Sample from Udo:
It is deeply offensive to conflate in a report on racism with discrimination against people who make the choice to believe such stuff, and who then go out of their way to let the world know that they do (eg by putting black cloth over their heads, or wearing any number of religious knickknack around their necks etc). If you belong to an ethnic minority and you have been subjected to racism you will be permanently scarred to some extent or other. You will continuously wonder when the next shoe's gonna drop. Well, compare that to people who choose to wear religious paraphernalia in order to identify themselves as adherents to an ideology they have chosen. Surely this doesn't exactly fall into the same ballpark. Again, my issue is not at all that unfair discrimination against people because of the ideologies they subscribe to is fair game. Quite to the contrary.
About Me
- Russell Blackford
- Australian philosopher, literary critic, legal scholar, and professional writer. Based in Newcastle, NSW. My latest books are THE TYRANNY OF OPINION: CONFORMITY AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM (2019); AT THE DAWN OF A GREAT TRANSITION: THE QUESTION OF RADICAL ENHANCEMENT (2021); and HOW WE BECAME POST-LIBERAL: THE RISE AND FALL OF TOLERATION (2024).
Monday, March 15, 2010
Udo nails it on race and religion
This piece by Udo Schuklenk is superb. I hope it gets picked up by some of the high-traffic sites such as RD.net, B&W, Pharyngula, etc. I'm still interstate and running around, so can someone else draw it to people's attention? (I drove PZ Myers back from the post-convention presenters' party last night, but won't be seeing him again on his trip to Australia.)
Sunday, March 14, 2010
ABC Religion reports on moi
Go here for Margaret Coffey's, um ... interesting report on my presentation at the Global Atheist Convention. Note my comment in response on the (so far) short thread. You might want to make comments of your own, one way or other, especially if you're at the convention. By no means let me bias you. See what you think.
While you're there, you might then like to nose around on the site and see what is said about some of the other talks.
When you've had a look at the ABC Religion site, you might like to think about what I've previously said here about social pluralism:
If you mean that ["militant" atheists or "New Atheists"] will go on arguing for the truth of what they believe, using logic and evidence and … well … words, that is exactly what people do in a tolerant, pluralist society. In such a society, people also try to persuade others to live in certain ways and not to do certain things. This involves using the techniques of argument and exhortation, personal practice and example, and so on.
What you don’t do in a tolerant, pluralist society, at least if you are committed to tolerance and pluralism, is try to enforce your beliefs and your preferred way of life by the use of force, whether it be by acts of terrorist violence or by trying to get laws enacted to suppress the views you reject or the practices and ways of life you dislike. But the so-called "New Atheists" are not trying to do any such thing (and I for one would speak up loudly in opposition if they did).
Richard Dawkins, for example, has made it clear that he is trying to raise people’s consciousness, not control their lives.
It is religious believers who are always far more likely to attempt to impose their particular views of right and wrong, e.g. by trying to ban abortion and certain kinds of medical research.
While you're there, you might then like to nose around on the site and see what is said about some of the other talks.
When you've had a look at the ABC Religion site, you might like to think about what I've previously said here about social pluralism:
If you mean that ["militant" atheists or "New Atheists"] will go on arguing for the truth of what they believe, using logic and evidence and … well … words, that is exactly what people do in a tolerant, pluralist society. In such a society, people also try to persuade others to live in certain ways and not to do certain things. This involves using the techniques of argument and exhortation, personal practice and example, and so on.
What you don’t do in a tolerant, pluralist society, at least if you are committed to tolerance and pluralism, is try to enforce your beliefs and your preferred way of life by the use of force, whether it be by acts of terrorist violence or by trying to get laws enacted to suppress the views you reject or the practices and ways of life you dislike. But the so-called "New Atheists" are not trying to do any such thing (and I for one would speak up loudly in opposition if they did).
Richard Dawkins, for example, has made it clear that he is trying to raise people’s consciousness, not control their lives.
It is religious believers who are always far more likely to attempt to impose their particular views of right and wrong, e.g. by trying to ban abortion and certain kinds of medical research.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Big gig coming up!
I'll be speaking in front of about 2000 people at 9 am this morning - which I can assure you is not usual for me - enjoining them to be militant forthright supporters of basic liberal principles such as freedom of speech and separation of church and state. At a time when so much emphasis is placed, correctly, on human rights, these very basic principles are under constant attack from many quarters. At the same time, we see attempts to pervert the meaning of human rights as with attempts to ban "defamation of religions".
Anyway, wish me luck, the assistance of Zeus, and so on.
Anyway, wish me luck, the assistance of Zeus, and so on.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Taner Edis should write a book
Consider this the promised Part III in a series.
Over at The Secular Outpost, Taner Edis has written several more pieces about the respective merits of secular liberalism of the familiar kind and a multicultural utopia (or, from both his perspective and mine, perhaps dystopia) of traditional communities within the framework of the state.
As he acknowledges, the latter would resemble the Ottoman millet system, updated to allow for secular people to have their own "community" with the kind of sexual and other freedoms (plenty of boozy parties, apparently) that we enjoy or aspire to. Still, it's an old-fashioned, as well as post-modern, multiculturalism in borrowing from quite ancient precedents. (Taner is probably well aware that it also resembles the utopia of utopias proposed by Robert Nozick at the end of Anarchy, State, and Utopia; not that that invalidates it - although I am not a political libertarian, but more a social democrat on economic issues, I find Nozick a very interesting and provocative thinker.)
I think that Taner needs to write a book about this - seriously. It's obviously on his mind, and he's clearly been thinking hard and reading a lot of political philosophy in an effort to imagine a political system that will be workable and stable, acceptable from many viewpoints, and bearable to people who share his own viewpoint (that of an atheist whose temperament runs towards individualism and away from involvement in tight communities). If he put all his thinking together in one place, at book length, it could be a very valuable contribution to contemporary debates on these subjects, and I don't think the fact that he's a physicist, rather than a political philosopher, should count against him. He has a wealth of relevant experience, and political philosophy is not so difficult that it needs to be reserved for the officially-recognised specialists.
However, let's step back for a moment and look at the overall argument. It began when I challenged a statement attributed in the media to Gary Bouma, who criticised secularists as divisive when we, supposedly, call for religious voices to be driven out of the public policy area.
Briefly, secularists do not say anything so crude. We do challenge the privileged position that is given to religious voices in the public policy area. Moreover, we argue that much of what those voices say is wrong. Often, we go on to add that what they say is (frequently) contrary to widely accepted principles of the political culture in Western countries, including freedom of speech, separation of church and state, the harm principle, and so on. Like other speech that goes against these principles, it deserves to be marginalised, not privileged. It certainly merits opposition, though not suppression.
There is no evidence at all that the speech of secularists who talk along these lines - as AC Grayling and I did in a gig at the Cinema Nova here in Melbourne last night - is causing social division in anything other than a trivial sense. I.e., we may be causing debate and controversy, but there is no evidence at all that we are "fuelling sectarian conflict". We are not dividing society in any bad sense. Thus, when Bouma attacks us as "divisive", this is simply wrong and unfair.
Yet, Taner Edis has said:
But I want to argue that here, Bouma is correct and Blackford is wrong. Secularism, particularly when it extends to public criticism of religion and policies that inconvenience religious communities, is a source of social division. Secularists keeping quiet is, in fact, in the interest of peace and public order in many present circumstances.
Even if everything else that Taner has written is correct, I don't see how he can reasonably maintain this. When we go back to what Bouma was actually quoted as saying, and what I said in reply, nothing that Taner has been arguing supports Bouma's claim. It is simply not the case that the sorts of things that Grayling and I said last night threaten peace and public order, or promote sectarian conflict, or do anything of the sort. I really think that it would be useful if Taner withdrew his support for this kind of claim. It's unhelpful, incorrect, and detracts from what he actually wants to discuss, which is the extent to which it's desirable to move to some kind of radical multicultural system of political organisation in which various communities are given a great deal of autonomy, apparently even being able to set their own internal laws (at least to some extent).
With all respect to Taner, I think he's using my (I still say justified) riposte to Bouma's quoted remarks as a springboard to launch into his own elaborate musings about the relationship between traditional community authority and the state.
The most that he can reasonably say is (1) that the sorts of views that Grayling and I were expressing last night would be out of place in the radical multicultural system that he envisages, and (2) that they are an obstacle to that system's creation.
However, (1) certainly does not equate to those views being "divisive" in the sense under discussion. We don't have the system that Taner is talking about, and within the context of the current system it is far from clear that Grayling and I, for example, are contributing to (the bad kind of) social division.
After all, Taner concedes that there are people who have much populist support whom he calls "theoconservatives". He says that theocracy is not the issue, but then admits that quasi-theocracy is a genuine issue. Okay, I agree that very few people in Western countries advocate literal theocracy. But surely it is clear that Grayling and I, and all the other people Bouma has smeared, don't think that literal theocracy is the issue. It is quasi-theocracy, or theoconservativism, or theocratic tendencies, that we attack, and we do spell out what sorts of things we are attacking. I continue to insist that this quasi-theocratic or theoconservative (or whatever we call it) viewpoint is genuinely worrying, merits rebuttal, and is divisive in a far more troublesome way than anything ever said by any atheist or secularist.
It's not old-fashioned, or jumping at shadows, or fighting the wars of the past, to see this quasi-theocratic or theoconservative thinking as a real and current danger. When we criticise it, it is very likely that, provided our words are heeded, we will actually end up reducing, rather than increasing, the bad kinds of social division. Of course, it's also possible that our efforts will have no effect at all, one way or another, but even that would not justify the claim that "Bouma is right and Blackford is wrong".
At the most, then, Taner Edis is left with (2) the claim that Grayling and I and our allies are standing in the way of the radical multicultural system that Taner himself sort of advocates. We may, therefore, be opposed to the system that (let us assume for the sake of argument) would be best in the long run for social peace. But even if all that is correct, which I certainly don't concede by any means, it's scarcely fair to say that Bouma is right to attack secularists as divisive. Bouma appears to have meant something quite strong, something about actually contributing to group antagonism in the community here and now. Grayling and I (and Richard Dawkins, and Ophelia Benson, and whoever) are simply not doing that.
And it is not useful language to accuse anyone who peacefully disagrees with you about what social system will promote social peace in the long run as being "divisive". That is a highly provocative and prejudicial slur which merits a sharp response.
Once again, it would be helpful if Taner withdrew his support for Bouma on this. Bouma is not correct and is not being fair. Bouma may (we don't know) support the kind of radical multicultural system that Taner is sort of defending and which he argues may have advantages in the long run. Well, so what? If Taner backed away from this point, he would then be free of having to defend Bouma's indefensible remarks and could concentrate on the substantive merits or otherwise of the radical multicultural system. As I said, he should write a book on this, since he has so much to say about it. Of course, that doesn't stop him continuing to write long blog posts about it, and nor does it stop us discussing the merits of the proposal.
