tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-247613912024-03-14T06:09:32.833+11:00Metamagician3000Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.comBlogger2780125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-61656517244216398482023-03-02T14:25:00.006+11:002023-03-02T14:31:28.732+11:00My (hilariously inaccurate) biography according to ChatGPT<p>Warning, what follows is what ChatGPT came up with when I asked it to write a biography for me. It sounds very plausible and some of it is, indeed, based on reality, but it is mainly untrue. Do <i>not</i> rely on it or on any bio of anybody that you suspect ChatGPP has produced. I'm sure this generalizes much more widely. ChatGPT has a pretty good prose style but can't be relied on for factual claims.</p><p>(I now fear that simply by publishing this hilariously inaccurate biography I'll be reinforcing it. Oh well ...)</p><p><span face="Söhne, ui-sans-serif, system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji"" style="background-color: #f7f7f8; color: #374151; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p><span face="Söhne, ui-sans-serif, system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji"" style="background-color: #f7f7f8; color: #374151; font-size: 16px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Russell Blackford is an Australian philosopher, literary critic, and writer born on October 27, 1954, in Sydney, Australia. He is known for his contributions to the fields of ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion, as well as his work as an author and critic of science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature.</span></p><p style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 transparent; --tw-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: #f7f7f8; border: 0px solid rgb(217, 217, 227); box-sizing: border-box; color: #374151; font-family: Söhne, ui-sans-serif, system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji"; font-size: 16px; margin: 1.25em 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Blackford completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Sydney in 1977, followed by a Master of Arts degree in Philosophy in 1981. He later received a PhD in the same field from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, in 1994. His doctoral thesis was titled "The Mystery of Moral Authority".</p><p style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 transparent; --tw-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: #f7f7f8; border: 0px solid rgb(217, 217, 227); box-sizing: border-box; color: #374151; font-family: Söhne, ui-sans-serif, system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji"; font-size: 16px; margin: 1.25em 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Blackford's academic career has included teaching positions at several universities in Australia, the United States, and Europe, including the University of Melbourne, Monash University, and the University of New England. He has published extensively in academic journals and edited collections, with a particular focus on ethics, political philosophy, and the intersection of science and religion.</p><p style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 transparent; --tw-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: #f7f7f8; border: 0px solid rgb(217, 217, 227); box-sizing: border-box; color: #374151; font-family: Söhne, ui-sans-serif, system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji"; font-size: 16px; margin: 1.25em 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">In addition to his academic work, Blackford is also a prolific writer and editor of science fiction, fantasy, and horror literature. He has authored several books, including "The New Mythology: An Anthology of Modern Myths" (1997), "1001 Nights in the Iraq War" (2007), and "Freedom of Religion and the Secular State" (2012), and has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and horror.</p><p style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 transparent; --tw-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: #f7f7f8; border: 0px solid rgb(217, 217, 227); box-sizing: border-box; color: #374151; font-family: Söhne, ui-sans-serif, system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji"; font-size: 16px; margin: 1.25em 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Blackford is an active member of the Australian Skeptics and the Secular Party of Australia, and has been a vocal critic of pseudoscience and supernaturalism. He has also been an advocate for secularism and humanism, and has argued for the separation of church and state in political and legal matters.</p><p style="--tw-border-spacing-x: 0; --tw-border-spacing-y: 0; --tw-ring-color: rgba(59,130,246,0.5); --tw-ring-offset-color: #fff; --tw-ring-offset-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-ring-offset-width: 0px; --tw-ring-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-rotate: 0; --tw-scale-x: 1; --tw-scale-y: 1; --tw-scroll-snap-strictness: proximity; --tw-shadow-colored: 0 0 transparent; --tw-shadow: 0 0 transparent; --tw-skew-x: 0; --tw-skew-y: 0; --tw-translate-x: 0; --tw-translate-y: 0; background-color: #f7f7f8; border: 0px solid rgb(217, 217, 227); box-sizing: border-box; color: #374151; font-family: Söhne, ui-sans-serif, system-ui, -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji"; font-size: 16px; margin: 1.25em 0px 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Today, Blackford continues to write and publish in both academic and popular contexts, and is widely regarded as one of Australia's most prominent public intellectuals. He currently resides in Newcastle, New South Wales, where he teaches philosophy at the University of Newcastle.</p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-91015757905461161452022-05-24T13:57:00.001+10:002022-05-24T13:57:24.574+10:00Interview with Atheists for Liberty<p>I have a new interview online - this time with Thomas Sheedy from the American organization Atheists for Liberty. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJyNlj-tBic" target="_blank">Check it out here on YouTube!</a> </p><p>Topics include the implosion of the New Atheist movement and why it happened, <a href="https://www.philosophersmag.com/essays/257-the-making-of-a-cancel-culture" target="_blank">the phenomenon of cancel culture</a> and whether anything can be done about it, differences between the political culture of the US and those of other Western liberal democracies, and much more. I enjoyed doing this interview, and found Thomas to be a pleasant and well-informed interviewer. I suspect that he and I would have found some political and philosophical differences if we'd dug down more deeply into this aspect. Although he's strongly opposed to the sort of theocratic thinking that is so dominant on the right wing of American politics, he supports the Republican Party, which suggests he may have some conservative values that I don't share.</p><p>But that's partly the point. We should be able to speak respectfully and seriously - and even form alliances on some issues - with people who may not share all of our values or all of our views over hot-button social, political, cultural, and philosophical issues. That is also what I suggest in the next-to-last chapter of <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Opinion-Conformity-Future-Liberalism/dp/1350056006/" target="_blank">The Tyranny of Opinion</a> </i>when trying to describe a path forward that accommodates non-conformity and dissent<i>.</i></p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-31676636058858587702022-02-09T15:41:00.002+11:002022-02-09T15:41:34.309+11:00Faculty letter in support of Stephen Kershnar<p>I have signed <a href="https://www.thefire.org/faculty-letter-in-support-of-stephen-kershnar-february-4-2022/" target="_blank">this letter</a>, published by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, in support of Professor Stephen Kershnar. Professor Kershnar has come under attack as a result of a video <a href="https://anchor.fm/braininavat/episodes/Sexual-Taboos--Stephen-Kershnar-e1dlqgp" target="_blank">that you can listen to here</a> (it seems to have been removed from YouTube after much back and forth with appeals and counterappeals). He is interviewed on the Brain in a Vat podcast about his philosophical work scrutinizing various sexual and other taboos and shibboleths. Although his work deals with emotionally inflammatory topics, I have looked into the issue and concluded that his research is properly rigorous, scholarly, and philosophical. He is not a mere provocateur trying to upset people.</p><p>In this particular case, the attack on an academic seems to have come mainly from the political Right. However, I have a principled stand on these issues, irrespective of the political direction where the attempts come from to ruin people's careers over their legitimate opinions and their public discussions of them. Compare my support in the past for Rebecca Tuvel, Kathleen Stock, and others.</p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-34274184436646360522022-01-13T18:00:00.014+11:002022-01-14T10:55:50.588+11:00My submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs<p>I have sent a submission to this committee, which is currently inquiring into the Australian government's package of Bills to introduce federal legislation on religious discrimination. The Committee has gradually <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Legal_and_Constitutional_Affairs/Religiousdiscrimination/Submissions" target="_blank">been publishing submissions here</a> - it looks as if they are publishing all submissions received from organizations and a selection of those received from individuals. My submission, if you care to broach it, is number 180.</p><p>At the time I wrote the document, I had read a large number of submissions to the parallel inquiry by a different parliamentary committee (<a href="http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2021/12/my-submission-to-latest-inquiry-on.html" target="_blank">see my own submission here</a>) plus a smaller number of the submissions to the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. Since then, as more submissions have been published, I've read most of them and have learned a few points that might have made me change some things if I'd had the benefit of reading all the other submissions first.</p><p>For example, I was unaware when I put in my submission that the legislative package provides for a review of the legislation two years after it comes into force. Given that, my recommendation that there be a review of the legislation <i>three</i> years after it comes into force, in order to consider how it is operating in practice, looks a bit silly. Oh well.</p><p>I have also seen some useful commentary on whether section 12 of the main Bill achieves its purpose of overriding certain state legislation, or whether it is drafted in such a way that it looks more like an attempt to amend the state legislation (for more, see submission number 31 by Professor Anne Twomey). The latter, or anything like it, is not something that the federal parliament can do. Arguably, the section should be modified so that it more clearly provides rights that then prevail over the state legislation. This is a technical issue in Australian constitutional law, but I think Professor Nicholas Aroney (see submission number 145) has probably been correct to respond by providing some alternative wording for the section.</p><p>It also looks as if I was wrong in thinking that, in the kinds of circumstances that have allegedly been arising, "no Muslims" policies adopted by shops and restaurants are likely already unlawful under federal law. There is relatively recent legal authority that seems to settle this issue the other way. But in any event, my recommendation did not rely on this one way or the other, as you'll see if you make it to the end. I recommended that these allegations be investigated and, if needed, specifically addressed to ensure that there are laws to prohibit such abuses even where there are no state laws that currently apply.</p><p>Otherwise, at this stage, I think the submission - all 22,000 words of it - is solid, especially for something that I wrote very quickly over the Christmas/New Year break.</p><p>I support provisions that will lessen some legal restrictions on speech that either advocates or criticizes religious views. I think that much of the opposition to this is far-fetched and illiberal. Much of it is based on misconceptions. More generally, however, I don't support the enactment of this comprehensive legislative package at this point of time. I am open to argument on many of the issues, but those issues, and the draft statutes themselves, are highly complex, and I don't see any immediate prospect of getting them "right" and in a form that will achieve a wide measure of community acceptance. Much of what is in them, as well as much that is <i>not</i> dealt with, needs much more extensive academic, political, and community debate.</p><p>Part of the problem, as I emphasize in my submission, is that religion is not like race or sex. Religious beliefs are highly controversial and highly motivating. In a sense, religions are more like political ideologies than like races. Each religion purports to be the true one, and the right to proclaim your religious beliefs and insist they are true is an important aspect of religious freedom. There should be room for vigorous public discussion of religion and religions, including their advocacy and also including views that challenge to them</p><p>While religious <i>freedom</i> is important, this is a freedom from religious persecutions and impositions by means of state power. It is also a freedom that includes freedom of religious speech and association, which in turn implies some ability to discriminate in order to preserve a group of like-minded people. It also implies an ability to engage in public debates about religion that might become disrespectful, uncivil, immoderate, and even hurtful. In short, there is a tension between religious freedom (including freedom <i>from</i> religion) and protection from religious discrimination. While I have ideas about how that tension should be resolved in various situations, this is something on which it's going to be extremely difficult to obtain either an obviously correct answer or a social consensus within a liberal democracy.</p><p>Some parties seem to think that an anti-discrimination statute dealing with religion could simply use existing Australian statutes, such as those prohibiting racial discrimination and sex discrimination, as a template. I disagree. I think that idea shows a failure of understanding in respect of religion and/or a failure to take the phenomenon of religion seriously. Any such simple approach could have far-reaching effects on freedom of association and freedom of speech.</p><p>I'll be watching developments closely and will doubtless have more to say about them from time to time.</p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-30189967453537665692022-01-11T12:03:00.005+11:002022-02-08T13:25:24.787+11:00New paper on radical enhancement: "Destiny and Desire"<a href="https://jeet.ieet.org/index.php/home/article/view/87/91" target="_blank">A new paper from me on radical enhancement</a>: "Destiny Destiny and Desire: How To Think About Radical Enhancement." This is published in the <i>Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies</i> (the former <i>Journal of Evolution and Technology</i>, now under the editorship of Mark Walker).<div><br /></div><div>For more on the same theme - though the article covers a fair bit of different ground - you can see my latest book, <i>At the Dawn of a Great Transition: The Question of Radical Enhancement</i>.</div>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-71249832843730366332021-12-31T20:37:00.002+11:002021-12-31T20:37:28.938+11:00My essay "The Making of a Cancel Culture" in TPMMy essay <a href="https://www.philosophersmag.com/essays/257-the-making-of-a-cancel-culture" target="_blank">"The Making of a Cancel Culture" has appeared online in <i>The Philosophers' Magazine</i></a>. Check it out.<div><br /></div><div>Sample:</div><div><blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #666666; font-family: "Libre Baskerville", sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.3px; margin: 0px 0px 11px;">In this essay, largely aimed at academic philosophers, I focus on university campuses. However, the present-day culture and praxis of cancellation extend much further.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #666666; font-family: "Libre Baskerville", sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.3px; margin: 0px 0px 11px;">In many cases, we’re entitled (relative to widespread norms of free and candid speech) to express ideas that are not especially scholarly, or not scholarly at all, but have a place in the rough-and-tumble of everyday debate. Some kinds of vilification of individuals or groups, or violations of personal privacy, might lie beyond the pale of democratic toleration, but wherever, exactly, the boundaries lie, this should still leave a vast zone of expressive freedom. When the stakes seem high enough, however, it’s tempting to contract the zone of what feels tolerable, and to excuse cruel behaviour to people who seem like our enemies.</p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #666666; font-family: "Libre Baskerville", sans-serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.3px; margin: 0px 0px 11px;"></p></div>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-36141125747538179762021-12-14T23:31:00.001+11:002021-12-14T23:31:25.096+11:00Submission to Human Rights Committee now appearing<p>Submissions to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, relating to the Australian federal government's legislative package on religious discrimination, are now appearing <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Human_Rights/ReligiousDiscrimination/Submissions" target="_blank">on the relevant parliamentary site</a>. So far, this includes my own submission as well as others by several academics and organizations.</p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-43662232960891516352021-12-11T10:38:00.002+11:002021-12-11T10:38:34.137+11:00My submission to the latest inquiry on the religious discrimination Bills<p> TO: Committee Secretary</p><p class="MsoNormal">
Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights<br />
Department of the Senate<br />
PO Box 6100<br />
Parliament House<br />
CANBERRA ACT 2600<br />
AUSTRALIA</p><p class="MsoNormal">FROM: Dr Russell Blackford</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">30 Birchgrove Drive<br />
Wallsend, NSW 2287<br />
<br />
E-mail: russell.blackford@newcastle.edu.au</p><p class="MsoNormal">Phone: [redacted]</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Inquiry regarding
Religious Discrimination Bill 2021 and related bills</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Introduction</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">1. I refer to the current inquiry relating to the
government’s religious discrimination legislative package, including the <i>Religious
Discrimination Bill 2021</i> (“the Bill”), and thank you for the opportunity to
make this submission.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">2. I am an academic philosopher with a specialization in
legal and political philosophy, including issues relating to liberal theory, secular
government, and traditional civil and political liberties such as freedom of religion
and freedom of speech. I have published widely on these topics. In particular,
my published books include <i>Freedom of Religion and the Secular State</i> (Wiley-Blackwell,
2012) and <i>The Tyranny of Opinion: Conformity and the Future of Liberalism</i>
(Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). My formal qualifications include an LLB with First
Class Honours from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in philosophy from
Monash University, where my doctoral dissertation applied ideas from liberal
theory and philosophy of law to certain topical issues in bioethics.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">3. I also have extensive practical experience as an industrial
advocate working in the federal jurisdiction and as a workplace relations solicitor
with a major commercial firm in Melbourne. I have considerable expertise in workplace
relations and employment law, and in anti-discrimination law.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">4. I currently hold an appointment as Conjoint Senior
Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle, though I do not, of
course, purport to represent the views of the university.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Scope of submission</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">5. The draft Bills are complex and much of their content deals
with issues arising from tensions between different strands of public policy. As
a result, there is much room for argument about the values and priorities that
have shaped the current legislative package. It is noteworthy that the Bills do
not generally deal with the topic of freedom of religion, which is a freedom
from persecution or imposition of religion by state power. They do not, for
example, seek to strengthen and extend the protection given by s. 116 of the
Australian Constitution. Instead, they are a contribution to
anti-discrimination law.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">6. In this brief submission, I will confine myself to just
two key areas of concern: first, the definition in the Bill of “religious
belief or activity”; second, the nature of a “statement of belief” and the
importance of allowing vigorous public discussion and debate about religion.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Religious belief or
activity</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">7. Fundamental to the legislative package is protection
against discrimination in employment, and in various other domains of public
life (education, accommodation, provision of goods and services to the public,
etc.), based on religious belief or activity as defined. The definition of
“religious belief or activity” is as follows: </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">(a) holding a religious belief;
or<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">(b) engaging in religious
activity; or <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">(c) not holding a religious
belief; or<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">(d) not engaging in, or refusing
to engage in, religious activity.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>8. The first problem with this definition is that it does
not clearly include the <i>communication</i> (or <i>expression</i>) of religious
beliefs. An employer might, for example, claim that it has not unlawfully discriminated
against an employee because of the mere fact that she is known or understood to
hold a certain belief, or because of her participation in clearly religious activities
such as ritual and worship. The employer might argue that it has lawfully
discriminated against the employee because of her <i>communication</i> of her belief,
or because of some aspect of her communication of it, such as its time, place,
tone, or manner. In response, a court might hold that the communication of
religious beliefs falls within “religious activity” or that it is implicit
within “religious belief”. However, that is not clear and it cannot be assumed.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">9. For reasons that are unclear to me, the Bill currently
protects communication of religious beliefs in relation to the rules of
qualifying bodies, but not in relation to areas such as employment. Compare s.
