Russell Blackford 2012 interview at RationalHub - on atheism, scientism, metaethics, philosophy, etc.

This interview (questions from Paula Louise) seems to have vanished from the internet. So it is not lost, I am going to republish here. It represents my views on the questions asked as of October 2012. Since then, I've done a great deal of thinking and writing about many of these topics, so some of my answers might now be a bit different, or at least differently expressed.

1. Do you think 'gnu atheists', in general, have been too harsh in criticizing religious dogma?

I think that what became known as the New Atheism was and is valuable, though I also think there was a sense in which it was business as usual. That is, there was always a body of work appearing that criticized religion. We shouldn’t sell short organizations such as the CFI and Prometheus Books, or their equivalents in other countries.

What changed, I think, was that it became apparent in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001 that there was a potentially large market for criticism of religion. Thus, we saw a stream of books from large trade publishers, as opposed to relatively small, specialized presses like Prometheus or the various academic publishers. And of course, some very popular writers, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, took up the challenge.

The New (or jokingly, “Gnu”) Atheist writers don’t form a monolith – they have varied ideas and viewpoints. Overall, I doubt that they’re especially more critical of religion than writers from an earlier time, such as Bertrand Russell, or back to the likes of Diderot and Voltaire. However, there’s now a sense of urgency about criticizing religion, and especially its political influence. That was less the case in the 1980s and 1990s, when many academics and public intellectuals probably considered religion a spent force, at least in the West.

Have the “New Atheists” been too harsh? Well, one of the leading participants has been Daniel Dennett, but no one could fairly accuse him of being especially harsh. Even Richard Dawkins, who is often painted as strident and angry, actually expresses himself in a mild and nuanced way on most occasions.

There are doubtless some comments about religion by some of the New Atheists, some of the time, that I’d disagree with. Some points may overreach, as is inevitable in any discussion. I’d probably be softer than, say, Sam Harris on the more moderate or liberal kinds of religion, although I should add that I am always a bit skeptical about this idea of “moderate religion” – some of the so-called “moderate” religious groups don’t strike me as moderate at all, among them the Catholic Church.

All in all, my view of the New Atheism, to the extent that it can be seen as a movement or an alliance, is that it is was totally needed and justified. The need and justification remain. That doesn’t mean I am committed to agreeing with, say, Dawkins or Harris or Dennett or Hitchens on every point. But then again, nor should I be. Their works should be taken as encouragements to discussion and reflection, not as a new body of dogma.

2. Does the Kalam Cosmological Argument hold any merit? Would any such 'arguments' suffice, in your view, to establish the existence of a deity?

I don’t think this particular argument has any merit. Its premises are very much open to challenge. Even if they were accepted as true, all the argument would demonstrate is that what we call the universe is not the totality of what exists and is part of some larger causal order.

If we treat the argument as a thought experiment with that outcome, we’ll still be no closer to saying that there is a deity – some kind of powerful, supernatural intelligence. Why not just say, if you do accept the argument’s premises, that the finite age of the universe is evidence that, despite its incomprehensible immensity, it is still only part of the totality of what exists? If you want to say that, fine. Plenty of physicists might even agree. You might then note the difficulties that face us in trying to understand that larger order, but even if all that is correct it is not an argument for the existence of a deity.

But could there have been a convincing argument for the existence of God? Well, possibly. If what we observed around us were very different, then we might think that the presence and activity of some kind of powerful disembodied intelligence made best sense of our experience.

What if we lived in a world in which we routinely encountered phenomena that were best understood as the actions of disembodied intelligences? What if the holy books agreed with each other and with scientific findings about factual matters such as the age of the earth? I can easily imagine living in a world in which the arguments to believe in a powerful disembodied intelligence that created nature as a whole were quite convincing. But we don’t live in that world.

3. Is there an inherent incompatibility between religion and science?

Not an inherent one, no. Back in, say, 1500 CE it might even have turned out, for all anyone knew, that science would confirm what is in some of the holy books.

 For example, science might have discovered that our planet is 6,000 years old, that the rock strata and fossil order are consistent with a worldwide flood some thousands of years ago, that reproductive processes in animals are best explained on a basis that involves the activities of disembodied intelligences, that evil spirits provide the best explanation of disease, and so on.

Science and religion have very different methods for finding out the truth, but there seems to be no inherent reason why there could not be a world in which they converge on the same conclusions. Obviously, as it’s turned out, we don’t live in such a world.

What I think is best said here, at least in a reasonably concise answer, is that it’s a massive oversimplification, in fact gravely misleading, to describe religion and science as compatible.

It doesn’t follow that they are incompatible in a simple way. The sorts of incompatibility that exist require some teasing out. Udo Schuklenk and I have been doing that in some detail in the book we’ve been writing together, 50 Great Myths About Atheism – we’ll have quite a lot to say in favour of what sometimes gets called anti-accommodationism. Given the nature of the world we find ourselves in, it turns out that science has progressed in a way that really has undermined the intellectual authority of religion. And given everything we know about this process so far, I expect that it will continue.

4. Organizations like NCSE has gone to great lengths to presumably be more inclusive, when it comes to religious people. Do you think that sort of accommodationist stance is a healthy one to take?

I can see why, from a political viewpoint, organizations like the NCSE want to take an accommodationist position – the position that religion and science are fully and somewhat straightforwardly compatible. However, I think that stance is intellectually untenable. I also question how much it really is politically advantageous.

I’d prefer to see these organizations take a stance of neutrality on such controversial philosophical questions. For example, there is plenty to be said in favor of evolutionary theory without getting into the question of whether or not it is compatible with theological views, and if so which theological views.

5. Has science rendered philosophy, weak, to some extent? How relevant is philosophy today?

A big question! Part of the problem here is that there are many different conceptions of philosophy and science. As I understand them, I don’t think there’s any clear dividing line between the two. Both have access to all the same arguments and evidence.

Clearly enough, however, there are pedagogical and other practical reasons to make distinctions among the various academic disciplines, and what practicing scientists do is rather different from what practicing philosophers do. That reflects the different kinds of questions they are trying to answer, and it necessitates different emphases in methods and training.

If it comes to that, there is no clear dividing line between the sciences and the humanities. Or between a discipline like philosophy and one like law.

That said, what we intuitively think of as philosophical questions remain, and they can’t be answered within the professional practice of science the way science is currently organized into specializations and sub-specializations, and so on.

Furthermore questions such as “What is needed for a just society?” or “Do we have free will?” often involve careful work to try to get clarification of vague, murky concepts. Asking such a question, then trying to answer it in an intellectually respectable and rigorous way, largely involves trying to nail down what people are really talking about when they carry on about, say, justice or free will. It’s just not straightforward, and as Socrates evidently discovered in antiquity people can tie themselves in knots when they try to work out what they really mean with all the abstract language that (until they are challenged) they seem to use so confidently.

