Haidt's awkward position

Having commented here recently with a reference to Jonathon Haidt, I spent a bit of time reading this Haidt article in which he critiques ''the new atheists''. Basically he uses his moral intuition findings to argue that such public advocates of atheism as Dawkins and Harris are so strongly guided by an intuitive sense of the wrongness or immorality of religious belief that this clouds their judgment when it comes to the possible benefits of such belief. Haidt has little to say about whether beliefs in supernatural forces are true - which is, to say the least, a weakness in his argument - but what he has to say about benefits is worth reflecting upon. He quotes some lines from Dennett's Breaking the spell about the morality of unbelievers v believers:

"Perhaps a survey would show that as a group atheists and agnostics are more respectful of the law, more sensitive to the needs of others, or more ethical than religious people. Certainly no reliable survey has yet been done that shows otherwise. It might be that the best that can be said for religion is that it helps some people achieve the level of citizenship and morality typically found in brights. If you find that conjecture offensive, you need to adjust your perspective. (Breaking the Spell, p. 55.)

Here's Haidt's commentary on the above:

I have italicized the two sections that show ordinary moral thinking rather than scientific thinking. The first is Dennett's claim not just that there is no evidence, but that there is certainly no evidence, when in fact surveys have shown for decades that religious practice is a strong predictor of charitable giving. Arthur Brooks recently analyzed these data (in Who Really Cares) and concluded that the enormous generosity of religious believers is not just recycled to religious charities.

Religious believers give more money than secular folk to secular charities, and to their neighbors. They give more of their time, too, and of their blood. Even if you excuse secular liberals from charity because they vote for government welfare programs, it is awfully hard to explain why secular liberals give so little blood. The bottom line, Brooks concludes, is that all forms of giving go together, and all are greatly increased by religious participation and slightly increased by conservative ideology (after controlling for religiosity).

These data are complex and perhaps they can be spun the other way, but at the moment it appears that Dennett is wrong in his reading of the literature. Atheists may have many other virtues, but on one of the least controversial and most objective measures of moral behavior—giving time, money, and blood to help strangers in need—religious people appear to be morally superior to secular folk.

Assuming this is true, and though I haven't independently examined the evidence, I suspect that it is, it needs to be accounted for. Not only that but, as Haidt suggests, we need to tap into this force for helping others that appears to be driven by religion, and utilise it for a secular society.

So what is so socially cohesive and happiness-making about religious belief, and do all religious beliefs have this tendency? How does Judeo-Christianity compare with the Dreamtime beliefs of Oz Aborigines in this regard?

To stick with Christianity, I think Haidt is right in saying that the beliefs of modern Christians are more complex and eclectic than some atheists give them credit for. Most of them don't read the Bible, and aren't familiar with it except through the many and various interpretations of priests whose sermons mix Bible stories with everyday modern observations, homespun homilies and more or less sophisticated treatment of current political and social issues. Bible passages are dealt with selectively and according to changing attitudes. Some quietly fall out of favour, as do whole religious concepts, such as the concept of hell. Some atheists think that, because the Bible is a fixed document - at least since the Council of Trent - Christian morality must also be fixed, in the time those texts were written, but this is plainly not so [in spite of what Christian leaders themselves say about eternal verities]. Certainly it's a largely conservative morality, which drags behind progressive secularism in terms of reform, but there's no doubt that it's always changing, just as today's conservative political parties don't support the institution of slavery, as they once did.

Haidt makes a distinction between contractual society and the beehive society, the first being more individualist and egalitarian, the second being more authoritarian and rigid. The first requires constant adjustment to balance individual and social needs against each other, the second requires constant vigilance against enemies from without and within. And although Haidt generally plumps for the contractual society, he seems to feel that the alternative shouldn't be contemptuously dismissed, but studied and learned from. Whether this is itself mere liberal posturing is hard to say. His main argument against the new atheists is that they're more driven by commitment to a cause than reason, and that their reasoning is heavily skewed by that commitment. It's an important point, of course, but it needs to be pointed out that new atheism has also grown out of a serious threat to scientific autonomy and scientific education, in the USA at least, coming from creationists and their very vocal fundamentalist supporters. It's also a response to the growing power of Islamism, to the violence of militant religion, and to the real danger posed by the politicisation of religious views. There really is something of a battle being waged here, and aren't we right to be concerned that not enough people are speaking up? And they should do so with carefully crafted, evidence-based arguments, as well as an awareness of where they're coming from, and of the dangers of bias.

I enjoy some of the rhetoric of the new atheists, but not all of it. I'm more interested in solid argument, such as those used by scientists to refute the anti-evolution claims of believers, arguments that are painstaking, patient and comprehensive, arguments that themselves promote science as a discipline for producing results, knowledge and insight. The effectiveness of the practice of science is always its best argument.

Science needs to turn to religion in the same spirit, to seek to explain it. Haidt touches on this when he refers to the work of Boyer and Atran and the exploration of religion as an evolutionary byproduct. He himself wonders whether religion isn't an adaptation, that's to say, a much more successful evolutionary product than is given credit for, though it must be hard to sustain that view as a secularist who seems, personally, to have no need of religion. He points out that anthropologists are much less interested in the truth of religious beliefs than in the social functions attached to ritual and ceremony, but this seems to me rather to fudge the issue [and functionalism in the social sciences has been criticised for just this reason].

The bottom line is that Haidt is trying to defend religion while not believing in it. It's an awkward position to take, and to some it might look like a patronising one. The only real defence he has provided for religious beliefs is that that they seem to make people more happy and more generous. The first claim can be dealt with along 'ignorance is bliss' lines, the second one may look a bit more difficult to deal with, but I would say that if you are a regular church-goer you would be constantly the target of sermons touching on civic responsibility. Helping the poor, helping those in need, caring for children and the elderly, loving sinners, if not the sin, and encouraging and reinforcing the bonds of community everywhere. It's also quite likely the case that you're drawn to churchy organisations because you want your sense of community and civic responsibility strengthened. It fulfils a need in you. But let's not pretend that there aren't other things that go along with these positives - the myths about gods and faith, the fear and loathing of the godless and such. And there are particular truth-claims, reiterated again and again, the central one being the existence of and the need to constantly worship a supernatural entity. There's no getting around that one, either it's true or not.

Primary Colors and political morality

I do get a bit behind in my film reviews, or my film viewing - sixty-two years behind in the case of Dragonwyck, but only ten years in the case of Mike Nichols's Primary Colors, but with this latter, the subject at least is not out of date, and we find it in every political campaign. In the recent federal election campaign, Rudd's one-time visit to a strip club, and a tenuous link with WA inc's notorious [I'm not entirely sure why] Brian Burke, were just two attempts to bring the scandalous and salacious into the political fray.

