Our cherished um er ah
Russell makes a good point about Quinn O’Neill’s 3 quarks post:
He quotes O’Neill
Success will be most likely if atheists and religioius moderates unite for a common goal; not the eradication of religion, but a securely secular society that optimizes well-being and respects our most cherished freedoms.
And notes
Yes, that’s what we should aim at – a secular, free society. I agree. But O’Neill doesn’t even understand what our cherished freedoms are. One of them is the freedom to criticise ideas that we disagree with, including religious ideas, and to criticise individuals and organisations that wield social power, including religious organisations and their leaders.
Indeed; well spotted. It’s quite funny when you notice it – sentimentalizing over our most cherished freedoms while betraying a remarkable cluelessness about exactly what they are. One of them really decidedly unambiguously is the freedom to say critical things about particular ideas and beliefs. If you’re going to cherish it, then cherish it.
Does O’Neill argue otherwise? Surely he’s implying that such criticism’s ineffective, not that it’s iniquitous and worthy of suppression.
Oh, balls, ignore that. I should have read the whole piece.
Swiftly moving from my own woeful reading comprehension — I agree and what’s more it wouldn’t be effective. Pluralism is an awkward and conflicting system. If you try to get it by excising differences then, well – you’re not trying to get it.
It underscores a larger problem—which is that lots of folks like referring to our “rights” without having the foggiest clue what those rights actually are (as Russell points out). So many times you have yokels saying I-have-the-right-to-do-this, and I-have-the-right-to-do-that, but what they’re actually referring to is what they think their “rights” are, not what the law or this country’s founding documents actually say. It’s a problem of education. So many people who say “I know my rights,” actually don’t.
I find that profoundly offensive — you have therefore clearly violated my rights!
I find that profoundly offensive — you have therefore clearly violated my rights!
I find your offense offensive, you’ve therefore clearly violated my rights!
Well, you all have the right to remain silent… ;-)
Carlin said it best.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWiBt-pqp0E
*gives Brian the stink-eye*
I have a different interpretation of her statement.
When I read the words “our most cherished freedoms” I am reminded of the old joke about Tonto and The Lone Ranger out in the desert when they are suddenly surrounded by a war party of angry Indians. The Lone Ranger says “what are we going to do now?” to Tonto, who replies. “…………we?”
I think the “our” in O’Neills statement doesn’t actually include everyone. It means what the majority consensus opinion regards as reasonable rights and this, unfortunately doesn’t necessarily mean freedom of speech in the same sense you or I might mean. In many societies the population wouldn’t have a problem with laws that restrict the right to publicly criticize or ridicule religious beliefs. Take for example the complete lack of protest from either the public at large or the Irish media to the Irish Blasphemy law – it was only the atheists who protested against it. Most Irish newspaper opinion pieces about the law were absolutely in favor of its implementation, not in a pro-catholic manner (the Irish church kept quiet on the matter) but in a way that reminds me of the accomodationist views about ‘tone’ and ‘respect’.
Those in the US are lucky that the US constitution provides strong legal safeguards for free speech but I don’t think you should assume that everyone agrees with the full implications of this situation – particularly those who elevate ‘tone’ and ‘respect’ above all other values.
O’Neill seems to make the same mistake Mooney et al do. They assume that becuase a person is critical of religion they cannot make common cause with religious people to speak out on matters they agree upon. Richard Dawkins was able to join with Anglican and Catholic religious leaders in the UK to oppose a state school that was teaching creationism for example.
O’Neill sets up a false dichotomy. It is quite possible to ally yourself with religious moderates to oppose policy suggestions put forward by more fundamentalist believers whilst still speaking out against religion in general.
Sigmund, the version of that joke that I know ends with Tonto saying “what do you mean ‘we,’ Kemosabe?” In that form one can use it as a shorthand for the whole joke, and Americans at least are likely to get it. :- )
I heard is as ‘Who’s this ‘we’, Paleface?’ He’s not just dissociating himself from the Lone Ranger, he’s taking the other side.
