Terra Incognita: Here be Dragons

Raison d'etre

A blog has been described as a small clearing in the jungle of the World Wide Web. This particular jungle clearing is located in England and China. This is a good analogy always provided it is understood that most personal blogs are no more than a bug on a leaf, in a jungle the size of the Amazon and probably even less likely to be noticed. That said, blogging, together with viral video, is an exciting new phenomenon and Google should be congratulated for allowing us all to seed our memes free of charge. Of course, at its worst (and as everyone knows, there is a whole ocean of 'worst' in cyberspace), it is no more than sleep inducing 'junk-food' that will promote stupidity rather than obesity. At its best however, it is likely to have every tin-pot dictator and government opponent of free speech reaching for the aspirin. In the short run parts of the web may be blocked of course. In the long run however, the spooks and government apparatchiks from Riyadh to Peking must already know that they will have more success trying to hold back the wind. This weblog, in some very small way, hopes to add to that tidal wave of free speech making that 'long run' shorter by the moment.

As a child I used to put together scrapbooks, mostly filled with pictures of footballers, in my case Chelsea footballers, like Peter Osgood. A personal blog is really no more than a wonderful hi-tech, grown-up, scrapbook in which to file personal cuttings. Most blogs have a theme and whilst this one centres on almost any writing I find interesting its emphasis is on political journalism, media analysis and the law; which, in turn, is just a reflection of my own background in social sciences and law. So ultimately it is 'just a scrapbook'; a place to file fragments of writing and ideas of interest to me at any given moment, and often, any given mood. A place to file flotsam and jetsam from the web in relation to the stated theme together with footnotes and references on my wider interests of the moment; whether on music or film, or books, food, or just a bit of fun.

Of course, if you are reading this, it also serves another function, viz that of sharing information and ideas. So if you want to write in my scrapbook please send an e-mail. But it is my scrapbook and I will decide what goes in it. Gratuitous abuse will always be deleted unless it is also humerous ... and I will be the judge of that. If you do not like this weblog or the writers and journalists here irritate or offend you ... tough, do not read it. If you feel that strongly about it start your own weblog. Blogger is a free utility and it is a free world, at least for those of us fortunate enough to be able to communicate like this, without worrying about our doors being kicked down in the middle of the night.

The Theme

The brief period of political optimism following the end of the Cold War has been replaced, post 9/11, with a sense that western democracies are moving towards terra incognita or unknown territory as far as the advance of political democracy and the rule of law is concerned. That Here Be Dragons on the map of truth and universal human rights. This site is an attempt to gather together and publicise those writers who seek to chart this new unknown and to add links and commentary where there is something to add.

Its primary purpose is to make available in one location writing (that is often courageous given the current climate of intolerance in some quarters), by political and legal commentators, who place particular emphasis on exposing media bias and government distortion of otherwise clearly understood facts. It will strive to promote and comment upon writers who, in the post 9/11 world, have grasped that western societies born of the Enlightenment and rule of law, need to embark on a radical re-assertion and of their democratic history and culture, politics, legal traditions and, above all, the terrifying consequences of (in particular) Christian and Muslim fundamentalist religious belief. The latter summed up by perfectly by H. L Mencken, when he wrote that 'Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration: courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.' Many of these writers and commentators would, justifiably, claim to have been doing this long before 9/11. Others, like Nick Cohen for example, have come around to such a world-view more recently.

In the West, faced with convulsions over Islamist fundamentalism, some governments have displayed an extreme political and moral relativism. In terms of a political response, they have begun to roll back many historic, settled legal principles, human rights and freedoms including, increasingly, free speech. Under the smokescreen of the 'war on terror' on the one hand combined with farcical attempts, by way of supposed mitigation, to legislate in favour of multiculturalism or against 'hate crime' on the other, the criminal statue books are continually added to.

This has resulted in increased powers for the nanny state to determine peoples' lives. The fact that the political establishment (and even the current head of the Commission for Racial Equality in the UK), is now questioning the wisdom of multiculturalism, does not mean that the legislative breaks are being applied to the statutory coddling of almost any minority with a claim to victimisation. On the contrary, police powers, undreamed of prior to 9/11, are used not to prevent the London tube bombings, but to provide for the arrest and prosecution of an Oxford undergraduate for calling a policeman's horse 'gay'. This is not just police stupidity. Lawyers at the Crown Prosecution Service spent 8-months and £20,000 prosecuting a 10-year-old schoolboy for racially aggravated assault. His crime? Calling another boy a 'Paki bastard' and tapping him on the arm in the school playground. Magistrates' eventually handed down an 'absolute discharge' on a guilty plea to common assault.

This blog will promote those writers and commentators who are unafraid to say that the ‘king has no clothes’ and who do not go along with the current fashion for infantile anti-Americanism and anti-Semitic chic. This is the sine qua non of their work and this site. Writers who, whilst recognising that the world is undoubtedly a complex place, nonetheless reject the idea that it is divided between many equally valid ideologies and philosophies. On the contrary, in any rational political sphere intelligible political facts clearly exist. Human rights and fundamental freedoms are universal and cannot be excluded by any ideological interpretation of reality. In this sense most writers here would oppose philosophical and political relativism in all its forms in particular where democracy and freedom of speech are threatened. They regard as axiomatic the fact that there are democratic political systems, theologies and ideologies that accept and espouse universal truths and moral values and those that do not. No amount of media objectivity should be allowed to disguise fascism, despotism and fundamentalist tyranny as merely an alternative political system, religion or ideology. There may be books to write about Chechnya for example but, ex cathedra, there are not two sides to any discussion about Beslan. There is right and there is wrong tout court. Two words very easily understood in any language, even by the perpetrators.

These writers robustly assert that at there should be no ‘no-go’ areas writing in defence of democracy and human freedoms and that terra incognita can be mapped and the dragons removed from the chart.

Writers & Journalists

For want of a better term, most of the writers, together with the views expressed here, might be labelled conservative. Some would accept the description as a compliment. Others would certainly reject it. Some are indeed ‘neo-cons’ in the sense that many were former socialists in Europe or liberals and democrats in the US and were new to conservatism. Others may still wish to regards themselves as liberals and a declining few even socialists or at least 'leftists', whatever that might mean in 2011. In more important respects the labels are irrelevant as all these commentators, however they choose to describe themselves, share a common objective of opposing populist political views, limits on freedom of speech and, simplistic ideological interpretations of the world. Indeed, most would accept that the concepts of left and right no longer hold any serious political meaning since the fall of the Berlin wall and certainly not since 9/11.

Media Analysis

The world’s major mass-media organisations such a the BBC, CNN and the Murdock empire have often shown themselves to be incapable of avoiding craven bias, timid ideological mediocrity and on occasion straightforward dishonesty when it comes to reporting world events, particularly in the Middle East and China. That is not to say that all individuals within these media organisations are biased or dishonest. Indeed, many of those writers and commentators highlighted on this site are regular contributors to their various websites, newspapers and journals. What is self-evident however, is that apparent editorial objectivity can lead to a grave distortion of the facts. We have come to expect spin from governments, particularly western governments. However, the BBC and other major media organisations need to understand that in reporting world events, balance and objectivity (often no more than euphemisms for political correctness and spin), may never be substituted for the truth. The recognition that legitimate questions might be asked of American or Israeli foreign policy, for example, does not require 'balance' by enquiring of every Islamist psychopath with a death wish and a nail bomb strapped to his waist, whether or not he might have a justifiable political grievance. China and some American States favour the death penalty for certain statutory crimes following due process. True, that 'due process' may be questionable, particularly in China, but there is no moral equivalence with the kidnap and brutal murder of Daniel Pearl or Kenneth Bigley and then filming their heads being sawn-off before posting the obscenity on the Internet.

Media objectivity or balance should never make a terrorist an 'insurgent'. The intellectual and moral bankruptcy of this position has been documented time and again (see here). For example, while the BBC have no difficulty referring to the London tube bombers as terrorists, albeit only for only a short time, they describe those responsible for blowing up a bus in Jerusalem, 'packed with doctors and nurses from a local hospital', as 'militants from Islamic Jihad'.

This blog, in some small way, hopes to highlight and promote the work of those writers who have no difficulty comprehending this simple fact.

Post Script. By way of a little light relief (this is only a personal blog after all), my obsessions a la mode are represented in the links and posts that self-evidently fall outside the main scope of this site. In respect of these current 'enthusiasms', the author reserves the right to change his mind habitually and to be as faddish, temperamental, contrary and as hypocritical as he damned well pleases.

Terra Incognita

In the Name of Honour

An Essay in Memory of Pamela Bone

By Clive James

In February 2005 the Australian journalist Pamela Bone, already close to her death from cancer, published an article in the Melbourne Age entitled “Where are the Western Feminists?” Some of us would still like to know.

The immediate spur to Pamela Bone’s article had been the piercing silence from Western feminists on the subject of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s condemnation of how women were being treated in the culture of Islam. In asking her question, Pamela Bone already knew why the Western feminists were saying so little. They were saying little not just about Islam, but about Hinduism or any other culture which, when the behaviour of its more extreme groups towards women attracts criticism, bridles as if it is being attacked as a whole. Of all the liberal democracies, Australia is the one where the idea is most firmly entrenched among the local intelligentsia that the culture of the West is the only criminal, all other cultures being victims no matter what atrocities they might condone even within their own families.