Primary Colors takes aim at the most magnetic of recent politicians, Bill Clinton [magnetic especially in attracting scandal], by creating a fiction with obvious parallels. Presidential hopeful Jack Stanton [John Travolta] and his savvy wife Susan [Emma Thompson] have a way of sucking people into the stream of their ambition and enthusiasm, and the film is largely seen from the perspective of one such sucked-in character, Henry Burton [Adrian Lester], who becomes Stanton's campaign manager. It's an extremely well-written film, and the performances of Thompson and Travolta, and Kathy Bates as a torrential and formidable campaign force who joins up with the Stantons after years of questionable absence, are a joy to watch.

I'm not going to review the film, though, as such. I'm more interested in the dilemmas raised. I should start with my general view, which will of course soon be qualified, that having sex more often, and with more people, is a Good and Healthy thing.

First qualification, or problem, is that most people don't agree with this statement, or at least with the 'more people' bit. Fidelity and loyalty are viewed as a positive, and Robert Manne amongst others has emphasized this. My own view is that having sex with a variety of people isn't necessarily proof of disloyalty, and that there is a confusion between sex and love, though admittedly the road of promiscuity is a hard road to hoe for a genuinely loving and loyal person, given human jealousies and possessiveness. And to travel that road under the spotlight of a political life is essentially impossible, unfortunately.

While a lot more could be said about the above confusion [about the meaning of sex in the context of human relations], I'll leave much of that to my online fiction which tries to explore many of these issues. Another matter dealt with in Primary Colors is that of sex and power. The high-flying Presidential candidate who takes advantage of a friend's bedazzled daughter, the Governor who has no trouble and no compunction about seducing his secretary, etc. As the film shows, these issues cut more than one way - the secretary may have no compunction about exaggerating a dalliance into a full-blown affair, for the purpose of extorting money or favours. Jack Stanton tries to 'clear his name' via DNA tests and such, but some might feel that this misses the point, which is that Stanton shouldn't use his personal charisma or political status to exploit the vulnerable and naive. On the other hand, there seems to have been enough people willing to turn a blind eye, or even to have been quietly approving of his behaviour, for him to have gotten away with it [sorry, I'm switching my thinking here from Stanton to Clinton, though Stanton too was successful in the Presidential race].

One possible explanation for this is that people are aware [however consciously] of the harm principle, and that the question of the harm caused by a few, or even more than a few, dalliances in the context of a marriage the openness of which is itself an open question, is at the very least difficult to determine. One of the problems for me, I confess, is that the Stantons/Clintons would never admit to their marriage being an open one, if that's what it is, for fear of losing the support of vast numbers of more conservative voters. This is one of the points of the film, of course - how pragmatic are we allowed to be, in order to get elected? If Clinton's 'closed' - and close - marriage is a sham [but note that the pair are still very much together], what about, say, his religion? After all, we all know that, more than in any other country, the USA's leadership aspirants have no option but to be practicing Christians. So is Clinton really a god-fearer? How much is sincere, and how much pretence?

These issues are perennial for all campaigners in all democratic elections, and they come with the territory of representative democracy. You could even say it's the poison at the heart of this system. Is this candidate/incumbent saying what she's saying in order to get into/stay in power, or does she really feel and believe it? Did Howard throw money and resources at the tax payer because he felt they deserved it, or to get re-elected? Were his actions re Aboriginal communities and the abuse of Aboriginal children a matter of sincere conviction or political expediency? Some of these question are much more easy to answer than others.

The Clinton warts-and-all Presidency was something of a victory for flawed, ambitious humanity, though I see the flaws rather differently from most. In the film, someone commits suicide because she has ideals that the Stantons don't live up to - but nobody can be expected to live up to the ideals of others, or even to be aware of them. As it happens, the Stantons are by turns exploitative and compassionate, as we all are. I suppose the best way to judge them is also the most painstaking - to analyse who gets hurt and who benefits, how many and by how much.
It's essentially a never-ending process.

Dragonwyck

Walter Huston, Anne Revere, Gene Tierney and Vincent Price in Dragonwyck, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz. Huston and Price compare suits.

Lately I've been watching films galore. Partly it's been a bonding of sorts with my sixteen-year-old foster child - he's been cajoling me into watching things I'm not particularly interested in. The 'Saw' series of movies, for example, which I'm much more than not particularly interested in. These are dreadful, intellectually dishonest pieces of barbarity, but perhaps useful for teens to watch, to sort out their own understanding of morality in extreme circs. I found them boring, laughable, but also offensive and insulting. Other films I've watched with him, just in the past few days, include Fido, The Butterfly Effect, Pulp Fiction and Stranger than fiction.

I might review at least some of these, but for now I'm going to review a film which I saw as a child, and which I've wanted to see as an adult for I wouldn't like to say how many years. All I remember about it really was that it riveted me, and profoundly scared me, though watching it now, I've no idea why. Over the years I seem to have got it mixed up in my mind with Hitchcock's Rebecca, for I expected a frightening mansion, a dour, skull-faced housekeeper, silhouettes in flames and other gothic histrionics. What I got instead was a solid, absorbing piece, with a subtly sinister character at its centre, played by Vincent Price [before he lost his subtlety].

Based on a novel by Anya Seton, author of popular historicals in the first half of the 20th, Dragonwyck has something of an Austen-like quality [think Northanger Abbey], with its central heroine, Miranda [Gene Tierney] starting out enamoured of the idea of rich rellies and the manor born. Instead she's mired in a puritanically religious farming family [Walter Huston's a real card as her father]. But guess what, her dream comes true, via a mysteriously unlikely letter from a distant, filthily rich rellie, who's not really a rellie at all [think Tess of the D'Urbervilles], and who wants the company of a beautiful innocent like Miranda to assist him in dealing with his daughter and sundry other matters, such as his wife. Eventually she coaxes Dad into letting her go.

Miranda is naturally very much taken with the tall suave and immaculately dressed Nicholas Van Rhyn [Price], as well as his mansion, Dragonwyck, but is aghast at the narcissism, gluttony and valetudinarianism of his wife. Their daughter Katrine is kept at arm's length, and all in all it's a far cry from the homely closeness of Connecticut farm life.

The focus switches for a while to Van Rhyn himself. He's having trouble with his tenant farmers [the film is set in the 1840s], who are rebellious about having to pay tribute and never being able to own the land they farm. Van Rhyn is an inflexible autocrat who insists on his divine rights [even though he has atheist tendencies and mock's Miranda's simple religiosity]. Obviously he's headed for a fall.

He's also increasingly keen to get rid of his odious wife [and increasingly keen on the melodious Miranda], and manages to do so, via some cake spiked with oleander, a plant which he obligingly brings into his wife's bedroom to cheer her up. He has a young doctor staying in the house, who's stunned at the sudden decline of Madam Van Rhyn after he'd diagnosed nothing but a head cold.
The doctor, who sides with Van Rhyn's tenant farmers, presents to Miranda an alternative to the dodgy aristocrat, but she still hasn't cottoned on, and she marries Van Ryn.