15 with, for example, s. 19. At best, this is confusing.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">10. The legal effect of this difference is open to more than
one interpretation. On one construction, however, it suggests that
communicating religious beliefs is <i>not</i> included within the definition of
religious belief or activity, but is a separate topic. If so, s. 15 provides
that the rules of a qualifying body cannot generally forbid communication of
religious beliefs, but it seems that an employer’s code of conduct probably <i>can</i>
prevent communication of religious beliefs, even outside the workplace (or to
use the language of the Bill, outside of practising the employee’s profession,
trade, or occupation). In that case, this anomaly should be corrected.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">11. Even if it were clear that communicating religious
beliefs falls within “religious belief or activity”, consider the situation of a
person who does not hold any religious belief or engage in any religious
activity, but who does hold philosophical beliefs that are critical of religion
and/or provide a non-religious alternative worldview, such as some form of
secular humanism or philosophical naturalism. This person might communicate her
beliefs about religion in public discussion and might engage in other activities
that are aimed at undermining the credibility of religious doctrines, or at
opposing the social and political influence of religious organizations. For
example, she might be affiliated with a secular humanist organization, or the like,
and take part in its activities.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">12. This person should receive the same protection for her relevant
beliefs, communications, and lawful activities as an adherent to a religion
receives for her religious beliefs and communications and her lawful religious activities.
Any other approach would be intolerably discriminatory. However, despite what
is stated in paragraph 41 of the explanatory notes to the Bill in the
Explanatory Memorandum, the current definition does not appear to have that
effect. As worded, it protects only passively <i>not</i> holding a religious
belief and passively <i>not</i> engaging in (or refusing to engage in)
religious activity.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">13. Accordingly, the definition of religious belief or
activity needs to be modified so that it clearly includes communicating religious
beliefs, and so that it includes holding and/or communicating beliefs that are actively
critical of religion or are philosophical alternatives to religious beliefs.
Furthermore, the definition needs to be modified to include not just non-participation
in religious activity but also positive engagement in activity related to worldviews
that are critical of religion and/or stand as alternatives to religious beliefs.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">14. All of the problems identified under the current heading
can be solved by adding the following to the current definition of religious
belief or activity (perhaps with consequential amendments elsewhere in the
Bill):</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;"><b>[(d) …]; or<o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;"><b>(e) communicating a statement
of belief; or<o:p></o:p></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;"><b>(f) engaging in any activity
reasonably connected with a lack of religious belief, or of a particular
religious belief, or reasonably connected with a critical attitude to religious
belief generally or to a particular religious belief.</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Statements of belief and
public discussion of religion</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">15. If enacted, the legislative package will have the effect
that a statement of belief is deemed not to be, solely in itself,
discrimination under any of a list of federal and state anti-discrimination
statutes. As far as it goes, this is welcome. It provides a valuable protection
for one kind of speech, namely (subject to certain conditions) speech that
expresses or communicates a religious belief, and speech that communicates a belief
that the individual concerned genuinely considers related to his or her not
holding a religious belief.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">16. I expect that the courts would interpret the definition
of a statement of belief broadly to include speech that communicates a critical
attitude to religious belief or to a particular religious belief. Here,
paragraphs 171 and 172 of the relevant section of the Explanatory Memorandum
appear to be correct. Although this issue should be kept under review as case
law develops, the proposed definition is probably broad enough to be workable
and acceptable.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">17. However, Note 1 inserted after sub-s. 12(2) is a matter
of concern. This note also appears after sub-s. 15(3) (and see also paragraph
192 of the relevant section of the Explanatory Memorandum). It states: “A
moderately expressed religious view that does not incite hatred or violence would
not constitute vilification.” As far as it goes, this statement is correct.
However, it is seriously misleading.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">18. First, even an <i>anti</i>-religious view, or a view severely
critical of religion or a particular religion, would not constitute
vilification unless it incited hatred or violence. Though not defined in the
Bill, hatred is an extreme emotion involving animosity, detestation, and
calumny. Second, and more importantly, even statements of belief that are
discourteous, disrespectful, satirical, mocking, or uncivil, or otherwise
immoderate in their expression, would not constitute vilification unless they rose
to the level of inciting either the extreme emotion of hatred or outright
violence. While that much is clear as a matter of statutory interpretation, it
is important not to create confusion with a note that conveys a contrary and
misleading impression.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">19. Thus, the note should be reworded to reflect the
intention and meaning of the Bill. The note would be accurate – and more reassuring
– if it stated as follows: <b>Robustly expressed statements of belief that do
not incite hatred or violence do not constitute vilification. This guarantees a
broad zone for vigorous public discussion of religion.</b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">20. In that regard, compare the broad zone for academic
discussion and debate recently identified by a unanimous High Court in <i>Ridd
v. James Cook University</i> (13 October 2021). Here, the judges explained that
ideas of academic or intellectual freedom provide a broad zone for vigorous discussion
that rightly includes much that inevitably cannot be expressed with courtesy
and respect.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">21. Outside the relatively genteel environment of the
academy, this idea applies even more strongly to certain kinds of discussion
and debate conducted in the public sphere. These include political, cultural,
moral, and, most importantly for current purposes, religious discussion and
debate.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">22. To expect that public discussion and debate about
religion should, or could, typically proceed in a “moderately expressed” way is
to fail to take the issues of disagreement seriously. For example, adherents of
some religions sincerely regard other religions as not merely false but actually
demonic. Some religions sincerely view themselves as engaged in a cosmic
struggle of good versus evil against other religions and/or against unbelief. Some
religions sincerely regard a wide range of conduct as sinful, and hence
conducive to spiritual damnation or an equivalent, even though the conduct might
be essentially harmless in its visible effects, and thus not a good candidate
for legal prohibition or for ordinary kinds of social condemnation. Religious
leaders and adherents often feel called upon by God to speak prophetically, using
forceful rhetoric to call their society back to its traditional moral ideas and
forms of worship. Conversely, many people with non-religious or anti-religious philosophies
view religious beliefs as ill-founded, false, socially harmful, and damaging to
the welfare of individuals in the everyday, empirical world. Such people might
well be motivated to engage in satire, ridicule, and denunciation in the
tradition of Voltaire.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">23. It follows that, even more than with academic discussion
and debate, there is a limit to how far public discussion and debate about
religion can be universally, or typically, moderate in its expression. There
is, for example, a limit to how courteously, respectfully, and otherwise moderately
religious leaders can express the view that certain conduct is wicked, sinful,
and abhorrent to God. There is a limit to how moderately rival views can be identified
and opposed as heresy, or as the products of malevolent spiritual intelligences
active in the universe. Likewise, there is a limit to how moderately one could affirm
that some or all religious beliefs are illusory and harmful. Public disputation
over these and similar issues is inevitably passionate, robust, and marked by a
sense of great urgency.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">24. While some viewpoints might lead to ugly and hostile speech
appearing within the sphere of public discussion and debate, the general policy
that has developed in recent centuries, as part of the emergence of Western
liberal democracies, has been to tolerate rival viewpoints and their vigorous assertion.