Ordinary language is full of ambiguity, metaphor, and approximation, and often the problems of what is really going are resistant to the methods of, say, lexicographers. So philosophers are trained to clarify concepts, tease apart their components, make careful distinctions, etc., with natural language. This kind of analysis is not necessarily useful for working scientists. I can imagine scientists getting frustrated with it, but there’s no avoiding it in philosophy.

Even if we tried to conduct a scientifically-rigorously study to get an idea of what conception of free will or justice most people have in their minds, there would be no escaping the need for a lot of conceptual analysis before trying to draw up the words used in something like a survey instrument, and then in interpreting the results.

If anything weakens philosophy, it is its inability to produce decisive outcomes. No one has yet established in an uncontroversial way what is really meant by “justice” or “free will,” or many, many other such terms, let alone whether we have free will or what is a just society. It often seems that the more we delve into these sorts of issues the more they complicate and ramify. Thus, we can develop all sorts of complex, elegant concepts, but the “true” definition of justice, say, still seems to elude us, and that fact itself calls for reflection.

Perhaps when we use this language we are often talking past each other, because our concepts are very imprecise and to a considerable degree not actually shared once we get beyond obvious cases. But the result that we see in philosophy journals can be enormously detailed efforts at clarification by academic philosophers which don’t seem to get us much closer to answering the original questions. Ironically, these attempts at clarification can be impenetrable to ordinary people.

By contrast, science makes impressive progress – clearly we understand vastly more about the natural world than we did 500 years ago, or even 50 years ago. So perhaps that is a reason to be impatient with philosophy and philosophers by comparison. Scientists can point to practical results. It’s no wonder that science is in a stronger position to attract funding from business and government.

Where does this get us? I don’t think the practice or the academic discipline of philosophy will go away, because the classic philosophical questions are too fascinating and too much a source of anxiety. If you tried to reassign those questions to a branch of science, you’d soon find the scientists who were assigned to answer them would get bogged down in the same conceptual problems and would start to reinvent the same techniques of conceptual analysis, etc.

So something like the current discipline of philosophy will continue, frustrations and all.

I don’t have a simple solution to philosophy’s discontents. It seems to be difficult making progress in philosophy partly because the “big questions” that arise in natural language so often turn out to be so full of conceptual puzzles and confusions. As a result, philosophers can get tied up in interminable, indecisive, very fine-grained and technical wrangling about what seems like mere semantics to others. Even if conceptual progress is made (and I think it often is), the result might not be accessible to a popular audience, or the sort of thing that ordinary people wanted to know in the first place.

Yet there’s no substitute for the process, and it should not be dismissed. By and large, philosophers, at least those in the English-language analytic tradition, are doing their best to achieve progress and clarity.

Fortunately, my own work tends not to be conducted at a highly-technical level, and I hope that it’s accessible to a fairly broad educated audience. All the same, even a relatively low amount of technical analysis can be a barrier to readers – I work hard to avoid putting people off, but it’s partly the nature of what is involved in philosophy, and in human thought and language.

6. I'm sure you've blogged somewhat extensively on this topic - especially in response to Jerry and Sam Harris I believe - but still, what's your stance on free will?

I think the problem here, as I touched on in the previous question, is getting a handle on what ordinary people mean when they worry about whether or not they have free will.

Anyone who thinks that is something straightforward is really not being fair to the full range of problems that have emerged in the historical dialogue over the issue. So, although I am more a compatibilist than not, I’m not convinced that we all have the same conceptions of free will or that ordinary people have entirely coherent conceptions of it at all. Many people may have a mix of libertarian and compatibilist intuitions.

 My response to Jerry Coyne and Sam Harris has not so much been a defense of compatibilism, though I guess it’s widely seen that way. It is basically to ask them to hang on a minute and be more patient with people who don’t think their, i.e. Jerry’s or Sam’s, conceptions of free will “just are” what the folk mean by the expression or related expressions, or necessarily what is really bugging people who, over the centuries, have felt the need to ask questions about whether they have free will or not.

If you want a simple answer from me, I don’t think we have libertarian free will, and I always struggle to see how the idea even makes sense. But do we often act “of our own free will” in ways that philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and David Hume would recognize? Yes, I think we often do.

There’s then, I suppose, a whole lot of political and other questions if I’m right on both of those points. What are the implications?

7. Having read your articles on moral realism and moral skepticism some time back (and really loved reading it) - but still a lot of people, at least in my experience, still remain moral realists by appealing to consequence. Would not subscribing to moral realism, by any means, imply 'anything goes'?

It’s nice to know that someone loved reading it – so thanks!

Unfortunately, yet again, this is going to get murky if I try to do justice to the complexity of the problems and their history. I’ll do my best to skate over all that and give you a relatively brief answer — though my answer might not be entirely satisfying.

Basically, my view is that moral norms and moral codes are best seen as standards that serve the desires of human beings living in societies. If we all (or even most of us) make certain kinds of efforts and accept certain kinds of constraints, there will tend to be a mutual benefit.

Obviously there’s a lot more to be said here, but that’s my broad-brush view of what moral norms and codes might actually be able to accomplish. I don’t think, for example, that they are going to be much use for obtaining spiritual immortality or pleasing divine beings, or anything of the kind, though of course some religious codes of conduct purport to do exactly that.

We should reject the false dichotomy between either there being the “true” moral norms and codes that are inescapably and absolutely binding in some sense or it being a case that “anything goes,” so cruelty is just as good as kindness, dishonesty just as good as honesty, treachery just as good as loyalty, etc. Neither of those is the actual situation. I guess I’ll need to return to this as we go, and say something about why.

8. On a related note, would moral scepticism be compatible with humanism? I must say that moral scepticism gets quite a bad rap, along with relativism.

If humanism is a this-worldly philosophy that concentrates on progressing the secular interests of human beings, rather than trying to please deities or conform to a supernatural principle of some kind, I don’t think there’s anything contrary to humanism in any plausible form of moral skepticism or moral relativism.

The big problem with moral relativism is that the usual form of it that people encounter, and often accept, is not at all plausible once you look into it even slightly. But there are some sophisticated versions of moral relativism that deal pretty well with the most obvious problems. We can’t write off all philosophers who argue for some sort of moral relativism just because many people seem to buy a crude version of it.

That said, it’s worth continuing to expose people to the real problems with the crude version. It won’t do to run around saying: “Female genital mutilation is fine in the societies that practice it, because that’s their moral code. We shouldn’t interfere.” Wrong. That’s not a coherent set of ideas.

