Archive for the ‘religion’ Category
what can we learn from religion?
Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the Being of a God. Promises, Covenants and Oaths, which are the Bonds of Humane Society, can have no hold upon an Atheist.
John Locke, ‘A letter concerning toleration’, 1689
In my last post I referred to some aspects of religious belief that I think are worth focusing on if we want to get past the rational/irrational, or even the true/false debates. Alain de Botton created quite a stir recently when he claimed that arguments about the truth/falsity of religion were boring and without much value – or something like that. Typically, I both agree and disagree. There are essential empirical questions at stake, as I argued in my critique of Stephen Jay Gould here, but they’re hardly key to getting a handle on religion’s enormous popularity and endurance. That requires a deeper understanding of the psychological underpinnings of religious belief.
First, I’ve already written of the fact that, for all very young children, adults are supernatural beings. They’ve yet to learn about human mortality and limitations. They certainly learn quickly about their own pain and discomfort, but it comes as a shock when they first observe that all these competent, powerful, protective giants can be hurt, angry and frustrated just like them. These findings should hardly surprise us – children at this stage are entirely dependent on adults for their survival. These adults, they observe, can throw them up in the air and hopefully catch them, they can walk across a room in three seconds flat, they can transport them by car or plane to a completely different world, they’re not afraid of anything, and they miraculously provide all sustenance and succour.
While non-believers mostly understand such basic childhood beliefs, many are highly impatient of those who haven’t, at an appropriate age, abandoned this ‘theory of mind’ and replaced it with a more rational or sophisticated scientific worldview. The response of many psychologists in the field would be that, yes, we do change, but the idea of the supernatural, of transcending the usual limitations, has a long, lingering effect. The popularity of fairies, Harry Potter and Spiderman, which take us through early childhood into adolescence and beyond, attests to this. It’s worth noting that the nerdiest atheists are avid Trekkies and Whovians.
But none of this is really disturbing or unhealthy in the way that religious belief seems to be in the eyes of many non-believers – such as myself. The world’s most secular polities – in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, and in many European countries, are also the most law-abiding, secure and contented, as countless surveys show. As a regular dipper into history, I can’t help but note that social life in god-obsessed pre-Enlightenment Europe was far more volatile, cruel and corrupt than it is today in the era of democracy, human rights and secularism. Locke’s remarks above, have been throughly refuted by modern experience – though I suspect this is due to having a more regularised legal framework and a functioning police force than to the greater moral virtue of non-believers.
So for many of us, the point is not to understand religion, but to change it. Or rather, to neutralise it by understanding it and then applying that understanding within a more secular framework. For example, one of the themes of the religious is that you can’t be good without god x, y or z. Atheists rarely concede that theists might have a point here. The stock response is a personal one ‘I don’t need a supernatural fantasy-figure to frighten me into being good, I’m good because I have respect for others and for my environment’, etc. Psychological study, however, tells us a different story.
The Lebanese-born social psychologist Ara Norenzayan, at the University of British Columbia, points out that many of the gods of small societies have little interest in morality. Instead, ‘being good’ in these small societies is enforced by their very size, and their inescapability. Kin altruism and reciprocity, being the subject of gossip, the fear of ostracism, these are what keep society members on the right track. As numbers increase, though, a sense of anonymity engenders a greater tendency towards cheating and self-serving behaviours. Studies show that even wearing dark glasses, like the Tontons Macoutes, makes it easier to engage in anti-social behaviour. People behave much better when watched, by an audience, by a camera, and even by a large drawing of an eye in the corner of a shop.
The idea that non-believers can be ‘tricked’ into behaving better by the picture of an eye watching them should make us think again, not about gods, but about being watched. And about how we still over-determine for agency in our thinking. Civil libertarians get their backs up about CC-TV cameras on every street corner, but there’s no doubt they’ve been a success in catching robbers and muggers and king-hitters in the act, or just before or after. Even those of us with no urge to steal or who, like me, have left that urge behind long ago, tend to notice when a shop does or doesn’t feature an electronic scanning device, and if they’re like me they’ll wonder about the shop’s vulnerability or otherwise, and the trustworthiness or desperation of the customers around them. As to the painted eye, I presume it doesn’t have the deterrent effect of cameras and scanners, but the fact that it works at all should make us think again about our basic beliefs. Or does it only work on the religious?
That was a joke.
So how do more secular societies utilise the idea that someone knowing if you’ve been bad or good makes for a more moral, or at least law-abiding society? Well, it appears from the statistics that either they’ve already done so, or they’ve found other ways of being good. I suspect it’s been a complex mix of substitute gods, comprehensive education and community expectations. Large scale society has naturally subdivided into smaller groups based on family, business, sport, academic or professional interest and so on, so the age-old stabilisers of kinship, reciprocity and reputation within the group are still there, and these are bolstered by a greater set of ‘watched’ networks. Trade and travel, international relations, the internet, all of these things are always in process of being regulated to reflect community concepts of fairness. We are our own Big Brother (another supernatural agent). Modern liberal education teaches kids from an early age about human rights and environmental responsibility, so much so that they’re often happy to lecture their parents about it. The Freudian concept of the superego is a kind of internalised supernatural parental figure, finger-wagging at us during our weaker moments. The declaration of human rights, accepted by most countries today, though criticised as artificial and without teeth, surely presents a better framework for moral behaviour in the modern world than the often obscure and contradictory stories and proverbs found in the Bible and other religious texts. In short, there are many ways we’ve worked out for behaving well and generally flourishing in a secular society.
So I’m basically saying there isn’t much we can learn from religion, with respect to moral policing, that we haven’t learned already. But what about community and social bonding? In the USA and in other highly religious societies, the populace seems to be very united in its religion – especially against the irreligious. Some non-believers are concerned to replicate religion’s success in this area, and I’ve heard that there’s an atheist church, or I think they call it an atheist assembly – meeting on Sunday – somewhere in my area. I’m not particularly inclined to attend. Non-believers don’t necessarily have much in common apart from a lack of interest in religion, and I’m wary of in-group thinking anyway. I’m wary of just the kind of bonding above-mentioned, a bonding that might depend upon mutual congratulations and mocking or belittling, or despising, believers.
Non-believers are of course no less community-minded than the religious. Business, sporting, scientific and small-town communities, these attract us as social animals regardless of our views on the supernatural, and I don’t think we need a top-down ‘alternative’ to religious congregations or community spirit as advocated by de Botton.
Many of the religious point out that they’re more involved in charitable works than selfish unbelievers. Where are the atheist alternatives to Centacare and Anglicare, the welfare and social services arms of the Catholic and Anglican denominations? But these organisations have built up their considerable infrastructure and expertise under extremely favourable tax circumstances which have been a part of Australia’s religious history for a couple of centuries, so they’re always more favourably placed to win government and other contracts for social and educational services. I’ve experienced personally the frustrations of humanist organisations trying to attain the same tax-exempt status for charitable purposes. They’re not given a look-in. Nevertheless there are many powerful and effective NGOs such as Oxfam and MSF, and important human rights bodies like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, whose impetus comes directly from the secular human rights movement.
I would also argue, as a former employee of Centacare (as an educator) and of Anglicare (as a foster-carer) that one result of their having cornered so much of the education and social services market is that they’ve become more secularised. They no longer require their workers to share their supernatural beliefs, and this has enabled them to reach a wider market which they’ve been able to expand largely by downplaying or eliminating the proselytising. I’ve never heard any god-talk from Centacare or Anglicare employers, and this would surely not have been the case fifty years ago. It’s the same in Catholic schools I suspect, with so many non-Catholics sending their kids there due to doubts about under-funded state schools.
This is all to the good, as too-exclusive Christian or religious communities – as well as non-religious communities – lead to us-them problems. We need to be secure in our position on the supernatural without being dismissive.
So, what in the end do we have to learn from religion? My answer, frankly, is nothing much. We have far more to learn from history and from clear-minded examination of the evidence we uncover about ourselves and our fellow organisms in this shared biosphere.
is belief in god irrational? – that is not the question
forget them – read this!
Debates between theists and atheists have become commonplace over the past few years, for better or worse, and the topic has often been vague enough to allow the protagonists plenty of leeway to espouse their views. True or false, rational or irrational, these are the oppositional terms most often used. These debates are often quite arid, with both parties firing from fixed positions and very carefully concealing from observers any palpable hits they’ve received from the other side. Whether they’ve contributed to the continued rise of the nones is hard to say.
I heard another one recently, bearing the title Is belief in God irrational? It was hosted on the Reasonable Doubts podcast, one that I recommend to those interested in the claims of Christianity in particular, as these ‘doubtcasters’ know their Bible pretty well and are well up on Christian politics, particularly in the US. The debaters were Chris Hallquist (atheist) and Randal Rauser (theist), and it was pretty hard to listen to at times, with much squabbling and point-scoring over the definition of rationality, and obscure issues of epistemology. I found the theist in particular to be shrill and often quite unpleasant in his faux-contempt for the other side, but then I’m probably biased.
I found myself, as I very often do, arguing or speculating my way through the topic from a very different standpoint, and here are my always provisional thoughts.
Let me begin by more or less rejecting two of the terms of the debate, ‘God’ and ‘irrational’. I’m not particularly interested in God, that’s to say the Judeo-Christian god, and I strongly object to designating that particular amalgam of Canaanite, Ugaritic and other Semitic deities as capital G God, as if one can, through a piece of semantic legerdemain, magick away the thousands of other deities that people have worshipped and adhered to over the centuries. It’s as if the Apple company chose to name their next Ipad ‘Tablet’, thereby rendering irrelevant all the other tablets produced by competing companies. Of course we have marketing regulations that prevent that sort of manipulation, but not so in religion.
So I will refer henceforth to gods, or supernatural entities and supernatural agency, with all their various and sometimes contradictory qualities, rather than to God, as defined by Aquinas and others. It is supernatural agency of any kind that I call into question.
More important for me, though, is the question of rationality. I’m not a philosopher, but I’ve certainly dipped into philosophy many times over the past 40 years or so, and I’ve even been obsessed with it at times. And rationalism has long been a major theme of philosophers, but I’ve never found a satisfactory way to define it. In the context of this debate, I would prefer the term ‘reasonable’ to ‘rational’. Being reasonable has a more sociable quality to it, it lacks the hard edge of rationality. So, for my purposes I’ll re-jig the topic to – Is belief in supernatural entities reasonable?
