Okay, what does Bush mean by it?

President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution…Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush’s assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ”to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ”execute” a law he believes is unconstitutional.

Because – why? Because he’s a constitutional scholar? Because even if he’s not a scholar he knows more than most people about what’s constitutional and what isn’t? Because he knows anything at all about what is constitutional? Because it says in the Constitution that if a president ‘believes’ a given law is not constitutional he can just ignore it? Because the US president has unlimited, monarchical powers? Because magical powers to interpret the Constitution correctly pass to the new president the moment CBS news says who won Ohio? Because presidents who are elected because their father was president sometime in the previous decade have special rights to ignore laws whenever they dang well feel like it? Because presidents who have signed more death warrants than anyone else in the country are empowered to bypass laws? Because presidents who are in office when people fly airplanes into buildings are permitted to tear up all laws that they find pesky?

No, none of those reasons, I don’t think, on account of how none of those are true. So, why, then?

Far more than any predecessor, Bush has been aggressive about declaring his right to ignore vast swaths of laws — many of which he says infringe on power he believes the Constitution assigns to him alone as the head of the executive branch or the commander in chief of the military. Many legal scholars say they believe that Bush’s theory about his own powers goes too far and that he is seizing for himself some of the law-making role of Congress and the Constitution-interpreting role of the courts.

Well that certainly is what it sounds like.

Bush administration spokesmen declined to make White House or Justice Department attorneys available to discuss any of Bush’s challenges to the laws he has signed. Instead, they referred a Globe reporter to their response to questions about Bush’s position that he could ignore provisions of the Patriot Act. They said at the time that Bush was following a practice that has ”been used for several administrations” and that ”the president will faithfully execute the law in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution.” But the words ”in a manner that is consistent with the Constitution” are the catch, legal scholars say, because Bush is according himself the ultimate interpretation of the Constitution. And he is quietly exercising that authority to a degree that is unprecedented in US history.

Gee – here was I thinking the ultimate interpretation of the Constitution was supposed to be a Supreme Court thing, not a president thing. I must have done more sleeping in government class than I thought.

Bruce Fein, a deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration, said the American system of government relies upon the leaders of each branch ”to exercise some self-restraint.” But Bush has declared himself the sole judge of his own powers, he said, and then ruled for himself every time. ”This is an attempt by the president to have the final word on his own constitutional powers, which eliminates the checks and balances that keep the country a democracy,” Fein said. ”There is no way for an independent judiciary to check his assertions of power, and Congress isn’t doing it, either. So this is moving us toward an unlimited executive power.”

There’s something deeply enraging about the whole thing. Who does that man think he is? (God’s chosen, I know. Don’t remind me.)

Someone should have said this long ago.

Something terribly important has been missing from discussions orbiting around the Mohammed cartoons…What’s been missing has been an acknowledgment that blasphemy isn’t just something that must be tolerated. It’s something that possesses a special political value of its own. Blasphemy, in short, is a good thing. It’s something admirable, noble, and, yes, even respectable.

Actually…now you mention it…somebody ought to start a magazine called Blasphemy. And mean it.

It must be stated and stated unequivocally that it’s no more improper in healthy democratic discourse to ridicule religious figures and ideas (even core ideas) than it is to criticize and mock (other) politically important figures and ideas…Formally speaking, in democratic discourse there’s nothing special about religious doctrines. Like other ideologies, religion instructs and even commands people about what they should value and how they should conduct themselves…Many clerics actually tell their congregations how to vote. It’s simply not acceptable for a participant to enter public debate, have such a powerful effect upon it, and then claim immunity from the sort of treatment to which other participants are subject.

Exactly! They don’t get to mix it up so thoroughly in public debate and then demand immunity. They don’t get to dive head-first into the profane and then demand (with threats and menaces) to be treated as sacred.

The article is in an Open Debate at TPM: you can reply to it, and Peter Fosl will reply to three of the best, which will (I think, although it doesn’t say that on the page) be published in the magazine.

Here’s something I’d like to know. Why do people keep calling Galbraith an ‘unapologetic’ liberal? Why is being a liberal something one is expected to apologize for?

Those French – they’re witty bastards. Flaubert for instance. I picked a Penguin selection of his letters off a shelf this morning, for no particular reason, I just caught sight of it and felt like browsing in it – I opened it at random – at a letter to Louise Colet in which he talks about Musset, with whom Colet had just begun an affair. (Page 185)

I have been thinking a great deal about Musset. And I think that in the end it is all just Affectation…Men sentimentalize over everything, and most of the time the poor women are taken in by it. It was only to make a good impression on you that he said: ‘Try me. I have left Italian women gasping’ (an idea of Italian women that is connected with the idea of a volcano; you always find Mount Vesuvius between their legs. Nonsense! Italian women are like Eastern women: drowsy, languid, voluptuous things; but never mind, it is a received idea), whereas in fact the poor lad may simply be having trouble satisfying his washer-woman. It was so as to look like a man of passion that he said: ‘I am one of the jealous kind, I would kill a woman, and so on.’ He hasn’t killed George Sand.

And it goes on like that, and there’s a lot more like it in other letters. He was a funny, rude, caustic bastard.

And then there’s our friend Marcel, who was also a funny bastard, in his own way. Behold Albertine.

As soon as she entered my room, she would spring on to my bed and sometimes would expatiate upon my type of intellect, would vow in a transport of sincerity that she would sooner die than leave me; this was on mornings when I had shaved before sending for her.

