Amateur night at the Anti-science Fair
Karen Armstrong is a former English teacher and current religious apologist with a strong dislike of science; she has found a novelist who also has a strong dislike of science, and who was invited to give some lectures on the subject at Yale. (Yale invites some very odd fish to give lectures on subjects they don’t seem to know much about. Terry Eagleton for instance, and now Marilynne Robinson. Why does Yale do that?)
[T]he novelist Marilynne Robinson argues that positivism, the belief that science is the only reliable means to truth, has adopted a “systematically reductionist” view of human nature.
Oh yay, a much-needed critique of the reductionism of positivism and the folly of thinking that science is better at finding out things than more amateurish brands of inquiry. That will be new and different.
Armstrong summarizes Robinson in several excruciating paragraphs of uncomprehending formulaic nonsense, then winds up with a final deepity:
If we are indeed completely in thrall to the selfish gene, why not throw all constraint to the winds and just be selfish – individually and collectively, in our politics, social arrangements, financial and economic dealings? We saw during the 20th century (not to mention the first decade of the 21st) what can happen when the “me-first” mentality is given free rein.
She seems to have derived her understanding of the selfish gene from Mary Midgley, or perhaps the back of a cereal box. The whole review is warmed-over Midgley, which might as well be warmed-over Charles Windsor, which might as well be warmed-over Marilynne Robinson. They all peddle the same line of annoying uninformed grandiose New Agey bullshit, and they give me a pain.
Ah, Midgley…. As bad as a social darwinist when it comes to separating science from political metaphor. Armstrong et al seem quite eager to build careers out of pretending that others are similarly limited.
Ok, let’s consider the converse to positivism: there exists a methodology wholly distinct from science capable of reliably arriving at truths about the natural world.
For this to be the case, there are two possibilities:
1) This reliable methodology could be assessed using scientific methods.
2) This reliable methodology is immune to scientific verification.
Ok, for (1), the methodology can be considered a subset of scientific methodology. Methods are frequently investigated, and if successful, appended to practices within the relevant fields. So, this would not contradict positivism.
For (2), this is what is being said: it is impossible to verify the reliability of the methodology in question. Whatever “results” it yields, science can not observe or test. What kind of “results” fall into this category, I wonder?
The first that comes to mind, as this is Armstrong, is claims to revelation. However, these can be verified and falsified by observation insofar as they make any factual claims concerning the natural world.
The second item, something which ties into the subsets of things excluded from our first consideration, is values. However, values are not factual propositions in the sense of being natural entities. And further, they can be evaluated insofar as they related to goal-oriented statements and in terms of success with other values. So, science is extremely relevant in discussing values.
Of course, this is only being mentioned because we can expect claims of revelatory authority for values, tying these items together. But, idea that religion is a reliable methodology for determining values is also susceptible to scientific methods, and I must say, religion fares badly in this regard. Actually, religion is almost always a formalization of previously held values, not a source or methodology for their determination.
Also, Armstrong’s condemnation of the consequences of the “me-first” mentality neglects the consequences of the “General Will-first” nationalist mentality, which would prove to be as much or more destructive than pure capitalism managed to be. Of course, I wouldn’t take valuing community to be the same thing as nationalism. That would be like interpreting a scientific hypothesis to be an endorsement of laissez-faire.
Oh yeah.
Please don’t judge all English majors by this woman…
I finally got a copy of “The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense” the other day. My friend and I spent the afternoon laughing at how spot on the parodies are. We’ve had a few disagreements with some of our post modernity loving lecturers and the parodies do go some way to make listening to them more bearable, if not more awkward when I start laughing at the lecturers.
Reading this post just reminded me of how widespread the mindless repetitions of those buzzwords are and how durable they are to critique.
Crap, what happened there?
Science, as a discipline, is an instance of methological naturalism, which includes everyday experience and everyday trial and error, as well as science. It seems to me that our argument against Ms. Armstrong and others would be stronger if, instead of speaking in the name of science, we spoke in the name of methodological or metaphysical naturalism.
Amos,
I would put it more broadly, and technically, as independently replicable sense-data, usually made in terms of predictive statements.
These people work very hard to misrepresent Dawkins. He has repeatedly said that just because genes are selfish doesn’t mean people need act that way. The whole is/ought thing keeps going around endlessly.
I take the opportunity to reread Dawkin’s reply to Midgley.
It’s hard to remember a lazier approach to scholarship outside of political circles… but then again, Midgley’s political concerns are the primary issue.
And on a more relevant note, I hate the treatment of scientific method as a singular entity or approach… it’s actually a (very very huge) category of methods roughly matching the criteria of #6. Midgley’s objection to positivism as non-pluralistic is absurd.
What, not ecstatic?
Ah, yes, the definitive argument. If you think we should be rational, that must mean we should be sadistic. This maddening claim, which we hear over and over again, reveals either an appalling lack of intellectual honesty, or an insane indifference to the human condition.
I sincerely hope it is the former.
It’s depressing – so depressing – to read this stuff and realize Armstrong and Robinson (like Midgley before them, as others pointed out) are fighting against an idea that doesn’t even exist. They’re so fundamentally mistaken about the epistemological outlook put forward by most scientists I know of (including Dawkins). They’re also embarrassingly mistaken about the actual propositions they think they’re criticizing. No one I know of proposes the bleak, nihilistic, self-centered narcissism they think they’re arguing with. Why don’t they understand that scientists are no less human, no less capable of awe, joy, and sadness than they are? It’s insulting, really, isn’t it?
At this point, I’d like to post a link to Robinson’s review of The God Delusion in Harper’s Magazine from 2006. (Apparently you can only see it on their website if you’re a subscriber, so here’s a reposting of it.) The fact that it’s called “Hysterical scientism: The ecstasy of Richard Dawkins” says it all, really, and it manages to pack in almost every single anti-atheist fallacy (Hitler was inspired by science in the form of eugenics, quantum theory, logical positivism, etc.).
http://solutions.synearth.net/2006/10/20/
Further –
It’s almost as if Armstrong, Robinson, and Midgley don’t credit scientists, atheists, or secularists with being fully human. That they really don’t believe we have the same range of emotions and personal commitments that they do. I resent that.
Richard Dawkins wrote a whole goddamned book about that (Unweaving the Rainbow). Do you think they could be arsed to read it? Isn’t that the minimum level of engagement they’re obligated to meet before they spout off the way they do?
I don’t believe in any supernatural anything; I’m a materialist through and through. But I’m not a clockwork automaton. There are pieces of classical music – yes, including those with religious themes – that stir me so deeply I burst into tears. . .to the point where I can’t trust myself to see them performed in public because I will dissolve into a crying jag I can’t stop. Certain paintings leave me slack-jawed with the feeling of being overwhelmed. I have family and friends I love dearly, I have people who’ve died that I miss so terribly it’s like physical pain. I’ve been so in love I might as well have been intoxicated.
This is part of being human, it’s something we all share (in one way or another), and it makes me extremely cross when the Armstrongs of the world write the rest of us off as if we were fundamentally other, detached from the experience of being human.
It sells the wonder of empirical discovery short, and it degrades and dismisses the humanity of atheists. Again, I resent it, bitterly.
