The Delusion Of Dawkins' Dangerous Religion

I Just watched the first part of Richard Dawkins' Age of Reason series. The title is a brilliant steal from Thomas Paine, and as usual very entertaining to watch. It has struck me for some time now that Dawkins himself, in his style if not his conclusions, is a parallel not only with Paine, for his brilliant polemic style in energising his own side, but also with Socrates. This might seem like too high a praise, I'm sure he would reject the characterisation, but watching his methods you cannot fail to see the parallels. Socrates never wrote, what we have from him are dialogues recorded by Plato, and although of course Dawkins does he also has also has something of a penchant for documentaries including discursive interviews. It's two things mainly.

First they are/were both exquisite at humiliating people with well placed questions. This is not only very amusing, a subtler point in philosophy but actually very important, but reflects a radical rejection of the idea that deeply held beliefs on any subject should be respected. What this does in both cases is switch the focus of the debate to the bare propositions, if what you say is stupid and ludicrous then no amount of justification by what that belief means to you can command respect for it. As Nietzche was fond of saying, 'A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.' and I always find it profitable to remember this point. Secondly the occasional unacknowledged quotes. On this particular occasion using the same Socratic argument about conflicts between figures of authority to justify their method. In Socrates it is disagreement between the gods on the nature of the good. Dawkins makes do with the rather more mundane example of adults disagreeing about things, but then he is talking to 6 year olds, the principle is the same. 

In general however I have gone rather cooler on Dawkins than in the past. At the time I first read The God Delusion I shared the good professor's alarm about, as well as views on, religion. It felt like a pressing danger, a threat to the scientific ideals of the enlightenment and everything I believed in. A while back though I started to notice something about the way these great adversaries of reason talked about themselves and their beliefs, something that made them seem a lot less dangerous. In essence the kind of religion that exists today frames itself purely in the terms of a positivist world view and standards of proof and evidence that in never did before. It also treats the individual in a completely different way, seeing people as noble, rational and flawed but not fundamentally so. Finally it confines itself in a way that it could never have accepted before, compartmentalising itself to the sphere of ethics and morality, saying only what should be and ceasing to try to explain what is. We underestimate the extent to which modern religion, in the west at the very least, has been totally hamstrung by the prevailing discourse. This is only natural, when all of the things that make life so liveable for us, from Tesco to the IPhone, are explained to us scientifically we are bound to find that more compelling than religious discourse that we only hear when we are being told about the things that make life worse.

Leviathan, Lucca and Libertas! :)

There is written on the turrets of the city of Lucca in great characters at this day, the word LIBERTAS; yet no man can thence infer that a particular man has more liberty, or immunity from service of the commonwealth, there than in Constantinople. Not my words but those of Thomas Hobbes in chapter 21 of his Leviathan. It is, so the story goes, one of the greatest ironies of political philosophy that the arch defender of absolute sovereign power, who went so far as to say that by definition the sovereign can never act unjustly, was also in possession of an extremely advanced theory of liberty. Although of course it's not ironic at all, it's perfectly logical, because thinkers like Hobbes don't contradict themselves lightly - and a contradiction is not how he saw it.

The reason that I bring it up is that the point he was making about Lucca and Constantinople is the bit that we miss out far too easily today from our ideas of freedom. Hobbes was a proponent of what Isaiah Berlin would later call negative freedom, defined as the absence of external constraints, and we would all recognise (wouldn't we?) the value of this aspect of freedom. But our intuition about how this liberty is attained is completely wrong, just as it was when Hobbes wrote, because we have conflated it with something else.

In short we have taken our ownership and participation in the government as a guarantor of liberty, and conversely the lack of ownership and participation in other regimes as a sign of oppression, when in fact there is no necessary connexion. Consequently when we look to a regime, say modern day china, where government is not established by the choice of the people we necessarily deem them less free. What we are assuming is that a say in our collective government makes any essential difference to the liberty that we as individuals are allotted at any one time. If in Britain a democratic government instituted national service, with the blessing of a majority, and in China the State Council simultaneously abolished it for it's citizens? Who then, treated at the individual level, is more free, those living in a democracy or a dictatorship?

