I’ve been thinking some more about this idea of ethical commitments as the best argument for treating religion differently from other systems of thought. I didn’t make clear enough in yesterday’s post that both Amy Gutman and Jonathan Derbyshire think that argument fails, despite being the best one available. I’m not taking issue with Jonathan, I’m just trying to poke at the idea to see where it gives. One place it gives, as Jonathan mentioned, is the fact that religion is not the only source of ethical commitments. But I think there are other places.

For one thing – ‘ethical commitments’ sounds like an individual item. It sounds like something that goes with the self, and matters to the self. But ethical commitments are about what the self does to other people. So this idea – “ultimate ethical commitments of individuals -which may be religious or secular in their source- are an especially valued and valuable part of individual identity” – seems to need some poking. Though I’m not sure exactly what kind. It’s not that I disagree that ethical commitments are a valued part of individual identity; I’m sure they often are. I suppose I disagree (tentatively) about what follows from that. (And, again, I’m not disagreeing with Jonathan, I’m disagreeing with whatever nebulous body of opinion holds to that idea. Joe Lieberman, maybe. Yes, that’s it! He’s just the kind of person who thinks that kind of thing. Okay I’m arguing with Soapy Joe again.) Ethical commitments aren’t like clothes or haircuts, or tastes in music or books; they’re directly, not indirectly, about how one treats other people. Your taste in music doesn’t affect me unless you live next door and play heavy metal at top volume – in which case I have you killed. But your ethical commitments are likely to, if we have any dealings together.

Ethical commitments are for one thing about telling people what to do. Christopher Hitchens talks about this and about the way religion is used to back up what may be quite tottery in an interview on the Atlantic’s site.

However, if a grown-up says “I’ve just a heard a voice telling me what to do,” what they really mean is “I can now tell you what to do.” That’s what I don’t like. What I noticed when I was a kid wasn’t just that what the headmaster was preaching at sermon time was rubbish (which was easy to see), it was also that it seemed very important that the headmaster be able to invest his otherwise rather feeble authority with religious authority. In other words, I could see already when I was eight that religion is used to say, “You better listen to what I say. My power is not just of this world. I have divine right.” That’s where you have to say, “Say that again and I’ll burn your church.” That’s fascism. I loathe it. And I tend to loathe the people who believe it, because they are making a claim on me.

So, yes, ethical commitments feel like an important part of the self to many people, and so do the supernatural sanctions that are taken to back them up. But that isn’t necessarily a good argument for treating religion as special or deserving of consideration. It could just as well be an argument for doing precisely the opposite. For being quicker, not slower, to subject religious sources of ethical commitments to close scrutiny and sharp questions. Yes, it may be an important part of someone’s identity that he keeps women under control to please Allah, or that she tells children who play with their genitals that they will burn in hell, or that he whips his children for disobedience because the Bible says he should, or that she told her gay son to get out of the house and has never spoken to him since because she thinks that’s what Jesus would do. But what of the identity of the people subject to such ethical commitments?

I have more poking, but it’s rather long-winded, so…later.

Jonathan Derbyshire has an interesting post that’s relevant to that last post, and to many of the posts lately.

“Is religious identity special?” This is a question Amy Gutman poses in her excellent new-ish book, Identity in Democracy. And of course it’s a question many people have been asking themselves recently…As far as specifically religious identity groups are concerned, Gutman’s view is that they should not be treated with special consideration. However, and this is very important, she takes seriously, as some liberals do not, the reasons why it is argued that religion should be given such consideration. The best argument for according religion special consideration in democracies, in Gutman’s view and mine, is that the “ultimate ethical commitments of individuals -which may be religious or secular in their source- are an especially valued and valuable part of individual identity”. But, she goes on, a “degree of deference does not mean that conscience [another name for those ultimate ethical commitments, JD] trumps legitimate laws”. Moreover, conscience is special but religious identity is not, because religious identity is not the “only source of binding ethical commitment”.

Hmm. “ultimate ethical commitments of individuals -which may be religious or secular in their source- are an especially valued and valuable part of individual identity”. Yes…but then, since ultimate ethical commitments may be religious or secular in their source, I’m not sure why that is a good argument for according religion special consideration in democracies. Since (as pretty much everyone seems to agree, at least I have yet to see anyone disagree) it doesn’t apply to secular sources of ultimate ethical commitments. So aren’t we still left with the same problem, the same asymmetry? Why treat one source of ultimate ethical commitments with special consideration and not treat others the same way? Am I failing to take the reasons seriously in asking that question? I don’t think so. I think I do take them seriously (if only because I’m afraid of them). I just fail to understand them entirely – because of the asymmetry. There are other sources of commitment, other systems of belief, other cherished illusions, other sources of consolation – but they don’t get the kind of consideration that religion does.

And then there’s also the problem that we’ve noticed before: some people’s ultimate ethical commitments are inimical to other people’s ultimate ethical commitments, or sense of identity, or well-being, or freedom, or tenure of life, or all those and more. The BNP has ultimate ethical commitments. So, very much, does the Taliban and its offshoots in Bangladesh and elsewhere. So ultimate ethical commitments and valuable parts of individual identity seem to me to be somewhat slippery terms. Maybe I’m just being dense…but the Mafia has those, gangbangers have those, all sorts of people and groups and parties have those. The people in Bosnia and Kosovo and Rwanda thought they were doing the right thing, most of them – and for reasons that had a lot to do with identity. I tend to think people should be somewhat less concerned with their own identities and ultimate ethical commitments and consciences and a little more concerned with their effects on other people – a little more consequentialist in their thinking, I guess is what I mean. I could be dead wrong, but I have a lurking suspicion that there’s something irreducibly selfish and self-concerned and self-aggrandizing in all this identity-hugging. Yeah yeah, one wants to say, never mind your conscience and your ultimate ethical commitments, just stop whipping that woman and mind your own business.

Is that what I’m saying? Maybe. That ultimate ethical commitments and conscience and identity sound nice, but too often they’re just disguises and pretexts for pushing other people around. Words and phrases that sound nice have a tendency that way, sometimes. That’s one reason the 18th century was so down on enthusiasm, why Kant hated Schwärmerei. People can inflate themselves with high-sounding rhetoric (see Falstaff on ‘honour’) and then go out and punish everyone they consider less moral or pure or enthusiastic than they are.

Well, this makes things admirably clear. There’s a useful absence of fuzz and wool and disguise about this crowd.

Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi is a controversial Islamic scholar who approves of wife-beating and believes in traditional family values. The Mormon church, having abandoned polygamy more than a century ago, believes in traditional families too. With that much in common, they have joined forces to “defend the family” and fight progressive social policies at the United Nations. Other members of the holy alliance include Cardinal Alfonso Trujillo, who campaigns against condoms on behalf of the Catholic church, and Mahathir Mohamad, the dictatorial former prime minister of Malaysia who sacked and jailed his deputy for alleged homosexuality.

‘Traditional’ families – meaning…? Don’t tell me; let me guess. Meaning ones where The Man is The Boss and everyone else is subordinate to him. Am I right? Am I in the ballpark?

Opening the conference, Sheikha Mousa bint Nasser al-Misnad, the wife of Qatar’s ruler, announced that the well-being of the family was in peril. She warned against trying to “redefine the concept of family in a manner contrary to religious precepts” – though there was little danger of anyone at the Doha conference doing that. In common with many Muslim states, Qatar rejects basic family rights legislation such as the international Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (Cedaw), using “religious precepts” as an excuse.

Oh look, I am right. We have to preserve and keep and cherish discrimination against women, not eliminate it. Because why? Because Daddy God said so, that’s why. How do we know? We know because somebody wrote it down a long time ago. Ah – well in that case, there’s nothing more to be said. Obviously ‘religious precepts’ have to trump mere silly modern egalitarian ideas about basic human equality. Obviously we simply cannot allow a world without the principle of subordination enshrined at the very heart of it.

And how pleasant that Bangladesh is also pulling its socks up and getting women under control. At this rate, maybe in a decade or two all women everywhere on the planet will be under control, and The City of God will be established on earth.

The quiet was broken now and then by donkey carts clattering past, as village women, seated on the backs of the carts, were taken to the market. The women wore makeshift burkas — black, white, canary yellow — and kept their heads down, and this, the men explained, was Bangla Bhai’s doing.

My imagination is haunted by items like this. How could it not be? One minute you’re living a normal (normal for us, yes) modern autonomous life, where you’re an adult and you get to decide for yourself what you wear and how you hold your head, not to mention when and whether you go out and come in, work and learn, talk and walk and drive – a life where you’re a person like other people, a grown-up like other grown-ups, independent and responsible and competent even as other people are – and the next minute you’re thrust into a bag for the rest of your life and subject to the command and bullying and physical violence of every male human being within a thousand miles – and you’re not allowed to leave. You are so very not allowed to leave. You can’t leave the man who owns you (and a man always does own you – women are not allowed to be unowned by a man in these arrangements), you can’t leave your house or your bag, and you sure as hell can’t leave Islam. You are doubly or triply or quintuply trapped and imprisoned and locked up. Yes – I would say that’s an imagination-haunter.

Nonetheless, it is possible to travel through Bangladesh and observe the increased political and religious repression in everyday life, and to verify the simple remark by one journalist there: ”We are losing our freedom.”…In Bangladesh, ”Islam is becoming the legitimizing political discourse,” according to C. Christine Fair, a South Asia specialist at the United States Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan, federally financed policy group in Washington. ”Once you don that religious mantle, who can criticize you?…Another close observer of Bangladeshi politics, Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch, told me recently: ”The practical effect of politics along religious lines is that you start to accept a religious identity and reject every other. It’s absolutely crucial to understand that this is happening in Bangladesh right now.”

Exactly. Once you don that religious mantle, who can criticize you? And the practical effect of politics along religious lines is that you start to accept a religious identity and reject every other. Combine the two, as all too many people do, and not only in Bangladesh, to put it mildly – and you get an uncriticizable system of ideas that excludes all other ideas. Not a good situation, especially when the system of ideas in question is one that rejects Conventions for Elimination of Discrimination.

There was an interview with Amrit and Rabindra Singh on Front Row last night. Mark Lawson asked them (about six minutes in) what they think about the controversy about ‘Behzti,’ especially as Sikhs themselves. Of course, as artists, they think freedom of expression is important and that artists should express what they think is valid, but – there have to be boundaries somewhere along the line. It’s like the idea of a so-called free society: that doesn’t mean you can walk down the street and punch your neighbour in the face. There have to be some regulations and rules that take other people’s feelings into account; artists should not seek knowingly to offend people’s feelings, or to offend the feelings of a certain religion or section of the community.

Lawson pointed out and they agreed that this can be very difficult (impossible, more like) because different people get offended at different things. Well don’t they just. As PEN says, the religious can be quick to take offence. PEN mentioned the Index – ‘The Papal Index makes salutary reading: it has banned every great offender from Voltaire to Flaubert to James Joyce.’ And it’s sobering to reflect that the Index banned for instance Montaigne’s great essay ‘On Cruelty’ – partly (or maybe wholly) because of the famous line that says it’s enough to kill people, roasting them alive is surplus to requirements. It’s sobering and interesting to reflect that the Papal Index didn’t like that and didn’t want that kind of thing written or read.

So there are at least two blindingly obvious problems right there. People are offended by different things, and people can be ‘offended’ by things that desperately need saying. If we decide we have to start censoring ourselves lest we ‘offend’ a certain religion or a certain section of the community – well we’ll never say anything at all. A great pall of silence will fall over the earth. Everyone’s larynx and tongue will atrophy. All art will be abstract and devoid of meaning; pretty noises, colours, shapes, but nothing one could actually put into words, lest the words might say something that could offend someone. Life will become one big warm bland soft soup, and we’ll all asphyxiate with boredom. Then the snails and armadilloes will take over, and the earth will give a great sigh of relief and say thank goodness they’re gone.

But really. How (as Mark Lawson, to his credit, asks) does one draw the line? Which religions, for instance, get to kick up a fuss and be listened to when some of their adherents are ‘offended,’ and which don’t? Scientology? Aum Shinrikyo? Branch Davidians? And then how do you draw the line between religions and other beliefs? Which imaginary or supernatural or metaphysical beings get to be protected from offensive comments and which don’t? What about Frodo? Spock? Yosemite Sam? ET? What are the criteria? And what are the reasons for the criteria, if and when there are any criteria? A belief is entitled to protection provided it is based purely on fantasy and wishful thinking, but if it is based on evidence then it must take care of itself? Is that the idea? Or is it only some kinds of fantasy and not other kinds. But if so, why? How exactly is that justified?

I hope I don’t get in trouble for asking these questions…

PEN’s Open Letter is quite interesting, I think.

Although we applaud the government’s wish to make everyone in our multi-cultural, multi-faith nation feel that they have an equal stake in Britain, the proposed amendment to the bill is misguided. It is emphatically not the way forward. It creates a climate which engenders events such as the recent Sikh riot in Birmingham. Here a violent mob, on the grounds that a play offended their religion, successfully prevented its performance, acted as censors, and threatened the life of its author. Fiona MacTaggart, the Home Office Minister, has contended that the remit of the proposed legislation is narrow. However, the signal the offence clause sends out to religious leaders is broad. It serves as a sanction for censorship of a kind which would constrain writers and impoverish our cultural life. Rather than averting intolerance, ‘it would’, as the Southall Black Sisters have pointed out, ‘encourage the culture of intolerance that already exists in all religions’. To gag criticism is to encourage abuse of power within religious communities.

