I’m still faintly surprised by some of the reactions to Sam Harris’s book, and to the criticisms of it, so I re-read some this morning. I didn’t slap my brow and say “gosh it’s way better than I thought.” Nope.

Consider, for instance, p 199 n. 11.

…many people assume that an emphasis on human “well-being” would lead us to do terrible things like reinstate slavery…Such expectations are the result of not thinking about these issues seriously. There are rather clear reasons not to do these things – all of which relate to the immensity of suffering that such actions would cause and the possibilities of deeper happiness that they would foreclose.

That’s a terrible “argument” – it’s not an argument at all. It’s one of the many many places where he simply doesn’t make an argument, perhaps because he expects us to supply all the missing bits ourselves.

It is not self-evident that slavery would increase suffering overall – it is self-evident only that it would increase suffering for the slaves. Harris doesn’t even manage to say that much – and if he can’t manage that, what can he manage?

His defenders seem to think all that kind of thing is obvious. It isn’t.

Slavery doesn’t exist because people think “Aha, if some people were slaves, then everyone would be happier.” It exists because people think “If some people were slaves then we would be happier.” Harris’s note simply jumps right over that. He does that all the time, and that’s why the book is so irritating.

Take a look at pp 40-1, where he belatedly admits that “genuine ethical difficulties arise when we ask questions” about what’s good for other people as well as for me. He clears up that little difficulty as briskly as if it were a bit of lint on a sweater. Consider Adam and Eve. Surely they could have figured out how to maximize their well-being. There could be lots of ways to thrive, and ways not to, but they can do it

and the differences between luxuriating on a peak of well-being and languishing in a valley of internecine horror will translate into facts that can be scientifically understood. Why would the difference between right and wrong answers suddenly disappear once we add 6.7 billion people to this experiment?

Seriously. That’s what he said. I’m not making it up. Look for yourself.

A priest named Roy Bourgeois publicly supports the ordination of women, and participated in the ordination of his friend Janice Sevre-Duszynska, for which the Vatican promptly excommunicated him. Then he went to a film festival that showed a movie on the subject, so the Maryknolls are kicking him out and plan to ask the Vatican to laicize him, i.e. take away his priesthood forever.

This swift and unequivocal action has never been the response of these same church leaders to the rape, sodomizing, sexual torture and torment of children — from infancy through adolescence — by thousands of male Catholic clergy worldwide.

It’s always interesting to see what the Vatican considers important and what it doesn’t.

Anthony Grayling is going to be on The Colbert Report on Tuesday to talk about The Good Book.

That’s hitting the jackpot when it comes to promoting a book. It’s also likely to be pretty good fun in itself – like going on tv to have a chat with Alan Bennett, or Jonathan Miller, or John Cleese, or Michael Palin. I would be quite happy to do any of those things, or all four of them, and I would also be quite happy to go on tv to chat with Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.

By all accounts, Colbert is a very nice guy. I’ve met someone who once worked for the Report – she had gone from that job to being an admin at CFI. Julian and I were having dinner with her about the fourth day we were there, and she told us she’d worked for Colbert. Julian was a bit startled when I exclaimed “You worked for Colbert?” I had to try to explain to him the significance of Colbert. Anyway – she said he’s a truly nice guy, and very considerate of the employees.

Hey up for philosophy for the people, eh? A philosopher does Colbert; not bad!

In the wake of some discussions of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape I’ve been dipping into a few other books on morality, all of which are (frankly) much more rewarding to read than the Harris book. Mary Whitlock Blundell’s Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: a Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics, for instance, the title of which is self-explanatory. Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue, which summarizes a lot of research in a number of fields. And Bernard Williams’s Morality. From the chapter on Utilitarianism:

For we are going to be able to use the Greatest Happiness Principle as the common measure of all and everybody’s claims, only if the ‘happiness’ involved is in some sense comparable and in some sense additive. Only if we can compare the happiness involved for different people and over different outcomes, and also put them together into some kind of General Happiness, can we make the thing work.

Just what I said, only of course not so well.