Zachary Voch:
I found this equally puzzling. How could anyone look at the 20th Century and conclude the biggest problem facing humanity was excessive individualism?
On the other hand . . .
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/sunday_sacrilege_the_active_ha.php#more
Repost to include para breaks. Please delete the previous version.
Our minds are simply a passive conduit for an unknown, indifferent force.As in, I take it, the soul. Meanwhile those of us who reject such notions still note the unreliability of human perception, and thus employ our minds, which are products of our brains, in order to overcome such limitations. the novelist Marilynne Robinson argues that positivism, the belief that science is the only reliable means to truth, has adopted a “systematically reductionist” view of human nature. You mean Marilyne Robinson doesn’t like people who she cannot beat in an argument by making up bullshit without any evidence. Positivism is a charge rallied against people who are largely incorrect by people who are largely involved in mental masturbation.
Though science has its limits, much as Churchill said of Democracy, it is the very best system we have thus far, and frankly much as though fakes and flakes would like it to not be so, the scientific reality of getting shot really does trump the faith-based fantasy of being bulletproof.
“the mind, as felt experience, has been excluded from important fields of modern thought” and as a result “our conception of humanity has shrunk”.You mean there is no such field as cognitive psychology? And that nobody studies Personality psychology?
You know, if you are going to critique science for what it doesn’t include, then maybe you should stop simply pulling things out of your ass and at least take a cursory glance at what various scientific fields actually study.
This is why woo in general, which includes religious apologists, annoy me. It isn’t hard to spot their utter and complete ignorance, to the point that you wonder how they made it past standard five. You average high-school student should be able to point out flaws in that article – yet it gets published by one of the more highly regarded and scientifically literate newspapers in the world.
The Guardian is not the Telegraph, or the Daily Mail, WTF?
I wonder if these uneducated idiots have ever taken the time to read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance” ??
Robert Persig quite clearly showed the virtue of “The scientific method”, especially for difficult or complex problems. And that asking the “right” questions, and observing the pertinent facts were important as well. It’s only too clear that this group have no real understanding of what they are attacking. In fact, they are attacking their own false image of science, not real science at all.
Unfortunately, the deplorable state of education in both Britain and the USA allows them to get away with this rubbish.
I think we should try to get away from the idea that being a writer is in itself a sign that one has a useful contribution to make.
She is sufficiently vague about what she means by the “me-first” mentality that I wouldn’t put it past her to hope that some would understand it to include totalitarian regimes. The logic for that would be that totalitarian must equal atheist (even when god is invoked as a partner) and that means “me-first” because there is no god to consider. I fear I am onto something here. Can anyone else do a better job of formulation?
Armstrong has made a career – rather a lucrative one of late, I imagine – out of attempting to reason us into believing that feeling is a surer path to knowledge than reason can ever be. That being so, why does she attempt to present her arguments as though they were the product of a reasoning process rather than mere lazy prejudice? And why, if she is correct, does my overwhelming feeling that everything she writes is meaningless vacuity not convince her to abandon her attempts to interpret the universe, and go and knit some yogurt instead?
Ah, Paula, as you doubtless know very well indeed, while it is true that feelings are privileged over facts, it is nonetheless a fact that some feelings are privileged over others and this we know to be a fact because our feeling in this regard is so strong. This can be, and often is, translated into “Karen Armstrong knows better.”
Excellent point, Stewart!
I think Josh’s comment at No. 12 is also very enlightening. The would-be mystics really do seem to believe that we cannot be fully human if we reject that which flies in the face of reason. It’s an ironic view to hold, given that, if it were true, it would mean that human evolutionary development had gone something like this:
1. Primitive: instinct-driven, unable to reason to any significant extent
2. Advanced: able to reason
3. Super-advanced: rejects reason and prefers instinct.
Probably just as well we didn’t reach stage 3 until AFTER those pesky scientists had used stage 2 to figure out the importance of clean water in disease prevention, and how to make it clean, and how to fight diseases that couldn’t be prevented, and how to create safe anaesthetics, and how to grow food reliably despite the vagaries of the seasons, and how to decode the genome, and how the body works, how to stop vast numbers of babies and mothers dying during childbirth, how molecules bond together, what causes earthquakes and volcanoes, how the rocks were formed, and the laws of physics and quantum mechanics that permit things such as satellites, aircraft, computers, the internet.
You could almost say that Armstrongism is a tribute to the power of science. It is science and the technology that has resulted from it that have created the cosy, safe world she lives in, where she can safely spend her days in idle speculation and in which she feels the desire to spice things up a bit through the injection of spurious mysticism. And, as science has become more advanced and more powerful, so it has felt less and less accessible to those who have not studied it: and what we do not understand, we often fear. No wonder, perhaps, that those who cannot or will not attempt to keep themselves informed about it, and who lazily take their understanding of science from those who deliberately misrepresent it (‘selfish gene’, indeed), take comfort in a retreat into fantasy and attempt to create a rival, more pleasing, less challenging reality. And if they can persuade themselves in the process that doing so is a virtue, and makes them superior to those who find satisfaction enough in the REAL world, well, they’re going to fight very hard to preserve their little bubble, aren’t they.
I’ve actually read Robinson’s book – it sounded as though it might be interesting but was a little disappointing. She devotes a lot a space to Freud, but you wouldn’t know it from reading the reviews. I wonder why?
Armstrong is, as some of you know, a bête noir for me, She’s gushing and shallow and thinks profundity means the ability to string words together in such a way as to hint that there are more things in her mind than are dreamt of in your philosophy (for any value of ‘your’). But when you actually get round to making a few soundings all you come up with is sand and broken shell.
First off, a lot of evolutionary psychology is probably pretty wide of the mark. So in this respect at least both Armstrong and Robinson have something they can sink their teeth into. But more importantly, even if evolutionary psychology or sociology do manage to isolate aspects of the evolution of human beings’ pyschology and society that can be confirmed it would not follow that it would make sense to make reductive statements of the sort: “Composing symphonies is a mating ritual behaviour of the species homo sapiens.” Nor does it suggest, what is false, that Mozart or Beethoven did not have complex interior selves — although, of course, we might have been surprised as to what they were composed of. If Hitchens is right about James Joyce, then at least part of the Joyce’s creative power lies in his ability to write with one hand while doing something quite different with the other!
But — more serious — if she thinks that she can pillory Dawkins (for instance) as a positivist, she won’t get much leverage, because Dawkins gives no reason for thinking that that’s what he is. He doesn’t think, for instance, that morality is just a matter of emoting. Nor, equally harmful, does he think it is merely a matter of receiving commands from on high. He believes that it is an entirely human process — which is why it is so important to distinguish religion as a form of belief which acknowledges, whatever else it might acknowledge, powers or beings higher than human beings who take an interest in our comings and goings, and especially in the way we have sex and with whom. If we don’t start out there, then anything becomes religion and the claims of the religious are merely different ways of talking about human beings and their creations. But having started out there, and denied the existence of such powers or beings, all the so-called ‘spiritual’ aspects of human beings can be seen as merely aspects of what being human is like. Some get off on so-called ‘mystical’ states, for which they are prepared to suffer privations, torments, isolation, and the mindless repetition of mantras. Others find mescaline a quicker way to similar states; but in either case we are talking about things that are fully this worldly — there being no other world that we can know of.
