Hitchens at his best

After complaining about the militarist side of Christopher Hitchens yesterday, let me point out this performance in a new debate with Alister McGrath about the value of religion.

It seems to me a bit of mismatch: McGrath is intelligent, moderate, and sometimes engages sympathy. Part of his problem as a debater is that he has both a waffly style - he's too gentle and indirect, with expressions such as "What I think I'd like to say to that is ..." - and some unfortunate mannerisms. This can be off-putting, can distract from whatever substance there might be in his arguments.

By contrast, Hitchens is a superb live debater with a bulldozing style. He also had a strong set of points to make, and was obviously comfortable with them all. He's made these points so many times by now that the presentation of them has evolved into a very powerful form. You'd think he'd be getting bored making them over and over, as he debates various opponents, but in this presentation there's no sign of it.

One point that I always find annoying in such debates is that the religious apologist inevitably brings up the old canard about the supposed need for a metaphysical grounding for morality. The non-believer then suggests some kind of naturalistic grounding, based in evolutionary psychology or social necessity, or whatever. Nothing is ever clarified. In fact, it's not at all obvious either that morality needs any metaphysical grounding or that any naturalistic grounding it has is just one thing. The story may be quite complex, and secular moral philosophy and moral psychology are still working it out. That doesn't detract from the widespread practical agreement on at least some core moral ideas, or from the fact that we need morality to meet certain human interests, even if nailing down the exact nature of those interests (and the exact nature of the morality we need) is difficult. Moreover, no religious apologist has ever told a sensible story as to how morality could have a philosophical grounding even if a being like the Christian deity existed.

The whole issue of moral arguments in support of God's existence is such a red herring. The truth of it, I suppose, is that there are people who crave a simple support for their moral beliefs, and want no complications or uncertainties. There's a fear out there that religion plays upon. To borrow an image from somewhere in John Barth's oeuvre, we're like Loony Tunes characters who have run off the edge of the cliff. When we moralise, we're suspended in thin air, with nothing beneath to hold us up. Or so the fear goes. But that's the wrong way to think about morality: it's something we create, socially, but to meet real needs. It's not just arbitrary, leaving us hanging in air, and that's not the only alternative to a religious account.

Anyway, Hitchens won this debate quite clearly - certainly at the level of performance, and I think at the intellectual level as well.

Ibn Warraq on committing adultery and getting stoned

At normblog a few days ago there was a nice report on a debate about Western values. More specifically, the motion under debate was: "We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values." (I found this via Blake Stacey's excellent blog: Science after Sunclipse).

What are Western values? Well, evidently they were defined along the lines of democracy, the rule of law, equality before the law, human rights, freedom of speech and opinion, and self-critical rationalism. I suppose that's a reasonably indicative set of modern, largely liberal values. Of course, there might be others, such as separation of church and state (or however that distinction is best made) and individual liberty (which, arguably, goes beyond any of these without entirely outflanking or subsuming them) and tolerance of differences.

There's also the complication that some of these values have equivalents, or potential precursors, in other traditions. Let's not forget that even such a compelling idea as religious tolerance has taken its current form quite recently; John Locke put a powerful practical justification for it, but we have now gone far beyond Locke, who did not want toleration for Roman Catholics or atheists. Some other cultural and religious traditions may yet have the intellectual resources to accept a broadly-based religious tolerance from within their own viewpoints.

It's reported that Ibn Warraq, a high-profile critic of Islam, and certainly a staunch defender of the relevant Western values, concluded the debate with a zesty punchline: "Finally, I do not wish to live in a society where you are stoned for adultery; I prefer to live in a society where we get stoned first and then commit adultery."

What can I say?

He went warring and drinking and blaming gods: Hitchens and alcohol

Pharyngula has been the site for heated (and often off-topic) discussion about some recent comments by Christopher Hitchens at a "Freedom from Religion" convention in Wisconsin. Apparently, Hitchens took the opportunity to urge a more violently militaristic approach to the current tensions between the West and much of the Muslim world. If he's been reported accurately, he has, in effect, declared war on Islam and called for the infliction of massive casualties if we in the West are to prevail. 