Bentham’s version, pleasure and the absence of pain, didn’t do the job, not satisfying the conditions of being calculable, comparable, and additive, or the condition

of being an indisputable objective: the more it looked like the sort of pleasure that could conceivably be dealt with in those quasi-arithmetical terms, the less it looked like something that any rational [person] must evidently be aiming at…Apart from anything else, there is the difficulty that many things which people actually include in the content of a happy life are things which essentially involve other values, such as integrity, for instance, or spontaneity, or freedom, or love, or artistic self-expression…

Well-being is not sufficient.

Five out of six men accused of gang-raping Mukhtaran Mai in 2006 have been acquitted by the Pakistan Supreme Court.

Nine years after the gang rape, Mai’s struggle for justice ended with the court ordering five of the six accused to be freed. A distraught Mai, who has won international acclaim for her bravery in a deeply chauvinistic society, said that the release of the men had put her life in danger.

It was such a pretty story. Her 12-year-old brother was accused, falsely, of having sex with a woman from another clan. To punish the brother, the village “elders” sitting as a tribal “court” decided Mai should be gang-raped, and so she was. 14 men were accused of carrying out the “sentence.” Only one has been found guilty.

“I am scared these 13 people will come back to my village and harm me and my family,” Mai said, in her remote home in the south of Punjab province. “I have lost faith in the courts and now I am leaving my case to the court of God. I am sure God will punish those who molested me.”

Mai has started a school for girls and a non-governmental organisation that promotes women’s education. She vowed that she would not flee her village, and would continue with her work.

It’s a fucking outrage.

The New Statesman has a lot of articles on religion. This is old news; I just thought I’d mention it.

It has a lot of Name people saying why they believe in god. Why? Because

In our increasingly secular society, many religious people feel their voices are not heard.

So the Staggers hands them a microphone. The bishops in the House of Lords and all those “faith” schools aren’t enough; their voices have to be even louder.

Cherie Blair, barrister
It’s been a journey from my upbringing to an understanding of something that my head cannot explain but my heart knows to be true.

See…that’s why we get irritated. Her heart doesn’t know it to be true. Hearts don’t know things. She means something else – not literally heart, but something like the bit of her head that doesn’t feel like doing joined-up thinking. But whatever bit of her anatomy it is, it doesn’t know what she says it knows. She has a woolly “understanding” of something she can’t “explain” yet somehow the woolly bit of her brain “knows” it to be true. The hell it does.

Peter Hitchens, journalist
I believe in God because I choose to do so. I believe in the Christian faith because I prefer to do so.

Now that I don’t mind so much; it has the virtue of honesty. One doesn’t have to peel away annoying bullshit about knowing with your heart.

(You thought I meant the other Blair v Hitchens, didn’t you. Good joke eh?)

I mentioned that interview I did for Humanistpodden the other day; here it is. Johan is remarkably knowledgeable about inter-atheist quarrels, among other things.

Update: And another thing, as long as I’m in me me me vein. I’m now a columnist for Free Inquiry. The first column will be in the August-September issue.

Chris Stedman is bizarrely indignant that some people disagree with him. Apparently if he writes an article for the Huffington Post, it’s somehow wrong and out of line to write a blog post that disputes it. Why would that be the case? What rule says that Chris Stedman’s articles on the Huffington Post are off-limits to disagreement? I thought it was pretty well known by now that if you write something that gets posted on the internet, there’s always a chance that someone will disagree with it.

Chris did three updates at Facebook to express this “you disagree with me! you really disagree with me!” outrage, along with a good few comments on same. The first, on my post, says

Hmm. Some of the comments on this… Well, I’m glad my “personality flaws” are diagnosable over the internet! Who needs therapy? Hey, at least I’m a master in jedi mind tricks? Okay, but seriously: I’d respond, but I’m about to give a talk at Carnegie Mellon. Perhaps some people who actually know me have some thoughts they’d like to share? Or, you know, perhaps this is best left alone. #dontfeedthetrolls

The second says

Um, woah. Came back from giving a speech / having dinner with the awesome folks at Carnegie Mellon Aha!: Atheists, Humanist, Agnostics to find myself at the center of SIGNIFICANT DISAGREEMENTS all over the atheist blogosphere.

