Some Personal Obsessions a la Mode

RichardDawkins.net
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration: courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.  H.L. Mencken


TV ushered in the age of post-literacy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence. We will live to see the day when a person of learning and cultivation is spoken of as being well-blogged. PJ O'Rourke on The Wealth of Nations

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.

KH

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 May 2008

What Shall We Tell the Children?

Amnesty Lecture, Oxford, 21st February 1997

By Nicholas Humphrey
Department of Psychology
New School for Social Research
65 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10003.

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me," the proverb goes. And since, like most proverbs, this one captures at least part of the truth, it makes sense that Amnesty International should have devoted most of its efforts to protecting people from the menace of sticks and stones not words. Worrying about words must have seemed something of a luxury.

Still the proverb, like most proverbs, is also in part obviously false. The fact is that words can hurt. For a start, they can hurt people indirectly by inciting others to hurt them: a crusade preached by a pope, racist propaganda from the Nazis, malevolent gossip from a rival. . . They can hurt people, not so indirectly, by inciting them to take actions that harm themselves: the lies of a false prophet, the blackmail of a bully, the flattery of a seducer. . . And words can hurt directly, too: the lash of a malicious tongue, the dreaded message carried by a telegram, the spiteful onslaught that makes the hearer beg his tormentor say no more. . .

Sometimes indeed mere words can kill outright. There is a story by Christopher Cherniak about a deadly "word-virus" that appeared one night on a computer screen.(1) It took the form of a brain-teaser, a riddle, so paradoxical that it fatally twisted the mind of anyone who heard or read it, making him fall into an irreversible coma. A fiction? Yes, of course. But a fiction with some horrible parallels in the real world. There have been all too many examples historically of how words can take possession of a person's mind, destroying his will to live. Think, for example, of so-called voodoo death. The witch-doctor has merely to cast his spell of death upon a man and within hours the victim will collapse and die. Or, on a larger and more dreadful scale, think of the mass suicide at Jonestown in Guyana in 1972. The cult leader Jim Jones had only to plant certain crazed ideas in the heads of his disciples, and at his signal nine hundred of them willingly drank cyanide.

"Words will never hurt me"? The truth may rather be that words have a unique power to hurt. And if we were to make an inventory of the man-made causes of human misery, it would be words, not sticks and stones, that head the list. Even guns and high explosives might be considered playthings by comparison. Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote in his poem "I": "On the pavement / of my trampled soul / the soles of madmen / stamp the print of rude, crude, words."(2)
 
Should we then be fighting Amnesty's battle on this front too? Should we be campaigning for the rights of human beings to be protected from verbal oppression and manipulation? Do we need "word laws", just as all civilised societies have gun laws, licensing who should be allowed to use them in what circumstances? Should there be Geneva protocols establishing what kinds of speech act count as crimes against humanity?

No. The answer, I'm sure, ought in general to be "No, don't even think of it." Freedom of speech is too precious a freedom to be meddled with. And however painful some of its consequences may sometimes be for some people, we should still as a matter of principle resist putting curbs on it. By all means we should try to make up for the harm that other people's words do, but not by censoring the words as such.
 
And, since I am so sure of this in general, and since I'd expect most of you to be so too, I shall probably shock you when I say it is the purpose of my lecture today to argue in one particular area just the opposite. To argue, in short, in favour of censorship, against freedom of expression, and to do so moreover in an area of life that has traditionally been regarded as sacrosanct.  I am talking about moral and religious education. And especially the education a child receives at home, where parents are allowed -- even expected -- to determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and wrong.

Children, I'll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas -- no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no god-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children's knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith.

In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense. And we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out or lock them in a dungeon. That's the negative side of what I want to say. But there will be a positive side as well. If children have a right to be protected from false ideas, they have too a right to be succoured by the truth. And we as a society have a duty to provide it. Therefore we should feel as much obliged to pass on to our children the best scientific and philosophical understanding of the natural world -- to teach, for example, the truths of evolution and cosmology, or the methods of rational analysis -- as we already feel obliged to feed and shelter them.