A lot of students seem to enter college or university from high school with a set of ideas like that, which they acquired from somewhere. I think it’s worthwhile showing them how doesn’t add up. They can worry later about whether some much more sophisticated variety  of moral relativism might be possible – in the past, I’ve mentioned this to my students, in an effort to be open with them. But I think the urgent point at that stage of their philosophical careers is more to show them the problems with crude relativism than to introduce them to the interesting approaches of people like, say, Gilbert Harman or Jesse Prinz.

9. I have never been able to wrap my head around moral error theory in specific. How could one be a moral error theorist and condemn something as immoral or unethical?

One reason why you might not be able to get your head around it is that it’s not entirely clear what it means. Whatever it originally meant, it seems to have come to mean that all so-called first order moral statements – statements such as “Torturing babies is morally wrong” or “Giving to Oxfam is morally desirable”, and so on – are simply false. That sounds outrageous. Yet, it might be correct.

This is the point in the interview where many of your readers will, in fact, be outraged ... and understandably so.

So perhaps it’s also the point where I need to say more, even at the risk of some technicality and long-windedness. You may have guessed already that a problem arises about what is really meant, or conveyed, by a sentence such as “Torturing babies is morally wrong.” It may turn out that the sentence conveys something that is not literally true, even though it might also play a useful role in, say, denouncing and opposing the torture of babies.

I’ll come at this indirectly. What if I said one of the following? “My car is a good car.” “The Amazon River is majestic.” Or, “The sunset over Cable Beach is beautiful.” Most people would agree that there is something about these sentences that prevents them from being just facts like “My car is a Honda Civic” or “Cable Beach is on the west coast of Australia.” The claim that Cable Beach is on the west coast of Australia seems like a plain fact that is, as it were, binding on us all. Someone who disagrees is simply, unequivocally, factually wrong, given the ordinary meaning of the sentence. And something similar applies to the claim about what make of car I own (even though ownership is a socially constructed fact).

But when I praise the Amazon River as “majestic” or the (typical) Cable Beach sunset as “beautiful,” I don’t seem to be making a claim that is just factually correct in the same way. Perhaps those words can be interpreted in a way that does make them apply factually. E.g. we might say that “majestic,” when applied to rivers, just means some complicated combination of physical properties. Or “beautiful” might just mean something like having the property of inducing a certain kind of feeling in most human beings. But that’s all obviously problematic – it’s not at all clear that I’m just stating a fact in that way when I use such words. In at least some cases, it seems as if it might be legitimate for me to say, “X is beautiful” without thinking that you are just wrong if you disagree. You might say, in response, “Well, I don’t think X is beautiful,” and that’s also legitimate. We agree to disagree, and we accept that neither of us is “just wrong” about something like that. Something similar might apply to whether we want to call a natural feature like a river “majestic.”

Our language is full of these sorts of terms where legitimate disagreement seems possible, and neither disagreeing party is necessarily just wrong. Try going through your day looking out for instances, and you may find a myriad of examples — “great”; “sexy”; “alluring”; “creepy”; “cool”; and on and on. They are about as common in everyday experience as the instances where there is a factually correct statement to be made, and anyone who rejects it is just mistaken.

My reference to ideas of “majesty” and “beauty” was to warm you up. But now I want to talk about the word “good.” What does this everyday word really mean?

Well, that’s a difficult question. But arguably when I say that my car is a “good” one I mean something like this – my car has a combination of properties that, taken together, make it effective or efficient for whatever it is that we desire from a car. Those properties will include certain levels of performance, certain levels of comfort (presumably for average human beings), certain levels of reliability, etc. Part of the trouble is that the levels concerned are rather vague – even I may not know what level of performance I really want from a car. But we will probably share some vague idea. Given that people want much the same things from a car, we can reach a great deal of agreement on whether a particular car is a “good” one or not. Furthermore, when we reach that level of agreement we won’t be doing so arbitrarily.

All the same, some people place more weight than others on such things as reliability, as opposed to performance or comfort, or other factors. And we tend to think that these different weightings, not to mention our differing standards for the levels we demand, are all legitimate. You might say that the idea of “whatever it is that we desire from a car” is something of a fiction, since we all desire slightly different things. In fact, if “effective or efficient for whatever it is that we desire of the sort of thing in question” were the precise meaning of “good” then we could not (or at least not often) say that any car is a good one, because there is no such thing as exactly what we desire. There is what I desire, the slightly different thing that you desire, the slightly different thing again that she desires, etc. These will overlap heavily, but they won’t line up exactly.

And yet, not-so-miraculously, we can have perfectly sensible discussions of the merits of cars!

That’s because, given the kinds of beings we are, with similar needs, desires, projects, etc., and given the uses we actually make of cars, we are tacitly applying similar approximate standards. We may ultimately agree to disagree about which is the better of two competitive current-model cars in the same price range, but often we’ll reach agreement in more clear-cut cases.

I want to suggest to you that something similar applies to other things whose merits we discuss. We can have sensible discussions of the merits of clothes, movies, books, houses, tennis players (considered simply as tennis players), and so on – and in each case the discussion won’t be simply futile or the standards used just arbitrary. We’ll be able to reach considerable agreement. And yet, we really might, to some extent or other, want different things from, say, a book, and that might mean that we ultimately disagree, quite legitimately, about whether The Lord of the Rings is a better novel than, say, Tom Jones or Midnight’s Children.

But what if say, “Roger Federer is a good man.” I don’t mean he’s a good tennis player (perhaps we can all agree on that easy case, at least). I’m really talking about his character. And character is something to do with people’s dispositions of certain kinds, such as kindness or cruelty, courage or cowardice, propensity to violence, or otherwise, willingness to compromise and get along, or otherwise, and on and on. If we have some difficulty applying exactly the same standards as each other to cars or books, I expect it may be even more difficult when we sum up the characters of human beings.

Even if we agree that kindness is better than cruelty, courage is better than cowardice, etc., none of us are completely kind or courageous, etc., and we all have mixed, complicated sets of dispositions. X might be very kind but rather cowardly, while Y has a cruel streak but is very courageous and absolutely loyal. Which of them is a “better person,” summed up overall?

If we followed the approach in my earlier answers, we’d conclude that there will be easy cases where every sincere person considers X, overall, to be of bad character, while Y is of good character – but there will also be cases where it might not be clear what we should say about someone’s character overall, or where it might not be clear who is the better person out of X and Y, judged overall. You might rank X higher, while I rank Y higher, and in the end it might be legitimate to disagree (despite having had a sensible discussion of the merits) because, really, there is no “what we desire from a person’s character” just “what I desire from a person’s character” and the slightly different “what you desire from a person’s character.”