But I want to say more about rationality, to illustrate my difficulties with the term. Hume famously or perhaps notoriously wrote that reason can never be more than the slave of the emotions. This raises the question – what are these emotions that have such primacy and why are they so dominant? I have no doubt that a modern-day Hume – and Hume was always interested in the science of his day – would write differently about the factors that dominate and guide our reason. He would write about evolved instincts as much as about emotions. Above all the survival instinct, which we appear to share with every other living creature. Let me give some examples, which might bring some of our fonder notions of rationality into question.
A large volume of psychometric data in recent years has told us that we generally have a distorted view of ourselves and our competence. In assessing our physical attractiveness, our driving ability, our generosity to others and just about everything else, we take a more flattering view of ourselves than others take of us. What’s more, this is seen as no bad thing. In terms of surviving and thriving in a competitive environment, there’s a pay-off in being over-confident about your attractiveness, as a romantic partner, a business partner, or your nation’s Prime Minister. Of course, if you’re too over-confident, if the distortion between reality and self-perception becomes too great, it will act to your detriment. But does this mean that having a clear-eyed, non-distorted view of your qualities is rational, by that very fact, or irrational, because it puts you at a disadvantage vis-à-vis others? To put it another way, does rationality mean conformity to strict observation and logic, or is it behaviour that contributes to success in terms of well-being and thriving (within the constraints of our profoundly social existence)?
I don’t have any (rational?) answer to that conundrum, but I suppose my preference for the term ‘reasonable’ puts me in the second camp. So my answer to my own question, ‘Is it reasonable to believe in supernatural entities’ is that it depends on the circumstances.
Let’s look at belief in Santa, an eminently supernatural entity. He is, at least on Christmas Eve, endowed with omnipresence, being able to enter hundreds of millions of houses laden with gifts in an impossibly limited time-period. He’s even able to enter all these houses through the chimney in spite of the fact that 99.99% of them don’t have chimneys. What’s more, he’s omniscient, ‘He knows if you’ve been bad or good’, according to the sacred hymn ‘Santa Claus is coming to town’, ostensibly written by J F Coots and Haven Gillespie, but they were really just conduits for the Word of Santa. We consider it perfectly reasonable for three- and four-year-olds to believe in Santa, and, apart from some ultra-rationalist atheists and more than a few cultish Christians and adherents of rival deities, we generally encourage the belief. Clearly, we believe it does no harm and might even do some good. An avuncular, convivial figure with a definite fleshly representation, he’s also remote and mysterious with his supernatural powers and his distant home at the North Pole, which to a preschooler might as well be Mars, or Heaven. As an extra parent, he increases the quotient of love, security and belonging. To be watched over like Santa watches over kids might seem a bit creepy as you get older, but three-year-olds would have no such concerns, they’d accept it as their due, and would no doubt find his magical powers as well as his total jollity, knowledge and insight thoroughly inspiring as well as comforting. From a parent’s perspective, it’s all good, pretty much.
Of course, if your darling 23-year-old believes in Santa, that’s a problem. We expect our kids to grow out of this belief, and they rarely disappoint. They don’t need much encouragement. Children are bombarded with TV Santas, department store Santas, skinny Santas, bad Santas, Santas that look just like their Uncle Bill, etc, and they usually go through a period of jollying their parents along before making their big apostate announcement. Santas are human, all too human.
Santa belief is, it would seem, a harmless and perhaps positive massaging of a child’s vivid imagination, but when a child’s ready for school, she’s expected to put away childish things, little by little.
And isn’t that what many atheists say about the deities of the Big Monotheisms? Yes, but too many atheists underestimate the hurdles that need to be overcome. Most of these atheists either already live in highly secularised societies, such as here in Australia, or other English-speaking or European countries. Even the USA has many more atheists in it than the entire population of Australia, if we make the conservative assumption that 10% of its citizens are non-believers. Atheists are learning to club together but the religious have been doing it for centuries, and you’re likely to lose a lot of club benefits if you declare yourself a non-believer in a region of fervent or even routine belief. Or worse – I just read today of a Filipino lad who was murdered by his schoolmates after coming out as an atheist on a networking site. So just from a self-preservation point of view it might be reasonable to at least pretend to believe, in certain circumstances.
But there are many other situations in which it’s surely reasonable to believe – I mean really believe – in the supernatural agent or agents of your culture. The first of these is that supernatural agency explains things more satisfactorily to more people than any other available explanation. This might sound strange coming from a non-believer like myself, but it’s undoubtedly true. Bear in mind that I’m talking about satisfactory explanations, not true ones, and that I’m talking about most, not all, people.
Why was belief in supernatural agency virtually universal in the long ago? I don’t think that’s hard to understand. As human populations grew and became more successful in terms of harnessing of resources and domination of the landscape, they came to realise that they were prey to forces well beyond their control, forces that threatened them more seriously than any earthly predator. Famine, disease, earthquakes, storms, the seemingly arbitrary deaths of new-borns, sudden outbreaks of warfare between once-neighbourly tribes – all of these were unforeseen and demanded an explanation. Thoughts tended to converge on one common theme: someone, some force was out to get them, someone was angry with them, or disapproved somehow. Some unseen, perhaps unseeable agent.
Psychologists have done a lot of work on agency in recent years. They’ve found that we can create convincing agents for ourselves with the most basic computer-generated or pen-and-paper images. Give them some animation, have one chasing another, and we’re ready to attribute all sorts of motives and purposes. Recognising, or just suspecting, agency behind the movement of a bush, the flying through the air of a rock, or an unfamiliar sound in the distance, has been a useful mindset for our ancestors as they sought to survive against the hazards of life. ‘If in doubt, it’s an agent’ might have been humanity’s first slogan, though of course humanity didn’t come up with it, they got it from their own mammalian ancestors. My pet cat’s reaction to thunder and lightning clearly indicates her view that someone’s out to get her.
But what about the supernatural part of supernatural agency? That, too, is very basic to our nature, and it’s another feature of our thinking that has been brought to light by psychologists in recent times. I won’t go into the ingenious experiments they’ve conducted on children here – look up the work of Justin Barrett, Paul Harris and others – but they show conclusively that very young children assume that the adults around them, those towering, confident, competent and purposive figures, are omniscient, omnipotent and immortal, until experience tells them otherwise. As children we think more in terms of absolutes. Good and evil are palpably real to us, as ‘bad’ and ‘good’ are some of the first categories we ever learn from the god-like beings, our parents, who protect us and are obsessed with us (if we’re lucky in our choice of parents), and who have created us in their image.
Given all this, we might come to understand the naturalness of religion, and its near-universality. But what about the argument, which some of these psychological findings might support, that religion is a form of childishness that we should grow out of, like belief in Santa? It’a common argument among atheists, which to some degree I share, but I also feel, along with the psychologists who have shed such light on the default thinking of children, that ‘childish’ thinking is something we need to learn from rather than dismissing it with contempt. This kind of thinking is far more ingrained in us than we often like to admit, and it’ll always be more natural to us than the kind of reasoning that produces our scientific theories and technology. Creationism is easy – a supernatural agent did it – but evolution – the theory of natural selection from random variation – is much harder. The idea that we’re the special creation of a supernatural agent who’s obsessed with our welfare is far more comforting than the idea that we’re the product of purposeless selection from variation, existing by apparent chance on one insignificant planet in an insignificant galaxy amongst billions of others. In terms of appeal to our most basic needs, for protection, belonging and significance in the scheme of things, religious belief has an awful lot going for it.
So belief in a supernatural being, for whom we are special, is eminently reasonable. And yet… I don’t believe in such a being, and an increasing number of people are abandoning such a belief, especially in ‘the west’, and especially amongst the intelligentsia, which I’ll broadly define as those who make their living through their brainpower, such as scientists, academics, doctors, lawyers, teachers, journalists, writers and artists. New Scientist, in its fascinating recent issue on the Big Questions, features a graph of the world’s religious belief systems. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it claims 2.2 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Moslems, 900 million Hindus, and 750 million in the category ‘secular/non-religious/atheist/agnostic’. These are the top four religious categories. I find that fourth figure truly extraordinary, especially considering that it was only really recognised and counted as a category from the mid-twentieth century, or even later. In Australia, where religious belief is counted in the national census every five years, this optional question was first put in 1971. In that year the percentage of people who professed to having no religion was minuscule – about 5%. Since then, the category of the ‘nones’ has been by far the fastest growing category, and if trends continue, the non-religious will be in the majority by mid-century.
So, while I recognise that religious belief is quite reasonable, it’s clear that, in some parts of the world, a growing number find non-belief more reasonable, and I’m not even going to explore here the reasons why. You can work those out for yourself. It’s clear though that we’re entering a new era with regard to religious belief.
spirituality issues, encore
a mob of didges, right way up
To me – and I’ve written about this before – the invocation of the supernatural, the ‘call’ of the supernatural, if you will, is something deeply psychological, and so not to be sniffed at, though sniff at it I often do.
I’m prompted to write about this because of a program I saw recently on Heath Ledger (Australia’s own), an understandably romantic, mildly hagiographic presentation, in which a few film directors and friends fondly remembered him as wise beyond his years, with hidden depths, a kind of inner force, a certain je ne sais quoi, that sort of thing. As both a romantic and a skeptic, I was torn as usual. The word ‘spiritual’ was given an airing, unsurprisingly, though mercifully it wasn’t dwelt on. I once came up with my own definition of spirituality: ‘To be spiritual is to believe there’s more to this world than this world, and to know that by believing this you’re a better person than those who don’t believe it’. This might sound a mite cynical but I didn’t mean it to be, or maybe I did.
Anyway one of Ledger’s associates, a film director I think, told this story of the young Heath. A number of friends were partying in his apartment when he, the director, picked up a didgeridoo, which obviously Ledger had brought with him from Australia, and attempted to play it, but not knowing much about the instrument, held it upside-down. Heath gently took it from him and corrected him, saying ‘no, no, if you hold it that way it will lose its power, the power of the instrument and its maker,’ or some such thing. And the seriousness and respectfulness with which this young actor spoke of his didge impressed the director, who considered this a favourite memory, something which caught an ‘essence’ of Ledger that he wanted to preserve.