Splat!

Here’s a bit more Gustave. (Page 188)

They are all essentially the same, all the people who tell you about their lost love, their mother’s grave, their father’s grave, their sacred memories, who kiss medallions, who weep in the moonlight, who go into raptures when they see children, swoon at the theatre, look thoughtful when they stand by the Ocean. Fakers! fakers! triple charlatans! who use their hearts as trampolines in order to reach up to something.

Dear grenouilles.

I like this item of Julian’s, too. He asks what is meant by ‘being religious’.

Yet logos and mythos do not exhaust the meanings of religiosity. There is a third sense, one which I believe is more important and more widely held. This is the idea of having a religious attitude. Attitudes are…deeply important to how we live, for they determine our entire orientation to the world around us. Among the primary religious attitudes are those of awe, reverence, gratitude and humility. What each have in common is that they capture a sense that there is something greater than us, which commands us, and which we cannot control. And it is the perceived absence of these attitudes in atheism that lends it the reputation for arrogance. Yet although religion arguably allows for a more natural expression of these attitudes, they are compatible with even the most naturalistic cosmology.

Indeed. Although I think it’s fair to say that the reason atheism is widely thought to lack those attitudes is that the atheist versions are not personal, are not about an agent or a loved mega-person, and as such, are considered too thin, too impoverished, too abstract, cold, unemotional – unloving, perhaps. I can see why theists would think that – but I think it’s wrong. Just for one thing, I think that view underestimates the intensity of the love it’s possible to have for places, for landscapes, for nature, for the world or the cosmos. They should read some Wordsworth: that might enlighten them. Or Proust. Or they could listen to Gene Sparling’s account of finding the Ivory Bill. No thinness in any of those.

A theist, for example, has a clear object for their feeling of gratitude: the creator God. But an atheist can clearly have a sense of their own good fortune and an understanding that any period of prosperity may be impermanent. Likewise, a theist feels awe and reverence for “creation”, yet as even the atheist Richard Dawkins has described in his Unweaving the Rainbow, almost identical emotional responses to the natural world can be shared by materialist scientists.

Exactly. That’s why I quoted a bit of Unweaving the Rainbow to end Why Truth Matters –

To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterously mistaken, so diametrically opposed to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to the despair of which I am wrongly suspected…The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver.

Along with something Matt Ridley said at Spiked:

The one thing I would try to teach the world about science is that science is not a catalogue of facts, but a search for new mysteries. Science increases the store of wonder and mystery in the world; it does not erode it. The myth, started by the Romantic poets, that science gets rid of mysteries was well nailed by Albert Einstein – whose thought experiments about relativity are far more otherworldly, elusive, thrilling and baffling than anything dreamt up by poets. Isaac Newton showed us the mysteries of deep space, Charles Darwin showed us the mysteries of deep time, and Francis Crick and James D Watson showed us the mysteries of deep encoding. To get rid of those insights would be to reduce the world’s stock of awe.

There you go. We do awe.

The Archive

Interrogations Archive

Phrasemaker, Scruton, isn’t he.

Freud, who assumed the mask of the objective observer, who presented his results as the inescapable conclusions of arduous empirical study, who repeatedly claimed that his psychological discoveries would one day be grounded in biology, is now widely accepted at mask-value…Someone must have reminded him that not all children are boys; but he had an easy way with his critics, which was to throw the Greeks at them. Thus was born the Electra complex, conjured from a thigh-bone of Oedipus…At every point where scientific method might impose its logic on the argument, Freud stepped sideways into metaphor, asserting with dogmatic intransigence that this is how things are because this is how they must be.

Stepping sideways into metaphor – perfect way of putting it. That’s quite a familiar dance step these days, beloved of bishops and postmodernist theologians alike, not to mention astrologers.

And in his case studies he presented unforgettable portraits of wrecked human beings, about whose flailing carcasses he patrolled like a jackal, tearing off pieces and holding them up to the light, which he imagined to be a light of science, but which was in fact a light of the imagination, transfiguring all on which it fell. Freud suffered from the ‘charm of disenchantment’. Like Marx he was irresistibly drawn to explanations that demean us, and which turn our world-view upside down – or set it, as Marx insisted, ‘on its feet’.

Yeah. I used to suffer from that charm too – I’m sure most of us did. Although I wouldn’t say ‘explanations that demean us’ – I don’t think that’s quite accurate (though it’s close). I think it’s more a matter of trying to see past explanations that sentimentalize or prettify us, to get at the uglier (more demeaning) truth underneath. Of course that’s not always mistaken, to put it mildly (advertisers aren’t actually always in the business because they want to educate us); but it’s also not always the case that the most repellent or unnerving explanation is invariably and necessarily the right one. Freud often does seem to be convinced that the most irritating intepretation he can come up with is indeed necessarily the right one. Probably because of his toilet training.

Okay and now that we’ve got it straight that I have no choice but to go on being smugly complacently in favour of rational inquiry as opposed to the other thing, let’s drop in on the Independent and see what it has to say about astrology.

The massive power of waves and the tides that cause them are, it is universally accepted, a direct consequence of the gravitational influences of the Moon and the Sun upon Earth. We also know that the Moon sometimes determines animal behaviour and has long been linked with aspects of our lives as diverse as a women’s menstrual cycle and mental disturbance, hence the word lunatic. Is it, astrologists argue, therefore completely impossible that the other planets also exert influences on our lives and personalities, to greater or lesser degrees and in varying combinations?

Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve seen anything quite as ridiculous as that, at least in a respectable newspaper. (Okay, not counting Bunting.) Note the discrepancy between ‘it is universally accepted’ in the first sentence and the much vaguer ‘we also know’ in the second. Who’s we, bub? And what do you mean ‘know’? And once we’ve got that clear – what on earth do you mean by ‘the Moon sometimes determines animal behaviour’? You mean like wolves howling at it? Or you mean like the moon turning bats into vampires? And then when we’re clear about that, what in the sam hill do you mean by ‘has long been linked with aspects of our lives as diverse as a women’s menstrual cycle and mental disturbance’? Eh? What do you mean ‘linked with’ for a start? You mean correlated with? You mean somebody has said ‘Hey, Clara went barking mad when the moon was almost full, and that other woman across town went a little funny during an eclipse’? Saying the moon has ‘long been linked with’ women’s ‘mental disturbance’ is perfectly compatible with simply saying that a lot of people who didn’t know much about either the moon or women’s brains have made random speculative correlations between the moon and women flipping out – which isn’t saying much. (Neither is ‘hence the word lunatic’. We know whence the word lunatic, you prat, that doesn’t constitute evidence that the moon does in fact make women go crazy, it just constitutes evidence that people thought the moon made people go crazy.) And then the descent into complete raving in the last sentence. Who knows whether it’s ‘completely impossible’ or not, but that’s not the issue; the issue is that there’s no reason to think so. Woolly thinkers always babble about proof and certainty and completely impossible, when those are not what’s at stake. Anyway – how did Terry Kirby get from the waves and the tides to ‘influences on our lives and personalities’? (By sly stages, that’s how. Waves and tides, to animal behaviour, to aspects of our lives such as menstruation and mental disturbance, to influences on our lives and personalities – as if they were all pretty much the same kind of thing. Well they’re not. If Kirby knows of some evidence that gravity influences our personalities the same way it influences the tides, I’d be curious to see it.) And then there’s ‘the other planets,’ meaning in addition to the moon and the sun. Err…

And that, having been around in various forms since the ancient Babylonians first began to describe celestial omens 4,000 years ago, astrology deserves more respect than the derision commonly accorded it by the rational scientists and the established churches[?]

Well there’s a stupid ‘argument’. Lots of things have ‘been around’ for four thousand years or more, but that doesn’t automatically mean they ‘deserve’ ‘respect’ – why would it? Stupid ideas don’t become less stupid as they get older; often the contrary is true, as better information becomes available. The four humours were around for a long time too; does that mean they ‘deserve’ ‘respect’ now?

Marlene Houghton, an astrologer for more than 30 years, puts it another way. “Astrology is a metaphysical doctrine, not a science, and cannot be easily judged by the narrow instrument that is science.”

Yupuhuh. Also known as the easy out. Astrology is a ‘metaphysical doctrine’ – okay, but then if it claims that distant planets do in fact ‘exert influences on our lives and personalities’ then it is making non-metaphysical truth claims, and doesn’t get to wiggle out of noticing disconfirming evidence with handwaving about metaphysical doctrines. That is, in the vernacular, cheating.

I’ve never seen astrology as a prop or a belief system but, as Ms Chalklin says, simply a tool to better understand the ups and downs of everyday life and help explain something about ourselves and the people we meet. It’s not rocket science, in fact, it’s not science at all. Whether you are an Aries or a Pisces, it is ultimately about people and what makes us what we are.

But if it’s a crap tool with all broken teeth and twisted prongs and dull blades and bent shafts, then what’s the point of it? How does it help anyone better understand the ups and downs of anything if it’s a great whirling cloud of vapor? How does it explain anything about ourselves and the people we meet when in fact it doesn’t explain anything at all because it’s pure raving nonsense?

Ah, the hell with it. With people like that around and the Indy publishing them, I’ll just have to go on being smug and complacent, I can’t possibly do anything else.

Sastra makes a relevant point, or set of points, in a comment on ‘No Exit’.

Bottom line, science is the method you use when you want to force yourself to seriously consider the possibility that you might be wrong. It’s designed to eliminate bias and test views as much as possible. It’s structured to force a change of mind. If that is allowed to pass as just a “different kind of dogma,” then being undogmatic would mean refusing to consider the possibility you might be wrong, embracing your biases, and not testing your beliefs. Don’t change your mind. Stay firm. Otherwise, you might be in danger of the smugness of scientism.

Just so, and that’s where the regress comes in, and I just can’t see any way out of it. For one thing, as Sastra indicates, taking things on faith itself involves a kind of smugness. In fact you could say that it doesn’t involve smugness, it is smugness. The refusal to consider disconfirming evidence (and that is what faith is, by definition) could be seen as the very essence of smugness. Again, I reach a dead end where I just don’t see what the alternative can be. Making a virtue of refusing ever to change one’s mind, no matter what, is not an anti-smug stance.

But then it’s smug of me to say that. We’re saying (we have a consensus) that rational inquiry and science, which always include the possibility that we might be wrong, are better forms of inquiry than their opposites, which exclude the possibility that their practitioners might be wrong; we’re saying this method is better than that method; therefore there is a potential for smugness. Sure; there is; but the remedy for that can’t be to take up a much smugger, more self-protective way of thinking. I don’t know what the remedy is, other than the usual ones of trying to be vigilant, aware, self-critical, and so on; but I’m pretty convinced of what it’s not.

