I’ve been re-reading the chapter on democracy in Norman Levitt’s Prometheus Bedeviled. I’ve been pondering the tensions between democracy and science, public opinion and truth, elections and epistemology, for – well for years, really, but with renewed attention recently. The discussion of scientific literacy a few weeks ago, reviews of Fareed Zakaria’s new book on democracy, the naive surprise of so many of the good and great at the possibility (or likelihood) that democracy in Iraq might very well result in a fundamentalist theocracy, Julian’s latest Bad Moves on the democratic fallacy and majoritarianism, and more, have combined to show me or remind me that the subject is full of unnoticed pieties, assumptions, sentimentalities, untrue bromides, leaps of faith, and contradictions. Levitt’s chapter is a good place to find some open-eyed statements on the matter.

One point is that public opinion and the truth are two different things. Entirely. There is no law of nature, no provision by a kind and caring deity, that insures that their paths will ever cross. No mechanism ensures that sooner or later, eventually, in the end (whenever that is – there is no end, there is only now) public opinion will get it right. That’s how it is even in non-factual, non-scientific, fuzzy, opinion-based areas like morality and politics, and it’s certainly the case when it comes to facts and evidence and logic. No amount of public opinion can make it true that the sun travels around the earth. That’s blindingly obvious, of course, but people who want a ‘demotic science’ have to overlook or obfuscate it.

It is precisely because successful democracy needs a successful means of filtering evidence and theories that the political culture of democracy must acknowledge that science has created such a methodology, and that it is without counterpart in other areas of experience. To heap this kind of flattery on science is simply to recognize the role of logic and sound evidentiary principles in human affairs. This is what gives science its special social status as our chief instrument for dealing with a vast array of practical problems.

There are no short cuts. By all means, make science more democratic if that means more people being scientifically literate. But if it means demanding that scientists pay attention to public opinion no matter how ill-informed…that’s another matter.

Oh, the hell with the Enlightenment project, you know? Screw all that stuff about education and rationality and informed consent and critical thinking. Nah. Too much trouble. We’ve got better things to do, we’ve got tv to watch and sports pages to read and an inner child to get in touch with. Don’t bother us with that rational argument and evidence and peer review crap. Just manipulate us, okay? Just make us feel good, make us feel empowered and participatory and noticed and brimfull of self-esteem, and we’ll do anything you want.

Research over the past decade has begun to question the central importance of knowledge in shaping public opinion about science. Instead of public education programs, argue some social scientists, we should be more concerned with public engagement strategies that get citizens directly involved in science policy-making, and that enhance public trust in science-as-an-institution.

Trust. That’s the ticket. And not reasonable, well-founded, justified trust, either. No, that’s sissy stuff, that’s for those pencil-neck geeks in the labs who actually want to understand what they’re trusting and agreeing to. Pedants! No, I just want to trust blindly, thanks, I want to trust anybody who opens the door and invites me to come in and doesn’t mind that I don’t understand one single word of what anyone is saying.

At least, that seems to be the thinking behind this bizarre article. Someone who is getting a PhD in communication wants us to know that public acceptance of science is all about communication (just as hammers want us to know that everything is all about nails). But this is communication of a certain kind, communication as hand-holding and inclusion, communication as rhetoric and public relations, rather than communication as education and elucidation and (cover your ears, children) enlightenment.

Many social scientists, for example, question the heavy emphasis on science literacy. Instead, these researchers insist that the scientific community has been too quick to blame the public. By “problematizing” the public, scientists assume too often that the science they produce is “unproblematic,” even though technologies such as genetic engineering raise a number of valid technical and moral concerns. As a result, when science knowledge and know-how is brought to bear in policy decisions or communicated to the public by scientists, the view from science is often privileged over differing public perspectives about the issue, thereby simply reinforcing any resistance. The “public engagement” perspective asserts that scientific institutions and scientists need to focus less on programs designed to inform the public about the facts of science, and should instead focus on programs that get citizens involved in science-related decision-making, with a goal of promoting public trust.

Okay, but if we’re going to blow off scientific literacy, how are all these ‘citizens’ going to know, how are they going to have the slightest clue, which technologies ‘raise a number of valid technical and moral concerns’ and just exactly what those concerns are and how they should be dealt with? How does ignorance help? Do we have some sort of in-born intuition about which technologies raise valid concerns and which don’t? If so, where does it come from, how does it operate, and above all, how accurate is it? Or are we just talking Yuk-factor again. Or to put it another way, is it really such a brilliant idea to ‘get citizens involved in science-related decision-making, with a goal of promoting public trust’ without educating those citizens first? Guess what! I don’t want ignorant ‘citizens’ – people like me, for example – making ‘science-related’ decisions, even if that heady taste of power does promote their trust. Let’s promote citizens’ trust in some other way. Maybe we could inscribe something about trust on the currency.