I don't suppose you'll doubt my good intentions here. Even so, I realise there may be many in this audience -- especially the more liberal of you -- who do not like the sound of this at all: neither the negative, nor still less the positive side of it.

In which case, among the good questions you may have for me, will probably be these. First, what is all this about "truths" and "lies"? How could anyone these days have the face to argue that the modern scientific view of the world is the only true view that there is? Haven't the post-modernists and relativists taught us that more or less anything can be true in its own way? What possible justification could there be, then, for presuming to protect children from one set of ideas or to steer them towards another, if in the end all are all equally valid?

Second, even supposing that in some boring sense the scientific view really is "more true" than some others, who's to say that this truer world-view is the better one? At any rate, the better for everybody? Isn't it possible -- or actually likely -- that particular individuals, given who they are and what their life situation is, would be better served by one of the not-so-true world-views? How could it possibly be right to insist on teaching children to think this modern way when, in practice, the more traditional way of thinking might actually work best for them?

Third, even in the unlikely event that almost everybody really would be happier and better off if they were brought up with the modern scientific picture, do we -- as a global community -- really want everyone right across the world thinking the same way, everyone living in a dreary scientific monoculture? Don't we want pluralism and cultural diversity? A hundred flowers blooming, a hundred schools of thought contending?

And then, last, why -- when it comes to it -- should children's rights be considered so much more important than those of other people? Everyone would grant of course that children are relatively innocent and relatively vulnerable, and so may have more need of protection than their seniors do. Still, why should their special rights in this respect take precedence over everybody else's rights in other respects? Don't parents have their own rights too, their rights as parents? The right, most obviously, to be parents, or literally to bring forth and pre-pare their children for the future as they see fit?

Good questions? Knock-down questions, some of you may think, and questions to which any broad-minded and progressive person could give only one answer. I agree they are good-ish questions, and ones that I should deal with. But I don't think it is by any means so obvious what the answers are. Especially for a liberal. Indeed, were we to change the context not so greatly, most people's liberal instincts would I'm sure pull quite the other way.

Let's suppose we were talking not about children's minds but children's bodies. Suppose the issue were not who should control a child's intellectual development but who should control the development of her hands or feet . . . or genitalia. Let's suppose indeed that this is a lecture about female circumcision. And the issue is not whether anyone should be permitted to deny a girl knowledge of Darwin, but whether anyone should be permitted to deny her the uses of a clitoris.

And now here I am suggesting that it is a girl's right to be left intact, that parents have no right to mutilate their daughters to suit their own socio-sexual agenda, and that we as a society ought to prevent it. What's more, to make the positive case as well, that every girl should actually be encouraged to find out how best to use to her own advantage the intact body she was born with. Would you still have those good questions for me? And would it still be so obvious what the liberal answers are? There will be a lesson -- even if an awful one -- in hearing how the questions sound.

First, what's all this about "intactness" and "mutilation"? Haven't the anthropological relativists taught us that the idea of there being any such thing as "absolute intactness" is an illusion, and that girls are -- in a way -- just as intact without their clitorises? Anyway, even if uncircumcised girls are in some boring sense "more intact", who's to say that intactness is a virtue? Isn't it possible that some girls, given their life situation, would actually be better off being not-so-intact? What if the men of their culture consider intact women unmarriageable?

Besides, who wants to live in a world where all women have standard genitalia? Isn't it essential to maintaining the rich tapestry of human culture that there should be at least a few groups where circumcision is still practised? Doesn't it indirectly enrich the lives of all of us to know that some women somewhere have had their clitorises removed?  In any case, why should it be only the rights of the girls that concern us? Don't other people have rights in relation to circumcision also? How about the rights of the circumcisers themselves, their rights as circumcisers? Or the rights of mothers to do what they think best, just as in their day was done to them?

You'll agree, I hope, that the answers go the other way now. But maybe some of you are going to say that this is not playing fair. Whatever the superficial similarities between doing things to a child's body and doing things to her mind, there are also several obvious and important differences. For one thing, the effects of circumcision are final and irreversible, while the effects of even the most restrictive regime of education can perhaps be undone later. For another, circumcision involves the removal of something that is already part of the body and will naturally be missed, while education involves selectively adding new things to the mind that would otherwise never have been there. To be deprived of the pleasures of bodily sensation is an insult on the most personal of levels, but to be deprived of a way of thinking is perhaps no great personal loss.