Here’s where the moral error theorist chimes in. The moral error theorist is likely to claim  that people are not prepared to accept legitimate disagreement when it comes to these judgments of people’s characters in the way that there is room for legitimate disagreement about the merits of cars. It seems that when we make judgments about the goodness or badness of people’s characters, i.e. moral judgments about people, we erroneously think that we are making purely factual statements like whether Cable Beach is on the west coast of Australia. We see someone who disagrees with us as just factually wrong. But this is an error – the other person is not just factually wrong when she disagrees with me about the goodness of someone’s character in a case that is not clear-cut, any more than if she disagrees with me about the goodness of a car in a case that is not clear-cut.

Well, that will be controversial. But let’s move beyond the goodness or badness of character to the moral rightness or wrongness of people’s decisions and the resulting acts.

The moral error theorist should concede that we often have sensible, meaningful discussions about whether someone decided well or badly and whether their act was a good one or a bad one. But she will notice how even in cases that don’t seem at all clear-cut we don’t seem to be willing to accept disagreement with judgments about what we call the moral goodness or badness (or wrongness) of acts. We seem to insist that the acts we judge to be morally wrong just are wrong – i.e. this is a matter of unequivocal factual correctness.

Thus, we look for an answer that is factually correct. We then insist on our view prevailing, and when we say that an act is morally wrong we don’t mean something like: “Having properties counter to those that are effective for what we (really, I) desire from human decisions and acts.” Rather we seem to mean something more like: “Having properties such that the act breaches an absolutely binding standard that transcends all desires and social institutions.” If that’s what morally wrong means, says the error theorist, then all statements of the form, “X-ing is morally wrong” are false, because there simply are no such absolutely binding, transcendent standards.

What I’ve just tried to explain has taken a long time, but it would probably take a book to explain it properly and make it really persuasive. Suffice to say, I think that the error theorist has a point here. We do have this tendency, when it comes to people’s characters and certainly their decisions (or at least particular types of decisions that we consider “morally significant”) to think that we are applying absolute, transcendent standards, rather than standards that we roughly agree on because most of us have similar desires about these things (e.g. a desire for human societies to survive, or for pain and suffering to be avoided). At least with some kinds of moral language, this idea of an absolutely binding and transcendent standard may well infect our language itself.

Thus, the error theorist will (however outrageous it sounds) count the following as, strictly speaking, a false statement: “Torturing babies is morally wrong.”

That isn’t because the error theorist thinks that torturing babies is, in the ordinary sense, a good thing.

But she will interpret “Torturing babies is morally wrong” as meaning something like “Torturing babies is forbidden by an inescapably binding and transcendent standard” or perhaps “Torturing babies is categorically forbidden in the nature of things.” Since the moral error theorist, rightly in my view, denies that there are such standards, or that anything is “categorically forbidden” in that mysterious way, she says that this statement comes out false. She will still be opposed to torturing babies, and she will probably think that it’s a bad thing to do in the ordinary sense of “bad.”

How far error theory is correct is going to depend on how far people tend to think that categorical forbiddenness and similar strange properties actually exist, and how far our language itself conveys such ideas. There does seem (to me) to be at least some tendency that way, so, once again, I think that moral error theorists have a point.

But how far is it a practical point? Clearly, we are going to go on making judgments about people’s characters, decisions, actions, etc. Clearly, we’ll continue to have sensible discussions of these things, and we’ll often reach agreement. In practice, many cases will be clear-cut. So the point might not be very practical. Even if you think that certain moral sentences are, strictly speaking, false, you might think they are near enough to being true not to quibble.

All the same, there might be more to it. If you accept moral error theory, you might be less insistent on others accepting at least some of your judgments. Again, you might consider that at least some moral language is best avoided if you think it encourages unnecessary and harmful dogmatism about certain judgments where you think disagreement is legitimate. You might also find that the most suspect language is not the language you are most inclined to use on an everyday basis in any event.

Again, it might be disconcerting if the theory pushes you to think that our moral codes are  ultimately based on human desires, which vary to an extent, rather than on something that goes more deeply into the impersonal fabric of the universe – though then again, this might be a salutary reminder of the limits of what moral norms and codes can really do. Without wanting to write a whole book on the subject – at least right this minute – I’ll leave you to think whether moral error theory, if it is on the right track, has any practical importance or use.

10. The word 'scientism' is thrown around often these days. What do you make of it?

Again, there’s a lot to say, and much of the disagreement relates to what is meant by science as well as by “scientism.” I’ve already said that I don’t see a clear dividing line between the sciences and the humanities. All the methods available to one are available to the other. Nonetheless, different questions tend to require different approaches and emphases, and this will necessitate different training.

For example, if I am doing a lot of historical research that involves translating ancient inscriptions there is really no substitute for training in the relevant ancient language or languages. At least the way the sciences and humanities are usually understood in English-speaking countries, learning and using languages is more a hallmark of scholarship in the humanities than of the practice of science. Conversely, employing instruments that extend the human senses, developing mathematical models, and conducting controlled experiments are more the hallmarks of science than of scholarship in the humanities.

However, scientists and humanities scholars both need to use logic, including hypothetico-deductive reasoning. They may both need to carry out various kinds of close observation, and so on. There may be circumstances where it would be helpful for a scientist to understand a foreign language. There will certainly be times when humanities scholars will use scientific instruments and other devices. None of this is a matter of drawing sharp lines.

There would be a problem with scientism if it meant the idea that the methods that are hallmarks of science are the best, or the only, approach to all problems and that the methods that are hallmarks of the humanities are never useful or the most useful – so it is useless learning foreign languages, or mastering a reasonably integrated technique of interpretation of certain kinds of documents such as might be used by a legal scholar making sense of a statute or a literary scholar making sense of, say, a seventeenth-century poem.

If that is how scientism is understood, then scientism is clearly wrongheaded and a bad thing (where “bad” has its everyday meaning). Of course it can – and often is – useful to learn a foreign language, for example.

 But how many people really do embrace scientism in that sense? It’s very difficult to think of examples. Perhaps there are scientists who are sufficiently ignorant of the humanities to despise them or to think their methods are useless, or to think that they could do better with, say, making sense of a legal statute or deciphering an ancient inscription in a ead language. But any scientists like that would be rare. At least I hope so. I certainly don’t see them involved in serious debates about religion and philosophy.

All that said, the methods that are so much the hallmark of science have been very effective in opening up the universe to our inspection over the past four to five hundred years. In particular, science has enormously extended our knowledge of the natural world, enabling us to probe the depths of time, the distances of space, and the many scales of the micro-world that is invisible to our ordinary senses. I’m a great fan of science.