[Note: don’t be alarmed if this N and C looks oddly familiar. I first wrote it last month, and it’s one of the many that disappeared during our little server mishap last weekend. But I have a hard copy, so I just ploddingly typed it back in again, because it’s relevant to some matters I want to explore further.]

I heard something interesting on the US public radio show ‘Fresh Air’ last week. Peter Stotherd, a former editor of the Times (of London), has written a book called Thirty Days: Tony Blair and the Test of History, about Blair in the days on either side of the beginning of the war in Iraq. It’s all quite interesting, it’s a subject that interests me – for one thing, I was relieved to hear that (contrary to some reports I’d read) Blair has a business-like relationship as opposed to a friendship with George Bush. Absurd, isn’t it. What do I care, what business is it of mine? But there’s something so repulsive in the thought of a grown-up, intelligent man like Blair actually feeling friendship for such a proudly vacuous bully boy as Bush that it makes me queasy.

But that’s not the bit that prompted a Note and Comment. No, I’m still musing on this question of religion and the role it plays in the two countries (the two countries B and W originates from, the UK and the US). It’s well known that the US is far more fundamentalist and god-bothering than the UK – but then again the US does have an official, constitutional, written, explicit separation of church and state, which the UK doesn’t, and there are corners of Ukanian life where religion is allowed when it wouldn’t be in the US – in schools, for example.

Stotherd tells us that Blair badly wanted to say ‘God bless you’ at the end of a major speech on Iraq, but his colleagues wouldn’t let him, indeed were somewhat outraged at the idea. ‘It will sound like a crusade!’ they exclaimed. Yes, thought I, and more than that, it will sound so horribly American. Bad enough that he’s called Bush’s poodle (Stotherd had already discussed that nickname), what would they call him if he started sounding like Jerry Fallwell? For that matter what would I call him? I can’t stand it when presidents say that. And Blair’s colleagues must feel the same way, because Stotherd reports that they said ‘People don’t want that kind of thing forced down their throats.’ Blair was affronted, Stotherd says. ‘You’re a godless lot, aren’t you!’ he exclaimed.

And that’s the bit that irritates me. There we are again, you see. Indignation at people who are ‘godless’ on the part of the godfull. But what business do they have being indignant about it? Any more than they have getting indignant at people for not believing in the tooth fairy or the Great Pumpkin? Why do believers always think they have the right to upbraid the skeptics? Why is not the upbraiding all on the other side? Or at least why is the polite toleration not mutual. Why is non-theism not the default position? Why is the burden of proof not on the believers as opposed to the non-believers? No good reason, that I can see, apart from habit and contagion. Which is why there can be such a thing as too much toleration of religion.

This is an alarming article. Hate mail ‘by the ton’, name-calling, character assasination, merely for doing research.

The simple act of conducting research into the matter struck some as an enterprise ”designed to cheer on child molesters,” as one anonymous letter writer wrote, ”and ridicules the suffering sustained by children who are abused as well as therapists who are knowledgeable about the effects of trauma on children’s minds and bodies.” Clancy was a ”bad person,” according to another letter writer, to question such reports. Yet another suggested that she was probably an abuser herself.

So Susan Clancy, the researcher in question, decided that ‘repressed’ memories of child abuse made for an excessively sensitive subject, and also that the fact that child abuse does actually happen tainted the research. She needed a less sensitive subject in which the memory was of an event that does not actually happen. Of course, that’s an oxymoron. The more it doesn’t happen, the more ‘sensitive’ (at least on their own accounts) the believers are likely to be.

”I thought, Thank God, man,” she recalls. ”With alien abductees, I’m never going to have to deal with the criticism that it might have actually happened.”

Famous last words, and enter John Mack, the Harvard psychologist who believes alien abductions are real events, and who has had a large if largely invisible influence on American culture in recent years.

Mack’s Harvard imprimatur jacked the credibility of abduction accounts into another orbit. Chris Carter, creator of ”The X-Files,” used Mack’s work to help sell his show to Fox.

One oddity of the article is that it never mentions Ockham’s razor or Hume on miracles or any equivalent – that is to say, it fails to make explicit the obvious weakness in the beliefs of the ‘abductees’ and (alas) John Mack himself. To wit: the abductees report being abducted by aliens. Excluding the possibility of lying for the sake of argument, there are two possible explanations: they really were abducted by aliens, or they hallucinated it. Given the inherent unlikelihood of intergalactic travel, the laws of physics, the absence of bug-eyed aliens roaming the streets [never mind the jokes, please], and the total absence of any genuine corroborating evidence whatsoever, which is more likely? That people really were abducted by aliens without the rest of the world ever seeing it or filming or videotaping it? Or that a number of people had hallucinations of a kind that is very familiar to science. And don’t ask Muldur.

We’re back, after an unpleasant little interlude caused by a hardware problem on the server. We’ve been toiling and slaving here to get everything back, and since one of us (and it’s not Jeremy) is not very computer literate, some areas look a bit odd. Not to worry, we’re getting to it.

