Author: Ophelia Benson

Stephen Law said the same things (as Anthony Grayling said, and as I said about that survey) back in June. They’re not very startling things to say, in fact they’re the good old bleeding obvious, but they’re not very fashionable at the moment, and they tend to get lost in all the droning about faith this and faith that.

“The liberal approach,” he says, “is entirely consistent with drilling and the instilling of good habits.” Indeed, thinking critically, challenging political or religious orthodoxies, is a highly disciplined intellectual activity…Many secular parents try to get their children into faith schools because they believe the discipline and order is better in a Christian environment. Law argues that this is a fallacy. In fact, many faith schools flourish by being selective. The authoritarian intellectual climate leaves children bereft of the intellectual and emotional skills necessary to deal with the modern world.

See that’s the problem. Even if it’s true that religious schools do better at discipline and order, that’s discipline and order bought at a very high price. If, for instance, that ‘discipline and order’ is achieved partly or wholly by means of intellectual authoritarianism, well, then it’s a case of getting the tools in order and then calling the job done. ‘Discipline and order’ in school aren’t the actual goal of education, they’re only a tool for the purpose of education. If discipline and order were the goal, it would be simpler just to gag the students and put them in irons for the day and let it go at that. The goal is education, including the use of a flexible mind. A mind that has been trained to accept assertions delivered by authorities as a matter of faith is not a flexible or a useful mind.

On one level, Law’s objective is simple – to insist on the value of clear and rational thinking. He says schools need to “teach young people to question underlying assumptions, diagnose faulty reasoning, weigh up evidence, listen to other people’s points of view”. It all sounds uncontroversial. But Law is convinced that basic Enlightenment values are under serious threat from the new authoritarians of New Labour and America’s Republican right. Blair’s faith schools, and conservative educationalists, are taking us back to the bad old days when children were told to take things on trust and never question authority…Law is profoundly opposed to moral relativism, and gets annoyed when people see it as synonymous with liberalism or a by-product of liberal modes of thought. One of his objectives is to “slay the dragon of relativism”. It’s not true, Law argues, that liberals regard all beliefs as equally valid . The disciplines of critical thought, the values of rational scientific inquiry, are non-negotiable elements in the true liberal world-view. They don’t just “believe in everything and nothing”. They believe only in what is reasonable.

Well, not in practice, probably, but in principle. Anyway the point is clear enough. Authority and faith and no questions, no good; critical thought and inquiry and questions, good. Don’t take my word for it: inquire.

Sarah Baxter makes some pointed comments.

The peace movement lost a foe in Reagan but has gone on to find new friends in today’s Stop the War movement. Women pushing their children in buggies bearing the familiar symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marched last weekend alongside banners proclaiming “We are all Hezbollah now” and Muslim extremists chanting “Oh Jew, the army of Muhammad will return.” For Linda Grant, the novelist, who says that “feminism” is the one “ism” she has not given up on, it was a shocking sight: “What you’re seeing is an alliance of what used to be the far left with various Muslim groups and that poses real problems. Saturday’s march was not a peace march in the way that the Ban the Bomb marches were. Seeing young and old white women holding Hezbollah placards showed that it’s a very different anti-war movement to Greenham. Part of it feels the wrong side is winning.”

Baxter feels the same way:

As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic. Nor would I have predicted that today’s feminists would be so indulgent towards Iran, a theocratic nation where it is an act of resistance to show an inch or two of female hair beneath the veil and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not joking about his murderous intentions towards Israel and the Jews.

No, nor would I. This is not the revolution I signed up for.

But where is the parallel, equally vital debate about how to combat Islamic fundamentalism? And why don’t more peace-loving feminists regard it as a threat? Kira Cochrane, 29, is the new editor of The Guardian women’s page, the bible of the Greenham years, where so many women writers made their names by staking out positions on the peace movement. She has noticed that today’s feminists are inclined to keep quiet about the march of radical Islam. “There’s a great fear of tackling the subject because of cultural relativism. People are scared of being called racist,” Cochrane observes.

Racist or cultural imperialist or colonialist or Eurocentric or hegemonic or microfascist or postpositivist or Orientalist or universalist or naïvely pro-Enlightenment or many more items – the vocabulary of guilt-tripping is quite extensive, and quite effective.

I prefer to take Islamic fundamentalists at their word when they spout insults about Jews being the descendants of “pigs and apes” and launch their chillingly apocalyptic tirades. Why? Because they not only talk centuries-old nonsense about the place of women in society, but they also purposely oppress the female sex whenever they are given the chance. As regards their treatment of women, there is no discernible difference between their acts and their words…The Middle East is engaged in a titanic struggle between modernity and theocracy. Whatever one’s views about the Iraq war or the conflict in Lebanon, it deserves more than slogans about “We are all Hezbollah now” and fury against Bush and Blair.

They may be Hezbollah now, but I ain’t.

The Indy tells us in a sub-head that ‘This year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe is taking place in a climate of heightened inter-faith sensitivity.’ What a revolting phrase, and what a revolting climate. What a revolting euphemism for a form of thought-control by guilt-trip.

But there are comedians there resisting the sensitivity thing. Go, comedians.

As so often, the bravest, smartest critic of Islamic fundamentalism in town is a woman the fundamentalists would love to claim as “one of ours” and enslave. Last year it was Shazia Mirza; this year it’s Shappi Khorsandi…Shappi is one of the millions of children of the Islamic revolution who – in the face of the Iranian mullahs’ theocratic repression – have become the most articulate, committed atheists in the world…While she is sympathetic to Muslims suffering from stupid social prejudice…she has lashings of righteous contempt for fundamentalists like “that 14-year-old girl who went to the High Court to fight for her right to go to school wearing her sleeping bag”.