I’ve been bothered by this tale, and by my ambivalent response to it, ever since. It would be superfluous, I suppose, to say that I don’t believe that briefly holding a didge upside-down has any permanent effect on its musical power.
It’s quite likely that Ledger didn’t believe this either, though you never know. What I’m fairly sure of, though, was that his respectfulness was genuine, and that there was something very likeable, to me at least, in this.
All of this takes me back to a piece I wrote some years ago, since lost, about big and small religions. I was contrasting the ‘big’ religions, like Catholicism and the two main strands of Islam, with their political power in the big world, often horrific in its impact, with the ‘small’ religions or spiritual belief systems, such as those found among Australian Aboriginal or some African societies, who have no political power in the big world but provide their adherents with identity and a kind of social energy that’s marvelous to contemplate. My piece focused on the art work of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, whose prolific and astonishing oeuvre, with its characteristic energy and vitality, clearly owed so much to the beliefs and practices of her ‘mob’, the so-called Utopian Community in Central Australia, between Alice Springs and Tenant Creek to the north.
Those beliefs and practices include dreaming stories and totemic identifications that many western skeptics, such as myself, might find difficult to swallow, in spite of a certain romantic appeal. The fact is, though, that the Utopian Community has been remarkably successful, in terms of the usual measures of well-being, and particularly in the area of health and mortality, compared to other Aboriginal groups, and its success has been put down to tighter community living, an outdoor outstation life, the use of traditional foods and medicines, and a greater resistance to the more destructive western products, such as alcohol.
This might put a red-blooded but reflective skeptic in something of a quandary, and the response might be something like – ‘well, the downside of their vitality and health, derived from spiritual beliefs which have served them well for thousands of years, is that, in order to preserve it, they must live in this bubble of tribal thinking, unpierced by modern evolutionary or cosmological knowledge, and this bubble must inevitably burst.’ Must it? Is there a pathway from tribalism to modern globalism that isn’t entirely destructive? Is the preservation of tribal spiritual beliefs a good thing in itself? Can we take the statement, that holding a didgery-doo upside-down affects its spirit, as a truth over and above, or alongside, the contrasting truths of physical laws?
I don’t know the answer to these questions, of course. Groping my way through these issues, I would say that we should respect and acknowledge those beliefs that give a people their dignity, and which have served them for so long, but perhaps that’s because we’re feeling the generosity of someone outside that system who’s unlikely to be affected or to feel diminished by it. These are, after all, small religions, from our perspective, not the big, profoundly ambitious religions intent on global domination, with their missionaries and their jihadists and their historical trampling of other belief systems, as in Mexico and South America and Africa and here in Australia.
Of course there’s the question – what if those small religions grew bigger and more ambitious? Highly unlikely – but what if?
a few thoughts on well-being, religion, doubt and science
Well, the atheist wars continue to provide an amusing spectacle, as the rise of the nones proceeds apace. I recently took a look at 3 Quarks Daily, and this piece was heading the bill. Atheist David Johnson has launched into the soi-disant new atheists, dubbing them ‘undergraduate atheists’, and wondering whether we might not be better off with religion. The 3 quarks essay, written by Stefany Ann Golberg and Morgan Meis, is an interesting consideration of just this question, but I’ll look at it from a different perspective, before returning to their essay, which deals largely with existential doubt.
The question of whether are not we’re better off with religion appears to be answering itself, in the modern world, and my reading of history – and surely any reasonable reading of history – would support the view that our slow, patchy emergence from religion has been a positive thing. So I’m going to look, or glance, at it from both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective, as the post-modernists used to say.
Starting with the diachronic, Steven Pinker’s The better angels of our nature (which I’ve not read) chronicles human violence and brutality from our hunter-gatherer ancestors through to the early civilisations and their religio-cultural practices, then the long years of Christendom, the enlightenment, modern warfare and more or less secular modern western society. I don’t have to read it to know that his case for our society having become less violent is a convincing one. I’ve read enough history myself to independently verify this. To cite just a few texts – Robert Hughes’ The fatal shore, Martyn Whittock’s Brief history of life in the middle ages, Geoffrey Robertson’s The tyrannicide brief, Simon Schama’s Rough crossings and Ben Kiernan’s Blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur – these readings have overwhelmingly confirmed to me how lucky I am to be alive in the here and now, in the country I happen to live in, Australia.
So what does that have to do with religion, specifically? Well, the fact that life was nastier, more brutish and shorter in the past than it is today, and the more so the further back you go, suggests some kind of positive evolution. It hasn’t been smoothly linear, it’s bumped along in fits and starts, but being poor (which I am) in the 21st century, in a fairly wealthy country, has been far less of a pain than it was in most of the 20th century. The 19th century would’ve been far worse, and the 9th century – well, then I would’ve been subject to the vagaries of the politico-religious forces way above my head. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to read or write, I’d never have moved beyond my local district, my thoughts would’ve dwelt far more on basic survival, and knowing what I do today, I surely would’ve considered it a miserable and frustratingly circumscribed life (but at least I wasn’t a woman). And religion would’ve played its part in this. It’s been said recently, by an ultra-conservative government appointee looking into ‘reforming’ our schools, that Australia’s a Christian country. But the very backlash created by such a statement, which would’ve been completely uncontroversial in the 1950s, indicates that in the interim things have changed, and quite dramatically. What it means to be a Christian country has changed over the past few decades, but you get an even better perspective if you look back over centuries, as I roughly did here. And it would be hard to deny that, as religion has loosened its grip, both politically and economically, life has improved. For example, the general view that held sway centuries ago, that probing into and questioning God’s creation was idle and pointless if not downright devilish (with sometimes devastating consequences for those who didn’t toe the line), held us back from a multitude of discoveries that would’ve improved the lot of humanity. The prevailing attitude seemed to be, don’t expect too much from this world, cause that’s just how God made it, but if you get through it and obey God, you won’t believe what’s waiting for you on the other side.
So let’s move now to the synchronic. Even if you agree that generally life’s better now than in the past, you might want to point to Somalia, or Syria, or Sudan, etc, so it matters which country or region you’re looking at. I’ve mentioned before the extraordinary fact that the Paris-based OECD has assessed Australia as ‘the happiest country in the world’ for the last three consecutive years, based on 11 separate social and economic indices. There are a few such regular surveys floating around, and Australia obviously doesn’t win them all, but it’s up there with the same handful of countries every time. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and a few western European countries, particularly the Scandinavian ones – these are always at the top of the lists of best countries to live in, and they also happen to be the least religious countries on the planet. They share other features too, of course, such as affluence combined with social safety nets, long-term political stability, low crime rates, and high levels of social mobility and social participation, all of which prompts reflection on whether this is more influencing or influenced by the nones. In any case, it’s very clear that a large and growing percentage of the populations of the world’s happiest and most successful countries are deciding they’re better off without religion. And that’s not an opinion, it’s a fact.
So there’s an answer, on broad political and economic grounds. Now to look at the more existential, personal issues around belief and doubt, as explored in the essay that prompted this post. David Johnson argues that maybe we’re better off with religion, even though it’s not true. This poses immediate problems in that Johnson’s an atheist. I would find his argument more convincing if he himself embraced religion (but which one?) and denied its falsehood. Otherwise he’s muddying the term ‘we’ and taking on a position of Napoleonic condescension. ‘Religion keeps the people happy so I’ll make a pact with the pope and even build a few churches, but for me it’s all BS’. It’s a kind of bad faith argument, for once we’ve eaten of the tree of knowledge, we can’t return to a state of innocence.
Golberg and Meis look at the issue by re-examining the thoughts of Miguel de Unamuno, an early 20th century Spanish writer and philosopher not much read nowadays. Unamuno was raised Catholic, lost his faith, embraced ‘scientific rationalism’, found it unsatisfactory, and explored in his writing a kind of tortured existence between faith and doubt. What his work brings back to our mind, as we’re sometimes forgetful of it, is that doubt, not of the scientifically skeptical kind, but of the soul-gripping and sometimes soul-destroying kind, is a major factor in our lives, whether or not we’re religious. Not believing in the supernatural is easy, for me at least, but it doesn’t solve any of the major problems of life, such as what we owe to ourselves, what we owe to others, whether we should stay or go, whether we should submit or fight back, whether we should take a situation seriously or lightly, whether we should forgive or take umbrage, or even, in some instances, whether life is worth the candle. And of course most people who strongly believe in an afterlife, or profess to, still cling to this life tenaciously at the end. Doubt is everywhere.
Having said this, I must say that I personally take great solace in science, for many reasons, but perhaps mostly because it takes me out of myself into a much larger world. And I don’t think of it in rational terms. In fact, describing it as science doesn’t quite do it for me, it’s more a world of exploration and adventure, which, like the world of fractals, never ends, but just just keeps on giving. And if we’re talking of mysteries, as Unamuno does, there’s an ever-replenishing supply in such explorations.
are biodynamic olives better for you?
cowhorns and bullshit
This afternoon I was watching a Landline program, in which an Australian olive farmer was described as doing very good business, the key to her success being that her olives were marketed as ‘biodynamic’. It’s such a catchy term isn’t it? Don’t buy those sluggish, more or less static olives, get stuck into these lively, energetic ones.
But what does biodynamic really mean? Is there any science to it, or is it just another fad? Well, anybody with a reasonably decent scientific education, or self-education, will not be encouraged by the fact that ‘biodynamic agriculture’ was first developed by Rudolf Steiner, that utterly earnest pedlar of pseudo-scientific dogma of the early twentieth century. So, okay, let’s leave aside the more loopy beliefs that he and his followers tried to put into practice, such as ‘astrological’ sowing, burying ground quartz stuffed into the horn of a cow (thus releasing “cosmic forces in the soil”), and the general treatment of the farm and its soils as an ‘organic entity’. What, then, is left of ‘biodynamics’ that makes it any different from integrated farming techniques practiced the world over?
