Author: Ophelia Benson

George Szirtes mentioned in a comment on that post Science and Religion that he has a blog, where he commented further on the subject we were discussing there. (It doesn’t have permalinks, so scroll down.) This subject interests me, and I agree with George on most of it. Especially some of it.

My contention is that the experience of listening to, say, Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion, strikes some people with the force of truth. It is not some verifiable truth about the existence or otherwise of God. The music doesn’t set itself out as proof of anything. The sense of truth arises because the music seems profoundly true to some element of human experience. In that sense – though not in the ‘grass is green’ verifiable sense – it is experientially true. Art without that notion of truth would indeed be airy-fairy.

Absolutely. Agree completely. Have no trouble whatever agreeing comepletely – am aware of no tension at all between that and my chronic suspicion of the truth-claims of religion – the factual truth-claims, the claims that there is a deity and that the deity is omnipotent and benevolent. I have zero problem being powerfully moved by powerful art – also by certain kinds of landscape, and the quality of the being moved seems to me to be pretty similar. (Eve Garrard has a terrific essay on the way we are transported by landscape and how mysterious that effect can be, in the current [just out] Philosophers’ Magazine.) My paradigm example is ‘Hamlet.’ To some extent I think I know why it moves us the way it does – I’ve dug into it somewhat obsessively, piling up mountains of notes, and I think I know some of how Shaksespeare did it; but only to some extent; for the rest, I just think it’s a kind of magic. Not literal magic, but something that isn’t really completely explicable. Or that is only explicable by saying it seems profoundly true to some element of human experience. Actually that is it, pretty much. Maybe it is explicable. The thing about ‘Hamlet’ is that it seems profoundly true to so many elements of human experience, all packed into three and a half hours – love, loss, regret, betrayal, doubt, loyalty, despair, irony, wit, lying, truth-telling – and an immense amount more. It’s not many plays that can do that. There’s something…exciting, exhilarating, a little alarming about digging into ‘Hamlet,’ because you keep feeling surprised. The more you dig the more you realize Shakespeare wove this web, the tightest most drawn-together web ever woven; that he laid all these little charges, that go off one after another, in every line – and you start to wonder, how the hell did he do that…

So I completely agree with George about that. It’s just that I don’t really think most religion belongs in the same category – because of the truth-claims about the deity. Religion without those truth claims is a whole different ball game, but that’s not what I’ve been talking about here all this time. And it’s not what Dawkins is talking about. (He says that, in one of the essays in A Devil’s Chaplain.)

That, I suspect, is hard for people of a stiffly rational temperament to understand. They look for some verifiable truth claim that they can refute. They think I am making a verifiable truth claim. No. What I am saying is that some truths, certain profound truths to experience, are not easily, if at all, verifiable.

But few if any rationalists that I know of would deny that. They don’t look for verifiable truth claims in everything. They do perhaps point out veiled truth claims that are lurking behind fluffy verbiage, like the kind we keep seeing in those soppy Guardian columns. But that fluffy verbiage is not the kind of thing George is talking about – so I think we don’t disagree all that much.

But we may disagree about the link between religion and uncertainty.

Uncertainty continues to exist: art and the religious instinct, I suggested, proceeded out of uncertainty. The uncertainty principle seems to me humane and ‘true’ in that it corresponds to our experience of life. It behoves even scientists and rationalists to be uncertain about that which they cannot know, because not everything is knowable by scientific method, only that which is verifiable / falsifiable.

But there again – they are. The scientists and rationalists I know are uncertain about that which they cannot know; it’s religious people who claim to know things they don’t and can’t know. And the religious instinct may have proceeded out of uncertainty – that seems quite plausible – but I’m not at all convinced most of it hung onto the uncertainty once it arrived at the religion. Some believers, true, will say that their beliefs are beliefs and that they know they’re not certain; but oh dear, what a lot of believers won’t say any such thing – and what a lot of them get indignant at people who don’t share their beliefs, which seems odd if they’re really uncertain about them.

Some brief notices. Daniel Dennett is going to be on Philosophy Talk on January 17 to discuss ‘Intelligent Design’.

Pharyngula has moved to here. Change your bookmarks!

David Luban has a terrific guestpost at Balkinization on what’s wrong (hint: everything) with an article in defense of broad executive power by Harvey Mansfield in the Weekly Standard.

The article is loaded with gravitas, and Mansfield obviously wants to sound deep. But the depth is all on the surface. Read with care, Mansfield’s arguments are profoundly silly.

There’s a lot of that about. People wanting to sound deep, and just being silly instead. A lesson for us all. (Except me, because I never want to sound deep. Rude, hostile, irritating, snide, but not deep.)