Since the seventeenth century, supporters of secular government and freedom of
religion have hoped that the harshest attitudes would soften in an environment where,
at least, no one need fear persecution with “fire and sword” for holding and communicating
their religious or philosophical views. By and large, that approach has been
successful, and there has been a discernible softening of attitudes over the
past, say, 350 years, and even within current lifetimes. It remains prudent to
allow vigorous discussion and debate to continue in the public sphere, with
minimal interference from the government or from others with lawful authority
such as employers. Participants in public discussion and debate about religion
should not have to fear legal sanctions, or adverse social outcomes such as
termination of their employment, for insufficiently “moderately expressed”
views.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">25. This is not to suggest that statements of religious or
philosophical belief should lie entirely beyond the law, allowing a total
free-for-all in this area. Although it is difficult to identify with
exactitude, there is an outer boundary to toleration of vigorous discussion and
debate about religion or anything else.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">26. Within the present Bill, the boundary is set by
reference to statements of belief that are malicious, threatening,
intimidating, harassing, or vilifying, or which incite serious crime. It is
worth emphasizing that nothing in the Bill protects anyone from a civil suit
for defamation, should she communicate a statement of belief that includes
defamatory content. Nothing protects an employee who has confronted a workmate,
colleague, customer, client, patient, etc., with a statement of belief that is,
in context, malicious, threatening, intimidating, or harassing. Again, nothing in
the Bill protects an individual who has committed one of the crimes in s. 80 of
the Commonwealth <i>Criminal Code</i> – see especially ss. 80.2A and 80.2B,
where the essence of the relevant offences is intentional urging of force or
violence against groups or their members. Such boundaries provide more than adequate
limits to toleration of vigorous discussion and debate about religion.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Conclusion</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">27. In summary, I have offered and defended two specific
recommendations for amendment of the <i>Religious Discrimination Bill 2021</i>:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Symbol; text-indent: -18pt;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">First, amend the definition of religious belief
or activity as I have set out in paragraph 14 above. This may require some
consequential amendments.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Symbol; text-indent: -18pt;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">Second, as per paragraph 19 above, delete the
first note to sub-ss. 12(2) and 15(3) of the Bill, and replace it with more
accurate wording as follows: “Robustly expressed statements of belief that do
not incite hatred or violence do not constitute vilification. This guarantees a
broad zone for vigorous public discussion of religion.”</span></p></blockquote><p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>Yours sincerely,</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>Russell Blackford</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">9 December 2021</span>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-77544341452259533102021-11-02T17:26:00.003+11:002021-11-02T17:26:41.893+11:00What is philosophy? A useful post and thread at Leiter Reports<p><a href="https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2021/10/what-is-philosophy-and-why-should-we-do-it-readings-for-high-school-students.html#comments" target="_blank">This post and thread over on Brian Leiter's blog</a> provides a good resource for folks interested in metaphilosophical discussion. I was pleased to see one person giving a shout-out to my 2017 book with Damien Broderick, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Philosophys-Future-Problem-Philosophical-Progress-ebook/dp/B071DR6RCP/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=" target="_blank">Philosophy's Future: The Problem of Philosophical Progress</a></i>.</p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-83913366347746442112021-09-09T11:17:00.005+10:002021-09-09T23:44:30.395+10:00Paul Gilster on the science fiction of Edgar Allan Poe<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Paul Gilster, a technology writer and specifically an expert on the prospects of interstellar travel and exploration, has published <a href="https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2021/09/07/the-unusual-prescience-of-edgar-allen-poe/" target="_blank">a superb essay</a> on the science fiction of Edgar Allan Poe over on <a href="https://www.centauri-dreams.org/" target="_blank">his Centauri Dreams site</a>. It doesn't hurt that he's cited my "Science Fiction as a Lens into the Future" piece, which I have <a href="http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2021/06/science-fiction-as-lens-into-future.html" target="_blank">recently republished here</a>. Check out both of them if this topic interests you.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I was not aware of Centauri Dreams until Gilster kindly contacted me today to let me know he'd cited my work. However, it looks like a wonderful resource, and I'll be browsing it further. If you have any interest in space travel you would probably benefit from doing likewise.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It was slightly galling to find that on the site's "about" page Gilster uses the trope of building star-faring craft as an intergenerational task like building a medieval cathedral. It's an excellent image, so the galling part of it is that he beat me to it! In my latest book, <i>At the Dawn of a Great Transition: The Question of Radical Enhancement, </i>I used the same image for the construction of a post-human, star-faring civilization. In future writings where I make that point, I'll be sure to cite Gilster's prior use of a similar idea!</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In all, though, the point is just: do check out Centauri Dreams and particularly the newly published essay on Poe.</span></p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-90182633907032579042021-09-07T20:18:00.000+10:002021-09-07T20:18:06.558+10:00That's controversial!<p><span style="font-size: medium;">My essay, "Oh No, That's Controversial!", <a href="https://www.philosophersmag.com/essays/250-oh-no-that-s-controversial?fbclid=IwAR3MIVNMHXBQMhPqW6MsTSuJnqn8NSLlqpTvgdMO7j5LaL6ZlJqYAlKydqE" target="_blank">has been published online by <i>The Philosophers' Magazine</i></a>. I discuss the recent launch of the <i>Journal of Controversial Ideas</i>, which is an initiative that I support for reasons that I explain in some detail. This does not mean that its performance has been perfect so far, but it has good intentions and has made a pretty good start. In my view, this journal does have a role to play - perhaps an important one.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Near the end of my essay, I observe: "<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: "Libre Baskerville", sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.3px;">I’m sympathetic to this project; for many reasons, I wish it success. One reason is that it seems to stand for an important point that’s seldom well understood. We can distinguish between abusive conduct toward individuals, on one hand, and, on the other hand, scholarly discussion of ideas that some people might find upsetting. It is one thing to mock, or taunt, or deeply denigrate individuals for their personal characteristics or aspects of their self-presentation, or, indeed, for their ideas. It’s an entirely different thing to communicate opinions on topics of general importance, even if they challenge others’ self-conceptions or dissent radically from a local consensus. Within very broad limits, advancing unpopular or dissenting opinions should not be seen as inviting abuse, censorship, or harmful consequences such as derailed careers and tainted reputations."</span></span></p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-77430546679716852572021-09-06T18:15:00.008+10:002021-09-07T21:23:32.941+10:00Submissions to the Australian government's current consultation on freedom of expression<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs has now published <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Legal_and_Constitutional_Affairs/ConstitutionAlteration/Submissions" target="_blank">the submissions it has received</a> on a proposed constitutional amendment to protect freedom of expression in Australia. These submissions include my own, which I earlier <a href="http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2021/08/my-submission-to-current-senate.html" target="_blank">published on this blog</a>.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This exercise involves consultation with interested parties over a specific proposal originally introduced as a Bill in 2019. The views of the responding individuals and organizations vary considerably. However, I was pleased to see some other parties making points similar to mine about: 1. the need to protect the use by <i>everyone </i>of communication technologies to receive and impart ideas and opinions (or some similar formulation), and not just to protect large news and media corporations and their employees; and 2. the need for governments to meet a stronger test than provided in the Bill if they are to justify encroachments on freedom of expression, i.e. the formula "reasonable and justifiable" is too weak, and could permit the constitutionality of too many laws that restrict the freedom.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">On the second point, there seems to be almost a consensus that some tougher test is required to justify government encroachments on freedom of expression, though parties making this point have offered a variety of formulas to toughen up the requirement. The most popular view seems to be that the word "necessary" - or even the words "demonstrably necessary" - should be included in some way. My own proposal was that for most laws, outside of protecting individual reputation and privacy, the test should be the very strong one of "<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">demonstrably necessary for the viability of an open, free and democratic society."</span></span></p><p><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: medium;">The words "for the viability of" are important here, as they make clear that I don't merely mean necessary to achieve some governmental purpose, but necessary for the viability of the society itself. Some laws would doubtless meet that test, such as laws against leaking military plans in advance, or against disseminating means of easily producing weapons of mass destruction. A law against genocidal hate propaganda would, I think, also survive, as campaigns using such propaganda can notoriously rip a society apart. But many existing laws would be in deep trouble under my version of the proposed new section of the Australian Constitution, which, in my opinion, they should be.</span></p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-16407499516911236042021-09-03T10:56:00.013+10:002021-09-07T21:23:10.389+10:00A terrific article in The Atlantic, and some observations on "cancel culture"<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/" target="_blank">This piece, by Anne Applebaum, in <i>The Atlantic</i></a>, is important and excellent. It concerns what is now called "cancel culture" - not a term that I find particularly apt, but it's the one that seems to have stuck.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">On a daily basis, I see many people - often people whom I otherwise like and respect - denying that this phenomenon exists, even though it is all around them. There are constant pressures to conform in act and (especially) speech. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This is not entirely new. Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed nearly two hundred years ago that there was no freedom of opinion in, specifically, the United States. This was not because of government censorship, but because of a culture where anyone who dissented from the popular view would be subjected to so much opprobrium that it would not be worth their while to say what they really thought. This is now very much the environment within what could be called the academic and cultural Left. The slightest dissent from the current package of popular ideas within that environment will lead to a vicious backlash that will upend your life.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I've experienced this myself, if only in a relatively mild way - mainly in the years from 2011 to 2013, when I expressed some views that dissented from those of my online "liberal" (in the strange American sense) peer group. I have not had my actual, real-life friends go after me, but I can report that what I experienced in 2011 in particular was emotionally devastating at the time. Many people have experienced far worse, and have been subjected to punishments massively disproportionate to anything wrong that they might have done or were accused of doing.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Individuals who minimize the impact of cancel culture have, I suspect, never been on the receiving end. Frankly, though, if they haven't experienced it that makes me suspicious. As I've seen, and experienced myself, it's so easy to be on the receiving end of cancel culture, even for very mild dissent from locally popular positions, that if you <i>haven't</i> ever been, I can only assume that you've never publicly expressed even a mildly heretical thought on social and political issues.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Tocqueville notwithstanding, it doesn't have to be like this. Perhaps I was fortunate in coming of age in the 1970s, a period when we actually made fun of the idea that we might be "politically correct" or "ideologically sound" in a Maoist or Stalinist way (note that leading Marxist thinkers such as Mao always emphasized the need for a so-called correct political line - this wasn't something just made up by 1990s right-wing culture warriors).</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">There was a general assumption back in the 1970s that a variety of opinions was a <i>good</i> thing and that we could and should enjoy political and philosophical arguments going late into the night - with no hard feelings attached. Perhaps we were naive and innocent in that way, but I do think something was lost when this freewheeling, tolerant culture was largely erased in the 1980s. In frightens me that most people under the age of, say, 55 have never experienced it.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Over the past 10 or 15 years, the use of social media to enforce conformity has made the environment much worse. It is now far easier for a mob to engage in a concerted campaign to go after an individual, and thus enforce conformity. We are back with a vengeance to what Tocqueville wrote about all those years ago. The environment is now scary, and even I am somewhat afraid to say - beyond my most intimate circle of friends - what I really think on important social and political issues, even though I think I have a contribution to make and despite the fact that I am fairly well buffered (financially and otherwise).</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The victims, of course, are not the real enemies of the Left, such as fascists and right-wing culture warriors, who have their own supporters and are largely immune to cancellation. The victims tend to be humane people whose politics are at least somewhat liberal or left wing, but who are independent thinkers and don't go along with every view that happens to be fashionable within their milieu at the particular moment. Those people have valuable things to say and appropriately complex arguments to make. But it is dangerous for them to raise their head above the parapet. When they do so - and they are conspicuously shamed and punished - others with similar ideas learn that it's safest to conform.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This is an intolerable situation, and I wish we didn't have so many people minimizing it or denying that it exists.</span></p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-11567525541434875362021-09-03T09:24:00.005+10:002021-09-07T21:22:33.422+10:00The Economist on "The Threat from the Illiberal Left"<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/09/04/the-threat-from-the-illiberal-left" target="_blank">This article in <i>The Economist</i></a> is very good. It could almost be a summary of my 2019 book, <i>The Tyranny of Opinion</i>. You can read the whole thing with a free account with <i>The Economist</i>.</span></p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-8275388949067725572021-08-26T15:08:00.004+10:002021-09-07T21:22:06.569+10:00My book review of Tosi and Warmke's book, Grandstanding<p><span style="font-size: medium;">In case you missed this book review in <i>The Philosophers' Magazine</i>, earlier this year, <a href="https://www.philosophersmag.com/essays/234-grandstanding-the-use-and-abuse-of-moral-talk-a-review" target="_blank">you can find it online here</a>.</span></p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-45130224206030317792021-08-02T17:38:00.004+10:002021-09-07T21:21:38.388+10:00My submission to the current Senate consultation on freedom of expression<span style="font-size: medium;">TO: Committee Secretary<br />Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee<br /> PO Box 6100<br /> Parliament House<br /> Canberra ACT 2600
</span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">FROM: Dr Russell Blackford</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">30 Birchgrove Drive<br />
Wallsend, NSW 2287<br />
<br />
E-mail: <a href="mailto:russell.blackford@newcastle.edu.au">russell.blackford@newcastle.edu.au</a>
<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><span lang="EN">Consultation
regarding </span>Constitution Alteration (Freedom of Expression and Freedom of
the Press) 2019</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">1. I refer to the above public consultation, and thank you for
the opportunity to make this submission.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">2. I am an academic philosopher with a special interest in legal
and political philosophy, including issues relating to traditional civil and
political liberties such as freedom of religion and freedom of speech. I have
published widely on these topics. In particular, my published books
include <i>Freedom of Religion and the Secular State</i> (Wiley-Blackwell,
2012) and <i>The Tyranny of Opinion: Conformity and the Future of Liberalism</i>
(Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). My formal qualifications include an LLB with First
Class Honours from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in philosophy from
Monash University, where my doctoral dissertation applied ideas from liberal
theory and philosophy of law to certain topical issues in bioethics.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p> </o:p>3. In short, I am an academic expert on issues to do with
liberal theory and philosophy of law, including issues relating to freedom of
speech. I am currently Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University
of Newcastle, though I do not, of course, purport to represent the views of the
university.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p> </o:p>4. I have studied the proposed Bill to amend the Australian
Constitution, and I can express my response to it quite briefly.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p> </o:p>5. I am generally supportive of the idea of giving greater
constitutional protection to freedom of speech and expression.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p> </o:p>6. I doubt, however, that it is helpful to make specific
reference to “the press”, since this is an ambiguous expression. Historically,
“the press” referred to a technology, i.e. the printing press, and not to a
social institution such as what is sometimes called the “institutional press”
as it exists today, i.e. large news and media corporations. Thus, “freedom of
the press” historically referred to the freedom not only of newspapers and
professional journalists but also of lone – often scurrilous – pamphleteers.
Today, this original meaning is often forgotten, and it is often assumed that
“freedom of the press” means a special freedom (or set of privileges) for
professional journalists and broadcasters employed by large news and media corporations.
In fact, the freedom that should be protected is a freedom for <i>everyone</i>
to use the media of mass communication to address their ideas and opinions to
the public.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p> </o:p>7. It is worth noting that the large news and media corporations
operating in Australia already possess enormous wealth, influence, and power,
and that this can enable them to harm individuals whose reputations are smeared
or whose privacy is invaded. The psychological and financial cost of legal
action to protect individual reputation or privacy against these corporations
is prohibitive for most individuals, and it should not be made even more
difficult.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p> </o:p>8. In short, any constitutional amendment should clearly
enhance the power of <i>all</i> citizens to use the media of mass communication
to communicate ideas and opinions to the public, without further increasing the
power of large news and media corporations relative to that of individual
citizens.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p> </o:p>9. At the same time, the proviso in the proposed Bill is too
lax in how far it allows legislatures to interfere with the proposed freedom.
The current wording which uses a formula of “reasonable and justifiable” could
allow many legislative provisions that restrict individual freedom of
expression more than is strictly necessary.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p> </o:p>10. Accordingly, I propose that the current substantive
provision in the draft Bill be replaced with the following words, based in part
on concepts in the European Convention on Human Rights and the Canadian Charter
of Rights and Freedoms:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The Commonwealth, a State or a
Territory must not limit freedom of expression, which includes the freedom to
hold and express ideas and opinions, and in particular to receive and impart
ideas and opinions by means of present and future communication technologies.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">However, a law of the
Commonwealth, a State or a Territory may limit the freedom of expression only
if, and only to the extent that, the limitation is</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">(a) reasonable and justifiable to
protect individual reputation or privacy; or</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">(b) for any other reason,
demonstrably necessary for the viability of an open, free and democratic
society. </span></p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">Yours sincerely,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p> </o:p>Russell Blackford</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">2 August 2021</span><o:p></o:p></p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-9466665605055823782021-07-14T10:26:00.003+10:002021-07-14T10:29:20.413+10:00How free is the will? Sam Harris misses his mark<p><b><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">by Russell Blackford</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">First published, in slightly abridged and
different form, ABC Religion and Ethics Portal, 26-27 April 2012. Available at
URL </span></b><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/04/26/3489758.htm"><b><span lang="EN-AU" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/04/26/3489758.htm</span></b></a></span><b><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;"> <o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">The long conversation</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">For thousands
of years, myth-makers, poets, philosophers, theologians, novelists and others
have wrestled with a daunting question: whether, or to what extent, our lives
are in our own hands (or minds).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">To many
people, future events seem to be laid down independently of any say that <i>we</i>
might have in the matter. This characterized the worldview of Greek mythology.
