Genesis 3:17 and Articles 3,4,5 of the UDHR

****Day-O!****

"To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life." Gen 3:17 (NIV)

Compare this with Articles 3, 4 and 5 from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948:

"Article 3

• Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person

Article 4

• No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5

• No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

It is of course odd and pretty trivial to say that if Adam were to live in the far future God would have some explaining to do.  For in the future, should we not hope that Article 3 would be assured because there would be no work-curse on mankind; should we not also hope that Article 4 would not be casually broken day by day; should we not hope that Article 5 would not provide the moral framework for all human interaction?  (perhaps you don't agree with that last assertion but I'm indicating such things as the dehumanising effect of education, the monster of the law and the criminal justice system, the NHS, sexual politics, the 'recognising oneself as victim' that provides a core for humanitarianism...)

These are far-flung hopes.  They are not practical or really viable at all, but for all that - and perhaps because of that - they are still not really ideal, abstract thoughts.  Yes, human rights is incredibly popular and everybody wants to expand the law and work within the system to do whatever, but what kind of bastardisation of the simple notion of dignity is that?  I emplore you to stop for a minute and see that, on some utterly important and visceral level, what the UDHR touches on is the idea that when ordinary human beings look around and see misery, they can, on the back of that experience, feel completely justified - even ontologically so - in expecting and demanding better.  That is a simple thought that anyone can author in its entirety.

And yet the Human Rights movement is ideological, it idealizes certain modes of thought and culture.  I don't wish, though, to criticise the Human Rights movement here.  What I did want to do is to offer the simple thought, the everyday danger of the simple thought, that human life is undignified - that my, your life, robs us both of dignity, and ask you why you, like me, must work for a living.

It is, to be sure, partly God's fault.  It can be said that religions originate in the need for cultures to tell themselves stories in lieu of explanation for why man must work the land, why women must bear children, where animals come from, and so on.  But once these stories are passed down the ages they sit over you like so many dead ancestors, mixing their misery with yours, letting you know through the centuries that you simply deserve it.  Sure, religion provides for some need for explanation, but that explanation deadens your feelings, and it even does more than that: it takes your self-respect and gives it over to an arbitrary religious authority, such as a God or a leader or a community, and allows that authority to administer it back meagerly and conditionally.

What does it take to stand up and say that your life is not conditional, that it simply is what it is?  What does it take to say that it does not need to deserve to be what it is, or to possess those capacities for the furtherance of life which it already exercises and enjoys?

This is the context in which I want to ask the following question:  Why do Humanists feel that human life is worth something?  Is it because there is always something to be extracted from it?

That's what I think is a more incisive question than the one I addressed in the last post.  The last post, and other things I've seen on the internetz, deals with arguments in part decrying the lack of power atheists and scientists have, globally, to 'fight for their rights'.  As I encountered this it was set in terms of the question 'how are you going to have space to think without being crushed by the weight of the world which religion suspends, however badly?'.  In order to exercise the right to think (scientifically and properly) you have to first have the space to think.  A compelling common sense idea but I think I've shown that it falls pretty flat.

There's more I can say about the idea that religion is in some fundamental sense (a practical sense, of all things!) a positive force, but I think it's even more important to talk about the much anticipated 'political growth of atheism', the partner to the helper-religion.

It's already difficult to find an atheist that doesn't pay heavy platitudes to over-simplified notions of rationality, and who doesn't assume that minds work more or less rationally on the basis of awareness of independent evidence.  The ideas atheists have about what kind of thing the mind has to be is just very outdated, possibly by a couple of hundreds of years.  Of course it's ok to criticise religion on the basis of historical argument, but when you draw political conclusions from the principles you express what on Earth do you think you're doing?  The growth of atheism is predicated on membership to this sort of peculiar club, like a Frankenstein club. 

Yes, of course it is understood that the mind is more complex than all that, but the belief remains that it is the operation of this over-simplified mind that matters, ultimately, that they are idealized traits and provide a base of operations for atheism.  Every time you have heard an atheist opine regarding the inability of the converted to reason about evidence, and that it is this skill that needs to be taught through education, did you really want acquisition of that skill to be the fundamental human skill?

Here's the rub:  What does a mind like that deserve?  What is it said to deserve?  Certainly it has to deserve the work-curse, does it not! 

It is the supposed growth of atheism, based upon humanistic principles of 'rational practice', that most smacks of scientism - not, of course, the idea of being led by the evidence, but the idea of the slave-mind that gets invoked to prepare it for the future.  The thing I would hate most for atheism to be is a shuffling of the ideological scenery, a slight re-organization of the same kind of society, just with 'a different basis' for the same sense of morality (and sure the poor continue to be poor but now they can be felt to properly deserve it:  even if the market isn't rational at least the individual is!?).  One of the most wonderful things about Richard Dawkins, in fact, is his political modesty, and thank goodness for it.

Adam was cursed and the world suffered.  That curse will simply continue whilst human life has to be made worthy of itself, the making-rational of the untamed mind echoing the process that makes man worthy of God - the repentence of sin.  If we are happy with our mind's capacities then we can look forward to a future in which there is an infinity of work to be done, but on what basis should we be happy with the mind's capacities?  In this miserable and dying world is the success of science really enough to justify a full-blooded social programme for atheism?  No!  Eveything needs to be worked out, no half-measures are possible (and entreating rational behaviour is certainly a half measure).  The only people unaware of this are the ruling classes, and it is in their unfortunate hands that the future of human dignity currently rests - although it should be possible to recover the unconditional awareness of dignity, very simply, from out of your own experience.  Only this time, no excuses, no more work.


V

Does religion ask existential questions?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XpEjVlPFrs

FYI: The proposal was that 'Religion has no place in the 21st century'.