Relations begin to founder, of course. Van Rhyn spends more and more time in his tower room [taking unspecified drugs], no doubt plagued by guilt, affected by rumours about his first wife's death, and unable to cope effectively with the rebelliousness of his tenants. Miranda's also hurt by his cynicism re her down-home religion, and by his contempt for the crippled servant she hires [Jessica Tandy in one of her first screen roles]. 'Deformed bodies depress me,' he says. Miranda's offended response is even more depressing - 'You talk as if it's her fault she's a cripple when it's simply God's will.' The typically American connection between atheistic tendencies and amorality is made clearly enough.

Miranda emerges as another element in Van Ryn's life that he can't control, and when the good doctor discovers that he's trying to do away with her as he did his first wife, things unravel pretty quickly. He's finally shot while resisting arrest, asserting his rights as lord of the manor to the end.

Dragonwyck isn't exactly a great film, there's a little too much of the Mills and Boon about it, and the themes of old world v new world, elitism and aristocracy v liberty and democracy, are touched on only lightly. There are other flaws relating to the translating of a novel into film. The doctor at one point tells Miranda he finds he has nothing to say to her, though they got on so well when they first met. This seems a condensation of the novel which doesn't quite make sense on its own. Also the young Katrine, the ostensible reason Miranda first came to Dragonwyck, simply disappears in the second half. Still it's an absorbing piece, the gothic elements of which are more effective for their restraint. The production values, the costuming and so forth, are immaculate, and the whole thing looks great. The print was superb. It was fun reaquainting myself with something I'd never forgotten, and yet had forgotten completely.

There's a useful essay on Mankiewicz's films here.

science works

the remarkable flagellum

I note that in a couple of recent issues of New Scientist they've been having a go - belatedly? - at creationists attempts to undermine evolutionary theory with their two pet objections, irreducible complexity and so-called gaps in the fossil record [which also has a high-falutin moniker I can't currently recall].

The intellectual debate on this matter seems to be over, but a great deal of noise remains of course, and the film Expelled, which I don't think has been released yet even in the US, will add to the static.

For my own sake I'll summarise the objections, via the New Scientist articles. The supposed lack of 'transitional' species 'between' highly distinct species makes a mockery of evolutionary theory, according to the creationists. If they're smart enough, they'll even know that Darwin himself was concerned at this lack. Donald Prothero, author of the March New Scientist article, and of a new book, Evolution: What the fossils say and why it matters, marshals the evidence and the arguments against this objection, pointing to the 'fishibian' record, synapsids [the ancestors of mammals], ceratopsians [horned dinosaurs] and many other 'transitional' forms, from mammals to worms [the term transitional being problematic because it suggests that these were not fully fledged forms in their own right, that they were halfway houses in some sense]. He's pretty conclusive about the richness of the fossil record for all those who don't wish to remain willfully blind to it.

The case of the bacterial flagellum has been claimed as a prime example of designed complexity by creationists, and they attempted to use it to promote their case in Dover, Pennsylvania in 2005. The failure of the creationists in that case, considering the bizarre context of American religious politics, was a great victory for those who respect evidence and reason.

A lot of work has been done recently on the bacterial flagellum, no doubt prompted , at least partly, by the attention devoted to it by the creationists. So what is it? It's a mechanism for moving bacteria about in fluids, and it can be divided into three protein-constructed parts, a basal body, a hook and a filament. The basal body is the key to this mechanism, and it is indeed extraordinarily complex. Embedded in the cell wall, it has been described as a sort of outboard motor for the bacterium. It consists of a series of minuscule rings, with a rotating rod in the centre, attached to a hook...

These manically rotating rods and hooks are driven by the flow of sodium and hydrogen ions. The intricacy of the mechanism has long intrigued biologists, and creationists have latched onto it for their own purposes. However, in the nineties the discovery and analysis of ‘type III secretion systems’ [T3SS] helped in breaking down the mystery. This complex protein system is used in certain bacteria to inject toxins into their hosts. A number of the same proteins are found in the flagellum’s protein export system, and the two systems have subsequently been found to be variants of each other, with probably a common ancestry. It's all about homology - homologies in the bone structure of whales, horses and bats, for example, have led to an understanding of the common ancestry of these apparently unconnected creatures. Homologies in DNA or amino acid sequencing similarly reveal shared descent, and such homologies are regularly being turned up in discoveries that chip away at claims about irreducible complexity.

Analysis continues on the relationship between flagella and their components [there is in fact no one flagellum, there are a number, which differ slightly in detail], and there is much debate about findings - for example, were the flagella a development from the T3SS, or vice versa, or neither. Much of this debate lies beyond my competence to report, but there's no dissension about the fact that gene duplication and diversification are involved. In other words, it's all about evolution. Irreducible complexity can no longer be claimed with regard to these ingenious structures, but the creationists will no doubt find something else to pin their hopes on.

Turning to the more general issue, creationists have nothing testable to offer as an alternative to evolution. God did it, but there is no method, no theory, no direction for research, nothing. Presumably they believe in a return to the fixity-of-species model which proved a dead-end centuries ago. Some seem to be suggesting though, a combination of evolution and fixity. Coherence is a real problem.

There's an interesting discussion of some of these matters here, gathered around the question of whether creationism should be dismissed as total non-science [and non-sense] or critiqued as very bad science. I lean towards the former view. It bears no resemblance to science as currently practiced, it merely tries to ape science-speak and, far less successfully, scientific method, for credibility purposes.

travels from Tibet to Cyprus

random hate-filled scumbags

I have mixed feelings about the current spate of protests over Chinese oppression, but for the most part I think that raising awareness about oppressed minorities - not only Tibetans - is more important than the smooth running of an international sportsfest. In fact it seems highly appropriate to raise these issues in the context of an event which is intended to promote international harmony, for reasons that I would hope are obvious. I’ll spell them out though. A harmony that seeks to keep oppression out of sight and out of mind is a harmony not worth having. It should have been obvious to the Olympic Committee that, in granting the games to China, a state renowned internationally for its cruelty to and oppression of its own minorities, they had provided a golden opportunity to those who have suffered from that state’s cruelties to raise issues of hypocrisy and the reality that belies the Olympic ideal.



So I must say I found the remarks made by one Kevan Gosper, an Australian Olympic official, on these events, to be particularly lamentable. On last night's news he made the claim that most people have probably not even heard of the cause being highlighted by the protesters, as if this was some kind of decisive argument against them. That's to say, oppression that people haven't heard of isn't really oppression at all. What his remark really highlights [or would highlight if it were true] is the woeful ignorance of most people about the crimes committed against minority ethnicities or belief systems by large, closed nations such as China, or Indonesia under Suharto. This may be true, though I suspect Gosper is merely generalising from the position of his own woeful ignorance.