In Homer’s <i>Iliad</i>, the will of Zeus is depicted as binding on men and
women, however much we mortals struggle and complain. Human attempts at
rebellion are futile.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">Oedipus
is one mortal who struggles against his fate: he flees Corinth for Thebes,
seeking to escape a terrible prophecy that he will kill his father and marry
his mother. But, once again, his attempt is futile. The very act of journeying
to Thebes brings him to a fatal (in every sense) confrontation with his true
father, Laius, and to marriage to his true mother, Jocasta.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">This
theme in the long history of recorded thought finds popular expression even
today, whenever we hear talk of how some important life event – when Jack meets
Jill, perhaps – was “meant to be” and in the widespread, though perhaps only
half-believed, idea that our days are numbered, with an appointed date of death
for each of us (decided, perhaps, by God).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-AU;">It finds
expression in many ways in literary narrative and popular culture, as well,
though most often the idea is resisted, as when Sarah Connor in <i>Terminator
2: Judgment Day</i> uses a knife to inscribe the defiant words, “NO FATE.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Behind
this lies the fear (or the assurance, depending on your disposition) that the
future comes about in a way that is uncoupled from our deliberations, choices
and actions. How might this be?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Well,
an obvious way – or, at least, one that has seemed obvious to many people and
cultures – is that our choices or their outcomes are controlled by overriding
forces, such as the stars or the gods or a reified Fate or Destiny.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">There
are, however, other ways in which our deliberations, choices and actions could
be, as it were, <em>bypassed</em> by events (to borrow from </span><span lang="EN-AU"><a href="http://www2.gsu.edu/~phlean/"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Eddy Nahmias</span></a></span><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">).
Thus, our deliberations would be futile on some portrayals of the relationship
between mind and body.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If
(as I tend to think) mental events just are, at another level of description,
physical events in our brains, they can have causal efficacy much like any
other physical events. Similarly, an interactionist form of mind-body dualism
does not entail any scary sort of bypassing of our deliberations and choices.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">However,
the situation is rather different on other dualist theories of the mind. If our
thoughts, emotions, and choices are mere epiphenomena, they cannot affect our
bodies or the external world; nor can they do so if, as Leibniz believed, the
mind and body are like parallel clocks in a pre-established harmony, but
exercising no causal influence on each other. On either of these views,
deliberation and choice cannot reach out to touch the physical world. </span><span lang="EN-AU"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse-Five"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So it goes</span></a></span><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">To
some thinkers, the very fact that there <em>are</em> facts (by which I simply
mean true statements) about future events is sufficient reason for a kind of
fatalism. Imagine that I am sick, for example – should I call for my doctor?
Well, presumably there is a fact as to whether or not I will recover from my
illness. If I am going to recover, then this will happen (so the doctor has
nothing to do with it). Conversely, if I am not going to recover, it will
happen this way (so the doctor has nothing to do with it). In either case,
events will reach their conclusion whether I call the doctor or not. Thus, it
is pointless for me to call her, as it cannot affect my fate! By similar
reasoning, it is pointless to take any action at all.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Such
is the conclusion of what was known in antiquity as the Lazy Argument. Fatalism
about the future leads to a recommendation of passivism, though, really, we
have no say in that either. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Although
some philosophers deny that there are facts about the future, the idea seems
intuitively appealing. Moreover, Einsteinian relativity theory seemingly
entails that the universe is a four-dimensional space-time manifold; in that
case, there are facts about events that are (relative to us) in the future.
Such facts also seem to be entailed by any theory of comprehensive causal
determinism, since the current state of the world precisely determines all
states of the world in the future.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ancient
philosophers knew nothing about Einsteinian theory, of course, but they were
familiar with many such considerations, and they produced sophisticated responses.
In particular, some Stoic philosophers developed arguments to counteract
fatalist thinking and show that our actions really are “up to us.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This
is not the place to explore all the tendencies of Stoic thought, but the
general idea was to accept causal determinism, and even to refer to the causal
series as “fate” – and yet argue that our actions proceed by means of our
individual characters.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">On
this approach, our beliefs about the world, our desires, our ingrained
dispositions – in short, the motivating elements in our individual
psychological make-ups – are the features that bring about our choices and
actions, and thereby affect the course of events. If I am offered food, for
example, my action of eating it (or else declining it) will be brought about
partly by the circumstances of the offer, but also by the way I respond, which
will result from my beliefs, desires, character, etc.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The
point of all this is that humankind has engaged in a sophisticated discussion
over many centuries as to whether, in some sense, our choices and actions, and
the predictable consequences of our actions, are up to us, or whether, at some
point in the order of events, </span><em style="font-size: 12pt;">we</em><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> are bypassed, leaving our efforts
essentially futile. The great cultural conversation certainly did not end with
the Stoics, and it has continued to the present day. Throughout the medieval
period, the issue became entangled with theological considerations, and to some
extent this remains so.</span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Not
surprisingly, recent analyses by professional philosophers have become
increasingly fine-grained and technical, particularly, though not solely, where
arguments about the role of </span><span lang="EN-AU"><a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">causal determinism</span></a></span><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> are
involved.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<h3><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt;">What is “free will”?<o:p></o:p></span></h3>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Although
we sometimes say to each other, “That’s up to you,” the usual English term for
the up-to-us-ness discussed by Greek philosophers is “free will.” Whether or
not this expression is very apt, it does capture one aspect of the long
conversation – the idea that we are free from the control of Fate or other
spooky forces.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">More
generally, it might be said that we are “free” if we choose on the basis of our
own beliefs, desires and characters. If these things are unencumbered, then we
can be said to be acting as we <em>want</em> to act, at least within the limits
of our opportunities, physical and cognitive capacities, resources and so on.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Like
many expressions that have become subjects of philosophical inquiry, “free will”
may seem rather vague and elusive. However, there has now been a fair bit of
empirical research (by Nahmias and his colleagues, among others) that provides
some clues about the way that the idea of free will relates to the concerns of
ordinary people who are not philosophers or theologians (“the folk,” as
philosophers like to say).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Unfortunately,
the published research is open to interpretation and, at this stage, it appears
unlikely that there is a single “folk” conception. The folk, or many of them,
do seem to have concerns about causal determinism, but mainly when it is
described so that it sounds like fatalism or epiphenomenalism.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Speaking
very generally, ordinary people are most likely to deny the existence of free
will when they see our deliberations, choices and actions being overridden or
bypassed in some way or another. For the folk, or most of them, the dominant
idea in attributing free will to themselves and others seems to be a denial of
fatalism.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ordinary
people are likely to affirm that “we have free will” if they dispute our
subservience to forces such as the gods, the stars and Fate; and they are
likely to say, in a particular situation, that “X acted of her own free will”
if, in addition, X was not subjected to some more earthly kind of coercion
(perhaps a gun at her head) or certain other kinds of frightening pressure
(perhaps being required to make an important and complex decision in a very
short time). Note, however, that I do not claim that these are the <em>only</em>
ideas of free will existing among the general population.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Contemporary
philosophers have what may or may not be a more stringent concept of free will:
we possess free will only insofar as we can be morally responsible for our
conduct. It is the capacity to act with moral responsibility. This conception
of free will has dominated modern Western philosophy – though, again, I don’t claim that it is the <em>only</em>
philosophical conception of free will (for more, see the </span><span lang="EN-AU"><a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#4"><i><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy</span></i></a></span><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> entry on the
subject).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Moral
responsibility for our actions may well require the absence of spooky
controlling forces, coercion, unusual pressures and so on, but perhaps it also
demands something more. The current debate among philosophers revolves around
the circumstances under which people are, or should be held to be, morally
responsible agents.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If
we are very demanding about what capacities are required for moral
responsibility, we may find ourselves denying that human beings possess free
will in the philosophers’ more technical sense, but we might still mislead the
folk if we say to them, evoking <em>their</em> understanding of the expression,
“You do not have free will.” This is likely to convey the false – and perhaps
demoralizing – claim that fatalism is true.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<h3><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt;">Could I have acted otherwise?<o:p></o:p></span></h3>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sometimes
the question of whether I had free will when I acted in a certain way is said
to be a matter of whether <em>I could have acted otherwise</em> – say, could I
have had coffee this morning instead of tea? In this example, it seems clear
enough: yes, I could have chosen tea instead of coffee. Intuitively, the “could
have acted otherwise” formulation works here.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">However,
this formulation is problematic because we sometimes seem, intuitively, to be “free”
even when we cannot act otherwise, provided that we actually acted <em>as we
wanted to</em>. At the very least, any intuitions to the contrary are rather
murky.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Suppose
I was offered coffee or tea, and I chose coffee (for no particular reason other
than my preference for the taste of coffee). Unknown to me or to her, however,
my host had accidentally filled both pots with coffee, so my counterfactual
choice of tea would have been ineffectual: I did not have a live option of
acting otherwise, in the sense of actually drinking tea (perhaps there was no
time to make some tea even if we’d discovered what went wrong).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Let’s
consider the situation: I thought about it briefly – “coffee or tea?” – and I
chose what I wanted. Furthermore, I received the coffee I asked for, and I
happily drank it. I don’t know about your intuitions, but it looks to me as if
I acted of my own free will, in the everyday sense of that expression.
Unsurprisingly, philosophers have developed many other examples of situations
where I had no actual prospect of acting other than as I did, though
intuitively I seemed to be acting freely.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What
if my choice is about something morally significant, rather than about whether
to choose coffee or tea for breakfast? Should I, or shouldn’t I, save this
nearby drowning baby? Imagine that I don’t like babies, so I deliberately let
the baby drown – but I would have failed to save it in any event, since,
unbeknown to me, an invisible monster with a taste for adult humans was
swimming between me and the baby. I might still be considered morally
responsible for my conduct, since I actually acted <em>as I wanted</em>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
upshot is that the idea that notions of free will are best conveyed by talk of
“could have acted otherwise” is out of fashion among philosophers, though we
still see this sort of talk in many popular discussions. Accordingly, it is
worth saying a little more about it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Note
that the idea that I could have acted otherwise in a situation is ambiguous. In
one sense, it is merely a formula that conveys roughly the following: I acted <em>as
I wanted</em>, given the opportunities available to me. Here, saying that I “could”
have acted in some other way means that I had whatever capacities, resources,
equipment, proximity to other people and things, and so on were needed to do so
(and, of course, I was not constrained by, say, another person’s coercion or an
overriding spooky force).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hence,
what action I took depended upon my beliefs, desires, character and so on. If
these psychological aspects of <em>me</em> had been different in some relevant
way, my choice would also have differed. This idea does seem to capture much of
what is meant by ordinary talk about “acting of your own free will,” and to
reflect much of what is found in the cultural conversation dating back to the
Stoics and beyond.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Alas,
this first conception of “could have acted otherwise” has problems when tested
against sufficiently ingenious counterexamples, perhaps involving people who
suffer from inner compulsions, phobias, or special blocks on their ability to
form certain desires. In some of these cases, we seem to get a “wrong” (that
is, unintuitive) answer to whether someone acted of her own free will.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Still,
this weak form of “could have acted otherwise” talk may be a harmless way of
thinking about free will for many purposes. It conveys a rough idea of ordinary
conceptions of what it is to act freely, though it probably can’t be used as a
strict definition. At the least, it would need to be refined.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
another sense, however, to say that I “could have acted otherwise” might mean
that, at the time of my action, there was some non-zero probability of my
acting otherwise, <em>even given my beliefs, desires, character and so on</em>.
