Wikipedia has an article on scientism which contains a lot of information, but also shows that the word "scientism" is used in a wide range of ways, usually pejorative.
Is there a phenomenon that could be called "scientism" and which deserves to be denounced? I suppose there is. I suppose there are people who think the humanities are worthless, or that public policy favours starving arts faculties of funds, or perhaps that we could somehow understand, let's say Macbeth, without developing any sensitivity to Shakespeare's language ... perhaps by applying the methods distinctive of science (though how you would use controlled experiments, for example, to interpret Macbeth is far from clear). The idea that science (defined narrowly in contradistinction to humanistic forms of inquiry) could answer every question would, in my view at least, be untenable. I don't see how science, narrowly defined, can tell you how sympathetic you should be to Macbeth when he learns of his wife's death and replies, "She should have died hereafter." The distinctive techniques of narrowly-defined science are not going to tell a literary scholar, an actor, or a director how that line should be spoken.
If "scientism" refers to some of the more extreme or loony viewpoints mentioned in the previous paragraph, then I think it's a bad thing. I don't think we should be closing faculties of arts or humanities, or that distinctively scientific techniques are much use in understanding or staging Macbeth, or that studying great literature is useless anyway, or anything remotely in this ballpark. But then again, I don't see many other people expressing those sentiments either. Once again, someone may think these things, but if I see Richard Dawkins, for example, accused of thinking these things I'm not going to be too impressed.
The thing is, if you're going to denounce someone for "scientism" or complain that her ideas lead to "scientism", or are somehow reliant on "scientism" - and if this is meant to be a serious criticism - you must be using the word "scientism" in a sense that denotes something horrible or foolish or otherwise worthy of denunciation. It's no use denouncing someone for "scientism" and then, when called on it, explain that you were using the word in some other, more technical, non-pejorative sense (perhaps that the person takes a logical empiricist approach to philosophy). That's equivocation. It's cheating to apply the word in some non-pejorative sense that you secretly have in mind while at the very same time trying to get the pejorative connotations of other senses of the word.
A word like "scientism" lends itself too readily to this kind of argumentative cheating. So much so that I think that intellectually honest people should stop using the word; and, frankly, when I see people using it in current debates I am automatically suspicious of their intellectual honesty. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
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).
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Voting out judges
Nothing much to say here, but this piece by Derek C. Araujo is worth a look if you don't usually frequent the Center for Inquiry's site. It's about Supreme Court judges getting voted out in Iowa in the recent American elections.
Sample:
The notion that "the will of the people" rules supreme in the United States is seductive, but wrong in an important sense. Under our system of government, political majorities cannot use the ballot box to trample the rights of minorities. And the only people standing between minority rights and a tyranny of the majority are the men and women in black robes so frequently maligned by conservative forces.
Conservative critics of the judiciary make a great show of respecting "the Constitution." In my judgment, their stance is unprincipled. Judicial decisions they agree with must be respected under the Constitution and the rule of law; when shown a judicial decision they don't like, however, they fulminate against "activist" judges and "robed masters" who are "unaccountable to the people." Never mind that unaccountability to political forces is an essential component of the system of government enshrined in the Constitution.
The idea that (at least some) judges are elected in 39 of the American states is incredible. Araujo again:
This practice is virtually unknown in the rest of the world, and with good reason. As the Founders of the U.S. well knew, if judges are to render objectively fair decisions based on law rather than public opinion, the judiciary must be independent. If judges are to prevent the majority from trampling the rights of minorities and unpopular parties, they must be shielded from electoral politics, special interests, the need to raise ever-increasing amounts of money to fund elections, the force of public opinion, or fear of rebuke by powerful political forces. The Founders therefore guaranteed that federal court judges would not be elected, but would be appointed for life, subject to removal only on impeachment and conviction of "high crimes and misdemeanors."
Sample:
The notion that "the will of the people" rules supreme in the United States is seductive, but wrong in an important sense. Under our system of government, political majorities cannot use the ballot box to trample the rights of minorities. And the only people standing between minority rights and a tyranny of the majority are the men and women in black robes so frequently maligned by conservative forces.