Perhaps the most successful example of how a western liberal democracy can absorb migrant diasporas into its social texture, Australia would have reason to vaunt itself as a multicultural society if the supposedly universal unhappiness of the Aboriginals did not, in the eyes of its guilty intelligentsia, make the claim seem empty. But in Australia multiculturalism is not only a social aim, largely attained. It is also an ideology, in which form, to borrow Pascal Bruckner’s useful phrase, it becomes the racism of the anti-racists. Australian multiculturalist ideologues will call anyone a racist who dares to suggest that another culture than the one in which they flourish might have aspects more repellent than their own. And it was just such accusations that Pamela Bone heard ringing in her ears when she made her exit.

The essay you are reading now has its own history, which will probably be part of its subject, because I have nothing original to say on the matter. Indeed that was why I could never seem to get the thing written. That there were countries in the world where the culture visited hellish violence on women even when their governments professed a measure of equality, and that these governments were unlikely to temper the psychopathic inclinations of the culture unless there was a measure of democracy sufficient to separate the state from theocratic pressure: these conclusions seemed obvious. The only mystery was why so few female intellectuals seemed willing to reach them.

Pamela Bone was still very much alive when I began making sketches for this essay back in the first year of the decade, before the successful attack on the World Trade Center. Her cancer had already been diagnosed but she was fighting it hard and had definitely not stopped writing. Indeed she was producing some of her most adventurous things. She had made the inherent conflict between feminism and multiculturalism one of her subjects.

To do so took bravery, especially in Australia, where the multiculturalist ideology – as opposed, often directly opposed, to the reasonable approval of multiculturalism as a desirable form of social organization -- is not just a consensus, as I have said, but often thought to be fundamental to a liberal position, and therefore not to be questioned. The distinguished writer Helen Garner had been similarly daring when she raised the possibility that the occasional woman might be evil enough to falsely accuse a man of sexual harassment – a conjecture on Garner’s part which drew the wrath of all those legions of Australian female pundits who seemed honestly to believe either (a) that if the occasional innocent man should get locked up it would be a small price to pay for the sure punishment of those men who were guilty, or (b) all men were guilty. Like Helen Garner, if on a less celebrated scale, Pamela Bone was a fine enough writer to make the onlooker toy with the possibility that these matters vital to women were being debated among them.

But the onlooker needed to overlook the fact that such independent voices were few, whether in Australia or anywhere else. And as the decade wore on, the number did not notably increase, especially in the matter of the treatment of women within the culture of Islam, and especially in the matter of honour crimes. My own impression, drawn over the course of these past ten years or so, is that the amount of protest about honour crimes from Western female thinkers has diminished as the news about honour crimes has proliferated, and has steadily shrunk towards nothing even as news about honour crimes among immigrant populations in the Western countries has become more conspicuous.

In Britain especially, the worse it gets, the fewer objections we hear from writers in the serious newspapers. (In the unserious ones, the stories run all the time, as a kind of snuff video on a loop: but the purpose there is to play on fears about immigration in general, and not to highlight a failing in the law.) A serious British journalist such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who promotes the difficult double programme of wanting Islam respected and honour crimes condemned, would not have to be quite so brave if she had more-back-up. But the feminists do not want to know, or, if they know, prefer to do nothing. This was certainly a conclusion I didn’t want to draw, because I never wanted to publish this essay, or even to make much more than a start on writing it. I wanted women to do the job. After seventy years of hard training I had finally accepted that it was not a woman’s job to wash my socks, but I still thought that if there were thousands of madmen all over the world ready to murder or mutilate their own daughters for imaginary crimes, then it was a woman’s job to object in the first instance, always provided that she was free to do so. On the whole, however, it hasn’t happened.

Some people keep a file of outrageous things they read in the newspapers, and sometimes those same people are eventually found dead among their heaps of clippings, having understandably decided that life is not worth going on with. Keen to avoid the same fate, I make a point of throwing almost everything away. But there is a paragraph I saw in 2001, before the twin towers were brought down, that I have never been able to get rid of. When I clipped it out in the first place, I knew it would be harder to lose than a bad dream. I would use the clipping as a marker in a work-book, and then deliberately lose the work-book in my inland sea of papers; but I always knew where the clipping was. I knew that it would go on sending out its beeping signal until I had summoned up the courage to write something about it. Perhaps the time has come. Anyway, here is the clipping, reduced to the form of a single quotation, with a credit for the speaker.

All women killed in cases of honour are prostitutes. I believe prostitutes deserve to die.

--- Abdul Karim Dughmi, former Minister of Justice in Jordan, quoted in the Sunday Times Magazine, July 8th, 2001.

The “former Minister of Justice” no longer held his post, but he was still prominent enough in public life to have his opinion quoted. A key part of his belief system, it emerged, centred on the principle that if a girl is raped, her father is honour-bound to kill her. At the time, as clueless as anyone else in the West, I was not yet fully familiar with the idea of taking revenge on the victim. Later on, when it finally emerged that a feature of the conflict in the Balkans during the 1990s was the reluctance of Muslim girls who had been raped to tell their own families, I woke up. But even while still asleep I was impressed by what this man had said, mainly because of the eminence of the post he had held, and in which country. The fact that this principle could be enunciated at all by any man not clinically insane attained a special piquancy in the context of Jordan, then as now held to be a centre of enlightenment within the Arab world. Stung to attention, I started to keep an eye on the news coming out of Jordan.

I should say straight away, when it comes to Jordan, that there was, and still is, reason for hope. Obviously Queen Rania has never believed any of this lethal nonsense, and she has often verbally condemned it as an anachronism. Even saying that much couldn’t have been easy, but she has contrived to back her words with action, and it was partly due to her influence that the notorious Article 340 of the Jordanian criminal code was at last modified so that men who murder women on a point of honour no longer automatically walk free straight away. But they still walk free soon enough to make you wonder if an enlightened ruling elite, and even a reformed justice system, really has much chance against the ingrained prejudices of the culture. We know that the present monarch, Abdullah II, and his elegant wife have done what they can for the liberal reform of the Jordanian system of justice. But we also know that they would be receiving less praise for their bravery and originality if the Jordanian system of justice had been less recalcitrant. Or, to cut the irony before it starts softening the enormity, it is a fair bet that the culture, in Jordan, goes on treating women like dirt.

Upon investigation this proves to be the case. In Jordan, to expiate the shame brought upon a family by loss of honour, a woman is murdered every two weeks. Not only the crime of having been raped brings loss of honour. A rumour can bring loss of honour. Apparently there is little to encourage fathers in these cases to the consideration that there might be loss of honour involved in murdering their helpless daughters. The King and Queen have tried: they have spoken out for reform. The lawyer Asma Kadaar and a journalist on The Jordan Times have bravely devoted a good part of their working lives to the cause of sanity – particularly bravely because they are both female, and thus potentially subject to the self-righteous vengefulness of any mentally challenged male with honour on his mind. These advocates of elementary justice are people of influence, but they count for little against the collective dementia of the culture.

One says “the culture” because one is not allowed to say “the state”. The state, we are assured, isn’t really like that. Theoretically, in Jordan, a father must go to gaol for killing his daughter. And so he does, but he is out again soon enough to be in good shape for a hero’s welcome. In response to the influential liberal voices, the Jordanian system of justice is currently, in August 2009, tying itself in yet another series of knots as it strives to assure the world that the courts will not admit a plea about “honour” when it comes to murder committed “in a fit of fury caused by an unlawful act on the part of the victim”, and that a convicted murderer in such a case, instead of being let out after three months – six months in severe cases -- might have to serve the full term of two years. (A 29-year old man who stabbed his raped sister twelve times was sentenced to fifteen years but has just had his sentence halved. Will anyone be stunned when the sentence is halved again?) It seems to occur to nobody, not even the concerned royal family, that the sentencing policy is laughably unjust even when it is strictly applied. What a threat: if you murder your daughter because you think she has been raped you might very well go to gaol for months on end.

We are told that when it comes to a case of honour, Jordan is one of the more progressive Islamic communities. In Jordan, only one quarter of all homicides are cases of honour. In the Palestinian sectors of the West Bank and in Gaza, the proportion is two thirds. In Pakistan about a thousand women get killed every year, and a startling, if lesser, incidence of ritual murder is true wherever Pakistanis live in the outside world. When a girl in a British Pakistani community is set on fire by her brothers, or has her face ruined with acid by a rejected candidate for the role of husband, we hear about it in the newspapers, although seldom for long; but in Pakistan such incidents aren’t news at all. They happen three times a day. They are part of the culture. It was news in Britain when, on July 14, 2006, in London, a gifted Pakistani girl (her name was Sumari) was slain by her father, brother and cousin. It needed all of them to do it, because apparently she had to be stabbed eighteen times. Her crime had been to disobey them, and she died of the proof that they had been well worth disobeying. Taking it on the lam, the father – who, while thicker than any brick, had at least been smart enough to spot the lack of congruity between British law and his own beliefs – holed up in his land of origin, Pakistan, thus providing yet another statistic in one half of the two way traffic whereby potential victims, if they are lucky, hide out in the West, whereas perpetrators flee the West to hide out in the East. That two-way traffic should surely be enough by itself to define the nature of the horrible cultural interchange, which is mainly a matter of our culture failing to provide sufficient protection against the consequences of theirs.