That is, there is some non-zero probability of something different happening
even if everything that could conceivably influence the outcome is the same,
including everything that seems relevant about <em>me</em> and my motivations.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">On
this interpretation of “could have acted otherwise,” it might be argued that I
am <em>never</em> able to act otherwise. I fail to do so even when I act as I
want, perhaps with alternative opportunities available to me, and in
circumstances where ordinary people would say unhesitatingly that I acted “of
my own free will.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But
is <em>this</em> idea of “could have acted otherwise” even intelligible? What
could possibly make a difference to how I act when seemingly <em>everything</em>
that could affect my choice has been stipulated as being exactly the same? This
is very mysterious.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">On
the weak interpretation, then, the idea of being able to act otherwise has
problems as a strict definition of when actions are “up to us” or “of our free
will.” However, unusual examples are needed to bring out the problems, and
perhaps the idea will do as a rough indication of what we’re getting at with
free will talk.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What
we must not do, however, is adopt “could have acted otherwise” as our
definition of free will, attracted by the common sense in the first, weak,
meaning of the phrase, and then claim that human beings lack free will because
(we triumphantly point out) no one can never “act otherwise” in the far
stronger, more mysterious, perhaps unintelligible, second meaning. We’d be
tying ourselves in logical knots.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<h3><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt;">Free will and <em>Free Will</em><o:p></o:p></span></h3>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">All
this brings me to the short book </span><span lang="EN-AU"><a href="http://www.samharris.org/free-will"><i><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Free Will</span></i></a></span><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> by
Sam Harris. Throughout, Harris argues two things.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<ul type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We can never
act otherwise in the strong and mysterious sense, mainly because this is
precluded by the fact, as he sees it, of causal determinism.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We are not
“the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present.”<o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ul>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Harris
appears, then, to think that free will means acting (1) in circumstances such
that I could have done otherwise (in the strong, mysterious sense), and (2) by
means of a process of deliberation that is entirely conscious. Since, this does
not happen, he concludes, we do not have (what he calls) free will.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As
always, Harris writes clearly, persuasively, and with a certain rhetorical
flair. In particular, he has an enviable gift for describing opposing views in
ways that make them sound ridiculous – whether they are or not. <em>Free Will</em>
– the book, that is – is entertaining and easy to read, and I’m sure it will
sell plenty of copies.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">However,
I submit that the views Harris ridicules are not, in all cases, ridiculous at
all, and that readers of his new book should subject it to sceptical scrutiny. <em>Free
Will</em> provides neither any useful historical context (it ignores the long
cultural conversation) nor any state-of-the-art analysis of the current
philosophical positions and their respective problems (it ignores most of the
professional literature).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Importantly,
the concept of free will that Harris attacks so relentlessly bears little resemblance
to either the dominant folk ideas (roughly speaking, that fatalism is false,
and that we commonly act without coercion, with adequate time to think) or the
technical concept used by most philosophers (we have the capacity to act in
such a way that we are morally responsible for our conduct).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
fairness to Harris, some philosophers who define free will as a capacity to act
with moral responsibility think that we can have moral responsibility only if
we can “act otherwise” in the mysterious sense that I’ve discussed, one that
makes us the ultimate sources of our own actions (somehow preceding or
transcending even our own beliefs, desires and characters). However, this is
neither a consensus view among philosophers today nor a view that especially
dominates the long conversation about free will and related concepts. Nor does
Harris himself offer much of an argument as to why anything like this is part
of the very definition of free will.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">To
be fair, again, some philosophers do seem to resist the idea of unconscious
decision-making. However, the idea that we are the <em>conscious</em> source of
most of our thoughts and actions is not the standard philosophical definition
of free will. Nor does it seem to dominate the thinking of the folk.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
fact, no plausible story could be told in which we make any of our decisions
entirely consciously. Many are probably made entirely <em>un</em>consciously.
And I find it difficult even to make sense of consciously choosing my next
thought. How is that supposed to work?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Harris
defines “free will” as he does because he thinks that it is “the popular
conception” or “the free will that most people feel they have” while offering
no evidence to support these bold assertions. Thus, even if he succeeds in
showing that “free will,” as he defines it, does not exist – I agree that it
doesn’t – that will not entail that either philosophers or the folk are
incorrect when, employing <em>their</em> definitions or conceptions, they claim
that we have free will.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Let
me be clear on this: Harris may, indeed, have isolated one tendency in the
thinking of some philosophers and some ordinary people. Perhaps he has met
people who think about free will in a way that matches up with his definition,
and I’m sure some readers will find that the definition rings true for them (the
evidence suggests, remember, that ordinary people do not all think alike about
free will – and philosophers certainly do not).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But
Harris does not claim to be attacking <em>one tendency</em>, perhaps a
dangerous one, in ordinary thinking or the philosophical literature. Nor does
he limit himself to claiming (against the evidence to date) that it is the
dominant tendency.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As
far as he is concerned, he is writing about the true conception of free will,
and anyone who disagrees is changing the subject. They are not talking about
free will, he thinks, but only about “free will” – about an intellectual
construction of their own making. That is almost the reverse of the truth, and
if anything it is Harris who wants to change the subject by insisting on his
own pet definition.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<h3><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt;">Harris on compatibilism<o:p></o:p></span></h3>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">When
Harris turns to the views of compatibilists, philosophers who think that the
existence of free will is logically consistent with causal determinism, he
accuses them of changing the subject, but that is unfair and untrue.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Rather,
the views of the compatibilists, whether correct or not, have been a key
component of the conversation for over two thousand years. He accuses them of
producing a body of literature that resembles theology, primarily aimed, he
suspects, at “not allowing the laws of nature to strip us of a cherished
illusion.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Just
how offensive compatibilists ought to find this will depend, in part, on how
they regard theology. If I think that theological discourse frequently contains
clever, distracting rhetoric, duplicitous manipulations of standards (such as
interpreting texts literally when it suits the theologian’s agenda to do so,
but interpreting them in some other way whenever this is more convenient to
her), and other slippery methods of argument, I might well think that I’ve been
insulted if told that I write like a theologian.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Harris
does not spell out the features of theological writing that he has in mind.
However, it seems clear enough that he does not intend the comparison as a
compliment, and that the thrust of his remarks at this point of his book is to
accuse compatibilist philosophers of some form of intellectual dishonesty or at
least wishful thinking.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">That,
however, is unfounded. From ancient times to the present day, compatibilist
philosophers – whether Stoics, early modern thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes,
Enlightenment figures like David Hume, or contemporary successors to the
tradition such as Daniel Dennett – have attempted to do what philosophers do at
their best: they have tried to reason clearly and carefully about a deep but
elusive topic of general importance.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
doing so, they have needed to make distinctions, examine and refine concepts,
and reveal nuances (and possible inconsistencies) in everyday thought.
Unfortunately, this process can lead to a thicket of new conceptual problems.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Inevitably
– so it goes – compatibilist theories have become more detailed and ramified
than the relatively brief pronouncements from earlier writers such as Hobbes.
At a minimum, recent compatibilists have had to elaborate and qualify their
views as they’ve encountered objections, baffling science-fictional examples, and
troubling classes of cases (such as whether psychiatric patients have free will
if they are physically unimpeded when acting on their delusions).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But
incompatibilists must face the same sorts of problems, and the resulting garden
of competing analyses, each one making finer points than its predecessor, is no
different from what we see in any other area of philosophy. If compatibilist philosophers
write like theologians in some (unexplained) sense, so do their opponents.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nor
is there anything that, to a fair critic, “seems deliberately obtuse” about the
idea of someone acting freely on her desire to commit a murder. Harris is
correct that we often have conflicting desires, some of which we would rather
not have (that is, we have second-order desires about our desires). But this is
old news and exhaustively discussed in the philosophical literature.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A
related point about psychic fractures could indeed be developed into a problem
for free will, so let me flag that for later, but there is nothing obviously
obtuse (let alone “deliberately” so) about assuming that the murderer acted on
her strongest desire, and that her action revealed something important about <em>what
she was like as a person</em>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
the same passage, Harris goes on to claim that the deeper problem for
compatibilists is that there is no freedom in doing as I want, such as when I
reach for a glass of water to quench my thirst.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But
really, where is the <em>un</em>freedom? <em>Where</em>, as Hobbes would have
put it, <em>is the stop</em>? Where is the thing that impedes me from doing
what I want to do? Are there any spooky forces (the gods, the stars, Fate) in
the vicinity, preventing me from acting as I want? How has anything in the
situation, as described, led to my efforts being bypassed or blocked, or to my
desires being frustrated?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Unless,
I am employing my own pet definitions, or unless, perhaps, I am one of those
philosophers who is haunted by a very demanding notion of what is required for
moral responsibility, I will have no good reason to see my action in drinking
the water as other than having been up to me – or as a “free” one.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Perhaps
compatibilism is false, but the various attempts by Harris to dismiss it with
little argument should not convince anybody – however robustly or amusingly he
words them (“changing the subject,” “resembles theology,” “seems deliberately
obtuse,” “a bait and switch,” “nothing to do with free will”). This sort of
dogmatism and abuse can be fun, but it does little to advance philosophical
understanding.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<h3><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt;">The future of free will<o:p></o:p></span></h3>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Allow
me to confess, at this late stage, that I think that the concept of free will
has problems, perhaps many of them, although I am not at all persuaded that
causal determinism is the important issue.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One
problem relates to the nature of coercion. How do I draw a principled line
between actions that are coerced, or otherwise brought about in circumstances
that seem to overwhelm me, and those that are not?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">To
some extent, this looks like a moral or even political judgment, and </span><span lang="EN-AU"><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/04/05/3182601.htm"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">it is very
arguable that</span></a></span><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">, although not simply arbitrary, these
sorts of judgments are not objectively binding. In some cases, at least, there
may be no determinate answer as to whether I was coerced or acted freely.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Furthermore,
the folk (and perhaps philosophers) are not worried only by outright coercion
but also by other circumstances, such as whether there was adequate time to
think. But where do we draw the line with something like that – for example,
how much time is “adequate”? Again, how should we handle such things as
compulsions and phobias – are they just another part of our desire-sets, or are
they more analogous to external barriers to our actions?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Another
problem relates to the largely-unconsciousness nature of our decisions. No one
should doubt this, and Harris is correct to emphasise it and discuss the actual
phenomenology of choice. Still, taken by itself it is not necessarily very
threatening.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Imagine
for a moment that my unconscious mind makes decisions in accordance with the
same beliefs and desires that I endorse consciously, and imagine, more
generally, that my unconscious and conscious minds are closely “in character”
with each other. If that is so, delegating a great deal of decision-making to
unconscious processes might even be an efficient use of scarce time for
conscious thought.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
issue that Harris ought to press more strongly – and I foreshadowed this
earlier – is that our unconscious minds may be rather alien to our conscious
egos. I suspect that Freudian theory is largely bunk, but a large body of
social psychology literature can be interpreted as confirming that our psyches
are more fractured, and some of our true motivations stranger to us, than we
like to think.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If
this is so, we may be at the mercy of alien forces after all, at least to an
extent – these are not external powers, and not exactly spooky ones, but
actually components of ourselves.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But
even if we press such points as hard as possible, folk ideas of free will might
survive. Perhaps whether we act freely becomes a matter of judgment and degree,
and the question of whether we do so in various particular cases does not have
an entirely compelling answer.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nonetheless,
it might remain more false than true if we tell the folk, “You do not have free
will.” On the other hand, philosophical ideas of moral responsibility might be
in more trouble as we </span><span lang="EN-AU"><a href="http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199601387.do"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">insist on the
difficulties</span></a></span><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">. Much more needs to be considered
here.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Finally,
I acknowledge that some intuitions may favour incompatibilism. On the other
hand, it remains the case – doesn’t it? – that we are not controlled by spooky
powers, that our beliefs, desires and characters are not bypassed in some other
way (as they would be if epiphenomenalism were true), and that these aspects of
<em>us</em> appear to have causal power: they lead to choices, actions and
consequences.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">There
is nothing especially arcane about these key points, and they are consistent
with causal determinism as far as it goes. The worst problems for free will, I
suggest, come from elsewhere.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">After
some two thousand years, the basics of a compatibilist approach remain
attractive, and the burden of going forward seems to fall on opponents of free
will, and particularly on incompatibilists such as Harris.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: AR-SA;">Harris himself needs to do more work, particularly in
understanding and responding to the strengths in his opponents’ arguments.
Until then, we should take his pronouncements on the topic of free will with a
few grains of salt. So it goes.</span>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-36057262288313561912021-06-28T12:10:00.007+10:002021-06-28T18:20:40.718+10:00Science Fiction as a Lens into the Future<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">(This is the written version of a talk presented to the Australian Defence College’s “Perry Group”, Canberra, 7 June 2019. It has previously been published by Bruce Gillespie in his excellent magazine <i>SF Commentary</i>. The following is almost identical to the <i>SF Commentary</i> text, but I’ve taken the opportunity to make a few small amendments and corrections.)</span></b>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><b><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">I.<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">First, thanks to all
concerned at the Australian Defence College for organising this event, and
especially to Professor Michael Evans for thinking of me and inviting me as
your speaker. I’m honoured to be here and delighted to discover that science
fiction is studied by a collection of people such as the college’s Perry Group.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">It has been said (by the
British novelist L.P. Hartley) that the past is a foreign country – that they
do things differently there. A lesson from relatively recent human history is
that the future is also a foreign country.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><b><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">When I say “relatively
recent”, we can put this in a broad perspective. Our species, <i>Homo sapiens</i>,
is some 300,000 years old, and earlier human species from which we descended go
back much further, millions of years, indeed, into the past. <i>Homo sapiens</i>
has continued to evolve since the earliest fossilised specimens that we know
of, becoming more gracile – or light-boned – in anatomically “modern” humans. The
rise of agriculture dates back about 12,000 years, and something recognisable
as civilisation, with large cities, writing, and bureaucratic social organisation,
emerged in the Middle East and other locations about 5,000 years ago, give or
take.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">By contrast, what we now
call European modernity is historically recent. If we could travel back to
Europe in, say, 1500, or even 1600, CE, we’d find societies in which there was
little sense of ongoing social change, though of course there had always been
large-scale changes from specific events such as wars and conquests, plagues
and famines, and various other kinds of human-caused and natural disasters. But
changes in technology, work methods, social organisation, transport, and so on,
happened too slowly to be transformative within a single lifetime. People were
more aware of the daily, seasonal, and generational cycles of time than of
gradual, progressive change driven by technology.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">In the past, some
religious and mythological systems described grander cycles of time than
seasons and generations, some societies looked back to a lost golden age from
which they thought they had degenerated, and Christian writings prophesied an
eventual end of worldly things to be brought about by the intervention of God. But
none of this resembles our contemporary idea of the future, in which human
societies are continually transformed by advances in scientific knowledge and new
technologies.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">That said, the sixteenth
century in Europe was an extraordinarily volatile period – it immediately
followed the invention and development of the printing press, with all that
that entailed for distributing ideas widely, and the European discovery of the
New World. Exploration and colonialism brought the cultures of Europe into
contact with what seemed like strange – sometimes hostile – environments and
peoples. For some European intellectuals, this provoked a sense of the
historical contingency and precariousness of existing cultures and civilisations.