The third (as I mentioned in a comment) says

Who knew that calling people to the ideals of love and compassionate action could ignite controversy?! Oh yeah, Jesus. Lulz. Oh internet, let’s move on to more important things now, shall we? (Like, you know, acting in love and compassion…)

That last is a funny question. “Who knew that calling people to the ideals of love and compassionate action could ignite controversy?!” Think about it.

Ok I’ll bite; I knew. I can explain why, too – one reason is the implied claim that the speaker is good and the recipient of the message is not; that the speaker is loving and compassionate and the recipient is something else. There are others: the suggestion to stop doing one thing and do another instead; the backround campaign of vilification of gnu atheists which makes this kind of positioning seem at least suspect; the fact that that kind of pious advice has more than a whiff of churchy missionary sanctimonious versions of “compassion” that not everyone admires; and so on.

Here’s a blunt statement to motivate Chris to make more outraged updates: not everybody wants “love and compassion” from strangers. As a matter of fact I think most people don’t want that. Love and compassion from strangers is intrusive and presumptuous; it’s too much; it’s not what’s needed or wanted. Chris probably knows that, actually, at some level – I don’t suppose he approaches people saying “I bring love and compassion!” But he doesn’t seem to know that talking about it in the way he does is too close to doing exactly that. There’s a vanity and self-display to it that is really not all that admirable. Check out Matthew 6:3 if you don’t believe me.

I’m going to disagree with Chris Stedman again. Let me preface my disagreement by saying he’s obviously a good guy, a better one than I am. There that’s out of the way; now let me shred him.

No but seriously. He’s a good guy but being a good guy isn’t enough. One has to learn that people have their own plans and projects and ways of doing things. Chris seems to have a missionary streak that prevents him from understanding that.

the last ten years have seen me change my philosophy in several dramatic ways — from born-again Christian to rejectionist atheist to my current work as a Secular Humanist and interfaith activist —

What’s a rejectionist atheist? It sounds nasty. Is it meant to sound nasty? Yes, I think so, a little. It probably means “an atheist who rejects theism” and is meant to contrast with the kinder, gentler, warmer sort of atheist who is an interfaith activist. And this is where the missionary note creeps in, already – this hint that rejecting atheism is not ok because the right thing to do is “interfaith activism.” Atheists who do interfaith activism are a rare breed, though, so I think Chris is being a little too stringent here.

As the Interfaith and Community Service Fellow for the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard, I had the opportunity to collaborate with the Humanist Graduate Community at Harvard to plan and lead a service trip to work at the CRYP last month.

And they did good things there, and that’s nice, but…

But it’s not the only way to make the world a better place, and it’s not something everyone wants to do, and the reasons for that are not just laziness or callousness or worldly ambition. I, for one, am uneasy about the noblesse oblige aspect. I don’t like it; it makes me feel squirmy. That’s just one angle on all this that Chris overlooks. He likes up close and personal stuff; good; but not everyone does, and more to the point, not everyone wants groups of Harvard students moving in.

Just a few days ago, I organized and ran a community service project for the American Humanist Association‘s (AHA) annual conference — the first time the AHA has featured one at its annual conference. After years of attending interfaith conferences and Humanist/atheist conferences but only encountering community service events at the former, I realized that if my community wants to be seen as equally ethical individuals, we will need to make good on our values. That we must actualize our commitments to justice and compassion — for our own sake, if not in respect to how we’re perceived by others.

But community service events aren’t the only way to do that, and maybe they’re not the best way. “Charity” isn’t the best way to deal with social problems. It may be more uplifting for the participants, but that’s a seriously crappy reason for thinking it’s the best way.

This is a call to Humanists and atheists everywhere: Can we set aside intellectualizing and debating, even just for a moment, and start putting our money where other people’s mouths are?

This is a reply from one atheist: Different people have different talents. Division of labor is a good thing. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t really want to be told to stop doing one thing and do another instead.

Oh no he didn’t, did he? Seriously? Again?

Yes, he did. I know it’s hard to believe, but he did. Yet again, the same thing – the self-obsession, the artless confiding of boring trivial details about his precious Self, the pompous kvetching, the wondering why he can’t stop, the repetition, the childish sneering, the bad reasons.

