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