Conservative critics of the judiciary make a great show of respecting "the Constitution." In my judgment, their stance is unprincipled. Judicial decisions they agree with must be respected under the Constitution and the rule of law; when shown a judicial decision they don't like, however, they fulminate against "activist" judges and "robed masters" who are "unaccountable to the people." Never mind that unaccountability to political forces is an essential component of the system of government enshrined in the Constitution.
The idea that (at least some) judges are elected in 39 of the American states is incredible. Araujo again:
This practice is virtually unknown in the rest of the world, and with good reason. As the Founders of the U.S. well knew, if judges are to render objectively fair decisions based on law rather than public opinion, the judiciary must be independent. If judges are to prevent the majority from trampling the rights of minorities and unpopular parties, they must be shielded from electoral politics, special interests, the need to raise ever-increasing amounts of money to fund elections, the force of public opinion, or fear of rebuke by powerful political forces. The Founders therefore guaranteed that federal court judges would not be elected, but would be appointed for life, subject to removal only on impeachment and conviction of "high crimes and misdemeanors."
Will science put the humanities out of business?
Nah, I don't think so. Nor are they about to tell us everything we want for the development of public policy. The following paras are edited from an article I published in Quadrant about a decade ago.
====
What implications could scientific knowledge about ourselves have for moral conduct or social policy? No number of factual statements about human nature, by themselves, can ever entail statements that amount to moral knowledge, as Hume demonstrated. What is required is an ethical theory, persuasive on other grounds, that already links "is" and "ought". This might be found, for example, in a definition of moral action in terms of human flourishing, though it is not clear why we should, as individuals, be concerned about something as abstract as that - why not merely the flourishing of ourselves or our particular loved ones?
One comfort is that, even if we had a plausible set of empirical and meta-ethical gadgets to connect what we know of human nature to high-level questions about social policy, we would discover significant slippage between levels. Nature does not contradict itself, and no findings from a field such as evolutionary psychology could be inconsistent with the observed facts of cultural diversity. If reductive explanations of human nature become available in more detail, they must turn out to be compatible with the existence of the vast spectrum of viable cultures that human beings have created so far.
The dark side of evolutionary psychology includes, among other things, some scary-looking claims about the reproductive and sociopolitical behaviour of the respective sexes. True, no one seriously asserts that sexual conduct in human societies and the respective roles of men and women within families and extra-familial hierarchies are specified by our genes in a direct or detailed fashion. What, however, are we to make of the controversial analyses of male and female reproductive "strategies" that have been popularised by several writers in the 1990s? E.g., some accounts argue that men are genetically hardwired to be highly polygamous or promiscuous, while women are similarly programmed to be imperfectly monogamous, as well as sexually deceitful.
In responding to this, first, I am in favour of scrutinising the evidence for such claims very carefully, since they can so readily be adapted to support out-worn stereotypes about the roles of the sexes. That, however, is a reason to show scientific and philosophical rigour, not to accept strong social constructionism about science. Secondly, even if something like this turned out to be correct, the social consequences of such knowledge are by no means apparent. Mere biological facts cannot tell us in some absolute way what are the correct sexual mores for a human society.
To take this a step further, theories about reproductive strategies suggest that there are in-built conflicts between the interests of men and women, and of higher and lower status men, which will inevitably need to be moderated by social compromise, not necessarily in the same way by different cultures. If all this were accepted for the sake of argument, it might destroy a precious notion about ourselves: that there is a simple way for relations between the sexes to be harmonious. On the other hand, it would seem to support rather than refute what might be considered a "progressive" notion: that no one society, certainly not our own, has the absolutely final answer to questions about sexual morality.
Although evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience are potential minefields, it is irrational to pretend that they are incapable of discovering objective knowledge. Fortunately, such knowledge will surely include insight into the slippage between our genetic similarity and the diversity of forms taken by viable cultures. The commonality of human nature will be at a level that is consistent with the (substantial) historical contingency of social practices and of many areas of understanding and evaluative belief. The effect on social policy is likely to be limited, though we may become more charitable about what moral requirements are reasonable for the kinds of creatures that we are.
I should add that evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience are not about to put the humanities, in particular, out of business. At this stage, there is a banality in attempts to produce illuminating comment about the arts, based on evolutionary considerations. There are good reasons why the natural sciences cannot provide a substitute for humanistic explanation, even if we obtain a far deeper understanding of our own genetic and neurophysiological make-up. This is partly because reductive science is ill-equipped to deal with the particularity of complex events, partly because causal explanation may not be all that we want, anyway, when we try to interpret and clarify human experience.