By now you know who “he” is – Michael Ruse, of course. Michael Ruse pitching yet another absurd embarrassing fit about the dreaded nooo atheists and their failure to do what he tells them.

He’s desperate for attention, so I shouldn’t give it to him, but on the other hand, he’s also publicly self-destructing, so if he gets more attention who knows, maybe a mental health professional will intervene.

Now…heeeeeeere’s Rusey.

I keep swearing off talking about the New Atheists, but like quitting smoking it is easier said than done.  It’s not really that I object to their criticizing me non-stop.  I do rather belong to the school of “so long as you spell my name right” – although interestingly, given that I have a name of only four letters, the misspellings are rife.  (Russe, Russo, Rose, Roose, Rooze, Rouse, and many more.)  In fact I take a certain pride in the fact that our blog, Brainstorm, thanks in no small degree to the splendid efforts of my fellow blogger Jacques Berlinerblau, seems now to be even more hated than Biologos, a Templeton Foundation-supported, Christian blog, founded by Francis Collins, now head of the National Institute of Health.

Good mix of self-importance, anger, vanity, and surrealism, isn’t it.

The latest outcry is by one of the junior New Atheists (in other words, not one of the big four of Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris) writing from Australia – picked up and intensified (especially in the nastiness towards Jacques and me) elsewhere. 

And so on, blah blah blah blah – nearly identical to the ones we’ve seen about five times in the last few months. The New Atheism is playing into the hands of the Religious Right; the only thing to do about the Religious Right is let it have its way in everything, like an angry baby twenty feet high; therefore The New Atheism is the enemy.

That’s all bullshit, frankly. If that were really the reason he would try hard to convince us. He doesn’t do anything remotely like that – he jumps up and down in front of us screeching insults and saying “tryandgetme!” I don’t believe for a second that he does all this McCarthyesque blackguarding because he thinks we’re the stepping stone to theocracy.

What a chump. Honestly.

Robert Winston says the Templeton Prize is just fine, no problem, what’s the big deal, relax, take a chill pill, don’t get your knickers in a twist, why do you have such an attitude. Sam Harris says religious language is unscientific in its claims for what is true. Winston says there’s no such thing as “the truth.” Harris says we can still recognise falsehood. Winston says

I suppose I really wonder why you’re so angry.

Whut?

Yes really; he says that. Maybe not that abruptly and inconsequentially – that may be editing – but those are the words. Harris attempts to laugh off this sudden rudeness, but Winston isn’t having it. “You write angrily, too,” he says. Furthermore,

books like yours and [Richard Dawkins’s] God Delusion balkanise the world a good deal more, because they polarise views. The God Delusion has caused very aggressive reactions from [people who] previously weren’t aggressive.

Got that? The books of Dawkins and Harris caused very aggressive reactions – just as Salman Rushdie’s Naughty Book caused other very aggressive reactions and Theo Van Gogh’s movie caused others and Lars Vilks’s cartoon caused others and the Motoons caused others and so on. We people who offend religious believers in their organs of religiosity are at fault for being so offensive and we are the cause of any aggressive reactions that ensue. It’s not that religious believers are Spoiled by the longstanding custom of treating religion as special and taboo so they now feel entitled to permanent deference; it’s not Privilege; no, it’s that people who try to discuss the subject openly are creators of aggression.

Andrew Gilligan tells us that the Muslim Council of Britain says…well actually I’m not sure what he tells us it says, and I can’t find the statement itself so that I can say what it says as opposed to what Gilligan says. Frankly he could have done a better job with this – he should have included a link and he should have put the crucial bit inside quotation marks so that we would know who said what. As it is it isn’t clear. The words “women,” “niqab,” and “veil” are not inside quotation marks, so I’m left wondering exactly what the MCB said.

Here’s Gilligan’s unhelpful summary:

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) said that not covering the face is a “shortcoming” and suggested that any Muslims who advocate being uncovered could be guilty of rejecting Islam.

In a statement published on its website the MCB, warns: “We advise all Muslims to exercise extreme caution on this issue, since denying any part of Islam may lead to disbelief.

