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
 

Fibre and the 99%

Reading through my previous posts, as it has been a while, I find myself wondering about the power plays betwixt New Athiests (NA) and Religious Believers (RB).  Putemtogetherandwotavyougot? NARB, or, anagramatically, BRAN, which sounds wholesome enough, until you read this :

http://www.fitday.com/fitness-articles/nutrition/healthy-eating/6-health-risks-of-eating-too-much-fiber.html

Yes, atheism has bottom problems.  Although I think Dawkins, for example, is a stalwart and wholesome individual with bags of charm (despite his apparently elitist smarm), he is also a good example of, if you will, intestinal blockage.  Too much of a good education has left Dawkins unable to fully absorb the real force of religion, which is entrely social.

The good professor reminds me again and again that given a basically decent education little humans can grow into basically decent bigger humans capable of making more rational decisions than deciding to believe in an omnipotent and invisible creator that demands that they do what He tells them.  Well, ok, but naive.

As I wrote in an earlier post, there are perennial problems with the extent to which humans can make decisions, when this is conceived as the whimsy of an ahistorical mind.  Now, we can of course accept that the mind is historical and go about making decisions as if it were ahistorical, but that would be wrong.  A more correct way of retaining the idea of a decision would be to heavily and constantly inform it with knowledge about history, about demographics, about cognitive science, and so on.  Would a mind of this type be able to 'unchoose' itself and use its power of decision to assert that it is the incarnation of an immortal soul?  Not credibly.

What I neglected to bang on about was the complete importance of the context in which the decision making mind exists, and how education actually has to struggle and go out of its way to make points against the social dogmas of the status quo.  If you are educated to a high degree in a non-religious school, what are the actual chances that you will choose to relinquish your inadequate ideas if you turned up for your first day as a religious zealot?  There may be a chance, and it does happen that deconversion is a fact of a western sceptical education, but I just wonder how completely rational students, say gifted with GCSEs (yes I'm taking GCSEs as a high standard of education, because anyone who has them in the UK has likely gone through 10 or so years of relentless boredom at school and whatever was meant to be inculcated should have been expected to work within that timeframe), have simply blossomed out of the religious influence of their family and community life because of this now well developed rationality.  (If you still think taking GCSEs as a standard of good education is a cop-out, take whatever you want, college, Uni... I've met zealots at Uni).  I'd wager not as many as might be thought.  Part of my job as an RE teacher is to pander to belief systems and walk on eggshells just in case knowledge upsets some parent.

Some nominal athiests turn to religion.  Fact.  But the amount of children born to religious parents that then become religious themselves of course completely overwhelms this fact.  So it seems even if you grant that a wholesome education occured to an atheist, who was able then to decide not to turn to religion (...), the point still has to be addressed as to how the 99% of religious people keep going and going for generation after generation, granted that you subtract the 1% of atheist conversions that seem to be targeted educationally for letting the side down.  Education just seems to be besides the point, or, better, that the kind of education Prof. Dawkins and others implicitly rely upon for their appeal to reasonableness and the rational appraisal of evidence, just doesn't yet exist.  And it may never.

If I had an intestinal blockage where 99% of the good stuff wasn't being dealt with, I might feel pretty sick.  Metaphorically the question arises - how does one eat a Muslim, or a Christian, or a Jew?  Surely some kind of yoghurt-attitude needs to be developed here to get the atheistic bowels moving, and the world can then finally drop some dung on the dry and hungry Plants of Hope and Adventurousness.

So, for the sake of mixing up some creamy yoghurty goodness and finally getting some human being in your system (what?), lets do:

How to eat Islam

1. Encourage confused young Muslim men to experiment with any homosexual feelings they may have, and provide safe environments for them to do so.

2. Marry a woman from a country where women are terrorized by men and make lots of lovely brown babies that you can lavish with love.  If you have the means, try to set up her whole family with a more progressive lifestyle (i.e. because it's better, and it's loving, to do so.  Don't read tabloids).