We have also made the mistake, which again Hobbes pointed out to the proponents of popular sovereignty in his day, of counting up all of the things that we could do and calling that our liberty, in contrast to a smaller variety elsewhere. But how are we constrained by laws that we would never want to contest? The government has no law against rotating clockwise on every full moon, or any number of pointless and (as of yet) unfavoured activities - but we are unused to calling this our liberty. So in what sense can we say that all the people of the PRC (to pick on China again) are 'not free' if most simply do not ask for what they are not allowed.

I'm not apologist for the Chinese government, I'm fairly reluctant to grant to them even the virtues that are probably due, nor am I saying that democratic states do not have a greater call on their citizen's time and effort. But I do think, much as Isaiah Berlin did, a more nuanced view of freedom would do us good, if only as a way of understanding the way we are living our lives - never mind changing them (that's another story).

Machiavellians With Double Standards

I posted a while back about David Cameron's comments on Pakistan's (alleged) dual attitude to the problem of violent islamism. As I noted it attracted quite some flack but comparatively little about the accuracy of the comments. It seems, at the very least, I was right about the popular feeling aspect of this.

'on the recent controversy over David Cameron’s comments on Pakistan the public agreed with what Cameron actually said about Pakistan and the export of terror by 66% to 15%. However, they also had negative view about Cameron’s abilities as a statesman – 30% thought he was a good statesman, 43% thought he wasn’t (compare that to his overall approval ratings which remain positive).' - UK Polling Report

What I didn't think about at the time was that the Pakistanis are not the only ones whose double standards are on display in this affair. This can be explained as just simple cognitive polyphasia (a much better term for double standards), a well know phenomenon in political polling and nothing particularly remarkable in this case. What this reflects is only that people's image of Cameron as a statesman is not in fact informed by any of diplomatic activities - this is just how people think about politics.

But in this case there is a way out of the usual indictment of public opinion. Alternatively we can explain this by saying that the public genuinely view diplomacy and statesmanship as an exercise in deception and lying. Tell the truth in the wrong circumstances and you have done the wrong thing, regardless of the facts. Nothing new in that either, that doctrine has been ever present in politics since Machiavelli, and a very mature attitude for the public to take (if that isn't too pejorative). Except that when you put it like that it starts to look like double standards and polyphasia again. Imagine the reaction if a British politician admitted having lied about domestic matters in the same way. I defy anyone to find an example of press or popular criticism of a minister for being excessively truthful about the domestic situation. Could you really see those headlines? 'Minister Admits Crime Is Rising, Should He Have Hushed It Up?' or 'PM Should Have Lied Over Economic Figures'. Lying to johnny foreigner = good, lying to Brits = bad.

The good news is that on balance I don't think this is about racism. It isn't really British people that we object to dishonesty toward, it's to us personally, but it is far easier to express it this way (it gives you a few more allies). Even though we are rarely as patriarchal as to exclaim on a regular basis 'You can't handle the truth!' we all do hold the view (don't we?) that there are at least some truths that some people really can't, or perhaps more to express it more sympathetically - shouldn't be made to, handle. And this is what is really at work, not some mistrust of other collectives, just a simple mistrust of every other person on earth! So what is to be done? If you will excuse the pun. Simple, we just have to stop trusting ourselves and what we can and can't 'handle' so that next time when we are told that there are some things that we can't or shouldn't know, for our own good, we might just believe them and be better off for it.

Why Watching The Oposition Could Tell You More Than Watching The Government...

It might just be that the Labour Party, in spite of being out of power since May, will tell us more about British politics in the next few years than the coalition will - even though they will be the ones dictating the focus of the national conversation and agenda (this is after all what liberal government really consists in, yes?). The reason for this is the litmus test it will provide for political reactions. Reactions are not quite the same as opinions. An opinion is pretty easy to measure, you just ask, but a reaction is much harder to gauge. You can ask people (How would your opinion change if x happened?) but people are very bad at knowing how their opinion would change. There are probably a number of reasons for this, not least the fact that people rarely find the actuality of something the same as they had envisaged it and so take a less favourable attitude once a thing has actually come to pass, but it clearly happens. One of the best examples is the fate of the Conservative Party in 2005.