Sunday update. JS points out that the server may go blooey again, also that pages will sometimes be slow to load. But also also, that we are changing servers entirely soon (that is to say, he is – I might as well stand around and wave a magic wand for all the use I am) and that will solve all the problems, but it could also mean another brief disappearance.

You will notice the comments have all disappeared. Sorry. That’s one item that didn’t get saved. Feel free to replace them or start over.

Well, I’ve had some correspondence about the Science and Religion In Focus, which I suppose is not surprising. I thought I might as well discuss the issue a little more here, so that people can comment directly. To quote from Bill’s letter on the Letters page:

And aren’t these quotations reflective of a climate of opinion that is dominant in many quarters, notably (in my experience)in American academia? So dominant, in fact, that the viewpoint you deem right is pretty much taken for granted, hardly needing to be articulated–which condition you may be confusing with polite silence. In other areas, of course, including American electoral politics, the situation is rather different.

Well, maybe. It depends what you mean by ‘many quarters,’ for one thing. But in a great many other quarters, like for instance the mass media, that’s not the case at all. And that’s a change. All these angels cluttering up the place, for example – you didn’t see that kind of thing in my long-ago youth! And a good thing too. And yes indeed, American electoral politics (they do these things differently on the other side – Tony Blair is religious, but he doesn’t like to go on about it). And that is after all a rather important sector, wouldn’t you say? Worth talking about, worth criticising if you think it needs criticising?

I realize your view is a popular one. Susan Greenfield was saying a similar thing. But I simply don’t think religion is benign or harmless, so I think it’s a mistake to allow it to throw its weight about the way it does.

As long as we’re talking about religion and science, the futility or non-futility of scientists, atheists, rationalists, skeptics, and secularists arguing with believers, whether or not people can change their minds, what kind of influence religion has in the public realm, and related matters, we might as well add this famous New Republic article by Wendy Kaminer to the mix.

Obviously, people carry their faith in God, Satan, crystals or UFOs into town meetings, community organizations and voting booths. Obviously, a core belief in the supernatural is not severable from beliefs about the natural world and the social order. It is the inevitable effect of religion on public policy that makes it a matter of public concern. Advocates of religiosity extol the virtues or moral habits that religion is supposed to instill in us. But we should be equally concerned with the intellectual habits it discourages.

Exactly so. Most of us who read the words of Susan Greenfield or Wendy Kaminer live in democracies, after all. We live in places where majority opinion is, as de Tocqueville pointed out a long time ago, very powerful indeed. Is it not obvious that we all have good reason to want that opinion to be well-founded, to be based on evidence and reality rather than wishful thinking and the supernatural? Is it not self-evident that the intellectual habits of the electorate are very far from being a merely private matter?

Would a resurgence of skepticism and rationality make us smarter? Not exactly, but it would balance supernaturalism and the habit of belief with respect for empirical realities, which should influence the formulation of public policy more than faith. Rationalism would be an antidote to prejudice, which is, after all, a form of faith.

Again, exactly so. Far from being a waste of time, the defense of rationalism is our only defense against the theocrats.

Well I feel vindicated. I read an article in The American Prospect a couple of weeks ago that I thought made some staggeringly stupid remarks based on some even more staggeringly stupid assumptions. I almost wrote a Note and Comment about it, but then got too busy with other subjects and so let it slide. But now there is a review in The Washington Post of a book by the same author, pointing out some of the flaws I noticed and some others besides – in particular, the fact (which the Prospect did not make clear enough) that Danny Goldberg is an entertainment industry executive, so his enthusiasm for popular culture has considerable financial interest behind it. There I was thinking he was a political commentator saying all those silly things…

As Washington pundits start analyzing potential strategies for Democrats in 2004, there has been little or no discussion of ways to win back the youth vote, or, for that matter, how to craft a message for people of all ages who process information through the language of popular culture (as distinguished from the much smaller elite who are devotees of the political news subculture).

What on earth does that mean? ‘Process information through the language of popular culture’? Like what? Music? Sit-coms? The latest exploding-building epic at the multiplex? What ‘information’ does one get that way? And what does one process it into? And then even more ridiculous, the notion that there’s something invidious (note the use of the devil-word ‘elite’ – always a dead giveaway that someone is doing some manipulating) about getting one’s information about politics from ‘the political news subculture.’ God almighty – it’s no wonder the US still doesn’t have a national health system: we’re encouraged by anti-intellectual messages like that to ‘process’ our ‘information’ via Harry and Louise ads instead of bothering to read a good newspaper (if we can find one) or magazine.

And it gets even worse:

One obvious flaw in the culture of Democrats is the elitist language. While former House Speaker Newt Gingrich carefully researched the impact of various words to demonize his congressional opponents and George W. Bush told his advisers to make a speech on Iraq so simple that “the boys in Lubbock can understand it,” national Democrats routinely go on TV and use phrases that resonate only with political insiders. What percentage of Americans understood Sen. John Kerry’s recent references to Tora Bora or Gore’s incessant mentions of the Social Security lockbox?