Well, as far as I can see, nothing. However , biodynamic farming is also ‘organic’, in that it subscribes to zero toleration of synthetic fertilisers. What exactly makes it different from other ‘organic’ farming is an interesting question, but it seems that, like ‘organic’ farming, it follows a more or less arbitrary set of practices, which differ from country to country, in order to gain ‘certification’. Australia’s Department of Agriculture has this fact sheet up on its website, which conflates ‘organic’ and ‘biodynamic’ produce in a revealing way. There we learn that there’s a National Standard for Organic and Biodynamic Produce, the most recent update of which I’ve tracked down here. Near the beginning of the document we have ‘definitions’, two of which are clearly relevant to my little investigation:
biodynamic: means an agricultural system that introduces specific additional requirements to an organic system. These are based on the application of preparations indicated by Rudolf Steiner and subsequent developments for management derived from practical application, experience and research based on these preparations.
biodynamic preparation(s): means the natural activators developed according to Steiner’s original indications.
All of which appears to indicate that ‘biodynamic’ agriculture is still based on Steiner, the Austrian founder of ‘anthroposophy’ and ‘spiritual science’ (he never did any farming in his life). But what are the ‘preparations’ indicated by Steiner, and what are the ‘natural activators’ derived from Steiner?
Well, we might find out (but we probably won’t) as we wade through this document, but meanwhile, I note, among the definitions, one for genetically modified organisms (now I wonder why?), and, even more disturbingly, homeopathic preparation/treatment, and allopathic veterinary drugs. Homeopathy is probably the most thoroughly discredited pseudo-science of the past 200 years, and its mention in these guidelines for ‘organic’ and ‘biodynamic’ farming should set alarm bells ringing from here to kingdom come (the term ‘allopathic’ was coined by homeopathy’s creator, Samuel Hahnemann). But it’ll be interesting to see how the authors of this document, namely the “Organic Industry Export Consultative Committee”, connect homeopathy with biodynamism.
Under the section “Scope of this Standard” we have this:
1.1 This standard stipulates the minimum criteria that must be met by operators before any certified product can be labelled as in-conversion, organic or bio-dynamic.
‘In-conversion’ presumably means a product in the process of being converted to being organic or biodynamic. Further along, we have this more controversial section:
1.5 Products or by-products that
a. are derived from genetic modification technology, or
b. treated with ionising radiation, or
c. which interfere with the natural metabolism of livestock and plants,
d. that are manufactured/produced using nanotechnology
e. are not compatible with the principles of organic and biodynamic agriculture and are therefore not permitted under this Standard.
The writer seems unaware that 1.5 (e) is not a similar point to 1.5 (a) to (d), but is part of the main clause that starts 1.5, and defines (a) to (d) as verboten. But nanotechnology? Really? Presumably any other newly developing science that might help agriculture in the future will also be banned, as GMOs have been – an indication of the thoroughly ideological nature of this ‘methodology’. It should also be pointed out that ionising radiation is perfectly safe and does not produce ‘radioactive food’. To quote Wikipedia, ‘This treatment is used to preserve food, reduce the risk of food borne illness, prevent the spread of invasive pests, delay or eliminate sprouting or ripening, increase juice yield, and improve re-hydration.’ It consists of stripping atoms of electrons, which interferes with chemical bonding and reproduction, and of course such processes are seen as ‘unnatural’ by ‘biodynamic’ and ‘organic’ ideologues, in thrall to the ‘natural is always better’ fallacy. In fact, 1.6 mentions other ‘environmental contaminants’ and pollutants – that’s to say, other than nanotech, GMOs and irradiation. Contamination is often used as a bogey-term here, always seeking to give the impression that all non-biodynamic and non-‘organic’ food is contaminated.
More specific info about biodynamics is given further down the document, in Section 3.23, where mention is made once again of Steiner’s 1924 lectures and the ‘natural activators’ or ‘biodynamic preparations’ he apparently recommended. What a surprise to find, though, that these activators or preparations aren’t described, either chemically or physically. They’re simply referred to as Preparation 500 through to Preparation 507. I wonder what happened to the previous 499? Some 14 ‘principles’ of biodynamic preparation or production are mentioned, most of which speak of nutrient cycles and dynamic biological processes without leaving us any wiser. Principle 4, though says this:
The Bio-dynamic Preparations are not fertilisers themselves but greatly assist the fertilising process. As the name suggests, these Preparations are designed to work directly with the dynamic biological processes and cycles which are the basis of soil fertility. As activators of life processes they only need to be used in very small amounts.
Very small amounts – hmmm, could this be the connection with homeopathy? And why are they so coy about the precise make-up of these ‘preparations’? Anyway these preparations are to be used in conjunction with more conventional ‘organic’ treatments, such as composting, manuring, crop rotation and diverse planting – all of which can be done without reference to ‘organic’ farming at all, I might add.
We do get some tiny tidbits of info about these preparations, which stop short of decent descriptions. That’s to say, the information describes their effects rather than their ingredients:
Preparation 500, and “prepared” 500 (500 with Compost Preparations 502 to 507 added) specifically enlivens the soil, increasing the micro flora, root exudation and availability of nutrients and trace elements via humus and not through soil water. 500 promotes root growth, especially the fine root hairs. It develops humus formation, soil structure and water holding capacity.
Preparations 502 to 507 are ‘Compost Preparations’, and Preparation 501 ‘enhances the light assimilation of the plant, leading to better fruit and seed development with improved flavour, aroma, colour and nutritional quality‘.
Apparently these are like Colonel Sanders’ secret recipe for KFC, you can’t have authentic bio-dynamic olives, grapes or whatever without them. Having said that, it doesn’t seem all that bad does it? Increased micro-flora, humus formation, putting hairs on your roots and nicely structuring your soil – where’s the harm? And when it comes to livestock, they’re very caring and sensitive. Yet you have to question some of these strictures:
Standard 3.23.2
(f) – Bio-dynamic Preparations 500 and 501 are to be stirred for one hour.
(g) – Stirring of Bio-dynamic Preparations shall be organised to achieve an energetic vortex, followed by an immediate reverse action – causing a ‘bubbling’ chaos and reverse vortex – then subsequent reverse chaos and vortex etc for the full hour (Steiner, Pfeiffer)
And of course there are more of these ‘Standards’, with not a scientific explanation in sight. How do you know when you’ve achieved an energetic vortex? How bubbly is a bubbling chaos? And how, exactly, do all these stirrings help plants to grow? You would think, wouldn’t you, that the scientific mechanisms that connect these activities with plant growth and health would be the first things cited. But no, there’s nothing, zilch, zero.
We move on, then, to “General Principles”. Again, there’s a great deal of vague but positive talk about healthy soils, a healthy atmosphere, and of course, dynamism and nutrient cycles, but no scientific detail on plant or soil chemistry. But get this one:
In accordance with the research evidence of Lily Kolisko on the often-dangerous effect of minutest substances (even less than a molecule), materials used for the storage of the Bio-dynamic Preparations, stirring machines, spray tanks etc., need to be carefully considered.
I do wonder how substances of ‘less than a molecule’ (supposing such substances exist in soils!) can have such deleterious effects on plants, but hey, don’t homeopaths think that the more diluted a substance is, the more potent? And who is Lily Kolisko? She was a leading anthroposophist who did lots of experiments trying to prove the efficacy of astrological and lunar plantings, and, as you can see, she also believed in homeopathy. Nothing has, of course, come of her theories and claims, and there is no ‘research evidence’.
Both biodynamism and homeopathy are products of the guru effect – allegiance to one charismatic purveyor of pseudo-science – Steiner in the case of biodynamism, and Hahnemann in the case of homeopathy. At least, to Steiner’s credit, he called for thorough scientific experimental support for his agricultural claims, made at the very end of his life. His call has gone largely unheeded, leaving aside hopelessly compromised anthroposophical rersearchers. Had this not been the case, we might not be plagued today by no doubt over-priced ‘biodynamic’ products. But given the gullibility quotient, I’m probably being way too optimistic.
Having said this, these products are no doubt very tasty, and their makers no doubt really care for the land and its fruits, and sustainability and all the rest of it. But biodynamics is something else altogether. It’s bullshit, and the products are not made better by following some guru’s directives.
Don’t get angry, get educated.
Why is theology so boring? Stanley Hauerwas
These are the posts where I get to be a not-so-nice guy. Theology is one of my principal bugbears, for many reasons, one of which is that I’ve rarely encountered a modern theologian or Christian apologist who can resist lashing out at atheists.
I suppose I should feel sorry for them, they make such soft, or frail, targets (they’re mostly elderly), but they do insist on making themselves targets, so I’m happy to oblige. Before today I’d never heard of Stanley Hauerwas, so imagine my lack of interest in encountering this soft-spoken elderly gentleman being interviewed on my favourite ABC this arvo. Well, not so much lack of interest but mild willingness to be interested – a willingness quickly dashed by some of the first remarks I heard Hauerwas utter (I didn’t know at the time that he was a theologian). He was being interviewed for all of ten minutes on the ABC show One plus One by Scott Stephens, the ABC’s ‘online editor for religion and ethics’. I now recall Stephens having conducted a series of soft interviews in recent times with prominent ‘believing’ Australians such as David Cappo and Clare Bowditch, but I didn’t recognise him immediately, otherwise I might’ve dodged this. Unfortunately I listened – well, ok, I do have a combative interest in what theologians say.
So here’s the little interview in total, together with my commentary and summing up. The interview material is in italics. Enjoy.
Stephens: You’ve written some very interesting things in your recently published memoir. You’ve admitted for instance – ‘you don’t need to be a theologian to be a Christian, but I probably did’. At the end of your memoir, you then say that the whole reason you’re able to call yourself a Christian is because your friends name you as such. In a time that values self-reliance and even fetishizes self-made men, it’s a very strange series of admissions to make from someone who is renowned as one of the most important Christian thinkers in the last half-century. How did you come to that conclusion?
Hmmm. What makes me think all this was in order to introduce Hauerwas as the best thing since Christians invented sliced bread?
Hauerwas: By necessity. I can’t imagine coming to it just by individual reflection, because I don’t trust my own subjectivity at all. So it’s exactly by discovering what I believe through friends who tell me that this is what I believe that I discover that I am a Christian. Umm, it’s not a natural thing for me to be, I oftentimes point out, hell I’m a Texan (laughs) I mean it does not come easy for Texans to become Christian in the way that I think we must be as faithful followers of Christ, that is, to be non-violent. But I think that it’s through friends that you are enabled to live that way.
All of this sounds unproblematic on the face of it, but I have two criticisms to make.