The practices and beliefs of particular cultures, including those of Europe,
increasingly appeared at least somewhat arbitrary, and thus open to change.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">The sixteenth century began
with festering religious discontent that quickly led to the Protestant
Reformation, whose beginning we could date from Martin Luther’s famous
proclamations against Church practices, the “95 Theses”, in 1517. Europe was
soon wracked by the great wars of religion that extended, in one form or
another, deep into the seventeenth century (the Thirty Years’ War from 1618 to
1648 left much of the continent in ruins). The sixteenth century also saw the
beginnings of modern science, including the radically transformative astronomy of
Copernicus.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">By the early decades of
the following century, science had reached a form much more like we’d recognize
today, especially with Galileo’s observations, experiments, and reflections on
scientific methodology. (Galileo was active 400 years ago – he first demonstrated
his telescope, and turned it to the heavens, in 1609, and it was in 1633 that
he was interrogated by the Inquisition and placed under permanent house arrest
for supporting the Copernican claim that the Earth revolves around the Sun.) The
rise, consolidation, and extension of science, throughout the seventeenth-century
Scientific Revolution, and beyond, challenged old understandings of humanity’s
place in the universe. It was the early success of modern science, more than
anything else, that led European thinkers of the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment
to imagine future states of society with superior knowledge and wisdom.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Enlightenment ideas of
progress involved intellectual – especially scientific – and moral advances, though
with little of our emphasis today on new technology when we try to imagine the
future. Enlightenment thinkers hoped, and worked, for societies that might be better
than their own. They looked to continued intellectual progress accompanied by
social reform. This way of thinking nourished the great political revolutions
at the end of the eighteenth century – the American Revolution and the French
Revolution – and the upheavals that these produced inspired even more conjectures
and schemes involving future societies.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Even when we look at the
work of great utopians and social thinkers from the early nineteenth century, however,
in the wake of the Enlightenment, there is little emphasis on technological
transformations of society. In 1800, let’s say, that thought was only in its
infancy. The idea of the future that we possess today developed slowly and
gathered force, responding to the Industrial Revolution, which commenced during
the second half of the eighteenth century, at first in Britain, but then in
other European societies. As the Industrial Revolution continued and renewed
itself, with its steam engines, factories, and railroads, Europe and its
colonies experienced something altogether new: continual – and visible – social
change that was driven and shaped by advances in science and, above all,
technology. As the nineteenth century rolled on, changes in the ways that
things were done happened on a large scale and at a pace that could not be
ignored. You could say that the nineteenth century was when humanity discovered
the future.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><b><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">II.<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Much later, writing in
the 1920s, the scientist and social commentator J.D. Bernal observed that human
beings normally take accidental features of their own societies to be axiomatic
features of the universe, likely to continue until supernaturally interrupted.
Bernal added: “Until the last few centuries this inability to see the future
except as a continuation of the present prevented any but mystical
anticipations of it” (Bernal, <i>The World, The Flesh and the Devil: An Inquiry
in the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul</i>, 1929). Humans
might previously have imagined supernatural events in the future, such as the
second coming of the Messiah, but they did not imagine events such as the
invention of the steam engine, the spread of the railways, electricity, the
telegraph, motor cars, and aviation. But, as Bernal goes on to elaborate, the assumption
of a relatively static society ceased to be tenable. This provided the social
ground to fertilise science fiction.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">In his fascinating, if
polemical, book <i>A Short History of Progress</i> (2004), the archeologist and
historian Ronald Wright makes the point that a citizen of London from 1600 CE would
have felt reasonably at home two hundred years later, in the London of 1800.
The city would have looked rather familiar. But, says Wright, warnings of
threats to humanity from the rise of machines “became common in the nineteenth century,
when, for the first time ever, wrenching technical and social change was felt
within a single lifetime.” Wright immediately adds:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">In
1800, the cities had been small, the air and water relatively clean – which is
to say that it would give you cholera, not cancer. Nothing moved faster than by
wind or limb. The sound of machinery was almost unknown. A person transported
from 1600 to 1800 could have made his way around quite easily. But by 1900,
there were motor cars on the streets and electric trains beneath them, movies
were flickering on screens, earth’s age was reckoned in millions of years, and
Albert Einstein was writing his Special Theory of Relativity. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Yet, it took visionaries
like H.G. Wells to grasp this, spell it out, and incorporate it in a new kind
of fictional narrative. In addressing the great changes of the nineteenth
century, Wright refers to the misgivings of many Victorians as they confronted
the rise of industrial machinery, and viewed its comprehensive social impact.
This leads him to an observation about the beginning of what was originally called
“scientific romance”:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">As
the Victorian age rushed on, many writers began to ask, “Where are we going?”
If so much was happening so quickly in their century, what might happen in the
next? [Samuel] Butler, Wells, William Morris, Richard Jefferies, and many
others mixed fantasy, satire, and allegory, creating a genre known as the
scientific romance. (Wright, <i>A Short History of Progress</i>, 2004)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">In this passage and the discussion
that follows in<i> A Short History of Progress</i>, Wright is concerned with both
scientific knowledge and the industrial uses of technology. The latter greatly
altered and increased production while also transforming work and its organisation,
the means of transportation, and the landscape – not in all respects, by any
means, for the better.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">I have emphasised
technology to this point, but we should not lose track of science itself, which
continued to advance and to shape understandings of the world. As the sciences developed,
their practitioners were able to study a great range of natural phenomena that
had previously resisted human efforts. These included very distant and vastly
out-of-scale phenomena such as those investigated by astronomers, very small
phenomena such as the detailed composition and functioning of our bodies, and
(somewhat later, with the advent of scientific geology) phenomena from deep in
time before human artifacts, buildings, or written records. By the early
decades of the nineteenth century, the sciences were starting to imagine, and
communicate, the extreme depth of time as well as the vastness of space.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 10pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="line-height: 150%;"> </span><span>Nineteenth-century geology suggested that we live on the surface of an
incomprehensibly old planet, with the implication of a similarly
incomprehensible number of years still to come. As you will know, this idea has
since been confirmed, elaborated, and expanded by scientists from numerous
disciplines, and, all in all, a new understanding of the cosmos has emerged.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="line-height: 150%;"> </span><span>To sum up at this point, the revolutions
in science and technology during the centuries of European modernity introduced
new ideas about the universe, ourselves, and the future. All of this amounted to
a revised world picture.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">As a result, it is now established – and
was known in outline to educated Europeans in the second half of the nineteenth
century – that we inhabit a vast universe whose origins lie deep in time. Like
other living things, we are the product of natural events taking place over
many millions of years. In all meaningful ways, so Darwinian evolutionary
theory revealed, we are continuous with other animal species. Anthropocentrism
and human exceptionalism have been challenged from all directions. Furthermore,
our particular societies and cultures are significantly mutable. Human
societies have changed dramatically in the past – and we can be sure that this
will continue.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><b><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">III. <o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">All known social and cultural forms, and
specifically those we have experienced in our individual lifetimes, are now
revealed as contingent and temporary. Technological developments continually
revolutionise the ways we work, play, plan, organise ourselves, and move from
place to place. Even the relatively near future may turn out very strange by
the standards of those now living. Not only is our origin as a species deep in
time, our eventual destiny is unknown and perhaps lies in the very remote
future (assuming we don’t find a way to destroy ourselves more quickly, or perhaps
fall foul of a disaster such as a collision with an asteroid). This set of
claims is the new worldview embraced, since the era of Queen Victoria, by most
educated people in Europe, the Anglosphere,
and other industrially advanced countries. It seems almost commonsensical, when
considered by secular-minded people from the vantage point of 2019. But let me
make two important points about that.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">The first is that these claims are not <i>pre-scientific</i>
common sense. The overall picture constitutes a dramatic historical shift in
human understanding of the universe and our place in it. Not so long ago, historically,
such ideas would have been viewed within European Christendom (and most other
parts of the world) as intolerably radical and heretical. They met with much
resistance, and they still meet with resistance from some quarters.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">The second point is that even now we tend
to live without being fully aware of the implications of deep time and the new
worldview that we’ve inherited from the Victorian generation. We live from day
to day, and consider politics, social issues, and the like, forgetful of the deep
past behind us, and we ignore the implication of a similarly deep future ahead of
us. Indeed, what can we even <i>do</i> with that sort of knowledge in everyday
situations?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Nonetheless, as Wells knew, the rapid
changes of the nineteenth century implied the likelihood of rapid – perhaps <i>more</i>
rapid – changes to come. That reasoning applies equally to us. We should assume
that the current century, and the many centuries to follow, will see great changes
to the world and to human societies. Our own society has not reached a point of
stability, though again it’s not obvious what we can do with that sort of knowledge.
Historically, this was all difficult to digest – and it remains difficult. But
it offered new opportunities for storytelling.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">In more than one sense, science fiction is
the fiction of the future. In his 1975 book, <i>Structural Fabulation: An Essay
on Fiction of the Future</i>, the American critic Robert Scholes produced a
short account of science fiction that influenced me when I was young and
remains, the best part of half a century after it was published, a remarkably shrewd
introduction to the genre. Scholes covers some of the ground that I am dealing
with in this paper, in describing how science fiction relates to human history,
and especially to the history of how we’ve conceived of time and history
themselves.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Scholes writes of science
fiction as a kind of fiction that is <i>about</i> the future, but he also explains
why that kind of fiction is inevitable in a world with a new conception of
time, history, and progress, one in which the future will be, as it were, a
country foreign to us, one where they do things differently. For Scholes, it
seems, science fiction will <i>thrive</i> in the future, perhaps become a
dominant narrative form, and produce great things. Science fiction has become
far more visible and popular since 1975, and in my assessment Scholes has
turned out to be right.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><b><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">IV.<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm; tab-stops: -36.0pt;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm; tab-stops: -36.0pt;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">When
did science fiction begin? Some proto-science fiction narratives appeared even
in the seventeenth century, such as a strange little book by Johannes Kepler,
called <i>Somnium, Sive Astronomia Lunaris</i>
(this was completed around 1608–1609, but not formally published until 1634). <i>Somnium</i>
is sometimes called the first science fiction novel, but it has none of the
characteristics that we normally associate with novels, such as telling a
complex story and including characters with at least some appearance of
psychological plausibility. It is really just a geography (if that’s the right
word) of the Moon’s surface, based on the best observations that had been made
prior to astronomical use of telescopes. The scientific lesson is framed by a
thinly developed fictional narrative that showcases the discoveries of the time
and allegorises the scientific quest for knowledge.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm; tab-stops: -36.0pt;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><i><span lang="EN-AU" style="line-height: 150%;">Somnium</span></i><span lang="EN-AU" style="line-height: 150%;">
is not a fully fledged science fiction novel, but it foreshadows themes that SF
writers have explored ever since. There is a trust that science can obtain knowledge
of kinds that had previously eluded human efforts. At the same time, there is
the sense that Kepler wants to portray a physically greater cosmos than was
previously imagined. Along with this goes a recognition of our relative
smallness in the total scheme, and of our limited understanding. Kepler seems
to suggest that things are not always as they appear to us from our vantage
point on Earth.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Notwithstanding <i>Somnium</i>
and some other early works, science fiction is very much a child of the
nineteenth century. As has been said by others, it could not have existed as a
field “until the time came when the concept of social change through
alterations in the level of science and technology had evolved in the first
place” (Isaac Asimov, <i>Asimov on Science Fiction</i>, 1981). As a result, we
see little or nothing in the way of recognisable science fiction novels and
stories until the nineteenth century, beginning with works such as Mary
Shelley’s <i>Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus</i> in 1818. <i>Frankenstein</i> famously depicts Victor
Frankenstein’s use of scientifically based technology to create something entirely
new in the world: a physically powerful, but unfortunately repulsive,
artificial man. As is well known, the actual term “science fiction” was not coined
for another century or so, with the rise of specialist SF magazines in the
United States in the 1920s and 1930s.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Meanwhile, some of Edgar
Allan Poe’s stories from the 1830s and 1840s have science fiction elements, and
the SF author and critic James Gunn regards Poe’s “Mellonta Tauta” (1848) as
possibly the first true story of the future (<i>Inside Science Fiction</i>,
second ed., 2006). Unlike earlier narratives of future disasters, such as Mary
Shelley’s <i>The Last Man</i> (1826), it portrays a future society with
unfamiliar ideas and practices. “Mellonta Tauta” is set in the year 2848 – thus,
one thousand years after its date of composition – and its Greek title can be
translated as “future things” or “things of the future” (or it might, I dare
say, with H.G. Wells in mind, even be translated as “things to come”). It’s a very
peculiar story, even by Poe’s standards, taking the form of one character’s
rambling, gossiping, speculation-filled letter to a friend. In fact, it is more
like a series of diary entries, beginning on April 1 – April Fools’ Day, of
course – and it is composed by a well-educated but deeply misinformed
individual, who reveals that she is on a pleasure excursion aboard a balloon.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm; tab-stops: -36.0pt;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">In
Poe’s version of the future, humanity has explored the Moon and made contact
with its diminutive people. However, much knowledge from the nineteenth century
has become garbled and (at least) half lost. The story thus sheds doubt on
historians’ confident interpretations of the practices of other peoples living
in earlier times. It is full of jokes, many of which are puzzling for today’s
readers, and even when they’re explained it is often difficult to be sure
exactly what ideas Poe is putting forward and which he is satirising. (Other
material that Poe wrote about the same time suffers from the same problems of
interpretation.) Nonetheless, Poe laid a foundation for the development of
satirical science fiction set in future, greatly altered societies.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm; tab-stops: -36.0pt;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">A more substantial body
of work that resembles modern science fiction emerged around 1860, particularly
with the French author Jules Verne, who is best known for novels in which
highly advanced (for the time) science and technology enable remarkable
journeys – to the centre of the Earth, around the Moon and back, beneath the
sea, and so on. H.G. Wells’s career as a writer of what were then known as
scientific romances commenced two or three decades later, with a group of short
stories that led up to his short novel <i>The
Time Machine</i> (1895). The importance of this work for the later development
of science fiction cannot be overstated. That great theorist of the genre, Darko
Suvin, writes, without hyperbole, that “all subsequent significant SF can be
said to have sprung from Wells’s <i>The Time
Machine</i>” (<i>Metamorphoses of Science Fiction</i>, 1979). Wells followed up
with his first full-length scientific romance, <i>The Island of Dr Moreau</i> (1896), and his extraordinary career was
underway.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">In the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, science fictional elements appeared in many
utopias, dystopias (such as Wells’s <i>When the Sleeper Wakes</i> (serialised 1898–99)),
and lost-world novels set in remote locations or even beneath the ground. The
use of interplanetary settings took the idea of lost worlds and races a step
further. The first published novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, <i>A Princess of Mars</i> (originally in serial
form in 1912), epitomised the trend. Planetary romance of the kind favoured by
Burroughs defined one pole of early science fiction, emphasising action and
adventure in an alien setting.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Another approach was the
near-future political thriller. Works of this sort, most notably “The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a
Volunteer”, by George Tomkyns Chesney (not a full-length novel, but a
novella originally published in <i>Blackwoods Magazine</i> in 1871), were a
prominent component of the literary scene in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. They portrayed future wars and invasions, often involving
racial conflict. These political thrillers typically contained melodramatic and
blatantly racist elements, but they are noteworthy as serious speculations
about near-future possibilities.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">All of these forms of
early science fiction have continued, in one way or another, to the present
day. Literary scientific romances, particularly inspired by those of Wells, and
by those of authors who reacted to him, have maintained a pedigree partly
independent of, and parallel to, what I call “genre science fiction” (or “genre
SF”), by which I mean science fiction aimed at a relatively specialist audience
of SF fans and aficionados. Genre science fiction is a phenomenon dating from
the 1920s, and there is an interesting story to tell about its development
under the leadership of its first great editors – Hugo Gernsback and John W.
