It’s amusing to compare John Banville’s review of Michael Frayn’s The Human Touch with that of Jerry Fodor. Frayn is a novelist with a philosophical background, Banville is a novelist, Fodor is a philosopher.

Banville is keen.

In his opening “Prospectus” he modestly insists that, although he has studied philosophy, his book is not an attempt to do philosophy – “I shouldn’t have the courage to make any such claim” – but then goes on to take a sly dig at the extreme specialisation and technicality of much of modern-day philosophical research…From his acquaintance with philosophy and his readings in the work of physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr…he has got hold of a simple fact about the world, which is its indeterminacy. What you see is not what you get, and Frayn is here to tell us how it is not…But Frayn is concerned with far more than physics. In his vast overview of this anomalous universe in which we find ourselves thrown, he takes a good-humoured crack at a broad range of our certainties, from the laws of nature – or “the laws of nature” – through the chimera of free will, the dubious status of truth and the ambiguousness of language, to, at the close, the question of the self itself. The breadth of his reading is awesome and he is fearless in interpreting, and in some cases attacking, the philosophical or scientific dogmas of this or that revered savant. Everywhere he is eminently sensible, especially when he is making nonsense of our illusory certainties.

Fodor not so much.

For one thing, it’s clear at a glance that this is no joke; it’s a book of philosophy, not a book on philosophy, and I can’t imagine an author who is more in earnest. It’s also clear that the thing is much too long. These days nobody writes philosophy in chunks of four hundred pages (plus notes). Partly that’s just fashion; partly it’s tenure politics; but mostly it’s because the problems philosophers work on have turned out to be much more subtle than we used to suppose them, and much more idiosyncratic. You have to do them one at a time, and the progress you make is generally inch by inch…Frayn, however, doesn’t approve of all that picking of nits…the range of issues Frayn takes on is staggering…And these topics are not treated narrowly: one gets a whole spectrum, from Frayn on quantum mechanics to Frayn on the psychology of perception, to Frayn on the ontology of numbers, to Frayn on Chomskian linguistics, to Frayn on personal identity, to Frayn on the phenomenology of dreaming, with many, many intermediate stops. Could anybody conceivably have views worth hearing on all those topics?…The basic idea is to undermine the authority of science (and, indeed, the authority of common sense) by launching a general attack on the notions of truth and knowledge. What a Copernican astronomy taketh away, a relativist epistemology giveth back…And finally, with a flourish: ‘The story is the paradigm. Factual statements are specialised derivatives of fictitious ones.’

To which Fodor replies, crisply, ‘Piffle.’ In between, where all those elipses are, he says why it’s piffle, but I didn’t need all that to illustrate the difference in tone. Wondering awe from the novelist, amused irritation from the philosopher. There’s making nonsense of our illusory certainties for you.

Cheney said in a tv interview that the US would have invaded Iraq ‘even if we knew [had known, he means] that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction.’ Prominent legal scholars sent him a letter in response. That’s good – but there’s one part of what they say that I think is worrying.

Alternative justifications offered by vice-president Cheney during the recent interview are clearly legally insufficient for military action. A capability to produce weapons of mass destruction in the future, the use of weapons of mass destruction in the past, crimes against the people of Iraq, possible connections with terrorist organisations – all of these qualify as grievances which the United States might bring against Iraq in the United Nations, as we did, but do not constitute grounds for the first use of force without UN approval.

Bracket Cheney and that other fella for the purposes of this discussion, and also bracket the legality question; it’s the moral (and consequential) aspect I think is worrying. It’s that ‘crimes against the people of Iraq’ bit. The problem is obvious, and has been discussed endlessly, but it remains just as worrying. What if the crimes against the people of [wherever it be] are really huge crimes? And what if UN approval for the use of force is not forthcoming? What if there are only two choices: unilateral intervention (i.e. aggression) or standing by and watching a genocide continue?

That’s the worry. It’s not that I want to give Cheney and his gang a blank check, it’s not that I trust them an inch, which is why I said bracket them; but the principle is a worry. It’s related (obviously) to the whole national sovereignty question, which has been changing lately. It’s also obviously related to Darfur, and to future Darfurs. I don’t know what the answer is; I just wanted to point out the worry.

Marek Kohn reviews The God Delusion.

Turning to agnosticism, he dismisses it as a principle and reaches for Bertrand Russell’s teapot…This move is something of a reflex among atheists: they should adopt the teapot as their symbol. Their point and Russell’s was that not being able to disprove the existence of such an object does not warrant belief in it; their implicit message is that gods are also trivial human artefacts. God is thus detached from the terrible and exhilarating question of why anything should exist at all. Instead, Dawkins recasts agnosticism as a humdrum matter of probability captured by a spectrum of opinion-poll responses. But it is possible, along with Dawkins, to be a de facto atheist who lives on the assumption that there is no God, while remaining awed by the possibility that we cannot begin to comprehend how far beyond our comprehension the question may be.

Of course it is. But I see that from an angle opposite to the one from which Kohn (apparently, if I understand him correctly) does. The awe he cites has to do with how far beyond our comprehension the question may be – really how far, really beyond. But it seems to me that answering ‘God’ to such questions simply reels the answer in from that far beyond to make it near and local again. I know some people say god is distant, beyond comprehension, not to be pinned down by our poor words, all that, but if they call it ‘God’ at all they don’t really mean it, or at least if they call it ‘God’ that’s deceptive labeling. God is local, God is a person, God hears our prayers, God is a character in a book. It’s no good pretending that’s not true, because that’s how the word is generally used – it is not generally used as a word for ‘far beyond, unknown, incomprehensible’. (If it were, believers would shut up about God, but they don’t.) I think the implicit message that Kohn cites is quite right: gods are trivial human artifacts. If you do in fact remain awed by the possibility that we cannot begin to comprehend how far beyond our comprehension the question may be, then you find the pat one-syllable answer ‘God’ to be laughably unsatisfactory, irrelevant, provincial, and, frankly, trivial.

