Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

 
An amusing commentary on Richard Dawkins' self description as being culturally christian from Mark Vernon:

"The deeper and philosophically interesting point, missed in the comments, is the possibility that Dawkins is not only culturally Christian, he's a Christian atheist too. For example, he believes we are like the animals bar being able 'to rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators'. Note the 'rebel' against nature. It's straight out of the story of Adam and Eve. As far as I know, the concept doesn't exist outside of Judeo-Christian religion.

Similarly the effort to reconcile scientific materialism with free will, hard line Darwinism being deterministic. This is a Reformation concern. It was only then that the issue of free will became so crucial, people having to be free to choose their salvation. Before free will was a marginal philosophical concern, it being fairly obvious when you think about it that we are free in some respects, influenced by all sorts of factors in others, and able to become conscious of at least some of them, of course... Perhaps Dawkins would say he was Christian atheist if asked. He'd increase the column/blog inches again, since, of course, that implies his atheism is not truth in black and white, but is coloured in a certain way. Relative, in other words - another charge that troubles the doctrinally-minded."


I've often thought it would be interesting to observe what Hindu or Islamic versions of texts like The God Delusion might look like; I suspect rather different from their Western counterpart (for instance, Sanskrit has a larger atheistic literature than exists in any other classical language). With that said, while the above point about Dawkins' attachment to a rather narrowly defined correspondence theory of truth is amusing, I'm not sure that the idea of Christian atheism is quite as outlandish as Vernon suggest. After all, Bertrand Russell did write an article entitled On Catholic and Protestant Sceptics:

"To the Protestant the exceptionally good man is one who opposes the authorities and the received doctrines, like Luther at the Diet of Worms. The Protestant conception of goodness is of something individual and isolated. I was myself educated as a Protestant, and one of the texts most impressed upon my youthful mind was, "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil." I am conscious that to this day this text influences me in my most serious actions. The Catholic has quite a different conception of virtue: to him there is in all virtue an element of submission, not only to the voice of God as revealed in conscience but also to the authority of the church as the repository of Revelation. This gives to the Catholic a conception of virtue far more social than that of the Protestant and makes the wrench much greater when he severs his connection with the church. The Protestant who leaves the particular Protestant sect in which he has been brought up is only doing what the founders of that sect did not so very long ago, and his mentality is adapted to the foundation of a new sect. The Catholic, on the other hand, feels himself lost without the support of the church. He can, of course, join some other institution, such as the freemasons, but he remains conscious, nonetheless, of desperate revolt. And he generally remains convinced, at any rate subconsciously, that the moral life is confined to members of the church, so that for the freethinker the highest kinds of virtue have become impossible. "


Update: John Gray takes a similar view in this piece:

"The Golden Compass - is a good example. Pullman's parable concerns far more than the dangers of authoritarianism. The issues it raises are essentially religious, and it is deeply indebted to the faith it attacks. Pullman has stated that his atheism was formed in the Anglican tradition, and there are many echoes of Milton and Blake in his work. His largest debt to this tradition is the notion of free will. The central thread of the story is the assertion of free will against faith. The young heroine Lyra Belacqua sets out to thwart the Magisterium - Pullman's metaphor for Christianity - because it aims to deprive humans of their ability to choose their own course in life, which she believes would destroy what is most human in them. But the idea of free will that informs liberal notions of personal autonomy is biblical in origin (think of the Genesis story). The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith, and like most varieties of atheism today, Pullman's is a derivative of Christianity...

The belief that history is a directional process is as faith-based as anything in the Christian catechism. Secular thinkers such as Grayling reject the idea of providence, but they continue to think humankind is moving towards a universal goal - a civilisation based on science that will eventually encompass the entire species. In pre-Christian Europe, human life was understood as a series of cycles; history was seen as tragic or comic rather than redemptive. With the arrival of Christianity, it came to be believed that history had a predetermined goal, which was human salvation. Though they suppress their religious content, secular humanists continue to cling to similar beliefs. One does not want to deny anyone the consolations of a faith, but it is obvious that the idea of progress in history is a myth created by the need for meaning... Among contemporary anti-religious polemicists, only the French writer Michel Onfray has taken Nietzsche as his point of departure. In some ways, Onfray's In Defence of Atheism is superior to anything English-speaking writers have published on the subject... More clearly than his Anglo-Saxon counterparts, Onfray understands the formative influence of religion on secular thinking. Yet he seems not to notice that the liberal values he takes for granted were partly shaped by Christianity and Judaism. The key liberal theorists of toleration are John Locke, who defended religious freedom in explicitly Christian terms, and Benedict Spinoza, a Jewish rationalist who was also a mystic.

There is a deal of fashionable talk of Islamo-fascism, and Islamist parties have some features in common with interwar fascist movements, including antisemitism. But Islamists owe as much, if not more, to the far left, and it would be more accurate to describe many of them as Islamo-Leninists. Islamist techniques of terror also have a pedigree in secular revolutionary movements. The executions of hostages in Iraq are copied in exact theatrical detail from European "revolutionary tribunals" in the 1970s, such as that staged by the Red Brigades when they murdered the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978.