However, to continue to make Midgley’s mistake about selfish genes, and the reason for prioritising science as a way to know, is really unforgiveable at this stage of the discussion. And to suggest that science is reductive, reducing complex human experiences to chemical reactions at the synapses of neural networks in the brain, is really silly. I watched Christopher Hitchens debating with a mad Christian last night, and he kept challenging Hitchens to explain how a bunch of chemicals can have a moral life, and then wouldn’t listen to the answers provided, repeating the mantra over and over again as though it were a sacred litany. But the poor man hadn’t noticed that we are not just a collection of chemicals, and that the particular arrangement of chemicals that constitutes a human being has all sorts of abilities that those same chemicals, jumbled together in a flask, do not have.
Armstrong writes:
But we aren’t, and if she had read Dawkins with attention, she would see that we aren’t. We can, because we are humans, arise above the selfish gene, and control it. What is so hard to understand about that? As I have said before, this is a woman who left the convent, and then has spent the rest of her life building convent walls in her mind. And it shows, in everything she writes.
Surely it’s not overly simplistic to say that the pro-religion anti-science crew are in favour of a restoration of ignorance, since that is the state in which religion thrives best. They’ve correctly seen that knowledge has made religion less relevant wherever it penetrates and are simply attacking the problem afflicting religion at the root. I hope they don’t really think they have a chance, because surely they must see that they will suffer from the consequences of their own success, too. I don’t intend to be sexist when I note how women campaigning like Armstrong seem more perverse to me than men. If they have their way and religion is strengthened, it’ll mean less of the benefits of science for all of us, and free speech will vanish, but women will suffer the most.
Hi there – long time fan, first time poster as a direct result of reading that drivel in the Grauniad; not hugely impressed by it!
I don’t have much to add to what has been said above, except that @Josh comment 12 was absolutely spot on, better than I could have said; and also that it wasn’t so long ago that the former archbishop of Westminster (Murphy O’Connor?) effectively declared that he thought that atheists aren’t “fully human” – to absolutely no response from the mainstream media (btw, does anyone have a source for this?).
Maybe not a huge shock to hear it from someone like him, but the lazy and almost contemptuous caricatures of atheists etc by Armstrong et al in reviews and articles are irritating in the extreme.
Positivism, properly speaking, is idealist, as Bunge and others have pointed out endlessly. For this and other reasons it is not suitable as a philosophy of science. But you wouldn’t get this reading the folks like the anti-science crowd, who seem to think “positivism” means “nasty icky sciency stuff I don’t like”.
Well, the original YouTube video of him actually saying it has been removed, but here’s a reference to it: http://freethinker.co.uk/2009/05/15/atheists-are-not-“fully-human”-says-idiotic-archbishop/
Can anyone tell me if Marilynne Robinson’s fiction is any better than her (attempted) non-fiction? From what I’ve seen of her writing, it’s pretentious and overblown, and seems more like a conscious attempt to imitate great writing than great writing itself. (It’s like Cargo Cult poetry, where she has used impressive sounding phrases and important sounding words, but has not actually used those words to convey greater meaning.) Does she deserve her Pulitzer Prize, or did the judges slip up?
Absolutely right on, Stewart. They do want a restoration of ignorance — or, at least, they want an institutionalisation of their own! That’s why I keep saying that poor old Karen Armstrong, though she tried very hard to do so, has not really made it out of the convent yet. (Though she seems to have found a formula for minting money from the foolish.) Which is why Ophelia’s title is so ‘dead on balls accurate’ (got that from a movie somewhere — My Cousin Vinny, I think). This is amateur night at the anti-science fair. Let’s keep outselves as stupid as we can, misread as much as possible, interpret it in such a way that our ignorance is preserved, and continue to pretend that things were better when ‘god’ was in charge. That this would immediately subvert Armstrong’s attempt to make up religion all on her own has escaped her; and, what is more, they’d have her back in her habit as fast as you can say ‘selfish gene’. No more swanning around in the empyrean for her!
Tried to stop it before it got away on me…. “Let’s keep outselves” should be “Let’s keep ourselves.”
I maintain cautious optimism for the future, for the following reason: it is extremely difficult to prevent superstition and religion where ignorance and obscurity reign, but it is perhaps even more difficult to keep knowledge from spreading, once it exists. Reprehensible as the anti-science people are in their aims, their task is really to get a genie back into a bottle. If it were toothpaste they had to get back into a tube, they could ally themselves with science to get the job done, but if I remember my Arabian Nights at all well, the genie only goes back into the bottle if you fool him into it – and that’s what we mustn’t let them do.
Why did Yale invite Robinson to speak? Could it be that her book has been published by Yale University Press? A bit of selfishness in action.
That final paragraph had me in stitches!
If you read German, have a look at a piece by Karen Armstrong in the German weekly “Die Zeit”. You probably already know what it is about: modern religious thought is “primitive”, the New Atheists “focus exclusively on the god of the fundamentalists”, we need God to give us “strength and comfort”, a completely transcendent (i.e. non-existent, in Armstrong’s own word) god “could solve many of our current problems”, and so predictably on.
It’s all very warm and fuzzy and nice (except when she wilfully misrepresents the Assertive Atheists, of course), but how can she even pretend any appreciable number of actually religious people will not see that what she advocates is de-facto atheism?
phil-anim, do you mean positivism in the Comtean sense or in the sense of logical empiricism?
Huh. I thought I remembered doing a post on Murphy-O’Connor’s insight about atheists, but apparently not. I linked to Stephen Law’s post on the subject in News, but that’s all. There was a lot to post about right then.
Ah, yes, even in German. (Thank you Peter, for the link. I’m trying to learn German, which I do not find easy. My old mind is not so supple or as retentive as it used to be.) This woman is shamelessly self-promoting. My German’s not great, but…. Talk about the anti-science fair. Here’s Armstrong:
“Today we live in an epoch [or era] of scientific reason, which despises myth.” But that’s not true. We do not despise or scorn myth at all. We understand myth as a storied way of understanding the world and human life. And some of the myths are quite beautiful and pregnant with meaning. As story myth may tell us much about ourselves. No one who reads the Greek or Roman myths, for example, could say that they do not contribute to our understanding of what it is to be human. (I am particularly fond of a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, recommended by PZ Myers, which he found of comfort, as I recall, when his father died.) And in so far as it does this, it is a kind of ‘knowledge’, the same kind of knowledge that we can get from reading, say, Tolstoy, Lawrence, Dickens or Nobokov. No one is suggesting that there is nothing to be learned from art or literature. In other words, myth is not ‘untrue’, as she suggests, but simply not a candidate for literal (scientific, empirical) truth or falsity at all. It is a human imaginative creation.
But Armstrong wants to take this further, as she does in her very embarrassing The Case for God, to suggest that, in some sense, though not in the sense of Being (Wesen), there ‘is’ (a) god. As she says, some theologians wisely call god a ‘nothing’. As Wittgenstein so aptly remarked, though he seemed to have taken this back to some extent later in life, whereof we cannot speak, we should remain silent. But poor Armstrong, she just can’t stop talking!