First, the Jesus of the gospels wasn’t an entirely consistent construction. Yes, he said ‘blessed are the peacemakers’, and I say hurray to that, but he also lashed out at the moneylenders in the temple, sending tables and chairs flying (Matt 21:12), killed a fig tree for not producing fruit out of season (Mark 11:12-14, 20-25, Matt 21:18-22), and damned for all time the townsfolk of Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum, villages in his own neighbourhood, for not listening to his preachifying (Matt 11:23, Luke 10:13-15). So much for love your neighbours, never mind love your enemies.
Second, Hauerwas describes what people ‘must be as faithful followers of Christ’, rather than what we, arguably, should be upon reflection. It’s all about following the leader, apparently. I’ve written about this before, but the difference between the ‘follow my lead’ approach of Jesus and other preachers and sermonizers, and the Socratic method of constructive engagement, getting the interlocutor to ‘go deeper’, is key, and should be key to the whole framework of modern education. It’s because of this approach towards independence and ‘ownership’ of ideas that religion is fading, methinks.
Stephens: Now this is interesting to me, because one of the themes that you’ve been exploring throughout your career is that, even though it might seem, looking from the outside, that the church is in a pretty good position here in the USA, it’s precisely because American culture is so saturated with Christianity – you’ve spent the better part of your professional career trying to convince Christians in the United States that their cosy relationship with American culture is pretty hazardous to its own health.
Hauerwas: Absolutely. I say I represent the Tonto principle of Christian ethics. The Lone Ranger and Tonto were once surrounded by 25,000 Sioux in the Dakotas, and the Lone Ranger looked over to Tonto and said, “What d’you think we should do Tonto?’ and Tonto said, “What do you mean we, white man?’ and I’m trying to help Christians in America recover the Christian ‘we’, which has been very much occluded in the celebration of the relationship between Christianity and America as the presumption that American democracy is the equivalent of what it means to be Christian.
Stephens: One of your great critiques is that it’s not simply just, say, a cultural issue, that many Christians assume that what it means to be American is to be Christian, and in turn what it means to be Christian is to be American in some sort of deep level, but you’ve even, in some ways you’ve also upped the ante. You’ve said that one of the great problems facing American politics and also Christian identity, is the assumption that the American god is the Christian god.
This American stuff is of course a bit of a yawn to me, but I will say that there’s no such thing as the Christian god – or rather, no clear-cut thing. In the same sense, there’s no such thing as the American god. There’s the god of Bush junior, who’s different from the god of Obama, etc etc. These are fantasies you can tailor to your individual personality and needs. Apart from that, I’m happy to let American believers simmer in their theological idiosyncrasies.
Hauerwas: Right, yeah, I think, that the reason – I mean, atheism is so uninteresting in America. I mean, atheism in general is uninteresting in our world, because the god that is being denied isn’t very (laughs), isn’t the Christian god. That’s the reason why Americans think it’s very important that you believe in god, irrespective of what ‘god’ names. I find it extremely uninteresting whether you believe in god or not. The god I worship is not some deity, but the father the son and the holy spirit. That makes all the difference in the world for a people that are identified as not religious America. So I want Christians to be able to recover that kind of theological integrity in a world that makes it very hard to even identify it.
This is the passage I first heard – ‘atheism is uninteresting’. Again, I’m endlessly amused that theologians and religious apologists just can’t help having a go at atheism, and so revealing their ignorance as well as their anxiety. And of course their denialism of the fastest-growing movement vis-à-vis religion in the west. Of course, in one sense Hauerwas is right, atheism is totally uninteresting when you compare it to being the pet project of a supernatural being who’s also the creator of the universe, created just for you. It’s a bit like being personally chosen by the Doctor as his lifetime companion in all his space-time adventures. Great japes! Only Doctor Who is a science fantasy TV show, not a religion (with apologies to the Whovians out there).
Yes, rejecting the existence of supernatural entities is not intrinsically interesting, but the point is that atheists don’t go around being atheists. If I can give a roll-call of some of my intellectual heroes – Aristotle, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Hume, Stendhal, Darwin, Russell, Einstein, Sagan, Attenborough, to name a few – I don’t so much care whether they were atheists, though clearly many of them were/are. What attracts me is their this-worldly concerns. None of these ‘uninteresting’ people are interested in theology, they’re too fascinated by how the real world – and its inhabitants on this tiny planet – works. We live in enthralling times – for exploring human origins, for exploring the world within and beyond our solar system, for exploring neurophysiology and consciousness, for exploring nanotechnology. So many realms opening up for exploration, it’s just endlessly fascinating. I just can’t see how ‘faith’ and theology, the eternally fruitless but entirely self-serving speculation about non-evidence-based supernatural entities, can possibly compare.
Stephens: What you’re saying, though, truly runs against the grain of the assumption that many people believe today, kind of guarantees a kind of social peace and cohesion, the assumption being that, if you wanna be religious, fine, just make sure your religiosity remains a form of inwardness, or even just, probably a better term would be sentimentality. Now, almost everything you’ve written is pitted against the reduction of religion to sentimentality, or ‘god’ to some sort of general deity.
These remarks of Stephens are simply intended to introduce the term ‘sentimentality’, a term that Hauerwas has apparently twisted out of all recognition to feed his theological concerns. I should simply remind readers that the currently agreed dictionary definition of sentimentality is something like ‘an appeal to shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason’.
Hauerwas: Absolutely, I say the great enemy of Christianity is not atheism it’s sentimentality. and the deepest sentimentality in our culture is the presumption that we should have children in a manner that they do not have to suffer for our convictions. I think it drives people – it drives children absolutely crazy for our parents to think that they ought to raise children in a manner that when children grow up they get to make up their own minds. I mean, what kind of conviction is that, why did you have them in the first place, if you want them to make up their own minds? They don’t have minds worth making up until they’ve been trained. So exactly how to overcome those kinds of sentimentalities that, interestingly enough result in great violence, I think, is exactly the kind of challenge that Christianity presents to the world in which we find ourselves.
So Hauerwas has defined sentimentality, or one aspect of it, as ‘raising children so that they get to make up their own minds when they grow up.’ Imagine how Socrates would deal with such a distortion of a concept!
Maybe somewhere in his theological works Hauerwas has presented his views more cogently than here, but I have little appetite for anyone’s theology, so I must presume to limit myself to this little interview. I’m far from denying that human children need (and get) training, as do all social animals, including dolphins, elephants, wolves, lions and hyenas, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t have minds of their own, and that independence of thought isn’t a desired outcome. The trouble is, Hauerwas’s god only knows what he means by ‘being trained’. I suspect the worst, bearing in mind his remark that children should suffer for their parents’ convictions. This sounds to me like he thinks Christian parents should bring them up strictly to be Christians, and make them suffer if they stray. No Darwins, no… (name just about every significant thinker of the last century) would ever get to emerge in Hauerwas’s world it seems, they’d all be trained out of their independence of mind until they were black and blue. But I’m being mean – Hauerwas is an advocate of non-violence.
In any case, none of this has anything to do with sentimentality. We bring children into the world for a whole host of reasons, not all of them worthy, of course. We hope to contribute to their becoming good people and happy, but we don’t need to have read Pinker’s The Blank Slate (another boring atheist) to be aware that kids do indeed have minds of their own from day one. I have no idea what Hauerwas could possibly mean by saying that encouraging independence of spirit leads to great violence, but obviously he’s no student of history. Our modern education, which tries to combine a certain degree of training in the basics, without which children are unlikely to succeed in modern society, with independent analytical skills of the type that have created the scientific and technological explosion we’re currently witnessing, has, in fact, helped to create a less violent society than at any time in human history. And that’s not spin, it’s well-supported fact.
Stephens: Weeks before the terrorist attacks on September 11 2001, Time magazine named you America’s best theologian.
Hauerwas: Actually it was September 10, 2000 the 11th, by the time the magazine came out it was the day before, which was wonderfully ironic, because then no-one noticed.
Stephens: But after September 11 you issued many of your most public, most notable, and for many people now even most infamous critiques of the American response to that attack.
Hauerwas: That’s true. My response was, one, you could have done it as a just warrior. I said, you know, the most fateful words that were uttered after September 11 was George Bush’s ‘we are at war’. Now, I think that that was a deep mistake on ‘just war’ grounds. What happened on September 11 was murder, and you don’t go to war against a murderer. As soon as Americans agreed with George Bush, we are at war, you gave Bin Laden exactly what he wanted. You made him a warrior, not a murderer. I think then, the problem…. I think George Bush’s response was a pastoral response. The American people felt at a loss, we didn’t know what to do. We know war, so to say we were at war made this a comforting claim that gave us a sense that we knew what to do – we had to find someone to kill (laughs). So Afghanistan and Iraq were destined to be wars that we had to fight against the infidel. If we had been able to say ‘this was murder’, and how do you respond to murderers, it would have been… it would’ve required a patience that the American people find very hard to enact. I was recently asked, what would I suggest if I wanted America to be more thoughtful and possibly even non-violent, and I said the return to the draft. That we have the situation, we now have is because we have a paid military in which we expect very little cost from the broad American middle class, and it would be very interesting to have a return to the actual sacrifice necessary in order to pursue a legislated war against terrorism. It’s very… I think the Obama administration is to be credited with toning down the war against terrorism, because they understand that’s a war you can’t win in that way. But, generally the American people bought into that, and we paid big prices for it.
Okay, in this latter part of the interview we’ve left theology far behind, thankfully, and we’re into straightforward ethical issues. Apart from the remark about a ‘pastoral response’ from George Bush, there’s nothing in Hauerwas’s argument that owes anything to religion, it’s all secular ethics, and it’s the same ethical argument that myself and many others, such as Geoffrey Robertson, have been putting for years – that so-called acts of terrorism should be treated as criminal, police matters and dealt with under criminal law rather than glorifying them, inadvertantly or otherwise, as acts of war.
So Hauerwas seems to have some reasonable ideas, and a few dodgy ones (he’s a Texan, after all), but it’s unlikely that any of his best ideas emerge from Christian theology. Don’t be a faithful follower of anyone – or anything, except evidence.
why is the after-life so appealing?
You could say that the question this post poses is both rhetorical and not. Why wouldn’t living forever, whether through cycles of reincarnation, or as a disembodied ‘ancestor spirit’, or in heaven, jannah, elysium or wherever, be appealing? And what could possibly be appealing about the finality of death?