The influence of secular revolutionary movements on terrorism extends well beyond Islamists. In God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens notes that, long before Hizbullah and al-Qaida, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka pioneered what he rightly calls "the disgusting tactic of suicide murder". He omits to mention that the Tigers are Marxist-Leninists who, while recruiting mainly from the island's Hindu population, reject religion in all its varieties. Tiger suicide bombers do not go to certain death in the belief that they will be rewarded in any postmortem paradise. Nor did the suicide bombers who drove American and French forces out of Lebanon in the 80s, most of whom belonged to organisations of the left such as the Lebanese communist party. These secular terrorists believed they were expediting a historical process from which will come a world better than any that has ever existed. "


I'm not particularly sure that any of this should be especially troubling; Like James and Dewey (or even Eliot and Mill) I tend to think we can retain certain aspects of christian heritage whilst discarding others and the broader metaphysical superstructure. I might have more time for Nietzsche than Gray apparently does but that still leaves me far from advocating a revaluation of all values. The central problem with Gray's arguments is that on the one hand he describes atheism as having inherited many of its central concepts from its christian heritage while on the other denouncing communism and fascism as exemplars of the dangers of atheism and scientific worldviews rather than (as I would see them) secularised forms of religions. In Gray's worldview atheism's religious basis is only apparent when it is most useful as a stick to beat atheism with; when it is not, he quietly elides it.

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posted by Richard 9:42 PM

Saturday, June 16, 2007

 
Having been interested for a while in the ideas of Sapir and Lee Whorf, the recent research on the Piraha language, which has occasionally been characterised as providing evidence for those theories, was something I was immediately interested in. Looking into it in more detail, I don't think it actually does support Sapir to any marked intent, but as this article argues, it does challenge many current assumptions about language and consciousness:

"So in the case of Piraha, the language I've worked with the longest of the 24 languages I've worked with in the Amazon, for about 30 years, Pirahă doesn't have expressions like "John's brother's house". You can say "John's house", you can say "John's brother", but if you want to say "John's brother's house", you have to say "John has a brother. This brother has a house". They have to say it in separate sentences.

One answer that's been given when I claim that Piraha lacks recursion, is that recursion is a tool that's made available by the brain, but it doesn't have to be used. But then that's very difficult to reconcile with the idea that it's an essential property of human language—if it doesn't have to appear in a given language then, in principle, it doesn't have to appear in any language. If it doesn't have to appear in one part of a language, it doesn't have to appear in any part of a language... If you go back to the Pirahă language, and you look at the stories that they tell, you do find recursion. You find that ideas are built inside of other ideas, and one part of the story is subordinate to another part of the story. That's not part of the grammar per se, that's part of the way that they tell their stories.

So the evidence is still being collected, the claims that I have made about Pirahă lacking recursion and the fact that Piraha is an evidence that there probably isn't a need for universal grammar. Contrary to Chomsky's proposal that universal grammar is the best way to think about where language comes from, another possibility is just that humans have different brains that are different globally from those of other species, that they have a greater general intelligence that can be exploited for all sorts of purposes in human thinking and human problem-solving... The ongoing investigation of these claims and alternatives to universal grammar, an architectonic effect of culture on grammar as whole, and the implications of this for the way that we've thought about language for the last 50 years are serious. If I am correct then the research so ably summarized in Steve Pinker's book The Language Instinct might not be the best way to think about things."


What particularly interests me about these arguments is the role they play in the overall history of ideas. In contrast to the ideas of Marx, Freud, Skinner and Foucault, which all assumed to varying degrees that environmental forces are markedly more important than what would now be termed genetic considerations, modern conceptions of rationality have increasingly spurned the idea of the blank slate and moved towards a conception that bears a marked resemblance to that of Thomas Hobbes, if we substitute the term ‘genes’ for ‘passions.’ As Edward O Wilson observed every human brain is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but as 'an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid. I have to admit that evolutionary psychology of this kind is not something I have ever had a great deal of regard for; it tends to involve post-hoc extrapolations that are typically every bit as unfalsifiable as Freud's theories. In either case, the term 'just-so story' seems amply deserved. It tends to disregard culture as a natural and material phenomenon and one that can be described as responding to a form of natural selection. If that is being displaced in favour of a more nuanced, tempered view, the I'll certainly be happy.

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posted by Richard 4:41 PM

Thursday, January 04, 2007

 
I had planned to consign religion to the vaults I imprisoned politics as a subject that was not going to be discussed here, but this article on Isaac Bashevis Singer's anti-theism seemed well worth making an exception for:

"None has seen fit to give a name to Singer’s Third Position in the debate. So I will: It’s not atheism, not theism, but rather anti-theism, a provocative, profoundly different stance from either of the others. Simply put, contrary to the atheists, Singer believes in a God, but, contrary to the theists, he doesn’t believe in a just, loving or merciful God; he believes in a God who doesn’t deserve worship, a God who deserves our condemnation.

“Singer’s ‘ethic of protest,’ a philosophy that would be his to the end … the point was to show God that he [Singer] disapproved of the way He ran the world, disapproved of His silence and absence of compassion …. Singer insists that because God is evil, man should behave in a moral way … ‘to spite God.'"