I’ve been thinking about consensus and complacency. I know of people who think that B&W has too much in the way of consensus and thereby risks smug complacency. That’s true enough, but I don’t quite know what can be done about it, or even if anything should be done about it (that’s what I’ve been thinking about). It seems to me that as soon as I try to figure out what (if anything) can be done about it, I immediately get into a regress, which engenders feelings of deep hopelessness and futility (along with hunger). It may be that from a moral point of view, feelings of hopelessness and futility (and hunger) are preferable to smug complacency; but from other points of view, I’m not sure they are.

Here’s why I get into the regress. It seems to me that B&W’s* only really basic commitment – and thus all it can really risk being complacent about – is to rational inquiry. To rational inquiry of whatever kind; to using whatever tools and methods are needed to investigate whatever particular question needs investigating – including whether or not B&W is smug and complacent, and whether consensus on the need for and value of rational inquiry necessarily leads to smug complacency. And right there, two seconds into the inquiry, we smack into the regress, and I don’t see how we can get out of it. How can we tell whether or not B&W is smugly complacent except by trying to find out? By trying to find out by inquiry? But if we do that we’re just displaying the consensus again, smugly and complacently. But what else can we do? What is there other than rational inquiry? Faith? Revelation? Authority? Intuition? Blind commitment? Hunch? Insight? Mystical experience? But those simply don’t seem the right (the most reliable, the most testable, the most likely to be accurate) way to find out the truth of the matter. No doubt it’s smug and complacent of me to say and to think that – I can see that in a way it is by definition – but I still don’t see any good alternative. To rely on faith or revelation would be credulous and reckless and fundamentally incompetent, in the sense of using the wrong tools for a particular job.

So I seem to be stuck. It seems to me that B&W is not (necessarily) smug and complacent, because the basic idea it is committed to is, to the best of its (my) knowledge, the only one that’s a valid option – so it’s a forced choice – so not really a source of smugness. We don’t really feel smug when we pick up a garlic press instead of a chainsaw when we have some garlic to squash. Not unless we’re terribly hard up for reasons to feel smug (in which case no one should begrudge us, because really, how sad, don’t you think?).

It’s as if someone said, ‘what colour is that shirt?’ You have two choices – you can guess, or you can look. You think you’re more likely to give an accurate answer if you look. Is it smug and complacent to think that?

The other issue is that in a world where lots of people guess, and not only guess but make a virtue of guessing, and chastise people who look instead of guessing – the result may well be that the people who look will feel superior to the guessers (and, as a matter of fact, the guessers will feel superior to the lookers). If that is the sense of smug and complacent that is meant, it’s true enough: no doubt that is a risk. But how can it be helped? What is to be done? Should we start arguing in favour of guessing in order to avoid feeling superior to guessers? (What of the risk then of feeling superior to lookers? Should we just alternate every few minutes? But then wouldn’t we get dizzy and start dropping things?) But is that a good reason to do that? If we think rational inquiry really is the best way to find out things (and we think finding out things is worth doing) then is it sensible to do the opposite simply to prevent ourselves from (possibly) feeling superior? Isn’t that doing a large bad in order to prevent a comparatively trivial bad?

And the logic of doing things we don’t actually believe in in order to avoid smugness is tricky – because anything can prompt such feelings – so at that rate we should never do anything. Never learn anything, acquire any skill, form any opinion – we should be so humble and self-abnegating that we don’t exist at all. Which seems safe, but a bit pointless.

*I keep saying B&W, which is a bit absurd, because B&W c’est moi, there isn’t anyone else here – so why don’t I just say ‘I’? It seems coy to say B&W if I mean me. But I don’t really mean me, I mean B&W, so that’s what I say. B&W seems like something bigger than mere me – which it is, actually, because a lot of other people write for it, and I assume they do that because of the nature of B&W, which is created partly by those very people who write for it, in a continuing expansive process. Okay that’s why I say B&W. Though it’s also because it was two people when it was founded, so I formed the habit of thinking of it and referring to it that way; it’s taken me a long time to break the habit of using the plural first-person pronoun.

Well you can see their point, of course. Men in shorts darting around kicking a ball – I mean to say. If they let women in to watch that kind of thing, not much football would get played, know what I mean? I mean, whoarrrr, right? Obviously. So if they let women in, then all they would get is, the men would come running out and do a spot of kicking and in thirty seconds flat each man would have forty or fifty women on top of him, and those shorts would be nowhere to be seen. Whoarrrrrrr.

That’s how it is here of course. In the West. There’s no such thing as football here, there are just these abortive occasions where men in shorts start to play football and then before you can say ‘Play ball!’ there’s just a lot of rutting going on. Not all that sporting. But you know how women are – one look at men’s knees and they can’t keep their clothes on. I think there used to be football, once upon a time, but I suppose that was before the Pankhursts or Betty Friedan or something.

It’s the thing about the other men in shorts that I don’t quite get.

Women can watch football broadcast on Iranian television and they can attend basketball and volleyball matches even though they too involve men dressed in shorts.

The thing about television seems quite cruel. It must drive them almost insane, poor things. Do they try to hump the television itself, I wonder? But it’s the part about attending basketball and volleyball matches that I really don’t understand. Why is that allowed? Why is it okay to have basketball and volleyball matches interrupted and ruined by throngs of whimpering women dragging the players’ shorts off? What’s the deal – Iranians like football but not basketball and volleyball? So they want football to go ahead and be played all the way to the end without being sidetracked to a copulation-fest, while with basketball and volleyball they figure it’s okay either way? That must be it, but I think it’s a little unfair to basketball and volleyball. But I prefer football myself, so I guess I can understand it.