The version of the joke I remember my dad telling me ended with Tonto saying “What mean we, white-man?”
Ha! I have alliteration on my side.
Back to the issue. A commenter at Pharyngula had a very nifty idea for an accommodationist bumper-sticker.
“Every time someone yells at baby Jesus, a scientist loses a grant.”
Of course, Russell is right, as you say, Ophelia. O’Neill doesn’t seem to realise what our freedoms are, and why they are important. In fact, she seems to go out of her way to suggest that the real point of freedom is diversity. If she would stop and read a few of the foundation documents of liberal society, she’d see that the most important object of our freedoms is truth. We want to base our lives and our relationships on the most reliable understanding of the world.
Yes, as O’Neill points out, we will differ, but the reason we differ is not simply because religious beliefs are comforting, or because artists are emotional, but because no one has a right to tell us and prescribe for us what is true. And the reason for holding this is that we value truth and reason. Read Milton’s Areopagitica, for instance. The main reason Milton objects to an official censor is that it is impossible for the censor to say, before the issue is pursued — and it can only be pursued if people have the freedom to publish their views freely — whether it is true or not. This can be shown only in the process of deliberation, question, investigation and argument. So, inevitably, the censor will suppress the only process that we know for arriving at the truth.
Truth is the important thing, as even O’Neill seems to acknowledge, since her whole argument is based on the premise that she is right, that what she says is true, and that what we should be aiming for is some sort social harmony of irrational diversity, because this is what people are like, and what makes them most happy.
Well, that’s a big argument to make, and it’s not obviously true. In fact, I suggest that it is obviously false, because it involves itself in self-reflexive problems. If it’s true, it’s false, because she’s telling us that her particular truth is much better to be going on with than trying to create a society where we really do seriously seek the truth. In other words, she’s really defending a form of relativism. We can’t all be rational, and none of us is completely rational, so we should just let people live with their own truth, astrologers with theirs and astronomers with theirs, the religious with their religious truth and the atheists with their (apparently) strictly rational and unemotional way of looking at the world.
Those are some of the little problems with her essay. More serious problems appear if you look more closely. In the course of just 1700 words she’s managed to make a lot of empirical assumptions which are not obviously true, although she protects these with ‘perhaps’ and ‘might’ or ‘may’, even though they are absolutely crucial to her argument. Take just one as an example.
I don’t know whether this is true or not, but I suspect not. In fact, it seems much more likely that aggressive efforts to influence the curriculum have arisen in a context where people’s attention was largely focused elsewhere, at at time when it was widely assumed that religion was not a central concern any longer. But if she thinks that her statement that:
will not be taken as aggressively anti-religious by the religious, she’s missed most of the social conversation lately.
I guess my point is that this is not really ‘a rational approach to the irrational’ after all. It’s what it seems to be: a confused attempt to attempt to reconcile rationality with irrationality. Sure, we’re not perfectly rational. That’s not the issue, even though O’Neill seems to think so. We surely must do better than this.
That reminds me of when Tony Blair, during PMQ’s, defended a state school that was teaching creationism on the grounds that it promoted diversity. Thankfully the Government ministers in charge if education were not so equivical, and made it clear creationism has no place in the science classes of schools that receive state funding.
I can’t remember the last time that a mention of Tony Blair improved my opinion of him.
Sometimes I have had the perhaps idle thought that there could be (or should be) a prohibition on teaching children things that are untrue. A sort of Hippocratic oath for teachers, if you like. Something similar could apply to journalists and bolggers.
I suppose that enforcement would have to be by the profession itself, and not by government. As for how we decide whether or not something is true, that is also tricky. An anecdote might be true without being typical, for instance (as in Ben Goldacre’s column today about the drug Avastin. http://www.badscience.net/2010/08/in-praise-of-anecdotes/ )
Still, perhaps untruth is like pornography: it’s hard to define but I know it when I see it!