I've read further absurd remarks today from Gosper, claiming that the protesters were 'professional spoilers' who 'take their hate out on whatever the issues are at the time'. I know there are professional protesters out there, usually one or two in a hundred at your average demo, but to brand them all in this way is laughable. Gosper apparently knows what makes all these people tick, and he doesn't think the actual issues they're upset about rate a mention, presumably because he's never given them a moment's thought in his life. Such appalling complacency tips me over to the side of the protesters, though I don't think that assaulting torchbearers is acceptable.

On a completely unrelated issue, I read this the other day in Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons, a novel cum political appraisal of Cyprus in the fifties:

... a village like Amiandos made us catch our breath in pain. It lies against the side of a mountain which has been clumsily raped. The houses, factories and shacks are powdered white as if after a heavy snowfall; mounds of white snow rise in every direction, filling the cool still airs of the mountain with the thin dust of asbestos. Men and women walked about in this moon-landscape, powdered into ghoulish insignificance by the dust. A man with a white wig and white moustache shouted 'Hullo' as we passed.

Durrell wouldn't have known then what we know now, which only makes the passage all the more ghoulish.
Apparently, as with tobacco, asbestos manufacturers are still aggressively pursuing markets in 'developing' countries. Ghoulish indeed.

a brief walk through the labyrinth of sex and love

The other day a couple of people I know had a disagreement. The woman was concerned that the man, aged fifty-one, had an interest in a woman fifteen years his junior. ‘What’s wrong with women closer to your own age?’ she asked.

The man was annoyed at the question. He didn’t like the idea that the woman seemed to be playing this as a moral issue. She seemed to be implying that, the closer the woman was to his own age, the more ‘right’ his feelings would be.

We don’t generally choose the people we love, they choose us. Also, as survey after survey after survey has shown, men prefer young beautiful women, women prefer men of status. This is a general rule, with of course many exceptions. Men and women, then, are equally but differently shallow. Only, of course, it’s not shallow at all, it makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. What attracts men, generally, is women of child-bearing age – and the best years of child-bearing, which isn’t the mid thirties but the early twenties, and the years round about. They are the best bearers of the seed.

Now I know this is controversial stuff and some women will argue that it’s all just a self-serving take on sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, and that we’re more than just animals, that we’re not merely driven by our instincts, and that we don’t see men – at least not all of them – ditching their partners when they hit menopause and chasing after the young and fruitful.

This is a complex and confusing matter, and I’ve already confused it further by treating sexual desire as if it is love. They are in fact two separate things. You can continue to love someone though you no longer feel sexual desire for her, and this happens, for example in marriage and long-term relationships, much more often than people like to admit. Love, to me, is essentially about empathy and identification. Suffering with he who has suffered, delighting in her delight, I mean really feeling it, being bowled over and knocked about by it. The love thing often interferes or clashes with sexual desire – it’s where commitment and loyalty come in. It’s also supported by mythology. The other day, I heard this remark in a film – ‘when I kissed her lips, I realized that I never wanted to kiss any other lips than hers again’. The fact that this referred to a lesbian relationship might have obscured its underlying traditionalist message, the message from Plato’s Symposium as relayed, no doubt facetiously, by Aristophanes: that love is about finding your other half, the Desire and Pursuit of the Whole.

I for one am unconvinced by this mythology, but who hasn’t been beguiled by it? When you kiss another’s lips for the first time, isn’t it sweeter if you somehow believe these lips are the best ever tasted, the most perfectly matched with your own? Love of this kind is an invigorating, if often harrowing, invention.

This mythologizing of the other is all down to hormones, the women’s magazines tell us, and it lasts no more than a few years at most. After that comes a readjustment of expectations, or a break-up. If the latter occurs, both parties will probably be guided in their next choice by those general categories above-mentioned, youth and beauty for the male, social status for the female, and they will quite likely look askance at each others’ facile, shallow choices. Unless of course, they still love each other, in that empathic way I’ve mentioned. But then, why would they have broken up?

To me, the mature option is to recognize that love and sex really are different, and to cut each other a little slack, as the Americans say. To be mature enough to recognize that having sex with another isn’t necessarily a slap in the face, nor a denial of love. It’s simply a recognition that there are no lips we want to kiss to the exclusion of all others, that variety does spice up life.

It’s often a hard road to hoe, what with jealousy and insecurity, not to mention the effort required to entice new sexual partners to your bed. It’s hardly surprising that most of us give up – if we ever travel that road – and settle into complacent monogamy, spiced up now and then by easy-to-hand fantasies from parties, movies or the internet.

So to return to our fifty-one year old single gent and his sexual pursuits and fantasies. Does he really deserve scorn for showing interest in a woman fifteen years his junior rather than five years his junior? Would he be more ‘moral’ to pursue women closer to his own age? If he fell for a woman of twenty-five, would this be obscene? My own view would be that in a world of mature, consenting adults, let people pursue their objects of desire as they will, and let the cards fall as they may. Tears, longings, mixed and missed messages, rebuffs, hope deferred and heartsickness may follow, along with moments of exhilaration and, with a little luck, contented days. Our gentleman may end up getting just what he deserves. Then again, maybe not.

Kissinger and Vietnam

criminal handshake? - Kissinger and Hanoi's Le Duc Tho, January 1973

Tomorrow, supposedly, we’ll be coming out of the biggest heat wave for any Austalian capital city in recorded history [which goes back only 120 years]. Biggest by a long drink, too, today being the fifteenth day with a maximum over 35. Previously, Perth held the record with 10 consecutives 20 years ago. I’ve survived this period – well, haven’t quite survived it yet – sans AC, though I helped Sarah install one from Radio Rentals a few days ago, and have been taking advantage of it just a little, nervously, being semi persona non grata over there.

Not surprisingly it has been an unproductive period, I’m having big trouble with my novel/memoir, it being too unwieldy, too personal, too obviously uncommercial for a publisher, too potentially dangerous [though that’s too strong a word] to people I love. I’m not sure what to do about it.

What do you do when someone you love lets it be known that she despises you? You have to let it go, I think. The Morcheeba song plays in my head: Fear can stop you loving, love can stop your fear. But it’s not always that clear.

So let me focus, for the time being, on Kissinger and Vietnam. I’ve just read a tatty old book, first published in 1973 when Kissinger was still at the height of his power and the Vietnam War was still being prolonged by the Nixon administration, called Kissinger: the uses of power, by David Landau. I was prompted to read it because, well, it was around the house, and I wanted to get some background to claims by some that Kissinger is a war criminal.

Landau’s book is unsympathetic to Kissinger, though far from unreservedly so. I doubt if it would’ve occurred to him at that time to consider Kissinger a criminal, especially as he deals in his book with considerably more hawkish characters, including Nixon himself. Also, as I argued in my piece on Suharto, the idea of bringing heads of state, or top brass, to book for their decisions is a relatively new one. Landau, who confines himself in the book to Kissinger’s involvement in the Vietnam War, contents himself with the conclusion [devastating enough, after all] that Kissinger and Nixon did more to perpetuate that war than anyone else.