So, you might argue, the analogy is far too crude for us to learn from it. And those original questions about the rights to control a child's education still need addressing and answering on their own terms.  Very well. I'll try to answer them just so -- and we shall see whether or not the analogy with circumcision was unfair. But there may be another kind of objection to my project that I should deal with first. For it might be argued, I suppose, that the whole issue of intellectual rights is not worth bothering with, since so few of the world's children are in point of fact at risk of being hurt by any severely misleading forms of education -- and those who are mostly far away and out of reach.

Now that I say it, however, I wonder whether anyone could make such a claim with a straight face. Look around -- close to home. We ourselves live in a society where most adults -- not just a few crazies, but most adults -- subscribe to a whole variety of weird and nonsensical beliefs, that in one way or another they shamelessly impose upon their children.

In the United States, for example -- which I take as the example since it's where I currently reside -- it sometimes seems that almost everyone is either a religious fundamentalist or a New Age mystic or both. And even those who aren't will scarcely dare admit it. Opinion polls confirm that, for example, a full 98% of the US population say they believe in God, 70% believe in life after death, 50% believe in human psychic powers, 30% think their lives are directly influenced by the position of the stars (and 70% follow their horoscopes anyway -- just in case), and 20% believe they are at risk of being abducted by aliens.(3)

The problem, I mean the problem for children's education, is not just that so many adults positively believe in things that flatly contradict the modern scientific world view, but that so many do not believe in things that are absolutely central to the scientific view. A survey published last year showed that half the American people do not know, for example, that the earth goes round the sun once a year. Fewer than one in ten know what a molecule is. More than half do not accept that human beings have evolved from animal ancestors; and less than one in ten believe that evolution -- if it has occurred -- can have taken place without some kind of external intervention. Not only do people not know the results of science, they do not even know what science is. When asked what they think distinguishes the scientific method, only 2% realised it involves putting theories to the test, 34% vaguely knew it has something to do with experiments and measurement, but 66% didn't have a clue.(4)

Nor do these figures, worrying as they are, give the full picture of what children are up against. They tell us about the beliefs of typical people, and so about the belief environment of the average child. But there are small but significant communities just down the road from us -- I mean literally just down the road, in New York, or London or Oxford -- where the situation is arguably very much worse: communities where not only are superstition and ignorance even more firmly entrenched, but where this goes hand in hand with the imposition of repressive regimes of social and inter-personal conduct -- in relation to hygiene, diet, dress, sex, gender roles, marriage arrangements, and so on. I think, for example of the Amish Christians, Hasidic Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Orthodox Muslims . . . or, for that matter, the radical New Agers . . . all no doubt very different from each other, all with their own peculiar hang-ups and neuroses, but alike in providing an intellectual and cultural dungeon for those who live among them.

In theory, maybe, the children need not suffer. Adults might perhaps keep their beliefs to themselves and not make any active attempt to pass them on. But we know, I'm sure, better than to expect that. This kind of self-restraint is simply not in the nature of a parent-child relationship. If a mother, for example, sincerely believes that eating pork is a sin, or that the best cure for depression is holding a crystal to her head, or that after she dies she will be reincarnated as a mongoose, or that Capricorns and Aries are bound to quarrel, she is hardly likely to withhold such serious matters from her own offspring.  

