Author: Ophelia Benson

The Herald on Dawkins on religion on channel 4.

This new two-part documentary, which begins on Channel 4 tomorrow, asserts that there is no safe or defensible middle ground between science and religion, its thesis being that even the moderate followers of Islam, Judaism and Christianity are deluded, defective and potentially dangerous…It is in this capacity that Dawkins travels to various theological flashpoints…challenging a full range of beliefs and their advocates. And for an ambassador, he is not particularly diplomatic. The programme takes its cue from a statement Dawkins made immediately after September 11, 2001: “[Religion is] lethally dangerous nonsense. Let’s now stop being so damned respectful!”

Well, we’ve tried diplomacy, and what has it gotten us? Only more and louder demands. Only an ever-stronger and more entrenched sense of entitlement, to an infinite quantity of respect. So the hell with it.

While Pastor Haggard, for example, may have a point when he counter-accuses Dawkins of “intellectual arrogance” on camera, he does himself no favours by later throwing the film crew out of his Christian-industrial mega-compound.

I don’t think Pastor Haggard does have a point, as a matter of fact. I heard the soundtrack from that particular bit on Saturday Review, and it seems to me Pastor H was the arrogant one. He made a silly pronouncement about evolution – about the eye or the ear evolving ‘by accident’ – which showed he had no understanding of what he was pronouncing about. Dawkins said as much – and Haggard called him arrogant. Well how silly! How completely inane! Yet again – this kind of thing doesn’t fly in other areas, and we know it doesn’t, but as soon as people clutching prayer books turn up, all the rules change. We don’t wander into operating rooms and tell neurosurgeons that it’s really hard to believe they’re going to be able to repair the aneurism that way. We don’t stroll into the pharmacological factory and start querying the recipes. So why does Pastor Haggard think a zoologist is being ‘arrogant’ in telling him he doesn’t understand evolution? Which of them is more likely to know something of the subject? But Pastor H is a godbotherer, so it’s ‘arrogant’ to tell him he’s clueless and confused and ignorant.

Producer Alan Clements will accept credit for the original “uneasy and timely idea” of making a documentary about the apparent “rise of faith and retreat of reason in modern society”. He stands by the finished product 100%. “I think these are important films,” says Clements, “and programmes like this need to be made and watched.”…This is, then, for better or worse, a programme that lets Dawkins be Dawkins. His views, already well known, are expressed here with often electrifying clarity. He deconstructs such “fairy stories” as the assumption of the Virgin Mary with witty, angry and rigorous academic passion.

Isn’t a little clarity on this subject a welcome relief? We hear more than enough mumbling about deep piety and devout faith and pious depth and faithful devoutness – isn’t a little of the other thing useful for clearing our heads?

Dawkins describes all religious faith as “a process of non-thinking”…What, though, does he actually hope to achieve with these programmes, in this country? He must know that audiences will respond according to the polarities of their own faith or lack of it. True believers will be affronted, while the typical, liberal Channel 4 viewer will have their non-belief validated.

No, I don’t think you know that. I don’t think anyone does, or can. It’s likely that many people will be in one of those two categories, but no one knows how many people will think about what is being said, perhaps for the first time in their lives. We do sometimes change our minds about things, we do sometimes listen and hear, we do sometimes take in new ideas and new evidence, we do sometimes see things in a new light. It’s not useful to write that possibility off in advance. One never knows.

“But I think a fairly substantial number of people haven’t really given it a lot of thought, and only vaguely think of themselves as Christian. This programme just might open some eyes to the fact that you don’t have to believe this stuff, that it’s OK to be an atheist. It’s a bit like being gay 30 years ago, when it was necessary to consciously come out of the closet. I’m hoping that I may sway people in that middle category, who might be shaken into thinking about it.”

Just so. It’s not possible to tell what eyes will be opened. (Consider the massive impact Carl Sagan had with ‘Cosmos’. These things happen.)

Television, like the society from which it broadcasts, has found it expedient to display ever greater tolerance, indulgence and relativism in regard to lifestyle choices, particularly matters of faith. For this reason, Dawkins’s eminently reasonable argument may come across as almost radical in its forcefulness. “Yes it will,” he says. “Because you’re simply not allowed to attack someone’s religion. You can attack their politics or their football team, but not their faith. I think it’s very important that this should be seen as complete nonsense. Why shouldn’t people be required to defend their religion?…I think moderate religion makes the world safe for extremists, because children are trained from the cradle to think faith in itself is a good thing. So then when someone says it’s part of their faith to kill people, their actions need no further justification, and are almost respected as such.”

Exactly. We’re constantly bombarded with that silly idea that faith in itself is a good thing. How can we resist except by resisting?

There are some oddities in this piece on books about how to read Derrida and Marx.