Campbell – through to the present day. But for current purposes, we’ll have to
skip over that. For more, see the opening chapters of my 2017 book, <i>Science
Fiction and the Moral Imagination: Visions, Minds, Ethics</i>. Suffice to say
that the pace of social, scientific, and technological change continued to accelerate.
In response, as the twentieth century unfolded and segued into the
twenty-first, narratives of technological innovation and humanity’s future prospects
became even more culturally prominent.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm; tab-stops: -36.0pt;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">I’ll
also make short work here of the much-debated question of how we should define
science fiction, and how, if at all, we can fence it off from other narrative genres
or modes such as technothrillers, horror stories, and fantasy. In summary – see
<i>Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination</i> again if you want more – I identify
science fiction as combining three elements that we may call “novelty”,
“rationality”, and “realism”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm; tab-stops: -36.0pt;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm; tab-stops: -36.0pt;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">I
intend each of these in a specific and rather narrow sense: <i>novelty</i>, in
that the narrative depicts some kind of break with the empirical environment of
the author’s own society and historically recorded societies (this is what Darko
Suvin refers to as the <i>novum</i>); <i>rationality</i> in the sense that whatever
is novel is nonetheless imagined to be scientifically possible (at least by the
standards of some future body of scientific knowledge), rather than magical or
otherwise supernatural; and <i>realism</i> in the minimal sense that the events
described are imagined as actually happening within the internal universe of
the story – that is, the events, including the problems confronted by the
characters, are to be interpreted literally, even if they have a further
allegorical or metaphorical level of meaning. In other senses, of course,
science fiction is not a variety of literary realism, but nor does it have the
qualities of straightforward allegory, dream, or psychodrama.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm; tab-stops: -36.0pt;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Science fiction, then, is a kind of
fictional narrative that is characterised by novelty, rationality, and realism.
It typically and centrally imagines future developments in social organisation,
science, and/or technology, though I hope I’ve said enough for it to be clear
why it sometimes depicts amazing inventions in the present day, present-day
invasions from space, or events that happened in the deep past, in prehistoric
times. Science fiction can take many forms, but <i>at its core</i> it is
fiction about the future.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><b><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">V.<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Although science fiction has
a central concern with future societies, SF writers are not prophets and they
cannot simply provide a transparent window that opens upon the future. Hence,
the title of this paper refers to a <i>lens into the future</i>: something more
probing – and perhaps more difficult to use, requiring more activity,
interpretation, and skill – than a window overlooking a future vista. In some
cases, setting narratives in the future (much like the use of extraterrestrial
settings) merely provides writers with exotic locales for adventure stories, something
that came in handy as a plot device during a time when the surface of the Earth
was increasingly being explored and mapped. To be clear, there’s nothing
terrible about adventure stories in exotic locales – I love them as much as
anybody – but science fiction writers often engage more meaningfully than <i>that</i>
with ideas of the future, or of possible futures.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Wells certainly thought –
at least for most of his career – that it was possible to consider and imagine
the future of humanity with some prospect of making successful predictions. He
discussed exactly this topic in a famous lecture that he delivered to the Royal
Institution of London in January 1902. This lecture, entitled “The Discovery of
the Future”, helped to establish his reputation, and it was published as a
small book not long after he delivered it. In “The Discovery of the Future”, he
put the problem like this: “How far may we hope to get trustworthy inductions
about the future of man?” (We’d now say something more like: “How far can we have
a reliable science of the future of humanity?”)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">For Wells, speaking and
writing in 1902, the present had arisen from the past through the deterministic
operation of scientific laws, and the future would follow from the present in the
same deterministic way. However, he suggested that there was an asymmetry
between the past and the future, or at least in how we perceive them. That is,
we can be certain about many events that happened to us personally in the past,
and which we remember clearly, whereas we do not know what lies in store for us,
as individuals, in the future. We have no future-oriented equivalent of personal
memory.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">However, Wells said,
things are different when it comes to future events involving large
populations. By analogy, he argued, we can’t predict where individual grains of
sand will fall if we shoot them from a cart, or even the shapes of the
individual grains, which will vary greatly. But we can predict which grains –
of what sizes and shapes – will tend to be found in different parts of the
resulting heap. Wells considered the possibility that individual people of great
energy and ability might be less predictable, and have greater effects on human
destiny, than exceptionally large grains of sand. Nonetheless, he was strongly inclined
to think that larger forces operating in history determined broad historical outcomes.
For example, if Julius Caesar or Napoleon had never been born, someone else
would have played a similar role in the history of Europe.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">On this basis, Wells
concluded that we have evidence available to us in the present that can help us
to reconstruct the past, and that we <i>also</i> have information available to
us now to help us predict how humanity’s future will unfold on a large scale. He
was very conscious of human origins in deep time, and with that in mind he placed
a special emphasis on humanity’s long-term destiny, the deep future of our
species:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">We
look back through countless millions of years and see the will to live struggling
out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape and from power to
power, crawling and then walking confidently upon the land, struggling
generation after generation to master the air, creeping down into the darkness
of the deep; we see it turn upon itself in rage and hunger and reshape itself
anew; we watch it draw nearer and more akin to us, expanding, elaborating
itself, pursuing its relentless, inconceivable purpose, until at last it
reaches us and its being beats through our brains and arteries, throbs and
thunders in our battleships, roars through our cities, sings in our music, and
flowers in our art. And when, from that retrospect, we turn again toward the
future, surely any thought of finality, any millennial settlement of cultured
persons, has vanished from our minds.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">This
fact that man is not final is the great unmanageable, disturbing fact that
arises upon us in the scientific discovery of the future, and to my mind, at
any rate, the question what is to come after man is the most persistently
fascinating and the most insoluble question in the whole world. (“The Discovery
of the Future”, 1902)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">In “The Discovery of the
Future”, Wells repudiated any idea of a static human society, even as part of some
utopian blueprint:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">In
the past century there was more change in the conditions of human life than
there had been in the previous thousand years. A hundred years ago inventors
and investigators were rare scattered men, and now invention and inquiry are
the work of an unorganized army. This century will see changes that will dwarf
those of the nineteenth century, as those of the nineteenth dwarf those of the
eighteenth. […] Human society never has been quite static, and it will
presently cease to attempt to be static.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Wells made certain
predictions about the nearer future, before our species is eventually
superseded, such as the emergence, perhaps not for hundreds of years, or even for
“a thousand or so” years, of a great world state. Toward the end of his lecture,
he granted that humanity might be destroyed by a cataclysm of some kind, if not
by the eventual death of the Sun itself, but he expressed his fundamental rejection
of these outcomes and his belief in what he called “the greatness of human
destiny”. He claimed to have no illusions about human failings, but he saw a
path of ascent from the deep past to the deep future:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Small
as our vanity and carnality make us, there has been a day of still smaller
things. It is the long ascent of the past that gives the lie to our despair. We
know now that all the blood and passion of our life were represented in the
Carboniferous time by something – something, perhaps, cold-blooded and with a
clammy skin, that lurked between air and water, and fled before the giant
amphibia of those days.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">For
all the folly, blindness, and pain of our lives, we have come some way from
that. And the distance we have travelled gives us some earnest of the way we
have yet to go.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">He concluded “The
Discovery of the Future” with a radically optimistic sentiment that later found
expression in much twentieth-century science fiction, and, I venture to add, in
much current thought from transhumanists and similar thinkers about the human
future:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">It
is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning,
and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is
possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but
the dream before the awakening. We cannot see, there is no need for us to see,
what this world will be like when the day has fully come. We are creatures of
the twilight. But it is out of our race and lineage that minds will spring,
that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know
ourselves, and that will reach forward fearlessly to comprehend this future
that defeats our eyes.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 0cm 0cm 36pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">All
this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, and a day will come,
one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now
latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as
one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the
stars.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><b><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">VI.<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Let’s return, in
conclusion, to one of Wells’s key questions in “The Discovery of the Future”: “How
far may we hope to get trustworthy inductions about the future of man?” I
conspicuously have not provided an answer, although I’ve reported Wells’s claim
that we have considerable ability to predict the broad outlines, if not the
detail, of humanity’s future. Wells certainly did not think that the future for
individuals was predictable – alas! – but it was possible, he thought, to work
out the future’s broad outlines for very large numbers of people, including
humanity as a whole.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">This idea seems to have
been accepted, in large part, by the science fiction writers of the following
several decades. You can find something like the same idea in Isaac Asimov’s
Foundation series, begun in 1942, with its science of psychohistory developed
by the main protagonist, Hari Seldon. Asimov even grapples with the impact of a
truly remarkable human being – a kind of super-Napoleon – in the person of the
Mule, a mutant with the extraordinary power to bend others’ emotions to his
wishes. During the so-called Golden Age of science fiction, from the late 1930s
to the end of the 1940s, something of a consensus picture of the long-term
human future seems to have been shared by Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and
others. They embraced a vision, much like that offered by Wells in “The
Discovery of the Future”, of a destiny in the stars for humanity and whatever
beings might descend from us.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">However, this vision has
become considerably less popular in genre science fiction since the 1950s, and
it might now be disputed by many professional SF writers. Also, there is an
obvious alternative to this way of thinking about science fiction. The
alternative is that the point is not to reveal the actual human future, or even
an approximation of it, so much as to investigate many possible futures. In
short, science fiction is not predictive. On this approach, we could think of
the future not as something determinate, but as something that could, at least
as far as our practical knowledge ever extends, take many forms or go down many
paths. If science fiction is a lens into <i>this</i> sort of future, it is a
way for us to probe a dimension of possibilities, and to consider their
implications. Science fiction can help us prepare for the real future by portraying
possibilities. It is a lens into an indeterminate, but multiply imaginable, future.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">Another approach, perhaps
the dominant one in the tradition of scientific romance – that is, once again,
in science fiction narratives outside of, and parallel to, genre SF – is to
view imagined futures as most relevant and compelling when they are distorted
pictures of the present, or its trends, created for the purpose of social
commentary. If we think of it in this way, science fiction is not so much a
lens into the future as a narrative form that uses imaginative pictures of the future
to provide a lens into the <i>present</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;">When we consider these
models of science fiction and how it approaches the future, we might ponder
H.G. Wells’s own enormous contribution to SF. Wells made some impressive
predictions, not least about armoured military vehicles, the importance of
aviation for future warfare, and, in <i>The World Set Free</i> (1914), the
development of massively destructive atomic bombs (admittedly rather different
in operation from those that were dropped on Japanese cities three decades
later). Did Wells offer “trustworthy inductions” about humanity’s future? Perhaps
he did to some extent, though by 1945, the year before his death, he’d become
despairing about the future’s predictability. Was his science fiction a lens
into the future in some sense, or even into the present, or into our world and
the human situation in some other way?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">This, I hope, gives us
plenty to talk about, so let’s open up the discussion about science fiction and
the future of our species.</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p style="font-size: 12pt;"></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-hyphenate: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 10.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></p>
<b><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Russell Blackford</span></b><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-AU; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"> is a Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at
the University of Newcastle, NSW. He is the author of numerous books, including
<i>Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction</i>
(co-authored with Van Ikin and Sean McMullen, 1999) and <i>Science Fiction and