I long ago lost count, just as I lost the clippings, of those occasions in which a local British police force could do no more than “warn” a woman whose life was in danger from the men around her. In late July 2009 the newspapers were featuring –but for not more than the usual few days – stories of a case in which a woman had been “warned” after the men around her poured acid down the throat of the man she had been seeing. The man ended up in hospital with his tongue destroyed, but it appears that the tongues of the police had been destroyed too, because a “warning” was the only help they could give, apparently for fear that the local immigrant community might take offence. There is seldom, apparently, much chance of “warning” the men in such cases that if they publicly avow violent intentions towards a woman they will be hauled up, and there is never any chance at all that such men will be expelled from the country. No Minister of Community Cohesion has yet said that all communities would have a better chance of cohering with each other if those communities whose beliefs about honour were contrary to the law of the land could change them.

By this time the words “community” and “culture” are starting to sound like what they are: weasel words for institutionalised sadism, which the naïve onlooker is likely to suspect might have something to do with the religion, whether it be Hindu, Sikh or Islamic. But at the mere mention of Islam, cue the experts: apparently these cases of honour have no justification in Sharia, and therefore honour crimes have nothing to do with the religion. In Sharia, four witnesses have to catch a pair of illicit lovers in flagrante before they can both be killed. We are supposed to be reassured by these rigorous requirements of sufficient evidence, and are thought to be niggling if we question the assumption that the death penalty is mandatory if the case is proved. The requirement that the culprits should be killed goes unexamined. No doubt, if it were examined, the community would be placed in danger, and the culture begin to fray. But surely, if moderate Islam is to hold its own against its extremist wings, then fraying, in that one respect at least, is exactly what the culture needs to do. There are more than a billion Muslims who are not engaged in jihad against the west, and not likely to be. We should try to remember just how few people are trying to kill us, even when they feel sorely provoked. But if the non-fanatical majority can’t find a voice to condemn the few among their fellows who see nothing wrong with killing their own women for imaginary crimes, then they either condone that attitude or are afraid of those who hold it: either way, not a very encouraging start towards the more liberal Muslim future that we have been promised.

If Jordan is progressive, you can imagine what things must be like elsewhere: except that you can’t imagine. Interviewed in our press, a Tunisian woman who dares to write about what is going on in her homeland clearly credits herself with the life expectancy of a snowflake on a hot stove. No wonder she is a lone voice. From Afghanistan, when the Taliban ruled, the reports were awful beyond belief. But we did better if we believed them, because it turned out that some of the Northern Alliance forces that replaced the Taliban were united only in their conviction that the Taliban were soft on women. Later on the Taliban came back to prominence and in the areas under their control things were re-established on the same plane of dementia as was the rule until just yesterday in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, where it was considered a mercy if, when a girl’s school was burned to the ground, the girls were not still inside it. At the time of writing, the Pakistani army has cleared the Taliban out of the Swat Valley, to the point where the streets where they used to dump the bodies of the punished are now full again of living people. But when the BBC interviews boy “fighters” who have been rescued from the Taliban’s suicide schools, the hoys have to be fully masked for their “protection.” It doesn’t sound as if the madmen have gone very far away, and judging by the fact that the BBC correspondent has only her face showing, the local men who theoretically aren’t insane might not be as sane as all that.

We had also better believe that where men alone decide what women’s rights are, the results are rarely good. Western liberal democracy, or a reasonable imitation of Western liberal democracy when it comes to the rule of law, is still the only kind of society we know about where women are not at the mercy of systematic injustice –that is, of justice conceived of and maintained as a weapon of terror. Where women are concerned, countries like Japan have climbed out of their dark histories to the exact extent that they have become Western-style liberal democracies, and no further. The same is true for the “Tiger” economies: the condition of women might have been ameliorated only because it has been thought expedient to subject theocratic pressures to the rule of law, but it doesn’t matter why the law is there, as long as it is there. The rule of law does not guarantee justice, but there is no justice without it. It has been one of the sour amusements provided by our feminist movement in its modern phase to watch its proponents trying to blink this fact.

At one point our feminists, getting frustrated as the pace slowed down in the home stretch to utopia, started telling us that other cultures (cultures practising clitoridectomy, for example) were more “authentic” in the respect of female sexual identity. A woman in Somalia, we were told, at least knows she is a woman. At one point my friend Germaine Greer could be heard propounding this view, but she has a good heart, and perhaps found reason to dial back on her fervour after Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has actually suffered a clitoridectomy in Somalia, pointed out that the practice, far from being a sign of authenticity, was a mechanism of repression. How Germaine Greer could ever, even momentarily, have thought anything different is a matter for study in a field that needs to be explored: the way Western intellectuals lose sight of elementary liberalism in the heat-haze of their own rhetoric.

In a free society, radical dissatisfaction is usually a condition of mind before it is a response to circumstances, so it has to go somewhere. As atomisation continues in the liberal democracies, the number of candidates for an irresponsible semi-intelligentsia continues to increase. They come from either wing, but are always more vociferous on the left, because capitalism provides the more blatant source of provocation. One can hardly blame them for that. What is striking is their capacity, once they run out of injustices in liberal democracy that they can blame on capitalism, to look for injustices in the rest of the world that they can blame on liberal democracy. In sub-Saharan Africa, especially, criminal states are regarded as victim states even when their sole concern is the victimisation of their own people. By now Bob Geldof seems ready to admit the possibility that he and President Mengistu of Ethiopia were in a symmetrical relationship. But Geldof is a long way ahead of most of his admirers. Food aid enthusiasts are still reluctant to believe that most of the money raised for Ethiopia was wasted.

But it was worse than wasted. It fuelled the engine of injustice, and the result of injustice, in Ethiopia and in any other African country that melts down, is invariably a situation in which the lot of women, already bad, gets worse. In those failed states where Islam is a factor, the sufferings of women seem to be even worse than in the others, but in the others it is bad enough to suggest that what we are talking about goes far beyond religion. An African state where men rule the roost is usually on its way to chaos, and the inevitable inference is that a fair shake for women is the only hope for a decent future. It is some encouragement to find that Barack Obama, whose influence is bound to count in Africa for the foreseeable future, seems to think the same. His excellent first book Dreams from My Father is ruled by the spirit of his mother, not his father. She is the responsible one. And as the Australian Aboriginal political thinker Noel Pearson has insisted, the right to responsibility is crucial. (Pearson, who argues that welfare for Aboriginals should be accompanied by a strict application of the law against abusive Aboriginal men, will no doubt become an object for execration among Australian intellectuals once they have finished collating the evidence that he is a CIA sleeper who was planted in Cooktown by a low-flying C-130 after he completed his training at Langley, Virginia.)

The other crucial requirement, surely, is for the pampered intelligentsia of the West to give up finally and forever on any notion that the Third World –for all its deprivations and perhaps because of them – is some kind of Eden in which countervailing values against the excesses of the West may be found. What may be found is more often a heap of dead bodies. Most of those get blamed on the West, too, but when half of the population of Rwanda sets out to murder the other half, with no recourse to Western technology except the metal to make machetes, the explanation starts looking thin. And always it is mandatory for the women to be raped as well as being chopped up, the only question in the minds of the men being about what order in which to do these things. No doubt the same sort of dialogue was going on somewhere in the mind of Fred West, but at least he found it advisable to hide the corpses.

It should be obvious that in Africa there is little hope without education and that any educational reform should emphasise the educating of women. We can’t be sure that the rise of women to political prominence, there or anywhere, will guarantee the beneficial modification of a monolithic state – Madame Mao, after all, was a product of the Chinese educational system – but we can be sure that any monolithic state which resists the very idea of educating women has no intention of liberalising itself. This principle holds true all the way up to – or down to, if you like – the level of Saudi Arabia, which even the West’s most ardently anti-Western feminists are ready to concede is an organized insult to their gender. (They would probably be less ready to concede this if Saudi Arabia were a declared enemy of the United States, but that’s by the way.) Where women are concerned – and where women are concerned we are all concerned, or should be --Saudi Arabia is such a horror show that it would constitute all on its own sufficient reason for the West to wean itself off oil, if only to deprive those untold thousands of idle princes and useless Koranic scholars of their endless supply of free money, large amounts of which are used in an export drive to flood the world with extremist doctrine on the intellectual level of the Sexcetera channel but with the virulence of botulism.

Countries in receipt of free money are under no compulsion to develop a real economy, and are thus less likely than ever to see even the material benefits, let alone the moral ones, of setting women free.