As he does so, one thing that he needs to articulate more clearly is how he views this system as someone holding the values he actually holds, as distinct from someone who thinks that radical multiculturalism might, in some circumstances, be more realistic, and more likely to promote social harmony, than the kind of secular liberal democracy that has been implemented to a large extent (certainly not totally) in the West. In his posts, Taner seems to oppose the system he describes at the same time as he defends it. He says at times that he would resist it (but isn't that promoting social division, on Bouma's approach?) and at other times that it might be superior to what we currently have. The trouble is that he seems to want to judge it by two different systems of values.
Now that's not necessarily a problem. Ordinary secular liberals may also use two systems or sets of values. We may have one set of values for how we live our own lives, based on our comprehensive views of the world or theories of the good. And we may try to promote these values in public and in private (by speech, example, our associations with others, and so on). However, we don't advocate that the state should impose this set of values on other people. We accept the reality that different people do have different values, that these are often deeply held, that they are often contrary to our own values, that the state is not well placed to judge between us, and so on. So we ask the state to maintain a framework in which we are able to live as we wish but other people have a great deal of freedom to live in different ways.
We are still free to promote our values through speech, example, and association, but we don't think of the various arms of the state, operating by coercion, as a good way to promote our comprehensive values. We expect the state to concentrate on protecting people from fairly straightforward kinds of harms, providing an acceptable level of economic well-being, and so on.
Thus we may apply one set of values to our lives while expecting the state to impose only a much thinner set of values on ourselves and other people. Note, however, that we justify our view as to how the state should operate by argument about what the state can do best, the likely consequences if it attempts to impose our comprehensive values, and so on. (I'm sorry to keep saying "and so on", but getting all the details right really would require a book, and the exact details don't matter to my point.)
We justify the values that we want the state to act by from within the much more comprehensive values by which we live our own lives. We hope that people with a wide range of comprehensive systems of values for living their own lives can reach agreement that, for example, the state should concentrate on protecting things of this world rather than on facilitating spiritual salvation. And we realise, from within our own values, that some things that we value will not be obtained if the state tries to impose our comprehensive values on the unwilling (there will be resentment and resistance).
Taner keeps telling us that many people, traditional Muslims for example, do not share the comprehensive value systems of people who have comprehensive liberal views (based, perhaps, on science and secular philosophy). I agree.
I also agree that the values of people with comprehensive liberal views cannot be justified all the way down (as Nozick puts it in a different context). We cannot appeal to people who do not share those values by relying upon them. But we still need to work out what we want from within our own values. We have nowhere else to stand. What we want, ultimately, is what we want. So, if Taner expects us (people like me, AC Grayling, Ophelia Benson ...) to agree with the radical multicultural option, he is going to have to appeal to our values. If he is going to end up supporting it himself, it is going to have to be from within his own values. It's not to the point to say that those values may not be those of a traditional Muslim. In the first instance, the question is whether we can support it.
Of course, "we" may end up becoming such a social minority that Western governments will ride roughshod over us, even seeing us as enemies of the public order - as Locke thought atheists were. But it's not as if we'll be without allies. There are many features of the radical multicultural option that may make it unattractive, not just to us, but to other important players in the realpolitik of social life. For example, many Christians may be prepared to go along with a secular liberal model in which they cannot impose their own views of what is required to avoid sin and obtain spiritual salvation. They may not be so happy with a system that requires that they drastically constrain their ability to proselytise, or that they accept restrictions (even soft and informal ones involving a kind of conspiracy of political correctness) on freedom of religious speech. Many largely uncommitted people may also be appalled at aspects of the foreseeable operation of the radical multicultural option.
Radical multiculturalism may, itself, generate much understandable resentment and resistance.
Much of what Taner seems to be saying, when you boil it down, is that he has given up on attracting traditional Muslims to embrace a full-blooded secular liberal system. A radical multicultural system may be more acceptable to them, and they won't be talked out of this by arguments that rely on values that they don't share and that can't be justified all the way down.
That may be true. But it doesn't follow that comprehensive liberals, or the less fuzzy kinds of Christians, or largely-uncommitted people, or New Age folks, or anyone else should therefore embrace a model that may well operate in ways that are massively contrary to their (or our) actual values. All the concerns that are being raised by commenters on Taner's posts are quite legitimate.
Yes, we may not have "objective" values that traditional Muslims must accept on pain of being irrational. Thus, we may not be able to talk them out of a preference for the radical multicultural system. But it by no means follows that we are being irrational in opposing it or preferring a scheme of secular liberalism with robust freedom of speech, relatively little in the way of religious exemptions from general laws (though I, for one, do not argue that such exemptions are never justified), and few politically legitimate restrictions on individual freedom (in the sense that is commonly understood in the West).
I think that Taner needs to take this into account and get clear about what he really wants, all things considered. At the moment, there's a degree of schizophrenia in his posts. In the end, I look forward to his book, though I will probably disagree with much of it.
Over at The Secular Outpost, Taner Edis has written several more pieces about the respective merits of secular liberalism of the familiar kind and a multicultural utopia (or, from both his perspective and mine, perhaps dystopia) of traditional communities within the framework of the state.
As he acknowledges, the latter would resemble the Ottoman millet system, updated to allow for secular people to have their own "community" with the kind of sexual and other freedoms (plenty of boozy parties, apparently) that we enjoy or aspire to. Still, it's an old-fashioned, as well as post-modern, multiculturalism in borrowing from quite ancient precedents. (Taner is probably well aware that it also resembles the utopia of utopias proposed by Robert Nozick at the end of Anarchy, State, and Utopia; not that that invalidates it - although I am not a political libertarian, but more a social democrat on economic issues, I find Nozick a very interesting and provocative thinker.)
I think that Taner needs to write a book about this - seriously. It's obviously on his mind, and he's clearly been thinking hard and reading a lot of political philosophy in an effort to imagine a political system that will be workable and stable, acceptable from many viewpoints, and bearable to people who share his own viewpoint (that of an atheist whose temperament runs towards individualism and away from involvement in tight communities). If he put all his thinking together in one place, at book length, it could be a very valuable contribution to contemporary debates on these subjects, and I don't think the fact that he's a physicist, rather than a political philosopher, should count against him. He has a wealth of relevant experience, and political philosophy is not so difficult that it needs to be reserved for the officially-recognised specialists.
However, let's step back for a moment and look at the overall argument. It began when I challenged a statement attributed in the media to Gary Bouma, who criticised secularists as divisive when we, supposedly, call for religious voices to be driven out of the public policy area.
Briefly, secularists do not say anything so crude. We do challenge the privileged position that is given to religious voices in the public policy area. Moreover, we argue that much of what those voices say is wrong. Often, we go on to add that what they say is (frequently) contrary to widely accepted principles of the political culture in Western countries, including freedom of speech, separation of church and state, the harm principle, and so on. Like other speech that goes against these principles, it deserves to be marginalised, not privileged. It certainly merits opposition, though not suppression.
There is no evidence at all that the speech of secularists who talk along these lines - as AC Grayling and I did in a gig at the Cinema Nova here in Melbourne last night - is causing social division in anything other than a trivial sense. I.e., we may be causing debate and controversy, but there is no evidence at all that we are "fuelling sectarian conflict". We are not dividing society in any bad sense. Thus, when Bouma attacks us as "divisive", this is simply wrong and unfair.
Yet, Taner Edis has said:
But I want to argue that here, Bouma is correct and Blackford is wrong. Secularism, particularly when it extends to public criticism of religion and policies that inconvenience religious communities, is a source of social division. Secularists keeping quiet is, in fact, in the interest of peace and public order in many present circumstances.
Even if everything else that Taner has written is correct, I don't see how he can reasonably maintain this. When we go back to what Bouma was actually quoted as saying, and what I said in reply, nothing that Taner has been arguing supports Bouma's claim. It is simply not the case that the sorts of things that Grayling and I said last night threaten peace and public order, or promote sectarian conflict, or do anything of the sort. I really think that it would be useful if Taner withdrew his support for this kind of claim. It's unhelpful, incorrect, and detracts from what he actually wants to discuss, which is the extent to which it's desirable to move to some kind of radical multicultural system of political organisation in which various communities are given a great deal of autonomy, apparently even being able to set their own internal laws (at least to some extent).
With all respect to Taner, I think he's using my (I still say justified) riposte to Bouma's quoted remarks as a springboard to launch into his own elaborate musings about the relationship between traditional community authority and the state.
The most that he can reasonably say is (1) that the sorts of views that Grayling and I were expressing last night would be out of place in the radical multicultural system that he envisages, and (2) that they are an obstacle to that system's creation.
However, (1) certainly does not equate to those views being "divisive" in the sense under discussion. We don't have the system that Taner is talking about, and within the context of the current system it is far from clear that Grayling and I, for example, are contributing to (the bad kind of) social division.
After all, Taner concedes that there are people who have much populist support whom he calls "theoconservatives". He says that theocracy is not the issue, but then admits that quasi-theocracy is a genuine issue. Okay, I agree that very few people in Western countries advocate literal theocracy. But surely it is clear that Grayling and I, and all the other people Bouma has smeared, don't think that literal theocracy is the issue. It is quasi-theocracy, or theoconservativism, or theocratic tendencies, that we attack, and we do spell out what sorts of things we are attacking. I continue to insist that this quasi-theocratic or theoconservative (or whatever we call it) viewpoint is genuinely worrying, merits rebuttal, and is divisive in a far more troublesome way than anything ever said by any atheist or secularist.
It's not old-fashioned, or jumping at shadows, or fighting the wars of the past, to see this quasi-theocratic or theoconservative thinking as a real and current danger. When we criticise it, it is very likely that, provided our words are heeded, we will actually end up reducing, rather than increasing, the bad kinds of social division. Of course, it's also possible that our efforts will have no effect at all, one way or another, but even that would not justify the claim that "Bouma is right and Blackford is wrong".
At the most, then, Taner Edis is left with (2) the claim that Grayling and I and our allies are standing in the way of the radical multicultural system that Taner himself sort of advocates. We may, therefore, be opposed to the system that (let us assume for the sake of argument) would be best in the long run for social peace. But even if all that is correct, which I certainly don't concede by any means, it's scarcely fair to say that Bouma is right to attack secularists as divisive. Bouma appears to have meant something quite strong, something about actually contributing to group antagonism in the community here and now. Grayling and I (and Richard Dawkins, and Ophelia Benson, and whoever) are simply not doing that.
