Existence of Something

I learn today via Mark Thwaite at ReadySteadyBlog that Daniel Hind's Threat to Reason, in which I expressed an interest in my last post, is due out from Verso in May. Mark has touched on these topics a few times and has actually read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. He found it "blunt yet shrill". In a brief post on it a couple of weeks ago, he wrote:

...it just made me think Dawkins was a bit of a scary megalomaniac. As an atheist, it didn't convince me as a book, as an argument, but then neither have any of the religious responses to it that I've read. Often these argue well enough for the existence of something, i.e. something spiritual (we can't empirically prove or find love, but we know it exists), but none argue convincingly for the specificity of their own very particular brand of religion. Dawkins doesn't get out of the double-bind of needing a prime mover, but equally that is no justification for thinking e.g. that Christ is the way to salvation, nor that "we" need saving. It is a huge leap from arguing that there is "something out there" to being able to posit that your own version of faith is any kind of truth.

Simple Division

At the end of the Lenin's Tomb post I cited in my last post, Lenin briefly informs us about an upcoming book called The Threat to Reason, by Daniel Hind, who is new to me. Lenin points to Hind's blog of the same name. He's only posted four times since launching the blog in November of last year, but what he's written so far has caught my interest. From his first post:

The book - and this blog - will look at the ways in which the ideas and prestige of the eighteenth century Enlightenment are used in contemporary political debate. In particular I want to show how attempts to define Enlightenment primarily as a conflict between reason and faith can function as a form of enchantment, and distract us from the work of understanding the world.

And from his second:

There has been a spate of books in recent years that have sought to set out a simple division between faith and reason in which faith is understood as being a commitment to Biblical (or Koranic) literalism and reason is a commitment to materialism and the values of the Enlightenment. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and The End of Faith by Sam Harris adopt this central organizing division.

We will have plenty of opportunities to examine this style of thought in the months ahead [...]. But right now I just want to ask whether if what Dawkins and Harris say is true - that fundamentalist religion poses a unique and autonomous threat to secular society, even to the survival of mankind - their response is a sensible one. (They are quite wrong of course, let's be clear about that, but like I say, we have plenty of time).

Of course, I've been trying to talk about some of these issues here, in my own stumbling way. I've been afraid that I might have painted myself in a corner--but I guess that's a good thing about blogs; I can start over if I want to. Anyway, I've disagreed with Dawkins and others about the "problem of religion"--even as an atheist, who agrees on what evolutionary science tells us about the likelihood of there being a God. (I am aware that I have already in effect repudiated my earlier linguistic argument against saying "I am an atheist". Holding myself to saying "atheistic" all the time, I quickly noticed, would make for some awkward writing. The point still holds, however, that my atheism does not define who I am, nor do I consider it terribly interesting.) Hind says in passing here what I've been wondering about but haven't gotten around to discussing: even if Dawkins and Harris and so on were right, their approach to the problem seems remarkably wrong-headed, even stupid.

I strongly suspect I'll be reading Hind's book when it appears. And of course, I'll be returning to this theme yet again here.

Effacing Politics

One thing I've been meaning to write about has been the debate surrounding the publication of Richard Dawkins' latest book, The God Delusion. Rather, I've been thinking about some issues that have been brought to the fore with the publication of the book and the subsequent debate. People have been talking about this book for a few months now, so I'm a little late in jumping in, but the topic is of particular interest to me.

I am atheistic. I choose that phrasing over "I am an atheist", because it's an aspect of me; it doesn't define who or what I am. In fact, for most of the time, it's not terribly important to me. Except as defined as an absence, not believing in a god has had little bearing on my life. It never really has. It could be said that this absence is crucial, and thus has had bearing. Fair enough. I mean to say only that I have generally not defined myself by my atheism. As a child, I remember attending church and enjoying Sunday School. It was fun to learn things, and there was candy involved. But I never felt any religious faith, or subscribed to any religious belief, two different things in my view. We stopped attending church altogether when I was still quite young, and when my mother found a new church she liked, I did go with her fairly often, but it didn't mean anything to me. Somehow, my general sense of things was that religion was rare, and historical. Naively, I saw it like racism and sexism: each generation would be less racist, less sexist, less religious than the last. Obviously I wasn't paying that much attention. And in this formulation, of course, "religious" is clearly a pejorative. By the time I got to college I was more vocally atheist and was confronted for the first time, really, with friends who believed in God and who didn't believe in evolution.