Similarly, to return to my main theme, it should be permissible to say that if Islamic leaders really believe that the Koran is a book of justice, they should enforce its spirit. It took Western civilization almost two millennia to do a decent job of enforcing the spirit of the New Testament, and part of the job consisted of imposing a separation between church and state, which couldn’t be done until the book was subjected to critical scrutiny, so that it could be taken as a source of benevolent metaphor rather than a set of inflexible precepts. In this regard, the enforced halt, in the 19th Century, to any critical scrutiny of the Islamic sacred writings had such deleterious effects that they were regretted even by Edward Said. But even in less enlightened times, the New Testament had one salient virtue: the merciful teachings of Jesus Christ. In Italy, perpetrators of crimes of passion were still being given a free pass well into my own day, but finally even the Catholic Church felt obliged to remind the legal system that the Son of God might have taken a dim view. It would be a blessing for Islam if its book featured a leading character imbued with the belief that when a woman is taken in adultery the best idea is not to throw stones at her unless you are certain of being without sin yourself. Jesus never said that if four of you catch her in the act, you can stone her to death.

But at least the Islamic holy writings say that Allah is merciful. Some kind of Islamic protestant reform might start from that assurance. In the case of Christianity, protestant reform started with pointing out what was actually written in the book, instead of concocted by a priesthood. Islamic protestants might have less to go on, and it could be that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is correct in wanting the whole religious edifice pulled down. But if we think that a reformation, rather than a dissolution, is more desirable, or at least more likely, then surely a movement that puts the emphasis back on the less fanatical interpretation of the texts that prevailed before the Wahabist aberration is one to be encouraged. Islamic protestants, however, seem more likely to come from among women than among men. Recent initiatives from putatively liberal thinkers among Islamic men have not been very convincing. Paul Berman has dealt in detail with the thought processes of Tariq Ramadan but really Nicholas Sarkozy had already done the necessary when, before he was President of France, he asked Ramadan on television whether he condemned the stoning of women, and Ramadan said that he could have no opinion until the imams had discussed the matter first. And Ali A. Allawi’s recent assurances that the Islamic civilization of the future will be ruled with the aid of a modernised Sharia sounded a lot less promising than his fond reminiscences of what the secular movement in some of the Arab countries used to be like when he was young enough to enjoy it.

A modernised Sharia? Even the Archbishop of Canterbury would have smelt a rat there. Instances of these nice noises from Islamic male thinkers could be multiplied, but even at their best they sound hollow beside those cries of protest arising from women where protesting is momentarily permitted without penalty, as it was when the admirable Wafa Sultan confronted a studio full of imams on Al Jazeera Television and told them where they could put their parade of clerical authority. But Wafa Sultan was safe in America when she said her piece, although the assembled male clerics would undoubtedly have thrown stones at her satellite image if there had been any stones available. It’s the cries of protest when protesting is not permitted, however, that really tell you what you need to know. The cries tend to be brief, and in the case of the girl we now all know as Neda Iran, we might not have heard the cry at all if she had not been so beautiful. The cult of glamour worked, for once, in the cause of justice. It was a crumb of comfort to offset against the depressing extent to which the cult of glamour has failed to work in the cause of Aung San Suu Kyi. She is beautiful too, and she is still alive: but she is wasting away.

What is to be done about this world-wide victimisation of women? What else but to condemn it? To do so, it would be a help to uncouple the question from all the other questions that look more pressing but are much more equivocal. Let me end where I started, in Australia, where Pamela Bone asked “Where are the Western feminists?” when she already knew the answer. They were hiding, under the guise of concerning themselves with those pressing questions. In Australia, which is in so many ways the ideal Western liberal democracy, and all the more instructive for being so, it is hard to find more than a handful of pundits, academics, journalists and broadcasters who do not hold the West responsible for world poverty, Israeli imperialism, genocide in Iraq, and the imminent heat death of what they insist on calling the Planet. On each point, they might well be less silly than they sound. They can make a case for their views. The feminists among them are especially eloquent in the condemnation of Western evils. But Pamela Bone wanted the feminists to speak out clearly about a simpler topic, which can be exemplified by a sign on the wall of a temple in Bali. NO MENSTRUATION WOMEN ALLOW. And the fact that there are men in charge of synagogues who feel the same is not really an answer, because except for the occasional ultra-orthodox head-case no man who runs a synagogue wants to burn the women inside it.

But there are men all over the world who really do want to kill women on a point of honour. What kind of honour is that? When are these dreadful men, and all who encourage and “understand” them, to be condemned as the homicidal maniacs they are? It could be said that there is not much point in condemning what we can’t change, but in our own countries, where it could be changed if the will existed, condemnation would surely be a useful first step, and it might help some of the countries of origin to at least see the point. Jordan, which is sensitive enough to Western opinion for its Queen to see the advantage of regular appearances in Hello magazine, has recently announced a shelter system for women running away from danger. While the women are in the shelter, the men in their families are given counselling. I suppose that’s a start, although some of the women might be wise not to take it on trust when they are told the danger is over. Daddy says it’s all right to come home now.

-- Standpoint, September 2009

Orlando Figis A Victory for Russian History

14 May 2009

Go to Orlando Figes website here

Check out 'The Whisperers' (stunning book) here

A St Petersburg court has confirmed that the police raid on Gulag archive Memorial was illegal. A small victory for historical justice was won in the courts of St Petersburg last week. In a final ruling on the police raid of the Memorial archives in St Petersburg, on 6 May the City Court of St Petersburg upheld the decision of an earlier court ruling that the raid carried out on 4 December had been illegal because no lawyer had been present for Memorial — a procedural violation under Russian law.

In legal terms, it is only a partial victory for Memorial, which had listed several other procedural violations in its appeal against the raid on 20 January. Politically it leaves the human rights and historical research society in no less danger of repression by the Russian state — for the City Court insisted that the raid was “justified”, although it was illegal.

But in practical terms it is a significant victory. For the court ruled that the 12 hard disks containing the archives — invaluable data on the history of repression in the Soviet Union — must now be returned to Memorial in St Petersburg.

The raid took place on 4 December, when a group of masked men from the Investigative Committee of the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office forced their way with police truncheons into the St Petersburg offices of Memorial, which for 20 years has pioneered the research of Stalinist repressions in the Soviet Union.

After a search the men confiscated hard-drives containing the entire archive of Memorial in St Petersburg: databases containing biographical information on more than 50,000 victims of repression; details about burial sites in the St Petersburg area; family archives, memoirs, letters, sound recordings and transcripts of interviews, photographs and other documents about the history of the Gulag and the Soviet Terror from 1917 to the 1960s (including the materials I collected with Memorial in St Petersburg for my book The Whisperers).

Among the confiscated items was the entire collection of materials in the Virtual Gulag Museum, a much-needed initiative to rescue precious artifacts, photographs and documents from more than a hundred small exhibits under threat across Russia (a country where there is just one substantial museum of the Gulag, Perm-36, in the Urals).

A spokesman for the Investigative Committee of the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office said the raid was part of an investigation of a criminal case involving the publication of an article inciting racial hatred in a local newspaper, Novy Peterburg, in June 2007. There is no evidence of any connection between Memorial and Novy Peterburg, or with the author of the article.

On 20 January, an appeal against the raid (which was carried out with a number of illegal irregularities) was upheld by the Dzerzhinsky Regional Court in St Petersburg, which ordered the return of all the confiscated materials to Memorial. On 24 February, this decision was overturned by the City Court of St Petersburg after an appeal by the Procuracy of St Petersburg.

It seems fairly clear that the aim of the raid was to intimidate Memorial, which has long been the target of political attacks by the Russian government. The human rights wing of Memorial has been very critical of the Putin and Medvedev governments, particularly over Chechnya.

But the raid is also part of a broader ideological struggle over Soviet history and memory. It was timed to coincide with a large international conference entitled “Moscow on The History of Stalinism: Results and Problems of Study” — the first conference on such a scale. As if to underline the political motive of the raid, conference delegates were given complimentary copies of a special issue of Russkii Zhurnal (Russian Journal), On the Politics of Memory, in which there were two vicious attacks on Memorial, one by Gleb Pavlovsky, the journal’s editor and a presidential adviser, in an article entitled Bad with Memory – Bad with Politics.

Russkii Zhurnal aims to create an intellectual base for Putin’s pseudo-democracy. The attacks on Memorial are part of a broader ideological campaign led by figures close to the Kremlin for the rehabilitation of Stalin. The aim is not to deny Stalin’s crimes but to emphasise his achievements as the builder of the country’s “glorious Soviet past”.

At a conference in June 2007, Putin called on Russia’s schoolteachers to portray the Stalin period in a more positive light. It was Stalin who made Soviet Union great, who won the war against Hitler, and his “mistakes” were no worse than the crimes of western states, he said. Textbooks dwelling on the Great Terror and the Gulag have been censored; historians attacked as “anti-patriotic” for highlighting Stalin’s crimes.

The presidential administration has promoted its own textbook, The Modern History of Russia, 1945-2006: A Teacher’s Handbook. According to one of its authors, the Kremlin propagandist Pavel Danilin, its aim is to present Russian history “not as a depressing sequence of misfortunes and mistakes but as something to instill pride in one’s country. This is precisely how teachers must teach history and not smear the Motherland with mud.” Danilin is a close associate of Gleb Pavlovsky and writes frequently for Russkii Zhurnal.