There. It creates a climate, it sends a signal, it serves as a sanction, it would encourage a culture of intolerance. Just so. Of course, that’s all fairly subjunctive, fairly conditional, fairly subtle. It’s an interpretation, an extrapolation, an educated surmise, rather than 3 + 3=6. It’s about other minds, and why people do what they do, and groupthink, and hidden influences. But then so is the clause itself, and so is politics. Mathematical certainty isn’t a requirement or a possibility for legislation, so it can’t be required for opposition to legislation either. And surely the surmise is plausible. Does it not seem likely that the proposed criminalization of ‘religious hatred’ is interpreted by many religious people not as Fiona MacTaggart interprets it but more broadly – as encouragement to get in a temper at anything that ‘offends’ their sensibilities?

Finally, as writers of many faiths and none, we must emphasize that if religious leaders had their way, we would have little literature, less art and no humour. The religious can be quick to take offence. The Papal Index makes salutary reading: it has banned every great offender from Voltaire to Flaubert to James Joyce. On their side, some Jews have objected to Philip Roth and to Joseph Heller; while some Muslim clerics have been so severely offended by the fictions of Salman Rushdie and the Egyptian writer, Naguib Mahfouz, as to issue fatwas against them – much to the distress of other Muslims. Now some British Sikhs have succeeded in censoring the play Behzti and forcing Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti into hiding.

The religious can be quick to take offense. Yeah. You could say that.

The new legislation encourages rather than combats intolerance. We do not need it. What we need is a signal from government that it wishes to defend true democracy and its many virtues, including those of dissent and the freedom of expression. If the government feels more legislation is essential in this area, then it would achieve more of its ends by repealing the law on blasphemy, a relic of pre-multicultural times. Less, here, is more.

Well said. Go, PEN. The response of the Home Office is not very encouraging though.

A Home Office spokesman said: “Both Fiona Mactaggart and the home secretary understand the concerns some groups feel about this legislation and are happy to have meetings to discuss these and reassure them.”

Oh how sweet. As if those ‘some groups’ were whiny little children afraid of the dark. I don’t think Salman Rushdie and Lisa Appignanesi want to be ‘reassured’ – I think they want the Home Office people to take on board what the writers and PEN are saying. I don’t think ‘There, there, everything will be all right’ is precisely what they’re after.

A reader sent me the link to this interesting item in the Guardian. The subhead starts things right off – ‘Colonial attitudes linger, finding their most xenophobic expression among liberal defenders of free speech.’ Uh oh.

The argument is basically a ‘taboo’ argument. Every culture has some sacred things, which should be beyond criticism, and certainly beyond mockery. In the UK, it’s the Queen that’s sacred; all cultures have ’em.

Neither is rationalism alien to eastern cultures. Science and mathematics thrived both in the great age of Hindu civilisation and Islamic ascendancy. Eastern cultures have long traditions of theatre, reform movements and of absorbing criticism. But when a creative work offends the sacred, it loses its message.

Well, that’s debatable.

Sikhism believes that the rational is as speculative, variable and subjective as any other construction of belief. From that philosophical premise, the sacred cannot be dismissed. Jacques Derrida similarly analyses the subjectivity of rationalism. Further, Sikhism holds that language is limited. The Guru Granth Sahib uses several tools of communication including poetry, music and pragmatic symbolism. Again, a 20th-century western philosopher – Foucault – has also articulated the limits of language.

And therefore ‘Behzti’ had to be stopped? Not sure I get the connection.

The sacred may not make sense in the constructed paradigms of rationalism, but it sustains people through traumatic times, as well as giving strength to the successful. Offending the sacred wounds those whose hopes and culture are orientated around the subjective inscrutability of sacred icons. Fifty years after the end of colonialism, most British people are comfortable living with people of different colours. But many are still uncomfortable with different cultures. The legacy of colonialism lingers, now disguised as a defence of “free speech”. Ironically, it finds its most xenophobic expression among liberals.

What if the defence of free speech is actually not disguised colonialism but in fact a defence of free speech? How can you be sure it’s the one rather than the other? Are you sure you can tell the difference? Or are you in fact using the dread phrase ‘legacy of colonialism’ as an intimidation-device.

Now if you want to see someone else, this time a ‘Westerner,’ take on the dratted old legacy of colonialism, here’s a fun item. It’s at Salon, so that means clicking through an ad, but it’s worth it. The item you get is really quite staggering. This link was also sent by a reader. The item is an advice column, the question is from a guy in love with a woman who can’t bring herself to introduce him to her family because he’s not of the right religion or ethnic background. The columnist pins his ears back. The columnist gives that man what for. The columnist is a piece of work.

Consider how you have been indoctrinated since birth in a secular, scientific, cosmopolitan faith. Cosmopolitanism teaches us to be broad and accepting, but it’s easiest to be broad and accepting of others who are also broad and accepting. When the other seems genuinely narrow and parochial, we see that narrowness and parochialism as a barrier to some other higher, truer reality — our Western reality.

Very true. It is easier to be broad and accepting of others who are also broad and accepting. I’ve noticed that myself. Similarly it’s easier to be kind to people who are also kind, and polite to people who are also polite, and considerate of people who are also considerate. In a like manner it’s easier to be a pissy rotten bastard to people who are also pissy rotten bastards.

In order to see things a little differently, try to imagine that she is not being held prisoner by a narrow-minded family and culture but rather is struggling to preserve her identity against the onslaught of your intoxicating Western-ness, your powerful banjo of I, your hypnotic gaze, your KitchenAid mixer of desire and promise, your Cadillac and your Camels, your plantations and riding mowers and frontier hats, the echo of imperial riches in your thick, sweet voice, your arrogant swagger…

Wha…? Cadillac? Plantations?? The guy didn’t mention any Cadillac or riding mowers, let alone any plantations. I like purple writing now and then, if it’s done well, but there is a limit.

For the sake of argument, consider how innocently our genocidal forefathers went about curing the world of its savagery, and consider how harshly they later were judged. Consider how with progressively fine gradations each generation codifies its righteousness. Consider even the possibility that you may be in fact a wretched criminal in the eyes of history…You don’t need to lie to yourselves or to anyone else. If you do the hard work of accepting how closely she, her family and her culture are knitted together in one collective, diffused identity, you may come to feel a little differently about what we in the West revere as “telling the truth.”