My issue is with the last speaker, Douglas Murray, whom I found myself initially in agreement with.  His argument I believe runs as follows:

1) Religion allows people to address questions of an existential nature
2) The general culture of today is unreflective and tends to bury these questions
3) Atheism/Scientific-rational discourse is not powerful enough to guarantee any everyday presence for existential questions
4) Exploring these questions is vitally important

Therefore: Religion cannot be discarded in favour of Atheism because religion provides much needed support for irreplaceable forms of questioning.

Corollary: The task facing an Atheism that wishes to replace or eradicate religion is political representation. With enough organisation, government lobbying, etc., perhaps in the future there can be 'a people' known as Atheists. Such a 'people' can gain and use power in order that they be able to let their truth shine through.

The corollary of the argument is of course quite a cop out.  There is no reason why scientific truth and rational argument need to be put to any merely political test.  However, that comment is of course trivial in the sense of the Realpolitik that is being called for.  As it stands the argument is persuasive, and it would seem to be the case that I am being asked to 'put on hold' the hard consequences of sound scientific and philosophical thought, just so that the ground of such thought can be preserved long enough for it to have any real and lasting effect on society.  If the people cannot question, they cannot know.  The argument marks a real difference between the properly scientific activity of research and academic truth-seeking, and the ethical ambition to alter society to reflect known truths.

Religion must do a fairly good job in guaranteeing the right to pose certain questions, as it is, on the face of it, concerned very much with questions of death, the meaning of life, the origins of humankind, and so on.  As Murray states in his speech, no matter how wrong the answers then given by religions may be, this predisposition towards existential matters cannot afford to be lost in a world otherwise hostile to them.  I want to write a challenge to the argument, and have begun by adding a couple of caveats.  The argument may be permitted so long as:

A) Religion does not bury the questions it invokes
B) The existential problems discussed through religion are genuine

If either A) or B) tends to be violated then I should have grounds to question why such discourse needs protecting, as it would in those instances not truly be the kind of questioning that Murray requires for satisfying atheists.  For Murray needs to be indicating the kind of profound questioning capable of attaining to the most beautiful scientific understandings of the universe, and the place of human life within it (which happen to be very well expressed by Dawkins).  In other words, the argument must engage the kind of questioning that can make a thoroughgoing atheistic naturalism posssible.

To take death as an example:  It may be that the undeveloped encounter with death, such as the thought 'my father died, what is going on?', is a natural ground for any scientific understanding of life and death that may subsequently emerge.  Put another way, the kind of well developed science that can describe the physical forces, such as gravity, at work shaping animals' differing lifespans according to their size, can be thought of as emerging from original points of wonder, curiousity and seemingly insoluble problems that arise in human existence, such as the simple experience of the deaths of others.  The scientific viewpoint can then perhaps offer the consolation that human beings have a certain range for their natural life cycles, and death from old age really should not surprise them, and to a good extent these considerations (along with others) will help people to realise that their own inevitable demise should be just as unsurprising.  There is, then, a certain vitally important message in the natural sciences that depicts a bridge across the millenia from states of initial curiosity, wonder, and fear, to understanding.  The question I want to ask is whether such a bridge can truly extend out from or through religion.  Here are some points to consider:

With regards to A):  Religion does not so much offer ways to freely explore the concept of death as to impose a view of death via some authority or convention of thought.  If a problem with death is truly apprehended, then for religion it is either truly expressed in faith or it isn't.  Sucks to be you.

With regards to B):  Do philosophical issues and problems concerning death get broached in religious discourse in the first place? Or does religion instead focus on eliciting and structuring the emotional experiences and needs of people undergoing loss?  If someone close to you dies, you want to know where that person has gone, so religion talks about that, in one way or another.  Confronted with the question 'what is the meaning of death?', no minister of religion would throw up his hands and say 'we don't know yet, what do you think?'.  I fancy that, on the contrary, ministers of religion talk about spirit or somesuch, and conjure ways to replace any germ of philosophical thinking with whatever superstition is favoured by the history of their religion. 

The argument is also put regularly to atheists that religion consoles, that it offers a support for all the big difficulties in life, whether this is through general religious culture or through the shared experiences of religious communities.  Why is it never countered that these needs, under the auspices of religious thought, are always stated and developed as so much superstition?  For so long as people are conditioned and prompted to respond superstitiously to life, how is the actual event of death, or anything else for that matter, ever likely to emerge as something truly problematic, and capable of receiving philosophical relief?

In short, perhaps religion does not offer the space and support that Murray asserts that it does, even if on the surface of things the mere fact that countless people go to church to pray deeply about something or other offers evidence for this view.  For you may regularly go to church for the rest of your life in order to to cope with loss, but you will never reach understanding so long as answers are simply given, or expected, and already anticipated within an arbitrary frame of thought.  I want to know, therefore, what constitutes fertile ground for thinking within religion, and I want to be able to match that up with scientific understanding.  If that cannot be done, and I believe it cannot and that science and religion travel in two different directions - one to life, and the other to death - then I cannot accept arguments such as Murray's that seek to ;give the devil his due'.  There is a burden of proof that needs to be satisfied, and for me this issue was decided long ago in a million different ways.


V
 

Discipline in Education

Yes it's another internet rant on discipline in education.  You've probably read enough about it in the newspapers since the time of Moses so do skip this post as it is indulgent and adds nothing to the debate as you know it - which, if you know it at all, you know does not matter one bit.  Not one little bit.  Go eat a pizza, they're bad for you but they're tasty.  Oh and I've just read this through again and it's not very good even by my own terrible standards.