Returning to Richard Dawkins. I have not read The God Delusion. I don't intend to. (If I had all the time in the world, I'd love to read the book and be able to discuss it in specific detail, but I don't.) So, I won't be discussing the book as such, though I may refer to what some have said about the book, but only because the ensuing arguments are of interest to me. I'd read some anti-religion articles by Dawkins in recent years (like this one, immediately post-9/11), so when I heard that this book was to be published, my reaction was to roll my eyes. In my opinion he has the problem wrong and is not likely to convince anyone.

I have read other Dawkins books. I've said before that he used to be something of an intellectual hero to me. The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and Climbing Mount Improbable are all excellent popular science books: cogent explanations of how the theory of evolution explains things. I agree with Dawkins that "the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design", as the subtitle to The Blind Watchmaker has it. I take this further to imply that there is no Creator. I took this still further and rather urgently claimed that acceptance of the theory is incompatible with belief in God (and here I was necessarily thinking of the God of the Jewish/Christian/Islamic traditions). For, if there is no design, then what does the Creator do?

The problem here, I think, is that those of us who are atheistic tend to hew to an excessively rationalistic framework of thinking. If you're not thinking rationally, then you're by definition thinking irrationally, and being irrational is intellectually suspect. So the argument goes. (I know I'm going to have to spend some time unpacking what exactly I'm taking issue with here; unfortunately, it won't be in this post.)

We accept the fundamentalists' view of their religions as being the most accurate, because we want to nail down what religions are, and their versions are black and white, we can understand them, even if we understand them only to disagree, even violently so. For me to say, then, that an acceptance of the truth of the theory of evolution by definition conflicts with a consistent belief in God, is not only arrogant, but reduces the vast history of theological debate (about which I am anyway almost completely ignorant) to narrow issues of fundamentals, mere questions of right and wrong. Is it logical or isn't it? It also ignores the fact that people are quite capable of holding apparently contradictory thoughts in their minds, and believing them both, without their heads exploding. And, I think, it conceives of people as choosing their religious beliefs among all possible beliefs, and simply choosing irrationally. If only they could be shown how irrational their chosen beliefs are!

My ultimate purpose here is to say that politics and economics are more important than religion. The apparent increase in religious belief in recent decades is a function of politics and economics. And I think that liberal atheists are too often unwilling to recognize this. We get so worked up over the idiocies of religion, but it seems to me we have little notion of what kind of role religion actually plays in people's lives. In his post-9/11 article linked to above, Dawkins writes that "[r]eligion is . . ., of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East". It is on exactly this point that he's wrong. Attacking religion is attacking a symptom.

I've just gotten started on this theme, but I'm going to stop here today (I'm trying to get used to the obvious blog-idea that I don't need to have every post contain all my thoughts on a topic). My hope is to talk about it more in future posts and to link to various online debates about it. Let me leave off with a quote from the blog post at Voyou Desoeuvre that prompted me to start addressing this topic today. In it, Voyou recounts waking up to the audio of Dawkins' The Root of All Evil? show. Voyou thinks of Marx's The German Ideology and writes:

I heard Dawkins’s report from Jerusalem, which got me thinking about what’s wrong, and kind of pernicious, about his approach.

It’s not just the inaccuracy, although it’s irritating to hear a conflict between secular nationalisms described as if it were a religious conflict. The problem is that by so describing the conflict, Dawkins effaces the political issues: the dispossession of the Palestinians, the colonialist history of Zionism, and the mobilization of fundamentalism as a response to neo-liberalism in Israel and corruption in Palestine. Any consideration of power drops out of the equation for Dawkins, for whom the question is simply one of incorrect beliefs. The same occurs with militant atheism’s positioning of itself as an alternative to Bush simply because of an intellectual disagreement with Bush’s fundamentalist Christian “base.” The criticism of religion substitutes elucidations for political struggle, and thereby serves as an apologia for the political and social conditions that underly religious belief (the whole first section of the German Ideology, which I only looked up due to half-remembering that bit about “phrases,” is really extraordinarily sharp as a criticism of contemporary liberal atheism).

