICAL LIAISONS

My map doesn’t tell you what positions on the terrain you should
choose as the habitation for your beliefs. But it does tell you, once you
have found your home, what you are committed to accepting and
rejecting as a matter of logic and probability theory.

Let’s begin with the position at the top left-hand corner of my map.

Labelled “Natural design” this represents the set of beliefs of those
who, like Richard Dawkins, believe that the natural world comprises all
that exists and that the laws of nature that describe its operations suffice,
by themselves, to design and produce all its complexities, from the first
living creatures to its most complex structures like the human brain.
Eighteenth century William Paley had argued that these could only have
been produced by a Great Watchmaker. Dawkins argues to the contrary,
that the laws of nature themselves – including those of evolution – have
worked by themselves to produce all the wonders of nature before which
we stand in awe. Nature is the designer: it is a “Blind Watchmaker” that
has no prevision of its final product.

Now let’s look at some of the logical liaisons between natural
design and other theories.

Note, first, that it is inconsistent (as shown by the crossed line)
with all versions of intelligent design, such as those described in the
rounded boxes to its right, plus a host of others that don’t usually feature
in the current debate so are not depicted here.

Note, too, that each of these different concepts of intelligent design
is a logical contrary of each of the others. Hence all could be false.

Obviously enough, belief in natural design implies (see the arrow)
belief in metaphysical naturalism, a world view whose ontology
comprises all and only the set of natural (physical/material) objects, their
simple and emergent properties and relations. Naturalism has no room,
for instance, for the idea that our minds could survive our bodily deaths.
To suppose the contrary would be to commit what I call the “Cheshire
Cat” fallacy, as depicted in Lewis Carroll’s story of the cat that faded
away until only its grin remained. As if a grin could have substantial
existence independent of the physical face of which it was a property!

Although naturalism is incompatible with belief in supernatural
gods it isn’t incompatible with a certain kind of “god”-talk, e.g., the so-called
“God” of pantheists such as the seventeenth century philosopher
Spinoza and latter-day physicists Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
They, however use the term in a semantically deviant way. For them God
is identical with nature. Thus, when asked whether he believed in God,
Hawking answered: “Yes, if by God is meant the embodiment of the laws
of the universe.” The kind of design that pantheists admit, and before
which they stand in awe, is precisely that of naturalist design. Hence,
pantheists are metaphysical naturalists.

Now let’s turn to Methodological Naturalism, i.e., the scientific
method of searching for natural causes. Philosopher of science, Karl
Popper, called it the process of conjecture and refutation. Likewise,
immunologist and Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar described it as “the
invention of a possible world, or of a tiny fraction of that world. The
conjecture is then exposed to criticism to find out whether that imagined
world is anything like the real one.”

Religionists frequently object to the fact that science restricts itself
to the search for natural causes only. Why, they ask, do scientists close
their minds to the possibility of supernatural ones?

There’s a very good reason. There are too many possible deities
whose agency can be invoked. Infinitely many, in fact. Just think of the
range of possibilities embraced within theism. Judaism, Christianity and
Islam are just the start of it. Each has its own sects and offshoots. And
more are in the making every day.

Mind you, there are infinitely many possible natural agents that can
also be imagined. So the difference doesn’t lie in mere numbers. It lies,
rather, in the fact that naturalistic explanations are answerable to the
tribunal of experience and that this tribunal eliminates any that don’t pass
its tests. Supernaturalistic hypotheses, by way of contrast, simply don’t
admit any evidence to count against them. But a hypothesis that’s
compatible with anything and everything that might occur can’t explain
why in fact this occurs rather than that. In order to be a candidate for scientific status, a hypothesis must be falsifiable. That is to say, it must be possibly false. Only then can the screening practices of science get rid of those hypotheses that are actually false, and thus bring us closer to the truth. There aren’t any such practices for the evaluation of
supernaturalistic beliefs.

Methodological naturalism has produced the whole panoply of
empirically established facts and theories that we now draw upon to
explain why the world works as it does. Supernaturalistic explanations
have fallen by the way. The graveyard of the gods isn’t yet full. But gone
are the deities of the ancient Egyptians, Vikings, Aztecs, and the like, all
of whom once played a role in filling the gaps in human understanding of
how nature works. Relatively few of those gaps are left. And filling them
with any surviving gods won’t help.