And it is not useful language to accuse anyone who peacefully disagrees with you about what social system will promote social peace in the long run as being "divisive". That is a highly provocative and prejudicial slur which merits a sharp response.
Once again, it would be helpful if Taner withdrew his support for Bouma on this. Bouma is not correct and is not being fair. Bouma may (we don't know) support the kind of radical multicultural system that Taner is sort of defending and which he argues may have advantages in the long run. Well, so what? If Taner backed away from this point, he would then be free of having to defend Bouma's indefensible remarks and could concentrate on the substantive merits or otherwise of the radical multicultural system. As I said, he should write a book on this, since he has so much to say about it. Of course, that doesn't stop him continuing to write long blog posts about it, and nor does it stop us discussing the merits of the proposal.
As he does so, one thing that he needs to articulate more clearly is how he views this system as someone holding the values he actually holds, as distinct from someone who thinks that radical multiculturalism might, in some circumstances, be more realistic, and more likely to promote social harmony, than the kind of secular liberal democracy that has been implemented to a large extent (certainly not totally) in the West. In his posts, Taner seems to oppose the system he describes at the same time as he defends it. He says at times that he would resist it (but isn't that promoting social division, on Bouma's approach?) and at other times that it might be superior to what we currently have. The trouble is that he seems to want to judge it by two different systems of values.
Now that's not necessarily a problem. Ordinary secular liberals may also use two systems or sets of values. We may have one set of values for how we live our own lives, based on our comprehensive views of the world or theories of the good. And we may try to promote these values in public and in private (by speech, example, our associations with others, and so on). However, we don't advocate that the state should impose this set of values on other people. We accept the reality that different people do have different values, that these are often deeply held, that they are often contrary to our own values, that the state is not well placed to judge between us, and so on. So we ask the state to maintain a framework in which we are able to live as we wish but other people have a great deal of freedom to live in different ways.
We are still free to promote our values through speech, example, and association, but we don't think of the various arms of the state, operating by coercion, as a good way to promote our comprehensive values. We expect the state to concentrate on protecting people from fairly straightforward kinds of harms, providing an acceptable level of economic well-being, and so on.
Thus we may apply one set of values to our lives while expecting the state to impose only a much thinner set of values on ourselves and other people. Note, however, that we justify our view as to how the state should operate by argument about what the state can do best, the likely consequences if it attempts to impose our comprehensive values, and so on. (I'm sorry to keep saying "and so on", but getting all the details right really would require a book, and the exact details don't matter to my point.)
We justify the values that we want the state to act by from within the much more comprehensive values by which we live our own lives. We hope that people with a wide range of comprehensive systems of values for living their own lives can reach agreement that, for example, the state should concentrate on protecting things of this world rather than on facilitating spiritual salvation. And we realise, from within our own values, that some things that we value will not be obtained if the state tries to impose our comprehensive values on the unwilling (there will be resentment and resistance).
Taner keeps telling us that many people, traditional Muslims for example, do not share the comprehensive value systems of people who have comprehensive liberal views (based, perhaps, on science and secular philosophy). I agree.
I also agree that the values of people with comprehensive liberal views cannot be justified all the way down (as Nozick puts it in a different context). We cannot appeal to people who do not share those values by relying upon them. But we still need to work out what we want from within our own values. We have nowhere else to stand. What we want, ultimately, is what we want. So, if Taner expects us (people like me, AC Grayling, Ophelia Benson ...) to agree with the radical multicultural option, he is going to have to appeal to our values. If he is going to end up supporting it himself, it is going to have to be from within his own values. It's not to the point to say that those values may not be those of a traditional Muslim. In the first instance, the question is whether we can support it.
Of course, "we" may end up becoming such a social minority that Western governments will ride roughshod over us, even seeing us as enemies of the public order - as Locke thought atheists were. But it's not as if we'll be without allies. There are many features of the radical multicultural option that may make it unattractive, not just to us, but to other important players in the realpolitik of social life. For example, many Christians may be prepared to go along with a secular liberal model in which they cannot impose their own views of what is required to avoid sin and obtain spiritual salvation. They may not be so happy with a system that requires that they drastically constrain their ability to proselytise, or that they accept restrictions (even soft and informal ones involving a kind of conspiracy of political correctness) on freedom of religious speech. Many largely uncommitted people may also be appalled at aspects of the foreseeable operation of the radical multicultural option.
Radical multiculturalism may, itself, generate much understandable resentment and resistance.
Much of what Taner seems to be saying, when you boil it down, is that he has given up on attracting traditional Muslims to embrace a full-blooded secular liberal system. A radical multicultural system may be more acceptable to them, and they won't be talked out of this by arguments that rely on values that they don't share and that can't be justified all the way down.
That may be true. But it doesn't follow that comprehensive liberals, or the less fuzzy kinds of Christians, or largely-uncommitted people, or New Age folks, or anyone else should therefore embrace a model that may well operate in ways that are massively contrary to their (or our) actual values. All the concerns that are being raised by commenters on Taner's posts are quite legitimate.
Yes, we may not have "objective" values that traditional Muslims must accept on pain of being irrational. Thus, we may not be able to talk them out of a preference for the radical multicultural system. But it by no means follows that we are being irrational in opposing it or preferring a scheme of secular liberalism with robust freedom of speech, relatively little in the way of religious exemptions from general laws (though I, for one, do not argue that such exemptions are never justified), and few politically legitimate restrictions on individual freedom (in the sense that is commonly understood in the West).
I think that Taner needs to take this into account and get clear about what he really wants, all things considered. At the moment, there's a degree of schizophrenia in his posts. In the end, I look forward to his book, though I will probably disagree with much of it.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Update from Udo
Do have a look at Udo Schuklenk's Ethx Blog, especially this quite recent longish post catching up with what's been on his mind of late. All the material on abortion - and circumstances in which Catholic medical ethics will not allow abortions even for the purpose of saving a mother's life - is informative and troubling.
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Taner Edis: "Theocracy is not the issue"
Taner Edis replies here to Part I of my response his response to my earlier response to a story about Gary Bouma's about divisive secularists. Got it?
As you'll see, what Taner has written is very long indeed. I'm not going to try to reply to it tonight or probably for a few days. I'm currently preparing to drive down to Melbourne in the morning, which means at least a full day of driving. I'll probably stay somewhere on the road on Wednesday night, then get into the city on Thursday morning. Thursday afternoon I have a meeting of some importance to me, then my gig with AC Grayling on Thursday night. So I don't know when I'll be able to write my own Part III and do anything like justice to Taner's latest. But I'll get there.
Meanwhile, I hope that Ophelia and some of the others who are interested in all this will keep the ball in play.
As you'll see, what Taner has written is very long indeed. I'm not going to try to reply to it tonight or probably for a few days. I'm currently preparing to drive down to Melbourne in the morning, which means at least a full day of driving. I'll probably stay somewhere on the road on Wednesday night, then get into the city on Thursday morning. Thursday afternoon I have a meeting of some importance to me, then my gig with AC Grayling on Thursday night. So I don't know when I'll be able to write my own Part III and do anything like justice to Taner's latest. But I'll get there.
Meanwhile, I hope that Ophelia and some of the others who are interested in all this will keep the ball in play.
A multi-cultural dystopia?
This is the second part of my response to the post by Taner Edis a couple of days ago, in which he takes me to task for defending classical liberal secularism of the kind proposed by John Locke in the 1680s - though much developed by other thinkers in the liberal tradition since that time. Unfortunately, there will now need to be a third part, since Edis has since had more to say in response to the first.
In the first part of my response, I developed the theme that any criticism of religion creates division only in the trivial sense that it creates (often healthy) disagreement. By contrast, real social division - social division with a vengeance - is caused when the theocratically inclined offer their controversial theological claims (or moral claims that are grounded in theological thinking) as a basis for coercive measures by the state.
For many reasons, it is better to avoid the concept of a Christian (or Muslim, or Jewish, or whatever it may be) state, in which political power is to be used to further God's eschatological plan and lead citizens to spiritual salvation. Rather, the state is best regarded as an institution, or set of institutions, that protects purely worldly things. Thus, the state provides a framework for public order, economic welfare, and the like. It establishes a scheme of property and commerce (which must be reasonably fair by ordinary secular standards, such as rewarding efforts and contributions), protects us from external violence, restrains us from using violence in social competition, and (increasingly) provides a social and economic safety net.
Once the state is regarded as a "secular", in the sense of "worldly", institution, the main source of conflict between rival theocrats is defused. Secular states will not have religious reasons to go to war against each other or to persecute their citizens, and they can concentrate on worldly issues where there is at least some prospect of success (including by way of political compromises). The various sects need not fear persecution with fire and sword (or with pistols and prison bars), and are likely to soften their attitudes in response.
If we argue that the state should be secular in this sense, we thereby argue that would-be theocrats are wrong - but not that their speech should be suppressed. We also attempt to create a norm of the political culture that the functions of the state (the worldly ones mentioned above) and those of the various churches and sects (spiritual salvation, rightness with God, etc.) will be kept separate. This functional separation of church and state also enhances the liberty of individual citizens: while we will be required by the secular law to act within certain constraints (not resorting to violence, honouring our formal contracts, paying taxes, taking care in situations where the welfare of others requires it and they are reasonable to rely on us), we are left with a potentially infinite range of choices and plans of life.
As Locke envisaged this regime, nothing would be illegal inside of a church unless it were also illegal outside. Thus, a church could not be singled out by hostile state officials by being forbidden to do something allowed to others. However, by itself, this might still allow some things to be made illegal (both in church and out) to the great inconvenience of a particular sect. Locke overcame this problem by emphasising a version of the harm principle, later developed in more detail (and more restrictively) by John Stuart Mill: the state should not ban anything except for a good secular reason relating to the protection of worldly things. That, of course, follows from his conception of the state's fundamental role.
Locke gave a good example: the state cannot forbid the religious sacrifice of cattle unless it also forbids killing cattle outside of church. And it cannot do that unless it has a good secular reason. However, a dramatic plague of some cattle disease may provide the state with a good secular reason to ban all killing of cattle for a time, while stocks replenish. In the latter case, the state is acting within its proper role and cannot be criticised.
Taner Edis observes, "Old-fashioned secular liberals such as Blackford have, perhaps, not adequately adjusted to new political and social realities. There are good reasons that secular liberalism is out of fashion these days."
Well, perhaps. But as I said yesterday, "Ironically enough, Edis turns to a much more old-fashioned model for the operation of society than anything imagined by John Locke or John Stuart Mill."
