Author: Ophelia Benson

Excellent. Word is out at last. Via Hari Kunzru.

Somehow the idea of culture has got very confused in the UK. Multicultural politics once provided a light in the post-imperial gloom…However, as biological racism has faded away, a form of cultural racism is taking its place, often propagated by left-liberals who consider themelves, um, whiter than white on issues of diversity. Underlying much of the current hot air about “respect” and “offence” we find implicit the idea that as BME’s…we’re somehow more determined by our culture than our flexible white co-Britons…Our more serious conversation has to be with the communitarian politicians who feel happiest when dealing with us in groups. Instead of asking us as individual British citizens what we think or feel about contentious issues, our views are too often inferred from a dialogue conducted with so-called “community leaders”, who are frequently self-appointed, and almost always cultural conservatives, with every incentive to take offence on our behalf in order to preserve their own access to funding and influence. This odd coupling of white liberals and brown conservatives has produced a form of multiculturalism in which culture appears as fixed and fragile as a dried flower…This ossified form of multiculturalism creates casualties within the ethnic minority communities its proponents believe they are protecting. Women, homosexuals, religious, social or political dissidents and artists must all contend with a political environment in which their freedoms are considered less important than the “representative” power of community leaders, who will zealously wield the weapon of offence when their authority is challenged.

Via Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

Too many wretched years have been wasted under communal political management which skilfully divided and relabelled black and Asian Britons to disable progressive politics…I can’t remember when unelected religious and community leaders, politicians and institutions decided the religious identity was primary and that the broad black political movement was dead as was any claim to multiple identities and complicated allegiances. But they did and it was without our consent. Once human rights and equality activists mobilised to stand up for all victims of racism and the internal oppressions within groups, particularly violence against women and children. Our compassion and action were not rationed, colour-coded or preserved for our own kind…We believed in universal standards and rights which are enshrined in the UN Human Rights charter. Citizens were autonomous individuals with not creatures owned and controlled by rigid traditions…Today the enemy of equality, freedom and justice is as likely to be within. Broken up into simple tribes which compete for attention and resources (who is the most oppressed of us all?), commonalities are negated, differences fetishised. Religionists – Muslim, Catholic, Hindu, Protestant- want not parity but special and exceptional treatment and unacceptable influence over policies. The responses of Salma Yaqoob and the Muslim Council of Britain to our manifesto make those demands without a blush.

And of course via the New Generation Manifesto and via Sunny Hundal.

During the past decade, a group of self-appointed representatives has sprung up, including the Hindu Council UK and Hindu Forum of Britain; the Network of Sikh Organisations, the Sikh Federation and Sikh Human Rights Group; and the Muslim Council of Britain and Muslim Association of Britain, all claiming to speak on behalf of all Hindu, Sikh and Muslim citizens…For a start, there are problems specific to the structure of these organisations. They tend to reflect a narrow range of predominantly conservative opinion. They generally ignore non-religious, liberal or progressive opinions and yet claim to represent everyone of their particular faith. Any criticism, from the outside or within, is portrayed as an attack on the religion itself, making it more difficult to hold the groups to account. Worse, they largely consist of first-generation, middle-aged men who are out of touch with second- and third-generation Britons.

And women. Well – excellent that the word is out. Good voyage to you.

So I’m not the only one who found Terry Eagleton’s review of Dawkins’s book more than slightly incoherent, especially the ‘God is not a person God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO but then again God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it God is the condition of possibility’ stuff. Others have had the same reaction. Good. A C Grayling for instance.

Terry Eagleton charges Richard Dawkins with failing to read theology in formulating his objection to religious belief, and thereby misses the point that when one rejects the premises of a set of views, it is a waste of one’s time to address what is built on those premises…Eagleton’s touching foray into theology shows, if proof were needed, that he is no philosopher: God does not have to exist, he informs us, to be the ‘condition of possibility’ for anything else to exist. There follow several paragraphs in the same fanciful and increasingly emetic vein, which indirectly explain why he once thought Derrida should have been awarded an honorary degree at Cambridge.

James Wood for another instance.

One doesn’t need to have Richard Dawkins’s level of certainty to find Terry Eagleton’s Catholic sermon utterly incoherent. On the one hand, according to Eagleton, God is transcendent, invisible, not a principle nor an entity, not even ‘existent’: indeed, ‘in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist.’ This God is neither inside nor outside the universe, but is mysteriously ‘the condition of possibility’. On the other hand, Eagleton just happens to know that this God chose to reveal himself in Jesus Christ, that he created the world ‘out of love rather than need’, and because this act was gratuitous God is ‘an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it’.

Well exactly. What I said. How does he know all this? Divine insertion, or what?

Eagleton mocks Dawkins’s mockery of ‘a personal God’ (‘some kind of chap’), but how is this gratuitously loving and unneurotic but possibly rather cross and murderously neurotic modernist artist who speaks to us via Jesus not a personal God? It would not be obnoxious of Richard Dawkins to ask how Eagleton knows these things. The reply, I think, would be threefold: Eagleton was brought up a Catholic and is reverting to his roots; God or Christ has somehow ‘spoken’ to Eagleton at some point in his life; and Eagleton just has ‘faith’ that his assertions are true. These are all forms of irrationality, however understandable or even magnificent we find them, and it is not overweening for rational atheism to expose this irrationality, as it always has done.

I don’t find them magnificent, especially not in the sneering-dogmatic form Eagelton presented them in, and I don’t really even find them all that understandable, coming from someone with Eagleton’s pretensions to insight and general all-round cleverness.