====
Let's just make that last point more vivid. There may, I suppose, be some ultimate set of incredibly complex physical facts on which supervenes a higher-level fact such as "Macbeth is a tragic hero" or "Macbeth is the main character in Macbeth" or "Macbeth deals, thematically, with the perils of ambition" or even the factual content of a complex claim that somehow relates the thematic concerns of Macbeth to its recurrent imagery. (I remember once discussing something like this with Greg Egan, but not in a way that makes Greg someone who disagrees with the thrust of this post - I think his example was understanding the Battle of Waterloo.)
But despite the previous paragraph, we can make all these humanistic claims without relying on any processes that are distinctively scientific, and even if we had a super-science that could, in principle, explain how all these claims are true, assuming they are, it would be impossible to deploy the super-science in particular cases. There is just no substitute for a sensitivity to language, including to how the English language has changed over the centuries, and that requires the sort of study that goes on within the arts and humanities. If we were talking about a play written in a foreign language, there would be no real substitute for a sensitive mastery of that other language, even if we could "get" quite a lot from a good translation. Moreover, there is also no substitute for a sensitivity to literary forms and historical contexts.
When we encounter particular complex cultural products, such as the play Macbeth - perhaps we wish to discuss the play as a text, or to discuss a particular production of it, or even the performance of a particular actor playing one of the well-known characters - a scientific education won't be especially helpful, and distinctively scientific techniques will seldom be of much use. That's not to say they can never be of any use at all to students of the humanities - I can think of examples where they may well be - but these techniques are not going to put the humanities as we know them out of business.
====
What implications could scientific knowledge about ourselves have for moral conduct or social policy? No number of factual statements about human nature, by themselves, can ever entail statements that amount to moral knowledge, as Hume demonstrated. What is required is an ethical theory, persuasive on other grounds, that already links "is" and "ought". This might be found, for example, in a definition of moral action in terms of human flourishing, though it is not clear why we should, as individuals, be concerned about something as abstract as that - why not merely the flourishing of ourselves or our particular loved ones?
One comfort is that, even if we had a plausible set of empirical and meta-ethical gadgets to connect what we know of human nature to high-level questions about social policy, we would discover significant slippage between levels. Nature does not contradict itself, and no findings from a field such as evolutionary psychology could be inconsistent with the observed facts of cultural diversity. If reductive explanations of human nature become available in more detail, they must turn out to be compatible with the existence of the vast spectrum of viable cultures that human beings have created so far.
The dark side of evolutionary psychology includes, among other things, some scary-looking claims about the reproductive and sociopolitical behaviour of the respective sexes. True, no one seriously asserts that sexual conduct in human societies and the respective roles of men and women within families and extra-familial hierarchies are specified by our genes in a direct or detailed fashion. What, however, are we to make of the controversial analyses of male and female reproductive "strategies" that have been popularised by several writers in the 1990s? E.g., some accounts argue that men are genetically hardwired to be highly polygamous or promiscuous, while women are similarly programmed to be imperfectly monogamous, as well as sexually deceitful.
In responding to this, first, I am in favour of scrutinising the evidence for such claims very carefully, since they can so readily be adapted to support out-worn stereotypes about the roles of the sexes. That, however, is a reason to show scientific and philosophical rigour, not to accept strong social constructionism about science. Secondly, even if something like this turned out to be correct, the social consequences of such knowledge are by no means apparent. Mere biological facts cannot tell us in some absolute way what are the correct sexual mores for a human society.
To take this a step further, theories about reproductive strategies suggest that there are in-built conflicts between the interests of men and women, and of higher and lower status men, which will inevitably need to be moderated by social compromise, not necessarily in the same way by different cultures. If all this were accepted for the sake of argument, it might destroy a precious notion about ourselves: that there is a simple way for relations between the sexes to be harmonious. On the other hand, it would seem to support rather than refute what might be considered a "progressive" notion: that no one society, certainly not our own, has the absolutely final answer to questions about sexual morality.