I see that Lisa Bauer has now made this point for me in a thread over at RichardDawkins.net. Her views, which I generally endorse, are worth quoting at some length. Here is her impression of what Edis proposes (responding to discussion on the thread, to a contribution by Ophelia Benson that forms the thread's subject, and, if I'm following the twists and turns, to the further post by Edis that will force me to write Part III of all this):
That quote pretty much sums up the old Ottoman millet system, in which each religious community (Jews, Armenians, Orthodox Greeks, Syriac Orthodox, and so on) was allowed to govern their affairs according to their own religious law...under the umbrella of Muslim supremacy, admittedly, and non-Muslim communities suffered under a lot of legal disadvantages at least until the Tanzimat reforms in the 19th century when the empire was trying to modernize and more fully integrate all its citizens into the state (allowing non-Muslims to become soldiers, for instance, and granting them legal equality with Muslims).
[...]
This system was swept away with the Ottoman Empire back in the 1920s, so why somebody would think this is somehow less "outdated" than liberal democracy is beyond me. Traces of it still exist in places like Lebanon, where religious communities (Shi'ite, Sunni, Maronite, etc.) are still clearly marked and marriage is completely under the control of the religious authorities, and you know how well that has worked out! Israel and many other ex-Ottoman countries like Egypt and Jordan also divide up their religious communities along these lines, where each one has their own family law courts based on religious law and so on, and we might note how friendly most of them are to atheists and the nonreligious (not very!). And this autonomy certainly doesn't prevent the majority from treating minorities poorly, as Copts in Egypt or even Palestinian Muslims under Israeli rule might tell you.
In fact, it's quite medieval -- European Jews had a not dissimilar relation with medieval European governments, in which the Jewish community had the same kind of quasi-autonomous status within itself, and the elders and rabbis controlled the affairs of the community. If you fell foul of the authorities, like Baruch/Benedict Spinoza did, you fell under the cherem ban, which meant you were totally excommunicated from the Jewish community, and during the period being cut off from a community meant you were basically defenseless and at the mercy of the cruel world. This is another matter that comes up in all such communitarian schemes -- what of the individual who does NOT fit into one or another group?
This setup was stifling to many Jews, who broke free from the ghetto and shtetl with their stultifying Jewish religious law codes (halakha) during the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, in the 19th century, and it's no coincidence that Jews were often at the forefront of efforts to convince governments to adopt liberal human rights. (This is where studying the history of Judaism can be helpful, I must say!) Jewish liberation in the late 18th and 19th centuries in Western European nations like France was predicated on granting rights to Jews as individuals, the same as everybody else, but not to the Jewish community as an autonomous entity, and I doubt that Jews in Western nations outside of Orthodox or Haredi enclaves would be pleased at the prospect of returning to live under rabbinical authority.
The biggest problem with all of this should be pretty obvious -- why should all members of a religion be bound by their religious law, usually as conceived by the most traditionalist, conservative clerics? Keep in mind who fought the hardest AGAINST shari'ah courts for family law in Canada -- liberal Muslim women who knew just what kind of injustices that would lead to! Many misguided whites were under the illusion that Muslims as a group "wanted" shari'ah law, since this is what the male "community leaders" might have led them to believe, but this turned out to be far from the truth. WHO would be the leaders of these religious communities, and how would this NOT ride roughshod over the rights of minorities within the group, such as women, gays, liberals, apostates, etc.?
So...why is it that so many notions of multiculturalism turn out to look an awful lot like medieval ways of organizing societies? Give me individualism any day!
Just so. I may be an "old-fashioned secular liberal", but that is not a reason for me to transform into an even more old-fashioned supporter of the Ottoman millet system or some post-modernist variant. Someone who adopts the picture of the universe developed by Copernicus and Galileo might also be old-fahioned, but Copernicus and Galileo were on the right track. Better to update their thinking than to adopt a super-sophisticated version of the Ptolemaic system, even if it has all sorts of lovely computer-generated epicycles to pretty it up.
Since the 1680s, many things have happened to put the classical liberal model of secularism under pressure, but that does not mean it was on the wrong track. Most notably, modern governments have developed functions going far beyond those imagined by Locke or even by the US founding fathers a century later.
Since about the 1870s, Western governments have been extremely active in carving out new functions in response to the success of industrial capitalism ... and its harshness if it is not regulated. Thus, we see the state doing many things that still bear close relationships to this-worldly goods, but also have scope to cut across the spiritual aims of the churches. This is seen no more strongly than in the area of public education, which was not merely a response to the worldly need for knowledge and the ability of the state to provide a safety net for the poor. It was also intended to provide a common moral grounding for growing citizens, who would be expected to play an active political role in democratic societies on reaching adulthood. That concept, of course, has the potential to cut across religious notions of morality, and even across theological doctrine.
A case in point was the introduction of moral education, based on supposedly non-sectarian Bible reading, in the first wave of public schools in the US. This was unacceptable to Catholics, who saw it (with much justification) as an imposition of the Protestant practice of individual reading and interpretation of the holy book. Catholic theology insisted that the priesthood must mediate between the Bible, as God's word, and individual religious adherents. In effect, the state was imposing Protestantism, admittedly of a generic kind, on its Catholic citizens.
I am not so naive as to be unaware that many complex problems of this kind have developed as the state - often with the best of secular intentions, but also with its share of biases - has turned into an octopus with tentacles in many areas of everyday life. For that reason, I have never claimed that there is no room at all for religious voices in politics. I have, however, insisted that those voices should become marginalised to the extent that they are theocratic. I make no apology for that. Sure, our political philosophy needs to be updated to reflect modern developments, such as the changing role of the state in response to the harshness of nineteenth-century laissez faire. Nonetheless, I see nothing divisive, except in a trivial sense, in defending the functional separation of church and state, while of course acknowledging the grey areas and practical difficulties.
My original post, which Edis objected to, criticised Gary Bouma for his attack on secularists who, supposedly, "want to drive religious voices out of the public policy area". But most of us do not seek to do anything that can be described so simplistically as that, and what we actually do is completely defensible. We seek to reinforce a political norm against state power being used to impose theologically-based requirements on those who do not believe. I am not repentant about defending that political norm, or about criticising Bouma's misplaced objection to it. Whatever the complexities - and I'm sure some more of them will emerge in the comments and in my next post - we have every reason to struggle against the contrary model of a Christian (or Muslim, or Jewish, or Hindu, etc.) state.
And amidst the undoubted complexities, we have no reason to aspire to a stifling multi-cultural dystopia where freedom of speech is suppressed and people are trapped in authoritarian communities. Better an updated liberal secularism than what Taner Edis seems to recommend.
In the first part of my response, I developed the theme that any criticism of religion creates division only in the trivial sense that it creates (often healthy) disagreement. By contrast, real social division - social division with a vengeance - is caused when the theocratically inclined offer their controversial theological claims (or moral claims that are grounded in theological thinking) as a basis for coercive measures by the state.
For many reasons, it is better to avoid the concept of a Christian (or Muslim, or Jewish, or whatever it may be) state, in which political power is to be used to further God's eschatological plan and lead citizens to spiritual salvation. Rather, the state is best regarded as an institution, or set of institutions, that protects purely worldly things. Thus, the state provides a framework for public order, economic welfare, and the like. It establishes a scheme of property and commerce (which must be reasonably fair by ordinary secular standards, such as rewarding efforts and contributions), protects us from external violence, restrains us from using violence in social competition, and (increasingly) provides a social and economic safety net.
Once the state is regarded as a "secular", in the sense of "worldly", institution, the main source of conflict between rival theocrats is defused. Secular states will not have religious reasons to go to war against each other or to persecute their citizens, and they can concentrate on worldly issues where there is at least some prospect of success (including by way of political compromises). The various sects need not fear persecution with fire and sword (or with pistols and prison bars), and are likely to soften their attitudes in response.
If we argue that the state should be secular in this sense, we thereby argue that would-be theocrats are wrong - but not that their speech should be suppressed. We also attempt to create a norm of the political culture that the functions of the state (the worldly ones mentioned above) and those of the various churches and sects (spiritual salvation, rightness with God, etc.) will be kept separate. This functional separation of church and state also enhances the liberty of individual citizens: while we will be required by the secular law to act within certain constraints (not resorting to violence, honouring our formal contracts, paying taxes, taking care in situations where the welfare of others requires it and they are reasonable to rely on us), we are left with a potentially infinite range of choices and plans of life.
As Locke envisaged this regime, nothing would be illegal inside of a church unless it were also illegal outside. Thus, a church could not be singled out by hostile state officials by being forbidden to do something allowed to others. However, by itself, this might still allow some things to be made illegal (both in church and out) to the great inconvenience of a particular sect. Locke overcame this problem by emphasising a version of the harm principle, later developed in more detail (and more restrictively) by John Stuart Mill: the state should not ban anything except for a good secular reason relating to the protection of worldly things. That, of course, follows from his conception of the state's fundamental role.
Locke gave a good example: the state cannot forbid the religious sacrifice of cattle unless it also forbids killing cattle outside of church. And it cannot do that unless it has a good secular reason. However, a dramatic plague of some cattle disease may provide the state with a good secular reason to ban all killing of cattle for a time, while stocks replenish. In the latter case, the state is acting within its proper role and cannot be criticised.
Taner Edis observes, "Old-fashioned secular liberals such as Blackford have, perhaps, not adequately adjusted to new political and social realities. There are good reasons that secular liberalism is out of fashion these days."
Well, perhaps. But as I said yesterday, "Ironically enough, Edis turns to a much more old-fashioned model for the operation of society than anything imagined by John Locke or John Stuart Mill."
I see that Lisa Bauer has now made this point for me in a thread over at RichardDawkins.net. Her views, which I generally endorse, are worth quoting at some length. Here is her impression of what Edis proposes (responding to discussion on the thread, to a contribution by Ophelia Benson that forms the thread's subject, and, if I'm following the twists and turns, to the further post by Edis that will force me to write Part III of all this):
That quote pretty much sums up the old Ottoman millet system, in which each religious community (Jews, Armenians, Orthodox Greeks, Syriac Orthodox, and so on) was allowed to govern their affairs according to their own religious law...under the umbrella of Muslim supremacy, admittedly, and non-Muslim communities suffered under a lot of legal disadvantages at least until the Tanzimat reforms in the 19th century when the empire was trying to modernize and more fully integrate all its citizens into the state (allowing non-Muslims to become soldiers, for instance, and granting them legal equality with Muslims).
[...]