He makes a number of excellent points here, all of which I agree with (except the German Ideology part, but only because I haven't read it yet), and all of which I plan to discuss further.

Ok. That's it for now.

See also:

This interview with Dawkins at Salon.

Terry Eagleton's much talked about review of Dawkins' book in the London Review of Books.

Marilynne Robinson's very interesting review in Harper's.

These two heated threads at The Valve (which address the Eagleton review, among other things), as well as this later thread, which is perhaps more heated, and which specifically references this review at The Times Literary Supplement.

And a fascinating exchange at this earlier Voyou Desoeuvre post (this thread also addresses the Eagleton review, and A.C. Grayling).

On Science and Politics

ReadySteadyBook has a fascinating interview with Chris Knight, professor of anthropology at The University of East London. First, on Chomsky, the "genius" who "should be overthrown":

The problem is that Chomsky's separation of science and politics is a myth. His own science - his linguistics - is political through and through. Chomsky defines language as not social. He defines it as an object inside the individual head. He says it doesn't have any special communicative function - mostly, we use language just for privately thinking to ourselves. He says that the meanings of words are not socially negotiated but wired into the brain in advance as features of the human genome. In my view, to say all this is pure nonsense - stark, raving nonsense. But it is not politically neutral nonsense. To argue for such far-fetched positions is is to adopt an ideological stance - that of the liberal bourgeoisie. Chomsky is the most virulent imaginable opponent of social science in general and of Marxism in particular. Since the late 1950s, bourgeois hostility towards Marxism in western intellectual life has found its most extreme and articulate champion in Noam Chomsky.

Conversely, it is a myth to say that Chomsky's political activism is unconnected with is science. The connection is intimate. Today's most imaginative and effective political activists are constantly engaged with the findings of environmental scientists, earth scientists, economists, anthropologists, historians and others. Could we even imagine today's environmentalist movement without the brilliant environmental science which lies behind it? Against this background, it is positively uncanny to find how little science appears in Chomsky's writings as a political critic. We find no economic analyses, no sociological analyses, no application of theories or findings from any part of the social sciences or humanities. All we find are quotes from newspapers or reports of various kinds, telling a journalistic story. I personally tend to find Chomsky's stories accurate - more accurate than most. I admire his political integrity and courage. But I am suspicious about Chomsky's overall role. My view is that the ruling class are perfectly happy to have Chomsky writing this kind of thing. It doesn't frighten them in the least because it doesn't threaten them - Chomsky goes out of his way to construct and represent himself as a lone voice. In particular, when wearing his activist hat, he ostentatiously removes his scientific one. What would upset the ruling class would be the reverse strategy. What would upset them would be for the world community of scientists to become active while the activists became scientific. Our two communities might then hope to converge on a shared language of self-emancipation and revolutionary change. Chomsky has devoted his life to obstructing any such development. This is why I think he should be overthrown.

And then on Richard Dawkins:

Among other things, the [selfish gene] theory explains conflict: conflict between the sexes, between parents and offspring and so on. It shows how conflicting strategies arise, and how conflicting interests drive evolutionary change. For Marxists, these should be familiar themes. Most of the middle class 'left' refused to read further than the title of Dawkins' book. Failing to grasp the author's entire point, they imagined him to be justifying capitalism, racism and so forth. Nothing could have been further from the truth. It was precisely selfish gene theory which exploded the earlier idea that natural selection pitted 'race' against 'race'. The left's response to this scientific revolution was embarrassingly ignorant and self-destructive. In fact, it was a disgrace.

[...]

As an atheist and communist, I love Dawkins' hostility to religion. But as a Marxist, I think it is our job not just to condemn but to understand. [...] My problem with Dawkins is that he steers well clear of all theories which investigate the sexual, social and foraging strategies of evolving humans. Instead, he comes up with the idea that religion is a virus, like a computer virus. [...]

To explain religion, we need to go deeper. We need a theory which explains the evolutionary emergence of symbolic culture as a whole. Anyone who explores this topic in any depth is likely to come to discover intriguing details, such as the extraordinarily prominent ochre record. The first substance ever mined was red ochre. The first form of art was body-painting using this ochre. This behaviour has to be explained. The evolutionary anthropologist Camilla Power has come up with an explanation: the pigments were used in female initiation rites. The archaeologist Ian Watts (one of the world's leading specialists on the ochre record) has endorsed this explanation. One way or another, anyone who tries to explain the facts is likely to arrive at similar conclusions. The human revolution happened. Its outcome was an egalitarian society. I suspect that Richard Dawkins knows about these ideas, feels unsure about their political implications - and has decided not to investigate too deeply.

