Author: Ophelia Benson

Behold, it’s August. Well not really, not where I am. I’m kind of lying when I say that. It is August where B&W is (if B&W is where its database is), but it’s not August where I, typing these words onto this little computer screen, am. So if I (as opposed to someone else) say it’s August, I’m telling a falsehood, because where my body is, it’s 4:30-ish in the afternoon on July 31. But I’m also not telling a falsehood, because it is August in other places – but it’s not August for me, the one uttering the sentence. So is it a lie, or not?

Oh stop playing silly buggers. Anyway the point is it’s August or near enough, and that’s only a month to September, and in October the Dictionary is published. So that means it’s soon. Much, much sooner than if it were still July. And speaking of books being published – here’s another, this one not until May 2005. My colleague has been very busy. It’s a terrific book, too.

Now – I did summon you here for a reason. I just wanted to draw your attention to a few remarks about Francis Crick. One from the Telegraph obit:

In 1960 Crick accepted a fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge, on condition that no chapel was built in the college. When in 1963 a benefactor offered the money for one and the majority of college fellows voted to accept, Crick refused to be fobbed off with the argument that some members of the college would “appreciate” a place of worship; many more might “appreciate” the amenities of a harem, he countered, and offered to contribute financially. The offer was refused and he resigned his fellowship.

And the other from Matt Ridley’s article yesterday.

Throughout his life he was high on the drug called rationality. He could never get over how much could be deduced about the world if you stick to logic and eschew mysticism…He disliked religion even more than philosophy, but he wore his lifelong atheism lightly. His letter to Churchill suggesting that Churchill College build a brothel rather than a chapel (Churchill had written saying “no one will be required to enter it against his will”) was hilarious rather than offensive.

And then a passage from Crick’s own account of the matter:

I have no doubt, as will emerge later, that this loss of faith in Christian religion and my growing attachment to science have played a dominant part in my scientific career not so much on a day-to-day basis but in the choice of what I have considered interesting and important. I realized early on that it is detailed scientific knowledge which makes certain religious beliefs untenable…A belief, at the time it was formulated, may not only have appealed to the imagination but also fit well with all that was than known. It can nevertheless be made to appear ridiculous because of facts uncovered later by science. What could be more foolish than to base one’s entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at that time, now appear to be quite erroneous? And what would be more important then to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs?

Refreshing, isn’t it, compared to the floods of sugary drivel people pour out on the subject. One gets so very tired of the latter kind of thing, over here in the land of the believers. P Z commented on that at Pharyngula today, in relation to something Kerry said:

And let me say it plainly: in that cause, and in this campaign, we welcome people of faith. America is not us and them.

Huh? Well if it’s not us and them, then why mention only people of faith, and not people of no faith (or as P Z put it, people of reason)? And why mention people of faith in that particular way, as if they were an excluded minority? What, have Democrats been excluding ‘people of faith’ all this time? News to me! Well of course we know why he said that, he said it because of all the drivel there’s been about how he doesn’t say ‘God’ every third word or whatever the hell the complaint is. But it’s irritating all the same.

But not as irritating as this crap:

The Pope will call on leaders of the Roman Catholic church today to attack feminist ideologies which assert that men and women are fundamentally the same. The Vatican is concerned that this belief is eroding what it regards as women’s maternal vocation.

Oh is it. Is it really. Well that’s good to know. Women’s maternal vocation. Just like that. So the idea is that all women without exception are obliged to whelp? Doesn’t matter whether they want to or not, whether they think they’d be any good at it or not, whether they have other plans or not, eh? Just, yo, you’re one of the ones with ovaries, so get to work, hon! Whereas people with dangly bits get to choose whether they whelp or not. At least, J-P seems to have chosen, doesn’t he? Or is it rude to point that out. But no doubt all this sort of thing is over my head.

In a letter to bishops on the participation of men and women in the church and the world, the Pope’s chief theological spokesman, the German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, stresses, as the pontiff has done on several occasions, that the book of Genesis is unambiguous on this point.