Let us now praise famous imams and representatives of various British Muslim organisations – every single one of them male, if I’m not mistaken. What a swell bunch – all two and twenty of them.

In light of the bizarre news that the Metropolitan Police is to “investigate” comments about homosexuality made by Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, we, the undersigned, Imams and representatives of various British Muslim organisations, affirm that Sir Iqbal’s views faithfully reflected mainstream Islamic teachings…The practice of homosexuality is regarded as being sinful in Islam.

Yes, and in other religions too, as Ratzinger keeps anxiously pointing out, in case we might confuse him with someone else. So what? Who cares what is regarded as sinful in Islam or any other religion?

Of course the Imams and reps are right that the police investigation is bizarre – but it comes a little oddly from them, frankly. Some of them at least.

All Britons, whether they are in favour of homosexuality or not, should be allowed to freely express their views in an atmosphere free of intimidation or bullying. We cannot claim to be a truly free and open society while we are trying to silence dissenting views.

Well, that sounds good, but let’s not forget that Iqbal Sacranie himself remarked that death was too good for Salman Rushdie. Because? Because he had freely expressed his views in a novel. After he did that, an atmosphere not free of intimidation and bullying sprang into being, thanks to Sacranie and others like him. Were they not energetically engaged in trying to silence dissenting views? Has Sacranie ever disavowed that activity? Not that I’m aware of. It was just recently that he expressed the wish that the religious hatred bill could silence dissenting views like Rushdie’s.

Nick Cohen and Evan Harris noted the same irony, or hypocrisy.

The most encouraging reaction to news that the police were investigating Sir Iqbal Sacranie’s foul comments about homosexuality came from gay and secular leaders. Instead of revelling in the discomfiture of the fundamentalist head of the Muslim Council of Britain, they quite properly said that they believed in freedom of speech and that included Sir Iqbal’s freedom to be prejudiced and foolish.

So we did. Okay, okay, I’m not a leader – but I did quite properly say.

As Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat MP, pointed out, the MCB has not returned the compliment. It’s all for freedom of speech when it comes to laying into gays. It also believes that the government has no right to ban the glorification of terrorism. When it comes to freedom of speech about religion, however, it’s a very different matter. At the height of The Satanic Verses affair in 1988, Sacranie said that ‘death was perhaps too easy’ for Salman Rushdie. This did not stop New Labour almost tripping over its feet as it rushed to embrace the MCB when it came to power in 1997. As well as knighting Sacranie, it responded to his lobbying by putting before parliament a law against incitement of religious hatred. In their attempts to keep this unelected homophobe in their big tent, New Labour is prepared to ignore its more liberal supporters – and the conclusively argued opposition of the House of Lords – and force the bill through.

So, we’ll all just have to keep on quite properly saying, over and over again. Monotonous but necessary.

I know it’s obvious, but this kind of thing gets on my nerves. I know it’s obvious, I know this is The Economist, but still.

When IBM announced an overhaul of its pension plan for employees in America last week, it joined a parade of employers that are shifting more responsibility for saving for retirement on to workers.

Shifting more responsibility. As if those slacker employees have been just flopping around expecting employers to spoon-feed them, because they’re such babies. As if pensions were not simply part of the agreed compensation package, like, you know, wages. If IBM announced an overhaul of its payment plan for employees, which consisted of reducing their salaries by 100%, would that be shifting more responsibility on to workers? Well, yes, that would be one thing to call it, but I can think of other things.

To the extent that this creates and encourages individual choice and responsibility, it is something to welcome rather than to fear.

Excuse me? I beg your pardon? A reduction in pay is something to welcome? A reduction in pay is something to welcome to the extent that it creates and encourages individual choice and responsibility? Is it? But if that’s true, why doesn’t everyone just decide to shift to a zero-pay system, thus creating maximum individual choice and responsibility? Starting with CEOs? They would welcome zero pay and zero pensions and zero stock options, surely – right? And so would people who write for The Economist?

And even leaving that aside, even ignoring the ludicrous and insulting equation of a pay-cut with an encouragement of frontier virtues, there’s another problem with this stupid kind of rhetoric. No matter how responsible one may be, if one works for low wages, one doesn’t necessarily have the spare money to do one’s own saving for retirement. And yes, even responsible people work for low wages; it happens. And since the entire economy depends on people who work for low wages, it’s hypocritical and shameless to blame those very people for working for low wages, and to ignore their existence when equating the absence of pensions with increased responsibility.

John Gray is often irritating, but this review in The Nation of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism is not too bad. It also hooks up with some things we’ve been talking about lately in the discussions on comprehensive liberalism v political liberalism.