And another thing.

Dawkins does not admit sympathy for believers, or acknowledge the extent to which religion may constitute their sense of identity. He disregards the risk that attacking a people’s religion may amount to an attack on them as a group. Some comments and quotes in this respect are reckless.

Reckless? But if there is a risk that attacking a people’s religion may amount to an attack on them as a group, then there is also a risk that attacking a people’s politics or hobby or profession may amount to an attack on them as a group – but people aren’t generally frowned at for attacking a people’s politics or profession, are they? So why should religion be in a special category? I know that’s a question I’ve asked before, more than once; I’m asking it again.

Interesting. Eric at Drink-soaked Trots notices an early stirring of (let us call it) Eustonism, in an article called ‘Afghanistan: a Just Intervention’ that appeared so long ago as 2002. He helpfully highlights some passages.

The attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 were terrible events, they were also acts of barbarism…In attacking New York, the Islamo-fascists of Al Qaeda attacked one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world…Moreover, it was an attack mounted by people who hate the United States of America not only (and probably not even mainly) for its inequality or its acts of injustice in the world or for its place in an unequal international order, but rather because of its democracy, its pluralism, its sexual libertinism, and all the other things that the left ought to like about the United States. By and large, the left discredited itself by its reaction…Some on the left, have gone even further, appearing to urge backing for the radical Islamists…Why then, did the British left react in such a manner? Partly, it did so because of an ingrained cultural anti-Americanism…But the moral stakes are now very high and many of the ‘facts’ deployed by the left in recent debates are, at best, of dubious character. (They are the kind of ‘facts’ that support conclusions people have already reached.)

The surprising thing about that is who wrote it. It’s surprising because the author, who is a blogger, frequently writes posts about Eustonism which seem to betray (before reading Eric’s post I would have said simply ‘betray’) intense hostility and anger. For instance there was this post a couple of weeks ago on Ted Honderich’s tv appearance (a discussion of which among a few Bristol philosophers will appear in the next TPM), which included this bizarrely (I thought) gratuitous remark:

Honderich repeatedly tells the viewer that 9/11 was a crime, but rather gives the impression that this is because people were killed without his pet principle being advanced…The whole thing ended up being rather a gift to the Euston Manifesto crowd. God knows whether any of them watched it, but it will have given them no end of material to moan about: endless whataboutery and apologetics for appalling acts. Just what we don’t need, in fact.

The same person wrote those two passages. That surprises me – indeed, it puzzles me. Why the contempt for a ‘crowd’ that would endorse everything in that first passage? I don’t know. The hostility to preEuston Eustonism (let’s call it) has puzzled me for a long time, and now it puzzles me even more.

Read the comments on the Trots post, too; they’re very meaty.

The Guardian talks some creeping sneaking nonsense.

It is now exactly a year since a Danish newspaper published a series of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which Muslims found so insulting that 140 people died in the ensuing violence.

No. That’s wrong, and it’s a misleading way of putting it. Some Muslims found the cartoons ‘so insulting’, and a much much smaller number found them ‘so insulting that 140 people died in the ensuing violence’ – that is, to interpret that foolishly meaningless phrase, either found them so insulting that they caused lethal violence or found them so insulting that they thought the deaths of 140 people made an appropriate response. Not all Muslims found the cartoons insulting at all; not all Muslims who did find them insulting found them also worthy of protest or criticism of the act of publication; not all Muslims who found them worthy of protest also found them deserving of outright censorship or government action; and so on. Why do so many people – especially, of all things, well-meaning liberal people who (clearly) see themselves as being kind to and trying to help ‘Muslims’ – equate some Muslims with all Muslims that way? Why do they chronically and repeatedly assume that if some Muslims feel insulted or offended then all do? Why do they not pause to remember that as a matter of fact there are some Muslims who are insulted or offended not by cartoons or papal speeches or operas but by their insultable co-religionists and by liberal columnists who assume that all Muslims are offended by what some Muslims are offended by? Why do they not also pause to remember that there is, in fact, something quite searchingly insulting about assuming that all people in a particular group think exactly the same thing, particularly on a controversial and contested issue? Why are they so fokking patronizing? And why are they so fokking patronizing while thinking they are being kind and empathetic and helpful? Why don’t they think a little harder and look a little farther?

These incidents all hurt Muslim sensibilities – and generated agonised debate about freedom of expression and its limits.

Same again. No they didn’t – not all ‘Muslim sensibilities’. Some Muslims are actually grown-up enough and rational enough not to let their sensibilities be hurt by every pimple on the media horizon merely because some people stage shouting fests about them. I’m guessing that quite a few Muslims are that grown-up and rational, actually.

Salman Rushdie won sympathy on the basis of that classic Enlightenment stance in 1989 when his Satanic Verses generated an Iranian “fatwa” – the first incident of its kind in our globalised world.

Note the shift of agency. It was Rushdie’s novel that generated the fatwa, not the ayatollah. Thus, if anyone writes or draws or sings or stages anything that someone elects to find insulting or offensive or blasphemous or just not quite the thing, if you know what I mean, and sets about getting the writer or drawer killed, it is the fault of the writer or drawer for perpetrating this Object of Insultingness. So therefore – all things are to be considered presumptively guilty, because if anyone decides to find one guilty, then it becomes guilty. So this post right here is guilty, all the books in this room are guilty, all the paintings in all the museums are guilty, all plays, all songs, all everything – they’re all, all guilty, because they can’t know in advance that there is no possibility that no one on the planet will be insulted by them. That’s an interesting way of thinking about the subject. If the Guardian buys that it really ought to shut down right now, for safety reasons.