Religion, she says, was not, originally, what people thought or believed, but what they did. Again, the same old bloody story. It’s not about belief. Religion is about … well, what? And then she says the same thing that she says in The Case, that religious practice and ritual are like learning a skill, like skating. We just do it. It just comes naturally, I suppose, with a bit of practice, even though we cannot put what we are doing into the language of natural law, … and, as Peter says, so predictably on. But notice how she brings in the idea of natural law, as though religious practice belongs in the same company, plays by the same rules, even though, because no-god is transcendent, and therefore, apparently, something that somehow just happens to us as we carry out religious practices, it is not something that we can put in scientific terms. Is she really as stupid as this, or am I just getting old and grumpy?
And then you get to the end, and it says that it’s based on The Case for God! Well, of course, I thought I had read it all before!
The “Zeit” piece is a translation from English and appears to be a kind of summary of her book. Didn’t read it all (she simply wearies me, in any language), but the beginning strongly suggested that the point was a combination of the dogged assertion that god is nothing like what anyone thinks it is and the equally dogged assertion that this thing that is nothing like what anyone thinks it is nonetheless exists.
Glanced down further in spite of myself. She does her shtick about what science can tell us about cancer, up to and including curing it, then says that science cannot help us deal with the fear, disappointment and suffering, nor teach us how to die with dignity, and that’s what religion can do. That’s all in answer to her question: what do we need god for? She remains maddeningly unspecific and doesn’t relate to the likelihood that those who can get what she’s claiming from religion get it only from the kind of religion she keeps saying is the old-fashioned sort that no one but atheists still think exists. Or some such nonsense. She has tried my patience – and found it wanting.
Yes, Eric, I have long thought that it shouldn’t be the ‘New’ Atheists but the Old and Grumpy Atheists. :)
Another thing I think is curious is that scarcely anyone seems to have noticed that in terms of Popper’s Three Worlds there is almost certainly no god in World 1 (as per, of course, The God Delusion), but there is most definitely a god (even more than one, to be sure) in World 2. I should think there is no question, and indeed hardly any discussion, for better or worse*, that, as such a psychological construct, a god meme can have quite significant therapeutic value. But then any notion of ‘truth’, to quote Mr Praline, “don’t enter into it”.
* Maybe there should be a more widely promoted discussion of religion as a therapeutic aid. That way we could establish safety instructions as to when and how often to use it, as with medication. Perhaps having a case of persistent religion branded as an addiction and treated as a medical condition would be helpful as well as mildly ironic in light of Dawkins’s “Viruses of the Mind”.
Sorry, Eric. I was writing mine while you were posting yours. It seems to be just a summary of stuff we know for a German-speaking audience (and I’m not aware of any major crimes by this generation of Germans that warrants that).
Ah, Stewart… No problem. I was just enjoying trying to use my German (what little there is of it!). I was writing as I read, and when I came to the end I was tempted not to send it at all when I saw that it was actually meant to be based on the silly book, but then I thought, what the hell. But really, when you do get to the end, and realise that she’s really a Buddhist, you have to wonder why all the talk of god? After all, even at the end she says, that Buddha, as the enlightened one, has decided to live in peace with his fellow creatures. And then she says:
Which I assume means: It makes no sense simply to believe in peace, one must also put it into practice. (although I’ve never run across müsse before — shouldn’t it just be muss?) But this has nothing whatever to do with god or gods. If she wants simply to claim that religion is a ‘spiritual’ practice, a matter, say, of meditation, and living in harmony with others and the natural world around one, then that is what she should say, instead of pretending, deceptively, that she is preserving the heart of religion as most people have understood that. After all, in the story she tells, of the Brahman who asks Buddha whether he is a god or an angel or a spirit, Buddha answers, ‘No, think of me as someone who is awake.’ Now, we may disagree on what being truly awake means, or what enlightenment is, but Buddha gives no purchase whatever to the idea of a god. So what is all the tricksy language about das Nichts?
When Armstrong did that switch with the word ‘selfish’ she showed herself to be either remarkably uninformed or very dishonest. She must have read the book, it’s very lucid. Very difficult to misunderstand unless tou really, really want to.
[…] gene, showing a lack of comprehension or interest in what she imagines to be arguing against. (See Butterflies and Wheels for […]
Eric, yes I think you understood correctly. I shall not tangle myself up with things I’m not good enough at myself; when I hear “müsse” in that context, I just take it as being a fancier way of expressing oneself (more common written than spoken).
As you saw, “das Nichts” is there so she can explain that it was not used as a denial of god’s reality, but in order to emphasise its transcendence. Not that I think that helps much.
Just as the literal believers in scripture don’t give any thought to any metaphorical levels, so Armstrong seems to ignore the existence of all the literalists and writes that theologians of all three monotheisms have insisted for many centuries on god’s non-existence. Funny that Ophelia should have mentioned Albert Mohler in the next entry; he had it in for Armstrong, comparing her unfavourably to Dawkins, at least as far as honesty goes, in a piece a while back that I probably first saw linked here at B&W.
Ah, yes, but she seems to want to play both sides of the fence, because she does have a paragraph which speaks just of god, not of das Nichts. Its the one where she asks what need we have for god. And she continues, quite naively, to say, in response to her question: “Of course, as a support and consolation. Science can tell us why we have cancer, and can even perhaps heal our sickness. But it cannot provide solace for the fear, the disappointment and the sorrow that comes with the diagnosis, nor can it teach us how to die with dignity. Religion, anyhow, can help us with this.”
Now, this just makes me angry, for religion is the primary obstacle to people’s choice to die with dignity. They want to force people to die in misery with the paltry assurances of religion to guide them. Now, that might be just fine for some religious people, who are so steeped in idiocy that they are prepared to say that they just accept whatever comes from god’s hands, because he knows best, or something inane like that. But that doesn’t wash with me. And the damned woman can’t play with das Nichts in one breath and then bring all the consolations of god to bear at another, which aren’t fucking consolations at all, but brutal demands that people die in misery, without the option. And this is a repugnant point of view. Talk about selfishness! The woman should be staked for this, and let her find out what god’s punishment can really be like. I just saw red when I read it first, and didn’t mention it at the time. But she can’t have the fallback position of das Nichts if she’s going to claim the comforts of god at times of trouble. She’s a damned charlatan, and should be seen to be one.
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Having seen several mentions of ‘memes’ in the comments, I am reminded of the day, about a year ago, when I was channel-surfing, and had my attention captured by a mention of Richard Dawkins. I stopped to check it out, and was rather surprised to find myself on a Christian channel, listening to a woman in a sit-down interview lecturing her hostess (and the ever-curious Christ-cult TV audience) about ‘memes’, and what an awful, evil, atheistic concept they are. Here’s the funny thing… she was going-on, sincerely… compellingly… captivatingly, even (and of course, completely misunderstanding)… about ‘me-mes’ (sounds like the name ‘Mimi’, like in Mimi Rogers).
Anyway, Karen Armstrong… Midgley… Robinson… ALL put me in mind of that ridiculous woman, whose name I did not get. I found myself in AWE of her stupidity and cluelessness.
Oooh those horrid atheistic Mimis, how we hates’em.
Can Mimi be the fifth horseman – sorry, horsewoman?