Members of the clergy say it is wrong for men and women to look at each other’s bodies, even if they have no intention of taking pleasure from it.

Well of course it is. And what do they mean about no intention of taking pleasure from it? What planet is that supposed to be on? The one where women go to soccer matches and tennis matches and squash tournaments and swimming competitions and volleyball and basketball games and marathons and bicycle races with no intention of taking pleasure from slavering over men’s bodies? The one where women don’t even notice those tight tight tight lycra shorts? That planet? Haaaaaaa –

Sorry, but you have to admit, that’s funny.

One MP said, if the reformists had tried this, there would have been suicide bombers protesting on the streets of Teheran.

Protesting? Suicide bombers protesting? In the sense of blowing themselves up? Or just in the usual sense of marching and setting fire to things? But if it’s that – do suicide bombers announce themselves beforehand? Do they have like suicide bomber clubs, or uniforms, or regalia of some sort? Banners, maybe? I’d have thought they didn’t, I’d have thought the idea was to conceal the fact that one was a suicide bomber until the very instant when that fact was made apparent by an explosion. Because, see, if you go around beforehand saying you’re a suicide bomber and protesting things, there is some remote chance that someone might stop you going on being a suicide bomber.

But, maybe not, with everyone so busy keeping women out of football stadiums. First things first, ya know?

One good Radio 4 idea-discusser reviews another. (I like Laurie Taylor. For one thing, he reviewed the Dictionary of FN in the Times Higher. He didn’t think much of it, but he did think some of the jokes were funny – that’s good enough.)

I’m also put off by the assumption that anyone who doesn’t wholeheartedly join Bragg in his latest popularising endeavour is something of a spoilsport or a dangerous elitist…No one can doubt Bragg’s populist spirit. One of the chief pleasures of In Our Time on Radio 4 is the sound of him trying to persuade the assembled academics to speak more plainly about their specialist subject. Whether the topic of the day is quantum mechanics, Goethe, or the rise and fall of Charlemagne, there’s nearly always a magic moment when Melvyn grumbles that a distinguished professorial guest is departing from the order of play or becoming too interested in matters that are not central to the main story. Such episodes perfectly capture the dialectic between Melvyn’s healthy and commendable populist belief that every topic can be successfully brought to heel and his guests’ equally well-grounded insistence that matters are, on the whole, looking at it from both sides, taking everything into account, rather more complicated than their host would wish them to allow.

Yeh. That’s an interesting and tricky dialectic. I spend much of my life encountering it these days. Jeremy and I were always wrangling over it while writing Why Truth Matters, and I always have to keep it in mind while working on The Philosophers’ Mag. The basic issue JS and I kept disagreeing over is whether it makes people feel stupid and frustrated to read something they don’t entirely understand, or whether it makes them feel insulted and frustrated to have something they do understand explained to them. That’s why it’s a dialectic. I tend to think that a certain amount of difficulty or unfamiliarity does not necessarily make people feel stupid and frustrated but rather challenged and stimulated; I think he tends to think I go too far in that direction, and also that the risk isn’t worth it. I suppose the problem is that what a certain amount of difficulty or unfamiliarity does is make some people feel challenged and stimulated while it makes other people feel stupid and frustrated. But the trouble is that there has to be a cutoff point somewhere – it’s not possible or practical to explain absolutely everything, or else no one would be able to write anything at all, since every word would need explaining, as would the words that did the explaining, so that progress would be impossible. But how does one figure out where the cutoff point is? It’s pure guesswork, pure intuition; seat of the pants stuff. Nobody knows. We just do our best, that’s all. And argue over words like ‘quotidian’.

This is good bracing stuff.

At Wellington College, one of Britain’s top public schools, headmaster Anthony Seldon is piloting an initiative that may eventually see lessons in happiness added to the curriculum in both the state and independent sectors. What an unhappy prospect…The problem is that Wellington is opting to teach happiness through positive psychology which, in my view, can amount to little more than self-help with a veneer of academic respectability.

And one thing neither the world nor education needs more of is self-help with a veneer of academic respectability. It’s had lashings of that, via for instance the totem of ‘self-esteem’, and look how well that turned out – producing throngs of people with all too much self-esteem and all too little awareness of their own limitations. Positive psychology sounds unnervingly like more of the same.

A life of unremitting cheerfulness is one of delusion, for it refuses to acknowledge normal ups and downs. By emphasising pleasure, the psychologists turn happiness into something self-regarding: mere accumulation of pleasure and avoidance of pain. More, they leave unanswered all the tough questions: Do you have a right to be happy? Can you be happy if others are unhappy? Does it matter whether or not you’re happy?

The tough questions and also the most interesting ones. For instance: if there were a happiness pill, would you take it? The answer is far from obviously yes, for the same sort of reason the answer is not obviously yes to questions like ‘if there were a pill that could make you write great poetry or play the cello like Rostropovich, would you take it?’ The idea may appeal for about a quarter of a second, but then when we think about it we realize we want our happiness and our accompishments or talents to mean something, which entails that they have to be the product of something, of something connected to our own efforts or experience or thought or all those. No, actually, we don’t want to just magically turn into another Keats or Mozart; what would be the point? We want to cover the ground that lies in between being our poor bare selves and whatever magical being we have it in us to become – we want to cover all the ground, ourselves, wide awake and bending every nerve. If we don’t do that, whatever we get at the end doesn’t belong to us, and it doesn’t mean anything; it’s just some sort of parlour trick. Away with it. Same with positive psychology.