This, it seems to me, is the last message that we need from a major public intellectual such as Hitchens. We may, in some metaphorical sense, be at war with terrorist networks, but to imagine that we are at war - literal war - with Islam itself, or with Muslims as a group, is starting to sound unhinged.

Many of Hitchens' critics blame his wilder comments on his supposed alcoholism and alleged penchant for drunkenness. Ho hum! It's amazing how readily some self-identified "rational" thinkers can resort to such moralistic garbage whenever they find themselves in radical disagreement with somebody. Despite the slightly facetious title of this post, I have no reason to believe that Hitchens has any serious problem with alcohol - or that any such problem, even if it does exist, has impaired his judgment. If, as widely rumoured, he does have a special fondness for whiskey, then good for him. I'm partial to a drop myself.

Can't we engage in intellectual debate without indulging in silly personal slurs? As I said on one of the Pharyngula threads, I wouldn't care if it turned out that Hitchens is a heroin addict who listens to Barry Manilow records and has sex with a parrot while dressed in a rubber suit. It's his ideas that matter, not his habits. 

But what about his ideas? Hitchens has been built up as some kind of hero to the cause of anti-religion. There's been a fair bit of rhetoric about "four musketeers" in that cause - Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and of course Hitchens. Dawkins' site has used this meme, but I wonder how wise it is when some of the muskets are, at times, more like loose cannons.

I love some of what Hitchens delivers - I greatly enjoyed God is Not Great, and he makes some telling points even in the speech that he gave in Wisconsin (from what I've been able to watch so far). But as we've also seen recently with Sam Harris, who doesn't even like the words "atheist" and "atheism", the "New Atheists" do not form a philosophical school. The more we see of them, the more we can see that they are very diverse individuals, sharing only a non-belief in deities and a knack for explaining difficult concepts clearly. That diversity of voices expressing powerful criticism of religion is healthy for our intellectual culture, but I do think that the four musketeers idea is rather lame, and that the "New Atheism" is a journalistic tag of limited value: it's more useful if we apply it to the entire publishing phenomenon of recent, high-profile books attacking religion (of which there are now many) than if it is simply shorthand for Dawkins-Dennett-Harris-Hitchens. 

Dawkins (along with his friend Dennett) might be safer associating himself with people like Alan Sokal, A.C. Grayling, and Philip Kitcher than with Hitchens and Harris. Never mind that Kitcher himself has been less than tactful in distancing himself from Dawkins! It was always apparent that there's no monolith of unbelief, but it's becoming more evident that Hitchens and Harris, in particular, have distinctive personal agendas and will never subordinate these to any "movement". Nor, of course, should they. They are entitled to say what they really think - just as we are entitled to think (and say) that Hitchens appears to have jumped the shark in his latest comments on Islam.

Blog break

I need to travel interstate for a few days because of some family concerns; I'll resume blogging when I get back.

I'll leave you with this excellent interview by Mitchell Cohen to mull over. Oh, and I must add this great blog post by Brian Leiter.

New book by John Harris

Here is a surprisingly sympathetic article in The Times about British philosophical bioethicist John Harris, who has a new book out: Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People. I say "surprisingly" because Harris takes a very strong pro-enhancement view that is likely to frighten many people.

I'm not going to say much about the book here. I've read it once already, but I need to do so again before I can comment in any cogent way. One problem is that it picks up arguments from previous publications by Harris, some of which were already familiar to me. This is inevitable when a prolific and high-profile working scholar brings out a book every few years, but it can get a bit confusing after a while remembering what he said where. Still, it's helpful to have a lot of the arguments on related topics now consolidated in one place. I am broadly on his side of this debate, of course, and his views in earlier books and other publications have influenced my own approach to bioethics; I'm certainly not batting for the same team as Leon Kass, Michael Sandel, Bill McKibben, George Annas, Jurgen Habermas, and the rest of the bioconservative line-up - all of whom Harris criticises strongly and tellingly. However, I'll wait until I have a chance to give the book a careful second reading before I really try to tease out its strengths and weaknesses.

The main thing to note is that Enhancing Evolution is now out and about, and getting some publicity - and that it is instantly one of the most important contributions to the enhancement debate. Anyone who wants to take part in that debate will need to come to grips with its arguments.

The Pharyngula mutating genre meme

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is ...".

Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

*You can leave them exactly as is.