Although evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience are potential minefields, it is irrational to pretend that they are incapable of discovering objective knowledge. Fortunately, such knowledge will surely include insight into the slippage between our genetic similarity and the diversity of forms taken by viable cultures. The commonality of human nature will be at a level that is consistent with the (substantial) historical contingency of social practices and of many areas of understanding and evaluative belief. The effect on social policy is likely to be limited, though we may become more charitable about what moral requirements are reasonable for the kinds of creatures that we are.
I should add that evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience are not about to put the humanities, in particular, out of business. At this stage, there is a banality in attempts to produce illuminating comment about the arts, based on evolutionary considerations. There are good reasons why the natural sciences cannot provide a substitute for humanistic explanation, even if we obtain a far deeper understanding of our own genetic and neurophysiological make-up. This is partly because reductive science is ill-equipped to deal with the particularity of complex events, partly because causal explanation may not be all that we want, anyway, when we try to interpret and clarify human experience.
====
Let's just make that last point more vivid. There may, I suppose, be some ultimate set of incredibly complex physical facts on which supervenes a higher-level fact such as "Macbeth is a tragic hero" or "Macbeth is the main character in Macbeth" or "Macbeth deals, thematically, with the perils of ambition" or even the factual content of a complex claim that somehow relates the thematic concerns of Macbeth to its recurrent imagery. (I remember once discussing something like this with Greg Egan, but not in a way that makes Greg someone who disagrees with the thrust of this post - I think his example was understanding the Battle of Waterloo.)
But despite the previous paragraph, we can make all these humanistic claims without relying on any processes that are distinctively scientific, and even if we had a super-science that could, in principle, explain how all these claims are true, assuming they are, it would be impossible to deploy the super-science in particular cases. There is just no substitute for a sensitivity to language, including to how the English language has changed over the centuries, and that requires the sort of study that goes on within the arts and humanities. If we were talking about a play written in a foreign language, there would be no real substitute for a sensitive mastery of that other language, even if we could "get" quite a lot from a good translation. Moreover, there is also no substitute for a sensitivity to literary forms and historical contexts.
When we encounter particular complex cultural products, such as the play Macbeth - perhaps we wish to discuss the play as a text, or to discuss a particular production of it, or even the performance of a particular actor playing one of the well-known characters - a scientific education won't be especially helpful, and distinctively scientific techniques will seldom be of much use. That's not to say they can never be of any use at all to students of the humanities - I can think of examples where they may well be - but these techniques are not going to put the humanities as we know them out of business.
Monday, November 08, 2010
John Wilkins on secularism
A smallish sample of an essay (from here) that is worth reading in full:
What can be done when people are unable to see things other than in absolute terms, and so decide that their religion, being True, is entitled to do anything it can to bring about the Proper Society? All I can say is that we should all stand against such absolutism, with arms if necessary, to protect freedoms, ours and others', and the Open Society. No principle of reasoning can prevent this.
All of this relies on there being only rational actors in the consideration of how to set up society and the law. Of course, there are not. There are those who think God will come down in the End Times next week and smite all the unbelievers. Millenarian views like this come and go, and are, I suspect, correlated with social rates of change - the greater the society is changing, especially as it is modernising, the more millenarianism is about. Much religious opposition in society is, I think, opposition to modernism itself, not the specific aspects. For example, opposition to abortion is more about having some control over who may mate with whom and how in a permissive society, than it is about theological issues. ... There are always those who think it only right that they control society, because they are God's agents, or at least the agents of Providence or History.
I like the frank acknowledgment that there can come a time when revolutionary violence is needed to oppose theocracy. Thankfully we're not in that position in the West, but the situation of our friends in places like Iran may well be another story.
Wilkins is not a Gnu Atheist, but this is pretty feisty secularism.
What can be done when people are unable to see things other than in absolute terms, and so decide that their religion, being True, is entitled to do anything it can to bring about the Proper Society? All I can say is that we should all stand against such absolutism, with arms if necessary, to protect freedoms, ours and others', and the Open Society. No principle of reasoning can prevent this.
All of this relies on there being only rational actors in the consideration of how to set up society and the law. Of course, there are not. There are those who think God will come down in the End Times next week and smite all the unbelievers. Millenarian views like this come and go, and are, I suspect, correlated with social rates of change - the greater the society is changing, especially as it is modernising, the more millenarianism is about. Much religious opposition in society is, I think, opposition to modernism itself, not the specific aspects. For example, opposition to abortion is more about having some control over who may mate with whom and how in a permissive society, than it is about theological issues. ... There are always those who think it only right that they control society, because they are God's agents, or at least the agents of Providence or History.