To begin, we must find a better definition of happiness, one that surpasses the restricted boundaries of subjective wellbeing. Lasting and profound happiness is the active orientation of your life towards meaning, purpose and value. It’s a reflection upon the character of your life as a whole. This kind of happiness is strong enough to withstand misfortune and does not depend upon good fortune. It isn’t about feeling good, it’s about being good. That’s what Aristotle meant when he called happiness (eudaemonia) a state of flourishing in the art of living…And thus he insisted that happiness was an activity – because it requires skill and focus.

It’s the opposite of a magic pill; it’s the negation of a magic pill. A magic pill would block and prevent the need for activity, skill and focus, so the happiness it created would be just some sort of weird delusion (a trick of the Evil Demon, perhaps) rather than the real thing. It would be like taking a pill that would cause you to have won a marathon, without having actually run the 26 miles and with no memory of having done so. Not very rewarding.

Why Truth Matters.

The thing about the cultural anthropoligical view is that, unless you are a cultural anthropologist, it’s not the place to stop. Because tolerance, acceptance, neutrality, non-judgmentalism never is the place to stop. That’s one of the advantages of being human, isn’t it – we are able to second-guess things, and ask for something better, so we should never permananently and thoroughly give up that ability and right.

We can suspend it at times, obviously. You don’t go to a friend’s house and tell her how to do things. (On the other hand, if you somehow discover that serious abuse is going on, you may want to intervene, with all the attendant difficulties and worries that possible duty raises.) But that is not the same thing as, and should not be confused with, either 1) never making any critical judgment at all or 2) accepting or approving everything no matter what.

No matter what; sight unseen; unconditionally; in advance: all are bad and dangerous ways to think. The Euston Manifesto has sparked a lot of discussions of cultural relativism, and many people think (or claim to think) it’s a fiction, but it isn’t at all. The very word ‘Islamophobia’ which is so readily flung around is a symptom and an example of cultural relativism. The word itself forms a mandate not to criticise Islam because to do so is ‘phobic’: irrational, neurotic, mistaken, hostile, fearful; and also, on the assumption that Islam is a race rather than a religion (which of course it isn’t), a form of racism. That’s a lot of work for one word to do, but it does it. (Why else would Comment is Free include Bunglawala?) As long as the word Islamophobia is in popular currency and used not (inaccurately but in another sense reasonably) to mean hostility to all Muslims no matter what, but to mean criticism of Islam, then it’s no good saying there is no cultural relativism; there is a lot of it.

Perhaps it clarifies to think of it as not so much cultural relativism as in advance, unconditional, sight unseen, pre-emptive thinking, or non-thinking. They describe the same thing, but perhaps the alternative term makes it more obvious what the problem is. The problem is this business of deciding ahead of time what the mandatory conclusion is, and then always reaching that conclusion, without considering evidence and without analysis.

It’s much like the way that religious argument functions, as a matter of fact – where no amount of evidence is relevant or heeded, and attempts to cite evidence are called ‘scientism’ and reductionism and then rebuked on the grounds that they claim anything that can’t be measured doesn’t exist; all that just boils down to saying ‘don’t ask, don’t look, don’t think, don’t evaluate.’ But we need to be able to evaluate and ask and think, we need to be able to reject as well as accept. Without that ability we can’t change or correct or fix or reform anything, not political systems nor economic arrangements nor traditions nor gender relations nor anything else. Life without the ability to second-guess and then fix or change anything would be hellish.

Another point about this strawman argument we keep getting from rabbis and bishops, this ‘argument’ that boils down to claiming that non-theists have a ‘belief that the only things that are real or can be known are those that can be empirically observed and measured’ and then following that absurd claim with the equally absurd claim that love, morality, beauty and god are all ‘face[s] of human experience that [are] not subject to empirical verification.’

The other point (see above) is that that endlessly repeated pseudo-argument is a crap argument from two directions, not just one. It’s bad and stupid first, as I mentioned, because it dishonestly or woollily or confusedly makes a truth-claim about the existence of an entity, a being, in the view of theists a person, equivalent to evaluative thoughts and emotions such as love, ethics, awe, beauty, when they are quite different kinds of thing. That amounts to a large and glaring category mistake. On the one hand you have questions, controversies, discussions about whether Napoleon, King Arthur, Achilles, Marco Polo, Paul Bunyan, Mata Hari was or was not a real person who actually existed. On the other hand you have discussions of what we mean when we talk about love, beauty, good, bad, better, worse. Those are different kinds of thing. I think we can all agree on that? Am I right? Napoleon did or did not exist; a yes or no question; an empirical question. Napoleon was good or bad; a complicated question, not a yes or no; a question with empirical elements but also with other elements.

That’s one reason Lerner’s argument is a bad one, but there’s another reason, that comes from another direction. It’s bad because it relies on a claim that questions about the evaluative as opposed to the factual category are absolutely and entirely non-empirical questions, and I think that’s nonsense, and stultifying nonsense at that. It is not the case that there is nothing empirical to say or to discover about love or ethics or beauty (though it may be the case about god, though not about religion or belief). It is not necessary to think that statements such as ‘beauty is an excitation of this particular set of neurons’ are all there is to say on the subject, to think that they are some of what there is to say on the subject. The idea that empirical inquiry is completely beside the point and even profanation is just a way of sealing off one whole useful way of exploring the subjects; what would be the point of that? Why not inquire into both what is going on in the brain when we watch the sun set over mountains and what we experience when we watch the sun set over mountains? Rabbis and bishops don’t get to monopolize whole areas of life such as emotions and judgments merely because they want to assimilate them to their fuzzy ideas of what god might be. They also don’t get to wall them off from close examination merely because they want to protect that fuzzy god who tends to melt away into nothing when people look at it too hard.

