A Valediction Forbidding Nonsense
A couple of passages from the president of the Royal Society’s valedictory speech because they are so B&W.
In short, I guess that the same ill-understood circumstances that allow complex human societies to arise and persist also – and perhaps necessarily – have elements that are strongly antithetic to the values of the Enlightenment. What are these values? They are tolerance of diversity, respect for individual liberty of conscience, and above all recognition that an ugly fact trumps a beautiful theory or a cherished belief. All ideas should be open to questioning, and the merit of ideas should be assessed on the strength of the evidence that supports them and not on the credentials or affiliations of the individuals proposing them. It is not a recipe for a comfortable life, but it is demonstrably a powerful engine for understanding how the world actually works and for applying this understanding.
See – ‘and above all recognition that an ugly fact trumps a beautiful theory or a cherished belief’. That’s where we came in.
I end this valedictory Address much as I began my first one, by again reminding us that the Royal Society was born of the Enlightenment. Everything we do embodies that spirit: a fact-based, questioning, analytic approach to understanding the world and humankind’s place in it…Many people and institutions have always found such questioning, attended often by unavoidable uncertainties, less comfortable than the authoritarian certitudes of dogma or revelation…Today, however, fundamentalist forces are again on the march, West and East. Surveying this phenomenon, Debora MacKenzie has suggested that – in remarkably similar ways across countries and cultures – many people are scandalised by “pluralism and tolerance of other faiths, non-traditional gender roles and sexual behaviour, reliance on human reason rather than divine revelation, and democracy, which grants power to people rather than God.” She adds that in the US evangelical Christians have successfully fostered a belief that science is anti-religious, and that a balance must be restored, citing a survey which found 37% of Americans (many of them not evangelicals) wanted Creationism taught in schools. Fundamentalist Islam offers a similar threat to science according to Ziauddin Sardar, who notes that a rise in literalist religious thinking in the Islamic world in the 1990s seriously damaged science there, seeing the Koran as the font of all knowledge.
Because people refuse to recognize that an ugly fact trumps a cherished belief. Because as far as a great many people are concerned, it is very much the other way around – a cherished belief trumps pretty much everything, and certainly anything so small and petty and trivial as a mere fact or piece of evidence. And because deference is paid to them and witheld from the other team – because it’s considered bad manners to tell the cherished-belief-first crowd that they’re mistaken and not thinking clearly, while it’s not in the least considered bad manners to tell the evidence-first crowd that we are shallow, cold, boring, heartless, unimaginative, trivial, shallow, and mistaken and deluded and going to burn in hell forever. An unfortunate arrangement.
I sometimes wonder at the lengths people will go to defend the beliefs and behaviors of the Christian “belief-first crowd”. A couple of years ago I worked for a contractor at IBM and worked with a Muslim woman from Algeria – she was a secular Muslim and had, along with her husband and children, just become U.S. citizens. There was a fundamentalist Christian in the dept. where we worked who would follow her around during breaks and at lunch and tell her that her religion meant nothing, her soul was condemned to hell, etc. Finally, after she was reduced to tears I talked to the dept. managers about it. He was told to stop bothering her – but much concern was expressed by several people about offending HIS beliefs (after all, an evangelical Christian is required to proselytize nonbelievers). Later, after it had been dealt with and he stopped, a few people said that they hoped he hadn’t been “too offended”. Not one asked after the woman.
Yep, that makes it hard for us non-believers to be tolerant of beliefs that claim universal application. If they would just do it between consenting adults in private I would not mind.
But their belief commands them to save others.
As in the abortion “debate” – someone who believes it is murder cannot accept free choice.
One day I will work out a theory of tolerance that draws lines between acceptable interference in other’s affairs and the rest.
If someone has usefelly done it, can you let me know, to save me the effort?
Aaaaaaaaah! What a horrible story, Matt. God damn. (And well done – but what [as you must have wondered] was wrong with everyone else?!]
“hard for us non-believers to be tolerant of beliefs that claim universal application”
I keep coming back to this. I can see people wanting to believe whatever they want to believe themselves – but they have no business enforcing it on other people. It’s just absurd to order or urge or persuade or try to persuade people to believe something there is no good reason to believe. If X wants to, X has that right, but X has zero right to demand it of anyone else.
And yet the situation is precisely the opposite. It’s non-believers who are expected to keep silent.
Matt’s story does not surprise me at all. I have lost track of the number of times evangelical christians have accosted and harassed my family and myself. I hit back but older members of my family have been too kind, too polite to do much more than tolerate the insults with a pained expression. And all this is in a country where only about 15% of the country is christian! I;ll take muslims, hindus, buddhists etc anyday for day-to-day, people to people interactions.
One of my favourite responses to these advances was given by a friend of my mine, whose doorbell was rung by Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their opening gambit was “You want to go to heaven, right?” to which my friend replied “No.” Not yet flummoxed, they persisted: “No, not right now, but one day, when your life on earth comes to an end, you want to go heaven, don’t you?” “No. Absolutely not. Under no circumstances.”