I like the frank acknowledgment that there can come a time when revolutionary violence is needed to oppose theocracy. Thankfully we're not in that position in the West, but the situation of our friends in places like Iran may well be another story.
Wilkins is not a Gnu Atheist, but this is pretty feisty secularism.
Currently reading: X-Men Legacy # 241 (review) and the "Collision" arc
X-Men Legacy, which has been written for some time now by Mike Carey, is currently focused on the adventures of Rogue. For the past few months, it's actually been more the Magneto-and-Rogue show, as Rogue has been plunged into a series of adventures fighting alongside the X-Men's premier supervillain.
I always, at this point, have to remind folks whose knowledge of the X-Men mythos is based solely on the movies that these are not exactly the Magneto and Rogue that you know. Not only is Rogue all grown up now; comic-book Rogue actually started out as a villain, and arguably a nastier one than Magneto himself. But she switched over to the side of good as a result of, well, a mix of things - partly when she temporarily absorbed the personality of one particular hero and gained a sense of what it is like to be a more noble person, and partly when she needed help from Charles "Professor X" Xavier.
As for Magneto, he's physically much younger in the contemporary comics than the version of the character played by Sir Ian McKellen, having gone through a complicated rejuvenation process that left him de-aged by decades. The process also left him much saner, though still morally grey to say the least. Occasionally he goes over the edge into insanity, but his usual modus operandi is that he's a basically good man who has deliberately hardened himself to a mentality of doing whatever it takes to achieve his goal of protecting mutants - which includes killing as and when he thinks it necessary.
In the pic I've provided, he is seemingly about to blow away one of the Children of the Vault, their leader, Cadena, but Rogue gets him to stay his hand. That's a nice touch from Carey and Mann, because Rogue and Magneto once almost became lovers when he helped her out and she stayed for a time at one of his bases, but he then alienated her by murdering one of their enemies, Zaladane, over her protests and before her eyes. Marvel has been teasing us with this relationship ever since, in one way or another.
I've enjoyed the whole "Collision" arc very much. I love Clay Mann's art - especially his depictions of the main characters and their body language, and the CotV's cyberpunkish city - as much as Carey's writing.
Issue #241 is a lot of fun, as Rogue and Magneto kick butt, despite being outnumbered by two thousand, or something, to two (reduced to two thousand, or whatever, to six when help arrives). Eventually, they have to figure out a way to come out of the situation on top without ultimately being able to defeat an entire army of supervillains and their robot support troops in open combat.
Although Wolverine is the most popular X-character - the one that the most readers and cinema-goers seem to identify with - the struggle of ideas between Professor X ("Humans and mutants can live in peace") and Magneto ("The humans hate us, Charles. Fight them with me, or they'll exterminate us") has always been at the thematic heart of the franchise, and the depiction of Magneto as a worthy, frequently successful, not-entirely-villainous antagonist for the X-Men has been crucial to making the whole mythos work, to giving it so much resonance. For the moment, at least, he has sort of reformed and actually joined the X-Men, though in large part this is a matter of the X-Men moving towards his harsh outlook under the pressure of events, rather than him entirely abandoning his view of things.
Carey gets Magneto right, conveying the character's complexity - that he's overbearing and ruthless, with a brooding and menacing presence, but also that he's intelligent and courageous; has a ready, albeit grim, sense of humour (and even finds a moment to flirt with Rogue in the midst of fighting for his life); and possesses a compassionate streak. Rogue is a great character in her own right - brave, smart, rebellious, flirty, and an attractive mix of gentle and hot-headed - and again Carey makes her convincing and appealing. The exchanges of dialogue and other interactions are totally authoritative bits of character work.
Issue # 241 of Legacy is, alas, not perfect. Superhero comics almost inevitably have a rushed quality with various plot-holes that you need to try to overlook, and this issue seemed to me as if it could have been expanded into two issues. That might have allowed us more clarity about some events, not to mention a bit more pay-off when the X-team actually get into battle with the CotV.