I'm reminded of the ending of Joseph Roth's Rebellion; mistreated by god and state the dying and suffering Andreas is afforded a vision of being entered into heaven. He responds to it by turning his back and proclaiming that he wants to go to hell. In the past, I've generally tended to describe myself as agnostic. It's not so much that I don't think god exists (though it seems overwhelmingly improbable) as that the depictions of god in the major monotheisms present an entity that is invariably such a repellent tyrant that sympathy for the devil seems the only honourable course to adopt. In practice, this means that the position I most closely have to identify with the likes of Dennett and Dawkins, though I am far from sharing their commitment to rationalism. Dawkins objects to religion on essentially the same grounds that he objects to homeopathy; that he does not believe it to be true. For instance, consider the following from Sam Harris:

"Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as “wishful thinking” and “self-deception.” There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth...

In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available... If a person doesn’t already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won’t discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion... We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn’t make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. "


There are two overlapping questions. Firstly the truth value of religious mythologies and the question of morality and religion. While these are clearly related as questions, they are far from being ideal companions; the implication of the former proposition is that even if all morality did depend on religion, that this would still be a peripheral concern compared to whether it is true or not. For myself, I'd reverse this; even if god exists, that would be very far from making him moral.

Update: A similar argument in a review of Richard Dawkins by Thomas Nagel:

"Dawkins, like many of his contemporaries, is hobbled by the assumption that the only alternative to religion is to insist that the ultimate explanation of everything must lie in particle physics, string theory, or whatever purely extensional laws govern the elements of which the material world is composed.

This reductionist dream is nourished by the extraordinary success of the physical sciences in our time, not least in their recent application to the understanding of life through molecular biology. It is natural to try to take any successful intellectual method as far as it will go. Yet the impulse to find an explanation of everything in physics has over the last fifty years gotten out of control. The concepts of physical science provide a very special, and partial, description of the world that experience reveals to us. It is the world with all subjective consciousness, sensory appearances, thought, value, purpose, and will left out. What remains is the mathematically describable order of things and events in space and time.

That conceptual purification launched the extraordinary development of physics and chemistry that has taken place since the seventeenth century. But reductive physicalism turns this description into an exclusive ontology. The reductionist project usually tries to reclaim some of the originally excluded aspects of the world, by analyzing them in physical--that is, behavioral or neurophysiological--terms; but it denies reality to what cannot be so reduced. I believe the project is doomed--that conscious experience, thought, value, and so forth are not illusions, even though they cannot be identified with physical facts. "

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posted by Richard 9:10 PM

Sunday, November 05, 2006

 
I must admit to finding it difficult not to want to quote all of this article from John Gray:

"The secular ideologies that had such power during the last century were deeply shaped by Christianity... Michael Burleigh argued that, from the Jacobins in the French Revolution to the anarchists of late 19th-century Russia, Europe produced a succession of political religions that had many of the features of the faith they aimed to replace. In imagining a perfected world at the end of history, Marx and Bakunin reproduced Christian eschatology: the belief that human life can be transformed in a vast revolutionary conflagration was apocalyptic myth rendered into secular terms. Christian concepts and values permeated many lesser-known ideologies such as positivism and the many varieties of utopianism... In a horrible way Nazism was a messianic movement, which offered the promise of a new life in a transfigured world to those who were allowed to survive the cataclysm that was to come.

Downplaying the role of the church in the crimes of the last century is part of a larger default in Burleigh's analysis. Medieval Christendom was hardly an oasis of peace. It was racked with savage wars and campaigns of systematic extermination that prefigure those of modern times. The crusade against the Cathars launched by Pope Innocent III at the start of the 13th century led to the deaths of around half a million people, many by mass hanging, drowning or torture. Violent millenarian movements repeatedly convulsed late-medieval and early-modern Europe. In the early 16th century, a communist New Jerusalem was established in the city of Munster in northwest Germany that had many of the features of later secular regimes, including the methodical use of terror. The extraordinary savagery of modern political religion does not come from giving up Christianity. It is a secular version of the faith-based violence that has been an integral part of Christianity throughout its history."


I've long taken the view that both fascism (or at least Nazism) and communism can be understood as sublimated christian sects as much as responses to economic conditions in the manner Polanyi suggested. In all cases, the principle of noncontradiction is regarded as sound. Induction is useless; the basic premise must be believed in, rather than known, and in either case, conclusions must follow by means of deduction from the basic premise, not induction from empirically obtained data. In both cases, the vision of the new realm is all that is of import, rather than considerations of individual autonomy and rights.

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posted by Richard 8:45 PM

Sunday, October 01, 2006

 
I've just been reading this interview with Joseph Koerner about his work on the reformation of the image. Amongst many other things, it raises the question of whether the iconoclastic tradition within Protestantism was to undermine art by severing its link with faith.

"The dispiriting didacticism of this Lutheran art has often been commented on. Nineteenth-century Romantics blamed Luther for the death of art for art's sake, and its replacement with mere propaganda. Hegel thought that the Reformation inaugurated a tragic but necessary shift towards interiority which had robbed art of its intrinsic holiness, a disjunction between the beautiful and the true. The material world, fetishised by medieval Christianity in the cult of relics, the eucharist and holy images, was now disenchanted, and from that point onwards, however skilfully God, Christ or the saints might be portrayed by painters, 'it is no help, we bow the knee no longer.' Art was no longer sacred, immediate, an encounter with the ultimate: instead, it offered an alternative form of textuality, mere food for thought...