But it’s worth exploring this question more deeply, as I believe it’s a major key to understanding many aspects of religion and ‘spirituality’. I’ve written about this subject before in the context of children and the origins of religious and magical thinking, but this time I want to focus on the afterlife in more detail.
I like to focus on childhood because it’s fertile ground for thinking beyond the bounds and the limits of our mortality and our physical constraints. Shapeshifting, super-powers, magic, and the absolutes of good and evil, they come very easily to young children, and immortality is just another element of that thinking. I want to emphasise this because I object to claims made by some atheists that a lot of this thinking, about magic and absolutes and immortality, is irrational. I don’t think that’s a useful term in this instance.
I’ve given the example, which I’ll repeat here, of kids playing life-and-death games like cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, goodies and baddies. When a kid’s shot dead, he accepts it reluctantly, lies down for a few seconds, then declares he’s ‘alive again’, and this encapsulates time-honoured attitudes towards mortality.
Because death is literally unimaginable, and kids, with their vivid and unrestrained imaginations, don’t need much time to work that one out. What’s more, even playing dead is boring. Not moving, holding your breath, trying to get your brain to shut down its thinking and imagining, it’s all hard and unnatural work.
On the other hand thinking about the afterlife can bear rich fruit. To give just one of hundreds of literary examples, Dante’s Divine Comedy divides the afterlife, from which no-one can escape, into 3 realms, hell, purgatory and heaven, with each realm being divided into nine, or actually 10. Nine descending circles of the inferno, with Lucifer lurking at the bottom as number 10, nine rings around Mount Purgatory, with the garden of Eden at its summit representing number 10, and nine celestial bodies of heaven, with the tenth at the top, representing the Empyrean, filled with the essence of god. And their are various other divinely numerical schemes operating throughout the work. Another very interesting depiction of the afterlife occurs in Plato’s Republic, in which a soldier, Er, brought from the battlefield as a corpse, reveals himself after a number of days not to be dead but unconscious, and on recovering consciousness tells a richly detailed tale of the afterlife, which he’s been privileged to witness, and also to recall, as he was excused from the requirement of drinking from the river Lethe’s ‘waters of forgetfulness’.
The two points to be drawn from these afterlife descriptions is, first, that they offer great scope for the imagination, but second, they’re constrained by the particular time and space of their own culture, not unlike current descriptions of UFOs and alien abductions. So the Divine Comedy is a large-canvas imaginative rendering of Christian revelation and eschatology as experienced, at least by one atypical individual, in thirteenth and fourteenth century Italy, while Er’s tale reveals much of how Greeks living not far away but nearly 2000 years earlier might have imagined the life to come.
Interestingly, while there are many cultural peculiarities to these descriptions, they have one key feature in common – the afterlife constitutes a punishment or reward for the life lived on earth. It’s a theme repeated in many religions, as well as in beliefs in reincarnation which aren’t strictly religious. There are those who manage to believe that, even though there’s no deity pulling the strings, we get reincarnated into something ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ depending on how we behaved in the life just completed. How this happens, without some conscious being making judicial decisions, is not a question that seems to bother their brains. But what interests me more is that this kind of thinking goes back a long long way. It appears to have a very powerful appeal, one that, as I’ve said, is way too prevalent to be dismissed as irrational.
So I want to explore not only why the afterlife is so appealing, but why a particular kind of afterlife, based on perfect justice, is so appealing. I prefer ‘perfect justice’ to ‘divine justice’, as it takes away the religious trappings while preserving the most important ideal of many religions – the ideal hope that nobody will evade proper justice in the end.
Again I turn to early childhood, a period when rationality and logic mean little, to look for clues to this appeal. I suspect that one of the great events of childhood, or it might be a series of events, is the experience that your parents or your guardians are not the all-protecting beings that you’d more or less unconsciously assumed them to be. I think this experience is made much of in certain branches of psychoanalytic theory, and I associate it with the name of Jacques Lacan, but I have a very limited acquaintance with his views or theories.
In talking of all-protecting beings, I’m really thinking of them in god-like terms. Beings who protect us from harm caused by dangerous objects or predators, but also from harm caused by our own ignorance or folly, by correcting us and guiding us. Our early survival is, of course, entirely dependent on being nurtured by these all-protecting entities, so that it’s all the more shocking when, at some stage in our development, we actually see these entities, even if only for brief moments, as actually threatening our existence. I’m not sure when this may happen. It could be at a very early stage, when, say, a mother refuses the breast to her child, resulting in a screaming fit, and perhaps a great sense of inner trauma and crisis. Or it could be later, when the child has developed an independent sense of justice and realises, or at least strongly feels, that her parent is punishing her unjustly, and quickly infers from this that the parent could be a real threat to her freedom and even her life.
I see an obvious association between this very real experience, which may be near-universal in humans, and the garden of eden story, though the fact that in the eden story it’s the humans who have ‘fallen’, rather than the gods, is well worth pondering. It seems to me that monotheistic religions, by creating a perfect deity or parent, shift the focus of the world’s obvious injustices from that parent to the children, which has at least the advantage of avoiding what could become a problem for children who ‘see through’ their parents – the problem of blame-shifting. Not that this has always stopped irate believers from berating their perfect Dad for their sufferings.
Of course the more developed way of seeing the parent-child relation is as one between two faulty, all-too-human entities, but face it, the seemingly utterly powerless child and the seemingly all-powerful parent are neither likely to possess such equipoise, at least not for long. Both are profoundly frustrated, the child at not being able to get the parent to see the justice of her situation, or at least at not being able to penetrate the imperviousness and the mystery of the parent’s judgment, and the parent at not having the power to transform the child by his judicious punishment. Frustration leads to idealist fantasies, in which everyone understands each other, everyone judges and measures each other in perfect understanding and harmony. Of course this never happens in this world, bitter experience reveals this, especially in the harsh and often desperate environments out of which so many religions have been born.
It all happens in another life, in another world, another place, a world that doesn’t bear too much thinking about it, but a world that can absorb all the hope aimed at it, all the dreams of the ‘faithful’. In absorbing all these hopes and dreams and cries for justice it just keeps expanding, like a balloon, ever more diaphanous, amorphous, enticing. Who’d want to be the prick that bursts it?
how has our Christian society changed in the last millenium?
some Lollards hanging about
I happen to be reading an enjoyable little book in the ‘brief history’ series, A brief history of life in the middle ages by Martyn Whittock. His focus is England, and he covers a period from around the ninth century through to the fifteenth, but he provides enough interesting data from approximately a millennium ago and onwards to make the above question worth pursuing – with a bit more research too of course.
Australia is generally regarded as a Christian country, but Christianity sure ain’t what it used to be. Generally when talking about the decline of Christianity, pundits refer to the past few decades, but it’s worth taking a much longer view to see just how Christianity is faring compared to what it once was. It’s also convenient that Christianity is around 2000 years old – so going back a thousand years takes us to half its life-span up to now. We don’t know how much longer it will live, but I’m more interested in its ‘quality of life’ compared to what it once was. Is it in a near-vegetative state, or is it still thriving?
Obviously we can’t look at Christianity in Australia 1000 years ago, so England seems the obvious choice as the nation that brought Christianity to this country, so very recently.
Eleventh century England was thoroughly Christian, chockful of powerful bishops and clerics. The Norman conquest had little effect on Christianity generally except that the sees of bishops tended to be relocated to the commercial centres along continental lines, and the continental style of church architecture replaced the Anglo-Saxon, resulting in the loss of virtually all the great Anglo-Saxon churches. Edward the Confessor had already signalled this change before the Norman invasion with his reconstruction of Westminster, but of course after William I’s accession this rebuilding process was a deliberate sign of the new order – an erasing of Anglo-Saxon taste, style, and political influence rather than its version of Christianity.
The Church, undivided as it was then, played a vastly greater role in eleventh century society than it does today. The Church hierarchy, with its higher levels of literacy, played a significant, indeed dominant, role in civil administration, and of course the Church was a major landowner, charged with all the minutiae of running large estates, so that you could be a senior Church official without being in any way engaged in what we see as the domain of Christian workers today – sermons, spirituality and charitable works. The Church was in fact an international administrative network dominated by Rome, and administering estates for two masters in a sense – the ‘local’ royalty or nobility, and the pope. Chancery was run more or less entirely by Church officials until major changes occurred in the early fifteenth century.
It’s probably fair to say that atheism wasn’t even a concept in eleventh century England or Europe. Godlessness might’ve been a term of abuse for those who weren’t sufficiently orthodox, but essentially everyone was Christian, to a degree unthinkable today. One quite small but economically successful religious minority existed, namely the Jews, expelled from England in 1290, and increasingly harassed and oppressed from the mid-twelfth century onwards. The whole nation was divided into parishes, each overseen by a diocesan bishop, over-ruled by two archdioceses, Canterbury, which had seniority, and York. It was expected that everyone in the parish attend mass on Sundays, and on various festival days. A yearly procession called Rogationtide served to remind everyone of the boundaries of their particular parish.
All parishioners paid a tithe of their income to the church. A tithe is literally a tenth, though the amount no doubt varied. The practice originated with Judaism, and has been followed in a variety of ways by Christianity and Islam, as well as in secular terms, though this was caught up in the confusion of medieval views of Church and State, with the monarchy being seen as a quasi-religious inheritance.
In the wealthiest parishes tithes were held in tithe barns, for all to see, but of course there was always tension about this form of taxation, especially if the churches or monasteries and their abbots were displaying conspicuous wealth, as a good part of the tithes were expected to support the needy of the parish.
Of course, as among the religious today, the Church presided over all the Main Events – baptism (for babies), confirmation (for toddlers) and penance (for all the rest), as well as the Eucharist (regularly), marriage, ordination (for many, but only performed by bishops) and extreme unction (for everyone in the end). However it would be wrong to assume that religious belief was uniform, either in thought or practice. It was always changing, over time, and according to many and varied regional influences. Early medieval Christianity interacted with local folk practices, and various trends and fashions had a general impact, such as the rise of the mendicant friar movement, as a response to the perceived or actual corruption of the fixed monastic orders. This movement, largely intended as a return to the simple peripatetic teachings of Jesus, in turn suffered from its own popularity, and eventually became associated with a new form of parasitism. Another major impact on religious thinking in the later medieval period was plague, and the devastation it brought, which led to a darker and more personal relation to the deity among many. Chantry chapels for the burial of the dead were built, with special clergy to deal with the overload, since priests were only allowed by law to say one mass a day.