Memorial in St Petersburg will now begin the lengthy technical process of checking through the 12 confiscated disks to find out whether they have suffered any damage or loss of material while they were in the hands of the police.

In a statement announcing the return of the hard disks, Tatiana Kossinova of Memorial thanked supporters from around the world, who signed letters and petitions in their thousands protesting against the raid. Thanks are due to all those who signed the petition on Index on Censorship. “This is our common victory,” Kossinova said.

Perhaps our victory goes to show that the rule of law can be made to work in Russia when the world is watching it.

06 August 2009

The Strange Case of Francis Collins

August 5, 2009.

Sam Harris

[Author’s Note: My recent op-ed in the New York Times, in which I questioned the appointment of Francis Collins as head of the NIH, inspired a fair amount of discussion in the media and on the Internet. As many of Collins’ defenders do not seem to be fully acquainted with his beliefs, or take it for granted that others won’t be, I have written a longer essay on the subject. While most of this material is new, a few passages were previously published.]

It is widely claimed that there can be no conflict, in principle, between science and religion because many scientists are themselves “religious,” and some even believe in the God of Abraham and in the truth of ancient miracles. Even religious extremists value some of the products of science—antibiotics, computers, bombs, etc.—and these seeds of inquisitiveness, we are told, can be patiently nurtured in a way that offers no insult to religious faith.

This prayer of reconciliation goes by many names and now has many advocates. But it is based on a fallacy. The fact that some scientists do not detect any problem with religious faith merely proves that a juxtaposition of good ideas/methods and bad ones is possible. Is there a conflict between marriage and infidelity? The two regularly coincide. The fact that intellectual honesty can be confined to a ghetto—in a single brain, in an institution, in a culture, etc—does not mean that there isn’t a perfect contradiction between reason and faith, or between the worldview of science taken as a whole and those advanced by the world’s “great,” and greatly discrepant, religions.

What can be shown by example is how poorly religious scientists manage to reconcile reason and faith when they actually attempt to do so. Few such efforts have received more public attention than the work of Francis Collins. At the time of this writing, Collins seems destined to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health. One must admit that his credentials are impeccable: he is a physical chemist, a medical geneticist, and the former head of the Human Genome Project. He is also, by his own account, living proof that there is no conflict between science and religion. In 2006, Collins published a bestselling book, The Language of God, in which he claims to demonstrate “a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony” between 21st-century science and Evangelical Christianity. Let it be known that “consistency” and “harmony” can be in the eye of the beholder.

In fact, to read The Language of God is to witness nothing less than an intellectual suicide. It is, however, a suicide that has gone almost entirely unacknowledged: The body yielded to the rope; the neck snapped; the breath subsided; and the corpse dangles in ghastly discomposure even now—and yet, polite people everywhere continue to celebrate the great man’s health.

Dr. Collins is regularly praised by his fellow scientists for what he is not: he is not a “young earth creationist,” nor is he a proponent of “intelligent design.” Given the state of the evidence for evolution, these are both very good things for a scientist not to be. But as director of the institutes, Collins will have more responsibility for biomedical and health-related research than any person on earth, controlling an annual budget of more than $30 billion. He will also be one of the foremost representatives of science in the United States. For this reason, it is important to understand Collins’ religious beliefs as they relate to scientific inquiry.

Here is how Collins, as a scientist and educator, currently summarizes his understanding of the universe for the general public (what follows are a series of slides, presented in order, from a lecture that Collins gave at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008):

Slide 1

Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.

Slide 2

God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.

Slide 3

After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced “house” (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the Moral Law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.

Slide 4

We humans use our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.

Slide 5

If the Moral Law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?

Is it really so difficult to perceive a conflict between Collins’ science and his religion? Just imagine how scientific it would seem if Collins, as a devout Hindu, informed his audience that Lord Brahma had created the universe and now sleeps; Lord Vishnu sustains it and tinkers with our DNA (in way that respects the law of karma and rebirth); and Lord Shiva will eventually destroy it in a great conflagration.

It is worth recalling in this context that it is, in fact, possible for a brilliant scientist to destroy his career by saying something stupid. James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, a Nobel laureate, and the original head of the Human Genome Project, recently accomplished this feat by asserting in an interview that people of African descent appear to be innately less intelligent than white Europeans. A few sentences, spoken off the cuff, resulted in academic defenestration: lecture invitations were revoked, award ceremonies cancelled, and Watson was forced to immediately resign his post as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Watson’s opinions on race are disturbing, but his underlying point was not, in principle, unscientific. There may very well be detectable differences in intelligence between races. Given the genetic consequences of a population living in isolation for tens of thousands of years it would, in fact, be very surprising if there were no differences between racial or ethnic groups waiting to be discovered. I say this not to defend Watson’s fascination with race, or to suggest that such race-focused research might be worth doing. I am merely observing that there is, at least, a possible scientific basis for his views. While Watson’s statement was obnoxious, one cannot say that his views are utterly irrational or that, by merely giving voice to them, he has repudiated the scientific worldview and declared himself immune to its further discoveries. Such a distinction would have to be reserved for Watson’s successor at the Human Genome Project, Dr. Francis Collins.

Early in his career as a physician, Collins encountered a woman suffering from severe angina who appeared to take great comfort in her faith. She put the young doctor on the spot by asking him what he believed. This question shook Collins to his core. He says, “suddenly all my arguments seemed very thin, and I had the sensation that the ice under my feet was cracking.” Collins assures us that up until this moment he had been a staunch atheist.

How something breaks often says a lot about what it was. Collins’s claim to have been an atheist seems especially suspect, given that he does not understand what the position of atheism actually entails. For instance:

If God is outside of nature, then science can neither prove nor disprove his existence. Atheism itself must therefore be considered a form of blind faith, in that it adopts a belief system that cannot be defended on the basis of pure reason. (Collins, 2006, p.165)

Elsewhere he says that of “all the possible worldviews, atheism is the least rational” (Ibid, p. 231). I suspect that this will not be the last time a member of our species will be obliged to make the following point (but one can always hope): disbelief in the God of Abraham does not require that one search the entire cosmos and find Him absent; it only requires that one consider the evidence put forward by believers to be insufficient. Presumably Francis Collins does not believe in Zeus. I trust he considers this skeptical attitude to be fully justified. Might this be because there are no good reasons to believe in Zeus? And what would he say to a person who claimed that disbelief is Zeus is a form of “blind faith” or that of all possible worldviews it is the “least rational”?

After being destabilized by his patient’s faith, Collins attempted to fill the God-shaped hole in his life by studying the world’s major religions. He admits, however, that he did not get very far with this research before seeking the tender mercies of “a Methodist minister who lived down the street.” In fact, Collins’ ignorance of world religion is prodigious. For instance, he regularly repeats the Christian talking point about Jesus being the only person in human history who ever claimed to be God (as though this would render the opinions of an uneducated carpenter of the 1st century especially credible). Collins seems oblivious to the fact that saints, yogis, charlatans, and schizophrenics by the thousands claim to be God at this very moment, and it has always been thus. Forty years ago, a very unprepossessing Charles Manson convinced a rather large band of misfits in the San Fernando Valley that he was both God and Jesus. (Should we consult Manson on questions of cosmology? He still walks among us—or at least sits—in Corcoran State Prison.) The fact that Collins, as both a scientist and as an influential apologist for religion, repeatedly emphasizes the silly fiction of Jesus’ singular self-appraisal is one of many embarrassing signs that he has lived too long in the echo chamber of Evangelical Christianity.

But the pilgrim continues his progress. Next, we learn that Collins’ uncertainty about the identity of God could not survive a collision with C.S. Lewis. The following passage from Lewis proved decisive:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—- on a level with the man who says He is a poached egg—- or else He would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Collins provides this text for our contemplation and then describes how it boosted him over the church transom:

Lewis was right. I had to make a choice. A full year had passed since I decided to believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ. (Ibid, p. 225)

It is simply astounding that this passage was written by a scientist with the intent of demonstrating the compatibility of faith and reason. While Collins argues for the rational basis of his faith, passages like this make it clear that he “decided” (his word) to believe in God for emotional reasons. And if we thought Collins’ reasoning could grow no more labile, he has since divulged that the waterfall was frozen into three streams, which put him in mind of the Holy Trinity.

It should be obvious that if a frozen waterfall can confirm the specific tenets of Christianity, anything can confirm anything. But this truth was not obvious to Collins as he “knelt in the dewy grass,” and it is not obvious to him now. Indeed, it does not seem to be obvious to the editors of Nature. This journal, which remains the most influential scientific publication on earth, praised Collins for engaging “with people of faith to explore how science — both in its mode of thought and its results — is consistent with their religious beliefs.” According to Nature, Collins was engaged in the “moving” and “laudable” exercise of building “a bridge across the social and intellectual divide that exists between most of US academia and the so-called heartlands.” And here is Collins, hard at work on that bridge:

As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as Creator; you are right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold fast to the conclusion that science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence; and you are right to hold fast to the certainty that the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted…. (Collins, 2006, p.178)

God, who is not limited to space and time, created the universe and established natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with Him. He also knew these creatures would ultimately choose to disobey the Moral Law. (Ibid, p. 200-201)

Imagine: the year is 2006; half of the American population believes that the universe is 6,000 years old; our president had just used his first veto to block federal funding for the most promising medical research on religious grounds; and one of the foremost scientists in the land had that to say, straight from the heart (if not the brain).