In Appiah’s view cosmopolitanism has two intertwined strands: the idea that we have obligations to other human beings above and beyond those to whom we are related by ties of family, kinship or formal citizenship; and an attitude that values others not just as specimens of universal humanity but as having lives whose meaning is bound up with particular practices and beliefs that are often different from our own.

Hmm. One has to wonder exactly what that means (so one will have to read the book in order to find out, won’t one). I suppose what it means is – it’s not enough to value others just as specimens of universal humanity; in order to value them properly, that is, realistically, one has to acknowledge that they have practices and beliefs that are often different from our own and that matter to them. In other words one has to realize that there may be some difficulty in this process of valuing others. One has to make one’s valuing of other people not conditional on their agreeing with oneself in every particular. That seems to fit, and it’s also worth pointing out. But at the same time – depending on just how much one is expected to value others, and in just what way – such an attitude may be in strong tension with other desirable attitudes or commitments. Others may have lives whose meaning is bound up with accusing children of witchcraft and then torturing them, for instance. We can value those other in the sense of wanting to change their minds, and especially their practice, rather than wanting to torture them back – but we probably don’t simply want to value them and let it go at that. We don’t want to value them as they are, and let them go on doing what they’re doing. So our ‘valuing’ others may be more or less weak, depending on the circumstances.

That’s the same problem we talked about in Respect One and Respect Two. It’s a pre-emptive way of thinking – and as such, it may often be a much worse idea than the merely formal valuing of others as specimens of humanity. We can’t really sign up to a blanket promise to value everyone whose practices and beliefs are different from our own, sight unseen, no matter what the practices and beliefs are. It depends. It depends on just how cruel, unjust, exploitive, violent, arbitrary and the like, the practices are. And since it does depend, the pre-emption implicit in that idea seems to be pretty much ruled out. We can’t really accept that pre-emption, because if we do, we may find ourselves expected to value mass murderers, or slave-owners, or exorcists. The idea seems to be quite similar to political liberalism, and tricky for just the same kind of reasons.

As a position in ethical theory, cosmopolitanism is distinct from relativism and universalism. It affirms the possibility of mutual understanding between adherents to different moralities but without holding out the promise of any ultimate consensus. There are human universals that make species-wide communication possible – and yet these commonalities do not ground anything like a single universally valid morality or way of life. Clearly this is a position that carries within it a certain tension. The idea that we have universal moral obligations is not always easily reconciled with the practices and beliefs that give particular human lives their meaning. Appiah recognizes this tension, and writes: “There will be times when these two ideals – universal concern and respect for legitimate difference – clash. There’s a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge.”

Just so. Appiah recognizes the tension (not surprisingly). One thing Gray says in that passage strikes me though. ‘There are human universals that make species-wide communication possible.’ Well – no, actually. Not species-wide. Male of the species-wide, but not species-wide. Because one of those beliefs and practices that we don’t all agree on, and a very widespread one, is the practice of not allowing women to take part in communication with the rest of the species at all. There are whole immense cultures where species-wide communication is not remotely a goal – where in fact the very opposite is the goal: where half the humans who make up that species are permanently sequestered and incarcerated and forbidden to talk to male non-relatives ever at all. Species-wide communication is therefore impossible in such cultures; it’s not even an idea or a dream or a goal, it’s more of an abomination. So from that point of view, cosmopolitanism is also not a value there; it can’t be. How can women be cosmopolitan while confined to quarters? They can’t; it’s a contradiction. So unless one is thinking of male cosmopolitanism only – which would be a pretty parochial kind of cosmopolitianism – there is a disabling tension right at the beginning. Real cosmopolitanism seems out of reach until that changes.*

However, human life contains goods and evils that do not depend on our opinions. To be at risk of genocide or subject to torture is an evil for all human beings whatever their beliefs. These evils are not culture-relative, and protection from them is a species-wide good. Once we recognize this, we cannot avoid speaking of universal human values; but this is not the same as having a universal morality…Value-pluralism undercuts the claims of all universal moralities, including liberal morality. Like Berlin in some of his writings, Appiah seems to want to celebrate moral diversity and at the same time endorse the universality of liberal values. The result is that he is constantly pulling liberal rabbits out of cosmopolitan hats.

There you go. It’s just not always possible to celebrate moral diversity and endorse universalism. Sometimes it has to be one or the other but not both.

*Update. Harry points out in comments that I misread that sentence. He reads ‘There are human universals that make species-wide communication possible’ to mean ‘that human beings are alike in fundamental (genetic etc.) ways, and that this universal human nature is what makes species-wide communication possible’ and adds that this is a central pillar in our belief in human rights, and a corrective to postmodern denial of universals. I think his reading is the right one, which means I think mine is the wrong one. Never mind.