Polling at that time, much as now, showed that people were uneasy and unhappy about the levels of immigration to the UK. The Conservatives took a harder line than Labour but were rewarded with yet another defeat. The stock explanation for this was that while people may have agreed with the Conservatives on this issue Labour had one the 'big arguments' and so were, taking everything into account, preferred by voters. But the Polling had also shown that Immigration was the most mentioned issue when people were asked what the 'most important issue' facing the country was, with 42% also identifying the conservatives as the best party to deal with it. This seems totally absurd, what was going on? The best explanation is probably that while people thought that they would feel inclined to vote for an anti-immigration conservative the reacted to the reality in a way that they didn't expect or predict - they voted Labour instead. On that occasion what we learned about at least one section the British people was that, although they were opposed to immigration, they were not prepared to identify with a party that, because it took an anti-immigration line, came to be seen as unsympathetic and heartless (the 'nasty party' to borrow Theresa May's phrase).

What we stand to learn from Labour now is even more interesting. Labour are determined to do the difficult thing, at least what they perceive as the difficult thing. I'll let David Milliband explain...


'There are two ways of defining the task for Labour. One blames election defeat on public boredom after 13 years in government, a leader who was a great thinker but not a good communicator, the recession and expenses scandal, and voter anger about immigration. This is a comfortable analysis, but wrong. While the points are true, there is something more fundamental. The second view instead argues that we lost and lost badly because we did not occupy the ground of progressive reform.'



I think that more or less sums up the view of most of the contenders in the ongoing leadership race. Of course what progressive reform means, to slightly over-generalise, is a move to the left. This is because there is no 'hard lesson' for labour in this message. Sections of the party have been aching do dump what remained of the the Blairite reform agenda from the party program. They thought that labour had 'lost touch' even when they were winning - so it seems fairly clear that a move to the left is coming. What this move will tell us is whether people will, in spite of being opposed to excessive wealth and growing inequality, will actually react against a party that promises it, just as they did with the Conservative Party over immigration in 2005. This will be hugely revealing about what socialism means to people in the 21st century, and attitudes to wealth more broadly. Perhaps people will react positively, this would be just as interesting, it may depend on exactly the way in which it was done. In any case it may well end up shaping the paradigm of politics far more than the coalition, which by it's nature may end up being more pragmatic than ideological.

What Exactly Are We Doing In Afghanistan?

'We are certain that we are winning. Why should we talk if we have the upper hand, and the foreign troops are considering withdrawal, and there are differences in the ranks of our enemies?' - Zabiullah Mujahedd (Taliban spokesman)

The Afghan Taliban think that they have time, as well as god, on their side. This would be far easier to dismiss if it wasn't for the fact that we seem to agree with them (about the time, not god). Of course we don't say this directly, but all the talk of deadlines has exactly the same effect. This isn't the same as admitting defeat, the idea is that one more push can buy us one last chance to change the trajectory the future, and so for now the war goes on. The message however is clear, the weight of history is against us and thus we have to be 'realistic'. But is there far more danger in this than we realise? We only have to look back at what is usually taken as proof of the intractability of the Afghan problem - the Soviet occupation - to see one suggestion in this direction. 


'Afghanistan didn't just defeat the Soviet army. It reached out and corrupted and corroded the Soviet Union's faith in itself. Above all it destroyed what was left of the dream that communism was the future universal model for the world. The fascinating question now is whether Afghanistan is beginning to do the same to us in the West. Bit by bit, as we accept torture, corruption and rigged democracy, is our faith in the universalism of our European idea of democracy beginning to falter? And with it our power.' - Adam Curtis

In terms of domestic politics this is almost impossible to evaluate. Even though it is true that the majority of people on both sides of the pond think that the war is going badly, and is being mismanaged by political leaders, there are so many other factors that affect people's faith in their government it is extremely difficult to know if this precisely is what has undermined our faith in our political institutions of late. But it does highlight the extent to which we do appear to have given up on transplanting our idea of the best political institutions to Afghanistan. The crucial question now is, why?