Collins has since started an organization called the BioLogos Foundation, whose purpose (in the words of its mission statement) is to demonstrate “the compatibility of the Christian faith with what science has discovered about the origins of the universe and life.” BioLogos is funded by the Templeton Foundation, a religious organization that, because of its astonishing wealth, has managed to purchase the complicity of otherwise secular scientists as it seeks to re-brand religious faith as a legitimate arm of science.[1]

Would Collins have received the same treatment in Nature if he had argued for the compatibility between science and witchcraft, astrology, or Tarot cards? Not a chance. In fact, we can be confident that his scientific career would have terminated in an inferno of criticism.[2]

As should come as no surprise, once the eyes of faith have opened, confirmation is everywhere. Here Collins considers whether to accept the directorship of the Human Genome Project:

I spent a long afternoon praying in a little chapel, seeking guidance about this decision. I did not “hear” God speak—in fact, I’ve never had that experience. But during those hours, ending in an evensong service that I had not expected, a peace settled over me. A few days later, I accepted the offer. (p. 119)

One hopes to see, but does not find, the phrase “Dear Diary” framing these solemn excursions from honest reasoning. Again we find a peculiar emphasis on the most unremarkable violations of expectation: Just as Collins had not expected to see a frozen waterfall, he had not expected an evensong service. How unlikely would it be to encounter an evensong service (generally celebrated just before sunset) while spending “a long afternoon praying in a little chapel”? And what of Collins’ feeling of “peace”? We are clearly meant to view it as some indication, however slight, of the veracity of his religious beliefs. Elsewhere in his book Collins states, correctly, that “monotheism and polytheism cannot both be right.” But doesn’t he think that at some point in the last thousand years a Hindu or two has prayed in a temple, perhaps to the elephant-headed god Ganesh, and experienced similar feelings of peace? What might he, as a scientist, make of this fact?[3]

There is an epidemic of scientific ignorance in the United States. This isn’t surprising, as very few scientific truths are self-evident, and many are deeply counterintuitive. It is by no means obvious that empty space has structure or that we share a common ancestor with both the housefly and the banana. It can be difficult to think like a scientist (even, we have begun to see, if one is a scientist). But it would seem that few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than religion.

Collins argues that science makes belief in God “intensely plausible”—the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of Nature’s constants, the emergence of complex life, the effectiveness of mathematics, all suggest to him that a “loving, logical, and consistent” God exists; but when challenged with alternate (and far more plausible) accounts of these phenomena—or with evidence that suggests that God might be unloving, illogical, inconsistent, or, indeed, absent—Collins declares that God stands outside of Nature, and thus science cannot address the question of His existence at all. Similarly, Collins insists that our moral intuitions attest to God’s existence, to His perfectly moral character, and to His desire to have fellowship with every member of our species; but when our moral intuitions recoil at the casual destruction of innocent children by, say, tidal wave or earthquake, Collins assures us that our time-bound notions of good and evil can’t be trusted and that God’s will is a mystery.[4]

Like most Christians, Collins believes in a suite of canonical miracles, including the virgin birth and literal resurrection of Jesus Christ. He cites N.T. Wright and John Polkinghorne as the best authorities on these matters, and when pressed on points of theology, he recommends that people read their books for further illumination. To give the reader a taste of this literature, here is Polkinghorne describing the physics of the coming resurrection of the dead:

If we regard human beings as psychosomatic unities, as I believe both the Bible and contemporary experience of the intimate connection between mind and brain encourage us to do, then the soul will have to be understood in an Aristotelian sense as the “form,” or information-bearing pattern, of the body. Though this pattern is dissolved at death it seems perfectly rational to believe that it will be remembered by God and reconstituted in a divine act of resurrection. The “matter” of the world to come, which will be the carrier of the reembodiment, will be the transformed matter of the present universe, itself redeemed by God beyond its cosmic death. The resurrected universe is not a second attempt by the Creator to produce a world ex nihilo but it is the transmutation of the present world in an act of new creation ex vetere. God will then truly be “all in all” (1Cor.15:28) in a totally sacramental universe whose divine infused “matter” will be delivered from the transience and decay inherent in the present physical process. Such mysterious and exciting beliefs depend for their motivation not only on the faithfulness of God, but also on Christ’s resurrection, understood as the seminal event from which the new creation grows, and indeed also on the detail of the empty tomb, with its implication that the Lord’s risen and glorified body is the transmutation of his dead body, just as the world to come will be the transformation of this present mortal world. [Polkinghorne JC (2003) Belief in God in an age of science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. pp. 22-23]

These beliefs are, indeed, “mysterious and exciting.” As it happens, Polkinghorne is also a scientist. The problem, however, is that it is impossible to differentiate his writing on religion—which now fills an entire shelf of books—from an extraordinarily patient Sokal-style hoax.[5] If one intended to embarrass the religious establishment with carefully constructed nonsense, this is exactly the sort of pseudo-science, pseudo-scholarship, and pseudo-reasoning one would employ. Unfortunately, I see no reason to doubt Polkinghorne’s sincerity. Neither, it would seem, does Francis Collins.

Even for a scientist of Collins’ stature, who has struggled to reconcile his belief in the divinity of Jesus with modern science, it all boils down to the “empty tomb.” Indeed, Collins freely admits that if all his scientific arguments for the plausibility of God were proven to be in error, his faith would be undiminished, as it is founded upon the belief, shared by all serious Christians, that the Gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true. For a scientist, Collins speaks with remarkable naïveté about the Gospel account being the “record of eyewitnesses.” Biblical scholars generally agree that the earliest Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, was written several decades after the events it purports to describe. Of course, no has access to the original manuscript of Mark, or of any of the other Gospels: rather, there are thousands of fragmentary copies of copies of copies, many of which show obvious errors or signs of later interpolation. The earliest of these fragments dates to second century, but for many other sections of the text we must rely on copies that were produced centuries later. One would hope that a scientist might see that these disordered and frequently discordant texts constitute a rather precarious basis for believing in the divinity of Jesus.

But the problem is actually much worse than this: for even if we had multiple, contemporaneous, first-hand accounts of the miracles of Jesus, this would still not constitute sufficient support for the central tenets of Christianity. Indeed, first-hand accounts of miracles are extremely common, even in the 21st century. I’ve met scores of educated men and women who are convinced that their favorite Hindu or Buddhist guru has magic powers, and many of the miracles that they describe are every bit as outlandish as those attributed to Jesus. Stories about yogis and mystics walking on water, raising the dead, flying without the aid of technology, materializing objects, reading minds, foretelling the future are circulating right now, in communities where the average levels of education, access to information, and skeptical doubt are far higher than we would expect of first century fishermen and goatherds.

In fact, all of Jesus’ powers have been attributed to the South Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba by vast numbers of eyewitnesses who believe that he is a living god. The man even claims to have been born of a virgin.[6] Collins’ faith is predicated on the claim that miracle stories of the sort that today surround a person like Sathya Sai Baba—and do not even merit an hour on the Discovery Channel—somehow become especially credible when set in the pre-scientific religious context of the 1st century Roman Empire, decades after their supposed occurrence, as evidenced by discrepant and fragmentary copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek manuscripts.[7] It is on this basis that the future head of the NIH recommends that we believe the following propositions:

1. Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born of a virgin, ritually murdered as a scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an interval of three days.

2. He promptly ascended, bodily, to “heaven”—where, for two millennia, he has eavesdropped upon (and, on occasion, even answered) the simultaneous prayers of billions of beleaguered human beings.

3. Not content to maintain this numinous arrangement indefinitely, this invisible carpenter will one day return to earth to judge humanity for its sexual indiscretions and skeptical doubts, at which time he will grant immortality to anyone who has had the good fortune to be convinced, on mother’s knee, that this baffling litany of miracles is the most important series of truth-claims ever revealed about the cosmos.

4. Every other member of our species, past and present, from Cleopatra to Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will be consigned to a far less desirable fate, best left unspecified.

5. In the meantime, God/Jesus may or may not intervene in our world, as He pleases, curing the occasional end-stage cancer (or not), answering an especially earnest prayer for guidance (or not), consoling the bereaved (or not), through His perfectly wise and loving agency.

How many scientific laws would be violated by such a scheme? One is tempted to say “all of them.” And yet, judging from the way that journals like Nature have treated Collins, one can only conclude that there is nothing in the scientific worldview, or in the intellectual rigor and self-criticism that gave rise to it, that casts these convictions in an unfavorable light.

Some readers will consider any criticism of Collins’ views to be an overt expression of “intolerance.” Indeed, when I published an abbreviated version of this essay in the New York Times, this is precisely the kind of negative response I received.[8] For instance, the biologist Kenneth Miller claimed in a letter to the Times that my view was purely the product of my own “deeply held prejudices against religion” and that I opposed Collins merely because “he is a Christian.”[9] Writing in the Guardian, Andrew Brown called my criticism of Collins a “fantastically illiberal and embryonically totalitarian position that goes against every possible notion of human rights and even the American constitution.” Miller and Brown seem to think that bad ideas and disordered thinking should not be challenged as long as they are associated with a mainstream religion and that to do so is synonymous with bigotry. They are not alone.

