Author: Ophelia Benson

Here is what one might consider another installment of an on-going discussion we’re having here about religion and the way its defenders and supporters and promoters and fans re-define it for purposes of persuasion or coercion. One example is from an article by Paul Davies in an old Atlantic (September 2003) I happened to read the other day: ‘E.T. and God.’ It’s basically about what the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe would mean for human religion, but along the way he makes this strange (yet very familiar) comment, after calling the dismissal of religion by the director of the SETI Institute’s Center for SETI Research ‘rather naive’:

Though many religious movements have come and gone throughout history, some sort of spirituality seems to be part of human nature. Even atheistic scientists profess to experience what Albert Einstein called a ‘cosmic religious feeling’ when contemplating the awesome majesty of the universe.

Well, what does that ‘though’ mean, for instance? Why is there a ‘though,’ why is there anything surprising or in need of explanation or at least acknowledgement via a ‘though’ in the fact that atheists can profess to experience some sort of emotion, probably awe, at the awesome universe? What is Davies actually saying there? That awe at the universe is the same thing, or the same sort of thing, or more or less the same thing, as believing in a deity? That is surely at least what he’s implying. Though the usual weasel-word, escape-hatch word, ‘spirituality’ appears in the middle to make the implication slightly more fuzzy. But what does spirituality mean then? Just awe at the universe? If so, surely it’s not incompatible with not believing in a deity – is it? Not in my book. I can feel awe at all sorts of things. I never call the feeling ‘spiritual,’ because that’s a word I’m violently allergic to – but I don’t mind calling it the sublime, for example, and at any rate I have some idea what it is. And it does not require belief in an omniscient benevolent omnipotent person who created us for a purpose and is taking care of us. And I think it’s a kind of cheat to pretend that it does, to conflate the two things, to mix them up and imply that they are inseparable.

We were talking about Darwinism and morality, among other things. Here is George C. Williams in Plan and Purpose in Nature as quoted by Richard Dawkins in the title essay of A Devil’s Chaplain:

With what other than condemnation is a person with any moral sense supposed to respond to a system in which the ultimate purpose in life is to be better than your neighbour at getting genes into future generations,…in which that message is always ‘exploit your environment, including your friends and relatives, so as to maximise your genes’ success…?

Dawkins then quotes George Bernard Shaw doubting evolution because he didn’t like its cruelty, H.G. Wells rejoicing in the cruelty, and Julian Huxley trying to derive some kind of ethics from it, then quotes Julian Huxley’s grandfather T.H. Huxley getting it right in his lecture ‘Evolution and Ethics’:

Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

And then Dawkins says what he thinks of the matter, and what he says would doubtless suprise the many people who think all evolutionary thinkers and especially Dawkins conflate is with ought:

As an academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian…But at the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs…I have always held true to the closing words of my first book, ‘We, alone on earth, can rebel agains the tyranny of the selfish replicators.’

So. This is part of the picture. People at Twisty Sticks have, it seems to me, been taking it as axiomatic that everyone who believes natural selection has had some influence on human nature has some sort of ruthless right-wing agenda, but that just is not true.

Ah. I see via Normblog and Twisty Sticks that I’ve been neglecting a duty. That’s what I get for reading hastily and selectively because I’m catching up because I’m so far behind because I’ve been working 28 hours a day on this dictionary thing because my colleague kept saying We have to finish in a month no two weeks no a week no three days no an hour no right now, so like Miss Clavell I ran fast and faster, and had such a backlog of reading and posting you would not believe. So, anyway. Jew.

In case there are any of you even more behind than I am, that’s a counter-googlebomb, a googlebomb to counteract an anti-semitic googlebomb. If you have a website, do the same thing yourselves. Post that link to the wikipedia definition and it will drive the other one down the page.

There are a couple of discussions of Evolutionary Psychology at Twisty Sticks: one here and the other here. They’re interesting because of what appears to be a fairly unshakable assumption that all evolutionary psychologists have a right-wing agenda and that the agenda determines their conclusions. That’s probably true of some evolutionary psychologists – I think I’ve read one or two of those – but it’s not true of all of them. It’s a bit puzzling. It’s not easy to figure out why people are convinced that thinking natural selection might have played a part in making human nature what it is requires being a free marketeer. I’m not a free marketeer, and I think natural selection played a part in making human nature what it is. I don’t quite see how it could be otherwise, really. How could natural selection not have played such a part? How could we have evolved over millions of years in complete independence of selective pressures? How exactly would we go about doing that? With a little help from the God of the Gaps? Is that it? If not, then what? It would be a pretty good trick.