Aaarrrggghhh! The kind reader who sent the item said this: ‘I’ve been enjoying b&w on and off for a while now. I made the mistake of reading this, was completely deflated with revulsion – and thought “what would Ophelia Benson think?”‘ Well, that’s what I think – a loud guttural inarticulate scream of disgust, that’s what.

It’s not that I think there’s no such thing as a legacy of colonialism, or that I think ‘Westerners’ are never arrogant or intolerant. But – oh well. You get the idea.

I plan to improve N&C by talking less. More links and quotations from the articles linked, and less of me commenting on them. That will be an improvement, right? Right.

There is this article in the Guardian about some reactions to David Bell’s speech to the Hansard Society in which he expressed some reservations about ‘faith’ schools.

The head of the government’s education watchdog prompted an angry reaction from Muslim leaders yesterday after claiming that the growth of Islamic faith schools posed a challenge to the coherence of British society. In a deliberate intervention criticised as “irresponsible” and “derogatory” by senior Muslim representatives, the chief inspector of schools David Bell claimed that a traditional Islamic education did not equip Muslim children for living in modern Britain.

The article goes on the cite three Muslims who disagree with Bell and one who agrees. Three seems like a smallish number to be called ‘Muslim leaders’ and ‘senior Muslim representatives.’ And then there is some vagueness in the very terms ‘leader’ and ‘senior representative’ in this context. Do the three people quoted lead and represent all Muslims? Does anyone? Or is that particular choice of nouns part of the habit of thinking and talking about Muslims as more of a single entity than other ‘groups’ or ‘communities’. Is it, for instance, a way of ignoring and obscuring the possible existence of Muslims who don’t like the idea of ‘faith’ schools, who share Bell’s reservations about the idea, and who aren’t entirely happy to have it thought that all Muslims want all Muslim children to go to faith schools? If so, wouldn’t that tend to reinforce the idea (surely already out there) that Muslims as a group are more eager to be, and to be seen as, Muslims-as-a-group? And also to be and to be seen as more keen on religious segregation than other groups are?

In other words is the article reporting on something? Or is it creating the something it aims to report on. Or both. Probably both. No doubt there is some anger about Bell’s speech, but the article could be doing its bit to create the impression that the anger is more universal than it is, merely by its choice of words. With, no doubt, the best of intentions. But I can so easily imagine being a Muslim who wanted to be a Muslim but also wanted to be various other things – call them what you like – modern, secular, urban, pluralist, universalist. Part of the world of comprehensive schools and public libraries and community centres and Citizens’ Advice Bureaus and the NHS; one to whom restriction to a smaller world of co-religionists would feel suffocating and limiting. I can so easily imagine feeling intensely exasperated if journalists always referred to the segregationist wing of my co-religionists as my leaders and representatives. ‘They’re not my damn leaders!’ I would want to shout. ‘I didn’t elect them, I didn’t nominate them, why are you calling them leaders and representatives? They’re just some people! They don’t speak for all of us!’

Well. That wasn’t a very good job of talking less, was it. I guess I’m not going to be very good at that.

One more. Letters to the Guardian about Ken Livingstone and Yusuf al-Qaradawi. From Ramzi Isalam of OutRage!

I fled to Britain to escape murder by Islamic fundamentalists in Algeria. Now I find the mayor of my adopted city embracing a cleric who provides theological justification for the homophobia of the people who wanted to kill me. Why is the mayor prepared to have a dialogue with fundamentalists like Dr Qaradawi and the Muslim Association of Britain, but not with liberal and progressive Muslims and not with the victims of Islamist repression and dictatorship?

Why indeed. And from Nadia Mahmood of Middle East Centre for Women’s Rights and Faz Velmi.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi may well condemn the September 11 attacks and the killing of hostages in Iraq. What he most certainly does not condemn is the fundamental political and social vision behind these atrocities – the project of establishing a theocratic state in which individual liberty and every trace of democracy are eliminated. Would the mayor embrace a Christian cleric who argued, as Dr Qaradawi does, that gay sex should be punishable by death, that wife-beating is sometimes justified and that the world is dominated by a Jewish conspiracy?

Would he indeed.

I had a thought earlier today [medium close-up of Nigel Hawthorne as Sir Humphrey after Hacker has told him he’s just had an idea – expression of delighted surprise: ‘Prime Minister!’]. Yes very funny; anyway, I had this thought.

A bit from Daughters of France, Daughters of Allah:

Amiri was the first Muslim woman I contacted in Paris, and she cried as we spoke on the telephone. That day she had received an e-mail saying, “Do you realize what you are doing to your own people?” It was, she told me, one of many threatening messages she had received, and they were not to be taken lightly.

The thought was just about the meaning of that phrase – ‘your own people.’ Specifically of ‘your own.’ I mentioned that the other day – the way ‘own’ can be used as a bit of rhetorical manipulation or coercion. It’s one of a long list of words that get used that way. ‘Community’ is one of the most popular right now, and ‘own’ is another way of saying ‘community.’ At least the way it’s used there it is. Your own people=your community – and don’t you forget it. Right? That’s the point, right? Choose this community, be loyal to this particular set of people, and not any of the other possibilities.

But there’s more than one community, and more than one ‘own.’ There are usually lots – especially for people who’ve had some education – which is one of many compelling reasons why everyone should have as much education as possible, throughout life: to keep increasing the number of possible communities. (Of course, that’s scary. I realize that. The more communities there are, the less mandatory any one community will be. The more there are, the freer we are to go from one to another, to belong to several, or many, to choose our allegiances with due deliberation, to leave if we want to. And that’s scary for communities and own people who don’t want to lose members, who don’t want to be left looking forlorn and unwanted because everyone has run off to the disco. That’s always been the threat of education. But there it is. That doesn’t mean good progressives should agree to limit access to education in order to keep people in the communities they were born into.) One’s own people may be other people interested in politics or science or movies or popular music or mountaineering, rather than or in addition to being people of the same religion or ‘ethnic’ background as oneself. But the assumption in that email is that there is only one meaning of ‘your own people.’

One way to force people to choose one ‘own people’ instead of others is via hostility. Start the Week had an interesting discussion of that last week, in talking about the movie ‘Yasmin.’ Someone pointed out that al Qaeda got what it wanted: it shoved a lot of Muslims back into the mosque because of the hostility towards them that September 11 triggered. Yeah. Victimization can work that way. People who could escape, or widen their horizons without escaping, may choose not to because they want to be loyal to people who are not being fairly treated. A good thing to do; an admirable, touching, moving thing to do. But also a very sad one. It would be better if the choice were not forced by such considerations, especially for the people whose decision to stay amounts to a kind of self-imprisonment.