The Lutheran aesthetic, Koerner believes, broke decisively with the past in transforming art from a direct encounter with the sacred into a cognitive instrument, a didactic device in which understanding was everything, veneration banished. He therefore insists on the corresponding absence of this cognitive priority in medieval religion... Koerner here effectively articulates a modern version of an accusation often made by Lutherans at the time of the Reformation: Catholicism was external, magical and mechanical, Protestantism was interior and rooted in personal responsibility."


It's an interesting argument, albeit one perhaps more familiar from TS Eliot's theories concerning the dissociation of sensibility (where such writers as the metaphysical poets felt "their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose"). In The Open Work Umberto Eco commented that "the order of a work of art in this period is a mirror of an imperfect and theocratic society." Medieval literature is a place where every single sign was remorselessly subjugated to serving a transcendental order. As Thomas a Kempis wrote in his The Imitation of Christ; "Stand without choice and without all manner of self and thou shalt win ever; for anon, as thou hast resigned thyself and not taken thyself again, then shall be thrown to thee more grace." In other words, from the retraction that concludes the Canterbury Tales to the writings of mystics like Julian of Norwich, art was inseparable from religion. This is an old argument, shared by Bloom in Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human and originating with Burckhardt's The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy; "their powerful individuality made them in religion, as in other matters, altogether subjective... and markedly worldly... we are individually developed, we have outgrown the limits of morality and religion." The idea of subjectivity as a renaissance development is one that was later to be disavowed by Burckhardt and challenged by medievalists, but it has nonetheless persisted and does indeed seem to account for much of the difference we might find in the autobiographies of Abelard and Cellini. The lack of a sense of subjectivity in medieval art makes it especially difficult for an atheist like myself to appreciate it; there are simply very few naturalistic, non-religious, reasons to do so.

Medieval art and literature are things I can bring myself to admire but not something I can often bring myself to actually like. Reading the above comment from Eco, I find it very difficult not to think of Czeslaw Milosz's study of how writers were prepared to deform and contort their views to fit the prevailing ideology of communist states. The term Milosz uses to describe this is one derived from religion, ketman, a concept that seems highly applicable to the medieval worldview; "If one penetrates into the minds of these people, one discovers utter nonsense. They are totally unaware of the fact that nothing is their own, that everything is part of their historical formation - their occupations, their clothes, their gestures and expressions, their beliefs and ideas... The pressure of an all-powerful totalitarian state creates an emotional tension in its citizens that determines their acts." This tension is perhaps best observed in what is, to my mind, the most interesting work of medieval literature, Langland's Piers Plowman. This is one of the few medieval works where theological conformity is not a given, with Langland being deeply concerned with the relation of his radical social views to heterodox theological positions like Lollardy for the relationship between art and religion to be an unproblematic one.

For myself, art begins with the likes of Cranach and Holbein where the intermingling of the spiritual and the temporal is perhaps rather more uneasy than in their predecessors. Similarly, in literature characters in Shakespeare and Marlowe inhabit a world where god and the knowledge of god are no longer certain (as with Shakespeare's "as flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport"). The infinite variety of a Cleopatra or a Falstaff is something quite different to the trompe l'oeil effect Chaucer gives to characters like the Wife of Bath who at first sight appear fully rounded but to my mind never quite escape the taint of allgeory.

Update: Nigel Warburton quotes Richard Norman on the question of whether atheists can apreciate religious art:

"Haldane does however pose a genuine problem for the atheist when he turns to the specific case of religious art, and I want to consider this in more detail. He argues that any serious work of art is ‘a presentation of the reality and values in which the work seeks to participate’, and that in evaluating the work ‘we are judging the credibility of what it proclaims’ (pp.171-2). It would seem to follow that if a work presents religious beliefs and values, the atheist is bound to reject those beliefs and values and is therefore committed to judging the work less highly. And this appears to exclude the atheist from fully appreciating and valuing religious works of art. One of Haldane’s examples is Piero della Francesca’s painting The Resurrection in Borgo San Sepolcro. The atheist might try to take refuge in praise of the formal qualities of the work, but as Haldane rightly says, its form and content are inseparable. The arrangement of the figures, with the sleeping soldiers in their poses of disarray ‘contrasting with the simple sweeping contour of Christ’, who divides the background landscape between the deadness of winter and the new life of spring - all of this serves to point up the content of the painting, and the painting seems to be inescapably religious."


From a personal perspective, I do find appreciation of religious art to be far from straightforward. To continue to take medieval art as an example, I love the pigments and styles probably more than I do their Renaissance equivalents but do tend to find that art altogether impossible to relate to in a way that I don't for art after the Renaissance. Art is about content as much as form and the two are not easily separable. The aesthetics of art depend on its propositional elements to a very large extent; I doubt any art can be deflated down to such content but I'm equally inclined to doubt that it can exist independently of it. I've never really liked the idea that is some sort of all transcending concept rather than a product of specific cultures. It seems to me that it is more difficult to apprecicate a lot of religious art for much the same reason that the Victorians saw something in Little Nell's death that we can't. Certainly there are authors and artists that depict or propound viewpoints of such extremity that is very difficult to be other than revolted by them (the depiction of saints being tortured and killed in medieval art, some of the bloodthirstier parts of the Bible, Hitler's writings or Riefenstahl's films); pure aestheticism seems to me a position that very few people will actually hold in practice even while they happen to evince it in theory.