This system was swept away with the Ottoman Empire back in the 1920s, so why somebody would think this is somehow less "outdated" than liberal democracy is beyond me. Traces of it still exist in places like Lebanon, where religious communities (Shi'ite, Sunni, Maronite, etc.) are still clearly marked and marriage is completely under the control of the religious authorities, and you know how well that has worked out! Israel and many other ex-Ottoman countries like Egypt and Jordan also divide up their religious communities along these lines, where each one has their own family law courts based on religious law and so on, and we might note how friendly most of them are to atheists and the nonreligious (not very!). And this autonomy certainly doesn't prevent the majority from treating minorities poorly, as Copts in Egypt or even Palestinian Muslims under Israeli rule might tell you.
In fact, it's quite medieval -- European Jews had a not dissimilar relation with medieval European governments, in which the Jewish community had the same kind of quasi-autonomous status within itself, and the elders and rabbis controlled the affairs of the community. If you fell foul of the authorities, like Baruch/Benedict Spinoza did, you fell under the cherem ban, which meant you were totally excommunicated from the Jewish community, and during the period being cut off from a community meant you were basically defenseless and at the mercy of the cruel world. This is another matter that comes up in all such communitarian schemes -- what of the individual who does NOT fit into one or another group?
This setup was stifling to many Jews, who broke free from the ghetto and shtetl with their stultifying Jewish religious law codes (halakha) during the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, in the 19th century, and it's no coincidence that Jews were often at the forefront of efforts to convince governments to adopt liberal human rights. (This is where studying the history of Judaism can be helpful, I must say!) Jewish liberation in the late 18th and 19th centuries in Western European nations like France was predicated on granting rights to Jews as individuals, the same as everybody else, but not to the Jewish community as an autonomous entity, and I doubt that Jews in Western nations outside of Orthodox or Haredi enclaves would be pleased at the prospect of returning to live under rabbinical authority.
The biggest problem with all of this should be pretty obvious -- why should all members of a religion be bound by their religious law, usually as conceived by the most traditionalist, conservative clerics? Keep in mind who fought the hardest AGAINST shari'ah courts for family law in Canada -- liberal Muslim women who knew just what kind of injustices that would lead to! Many misguided whites were under the illusion that Muslims as a group "wanted" shari'ah law, since this is what the male "community leaders" might have led them to believe, but this turned out to be far from the truth. WHO would be the leaders of these religious communities, and how would this NOT ride roughshod over the rights of minorities within the group, such as women, gays, liberals, apostates, etc.?
So...why is it that so many notions of multiculturalism turn out to look an awful lot like medieval ways of organizing societies? Give me individualism any day!
Just so. I may be an "old-fashioned secular liberal", but that is not a reason for me to transform into an even more old-fashioned supporter of the Ottoman millet system or some post-modernist variant. Someone who adopts the picture of the universe developed by Copernicus and Galileo might also be old-fahioned, but Copernicus and Galileo were on the right track. Better to update their thinking than to adopt a super-sophisticated version of the Ptolemaic system, even if it has all sorts of lovely computer-generated epicycles to pretty it up.
Since the 1680s, many things have happened to put the classical liberal model of secularism under pressure, but that does not mean it was on the wrong track. Most notably, modern governments have developed functions going far beyond those imagined by Locke or even by the US founding fathers a century later.
Since about the 1870s, Western governments have been extremely active in carving out new functions in response to the success of industrial capitalism ... and its harshness if it is not regulated. Thus, we see the state doing many things that still bear close relationships to this-worldly goods, but also have scope to cut across the spiritual aims of the churches. This is seen no more strongly than in the area of public education, which was not merely a response to the worldly need for knowledge and the ability of the state to provide a safety net for the poor. It was also intended to provide a common moral grounding for growing citizens, who would be expected to play an active political role in democratic societies on reaching adulthood. That concept, of course, has the potential to cut across religious notions of morality, and even across theological doctrine.
A case in point was the introduction of moral education, based on supposedly non-sectarian Bible reading, in the first wave of public schools in the US. This was unacceptable to Catholics, who saw it (with much justification) as an imposition of the Protestant practice of individual reading and interpretation of the holy book. Catholic theology insisted that the priesthood must mediate between the Bible, as God's word, and individual religious adherents. In effect, the state was imposing Protestantism, admittedly of a generic kind, on its Catholic citizens.
I am not so naive as to be unaware that many complex problems of this kind have developed as the state - often with the best of secular intentions, but also with its share of biases - has turned into an octopus with tentacles in many areas of everyday life. For that reason, I have never claimed that there is no room at all for religious voices in politics. I have, however, insisted that those voices should become marginalised to the extent that they are theocratic. I make no apology for that. Sure, our political philosophy needs to be updated to reflect modern developments, such as the changing role of the state in response to the harshness of nineteenth-century laissez faire. Nonetheless, I see nothing divisive, except in a trivial sense, in defending the functional separation of church and state, while of course acknowledging the grey areas and practical difficulties.
My original post, which Edis objected to, criticised Gary Bouma for his attack on secularists who, supposedly, "want to drive religious voices out of the public policy area". But most of us do not seek to do anything that can be described so simplistically as that, and what we actually do is completely defensible. We seek to reinforce a political norm against state power being used to impose theologically-based requirements on those who do not believe. I am not repentant about defending that political norm, or about criticising Bouma's misplaced objection to it. Whatever the complexities - and I'm sure some more of them will emerge in the comments and in my next post - we have every reason to struggle against the contrary model of a Christian (or Muslim, or Jewish, or Hindu, etc.) state.
And amidst the undoubted complexities, we have no reason to aspire to a stifling multi-cultural dystopia where freedom of speech is suppressed and people are trapped in authoritarian communities. Better an updated liberal secularism than what Taner Edis seems to recommend.
Monday, March 08, 2010
Social division with a vengeance!
Taner Edis takes me to task
My colleague Taner Edis, who contributed a fine essay to 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Atheists , has, alas, written a new essay over on the Secular Outpost blog, in which he takes me to task for my recent criticism of Gary Bouma.
The main point made by Edis is this:
Secularism, particularly when it extends to public criticism of religion and policies that inconvenience religious communities, is a source of social division. Secularists keeping quiet is, in fact, in the interest of peace and public order in many present circumstances.
So, he argues, if secularists want social peace we will actually abandon secularism and shut up. Or, at any rate, we will cease to advocate the key idea of secularism in the sense under discussion: the separation of church and state.
Needless to say, I disagree. I can't, however, cover all the issues in just one blog post, at least not without making it very long and cumbersome. Consider this to be Part I, and I'll return with the second, and final, instalment tomorrow.
Democracy and disagreement
Let me make one concession at the outset. If I express any controversial idea, there is a trivial sense in which it causes social division. I.e., there will be people who'll oppose me, and we'll be divided by our disagreement. I will fall into one camp, they into another.
Some others may side with me, and still others with my opponents, so there will be, in a trivial sense, division over the issue under discussion. My original controversial idea might have been about the superiority of the Collingwood football team to its rivals (or the superiority of Arsenal, or New Orleans, or whatever choices might be suggested to you by your preferred football code). Or it might be about the rights and wrongs of criminalising homosexual conduct, or about the morality and prudence of embarking on a foreign war (against Iran, let's say, but there always seem to be proposals for foreign wars). So I concede that social division in this trivial sense is caused by any opinion, publicly expressed, on any controversial topic. In this trivial sense, social division is caused by a proposal that the government of my local jurisdiction ignore traditional Christian morality and apply the harm principle when considering such topics as the legality of homosexual conduct.
If this is what Gary Bouma meant when he accused secularists of creating social division, he is correct. We can't express any opinion on anything at all controversial without encountering disagreement, and, so, in a trivial sense, causing division.
Democracies, however, thrive on disagreement. The usual assumption is that disagreements about government policies can ultimately, if not entirely satisfactorily, be resolved at the ballot box. I say "not entirely satisfactorily" because the various political platforms on offer are package deals, and no one may be entirely pleased by the platform of whatever party or coalition obtains power. Democracy is an imperfect system, but it's often been observed that the alternatives are even worse. Thus, we persevere with it, and it does at least have the advantage of tending to weed out the most tyrannical, corrupt, idiosyncratic, or just plain incompetent governments. Parties that are serious contenders for political office will be pushed towards the centre, to fielding candidates with at least some claim to competence, and to acceptance of a certain degree of individual liberty.
Even this can have its downside: while individual liberty is a good thing, centrism sometimes stifles creativity. Still, democratic processes eliminate many opportunities for tyranny, while creating pressures for honesty and competence. Many politicians in democratic states may be corrupt, but corruption is at least frowned upon, and the level of corruption is insignificant by historical standards or those of more authoritarian systems. The point is that democracy is imperfect, yet supportable - and, most importantly for my purpose, that it assumes a measure of robust disagreement within society, at least about political issues.
When secularists argue for freedom of speech, the harm principle, separation of church and state, and so on, we merely do what democracy requires. Our opponents can reply with arguments that the state should be more theocratic, more responsive to distinctively religious morals, and so on. They can, for example, argue that homosexual conduct should be banned on the ground that it is condemned in the Bible. If they say such things, they will meet with disagreement, perhaps even with disagreement expressed as satire or mockery, but that is part of what democracy is all about.
So yes, when secularists argue that the state should not impose religion or religious morality we do, in a trivial sense, create division. That is, we provoke disagreement and argument. Does that mean we should shut up, or at least adopt a unilateral code of niceness that excludes mockery and satire? Of course not. The alternative is that we acquiesce in the contrary view, that religion or religious morality should be imposed by state power - either we don't oppose that view at all or we do so with one hand tied behind our backs. But once that view is accepted and acted upon by the state, social division will be taken to a new level.
Instead of the state permitting a vast range of religious (and moral) positions to exist side by side without their adherents suffering persecution, the state becomes a site for realistic contests to determine just which controversial religio-moral views will be imposed by force, even on those who disagree. Once the state brings force against those who disagree, the stakes are upped enormously. Those who lose out in the political struggle no longer have the choice of living side by side, and openly, with those who disagree with them. Instead, they must either go underground or stand up and resist.
Social division with a vengeance
We don't need to go back to the wars of religion in Europe to see how this happens, though the bloody wars and persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should not be dismissed as irrelevant. If Western countries have had few religious wars, persecutions, insurrections, and so on, for some hundreds of years, that has been because the state has exercised restraint. In a small number of cases, religious sects have, indeed, been overpowered by the state, as when mainstream Mormons in the US were forced, in the nineteenth century to abandon the doctrine of plural marriage. Generally speaking, however, the state apparatus in Western nations has not aimed at imposing a religious orthodoxy, and any persecutions have been directed at easy and unpopular targets such as the Mormons. A revived policy of demanding orthodoxy would lead to evasion of the law, police corruption, estrangement of huge numbers of people, and (very likely) large-scale violence.