Read any Dwight Macdonald? If not you should. He’s a good one.

I take exception to all this.

But you can’t dine on clippings and the bones of old controversies, so what did his versatile output amount to after decades of pounding the typewriter? For years…Macdonald had been…frustrated, fatigued and plagued by the feeling that he had failed to climb the masthead of his talent by writing a major, original work – bringing out a real book, not just a basket of articles.

That’s a stupid opposition – a real book as opposed to a ‘basket’ of articles. As if there is some Platonic Ideal length, as if there is some magic that makes sixty thousand words on the same subject a Real Book while six ten-thousand word articles are a mere basket. Some articles are worth more than some books, and there is no magic ideal Platonic length. Ask Hazlitt, ask Orwell, ask Montaigne.

Well, at least he gets there in the end.

More of an odd-jobber and instigator, Macdonald harbored no creative cravings, courted no muse, left behind no masterpiece to keep his legacy warm at night…Yet sometimes the most important thing a critic leaves behind is a singular, wised-up, cant-free voice that is pure intelligence at play, and at its best Macdonald’s voice shoots off the page as if he were broadcasting live and cutting through the static.

Yes it does. That singular, wised-up, cant-free voice is more worth reading than a lot of full-length books I can think of, so fret not after the unwritten ‘masterpiece’.

Martin Jacques has some thoughts on globalization, or on one version of globalization anyway. He starts with Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

Benedict, a cultural anthropologist, was assigned by the US office of war administration to work on a project to try and understand Japan as the US began to contemplate the challenge that would be posed by its defeat, occupation and subsequent administration. Her book is written with a complete absence of judgmental attitude or sense of superiority, which one might expect; she treats Japan’s culture as of equal merit, virtue and logic to that of the US. In other words, its tone and approach could not be more different from the present US attitude towards Iraq or that country’s arrogant and condescending manner towards the rest of the world. This prompts a deeper question: has the world, since then, gone backwards? Has the effect of globalisation been to promote a less respectful and more intolerant attitude in the west, and certainly on the part of the US, towards other cultures, religions and societies?

But that’s a silly question, at least the way Jacques puts it. Of course the approach of a cultural anthropologist will be different from ‘the present US attitude towards Iraq’ – if by that he means either the attitude of the Bush administration or that of the US people in general – because neither entity consists entirely of cultural anthropologists. Cultural anthropologists are necessarily professionally cultural relativists, in a technical sense that is a little different from the more colloquial sense in which Guardian columnists and B&W and other chatters use it. Cultural anthropologists take a value-neutral approach to other cultures in order to study them properly; that does not entail endorsing or agreeing with everything (or in fact anything) about other cultures, it simply entails understanding that other cultures have their own internal logic. If Jacques just means that the Bush administration would have done well to get more information about Iraq (preferably from people who knew a lot more about Iraq than Benedict knew about Japan – her book has its critics, who think it oversimplifies rather seriously), then of course he’s right, but he seems to be making a much larger claim.

In contrast, the underlying assumption with globalisation is that the whole world is moving in the same direction, towards the same destination: it is becoming, and should become, more and more like the west. Where once democracy was not suitable for anyone else, now everyone is required to adopt it, with all its western-style accoutrements…At the heart of globalisation is a new kind of intolerance in the west towards other cultures, traditions and values, less brutal than in the era of colonialism, but more comprehensive and totalitarian. The idea that each culture is possessed of its own specific wisdom and characteristics, its own novelty and uniqueness, born of its own individual struggle over thousands of years to cope with nature and circumstance, has been drowned out by the hue and cry that the world is now one, that the western model – neoliberal markets, democracy and the rest – is the template for all.

Note, as Norm does, the equation of intolerance with the idea that ‘democracy…is the template for all’. Note the oddity of that thought; note how insulting it is. Note the fatalism of the idea that ‘each culture is possessed of its own specific wisdom and characteristics’ and therefore some ‘cultures’ don’t want or need democracy, and nor do the people inside those cultures. Note the assumption that idea rests on, which is that cultures are monolithic and dissent-free and that therefore there is not so much as a hair’s width room for disagreement with or criticism of any aspect of that culture including its tyrannical or dictatorial or unaccountable and unrepresentative form of governance. But if a culture is undemocratic, how can Jacques be confident that all the people within that culture approve of its undemocratic character? Since, by definition, they haven’t been asked, how does he know that?

And how does he know they all think alike? Why does he assume that Other Cultures have no disagreement or dissent? Why does he assume that Other People are incapable of looking around them and thinking about their situations and wanting something different? Why does he assume Other People are incapable of saying No?

It would be interesting to know why he assumes that. Someone ought to assign a cultural anthropologist to study Martin Jacques and figure it out.

The New Statesman provides a partial antidote.