Behzti, a controversial play set in a temple, was axed after it offended Sikhs.

There we have both stupidities in one short sentence. ‘Behzti’ didn’t offend ‘Sikhs’, just as Brick Lane didn’t offend ‘the Brick Lane community’ – both offended a few men in each group, and in any case saying ‘”Behzti” offended Sikhs’ again makes it sound as if ‘Behzti’ is guilty as charged and to blame for its own axing.

…where the west needs to recognise its responsibilities, stop employing double standards, refrain from equating Islam and terrorism, and thus help isolate the fanatics who give ordinary Muslims a bad name.

You’ve just done a pretty good job of giving ‘ordinary’ Muslims a bad name yourself, Graun – not to mention giving your newspaper a bad name.

David Remnick’s account of Clinton’s trip to Africa is a good read, with some interesting truth-related points along the way.

“The Republicans are brilliant at creating bogus issues, cartoon cutouts,” he said, “and the press, even if it doesn’t agree with them, brings it along…This deal with Iraq makes me want to throw up,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of being told that if you voted for authorization you voted for the war. It was a mistake, and I would have made it, too. And Congress made it once before, at the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.” The blame was with the White House: “The Administration did not shoot straight on the nuclear issue or on Saddam’s supposed ties to Al Qaeda prior to 9/11.”

Garbage in garbage out. If people are given bad information they may vote to authorize a war when they wouldn’t have so voted if they’d had better information. Fiddling with intelligence reports does make a difference.

Clinton said that he had read Ron Suskind’s article in the Times Magazine in which an unnamed Bush aide says, mockingly, that journalists and Democrats languish in a “reality-based community” while the White House, as the vanguard of an American empire, creates its own realities. “That’s an amazing paradigm,” Clinton said. “We ought to run on that.”

Yes. They won’t though. Too busy being folksier than thou. Picking on the anti-reality crowd might not play well with The Folk; better not.

Remnick ‘asked Clinton if he thought intellect was an essential part of being President…’

“I keep reading that Bush is incurious, but when he talks to me he asks a lot of questions,” Clinton went on. “So I can’t give him a bad grade on curiosity…I’ve never been worried about his intellect so much as his ideological bent…But the thing that bothers me about having an ideology as opposed to a philosophy is that, if you have an ideology, then the outcome is dictated before the facts are in, before the arguments are heard. And that, I think, can cause problems.”

Yes.

Like weird double standards for instance.

Rahm Emanuel told me that this was too harsh an interpretation, that the attack on the Clintons in the nineties was so severe and baseless, in his view, that a moment of anger over dinner was nothing. He mentioned a recent report in the Chicago Tribune which revealed that the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, began his career in Congress with a net worth of three hundred thousand dollars and now has assets of six million, owing largely to an almost fantastical increase in the value of land near a highway project that he helped push through Congress. “The Speaker came in with three hundred thousand dollars and now has six million in real estate and no one asks a question? Your question is ‘Why is Clinton so angry?’ My question is ‘Why are you so stupid?’”

Fair point, it seems to me.

I read a bit of Keith Ward this morning, looking for some sophisticated theological arguments, since we keep being told there are some and we don’t respect them enough. Various thoughts occurred to me as I read. On pages 13-14 of God, Chance and Necessity, for instance, Ward says ‘The argument of this book, then, is that a theistic interpretation of evolution and of the findings of the natural sciences is by far the most reasonable…and that it is the postulate of God, with its corollary of purpose and value, that can best provide an explanation for why the universe is as it is.’

That’s just the introduction, not the argument itself, but all the same, it prompts me immediately to notice that the meaning even of that summary sentence depends heavily on what Ward means by ‘best’ and ‘explanation’. It strikes me that by ‘best’ he means ‘one I like best’ – one he finds comforting, familiar, unfrightening, nonalien.

And then, as always, it also strikes me how easy, and empty, that word ‘God’ is in that usage. You could say that about anything and everything; it’s just as explanatory, just as comfortable, and just as empty. You find a beautiful garden, a painting, a building, a statue; how do you explain this? ‘A genius.’ Okay – but which one; where; when; in what context; why; in short, tell us more. Just saying ‘a genius’ doesn’t say anything, because we already know that much; we want to know the details. The same applies to ‘God’ as the explanation for why the universe is as it is. What is ‘God’ there? The thing that caused the universe to be as it is. Well – we sort of know that something caused the universe to be as it is (unless we think it was uncaused, which is tricky), but what? Just saying ‘God’ amounts to the same thing as saying ‘don’t know’, except with all sorts of smuggled (and unwarranted) baggage. Theists claim the ‘God’ answer is explanatory but it isn’t because it argues backward, so it’s really just repeating the question – looky here, look at this, it’s special, so something special made it, and of course that something special=god, so there’s your explanation. No. Just pointing at an explanandum – where did this come from? – doesn’t provide its own answer. Of course ‘god’ is a better explanation in many senses of ‘better’ – it’s more appealing, more intuitive, more human-like – but it’s not better in the sense of being a real answer; it’s more of a disguised non-answer.

And then – when there is no explanation, or no explanation that we can get at, yet and perhaps ever – then providing one by supplying a name – God, or A Q Genius – is not better than saying ‘don’t know’. So the argument is spurious. Saying that god is a better explanation for the universe than (say) naturalism plus don’t know, is absurdly deceptive. It reassuringly soothingly says yes there is an answer when in fact there may not be – we may just not know.

And the god answer is just too generic – hence, again, too easy. It’s like seeing a poem and saying ‘a poet did this!’ A crime scene: ‘a criminal!’ It’s generic, it’s circular, it answers the question with the content of the question: ‘this is big, great, impressive, so who made it?’ ‘someone that can make things that are big, great, impressive.’ Er – that doesn’t answer.