Ah. Well in that case. If a three thousand-year-old story is unambiguous on what women are supposed to do, then who are we to argue. And it is quite wise

Recent decades have seen a plunge in birth and fertility rates, particularly in the Roman Catholic heartland of southern Europe, as women struggle to combine jobs with their traditional roles as mothers, homemakers and carers. Church representatives have argued that this is symptomatic of a breakdown in values, and particularly a greater selfishness among young couples more interested in consumer goods than creating life.

Oh right. Of course. It is very selfish of people to be more interested in doing what they actually want to do than in ‘creating life’. Any life? Tomatoes? Fruit flies? No, I suppose the dear Church representatives mean human life, of which there is such a terrible shortage on this planet. Actually that line of thought is not exclusive to celibate Catholic priests, I’ve seen it in other places lately too. There’s this peculiar bit of orthodoxy out there (orthodox in the sense that a lot of people seem to think it) that people who don’t have children are ‘free-riding’ on people who do. And what’s even more special is that they like to say so. It won’t be long before all childless atheists will be rounded up and interned, at this rate.

Thought for the Day – or perhaps I mean Provocative Cryptic Assertion via Adapted Quotation for the Day. Identity is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

I had this thought partly because of the ever-present dreary discussion of the Religion Question in US Politics (yawn). I’ve noticed that one ploy people resort to when anyone suggests that religion does not belong in the public sphere, is to conflate their religion with their ‘identity.’ It then occurred to me that that conflation, and confusion (because it is a confusion – religion is not ‘identity’), is what is going on – is the subtext, as it were – of the other side in the argument about Islamophobia we had a few days ago. (In many posts – Which Community?; More; What Liberals Can and Can’t Say; Stand Still, Dobbin; and Little Boxes, Little Boxes.) Not that I hadn’t realized it before, but it became a little clearer, a little more sharply into focus.

And it connects with something else I wanted to look at in the Mulholland post – which, again, may seem like more horse-walloping, but the ideas are Out There, so it’s better to get clear about what they are.

I think its a cop-out to argue that attacks on beliefs are different from attacks on inherited characteristics such as colour etc; the former acceptable under the rubric of ‘freedom of speech’, the latter unacceptable.

No. No, no, no. It’s not a cop-out at all, it’s of the very essence. It’s not a pretext or disguise for saying something else, it is the thing itself. (As a matter of fact, considered coldly, that sentence is a positively shocking thing for an academic – of all people! – to say. What in hell is their job if it’s not to ‘attack’ i.e. criticise and disagree with ‘beliefs’?) Beliefs are different from inherited characteristics, and the difference is one that makes disagreement (never mind ‘attacks’ – that’s just rhetoric) vital as well as possible. You can’t ‘argue’ with race or gender any more than you can with height or eye colour – or for that matter species. You can’t argue a dog into being a cat, now can you. (I know that, because I’ve tried.) But you can argue with beliefs, and you very often need to. It’s not just a matter of freedom of speech, either, it’s also freedom of thought. If you really think it’s taboo and somehow cruel and immoral to disagree with people’s beliefs, then you may well train yourself not to do so even in the privacy of your own mind.

And the ‘identity’ claim is one way to try to persuade or coerce us all to think exactly that. We all know it’s terribly wrong to mess with people’s ‘identity.’ We get told it all the time, for one thing. ‘Identity’ is one of the great cant-words of the day – one of those words that make one want to reach for one’s gun. (Which reminds me, someone actually said that on [I think] ‘Saturday Review’ a week or two ago. Exactly, I thought.) Just say your beliefs, your religion, are part of your ‘identity,’ and watch the atheists back off. Well – of course it depends how you define the silly word, whether that claim makes any sense or not. And people certainly do define it any old way that happens to be convenient – which is why I keep putting it in inverted commas: because it means so many things it doesn’t mean much of anything. But then…surely there is a choice that needs to be made. If we’re going to have expansive definitions of identity according to which it means whatever I do, think, believe, wear, eat, watch, listen to, like, dislike, sit on, put in my nose – then identity can’t function as a taboo or no-go area. Or if identity is going to function that way, then we need to stick to a very narrow definition of it, to cover what people are not what they become. To cover, in other words, things people can’t help rather than things that are chosen. To cover the physical, biological, genetic, and not the learned, acquired, added on. Otherwise, all of intellectual life will be full of taboos and unmentionables, and rational thought will come to a grinding halt. There are a lot of people who would like rational thought to come to a grinding halt, but we shouldn’t give them what they want. Rational thought requires the ability to consider and discuss cognitive matters on cognitive terms. Identity politics requires that people be allowed to draw magic circles around whatevery they decide to care about. The two are emphatically not compatible. I choose rational thought, thank you.