There is now a large and growing literature—spanning dozens of books and hundreds of articles—attacking Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and me (the so-called “New Atheists”) for our alleged incivility, bias, and ignorance of how “sophisticated” believers practice their faith. It is often said that we caricature religion, taking its most extreme forms to represent the whole. We do no such thing. We simply do what a paragon of sophisticated faith like Francis Collins does: we take the specific truth claims of religion seriously.

Many of our critics also worry that if we oblige people to choose between reason and faith, they will choose faith and cease to support scientific research. If, on the other hand, we ceaselessly reiterate that there is no conflict between religion and science, we can hope to cajole great multitudes into accepting the truth of evolution (as though this were an end in itself). Here is a version of this charge that, I fear, most people would accept:

If the goal is to create an America more friendly toward science and reason, the combativeness of the New Atheists is strongly counterproductive. If anything, they work in ironic combination with their dire enemies, the anti-science conservative Christians who populate the creation science and intelligent design movements, to ensure we’ll continue to be polarized over subjects like the teaching of evolution when we don’t have to be. America is a very religious nation, and if forced to choose between faith and science, vast numbers of Americans will select the former. The New Atheists err in insisting that such a choice needs to be made. Atheism is not the logically inevitable outcome of scientific reasoning, any more than intelligent design is a necessary corollary of religious faith. A great many scientists believe in God with no sense of internal contradiction, just as many religious believers accept evolution as the correct theory to explain the development, diversity, and inter-relatedness of life on Earth. The New Atheists, like the fundamentalists they so despise, are setting up a false dichotomy that can only damage the cause of scientific literacy for generations to come. It threatens to leave science itself caught in the middle between extremes, unable to find cover in a destructive, seemingly unending, culture war. [Mooney C, Kirshenbaum S (2009) Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future New York: Basic Books. pp. 97-98]

The first thing to notice is that Mooney and Kirshenbaum are confused about the nature of the problem. The goal is not to get more Americans to merely accept the truth of evolution (or any other scientific theory); the goal is to get them to value the principles of reasoning and educated discourse that now make a belief in evolution obligatory. Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying problem; the problem is faith itself—conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas occluded by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc. Mooney and Kirshenbaum seem to imagine that we can get people to value intellectual honesty by lying to them.

While it is invariably advertised as an expression of “respect” for people of faith, this accommodationism is nothing more than naked condescension, motivated by fear. Mooney and Kirshenbaum assure us that people will choose religion over science, no matter how good a case is made against religion. In certain contexts, this fear is probably warranted. I wouldn’t be eager to spell out the irrationality of Islam while standing in the Great Mosque in Mecca. But let’s be honest about how Mooney and Kirshenbaum view public discourse in the United States: watch what you say, or the Christian mob will burn down the library of Alexandria all over again. By comparison, the “combativeness” of the “New Atheists” seems entirely collegial. We merely assume that our fellow Homo sapiens possess the requisite intelligence and emotional maturity to respond to rational argument, satire, and ridicule on the subject of religion—just as they respond to these discursive pressures on all other subjects. Of course, we could be wrong. But let’s admit which side in this debate currently views our neighbors as dangerous children and which views them as adults who might prefer not to be utterly mistaken about the nature of reality.

Finally, we come to the kernel of confusion that has been the subject of this essay—the irrelevant claim that “a great many scientists believe in God with no sense of internal contradiction.”[9] The fact that certain people can reason poorly with a clear conscience—or can do so while saying that they have a clear conscience—proves absolutely nothing about the compatibility of specific ideas, goals, and modes of thought. It is possible to be wrong and to not know it (we call this “ignorance”). It is possible to be wrong and to know it, but to be reluctant to incur the social cost of admitting this publicly (we call this “hypocrisy”). And it may also be possible to be wrong, to dimly glimpse this fact, but to allow the fear of being wrong to increase one’s commitment one’s erroneous beliefs (we call this “self-deception”). It seems clear that these frames of mind do an unusual amount of work in the service of religion.

The world’s religions are predicated on the truth of specific doctrines that have been growing less plausible by the day. While the ultimate relationship between consciousness and matter has not been entirely settled, any naïve conception of a soul can now be jettisoned on account of the mind’s obvious dependency upon the brain. The idea that there might be an immortal soul capable of reasoning, feeling love, remembering life events, etc, all the while being metaphysically independent of the brain becomes untenable the moment we realize that damage to the relevant neural circuits obliterates these specific capacities in a living person. Does the soul of a completely aphasic patient still speak and think fluently? This is like asking whether the soul of a diabetic produces abundant insulin. What is more, the specific character of the mind’s dependency on the brain suggests that there cannot be a unified subject lurking behind all of the brain’s functionally distinct channels of processing. There are simply too many separable components to perception and cognition—each susceptible to independent disruption—for there to be a single entity to stand as rider to the horse.

The soul-doctrine suffers further upheaval in light of the fatal resemblance of the human brain to the brains of other animals. The obvious continuity of our mental powers with those of ostensibly soulless primates raises special difficulties. If the joint ancestors of chimpanzees and human beings did not have souls, when did we acquire ours? Most religions ignore these awkward facts and simply assert that human beings possess a unique form of subjectivity that has no homolog among lower animals. Indeed, Collins asserts this. He claims that the human mind cannot be the product of the human brain or the human brain the product of unguided evolution: rather, at some glorious moment in the development of our species God inserted crucial components—including an immortal soul, free will, the moral law, spiritual hunger, genuine altruism, etc. This claim makes a mockery of whole fields of study—neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, behavioral economics, among others—and, if taken seriously, would obliterate our growing understanding of the human mind. If we must look to religion to explain our moral sense, what should we make of the deficits of moral reasoning associated with conditions like autism, frontal lobe syndrome, and psychopathy? Are these disorders best addressed by theology?

According to Collins, the moral law applies exclusively to human beings:

Though other animals may at times appear to show glimmerings of a moral sense, they are certainly not widespread, and in many instances other species’ behavior seems to be in dramatic contrast to any sense of universal rightness.(Collins, 2006, p.23)

One wonders if the author has ever read a newspaper. The behavior of humans offers no such “dramatic contrast”‭?‬ How badly must human beings behave to put this “sense of universal rightness” in doubt? While no other species can match us for altruism, none can match us for sadistic cruelty either. And just how widespread must “glimmerings” of morality be among other animals before Collins—who, after all, knows a thing or two about genes—begins to wonder whether our moral sense has evolutionary precursors in the natural world? What if mice showed greater distress at the suffering of familiar mice than unfamiliar ones? (They do.[10]) What if monkeys will starve themselves to prevent their cage-mates from receiving painful shocks? (They will.[11]) What if chimps have a demonstrable sense of fairness when receiving food rewards? (They might.[12]) Wouldn’t these be precisely the sorts of findings one would expect if our morality were the product of evolution?

Collins’ case for the supernatural origin of morality rests on the further assertion that there can be no evolutionary explanation for genuine altruism. Because self-sacrifice cannot increase the likelihood that an individual creature will survive and reproduce, truly self-sacrificing behavior stands as a primordial rejoinder to any biological account of morality. In Collins’ view the mere existence of altruism offers compelling evidence of a personal God. But moment’s thought reveals that if we were to accept this neutered biology, almost everything about us would be bathed in the warm glow of religious mystery. Does our interest in astronomy owe its existence to the successful reproduction of ancient astronomers? (What about the practices of celibacy and birth control? Are they all about reproduction too?) Collins can’t seem to see that human morality and selfless love may be elaborations of more basic biological and psychological traits, which were themselves products of evolution. It is hard to interpret this oversight in light of his scientific training. If one didn’t know better, one might be tempted to conclude that religious dogmatism presents an obstacle to scientific reasoning.

There are, of course, ethical implications to believing that human beings are the only species made in God’s image and vouchsafed with “immortal souls.” History shows us that concern about souls is a very poor guide to ethical behavior—that is, to actually mitigating the suffering of conscious creatures like ourselves. Concern about souls leads to concerns about undifferentiated cells in Petri dishes and to ethical qualms over embryonic stem cell research. Rather often, it leads to indifference to the suffering of animals believed not to possess souls but which can clearly suffer in ways that three-day old human embryos cannot. The use of apes in medical research, the exposure of whales and dolphins to military sonar—these are real ethical dilemmas, with real suffering at issue. Concern over human embryos smaller than the period at the end of this sentence—when, for years they have been the most promising door to medical breakthrough—is one of the many delusional products of religion, which has led to one of its many predictable failures of compassion. While Collins appears to support embryonic stem cell research, he does so after much (literal) soul-searching and under considerable theological duress. Everything he has said and written the subject needlessly complicates an ethical question that is—if one is actually concerned about human and animal wellbeing—genuinely straightforward.