“Not practising something enjoined by Allah and his Messenger… is a shortcoming. Denying it is much more serious.”

See? You can’t tell what the MCB said! Gilligan didn’t even specify “not covering the face” is a “shortcoming” for women, so we can’t tell if the MCB said that. Sloppy; very sloppy.

I can’t find the statement on the MCB site, either; maybe they’ve taken it down now. I can find lots of people quoting Gilligan, but not the primary source. This is annoying.

At any rate – if the MCB did say what Gilligan seems to be saying they did, that’s interesting and worth noting. The quoted passage from the Koran is a flawless bit of theocratic tyranny:

The statement quotes from the Koran: “It is not for a believer, man or woman, that they should have any option in their decision when Allah and his Messenger have decreed a matter.”

In other words, “believers” (who are not allowed to stop being “believers,” don’t forget, on pain of summary execution) have to do whatever clerics tell them to do. Period.

Other signatories of the statement include Imran Waheed, spokesman of the extremist group Hizb ut Tahrir and several other extremists including Haitham al-Haddad, who has denounced music as a “prohibited and fake message of love and peace”. All 27 signatories, who describe themselves as “Islamic groups and scholars,” are male.

Of course they are. God hates women.

Kenan Malik is not bowled over by Sam Harris on morality.

Harris is nothing if not self-confident. There is a voluminous philosophical literature that stretches back almost to the origins of the discipline on the relationship between facts and values. Harris chooses to ignore most of it…It is one thing to want to “start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and can find helpful”, something that many of us, including many of those boring moral philosophers, seek to do. It is quite another to imagine that you can engage in any kind of conversation, with any kind of audience, by wilfully ignoring the relevant scholarship because it is “boring”.

I share that view. (I agree with Polly-O!) The breeziness of the attempt to settle complicated issues while ignoring the existing scholarship is grating.

“How does Harris establish that values are facts?” He describes an utterly crappy life, and an utterly blissful one. See? Facts.

It is a kind of argument that suggests that Harris might have done well to spend a bit more time immersed in all the boring stuff…The insistence that because it seems obvious that rape and murder are bad, and that wealth and security are good, so there must be objective values, seems about as plausible as the argument that because there are gaps in the fossil record, so God must have created Adam and Eve. 

Kenan sums up:

Creating a distinction between facts and values is neither to denigrate science nor to downgrade the importance of empirical evidence. It is, rather, to take both science and evidence seriously. It is precisely out of the facts of the world, and those of human existence, that the distinction between is and ought arises, as does the necessity for humans to take responsibility for moral judgement. 

I did a review of the book myself a few months ago.

Matthew Adams interviewed Anthony Grayling for the New Humanist. He met the same fella I met.

The couple of hours I spend with him reveal a warm and generous character, capable of being both expansive and associative, while retaining a sense of measure, order and precision.

With an additional element I didn’t meet.

 That order, however, is not much in evidence in his office. It is a catastrophe of books and papers, though in common with people who inhabit catastrophes of books and papers, he is keen to point out that he knows where everything is.

Ah yes that catastrophe of books and papers; I inhabit that too, but I don’t point out that I know where everything is, because alas I don’t. Most things, perhaps, but not everything.

Anthony is happy to concede that the Bible contains some sound moral lessons and moments of great beauty (his favourite being the Song of Solomon), but for him the whole thing is disfigured by phrases such as “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord”. His disdain for the notion of submission before a deity is put with characteristic force: “Just obey, just submit. The usual rather cowed posture of human beings toward divinity in the hope that it won’t inflict too many earthquakes or tsunamis or plagues in the near future.”

The more force behind that observation, the better. It needs to be made with force. The notion in question is one of the worst humans have come up with, and props up many of the others; it’s poisonous; it lurks behind hierarchy and oppression and mindlessness; it stinks.

Adams wonders “why Anthony feels it important to make the case for free thought at this particular moment.” The church fought back hard in the 16th and 17th centuries, Anthony explains, rather like a cornered rat.

