Despite sexual abuse, imprisonment and religious persecution, Elizabeth I was no slouch as a queen.
Author: Ophelia Benson
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The Other Side
And as long as we’re on the subject, why not add a few words from the Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, as well? Especially since it was his kind of atheism (as well as her husband’s) that Susan Greenfield was taking issue with in that interview.
There is ‘Snake Oil and Holy Water’ for instance, in which he quotes a classic bit of Wool in which a psychiatrist says that traditional African healers
are able to tap that other realm of negative entropy–that superquantum velocity and frequency of electromagnetic energy–and bring them as conduits down to our level. It’s not magic. It’s not mumbo jumbo. You will see the dawn of the 21st century, the new medical quantum physics really distributing these energies and what they are doing.
Or the classic ‘Dolly and the Cloth-Heads’, which gives one cogent answer to this question of whether or not it’s a waste of time to attempt to convince religious believers that they’re wrong: consider all the time that is wasted in public discussions of ethical issues because of the convention of including one or several religious leaders to address subjects in which they have no sort of expertise or knowledge.
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.
Or there’s this debate or rather discussion between Dawkins and Steven Pinker, which is more interesting than any religious discussion I’ve ever read or heard (not that I’ve heard many, you’ll have gathered it’s not the kind of occasion I rush to attend). Really, it’s an act of kindness to try to explain to religious people that they’re not only deluded, they’ve cut themselves off from a lot of fascinating material. And kindness is a virtue, after all.
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Inclusion and Wishful Thinking
Liberals and conservatives put aside their differences to come up with a terrible idea.
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Postmodernism and ‘Vedic Science’
Meera Nanda on the repackaging of Hindu obscurantism as ‘science’.
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People Do Change Their Views
I found a rather odd interview with Susan Greenfield the other day. The site is some sort of Christian one, but some of Greenfield’s answers are still a bit strange.
My husband, Peter Atkins, is an atheist of the Dawkins stamp and so I’ve sat through many science-religion ding-dongs, and they strike me as a complete waste of time. No one is going to change their views. The Atkins-Dawkins stance treats science almost as though it were a religion, and evangelically try to convert other people. Meanwhile, the religious person can’t articulate why they believe what they do: they just do.
But people do change their views. Of course they do. Not all people of course, and not every time anyone tries to persuade them to, but some people some of the time. That’s what teaching does, isn’t it, it gets people to change their views. Going from ignorance about something to some knowledge to more knowledge, that’s a change of views right there. And people do indeed change their views about religion, quite often precisely because of reading a book or talking to someone. Ideas do that. And as for the fact that religious people can’t articulate why they believe what they do, they just do…well what of it? If I ‘just believe’ that the sun travels around the earth, what’s wrong with someone teaching me that it doesn’t? Religion isn’t just a vague emotion, it’s a set of truth claims; what’s wrong with scientists and skeptics pointing out the lack of evidence for those truth claims?
So, I don’t believe in God but that is a belief, not some thing I know. I believe I love my husband, but I couldn’t prove it to you one way or the other. How could I? I just know I do. My particular belief is that there is no Deity out there, but I can’t prove it and therefore I would not have the temerity to tell other people they’re wrong. The coinage of proof is not appropriate for belief and Dawkins thinks it is.
But it’s not about proof, it’s about evidence. Naturally it’s not possible to prove there is no Deity out there, just as it’s not possible to prove there’s not an intangible invisible scentless and every other way undetectable by the human senses dragon in my living room – but that doesn’t mean I’m required to believe there is one, or that there are four trillion of them. Yes, I can choose simply to go ahead and believe it. But these ‘science-religion ding-dongs’ are generally about religion as a public matter, and there surely evidence is highly relevant. Religions don’t just sit back nicely and let people believe whatever they ‘just do’, they tell them what to believe, and how to act as well; they go into schools, they publish magazines and books, they go on tv and radio and write for the newspapers, they’re called in to give their opinions on ethical issues. So it seems perfectly reasonable and indeed very useful, in fact vitally necessary, for people who notice the non-existence of evidence for their beliefs, to point that out. And the analogy with loving someone seems to me to be a terrible analogy. People used to ask Carl Sagan that in a truculent manner, too. ‘Do you love your wife? Yes? Well how can you prove that? Can you see it? Huh?’ But what’s that got to do with anything? Again – religions are not just emotions, they make truth claims, claims about the world. Truth claims about the world can and should be tested and queried, surely.
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Other People’s Rhetoric
Let’s revisit Deborah Cameron’s article yet again, because judging by the comments on my comments, I didn’t make myself clear. Or perhaps I did and people disagree anyway, or perhaps I’m just dead wrong. But I want to try to clarify one or two points all the same. The disagreement is with what I said about the different value we place (the culture we live in places) on thoughts and feelings. I do think that difference exists, I do think there is a seldom-examined or -questioned assumption that feelings are good, authentic, spontaneous, real, honest, natural, and for all those reasons and perhaps more, better than thoughts. Some readers point out that the distinction between thoughts and feelings is not clear-cut – and I agree with that, I realize it’s not. But I’m talking about the rhetoric rather than the reality. It seems to me it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this particular discussion whether it makes sense to separate and oppose thoughts and feelings, because the point is that that’s what the rhetoric does, that’s what the culture does, that’s what other people do. Tell them to stop opposing feelings and thoughts, heart and head; don’t bother telling me, I already know.