The Archive

The Interrogations Archive

There is sophistication and then there is sophistication.

In this age of terror fueled by the ideology of Islamic extremism, some old insights of the liberal historiography of the roots and nature of Nazism remain relevant. In works published in the 1960s and 1970s, two of Nazism’s preeminent historians…made a similar point about the political significance of ideological fanaticism…This underestimation, the refusal or inability to understand that Hitler meant what he said was thought to be a mark of political sophistication in the 1930s…The great classic of the postwar years which did take Nazi ideology seriously, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, took specific issue with this liberal and left-wing reductionism. Arendt…redefined the meaning of political sophistication so that it came to mean a willingness to pay very close attention to the ravings and rantings of political fanatics. In so doing, she implicitly reversed the meaning of sophistication and naïveté.

I’ve been there. No doubt most of us have. It’s the old ‘behind the mask’ thing, the old appearance and reality thing. Ideas are just the frosting, just the superstructure, just the defense mechanism, just the wishful thinking, just the presentation of self; the reality, underneath, is money or sex or power or status. Sometimes that’s true, of course; there are oceans of pious platitudes offered up to veil the greed or self-aggrandizement or strategy that is really at work. But that doesn’t mean it’s always true, nor that the safest bet is to assume that it’s always true. Some ideas are a lot more dangerous than mere self-interest or lust.

It remains difficult for political and intellectual elites in liberal democracies to give fanaticism the causal impact it deserves…The traditions of liberal historiography of the Nazi era have powerfully addressed the problem of underestimation. Frank and frequent talk about what the radical Islamists are saying should not be primarily the preoccupation of right of center politicians and journalists…[I]n order that the history of radical Islam not again be the history of its underestimation, liberals should foster a kind of political sophistication that rests on the lessons of this most famous previous case of underestimation of political fanaticism.

It’s not all that sophisticated to fall asleep at the switch.

Did you read this? I put it in News a few days ago. It’s Danny Postel’s openDemocracy comment on Hossein Derakhshan’s article, also in openDemocracy, about Ramin Jahanbegloo’s release from prison. It’s interesting. I thought Derakhshan’s article was quite worrying and depressing and discouraging, and Postel says that and a good deal more.

Derakhshan asserts that Jahanbegloo’s “confession” was authentic – Indeed even “the possibility of it being imposed on him by his interrogators” is, according to his logic, “rule[d] out”. The most obvious and immediate question involved is: how in the world could Derakhshan lay claim to such knowledge, let alone rule out the very possibility that Jahanbegloo’s “confession” was coerced or imposed?

Well, yes. One does wonder.

Essential to Derakhshan’s assertion is his view that Jahanbegloo is in fact guilty. Of what? Of “indirectly helping the Bush administration in its plans for regime change in Iran through fomenting internal unrest and instability.” And how, precisely, did Jahanbegloo do that? By conducting “comparative analysis of socio-political change in contemporary east-central Europe and the Islamic Republic of Iran” with “financial support” from American think-tanks.

That was the really depressing and discouraging bit. I have some reformist contacts inside Iran as well as outside, and I started to fret that perhaps I ought not to have such contacts, lest I contaminate them or implicate them or generally mix up their work with Bush’s plans. That’s a horrible thought: it would mean no one could try to reform or improve anything for fear of helping the colonialists. So I’m glad to see people rejecting Derakhshan’s argument with energy. Samira Mohyeddin for instance in an article at Iranian.com.

First, let me begin by saying that I will not comment on Ramin Jahanbegloo because as far as I am concerned Jahanbegloo’s comments or retractions upon being released from prison are of no consequence and should be taken with a grain of salt, particularly while the government holds the deed to both his house and his mothers. It is unbelievably naive and audacious of Derakhshan to say that Jahanbegloo saw the error of his ways thanks to his interrogators. “Thanks to the work of the reformists who governed the country until 2005, Iran has passed the stage of state terror.” – Derakhshan…[T]his is an apalling statement at best, and a slap in the face to all those Iranians who have given their lives for the cause of freedom both in and outside of Iran…Would Hossein dare make such a statement to the son of Zahra Kazemi, who was indiscriminately raped, tortured, and murdered while in Evin prison? Would he have the audacity to make such statements to the family of Akbar Mohammadi who died in Evin just last month? Or to the family of 16 year old Atefeh Rajabi who was hung in the Iranian town of Neka for “engaging in acts incompatible with chastity”? Or to the family members of the thousands of prisoners of conscience who have perished in the jails of the Iran of the Islamic Republic over the past twenty-seven years?

La lutte continue.

I’m reading Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts. John Holbo at the Valve sent it because they’re doing one of those Valve events on it in a few weeks. It is, to put it succinctly, very good. (That Alan Wolfe review is all the more irritating once one actually reads the book. It’s irritating independently of the quality of the book reviewed, because of certain qualities intrinsic to the review, but it’s also even more irritating because of the quality of the book.)

I thought I would share a bit with you, because it strikes me as being right on the money, and well worth saying. Pages 120-1. He’s been describing political affiliations among students – liberal, conservative, libertarian, and so on.

‘Another bunch, further off to the left, finds figures like Noam Chomsky so persuasive when it comes to American wickedness at home and abroad – not capriciously, either, for that wickedness is often real enough – that they become utterly indiscriminate about “dissent,” valuing even its most counterproductive forms. While I admire these students for informing themselves about the history of Central America and East Timor, I watch with dismay as they embrace the conclusion that practically any form of “resistance” to US world hegemony is worth their support, and the conviction that if the US takes up arms in a cause, any cause, the real cause is probably unuacknowledged and nefarious. This conviction has been borne out quite frequently in the past, and will undoubtedly be borne out again, but it is not axiomatic, and it disturbs me to find young people identifying with “the left” in such a way as to suspend their critical judgment about leftists who do take it as axiomatic. The wholly uncritical Chomsky fans seem to me to have abdicated some of the tasks of critical thinking in precisely the same way that the wholly uncritical Bush worshippers have done, and I wish the campus left, especially, could be a domain without gurus and icons – a domain of ideas, where every citizen is obligated to scrutinize every idea on its merits.’