The Obama administration still has not removed the most important impediments to embryonic stem cell research—allowing funding only for work on stem cells derived from surplus embryos at fertility clinics. Such delicacy is a clear concession to the religious convictions of the American electorate. While Collins seems willing to go further and support research on embryos created through somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), he is very far from being a voice of ethical clarity in this debate. For instance, he considers embryos created through SCNT to be distinct from those formed through the union of sperm and egg because the former are “not part of God’s plan to create a human individual” while “the latter is very much part of God’s plan, carried out through the millennia by our own species and many others” (Collins, 2006, p. 256) There is little to be gained in a serious discussion of bioethics by talking about “God’s plan.” (If such embryos were brought to term and became sentient and suffering human beings, would it be ethical to kill them and harvest their organs because they had been conceived apart from “God’s plan”?) While his appointment to the NIH seems unlikely to impede our mincing progress on embryonic stem cell research, his appointment seems like another one of President Obama’s efforts to split difference between real science and real ethics on the one hand and religious superstition and taboo on the other.

Collins has written that “science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence” and that “the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted.” One can only hope that these convictions will not affect his judgment at the NIH. Understanding human wellbeing at the level of the brain might very well offer some “answers to the most pressing questions of human existence”—questions like, Why do we suffer? How can we achieve the deepest forms of happiness? Or, indeed, is it possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself? And wouldn’t any effort to explain human nature without reference to a soul, and to explain morality without reference to God, constitute “atheistic materialism”? Must we really entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who believes that understanding ourselves through science is impossible, while our resurrection from death is inevitable?

1. True to form, Nature recently produced an embarrassingly supine editorial on Templeton: Templeton’s legacy. Nature 454, 253-254, (2008). Download PDF ↩

2. A point of comparison: the biochemist Rupert Sheldrake had his academic career decapitated, in a single stroke, by an editorial in Nature [Maddox, J. A book for burning? Nature. 293, 245-246 (1981) Download PDF] published in response to his book A New Science of Life. Sheldrake has advanced a theory of “morphic resonance” which, he believes, accounts for how living systems and other patterns in nature develop. The theory may, indeed, be utterly mistaken. But there is not a single sentence in Sheldrake’s book to rival the intellectual dishonesty that Collins achieves on nearly every page of The Language of God. ↩

3. I should say that I see nothing irrational in seeking the “spiritual” experiences and personal insights that lie at the core of many religions. What is irrational, and irresponsible in a scientist and educator, is to make unjustified and unjustifiable claims about the structure of the universe, about the divine origin of certain books, and about the future of humanity on the basis of such experiences. I can also say that by the standards of any experienced contemplative, the phenomena that Collins puts forward in support of his religious beliefs scarcely merit discussion. A beautiful waterfall? An unexpected church service? A feeling of peace? The fact that these are the most salient landmarks on Collins’ journey out of bondage may be the most troubling detail in this positive sea of troubles. ↩

4. Collins also has a terrible habit of cherry picking and misrepresenting the views of famous scientists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. For instance he writes:

Even Albert Einstein saw the poverty of a purely naturalistic worldview. Choosing his words carefully, he wrote, “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

The one choosing words carefully here is Collins. Read in context, this quote reveals that Einstein did not in the least endorse theism and that his use of the word “God” was a poetical way of referring to the laws of nature. Einstein once protested being misused in this way: It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. (Cited in Dawkins, 2006, p. 36). ↩

5. In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal submitted the nonsense paper “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the journal Social Text. While the paper was patently insane, this journal, which still stands “at the forefront of cultural theory,” avidly published it. The text is filled with gems like following:

[T]he discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities… In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science—among them, existence itself—become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.

↩

6. This is actually not an uncommon claim in the history of religion, or in history generally. Even rather worldly men like Genghis Khan and Alexander were said to have been born of virgins (parthenogenesis apparently offers no guarantee that a man will turn the other cheek). ↩

7. The philosopher David Hume made a very nice point about believing in miracles on the basis of testimony: “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish…” This is a good rule of thumb. Which is more likely, that Mary, the mother of Jesus, would have sex outside of wedlock and then feel the need to lie about it, or that she would conceive a child through parthenogenesis the way aphids and Komodo dragons do? On the one hand we have lying about adultery—in a context where the penalty for adultery is death—and on the other we have a woman spontaneously mimicking the biology of certain insects and reptiles. Hmm… ↩

8. Of course, I also received a lot of support, especially from scientists, and even from scientists at the NIH. ↩

9. Miller, it should be noted, is also a believing Christian and the author of Finding Darwin’s God. For all its flaws, this book contains an extremely useful demolition of “intelligent design.” ↩

10. The claim is, in fact, ubiquitous. Here it is at the highest levels of scientific discourse: From a recent editorial in Nature, insisting on the reality of human evolution:

The vast majority of scientists, and the majority of religious people, see little potential for pleasure or progress in the conflicts between religion and science that are regularly fanned into flame by a relatively small number on both sides of the debate. Many scientists are religious, and perceive no conflict between the values of their science — values that insist on disinterested, objective inquiry into the nature of the Universe — and those of their faith. [Evolution and the brain. Nature 447, 753 (2007)]

From the National Academy of Sciences:

Science can neither prove nor disprove religion… Many scientists have written eloquently about how their scientific studies have increased their awe and understanding of a creator… The study of science need not lessen or compromise faith. [National Academy of Sciences, Science, evolution, and creationism. (National Academies Press, 2008)]

↩

11. Langford DJ, Crager SE, Shehzad Z, Smith SB, Sotocinal SG, et al. (2006) Social modulation of pain as evidence for empathy in mice. Science 312: 1967-1970. ↩

12. Masserman JH, Wechkin S, Terris W (1964) “Altruistic” Behavior in Rhesus Monkeys. Am J Psychiatry 121: 584-585. ↩

13. Our picture of chimp notions of fairness is somewhat muddled. There is no question that they notice inequity, but they do not seem to care if they profit from it. Brosnan SF (2008) How primates (including us!) respond to inequity. Adv Health Econ Health Serv Res 20: 99-124. Jensen K, Call J, Tomasello M (2007) Chimpanzees are rational maximizers in an ultimatum game. Science 318: 107-109. Jensen K, Hare B, Call J, Tomasello M (2006) What’s in it for me? Self-regard precludes altruism and spite in chimpanzees. Proc Biol Sci 273: 1013-1021. Silk JB, Brosnan SF, Vonk J, Henrich J, Povinelli DJ, et al. (2005) Chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members. Nature 437: 1357-1359. Brosnan SF, Schiff HC, de Waal FB (2005) Tolerance for inequity may increase with social closeness in chimpanzees. Proc Biol Sci 272: 253-258. ↩

11 May 2009

Sam Harris: Letter to A Christian Nation (Entire Book) Pt. 1/12

This 'Letter' is a model of gentle, quiet, reasoned, well researched, rational, argument. It is open to challenge. In other words, the precise opposite, in every respect, of the 'wrath' of your 'God'.

And with Terror Comes Boredom

There is this paradox that terror is always a concession of impotence and insecurity and illegitimacy, and Stalin's rule had that. And with terror comes boredom, in the oddest way. Mohamed Atta brought boredom to us too. It's not just airport queues, with some humorless airport official frisking your 6-year-old daughter. It's the confrontation with the dependent mind. There's no argument possible. We share no points of discourse. It's like being with any fanatical Christian, for instance. The higher faculties just close down, because there's nothing for them to do. So there's that paradox: when you get terror, you also get this completely daunting lack of response. You can't have an argument with it. Martin Amis, Time 5 February 2007

Do Americans Need Passports?

No need to travel

Sir: I enjoyed reading Michael Moorcock’s article ‘Why I am becoming an American’ (15 April). However, he referred without comment to one of the strange criticisms that Europeans sometimes make of us: that few Americans hold passports, implying that we are close-minded xenophobes unwilling to see exotic places and people.

In fact, our reluctance to obtain passports is well founded. If we want to ski, we can go to Colorado, Vermont or British Columbia. To visit a tropical beach we can go to Florida; desert, Arizona; the Arctic, Alaska; quaint towns in somewhat foreign places, south Louisiana or the Mexican border; massive cities and all they offer, New York or California.

One can travel no more than 100 miles south of London without a passport; but a Chicagoan could go all the way to the Guatemalan border, several thousand miles away, with nothing more than an Illinois driver’s licence.

Jason Boatright, Austin, Texas
The Spectator 22nd April 2006

Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

The profane existence of error is compromised as soon as its heavenly oratio pro aris et focis [speech for the altars and hearths] has been refuted. Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of himself, the non-man where he seeks and must seek his true reality.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is this: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man's self-consciousness and self-awareness so long as he has not found himself or has already lost himself again. But, man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man - state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself. Karl Marx February, 1844

Terra Incognita: Here be Dragons

Some Personal Obsessions a la Mode

Raison d'etre

In the Name of Honour

Orlando Figis A Victory for Russian History

06 August 2009

The Strange Case of Francis Collins

11 May 2009

Sam Harris: Letter to A Christian Nation (Entire Book) Pt. 1/12

And with Terror Comes Boredom

Do Americans Need Passports?

Me and my Honda Blackbird CBR 1100

Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

WH Auden For the Time Being A Christmas Oritorio

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