The assumption of Granta’s How to Read series is that readers will go on to read at least some of the works discussed. Including this author in a series of this sort, aimed at a “general reader”, invites an interesting question: should one read Derrida? Is his work important, something with which any intelligent person should be familiar? In the grand scheme of things, perhaps not, but the question is complicated. What might it mean to say that an author is important, not just in a particular field, but for society as a whole?

What, indeed? Surely it’s fairly obvious that one has to figure that out in order to offer a reasonable answer to such a question. Isn’t it? Isn’t a question like ‘is Derrida’s work important?’ one that pretty much demands consideration of what is meant by ‘important’? Doesn’t one have to start by saying ‘Well what are we talking about here? Important to whom? Important for what purpose? Who wants to know?’ Words like ‘important’ are pretty obviously contextual rather than self-evident, aren’t they? Or am I confused.

In How to Read Derrida, Penelope Deutscher, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University in the United States, explains that deconstruction, the idea most closely associated with Derrida, is a way of reading that focuses on hidden contradictions, “deconstructing” the text, and often confounding the intentions of the author. This applies to radical and alternative ideas as well as established ones…To suggest that people should read Derrida, then, is to warn against simplistic or one-sided ideologies, and insist that “things are more complicated than that”.

Okay, but – is Derrida the only writer that’s true of? Are there other people who fit into the sentence ‘to suggest that people should read [__], then, is to warn against simplistic or one-sided ideologies, and insist that “things are more complicated than that”‘? Is Derrida the only writer who has ever warned against simplistic or one-sided ideologies, or pointed out that things are more complicated than that? If he’s not (and I’m hinting that I think he’s not), then is it quite true to say that to suggest that people should read Derrida, then, is to warn against simplistic or one-sided ideologies, and insist that “things are more complicated than that”? If someone – say, Derrida – is only one of many people who have said X, then is it clear that a suggestion that one should read Derrida is a suggestion that X? I’m not sure it is.

But, whatever satisfaction we may derive from Marxism’s power to explain, if Marx’s work is merely another text to be read it loses much of what he intended. For theory to “grip the masses”, as Marx put it, there has to be at least the foundation of a mass movement for it to address. Without such a movement, theory lacks direction, discipline even. Consequently, the obscurity of contemporary philosophy as exemplified by Derrida and his followers is not a purely intellectual phenomenon. Disconnected from political engagement, reading lacks urgency, and how we read, and what, becomes almost arbitrary.

Wait – what? Disconnected from political engagement, reading lacks urgency? It does? Not at my house it doesn’t! Not unless ‘political engagement’ is interpreted almost insanely broadly. Disconnected from engagement of any kind, one might say, reading lacks urgency, but then that’s pretty much a tautology – and there are more kinds of engagement than the political. Lots more. So – I beg to differ.

And there’s always dear Madeleine Bunting. How fondly I look back on her musings about how much happier ‘African’ lives are than those in the creepy dreary alienated consumerist West. How the people in the Democratic Republic of Congo must have chuckled if any of them were in a position – what with being so busy starving and being ill and dying and all – to find a Guardian and read her essay.

Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo is killing 38,000 people each month, says the Lancet medical journal. Most of the deaths are not caused by violence but by malnutrition and preventable diseases after the collapse of health services, the study said. Since the war began in 1998, some 4m people have died, making it the world’s most deadly war since 1945, it said.

Yes but at least they’re not all trivial and consumerist, and that’s what counts. Anyway, she has a stupid piece on religion and ‘atheism’ (her version), taking off from Richard Dawkins’s Channel 4 show on religion as the root of all evil. I haven’t seen the show, so can’t (and won’t! not if it was ever so) comment on Bunting’s take on that. But that still leaves lots to comment on.

His voice is one of the loudest in an increasingly shrill chorus of atheist humanists; something has got them badly rattled…Behind unsubstantiated assertions, sweeping generalisations and random anecdotal evidence, there’s the unmistakable whiff of panic; they fear religion is on the march again.

Well gee, why would we think that, do you suppose? Are we all crazy and delusional and dribbling with paranoia? How could anyone possibly fear that religion is on the march again right now, and how could anyone object if it were?

That lack of empathy also lies behind Dawkins’s reference to a “process of non-thinking called faith”. For thousands of years, religious belief has been accompanied by thought and intellectual discovery, whether Islamic astronomy or the Renaissance. But his contempt is so profound that he can’t be bothered to even find out (in an interview he dismissed Christian theology in exactly these terms).

Yes but the fact that religious belief has been accompanied by thought and intellectual discovery (Bunting accidentally put that well) doesn’t mean that religious belief was useful or helpful or (certainly) causative of that thought and intellectual discovery, it just means it was there at the same time. It could be a correlation rather than a cause. So the fact that the two ways of thinking were sometimes in the same room doesn’t in the least contradict what Dawkins said. And after all, he’s right – ‘faith’ is by definition a process of non-thinking. That’s what the word means. Religious believers will say as much when their guard is down – that faith is not about believing things that are supported by evidence, anyone can do that; faith is about believing without evidence. In other words, non-thinking.