But, more important, as Richard Dawkins has explained so well,(5) this kind of self-restraint is not in the nature of successful belief systems. Belief systems in general flourish or die out according to how good they are at reproduction and competition. The better a system is at creating copies of itself,and the better at keeping other rival belief systems at bay, the greater its own chances of evolving and holding its own. So we should expect that it will be characteristic of successful belief systems -- especially those that survive when everything else seems to be against them -- that their devotees will be obsessed with education and with discipline: insisting on the rightness of their own ways and rubbishing or preventing access to others. We should expect, moreover, that they will make a special point of targeting children in the home, while they are still available, impressionable and vulnerable. For, as the Jesuit master wisely noted, "If I have the teaching of children up to seven years of age or thereabouts, I care not who has them afterwards, they are mine for life."(6)

Donald Kraybill, an anthropologist who made a close study of an Amish community in Pennsylvania, was well placed to observe how this works out in practice. "Groups threatened by cultural extinction," he writes, "must indoctrinate their offspring if they want to preserve their unique heritage. Socialization of the very young is one of the most potent forms of social control. As cultural values slip into the child's mind, they become personal values -- embedded in conscience and governed by emotions. . . The Amish contend that the Bible commissions parents to train their children in religious matters as well as the Amish way of life. . . An ethnic nursery, staffed by extended family and church members, moulds the Amish world view in the child's mind from the earliest moments of consciousness."(7)

But what he is describing is not, of course, peculiar to the Amish. "An ethnic nursery, staffed by extended family and church members . . ." could be as much a description of the early environment of a Belfast Catholic, a Birmingham Sikh, a Brooklyn Hasidic Jew -- or maybe the child of a North Oxford don. All sects that are serious about their own survival do indeed make every attempt to flood the child's mind with their own propaganda, and to deny the child access to any alternative viewpoints.

In the United States this kind of restricted education has continually received the blessing of the law. Parents have the legal right, if they wish to, to educate their children entirely at home, and nearly one million families do so.(8) But many more who wish to limit what their children learn can rely on the thousands of sectarian schools that are permitted to function subject to only minimal state supervision. A US court did recently insist that teachers at a Baptist school should at least hold teaching certificates; but at the same time it recognised that "the whole purpose of such a school is to foster the development of their children's minds in a religious environment" and therefore that the school should be allowed to teach all subjects "in its own way" -- which meant, as it happened, presenting all subjects only from a biblical point of view, and requiring all teachers, supervisors, and assistants to agree with the church's doctrinal position.(9)

Yet, parents hardly need the support of the law to achieve such a baleful hegemony over their children's minds. For there are, unfortunately, many ways of isolating children from external influences without actually physically removing them or controlling what they hear in class. Dress a little boy in the uniform of the Hasidim, curl his side-locks, subject him to strange dietary taboos, make him spend all weekend reading the Torah, tell him that gentiles are dirty, and you could send him to any school in the world and he'd still be a child of the Hasidim. The same -- just change the terms a bit -- for a child of the Muslims, or the Roman Catholics, or followers of the Maharishi Yogi.

More worrying still, the children themselves may often be unwitting collaborators in this game of isolation. For children all too easily learn who they are, what is allowed for them and where they must not go -- even in thought. John Schumaker, an Australian psychologist, has described his own Catholic boyhood: "I believed wholeheartedly that I would burn in eternal fire if I ate meat on a Friday. I now hear that people no longer spend an eternity in fire for eating meat on Fridays. Yet, I cannot help thinking back on the many Saturdays when I rushed to confess about the bologna and ketchup sandwich I could not resist the day before. I usually hoped I would not die before getting to the 3 p.m. confession."(10)

All the same . . . this particular Catholic boy actually escaped and lived to tell the tale. In fact Schumaker became an atheist, and has gone on to make something of a profession of his godlessness. Nor of course is he unique. There are plenty of other examples, known to all of us, of men and women who as children were pressured into becoming junior members of a sect, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Marxist -- and yet who came out the other side, free thinkers, and seemingly none the worse for their experience.

Then perhaps I am, after all, being too alarmist about what all this means. For sure the risks are real enough. We do live -- even in our advanced, democratic, Western nations -- in an environment of spiritual oppression, where many little children -- our neighbours' children if not actually ours -- are daily exposed to the attempts of adults to annexe their minds. Yet, you may still want to point out that there's a big difference between what the adults want and what actually transpires. All right, so children do frequently get saddled with adult nonsense. But so what. Maybe it's just something the child has to put up with until he or she is able to leave home and learn better. In which case I would have to admit that the issue is certainly nothing like so serious as I have been making out. After all there are surely lots of things that are done to children either accidentally or by design that -- though they may not be ideal for the child at the time -- have no lasting ill effects.