Johann (for it is he, seeing the shows and telling us about them) ends on a cautious note: ‘But can the strain of witty atheism on offer on the Edinburgh Fringe ever douse the great fire of religion currently consuming whole continents? I hope – but certainly don’t pray – so.’

Someone read (some of) Why Truth Matters about a month ago. Found it a bit of a drag in places, apparently.

…and now Why Truth Matters, a real headache-maker. There were some times I wondered “why am I reading this?” Passages like this one tended to blur the eyes and crease the forehead: “Although Montaigne might have found the Pyrrhonist epoche a satisfactory response to the problem of the missing criterion of truth, Rene Descartes did not. In Discourse on Method, he tells how in his youth he had been haunted by the spectre of uncertainty…”

Well…we did our best, that’s all I can say. Sometimes a little forehead-creasing is worth it. (Other times, of course, as in the case of Foucauldian nurses, it’s not.) And he apparently ended up liking it anyway, despite the eye-blurring.

‘Fascinating. A good book to get your brain thoroughly awake, and looking at the world you find yourself in. Not bedtime reading!’

Well good! Fascinating and brain-awakening and world-examining-getting; that’s my idea of high praise for a book.

Anthony Grayling talks about pretty much the same thing, also taking off from the survey that found all those creationists and IDers.

…a significant proportion of university entrants today are…less literate, less numerate, less broadly knowledgeable, and less reflective. At the same time education has been infected by post-modern relativism and the less desirable effects of “political correctness”, whose combined effect is to encourage teachers to accept, and even promote as valid alternatives, the various superstitions and antique belief-systems constituting the multiplicity of different and generally competing religions represented in our multicultural society…The key to the weakening of intellectual rigour that all this represents is that enquiry is no longer premised on the requirement that belief must be proportional to carefully gathered and assessed evidence. The fact that “faith” is enough to legitimate anything from superstition to mass murder is not one whit troubling to “people of faith” themselves…

Because they take faith to be a virtue. They take the ability to maintain one’s ‘faith’ and ‘beliefs’ in spite of conflicting evidence to be a sign of strength, and laudable strength at that. And that’s your problem right there – it gets you crap thinking. Thinking that makes a virtue of ignoring evidence is crap thinking.

“With faith anything goes”: here is why the claim that the resurgence of non-rational superstitious belief is a danger to the world. Fundamentalism in all the major religions (and some are fundamentalist by nature) can be and too often is politically infantilising, and in its typical radicalised forms provides utter certainty of being in the right, immunises against tolerance and pluralism, justifies the most atrocious behaviour to the apostate and the infidel, is blind to the appeals of justice let alone mercy or reason, and is intrinsically fascistic and monolithic.

It’s hard to argue right now that fundamentalism is not dangerous. So I won’t bother trying.

More regrettable still, though, is the fact that the civilised quarters of the world are not taking seriously the connection between the world’s current problems and failure to uphold intellectual rigour in education, and not demanding that religious belief be a private and personal matter for indulgence only in the home…As part of the strategy for countering the pernicious effects that faith and dogma can produce, we need to return religious commitment to the private sphere, stop the folly of promoting superstitions and religious segregation in education, demand that standards of intellectual rigour be upheld at all educational levels, and find major ways of reversing the current trend of falling enrolment in science courses. The alternative is a return to the Dark Ages, the tips of whose shadows are coldly falling upon us even now.

Well, that’s what I think. But I don’t have much faith it’s going to happen any time soon.

Not surprisingly, with all the faith-based whatnot everywhere, more than 30% of students in the UK believe in creationism or ‘intelligent design’. Wait, they can explain.

Chris Parker…believes God made the world…[U]ltimately, it is because: “As a Christian, I have believed in it for a long time and I have no reason to doubt it.”

Well, that of course depends on what you mean by ‘reason to doubt it.’ But that’s just it, isn’t it. ‘No reason to doubt it’ often means just no inclination to doubt it, no motivation to doubt it, no desire to doubt it, no intention of doubting it. In short, it doesn’t mean anything epistemic, it refers to desire and will and motivation, which is another matter. Faith-based people tend to think that desire and motivation trump epistemic issues, so that what one believes really has nothing to do with evidence; evidence is beside the point; evidence is supremely and thoroughly irrelevant; what is relevant is what one has believed for a long time and wants to go on believing. This is understandable on an emotional level, but it makes for crap thinking, and crap thinking, as we keep being reminded, is dangerous.

Kim Nicholas…agrees. “I have grown up in a family that goes to church and I have become a Christian,” she says…”If you have faith in God you can believe he has done it, whether there is evidence or not.”

Yes, you can. You shouldn’t (cognitively speaking), but you can.

Annie Nawaz…distinguishes between scientific and “natural” evidence written in stone in the holy books. “As a practising Muslim, the holy Qur’an – that’s our proper evidence,” she says. It does bother her when this conflicts with other kinds of evidence, but “it just comes down to the way you have been brought up and your beliefs and values and how strong they are”.

It comes down to whether or not your beliefs and values are strong enough to allow you to ignore the evidence that conflicts with your beliefs, and opt to believe blindly in a holy book. Some people consider that kind of strength a virtue and a gift; others consider it a vice and a plague.