As a final point, it does seem somewhat unreasonable to me that atheists are incessantly questioned on their ability to appreciate gothic architecture or Bach cantatas, when the question of whether the same applies in reverse is never raised. A committed christian could well have a cap on their appreciation of DH Lawrence, Gide, Genet, Bataille, Pasolini, Burroughs, or Bunuel given that all of those have marked divergences from a christian worldview in their work. Or even to Victorian writers like Hardy, Arnold and George Eliot, whose work takes the death of god as essentially a given. My own objection to christianity is mostly that it seems a very cramped worldview that would exclude a great deal if I were to adhere to it.

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posted by Richard 12:17 PM

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

 
Rather predictably, there has been quite a lot of discussion of Richard Dawkins's new series, The Root of All Evil:

"With this in mind, Dawkins confronts Pastor Ted Haggard of the New Life Church in Colorado by comparing the show business techniques of his evangelism to those used in the Nuremberg rally... In the programme’s most dramatic interview, an American-born Jew turned Gaza-based hard-line Muslim called Yousef al-Khattab (formerly Joseph Cohen) announces that he hates atheists as much as Zionists and Christians, and tells us with undisguised menace that we must clean up Western society, where 'women are allowed to dress like whores.'

'You’re simply not allowed to attack someone’s religion. You can attack their politics or their football team, but not their faith. I think it’s very important that this should be seen as complete nonsense. Why shouldn’t people be required to defend their religion?' Dawkins refers not just to Islamist terrorists or the Catholic leaders whose dogma allows Aids to blaze through Africa, but to that majority of believers who consider themselves rational and progressive - if his documentary makes a single statement, it’s that 'all religion represents a danger to our society and future.'

'I think moderate religion makes the world safe for extremists, because children are trained from the cradle to think faith in itself is a good thing. So then when someone says it’s part of their faith to kill people, their actions need no further justification, and are almost respected as such."


Generally speaking, I tend to share Dawkins' atheism but not his rationalism. With that said, one of the greatest irritations for me is that we speak of people doing wrong 'in the name of' religion but we do not hear the same being said of crimes being committed 'in the name of' any other ideology. No atrocity was ever done 'in the name of' fascism or communism. Religion occupies a privileged position that largely renders it immune from criticism. The distinction between religion and other forms of ideology seems particularly untenable to me given that of the fourteen characteristics of an ur-fascism identified by Umberto Eco, ten apply quite straightforwardly to most of the major monotheisms (religion as a cult of tradition, rejection of modernity, a cult of action for action's sake, disagreement as treason (heresy, to use the correct euphemism), distrust of disagreement, stemming from individual or social frustration and the provision of a social identity, a cult of heroic martyrdom, and life as a form of struggle). By comparison, Stalin-era communism would qualify for about eight of Eco's characteristics. In such cases as the Middle East and Northern Ireland it seems clear conflict and violence are attributable to a complex mixture of causal factors. But there's no shortage of examples of religious groups persecuting one another without reference to other factors to suggest that religion is perfectly capable of being every bit as pernicious as nationalism, racism, fascism or communism.

This all seems to me something that needs to be addressed, even if doing so apparently seems to violate a taboo. Essentially then, people like Dawkins are necessary and I would rather have Dawkins being intolerant and right than people like the Bishop of Oxford being terribly reasonable and fundamentally wrong.

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posted by Richard 6:04 PM

Friday, December 02, 2005

 
Somewhat belatedly and via this story, I've come across the comments made by Philip Pullman on CS Lewis:

"In Pullman's world, the universe is ruled by a senile, viciously sadistic deity who has to be deposed in battle so that its inhabitants can join with angels in creating a "republic of heaven".

In reply to a question, Pull man told an audience made up largely of children and young people that he had first read the Narnia books when he was a teacher. He added: "I realised that what he was up to was propaganda in the cause of the religion he believed in. It is monumentally disparaging of girls and women. It is blatantly racist. One girl was sent to hell because she was getting interested in clothes and boys."


It's not so much that I disagree with Pullman (though he generalises his comments are far from unreasonable) as that I suspect he has missed what is actually so unpalatable about Lewis. To a large extent, the difference between literature and propaganda seems rather arbitrary (Pullman's own work is, after all, propaganda for an anti-christian worldview) and in all fairness to Lewis, his works certainly do encompass myths other than the christian. However, this still leaves the rather unpleasant and rather sadistic way in which Lewis often seems to dwell on the need to purge inherent sin through suffering and punishment, whether than applies to Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It still leaves the choice of the lion rather than the lamb as the central metaphor for christianity. And it still leaves the dismissive comment in The Last Battle that "she's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She was always a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up." It seems rather difficult not to compare all this to Pullman's notion of sin as a birth into consciousness and to find something much richer and stranger there.