Kissinger was a great admirer of the nineteenth century Austrian diplomat, Metternich, and he shared Metternich’s anti-democratic elitism. This elitism seems to have blinded him to considerations about what the Vietnamese people really wanted. In fact he would have doubted if they knew what they wanted, realizing that, for all sorts of reasons, they were more easily captured, in terms of minds and hearts, by the NLF than by the Americans and their European precursors. He was doubtless right in this, but it’s only a short step from having a certain contempt for a people’s ability to choose what is best for them, according to Kissinger’s lights, and treating them as dispensable.

We are moving away, I hope, from the ‘grand schema’, chess-playing politics of the nineteenth century, and its partial revival in the seventies under Kissinger and his ilk. With the growth of education and trade, and the opening of borders, we’re making many more connections well below the heady levels of world diplomacy. Kissinger’s reputation has become something of a victim of this more humane refocusing, and deservedly so. Vietnam was never a threat to the USA, and Kissinger, as much as anyone, must’ve known that its people were much more interested in self-determination and freedom from foreign interference than in chimerical concepts such as communism. It seems that his ambition and love of centre stage led him to conveniently adopt the more rabid anti-communism of others in the Nixon administration [many of whom were suspicious of his ‘dovishness’], which allowed him to play the interfering game on the world’s stage to his heart’s content – at a massive human cost.

Landau’s book, though full of an insider’s insights, doesn’t touch on Chile, East Timor or other hotspots and disasters mentioned on such anti-Kissinger sites as this one. Neither does he claim Kissinger as the architect of the Cambodia bombing, as seems to be commonplace among Kissinger detractors now. It may be that further information has come to light, I don’t know. It’s an important matter, for if it’s true that around a million civilians of Cambodia and Laos were killed in those raids, as is claimed on the previously linked site, then that is a crime for which the decision-makers should be held responsible. Claims that the government of Cambodia permitted the bombing are hardly exculpatory.

Is Kissinger a criminal? I honestly don’t know. The real problem is that the evidence will never get to be tested in an international court, because the USA recognizes no international jurisdiction over its citizens.

It should be taken as a given that the foreign policies of all nations are monumentally self-serving. The word ‘monumentally’ provides essential emphasis. This is a fact for the most powerful and the least powerful nations on Earth. However, the most powerful countries inevitably wreak most havoc in the global arena. Given this fact, international policing and legal institutions are essential to safeguard small nations from the depradations of stronger ones. The USA has placed itself above the law in this regard – a situation which is as unacceptable as would have been a monarch proclaiming the divine right of kings in the enlightenment era. As unacceptable as a police force, with almost unlimited powers, answerable to no higher authority beyond itself.

This untenable situation needs first to be fixed, otherwise all the evidence in the world will amount to very little.

still here

Lloyd Rees - a lovely program on his work on the ABC recently - intelligence, sensibility, self-discipline and self-belief

It looks as if I've stopped blogging, which I didn't entirely intend to do. I've been working on a novel, since suffering a traumatic experience at the new year. Much of the rest of the time has been spent hiding under the bedclothes and avoiding various responsibilities. I'm a little better now, but I'll post sparingly. In fact I'm only posting today because I've had a temporary blockage with the novel [which isn't really a novel, but I don't know what else to call it].

I'm hoping too that I can bring myself to visit other blogs. I need more personal contacts, especially new ones.

Suharto

The recent death of the former dictator of Indonesia, Suharto [his single name, like that of Sukarno, is a Javanese trait] has brought tributes and obeisances from Australian political leaders past and present. Paul Keating was happy to describe the leader with whom he had such cordial relations as ‘quite shy and retiring…’. One can’t resist the urge to finish the sentence, ‘… for a mass-murderer.’

It shouldn’t be left to politicians to have the final say on the military leader who presided over Indonesia for over thirty years. That should be left to more disinterested historians, who will no doubt base their accounts partly on evidence from the families of Suharto’s innumerable innocent victims. The broad facts about the general are well enough known. While establishing himself in power in the mid-sixties, with the support of the USA, he killed up to a million fellow Indonesians under the guise of an anti-communist purge, as well as killing, and denying the rights to, vast numbers of ethnically Chinese Indonesians, for purely realpolitik reasons. He was also responsible for the deaths of 200,000 East Timorese in the invasion of 1975 – a third of the population. This has been described as the worst case of genocide, per head of population, since the Holocaust. Independence-minded populations in West Papua, in Aceh and in Ambon province suffered greatly under Suharto’s repressive policies, which included resettling Indonesians into those regions in abortive attempts to dilute the will of the native people.

Given such a record, any disinterested observer must wonder at the apparent lack of international will to bring such an obvious criminal to justice. Attempts to do so seem to have been as feeble as Suharto’s own health was in the years after his enforced retirement. Many explanations, though, can be cited. One of the more curious has been the view, popular about ten or fifteen years ago amongst some Western thinkers, that ‘Asian values’ are fundamentally different to Western ones. According to this view, Asians are not particularly in tune with human rights, an idea that has developed out of the increasingly individual-oriented West. Authoritarianism, in which order and discipline take precedence over individual freedom, is more natural to that part of the world, presumably because it has almost invariably been the practice. The view was probably first promoted by Western relativists, but unsurprisingly, advocates and practitioners of authoritarian government, such as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, were happy to concur with and develop the idea, albeit in a simplistic and self-serving way.

Such arguments tend to forget that individual liberty, and its concomitant, democracy, are recent Western developments – and very happy ones, both for our economic and our emotional well-being. The sheer brutality of Suharto’s dictatorship serves to remind us that the benefits of authoritarian rule can come at enormous cost to those of the wrong ethnicity or political persuasion. No arguments for Asian values could possibly justify these costs.

However, the principle reason that Suharto wasn’t brought to justice has to do with geopolitical realities. Unlike Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, who presided over relatively small nations which could be attacked or invaded with few consequences for the attacking or invading nations [or so they might convince themselves], Suharto had made himself master of a nation of near 200 million people, a nation of great diversity and unpredictability where perceived threats to its sovereignty might arise. As the region’s strong man, achieving stability through force rather than inclusivity, openness and balance, he naturally forged strong allegiances as well as making many enemies. Though he didn’t go out of his way to create a cult of personality around himself, as did Saddam and successive North Korean leaders, nevertheless he did have a cult-like, untouchable air. There was very little chance that his successors would risk handing him over to international authorities. Further, a trial involving Suharto would necessarily implicate those who materially supported and encouraged his regime, especially in the early, uncertain days.

It’s also worth remembering, for those of us impatient to see bigger fish being brought to book by international tribunals, that the terms crime against humanity and genocide were unheard of before the forties, only a generation before Suharto embarked on his first killing spree. International tribunals are a very new thing, and still – scandalously – unsupported by the world’s greatest military power.