I'd reply: Yes and No. Yes, it's right we should not fall into the error of a previous era of psychology of assuming that people's values and beliefs are determined once and for all by what they learn -- or do not learn -- as children. The first years of life, though certainly formative, are not necessarily the "critical period" they were once thought to be. Psychologists no longer generally believe that children "imprint" on the first ideas they come across, and thereafter refuse to follow any others. In most cases, rather, it seems that individuals can and will remain open to new opportunities of learning later in life -- and, if need be, will be able to make up a surprising amount of lost ground in areas where they have earlier been deprived or been misled.(11)

Yes, I agree therefore we should not be too alarmist -- or too prissy -- about the effects of early learning. But, No, we should certainly not be too sanguine about it either. True, it may not be so difficult for a person to unlearn or replace factual knowledge later in life: someone who once thought the world was flat, for example, may, when faced by overwhelming evidence to the contrary, grudgingly come round to accepting that the world is round. It will, however, often be very much more difficult for a person to unlearn established procedures or habits of thought: someone who has grown used, for example, to taking everything on trust from Biblical authority may find it very hard indeed to adopt a more critical and questioning attitude. And it may be nigh impossible for a person to unlearn attitudes and emotional reactions: someone who has learned as a child, for example, to think of sex as sinful may never again be able to be relaxed about making love.

But there is another even more pressing reason not to be too sanguine, or sanguine in the least. Research has shown that given the opportunity individuals can go on learning and can recover from poor childhood environments. However, what we should be worrying about are precisely those cases where such opportunities do not -- indeed are not allowed to -- occur. Suppose, as I began to describe above, children are in effect locked out by their families from access to any alternative ideas. Or, worse, that they are so effectively immunised against foreign influences that they do the locking out themselves.

Think of those cases, not so uncommon, when it has become a central plank of someone's belief system that they must not let themselves be defiled by mixing with others. When, because of their faith, all they want to hear is one voice, and all they want to read is one text. When they treat new ideas as if they carry infection. When, later, as they grow more sophisticated, they come to deride reason as an instrument of Satan. When they regard the humility of unquestioning obedience as a virtue. When they identify ignorance of worldly affairs with spiritual grace. . . In such case, it hardly matters what their minds may still remain capable of learning, because they themselves will have made certain they never again use this capacity. 

The question was, does childhood indoctrination matter: and the answer, I regret to say, is that it matters more than you might guess. The Jesuit did know what he was saying. Though human beings are remarkably resilient, the truth is that the effects of well-designed indoctrination may still prove irreversible, because one of the effects of such indoctrination will be precisely to remove the means and the motivation to reverse it. Several of these belief systems simply could not survive in a free and open market of comparison and criticism: but they have cunningly seen to it that they don't have to, by enlisting believers as their own gaolers. So, the bright young lad, full of hope and joy and inquisitiveness, becomes in time the nodding elder buried in the Torah; the little maid, fresh to the morning of the world, becomes the washed up New Age earth mother lost in mists of superstition.

Yet, we can ask, if this is right: what would happen if this kind of vicious circle were to be forcibly broken? What would happen if, for example, there were to be an externally imposed "time-out"? Wouldn't we predict that, just to the extent it is a vicious circle, the process of becoming a fully-fledged believer might be surprisingly easy to disrupt? I think the clearest evidence of how these belief systems typically hold sway over their followers can in fact be found in historical examples of what has happened when group members have been involuntarily exposed to the fresh air of the outside world.

A interesting test was provided in the 1960's by the case of the Amish and the military Draft.(12) The Amish have consistently refused to serve in the armed forces of the United States on grounds of conscience. Up to 1960's young Amish men who were due to be drafted for military service were regularly granted "agricultural deferments" and were able to continue working safely on their family farms. But as the draft continued through the Vietnam war, an increasing number of these men were deemed ineligible for farm deferments and were required instead to serve two years working in public hospitals -- where they were introduced, like it or not, to all manner of non-Amish people and non-Amish ways. Now, when the time came for these men to return home, many no longer wanted to do so and opted to defect. They had tasted the sweets of a more open, adventurous, free-thinking way of life -- and they were not about to declare it all a snare and a delusion.