Although the state has been reluctant to impose strict religious orthodoxy, it has often adopted large-scale experiments with moralistic laws backed by the prevalence of traditional religious attitudes to bodily pleasure. One relatively recent example was Prohibition in the US, which led to corruption, gangsterism, and other harms on a scale far greater than anything that might have been caused by the legal consumption of alcohol. A current example is the disastrous "war on drugs", which has led to huge numbers of people being locked up in cells and/or having their property confiscated. The number of Americans currently in prison, mainly because of crimes connected in some ways to drugs, is shameful - it looks like a war by the government on its own citizenry.
As long as the war on drugs continues, peaceful drug users must live their lifestyles covertly, rather than openly, and are to that extent excluded from society. Meanwhile, we have seen massive adverse effects in the form of police corruption, organised crime, and acts of violence. All of this is social division with a vengeance!
Consider a paradigm case where religious morality is imposed by force - criminalisation of homosexual conduct. The effect of this is that homosexuals must appear to conform or else face punishment (executions, canings, being locked up, or whatever the local barbaric treatment may be). This compels people to live false lives, drives homosexuality underground, and estranges homosexuals from the mainstream society. This is not merely division in the trivial sense of open disagreement, which is healthy, but in the far more profound sense that we have one group of people, the majority, who are included in society, while another group is excluded and has every reason to feel alienated. If homosexuals are unable to reverse such a situation through democratic processes (and they will be enormously disadvantaged if they try to speak up), then their most obvious option is to live one of the most important parts of their lives covertly.
Of course, they have other options. Some may respond with sufficient violence to make the oppressive laws that they face largely unenforceable in certain districts. Before getting to that point, they may try campaigns of peaceful civil disobedience, and such campaigns are sometimes effective. If, however, the state insists on enforcing laws against essentially harmless conduct that is very important to the people concerned, one outcome will eventually be violent riots. Meanwhile, morally good, otherwise law-abiding people will find themselves not only being disagreed with, or even satirised (something that gays have to put up with in our society), but actually executed, or locked up, or subjected to other outrages. Once again, social division with a vengeance!
Surely it would be better if the state reasoned that its essential goals are worldly, e.g. keeping of the peace, protecting citizens from violence, providing a system of property and a social safety net. Surely it would be better if the state did not operate with any concept of sin. In that case, it would know better than to ban essentially harmless conduct - or even conduct with more-or-less manageable and largely self-inflicted harms, such as drinking alcohol. It would, surely, be smarter if the state followed the harm principle, rather than a principle of enforcing religion or a religion-endorsed morality.
That outcome is more likely to be obtained if it becomes a widely expressed and accepted sentiment that the state ought not to enforce religious and "traditional" views of morality, but ought merely to protect worldly things such as life, liberty, health, and property. This can become part of a political culture, as has happened to some considerable extent in the West. Where attempts are made to undermine that sort of secular liberal political culture, we ought to oppose them unambiguously, rather than risk losing what has been won over hundreds of years.
There may still be debate about how best and how far to protect those worldly things that I mentioned, and there will still be strong disagreements and political rivalries, but at least no one will be harmed and stigmatised for essentially harmless (or mainly self-regarding) conduct. Moreover, if the government's policies are set on the basis of how best to protect worldly things, then the different sides of politics will all have some chance of obtaining real influence (and of gaining power). These are areas where changes can be made and compromise is possible, indeed frequently obtained. On this approach, no one is persecuted or driven underground, except for truly anti-social behaviour (violence, property crimes, and so on). The worst you can suffer from the state, if you are generally honest and non-violent, is taxation to provide funds for the social safety net ... and even the level of taxation will be limited by what the voting public as a whole will accept.
Free speech even for theocrats
I'm not suggesting that those who want the state to be more moralistic or theocratic should themselves be silenced by force (by fines, confiscations, imprisonment, and so on). They have freedom of speech, and attempts to suppress their speech would be just as divisive as attempts to criminalise homosexual conduct. If their speech were censored they would be driven underground and estranged from the larger society. They might ultimately riot if they found they had no other choice to regain their freedom of speech. The speech of moralists and theocrats is not directly harmful, and it is important to them. Even if their policies have no foreseeable prospect of being implemented within a healthy political culture, self-expression is too precious to people for the state to attempt suppress it. Indeed, we all have an interest in the continued expression of ideas that dissent from our own - otherwise, how can be sure that we are right?
Let the theocrats have their say, but let us continue to criticise their views and try to convince the state not to act on them.
In short, theocratic or moralistic speech should be permitted. But it does not follow that the policy prescriptions of theocrats and moralists should be implemented. Quite the contrary, they should not be. Nor should those of us who wish to criticise such policy prescriptions be silenced. If we are criticised, we should not call for the silencing of our opponents (notice that I have not suggested anywhere that Gary Bouma's speech should be banned), but we certainly have every right to defend our position, to criticise the criticisms, and to respond sharply to people who accuse us of being "divisive". Such accusations cheapen the concept of divisiveness, and we ought to say so.
Old-fashioned secularism?
Edis thinks that my views are old-fashioned. Well, it's true that views much like this were expressed as far back as the seventeenth century, notably in the writings of John Locke. Full-blooded versions of them needed John Stuart Mill's writings in the mid-nineteenth century, and they first became commonplace as recently as the 1960s, when governments became serious - at least some of the time - about the harm principle. Issues relating to separation of church and state, and to the harm principle, are still being worked through in Western parliaments and courts.
However, even if I am old-fashioned in my secularism, that does not make me wrong. Plenty of ideas that date back three or four hundred years, or more, have considerable truth attached to them, and we should not adopt some different view just because time has passed. Galileo staunchly defended the Copernican view of the solar system four hundred years ago; that does not mean that it is time for us to return, in a post-modernist spirit, to a geocentric theory. Of course, the views of Copernicus and Galileo needed much refinement, but they were on the right track. So was Locke, even though he knew nothing of the complications that would be caused by mass public education, the welfare state, technological change, and the sexual revolution.
For example, Locke thought that it was okay, or even necessary, to persecute atheists. He was wrong about that, although he provided a secular argument for his opinion, and his ideas need to be updated accordingly. (Briefly, the secular argument was that atheists cannot be trusted to honour their oaths. As it turns out, atheists are as likely to tell the truth in court or elsewhere as anyone else). Locke probably would have approved of laws against homosexual conduct, as he appears to have thought that heterosexual monogamy was crucial to the functioning of society. He was wrong about that, too - it turns out that modern societies can function just fine with a great diversity of sexual choices, especially in an era with highly effective methods of contraception.
By all means, let's update Locke's thinking, but none of that requires us to throw out his key insight, that the state exists to protect the things of this world, not to make us morally good by some religious standard or to promote our spiritual salvation. If anything, Locke did not go far enough. In any event, in a democracy people can disagree robustly about all sorts of things, including about whether Locke was right. But if we go down the path of theocratic or moralistic social policy we will have more than robust disagreements. Apart from all the other reasons for not persecuting people who've done nothing terribly wrong, we'll get social division with a vengeance.
Ironically enough, Edis turns to a much more old-fashioned model for the operation of society than anything imagined by John Locke or John Stuart Mill. That doesn't, in itself, prove that he's wrong, but perhaps we really have learned a thing or two since medieval times. Perhaps the struggle for liberal freedoms has not been in vain. More about that tomorrow, when I examine the proposal from Edis for what strikes me as a multi-cultural dystopia.
My colleague Taner Edis, who contributed a fine essay to 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Atheists , has, alas, written a new essay over on the Secular Outpost blog, in which he takes me to task for my recent criticism of Gary Bouma.
The main point made by Edis is this:
Secularism, particularly when it extends to public criticism of religion and policies that inconvenience religious communities, is a source of social division. Secularists keeping quiet is, in fact, in the interest of peace and public order in many present circumstances.
So, he argues, if secularists want social peace we will actually abandon secularism and shut up. Or, at any rate, we will cease to advocate the key idea of secularism in the sense under discussion: the separation of church and state.
Needless to say, I disagree. I can't, however, cover all the issues in just one blog post, at least not without making it very long and cumbersome. Consider this to be Part I, and I'll return with the second, and final, instalment tomorrow.
Democracy and disagreement
Let me make one concession at the outset. If I express any controversial idea, there is a trivial sense in which it causes social division. I.e., there will be people who'll oppose me, and we'll be divided by our disagreement. I will fall into one camp, they into another.
Some others may side with me, and still others with my opponents, so there will be, in a trivial sense, division over the issue under discussion. My original controversial idea might have been about the superiority of the Collingwood football team to its rivals (or the superiority of Arsenal, or New Orleans, or whatever choices might be suggested to you by your preferred football code). Or it might be about the rights and wrongs of criminalising homosexual conduct, or about the morality and prudence of embarking on a foreign war (against Iran, let's say, but there always seem to be proposals for foreign wars). So I concede that social division in this trivial sense is caused by any opinion, publicly expressed, on any controversial topic. In this trivial sense, social division is caused by a proposal that the government of my local jurisdiction ignore traditional Christian morality and apply the harm principle when considering such topics as the legality of homosexual conduct.
If this is what Gary Bouma meant when he accused secularists of creating social division, he is correct. We can't express any opinion on anything at all controversial without encountering disagreement, and, so, in a trivial sense, causing division.
Democracies, however, thrive on disagreement. The usual assumption is that disagreements about government policies can ultimately, if not entirely satisfactorily, be resolved at the ballot box. I say "not entirely satisfactorily" because the various political platforms on offer are package deals, and no one may be entirely pleased by the platform of whatever party or coalition obtains power. Democracy is an imperfect system, but it's often been observed that the alternatives are even worse. Thus, we persevere with it, and it does at least have the advantage of tending to weed out the most tyrannical, corrupt, idiosyncratic, or just plain incompetent governments. Parties that are serious contenders for political office will be pushed towards the centre, to fielding candidates with at least some claim to competence, and to acceptance of a certain degree of individual liberty.
Even this can have its downside: while individual liberty is a good thing, centrism sometimes stifles creativity. Still, democratic processes eliminate many opportunities for tyranny, while creating pressures for honesty and competence. Many politicians in democratic states may be corrupt, but corruption is at least frowned upon, and the level of corruption is insignificant by historical standards or those of more authoritarian systems. The point is that democracy is imperfect, yet supportable - and, most importantly for my purpose, that it assumes a measure of robust disagreement within society, at least about political issues.
When secularists argue for freedom of speech, the harm principle, separation of church and state, and so on, we merely do what democracy requires. Our opponents can reply with arguments that the state should be more theocratic, more responsive to distinctively religious morals, and so on. They can, for example, argue that homosexual conduct should be banned on the ground that it is condemned in the Bible. If they say such things, they will meet with disagreement, perhaps even with disagreement expressed as satire or mockery, but that is part of what democracy is all about.