The concept of the ‘clergy’ in medieval Britain was necessarily vague – to the advantage of offenders against the law. In the 13th and 14th centuries any schoolboy (only boys of course) who achieved some literacy could be given the tonsure, the clerical cut, and wrong-doers could claim ‘benefit of clergy’ if they were literate, the test for which was to recite psalm 51:1 in Latin – ‘ Have mercy on me, Oh God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.’ The verse became known as ‘the neck verse’ presumably because it saved your neck, canon law penalties being much lighter than secular ones. A reaction against this avoidance of proper justice led to the benefit of clergy provision being restricted to minor crimes by the end of the 16th century (when England had broken with Rome). Of course, this controversial relationship between canon and secular law is still a problem today, with the Catholic Church still unable to accept the paramountcy of secular law.
Orthodoxy and its maintenance was a problem, as ever, what with Dominicans (blackfriars), Franciscans (friars minor, or greyfriars), Cistercians, Carmelites (whitefriars), and other assorted monks, nuns, canons, priors, churchwardens etc roaming the land or administering estates and distributing finances (at least 20% of all land was owned by the Church in the late middle ages), not to mention anchorites and mystical eccentrics such as Margery Kempe keeping the pot stirred. The Peasants Revolt of 1381 and the Lollard movement, both led by religious figures and both savagely repressed, gave an indication of the tenuous hold of religious authority in times of stress, but again these movements never threatened Christianity and were aimed at reinforcing it through renovation.
And then came the great church schism that fueled the genocidal treatment of the Catholic Irish, not to mention the Thirty Years War in middle-Europe and the English civil war…
As a lover of history I could go on and on, but the essential point is clear. We’ve never lived in a more secular age, nowhere near it. We can easily live our lives without interference from Christianity, to a degree that was impossible even 200 years ago let alone 1000. A situation which certainly gives added perspective to such recent apologist texts as The Twilight of Atheism.
Here in Australia, voted the happiest country in the world for the 3rd year in a row by the Paris-based OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), the rise of the nones is as spectacularly speedy as it is anywhere else. And it seems to me there are great historical reasons for embracing secularism. The current approach of the Catholic Church with respect to canon law and the behaviour of its clergy is an example, but one just has to look at those states where the churches, mosques, synagogues etc have political power, and compare them to those where religion plays little or no political role. Compare also the Europe and England of today with the pre-Enlightenment versions, when the official language was God-saturated but when the kind of justice we now take for granted was in very short supply. It’s taken a long time, and the situation continues patchy, but Aristotelian empiricism, so far as ethics is concerned, is winning out.
There’s no turning back. It seems to me that, as far as Christianity is concerned, it’s the long, long fade-out.
who will speak up for science in this new government?
Professor Ian Chubb – toughing it out
I made a very quick video the other night after listening to some depressing news on Lateline, or rather a depressing interview with our chief scientist, Ian Chubb, about the changes being made by the incoming conservative government. But I haven’t yet got the facility to host my own videos so I’ll write something instead.
Chubb was being questioned about the new government’s intention to abolish the Climate Change Authority, the Climate Commission and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, as well as to scrap the position of Science Minister. Now, you might think that all this scrapping, discarding and abolishing is a clear indication of the value that Tony Abbott and his colleagues place on science in general, and that our chief scientist might have some choice words to say about that, but it seems Professor Chubb is a canny operator who knows how to keep a cool head and to emphasize co-operation and positivity under the most strained circumstances.
Asked first off about the axing of the science portfolio, he put a brave face on it by saying that, as science was spread over a number of portfolios, having an actual Minister wasn’t as essential as having someone in government who is passionate about science. [Only one?]. When asked who that might be, Chubb rather dodged the question, unless you can take seriously his suggestion, presented almost sheepishly, that this might be the Prime Minister’s role. Abbott, you’ll recall, once publicly stated, and not so long ago, that anthropogenic global warming is bullshit.
Chubb spoke, no doubt sincerely, of a strategic whole-of-government approach to science, using the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council, but I’m sceptical that the new government will deal with anything strategically. My expectation is that it will govern like most conservative governments – do nothing innovative, abolish, cut and scrap as much as you can, make yourself as small a target for criticism as possible, and boast about your economic credentials while health, education, infrastructure and the rest are run into the ground.
Chubb went on – and I can only marvel at his bravery – to answer a question about Australia’s science education results, and how they lag behind those in Asia, by arguing for a more interventionist approach from government in this area. I thought I saw pigs flying across the screen at that one. Then the interviewer asked about the scrapping of the climate change ministry and the various environmental bodies aforementioned, on one of which, the Climate Change Authority, Chubb actually sits (or sat). The actual question asked was – did these to-be-axed bodies have a value? Chubb couldn’t really avoid that one, and had to respond positively, but he qualified this by saying he could only really speak about the body he sat on, and that, anyway, the CCA ‘will doubtless be compensated for by other bodies and groups and, doubtless, individuals who will be offering advice’. Doubtless? I doubt it.
One individual already offering plenty of advice at taxpayers’ expense is Abbott’s chief business adviser, one Maurice Newman, who describes climate change as a myth. What Newman actually means by this queer claim might be worth investigating, but here isn’t the place for it. When asked about this remark, Chubb was more blunt than usual, describing it as a ‘silly comment’. Generally, though, he countered the negativity and anti-science silliness of the conservatives with a lot of talk about the role of science, the importance of evidence, facts and informed debate. His many remarks about scientists being evidence-driven and free from beliefs seemed a trifle idealistic, but they still needed to be made in the face of the fixed, clearly uninformed beliefs of Abbott, Howard and others on that side of politics. Some of his remarks, such as that every contribution to the climate debate, whether pro or con, was valuable, seemed overly mollifying, but generally he gave science a good rap, in the typically cautious, under-stated way of most scientists.
Still, what I heard in the interview, about what was still then a government-elect, hardly warmed my heart about the future of evidence-based decision-making in this country. Hang on science lovers, we’re in for a bumpy ride.
This is an issue worth keeping an eye on. I’ll try to report on any further developments, or lack thereof.
*Incidentally, I was bemused on reading, in the transcript of this interview, that little Johnny Howard, that Giant of Aussie Science, is to deliver a ‘Global Warming Policy Foundation lecture’ in November, bearing the title ‘One religion is enough’. Now think about that title. It does more than claim that anthropogenic warming is a religion, it claims that any more than one religion is too much! And what is that one religion? Well, Jesus, it must be that religion. So much for our resident Hindus, Buddhists, Moslems, Jainists, Pastafarians and whatnot. Talk about an expense of spirit in a waste of shame.
what does curiosity actually mean?
Robert Hooke, star of the early Royal Society
You might say that Philip Ball has performed a curious task with his book, Curiosity. He’s taken this term, which we moderns might take for granted, and examined what intellectuals and the public have made of it down through the ages – with a particular focus on that wobbly symbol of the seventeenth century British scientific enlightenment, the Royal Society. I’ve been spending a bit of time in the seventeenth century lately, what with Dava Sobel’s book on the struggle to measure longitude, Matthew Cobb’s book on the untangling of the problem of eggs and sperm and conception, not to mention Bill Bryson’s lively treatment of Hooke, Leeuwenhoek and cells and protozoa in A Short History of Nearly Everything.
That century, with some of its most interesting actors, including Francis Bacon, René Descartes, William Harvey, Jan Swammerdam, Nicolas Steno, Johann Komensky (aka Comenius), Samuel Butler, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Thomas Shadwell, Margaret Cavendish and Isaac Newton, represented a great testing period for science and its reception by the public. Curiosity has always had its enemies, and still does, as evidenced by some Papal pronouncements of recent years, but in earlier, more universally religious times, knowledge and its pursuit were treated with great wariness and suspicion, a suspicion sanctioned by the Biblical tale of the fall. The Catholic Church had risen to a position of great power in the west, though the revolting Lutherans, Anglicans, Calvinists and their ilk had spoiled the party somewhat, and England in particular, having grown in pride and prosperity during the Elizabethan period, was flexing its muscles and exercising its grey matter in exciting new ways. The sense of renovation was captured by the versatile Bacon, with works like the Novum Organum (New Method), The New Atlantis and The Advancement of Learning.
In the past I’ve described curiosity and scepticism as the twin pillars of the scientific mindset, but they’re really more like a pair of essential forces that interact and modify each other. Scepticism without curiosity is just pure negativity and nihilism, curiosity without scepticism is directionless and naive.
But perhaps that’s overly glib. What, if any, are the limits of curiosity, and when is it a bad thing? It killed the cat, after all.
The word derives from the Latin ‘cura’, meaning care. Think of the word ‘curator’. However, if you think of one of the most curious works of the ancients, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, you’d have to say, from a modern perspective, that little care was taken to separate truth from fiction in his massive and sometimes bizarre collection of curios. This sort of unfiltered inclusivity in collecting ‘facts’ and stories goes back at least to Herodotus, the ‘father of lies’ as well as of history, and it goes forward to medieval bestiaries and herbaria. These collections of the weird and wonderful were, of course, not intended to be scientific in the modern sense. The term ‘science’ wasn’t in currency and no clear scientific methodologies had been elaborated. As to curiosity, it certainly wasn’t a fixed term, and after the political establishment of Christianity, it was more often than not seen in a negative light. ‘We want no curious disputation after possessing [i.e. accepting the truth of] Jesus Christ’, wrote Tertullian in the early Christian days. Another early Christian, Lactantius [c240-c320], explained that the reason Adam and Eve were created last was so that they’d remain forever ignorant of how their god created everything else. That was how it was intended to be. Modern creationists follow this tradition – God did it, we don’t know how and we don’t really care.