I've had the opportunity to do day to day teaching of RE in schools and have mentioned that and waffled about it before.  I've had the recent opportunity, however, to do some supply teaching across many subjects in Secondary at several schools, and even two days in two different Primary schools (in the UK).  It's the experience of supply that really interests me in regards to behaviour, because when schools work well they're typically described as having developed relationships.  Developing relationships is the one thing that a supply teacher in a new school cannot have done, and I have noticed that this can turn apparently good schools into bad schools, and apparently bad schools into the ninth level of hell.  Ofsted reports are misleading, to what extent is arguable, but I'll wager on my experiences that day to day school activity can be misleading also.  That means the relationships between teaching staff and students, and even extending to the school's relationship with the parents through the management of their expectations through formal and informal reporting ('living with the school'), though I won't waffle on about that.

So here's what usually happens - the vast majority of children in the average class (not the 'bad' classes) will behave almost impeccably, but a group of 4, usually 2 groups of 2, will misbehave from the moment they walk in, and usually boys.  Usually two are the 'off their heads' type whom I quickly identify by their fidgety, laugh-a-minute gestures, loud voices and constant eye contact with others (as if to say 'you're with me this time right?').  Most of the time I can get the behaviour under control with some techniques that don't include shouting or the giving of sanctions, because something 'clicks' in the student's mind and they put me on parity with other teachers and end up 'having to' do what you say, in the soft sense of necessity rather than force.  Sometimes they simply make the choice that they will keep pushing and not engage me properly despite attempts on my part, only avoiding sanction at each last minute instance, before settling back into minor misbehaviour. 

Well that is the usual picture for probably all supply teachers, and the debate can rage over what to do with these children who will not participate in the class.  Some say hard sanction, some soft, whatever, it is what it is.  What is interesting, however, is the following scenario:

I am told the class are a top or middle set, and will not pose any challenging behaviour.  This is not the case.  After so many years of education and educational conditioning, students fail to 'treat a visiting teacher with the respect that they deserve' - which is really only the measure of the respect they need to keep an ordered class.  Children that aren't normally naughty are 'let free' by the nature of the situation and from the moment they walk in, just as with their 'low ability' counterparts, the poor behaviour is chosen and is removed only with difficulty.  That's a really interesting situation to me and though it is the exception rather than the rule, I think this exceptional quality shows something interesting.

Rant speculation - it shows something about the nature of education as bullshit.

This kind of spoils the choices for behaviour management somewhat.  I've been in schools where they have a 'no shouting' policy.  Many people would be put off by this idea already, probably because they read tabloids (although they don't read obscure blogs so they're likely not you), but most are liberal enough to realise that education has to be a positive and inclusive experience, and shouty teachers means negativity and exclusion  (that's the rationale anyway).  I have also visited schools where behaviour is managed through this negativity, which, while present, was rarely needed (not at all by staff that I saw, and not very much by myself).  I'm going to explain the choice on offer here with reference to  my experiences in Primary schools, as they differ to my experiences of secondary, and I believe they show something important.

It seems to me that Primary schools in particular, but perhaps not exclusively, have a curious way of ensuring manageable behaviour - fuss.  In Primary school children are constantly filling in reading records, ensuring they have the correct colour sticker for lunch, moving their names up and down reward-based wall charts, collecting colour pencils (and putting them away), bringing their bags, coats and lunch boxes into class (and putting them away), having 'roles' for each task such as 'interpreter' and 'explainer' which again have their own recording process,  and so on and so on.  The successful teacher is the multitasking adult, whose fussy behaviour is simply more highly developed and can therefore be the necessary force of control through relentless management.

I want you to think of this 'positive' behaviour management as the relentless renewal and enforcement of behavioural expectations in the intellectually vulnerable (which is what children are), and that it works because of the fear of escalation that will exist in young minds exposed to it.  Managing an adult class in such a way would be met with dirision and rebellion simply because adults can handle any escalation.  A child, on the other hand, feels that 'if I lose my place on that particular star on the wall chart my world will surely end'.  I'm not convinced that this process is educationally useful.  I can test this idea by imagining its role for adults and on simple reflection it adds nothing to adult experience.  It's not just cynicism as adults that prevents the using of wall charts (in a graduate programme at a University for example), and this is ultimately because adults know that it cannot possibly help their behaviour or their methods of learning.  You can imagine a University administration trying to push this policy through and getting nowhere.  The argument can be put forward that the regimented and organised mind that is produced by 'fussy' Primary schools is ultimately the essential support that the adult mind needs for the free assessment of evidence and the clear thinking needed for decision-making, even if it has no further place once used in childhood.  This argument is stupid for a multitude of reasons that I will not go into here, so we'll just drop it, okay?

Digression:  The root of faith in the fuss method is probably the simple prejudice that even though adults feel free and willing, and do not stand as witness to any unhelpful patterns in thier own behaviour, they nonetheless notice these patterns in others and prescribe disciple and moral code (because how else does anyone but me think!).  'Just make them tick these boxes forever and everything will be ok - for me ... perhaps'.  I think this pathos of distance idea is more or less correct because of the seemingly chaotic nature of the young mind and the simple distance in years between that mind, and its vibrant biological needs, and the adult mind with its structure and need for relative calm (and the 'magic' of knowledge to be imparted requiring a priest?).  Anyway, on with the blah.

Given this view I cannot but suspect that an otherwise good environment with some shouting might even be preferable to an otherwise good environment with heaps of fuss.  This is because shouting can be used as a very limited device for the immediate correction of singular situations, but fuss is always used consistently as a device for mind-bending.  I have met primary children who refused to write down what I asked them to write down, in the course of my helping them with their work, because they do not have the correctly coloured pencil, or a ruler, or a line guide to write on, or all three (and I have experienced this several times over the course of only two days in two primary schools - such weird and predominant behaviour).  In any case it is clear to me that we over-value fuss, because any change in control of that fussy behaviour (like a supply teacher) leads to insecure behaviour (or at the very least 'breaks the spell' in an uncomfortable way).  For any closed social code, a stranger is an outsider, and an outsider is always dangerous.