No because she would bring Maurice Chevalier with her and I can’t be doing with that.
“We saw during the 20th century (not to mention the first decade of the 21st) what can happen when the “me-first” mentality is given free rein”
This period of time is marked by increasing individualism, liberal values, secularism, and atheism. And more kindness, more human respect, less murder, less rape. Even counting the world wars, the purges, and the genocides, the 20th century was less violent than those before it. Steven Pinker has an excellent presentation on this: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html
I don’t wish to defend Karen Armstrong, but anyone who takes the trouble to read the whole Midgley/Dawkins controversy will notice that her point — defended with numerous quotations — is that Dawkins himself does not always or sufficiently distinguish between the two relevant meanings of “selfishness”.
The root of the problem is that he uses “selfish” in both the correct and the indefensible sense in TSG. I don’t think a fair-minded reader ought to conclude that he meant the silly bits. But he did write them. The people who pick up on that fact can’t be blamed for it.
As for Josh Slocum’s comment that “It’s almost as if Armstrong, Robinson, and Midgley don’t credit scientists, atheists, or secularists with being fully human. That they really don’t believe we have the same range of emotions and personal commitments that they do. I resent that.” — it’s a good thing no atheists would ever talk about believers like that.
@28:
Her fiction is pretentious and schmaltzy. Her novels are “spiritual” in the Karen Armstrong-esque “God is an ineffable unknowable sparkly magic fluffy mystery” kind of way. Robinson and Armstrong are both Queens of Meaningless Deepities who see themselves as heroes in the war against “scientism” or whatever.
I really wonder exactly what Karen Armstrong does believe. When I read History of God she came to the clear conclusion that we can know nothing about god, including whether he exists or not. She spent many hundreds of pages whittling god down in much the same way Robert M Price does in the Incredible Shrinking Son of Man and I rather got the impression that she was a deist at most and probably an atheist/agnostic.
She seems to be the sort of fatheist who likes to keep the religious around as some sort of pet. “Here chrissy chrissy chrissy, aren’t you cute?” Very patronising really.
Andrew Brown:
Fixed that for you.
Can you provide examples of atheists saying things like that about religious believers in general? Atheists may say such things about violent extremists, but it’s justified. For example, it’s a reasonable hypothesis that the Taliban thugs who murder teachers for the crime of educating girls, indeed lack many of the emotional and cognitive faculties that comprise the fully human mind. Where, however (save the odd blog comment) are the same things said about all believers?
Damnit… the strikethrough tag (which should have gone through the word “indefensible” in the above post) seems to be malfunctioning.
Andrew, that is an astonishing claim. The question is not about the use of the words ‘selfish’ or ‘selfishness’, but whether Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, ever uses those words to speak of human psychology as determined by natural selection. In his response to Midgley, Dawkins says quite clearly: “My central point had no connnection with what she alleges. I am not even very directly interested in man, or at least not in his emotional nature.”* Is there anywhere in The Selfish Gene where he fails to make this distinction clear, and uses ‘selfish’ or ‘selfishness’ in such a way as to refer ambiguously to genes and/or human psychology? For that is what you must show. Dawkins makes it very clear that he is using words in the context of evolutionary biology, and that, in that context, they are defined solely in terms of ‘behaviour’, where behaviour can be used in reference to plants and other organisms that have no conative properties whatsoever. Can you give examples where there is a clear ambiguity in his use of ‘selfish’ in this technical sense?
*He also adds the interesting remark: “My book is about the evolution of life, not the ethics of one particular, rather aberrant, species.”
Andrew Brown @52,
A fair point, but we can fault Armstrong for the cause of her persistent misconception: that she lacks interest or curiosity in the very thing she seeks to oppose. (I took this route in my blog post.)
It is possible that The Selfish Gene cannot be grasped by everyone, which is fine. The problem comes when people don’t know that they don’t know, which I assume is the case for Karen Armstrong.
Andrew Brown:
– As for Dawkins and his metaphors, what Eric said above.
As for this,
What? Which atheists are you referring to? Even if such atheists exist, do you really mean to argue that it’s OK for Armstrong/Robinson/Midgley to take this approach simply because those putative (and undemonstrated) atheists do it too?
I made a specific complaint about these women; I did not cast aspersions on all believers as a general group. Are you able to engage a specific point without 9-year-old-level “mummy he did it too!!” arguments? This really is classic you, Andrew Brown. You do this sort of thing all the time in the Guardian. It’s not fair, it’s not enlightening, and it makes you look silly and tribal.
Andrew,
Read the link I put up at #8. Everybody should as well. Dawkins did not defend his language as being just metaphor… he defined metaphorical language in a narrow sense. Midgley barely seems to have even read the book before writing her screed.
Yes, Zach, that is the paper that I was quoting, which I have had stored away for a long time on my HD. It’s a brilliant riposte to a silly original, and as usual, the thoughts are scintillating and the language simply catches fire. What I can’t understand is why, if he had read this — and he should have done — Andrew can say what he said in his note above.
I addition to his reply to Mary Midgley, there is also Richard Dawkins’ response to Lucy Sullivan, on the same theme. The second paper, published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences (1995), is a masterpiece of intellectual demolition, and well worth reading. I do have some pity for the object of Dawkins’ wit and scorn, but it was, clearly, invited by the over-confident Lucy. That is why I encourage Andrew Brown to make sure that he knows whereof he speaks. It is easy to dig pits in the mind, and expose them for all to see, but much more difficult to fill them in again.
[…] Universalist camp. No, there is no requirement to believe in the standard superstitions. But nonsense such as this usually gets a good reception in such circles. Here is a sample of this sort of woo: Armstrong summarizes Robinson in several excruciating […]
The comment sections of any atheist blog, and quite often the bits above the line, are full of blanket scorn for “the religious”; descriptions of them as “morons” or worse. I don’t think that Midgley ever takes that sort of line. Nor am I aware the Robinson does.
Eric MacDonald: On page 66 of TSG (presumably the 2nd edition, but my note is not specific and I can’t see the book), he writes “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals co-operate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help form our biological nature .. let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.” If that isn’t a conflation of “selfish gene” with “gene for selfishness”, it’s hard to know what would qualify.
As a general point, the fact that someone writes with equal fervour and facility to claim p and ~p doesn’t mean he only ever claims p.
Absence of Mind is on my night table, but I haven’t gotten to it yet; it came from her Terry lectureship at Yale. That said….
Robinson has written three novels, all highly acclaimed pretty much across-the-board. I thought Housekeeping (1980 — winner of the Hemingwway/PEN and a Pulitzer nominee) was quite good, that Gilead (2004 –Pulitzer winner, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Ambassador) was wonderful, and I haven’t gotten to Home (2008 — winner of the Orange Prize and a National Book Award finalist) yet. Robinson was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences earlier this year. I have heard her described several times, including during an introduction at the 2009 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, as the best living writer in English. Taste is a difficult and subjective thing, but among the generally accepted experts and the apparent “people who matter,” Robinson is deemed, essentially unanimously, as a great fiction writer.
Your milage may vary.
The comment sections of any atheist blog, and quite often the bits above the line, are full of blanket scorn for “the religious”; descriptions of them as “morons” or worse. I don’t think that Midgley ever takes that sort of line. Nor am I aware the Robinson does.