Here’s a good passage. Not apropos of anything in particular, I just happened to read it and I liked it so thought I would pass it on. It’s from Three Seductive Ideas, by Jerome Kagan, page 44.

Some scientists are uncomfortable with this level of uncertainty because they seek facts that are unlikely to be proven wrong. They resemble hunters who, having trapped a secret of nature, want it to stay fixed on the trophy wall forever. Other scientists are chess players who derive joy from following the many complex rules for doing science – the correct assignment of subjects, the proper balancing of conditions, the most appropriate statistical analyses. Those who are butterfly chasers – a third group – are willing to work years for an aesthetic moment that follows a discovery, no matter how infrequent or transient. These investigators accept the temporary nature of all scientific generalizations and are bothered least by the message ‘maybe.’

Well this is good. Meera Nanda’s article in the New Humanist is apparently being widely read and discussed. Someone who edited it says so here:

It’s moments like these I like best about my job: getting some recognition, even from total strangers, for a piece I spent hours and hours editing: Meera Nanda’s piece on the intellectual treason of postmodernist scholars from the January 2005 issue of New Humanist is being picked up on various arts&ideas websites and personal blogs, people are reading it, some are even commenting on it. It’s good to see these ideas going beyond the narrow readership of NH – thanks to the internet.

There is another comment on the diffusion of Meera’s New Humanist article at A Voyage to Arcturus. Go, Meera!

A couple of signing opportunities.

Labour Friends of Iraq. This is an open letter to the Stop the War Coalition asking why they have not spoken out clearly and forcefully on the murder of Hadi Saleh, International Officer of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions.

StWC leaders view the “resistance” as a legitimate national liberation movement. StWC leaders view as ‘collaborators’ the IFTU, all election workers, and all democratic parties participating in the January elections, whether Iraqi Communists, Kurdish Parties or Shia.

This view is quite wrong. The leaders of the ‘resistance’ are an amalgam of Baathists, Islamic fundamentalists, pro-al-Qaeda militants and criminals. There is nothing progressive about their political programmes. If they were ever to take state power then it would be a disaster for every worker, woman, lesbian and gay, Christian, Jew and democrat who would be left in Iraq. There would be years of unbridled reaction.

And the International Campaign against setting up Shari’a court in Canada. You already know what that is, so I won’t bother explaining.

Nick Cohen said something interesting in the Observer the other day:

To take it from the top, the scandal about Britain’s television stations and many of its other cultural institutions is not that they are run by people who are motivated by anything so high-minded as converting the public to a political philosophy, but that they are run by well-educated and very well-paid men and women from the upper-middle class who protect themselves and their privately educated children from competition by feeding the masses mush – the favoured policy of aristocracies down the ages. That they do none the less read liberal newspapers and pretend that their pursuit of profit and market share is a radical blow in the anti-elitist class struggle is merely a sign that they have fooled themselves along with everyone else.

Yeah. [waves small flag of indeterminate hue and pattern] That’s one of the things I always don’t get about this supposed anti-elitism thing. Why is it considered right-on and good and of the moral high ground to tell everyone that putative ‘high’ culture (which is a very debatable category anyway, and remarkably often consists simply of popular culture that’s older than immediately contemporary popular culture) is ‘elitist’ and therefore tainted and reprehensible? Why is it not considered far more elitist to withold putative ‘high’ culture from people who might well like it and get quite a lot out of it, might in fact have their lives changed by it? Ever seen Ken Branagh’s ‘A Mid-winter’s Tale’? That’s about having one’s life changed by ‘Hamlet,’ as Branagh in fact did. It’s about being perfectly ordinary, not an aristocrat or otherwise privileged or ‘special,’ being a lower-middle-class provincial teenager like millions of others (like Shakespeare himself in his day, like Marlowe, Jonson, Clare, Mary Anne Evans) and being shaken to the roots by a 400 year old play. Does that make Branagh an ‘elitist’? Should he have resisted the life-changing? Should he have told himself that Shakespeare was only for posh people and gone back to Reading and got a job selling paper? Should Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi? Should Keats have stuck to his pills, as John Gibson Lockhart advised him, and leave poetry to the well-born Harrow and Cambridge types like Byron? If not, why is it now considered elitist to think it’s worthwhile to offer people of any class or status a chance to read Lear and The Tale of Genji and the Iliad and Don Quixote?

Jonathan Rose has a lovely article on this at City Journal. (If you haven’t read Rose’s wonderful book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, do yourself a favour and read it now. The article should inspire you in that direction.)

In 1988, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, president of the Modern Language Association, authoritatively stated (as something too obvious to require any evidence) that classic literature was always irrelevant to underprivileged people who were not classically educated. It was, she asserted, an undeniable “fact that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare do not figure significantly in the personal economies of these people, do not perform individual or social functions that gratify their interests, do not have value for them.“

Rose gives many examples of why that statement is flat-footed nonsense, and repulsively insular to boot.

For all his gentle liberalism, even E. M. Forster shared that class prejudice. In his 1910 novel Howards End, the pathetic clerk Leonard Bast tries to acquire a veneer of culture, but his efforts are hopeless…The reality was profoundly different. The founders of Britain’s Labour Party identified Ruskin, more than anyone else, as the author who had electrified their minds and inspired a vision of social justice. At the time, the brightest working-class boys often entered clerkdom, one of the few professions then open to them, and they often brought to their office an incandescent intellectual passion…None of this interested Forster or, for that matter, most literary scholars of the past 25 years. Some of the latter did investigate the responses of readers, but not “common” readers. The audience that mattered, wrote Cornell University deconstructionist Jonathan Culler, consisted of “oneself, one’s students, colleagues, and other critics”—all members of the academic club…As a result, academic literary criticism became ever more ingrown, disengaged from the general public, and fractured into several mutually unintelligible theoretical sects.

But no matter, because the struggle against ‘elitism’ is in great shape. People are being told to put down that book and turn the tv on, so the hell with the WEA and all its works. Right? Right.

Some more on fine phrases and their relationship (if any) to parsnip-buttering.

Yet, as
we shall see, in the moment of ritual divination the exclusive dualisms
of subject and object, mind and matter, what is outside and up there
(including stars) and what is down here and inside (including genes), partially dissolve in awareness of
cosmic connection. Multiplicity remains, separation remains, but there
is also relatedness, there is participation. Bringing an anthropological
perspective to bear on the topic of astrological divination, we see the
true business of astrology as participation in the greatest dialogue of
all, the grand conversation of earth and heaven.