So yes, when secularists argue that the state should not impose religion or religious morality we do, in a trivial sense, create division. That is, we provoke disagreement and argument. Does that mean we should shut up, or at least adopt a unilateral code of niceness that excludes mockery and satire? Of course not. The alternative is that we acquiesce in the contrary view, that religion or religious morality should be imposed by state power - either we don't oppose that view at all or we do so with one hand tied behind our backs. But once that view is accepted and acted upon by the state, social division will be taken to a new level.
Instead of the state permitting a vast range of religious (and moral) positions to exist side by side without their adherents suffering persecution, the state becomes a site for realistic contests to determine just which controversial religio-moral views will be imposed by force, even on those who disagree. Once the state brings force against those who disagree, the stakes are upped enormously. Those who lose out in the political struggle no longer have the choice of living side by side, and openly, with those who disagree with them. Instead, they must either go underground or stand up and resist.
Social division with a vengeance
We don't need to go back to the wars of religion in Europe to see how this happens, though the bloody wars and persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should not be dismissed as irrelevant. If Western countries have had few religious wars, persecutions, insurrections, and so on, for some hundreds of years, that has been because the state has exercised restraint. In a small number of cases, religious sects have, indeed, been overpowered by the state, as when mainstream Mormons in the US were forced, in the nineteenth century to abandon the doctrine of plural marriage. Generally speaking, however, the state apparatus in Western nations has not aimed at imposing a religious orthodoxy, and any persecutions have been directed at easy and unpopular targets such as the Mormons. A revived policy of demanding orthodoxy would lead to evasion of the law, police corruption, estrangement of huge numbers of people, and (very likely) large-scale violence.
Although the state has been reluctant to impose strict religious orthodoxy, it has often adopted large-scale experiments with moralistic laws backed by the prevalence of traditional religious attitudes to bodily pleasure. One relatively recent example was Prohibition in the US, which led to corruption, gangsterism, and other harms on a scale far greater than anything that might have been caused by the legal consumption of alcohol. A current example is the disastrous "war on drugs", which has led to huge numbers of people being locked up in cells and/or having their property confiscated. The number of Americans currently in prison, mainly because of crimes connected in some ways to drugs, is shameful - it looks like a war by the government on its own citizenry.
As long as the war on drugs continues, peaceful drug users must live their lifestyles covertly, rather than openly, and are to that extent excluded from society. Meanwhile, we have seen massive adverse effects in the form of police corruption, organised crime, and acts of violence. All of this is social division with a vengeance!
Consider a paradigm case where religious morality is imposed by force - criminalisation of homosexual conduct. The effect of this is that homosexuals must appear to conform or else face punishment (executions, canings, being locked up, or whatever the local barbaric treatment may be). This compels people to live false lives, drives homosexuality underground, and estranges homosexuals from the mainstream society. This is not merely division in the trivial sense of open disagreement, which is healthy, but in the far more profound sense that we have one group of people, the majority, who are included in society, while another group is excluded and has every reason to feel alienated. If homosexuals are unable to reverse such a situation through democratic processes (and they will be enormously disadvantaged if they try to speak up), then their most obvious option is to live one of the most important parts of their lives covertly.
Of course, they have other options. Some may respond with sufficient violence to make the oppressive laws that they face largely unenforceable in certain districts. Before getting to that point, they may try campaigns of peaceful civil disobedience, and such campaigns are sometimes effective. If, however, the state insists on enforcing laws against essentially harmless conduct that is very important to the people concerned, one outcome will eventually be violent riots. Meanwhile, morally good, otherwise law-abiding people will find themselves not only being disagreed with, or even satirised (something that gays have to put up with in our society), but actually executed, or locked up, or subjected to other outrages. Once again, social division with a vengeance!
Surely it would be better if the state reasoned that its essential goals are worldly, e.g. keeping of the peace, protecting citizens from violence, providing a system of property and a social safety net. Surely it would be better if the state did not operate with any concept of sin. In that case, it would know better than to ban essentially harmless conduct - or even conduct with more-or-less manageable and largely self-inflicted harms, such as drinking alcohol. It would, surely, be smarter if the state followed the harm principle, rather than a principle of enforcing religion or a religion-endorsed morality.
That outcome is more likely to be obtained if it becomes a widely expressed and accepted sentiment that the state ought not to enforce religious and "traditional" views of morality, but ought merely to protect worldly things such as life, liberty, health, and property. This can become part of a political culture, as has happened to some considerable extent in the West. Where attempts are made to undermine that sort of secular liberal political culture, we ought to oppose them unambiguously, rather than risk losing what has been won over hundreds of years.
There may still be debate about how best and how far to protect those worldly things that I mentioned, and there will still be strong disagreements and political rivalries, but at least no one will be harmed and stigmatised for essentially harmless (or mainly self-regarding) conduct. Moreover, if the government's policies are set on the basis of how best to protect worldly things, then the different sides of politics will all have some chance of obtaining real influence (and of gaining power). These are areas where changes can be made and compromise is possible, indeed frequently obtained. On this approach, no one is persecuted or driven underground, except for truly anti-social behaviour (violence, property crimes, and so on). The worst you can suffer from the state, if you are generally honest and non-violent, is taxation to provide funds for the social safety net ... and even the level of taxation will be limited by what the voting public as a whole will accept.
Free speech even for theocrats
I'm not suggesting that those who want the state to be more moralistic or theocratic should themselves be silenced by force (by fines, confiscations, imprisonment, and so on). They have freedom of speech, and attempts to suppress their speech would be just as divisive as attempts to criminalise homosexual conduct. If their speech were censored they would be driven underground and estranged from the larger society. They might ultimately riot if they found they had no other choice to regain their freedom of speech. The speech of moralists and theocrats is not directly harmful, and it is important to them. Even if their policies have no foreseeable prospect of being implemented within a healthy political culture, self-expression is too precious to people for the state to attempt suppress it. Indeed, we all have an interest in the continued expression of ideas that dissent from our own - otherwise, how can be sure that we are right?
Let the theocrats have their say, but let us continue to criticise their views and try to convince the state not to act on them.
In short, theocratic or moralistic speech should be permitted. But it does not follow that the policy prescriptions of theocrats and moralists should be implemented. Quite the contrary, they should not be. Nor should those of us who wish to criticise such policy prescriptions be silenced. If we are criticised, we should not call for the silencing of our opponents (notice that I have not suggested anywhere that Gary Bouma's speech should be banned), but we certainly have every right to defend our position, to criticise the criticisms, and to respond sharply to people who accuse us of being "divisive". Such accusations cheapen the concept of divisiveness, and we ought to say so.
Old-fashioned secularism?
Edis thinks that my views are old-fashioned. Well, it's true that views much like this were expressed as far back as the seventeenth century, notably in the writings of John Locke. Full-blooded versions of them needed John Stuart Mill's writings in the mid-nineteenth century, and they first became commonplace as recently as the 1960s, when governments became serious - at least some of the time - about the harm principle. Issues relating to separation of church and state, and to the harm principle, are still being worked through in Western parliaments and courts.
However, even if I am old-fashioned in my secularism, that does not make me wrong. Plenty of ideas that date back three or four hundred years, or more, have considerable truth attached to them, and we should not adopt some different view just because time has passed. Galileo staunchly defended the Copernican view of the solar system four hundred years ago; that does not mean that it is time for us to return, in a post-modernist spirit, to a geocentric theory. Of course, the views of Copernicus and Galileo needed much refinement, but they were on the right track. So was Locke, even though he knew nothing of the complications that would be caused by mass public education, the welfare state, technological change, and the sexual revolution.
For example, Locke thought that it was okay, or even necessary, to persecute atheists. He was wrong about that, although he provided a secular argument for his opinion, and his ideas need to be updated accordingly. (Briefly, the secular argument was that atheists cannot be trusted to honour their oaths. As it turns out, atheists are as likely to tell the truth in court or elsewhere as anyone else). Locke probably would have approved of laws against homosexual conduct, as he appears to have thought that heterosexual monogamy was crucial to the functioning of society. He was wrong about that, too - it turns out that modern societies can function just fine with a great diversity of sexual choices, especially in an era with highly effective methods of contraception.
By all means, let's update Locke's thinking, but none of that requires us to throw out his key insight, that the state exists to protect the things of this world, not to make us morally good by some religious standard or to promote our spiritual salvation. If anything, Locke did not go far enough. In any event, in a democracy people can disagree robustly about all sorts of things, including about whether Locke was right. But if we go down the path of theocratic or moralistic social policy we will have more than robust disagreements. Apart from all the other reasons for not persecuting people who've done nothing terribly wrong, we'll get social division with a vengeance.
Ironically enough, Edis turns to a much more old-fashioned model for the operation of society than anything imagined by John Locke or John Stuart Mill. That doesn't, in itself, prove that he's wrong, but perhaps we really have learned a thing or two since medieval times. Perhaps the struggle for liberal freedoms has not been in vain. More about that tomorrow, when I examine the proposal from Edis for what strikes me as a multi-cultural dystopia.
Sunday, March 07, 2010
Atheists for individual liberty
My talk at the forthcoming Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne is scheduled at 9.30 am next Saturday, 13 March. I'll also be signing books that morning (most likely copies of 50 Voices of Disbelief ... but hey, if you have copies of any of my other books I'm happy to sign them).
Here's what I'll be talking about:
Topic: Freedom From Religion: Atheists for Individual Liberty
Synopsis: One of the best reasons for challenging the authority of religion is that religion is, all too often, a powerful enemy of individual liberty and freedom of speech. Those things are worth defending for their own sake, but atheists and other critics of religion have especially strong reasons to defend them. We need the freedom to speak out against religion's flaws and its numerous attempts to control people's lives; and we need a social environment that favours individual liberty, since this provides us with room to organise and to live our own lives by standards of that we have chosen. There is a strong synergy between atheistic thought and classical notions of political freedom such as those advocated by John Stuart Mill. Atheists should work to defend such ideas as free speech, separation of church and state, and Mill's harm principle, which forbids the use of the criminal law merely to enforce religious or other ideas of morals. Beyond this, we must develop strategies to push religion's political influence to the margins. This will require a consistent political vision, and decisive actions to achieve both short-term and long-term goals. In that regard, we have much to learn from our conservative Christian opponents.