Another interesting discussion here and later here. It starts from the idea that I contradict myself by “saying that disgust is worthless as a moral compass” and yet using the word “disgusting” to express strong disapprobation quite often and consistently. I argue that it’s not inconsistent because my claim is only that disgust is worthless as a guide to morals on its own, not that disgust itself is morally worthless. On the contrary – I think it’s often called for, and that’s why I resort to the word. (I had noticed that I use it fairly often, when I’m feeling particularly…outraged, vehement…disgusted.) Brandon doesn’t agree, so the discussion has continued. I think he’s underestimating the degree to which judgment and reasons influence both the triggering of disgust and the decisions and actions that flow from it; but if the discussion goes on maybe he’ll convince me otherwise.

And then there’s another discussion of Theo Hobson. It quotes from comments here – it’s fun when our comments are interesting enough to get quoted!

“”But atheism is perfectly compatible with agnosticism, may indeed be the same thing. I (still) don’t see why not being a theist necessarily proceeds from any beliefs about the cosmos. Not being a socialist or a Friedmanite doesn’t necessarily proceed from any beliefs about economics; and so on. Are you claiming that theist belief is so natural that its absence requires prior beliefs?” I would call it an epiphany were I that way inclined, but this is exactly the point – to a theist, theism is that natural that there is some horror that others cannot see their truth…Every time I see Grayling or Dawkins poke their heads above the parapets, I sit and hope that it is to people like Hobson that the papers turn to for a refutation.

And so often it is. Maybe there’s an atheist spy handing out assignments at Comment is Free. It seems oddly plausible, now that it’s been suggested…

So now we’re talking about ritual, partly via what Julian said in that interview (‘And also you have rituals of gratitude. A religious person can say grace, they can pray. Now, you can try to create these little rituals in atheist settings if you like, but I tend to think they wouldn’t work.’) and partly via what JS said in that other interview (‘You have the thought that the rituals that go along with religious practice are desirable, and so on. However, there’s a lot of research that suggests that people get seduced by ritual…’). This is connected, it seems to me, with a post of Nigel Warburton’s the other day, which is also about something I ponder sometimes.

Many of the great works of visual art are religious. But when an atheist like me looks at, say Duccio’s painting in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery of the ‘miracle’ of Jesus healing a blindman, I do not believe in the literal truth of what is depicted (David Hume, for example gave excellent reasons for being sceptical about believing reports that such miracles have occurred).Nor do I believe that Jesus was the son of God (nor that there is such an entity as God). Does this mean that I can’t adequately appreciate this picture?

I think no, it doesn’t, although it may mean that you (and I) can’t appreciate it in exactly the same way that a thoroughgoing believer can. I brought up Rembrandt’s ‘Supper at Emmaus’ as another example. It seems to me it’s not necessary to believe Jesus came back from the dead to find that painting moving. One can think one’s way into it; one can imagine believing it; one can imagine being the disciples in the painting; one can imagine being a 17th century Dutch viewer of the painting; one can imagine that it is true, and what that would feel like; one can imagine half-believing and half-hoping, or all hoping. I don’t think we’re (always, necessarily) reduced to mere aestheticism in response to religious art.

So yesterday I asked, with reference to Theo Hobson’s argument, ‘how do you go about seeing god as the source of all goodness, all life if you don’t believe god exists? How can god’s existence be a non-question if you’re going to have gratitude to that god for being the source of all goodness, all life?’ and Jerry S answered ‘A lot of people in the non-realist tradition think something like this. I think Robin LaPoidevin makes this kind of argument, for example (check out my interview with him in New British Philosophy)’ – so I did. He asked an interesting question in that interview.

Robin Le Poidevin had said this about instrumentalist theology as opposed to the realist variety:

Presumably an atheist could see theological discourse as being fictional, but it would be a fiction that we can do without. Theological instrumentalists, on the other hand, would say that the fiction has a crucial point…[T]heological discourse and practices enable us to lead better lives, even though they are fictional.

JS asks if there isn’t a danger for non-realist theism that despite the claims of its advocates that it’s a fictional discourse, it is in fact almost invariably taken as comprising truth-claims? (Just what I’m always saying.) Then he adds that ‘this is worrying both if you have a commitment to the value of truth* and also because a lot of awful things are done in the name of religious belief.’ Le Poidevin answers the awful things part rather than the first part, then there’s the interesting question.

But if you’re an instrumentalist, you’re doing more than simply articulating a philosophical position. You have the thought that the rituals that go along with religious practice are desirable, and so on. However, there’s a lot of research that suggests that people get seduced by ritual, so whatever might be claimed about the status of religious language, people won’t be able to avoid believing and acting as if the fictions they espouse are actually statements about matters of fact. And religious discourses are frequently predicated on exclusionary relations – they often divide up the world into the righteous and the unrighteous. Surely, whatever the status ascribed to religious language by non-realist theorists, this is a worry?

Le Poidevin says that’s a very interesting argument, but gives what I think is a rather unconvincing answer: he agrees that people get caught up in and even lost in fictions, but then concludes with:

But it would be surprising if someone, without actually losing contact with the thought that this is just a fiction, became intolerant of people who didn’t want to join in.

Well, I don’t think it would be at all surprising. We hear the instrumentalist case all the time. We don’t usually hear it from people who say at the outset that ‘this is just a fiction,’ but we do hear the instrumentalist argument all on its own, with the question of the truth of the central proposition left entirely unaddressed, as if it were either irrelevant or somehow settled precisely by the instrumentalist case – you know: belief in god makes you good therefore god exists. So I don’t think it would be surprising.

JS tactfully changed the subject at that point.

*Little did he imagine when he asked that question that in a few short years he would be writing a book on that very commitment to that very value in collaboration with some Yank woman he’d never so much as heard of at the time, any more than she’d ever heard of him at the time. Little did she imagine either, but then she wasn’t the one asking Robin Le Poidevin a lot of questions, was she. Well exactly.