Author: Ophelia Benson

David Shariatmadari is asking what is indoctrination and is it such a bad thing?

Of course, for many, the idea that anyone should spend their whole lives believing something wrong is bad. Those who are convinced of the truth of Christianity, whether they suffer or not, have been convinced of a lie, so the argument goes. But why single out religion? Lots of people believe lots of things that are probably wrong: they cleave to political and social hypotheses whose benefits are hotly contested, and sometimes impossible to test. Most of our working models of the world are based on a very fallible combination of imagination and experience, not scientific truth.

It’s not so much the spending one’s whole life believing something wrong, that I think is bad – it’s the being told things that there is no reason to believe, that I think is bad. That’s especially the case when the things are large and consequential and fundamentally arbitrary. It’s the lack of reasons more than the wrongness that I think is suspect.

Why? Why does it matter? Why do I think it matters? Because we need our ability to sort through beliefs, and detect which ones are likely to be false. We need to be able to reject unfounded truth claims. We need that for all sorts of reasons, both practical and intellectual. That means that early training in accepting reason-less truth claims delivered by authority is not useful. To the extent that indoctrination matches that description, it is not a good thing.

Well I had good luck with the travel: a big wind blew into California the night before I came down so it was crystal clear – the flyover of San Francisco was absolutely spectacular, and even the shuttle bus trip from San Jose to Monterey was beautiful. And the stars – !

The wind had died down but it was still very clear yesterday so I went to Point Lobos to take advantage of the weather while it lasted. I went to Sea Lion Point and Cypress Grove trail and then I went back on the North Shore trail, where I haven’t been before. It’s very up and down, so you keep arriving at places where you look down sheer rock faces to a cove far below with the surf thundering in. It’s very beautiful.

Hello. I haven’t disappeared – I spent most of today traveling and then a big chunk of it walking along a bit of the California coast in a strong wind and then another big chunk of it writing a piece for Comment is Free. Normal broadcasting will resume shortly.

Sad sad sad. Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy – see comment 12:

I buy Jonathan Dimbleby’s arguments:

First, even the editor agreed that printing the images were not central to the story anyway since the Yale Press was central to the story. So it’s not censorship. Printing them would be gratuitous.

Really. The images were not ‘central’ to the story because Yale Press was central to the story. Well what about Yale Press was central to the story? Its pretty blue eyes? Its taste in music? No; its withdrawal of illustrations from a book about a controversy about those illustrations. So in what sense were the illustrations not central to the story? Who decides what’s central? Since when is reporting supposed to stick to what is (by some very narrow definition) ‘central’ while stripping out everything that is (by some insanely broad definition) peripheral? Since when is the subject matter of a controversy not central to reporting on that controversy? How can it be ‘gratuitous’ to print something that is informative about the subject of the story? Would Sunny Hundal take that view of the matter if the subject were a strike or a debate in Parliament or a war? I doubt it, so why does he take it here? I don’t know.

Clive Davis:

The ultimate ethical tangle, or a simple case of selling out to intimidation? I never ran the images on my old blog because I always thought it was a case of stirring up controversy for its own sake. I also had major doubts about the motives of bloggers and activists who did use them. All in all, Dimbleby has made the right decision, but I can’t help wondering if he made it for the wrong reasons.

That’s it. He doesn’t say what he thinks the motives of those bloggers and activists were – he just throws a little stinkbomb of suspicion and then runs away. Tacky. Tacky tacky tacky.