There's also just a touch of the common problem with using a very powerful character like Magneto or Thor or the Silver Surfer or Phoenix as part of a team. In this case, the heroes are so badly outnumbered that in theory the CotV are a deadly threat even to Magneto, but he needs help from his pals to deal with several problems that, on past showings, shouldn't have been all that hard for him. From one point of view, that's necessary, as all the characters must be given chances to shine, but too much of it can diminish the sense of enormous power that you want the big-gun characters to radiate.
Rogue doesn't have the same air of raw power as Magneto, but her power is the power to absorb others' powers - and she can keep adding these as she touches more and more of her opponents. Surely she could have made better use of this when so outnumbered. I can't help thinking that a bit more room, maybe a fifth episode or an expanded part 4, would have helped - the CotV might have been allowed to throw more of their ammunition at the X-Men on-panel and make us see more situations where all of the good guys are forced to dig very deep.
But hang it, why be picky? I'm hooked on this creative team, and I'll definitely be reading more material from Carey. His work on X-Men since he took over the Legacy book reminds me of Chris Claremont's great original run, and he has me eager to know what happens next with the sub-set of X-characters that he's currently opted to focus on.
Science and the supernatural
For those who are not following it, this little post from a few days ago is getting a bit of good discussion and using up some of my word hoard - i.e. I seem to be directing my efforts there a fair bit.
New Atheists are such philistines
First, a sarcasm warning. Not all the sentiments in the following paragraph are to be taken at face value - just so y'all are clear on that.
Jerry Coyne has a post about James Joyce's story "The Dead", from Dubliners. Obviously this is further proof that those goddamnnew gnu atheists are enemies of the arts and humanities, insensitive to language, and prone to a dreadful scientism according to which nothing is worth doing unless it involves the cold-blooded application of a large scientific instrument.
Jerry Coyne has a post about James Joyce's story "The Dead", from Dubliners. Obviously this is further proof that those goddamn
Sunday, November 07, 2010
Peace breaks out
I'm slow getting to this, but I welcome the apology that Massimo Pigliucci has extended to Jerry Coyne over here - and Jerry's gracious response over here. There's a lot to be said for civility - which doesn't mean that there's no place for satire and mockery. But it's better, as I see it, to aim satire and mockery at absurd and destructive ideas and at people who exercise power in ways that do harm. There's no sharp dividing line between good targets for satire and mockery and not-so-good targets, but it's generally better if we can engage in a civil way with people who are basically on our side and merely disagree about specifics, at least up to a point when it's reasonable for patience to run out.
And it's all-too-easy to get exasperated and to set the bar low for when patience has reasonably run out. In my case, I try to remain patient with people whom I see as basically on my side and disagreeing with me in good faith about something specific. I know I don't always succeed (though I don't think I'm worse than most).
I'm sure there'll be times when I get fed up with somebody who seems like a pest and/or to be obtuse or rude or to be making disagreements too personal, but who - from his or her viewpoint - is merely trying to explain something to me persistently but in good faith and with due civility. These things happen, perceptions can vary, and sometimes, to be frank, getting fed up seems justifiable. I don't promise to be saintly in discussion and argument, but I do think that a bit of patience and civility is a good thing when dealing with interlocutors who are at least being courteous. I usually aim for that, and it's something that I encourage in others who comment here.
And it's all-too-easy to get exasperated and to set the bar low for when patience has reasonably run out. In my case, I try to remain patient with people whom I see as basically on my side and disagreeing with me in good faith about something specific. I know I don't always succeed (though I don't think I'm worse than most).
I'm sure there'll be times when I get fed up with somebody who seems like a pest and/or to be obtuse or rude or to be making disagreements too personal, but who - from his or her viewpoint - is merely trying to explain something to me persistently but in good faith and with due civility. These things happen, perceptions can vary, and sometimes, to be frank, getting fed up seems justifiable. I don't promise to be saintly in discussion and argument, but I do think that a bit of patience and civility is a good thing when dealing with interlocutors who are at least being courteous. I usually aim for that, and it's something that I encourage in others who comment here.
Currently reading: The Australian Book of Atheism ed. by Warren Bonett
You wouldn't expect me to give this book, which contains my article/essay/chapter/whatever "Atheists for Freedom of Speech", an unbiased review. Obviously I'm primed to like it and to want to flog it to you.