11. Having read your entry in "50 voices of disbelief" (which I really enjoyed reading), it would be a bit redundant to ask about your transformation from an evangelical Christian to an atheist. But do you miss being religious?

Not at all. (That was an easy one!)

 
12. Are you working on anything at the moment?

Udo Schuklenk and I have just submitted the manuscript of 50 Great Myths About Atheism, which is under contract to Wiley-Blackwell. As I mentioned, this will come to grips with accommodationist ideas, among others. We’ll be discussing a wide range of misconceptions, half-truths, and misleading ideas that surround atheism, as well as spelling out something of our positive case for why atheism is the most reasonable response to the God question.

The other book I’m working on is Humanity Enhanced, which deals with issues, especially legal and political ones, surrounding genetic enhancement technologies, human cloning, etc. How should people of reason approach this? Humanity Enhanced is under contract to MIT Press.

I should also mention Freedom of Religion and the Secular State, which was published by Wiley-Backwell earlier this year, and which we haven’t really talked about. It’s my definitive attempt, so far, to defend the idea of a secular state – i.e. one in which the government is not guided by religious considerations, but only this-worldly ones – to explore the implications, and to explain why I think a secular state segues into a liberal state. Among other things, I explore conflicting concepts of freedom of religion, and I discuss the relationship between freedom of religion and freedom of speech. In brief, I reject ideas of any conflict between them, but there’s far more to say than that.

There are other projects, including another book that may or may not get off the ground, so I don’t want to say too much about it at the moment.

 My life is incredibly busy right now, but hopefully this will all come to fruition and be worth it.

 

13. Philosophers who inspire you the most?

Many of them. Among the great philosophers of past times, Epicurus, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill would all be near the top of my list. Hume is perhaps the greatest of all. He saw very clearly and deeply, and philosophy has been trying to come to terms with his vision ever since. Much of modern philosophy is either footnotes to Hume or a campaign of resistance to his insights.

14. Any book recommendations for our readers?

Ah, where do I start? Actually, a lot of what I’ve been reading is rather specialized – it’s been research for my own books. In particular, I haven’t been getting a lot of time to read fiction, which I miss. Conversely, I’ve read enough works of Christian theology or apologetics of late to last me a lifetime (all for the purposes of 50 Great Myths About Atheism).

I’m currently reading the newest edition of Galen Strawson’s challenging book on free will, Freedom and Belief, and in fact I’ve been doing a lot of reading in that area. Although Strawson is regarded as an incompatibilist, while I’m probably thought of as a compatibilist, his detailed views don’t seem that far from mine so far. Both of us reject libertarian free will, and for much the same reasons. It’s then a question of what you do with the conceptions of free will, or simply freedom, that are left.

A lighter read just lately, but still an interesting one, was Sex and God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality, by Darrel Ray. This is a very accessible and provocative approach to the topic, and I found myself nodding along as I read it. I would be interested in other opinions of it. Ray did not really need to convince me of the main thesis of the book, that religion can be a barrier to any rational consideration of sex, either for individuals navigating their own sex lives or for understanding at a social level. He does, however, develop the case with many examples and arguments.

Steven Diamond and Kary English stories - Hugo Awards Voting

Among the items nominated in the "Best Short Story" category of the 2015 Hugo Awards are "A Single Samurai", by Steven Diamond, and "Totaled", by Kary English.

I'll be quite brief about these. "A Single Samurai" is a fantasy story involving a magical samurai warrior's attempt to halt the path of a mountain-sized kaiju monster. Leaving aside a couple of small verbal infelicities, it is a well-written, well-crafted piece told in the first person by the samurai, whose character - one marked by honour, tradition, and invincible determination - is conveyed effectively. So vast is the kaiju that the samurai's efforts appear ineffectual and futile, but read on... All in all, this is a solid short story, if marred by something of a deus ex machina style of ending. By all means give it a try and see what you think.

"Totaled" is a more innovative and sophisticated story, and I think it's a genuine contender for the award. It's difficult to describe this one without giving away too much and spoiling the effect. Suffice to say that it's told - mainly in present tense, and for good reasons - from a very unusual point of view. Kary English was not previously on my radar but appears to be a noteworthy talent.

After writing the above, I checked and found that both of these stories were on the Sad Puppies slate, as was Lou Antonelli's story, "On the Spiritual Plain", which I reviewed a few days ago. The remaining two stories were not, although they do appear on the slate issued by the (Zeus help us!) "Rabid Puppies". I'll get to those soon. Meanwhile Kary English's "Totaled" seems most deserving of the award of three short stories that I've read so far.

Best Related Work Hugo - even more - Hugo Awards Voting

To follow up yesterday's post on this subject, I've now read the remaining two items on the list of nominees for "Best Related Work". Once again, the nominated works are:

1. Lou Antonelli, Letters from Gardner.

2. Ken Burnside, "The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF".

3. Ted Roberts, "Why Science is Never Settled".

4. Michael Z. Williamson, Wisdom from My Internet.

5. John C. Wright, Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth.

In yesterday's post I gave my reasons why I could not support the items by Antonelli, Roberts, and Wright. What about Williamson and Burnside?

The short book by Williamson is actually a compilation of jokes and snarky comments. It's edgy, has plenty to offend almost anyone, and will certainly piss off some readers. For all that, it's funny. A lot of the humour passed me by (much of it is based on details of American politics that I know little about), but there's a great deal of wordplay that made me laugh. Williamson's politics may not be mine - he seems to be some sort of political Libertarian, although he makes fun of almost everyone - but he's got a quick wit and a love of language. Good for him. The trouble is that the book is not even remotely related to science fiction or fantasy except in the most basic sense that it's by someone who is also a science fiction writer.

Burnside's article amounts to a short exposition of the problems of interplanetary propulsion systems and course trajectories, with advice on what might be plausible scenarios for a future in which travel takes place fairly freely within our solar system, complete with battles in space. It is framed as advice to writers of military sf, and it seems like it could help anyone who wants to write in that area with a high level of verisimilitude.

For my money, Burnside is the most deserving winner among the five authors who have been nominated. Unless you are planning to vote for No Award or not to vote in this category, you might find reason to vote for "The Hot Equations". I'm considering doing so. There is still, however, a question as to whether this short, specialised piece has the kind of gravitas that justifies winning an award at this level, bearing in mind the sorts of works that have won in past years. Still, it is relevant and nicely done.

Stepping back for a minute, two of the five works on the list of nominations seem to me quite clearly off-topic: those by Roberts and Williamson. Antonelli's book (what I read of it) did not seem overly impressive to me, though it has its value. Wright is perhaps the most impressive of the five authors, but his book is self-indulgent and deeply flawed. All in all, it's an odd assortment.