So fuss is a more extreme example of what I feel happens at secondary - that once you strip away the usual relationships and expectations between teacher and student there is nothing left to support a positive 'learning' environment.  Given that the work will be relevant to what students would have been doing anyway, although it is often 'boring' and underdeveloped (and that in itself surely cannot stand in principle), there is no recognition of the work, the environment, or the visiting professional that can continue to support learning in the limit situation of good kids behaving badly.

All behaviour management has bullshit in common with other behaviour management (whatever it is they seem to fall for it!).  It is, of course, a manipulation.  But the student's reward for participation in the manipulation of the behaviour managment is the self-esteem that could be taken from them if they refuse to participate.  A large percentage of all students in the UK have little or no self-esteem to lose (if 4 out of 28 then 14%), so they misbehave somewhat globally, but when it doesn't look likely that self-esteem is threatened - perhaps by the vulnerable person in the room initially at least being the supply teacher - any student can feel that all bets are temporarily off.  The belief in education simply does not save the class, that is that the basic structure of the situation falls apart - and something seemingly so innocuous as a classroom!  All things being equal (and I assure you they are), for that to happen, the society I live in must have really f-ed up.

I want to end my rant by saying that no matter what form discipline (whether imposed or nutured as self-discipline) takes in schools, the one thing that will perhaps never be honestly examined is the reason for education and its relationship to the content of that education.  The 'what' and the 'why' of learning have no place in the modern classroom.  They are simply non-motivational factors.  The ultimate reason for this, I suspect, is that the sum of human learning, even if front and centre in a classroom, has no real place in adult life.  Schools are horeshit because life is horseshit.  Children behave because it is encumbent upon them to do so, not because it is important to do so, and that isn't because they don't care, it's because despite massive progress in philosophy and the sciences, almost everyone is excluded from sharing in the joys of this life, as lived through this society, for the foreseeable future.

So there.


V

Other than inventors of God...

My previous to last post the other day painted Dennett as an ipso facto inventor of God in the sense of Voltaire's famous line ("if God didn't exist..."), placing him as part of a huge group of naturalists that I would call 'realists'.  But where can you find an alternative?  I'll try to get to that here but, as usual, here's some preliminary guff:

A little like a previous post I wrote about Dawkins and atheists and the bit about 'eating Islam', the very educated perspective is not necessarily the most active one.  The great strength of naturalism in its scientific work is that it can be powerfully presumed true - time and time again science works, technology develops, the world and people's lives are transformed.  A weakness accompanies this strength, however, which belongs not to science or to even naturalism proper but just to the conservative nature of the acceptance in society and the conservative personalities of the people involved.

I'm sure it's not controversial to point out that, whilst a scientist can produce a gadget, or at least some apparatus, that demonstrates the reality of the natural function or whatever it is that they have found or worked on, it is the corresponding usefulness of scientific research that matters socially.  Therefore, it is not strictly the science itself, but the science as it matters for humans (science works in outer space too!) that provides the vulnerability of a thoroughgoing naturalism.  There is also the strict objective standards and tests for scientific theses held by the scientific community that condition scientists not to accept simple intuition even when it can be presumed to be true.  Even at the top level of physics, it was not until this year that the Higgs-Boson was found, despite its being implicated within existing theoretical models since the 1960s (and even when it was discovered, the line from the team was the modest 'watch this space').

The reason I'm going into this is because it's important to realise that the productivity of science depends upon following conservative procedure (and it really does), whilst it also has to have some connection with everyday common-sensical life to be socially effective - for example, 'chemistry' as a general scientific interest is not as prevalent as pharmaceutical research.  So if the naturalism that gets entailed by scientific success has a social reality, it's of a nagging but certain variety:  People really have little interest in the truth of science, which is itself socially awkward although it doesn't go away, but they also have plenty to gain in the growth of technology and medicine, which is socially empowering and liberating and therefore of certain power.

Education in the sense of becoming aware of these relationships does not predispose you to exciting radical thinking, even if naturalism is ultimately an exciting truth (and it is: popular science books extolling how wonderful and beautiful the universe is are not just cash-ins, they actually tell the truth, however partially).  The truth of naturalism is more than a nagging concern once it is sought in its own right in every human sphere - which atheists well know.  But following a methodological naturalism is historically loaded with the same mixture of rational modesty and unforgiving conclusions that shaped scientific enquiry since the Enlightenment.  Another huge feature of that period is the promise of the nation-state as a rational government (Hobbes), and both the epistemological and political models of that era have been overturned in the 20th century (or earlier).  I tend to say that the Holocaust was the perfection of the Enlightenment, inasmuch as it was a rational marshalling of industrial forces to solve a social problem.  You might have heard that already.

In any case, and since I'm writing about naturalism (so I'll try to stay a little bit on subject), it's not as straightforward as to say 'traditional methodological naturalism = Holocaust' because that's stupid, just as those that say 'Hitler was an atheist' in some sort of triumphant put down to the possibility of atheism.  What you should understand is that naturalism has to be a conservative gesture politically, even if it can run rampant behind closed doors in the realm of theory.  A naturalistic social or political program recalls eugenics if not all the horrors of dehumanisation of recent history, threatening a future depicted by books such as Farenheit 451, 1984, etc.  And so the truth of naturalism simply gets left hanging, as if waiting for a day when it cannot be easily converted into fascism.  Education means Realpolitik with regards to any rational conclusions that can be drawn from naturalism.

The simplest socially exciting conclusion of course is that there is no God - there has never been a God and human beings will never discover one.  If naturalism is to be a way of life, then there can be no possibility of God.  This is very different from the realist naturalists who simply inform why people believe in God, in the trust that 'on one sunny day' the seed of doubt will take root and believers will encounter the divided universe whole and as it is.  That latter view is the modest Englightened view of appeals to sovereign reason alone, which incidentally never existed otherwise than as a political motto.  Some scientists are religious, and though they never write 'God did it' on their research papers, there really is no contradiction between personal belief and your day job, when the political nature of science licenses both.