Like other scientific theories, evolutionary theory is falsifiable.
Likewise, with prototype biogenetic theories. Both would be shown false,
for example, if there were conclusive evidence of the universe having
been created, as Lord Kelvin thought, somewhere between 20 and 400
million years ago (about 98 million, he finally thought). For then there
would not have been enough time for nature to do its work.
That the universe has been in existence for probably 12-15 billion
years, and the earth for about 4.5 billion years is now well attested.
Hence the logical conflict between science and all those creation
myths, including those of Maori and Aborigine, which commit
themselves to more recent beginnings.

Consider the creation myth of Scientific Creationists. By adding up
all the “begats” in the Old Testament adherents of that myth calculate the
beginnings of the universe at 4,000 BC, and that of Noah’s Flood at about
2,400 BC.

What can they say when confronted by evidence of the age of the
cosmos and our planet? Or evidence that life began on earth over 4 billion
years ago, that dinosaurs became extinct some 63 million years ago, and
that fossils of our hominid ancestors have been shown by potassiumargon
dating to be well over 3 million years old?

They could, perhaps, say that all this evidence shows their beliefs
to be false, hence falsifiable, and that it therefore qualifies on this score at
least for the description “scientific”.

But, of course, they don’t say this. Rather, they tack on an ancillary
hypothesis that “saves” their story by making it unfalsifiable.
They adopt the ploy of nineteenth century Philip Gosse and say
that God created the universe with all this contrary evidence – all the
accoutrements of grand deception – built into it. They can then say that
God put the fossils, for example, in place so as to “test our faith”. It
seems not to bother them that this hypothesis makes God the perpetrator
of an enormous hoax as well. A great deceiver, not just a great designer.
Of course, a God who would play that sort of mind-game could also have
created the universe just two minutes ago, replete with all evidence to the
contrary including our pseudo-memories of having been alive well before
that. There’s no way to disprove that creation story either.

Passing from such absurdities, let’s move on to the kind of
intelligent design promoted by those I’ve called theistic quasievolutionists.

How scientific is it? Although scientists can literally see
complexity in the biological world, especially at the molecular level, they
can’t, even metaphorically, see the irreducibility of any complex organs
or organisms. Behe can’t produce empirical evidence of irreducibility. He
therefore argues for it using linguistic legislation. So you don’t know how
nature could have been assembled the parts of an organism exhibiting
complexity? Label the complexity “irreducible” and attribute it to an
intelligent designer.

His argument is a bad one, a form of the Argument from Ignorance
– a rehash of the “God of the Gaps” fallacy. Faith-based. Not evidence-based. In any case, the new ID “theory” doesn’t pinpoint the identity of the
supposed designer. It could perhaps, as Dembski admits, be a space alien.
Or, we might add, the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The vague postulate that
the designer is some intelligent being or other isn’t falsifiable. So ID
theory doesn’t even meet this requirement for scientific status.

This brings us the position of those I’ve called theistic
evolutionists. They don’t have a problem about accepting the findings of
science in general or of evolution in particular. And they don’t lay claim
to scientific status for the articles of their faith.

But their position is still fraught with problems, especially that of
competing revelations. Like all theists, they believe in an intelligent
designer who reveals himself in some sacred text or other. But which
text? The Bible? The Koran? The Book of Mormon? So many
alternatives. And the choice between them is usually settled by unchosen
circumstances of birth and upbringing.

And there’s another problem. Suppose you’ve settled on the text
favoured by most ID supporters: the Bible. Then, whether you’re a
biblical literalist or figurativist, you’re faced with a dilemma. Either God
doesn’t mean what he says in his texts, or he doesn’t know how to say
what he does mean. So either his word can’t be relied on, or he’s
linguistically incompetent. Neither quite fits with the theistic concept of a
perfect being.

Retreat from revelation, then, and opt for the simplest form of
intelligent design, that of the deists.

Two insurmountable problems remain.

If you think an intelligent designer designed the universe, then how
about the unsavoury aspects of his design? Disasters like earthquakes,
tsunamis, and hurricanes. Distress, devastation and death caused by
diseases like Alzheimer’s, cancer, and the ID theorists’ favourite: the E.
coli bacterium. If complexity of design demonstrates supreme
intelligence, then by the same token the “god-awful” nature of much of
that design demonstrates supremely malevolent intelligence. Is that the
concept of a designer that you want to subscribe to?

