Author: Ophelia Benson

And speaking of fundamentalists v liberals, this piece by Stuart Jeffries is truly disgusting. It’s a whole new level beyond the usual mewling Guardian drivel about religion. It’s really contemptible.

Today, it’s the religious on one side, and the secular on the other. Britain is dividing into intolerant camps who revel in expressing contempt for each other’s most dearly held beliefs. “We are witnessing a social phenomenon that is about fundamentalism,” says Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark. “Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England.”

That’s a revolting, outrageous, immoral thing to say. Reading it, I keep wishing Colin Slee were in front of me – tied down, naturally, or else very small and weak – so that I could punch him.

“You have a triangle with fundamentalist secularists in one corner, fundamentalist faith people in another, and then the intelligent, thinking liberals of Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, baptism, methodism, other faiths – and, indeed, thinking atheists – in the other corner. ” says Slee.

Oh, right – it’s the Anglicans and Catholics and ‘other faiths’ who are intelligent and thinking, along with thinking atheists as an afterthought. Does Slee take himself to be an example of a thinking liberal? After that comment?

There’s a great deal of nonsense, then a resoundingly stupid conclusion.

What should such a public square be like?…[I]t could be based on respectful understanding of others’ most cherished beliefs, argues Spencer: “We should be more willing to treat other value systems as coherent, reasonable and even valuable rather than as primitive or grotesque mutations of liberal humanism to which every sane person adheres.” It is, at least, a hope…

But what about ‘other value systems’ that in fact are not coherent, reasonable, or valuable? Why should we be ‘more willing’ to treat them that way if that is not in fact the way they are? Why should we not be allowed to note that ‘cherished’ is one thing and ‘coherent, reasonable, and valuable’ are others, and that there is no necessary connection between them? Why are we being told to engage in some masquerade in which we pretend that every moth-eaten ridiculous ‘belief’ anyone has must be treated with respect as coherent, reasonable, and valuable? As if everyone were four years old and would cry boo-hoo if someone said ‘That’s crap’?

I leave it to your wisdom to determine.

Prospect’s Big Question is interesting in parts. The question is ‘Left and right defined the 20th century. What’s next?’ My answer of course is some version of reason and faith, or reason and supernaturalism, or open thinking and closed thinking, inquiry or dogmatism, revisability or certainty, fallibilism or authority. Thinking or obedience, you could call it; thinking or submission. Or you could call it liberalism or authoritarianism. Or, the Enlightenment or the Counter-enlightenment. You get the idea – and you’re certainly not surprised. What else would I say?

Human rights, is one thing I could say, but I take that to be subsumed under all the first terms. It’s all the second terms who say human rights are good except when they conflict with religious etc or traditional etc or national etc. That’s one big (huge) reason the second term is my sworn enemy – it’s because when there is a conflict or tension between the two, it chooses the dogma over the rights, the unchanging Word of Someone over changing ideas of which people it is okay to oppress.

But that’s only one reason, even though it’s a big one. The chief reason is simply the inherent value of the first term. The ability to think freely and question and doubt and change your mind is a human treasure, equivalent to the treasure of language itself. So I’m pleased to see that some of the thinkers who answered the question answered it in those terms.

Francis Wheen:

The new struggle is between the best of the Enlightenment legacy (rationalism, scientific empiricism, separation of church and state) on the one hand and, on the other, various forms of obscurantism and value-free relativism, often disguised as “anti-imperialism” or “anti-universalism” to give profoundly reactionary attitudes an alluringly radical veneer…What makes this battle so serious is the array of forces ganging up on the Enlightenment version of modernity—pre-modernists and postmodernists, new age progressives and Old Testament-style fundamentalists. They have little in common but the one big thing—their visceral hatred of reason.

Erik Tarloff: ‘My fear is that we are facing another round in the recurrent conflict between rationality and superstition (represented at the present time by religious fundamentalism).’ Philip Pullman: The struggle will continue to be what it has always been: wisdom against stupidity. In the 20th century the odds shortened greatly in favour of stupidity, because stupidity now has the means to destroy human civilisation entirely.’ Joe Boyd [he’s a music producer]: ‘The big divide in the coming decades will be between the “reality-based community” and the “ideologically-based community.”’ Julian Baggini: ‘The new conflict is between liberal universalism and a communitarianism which asserts the need for cultures to maintain their own values and traditions.’

Todd Gitlin’s version is a bit different, and interesting:

The coming cleavage is between zealots and realists. Zealots think the world will yield to their strenuous, righteous will. These include Islamists, utopian free traders, neoconservatives, purists of all stripes. Realists think that you work with the world you have, not the world you wish you had.

That’s different because it’s possible to be a rational zealot and a zealous realist – in fact I would claim that it’s possible to mix zeal and realism. But it is an interesting dichotomy, anyway.

Susan Greenberg:

We all made fun of Donald Rumsfeld’s “known knowns” and “unknowns.” But it is a useful analytical framework. And the main faultline of the future will be between those who recognise when they don’t know something, and those who cannot or will not.

I didn’t make fun of it; Rumsfeld was quite right, and it’s an important point. It is indeed a useful analytical framework – it annoyed me that so many people did make fun of it – because that’s just symptomatic of the fact that a lot of people not only don’t recognise when they don’t know something, they don’t even recognise that that’s a problem. Hence the world is full of stupidity, as Pullman points out. One of the very first steps on the path of doing what you can to avoid stupidity is knowing that you don’t always know you don’t know and that that is indeed a problem. (In fact Julian’s second blog post on TPM’s spanking new blog is about universal human stupidity; it’s titled ‘I’m stupid, and so are you.’)