20th century thinkers will be able to tell you how education is part of the social machinery that produces such effects.  Rather than informing children and adult students that science needs to be carried further, extended and quickened for the betterment of humanity generally, they learn about compartmentalisation, the limitations of science, humility and respect for culture, and so on.

So what is the result of naturalism more generally spoken?  Not a lot.  I'm not even sure there's a naturalistic way of speaking that isn't conditioned to apathy.  Why does it have to be considered a radical politic?  Just because it is radically true.  For naturalism itself has really nothing to do with human interests, and yet human lives and interests can still have something to do with the truth.


*Apparently most of today's Biological research, carried out by companies with various interests, isn't even reproducable!  What!  (read this in New Scientist a couple of months ago..)



V

Religious Education

So there's RE in schools and I teach it, however there's a lot wrong with it. In fact I regard it as the most damaging of all school subjects and that's the reason I decided to teach it.

As adults we are constantly betraying children, that much should be evident, and if you don't believe that simple premise you're crooked.

I reckon that RE is a way in which adults can betray children most directly, and forbid them from appropriating many of the most vital aspects of adult life. Not only this, but because almost all aspects of adult life are up for grabs today (we're not very well), it makes even more sense for the indefensible to be defended, and guarded from sensitive, imaginative minds. Consequently, the most valuable part of RE isn't in fact any material element, nor even any systematic approach to the subject, but simply the attitude of childhood, perhaps even an enquiring childishness, which must, until the last, be barred from any possible classroom experience. What is that experience?

Any RE teacher can agree that just flinging facts at children who diligently write these down and memorize them does not constitute good teaching, just as any other teacher can say exactly the same for his or her own subject. On the contrary, best teaching practice happens in schools, educational professionals and government agree, when children are free to formulate lines of questioning and develop their own views and intellectual skills. The teacher as an instructor is a minimized image, while the image of the teacher as a guide and conversationalist has become the most powerful image in contemporary education. That doesn't mean it always happens – it usually doesn't – but by the best standards of the day that's how it should be.

The RE teacher thus musters the forces of the classroom, deflecting and redirecting opinions whilst encouraging further study and flattering students as much as possible (even as they are being put back in their place). The reason this is so is what RE tries to accomplish – imparting 'traditional values', or at least those values that are reflected in the majority of people in a nation - or those with the most clout. The classroom 'conversation' is always one-sided because children are naturally underdeveloped in terms of interpolating their ideas to the dominant values, and consequently in bending or disregarding them with the most 'reasonable' objections. The teacher always fills this role as an expert in this regard, even if their putative role is one of guidance and implicit teaching (and they can usually pull it off even if, among adults, they are unusually thick).

RE teaches children to not be embarrassed by their childish nature, because they can simply disregard their current thoughts in favour of better ones. The fact that this is a cop out, since children will always be less refined in the ways of adults than adults themselves, doesn't present itself to teachers of RE: in fact, they only see their 'skill'. RE is usually a more or less subtle form of bullying. If it is performed energetically with smiles, then the most exquisite bullying is enacted. Children are encouraged to be that kind of victim which takes their beatings with gratitude and enthusiasm. This is called a 'child-centred' approach.

A consideration in favour of the teachers is that, typically, children's ideas are simply the weaker ideas of adults (or weaker adults' ideas) and not really new at all, so there is reason to think that all education simply refines thought to the point that it can be 'up to date', rather than being able to apprehend and encourage anything 'new', as that newness simply isn't present enough to be able to work with it – such a thing has to wait for university age, at the very least. The problem with this is that the reason unfashionable, old, or clumsy ideas get discarded isn't because they don't contain any grain of truth but because, ultimately, our culture (just as any culture) does not permit free expression of ideas that could potentially cause social embarrassment. It's not the case that an old or a weak idea, in a new setting, cannot lead to a new adventure in thought, because what's 'new' is emergent in thought rather than posited right away. But that is nonsense – they even talk in child-like voices and look how short they are!

There is also a problem of resources – for the sake of argument imagine that 99% of all schoolwork will resemble either the sensibilities of a vicar's wife or the conspiracy paranoia of an inmate, both dull and entirely predictable, and the remaining 1% is potentially new, or interesting. This 1% doesn't deserve the attention of resources (class time) that could be given to encourage the industry of those vast majority of others who otherwise have nothing else to contribute. There used to be something called 'Gifted and Talented', until government noticed that it was a waste of money, useful only in placating parents who were worried at the state of their child's education. There's genuinely no reason to be worried. Is the issue really how well developed children's actual ideas get? Well, as long as produced ideas/work can be classified as 'engaged' or as exemplifying industriousness, they can be systematically disregarded. There is no reason for a Gifted and Talented category because 'bright' children can instead enjoy endless self-management alongside intellectual litter-picking.

And so the most successful RE is of the 'engaging' type, but that is not to suggest that it has anything essentially different in it than 'non-engaging' teaching. They are both means to purely social ends, and the trained chimp of the modern classroom is no closer to the actual life of their minds than the trained chimp of yesteryear.

Yet aside from the bullies and the chimps that become valourised in school reports and government inspections, children are indeed children. They think and play and learn to exist as adults. Those that cannot typically will kill themselves, go to prison or end up in other undesirable circumstances. They might even become an MP. What is truly amazing about today's RE is how few children actually kill themselves once they find out that a meaningful life is unobtainable for them (for what other conclusion can they really draw if they were honest?). Non, Monsieur, in learning to manage their boredom and inadequacy for so many long school years children learn to lie just as well as the adults they look up to, adults that expect only this of them in the long run.