the Moral Imagination: Visions, Minds, Ethics</i> (2017).</span>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-40112015231985559882021-06-27T11:20:00.017+10:002021-06-27T11:47:14.520+10:00Michael Huemer on the costs of suppressing speech<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>The American philosopher <a href="https://fakenous.net/?p=2326&fbclid=IwAR2Bq-_uXHYilFxeqHhazxYYweZS7vOXoNScU9aBIoj5QkxJ37yyrvnJk0U" target="_blank">Michael Huemer writes</a> on why it's a bad idea to try suppressing speech that we disagree with. Early in this piece, Huemer makes the following insightful comments; I think this is, with one caveat, spot on:</span><br /></span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">[T]oday we’re seeing an unusual kind of speech suppression. Traditionally, you get suppression of ideas when there is a single dominant ideological faction in society. Some faction defined by controversial philosophical, religious, or political views manages to take control of society, and then they use the power of the state to suppress challenges to their ideas.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">But what we have today is a situation where there remain competing factions with comparable levels of power in our society – neither the left nor the right has gained overall control of the society – and yet one faction is still trying to suppress dissent from their main ideas. Normally, this doesn’t happen because you simply don’t have the power to suppress dissent unless you have a very dominant position in society. And since you know this, normally, you don’t even attempt it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">But people are doing it today because our society has become highly <i>ideologically segregated</i>. There are particular institutions or segments of society that are extremely dominated by a particular ideological faction (the woke/SJW left), even though that faction is a minority in the larger society. So this faction tries to suppress dissent using the institutions that they control. They also use the much greater emotional commitment and activist tendencies of their faction’s members to persecute the other side, e.g., starting petitions, email campaigns, etc., to try to cause <i>personal harm</i> to blasphemers. (It’s hard to organize an activist campaign among conservatives, and even harder among moderates.)</span></p></blockquote> <p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e2256; margin: 0.6em 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0em 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times;">Exactly so - with that one caveat. The conservative faction does seem to be getting better at organizing similar campaigns, as with the recent campaign against the movie <i>Cuties</i> and everyone associated with it<i>.</i></span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e2256; margin: 0.6em 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0em 0px; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times;">In any event, this means that your speech might be suppressed within your own world, where you hang out mainly with people from your own faction. Within that world, you'd be prudent not to express dissent from what the people around you are saying and seem to be thinking. The "other side" might want to hear these dissenting views, but probably for its own propaganda purposes rather than because it will take your overall worldview or value system seriously. The effect is that nuanced, complex, "hybrid" views - views </span><span style="font-family: times;">that don't fit with whatever packages are currently endorsed by one or other of the main competing factions - tend to be squeezed out of public, and even private, discussion.</span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e2256; margin: 0.6em 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0em 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">That is intellectually disastrous. It is worth noting that the packages on offer from the existing factions are not the natural result of which ideas are most coherent with each other (even if there's <i>some</i> element of that), but mainly the result of historical processes of alliance-forming, of the ideas of certain charismatic individuals being taken up by their disciples, etc. People who adopt one or other off-the-shelf package of ideas do so for largely non-rational, non-principled reasons, such as wanting to share the commitments of people whom they admire, or simply of their peer group.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e2256; margin: 0.6em 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0em 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Thus, we end up with factions who adhere to radically opposed packages of ideas, and who talk past each other while suppressing internal dissent. There is little room for people who are more principled and consistent in their reasoning to develop intellectually attractive alternatives to the off-the-shelf ideologies. Indeed, such people might be silenced, at least in respect of any dissenting thoughts, because it is not worth their while to stick their heads above the parapet in public discussion. They might even bite their tongues much of the time in private discussion with all except their very closest and most trusted friends.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e2256; margin: 0.6em 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0em 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Huemer makes points that are broadly consistent with this, but worth consulting in their own right, as his emphasis is slightly different from mine; it is not <i>inconsistent</i> with mine, as far as I can see, but he has his own set of priorities. He concludes with thoughtful comments about what happens if a generally left-leaning Western academia (together with left-leaning journalists and broadcasters, and others with large platforms) makes assiduous efforts to suppress the ideas of the "other side", i.e. ideas that tend to be held by political conservatives. In a polarized environment, the suppression might be locally successful, but it will <i>not</i> be successful within the broader society. Instead, a very large proportion of the society - maybe about half - will come to see left-leaning Western academia as not only wrong but actually evil, given its apparent wish to suppress opposing views. As a result, Huemer says, a very large proportion of society will reject out of hand whatever comes out of <span>academia. That is also disastrous:</span></span></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">[T]hey draw the conclusion that one can’t trust anything coming from [what they see as] the libtard academic and media elites.</span></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">This creates obvious problems. What if the academics find some important information that people really need to know? They try to tell the public, but half the public assumes that it’s just part of some partisan agenda. The mainstream media reports on it, but again, half the public distrusts anything they say (that isn’t confirmed by their preferred sources).</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The academic and media solution: Keep repeating “People should listen to us, and if you don’t, you’re being stupid and partisan.” How well do you suppose that works? Right, it just backfires and pushes people further into their bubbles. There’s <i>nothing</i> for the academics and mainstream reporters to say, because the well has already been poisoned – <i>anything</i> those sources say is just going to be interpreted as more partisan manipulation.</span></div></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e2256; margin: 0.6em 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0em 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">While I'm most worried about suppression of worthwhile, but unfashionable, ideas <i>within</i> the broadly-defined academic and cultural Left, Huemer is describing a somewhat different, yet readily recognizable, phenomenon.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #2e2256; margin: 0.6em 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0em 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">For both reasons, efforts to suppress ideas, carried out within the academic and cultural Left - or on its home turf, such as on university campuses, at literary festivals, and in left-leaning media outlets - end up being unhealthy. They hinder intellectual progress and prevent a valuable intellectual ferment <i>within</i> the Left, causing potentially worthwhile contributors to feel silenced and alienated. (I can report that there is plenty of this around, because some people know my concerns about all this, and that gives them the confidence to confide in me.) At the same time, it makes the dreaded "other side" think we're simply evil, not just misguided or sincerely wrong, all adding further to the polarization and dumbing down of society.</span></p></div>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-78429583930284542282021-06-16T22:44:00.002+10:002021-06-16T22:46:56.673+10:00Audiobook of Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4RUR3j8l9Wg/YMnxJYRz3ZI/AAAAAAAAB3c/jmCnhAp83eAFf0BsSaytym1l5Jq-gLk4gCNcBGAsYHQ/s500/Science%2BFiction%2Band%2Bthe%2BMoral%2BImagination%2BAudiobook.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4RUR3j8l9Wg/YMnxJYRz3ZI/AAAAAAAAB3c/jmCnhAp83eAFf0BsSaytym1l5Jq-gLk4gCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/Science%2BFiction%2Band%2Bthe%2BMoral%2BImagination%2BAudiobook.jpg" /></a></div><br />An audiobook version of <i>Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination: Visions, Minds, Ethics</i> is now available. <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Science-Fiction-Moral-Imagination-Visions/dp/B08WJQRN1D/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&fbclid=IwAR1orkYucXrEXfHBdw11v7m6elYCaijJs5fT6trNk7xPZt2CfN3JfWZ5bBI" target="_blank">Check it out if interested.</a> <p></p><p>The book is read by John Lescault, who is an excellent actor with a beautiful speaking voice, and he took great trouble to get everything right. In my dealings with him I was impressed by his work methods and work ethic. Thanks, John! I'm sure the end result will be great.</p><p>This version of <i>Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination</i> is now arguably the most definitive one, as it corrects a handful or so of small errors in the print versions.</p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-54065207864493365222021-05-31T04:22:00.000+10:002021-05-31T04:22:34.906+10:00Heading into the unknowable<p>My colleagues at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies have published an edited and abridged extract from <i>At the Dawn of a Great Transition</i> under the title <a href="https://medium.com/institute-for-ethics-and-emerging-technologies/into-the-unknowable-c87826092cc1"><b>"Into The Unknowable"</b></a>.</p><p>The book itself is slightly more "academic" than this extract adapted from its opening pages: i.e., it uses more formal notes, citations, etc., and in places it becomes more densely argued as I wrestle with the philosophical pros and cons of radical human enhancement. But I've gone to some trouble throughout to make the text as accessible, and perhaps even entertaining, as possible. With that caveat duly provided, the extract gives you a good idea of my topic, approach, and style. Check it out if interested!</p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-12968828701947203752021-05-30T19:12:00.006+10:002021-05-30T19:14:39.621+10:00At the Dawn of a Great Transition has been published<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-De99P1l-Wio/YLNT5GJlQxI/AAAAAAAAB28/uJvtks7rBR8U3omeX6nD7TvLxPelfiqrgCNcBGAsYHQ/s1916/At%2Bthe%2BDawn%2Bof%2Ba%2BGreat%2BTransition.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1916" data-original-width="1364" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-De99P1l-Wio/YLNT5GJlQxI/AAAAAAAAB28/uJvtks7rBR8U3omeX6nD7TvLxPelfiqrgCNcBGAsYHQ/s320/At%2Bthe%2BDawn%2Bof%2Ba%2BGreat%2BTransition.jpg" /></a></div>My new book, <i>At the Dawn of a Great Transition: The Question of Radical Enhancement</i>, <a href="https://schwabe.ch/9783796541896/at-the-dawn-of-a-great-transition" target="_blank"><b>has now been published</b></a> by the venerable academic publisher Schwabe Verlag, based in Basel, Switzerland. It is part of Schwabe Verlag's Posthuman Studies series. At this stage, it is available in hardcover and e-book pdf formats. I expect that a paperback version will become available at some point, and at that stage I'll advise. Most people would probably want to get their university libraries to order in the hardback, rather than buying it for themselves, but I won't be ungrateful for personal sales made to sufficiently interested individuals.<p></p><p><i>At the Dawn of a Great Transition</i> is available directly from the publisher or in the usual ways <a href="https://www.amazon.com/At-Dawn-Great-Transition/dp/3796541895/"><b>such as through Amazon</b></a>.</p><p>To pique your interest, the book's blurb states as follows:</p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: MinionPro, Times, serif;">"Radical enhancement would employ technology to extend human capacities far beyond anything yet seen or experienced. Imagine, for example, </span><i style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: MinionPro, Times, serif; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">easily</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: MinionPro, Times, serif;"> outrunning any Olympic athlete while being </span><i style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: MinionPro, Times, serif; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">dramatically</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: MinionPro, Times, serif;"> smarter than Albert Einstein. Or imagine living for hundreds or thousands of years, making today’s super-centenarians seem like mayflies. Soon – perhaps some time this century – we may have the technology for this. But if we had it, should we use it? Radical enhancement might seem like a gift, but could it become, as its critics warn, a poisoned chalice for individuals and a curse for human societies? In this fascinating book, Russell Blackford examines the pros and cons, bringing good humour, philosophical insight, and historical perspective to this most modern of modern debates."</span></p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-52577949969376502132021-05-29T09:14:00.002+10:002021-05-29T20:42:57.805+10:00Interview with A.C. Grayling<p><a href="https://www.newcastlewritersfestival.org.au/listen/" target="_blank"><b>I recently interviewed A.C. Grayling for the Newcastle Writers Festival's Stories to You podcast.</b></a></p><p>A little blurb that I wrote about it to pique your interest: <span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: #f0f2f5; color: #050505; font-size: 15px;">Dr Russell Blackford, Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle, interviews A.C. Grayling about his new book, The Frontiers of Knowledge: What We Now Know About Science, History, and the Mind. Professor Grayling is an eminent philosopher, author of many books, and Master of the New College of the Humanities, in London. They discuss fields of knowledge that have opened up with new methods and tools of inquiry – including cutting-edge physics, humanity’s very ancient history before Greece and Rome, and what we now know about the mind and the brain. Professor Grayling explains how we reached this point and the challenges for future progress in these fields. Their conversation turns to the important task of communicating knowledge to the public, and to the continued need for liberal education and the traditional humanities in a political environment that is often hostile to them.</span></p><p><br /></p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-34328532742997253782021-05-23T13:28:00.001+10:002021-05-23T13:29:23.273+10:00Religion at Work in Bioethics and Biopolicy<p> With my friend and collaborator Udo Sch<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: times;">ü</span></span>klenk, I have <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jmp/article-abstract/46/2/169/6208795" target="_blank">a new article in the <i>Journal of Medicine and Philosophy</i></a>.</p><p>The citation is Russell Blackford and Udo Sch<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: times;">ü</span></span>klenk, "Religion at Work in Bioethics and Biopolicy: Christian Bioethicists, Secular Language, Suspicious Orthodoxy." <i>Journal of Medicine and Philosophy</i> 46(2) (April 2021): 165-187. </p><p> </p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24761391.post-58296506385003755832021-01-26T17:08:00.001+11:002021-01-26T17:10:22.088+11:00Freedom For the Speech We Oppose<p><a href="https://www.philosophersmag.com/opinion/79-freedom-for-the-speech-we-oppose" target="_blank">This piece from 2015</a>, published by <i>The Philosophers' Magazine</i>, is something of a blast from the past, but it still seems to me to be about right. It also gives a taste of what my book, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07GFBSXKX/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0" target="_blank">The Tyranny of Opinion</a></i>, is about. It responds to the issue at the time when an anti-abortion campaigner from the US, Troy Newman, was denied entry to Australia, with the perverse effect that his views were actually given more publicity than if he'd simply been allowed to go about his business and give his talks quietly. As it turned out, then, he was not silenced, but this was nonetheless an attempt (a very counterproductive one) to hinder his ability to present his views to Australians. I'd rather spend my time arguing against "pro-life" advocates, especially such extreme ones, than arguing for their right to express their views. Increasingly, however, many debates are shifting away from disagreements about which views are correct, or would form the best basis for public policy, and which views should be permitted at all.</p>Russell Blackfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12431324430596809958noreply@blogger.com0