These defections were rightly regarded by Amish leaders as such a serious threat to their culture's survival, that they quickly moved to negotiate a special agreement with the government, under which all their draftees could in future be sent to Amish-run farms -- so that this kind of breach of security should not happen again.

Let me take stock. I have been discussing the survival strategies of some of the more tenacious beliefs systems -- the epidemiology, if you like, of those religions and pseudo-religions that Richard Dawkins has called "cultural viruses".(13) But you'll see that, especially with this last example, I have begun to approach the next and more important of the issues I wanted to address: the ethical one.

Suppose that, as the Amish case suggests, young members of such a faith would -- if given the opportunity to make up their own minds -- choose to leave. Doesn't this say something important about the morality of imposing any such faith on children to begin with? I think it does. In fact I think it says everything we need to know in order to condemn it. You'll agree that, if it were female circumcision we were talking about, we could build a moral case against it based just on considering whether it is something a woman would choose for herself. Given the fact -- I assume it is a fact -- that most of those women who were circumcised as children would, if they only knew what they were missing, have preferred to remain intact. Given that almost no woman who was not circumcised as a child volunteers to undergo the operation later in life. Given in short that it seems not to be what free women want to have done to their bodies. Then it seems clear that whoever takes advantage of their temporary power over a child's body to perform the operation must be abusing this power and acting wrongly.

Well then, if this is so for bodies, the same for minds. Given, let's say, that most people who have been brought up as members of a sect would, if they only knew what they are being denied, have preferred to remain outside it. Given that almost no one who was not brought up this way volunteers to adopt the faith later in life. Given in short that it is not a faith that a free-thinker would adopt. Then, likewise, it seems clear that whoever takes advantage of their temporary power over a child's mind to impose this faith, is equally abusing this power and acting wrongly.

So I'll come to the main point -- and lesson -- of this lecture. I want to propose a general test for deciding when and whether the teaching of a belief system to children is morally defensible. As follows. If it is ever the case that teaching this system to children will mean that later in life they come to hold beliefs that, were they in fact to have had access to alternatives, they would most likely not have chosen for themselves, then it is morally wrong of whoever presumes to impose this system and to chose for them to do so. No one has the right to choose badly for anyone else.

This test, I admit, will not be simple to apply. It is rare enough for there to be the kind of social experiment that occurred with the Amish and the military draft. And even such an experiment does not actually provide so strong a test as I'm suggesting we require. After all the Amish young men were not offered the alternative until they were already almost grown up, whereas what we need to know is what the children of the Amish or any other sect would choose for themselves if they were to have had access to the full range of alternatives all along. But in practice of course such a totally free-choice is never going to be available.

Still, utopian as the criterion is, I think its moral implications remain pretty obvious. For, even supposing we cannot know -- and can only guess on the basis of weaker tests -- whether an individual exercising this genuinely free choice would himself choose the beliefs that others intend to impose upon him, then this state of ignorance in itself must be grounds for making it morally wrong to proceed. In fact perhaps the best way of putting this is to put it the other way round, and say: only if we know that teaching a system to children will mean that later in life they come to hold beliefs that, were they to have had access to alternatives, they would still have chosen for themselves, only then can it be morally allowable for whoever imposes this system and choses for them to do so. And in all other cases, the moral imperative must be to hold off.

Now, I expect most of you will probably be happy to agree with this -- so far as it goes. Of course, other things being equal, everybody has a right to self-determination of both body and mind -- and it must indeed be morally wrong of others to stand in the way of it. But this is: other things being equal. And, to continue with those questions I raised earlier, what happens when other things are not equal?

It is surely a commonplace in ethics that sometimes the rights of individuals have to be limited or even overruled in the interests of the larger good or to protect the rights of other people. And it's certainly not immediately obvious why the case of children's intellectual rights should be an exception.