There are, to my mind, three answers to this. Firstly we can simply deny that we have in fact done so, all our realism in this case means is that we have rejected the naive idea that any radical transformation like the one we are trying to effect can happen overnight. Even the deadlines reflect only the recognition that the process cannot be completed by ISAF and NATO but only once Afghan security is handled entirely by forces under the control of a sovereign Afghan authority - this is part of democratic accountability and nationhood.

I find this very problematic. Sovereignty and central government control, even when democratically accountable, does not mean that the positive (so we see it) values of freedom, meritocracy, and maximum possible individual self-determination will flourish. We have surely learned by now that democracy and western values are not identical, even if they are often coextensive. And so, as so often seems to happen, we have a Catch 22 situation. If we are to justify pulling out as part of the process of transformation then we need to appeal to the popular sovereignty issue, but when we do this we give up our only way of ensuring that our other transformative aims are achieved - which was the only way we could justify pulling out in the first place.

Secondly we could answer that we have indeed taken a pragmatic decision to abandon the aim of a pure liberal-democratic Afghanistan. This was only ever a secondary aim anyway, the primary aim was national security and reprisal for the 9/11 attacks. An illiberal democratic government is still preferable to the old 1990's Taliban regime, even if the modern Taliban have to be cut into a post war settlement. So long as Afghanistan doesn't provide haven for terrorism or export too much opium then the country's domestic arrangements are not for us to dictate. It would be both arrogant and futile to try to tell Afghan's how to live, it is simply not sensible to rule out a solution that comes from inside of Afghan culture because it doesn't accord with how we would ideally want it. This seems to be about what the current paradigm is, and what was behind Liam Fox's poorly judged recent comments.

Again though I find this problematic. The national security benefits of the war are extremely spurious. We heard Eliza Manningham-Buller (former head of MI5) state fairly unequivocally at the Iraq inquiry that that war, which was admittedly even more unpopular, greatly increased radicalisation of British Muslims. I think it is reasonable to assume that Afghanistan is not much different, especially given it's proximity to the geographic origin of a large portion of Britain's Muslims in Pakistan. At this point someone usually quotes that statistic about how many of the terrorist plots against Britain had a connection to the Afghan-Pakistan tribal areas. However they rarely ever stop to wonder whether this is only because of the the destabilising and motivating effect of the war, as seems more likely to me - I'll go into why in another post. As for the second point, that we are simply not in principle able to bring about substantive change, why? Are Afghans somehow psychologically or biologically unable to adopt non-traditional lifestyles? This seems unlikely, we managed it (more or less). Moreover it is even more patronising than imposing change on them, thereby voiding the moral argument at the very least.

Third, and I think this is the honest truth, we find ourselves on the current unambitious course because we are fighting for, and over, nothing - simply because we can't think of a good reason to leave. The problem we face is that in spite of our inability to find a reason to fully justify continued fighting, like a really strong belief in liberal-democratic regime change (A Bush Doctrine), this does not seem to be an adequate reason for a pull out, like a really strong anti-interventionism (A Ron Paul Doctrine). In other words what we have found is that while staying in and pulling out might seem like two options in the same decision they are in fact two separate possible events that must be independently argued for, or more precisely that can be independently argued against. Thus when we find ourselves unable to make a convincing case for either we end up muddling through. In the mean time we deploy any old argument, national security, education, Pakistani stability, women's rights, Iran, until at some point in the future, when it feels like the right time, we can make a convincing argument to ourselves to justify leaving.

When we leave finally leave Afghanistan i suspect that the war will not be over. The war will in fact go on but with the key distinction that only Afghans, and maybe the odd aid worker, are being killed. As the Afghan government continues to fight the Taliban we will begin to see the war as just another global conflict - terrible and tragic yes, but also contained and manageable, something that does not demand that it is addressed directly (as our intimate involvement does now). What follows from that is impossible for me, with my limited knowledge, to predict - but what is certain is that we will not really care. The issue of Afghanistan in popular thought will simply be finished without a conclusion to the real questions ever being reached - hence we will learn nothing.