That sounds buttery, right? But what does it mean? Relatedness to what? Participation in what? Jupiter? One of its moons? One of the pieces of ice in the inner ring around Saturn? Or just everything? Every star, every planet orbiting every star, every moon orbiting every planet, every object on every planet and moon, every bit of cosmic dust…? That’s a lot of relatives. A lot of birthday presents and places at the table to worry about.

Conversation, whether mundane or cosmic, is a learned technique. As
individuals, we may well, and profitably, spend a lifetime developing
and perfecting our ability to communicate with our fellows in everyday
life. As for the cosmic dimension, for countless millennia humankind has
employed the species-level language of myth to construct a
trans-personal and trans-cultural world of the collective imagination.
In that perduring enterprise, it appears that women may well have played
a pioneering role.

Ooooh! Did we! Mega-cool. I knew women were good at something – I could just never quite figure out what, but now I know.

No but seriously. You do notice the hand-waving, right? The ‘exclusive dualisms’ of up there and down here (as in, stars and our little selves, and the funny idea that a star a few billion light years away from us is in a pretty thorough way ‘separate’ from us), relatedness, participation, dialogue, chats between earth and the rest of the universe. You do perceive the basic lack of meaning in that pseudo-profound jabberwocky, yes?

Here is Ivan Kelly in his excellent article ‘The Concepts of Modern Astrology: a Critique’:

Astrology as a discipline is a prime example of what happens when advocates consider only confirming evidence for their multitude of conflicting claims with little regard for contrary evidence, which is…’explained away’ …with slogans like ‘the complexity of astrology,’ and ‘astrology is another way of viewing the world.’..Criticisms and serious long-lasting anomalies can also be dealt with by hand-waving in another direction and the elevation of speculation to a futuristic higher plane…The obfuscations ‘orders of influence’ and ‘reflections…showing in their own ways’ are nowhere clarified, hence we are no further in our understanding after being told this than we were before.

Just so. Hand-waving, fine phrases – much the same thing. Astrologers (and other believers in, erm, alternative ways of knowing, as I’ve been discovering recently) have expansive vocabularies of obfuscatory, incantatory, cloud-assembling words and phrases to serve the hand-waving function.

A fourth popular response is to say that the phenomena astrology deals with are very subtle and elusive, and what is needed are more creative ways of investigating them…If scientsts had adopted similar attitudes in the face of negative studies and argument, physics would still be Aristotelian.

Yes and don’t forget the business about the narrowness of reductive materialism and its easy dismissal of, erm, very subtle and elusive somethings.

Finally, one can say that if researchers are obtaining negative results, they must be doing it wrong. They are using the wrong methodology, the wrong paradigm, or both…West (1991, 1996), for example, contends that scientific criticisms of astrology are irrelevant because astrology is ‘a system of magic,’ where magic is ‘the attempt to master the fundamental laws of resonance that have produced the cosmos.’ He is insufficiently explicit about this ‘system of magic’…

I love the academic way of putting things. “He is insufficiently explicit about this ‘system of magic’…” – which being interpreted means ‘have you ever heard anything so damn silly in your life?!’ The fundamental laws of resonance – how’s that attempt going, by the way? Making much progress?

I’ve been reading the Introduction to Astrology, Science and Culture: Pulling Down the Moon, by Roy Willis and Patrick Curry. Patrick Curry teaches in the astrology programme at Bath Spa University College which you may have noticed in Flashback. The introduction is truly fascinating, in the way a gangrenous wound might be fascinating to its owner. I’ll quote from it a little, so that you can see what I mean.

Very little in the debate about astrology is entirely new. The word itself means the ‘word’ (logos) or ‘language’ of the stars, and is now customarily
contrasted, as a pathetic remnant of primitive superstition, with the academically respectable science of astronomy. This latter term means
‘measurement of the stars’, and accurately reflects Galileo’s famous contention that only that which can be measured is truly real. Quantity is primary, quality secondary. This book maintains the converse proposition, daring to privilege sensory quality over a row of digits, and is devoted to investigating and recovering a stellar language of apparently immemorial antiquity; a mode of communication that is part of our common heritage as human beings..This is a primal faculty that seems to be embedded in our genes, ironically the very entities now commonly presented, in the current version of reductive materialism, as the sole and invisible masters of our personal and collective destinies (cf. Dawkins 1989).

That’s in the first paragraph, and it’s admirably representative of what the introduction is like. The self-attribution of ‘daring’ for instance. Always check your wallet when academics start telling you how brave and daring and bold and fearless they are. The chances are good that that’s the preface to a piece of nonsense. And then that ‘row of digits’ – oh that’s clever. Original, too. I used to say things like that in the 4th grade (and the 7th, and the 10th, and the 12th) to explain why I was so stupid at math. I didn’t want to think it was just because I was stupid at math, now did I.

And then the absurdity about this ‘primal faculty’ that seems to be embedded in our genes. Eh? It does? It ‘seems’? To whom? You? And anyone else? You just made it up, that’s all. So where does the ‘ironically’ come in? First you invent the idea that chatting with the stars is ’embedded’ in our genes, then you say how ironic when genes are usually such a horrid reductivematerialist item on the scientistic agenda. And then what do you mean ‘sole’? And what’s ‘invisible’ got to do with anything? And what do you mean ‘destinies’? Nothing; you don’t mean anything; you just want to take a very hackneyed slap at a usual suspect.

Another bit. I’ll leave you to ponder its wonders for yourselves.

Here let us note certain fundamental consequences of our dialogical
reading of human nature. In its essential, necessary openness – the
inherent duality of dialogue which is also, and most fundamentally, a
many-voiced plurality – this reading permanently guarantees us against
any possibility of collapse into monolithic solipsism. However, it also
means we must perforce abandon for ever all ambition to theoretical
closure, the dream – or nightmare – of a final, all-embracing theory of
everything, the breathtakingly arrogant project so dear to materialist
and reductionist science.

Openness and many-voiced plurality, hurrah; materialist and reductionist science, boo. Isn’t rhetoric great?

Interesting developments. And people sometimes ask me, whether plaintively or (more often) crossly, why I insist on trying to argue with metaphysical beliefs, which is a futile and even meaningless thing to do. Well, this sort of thing is one reason. Because ‘metaphysical’ beliefs seem to be the kind that prompt people to feel outraged, ‘offended,’ attacked, insulted, disrespected, challenged in the very core of their identity. I think that’s not a mere coincidence, I think it’s kind of the whole point. When people can’t point to evidence in reply to critics and skeptics of their beliefs, what can they do instead? They can of course do nothing, or they can shake their heads over the benighted ways of the heathen and then go on with their lives. But they can also get very worked up. They can find the home phone numbers of BBC executives on the ‘Christian Voice’ website and use them to make threatening and abusive phone calls. And then other believers can express a certain amount of approbation .