*You can delete any one question.

*You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...:, or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".

*You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...”.

You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the "parent" blog you got them from, e.g. Metamagician and the Hellfire Club to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

-----------------------------------------------------

My parent is: Pharyngula

1. The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is ...

Hmmm, which of my friends should I suck up to this time? I could say The Judas Mandala by Damien Broderick. But Alison Goodman is prettier ... (sorry, Damien).

Singing the Dogstar Blues, by Alison Goodman.

2. The best romantic movie in fictionalised biography is...

Beyond Good and Evil.

3. The best sexy song in rock is ...

"You Can Leave Your Hat On", by Joe Cocker.

4. The best cult novel in American fiction is ...

Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein.

I shall attempt to disseminate my seed to:

Science After Sunclipse

Sentient Developments

The Flying Trilobite

The Early Days of a Better Nation

EvolutionBlog

Anyone else who wants to accept my meme can also join in the game.

Fundamentalism

A lot of the debates that I find myself reading in the blogosphere or elsewhere on the net involve somebody accusing somebody else of something called "fundamentalism". This is not a useful way to advance most debates.

What is fundamentalism?

The best definition I can give of fundamentalism is belief in the literal and inerrant truth of the Bible (or, by extension some other holy book, or something that is treated as one).

But that definition is not straightforward. In fact, it's very difficult to nail down in a precise way what a "literal" interpretation of the Bible actually is. The Bible is a work, or rather a literary collection, that is obviously wide open to interpretation, and many passages are not given a literal interpretation by anyone. The doctrines discovered in its pages by real-life Christian fundamentalists - people in the tradition of those who consciously adopted that label for themselves - may well be ahistorical to some extent.

However, we needn't get too deeply into what a rigorous literalism would really be like or whether it is a coherent idea when tested to the limit. It's quite possible to obtain an adequate idea of Christian fundamentalism without any of that. Fundamentalists are, for example, the folks who believe that the Earth is only about six thousand years old or a little bit more with some fudging ... some say more like 10,000 years. They typically believe that something like the myth of Eden and the Fall actually took place 6000-or-whatever-odd years ago, somewhere in the Middle East (and complete with magic trees, rib-woman, and talking snake). They claim that Jesus really was born of a virgin, really did die as a blood sacrifice for our sins, really was resurrected bodily, and really will return to Earth from Heaven in judgment of the living and the dead. A lot of them believe in a doctrine of the Rapture - the saved will be taken up to Heaven when Jesus returns, and the rest of us will be left behind in the resulting destruction and chaos.

Etcetera. You have the idea. Not only is the Bible inerrant; there is a strong tendency to read it, wherever possible, as an accurate and literal account of historical events.

The problems with fundamentalism

One problem with Christian fundamentalism is that it collides with the outcomes of rational inquiry into the mechanisms of the natural world whenever this fails to confirm the "literal" biblical account. Thus, we often see fundamentalists arguing that (for example) radiometric dating is dramatically unreliable, that the Grand Canyon was formed by Noah's flood, that human beings and dinosaurs existed contemporaneously, that Leviathan and Behemoth (in the Book of Job) were in fact dinosaurs of different species, and even that God made billions-of-years old rocks - i.e., rocks already, in some sense, billions of years old when they came into existence less than ten thousand years ago. The madness that some fundamentalists feel obliged to defend seems to know no bounds.

Christian fundamentalists refuse to accommodate scientific findings that contradict their supposedly literal reading of the Bible. Perhaps worse in some ways, they are also unwilling to accommodate modern ideas of morality and justice, and to read biblical moral pronouncements in any cultural context that requires reinterpretation or any understanding more nuanced than the medieval ones.

At this point, we could delve into many interesting issues about how the Bible is best interpreted or understood, whether from a Christian viewpoint or from a more sceptical or uncommitted one. I don't claim to be especially expert on such matters, though of course I'm well aware that there are stong traditions of biblical interpretation that rely on cultural context, symbolic meaning, the reconstruction of original intentions, and so on. There's a wealth of scholarship of various levels of credibility. The main point to establish at this stage, though, is just that there is something - a real social phenomenon - that can be recognised as Christian fundamentalism.