You’re being conversationally and intellectually dishonest again, Mr. Brown. Once again, I made a specific argument about three writers. I offered the opinion that they don’t seem to see atheists as capable of the full range of human commitments. I never claimed they used words like “moron” – why are you bringing this up? What I said has nothing to do with what other atheists or commenters may or may not say. That’s not an answer to my specific charge (whether it’s right or wrong) against the three writers. It’s an unfair distraction tactic to avoid having to engage with my specific claim. Your conversational partners (including me) deserve more fair treatment. I get that you have an axed to grind with some atheists, but why are you grinding it on me?
Sorry, the first para. above was a quote from Andrew Brown, and it should have been off-set.
And sorry to bang on about this, but you, Andrew Brown, are doing the same thing to me that I think Midgley/Armstrong/Robinson do. You’re refusing to acknowledge the individual, specific thoughts I put down in favor of sweeping me up in a broad-brush stereotype about atheists who use language you dislike. I really don’t care what you think of me or any other atheist, but I do resent being treated with that kind of dismissive contempt. And that is what you’re doing. It’s petty and low, and it is the very essence of rudeness.
I think it’s important to note that the atheist attacks on supernaturalists are generally addressed to their intellectual case, and perceived irrationality on their part. It’s not much different than what you see when people argue over politics, or science. “What, you think that the tax plan is a fair one? You’re an idiot!” There’s a certain amount of hyperbole and exaggeration, but accusations of stupidity or ignorance place an issue clearly in the arena of reason. One side is factually wrong, and won’t recognize it. Don’t be stupid.
Not so with the supernaturalist/spiritual vs. atheist argument. From their side, the matter under dispute really isn’t about who is or isn’t being rational. It has to do with what you’re made of — the type of person you are. Are y0u sensitive enough to respond to the spirit? Can you feel awe, joy, sadness? Are y0u capable of delicate, nuanced thought? Or are you detached from the full experience of being human, with a twisted, shrunken ability to understand and feel things deeply? In other words, are you like an atheist?
Not that they’re judging, or anything.
As always Sastra, you’re precisely right, and eloquent. Yep, it’s the Oprah-fication of All Discourse.
The models which Dawkins spends most of his time expounding upon predict cooperation between kin. On that basis, it is indeed reasonable to say that in a larger-scale society, in which each individual interacts with many others who are not necessarily close kin, the same drive to altruistic behaviour might not exist. We could not “count on” the same genetic effect to work.
From the page before the “little help from our biological nature” quotation:
Of course, other factors such as reciprocal altruism could increase the degree of organism-level selflessness above that basic starting point.
If a popularizer of science says p, and later says something which can be construed to imply not-p, they might be confused or an unclear writer, but it does not mean that the science itself implies not-p.
First, the quote is on page 3 of TSG, as any two-click Google Books search could have told you. Second, where did you get the “gene for selfishness” nonsense from? Third, Dawkins’s point is, as he says just one paragraph earlier, on page 2, that:
Are you saying you cannot distinguish between the obviously and explicitly metaphorical sense of a ‘selfish gene’ from ‘selfishness in individual behaviour’?
Andrew, I appreciate your response, but I think you are wrong. First of all, we have to put the example you use in the context of what you originally said. Here is the point you wanted to make:
The root of the problem is that he uses “selfish” in both the correct and the indefensible sense in TSG. I don’t think a fair-minded reader ought to conclude that he meant the silly bits. But he did write them. The people who pick up on that fact can’t be blamed for it. [my emphasis]
I don’t know what you mean by ‘correct’ and ‘indefensible’ here, though I took it to be that you believed that he had confused the two senses, the biological sense in which he is speaking in terms of selfish genes, and the psychological sense in which he might be speaking about human behaviour. Now that I come back to it I wonder if that is what you do mean, or whether you are making the same mistake that Mary Midgley made in thinking that Dawkins was attributing psychological states to genes. If this is what you are saying then it is, quite frankly, it seems to me, well settled by Dawkins’ response to Midgley and Sullivan, and is already very clear in The Selfish Gene.
However, if you are thinking here about two different uses of the word ‘selfish’, one as a ‘term of art’ (if you like) in biology, and the other as a psychological or emotional state or character of actions, and you believe that Dawkins has confused these two uses of the word ‘selfish’, then your quotation does not show that he has done so.
Let’s take your quotation:
Now that we know where it comes from, it makes more sense. You left something important out. The elipsis hides this: “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”
The point that Dawkins is making is quite simple, and it certainly does not follow from a confusion between the idea of selfish genes and selfishness. Selfish genes may well produce behaviours that are altruistic, because such behaviour may, in certain contexts, enhance gene survival, but it will not do so with complete reliability, since genes are ‘in the business of creating’ (this is used figuratively too) organisms that will perpetuate themselves, and sometimes selfish behaviour will achieve this. Indeed, as he shows, gene survival produces altruistic behaviours where it (also) tends to benefit shared genes.
Of course, speaking of selfish genes is a figurative way of speaking about the algorithmic mechanism of natural selection. Organisms are, as Dawkins points out, looked at from the biologist’s point of view, survival mechanisms for genes. Organisms that survive carry their genes to the next generation, and the genes provide the program for building successor organisms. Some will survive, some will not. The successful ones are successful because they have successful (selfish) genes. In his response to Lucy Sullivan, Dawkins speaks in detail of the way in which biologists use anthropomorphic metaphors. It is a façon de parler. It is not an illegitimate use, any more than figurative speech is illegitimate in poetry.
So, now, to come to your quotation. What it is saying is that the genes which program the construction of the human phenotype may tend to create tendencies in us which, unchecked, would be destructive of human society and cooperation. We know those tendencies: kin, tribe, race, etc. Christians call it sin; biologists think it may have more to do with biology. We cannot depend on our biology to produce cooperative, peaceful societies. We can’t depend on it, though there may be — and, it seems, probably are — innate tendencies in human beings to altruism and compassion.
But I do not see here anywhere a misuse of the word ‘selfish’, or a confusion between different uses of the word, or any illegitimate uses. In fact, I am still very much where I was when I first read Mary Midgley’s paper: nonplussed. (Thanks to Peter Beattie for ‘googling’ out the page number.)
Aw, Andrew, come on. Josh Slocum cited three published writers, one of whom is quoted in my post – and you reply with comments on atheist blogs? Come on.
Furthermore – any atheist blogs? Really? How do you know? You’ve read them all? Every single one?
In a glowing review of Marilynne Robertson’s book in the Ottawa Citizen, the reviewer, and Robertson, go on an on about how science ignores the inwardness of human experience. Damned right, and this is how we can tell that Robertson knows nothing about science, despite her claims to the contrary. This is the grossest misunderstanding of science I have ever encountered.
The scientific method is the pursuit of objectivity, the deliberate abstraction from subjectivity or inwardness. Empirical research must be repeatable, regardless of who you are. Science is an attempt to describe the world without reference to us, the observers, and reality doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what you want to believe. These people don’t have a problem with science, they have a problem with reality. Reality isn’t about you (talk about the me generation–is it any wonder that the Moral Majority originated in the Me decade?) And reality always wins.