As a footnote, there's an interesting comparison to be made here to Tolkien, and his tendency to dwell on man's innate corruptibility and the evils of progress, when contrasted to Mervyn Peake's account of how Titus comes to rebel against tradition and order as surely as the villain of the novel, Steerpike, does. See also Michael Moorcock's comments on Tolkien:

"Like Chesterton, and other orthodox Christian writers who substituted faith for artistic rigour he sees the petit bourgeoisie, the honest artisans and peasants, as the bulwark against Chaos. These people are always sentimentalized in such fiction because traditionally, they are always the last to complain about any deficiencies in the social status quo... his High Tory Anglican beliefs permeate the book as thoroughly as they do the books of Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis, who, consciously or unconsciously, promoted their orthodox Toryism in everything they wrote. While there is an argument for the reactionary nature of the books, they are certainly deeply conservative and strongly anti-urban..."

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posted by Richard 9:09 PM

Saturday, October 01, 2005

 
Quite a lot of attention has been given to the results of this study into the relationship between religious belief and social problems:

"Belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today. According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional... He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added. "


Of course, on the basis of this description it would probably be more accurate to say that religious belief has done nothing in the United States to arrest or prevent these problems, given that any number of socio-economic conditions that are not present in other countries could be more important as causal factors. In either case, religion does not effectively play the role of enforcing collective moral codes that Durkheim saw it performing (though I always felt that advocating religion on social rather than spiritual grounds was putting the cart before the horse). However, that still leaves the more interesting question of the role religion has played in producing the socio-economic conditions I mentioned; for instance, by stressing individual salvation over collective responsibility (after all, much of modern liberalism and socialism has been at least in part a gradual secularisation of certain roles previously specific to religion). For example, one of the central characteristics of American politics in recent years has been the characterisation of liberals as elitists opposed to traditional values, with this being used as a means of persuading working class voters to vote contrary to what one might expect their economic interests to be:

"Republicans are still the party of corporate management, but they have also spent years honing their own populist approach, a melange of anti-intellectualism, promiscuous God-talk and sentimental evocations of middle America in all its humble averageness... a collection of gripes that faults leftists not because of their lack of faith in the free market, but because of the cultural monstrosities they have imposed on the good people of middle America: they have legalized abortion, stamped out prayer in the public schools and are now threatening to sanction gay marriage."

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posted by Richard 11:15 AM

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

 
I've often though that Slavoj Zizek provides an entirely unintentional justification of the adage that everything communism said about capitalism was true but so was everything capitalism said about communism; his criticisms of modern capitalism are acute but his alternatives represent precisely the form of ruthless idealism that leads to gas chambers and gulags (it's impossible not to read Zizek's descriptions of his politics of truth and not be reminded of the Stalinist credo that one cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs).

To elaborate, Slavoj Zizek's stance is self-consciously the equal and opposite of the hardline conservative, with whom he shares his opposition to that fuzzy liberal area that tends to be the dominant aspect of most modern societies. His readings are a tour de force of the egotistical sublime, with everything subordinated to that pattern from the political to the ephemeral. In each case, the argument is that conservatives and the leninist communist that Zizek describes himself as are equally prepared to adopt a politics of truth that reserves a policy of realpolitik in defence of that truth. My general reaction to such politics is to counter with an appropriately psychoanalytic (Zizek being an acolyte of Lacan) observation; that courtesy has always been rather important to civilisation than truth (i.e. civilisation perseveres through repression and sublimation of its discontents). In the instance of his latest essay, much of my ambivalence about Zizek applies:

"Religion is permitted — not as a substantial way of life, but as a particular "culture" or, rather, life-style phenomenon: what legitimizes it is not its immanent truth-claim but the way it allows us to express out innermost feelings and attitudes... And is this also not why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as "barbarians," as anti-cultural, as a threat to culture — they dare to take seriously their beliefs? .. the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today's tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while features like wife beating remain out of sight...)"


Certainly, my longstanding view has always been bemusement concerning the liberal and personal notions of religion (with the kind of selective approaches to the totality of religion that have earned contempt since Nietzsche) in contemporary society which are more of an appropriation of religion than an observance of it; such things seem to me indicative of little more than atheism without the conviction (though as I have never been anything other than an atheist I am certainly no authority; fundamentalist believers are far from being beyond equally selective approaches to doctrine). Equally, I've long been concerned at modern society's inability to form a critique of religious fundamentalism, since religion is invariably presumed to be a unmitigated social good (hence perhaps my sympathy for the French ban on religious symbols in public institutions).

On the other hand, as an atheist I am in position to object to modern society tending to fillet religion of its meaning (recalling Michel Houellebecq's observation in Platform as to how capitalism would denude islam of belief in time. As an example, consider the Catholic division of sin and sinner, a somewhat risible piece of sophistry that is only put forward since it is no longer possible to speak of sin as wilful inclination rather than simply innate and bengin characteristics), and there are other theoretical perspectives on such matters, such as those of Anthony Giddens. Giddens argues where tradition dominates, individual actions do not have to be analysed and thought about so much, because choices are already prescribed by the traditions and customs. In a post-traditional society, matters becomes much more reflexive and aware of its own precariously constructed state. In short, tradition falls into desuetude but is not replaced with any other equally miltat ideology and in place of the clash of utopian idealism Zizek misses one one is left with a fuzzy form of liberal tolerance. It's debatable as to the desirability of such outcomes (it does rather resemble something out of Brave New World and arguably does have the consequences for art that Zizek says it does; the recursive displacement of prohibition and the injunction of incessantly inventing new artistic transgressions and provocations) but it still seems infinitely preferrable to anything Zizek might offer in reply.