This kind of inflexible, literalist Christianity is not all that common in Australia, thank Zeus and Poseidon, but it is very common indeed in the USA, almost a dominant social and political force. Its essential weakness is its inflexibility: its adherents' inability to depart far from the actual words of ancient texts. This leads true fundamentalists into conflict with knowledge gained through rational inquiry, and also with much secular morality. It can sometimes make them almost impossible to reason with, and sometimes it can lead them to a degree of unscrupulousness in carrying out their deity's plan.

However, not all religious conservatism is truly fundamentalist. For example, conservative Roman Catholicism cannot meaningfully be called "fundamentalist", since it does not rely on the literal inerrancy of a holy book. Yet, it operates with certain traditions, sometimes interpreted with little flexibility, that can bring it, too, into sharp conflict with secular reasoning about morality and justice, and sometimes other things.

Are there fundamentalist atheists? (Not really)

I get annoyed when I see people like Richard Dawkins criticised for being "fundamentalist atheists". This is a misuse of words and only creates confusion. If Dawkins has faults, like everyone else, fundamentalism is not among them: there is no inflexible clinging to the words of a holy book, considered inerrant and interpreted in a literal-minded way. Nor is there anything analogous. Dawkins is willing to follow science where it leads, though like all leading scientists he does have his own opinions on important scientific controversies - opinions that he is willing to defend against rival ones until powerful evidence comes along.

Importantly, the word "fundamentalist" does not mean merely "passionate" or "forthright" or "outspoken", even something like "confident" or "hard-nosed" or "stubborn". Dawkins may be some of those things, but he is not a fundamentalist atheist, and it is difficult to identify any significant public figure who meets such a description. There may (by extension or analogy) be fundamentalist Marxists or fundamentalist Randians: people who cling to the literal words of Karl Marx or Ayn Rand, and who treat those authors' books as if they were inerrant holy texts. However, I cannot think of any significant figure who could meaningfully be described as a "fundamentalist atheist".

But there's something a bit like fundamentalist atheism

I would have left the issue at that a few weeks ago, but I'm becoming concerned that - despite all the above - there is something at least a bit like fundamentalist atheism in the world. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Michel Onfray, Daniel Dennett, and so on are not examples of it, but you can see what I'm referring to if you look further down the food chain.

I do see people - usually pseudonymous - who appear to have swallowed down a quite precise body of inflexible atheistic doctrine, wherever they got it from. Never, their doctrine insists, call yourself "agnostic", or anything else that sounds softer than "atheist"; always accept that the word "atheist" has only one possible meaning (usually, mere lack of belief in any deities ... I'm happy with this definition, but other definitions do exist). Treat all religious folks as liars or fools (of course, some are ... but many are far from it). Don't just satirise religion and (as I like to do) question its right to special respect; feel free to treat even moderate religious folks offensively. Of course, some people will take offense if you condemn or satirise their ideas, but you should go beyond that: make sure you attack them personally if they try to engage with you, even in a reasonable and honest way.

Probably, "fundamentalism" isn't the correct name for this. It's not that these people have a holy book - as far as I know. But the phenomenon is out there, whatever we call it, and it can be ugly to watch.

Forging coalitions

Here's how I see things: strangely enough, genuinely moderate religious people are not my enemies. They are usually good people, they are often on the same political side as me, and they are not stupid or dishonest. They may or may not have a view of the world that I find untenable. Many of them are more like deists or pantheists than believers in any traditional kind of providential theism, which means they have views that I consider a bit more plausible; some are not even deists, in that their "God" is more a metaphor than anything else. They may not agree with me on all moral issues, since they may have absorbed certain traditions, values, and culturally-transmitted intuitions that I treat with suspicion; yet, by and large, they are good people to socialise and work with.

In short, genuinely moderate religious people may make good comrades and allies on many issues. On others, we can agree to disagree with them. They won't think of us as sinners, or imagine that we will burn in hell fire.

A fortiori, there are various kinds of non-religious people who fall short of the most hardline atheism but likewise make good allies. Conversely - and this is important - there are atheists who make lousy allies on many issues. Some are in thrall to what can loosely be called secular religions, such as the cruder kinds of Marxism and Randian Objectivism. I don't feel that I have more in common with them than with moderate, deistically-oriented Christians, for example, or moderate Jews, Muslims, or whatever other brand of religion may be relevant with particular individuals. The religions may be worth attacking, but certainly not these sorts of individuals.