Exactly. The conviction may be right, but it’s not axiomatic, and convictions need to be scrutinized on their merits, not assumed to be axiomatic. That’s important, and it’s why the cult of Chomsky gets increasingly on my nerves. And I too wish the campus left could be a domain without gurus and icons; gurus and icons are just the things not to have, just the things that impede careful thinking. Careful thinking, as Michael is indicating there, is not dispensable, not some sort of effete frill or ruffle, but pretty much the first thing that needs doing. Activism isn’t much help if it passionately and commitedly does the wrong thing.

Dammit! Damn, damn, damn.

A leading Afghan official working on women’s rights has been shot dead in the southern province of Kandahar…She had served as head of women’s affairs in Kandahar’s provincial government since the Taleban government was toppled by US-led forces in 2001. An eloquent public speaker, Safia Amajan was fierce in her criticism of what she saw as the Taleban’s repression of women. After the US-led invasion in 2001, the former teacher took charge of women’s affairs in Kandahar’s provincial government. In a conservative region where most families keep wives and daughters cloistered indoors, she was able to attract hundreds of women to schools and vocational courses. Her requests for secure official transport and personal bodyguards had not been granted by the government. At the time of the attack, she was travelling in a taxi.

Damn it to hell. Bullying shits win another round. They win far too many rounds. So a former teacher who was able to attract hundreds of women to schools and vocational courses and who fiercely criticized the Taliban’s repression of women is taken out. Hell and damnation.

Why do people think there is a deity? (Small question. I’ll just knock off the answer in a few hundred words here. No biggy.) Partly (only partly) because of the thought that something must have created the universe – that there must be Mind behind it all. There is the regress problem – what created the mind then? – but many people simply find it more plausible to start with a mind than to start with a brute fact, or a Big Bang. Okay – but then you have to ask what kind of mind is it, and what kind of deity is it?

That’s one place you get the two-step. Mind in the form of an Intelligent Agent must have created the universe, and (unstated premise) the mind and the intelligence must be the kind of thing we mean by mind and intelligence. But that is not actually terribly likely. We think that what we have is Intelligence, generic intelligence, some of the kind of thing that intelligence is and has to be in order to count as intelligence. But maybe that’s all wrong. We would think that, of course, because it’s the only kind we know from the inside, and we’ve seen what it can do, so for us it’s quite natural to think that we have The Thing Itself, as opposed to having a set of faculties that have been adaptive (more or less) in this particular environment, which we call intelligence. In short, it could be that we’re flattering ourselves.

We don’t really know what – if anything – generic intelligence would be, or what it would be like. We think maybe like a computer, but who knows?

Our intelligence, for instance, is saturated in feeling. It’s full of evaluation, it’s always deciding what matters and what doesn’t. But what matters to us is what matters to mortal, reproducing, fragile, short-lived, hungry, greedy, easily frightened, vulnerable beings. Our intelligence is shaped by that, steeped in it. A deity’s would be nothing like that. So why do we think it would recognize us? Why do we think it would care? Any more than a filing cabinet does? It needn’t be cruel to make all this suffering – it could just be a thing that has no chip for recognizing, understanding, caring about suffering, just as (say) we don’t worry about the grains of sand on a beach bruising each other as they jostle about. There seems zero reason to think a universe-designing mind would care about us; zero reason to extrapolate from our best selves and minds to its.

It would have no reason to care about suffering because it is not (if it is for instance a First Cause) mortal or vulnerable. It has no predators, it needs no food, it has no need to choose between good and bad options – so its intelligence wouldn’t have evolved to select for that ability – as ours must have. So there’s not a lot of reason to think it would ‘think’ that way at all. We think it would – but that’s because we think that way. We can’t help thinking of it in our terms, but we have no real warrant for doing that. We have no way to think of it in alien terms (because any terms we can think of are thus our terms), but it is more likely to be thoroughly alien than it is to be reassuringly familiar.

If it doesn’t have a body it’s not like us. If it’s a star it’s not like us. If it’s disembodied intelligence it’s utterly not like us, and we can’t even imagine how it would go about creating a universe. We utter grand phrases about transcendence and unknowability, but we don’t take their implications on board. If it’s as alien as all that (as it pretty much has to be to do what’s claimed for it) why do we worship it and why do we think it’s interested in us? It seems to me that these questions just proliferate; the more you think about the putative deity, the more unanswerable they seem, and the more the confident answers given by religious authorities just seem like passes in the air. A deity as strange as this one would have to be seems to make no difference to anything.

The Guardian gives us an extract from Dawkins’s new book, in which he talks about things I’ve been pondering myself for the past couple of days, I suppose prompted by that long discussion on ‘Explain’.

All Sagan’s books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that religion monopolized in past centuries. My own books have the same aspiration. Consequently I hear myself often described as a deeply religious man…Steven Weinberg made the point as well as anybody, in Dreams of a Final Theory: “Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that ‘God is the ultimate’ or ‘God is our better nature’ or ‘God is the universe.'”…Weinberg is surely right that, if the word God is not to become completely useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to denote a supernatural creator that is “appropriate for us to worship”.

Since that generally is what people mean when they talk about ‘God’ – or maybe some of them mean something more ‘sophisticated’ but don’t say so in order not to affront or alarm the faithful – which comes to the same thing. Or some of them go back and forth between the two. Or some perhaps don’t know what the hell they mean, but the word is out there, after all, and people seem to understand something by it, so why not go on using it, however vaguely…

Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion.