They didn’t know what to do after that, so they left.
I car share with an evangelical who believes in Rapture, talks in tongues (not in the car, thankfully) and leaflets door to door. After a few months she stopped trying to save me, which I find insulting.
If she believes, as she must, that I am going to hell, then surely it is her duty to save my murky soul, however much I refute and ridicule her arguments and however often I play my Bill Hicks tapes.
In general, the line is that anyone has the right to seek to persuade others (and this right is not affected by the rationality/stupidity of the belief in question). However, the others have an equal right to tell the would-be persuader to f*** off, as this is equally a valid exercise of freedom.
The situation in a workplace is somewhat different, in that a management has a right (even a duty) to ensure good working relationships and prevent anyone from being pestered. After all, if someone approaches me in the street, I can walk away, but this is not usually possible in a work environment. Thus in that environment it is certainly right to stamp on the activities of the Christian evangelist. This has nothing to do with its being a religious view – the same would be true of someone who pushed his or her political views on unwilling colleagues.
What it comes down to is that you have an obligation of politeness towards work colleagues – and this is a stricter rule than can or should be enforced by the state.
What line?
In any case – one may have a right to seek to persuade others, without that being the right thing to do. A useful distinction.
Similar in fact to the point about obligation of politeness, which should not be enforced by the state. I don’t think any of us is arguing it should be an arrestable offense; we’re arguing that it’s disgusting behavior. (Worse than mere impoliteness, I would say – given all the power dynamics: man/woman, native/immigrant, Xian/Muslim, Xian/secular, etc. Bullying at the very least.)
Ophelia, Strictly off topic, but do you have a good link to the final score on the Canadian Sharia issue? I’d be much obliged.
“37% of Americans (many of them not evangelicals) wanted Creationism taught in schools.”
Is this an indication of how a great many Americans feel about the rest of the world right now ? “… Well, I don’t buy it (creationsism) myself, but it’s better than what the terrorists (Iraq, Afghanistan, Al Q, etc, etc) want us to believe… ” – rather than the average American being ‘anti-Darwinian’ as such. Bearing in mind the succesful obfuscation between Osama and Saddam. Just a thought…
(I have noticed how a lot of US citizens are rallying round the US forces back home having fundraising barbecues and block parties on weekends to get the boys extra provisions out there, stuff that the that the US govt doesn’t provide… Isn’t it – at least partly – part of the psyche of a nation at war ? Not that this is meant to be uplifting..
Cripes – I just re-read all the other posts above; I guess it’s pretty bad with state-side Christian loony/fundamentalists… I still don’t think the war in Doh’-raq is exactly helping calm things down though…
“An eception must be made for Irish sectarianism, I suppose”
Since Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, the adjective for which is apparently “British”, it’s not “Irish secrtarianism” but “British sectarianism”.
Since most of the sectarians in question come from an ethnic group the USA refers to as ‘Scots Irish’, take your pick.
Don – Sharia link – if you type Sharia Canada into the B&W search box you get 45 external links. Number 45 is “Newsflash – No Sharia in Ontario!” – so that seems like a good bet. Or Google News would be helpful – or perhaps the Toronto Star (whose blog links to B&W, which shows how sensible it must be).
Don – BBC Radio 4 had a well structured piece on this yesterday (5 Dec) afternoon at 4.30 – you can probably get it on the net still. Although the contributors often used carefully coded / sanitised language to get round the BBC’s PC police, all three contributors agreed that it was a good thing that the 1991 arbitration law was going to be re-written to restrictyit to commercial and business disputes only, and to exclude the ‘civil’ matters it currently encompasses. A clear strike for reason against mysogyny. OB – I really am astonished how many female supporters there are for even the more pernicious readings of Sharia around the globe – do you know if there is any one particular website that makes this issue it’s central focus ?
Thanks OB/Nick. There is an interesting thread on this at PP.
OB – that last post wasn’t ‘ironic’ by the way – (I realise that B&W frequently tackles the intellectual discrepancies at large on this issue among others) – I would genuinely like to lend my support to anything along the women’s rights / ‘ni pute’ line…
Nick – hmm – no, I don’t think I do. I know of several websites that make that issue one of several – er, foci. (Or is focus fifth declension? Oh, Latin is so tiresome.) Azam’s, Homa’s, ISIS, etc – but they all include other issues too.
You know…it would be good to have a big umbrella site for all these different organizations. Ni putes, the German equivalent if there is one, Netherlands ones; Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium; Canada – Irshad’s, Homa’s; etc. We’re learning about them one at a time – it would be helpful if there were a place where they all joined up. No need to merge; just find all the different organizations in one place. That would be good…
It is a good idea about the umbrella site…
BTW the Women Living Under Muslim Law (WLUML) website has a very good list of organisations working in this area:
http://www.wluml.org/english/links.shtml
Thanks, mirax, I hadn’t seen that before. Useful.