It’s also right for religion to concede ground to science to explain natural processes; but at the same time, science has to concede that despite its huge advances it still cannot answer questions about the nature of the universe – such as whether we are freak chances of evolution in an indifferent cosmos (Dawkins does finally acknowledge this point in the programmes).

Boy I get sick of that trope. It’s not clear that science can’t at least offer a plausible answer to that particular question, and in any case, religion can’t answer it any more than science or anything else can – and probably less. It can’t ‘answer’ such questions because all it does is say what it wants to say, and let it go at that. Excuse me, but that’s not an answer. Religion doesn’t have to check its answers against anything, it doesn’t have to have them peer-reviewed, it doesn’t have to do the maths, it doesn’t have to present them to audiences of restless ambitious rivals eager to show them wrong. It just says. That’s not an answer, that doesn’t count. Whenever people say that, with such an air of bovine triumph, we have some serious non-thinking going on. Because what they mean when they say ‘science can’t and religion can’ is that science can’t because it does have to check, it does have to meet certain criteria, and religion can because it doesn’t – because it doesn’t have to do anything at all other than run off at the mouth. Science ‘can’t’ because reality provides constraints and limitations and requires work, religion ‘can’ because fantasy doesn’t do any of that. So what is so impressive about this ridiculous idea that religion can answer all these deep questions?

Nothing. It’s an imbecilic line of argument, it’s sheer naked emperor. Must try harder, Madders.

The Economist tells us that racism and resentment haven’t gone away, they’ve just gotten more complex. Oh good. Old-fashioned white-on-black racism is old hat; now the happening thing is Caribbean children resenting Somali children and Sikhs resenting Muslims. So much more diverse and multiculti that way.

Kirk Dawes, a black former police officer who now runs a mediation service in Birmingham, commends the way in which the police and the council have purged overt racists from their ranks. But he criticises the way both have relied on “community leaders,” especially those of a fiery type, as interlocutors with ethnic minority groups. “There is a belief that those who shout the loudest can best solve the problems within their community,” Mr Dawes says. Some of those community leaders were prominent in the protests against Asian shopkeepers in October, which later turned violent.

And were based on rumours anyway, and perhaps even worse, were based on a very peculiar, unpleasant, (racist, surely) way of thinking of ‘Asians’ as essentially one body, so that if a few Asians do something, it makes sense to boycott all Asian businesses, or all Asian businesses in a given area. ‘Community leaders’ aren’t always the clearest thinkers around – probably because this community thinking is not a very clear kind of thinking.

Birmingham’s Asians are more pointed in their criticism. The police, they say, were so keen to avoid offending black sensibilities that they allowed the protests to run out of control. They also failed to shut down a pirate radio station that purveyed hostility against Asians. In that, the police may have been following lessons learned in the past. An attempt to silence a similar station in the 1980s had sparked rioting.

There, you see how tricky free speech can be? You can’t win. You try to silence a station and that sparks rioting; you let a station babble away, and that sparks rioting.

If only people would act sane or at least minimally decent of their own volition; but that’s probably too much to hope.

I love the hairdresser thing, don’t you?

In a splendid return to form, Demos has silenced rumours that it is all thunk out with a proposal that hairdressers be invited to shape local government policy…”Our research has led us to conclude that hairdressers are the most authentic voice on the high street,” says Demos’s Sam Hinton-Smith, “and that they should be given a formal role in urban policy-making.” Not only that. Hairdressers “act as counsellors and social workers”.

The most authentic voice on the high street – really? More authentic than the voice of the fishmonger? The traffic warden? The shopper for dinner and a newspaper and some lightbulbs and a DVD? The panhandler? The market surveyor? The random pedestrian? The non-random pedestrian? The inebriated teenager? The vomiting inebriated teenager? Who is to say which is more authentic? Who, ah, who?

Already there have been protests from street-cleaners arguing that, being both dirtier and closer to the high street, they have a superior claim to being its “most authentic voice”.

Well exactly. And people who actually lie down in the high street and take little naps are even closer.

How authentic is a dialogue that may be inspired, principally, by a need not to offend the person standing close to your face with a pair of sharp scissors (and a disinclination to spend an hour in awkward silence)? Would the conversation remain so relaxed if clients knew their confidences about boyfriends, shoes and minor operations would be translated, come break time, into a raft of initiatives for the delivery of local services?

Oh, come on. If you look at it in the right way, a dialogue inspired by a need not to offend the person standing close to your face with a pair of sharp scissors is the most authentic kind of dialogue there can possibly be. Very existential, very coalface, very gritty and real and down to brass tacks. Not like all this artificial effete superficial dialogue we have as a matter of choice with people who don’t have sharp things in their hands – that’s for sissies.