Here's what I'll be talking about:
Topic: Freedom From Religion: Atheists for Individual Liberty
Synopsis: One of the best reasons for challenging the authority of religion is that religion is, all too often, a powerful enemy of individual liberty and freedom of speech. Those things are worth defending for their own sake, but atheists and other critics of religion have especially strong reasons to defend them. We need the freedom to speak out against religion's flaws and its numerous attempts to control people's lives; and we need a social environment that favours individual liberty, since this provides us with room to organise and to live our own lives by standards of that we have chosen. There is a strong synergy between atheistic thought and classical notions of political freedom such as those advocated by John Stuart Mill. Atheists should work to defend such ideas as free speech, separation of church and state, and Mill's harm principle, which forbids the use of the criminal law merely to enforce religious or other ideas of morals. Beyond this, we must develop strategies to push religion's political influence to the margins. This will require a consistent political vision, and decisive actions to achieve both short-term and long-term goals. In that regard, we have much to learn from our conservative Christian opponents.
Saturday, March 06, 2010
Bouma: Secularists are responsible for social division
According to an ABC News report, Professor Gary Bouma has used a conference at the University of Sydney to attack secularists and atheists as a source of social division.
"Conflict comes up when groups vilify, deny the right to build the mosques," he told the Studies of Religion in Focus conference in Sydney today.
"Or when the 'nones' - those who are anti-theist - [say] 'You're stupid', that religious voices should be driven out of the public policy area, that religion shouldn't be in schools, etc.
"That is conflict, and that is highly divisive in this society."
If this is reported correctly, where do I even start in correcting Bouma's misconceptions? I'll focus on the bit about "religious voices should be driven out of the public policy area". It seems to me bizarre to give a free pass to those who advocate the use of coercive power - the state's power to fine, stigmatise, imprison, etc. - to impose religious views, as when the Catholic Church seeks laws that give effect to its specifically religious morality. But when criticism of this is criticised as "highly divisive" we go beyond the merely bizarre to the territory of the astounding.
The truth is the exact opposite of what Bouma has apparently stated. Contrary to Bouma, attempts to use political power to impose religious views are highly divisive. If they are not controlled by constitutional provisions and/or norms of the political culture, they can spiral into open conflict (as in the 16th and 17th century religious wars in Europe) or totalitarian oppression (as in modern theocracies such as the Islamic Republic of Iran). Bouma should be thankful that secularists (some of whom are atheistic and some religious) are on hand to reinforce the liberal norm that religion has no right to assistance from the secular arm. Far from causing division, those of us who continually speak up to reinforce this political norm are maintaining the cultural understanding that is the strongest bulwark against real division. If Professor Bouma doesn't like living in a country with religious freedom - where religious views are not imposed by the police - he is welcome to find a country that still labours under a 16th-century set of political norms. There are plenty available.
Of course, none of us are trying to drive religious voices out, if that means looking to the secular arm to silence our opponents. They have freedom of speech and may say what they like without fear of reprisal from men and women with guns and uniforms. Generally speaking, it is not atheists or secularists who support laws that deny people freedom of speech, such as Victoria's oppressive religious vilification provisions. In fact, Gary Bouma has been a leading champion of these laws. If he wants to find an opponent of free speech, he doesn't need to look for secularists under his bed. He only needs to look in the mirror when he wakes up in the morning.
But freedom of speech does not entail freedom to have your ideas accepted by governments and incorporated into law and policy. Some arguments that might be heard by governments are better than others, and arguments that governments should act to enforce specifically religious moral norms are not among the stronger ones. Quite the opposite. Governments should do no such thing. Rather, they should concentrate on secular goals such as protecting us against harm from fellow citizens and others who might be tempted to resort to violence or fraud in their dealings with us; protecting us against external attacks from terrorists or foreign powers; maintaining a fair system of property and commerce; and providing a socio-economic safety net through the tax-transfer system. All of these government activities are necessary for life in modern, complex societies, but none of them involves enforcing specifically religious moral and other doctrines.
The state is an essentially secular, in the sense of worldly (not in the sense of anti-religious), institution. It must not allow itself to be captured by religious agendas. The religious may argue whatever they like - they have freedom of speech - but the rest of us should be busy persuading the state to stick with its secular tasks and not yield to the goals of religionists who don't scruple to impose their views by force ... or to ask others to do so. If we can create a culture in which little weight is placed on the views of the religious, and they are commonly scorned or laughed at, so much the better. That doesn't mean denying their freedom of speech, but it may entail rendering their speech somewhat marginal, in that it has little effect on the thinking of politicians. That's fine - there are many kinds of speech that should not be banned but should have only marginal social impact because they contain little that is of merit.
What is most disturbing about all this is that Bouma heads up the Commonwealth government's Freedom of Religion and Belief project. Somebody with the views attributed to him in the ABC News article does not understand the nature of freedom of religion and belief, which arises from the refusal of the state to impose any particular religious views or to persecute adherents of any religious views (unless it has some absolutely compelling secular reason - which would almost never be the case in practice). Freedom of religion consists in the state acting as a purely secular, religion-blind institution. But it at least looks as if Bouma holds that freedom of religion and belief is compatible with the state imposing particular religious beliefs on non-believers; at the least, he appears to oppose secularists' criticism of this.
If that is the case, he has no credibility in his role with the freedom of religion and belief project. I'm not going to call for him to step down. Let him continue if he likes, but let him first search his conscience to determine whether he can really play this role credibly when he is so clearly and strongly biased, not only against atheists and secularists but against the classical liberal conception of religious freedom that goes back to Locke.
In any event, assuming he continues, his group's report will now carry no weight for many of us. Its main author has (again, assuming that he has been quoted accurately) declared his hand. He is deeply biased against secularists and the classical model of religious freedom that has doubtless been put to him by many people in their submissions. Based on Bouma's reported words, we now have every reason to anticipate a report that redefines notions of religious freedom in an Orwellian style: war is peace, slavery is freedom, and "freedom of religion and belief" means the freedom to impose your religious views on others by force.
No, Professor Bouma, I'm not buying it.
"Conflict comes up when groups vilify, deny the right to build the mosques," he told the Studies of Religion in Focus conference in Sydney today.
"Or when the 'nones' - those who are anti-theist - [say] 'You're stupid', that religious voices should be driven out of the public policy area, that religion shouldn't be in schools, etc.
"That is conflict, and that is highly divisive in this society."
If this is reported correctly, where do I even start in correcting Bouma's misconceptions? I'll focus on the bit about "religious voices should be driven out of the public policy area". It seems to me bizarre to give a free pass to those who advocate the use of coercive power - the state's power to fine, stigmatise, imprison, etc. - to impose religious views, as when the Catholic Church seeks laws that give effect to its specifically religious morality. But when criticism of this is criticised as "highly divisive" we go beyond the merely bizarre to the territory of the astounding.
The truth is the exact opposite of what Bouma has apparently stated. Contrary to Bouma, attempts to use political power to impose religious views are highly divisive. If they are not controlled by constitutional provisions and/or norms of the political culture, they can spiral into open conflict (as in the 16th and 17th century religious wars in Europe) or totalitarian oppression (as in modern theocracies such as the Islamic Republic of Iran). Bouma should be thankful that secularists (some of whom are atheistic and some religious) are on hand to reinforce the liberal norm that religion has no right to assistance from the secular arm. Far from causing division, those of us who continually speak up to reinforce this political norm are maintaining the cultural understanding that is the strongest bulwark against real division. If Professor Bouma doesn't like living in a country with religious freedom - where religious views are not imposed by the police - he is welcome to find a country that still labours under a 16th-century set of political norms. There are plenty available.
Of course, none of us are trying to drive religious voices out, if that means looking to the secular arm to silence our opponents. They have freedom of speech and may say what they like without fear of reprisal from men and women with guns and uniforms. Generally speaking, it is not atheists or secularists who support laws that deny people freedom of speech, such as Victoria's oppressive religious vilification provisions. In fact, Gary Bouma has been a leading champion of these laws. If he wants to find an opponent of free speech, he doesn't need to look for secularists under his bed. He only needs to look in the mirror when he wakes up in the morning.
But freedom of speech does not entail freedom to have your ideas accepted by governments and incorporated into law and policy. Some arguments that might be heard by governments are better than others, and arguments that governments should act to enforce specifically religious moral norms are not among the stronger ones. Quite the opposite. Governments should do no such thing. Rather, they should concentrate on secular goals such as protecting us against harm from fellow citizens and others who might be tempted to resort to violence or fraud in their dealings with us; protecting us against external attacks from terrorists or foreign powers; maintaining a fair system of property and commerce; and providing a socio-economic safety net through the tax-transfer system. All of these government activities are necessary for life in modern, complex societies, but none of them involves enforcing specifically religious moral and other doctrines.
The state is an essentially secular, in the sense of worldly (not in the sense of anti-religious), institution. It must not allow itself to be captured by religious agendas. The religious may argue whatever they like - they have freedom of speech - but the rest of us should be busy persuading the state to stick with its secular tasks and not yield to the goals of religionists who don't scruple to impose their views by force ... or to ask others to do so. If we can create a culture in which little weight is placed on the views of the religious, and they are commonly scorned or laughed at, so much the better. That doesn't mean denying their freedom of speech, but it may entail rendering their speech somewhat marginal, in that it has little effect on the thinking of politicians. That's fine - there are many kinds of speech that should not be banned but should have only marginal social impact because they contain little that is of merit.
What is most disturbing about all this is that Bouma heads up the Commonwealth government's Freedom of Religion and Belief project. Somebody with the views attributed to him in the ABC News article does not understand the nature of freedom of religion and belief, which arises from the refusal of the state to impose any particular religious views or to persecute adherents of any religious views (unless it has some absolutely compelling secular reason - which would almost never be the case in practice). Freedom of religion consists in the state acting as a purely secular, religion-blind institution. But it at least looks as if Bouma holds that freedom of religion and belief is compatible with the state imposing particular religious beliefs on non-believers; at the least, he appears to oppose secularists' criticism of this.
If that is the case, he has no credibility in his role with the freedom of religion and belief project. I'm not going to call for him to step down. Let him continue if he likes, but let him first search his conscience to determine whether he can really play this role credibly when he is so clearly and strongly biased, not only against atheists and secularists but against the classical liberal conception of religious freedom that goes back to Locke.
In any event, assuming he continues, his group's report will now carry no weight for many of us. Its main author has (again, assuming that he has been quoted accurately) declared his hand. He is deeply biased against secularists and the classical model of religious freedom that has doubtless been put to him by many people in their submissions. Based on Bouma's reported words, we now have every reason to anticipate a report that redefines notions of religious freedom in an Orwellian style: war is peace, slavery is freedom, and "freedom of religion and belief" means the freedom to impose your religious views on others by force.
No, Professor Bouma, I'm not buying it.
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