Chomsky and Dawkins are both sort of, well, not sacred cows certainly, but formative intellectual heroes of mine. With Chomsky, I still hold his political writings in the highest esteem. However, though I have always been generally interested in linguistics (and read with great interest popular books on language by Bill Bryson and Anthony Burgess), I've not read much of it, and Chomsky's writing on the topic I've found extremely hard to follow--even if, on the surface, what little I did understand seemed to make sense, as far as it went (especially as explicated in Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, a book I loved when I read it five or six years ago). Frankly, I basically took it for granted that his linguistic theories were valid. Certainly I was aware that not everyone agreed with his ideas, but I didn't spend much time looking into it. I noticed fierce oppostion to his linguistic theory online, at places like Language Hat, but I didn't know enough to judge for myself (still don't, really, though the criticisms have struck me as compelling). I have occasionally read articles about the disagreements he's had with philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, who tend to see all human traits as specifically selected for. Without getting into it too much here, I have found some of Chomsky's pronouncements on evolution and biology bizarre (like those noted here and here), but I have been sympathetic to the notion that not all traits would necessarily have been selected for, and that language could well have been one of them. Then, I read this article at ReadySteadyBook, which I only now notice is by the same Chris Knight, who argues convincingly that Chomsky's theories are incomprehensible and that what he does is effectively not science. That he's more Pope than Galileo.

Richard Dawkins was someone I was reading quite a bit of several years ago; I found The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker especially valuable. In recent years (especially since 9/11) most of what I've read by him has been article after article explaining yet again why religion is destructive and viral. I, too, am sympathetic to this attitude, but I find it unproductive. About the selfish gene theory, it seemed to me that people didn't want to deal with it. Most non-scientific references to it that I saw protrayed the theory as deterministic, which too often meant that the left dismissed it as reactionary, without looking beyond the title, as Knight has it. Yet when I read The Selfish Gene, I saw no reason to read the theory this way. I gather that it's commonly enough held that collectivization is "unnatural" or "against human nature". But I felt the book, in many ways, showed the opposite. Indeed, Dawkins all but said so at the end of his chapter on memes:

It is possible that yet another unique quality of man is a capacity for genuine, disinterested, true altruism. [...] ...even if we look on the dark side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight--our capacity to simulate the future in imagination--could save us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators.

So I think it's interesting that, in the interview, Knight, aside from chastizing the left here for not engaging with the theory, and with science in general, criticizes Dawkins for "steer[ing] well clear of all theories which investigate the sexual, social and foraging strategies of evolving humans"--for, effectively, also keeping politics and science separate. Coincidentally, earlier this year there was this excellent article in the Monthly Review, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Stephen Jay Gould's classic book, The Mismeasure of Man--"Debunking as Positive Science"--which concluded thus:

One of the most important lessons we can learn from Gould is that we should neither reject the ideal of seeking objective knowledge of the world nor assume that scientists operate in an objective manner, conveying the truths of nature unsullied by social preconceptions. [...] Since the scientific establishment remains dominated by those sympathetic to the concerns of the economic elite, debunking flawed research should be a central part of the left’s intellectual agenda. Radicals should not slip into the anti-intellectualism that Sokal exposed—intellectual dishonesty and fashionable nonsense in service of a just cause are dishonest and nonsense nonetheless. The rejection of reason will only serve to undermine the ability of the left to speak truth to power. We will be best served by sticking to the intellectual roots established by Marx, where socialism stands for a commitment to reason and fights the vapid dogma and pernicious ideology endlessly pedaled by the right. Gould’s work serves as an example of how the light of reason can lay bare the false claims of those who wish to perpetuate injustice and inequality and can lead us to a better understanding of the material world in which we live and struggle.

In light of this, encountering Chris Knight's work is, to me, revelatory. I look forward to finding and reading his books. ReadySteadyBlog also points us to this other, longer interview with him. Go read it. It's just as interesting as the one cited above, if not more so, and is, dare I say it, inspiring.