Armstrong, Robertson, and all their like are either fools, or criminally irresponsible. I’m not sure which is worse.
“Her fiction is pretentious and schmaltzy. Her novels are “spiritual” in the Karen Armstrong-esque “God is an ineffable unknowable sparkly magic fluffy mystery” kind of way. ”
This is so wrong that I think the commenter must have her confused with someone else. Robinson is a brilliant and subtle novelist, which just makes her contributions to public philosophical debate all the more tragic. The religious sensibility portrayed in her books (or the lack of it) is moving and poignant, it gives religion a good name. It is not at all new agey but demanding and very beautiful, nothing an atheist cannot enjoy. If you can be moved by Donne or Milton, I think you can find something in Robinson (the novelist)
Josh: I wasn’t accusing you personally of anything. Had I realised you were seriously accusing MM of thinking that atheists are necessarily unable to feel the full range of human experience, I would simply have giggled and left the thing behind. Really, I can’t suppose that she has ever said or written anything so silly. Nor do I think that MR does, and would appreciate a quote from her actual writings. I am not here to defend Karen Armstrong. But anyone who bundles the three of them together really hasn’t read any all that closely.
Eric: I’m sorry but I don’t really find your defence convincing. The question of what “selfishness” might mean in a gene is complicated, but there are two meanings which are relevant here. The first is that the gene propagates itself at the expense of the body it finds itself in. That’s the rather Hamiltonian sense in which body-level altruism can be explained. It’s one of the mechanisms that TSG introduced to the outside world. That’s not quite attributing psychological states to a gene, but it’s close enough to be dangerous. The whole idea of a “gene’s eye view” tends to suggest something looking through that eye. None the less, and with all the obvious caveats, I think that’s legitimate.
The second is a straightforward “gene for selfishness”, which tends to be elided into a theory of our selfish nature elevated by our noble thoughts. or culture. That’s what I regard as wholly illegitimate. And the passage I quoted does mix up the two senses in that it talks as if the human nature which our “selfish” genes have built is itself selfish as a result.
Anyway, I am off to the day job now.
<BLOCKQUOTE>
This is so wrong that I think the commenter must have her confused with someone else. Robinson is a brilliant and subtle novelist, which just makes her contributions to public philosophical debate all the more tragic. The religious sensibility portrayed in her books (or the lack of it) is moving and poignant, it gives religion a good name. It is not at all new agey but demanding and very beautiful, nothing an atheist cannot enjoy. If you can be moved by Donne or Milton, I think you can find something in Robinson (the novelist).
</BLOCKQUOTE>
Of course I’m not confusing her with someone else. The religious sensibility portrayed in her fiction is both pretentious and schmaltzy (I didn’t say “new age”) It’s a pretentious and vague spirituality that allows bored suburbanites to think that they are in touch with some sort of profound and sophisticated interpretation of the Bible and it’s schmaltzy in a “Hallmark movie of the week” kind of way (i.e. finding one’s “spiritual home”).
And I know it’s a matter of taste, but comparing her to Donne or Milton? Really?
See comment 66, which is out of sequence because it went into the spam file and I forgot to check that file late yesterday.
I’ve got to read Housekeeping, so that I can have an opinion on whether Robinson is a good novelist or not.
Andrew Brown
Bullshit.
In the case of the TSG it could just as well be said that a gene improves the body in order to better propagate itself – which wouldn’t be at the body’s expense but at its benefit. One of the profoundest weaknesses in anti-science thought, that it engages in a simple failure to grasp basic concepts such as the win-win situation.
A concept that is even one of the seven habits.
It is a concept which society at large has no real trouble with, going way back in our language with things like “You scratch my back, I scratch yours”. Selfish does not imply at the expense of others, it simply implies something being geared towards benefiting itself.
“and it’s schmaltzy in a “Hallmark movie of the week” kind of way (i.e. finding one’s “spiritual home”).”
This was why I thought you might have her confused. One of the central themes of ‘Home’ is a character that is unable to find a spiritual home (or an actual one), not a Disneyish tale of spiritual homecoming, closure and redemption. The novel seems to say that there can be no redemption for some people and, it seems, some individuals are simply predestined to belong to this category, regardless of what they do. This is not the usual version of modern fictionalised Christianity. You don’t have to concur with any of the theological cues or arguments to feel the emotional force of the books or to admire the beauty of the prose or to find that she acutely delineates truths about the human condition and be moved by them. Even her saints are very flawed. The saintly Ames in Gilead cannot restrain himself from delivering a spiteful and bullying sermon when someone in real need comes to him and the saintly father in Home is flatly incapable of any imaginative sympathy for the struggle for civil rights in 50s America. Robinson has no easy, banal, moral categories. That is why I think a comparison with Donne and Milton is appropriate. I am not claiming that she is necessarily of the same stature as those writers, although I think she is in the running.
Incidentally having actually read the book I would have to say that Marilynne Robinson argues more honestly than some of the folk cited in the thread above, but her understanding of some of the people she cites is coloured by the things she already “knows”. She is aware enough of the methods of science to try not to be too obviously anti-science, so uses the term “parascience” when she wants to be uncomplimentary. This is supposed (I think) to refer to people using their scientific reputations to bolster non-scientific arguments, and is a variant on the inappropriate use of “scientism” to mask anti-science sentiments. Unfortunately the meaning slides around so that sometimes it refers to actual science. Parascience is also used to refer to the requirement for evidence outside the pursuit of actual scientific investigation, so that if you demand evidence for a belief and you aren’t actually doing science then you are extending the requirement for evidence to places it should not go. Positivism is just evil and any demand that our intuitions have some contact with reality somewhere is a form of positivism. Remember that in the world of anti-science there is no difference between explaining and explaining away, and the science of optics makes rainbows less beautiful.
She writes well, and I’m sure the lectures sounded good at the time, perhaps with some members of the audience occasionally wondering if they actually heard aright.
Random samples:
Of an apophatic statement by Gregory of Nyssa she writes “it resembles nothing so much as contemporary physics”
Commenting on Bertrand Russell’s observation that christians persecuted each other more than they were themselves persecuted by the romans she says that this was only because the christians learned how to do it off the romans.
“certain writers” claim that all conflict is religious in origin. No footnote or endnote there, though there are for other statements.
she believes that “ancient writers” came up with true ideas about cosmology by intuition.
More telling however are the quotations she uses to bolster her argument that actually don’t, but you can sort of see how she might think they do given the colour of her spectacles, eg Stephen Pinker: “The mind is what the brain does; specifically the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of computation.” Now one might agree or disagree with that, but what she says is “-excluding the felt experience of thinking, with all its diverse burdens and colorations”. I really don’t see how Pinker’s statement does that.
I went back over the section on Freud, and I’m still not clear why she devotes so much space to him or why her reviewers all skipped that chapter. She might be trying to fix a point in time when science turned evil, but the link between Freud and “science” is problematic. Of Freud’s work she says “perhaps because of its superficial affinity to social-darwinist and then neo-darwinist assumptions (sic) it continues to hold its place among the great, sad, epochal insights that we say have made us modern.”
One last fine sentence – she writes of evolutionary theory “the neatness of this argument has always bothered me, but this is no refutation of it, nor am I interested in refuting it”. Biologists world-wide must be sighing with relief.