Though it is school in general that destroys the minds of the young, RE has a special place in denying any freedom children may feel that they have in the realm of faith and belief, philosophy, ethics and morality. RE acts against the growing sense children have of developing some power in all the difficult and abstract areas of life that adults often base their lives around. You might say that children have no real power in these areas and require 'schooling' in them, otherwise they could lead a difficult, intellectually stunted life. There's a lot to this in contemporary RE, which often seems to say 'don't go to prison' and nothing else (usually along the lines of 'don't disrespect the religious, they will put you in prison'). But adult culture surely shows you that adults don't have any power over their abstract life either, and for all the talk about the 'instructor' teacher being an outdated and arrogant perspective on teaching, how much more arrogant and condescending is it to presume to a be a 'guide'? The teacher is no longer the employer of the factory in its dehumanising heyday, instead the teacher is now the jumped up estate agent marketing it as a luxury timeshare.

What could come out of RE and which would be empowering young people rather than robbing them of their emotional connection to their thoughts? Whatever it is it has to admit that adults do not have appropriate answers or an appropriate culture for a meaningful future, it has to say that the adult world is a massive comprehensive failure, or rather, that all its successes lie in hatred, hurt and humiliation, and anything else that begins with h.

To transform RE it has to be engineered to be entirely critically orientated, and be the opposite of a process that merely sorts through thoughts with the stamps of the dominant social values. It has to say that it is against the status quo and it has to empower students whilst endowing them with as little preconceptions as possible. It could begin with a series of apologies, that the teacher is incredibly sorry that students will be entering the 'real world' soon and that this 'real world' is a false image based in the punitive self-loathing of a world that has destroyed itself before it even began; that the idea of nations being united is premised only on the self-interest of a few nations; that the reason there is so much 'good being done' around the world is premised entirely on the mercilessly doom-bringing day to day lives of their parents, teachers, community leaders, politicians, youth movements, and all their various workplaces, needs, social lives and consumptions. Feed a child or as many as you can! their villages were ensured to starve long before you could have done anything about it, and when you are dead, you can't help either – be a transfusion for a dying body while you can, while you're alive (well at least basically alive). Sorry that the economy is based on values based on interests, it isn't a science at all, and that now all life on the planet is threatened by the love of arbitrary and cruel power over others. Sucks to be you, I'll be dead first!

The teacher could apologise that most people believe in a God or Gods and that there are in fact no Gods at all, that for all the educational promise, clear thinking and abundant humanism one might assume lies at the heart of the human future, the world is, contrarily, controlled on the level of ideas by superstitions and fears that will sooner leave man to die clutching his temples in a cold dark place than to allow him to be liberated from those voodoo spells that bind and torture him. Yes! We bind and torture our minds as well as our bodies. Welcome to your teens: your life has been pretty shit so far, sorry that you were having fun being a child and didn't really notice so much. If you are born on planet Earth you will likely spend a considerable percentage of your life praying to a God or wondering about God's plan (you will most likely be a Catholic or a Muslim in fact!), particularly what he may have in store for you, and why everything is so scary and futile, which thought, of course, you will simply learn to keep to yourself.

Sorry that you're an individual without power, left to flit around 'making decisions' like a moth around a naked flame. That one isn't true either, but sod it if there's anything you can really do about it past the age of 6. You're finished, dead, you were killed long before you were born.

Sorry that you most definitely belong to a community that doesn't exist, that you belong to a country that should never have existed, that your attempts to anonymize your identity and dissolve it on the internet is met with enough controls at the point of use to render your efforts pointless. You are no longer a statistic like your parents and grandparents, your statistic owns you, and so you remain basically worthless without a relationship to it, and effectively worthless once you attempt to shore that relationship up. There is no love for you and you cannot love anything that you are. Are you proud of your country? No, but you can at least say it. You can't eat the spam but you can at least vomit like you did – there is your privilege!

V

The meaning of life, or soup.

Voltaire said: "If the heavens, despoiled of his august stamp could ever cease to manifest him, if God didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Let the wise proclaim him, and kings fear him."

Well, almost. Today atheists and naturalists proclaim that there is no extrinsic meaning of life: that there is no outside purpose that humans can look to as a guide and explanation for human life. The universe simply does not care.

What many naturalists say seems to be 'we have to find our own meaning in life', or 'we have to create our own sense of purpose', which sounds a bit rubbish. What sounds rubbish is in short the methodological individualism it seems to imply, which is frankly just lazy. Nobody has ever created the meaning for his or her own life, and that's the way it is. It's true that the human body is capable of 'taking the reigns' of life to a certain extent, but what it takes the reigns of is really an issue.

I saw some video by Daniel Dennett quite a while ago where he talks about free will (found it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cSgVgrC-6Y), don't watch it whatever you do it's loooong and rubbish, but basically he takes free will and 'naturalises' moral responsibility to reflect the freedom that we can assume to have as human agents. He examples a brick, which either hits or doesn't hit you based upon your reactions, and your choice of whether to react or to act against your dodging instinct is taken as a choice in the naturalistic sense (i.e. you can choose whether or not to get hit by the brick). Extrapolating this idea allows us to imagine a power of being able to act otherwise which we can then legitimately say permits a sense of moral accountability: a general idea based upon events of social interaction. So even if the universe is determinate, the sphere of control created by the human body and described by language is a real one, and realising this may help us to work with it to increase freedom. Even without the semantics he spends forever drooling over, this seems to work.

Not a terrible argument (and boy does he bore the tits off me - even the audience falls asleep), but what Dennett has achieved in re-casting free will is something many naturalists do – ignore that the nature of moral accountability should be understood as generated by social discourse which does not common-sensically derive from biology. Though I can agree that some relation between people in history can be a genetic cause, the idea that bodies generate moral discourses is such a weird idea that it actually makes the body something incredibly alien, perhaps requiring talk of collective bodies and so on. To think that freedom is straightforward once people clear away the clutter of cosmic thinking is to utterly neglect the fact that human moral instincts are conditioned wrongly and that their common-sense reality is faulty. For sure having a body implies spheres of control, but what are they? What do human beings really do? Is dodging a brick enough for you? Are you now sold on naturalism and baldness?  Maybe you are a brick!