As we saw, there are several factors that might be considered counter-balancing. And of these the one that seems to many people weightiest, or at least is often mentioned first, is our interest as a society in maintaining cultural diversity. All right, you may want to say, so it's tough on a child of the Amish, or the Hasidim or the Gypsies to be shaped up by their parents in the ways they are -- but at least the result is that these fascianting cultural traditions continue. Would not our whole civilisation be impoverished if they were to go? It's a shame, maybe, when individuals have to be sacrificed to maintain such diversity. But there it is: it's the price we pay as a society.

Except, I would feel bound to remind you, we do not pay it, they do. Let me give a telling example. In 1995, in the high mountains of Peru, some climbers came across the frozen mummified body of a young Inca girl. She was dressed as a princess. She was thirteen years old. About five hundred years ago, this little girl had, it seems, been taken alive up the mountain by a party of priests, and then ritually killed -- a sacrifice to the mountain's Gods in the hope that they would look kindly on the people below.

The discovery was described by the anthropologist, Johan Reinhard, in an article for the National Geographic magazine.(14) He was clearly elated both as a scientist and as a human being by the romance of finding this "ice maiden", as he called her. Even so, he did express some reservations about how she had come to be there: "we can't help but shudder," he wrote, "at [the Incas'] practice of performing human sacrifice."

The discovery was also made the subject of a documentary film shown on American television. Here, however, no one expressed any reservation whatsoever. Instead, viewers were simply invited to marvel at the spiritual commitment of the Inca priests and to share with the girl on her last journey her pride and excitement at having been selected for the signal honour of being sacrificed. The message of the Tv programme was in effect that the practice of human sacrifice was in its own way a glorious cultural invention -- another jewel in the crown of multiculturalism, if you like.

Yet, how dare anyone even suggest this? How dare they invite us -- in our sitting rooms, watching television -- to feel uplifted by contemplating an act of ritual murder: the murder of a dependent child by a group of stupid, puffed up, superstitious, ignorant old men? How dare they invite us to find good for ourselves in contemplating an immoral action against someone else?

Immoral? By Inca standards? No, that's not what matters. Immoral by ours -- and in particular by just the standard of free-choice that I was enunciating earlier. The plain fact is that none of us, knowing what we do about the way the world works, would freely choose to be sacrificed as she was. And however "proud" the Inca girl may or may not have been to have had the choice made for her by her family (and for all we know she may actually have felt betrayed and terrified), we can still be pretty sure that she, if she had known what we now know, would not have chosen this fate for herself either.

No, this girl was used by others as a means for achieving their ends. The elders of her community valued their collective security above her life, and decided for her that she must die in order that their crops might grow and they might live. Now, five hundred years later, we ourselves must not, in a lesser way, do the same: by thinking of her death as something that enriches our collective culture.

We must not do it here, nor in any other case where we are invited to celebrate other people's subjection to quaint and backward traditions as evidence of what a rich world we live in. We mustn't do it even when it can be argued, as I'd agree it sometimes can be, that the maintenance of these minority traditions is potentially of benefit to all of us because they keep alive ways of thinking that might one day serve as a valuable counterpoint to the majority culture.  The US Supreme Court, in supporting the Amish claim to be exempt from sending their children to public schools, commented in an aside: "We must not forget that in the Middle Ages important values of the civilization of the Western World were preserved by members of religious orders who isolated themselves from all worldly influences against great obstacles."(15)

By analogy, the Court implied, we should recognise that the Amish may be preserving ideas and values that our own descendants may one day wish to return to. But what the Court has failed to recognize is that there is a crucial difference between the religious communities of the Middle Ages, the monks of Holy Island for example, and the present-day Amish: namely, that the monks made their own choice to become monks, they did not have their monasticism imposed on them as children, and nor did they in their turn impose it on their own children -- for indeed they did not have any. Those mediaeval orders survived by the recruitment of adult volunteers. The Amish, by contrast, survive only by kidnapping little children before they can protest.

The Amish may -- possibly -- have wonderful things to teach the rest of us; and so may -- possibly -- the Incas have done, and so may several other outlying groups. But these things must not be paid for by the children's lives.