It’s therefore understandable that the focus against Suharto has been less on his tendency toward mass-slaughter than on his tendency to enrich himself and his family while in office. He embezzled more money than any other leader in history, but his own ill-health, and lawyers’ claims about it, have allowed him to cheat justice on that score too. Currently his children, who must be feeling the heat now that their benefactor is gone, are asking the religious and political authorities to forgive and no doubt forget these financial crimes. However, in order to discourage such behaviour in the future, in Indonesia and elsewhere, it’s imperative that justice be pursued.

on god, Einstein, religion and world peace: get it all here

My favourite Christmas present was the one I bought myself, a reasonable brick of a tome, recently released, called The Portable Atheist, edited by Hitchens, a reader presented chronologically.

Lucretius' De Rerum Natura starts it off. I first read this work, or a part of it, many years ago in my vie boheme. I was at a friend's party and ended up staying the night, in a sleeping bag. I was a little drunk, but energised, and I raided his bookshelves and settled on Lucretius. Of course I'd never read anything like it, an epic poem in rhyming stanzas [in translation], treating of the essential nature of the universe, arguing that all matter consisted of atoms, and spurning all superstition and religious dogma. I was blown away, and stayed up reading it till dawn. Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?

I'm already about a third of the way through, and there are contributions from many brave souls, some from the height of religious persecution in Europe, like Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes, whose 'free-thinking' endangered his life on a few occasions. Hume's essay on miracles is here, though it's not so impressive now as when I first read it, and some nineteenth century heavies like Shelley [expelled from Oxford for this particular essay - at least the consequences of speaking were becoming gradually less grim], J S Mill, and Leslie Stephen being very serious and comprehensive. Karl Marx waxes more or less incomprehensible [from his Hegel-shadowed years]. H L Mencken produces an impressive list of dead gods who once held Ozymandias-like sway.

Perhaps the most impressive contribution, and hopefully not just because it's the last one read, comes from Einstein. Not an essay, but a collection of his pronouncements and quotes from letters on the issue from his last years, presumably gathered by editor Hitchens. They're often repetitive but essentially consistent. They're a reminder that Einstein, in his last years, was revered as a kind of seer, much like Mandela today. I think he had a similar personality, a generally benign disposition but with an underlying fierce concern about the state of humanity, about truth and fairness, and a willingness to speak out on occasions, making him the target of many a well-meaning focus group. Much argument has been raised about the nature of Einstein's 'religiosity' but I think his own pronouncements settle the issue [leaving aside the possibility of selectivity and suppression from the editor]. Einstein had no use for a personal god, one who intervened in human affairs and answered prayer. He felt that such a construction was naive and self-serving. He described himself as a 'religious unbeliever', awed by the natural world and its laws, of which he felt we had a far from perfect understanding. He several times cited the pantheistic 'god' of Spinoza, a god identical with nature, with no transcendental - and certainly no anthropomorphic - features.

I'm of course not doing justice to too many of these thinkers with these perfunctory remarks but I've really enjoyed spending time with them over the last few days. Some lost their face slowly and with great reluctance, others were strictly educated into atheism, and others - and I put myself into this group - 'have been so made that they cannot believe' [Pascal's words]. All of them I see as fore-runners, pioneers, like the early feminists, chipping away at the power of religion over people's minds, helping to loosen its grip over educated people, finger by finger. May it never be allowed to rise again, especially not to cast its pall over everyday life.

I note that the Pope, [the Goddess bless him] has recently presented a Christmas day message, arguing inter alia that abortion and same-sex marriage [in other words any legitimisation of homosexuality] are as much a threat to world peace as the usual suspects, and that the nuclear family is our greatest bulwark against violence and instability. Obviously he hasn't heard of the bonobo. It's my contention that intolerance and bigotry are a much greater threat to world peace, and the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, with its shocking history as well as its current pronouncements, is the greatest promoter of those tendencies in the west. I chafe at the continued existence of such a grotesque institution, and its my fervent hope that it won't survive this century. Interestingly, Einstein also had something to say about their shenanigans:

I am convinced that some political and social activities of the Catholic organisations are detrimental and even dangerous for the community as a whole, here and everywhere. I mention here only the fight against birth control at a time when overpopulation in various countries has become a serious threat to the health of people and a grave obstacle to any attempt to organise peace on this planet.

A retrospective hit, indeed.

bring out that inner bonobo

les be friends, or how to avoid stress

Human sexuality, in the developed west, is tending towards bonoboism, me likes to think [actually it's far more a hope than a thought].

Bonobos are a wonder. According to primatologist and psychologist Frans de Waal, who's made a study of them, they might better have been named Pan satyrus rather than P paniscus [the diminutive one], because of their considerable predilection for sexual activity [meaning they love to fuck, with whoever, whenever, however]. As you might expect, I can't wait to write about this, but I'll get the less stimulating part of their story out of the way first.
Bonobos, along with their larger cousins, the chimps, are our closest living relatives, but bonobos are very different from chimps. For starters there are far fewer of them, and their habitat is very confined, and becoming more so with human encroachment. They inhabit an area south of the Zaire River, and number only a few thousand, falling rapidly. They were only identified in the late twenties, and classified as a new species in the early thirties. The chimp and bonobo lines separated not so long ago, with the chimps moving on to a wider, drier savannah-like habitat.

Although originally described as pygmy chimpanzees, they’re no smaller than the smallest sub-species of chimp, about 45 kgs for males, and 33kgs for females. De Waal, perhaps with some bias, describes them as more ‘stylish’ or gracile in their movements than chimps [they do in fact have proportionally longer legs than other apes], and they have flatter faces, higher foreheads, and a distinctive hair-style, parted in the middle. Their diet is similar to that of chimps, but with less meat. They’re described as very sensitive, with very expressive eyes. They’re also less aggressive, and this relates, inter alia, to their social structure.

And their social structure brings me, not before time, to sex.

Okay, I exaggerated when I say they fuck all the time, but the truth is even more interesting. They use sex – and I don’t mean fucking as in full penetrative hetero-sex – as a way of bonding and curbing aggression. And because the closest bonding occurs between females, female-female sexual activity, especially in the form of ‘genito-genital rubbing’, is the most common type.

Here’s the social set-up. As with chimps, young bonobo females move away from ‘home’ to another mating group, whereas the males stay forever within the home group. But unlike their cousins, the adolescent females gradually develop close bonds, facilitated by sexual activity, with senior females of their new group. This allows them to band together to keep any larger, would-be aggressive males in check. In fact, it has essentially allowed them to become the dominant sex, spite of sexual dimorphism. Sisterhood is powerful. One reason for this sort of alliance, which male bonobos don’t seem to engage in, may be to prevent infanticide, a common practice among other species, including chimps.

It’s not just a matter of ganging up though. They also use sex to soothe the savage beast [male or female] – and for many other reasons. In fact, I’ve just found a fabulous blog, written by an Oz researcher in the Congo, who’s discovering almost more than she can handle about bonobo [and young chimp] sexual behaviour as we speak. It’s so full of useful and up to date info as to more or less render this post redundant. So I’m going to quit this post and start reading her blog – and so should you, dear reader.