And/or by failure to distinguish what can be called Biblical or personal or cozy or lovable God from sophisticated abstract distant first-cause God.

[Interjection. Oh look – how funny. There’s Julian. I wasn’t expecting to see him here. But there he is – ‘But philosophers use ‘naturalist’ in a very different sense, as the opposite of supernaturalist. Julian Baggini explains in Atheism: A Very Short Introduction the meaning of an atheist’s commitment to naturalism’ and then he quotes a bit. Heh – small world. (Wish he’d quote a bit of Why Truth Matters instead. Or in addition. Perhaps he did. Why Truth Matters quoted him.)]

Carl Sagan put it well: “… if by “God” one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying … it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”…I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miraclewreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

That’s just it, it seems to me. The interventionist, miraclewreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible and of clerics and of the newspapers and radio and discourse is a kind of person – a person with a lot of labels stuck on such as omnipotent and omniscient, but still a kind of person, who does person-like things, who loves us and pities us and helps and protects us, so that it makes sense to love it and worship it. The other god, the one that created the whole of the universe – can’t possibly be like that. No matter how many labels you stick on it, it still just can’t be like that. It can’t be both transcendent and immanent, it can’t be both outside the universe and our loving parent. It’s an either-or thing, not a both-and thing. It’s a fork. You can call it Benson’s fork if you want to; I don’t mind. Either God is a local human-like god that humans can sensibly love and pray to (in which case one wonders where exactly it is) or it’s something so far away and so strange that as far as we’re concerned it might as well not exist at all. But it’s a cheat to pretend it can be both.

Why did no one (until G Tingey in comments today) tell me Richard Dawkins has set up a foundation and a website? It’s apparently (judging by the dates on some of the postings) been there since May. This is September. I’m out of touch.

So it republishes this Johann Hari piece about the real reasons to feel disapprobation for the pontiff. Here’s an item that stirred a certain amount of distaste in me.

For over a decade now, he has been one of the primary defenders of priests who go to the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world and tell them condoms are the cause of AIDS. In the past year, I have sat in two Catholic churches thousands of miles apart and listened while a Catholic priest told illiterate people with no alternative sources of information that condoms come pre-infected with AIDS and are the reason people die of it. In Bukavu, a crater-city in Congo, and in the slums ringing Caracas, Venezuela, people believed it. They told me they “would not go to Heaven” if they used condoms, and that condoms contain tiny invisible holes through which the virus passes – the advice their priest had doled out.

I knew about the last part, but I didn’t know priests were telling people that condoms come pre-infected and are themselves the reason people die of Aids. I knew priests were telling people condoms were ineffective as well as sinful; I didn’t know they were telling people they were actually the source of infection. I knew they were wicked, I didn’t know they were as wicked as that.

So…there’s one example of a harm that is prompted exclusively by a religious idea. What possible secular reason can there be to object to condoms on principle? And if there were one, what possible secular reason could be strong enough to outweigh the reasons to try to avoid getting and transmitting Aids. One reason preaching against condom-use is so disgusting is that people can be entirely virtuous and faithful and still get Aids from a partner who isn’t, so the Vatican’s policy kills faithful wives along with unfaithful husbands, and then it kills the children of the unfaithful husbands. It takes a real perversion of moral insight to do that, and to go on doing it despite being told that it’s what you’re doing. That’s the kind of thing that makes ‘aggressive’ atheists like me (and like Dawkins, and Hari) angry. There’s enough unavoidable illness and misery in the world; it annoys us that the Vatican goes to so much trouble to create extra, for the sake of – opposing birth control. The game seems not quite worth the candle, frankly.

But there is a deeper philosophical repugnance to Ratzinger lying beneath these individual decisions. His recent lecture was devoted to the premise that the free pursuit of reason will lead all people to a rational belief in the Christian God described in the Bible.

So it’s just a coincidence that most Christians have Christian parents and that most non-Christians have non-Christian parents? Accidents of birth, geography, social surroundings, context, upbringing, education, tradition have nothing to do with it? Interesting. Credulity-straining, but interesting.

Andrew Brown doesn’t admire Dawkins’s new book, despite agreeing on the basics.

In his broad thesis, Dawkins is right. Religions are potentially dangerous, and in their popular forms profoundly irrational. The agnostics must be right and the atheists very well may be. There is no purpose to the universe. Nothing inconsistent with the laws of physics has been reliably reported. To demand a designer to explain the complexity of the world begs the question, “Who designed the designer?” It has been clear since Darwin that we have no need to hypothesise a designer to explain the complexity of living things. The results of intercessory prayer are indistinguishable from those of chance.

Despite all the trillions of words in theological journals, ‘who designed the designer?’ is still a question without an answer. But Brown says Dawkins should get to grips with ‘the important truth added in the 20th century: that religious belief persists in the face of these facts and arguments.’

Dawkins is inexhaustibly outraged by the fact that religious opinions lead people to terrible crimes. But what, if there is no God, is so peculiarly shocking about these opinions being specifically religious? The answer he supplies is simple: that when religious people do evil things, they are acting on the promptings of their faith but when atheists do so, it’s nothing to do with their atheism.