One ally, Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association, is dismissive of the vogue for New Age thinking and the popularity of vaguely “spiritual” schools…Copson’s association has about 6,000 members, but it claims as kindred spirits, at the least, the many people of no religion who do not specifically identify themselves as humanists. These people need a voice, he argues, because of the continuing prevalence of the notion that religions have a superior morality. “Charles Clarke [the Home Secretary] gave a speech the other day saying that faith gives people values,” Copson says. “There’s an attempt to use faith as an instrument of cohesion. But other people are not valueless.” The philosopher A C Grayling, a supporter of the BHA, calls for “absolute clarity” in this area. “Very non-rigorous, very confused ideas [about belief] are a source of potential danger,” he says.

Exactly. There is indeed an attempt to use ‘faith’ or rather religion and religious belief as instruments of cohesion, and the attempt is riddled with very non-rigorous, confused ideas. For instance there is the obvious problem that ‘faith’ works against cohesion precisely to the extent that it works for it – it creates cohesion in one group and the opposite of cohesion between groups – in other words it creates sectarian hostility that might not be there if there weren’t so much insistence on cohesion of ‘faith communities’. For another instance there is the question whether it is either sensible or fair to attempt to create cohesion via fictions portrayed as truths.

The charge levelled at the New Godless is that, with their rigorous reasoning, testing and experimentation, they are making a religion out of the scientific method. “It’s an all-purpose, wild-card smear,” retorts Dennett. “It’s the last refuge of the sceptic. When someone puts forward a scientific theory that they really don’t like, they just try to discredit it as ‘scientism’. But when it comes to facts, and explanations of facts, science is the only game in town.”

Bishop of Oxford, please note. All other journalists who have used the word ‘scientism’ in the past week, please note.

Tested facts are the real ammunition of the New Godless…Raising unfounded doubts about those, says Copson, is “a failure to reason properly. The worst thing you can hear is, ‘Well, it’s my truth.'” Richard Dawkins, naturally, has little time for such viewpoints. “There’s this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out,” he says.

My, what a scientistic thing to say. Shocking.

Yet more kack; the rabbi hands the kack-distribution duty over to a bishop.

There is a paradox about the current bout of media atheism.

Oh yes, the current bout of media atheism. How about the ongoing drip drip drip of media theism? Is there a paradox about that? In the fact that it keeps saying the same few untrue things over and over and over again, never fazed by voices whispering of bad arguments and troops of strawmen, and never able to find anything new to say?

The idea that faith and reason are inherently opposed to one another is a mantra that is mind-boggling in its lack of historical perspective. The fact is that all philosophers, ancient and modern, have believed that reasons can be adduced for and against a religious view of life. Most of them have, in fact, believed in God but all have thought religious belief a matter of rational argument.

Nonsense. Tricksy wording. Sure, all philosophers have believed ‘reasons can be adduced for and against a religious view of life’ – that’s easy! Sure, reasons can be adduced for and against anything; it doesn’t follow that the reasons adduced are good reasons, or that all philosophers think they’re good reasons. And if it is still true (which I doubt, and which I strongly doubt that the bish has any evidence for) that most philosophers have believed in god in the past, much of that is, obviously, because they lacked evidence for alternative explanations. And as for all thinking religious belief is a matter of rational argument, same as the first point – of course they do, but that’s not the same thing as thinking religious believers have good rational arguments. Don’t be tricksy, bish. It ain’t Christian.

However, religious belief is a matter of considered judgment. It involves our aesthetic sense, our moral judgment, our imagination and our intuition. In this respect, it is not totally different from making a judgment, for example, that Beckett is a great playwright, the war against Iraq was wrong or the sheer existence of the universe is awesome.

Yes it is. Unless you are simply defining religious belief as a value judgment, but since that is not what most people mean by religious belief, that’s mere tricksiness. It’s that bait-and-switch tactic we’ve noted so often – talk about religion as a vague feeling or attitude to the universe when talking to atheists and a broad general public, and talk about it as theism the rest of the time. That’s cheating. Don’t cheat, bish. It ain’t Christian.

The danger of this simplistic understanding of the relationship between science and religion is now fully exposed by the way American creationists are using Dawkins and Dennett. Indeed, the leader of the American creationists has apparently written to Dawkins to say that they daily thank God for him.

Sigh. Apparently the bish missed Dennett’s piece in the Guardian commenting on that leader of the creationists thanking god story:

I find it amusing that two Brits – Madeleine Bunting and Michael Ruse – have fallen for a version of one of the most famous scams in American folklore. When Brer Rabbit gets caught by the fox, he pleads with him: “Oh, please, please, Brer Fox, whatever you do, don’t throw me in that awful briar patch!” – where he ends up safe and sound after the fox does just that. When the American propagandist William Dembski writes tauntingly to Richard Dawkins, telling him to keep up the good work on behalf of intelligent design, Bunting and Ruse fall for it!

Hello, bish? You missed the point? (I thought it was Americans who don’t do irony.)

Dawkins argues that evolution inevitably implies atheism.

No he does not. How many patient corrections of that stupid error have I seen in the past few months? I don’t know, but it’s more than a few. But obstinate blinkered tiresome woolly-minded bishops and rabbis and vicars and their fellow-travelers keep trotting it out every five minutes just the same. And then they expect us to take them seriously and think they are rational and have good arguments! No can do, bish. If you will insist on all this tricksiness of wording and recyclement of ancient misquotations, I’m not about to give you the accolade of being a rational arguer, or a scrupulous one, either.

This Easter, as usual, the Christian church will proclaim its central theme that, in Jesus, God shares our human anguish to the full and, through the resurrection, gives us hope that in the end all evil, including death, will be left behind.

So God shares our human anguish by causing his son to be tortured to death. Inspiring.