3. White Western men to wear Burkhas, to sumbolise suffrage and unity.


Or, of course, we could just have another debate from entrenched positions.  But isn't this more practical, more about actually changing circumstances and mixing things up?  There is a lot that atheism is in fact able to achieve in its own name that could not be achieved otherwise - could someone motivated by a moderate view run around in a Burkha (haven't tried it yet but if I find nothing better to do I might prefer it to a worthy debate)?  Could anyone but an atheist deliberately put the oar in and help out homosexuals, disrespecting the moral culture of one of the world's biggest religions?  There is no secular political will on earth right now that will disregard the balance of power to such an extreme extent as to upset religious communities (read: religious old men), because power is so fragile, and because it depends on the authority of such men even in 'such enlightened times' (*cough*).  Working in the name of atheism sounds good to me.   Atheist weddings please, table 4.

There was an interesting story in Time (I think) which described a group of reform Jews in Israel that run around at night in balaclavas putting up posters of tittilating artworks, to try to discourage the Ultra-Orthodox from moving in and aggressively taking over their community, which apparently is happening a lot there.  Worth a thought or two.

Peace,

V

Charity

"If you watch a TV advert telling you to give food to a starving African child and you actually don't do that, it's not because you're particularly conceited, but because history has granted you little capacity in this area. I'm of the view that the image of the child is actually an extension of the abuse visited on that child - something you're thought to deserve, even though you don't." - Me

Wrote this in my previous post, and perhaps it needed either more explanation or another post.  So here's another post, and its own set of arguments.

In this post I'll try to argue why you shouldn't give to charity.  I don't give to charities.  The rational thing is always of course to see whether your opinion or behaviour is good enough for someone else to accept (you lucky person).  I'll take the third-world-oriented charities as my example.

I'll grant that if I gave money or clothes to a third-world appeal charity that some good would come of it for somebody in need.  That in itself makes it very difficult to disagree with the work of charities.  The logic is simple enough for even me to grasp - put in A, get result B, where A is affordable, and B is good.  You'd think that you'd have to go out of your way as an asshole to find arguments not to follow this simple logic, especially given that we live in a materialistic world in which the only thing you generally stand to lose is the rate of growth of your DVD collection.  So you can either get that Hitchcock DVD that wasn't included in your box set (which you purchased anyway becuase it contained many of the classics you wanted, just not this one), or you can provide fresh water, clothing, or education, to somewhere far away where the people will never enjoy what you take for granted.  And in fact, your materialistic way of life seems to have been responsible for the downfall of third-world countries anyhow - the capitalistic hunger of the post-WWII era furnished you with cheap fuel and technology and a responsibility to the now-starving populations left in its wake.

Yes, I'll stand to go against this.  Fool that I am.  Of course it doesn't matter that I do so here, it's just nice to write stuff down so that next time some Christian do-gooder comes to my door my mind won't go blank while they storm off down the drive bemoaning my self-centred barbarism.  Not that I intend to win any arguments or anything, it just would be nice to see their anger have something to be angry at, because they're not used to resistance.

I'll make a list of presuppositions, or whatever they are, precepts probably:

1 - I am politically unfree

I won't offer any explanation of this - if you can't think like this then, well, what can I say?  Good luck!

2 - I'm not responsible for third-world debt, starvation of resources, lack of food and medicines, infrastructure etc.

This is the same statement that might be made by someone who is right-wing, who says 'I was born in this country with advantages that I will enjoy, and nobody has the right to tell me that I shouldn't have those advantages.  Look, no hands!'.  For me it's a bare fact that I'm not responsible.  I'm also not secondarily resoponsible, through the economical or political system that I live in, due to the last statement - becuase I understand how un-free I am with regard to them.  Of course I can make myself responsible by making all sorts of 'green choices', and there are plenty to tick off, but that's another (but I guess related) issue.  If I want to help someone it's because I understand that they are suffering, and that's really all.