That said, it contains over thirty such pieces by something of a who's who of Australian atheists, sceptics, and secularists, written at a level that is perfect for a general educated audience - these pieces are not dumbed down, but nor are they jargon-ridden or otherwise inaccessible. They focus on the personal, social, and political consequences of religion, rather than on arguments against its truth-claims (those arguments are, by and large, taken for granted). The Australian slant is strong, in that most contributors are especially concerned about religious intrusions in Australian politics and public policy, but overseas readers would find much of what is described all too recognisable (and much of the argument pertinent).
As with any anthology containing such a large number of contributions, I like some pieces more than others. Indeed, none of the contributors will find themselves agreeing with every sentiment expressed by all their fellow contributors. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because such a book is a showcase for the diversity of atheist, etc., thought, and it's no use pretending that this is monolithic. To a large extent, diversity is strength. That said, the political emphasis tends to give the book a feeling of unity: though you can sense that these 30+ authors don't agree on all philosophical or social issues, they do seem to agree with the sentiment that religion has too large a footprint in Australian politics. Even in Australia, a relatively secular country when compared to the US, religious leaders get their way with governments far more often than is justified. In particular, there is a sense, throughout the book's 400-odd pages, of serious concern about the promotion of religion by the Howard and Rudd governments, with Julia Gillard now following suit (the essays took their final form recently enough for some to comment at least briefly on the transition to Gillard as Australia's prime minister).
If I must choose a favourite contribution, it is that of an author with whom I'm not always in agreement: John Wilkins. Wilkins' discussion of secularism, and particularly the benefits that it offers both believers and non-believers, comports very much with my own views. Where we might differ is that I don't think secularism is enough; I think it's important to subject the actual truth-claims of religion to some pretty harsh critique and that this complements the arguments for secularism. However, Wilkins doesn't get into that - his piece is purely a defence of secularism, in the sense of governments making decisions for worldly, non-religious reasons. He presents the case clearly, strongly, and without compromise.
In all, this is a book that I'm pleased to have on my shelf and proud to have contributed to.
That said, it contains over thirty such pieces by something of a who's who of Australian atheists, sceptics, and secularists, written at a level that is perfect for a general educated audience - these pieces are not dumbed down, but nor are they jargon-ridden or otherwise inaccessible. They focus on the personal, social, and political consequences of religion, rather than on arguments against its truth-claims (those arguments are, by and large, taken for granted). The Australian slant is strong, in that most contributors are especially concerned about religious intrusions in Australian politics and public policy, but overseas readers would find much of what is described all too recognisable (and much of the argument pertinent).
As with any anthology containing such a large number of contributions, I like some pieces more than others. Indeed, none of the contributors will find themselves agreeing with every sentiment expressed by all their fellow contributors. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because such a book is a showcase for the diversity of atheist, etc., thought, and it's no use pretending that this is monolithic. To a large extent, diversity is strength. That said, the political emphasis tends to give the book a feeling of unity: though you can sense that these 30+ authors don't agree on all philosophical or social issues, they do seem to agree with the sentiment that religion has too large a footprint in Australian politics. Even in Australia, a relatively secular country when compared to the US, religious leaders get their way with governments far more often than is justified. In particular, there is a sense, throughout the book's 400-odd pages, of serious concern about the promotion of religion by the Howard and Rudd governments, with Julia Gillard now following suit (the essays took their final form recently enough for some to comment at least briefly on the transition to Gillard as Australia's prime minister).
If I must choose a favourite contribution, it is that of an author with whom I'm not always in agreement: John Wilkins. Wilkins' discussion of secularism, and particularly the benefits that it offers both believers and non-believers, comports very much with my own views. Where we might differ is that I don't think secularism is enough; I think it's important to subject the actual truth-claims of religion to some pretty harsh critique and that this complements the arguments for secularism. However, Wilkins doesn't get into that - his piece is purely a defence of secularism, in the sense of governments making decisions for worldly, non-religious reasons. He presents the case clearly, strongly, and without compromise.
In all, this is a book that I'm pleased to have on my shelf and proud to have contributed to.
Saturday, November 06, 2010
Sorry about the blog break
Life has just caught up with me in the last couple of days. Normal transmission will, I hope, resume tomorrow (and I'll get to a backlog of comments in moderation later today).
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