Words fail me (that’s another reason I didn’t write the N and C at the time, words really do fail me: I find that kind of thing so disgusting I’m afraid I may begin to rend my own flesh). The elitist language. It’s ‘elitist’ to talk about the actual specifics of policy and potential legislation. Oy veh. Listen, dude, we live in a democracy, people can vote here, don’t you think they have some responsibility to find out about things like Social Security? Do you think we should all just vote on the basis of which candidate is prettier or tells funnier jokes or is most ‘comfortable in his own skin’? Because I don’t!

There’s plenty more, but you get the idea. I do agree – emphatically – that Joseph Lieberman is far too conservative, and the Democrats need to be different from the Republicans, not as like them as possible. But that’s all I agree with him about. Now here’s what The Washington Post has to say:

Some will admire Goldberg’s energetic activism, but unfortunately he is not the best representative for the cause. It’s difficult to differentiate high-minded principle from self-interest here, seeing as how Goldberg is a record-industry man (“chair and CEO of Artemis Records”). When he talks about helping “adolescents who loved and helped create the culture that was under attack,” he is drowned out by the ring of cash registers.

Yes, and those cash registers indicate an even deeper problem, one endemic to US politics:

Goldberg’s problems aren’t just due to entertainment industry prejudice or sloppy analysis. In fact, his book highlights a broader problem on the left. He never squares his libertarian faith in the “free marketplace” with his argument for regulatory politics. Libertarianism and regulation are like oil and water for progressive politics. For instance, the ACLU has opposed many efforts at campaign finance reform. Why? Because reform infringes upon the rights of individual candidates to spend money how they wish. This is just the tip of the iceberg. For how can Goldberg expect health insurance companies to accept regulation for reformist purposes when he is so busy fighting government to keep it from trampling on his own profits?

It’s too little remarked how neatly populist posturing and shouts of elitism dovetail with respect for piles of cash. Lots of people pay lots of money to see Movie X or buy CD Y, therefore Movie X and CD Y are by definition good and anyone who says otherwise is a wicked elitist. What a useful rationalization for an entertainment excutive.

Tam Dalyell, UK MP and father of the House of Commons, may not be fashionable, but I’m pretty sure he has “nonsense” inscribed on his forehead. At the end of March, he had this to say about Tony Blair:

I…believe that since Mr Blair is going ahead with his support for a US attack without unambiguous UN authorisation, he should be branded as a war criminal and sent to The Hague.
The Guardian, March 27th 2003

Okay, so maybe there will be one or two Baathists reading this who will think that this is not such a bad idea. But I wonder what they will think about Mr Dalyell’s latest offering in today’s Observer/Guardian:

My view is that, depending on the inquiry, they [Campbell and Blair] have got to reflect on their positions. I am not at this moment asking that the Prime Minister resign, but it may be that, after a few days, he will feel he has to move aside for someone else. It could not be graver for him.
The Observer/Guardian, July 20th 2003

So we have the situation where Mr Dalyell seems to believe both that Mr Blair should not immediately resign*, but should be branded a war criminal and sent to the Hague for war crimes. Excellent! It’s always good to hear that war crimes do not necessarily warrant one’s resignation. Also it’s pleasing that the intellectual Left are resurgent again…

*Yes, yes, I know he’s talking about a different issue, but if you think about it closely, you’ll see it doesn’t alter the logic here.

Well here’s a turn-up for the books. Plagiarism now. Someone has helped himself to the article I wrote for In Focus recently, ‘What Is Elitism?’ and posted it on a philosophy forum without so much as a by your leave. Not a word about B and W, not even a shy mention of the fact that he hadn’t written it himself. Well except the dopy last sentence, he may have written that; I certainly didn’t. But I bloody well did write the rest of it.

I’ve been emailing him on the subject, but answer came there none. He did append a vague (and highly overdue) remark to the effect that ‘a version’ of this article appeared somewhere or other, naming two places where it damn well did not appear and not mentioning the one where it did, which he knew perfectly well, since I’d just written him about it! It’s quite funny really. In a maddening kind of way. So then, apparently realizing that hadn’t quite mollified me, he helped himself to yet another B and W item and posted that! He did say it was from B and W this time, but without a link, without permision, and in its entirety, which unless you have permission (did I mention that he doesn’t?) is a violation of copyright. Even funnier!

A kind reader emailed me about all this, or I never would have known. Unfortunately it’s not possible to expose and ridicule the plagiarist on the forum, because as my correspondent told me, he is the moderator and manager, and posts go through him instead of being posted directly (odd arrangement). So he simply (surprise!) doesn’t post them. I’ve written to the server, but who knows how long that will take to do any good. So I just thought I might as well expose and ridicule him here in the meantime.