“And I think we’re seeing something rather similar at the moment, with events like 9/11. These have just dragged the fig leaf off the claims that religion makes to be a positive and peaceful presence in society, so that people now who never had a religious view or were just a bit disdainful of it are now speaking out frankly and bluntly, and being called militant atheists and fundamentalist atheists and so on.”

The philosophically illiterate charge of fundamentalist atheism has been leveled against many of the figures – Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens – with whom Anthony has been aligned (and among whom he is “proud to be counted”).

As I have noted before. People who detest putative fundamentalist atheists will be disppointed if they hope to include Anthony on their side of the Great Split.

He hopes the book, Adams says, “will help to make the case that a spiritual life can be lived without religion”:

The churches have been so successful in monopolising spirituality. But a walk in the country, a visit to an exhibition, dinner with a friend, or just having a quiet drink in the evening – those are spiritual exercises too. The humanist tradition recognises this, and is much more generous and sympathetic about human nature and its needs and desires. And it recognises that there are as many ways of leading good and meaningful lives as there are individuals to live them.

He ought to know; he lives about twenty of them himself.

Hey look what I found. I was looking for something else – an interview I did a couple of weeks ago with Johan Signert of Humanisterna (the Swedish Humanists) – but I found this instead: a piece on Radio Sweden about Hatar Gud Kvinnor? I forgot to look for it last summer. I talk a bit – with too much umming, but hey, I’d just flown from Seattle via Amsterdam and then done a talk, so whaddya expect. Christer Sturmark also talks – which is pleasant; I liked Christer a lot, it’s nice to hear him. I wasn’t around when the radio guy talked to him – I was probably signing books then.

Most of the “anti-abortion community” hates contraception as well as abortion.

“Fertility and babies are not diseases,” said Jeanne Monahan of the Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity, which has been fighting against requiring insurance plans to cover contraceptives under the new health care law.

Oh isn’t that just precious – working for “Human Dignity” by trying to prevent women from avoiding pregnancy. Working for “Human Dignity” by forcing women to get pregnant and have children whether they want to or not. Yes, that’s my idea of dignity all right.

…many social conservatives are simply opposed to giving women the ability to have sex without the possibility of procreation.“Contraception helps reduce one’s sexual partner to just a sexual object since it renders sexual intercourse to be without any real commitments,” says Janet Smith, the author of “Contraception: Why Not.”

Oh get over it. Sneezing is without any real commitments, too, even if you make someone else sneeze. Anyway forcing women to get pregnant is hardly the way to prevent them from being just a sexual object – a baby-machine is a sexual object.

What we have here is a wide-ranging attack on women’s right to control their reproductive lives that the women themselves would strongly object to if it [were] stated clearly. So the attempt to end federal financing for Planned Parenthood, which uses the money for contraceptive services but not abortion, is portrayed as an anti-abortion crusade.

Theocracy at work.

Anthony Grayling was in Seattle yesterday – yesterday only – for a talk at Town Hall on The Good Book. It was a great talk. He does what he calls footnotes, which remind me of the nested notes David Foster Wallace did in some essays, a note within a note within a note. One example: he was telling a story about how he got interested in philosophy via classical Greek philosophy via Greek mythology via a book his grandmother sent him at school when he was seven. This paideia was embedded in a story about his brother which was embedded in a larger Bildung story about distant parents and being sent to school very young. The brother story was that his brother was five years older and a prefect, so there was a gulf between them; one day his brother had to punish him for a formal (though not substantive) infraction; the brother had the Greek mythology book (wrapped in brown paper) under his arm at the time, bringing it from the post; the punishment was that Anthony had to memorize the first page by the next morning; he was so enthralled that he’d memorized the whole book by then. The footnote came at the very beginning: an older boy sent young Anthony to fetch his cricket bat, which involved him in the formal infraction of opening another boy’s locker. The footnote was about cricket.

All this (and more) was a matter of perhaps two minutes.

It was all like that.

The audience was gripped.

There were questions at the end. One was the one about “what can atheists offer to replace the community and collective activity of religion and church etc?” “Look around you,” Grayling said. Well quite. There we all were.

I had tea with him before the talk. It was immense fun. He’s working on another play (following “Grace”) which will be produced next year. He’s the new president of the British Humanist Association. He’s about ten people in one.