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posted by Richard 8:01 PM

Thursday, February 26, 2004

 
The BBC has commissioned an interesting survey on levels of religious affiliation in differing countries. Many of the results are interesting, but to my mind the most surprising was that only 29% of the UK population said they thought the world would be a more peaceful place without religion. In fairness, the issue is not clearcut; as this article suggests there is usually a continuum of causes, wherein religion simply serves as another marker of otherness:

"Alice Lakwena, the leader of the Holy Spirit Movement, claimed that God had commanded her to seize the Ugandan capital and I and other journalists found and interviewed her in a banana grove about 100 kilometres (60 miles) short of Kampala. Superstition played a large part in the progress her ragtag band of followers had made. They smeared themselves with a potion they were told would protect them against the army's bullets. But this bizarre campaign has also fed on northern political grievances in Uganda."


That said, there are much more unambiguous instances from history where persecution was conducted with only religious difference being the cause and without ethnic difference or forms of economic or social grievance. In this sense, religion does serve as a prototype for a form of absolute ideology that must be imposed in a way that has rarely been true for other ideologies (interesting to note that most religions tend to meet most of Eco's characteristics of ur-fascism). An obvious exception is communism, but in many respects it can be argued that religion served as the prototype here. As an acquaintance of mine once wrote in comparing christianity and communism:

"Neither has much use for the criticisms of philosophy, which they both distrust because they cannot control it... One joins them only by publicly endorsing their doctrines, and advances by being perceived by one’s superiors as passionately conforming to them. The laity of each lack the power to dictate the course of church-state actions; power issues from the apex - the crowned head of the controlling minority of the ideological elite.

Dissent is either treasonous (contra people) or blasphemous (contra God); one punishes it directly in this life, one indirectly through disposition of a believed-in next. To join either is to forfeit it your rights. One is world negating the other is other-than-world negating. Each asserts that the only way to be truly human is to embrace its faith... Both have a person to worship and a book to read, and both have trained experts to communicate the orthodox meaning of each to the mass herds, and to denounce forbidden concepts and conceivers. The masses of each are constrained to take their words at face value, the words of ideologues commissioned to propagate the Faith."

In both cases, a certain set of concepts is promulgated which are essentially incompatible with the liberal ideas of the nation state that developed in opposition to them. Neither can claim exclusive preserve over such concepts but neither are easily separated from them.

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posted by Richard 9:37 PM

Wednesday, September 24, 2003

 
An interesting piece on the collapse of European democracies in the nineteen thirties and Latin American democracies in the nineteen seventies, criticising the polarisation thesis;

"The theory of "polarization" described a vicious circle: An economic crisis drives voters toward parties of the extreme left or right, and low-level political violence breaks out. In the next election cycle, still more voters choose extremist parties, partly out of fear of the "other side's" extremists. As centrist parties weaken and the ground for political compromise vanishes, democracy collapses and the state is seized by one or another extremist faction... (However) In almost all instances, extremist parties did not actually capture the loyalty of very many voters. And in almost all cases, the great majority of the population remained committed to democracy even during times of severe recession and popular unrest. "


As an example, 81% of the vote in Uruguay's elections two years before a coup went to the two main political parties. At the same time, a poll found that 79% of the population supported democracy even with disorder to an ordered military society (though I might be inclined to suspect that the remaining twenty percent might qualify as a sufficient tipping point, rather than invalidating the thesis concerning polarisation). In particular, the note concerning networks of churches, unions, and fraternal organizations in Germany and Austria allowing Nazism to be quickly disseminated, in contrast to the view that "civil society" acts as a barrier against fascism, is well made. One might also note the collusion of the church with the Franco regime and the general role of the church in Latin caciquism.

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posted by Richard 8:44 PM

Monday, July 28, 2003

 
One of the more interesting discussions of the Brights concept was the claim that a naturalistic ethics is not possible on the grounds of the naturalistic fallacy; namely the view originally derived from Hume that there is a form of inference barrier between is and ought. Or as David Stove put it "For any factual statement e and any ethical statement h, h is not deducible from e." In this context then, naturalism is an acceptance of what is, and ethics is the domain of what should be. There is accordingly no way, in this view, to bridge the is/ought gap without referencing an extra-natural source. Heedless to add, I do not admit the possibility of anything extra-natural being able to fill that gap (a ghost in the machine); like Nietzsche, I take the view that any such noumenal matter would certainly be unintelligible to us even if it was perceptible to us. That said, surely Kierkegaard was correct to suggest that such a source would have precedence over such phenomenal matters as ethics, as with the tale of Abraham and Isaac? In which case, such sources hardly appear a suitable basis for ethics.