A UN representative says the UK government is breaching the United Nations convention on children’s rights by imposing a targets and testing regime in English schools that ignores their needs. This is an interesting notion, and one is tempted to mock it noisily. There is a right not to be tested? Who knew! If only that right had been discovered when I was twelve! How much more fun I would have had. But perhaps one ought to resist the temptation. But perhaps one still ought to point out some problems with that idea, without actually mocking.

Of course, the whole question of tests and testing is a controversial, endlessly-debated one. There is much to be said for both sides, which is why the debate is endless. There are some inherent tensions in the issue, and all one can do in the end is bite the bullet and choose one or the other. But at least it helps to know what the tensions are.

Article 29 says education should be “directed to the development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential”…”We should drive away from this competitive-oriented uniformity, that all children should be cookie-cutter test-takers.”

Cookie-cutter. Well, possibly, but then again, possibly there simply are things that everyone ought to know, cookie-cutter-fashion? That’s the tension I’m looking at here. There is the educationist, progressive, Deweyish (or perhaps pseudo-Deweyish, because Dewey is notoriously over-simplified and misunderstood and paraphrased, and I in fact have read very little of him) school of thought that says each child is unique and has a unique set of talents and capacities that must be cherished and nourished etc. etc. We’ve all heard the rhetoric, I should think. And surely there is much truth in it. Different people do have different talents, and of course it does make sense to develop the talents people actually have. But then again there is also the school of thought that maintains there are some things that everyone should know, and that’s all there is to it. For reasons having to do with democracy, civic responsibility and participation, a full and adult human life, the value of understanding the world one lives in, the education of future generations, and so on, as well as the more drearily instrumental matter of job skills. So there is a point at which it is not helpful to say little Leslie would prefer to study drawing and football and simply skip math and science and history, thank you. I should know, I leaned on that way of thinking heavily when I was in school. Ooh, I’m a creative type, I read a lot, I’m deep, I don’t need to pay attention or work hard in math class. Huge mistake, and not one to urge on other people, in my opinion.

Right. Here’s an Op-Ed piece by Daniel Dennett that gives one answer to Susan Greenfield’s notion that ‘science-religion ding-dongs’ are a complete waste of time. The anecdote he tells about taking part in a conference at which leading authors, artists and scientists talked to clever high school students, and he at the end of his talk mentioned that he is an atheist.

Many students came up to me afterwards to thank me, with considerable passion, for “liberating” them. I hadn’t realized how lonely and insecure these thoughtful teenagers felt. They’d never heard a respected adult say, in an entirely matter of fact way, that he didn’t believe in God. I had calmly broken a taboo and shown how easy it was.

This is what I keep saying. Majority opinion and rhetoric do have their effects, and do need to be countered (if one disagrees with them, that is). It’s no good just shrugging or sighing and saying as Greenfield says, ‘No one is going to change their views.’ Even apart from the fact that we can’t know that in advance (and Dawkins tells many a story of Bible-raised students thanking him for being the first to explain evolution to them so that they understood and were convinced), there are all the people who already are non-theists but are convinced by the relentless battering of public rhetoric that they’re in a minority of about six people four of whom are insane.

Most brights don’t play the “aggressive atheist” role. We don’t want to turn every conversation into a debate about religion, and we don’t want to offend our friends and neighbors, and so we maintain a diplomatic silence. But the price is political impotence. Politicians don’t think they even have to pay us lip service, and leaders who wouldn’t be caught dead making religious or ethnic slurs don’t hesitate to disparage the “godless” among us.

Just so. That diplomatic silence lets the undiplomatic aggressive god-botherers have it all their own way, with all sorts of sinister consequences for the quality of thought and debate. Counter-theism is not a waste of time.

Science and Religion again. I happened on this odd little item at SciTech Daily. I haven’t read it yet – when I have, perhaps I will comment further – but just on the front page there is a somewhat absurd quotation.

Science can tell us how chemicals bond but only religion can answer the why questions, why do we have a universe like this at all?

Excuse me? Only religion can answer those questions? Er…doesn’t that rather presuppose that religion can answer those questions? And isn’t that a fairly ridiculous presupposition? Answer them how? By making assertions? By telling stories? By making stuff up? At that rate, I can answer those questions too, and so can science, and so can anyone at all. As Hotspur says in Henry IV Part One when Glendower announces ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep,’ ‘Why, so can I, and so can any man, but will they come when you do call for them?’

No, sorry, that kite just doesn’t fly. Naturally science can’t answer the why questions, because there is no answer. It’s childish to pretend there is, and even more childish to pretend that religion has some expertise in the matter.

Update: I’ve read it now, and I should tell you: don’t waste your time. The religious people don’t say anything remotely convincing. Can’t they do any better than that?

And as long as we’re on the subject, why not add a few words from the Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, as well? Especially since it was his kind of atheism (as well as her husband’s) that Susan Greenfield was taking issue with in that interview.