And finally, there remains the design dilemma I talked about
earlier. If you feel that rationality requires you to look for an explanation
of the universe in a realm beyond it, then you’ll have to find an
explanation of that other world as well. Or do you think you can stop just
one tier up? We know that the spatio-temporal world exists. Why not stop
there and accept it as a brute fact? Why postulate a creator and then –
refusing to set foot on the infinite regress of explanations – take his
existence, instead, as a brute fact? Isn’t it more comforting, as well as
more rational, to believe in design by impersonal forces of nature rather
than design by a personal deity who’s guilty of wanting it that way?

Raymond Bradley is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in New Zealand.

There are people who are very dear to you, a childhood friend for instance, that you’ll never see again in your life. You don’t know you are never going to see them again so that doesn’t hurt much, or doesn’t hurt at all. You think there’s always a chance of bumping into them someday even though that’s never going to happen. However, when you consciously know that you will never again see someone you love it’s different. That simple fact is like a great big wall. A wall that seems impossible to surmount.

My mother passed away a few weeks ago. Since then, some persons have tried to convince me that religion is the best way to jump that wall. That only religion can answer such ultimate questions as: “What’s beyond death?” or “What is the meaning of life?” It’s all about having faith, they say. The empirical method doesn’t work here. There’s only one little detail… in order to believe, you have to ignore some minor facts, such as evolution or the age of the universe and, most importantly, you have to stop asking such silly questions as why Adam and Eve had bellybuttons. Although it’s tempting, I’m afraid that my brain cannot be rewired like that. So, is there another way out? Can you get through this kind of pain without religion? I think you can, among other things because the idea that you can’t is based in several false assumptions.

The first is that your pain is directly linked to these fundamental questions. Do I really need to know what happens after life or what is its meaning in order to jump that wall? …In fact healing seems to come more from acceptance. As you gradually get used to the wall it slowly begins to crumble. And you don’t need to practice any faith for that. But acceptance is precisely the kind of thing that religion helps you achieve, they say. Maybe that’s true, but in order to achieve it you have to pretend that the wall is not really there or that it is in fact a door to another world. And I can’t do that.

Another false idea is that without religion everything is meaningless. “You need a faith to have a meaningful existence, to find out why you’re here, to feel hope… Without it you become a robot or a beast.” Apparently, you need to believe that you’re part of a master plan in order to feel important. But if I’m still going to die then am I not a disposable part of that plan? That doesn’t make me feel valuable at all. And going to heaven seems to me more like a consolation prize. You’re sent to a nice and quiet place to retire when you’re no longer useful in this world. In fact, heaven seems a lot like Florida. And I don’t want to go there. Never. So, I prefer to think that I’m here for no particular reason. In that way I can become the master of my own plan. If I make a difference in somebody else’s life then I can feel really valuable. And, by realizing what an improbable arrangement of matter I am I can truly appreciate how lucky I am to be alive. All that is meaningful and transcendent.

Another wrong assumption is that religion has the patent on meaning searching (if it does then I owe a lot of money to the Vatican and other faith monopolies). The quest for meaning is universal, a part of human nature. I don’t know, but it could be that it has its roots in the way our early ancestors learned to take advantage of their environment: What are things, plants and animals for? What is their use or function? Their value and meaning are directly linked to that. We appear to have evolved to see the world through these lenses. So if everything around me has a use or function and therefore a value and a meaning the obvious next question is: What is my own function in the world, my own value and meaning? You don’t need to have any religion to pose that questions or search for the answers.

In any case, I think that here the asking is more important than the answering. So the next false assumption of the religious view is that without answers you suffer, that uncertainty is always painful.

Science is generally the one that solves the puzzles and provides certainty. But in this particular area certainty appears to come from religion. So if you choose a faith you have answers. If you don’t you have only questions. Hence, believers argue, religion is the only path to mend the suffering that stems from a lack of answers. However, if uncertainty isn’t necessarily painful then nothing needs to be mended. In fact, the mere act of wondering feels like a pleasing and meaningful way to spend one’s life. Therefore, you can find purpose and meaning even if you don’t have answers to the ultimate questions. And ironically, by giving definite answers, religion is actually precluding people from wondering and from finding this kind of significant experience.

Thus, if you are the kind of person that needs something more than a Bible to believe in the answers that religion offers, then you’re saved from certainty. Doubt is an alternative way to jump the wall I’m talking about. That’s something that my mother taught me. A small example of why she made a big difference in so many lives and her existence was so meaningful.