I’ll just finish though by returning to my first line. It would be nice to think we’re becoming more like bonobos, make love not war and all, but my sense of the possibility comes from the increasing power of women in western society. Young women are more sexually confident, and even sexually exploitative than they’ve ever been before, and they’re also engaging in female-female sex play like never before. They’ve taken to hunting in packs, which have provided them with the security to go further than they would normally go. So-called ‘raunch culture’, female-driven, has provided women with a new sexual empowerment, and I’m not sure that I agree with feminist critics who claim that it’s just another form of enslavement [surely raunch culture is emphatically not about stripping for your man]. Sexual empowerment is only one form of empowerment certainly, but it’s far from an insignificant one, for sexuality is always going to be central, and if you can gain control of the sexual agenda, it’s likely everything else can fall to your hands as well. Could this be the real sexual revolution? All I can do is echo an earlier enthusiast. Vive le bonobo! I’d like to be one.

our ancestors

the earliest discovered human portait

Okay, it's time to get cracking on homo sapiens, our nearest and dearest, and our ancestors, as I recently promised myself.

First, we're primates. There are over 230 living primate species divided among 13 families. Most primates are arboreal, but a few species such as our own are described as terrestrial. I'm going to be using all sorts of nomenclature here to try to make connections between families, suborders and the like [for example, I’ve only just heard of cladistics], and much of this stuff is contested, so I should say at the outset that this is all provisional. Humans belong to the family Hominidae in the suborder Haplorrhini. At one time, humans were described as the only hominids, but more recent genetic and molecular research has placed chimps, gorillas and orang-utangs in the same family [though there's still some dispute re the latter. As to the rare and endangered bonobo [Pan paniscus], my favourite, it's our closest living relative along with the chimpanzee [Pan troglodytes], sharing some 98.4% of our DNA [though that figure, long quoted, belies the complexity of the differences between our genetic material and that of the Pan species, as revealed through the chimpanzee genome project]. The common chimpanzee and the bonobo, also known as the pygmy chimpanzee, are the only two species of the genus Pan, though there are a number of subspecies of chimps. I'm very much tempted to dwell on the bonobo, but I'll save it for another post. Anyway, in spite of differences, some authorities claim that bonobos, chimps and humans should all be classified within the genus Homo. Others suggest that humans should be reclassified as Pan sapiens, but none of this seems likely to happen in the foreseeable.

To quote from Wikipedia [which I’m pretty confident is reliable in this instance]:

Recent DNA evidence suggests the Bonobo and Common Chimpanzee species effectively separated from each other less than one million years ago. The chimpanzee line split from the last common ancestor with the Human approximately four to six million years ago. Because no species other than Homo sapiens has survived from the human line of that branching, both Pan species are the closest living relatives of humans, and cladistically exactly equally close to humans.

Now to the Homo genus. This is complicated. The Homo genus belongs to the sub-tribe Hominina, and is the only extant genus in that subtribe, one of two subtribes under the tribe Hominini. The other subtribe is Panina, which includes the chimps, but this classification is recent and not entirely accepted. In any case, other members of the Homo genus, such as Homo habilis, Homo ergaster [and/or Homo erectus] and Homo neanderthalensis, are all extinct. Interestingly, no remains have yet been identified of any extinct species of the closely related Pan genus.

It’s obviously difficult to tease out the relations between species and subgroups here, and to date them and determine patterns of movement and development. The fossil record, as everyone knows, is scant and heavily contested, as the ongoing debate about ‘Homo floresiensis’ has shown. The current orthodoxy, in any case, seems to be that Homo habilis is the earliest known member of our genus, and that the species flourished in Africa some two million years ago. Homo habilis seems to have been contemporaneous with the Australopithicines [such as A robusta and A boisei], an extinct genus, possibly the first bi-pedal genus, but not directly related to ourselves, though part of the Hominid family.

Homo erectus seems to have first emerged about 2 million years ago [thus making it contemporaneous with H habilis], and survived till about 400,000 years ago. Its brain size was some 55% larger than H Habilis, and it's believed to have been the first human species to have migrated out of Africa into colder regions. Sexual dimorphism [the size difference between the sexes within a species] became less pronounced over time, and some pundits have argued that these changes represent significant social and behavioural changes. All conjectural, however. The date of the migration out of Africa is also a subject of much dispute. Homo erectus was also contemporaneous with the later 'robust' Australopithicines.

The transition from H erectus to Homo sapiens is as highly contested as all the other transitions. Individual fossils have proved difficult to classify between late H erectus, H sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis. Neanderthals cloud the picture even further, and some classify them as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis [which explains why we are sometimes classified as Homo sapiens sapiens].

The so-called Cro-Magnon man, discovered in France and dating to 28,000 years ago, was an early representative of Homo sapiens sapiens outside of Africa. The earliest known example of H sapiens sapiens is 130,000 years old, and was found in East Africa.

The sites of discovery of H s sapiens show an increasingly accelerated development in tool-making and cultural artefacts. The Lascaux caves date from 15000 to 17000 years ago, and provide evidence of complex ritual and hunting practices, as well as artistic skills. The image accompanying this post is 26,000 years old, and is the oldest 'naturalistic' human portrait yet discovered. More stylised depictions date back to at least 32,000 years ago.

It's an almost impossibly complex story. and one worth updating continually in the light of new research, new dating techniques and new hypotheses. At least I have slightly more of a handle on it than I did before starting this post, which is all I could've hoped for.

Taylor's critique of secularism

Charles Taylor, winner of this year's Templeton Prize

I read here yesterday that Charles Taylor is a Roman Catholic.
I read some of Taylor's essays at uni. He wrote critiques of social theory, and I was particularly taken with his analysis of Foucault. His style had all the best of Anglo-American clarity, infused with a sort of gentleness and patience which was very becalming. I wasn't myself inclined to be so generous with Foucault. I read other essays of his, and was generally impressed. I know that he's something of a Hegel scholar, which in itself would require almost supernatural patience, as well as a certain kind of mind, one far removed from my own.
So, on hearing that he's RC, I'm frankly gobsmacked. I've always been tempted to claim that the term Roman Catholic thinker is oxymoronic, pace the Jesuits and their ilk. I would amend that, though, to RC thinkers about religion. Taylor didn't mention religion in the essays I read, but now he has written a lengthy book called A Secular Age, in which he apparently writes approvingly of the religious mindset while stringently avoiding the issue of God as broached by Dawkins and others. This is hardly surprising, given that as a catholic he must not only believe in a god but in that God, the mass murderer and moral monstrosity later reshaped by Aquinas et al as the sum of all perfections, etc. Presumably he also believes in the trinity, the virgin birth, the resurrection and transubstantiation. He may also believe in the infallibility of the pope. Then again, he might be an unorthodox catholic with dissenting views on any or all of these doctrines. I suspect that A Secular Age, in spite of its 874 pages, will answer none of these questions.