There is ‘Snake Oil and Holy Water’ for instance, in which he quotes a classic bit of Wool in which a psychiatrist says that traditional African healers

are able to tap that other realm of negative entropy–that superquantum velocity and frequency of electromagnetic energy–and bring them as conduits down to our level. It’s not magic. It’s not mumbo jumbo. You will see the dawn of the 21st century, the new medical quantum physics really distributing these energies and what they are doing.

Or the classic ‘Dolly and the Cloth-Heads’, which gives one cogent answer to this question of whether or not it’s a waste of time to attempt to convince religious believers that they’re wrong: consider all the time that is wasted in public discussions of ethical issues because of the convention of including one or several religious leaders to address subjects in which they have no sort of expertise or knowledge.

This has the incidental effect of multiplying the sheer number of people in the studio, with consequent consumption, if not waste, of time. It also, I believe, often has the effect of lowering the level of expertise and intelligence. This is only to be expected, given that these spokesmen are chosen not because of their own qualifications in the field, or as thinkers, but simply because they represent a particular section of the community.

Or there’s this debate or rather discussion between Dawkins and Steven Pinker, which is more interesting than any religious discussion I’ve ever read or heard (not that I’ve heard many, you’ll have gathered it’s not the kind of occasion I rush to attend). Really, it’s an act of kindness to try to explain to religious people that they’re not only deluded, they’ve cut themselves off from a lot of fascinating material. And kindness is a virtue, after all.

I found a rather odd interview with Susan Greenfield the other day. The site is some sort of Christian one, but some of Greenfield’s answers are still a bit strange.

My husband, Peter Atkins, is an atheist of the Dawkins stamp and so I’ve sat through many science-religion ding-dongs, and they strike me as a complete waste of time. No one is going to change their views. The Atkins-Dawkins stance treats science almost as though it were a religion, and evangelically try to convert other people. Meanwhile, the religious person can’t articulate why they believe what they do: they just do.

But people do change their views. Of course they do. Not all people of course, and not every time anyone tries to persuade them to, but some people some of the time. That’s what teaching does, isn’t it, it gets people to change their views. Going from ignorance about something to some knowledge to more knowledge, that’s a change of views right there. And people do indeed change their views about religion, quite often precisely because of reading a book or talking to someone. Ideas do that. And as for the fact that religious people can’t articulate why they believe what they do, they just do…well what of it? If I ‘just believe’ that the sun travels around the earth, what’s wrong with someone teaching me that it doesn’t? Religion isn’t just a vague emotion, it’s a set of truth claims; what’s wrong with scientists and skeptics pointing out the lack of evidence for those truth claims?

So, I don’t believe in God but that is a belief, not some thing I know. I believe I love my husband, but I couldn’t prove it to you one way or the other. How could I? I just know I do. My particular belief is that there is no Deity out there, but I can’t prove it and therefore I would not have the temerity to tell other people they’re wrong. The coinage of proof is not appropriate for belief ­ and Dawkins thinks it is.

But it’s not about proof, it’s about evidence. Naturally it’s not possible to prove there is no Deity out there, just as it’s not possible to prove there’s not an intangible invisible scentless and every other way undetectable by the human senses dragon in my living room – but that doesn’t mean I’m required to believe there is one, or that there are four trillion of them. Yes, I can choose simply to go ahead and believe it. But these ‘science-religion ding-dongs’ are generally about religion as a public matter, and there surely evidence is highly relevant. Religions don’t just sit back nicely and let people believe whatever they ‘just do’, they tell them what to believe, and how to act as well; they go into schools, they publish magazines and books, they go on tv and radio and write for the newspapers, they’re called in to give their opinions on ethical issues. So it seems perfectly reasonable and indeed very useful, in fact vitally necessary, for people who notice the non-existence of evidence for their beliefs, to point that out. And the analogy with loving someone seems to me to be a terrible analogy. People used to ask Carl Sagan that in a truculent manner, too. ‘Do you love your wife? Yes? Well how can you prove that? Can you see it? Huh?’ But what’s that got to do with anything? Again – religions are not just emotions, they make truth claims, claims about the world. Truth claims about the world can and should be tested and queried, surely.

Let’s revisit Deborah Cameron’s article yet again, because judging by the comments on my comments, I didn’t make myself clear. Or perhaps I did and people disagree anyway, or perhaps I’m just dead wrong. But I want to try to clarify one or two points all the same. The disagreement is with what I said about the different value we place (the culture we live in places) on thoughts and feelings. I do think that difference exists, I do think there is a seldom-examined or -questioned assumption that feelings are good, authentic, spontaneous, real, honest, natural, and for all those reasons and perhaps more, better than thoughts. Some readers point out that the distinction between thoughts and feelings is not clear-cut – and I agree with that, I realize it’s not. But I’m talking about the rhetoric rather than the reality. It seems to me it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this particular discussion whether it makes sense to separate and oppose thoughts and feelings, because the point is that that’s what the rhetoric does, that’s what the culture does, that’s what other people do. Tell them to stop opposing feelings and thoughts, heart and head; don’t bother telling me, I already know.