And although I don’t have strong feelings about blasphemy myself – Catholics are used to being scoffed at, and learn to be robust about it – I am glad that many Christians did make their feelings known about the transmission. I don’t say I like to see Roly Keating, the controller of BBC2, having to flee with his wife and family from his home, lest he be subjected to threats or unpleasantness. But it is gratifying when the BBC panjandrums have their cages rattled a little.

Hmm.

There is a penalty to be paid if you insult Islam; you may, like Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, end up with your own mocking words pinned bloodily to your chest. But there is no penalty for insulting Christianity – Christians will meekly accept it all (which, inconveniently, is just what the New Testament commands). When Sikh militants successfully got Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti closed at the Birmingham Rep last month, it was certainly an encouragement to offended Christians whose anger against the desecration of their taboos has been simmering away over the years…There is still a big debate to be had on how a society combines freedom of speech with respect for the values of others. An artist has to push boundaries, and offend sometimes; but the artist also has to recognise that there will be consequences of his actions.

Yeah, like getting stabbed in the chest and then having Mary Kenny gloating over the fact. Now that’s what I call respect for the values of others!

Here’s something to make you think, to shake your comfortable old positivist assumptions down to their roots, to alert you to the fact that there are deeper levels of reality that you’ve been forgetting to take into account…

I am glad to see that this page is being read by the press. On 6th December, Catherine Bennett of the Guardian (UK national newspaper and dyed-in-the-wool astrological sceptic) writes: On the Astrology News website, there is already speculation that the tsunami “because it involves destruction originating from a submarine source … appears to fall in line with the mythological themes of Sedna”. Suggesting that the California Institute of Technology scientists whose decision it was, last year, to name the planet after the Inuit sea goddess, may be more competent in the divination department than all the UK’s astrologers put together. I suspect that Bennett writes about esoteric subjects without reading about them. She would benefit by studying the writings of Carl Jung. Jung’s notion of synchronicity is that there is an acausal (non-linear) principle that links events having a similar meaning by their coincidence in time rather than sequentially. He claimed that there is a synchrony between the mind and the phenomenal world of perception. Though I am not sure if every coincidence has deep meaning, the naming of a planet is a significant and symbolic event that affects the world. As such, I cannot rule out a connection between the choice of the name and the nature of the planet.

An acausal principle that links events – how cool is that? And it’s non-linear, too, which is even cooler. Not that I have the faintest idea what the astrologists mean by that, and I bet they don’t either, but that’s exactly why it’s so cool. If we understood it that would take the mystification I mean mystery out of it, and that’s no fun.

So events are ‘linked’ (what does linked mean? linked how, linked in what sense, linked with what result, linked according to what evidence or logic?) if they have a similar meaning. Oh. What does meaning mean? What kind of meaning, and according to whom? They’re linked by their coincidence in time rather than sequentially. Oh – but since we don’t understand what ‘linked’ means, and so don’t understand how they’re linked, and we don’t understand what ‘meaning’ means, and so don’t understand what meaning has to do with the non-understood ‘linking’ (except that we’ve been told that it’s acausal, which helps remarkably little, in fact hinders), the information that they are ‘linked’ in a non-understood way by their coincidence in time rather than sequentially…really doesn’t get us much farther. But it sounds kind of deep, maybe. Either that or kind of daft.

I’ll show you something that links though. Not sequentially, but by meaning. But I, pedantically or literally enough, will explain in what sense the two items ‘link’ – I will explain that they ‘link’ in my own mind because I see a connection between them, which I will endeavour to explain to that large majority of the world’s population that doesn’t share a brain with me.

The scientific profession possesses considerable cognitive authority in modern societies…Such authority is of course of inestimable value to individual scientists, and they have a vested interest in its maintenance. They can be expected to police the existing boundaries of science, to avoid the intrusion of whatever may detract from its reputation and to seek to dispel anything potentially disreputable which arises within it.

That’s from the opening of chapter 6, ‘Drawing Boundaries,’ of Scientific Knowledge by Barry Barnes, David Bloor and John Henry, page 140. Here is a bit from the end of the same chapter, page 168:

The boundaries of science are conventional. To reify those boundaries, and to see them as hard-and-fast divisions between inherently different subject areas or disciplines is simply a mistake. The demarcation of science from pseudo-science, or of science from scientism or even physics from chemistry, can be fully understood only in sociological terms…Scientific boundaries are defined and maintained by social groups concerned to protect and promote their cognitive authority, intellectual hegemony, professional integrity, and whatever political and economic power they might be able to command by attaining these things.

Both of those statements have some truth to them as far as they go – but they leave a lot out. They also seem to carry a wealth of implication, which is probably what Barnes, Bloor and Henry have in mind, given the leaving a lot out aspect. The link I see between the two sets of quotations is that the kind of rhetorical skepticism we find in the last two tends to work as an enabler of the woolly thinking in the first one – at least I think so. The knowing stuff about policing boundaries and dispelling the disreputable is very popular with astrology fans and New Agers of all kinds. In other words, sociologists of knowledge who write sly comments like that without qualifying them (except sometimes in other books or far distant chapters) are just promoting the fashion for childish irrationalism we see all around the place.

This is an odd piece – a mix of harsh but possibly true observations and macho unpleasantness. Of course the one so often does slop over into the other. I do that slopping often myself, at least so I’m told (and I’m sure it’s true). That’s what’s usually going on in disagreements over Richard Dawkins (and Christopher Hitchens, too: he attracts such Necker cube-like clashes of perception the way chocolate attracts, er, me). Many people think Dawkins is being rude, tactless, brutal, self-satisfied and the like, while others think he is being honest and fog-dispelling. I tend to the latter view, but then I’m an atheist myself, so what he says doesn’t get up my nose at the outset.

But this guy who doesn’t admire Susan Sontag…

The reverential tone of the obituaries served to confirm that self-proclaimed intellectuals, no matter how deluded or preposterous, exert a strange, intimidating power over non-intellectuals – especially if they employ that infuriating literary device, the epigram.

Well, yeah. One does know what he means – though actually I would say that it’s (some) intellectuals that the intimidating power is really exerted over, rather than non-intellectuals. It’s hard not to suspect that some version of that is what’s going on with the cult of Derrida. (I say ‘suspect’ because as I’ve mentioned several times, I haven’t read Derrida [apart from a few late articles], so I’m talking about the way his followers [and they are followers, all too often, rather than merely admirers or readers] talk and write about him, not what he said and wrote himself.) The admiration seems to be so out of proportion to anything anyone manages to articulate that one has to wonder – are they simply snowed by rhetoric? If they were snowed by substance, wouldn’t they do a better job of convincing skeptics?