That does sound too simple (but I haven’t read the book, so don’t know if it’s a fair account of what Dawkins says – and people aren’t always fair to him). But a slightly different answer might be that religious opinions lead people to terrible crimes that they wouldn’t otherwise commit, and that is why the fact that they are religious opinions is shocking. If religious opinions generate murders and wars that would not otherwise occur, then religious opinions are a source of bad things, and that’s bad (whether or not it’s shocking, which is a little beside the point). It may well be that a lot of those crimes would occur anyway, that if there were no religion, some other pretext would be found; it may well be that what is basic is rivalry and anger and hatred and heterophobia, and religion is often just the top-dressing. But it may not; or it may sometimes and not others. For one thing, religion can transform and translate an otherwise obviously contemptible motivation into a glorious and pious one, and thus free people to act on it when they otherwise wouldn’t. I can’t kill those people just because I hate them, or just because I want their land, but if they’re heretics or infidels or followers of the anti-Christ, then I’m doing a good and brave thing. Atheism doesn’t exactly work that way – but it may work other ways, so I think Brown is right to say (paraphrasing) that it’s too simple to say religious believers kill people and atheists don’t. But I don’t think it’s too simple to say that religious enthusiasm or a pious sense of duty can motivate crimes that would otherwise go unmotivated.

I went to hear Chris Mooney on his book tour on Sunday, at dear Ravenna Third Place, which I have known since before it was born. He mentioned that he’d heard Al Gore was going to do a book about the war on reason, and sure enough. I’ve always found Gore too conservative in many ways, but on the other hand I’ve always liked his, shall we say, anti-anti-intellectualism, or ‘wonkishness’ as it’s usually called. Wonkishness is a good thing.

As described by editor Scott Moyers, the book is a meditation on how “the public arena has grown more hostile to reason,” and how solving problems such as global warming is impeded by a political culture with a pervasive “unwillingness to let facts drive decisions.”

Boringly, the rest of the article talks about nothing but what all this means for various people’s presidential plans, but that one sentence heralds what could be a good and much-needed book, one to put on the shelf next to The Republican War on Science – and, I suppose, that other book that is a meditation on how the public arena has grown more hostile to reason.

George Johnson in SciAm offers some welcome clarity.

…there has been a resurgence in recent years of “natural theology”–the attempt to justify religious teachings not through faith and scripture but through rational argument, astronomical observations and even experiments on the healing effects of prayer….Owen Gingerich, a Harvard University astronomer and science historian, tells how in the 1980s he was part of an effort to produce a kind of anti-Cosmos, a television series called Space, Time, and God that was to counter Sagan’s “conspicuously materialist approach to the universe.” The program never got off the ground, but its premise survives: that there are two ways to think about science. You can be a theist, believing that behind the veil of randomness lurks an active, loving, manipulative God, or you can be a materialist, for whom everything is matter and energy interacting within space and time. Whichever metaphysical club you belong to, the science comes out the same…But what sounds like a harmless metaphor can restrict the intellectual bravado that is essential to science. “In my view,” Collins goes on to say, “DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God.” Evolutionary explanations have been proffered for both these phenomena. Whether they are right or wrong is not a matter of belief but a question to be approached scientifically. The idea of an apartheid of two separate but equal metaphysics may work as a psychological coping mechanism, a way for a believer to get through a day at the lab. But theism and materialism don’t stand on equal footings. The assumption of materialism is fundamental to science.

Furthermore, Collins’s claim depends heavily on what he means and what other people understand by words like ‘explain’ and ‘special’ not to mention ‘the Moral Law’ and ‘God.’ What he seems to mean there is that DNA sequence will never explain in a way that he (in common with many others) finds satisfying, convincing, psychologically and emotionally complete and adequate. He probably means, approximately, if I may interpret, that the human capacity to have a moral sense seems special in a different kind of way from a string of information. Well, yes. It does. Even an ‘Enlightenment fundamentalist’ (thank you Timothy Garton Ash) like me has that feeling. Human consciousness, complexity, awareness, aesthetic sense, imagination, empathy, hope, memory, anticipation, creativity, elaboration – all do seem special, and unlike (in some ways, though not others) the rest of nature. But the thing is, they would. That is to say that feeling is probably just a by-product of the complexity in question, and inevitable in any being with an elaborated information processing system. We feel special to ourselves because, to ourselves, we are special, and because a complex brain gives us the capacity to have thoughts about what our thoughts are like and how they are different from the thoughts of our cat or that spider or this rock. It would be difficult to have a brain of that kind without also having the thought that there is something special about it.

And then, if you think further about the other end of this discrepancy, this unexplanatory explanation, this explanation that doesn’t satisfy, things get difficult right away, because if the idea is that materialism can’t explain our minds and moral sense but God can, then one thinks about that god who created the universe with its hundreds of billions of galaxies each with hundreds of billions of stars, and one realizes that there’s precious little reason to think it’s Like Us or that we’re like it; little reason to think we’re the same kind of thing as that god only smaller and weaker. It seems to make much more sense to think that our ideas about the Moral Law and in fact our search for God would be of considerably less interest to this god than the ideas about the Moral Law of a flake of pepper would be to us. So, sure, to humans there does seem to be a strange and permanently puzzling gap between our consciousness and a material universe, but saying that God bridges that gap also does seem to be, as Johnson says, a coping mechanism rather than a genuinely convincing explanation.

Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, tells of his exasperation with colleagues who try to play both sides of the street: looking to science for justification of their religious convictions while evading the most difficult implications–the existence of a prime mover sophisticated enough to create and run the universe, “to say nothing of mind reading millions of humans simultaneously.” Such an entity, he argues, would have to be extremely complex, raising the question of how it came into existence, how it communicates–through spiritons!–and where it resides.

Well exactly – ‘while evading the most difficult implications.’ That’s just it. Answering ‘God’ isn’t an answer, because it just raises the same question all over again, but magnified exponentially. If it seems strange that we’re here, why would it not seem even stranger that God is here? Why is it that we’re mysterious but ‘God’ is quite enough? The God answer doesn’t answer the questions, it opens a whole universe of new ones. It seems to me a bit lazy and a bit dishonest to pretend that materialistic explanations are inadequate while the God one is just right.