For example, a quotation in Cameron’s book Good to Talk?, from ‘Circle Time’, a bit of advice on ‘teaching interpersonal and communication skills that is used in some British schools’:

Within the circle children are encouraged to talk about their feelings and about problems that may have arisen at school…

Pure boilerplate, of course, and that’s my point. People are always encouraged to talk about feelings, full stop, not about feelings and thoughts. Now, granted, and here is where we probably just have to agree to differ, if I do have to choose one to talk about and say is better than the other, I will choose thoughts. I do think that when the two are separated there is an entrenched cultural habit (blame D.H. Lawrence, if you like) to say and believe that feelings are better, and I would reverse that if I could. But even leaving that aside, even without that disagreement, I still think there is room to notice and ponder and question the complete omission of thoughts. I think that is part of the subtext of Cameron’s article, and I think it’s worth making supertext, that is to say, explicit.

Here is part of that quotation from the article again:

The main premise of the ‘Mars and Venus’ literature is exactly the one restated by BT—that men are far less at ease than women with self-revelation and the verbalizing of emotional states.

Again. There is a whole set of implicit assumptions there. That self-revelation equates to verbalizing emotional states and not cognitive ones. Yes, the two bleed into each other and overlap, of course they do, but then why is emotional the only word used there? If both are involved, why are both not mentioned?

Oh dear, I ought to write a book myself, no doubt, but it would be such an effort.

Well, this is what I’m always saying. This is where anti-elitism gets you. Influential political operatives who are not ashamed to sneer at education.

Why this administration feels unbound by the consensus of academic scientists can be gleaned, in part, from a telling anecdote in Nicholas Lemann’s recent New Yorker profile of Karl Rove. When asked by Lemann to define a Democrat, Bush’s chief political strategist replied, “Somebody with a doctorate.” Lemann noted, “This he said with perhaps the suggestion of a smirk.” Fundamentally, much of today’s GOP, like Rove, seems to smirkingly equate academics, including scientists, with liberals.

And hence with really terrible people. The GOP could of course look at it another way – they could wonder why people with more education tend not to be of their party, they could pause to wonder what that says about their party. They might wonder what people have learned, that tends to make them dislike right wing parties. That would be one reasonable reaction. Or they could do what they are in fact doing, they could be certain in advance that dislike of right wing parties can’t possibly be well-founded and that therefore any activity that tends to promote such dislike must be corrupting and polluting. Hence higher education is a bad thing.

And then of course that has the incalculable added benefit of giving an entirely spurious but tragically convincing aura of populism to the party of tax cuts for the rich, so that people who make too little money even to pay taxes vote GOP all the same in the illusion that the GOP is on the side of Just Plain Folks and against elites. Stark nonsense. The GOP may pride itself on sneering at people with doctorates, but it’s very much in favor of elites.

Now, language is an interesting subject, isn’t it? So much of what we talk about at B and W comes down to language – well it would, wouldn’t it, since we’re talking about what gets written and said in academic ‘discourse’ and ‘texts’. Naturally it’s language, what else would it be, mud pies? But it’s interesting all the same.

I mentioned Deborah Cameron the other day, after hearing her with Richard Hoggart on Thinking Allowed. A friend sent me a link to this article of hers, which is an excellent read. Also quite amusing in places.

In the past, the habit of talking about oneself was almost universally decried as impolite, immodest and vulgar. Today’s experts, by contrast, do not regard self-effacement as a virtue…As BT’s ‘better conversations’ booklet puts it: ‘Unless you’re able to recognise your own feelings, you won’t be able to express them clearly and be open with other people.’

Well, maybe, but so what? What makes us all think that other people want us to be open about our feelings? How do we know they don’t want us to shut up about our wretched feelings and talk about something more interesting? Hurrah for people who are closed, and not only don’t express their feelings clearly, but don’t express them at all. Granted, that’s a slight exaggeration. Here I am expressing a feeling right now: exasperation. I’m very clear and open about it; aren’t you pleased?

Multinational corporations may require their employees to import the American English preference for informality into languages like Hungarian, where the distinction between formal and informal address is more strongly marked in the grammar (and where formal address would be the unmarked choice for the context).

Tell me about it. I often feel like a Martian in my own land. Oddly enough, I don’t like it when complete strangers telephone me to sell me something, and to start things off call me by my first name and ask me how I am. I must be Hungarian then.

Will we all consent to become the caring, sharing, self-reflexive, emotionally literate communicators who are currently idealized in both expert and popular literature? Or might we have our own ideas about what makes it ‘good to talk’?

I have one or two more thoughts on this matter of scientific literacy that we were discussing last month (that is to say, yesterday), inspired by this article on the CSICOP website, which was in turn inspired by a pair of articles in the Guardian.