For example, a quotation in Cameron’s book Good to Talk?, from ‘Circle Time’, a bit of advice on ‘teaching interpersonal and communication skills that is used in some British schools’:
Within the circle children are encouraged to talk about their feelings and about problems that may have arisen at school…
Pure boilerplate, of course, and that’s my point. People are always encouraged to talk about feelings, full stop, not about feelings and thoughts. Now, granted, and here is where we probably just have to agree to differ, if I do have to choose one to talk about and say is better than the other, I will choose thoughts. I do think that when the two are separated there is an entrenched cultural habit (blame D.H. Lawrence, if you like) to say and believe that feelings are better, and I would reverse that if I could. But even leaving that aside, even without that disagreement, I still think there is room to notice and ponder and question the complete omission of thoughts. I think that is part of the subtext of Cameron’s article, and I think it’s worth making supertext, that is to say, explicit.
Here is part of that quotation from the article again:
The main premise of the ‘Mars and Venus’ literature is exactly the one restated by BT—that men are far less at ease than women with self-revelation and the verbalizing of emotional states.
Again. There is a whole set of implicit assumptions there. That self-revelation equates to verbalizing emotional states and not cognitive ones. Yes, the two bleed into each other and overlap, of course they do, but then why is emotional the only word used there? If both are involved, why are both not mentioned?
Oh dear, I ought to write a book myself, no doubt, but it would be such an effort.
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A Book With Everything, Even Classy Prose
Alas poor Joe McCarthy, martyr to the com-symp liberals and Ed Murrow.
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How to Avoid Pop Culture
In these dark times holding out against the constant barrage of pop culture
has become more challenging than surviving a succession of carpet bombings.
Pop music seeps and swells from the ceilings and nooks of shops, offices, and
coffeehouses. Television sets are now permanent fixtures in airports, post offices,
saloons, and doctor’s offices – in fact, one dangled precariously above me as
I suffered a recent root canal, tuned to Oprah no less, which was far
more painful than the surgery itself. I commenced to pray the set would dislodge
from the ceiling and put me out of my misery, but Yahweh spared me – evidently
to continue His good work.
So much of popular culture is so indescribably bereft of good taste that
a thinking man will attempt to isolate himself from it whenever and however
possible. This, unhappily, is getting increasingly difficult to manage. It is
naturally assumed not only that we poor saps queuing in line need constant diversion,
but that we need infantile diversion of the worst kind. The relatively harmless
elevator music that once unassumingly infected public spaces has been supplanted
by commercial radio with its jackass disc jockeys and morning "zoos,"
while classical music is now wielded primarily as a weapon to drive loitering
and horror-stricken teens from parking lots. On the boulevards and byways one
finds insipid advertisements plastered to every imaginable surface, moving and
sedentary, human and inanimate. These days one moves in and out of pop culture
the way one dodges raindrops in a downpour. Against such overwhelming odds,
one has no choice but to hoist the white flag and lay downs one’s arms. Vulgarity
and boorishness have won the day.
It is unfortunate that in order to avoid the indecencies of pop culture one
must isolate oneself like a medieval monk in a Carpathian monastery; a monk
with a remote hopelessly surfing through hundreds of television channels, reeling
up and down the radio dial in a vain attempt to find some offering that only
mildly offends. Happily there are still enough decent books published, enough
tolerable music being recorded, a few passable newspapers and journals printed
so that one can stop his ears to the siren song of pop culture’s pimps.
I find noteworthy new music not by listening to KY-98, but rather by reading
reviews, and through the old reliable word of mouth, the same way I hear about
good films and good books. In this way, criticism is essential to my well-being,
and one first-rate critic is to me worth a hundred artists, if only for the
time and money the former saves me by sifting out the chaff.
But pop culture is far more insidious than mere TV and radio. It is films and
fashion, it is magazine fare and performance art, it is dance and design. These
too are impossible to avoid completely, particularly fashion – or its absence
– which has morphed into a perfidious form of advertising one might call fadshion,
for lack of a better word. Avoiding dance is as simple as avoiding dance clubs,
which is easy enough for a middle-aged homebody like myself. And as for magazines
and films, one learns to be selective, which is the one essential criterion
in a society where overabundance and choice are supreme.
Indeed the very term pop culture may just win the award for the most absurd
oxymoron. There has never been anything sophisticated, cultured or cultivated
about popular taste. Take rap musician Snoop Doggy Dogg. Granted, Snoop is the
coolest human being alive. Far cooler than me. Far wealthier than me. Am I jealous
of Snoop? Damn right. And yet what Snoop does in the recording studio has nothing
to do with culture; and yet what Snoop does is somewhat legitimized by the term
pop "culture." Sorry, but Snoop doesn’t deserve it. Culture, said
a very cultured fellow, Matthew Arnold, is "to know the best that has been
said and thought in the world." Elsewhere, in the same vein, he said, "Culture
has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light." Knowing the
best that has been said in the world is rarely associated with the masses, who
seldom know what even they are saying (let alone thinking). And as for
sweetness and light, the only light Snoop gives off is the one from his crack
pipe.