But even though one knows what he means, one also wishes he had kept some thoughts to himself – or better yet not had them at all (in a perfect world).

But would that someone had treated Sontag in life as Dr Johnson had disposed of Bishop Berkeley’s contention that objects only exist because we see them: kicking a stone till he bounced off it, he snarled, “I refute it thus.”

To take the trivial point first, it’s well known that Johnson didn’t ‘dispose’ of anything, that idealism is not disposed of that easily, that Berkeley was not such a fool that he didn’t know what a stone was. But that aside – Johnson kicked a stone, not Berkeley. Here’s this columnist guy (an intellectual of some sort, presumably, or he wouldn’t have the gig) apparently wanting to kick Sontag herself. Or perhaps not – perhaps simply wanting someone to ‘dispose of’ her contentions by kicking stones with energy. But he phrases it so vaguely and ambiguously that we can’t really tell, and I suspect that’s deliberate. Especially given the way he follows it up.

If memory serves – and possibly it doesn’t, no doubt clouded by guilt that I failed to put the wretched woman over my knee and give her a sound spanking…

Oh please. Come on. Isn’t it time to wake up now? Time to get a clue? Time to, you know, not let one’s threatened guy syndrome hang out quite so blatantly? Don’t men realize what they sound like when they slaver over fantasies of beating up women? Well who knows – I suppose in their view and that of their fans they are doing what I take people like Dawkins to be doing: brushing away clouds of sentimentality and obfuscation and appeasment (as Salman Rushdie put it) to tell the plain truth. Being blunt, irreverent, disrespectful, amusing, and honest. But threats of violence (however ‘jokey’) don’t work that way. Except clearly some people think they do. Oh well.

Well said, Salman. In a sharp letter to the Guardian in reply to a silly comment of Ian Jack’s on Saturday (I saw the comment at the time, rolled my eyes and wanted to argue with it, but also wanted a rest from the sound of my own voice arguing), in which he mentions the ‘currently fashionable Blairite politics of religious appeasement at all costs.’

Should we now censor ourselves because the current potentates of the Islamic faith are more repressive than their predecessors? Do we have no principles of our own? The continuing collapse of liberal, democratic, secular and humanist principles in the face of the increasingly strident demands of organised religions is perhaps the most worrying aspect of life in contemporary Britain.

Well said, Salman (excuse the familiarity – I’m a vulgar Yank). Well said Salman and Kenan and Homa and Maryam and Azam and many more. Maybe before too long this kind of well-saying will reach critical mass and the fashionable appeasment thing will become much less fashionable. If everyone just keeps nagging away (despite getting tired of sound of own voice, as one does).

If you listen to the most recent Start the Week – well you have to listen to a good bit of Ann Widdicombe, which I think is fairly unpleasant – but you could always fast forward. The last ten minutes or so you get Kenan Malik talking about Islamophobia and the religious hatred law. It’s good stuff. He thinks the idea of ‘Islamophobia’ is badly overblown and works to silence criticism of Islam and that that’s a bad thing. As you will have surmised, he also thinks the religious hatred law is a bad thing for the same sort of reason. He asks exactly the question I’ve been bleating and whining and braying for several months – why is it okay to say hard things about other ideas but not about religion?

And those of you in the UK will get to see his documentary on the subject on channel 4 at the end of the week. Wish I could.

“Everyone from anti-racist activists to government ministers wants to convince us that Britain is in the grip of Islamophobia.” But is this the reality or is hatred and abuse of Muslims being exaggerated to suit politicians’ ends and to silence critics of Islam, he asks. Malik, who grew up in the 80s – an era of real racist violence – shows how today there is very little statistical evidence to support the claims that Muslims are subject to either more physical assaults or to being targeted by the police.

See, silencing critics of immensely powerful institutions like religions is just not a very good idea. On Start the Week Malik talks about self-censorship, and he’s too right. There’s a lot of that around, along with a lot of other-censorship and attempted other-censorship. All of it unfortunate.

Much as I hate to, I have to disagree with Norm on this one. I think he’s misrepresenting what Dawkins said, with the annotation about the depth and finesse of the adolescent secularist. I don’t think Dawkins is making a shallow point at all, or that he’s expressing a flip certitude, or that he’s being callous about the deaths and griefs of others. On the contrary. (I say that partly because I remember his reaction to September 11 – there was certainly plenty of emotion behind that contribution.) The deaths and griefs are precisely the point. It cuts two ways, this business of clutching at God after a tragedy: yes some people get consolation from the thought of God, but at the price of getting consolation from exactly the guy who caused the tragedy. I think part of Dawkins’ thinking here is that that’s not really a consolation – that there’s a core of bitterness to it. Think of it this way: there you are, minding your own business, harming no one, and suddenly in comes a huge guy who beats you up, knocks your house down, kills all your relatives and friends, poisons your water supply, and trashes all the roads so that you can’t get help. A Job number, in short. Or a Banda Aceh number. You lie there on the ground crying, in pain and fear and agonizing grief. Then the huge guy comes and sits down next to you – and in desperation you crawl into his lap and he cuddles you and says ‘There there.’ And you feel ever so slightly consoled.

Is Dawkins really being so very brutal and callow to suggest that it actually might be more consoling to realize that nothing conscious caused the earthquake to happen? Epicurus wouldn’t have thought so, Lucretius wouldn’t have thought so. That was the very essence of Epicureanism: pointing out that fear of the gods was an unnecessary source of misery. Part of the core of bitterness in having to turn to God for consolation after a disaster is the knowledge that God let the disaster happen. Yes, people do it, and it no doubt works for some (if they can comparmentalize with enough rigour, so that they forget that the God they’re turning to for comfort is the same one who made them so unbearably miserable and bereaved), but why can’t Dawkins genuinely think that a naturalistic explanation of disaster is also comforting because it’s impersonal? And that is what he says, after all.

Of course, if you can derive comfort from such a monster, I would not wish to deprive you. My naive guess was that believers might be feeling more inclined to curse their god than pray to him, and maybe there’s some dark comfort in that. But I was trying, however insensitively, to offer a gentler and more constructive alternative. You don’t have to be a believer. Maybe there’s nobody there to curse…Science cannot (yet) prevent earthquakes, but science could have provided just enough warning of the Boxing Day tsunami to save most of the victims and spare the bereaved…And if the comforts afforded by outstretched human arms, warm human words and heartbroken human generosity seem puny against the agony, they at least have the advantage of existing in the real world.

I don’t find that at all flip, or unattractive, or like an adolescent; in fact I find it rather moving.