The NYT review of the book says this:

[Taylor] argues for “the ‘deconstruction’ of the death of God view” proclaimed by Nietzsche. To see secularization as simply the separation of church and state, the alienation of truth from power, and the rise of skepticism and worldliness, he writes, is to miss the deeper and more enduring residues of religion and the spiritual life, the true “bulwarks of belief” that in his view have hardly eroded. Taylor argues against the “subtraction stories” of modernity, in which religious belief and other “confining horizons” are “sloughed off,” leaving the mind without faith or piety. Instead, he argues, “Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.” Even the old distinction between the sacred and the profane has taken on new meaning. Instead of disappearing, God is now “sanctifying us everywhere,” including “in ordinary life, our work, in marriage, and so on.”

Now, what does all this actually mean? It's not quite as murky as theology, but it's getting there.
Firstly, the Nietzschean proclamation of the death of God is problematic. He presumably meant the death of God as concept, but his rhetoric lays itself open to a type of concrete thinking - and of course Nietzsche played on this. Not only does it paradoxically invoke the death of an immortal, but it plays into the concepts of death and immortality that are part and parcel of all religions - ancestor spirits, transfiguration, reincarnation etc. The 'deconstruction' of the idea makes me shudder, so I think I'll just ignore it.

The key sentence in the above para is, to me, the second one. To see secularization as simply the separation of church and state, the alienation of truth from power, and the rise of skepticism and worldliness, he writes, is to miss the deeper and more enduring residues of religion and the spiritual life, the true “bulwarks of belief” that in his view have hardly eroded.

It's possibly true that 'the bulwarks of belief' haven't faded that much, though those places where they have been most eclipsed have been those most affected by Enlightenment thought. The separation of church and state in those countries, and its spread around the globe, is a very positive phenomenon, as is the 'alienation of truth from power', most particularly the waning power of the Catholic church. Skepticism, too, is a healthy thing [I would say that, but note: nothing in excess], and worldliness has always been a pretty useful survival strategy. Just what the deeper residues of religion are, exactly, is unknown to me, as I'm one of the growing number of people in the West who has no need for religion or spirituality as commonly defined [or, more often, not defined]. That a great many people do profess some kind of 'faith' or adherence to a spiritual life is an interesting and important phenomenon, and one which requires investigation. A number of people are investigating the phenomenon, though these investigations are still in their infancy and a great deal more work needs to be done.

From the point of view of science, religious belief is indeed a confining horizon. Early scientists had to do battle with the confining belief that the Earth must be the centre of the universe, then there was the confining belief that humans were 'special', made in God's image, with 'dominion over the Earth'. Even liberal believers are still contending that the universe must be purposeful, and that the ultimate purpose must be the complexity of consciousness [as exhibited, of course, in homo sapiens]. It seems that this is what faith and piety is reduced to among some liberal theologians, a self-serving view about humanity's centrality in the scheme of things, for which we must thank our supernatural 'father'.

Taylor seems to have been rather more evasive about these terms, which is hardly more satisfactory. In any case, I would challenge his assertion that Western modernity [a too-vague term] is about new constructions of self-understanding, unrelated to 'perennial features of human life'. What are these perennial features? Presumably he's again referring to religious belief and its related rituals. We cannot as yet know how perennial these are [or indeed how perennial are any features in the constant flow of evolving human life and behaviour], but by constructions of self-understanding I suspect he means modern science, an impressive construction indeed. Science has been so phenomenally successful in such a short time-span, that to see it as atypical of or somehow contrary to the abiding concerns of humanity is perhaps forgivable, especially as it has so revolutionised our understanding of ourselves as a species in a mere 150 years. The question is, are these understandings mere ephemeral constructions? I doubt it, and I think the methods by which we arrived at those understandings will bring us many more surprises and revolutions in the years to come.

That'll do for now. I might look further into this review later. I think Taylor will have many interesting things to say in his book, but evading the particularities of religious belief looks like a bit of a problem for him.

The Courtier's Reply, and some old ground

Dawkins and Myers

A while ago, Terry Eagleton was on Late Night Live. I missed it, and am reluctant to listen via audio on demand, as his thinking simply annoys me and I doubt he has much to add to his LRB attack on Dawkins, which I responded to here, especially regarding his claims about the need for a critic to have theological knowledge, and here, regarding his claims against science. I think I dealt with the theological issue quite effectively, but rather long-windedly, and I've since discovered, via P Z Myers, a more summary and clever response, which captures perfectly my dismay over theological speculation.

Myers has called it the Courtier's Reply, and it has caught on wonderfully. It comes from the famous fable, The Emperor's New Clothes, and consists of cutting through all the learned disquisitions on the Emperor's embroidered pantaloons and silken hat and the fashions they relate to, to point out that there actually are no clothes to speak of. Theology, learned and ingenious though it often is, has this massive assumption at its heart, an assumption that something clearly exists that those outside of it just don't see. No amount of theological study will ever convince me, or Dawkins or Dennett or Myers or Rosenhouse, etc, that these supernatural entities at the heart of theology actually exist. Theology takes these entities for granted, so it's hard to see, from our perspective, that theology has anything interesting to say to us.

As to Eagleton’s attack on science and the concept of progress, which he blends with a very personal attack on Dawkins as a ‘bourgeois’, I wish I’d read Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday before responding. In it he quotes the Nobel Prize winning immunologist Peter Medawar ‘To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.’ Eagleton constantly confuses scientific discovery and technological development with the uses to which it has been put. Thus he argues that science might well annihilate us all. I think if the human species is self-annihilated it will likely be out of arrogance, carelessness, bigotry or ideological blindness, all of them human traits since the emergence of homo sapiens. Science and technology loom much larger than they ever did before, and they will continue to loom ever larger in the future, their creative and destructive capacities always barely within our grasp and control. Exciting isn’t it?

I’m a bit behind the times, but The God Delusion has of course generated more substantial criticisms than those of Eagleton, including this one by H Allen Orr, well critiqued by Rosenhouse here. Many of the comments are worth noting too. There’s a rather frustrating exchange between Dennett and Orr here.

wandering in the wilderness

the mighty, multifaceted Torrens

I'm onto the religion thing again, and it's not so much that I'm obsessed but that I'm almost wanting to find something to obsess over, or at least to find a subject to dedicate myself to, to anchor my flighty craft.

So, perversely, I'll avoid referring to it awhile. The other day I took Courtney out, down to the river, to give Sarah a break. Courtney was in love with the idea. Pic-a-nic basket, blanket, cut lunch, fruit and cordial. It was sharply hot. 'Remember when we went to the river and me and Isabelle climbed the rocks in the water and it was really dangerous, let's go there again...'
I remembered it, mainly as she'd often reminded me and I'd wondered at how such a seemingly paltry occasion - we'd stopped for o