3 - I don't live a blessed existence

Typically, the west sees itself as living in peace and freedom, in which citizens choose careers and live otherwise at leisure.  It sees itself as refined when in fact it is brutish; it sees itself as resourceful when in fact it is wasteful; it sees itself as powerful when in fact we are weak; it sees itself as full of luxury when in fact it is full of tat; it sees itself as happy when in fact it is miserable.  Things is really, really bad, man.  And even in those areas in which I can say that I are living well at the expense of others, I have to know that this makes my life bad also - not because I can't ignore it, but because of its effect on me.  The happy man can never be the oppressor.  What would, for example, an alien species think of my inability to act at the suffering of others?  Surely they will see me as singularly imprisoned within a worthless and a hopeless life, in just a truly miserable condition that may not exist across a million other worlds.  Anything else wouldn't really make sense.  Oh, and privilege?  Shopped in a supermarket recently?  You haven't seen privilege until you've seen the cheap look on that middle-aged hag's face as she finds a broken ready meal in the reduced section, before she ghosts away into the crisps aisle with her underdressed and likely abused daughter.  Certainly you can say that someone who is starving is suffering much more than I am, that's true, but you can't use the image of me on my throne as motivation: it just isn't like that.

And on the subject of crisps, I recall the picture of a woman in the London riots of last year making off with a multipack bag of crisps from her local pound shop.  I mean, if you had unlimited freedom to take whatever you want, what would you take?  Some took TVs and so on, for sure, but she took her crisps.  How bad must you feel spending one measly pound on bland, underfilled junk food, to feel liberated in stealing them?  (it's possible she didn't feel bad buying them ever, but just lacked imagination.  I simply prefer the former, though both serve my argument).

So those three precepts (if that's what they are!) might exasperate you, or leave you wanting more defence of them or whatever, but you can probably see that the usual logic of philanthropic giving may not hold with me here.  First of all, to be a philanthropist you have to be rich, and whilst I might be rich in that I have Pounds and not Roubles in my pockets, I'm not rich in the control and exercise of my faculties, which we all have taken away from us via education and social conditioning (so now, if there was someone reading, I've finally lost you.  Whatever, your mom is fat).  Nobody I know behaves appropriately, nor anyone I've ever heard of outside of books and films.  For example, that Denzil Washington film where he goes nuts trying to get treatment for his ill son, is completely believable and yet doesn't ever happen in real life.  Another example - a nurse killed a man's wife by giving her an epidural incorrectly, and (I think! I hope I'm not pasting together two anecdotes!) he appeared on a news-like programme reading the form letter he got from the hospital and etc.  why didn't he go nuts?  Why don't we go nuts?  If there's a panic about paedophiles (and there should be), just organize and hunt them down!  People sometimes know where a paedo lives - why not off him? For goodness sake.  Are there problems that are less real than they could be because of the media?  Probably, but my point is that for all the times the media is accused of scaremongering or starting a panic, what happens? Nothing!  If only something ever happened, then we could talk.

Secondly, pity is worthless.  When people watch the telly and it's charity night and they go 'oh the poor children' or whatever, they completely misunderstand not only the position of the children, but their own position.  A suffering child deserves respect, not pity, and of course that goes for anyone, and that respect can then give birth to appropriate action (in principle).  But your lack of respect springs from a misunderstanding about your own self - you do not have the power to designate pity, since you suffer the same way I do, you just don't know it.  You need to know that you're not free, that you give to the telly fundraiser as a symptom of unfreedom, not as a hero, nor even as a prelude to more meaningful action (as lifestylers might say).