What we are really describing then is a form of popular entertainment,
not culture, and if we need a word to describe this I suggest Dwight Macdonald’s
term masscult, which has a slightly malicious sound to it that appeals
to me. It may seem silly to make distinctions between good and bad masscult,
and yet that’s exactly what we do all the time. The Clash are good, P. Diddy
is bad. Old Paul McCartney is good. New Paul McCartney is bad. How much easier
to say all masscult is bad and be done with it. But we can’t. I love the Clash,
despite their undeniable lack of culture, class and teeth.
Macdonald also described a third level of culture he called "midcult,"
or the culture of the new state-college-educated middle-class suburbanites,
who occupy the no-man’s land midway between the masses and the highbrows. I
suspect Macdonald gives the middle class too much credit for brains. My own
feeling is that Macdonald’s midcult is nothing more than the best of bad popular
culture, and what has happened is that contemporary pop culture has gotten far
worse than anyone ever believed possible. Take television. In the 1950s, NBC
had its own orchestra led by the greatest director of the day, Toscanini. Nowadays,
NBC has Fear Factor on which we are invited to watch bikinied bimbos
eat bugs.
I’m inclined to think there are rather two levels of mass culture that we might
profitably call low mass and high mass. If these terms do nothing
else they at least succeed in disassociating the words popular and mass from
the term culture. As you might expect, it is low mass that I find so annoying,
so troubling, so irritating, and it is low mass that I try desperately to avoid.
Then again, it is high mass that I am most comfortable with, that speaks to
me, not in the lofty, intellectual manner of high culture, but in the warm,
friendly tones of a sympathetic companion. I may occasionally dip a toe into
high culture, take in a production of Lear, reread Beckett’s Watt,
put on Gould’s Bach Goldberg Variations, but I find the water a bit warm
for my liking and can only take it in short spurts.
This is unfortunate because it is precisely high culture that allows us to
"become all we are capable of being; expanding, if possible, to our full
growth, which is the law of culture," to bring in Thomas Carlyle. High
mass does nothing but briefly entertain us. Low mass corrupts.
If the U.S. seems backward culturally, it is small wonder. Its democratic leaders
give very little weight to high culture; even in its colleges and universities
there is little encouragement "to know the best that has been said and
thought in the world," as schools have generally moved from educating young
men and women to job training. What pittance the government doles out to support
the arts often goes to low mass institutions and other forms of popular entertainment,
since that is what the majority of voters long for.
There is, I suspect, an undeniable pleasure, a rank smugness in being in the
high mass minority, just as I suppose those in the high brow minority are doubly
smug. Smugness, to my mind, is a greatly under-rated amusement. If one must
be continually annoyed by pop culture – and I see no alternative to this in
the near future – one may as well get some pleasure out it. -
Rashomon is Fiction, the Friedmans are Real
Postmodern ambiguity as marketing ploy, and how gullible reviewers help.
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Private School or State School?
Adam Swift and Anthony Seldon debate issues of fairness and positional goods.
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Private School After All
State school is better socially, but what of children who want to do sums now?
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Argument Over Academic Boycott of Israel
Oxford professor rejects Israeli student, and is now being investigated.
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‘Somebody with a Doctorate’
Well, this is what I’m always saying. This is where anti-elitism gets you. Influential political operatives who are not ashamed to sneer at education.
Why this administration feels unbound by the consensus of academic scientists can be gleaned, in part, from a telling anecdote in Nicholas Lemann’s recent New Yorker profile of Karl Rove. When asked by Lemann to define a Democrat, Bush’s chief political strategist replied, “Somebody with a doctorate.” Lemann noted, “This he said with perhaps the suggestion of a smirk.” Fundamentally, much of today’s GOP, like Rove, seems to smirkingly equate academics, including scientists, with liberals.
And hence with really terrible people. The GOP could of course look at it another way – they could wonder why people with more education tend not to be of their party, they could pause to wonder what that says about their party. They might wonder what people have learned, that tends to make them dislike right wing parties. That would be one reasonable reaction. Or they could do what they are in fact doing, they could be certain in advance that dislike of right wing parties can’t possibly be well-founded and that therefore any activity that tends to promote such dislike must be corrupting and polluting. Hence higher education is a bad thing.
And then of course that has the incalculable added benefit of giving an entirely spurious but tragically convincing aura of populism to the party of tax cuts for the rich, so that people who make too little money even to pay taxes vote GOP all the same in the illusion that the GOP is on the side of Just Plain Folks and against elites. Stark nonsense. The GOP may pride itself on sneering at people with doctorates, but it’s very much in favor of elites.
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The Bush Administration Versus Scientists
To Karl Rove, a Democrat is ‘someone with a doctorate’…and that’s not a compliment.