I have a lot more to say on this, but I’m going to do it piecemeal. That’s fair warning.

And here is Mark Pitely’s list:

1) Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – Julian Jaynes. Brilliant, eye-opening, and quite possibly wrong. It definitely changed by thinking, even my thinking processes.

2) How to Read a Book – Mortimer J. Adler. Fascinating. I love all of his library science efforts.

3) Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies – Douglas Hofstadter (et al). My coding and AI leanings are showing. Great stuff here that it lightyears ahead of the rest in AI. His methodologies and tactics changed my approaches.

4) Cybernetics – Norbert Weiner. Complicated and varying, even unfocused, but a glimpse of how his mind worked.

5) Blood Rites: Origin and History of the Passions of War- Barbara Ehrenreich – Her own ideas in here were so potent they changed the intended nature of her work. It taught me to rethink my views on pre-historic man.

6) A Perfect Vacuum – Stanislaw Lem. Mind-blowing reviews of fictional books by fictional reviewers that simultaneously attack modern literary movements one by one despite using their tools.

7) The Dispossessed – Ursula K. LeGuin. Science Fiction, yes, but as political study of anarchy and capitalism, it belongs with Brave New World and 1984 – except it is better written.

8) The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil. A meditation on the modern human condition.

9) Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle- Nabokov. Unbelievably high in content, feeling, beauty, style. Its existence raises the bar on everything.

10) Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte. People would come looking for me if I didn’t mention this book. No other author has had such a profound effect upon me.

Do excuse me – I just feel like making a small boast. Doing a little auto-back-patting. I won’t take long – and anyway there is a sort of point behind it.

It’s Normblog’s first birthday, by the way – and he chose the occasion to mention his favorite blogs, in which select group he included B&W. I blushed unbecomingly to see that. And the same day – the very same day, I tell you – a guest poster at Pharyngula (guests are posting there to keep things going while PZ is at a conference in Calgary or Saskatoon or Kamloops) told the world of his discovery of B&W – so that my face became even more frighteningly florid. But I couldn’t help it, I did like what he said –

a website devoted to rationalism called Butterflies and Wheels. It’s providing all sorts of new stuff I hadn’t seen or thought about and is really helping my research.

See? Providing all sorts of new stuff he hadn’t seen or thought about. Is that our goal or what. M’colleague and I were talking about this on the phone yesterday, as a matter of fact, in a different context – about whether it’s possible to change people’s minds or not. I’m a little more optimistic than he is. I certainly don’t think one can change people’s minds just like that, every time one opens one’s mouth, or anything – but I think it can be done. And surely one reason it can be done is that people haven’t already thought of everything, and some people are honest enough to realize that. One can simply point out things – facts, implications, evidence, verbal trickery – that people haven’t noticed before, and that may change their minds. May for one thing change their minds in the sense we were discussing in the post on the reading lists – the sense not of persuading them to think the opposite of what they thought before, but of expanding or refining or slightly altering what they thought before. Enriching or broadening it to take in more factors.

I get email that says the same sort of thing. That people are excited to find B&W because they don’t know of anything else like it – anything that has this particular point of view and this particular combination of subjects and material. So that’s good. Since being involved with B&W I’ve learned to feel slightly sorry for people who work for more general and miscellaneous publications – for magazines with no real point of view. Oh well, that’s not right, is it – the truth is I feel slightly sorry for people who work for publications that aren’t B&W. Ha! There’s modesty for you.

But I said there was a sort of point behind this, and that point is that it’s a good sign that people like B&W. That anti-rationalism isn’t quite as unopposed as one might think. That there are more than three or four people in the world who don’t like fuzz and wool and nonsense. So be of good cheer, even when the nights are too hot to sleep.