One thought, which I touched on but in a jokey not to say flippant manner, has to do with how manipulative and touchy-feely and sub-rational it all seems. The public feels this and feels that, and the public feels this or that because we do things to make them feel that way. We hold their hands, we flatter them, we plant moist kisses on their cheeks, we tell them we really value their opinions. Is this not a little creepy? A little like the way we talk to six year olds who need a nap? Or the way advertisers and ‘Public Relations’ experts and real estate agents and political operatives and indeed politicians themselves talk to us? There are books and expensive seminars on how to do that kind of thing, how to tickle people’s sensitivities and nudge their fears and activate their prejudices in order to get them to do what we want. Hitler was good at it and the nice people who sell everyone enormous SUVs are good at it, too, but are those really examples of how we want scientists to talk to us? We all become like poor stupid drugged Linda in Truffaut’s movie version of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ thinking the nice man in the giant TV screen is really talking to her. ‘And what do YOU think, Linda?’ ‘And what do YOU think, Public?’ ‘Montag, look, they’re talking to me, they want to know what I think!’

The other thought has to do with some unexamined assumptions. Or some sacred cows, would be another way of putting it. Especially the assumption that the public already knows enough about science to make decisions about it. All the public, apparently, all six billion plus of us, infants included. How did we get that knowledge? Were we born with it? Is it innate? Do we just kind of breathe it in, or get it by osmosis? Susan Greenfield puts the matter this way:

Or could the “it” be that I was implying, however covertly, a patronising attitude to an otherwise Renaissance general public, who are already, as Turney avows, clear minded and up to speed with the subtleties and problems facing the integration of science with society? This mindset is, of course, in the focus-group-anti-elitist spirit of our age.

Exactly. The public must be universally wise and reflective and knowlegeable enough, because that’s the only decent thing to think. If experience and evidence contradict that happy thought, well, experience and evidence must be elitist, so we’ll just pretend they don’t exist.

I’ve had one or two further thoughts about Deborah Cameron’s ‘Good to Talk’ article.

And the relevance of this to the subject of conversation is that intimacy must be created and sustained to a large extent through a particular kind of talk, involving continuous mutual self-disclosure. The modern cliché ‘they just couldn’t communicate’, proffered as an explanation for the break-up of a marriage or other significant relationship, does not imply that the parties never spoke or that they found one another’s conversation unintelligible. Rather it implies a lack of honesty and emotional depth in their exchanges—a failure by one or both individuals to share their feelings openly and express their true selves authentically.

This is all true, and good stuff, but there’s a further aspect Cameron doesn’t go into (at least in this article). Why is self-disclosure and the authentic expression of our true selves purely emotional? Why is it only feelings and emotions that we’re supposed to reveal, disclose, express, communicate, converse and talk about? When how and why did we decide that the true authentic hidden-until-expressed self is purely emotional? Why aren’t our thoughts and ideas part of our selves too? Why can’t self-disclosure be cognitive as well as or even instead of emotional?

It’s interesting to note, for one thing, that if we did understand the self that way, the tacit or covert preference for the putative female style of communication might disappear.

The main premise of the ‘Mars and Venus’ literature is exactly the one restated by BT—that men are far less at ease than women with self-revelation and the verbalizing of emotional states…But in a culture that places emphasis on self-reflexivity and the creation of intimacy through self-disclosure, it is entirely logical that the (real or perceived) asymmetry between women and men should come to be apprehended as a serious problem. It is also logical that the problem should be seen to inhere primarily in men’s behaviour—for despite the efforts of authors like Deborah Tannen to present the sexes as ‘different but equal’, comments like the one quoted above from BT suggest an implicit common-sense belief in female communicational superiority.

If women are boringly and claustrophobically assumed to be better at communicating their feelings, men are perhaps assumed to be better at communicating about ideas. All too often that is seen as a flaw – a sign of how emotionally crippled and stunted men are compared to honest, open, in touch with their feelings women. Well that’s one way to look at it – but then, another way is that it’s women who are crippled and stunted, unable to get their heads out of the boring egotistical sludge of their own personal feelings and think about something more important.

When how and why did we decide that feelings are better than thoughts? And not only better but also somehow more real, more honest, authentic, internal, of the self? I wonder if it has to do with benevolent impulses toward egalitarianism and inclusiveness. Perhaps we’re afraid that not everyone has much in the way of thoughts and ideas, but we’re pretty sure that anyone can have feelings – it’s simply a matter of ‘getting in touch’ with them. So we convince ourselves that the core of our being is emotions, and that thoughts are some sort of aristocratic artificial overlay, an external frippery and decoration that disappears when the going gets tough; and then we convince ourselves that the core is the part that counts and the overlay is a slightly suspect sophistication or adulteration or pollution. So we end up coercing each other, with the best of intentions, to distrust the cognitive and overtrust the emotional. We get atrophied intellects and hypertrophied feelings. There are some drawbacks to that arrangement, I think.