Author: Ophelia Benson

I’ve been pondering this business of confusing or blurring the boundaries (see this week’s Bad Moves) between a religion and a group of people, between Judaism and Jews, Islam and Muslims, that I touched on in yesterday’s Note and Comment.

It all has to do with Identity Politics, I suppose, which is a large subject, and one we will be exploring in the future. It’s partly a generational matter. All those children of assimilated Jews who turned on their parents with cries of indignation at having been denied their heritage, their background, their identity, and turned into bland inoffensive no ones in particular when they could have been real Jews. It’s an understandable reaction, and yet it has some unfortunate side-effects, at least I think so.

Just for one thing, another boundary it blurs is the one between cognitive matters and genetic ones, between what one chooses and what one is born into, between ideas and circumstances. We are born women or men, human or dog, animal or plant. Up to a point we are born British or Chinese, black or white. But we’re not born Christian or Jewish or Muslim any more than we’re born Marxist or libertarian or Scientologist. We are not born into a set of ideas. We can be and usually are trained up in such sets, but that is not the same thing, and when we come to man’s estate, sometimes we are resilient and strong and autonomous enough to examine the sets of ideas we’ve grown up in and actually decide whether we agree with them or not. I submit that religion is emphatically one of these sets rather than being in the same category as gender or species or order or even nationality or race. If we forget or conceal that fact, and pretend that the religion of our parents is part of our own ‘identity’, we are consenting to our own imprisonment. We are also abdicating our right to make our own cognitive decisions, and making the area of human choice smaller than it needs to be. We are in fact allowing ourselves to be determined, an idea that religious people usually resist. It’s interesting that people are so eager to accuse Darwinian thinkers like Richard Dawkins of being ‘determinists’ when in fact it’s people who conflate religion with identity and nationality who do the really thorough job of that.

There are some strange assumptions in this review of Adam Sutcliffe’s Judaism and the Enlightenment. For one thing there’s a confusion throughout between Jews and Judaism. For another and related thing, there is a confusion between Judaism as a religion and Jewishness as nationality or ‘ethnic’ ‘identity’. As a result, there is a confusion between criticising a religion and hating people or a people.

There is also a lot of familiar and none the less annoying sneering at the Enlightenment.

The British-born historian is not the first writer to knock Enlightenment thinkers off their pedestals. The period’s “dark side” has been a recurring theme for more than a century now. Critics (among them Friedrich Nietzsche, the Romantic poets, and Michel Foucault) have charged the Enlightenment as an accomplice to a range of crimes that include not only racism, sexism, and “phallologocentrism,” but also bureaucracy, technocracy, ecological devastation, Western imperialism — even fascism.

And that’s the end of it. Did the charges stick? Is the evidence any good? Are the witnesses reliable? Have those zany ‘Enlightenment thinkers’ actually been knocked off their pedestals, or is it just that people have been trying to shove them for a long time. (Not to mention the vagueness on the dates of the ‘Romantic poets’ and the silly gossippy ‘dark side’ business, and the question of what pedestals.) Postel doesn’t trouble to say; just announces the off-knocking and moves on. And ends up with this untrue bromide:

And the prospect of a world without myth is neither possible nor desirable, Mr. Sutcliffe argues: “We need both reason and myth.” The “mythic resilience” of Judaism calls attention to the limits of the Enlightenment. “Enlightenment fundamentalism,” Mr. Sutcliffe says, can distort our understanding of the Other, or that which we deem to be irrational. Mr. Sutcliffe thus sees his book as more than a contribution to intellectual history. It is also a philosophical argument, he says, a cautionary tale against what he calls “the seductions of rationalist absolutism.”

We need myth, do we. What then? Are those of us who become aware that the myths are in fact myths supposed to keep quiet about the fact, lest we fall into the dangerous embrace of ‘rationalist absolutism’? Are we supposed to lie? Cover up? And what does it even mean to say we need both reason and myth. What, one minute we believe Jesus walked on water and the next we don’t and the next we do again? Is it possible the two are not compatible? Unless we redefine myth so thoroughly that it no longer means what everyone takes it to mean, in which case we have what? A myth about myth? Unvacated pedestals, is what it looks like.

By way of addendum to my Note & Comment of yesterday, here is the essay ‘Dolly and the Cloth-heads’ that Richard Dawkins and others discussed on ‘Start the Week’. The subject is one that has interested and annoyed me for a long time. For instance when I read Stephen Jay Gould’s strange little book Rocks of Ages in which he, very oddly it seemed to me, simply took it for granted that the way to carve up the world between science and religion is that science should tell us the facts about the world and religion should tell us about morals. What a very peculiar assumption. Also a very common one, to be sure, but not well-founded; I don’t expect unexamined conventional wisdom from people like Gould. Why should religious people have a monopoly on moral issues? Indeed, why should they have any claim to expertise at all? Why are they not on the contrary disqualified, because they rely not on actually thinking about moral issues, but on authority. What good is that? Especially if you take a look at the authority in question. The Bible, for example: not entirely a paragon of ethical wisdom.

So Dawkins is not convinced of the utility of the ‘representatives’ of the various religious ‘traditions’ and the ‘voices’ from each ‘community,’ which all have to be heard lest any one feel slighted.

This has the incidental effect of multiplying the sheer number of people in the studio, with consequent consumption, if not waste, of time. It also, I believe, often has the effect of lowering the level of expertise and intelligence. This is only to be expected, given that these spokesmen are chosen not because of their own qualifications in the field, or as thinkers, but simply because they represent a particular section of the community.

He then goes on to suggest, daringly, that a certain minimum qualification in the brains department ought to be expected along with being a spokesman for a particular ‘tradition’ or ‘community’. It’s the kind of thing that ought to be blindingly obvious but of course is also the kind of thing that drives people into frenzies of irritation. Not us though.

When I have an odd moment, or forty five of them, I listen to archived editions of BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week. Yesterday I listened to this one from February 10, with Richard Dawkins and Janet Radcliffe Richards, as well as Robert Harvey and, finally extricated from a traffic jam, Andrew Roberts. This is a highly interesting show which touches on a number of issues we are interested in at B and W. Just for one thing, we get to hear Andrew Marr tell Richard Dawkins ‘You’re not a genetic determinist, are you,’ and Dawkins reply that he’s long been plugging that line: that the way we have evolved does not determine the way we have to be. The brain has evolved, he explains, to over-reach what the genes would want if genes could want anything. He cites contraception as the most obvious example of our doing what our genes wouldn’t ‘want’ us to do. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, he elaborates: it can be difficult to wean ourselves off things that have come to us from our Pleistocene past. In reply to a question from Robert Harvey, Dawkins draws a distinction between what Darwinism can tell us about what we ought to do, which is nothing, and where we get our ethical feelings, which is something. Janet Radcliffe Richards adds that a Darwinian understanding of where we get our ethical feelings tells us nothing about which ones we should follow, that’s an entirely separate question, and Dawkins says ‘Exactly’.

So: there you are then: Richard Dawkins is not a genetic determinist. So it’s time for people to stop calling him that.

The discussion then gets into the equally fascinating territory of why panels and committees that are convened to discuss ethical issues such as cloning always include religious figures. It’s not, Dawkins points out, because they’re especially good at reasoning or arguing, it’s not because they’ve earned a place in such discussions, it’s simply because they represent a tradition, and what an odd reason that is for including people. Indeed. There is also some rather painful chat about how weird Americans are, at which I burst into tears and sobbed ‘Not all of us!’ But I can hardly blame anyone for thinking so.