What Does Set Thoery Tells Us About Ethnic and Political Conflict? And Why Organic Muesli, M&S and a Toyota Prius Is The Answer...

Bear with me on this one... Today a friend of mine attempted to explain to me how, mathematically speaking, you can make something out of nothing. It's called set theory. Not sure I entirely understood it but it think it went something like this... Take any number, say four, it can't be defined as four of something - because we could conceivably have four of anything, making the pure number four the only common element. It also can't be defined mathematically, as 2 + 2 for example, because then we have exactly the same problem for 2. What we need to say is what 4 is because this will allow us to then say why 2 + 2 = 4.

Fascinatingly this can apparently be done by grouping nothing in a certain way. A mathematical group is called a set (hence set theory), for example multiple's of 2 (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12) or prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13), and there is one particular set called, somewhat ominously, the 'empty set'. Perhaps predictably the empty set is a set with nothing in it, it is actually not strictly nothing, but it does contain nothing. Think of it like a bag. What becomes apparent is that these bags don't need to contain some object to be distinct from each other. If I take two bags (sets), putting one bag inside the first and another and another bag inside that, but put only one bag inside the the second then, in spite of the fact that there is nothing that isn't a bag (set) inside of them, I can still tell which one is which if they were jumbled up.

So what the hell does that mean? Mathematically I have no idea, I'm not sure I really understood, but as usual my mind flicked to politics and what struck me is how similar political identity can be to this idea of mathematical identity. Political disputes, particularly ideological or nationalist ones - which usually boil down to identity (prescriptive in the former case and descriptive in the latter), often seem to lack content. The conflict seems so pointless, and it is impossible to discern exactly what is motivating either side.

The upcoming elections in Rwanda remind us of a perfect example of this, the substantial difference between hutu and tutsi essentially comprising a twelve centimetre average height disparity and a tolerance for milk. This is clearly no reason for killing 800,000 people, so we tend to explain it in terms of how the two sides are the same. We say, though often tacitly, that there is a universal human tendency to commit vile and horrific acts for very spurious reasons, and this explains it. The fact that the Tutsi RPF (now the governing party) started the Rwandan Civil War, and possibly assassinated the president by shooting down his jet, leading eventually to the genocide is usually a good place to start when trying to prove this.

I think this is wrong for two reasons. Firstly it leads to a phenomenon that the brilliant documentary maker Adam Curtis calls 'Oh-Dearism', essentially the tendency for us to give up and stop trying when we think that problems are happening for no reason and are therefore intractable. Secondly it may simply be wrong, and I think set theory can help explain why (if only as a good analogy). The problem is that we are looking for a difference in content to explain the reason for a conflict (and failing, like looking for an explanation for 4 in 2 + 2), when we actually don't need one.

The real reason for politically or ethnically tribal conflict may in fact be down to the clarity and distribution of boundaries and borders and not the political or ethnic characteristics that the argument is ostensibly about. In other words it is more important when fighting an enemy to know that you are different than to know how. When the boundary between you, your group, the people 'like you' and the other individual or group is of the right kind then conflict becomes almost inevitable (given the appropriate means). That probably sounds like a long way of saying the same thing as the old 'look at what you have in common, not what separates you' line that is so popular in modern multicultural politics. In some sense it is, but it doesn't go far enough because it fails to deal with the areas of division, it simply tells people to ignore them in the hope that (because there is no substance) they will disappear, even though there is no reason to think that they necessarily will.

What is the message then? Should we try to eliminate all distinction between people in an attempt to end conflict? This is certainly what the Soviet Union tried in response to the hugely problematic issue of ethnic conflict in the former Russian Empire. But, as that example should show, this kind of policy rarely has a happy outcome (although to come back to Rwanda this seems to be what they are trying now, even if they have avoided persecution and mass deportation as tools so far). So we are back to Oh-Dearism then? Not quite, because in politics, unlike in mathematics, we can make use of those sweet shades of grey. As I have said it is borders, not substantive differences, itself that are the problem - and this is key. The problem is greatly lessened, if not eradicated, by the clear commonly recognised existence of positions (political, ethnic, economic, cultural) between you and your erstwhile opposite. The cause of conflict is not difference, but polarisation of those differences around two implacable opposites that cannot be mixed. Common ground simply in other areas (as per 'focus on what unites, not divides') simply will not do.