There have been some strange nominations in this category in the past, so it might be said that the Roberts and Williamson pieces are not that bizarre as nominees. Perhaps so, but the award has usually been won by works that are very clearly on-topic - check out Wikipedia's list of nominated works and winners.

Once we include on the list of nominees an article about the history and nature of science - with no particular connection made to fantasy and SF - and a book of jokes and snarky comments by someone who happens to be a science fiction writer, where does it end? It hasn't escaped me that both of my own books that were published last year would have had as much claim (or a better claim) than these works. So would, taken as a whole, last year's issues of The Journal of Evolution and Technology.

I'm not complaining, because I still don't think that Humanity Enhanced or Intelligence Unbound or JET should have been eligible, and I wouldn't have dreamt of suggesting anyone nominate them. (Conversely, my book under contract with Springer for publication a couple of years down the track will certainly be eligible.) But if the items by Roberts and Williamson are considered legitimate, it seems that in future all sorts of works might have a claim for consideration.

Once we get to that point, why not nominate, say, Nick Bostrom's recent book on superintelligence?

At the same time, there are plenty of other obvious contenders that might have been on the list, such as the second volume of William Patterson's huge biography of Heinlein and/or Brian Atteberry's new book about the fantasy genre. It is unfortunate that books such as these have been pushed out by dubiously relevant (and sometimes very flawed) contenders.

Of course, this raises large issues about politicisation of awards, especially when you have a group of people putting together a specific slate that they asked their fans to nominate on essentially political grounds. I've been very measured in what I've said about the people associated with the "Sad Puppies" campaign, partly because no great purpose is served by having yet another person (i.e. me) piling on in criticising them, and partly because I actually think some of the criticism they've received has been unfair, hyperbolic, abusive, and generally excessive. That makes me feel disinclined to add to all the flak (and to wonder whether I might cop some myself, from both sides, if I so much as tried to say something that attempted to be fair and measured).

But I can't be entirely silent after reading the five works nominated in this list - which correspond exactly with what was on the Sad Puppies official slate.

So... even if there is a legitimate grain of truth somewhere amongst what the folks in the Sad Puppies campaign have been complaining about, and fully acknowledging Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen as being well-meaning, decent people, etc. (not the monsters they are claimed to be by some), this campaign has been dreadfully wrongheaded. Worse, it has led to some perverse outcomes. If the idea was to go outside the box and identify outstanding work that might normally have been overlooked in favour of a group of well-networked "usual suspects", it does not appear to have turned out that way. And surely even people like Correia and Torgersen must (privately?) be horrified that Patterson's book is not shortlisted, whereas volume 1 was shortlisted in 2011, even though it didn't win.

I won't be trying to punish works or authors merely for being on the Sad Puppies slate. But I hope that this campaign will not be repeated in 2016 - at least not in anything remotely like the form we have seen this year.

Best Related Work nominations reviewed & discussed - Hugo Awards Voting

This year's Hugo nominations in the "Best Related Work" category are as follows (in alphabetical order):

1. Lou Antonelli, Letters from Gardner.

2. Ken Burnside, "The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF".

3. Ted Roberts, "Why Science is Never Settled".

4. Michael Z. Williamson, Wisdom from My Internet.

5. John C. Wright, Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth.

At this stage, I have not broached the items by Burnside and Williamson. They'll have to wait for another occasion - perhaps soon. However, I've read the Roberts and Wright items, plus a large chunk of Antonelli's book. Unfortunately, I cannot support any of these three for the award.

As I've previously stated, I intend to vote in the Hugo Awards on the basis of what I take to be the merits of the nominated works. Despite the unprecedentedly politicized nature of the nomination process in 2015, I will not be adopting any strategy such as automatically voting for "No Award" across all categories as some kind of protest or deterrent to the use of politicized slates of potential nominees. Nor will I be seeking to punish any author whose work was included in such a slate.

On the other hand, heavy voting along political lines can produce an outcome where some works are appearing on the nominations list because they were favoured by people drawing up a slate, rather than because of their merit. There may be some categories with weak sets of nominations, and from what I've read so far this looks like being one of them. If none of the nominations in a category look strong enough to deserve the relevant award, I will, indeed, vote for "No Award".

Antonelli's Letters from Gardner seems, from what I've read, to be about the author's development, at a relatively late stage of life, as a well-published author of (mainly) short stories. It includes a considerable amount of Antonelli's fiction, with much commentary and reflection, and amongst it some perfectly sound advice on the craft of writing. If it were up for a lesser (perhaps regional) award, I'd have no difficulty in voting for it. From what I've read, however, I just don't think the book is good, distinguished, or interesting enough to be worth a Hugo Award. It does not stand up well against past winners. Your mileage may vary. It's not a bad book, and I'd have happily read the whole thing if it had been provided in the Hugo Voters Packet.

"Why Science is Never Settled", by Tedd Roberts, is a well-written and thoughtful discussion of its subject matter. It popularises certain ideas in the history and philosophy of science, and does a workmanlike job of it. It was aimed at an SF-reading audience, and it was doubtless of interest to many people within that audience, but it does not seem to me to be sufficiently distinguished or relevant to deserve this award. There is some relationship to science fiction - enough that it would interest many readers who are also SF readers - but it's a rather tenuous one.

Wright's book is the most interesting case of the three works I've read in whole or part. It is a selection of essays, all of which are fairly closely related to science fiction and/or fantasy - indeed, most are directly on aspects of these genres.

Wright has a worldview that is antithetical to mine: he is a traditional, conservative Roman Catholic with all that this involves. He supports traditional gender roles and evidently has a very low view of gay men and lesbians. That might be enough for many readers to decide that they cannot vote for Transhuman and Subhuman, but it's not the worst problem with the book.

Note, in particular, that my mere disagreement with Wright's worldview would not lead me to try to silence him or punish him, or to characterise his views and attitudes in ways that go beyond the evidence. For example, he makes clear that he has a traditionally sexist approach to gender relations and roles. He would not characterise it as "sexist", of course, but he spells out his views quite clearly, and the approach he describes is, viewed from outside, a paradigmatically sexist one. I would not, however, go further and call him a misogynist in an attempt to discredit or punish him. He shows no sign of actually hating, or even disliking or despising, women, and it's sufficient to be accurate about wrongheaded and socially destructive views, rather than engaging in hyperbole and misrepresentation. (That said, Wright does appear to be an outright homophobe. The standard Roman Catholic position on homosexuality is homophobic enough to merit the label.)

