Author: Ophelia Benson

I’m reading Frederick Crews’s Follies of the Wise, which is terrific; don’t miss it. I thought I would give you a bit that resonated strongly with me.

When I began distancing myself from Freudianism around 1970, it was because of a growing, and personally vexing, sense that psychoanalytic ‘knowledge’ is acquired and certified by fatally lax means. I realized at that juncture that my deepest loyalty was not to any particular doctrine but to empirical rationality itself – the ethos that characterizes not just science but every investigative discipline worthy of the name. Ever since then, I’ve been fascinated by irrationalist movements that make a strong appeal to educated people who ought to know better. [page 344]

Well. It may be obvious why that resonates with me. It’s a pretty succinct and eloquent statement of the point of B&W. First the fact that my deepest loyalty is not to any particular doctrine but to empirical rationality itself, and then the fascination with educated people who ought to know better (and who teach other people, so ought to be especially careful and responsible) playing with irrationalist movements and failing (often flatly and explicitly refusing) to give their deepest loyalty to empirical rationality itself. That’s B&W, in a nutshell.

That has prompted me to ponder a little the question of why my deepest loyalty is not to any particular doctrine but to empirical rationality itself. It’s perhaps a slightly strange way to assign one’s deepest loyalty – loyalty usually seems like the kind of thing that is owed to more passion-inspiring entities than empirical rationality. It usually seems like the kind of thing that goes with inspiring doctrines but not so much with methods of inquiry. And yet deepest loyalty is the right phrase; that does describe it; it’s cognitive but also emotional; the two are thorougly entwined. So the question is why is that? I’ve come up with one version of an answer; I might write a book around it; but I’m not sure I’ve completely explored the question. We’ll see.

Did you enjoy the Times article about the study that found – o wonder – that churchgoers are superstitious? Were you dumbfounded, gobsmacked, astonished, staggered, amazed, knocked for a loop – in short, were you surprised? I can’t say I was. What surprises me is that anyone thinks there’s a tension between the two. I know people do think that (there was that hilarious item a few months ago about some cardinal at the Vat complaining about that very thing – about people believing all sorts of bizarro superstitious nonsense) but it still surprises me that they do. It seems to me that they’re not quite thinking things through if they think that. They’re not asking themselves why it’s sensible to believe one superstitious thing and absurd to believe another. (I know, I know, I know – that helpful nag who likes to tell me I’m secular religious or similar without ever explaining what he means by that is, if he bothers to read this, triumphantly telling himself that I am riddled with superstitions but just don’t know it. Let the court so stipulate.) What exactly is the criterion by which they know superstition from superstition-free religion? Just that they’re – you know – different?

According to a study, nearly all churchgoers admit to practising superstitious behaviour such as crossing their fingers for luck, touching wood for protection or throwing spilt salt over their left shoulder…The Christian Church has always been highly antagonistic towards superstition, believing it to be irrational and linked to paganism. Through the Dark and Middle Ages, anyone suspected of using traditional charms to secure good or bad luck for themselves or others would usually be burnt at the stake or drowned. The victims were nearly always women.

I don’t think that’s accurate. I’m pretty sure it’s not. Gledhill seems to be conflating the witch trials in the 15th-17th centuries with the sanctions on using charms from the 4th century onwards. I really don’t think everyone suspected of using a good luck charm in that period was killed – there’d have been no one left. But never mind that; the real question is what ‘the Christian Church’ (the what?) means by ‘irrational’ and at exactly what place on the map it draws the line between the rational and the irrational.

The research was carried out by a team at the University of Wales, Bangor, led by Leslie Francis, Professor of Practical Theology and the country’s leading exponent of the sociology of religion…In the paper, to be published in the Journal of Implicit Religion, the authors say that the findings contradict the hypothesis that Christian teaching precludes superstitious beliefs.

Well…how could it? Unless you simply take the resurrection as not a superstitious belief – by defining it that way. But that would be a rather glaring bit of special pleading. So…how else is it done?

The Archive

The Interrogations Archive

I had one or two things in mind to talk about before I tottered over to the computer, but they done got swept out of my mind and displaced from the agenda by reading this review by Simon Blackburn of several books on truth one of which was a book on truth that I take a particular interest in, owing to my fondness for the fly-specked lightbulb on the cover. It’s a funny thing…I’ve noticed it before…and probably mentioned it before…it’s a funny thing, but the reviews of this book 1. keep rolling in and 2. keep being surprisingly favourable. Or not at all surprisingly, you may want to urge, battering down my native modesty and diffidence. But – well, they’re not just favourable, they’re – you know – surprisingly favourable. Surprising kind of meaning very as well as surprising.

Oh well – I won’t go on. I’d like to, but I won’t. You get my drift, I daresay. I really am surprised. It’s the old Groucho Marx joke – you know the one.

So anyway here’s what the professor of philosophy at Cambridge said about the lightbulb book:

Postmodernism is often billed as attacking truth and science. This is how it is presented in the valuable little book Why Truth Matters, by the editors of the sceptical website butterfliesandwheels.com, Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom. They mount a spirited counterattack, reminding us – in the way that Cambridge philosopher GE Moore was famous for doing – that if it comes to a battle for hearts and minds, basic convictions of common sense and science beat philosophical subtleties hands down. Where Brian King horrifies us with his liars, Benson and Stangroom reveal a parallel rogues’ gallery of social constructivists, who look at how individuals and groups participate in the creation of their own perceived reality. These “rogues” include the feminist Sandra Harding and the neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty, but the doyen must surely be the French philosopher of science Bruno Latour. Latour’s confusion of words and things led him to the precipice of denying that there could have been dinosaurs before the term was invented. Presumably a similar argument would show that nobody before Crick and Watson had DNA. Why Truth Matters is an excellent example of philosophy done well but also, and not coincidentally, made accessible and exciting. Truth matters, it tells us “not in a dull perfunctory dutiful sense, but in a real lived felt sense – ‘on the pulses’ as Keats put it”.

So you see what I mean. Surprising.