Fast forward to Francis Bacon, who still, in the early 17th century, had to contend with the view of curiosity as a sinful extravagance, a view that had dominated Europe for almost a millennium and a half. Bacon had quite a pragmatic, almost business-like view of curiosity as a tool to benefit humanity. The ‘cabinet of curiosities’ was becoming well established in his time, and Bacon advised all monarchs, indeed all rich and powerful men, to maintain one, well sorted and labelled, as if to do so would be magically empowering. The problem with these cabinets, though, was that there was little understanding about the relations between entities and articles. That’s to say, there was little that was modernly scientific about them. Their objects were largely unrelated rarities and oddities, having only one thing in common, that they were ‘curious’. Bacon recognised that this wouldn’t quite do, and tried to point a way forward. He didn’t entirely succeed, but – small steps.
Ball’s book is at pains to correct, or at least provide nuance to, the standard view of Bacon as initiator of and father-figure to the British scientific enlightenment. In fact, Bacon may have been a Rosicrucian, and his utopian New Atlantis describes a more or less priestly caste of technical experts, living and working in Solomon’s House, and keeping their arts and knowledge largely under wraps, like the alchemists and mages of earlier generations. Bacon, with his government connections and his obvious ambition to be benefited by as well as benefiting the state, was concerned to harness knowledge to productivity and profit, and those who see science largely as a coercion of nature have cursed him for it ever since. Mining and metallurgy, engineering and manufacturing were his first subjects, but he also imagined great changes in agriculture – the breeding of plants, fruits and flowers, as well as animals, to create ‘super-organisms’, in and out of season, for our benefit and delight. The art and science of the kitchens of Solomon’s House produces superior dishes, as well as wines and other beverages, and printing and textiles have advanced greatly, with new fabrics, papers, dyes and machinery. Even the weather is subject to manipulation, with rain, snow and sunshine under the control of the savants. The details of all these advancements are kept vague of course, (and here’s where Bacon’s insistence on ‘secret knowledge’ plays to his advantage, a point not sufficiently noted by Ball in his need to connect Bacon with the the alchemist-magicians of the past) but what is represented here is promise, a faith in human ingenuity to improve on the products of the natural world.
In focusing on all these benefits, Bacon manages largely to sidestep the religious aversion to curiosity as a form of intellectual avarice. However, Bacon and his more curious compatriots were never too far from the magical dark arts. Few intellectuals of this period, for example, would have dismissed alchemy out of hand, in spite of Chaucer’s delicious mockery of it over 200 years before, or Ben Jonson’s more contemporaneous take in The Alchemist. What differentiated Bacon was an interest in system, however vaguely adumbrated, and a harnessing of this system to the interests of the state.
Bacon tried to interest James I in a state sponsored proto-scientific institution, but this got nowhere, largely because he couldn’t devise anything like a practical program for such an entity, but a generation or two after his death, after a civil war, a brief republic and a restoration, the Royal Society was formed under the more or less indifferent patronage of Charles II. Bacon was seen as its guiding spirit, and there was an expectation, or hope, that its members would be virtuosi, a term then in currency. As Ball explains:
The virtuoso was ‘a rational artist in all things’… meaning the arts as well as the sciences, pursued methodically with a scientist’s understanding of perspective, anatomy and so forth. (It is after all in the arts that the epithet ‘virtuoso’ survives today.) The virtuoso was permitted, indeed expected, to indulge pure curiosity: to pry into any aspect of nature or art, no matter how trivial, for the sake of knowing. There was no sense that this impulse need be harnessed and disciplined by anything resembling a systematic program, or by an attempt to generalise from particulars to overarching theories.
Charles II, in spite of having some scientific pretensions, paid scant attention to his own Society, and neglected to fund it. What was perhaps worse for the Society was his amused approval of a hit play of the time, Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, which satirized the Society through its central character, Sir Nicholas Gimcrack. The play, as well as many criticisms of the Society’s practices by the likes of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the aristocratic Margaret Cavendish (Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne), presented another kind of negativity vis-a-vis unbridled curiosity, more modern, if not more pointed than the old religious objections.
The play-goer first encounters Sir Nicholas Gimcrack lying on a table making swimming motions. He tells his visitors that he’s learning to swim, but they are dubious about his method. His response:
I content myself with the speculative part of swimming; I care not for the practick. I seldom bring anything to use; tis not my way. Knowledge is my ultimate end.
This was the updated criticism. Pointless observations and experiments, leading nowhere and of no practical use. Gimcrack appears to have been based on Robert Hooke, one of the Royal Society’s most brilliant members, who was suitably enraged on viewing the play. Shadwell mocked Hooke’s prized invention, the air pump, intended to create a vacuum for the purpose of observing objects inserted into it, and he presented a jaundiced view of Gimcrack, through the dialogue of his niece, as ‘a sot that has spent two thousand pounds in microscopes to find out the nature of eels in vinegar, mites in a cheese, and the blue of plums.’ These were all examined in Hooke’s ground-breaking and breath-taking work Micrographia.
Most of Shadwell’s mockery hasn’t stood the test of time, but he was far from the only one who targeted the practices and the approach of the Society and of ‘virtuosi’, sometimes with humour, sometimes with indignation. Their criticisms are worth examining, both for what they reveal of the era, and for their occasional relevance today. Many of them seem totally misplaced – mocking the ‘weighing of air’, which they naturally saw as the weighing of nothing, or the examining, through the newish tool the microscope, of a gnat’s leg. It should be recalled that Hooke, through his microscopic investigations, was the first to highlight and to name the individual cell. Yet it was a common criticism of the era, due largely to the ignorance of the interconnectedness of all things that the scientifically literate now take for granted, that these explorations were simply time-wasting dilettantism. The philosophical curmudgeon Thomas Hobbes, for example, firmly believed that experiments couldn’t produce significant truths about the world. It seems that the general public, who didn’t have access to such things, saw microscopes and telescopes as magical devices which didn’t so much reveal new worlds as to create them. If they couldn’t be verified with one’s own eyes, how could these visions be trusted? And there was the old religious argument that we weren’t meant to see them, that we should keep to our god-given limitations.
Generally speaking, as Ball describes it, though the criticisms and misgivings weren’t so clearly religious as they had been, they centred on a suspicion about unrestrained curiosity and questioning, which might lead to an undermining of the social order (a big issue after the recent upheavals in England), and to atheism (they were on the money with that one). They had a big impact on the Royal Society, which struggled to survive in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It’s worth noting too, that the later eighteenth century Enlightenment on the continent was much more political and social than scientific.
But rather than try to analyse these criticisms, I’ll provide a rich sample of them, without comment. None of them are ‘representative’, but together they give a flavour of the times, or of the more conservative feeling of the time.
[Is there] anything more Absurd and Impertinent than a Man who has so great a concern upon his Hands as the Preparing for Eternity, all busy and taken up with Quadrants, and Telescopes, Furnaces, Syphons and Air-pumps?
John Norris, Reflections on the conduct of human life, 1690
Through worlds unnumber’d though the God be known,
‘Tis ours to trace him only in our own….
The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find)
Is not to act or think beyond mankind;
No powers of body or of soul to share,
But what his nature and his state can bear.
Why has not a man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, man is not a fly.
Say what the use, were finer optics giv’n,
T’inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav’n? …
Then say not man’s imperfect, Heav’n in fault;
Say rather, man’s as perfect as he ought:
His knowledge measur’d to his state and place,
His time a moment, and a point his space.
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
There are some men whose heads are so oddly turned this way, that though they are utter strangers to the common occurrences of life, they are able to discover the sex of a cockle, or describe the generation of a mite, in all its circumstances. They are so little versed in the world, that they scarce know a horse from an ox; but at the same time will tell you, with a great deal of gravity, that a flea is a rhinoceros, and a snail an hermaphrodite.
… the mind of man… is capable of much higher contemplations [and] should not be altogether fixed upon such mean and disproportionate objects.
Joseph Addison, The Tatler, 1710
But could Experimental Philosophers find out more beneficial Arts then our Fore-fathers have done, either for the better increase of Vegetables and brute Animals to nourish our bodies, or better and commodious contrivances in the Art of Architecture to build us houses… it would not onely be worth their labour, but of as much praise as could be given to them: But as Boys that play with watry Bubbles, or fling Dust into each others Eyes, or make a Hobby-horse of Snow, are worthy of reproof rather then praise, for wasting their time with useless sports; so those that addict themselves to unprofitable Arts, spend more time then they reap benefit thereby… they will never be able to spin Silk, Thred, or Wool, &c. from loose Atomes; neither will Weavers weave a Web of Light from the Sun’s Rays, nor an Architect build an House of the bubbles of Water and Air… and if a Painter should draw a Lowse as big as a Crab, and of that shape as the Microscope presents, can any body imagine that a Beggar would believe it to be true? but if he did, what advantage would it be to the Beggar? for it doth neither instruct him how to avoid breeding them, or how to catch them, or to hinder them from biting.
[Inventors of telescopes etc] have done the world more injury than benefit; for this art has intoxicated so many men’s brains, and wholly employed their thoughts and bodily actions about phenomena, or the exterior figures of objects, as all better arts and studies are laid aside.
Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 1666
[A virtuoso is one who] has abandoned the society of men for that of Insects, Worms, Grubbs, Maggots, Flies, Moths, Locusts, Beetles, Spiders, Grasshoppers, Snails, Lizards and Tortoises….
To what purpose is it, that these Gentlemen ransack all Parts both of Earth and Sea to procure these Triffles?… I know that the desire of knowledge, and the discovery of things yet unknown is the pretence; but what Knowledge is it? What Discoveries do we owe to their Labours? It is only the discovery of some few unheeded Varieties of Plants, Shells, or Insects, unheeded only because useless; and the knowledge, they boast so much of, is no more than a Register of their Names and Marks of Distinction only.
Mary Astell, The character of a virtuoso, 1696
There are many other such comments, very various, some attempting to be witty, others indignant or contemptuous, and some quite astute – the Royal Society did have more than its share of dabblers and dilettantes, and was far from being simply ‘open to talents’ – but for the most parts the criticisms haven’t dated well. You won’t see The Virtuoso in your local playhouse in the near future. Wide-ranging curiosity, mixed with a big dose of scepticism and critical analysis of what the contemporary knowledge provides, has proved itself many times over in the development of scientific theory and an ever-expanding world view, taking us very far from the supposedly ‘better arts and studies’ the seventeenth century pundits thought we should be occupied by, but also making us realize that the science that has flowed from curiosity has mightily informed those ‘better arts and studies’, which can be perhaps best summarized by the four Kantian questions, Who are we? What do we know? What should we do? and What can we hope for?