At the same time, Wright is verbally talented. Better, he really does know a great deal about the history and techniques of science fiction/fantasy writing. As long as he focuses closely on these topics, he provides valuable information and insights. I venture to think that if he could discipline himself for the task he could produce a useful book on the subject, and even this one contains enough worthwhile material to be worth reading - if you can stomach the rest if it.

What ruins the book is that a very large proportion of the text consists of self-indulgent, abusive attacks on opponents. Once he starts writing about hot-button cultural or political controversies - and he does so for much of the book - Wright does not explain or analyse, at least not with any charity or fairness. He does not seek detachment, or critical distance, from the views that he is inclined to. There is no hint of an effort to persuade his opponents through reason and argument. Instead, he propounds, declaims, rants, speculates irresponsibly about others' motivations, and wildly attributes viciousness of character to people who disagree with his view of the world. Some of it - a lot of it - couldn't be much more extreme.

Does this material contain any grain of truth of truth at all? Perhaps. Almost any position developed by an intelligent person contains some grain of truth, and I freely admit at least one point. There have been many excesses of political correctness on the Left, with some dire results. See the recent abuse received by Joss Whedon over aspects of Avengers: Age of Ultron as just one example among many. For another example, see the farcical persecution of Laura Kipnis by her employing university.

But Wright's own style is as unfair and vitriolic as any of this, leading to a book that is full to bursting with moralistic, bad-tempered nonsense. Despite some intelligent and useful content when its author focuses on what he knows a lot about - again, the history and techniques of the SF and fantasy genres - this is nowhere near a book that merits my vote for a Hugo Award.

Moon (2009), dir. by Duncan Jones - NOTE SPOILERS!

This British movie, directed by Duncan Jones and starring Sam Rockwell, has the trappings of a serious work of science fiction. The sets and machines show considerable realism for a story supposedly set on the Moon's surface, the pace moves rather slowly, and the mystery is solved gradually. There is relatively little violent action, and when two men fight the scuffle is clumsy and unspectacular.

Moon held my interest, despite the slow pacing, and I do recommend it to SF aficianados as one alternative to fare that depends on spectacle, special effects, and violent conflict. Nonetheless, it's a movie that ultimately fails to convince.

That is partly because the resolution depends on what has long been a cliché - the employment of human reproductive cloning for wicked purposes by an unscrupulous business corporation. Can we please put this trope to bed for a few decades, and along with it the more general use of cloning to code for evil?

I gave a spoiler warning in the heading to this post. Here is another one, just in case. You've now been warned again.

The evil company, Lunar Industries, is mining helium-3 on the dark side of the Moon, with just one human operator (assisted by a clever and vocal computer system: GERTY) to oversee the workings of automated mining equipment. The operator, Sam Bell, is employed for a three-year term, keeping in regular contact with his pregnant wife on Earth.

Except (remember the spoiler warning)... the evil company has decided to staff its operation with a series of Sam Bell clones, each of which runs out of life toward the end of three years, to be replaced by a new, fully-developed clone with Sam's memories. Each successive clone thinks of itself - himself! - as at the beginning of the original Sam's term of work. To clarify, each clone is programmed with Sam's memories as they were at the beginning of Sam's trip to the Moon; each has to be tricked into thinking that it is still the year of Sam's arrival. As events turn out, Sam's wife is no longer pregnant: she actually had their baby, a girl called Eve, fifteen years before the main action.

It's mysterious how Lunar Industries manages to keep this arrangement secret, though I suppose it does a lot of clever lying and covering up, back on Earth. Bear in mind, that the helium-3 mined on the Moon is used in fusion reactors and provides for most of Earth's energy needs. This is not some obscure outfit, but, rather humankind's major energy supplier. You'd think it would be under some scrutiny.

It's also mysterious just how any of this is supposed to produce cost savings for the company that are significant in the scheme of things, when compared with some more straightforward means of staffing its mining operation. It does, admittedly, mean that the company doesn't need to train and transport a new astronaut every three years. On the other hand, it has gone to the trouble and expense of building a rather large secret vault of Sams on the Moon, to be unfrozen as needed. Furthermore, it has to maintain an elaborate charade to prevent Sam (the Sam in charge at any particular time) from speaking directly to anyone on Earth who is not a dupe of the company, from working out that he is not the original Sam, and even from discovering what year it is.

Given the trouble and cost associated with the scheme - not to mention the risk of being found out - it almost seems that the company runs its staffing arrangements as it does just to be evil. That might be acceptable in a different kind of movie with different conventions, aspirations, and standards. Here, I'm afraid, it really won't wash.

Some more on the 2015 Hugo Voting Packet

Sorry, folks, but this might all be a bit random for the next few days - I'm reading some of the shorter material more or less as it strikes me, rather than in any sensible order. So, three more items for me to comment on:

1. "On the Spiritual Plain" by Lou Antonelli (nominated for Best Short Story). I wish I could have liked this tale of human/alien interaction, but it doesn't belong in an award nomination list at this level. I expect that some readers might assume I'm hostile to its religious theme, but that doesn't bother me at all (I may be somewhat anti-religious, but I'm not a fanatic). Quite simply, the story is not up to Hugo standard in its basic technique. Some good copyediting might have improved it, but even with a lot of additional work this would not, as I see it, be a legitimate Hugo-winning story. Antonelli is a prolific, well-credentialed writer (particularly of short stories), but if he has published something worthy of a major international award, this is not it. Note: The story is often listed as "On a Spiritual Plain" but the title on the version received by voters is clearly "On the Spiritual Plain" - go figure.

2. Rat Queens Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery - written by Curtis J. Weibe and illustrated by Roc Upchurch (nominated for Best Graphic Story). This bawdy fantasy romp, set in a Tolkienesque secondary universe complete with elves, orcs, and trolls, entertained me from beginning to end. The characters who make up the eponymous Rat Queens - a band of magical (female) adventurers - are unfailingly fun to watch, and are strongly distinguished in their individual designs and personalities. The action is fast-paced, and I'm all for the non-stop violence and low comedy. It's a hoot, but does it have sufficient gravitas to merit a Hugo Award? Debatable, perhaps... but I wouldn't be wanting to stand in its way. I rate it a bit below the next item, but it has its attractions.

3. Saga Volume Three - written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Fiona Staples (nominated for Best Graphic Story). Here we have a potential winner. I rate it below Ms. Marvel, but an earlier volume of this complicated, engaging space opera has already won a Hugo Award (in 2013). The characters are worth caring about; the storyline is intriguing; and the overall narrative, when it's complete, could become a classic of its kind.