This is of course not at all new. Aristotle said something similar, and his version reveals the disturbing fact that the cure in this case might just be worse than the disease. What is needed, so he said, was a middle group to sit in the middle on the issues that would otherwise polarise society and cause damaging division - a group of middle income, middle culture, well tempered sort of individuals. A group of people who have both conservative and progressive tendencies (my words not his) that will bring stability simply by existing between the extremes. Yes that's right folks - It's the middle class. So next time you see a Toyota Hybrid 4x4, crammed full of organic, sustainably produced whole-foods, dropping Julian and Artemis off at that CofE school that they got into by moving house, even though they don't really agree with religious education - but the discipline must be good and it's last ofstead report was just marvellous! Before heading off to John Lewis to pick up some nick-naks for the kitchen. Just bite the back of your hand and remember - they are holding society together!

A Model Citizen

Watching Naomi Campbell questioned in the Special Court for Sierra Leone this morning was fascinating. It was an amazing juxtaposition, the super-model at the super-court. She looked truly out of place. It is hard to imagine a more serious, less frivolous, thing than a war crimes trial - Ms Campbell (and her profession) is of course the exact opposite of this. The popular idea of the courtroom as a dramatic place is not a difficult thing to dispel, 10 minutes in a real court will do, and the diligent thoroughness of analytic questioning from legal professionals clashes violently with the way the entertainment industry likes it's questions - sensational, chatty and on message for whatever they are pushing you to buy this week. It's also hard not to see the parallels between her and the other beautiful, glittering, utterly useless objects at the centre of this trial - the blood diamonds. The juxtaposition of these dazzling rocks with the awful brutality they fuelled, the terrible atrocities that the prosecutors who called Campbell are now trying to hold Taylor accountable for, is every bit as stark.

Of course there is one difference between the rocks and the model - It can't testify to it's activities, whereas she just didn't want to. Moreover she didn't seem to see why it was important, which is incredible. Charles Taylor was brutal even by the standards of African warlords and his greedy actions encouraged some of the worst bloodshed that Africa has ever seen. Here's a quick list... First Liberian Civil war - 200,000 dead, Sierra Leone Civil War - 50,000 dead, Second Liberian Civil War - 150,000 dead, 1,000,000 displaced, countless more mutilated, raped, enslaved, traumatised. I'm not going to list the specific offences, but 'sadistic' doesn't nearly cover it. So, Naomi Campbell's response to a request for her help in convicting Taylor? Refusal to testify voluntarily (necessitating a subpoena), non-co-operation with the prosecution, and when asked if she was nervous (because she had been impatiently answering questions before the prosecutor was finished talking) her response was cold callous and indifferent. 'No, well, I didn't really want to be here. I was made to be here,' she answered. 'So, obviously I'm just like wanting to get this over with and get on with my life. This is a big inconvenience for me.'.

Of course no one can be compelled to care about something, and attempts to do so in the past have not gone well. Perhaps it is too much to ask people to care about this case in particular - because I suspect many would say, in Campbell's words, 'I don't know anything about Charles Taylor. Never heard of him before, never heard of the country Liberia before. I never heard of the term 'blood diamonds' before.'. That said, perhaps the biggest irony of this affair is that now many more people will have heard of Liberia, and Charles Taylor. I'm sure Naomi Campbell considers herself a friend of Africa (she certainly considers herself a friend of Nelson Mandela!) for all her 'charity' work. This is the first time that she has ever been called upon to really sacrifice for the continent. I don't for a moment deny that testifying is potentially dangerous, earlier in the trial the chief prosecutor alleged that a key insider witness who testified against Taylor went into hiding after being threatened. But Ms Campbell has definitely tried as hard as possible not to help, if you believe the prosecutor she could still have said more if she had chosen to. This is perhaps defensible, you can't command courage either, but the callous indifference is probably only more offensive if it was only done out of guilt and shame.