A book such as The God Delusion is of value in offering a perspective to current debates that has been heard all too seldom until recently - that of an individual who argues that religion is false tout court, and should be rejected. That is a legitimate view, and I am prepared to subscribe to it over the long haul. Kudos to Dawkins for breaking the taboo against expressing such a viewpoint. I'm on the record in numerous places defending him and the value of this particular book.

But there are other viewpoints that are also of value in public debate, and we need to be able to form coalitions with people who have a wide range of those viewpoints - from those who might be almost as hard on religion as Dawkins, but have reasons to prefer the word "agnostic" to describe themselves, through to those who are liberal and supportive of secularism, though working and thinking within a religious tradition.

We need to forge political coalitions. We should reserve our right to express our true beliefs and to use such means as humour and satire (I am not in favour of slanting our ideas so as to hide their real implications, and so make them more acceptable to people who don't share them). But if we insist that no one can be a friend or an ally unless she agrees with some precise set of doctrines, then we're not much better than the true fundamentalists whose views we rightly scorn.

Galatea 2.2

My fiction reading for the week was another novel by Richard Powers, this time his mid-90s work Galatea 2.2 - a novel about love, artificial intelligence, and the dark side of the human condition. As the title suggests, it is a modern-day Pygmalion novel: in this case, about training up an artificial neural network, which goes through several upgrades until the final version, christened "Helen" by the first-person narrator.

The narrator, called "Richard Powers" just like his real-world creator, interweaves the story of his own life with that of Helen's creation and training, and "her" aghast response at the everyday horrors of human existence that are gradually unfolded to her when the AI researchers prime her, step by step as she needs it, with information about the natural and social worlds. Powers (the author) appears to have taken to heart Turing's idea that the most promising way to create a real artificial intelligence would be to mould it from a sort of infancy through to adulthood, much as we've always educated and socialised human children. Powers (the narrator) is more naive about these things when a group of AI scientists recruit him to help, but he is definitely a version of the author, slightly younger, equipped with a past that looks all-too-much like the biography of the real-world Powers, and fascinated by his encounter with research on advanced AI.

Though Galatea 2.2 is a kind of science fiction novel, and Powers (author as well as narrator) is well-versed in science, it is more in the Wellsian than the Gernsback tradition, and more socially realist than either. It is focused on the experience of love and how we cope with tragedy and pain. The narrator's back story is one of romantic love and its loss, of living through an aftermath of despair, and learning to love again.

How many of these books have you read?

This meme is doing the rounds at the moment. I found it on John Wilkins' blog.

As far as I can work out, these "books of pretension" are supposed to be books commonly found on people's shelves but left unread.

I've bolded the ones that I've read myself. One is supposed to italicise partly-read books, but that is almost irrelevant since I seldom give up on a book once I begin. Nonetheless, there are a couple. E.g. I doubt that I've read the entirety of The Canterbury Tales, and I must get back to Foucault's Pendulum one day.

There are quite a few here that are on my waiting-to-be-read list, such as Cryptonomicon, which has now been there for a long time - I'll get to it soon. There's an awful lot of classics that I somehow missed on. It really hurts to me to admit some of them, e.g. that I still haven't got around to reading The Satanic Verses. I don't think I've ever actually read A Tale of Two Cities, either, or The Grapes of Wrath, I realised, though I've read enough about them that I kind of thought I had for a second.

Oh well, let the plain-text titles stand as a nagging check-list of books that I must get to.

Anyway, here goes:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

The Echo Maker

To my shame, the fiction of Richard Powers was off my radar until recently, but I've just finished Powers' most recent novel, The Echo Maker, which won the 2006 National Book Award, and I'm an instant fan. It's about science, specifically cognitive neurology (one of the main characters is a kind of Oliver Sacks figure), has vividly-realised, involving, and interestingly flawed characters, with some tour-de-force dialogue involving a young man with Capgras syndrome, and contains more than its fair share of page-turning mystery and suspense. I'm going to read some more novels by Powers as soon as I can grab a bit of spare time.

Thanks to my good pal over in Poland, Pawel Frelik, for drawing this book to my attention.