Sex Criminals Volume 1: One Weird Trick - Hugo Voting (with basic spoilers)

This is a quirky, mildly erotic - and sometimes quite funny - story about characters who are able to stop time when they have orgasms... enabling them to get up to all sorts of nefarious shenanigans. Hence the title: "sex criminals".

Good for the creators, Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarksy, for having the amusing idea, and for running with it for laughs. To be honest, though, Sex Criminals Vol. 1 didn't do a lot for me. Your mileage may vary, so by all means check it out if what I've sketched sounds like it might be your thing. For myself, I'd be voting for Ms. Marvel over this in the Best Graphic Story Category.

Ms. Marvel vol. 1 - Hugo voting

As previously noted, I plan to read as much as possible of the material in the Hugo Voters Packet in an effort to inform myself fully before voting. On this blog, I'll discuss much of what I read, although I will not normally do so in substantial detail that involves significant spoilers. (If and when I publish significant spoilers, they will be accompanied by a warning.)

I've begun my efforts by reading Ms. Marvel Vol. 1, scripted by G. Willow Wilson and drawn by Adrian Alphona, which is nominated in the Best Graphic Story category. I haven't yet read anything else among the works nominated in the category, and as yet I have no view about the likely winner, but I found this volume quite charming.

The new Ms. Marvel is Kamala Khan, a 16-y.o. Muslim girl of ethnic Pakistani background, living in Jersey City. Her support cast includes school friends; her well-meaning, but overly strict, parents; and a zealous brother. One evening, Kamala gains a suite of powers involving size-changing and shapeshifting, and she initially patterns herself on Captain Marvel (i.e. the original Ms. Marvel, Carol Danvers), whom she reveres. Part of the story's ongoing fun involves jokes about the sexy costumes of superheroines and the impossibly perfect image of Captain Marvel in particular ... which Kamala is all too aware she cannot live up to.

Much like Peter Parker - Spider-Man - Kamala has to deal with the complications of balancing the demands of superheroism against the problems of ordinary, day-to-day life with her family. In fact, this first volume of the series displays something of the same freshness that the original run of Spider-Man was so notable for in its day, back in the 1960s. Clearly enough, that was just the effect Marvel Comics was aiming for, but it doesn't feel at all stale or cynical. By and large, I think it was mission accomplished for Marvel and its creative team.

I hope this character, and the cast established around her, end up being successful over the long haul - and particularly that Ms. Marvel might retain its current charm rather than turning into just another overwrought superhero book with the usual kind of obvious glamour and the almost inevitable escalations in power levels that can make characters less relatable.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman - review with spoilers

I followed up my recent re-read of Heinlein's Starship Troopers by re-reading Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (my copy was signed by Joe way back in 1980, when I first met him... we must both have been so young back then...).

Haldeman's book is often seen as an answer to, or critique of, Heinlein's - and there's some truth in that. But it also owes much to Heinlein's, with similar narrative structures and techniques on display.

The Forever War compellingly depicts the harshness of military training and the sheer terror, danger, and suffering of armed combat; but to be fair to Heinlein, Starship Troopers does not deny or downplay any of these things. They are always present, and even emphasised, yet they are painted with an overlay of anti-glamorous glamour. By that, I mean that there is no glamour in the daily discipline and tasks of a working soldier, as presented by Heinlein - it's all acknowledged as difficult, tedious, demanding, and dangerous - but there's a kind of allure or mystique created around being the sort of person who will step up and embrace this as a form of social responsibility. Haldeman, by contrast, removes even that kind of attraction from his portrayal of military life and all that it involves.

Like Starship Troopers, The Forever War is told in the first person by a narrator who has obviously survived the experiences he describes to us. In each case, the narrative depicts the military career of an individual soldier as he advances through the ranks. There is, perhaps, a grittier feel to Haldeman's prose: more focus on the grim details of training, work, and combat, as if we were there ourselves, with less reflection on the experience from the narrator's current perspective. When, however, that reflection is offered, it comes from a voice that sounds far more bleak and cynical than that of Heinlein's narrator, Juan ("Johnnie") Rico.

By contrast with Rico, Haldeman's William Mandella never comes to appreciate the essential benevolence and wisdom - or the necessity - of the military forces in which he serves. There's no sign of any of this - at most, we can say that some individual officers are personally impressive, and that Mandella encounters some of the difficulties of active command in a war zone. If Starship Troopers can be read as recruitment propaganda, The Forever War is fairly much the opposite.

Most shockingly, however, the eponymous war does not actually last forever (unlike the war against the Bugs in Starship Troopers, it has an ending that is revealed in the book). The shocking part is that the war turns out to have been completely unnecessary, based on a misunderstanding for which human beings, and especially human military leaders, have been mainly responsible. The dreaded and (to humans) visually disgusting enemy - the Taurans - have been the relatively innocent party throughout, while we have been the aggressors from the start.

Whereas Heinlein takes war to be inevitable and beyond moral criticism - its inevitability is an amoral feature of the background against which moral judgments are made - Haldeman presents war not only as Hell (Heinlein also does this, and with almost as much literary force) but as an unnecessary, futile, absurd sort of Hell. Whereas Heinlein depicts high-level military commanders as essentially wise and benevolent, Haldeman depicts them as utterly ruthless in their exploitation of the men and women who serve under them.

Leaving aside its obvious critique of war and the military, The Forever War contains much in the way of social and moral commentary as it depicts the varied mores of several periods in future human history. Because Mandella spends much of his military service in space vessels travelling at relativistic velocities, he effectively keeps time-travelling into the future. That is, in fact, one reason why he renews his military service: there is no place for him in the radically changed human society that he encounters the first time he returns to Earth from a battle with the Taurans. But it also gives Haldeman the opportunity to comment slyly on sexual mores and varied conceptions of freedom.

Perhaps strangely, Haldeman provides a happy ending in a way that Heinlein does not. The war is eventually resolved amicably and abandoned by both sides, and Mandella finally discovers a path out of military service, along with his lover, Marygay Porter. If we don't buy Heinlein's line about the necessity of war, we may actually see the narrative arc of his novel as more pessimistic than that of Haldeman's. (Conversely, the ending of The Forever War feels, to an extent, like a cop-out, given all that we have seen to that point; whatever its weaknesses, and however much its political philosophy might seem untenable or infuriating, no one could make that particular criticism of Starship Troopers.)

Over the past forty years or more, Haldeman has been one of the most respected SF writers among his peers, while also establishing a large fan base. The Forever War shows why he's so admired and popular. He was - and is - a superb exponent of the craft of fiction writing. His portrayals of futuristic equipment and military tactics are especially vivid and convincing. There's always a sense with Haldeman that he's the real deal: as a talented and capable author, and as someone who knows what he's writing about.