But, then again, maybe I just don’t understand the points that are being made. But I can’t help thinking I detect a good deal of rhetoric in play, a certain amount of deck-stacking. Though maybe I’m wrong. There’s a very interesting archived discussion of related issues among Steven Pinker, Janet Radcliffe Richards and John Gray on In Our Time in November 2002. Anticipating this discussion at Twisty Sticks, I happen to have re-listened to it a few days ago. And the email interview B&W did with Steven Pinker about a month before that is also relevant and worth a read.

Update. Our old friend the Anonymous One has made one of his classic comments, where the retort is so obvious it would be too cruel to make it. Too like aiming projectiles at a piscid in a water-containment device, as Chris said (using other words) of the sweet bit of Lacanian profundity I gave you the other day. So I’ll make it here, instead, where it’s not quite so cruel. He does have (Anonymous, not Chris) such a way of saying things that apply to himself better than they do to the people he’s saying them of. It’s quite hilarious really. A few weeks ago – this is really funny – he called Scott McLemee a talentless ankle-biter! I nearly fell onto the floor laughing at that one. Yo, dude, if you’re going to pee, don’t do it upwind because – oh too bad, too late. I’d run home and take a shower if I were you.

You should check out the wonderful passage from Higher Superstition where they argue that—just hypothetically, mind you—the science faculty at MIT could do a better job at teaching the humanities classes than vice versa, if it came down to that somehow…I certainly would feel better about the future with an English professor teaching differential equations than with Pinker teaching literature or philosophy. At the least the former would be humble enough to try to learn something about what they were doing beforehand, which Pinker rather plainly would not.

Right. Uh huh. And if the English professor is someone like, oh, say, you, which I’m afraid it all too probably is – well, I know which of the two I would rather be taught by. But I won’t say which one that is; it would be too cruel.

Not too bad, thanks. The agony is somewhat abated, as Macaulay said. (Was it Macaulay? I think so. At the age of two, or a week, or something, when a kind evangelical woman spilled some coffee on him.) I’m tottering around, pale and trembling, but recovering. A little weak, a tad mentally unstable, but on the mend. Kind of you to ask. The flowers are lovely. I don’t suppose you brought any chocolates – ? No no, of course not, silly question.

I wrote the Comment yesterday in such a way that it sounds as if I think I wrote the dictionary all by myself. I noticed that after I’d done it, but having done it, didn’t want to correct it. It sort of had the right number of syllables already and I didn’t want to rearrange them. But of course I didn’t write it all by myself, and I don’t even think I did. I’m delusional but not that delusional. No, my colleague wrote it too. But I’ve left him out of this story because he has nothing to do with it, he’s ecstatically happy that it’s finished, he wouldn’t know a postpartum depression if it bit him on the ankle, or calf. It’s all zip zip zip with him, none of this girly lingering and brooding and whining, thanks. Got a book to do? Wham! Write that sucker in a couple of days and be done with it, that’s the ticket. Plenty of time left for a game of squash, and no backward looks. Whereas I…well I sort of wanted to ease into it, as one might ease into a very hot hot tub, or a very cold ocean, or a tank of piranhas. Ease into it, slowly, gently, thoughtfully, and then once in, just sit there for awhile, a week or three, smiling peacefully and thinking things over. That’s what I wanted to do. And then just very slowly, deliberately, calmly, no rushing, no rapid breathing, no flurry, think up entries, one at a time, and write them down in careful calligraphy and then in the fullness of time type them into the database. That was my plan. But it wasn’t the Zipper’s, so it’s not what we did. No. What we did was more like carefully positioning a bob sled at the top of a cliff, climbing aboard, and then shoving off.

Well it was good fun, in a tumultuous sort of way, and I’m sure all the people whose emails I forgot to answer will forgive me eventually. Maybe.

You’re sure about the chocolates? Okay, sorry, no, you’re right, never mind. Forget I said anything. Would you like a little gin in that?