And this brings me to a larger point.  What you might call a physiological approach to charity - it makes you feel better.  You buy the disease and then you buy the cure.  The disease is guilt and pity and the cure is buying blankets.  Many arguments against charity show how it is a false economy, and others point out that wholesale politico-socio-economic change is necessary to stop untold millions starving to death in the near future.  Both of these arguments are interesting and correct, but need to be utilised somehow rather than simply 'taken note of', which never leads to anything.  They can be useful if I first of all describe how I feel when I spend my extra pounds on 'the poor children' - that basically I feel like I've saved them, or at least as many as is in my power, from further suffering, at least for now.  It's a bit like eating a meal: you feel full for a while, and then when the hunger strikes (or is induced), you have to eat again.  The issue for me is that my stomach is bigger than most people's (physically as well as metaphorically true, I assure you dear reader).  I don't anticipate the good feeling, and it doesn't happen for me, so far as I have knowledge.  And knowledge can't just be un-known: I don't want to feel happy or well about the fact that people are suffering and I can do very little to nothing about it by giving £3 a month or whatever it is.

So the most direct answer I suppose I have for not giving to charity is that I don't want to learn to fool myself into forgetting what a dire situation I'm really in. I feel the urgency of action, and I feel the paralysis that comes from living where and how I do, and something has to give. That tension has to be maintained for the sake of whatever might be posssible. I have to feel terrible about suffering and not swallow the charity pill, because it's something I'm going through, as a suffering person among suffering people, and it's something that has to end.  

The less subjective part of my argument says that as philanthropy is both politically and ethically backward (politically because our economic values create starvation, not what we do with our free cash, and ethically because giving requires the exercise of arbitrary power, which we must not count on), you could say that charity is no solution to the problems of the third-world because it assumes that reasonings that belong in the past (philanthropy is very victorian) can solve problems that require better reasoning in the future. 

So, if that's my argument, very roughly, I'll need to criticise charity.  Usually people are unable to believe in social critique becaue their imagination is only able to conjure up the notion of a barely concealed conspiracy, which they then reject out of hand. In saying that charity isn't a correct view, of course, it's really a world away from conspiracy that I'm speaking of. There is a dedicated, honest and caring photographer, with a caring, honest and dedicated journalist, somewhere out there in the third-world doing a job they believe is about the furthering of human life. They find the suffering, record it, and transmit it to their media bosses, who package it for me to consume, in the hope that I will give. The message, believed in from the source of the transmission to its eventual end, is one of humanitarianism, of damning judgement, and often of desperation.

This notwithstanding, if, when the TV turns itself on (don't they?) and makes me feel afraid for someone's life, there should have to be a very good reason to take that as a positive. By convention we grant this positivity immediately: it's good to show suffering because it's good to give, and the suffering should therefore not be done in silence. I would have it, on the contrary, that for the duration of time in which I'm incapable of acting suitably (that is, acting toward ending poverty etc.), the encounter with immediate suffering is counterproductive - as I've mentioned earlier, it's paralysing, and an extension of violence.

I'll identify therefore the anguish felt at others' suffering not as a motivation for charity but as a symptom of unfreedom.  But given that I am not free to change the situation of third-world countries, what happens to the freedom I believe myself to have when I give charitably? For there isn't a mere logic at work here, but a whole... what you possibly might refer to as a social apparatus or something... that places images of starving and sick children on television. Charity is big business, and my perceived freedom for philanthropic action is a huge part of this machine. That's the real meaning of my charitable giving, and it doesn't line up with ending suffering.

You could interject: perhaps it is the case that I'm not yet free enough, educated enough, to react appropriately to the message. Maybe the right thing to do is to give relief as part of my emotional response to the imagery, to carry on, learn, and someday 'get it'. Even if I'm politically in a cage, as I claim, surely that's something relative, and that there are more of less autonomous, more or less educated and therefore more or less free individuals within society, even if society itself acts to constrain them. On this view, the message of humanitarianism can still fully explain what is going on when starving children shake at the end of my living room.

Yet it isn't that I'm not free enough, like I have 10 beans when really I should have 50, and all I need to do is collect more beans vouchers and send them off before they expire (sorry). If there is a difference between the kind of freedom implied by charitable giving and the kind of freedom constrained to feel bad and capable of ending starvation (as I assert somewhat blankly), then it's not only unhelpful or lacking but simply incorrect to describe the appearance of the emaciated child in the usual way.  'Simply incorrect' probably needs a stronger and longer explication, as it's capable of doing a lot of work. In any case, this difference in kind is probably at the heart of what I'm saying, and why giving to charity isn't just a 'stopgap' measure that should be taken (i.e. to help someone right now) whilst the world sorts itself out (or until I feel capable to sort it out).  The pain of need - pleasure of giving logic detracts from the meaning of suffering, not just from my pocket or my DVD collection.