I'd take issue with arguments such as Dennetts by asking: what does taking the reigns of our lives really mean? Here's a video on 'Blue Sky Thinking', which if you live in a cave like me, is a corporate buzz-word:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM0-NeLl-2w

A quote from the woman: “Why is everybody paying attention to: 'is it going to be advertising or is going to be public relations?'. I don't even think that that's the right question to be asking. The question that we have in front of us is – how are we going to build great new exciting programs for our clients that integrate all of these great opportunities, whether its paid media, earned media. And I actually think that that's the question we should be asking. But it's not about 'will the advertisers win, or will the public relations companies win?', it's about 'who at the end of the day is able to integrate all disparate kinds of elements in the most unique and integrated communications programs that also live on in perpetuity that how a stretch of time and look at some long-term measurement balls(!)', it's those kinds of programs that are really going to make the client be glad he spent – he or she spent – so much money on marketing programs.”

I think watching this video demonstrates what I very much needed to say – balls.

The lady in the video is certainly enlarging her spheres of control – or her measurement balls – by offering a genuinely intriguing question in perpetuity that how (no, stop)... well anyway she is certainly having a full-on vision. However, in my view she really isn't.   It is actually a big deal how powerful accepted methods of reasoning seem, and this entirely regardless of whether they are right or wrong, beneficial or harmful, truth telling or deceitful. That fact should not simply pose a challenge, or cause a bit of worry, as if human beings can just 'go with it' and make reasonable adjustments to their lives. It's a harmful, harrowing fact that is worthy of the worst results of superstition, hatred and fear.

You can take for granted that I don't think that the lady in Blue Skies Thinking is advocating a step towards naturalism, even among the colleagues and businesses she made the video for, and even if I take her view to mean advocating creative, intuitive, holistic business models, whilst others are stuck in traditional business values. In fact, check out the delightfulness of the rhetoric in the video description:

“But how do we get to the BIG IDEAS that live in us but aren't necessarily proactively awakened because we are already meeting our goals and it appears we are doing well overall? The tragedy is, those ideas can stay dormant or, even worse, wither and never see the light of day — if we don't pause and allow ourselves to dream.”

Who could disagree with that? Well, perhaps, someone who doesn't think dreaming has very much to do with business, which stifles true dreaming. I commend to you the thought that naturalism is not served by businesswomen becoming adaptable and holistic about their future business strategies. It looks like it is, for sure, but that idea of naturalism is just a reflection of the business image of life, and does not stand in any way meaningfully outside it. You may say 'well, it is a form of life' and I would agree – there is a complete and effective explanation for all aspects of business culture, just as there is for all forms of religious culture and everything else (...perhaps people are so amazed that something is alive that they don't care what it is?). But I would not agree that naturalism has to steer me toward accepted culture by virtue of the fact that describing human life tends to do so. The critical possibilities that Dennett hints at at the end of his lecture, one an image of a fish leaving his bowl to 'make adjustments', leave a lot to be desired, or, rather, everything to be desired. If people are to explain their circumstances naturalistically, without therefore transforming them, what I ask is the point of naturalism? Does an errant brick really testify to the redundancy of the supernatural as an explanation of moral instinct? How has it done that? What has Dennett really done? Nothing!

From what I understand of the 'naturalism is everything you're already thinking' school of naturalists (read: all naturalists you will ever know), the creation of an extrinsic meaning to life doesn't have to be true, it simply has to be effective. And I would say to this that if naturalism simply redescribes the history of social and moral life as the effectiveness and the persistence of power, rather than supernatural commandment (for example), then, well, there's no trick, there's still supernatural commandment. Why is this? Well, there are some ideas and forces that just melt away, that when given a natural explanation simply vanish from human minds and hearts and they are liberated, but what can be treated like this?  And why?  To believe the realists (as I'll call them) is to think that the devil has a name: Rumpelstiltskin! 

But not everything that is terrifying will fly out of the window on a ladle.

Oh and I reckon the meaning of life is a class issue.

Aaaand..... SCENE!

V

An anti-tolstoyan perspective on crime

Tolstoy used to say something to the effect of: 'since the unjust are organised and settled in society, the just must also organise'.  In other words, the networks of the criminal and the corrupt extend through society, and so the good people in society require a similar distribution in order to fight them.  Whether one is talking about organised crime, or the dealings of the political class, the logic is spelled out the same: they are a skilled football team out for their various interests and for the general advancement of evil, and the choice for anyone who cares to stand against them is to grab a vest and face them across the muddy pitch of history.

For reasons philsophical, humanitarian and spiritual, Tolstoy re-enacts an earlier idea.  Martin Luther separated a 'Kingdom of God' off from a 'Kingdom of the World', where God's people are protected and the Devil's people brutalised and marginalised (essentially).  Referring to the establishment's putting down of the peasantry, whose rising up was in large part a result of Luther's own work, Luther was encouraging: 'Kill them as you would a mad dog!'.  The peasants were driven back into submission, but being the master theologian, Luther also asked 'by what authority should this have happened?'.  His solution did not include the political class in his Kingdom of the World, as a potentially corrupt from of power, but rather as the negative enforcers of his Kingdom of God.  While the regional princes weren't pious enough to devote their lives to God, they had enough sense to keep the Devil's minions at bay with a righteous sword.

Tolstoy also treats his two Kingdoms (or football teams, if you will) as a product of Christianity, but they are heavily modified by his individualistic philosophy and his criticisms of the church and the state.  I still equate the two schemes, however, insofar as they apply a salvation-based demarcation between people who are either good or evil.  I'm utterly sure Tolstoy's approach to morality is wrong because of its supernaturalist tendencies, if anything else.  I could also list its anthropocentrism, its need for both God and Man, its primitivism and so on.  So why am I ever talking about Tolstoy?  He ain't a hifalutin' Criminologist or nuffink, anywaay.