Two more. Nicholas Humphrey:

How can anyone doubt that the faultline is going to be religion? On one side there will be those who continue to appeal for their political and moral values to what they understand to be God’s will. On the other there will be the atheists, agnostics and scientific materialists, who see human lives as being under human control, subject only to the relatively negotiable constraints of our evolved psychology.

Will Hutton:

The key argument in the decades ahead will be between moral fundamentalists, animated by faith or nationalism or some combination of both, and Enlightenment liberals.

Between fundamentalists and liberals; which has the advantage that some religious believers belong and/or would place themselves on the liberal side.

I was thinking earlier today about religion as a meme, and the familiar point that (as Steven Weinberg summarizes it in the TLS) ‘the persistence of belief in a particular religion is naturally aided if that religion teaches that God punishes disbelief.’ I was thinking about the fact that what that means is that religions that do teach that are a racket, in a quite literal sense. A racket, and also circular. ‘Believe in this god because it will punish you if you don’t.’ ‘But why should I believe that?’ ‘Because it will punish you if you don’t.’ ‘Yes but why should I believe that it’s this god that will punish me, what if it’s actually a different one that will punish me for believing this one?’ ‘Because this one will punish you if you believe that.’ And so on. That’s one of the problems with Pascal’s flutter, of course. So anyway, it’s circular, and a racket. And it’s a very nasty racket at that – one of the nastiest that could be imagined.

Why? Because it systematically and deliberately disables one of the core human abilities: flexibility: the ability to change our minds.

That really is horrible, you know. I don’t think we appreciate how horrible it is, because we’re so used to it. But it is very horrible. Look, it’s a privilege being human. We get to have long-term memory, and we get to have language so that we can extend our memories by exchanging them and discussing them with other people, and we get to extend them further and make them more reliable by recording them in various ways. Think of that. Even the cleverest of other animals can’t tell each other what their ancestors did; they know nothing at all about anything that happened outside their own memory and observation. It’s a privilege having such complicated minds, and flexibility is one of the luxury appointments of those minds. The ability to change them is a fantastic thing, and religion’s short-circuiting of that ability is an appalling way of proceeding. We’re so used to it we take it for granted, we don’t notice the horror of it, but really it is a bad thing.

It’s one of the best things about us, the ability to change our minds, and it makes possible many other best things about us – the ability to learn, for a start. Imagine disabling people’s ability to learn. Terrible business.

Dawkins touches on this in an interview at Alternet, in reply to the observation that ‘People finally say, “What’s it to you? Why not be an atheist if that’s what works for you, and leave the rest of us to be as religious as we wish?” This, I believe, is offered as a challenge to your open-mindedness or your respect for others. You’re being called “an atheist fundamentalist.”

“Fundamentalist” usually means, “goes by the book.” And so, a religious fundamentalist goes back to the fundamentals of The Bible or The Koran and says, “nothing can change.” Of course, that’s not the case with any scientist, and certainly not with me. So, I’m not a fundamentalist in that sense.

Nothing can change, you see. What a horror. What a nightmare that idea is. Those poor deprived people. It’s heart-rending.

An interesting point about expertise and epistemology and how they interact in courtrooms.

The evolving science that surrounds DNA, for example, demands caution and careful interpretation, while the criminal law and our adversarial system expects a simple explanation – often nothing better than a “yes” or “no” answer. So the hired expert who presents his data with certainty and determination is more likely to win over a jury than the more hesitant doctor, scientist or expert who is prepared to acknowledge doubt. That’s why Gene Morrison was able to bamboozle the courts for as long as he did – not because he had a fake PhD (after all, even TV diet experts have those), but because he presented what he had to say with certainty and conviction and the scrutiny of the science behind what he said was never robustly questioned either by the defence or by the prosecution.

Beware of certainty; be especially ware of people who make claims with certainty; be triply ware of people who make claims with certainty in areas where certainty is not possible.

This is unpleasant stuff. Unsurprising, but unpleasant. A statement by the Cambridge Muslim Welfare Society about that business at Clare College.

With sorrow and anger the Mosque notes the publication, in the student newsletter Clareification, of material which deliberately insults the honour of the Blessed Prophet Muhammad (s.w.s.). Mindful of its duty before Almighty Allah and before humanity to defend the honour and good name of the Final Prophet, the Mosque condemns this provocation in the strongest terms.

Its duty? To tell everyone in the entire world that it is forbidden to ‘insult’ the honour of the Blessed Prophet Muhammad (s.w.s.)? To impose the taboos and rules of one religion on everyone everywhere, despite the impossibility and unreasonability of expecting everyone to share that view of the BPM? To worry more about the ‘honour’ of someone who died in the 7th century than about – pretty much anything else? That’s its duty?

We hope and trust…that the students will offer a full and unconditional apology for their irresponsible action. The University’s record of freedom of expression is a matter of record and of pride. However it is clear that incitement to religious and ethnic hatred is at all times immoral, and that its consequences for harmony between communities and nations can be grave. It is particularly important that the boundary between fair comment and hate speech be respected and understood at the present time…

Is insulting the honour of the BPM ‘incitement to religious and ethnic hatred’? Is the boundary between ‘fair comment and hate speech’ so well demarcated that it is self-evident where it is? Is it up to Mosques to decide? Is that worry about harmony between communities a threat? A lot of questions here. But it makes me nervous when religious people think they get to tell everyone what to do.