I want to defend Armstrong and Robinson, and Yale for their choice of “Terry” lecturers, and Yale’s maintaining the lectureship.
In response to your early remark “Yale invites some very odd fish to give lectures on subjects they don’t seem to know much about”, I would ask: do you believe Richard Dawkins knows a lot about religion?
You seem to be exasperated that anyone should give time to or think of criticising positivist thinking. Perhaps you feel that it simply doesn’t help matters to do such a thing: “Oh yay, a much-needed critique of the reductionism of positivism and the folly of thinking that science is better at finding out things than more amateurish brands of inquiry.”
Well, here you seem to allow that there can be non-scientific “brands” of enquiry. I agree. But “more amateurish” than scientific enquiry? Is that not an odd adjective to use? With it you seem to suggest that lines of enquiry that are not scientific have as their goal (because they are amateur) to get really good (perhaps you’d say “more professional”) and eventually good enough to be classed as “scientific”. Is this not a neat example of positivist thinking?
If you don’t like the writers that Yale have chosen for their Terry lectures, then perhaps you would be interested in three writers who, I believe, provide canonical arguments for the view that there are problems that are not-scientific, that science is not the mode of enquiry to address them and that the modes of enquiry that are appropriate to them, while not scientific, are yet rational: Karl Popper (e.g. “The Nature of Philosophical Problems” in Conjectures and Refutations, 1962); Isaiah Berlin (e.g. “The Divorce Between the Sciences and the Humanities” in “Against the Current”) and J S Mill (e.g. “Bentham”, 1838).
I think Dawkins knows a good deal more about religion than Marilynne Robinson knows about science. (Also – has Yale asked Dawkins to lecture on religion?)
What exactly do you mean by positivism? It tends to be an elastic word.
Most scientists agree (and even say “of course”) that there are lines of inquiry that are not scientific. It doesn’t follow from that that novelists are the best people to lecture on the epistemology of science. I’d be more interested in a philosopher on that subject. I think it’s naive to treat novelists as some kind of universal genius.
Hi Ophelia, and thanks for responding to my comment.
I agree, it does not follow from “there are lines of enquiry that are not scientific” to the conclusion “novelists are the best people to lecture on the epistemology of science”. However, you will surely allow that non-scientific lines of enquiry, lines of reasoning, may yet have something to say on epistemology? After all the long-standing investigation that has come to be called “epistemology” is an open question. It is only a particular philosophical stance that seeks to equate science with epistemology (which, by the way, I would offer as another pretty good definition of positivism), and it is a stance that may be contested, as it was, for example, by Karl Popper. In other words, what scientists have to say (write) about epistemology is to be judged according to its robustness as philosophy, not as science.
In their writing (“popular” or otherwise) scientists seem to say and write little about epistemology, or philosophy of science, presumably because it rarely comes up for them as something to be questioned or consulted. (The philosopher Hilary Putnam remarked on this in a televised conversation). Richard Dawkins seems to be no exception. If he does not write or say things about epistemology (or philosophy) could it be because he knows that he does not know much about it? Or perhaps he has been given little cause to think about it? Yet we know others do think about it, about “how we know” and “what we know”, and these people are not limited to scientists, nor are only scientists entitled to think about it. To regard such questions as only to be addressed by or in science is a philosophical stance (another fairly good definition of positivism, I think) and one that can be challenged, as, again, it was by Karl Popper.
You say that you would be more interested to hear a philosopher lecture on epistemology (of science) than Marilynne Robinson, or rather “novelists”. Here I have two responses.
Firstly I do not accept that Robinson, in her book “Absence of Mind” is lecturing on epistemology (of science). I think the subtitle of her book is much closer to what is being lectured on, i.e. “The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self”. I would assume that these terms are used deliberately by the author in view of the close analysis she gives of examples of what she calls “para-scientific” literature that aims either to render them meaningless or takes them to be meaningless. But in doing so, she exposes, I think quite convincingly, the authors’ often unstated prior belief of what they set out to prove. In other words, she draws attention to the philosophical stance that is conveyed through the writing, including sometimes “epistemology”.
Secondly, you say that you would be more interested to hear a philosopher lecture on epistemology than “novelists”, that is, you express a preference. Many would agree with you. But, supposing for the moment that Robinson was lecturing on epistemology, someone might ask you “Why do you have that preference?” I suppose you (or the questioner) may be dissatisfied with the reply “Because she is a novelist”. I would suppose you would want to offer reasons why “novelists’” views on epistemology do not interest you (as much). But then that may also not seem satisfactory, because novelists are individuals. To speak that way one would seem to need to offer general characteristics of “novelists” regarding their understanding of epistemology. But to do that and remain fair to “novelists” would seem to require at least some familiarity with some novelists. But if pressed further to justify ones preference it would also seem to require some in-depth knowledge of some, or at least one, novelist, i.e. possibly to a degree at which you would be able to point to the individual(novelist)’s position on epistemology. Probably the individual novelist will not have produced work in which that position is never explicitly stated (though there may be exceptions; Iris Murdoch, possibly), but it may nevertheless be possible, on examination of her writings, to guess at all kinds of ideas and thoughts and speculations about how people are that underpin the writings. But if you go down that path, to that extent, then I suppose you will be doing something like the study of literature. You may even end up writing a novel!
Of course I will allow that non-scientific lines of enquiry, lines of reasoning, may yet have something to say on epistemology. I said that. I certainly don’t equate science with epistemology. I think that’s a bit of a strawman.
Life is short. If I want to learn more about epistemology, I would rather learn it from people I have reason to think knowledgeable on the subject.
Life is short, yes.
Of course fiction is an art form. To regard fiction as not very good epistemology or sociology is a misapprehension, as it would be to regard Robinson (a fiction writer), at least in the performance of her Terry Lectures, as a not very good epistemologist claiming to lecture on epistemology. But I don’t see it that way. Surely what she has done is more accurately described as literary criticism? She’s examined the style and form of expression prevalent in what she calls “para-scientific” writing, because these are themselves indicative of thinking. As the literary critic FR Leavis once wrote “criticism of the style, here, becomes, as it follows down into analysis, criticism of the thought” (Richmond Lecture, 1962). What Robinson brings to the “para-scientific” writings of the science professionals Richard Dawkins, E O Wilson, Steven Pinker and others is the writing professional’s alertness to writing.
Well, I suppose I agree with that basic idea, especially since most of my writing does the same thing. But I think it can be carried way too far, such that lit crits start to imagine themselves universal experts.
Which “lit crits”? When?
A claim to “universal” expertise is not something I see on display here, in this work by Marilynne Robinson. The tone, if anything, is modest and questioning. I am prepared to accept that what is scrutinised in the work, i.e. certain writing, is in the domain of her expertise as a novelist and teacher of literature. That she actually has this expertise is, I believe, shown in the care and acuity with which she conducts the analysis of the writing and presents her case (“the dispelling of inwardness from the modern myth of the self”). That care – over the use and application of terms – surely indicates a respect for the intelligence of her readers and acknowledgement that the matters at hand are important and demand care if they are to be addressed? I think she also brings a certain deflationary humour to things even when the matters are serious, which I think is incredibly valuable.