Dawkins is frequently dismissed as a bully, but he is only putting theological doctrines to the same kind of scrutiny that any scientific theory must withstand. No one who has witnessed the merciless dissection of a new paper in physics would describe the atmosphere as overly polite.

But of course that’s just what one is not supposed to do – to put theological doctrines to the same kind of scrutiny that any scientific theory must withstand. No no. No no no no. That’s insensitive, that’s offensive, that’s impermissible. People who do that are bullies and Enlightenment fundamentalists. People who give inadequate one-word answers that always consist of the same three letters, on the other hand, are not bullies at all but spiritual questers.

No I’m still here, I haven’t run off with the minstrels. It’s just that there’s this deadline for TPM (The Philosophers’ Mag, you know) and I’ve been taken up with that. But I was reading an old Harper’s the other day, from November 2003, and found a lively article by Benjamin DeMott on ‘Junk Politics’ (excerpted from an eponymous book published a couple of months later). It’s not online, unfortunately, so I’ll give you an extract or two.

The case is that both the essential planks and the elaborating tropes of today’s junk politics are troublingly underexamined, yet they’ve been functioning for some time as major agents of public confusion…Junk politics introduces new qualifications for high political office…It tilts courage toward braggadocio, sympathy toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains.

Check, check, check, check.

Quiet accents of candor bring a sense of closeness between speaker and audience…The impression strengthens that heart – heart alone, not records of accomplishment, not positions on issues, not argued-for priorities, not expressive, persuasive talents – must be the electorate’s pivotal concern…Leaders need prove only that they can feel…[DeMott’s elipse] a child’s or parent’s or stranger’s pain. Problems aren’t as difficult as Phi Bete wonks claim.

Check.

And…there’s the diffidence-show implicit in leaders’ own mucker-posing speech, rich in solecisms, truculently stubborn mispronunciations [Eye-rack, anyone? OB], non sequiturs, plain absurdities…By intent or otherwise, such speech reflects lack of anxiety about appearing stupid to colleagues or constituents and thereby disses the political calling. The American democratic ideal called for universal, informed participation in the public square: acquaintance with skill of argument, familiarity with standards of coherence, brains. The embrace by those in high office of dim-bulb diffidence tropes – macho brandishings of ignorance – trashes that ideal and draws down added contempt on political vocation.

Check. Bad, bad, very bad.

Alan Wolfe wrote a very, erm, unsatisfactory review of Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? in the NY Times book review on Sunday. We could just slap it into that largish collection we’re starting to build up of Weirdly, Almost Perversely Bad Reviews from the NYTBR – there’s the one William Vollman did of a book on Nietzsche that Brian Leiter ripped up one side and down the other, there’s the Leon Wieseltier one of Dennett’s new book that Brian also took issue with, there was that Wonkette mess on Katha Pollitt’s new book that I was faintly critical of, and now this.

It starts horridly – “Bérubé comes off as spunky, likable and anything but a left-wing extremist…” Spunky? Spunky? Why not just tell him he’s cute when he argues? Spunky is right up there with feisty, and feisty is a word that needs to be expunged from the language. It’s a wonder people don’t (as far as I know) call me that. Pleasingly, they’re much more likely to call me things like acid, savage, and acerbic, which I have to tell you, makes me beam with quiet but deep happiness. (Then again there was that time someone called me twee. O the agony. But still, that’s not as bad as feisty.)

But then the wheels really come off.

…and he convinces me that Horowitz is as unpleasant as he is ungracious. But he does not persuade me that Horowitz is wrong. I’ve taught in at least two universities known for their leftism, and I know full well that those who teach at them strenuously opppose hiring conservatives and treat students who venerate the military, for example, as misguided. Were Horowitz not in fact intent on replacing left-wing thought police with their right-wing equivalent, I would applaud his efforts.

But that’s why Horowitz is wrong! His schtick is not just saying hey there are too many lefties in universities, it’s working to get laws passed that would ‘fix’ this putative imbalance by getting the state to micromanage every aspect of university teaching, hiring, curriculum, grading, evaluation, and haircut. Der. You might as well say ‘if eliminating the estate tax didn’t benefit the rich while shifting the tax burden onto the poor, I would applaud it’. And then there’s the bit about ‘venerating’ the military, and the sloppy notion that thinking ‘veneration’ of any military might be misguided is a necessarily lefty idea.

It is instructive to learn that anthropology is not a discipline composed entirely of like-minded people because left-liberals do not always agree with poststructuralist Marxists, but this hardly addresses the widespread perception that cultural anthropology has little room for those who might believe that America’s presence in a third-world country might bring about some good.

The what? The widespread what? The widespread perception that what? What does ‘America’s presence’ mean? Some Americans? Undercover agents? Invasion? The whole country picking up and plopping itself down inside a third-world country, squashing everything in sight and slopping all over the neighbours? Surely whether that presence ‘might’ bring about some good or not depends heavily on what that means, but it’s impossible to tell what it means. It’s just loose sloppy hand-waving in the general direction of a thought without bothering to pin it down. That’s lazy, frankly. One gets the irresistible impression while reading this article that Wolfe scribbled it down while watching a football game on tv or something. It doesn’t seem to have his full attention.

Also fueling conservative anger is the fact that universities work remarkably well. They bring jobs and new industries to the regions in which they are located. They tend not to lay employees off with the haste of the private sector.

Hello? Some universities are in the private sector? I know conservatives think they’re some sort of alternative world because they’re not always directly shuttled around by the profit motive, but all the same, quite a few of them are private rather than state. Maybe there was a touchdown just then, and he lost the thread.

And then he wraps up with a disjointed, lazy last paragraph, in which he even admits to a kind of childish boredom. But the Times thought this was good enough. Well it isn’t.