V

Two versions of atheism

'Being' an atheist is an ambiguous business.   It doesn't literally amount to any philosophy in itself but tends to exclude all philosophy.  Why?  Because the history of the negativity of the atheist still extends itself through the atheists of today.
Everyone knows that an atheist used to mean an immoral person - godless precisely because immoral.  All learning and rationality was unknown to or foolishly ignored by the atheist.  An atheistic 'worldview' would be the worldview of the beast: a mistaken image grounded in bodily hunger, and nothing more.  Not a great start, but the irony is that Christendom made up something impossible - man without God - in order to persecute and ridicule, and it turns out in the end that man without God may be something of a necessity.  'Looks like the foot's on the other hand' etc.  And yes, of course it should be strictly possible to be an atheist in the 16th century or whatever, as it is at least a legitimate worldview, but when I say the 'negativity of the atheist' I'm of course not talking about possible true atheists, I'm talking only about the historical, discursive atheist, the atheist-scapegoat of the past.

Today atheists have two outstanding features (other than feet).  Firstly, they tend to be republican with an emphasis on the development of 'secular society' away from the influence of the power of the traditional churches (in the UK this means decrying the place of the CofE in the House of Lords, for example).  At any rate it is assumed that an atheist is a secularist, and the atheist is held to be a statist - despite such people as, say, communists, anarchists and anarcho-communists,  And yes you can in fact take it for granted, as there are less and less people with alternate political persuasions these days.

A little intersting is the fact that some religious people and some ministers of religion feel that a secular society is the best or most progressive one (!), seemingly despite their instincts for a spiritually united people.  The question of how religions behave amonst others seems important here: whether they wish to gather power for themselves and treat rivals with suspicion, or whether they wish to live alongside other faiths.  They may well also believe that a secular society gives churches more freedom to flourish at their best - in control of the meaning of people's lives rather than control over their administration.  But this doesn't really bear on the argument, or whatever it is I end up writing.

I'll briefly point out the theological basis of the individual assumed to be capable of making fee choices and decisions in the atheists' radical secular democracy.  For a thoroughgoing conception of democracy, all citizens should be informed citizens, and as religion stands in the way of a clear understanding of human action and relationships, it really ought to be educated out.  However social science and philosophy (both of which many people hate because they make points like this one) tell us how the 'decision maker' model of human agency presumes a place for a human mind outside of nature, radically different in kind from the emotions, and a mere spectator to history.  This place is in fact somewhere a 'soul' used to be, and willing an informed citizenry that is able to make positive rational use of its democracy isn't in the end necessarily all that different from a Christian society preoccupying itself with God's will.  Why is this?  Probably because what people think and act like as well as what they're able to or likely to ever learn, is determined by their history, and a rational 'decision maker' belongs to historical lineage just as religious sentiment does, it just seems more likely for historical reasons.  If you watch a TV advert telling you to give food to a starving African child and you actually don't do that, it's not because you're particularly conceited, but because history has granted you little capacity in this area.  I'm of the view that the image of the child is actually an extension of the abuse visited on that child - something you're thought to deserve, even though you don't.  Well, maybe I'll write that one up another time.

If you granted the argument about the historical locality of your  supposedly ahistorical mental faculties, you could perhaps still say that the new democracy would rightly embody the good things about Christians without the bad things (i.e. weird beliefs like the ones that say that there is a God and that God wants us to do stuff).  Even if human beings don't have a mind outside of history or if they're constantly subjected to and compromised by their emotions, they still have to try and behave as if it were true that they made their own decisions.  And you actually have most of educated humanity summarised in that sentence.  Two problems of course - 1) politically, you lose any honest sense of a society freely chosen by the people once you admit that probably most people aren't 'behaving free enough' to effect it (though you could enjoy lots of controls, and that's why there should be suspicion!).  And also, 2) it's ethically demented. 