In terms of crime, as far as what I want to dribble on about here, it is clear today that there is a 'criminal culture', suggesting a 'criminal world', flopping about out there, it's threatening and ever-present.  The reason I wrote about Tolstoy and Luther is to say that there is an historical and important tendency to treat crime in a certain way.  Is the criminal world a football team?  Well today's learning says 'yes and no', that while there is organised crime and corruption that may require a more radical analysis, the everyday sense of crime is dependent on a number of factors, some of which might be:

1) The definition of crime, legislation describing crimes to be punished, the workings of the criminal justice system, etc.
2) The social condition; unemployment and economic deprivation, real and absolute poverty, housing, education and disenfranchisement of youth, etc.
3) Media glorification of violence and criminal culture, desensitisation to violent acts portrayed or simply shown on TV (there is plenty of the latter).

I might add: 4) The general lack of any future for anyone.  Perhaps this doesn't lead to crime on its own.  In many parts of the 'developing' or 'third' world, there is great poverty and lack of futures but lower crime than you might expect.  The difference may be the premium that western countries put on their social advantages - advantages that have turned out in reality to be considerably less advantageous - and the narrative that crime is an irrational opt-out of these.  Thus lack of any advantageous future leads to a criminally-staged opting-out that satisfies this narrative within westernised countries.  Or something like that.

Sorry.  Digressed.  The three reasons for crime I gave above, that probably everyone's familiar with, is a very mixed bag.  Some are not properly the direct causes of crime, such as TV, whereas some certainly are, such as disenfranchisement.  In fact the Media has often been cited as the cause of the general fear of crime where there shouldn't be any such fear (such as in Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11).  All this notwithstanding, however, I want to say that the tendency to treat crime in a two kingdoms perspective is very much a theme of the three reasons given, in the following ways:

A) The definition of crime and the vacillations of legislation is said by left wing criminologists (can I say crimnogs? sounds a bit racist, but whatever) to be the direct expression of the interests of the ruling elite, that is, if such and such a thing be done, then as a rule their interests will not be met.  Also, the criminal justice system serves ultimately as a punishment, that is, as the physical control and torment of an immoral body separated from good society.

B) A little harder to see, because 'weer all innit togevva int we?', and because not everybody who has a poor or abused background turns to crime (which makes conservatives get all moral about it - as if they needed an excuse - not that they would have believed the idea that there are social causes of crime in the first place), but I'm sure you, dear reader, are on my side in this one (not least because you probably are me) and can perceive a more sinister role for the idea of 'the criminal classes' than mere 'lack of a moral compass' (how I hate that phrase, as if living a good life is anything like orienteering or, more likely and more imperially, privateering).  I'm always reminded of the 'lumpenproletariat', which is a sabotaging section of the working class that acts as mercenaries for the ruling class interest (i.e. that the yobs are lumpens).  Here there's like a domesticated version of Luther; instead of mad dogs we have Pets At Home.  Arf.

C) As for the media, of course newspapers have always been split as to class and political persuasion, and the working class/middle class split in television viewing has never been more apparent (I can only speak for the UK here, however).  Private Eye calls ITV "the yob channel", and has plenty of reason to.  The two kingdoms narrative even plays out in episodes of middle-class tv, which prattles on about new ways to recycle (since the middle class has the good judgment (!) and therefore the interest to do so - very Tolstoy),  or how to reach salvation by building sustainable or environmentally pleasing houses with their spare 2 million (which I never understand how they got it, but I'm supposed to enjoy their decisions regardless).  Naturally the TV of the World cares disproportionately for programming about crime and punishment and petty soap operas ('pettyvision'), whilst the TV of God will bang out political and lifestyle programming to help people to be better citizens (read: ideologically conditioned masses).  And then there's YouTyube.  If I begin by cycling through debates and documentaries, I end up circulating among more of the same, utilising the tabs at the right hand side.  If, for my daughter, I'm looking at a clip of a funny pet, I will eventually end up (once she has left of course) with a list of tabs that quickly degenerates toward Jeremy Kyle and some truly threatening and harrowing clips that I would never open in a million years.  T'internet tends to behave as if there are two buckets, which could be called high and low culture for all but the fact that the subject matter is often acultural (or even anticultural if you see that).  The bucket of God is a bucket preseved and non-degrading, while the bucket of the World is an endless abyss of misery.  There is the future Jerusalem, and there is the arabs.

Ok ok my point is slipping away from me.  Forget the internet.  Here's the real problem, that of the existence and especially the activity of evil.  When the world is weak, the social contract myth seems easy to upset, and the activity of anyone who does otherwise but conform to the conventions and deferments that the social contract demands are in fact evil.  They are the ones that were born in the woods but could never be brought to fit into society, or the mercenary armies that go dangerously without pay or who no longer care to be paid.  That's not to valorise criminals in any way, however, since some crime is the most deviant and repulsive of these, and always some way along the scale leading man to absolute trauma and death.

This evil can be 'boxed out' of variously terrible or brilliant idealised worldviews, such as Luthers or Tolstoy's, but there's a huge flaw.  The flaw consists of the need for a strong will itself, which demands to be even stronger than princes, that wishes to treat the law as a weak man's tool.  The issue that has opened out today is that the two kingdoms view is fine if you're mad - that is, if you have a rigid moral system - but knowledge beyond this, which we have in these postmodern times, makes it impossible, even as it asserts itself as necessary.  The activity of evil is crushing, so the will to fight or to escape needs to be incredibly empowered to meet the challenge.

The best way to affirm the reality of such a will would be to deny the reality of the activity of evil itself, all else is, in one way or another, sooner or later, "evil".

V