Certainly, utilitarianism, whether Singer's recently discussed preference utilitarianism or Mill's liberal utilitarianism, represents means of bridging precisely that gap, by establihging the pursuit of happiness for the greatest majority as an ethical goal, something that appeals to out social nature. Though such models might lack a model of virtue (it might be more accurate to say lack any need for such a model) I am not sure what to call them if not naturalistic.

However, it is, I suspect, a good deal easier to put this debate into perspective by inverting it and establishing how the inference barrier functions in religious ethics where the extra-natural source posits an ought irrespective of an is. One way to do this might be to distinguish between morals and ethics. Morals can be considered to be “inherited” and tend to refer to sets of ingrained traditions, while ethics are considered and less dependent on any particular cultural or religious perspective. Since morals are frequently regarded as a given due to perceived divine injunction, they have a disturbing tendency to be self-validating (a condition that is arguably little more than an abdication of personal responsibility in favour of group norms). Accordingly, these morals are alarmingly arbitrary even when said morals have long since ceased to be applicable. The crudest example is the notion of halal and kosher foods, but sexuality is another obvious area where religious ethics are an ought in flagrant contradiction of naturalistic views; sexual behaviour may indiscriminately be described as immoral; for it to be unethical requires a significantly greater degree of precision. As Bertrand Russell put it, in Why I am Not a Christian; "moral rules are broadly of two kinds; there are those which have no basis except in a religious creed, and there are those which have an obvious basis in social utility."

The most important form of naturalistic ethics, to my mind, was that established by George Eliot. Eliot established empathy as the centre of such ethics; "deeply awing sense of responsibility to man, springing from sympathy with the difficulty of the human lot." Eliot took the view that religion was deeply invidious to morality, writing that "I regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life . . . to be most dishonorable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness."" Accordingly, the principal consideration of creating a secular ethics was the overcoming of egoism likely to suppress natural sympathies towards others. As such, her novels see her characters progressing from egotism to empathy through their interactions with others. Without god it is suggested, the need for duty and sympathy can only be stronger. Given that much evolutionary psychology has confirmed the co-operative trends in our nature (something Eliot, as an early exponent of Darwin would have appreciated) as well as some studies suggesting that sociopathy and the lack of an emotional centre are closely related, I suspect Eliot's particular ethics have weathered the years remarkably well.

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posted by Richard 7:53 PM

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

 
In recent years, evolutionary psychologists have come increasingly close to establishing a neural basis for religion. As one acquaintance put it, "the predilection to enter that state which Freud characterised as 'oceanic' and which Otto labelled as 'numinous' is hard-wired within humans to a greater or lesser degree," serving in evolutionary terms as a means of enforcing social cohesion. The localisation of a 'god module' within the brain, which becomes active during prayer is suggestive of much spiritual experience being essentially noetic, that is, independent of any external entity.

Of course, this is far from being conclusive since it does nothing to disprove external involvement, but it does suggest other explanations and tallies well with anecdotal evidence, e.g. correlation between drug induced and mystical experiences. However, much of these 'hardwired for god' arguments, while an interesting diversion, are somewhat unhelpful, since establishing a genetic basis for religion only serves to simultaneously discredit and perpetuate religion; not a helpful combination. In addition, such explanations do little to explain why some societies have seen organised religion decline (e.g. much of Europe) and others have seen this to a much less marked extent (e.g. The United States). For example, 48% of people in the UK claim to belong to a religion, compared with 86% of people in the US and 92% of Italians. In order to explain that, you need to look to environmental influences, the classic account of which being this:

"The general conclusion of the book which the reader has before him is that religion is something eminently social. Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities; the rites are a manner of acting which take rise in the midst of assembled groups and which are destined to excite, maintain, or recreate certain mental states in these groups. So if the categories are of religious origin, they ought to participate in this nature common to all religious facts; they should be social affairs and the product of collective thought. At least -- for in the actual condition of our knowledge of these matters, one should be careful to avoid all radical and exclusive statements -- it is allowable to suppose that they are rich in social elements."
(Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life)

As such, explanations of secularisation might well stress distinctions between urban and rural areas. Churches tend to play an important role in the social life of villages, while urban societies have many competing social centres. Accordingly, in a small and relatively closed community like a village, religion can inculcate and reproduce shared values. In a larger society, religion ceases to be a public performance and becomes a private consolation. As such, urban areas may be more conducive to secularisation than rural ones. A shift from local to national or transnational society (e.g. Europe) due to improved transportation may also have a role to play, in so far as migration is greater and religion has ceased to be a geographical marker to the same extent.

A second explanation lies with dogmatic conceptions within Churches. Since a church is a social system, it develops and seeks to reinforce group norms, which may prove to be self-limiting in the long term. An evangelical church promoting conservative doctrines may create a strong sense of affiliation amongst its existing adherents but may limit the available pool of potential adherents. Bear in mind at this point, that most European countries have had state churches, so lapsed believers are likely to fall into passive observance or non-belief. The US has historically had more of a free-market in religion and lapsed believers may have greater choice of alternatives.

Thirdly, the displacement of religious institutions. The rise of new roles and specialist institutions handling functions (e.g. education, health care, social security, even art and culture.) previously carried out by religious institutions, often based on increasingly rational principles (again an area where Europe is different to the US and is suggestive of policies that involve faith groups in public service provision).

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posted by Richard 9:46 AM