The second outstanding feature of atheists today (again, despite their feet), which is that you can be sure that they deny the place of God in explaining the universe, given the hard sciences' good form in doing so without reference to miraculous and other unexplainable occurances.  What is somewhat less clear is why the universe needs explaining, other than to get on God's nerves.  Of course, the pursuit of happiness, emancipation from superstition, the growth of the human race toward the stars and away from disease, the 'need' to have knowledge and to enjoy that knowledge (enjoying false knowledge has however been far more popular if you take a quick look at any amount of history), all these could be cited as reasons for explaining the universe, and they're ok, but why do I care?

If you're not a scientist or even particularly good at or knowledgeable about science, why do you care to further scientific understanding?  Given that at some important level you are recognizing that scientific understanding is really for the best, why do you therefore refuse to improve your own understanding (that old paradox - why do you not do good knowing that it is good?)?(?)...?....1+3=?  Now, you could be the kind of monster that watches children starve in Africa and does nothing about it, and therefore the kind of monster that can know that there is understanding and innumerable ways to gain understanding, but chooses to remain ignorant.  My point is that these chains of reasoning are (literally) no basis for your action and not injunctions you should want to entertain.  And of course, with Plato, I'll assert that if you truly knew in what direction lay justice, you'd move toward it in whatever way you could, and you wouldn't be ashamed.

Well, it seems too trivial to mention, since you're all aboard the Good Ship Lollipop and you imagine yourselves to be a part of the moving history of society that will eventually end in perfect democracy (no, really, you do!).  But your hypothetical involvement in understanding the world doesn't really make sense anyway.  You may say that your opinion regarding scientific understanding is a good one and that you're a 'good member of society' in holding to that opinion, and however inept you may be personally to further science yourself, at least you 'support' the idea of furthering science in principle.  Through the magic of democracy, the correct opinion then prevails within the political system itself, and society gradually becomes more science-oriented and less God-oriented.  Arguments against this kind of fantasising could take the form of showing how different it is to be a political subject on a matter such as race, and a supposedly political subject on the matter of science.  If you are a racist, you can vote for 'the racist party' - most countries have at least one, and be politically effective.  But there is no 'science is better than religion' party.  So this argument says that (even if democratic action were effective, which it isn't) unrepresented opinions can have no effect on the status quo.  Similarly, you can simply point out that the reason there isn't a science vs religion politics is that the political class sees this issue as suicidal, and so you can't vote on it.  Erm, so there.

The original issue was why the individual cares about there being scientific explanations for the world, instead of religious ones.  Atheists deny that God is an explanation for important things in their lives.  God doesn't explain what their actions mean and prescribe what they should morally do.  If this isn't a political thesis, then it is a personal one, but what is this personal value that merely denies its opposite?  As I've said, it seems that atheists believe in scientific understanding, and philosophical principles, that they don't further.  Does it not seem that atheists are therefore blind?  It just can't be enough to be an incidental atheist, to truly be an atheist.  On the face of it, anyone is an atheist who denies God, by definition, but in practice it seems that only a small percentage of these 'atheists' carry atheism through to some sort of active dimension (and I mean scientists, as philosophers are shit right now).  The risk, of course, is that an inactive and reactive atheism collapses back into religious practice.

There are problems with republicanism and problems with beliefs about science (not to mention the ignorance at the tenets of the philosophy of science), in these two characteristics of the modern atheist.  Who is to say that the irrational nature of the animalistic atheist of centuries ago doesn't significantly describe today's liberated atheists?

Atheism needs furthering and defending.  Media atheists like the New Atheists are all there is right now, and there needs to be something significantly more in entirely different directions.  The problem with the New Atheists is that they can only inform and entertain, whilst religious people have been willfully ignorant and cruel monsters for as long as human history.

V