This is, surely, the crux of it. It is a cornerstone of every decent moral system, stated explicitly by Immanuel Kant but already implicit in most people's very idea of morality, that human individuals have an absolute right to be treated as ends in themselves -- and never as means to achieving other people's ends. It goes without saying that this right applies no less to children than to anybody else. And since, in so many situations, children are in no position to look after themselves, it is morally obvious that the rest of us have a particular duty to watch out for them.

So, in every case where we come across examples of children's lives being manipulated to serve other ends, we have a duty to protest. And this, no matter whether the other ends involve the mollification of the Gods, "the preservation of important values for Western civilisation", the creation of an interesting anthropological exhibit for the rest of us . . . or -- now I'll come to the next big question that's been waiting -- the fulfillment of certain needs and aspirations of the child's own parents.

There is, I'd say, no reason whatever why we should treat the actions of parents as coming under a different set of moral rules here. The relationship of parent to child is of course a special one in all sorts of ways. But it is not so special as to deny the child her individual personhood. It is not a relationship of co-extension, nor one of ownership. Children are not a part of their parents, nor except figuratively do they "belong" to them. Children are in no sense their parents' private property. Indeed, to quote the US Supreme Court, commenting in a different context on this same issue: it is a "moral fact that a person belongs to himself and not others nor to society as a whole"(16).

It will therefore be as much a breach of a child's rights if he or she is used by their parents to achieve the parents' personal goals, as it would be if this were done by anyone else. No one has a right to treat children as anything less than ends in themselves.

Still, some of you I'm sure will want to argue that the case of parents is not quite the same as that of outsiders. No doubt we'd all agree that parents have no more right than anyone else to exploit children for ends that are obviously selfish -- to abuse them sexually, for example, or to exploit them as servants, or to sell them into slavery. But, first, isn't it different when the parents at least think their own ends are the child's ends too? When their manipulation of the child's beliefs to conform to their's is -- so as far as they are concerned -- entirely in the child's best interests? And then, second, isn't it different when the parents have already invested so much of their own resources in the child, giving him or her so much of their love and care and time? Haven't they somehow earned the reward of having the child honour their beliefs, even if these beliefs are -- by other people's lights -- eccentric or old fashioned?

Don't these considerations, together, mean that parents have at least some rights that other people don't have? And rights which arguably should come before -- or at least rank beside -- the rights of the children themselves?

No. The truth is these considerations simply don't add up to any form of rights, let alone rights that could outweigh the children's: at most they merely provide mitigating circumstances. Imagine. Suppose you were misguidedly to give your own child poison. The fact that you might think the poison you were administering was good for your child, the fact that you might have gone to a lot of trouble to obtain this poison, and that if it were not for all your efforts your child would not even been there to be offered it, none of this would give you a right to administer the poison -- at most, it would only make you less culpable when the child died. 

But in any case, to see the parents as simply misguided about the child's true interests is I think to put too generous a construction on it. For it is not at all clear that parents when they take control of their children's spiritual and intellectual lives really do believe they are acting in the child's best interests rather than their own. Abraham when he was commanded by God on the mountain to kill his son, Isaac, and dutifully went ahead with the preparation, was surely not thinking of what was best for Isaac -- he was thinking of his own relationship with God. And so on down the ages. Parents have used and still use their children to bring themselves spiritual or social benefits: dressing them up, educating them, baptising them, bringing them to confirmation or Bah Mitzvah in order to maintain their own social and religious standing.

Consider again the analogy with circumcision. No one should make the mistake of supposing that female circumcision, in those places where it's practised, is done to benefit the girl. Rather, it is done for the honour of the family, to demonstrate the parents' commitment to a tradition, to save them from dishonour. Althou I would not push the analogy too far, I think the motivation of the parents is not so different at many other levels of parental manipulation -- even when it comes to such apparently unselfish acts as deciding what a child should or should not learn in school.

A Christian Fundamentalist mother, for example, forbids her child from attending classes on evolution: though she may claim she is doing it for the child and not of course herself, she is very likely motivated primarily by a desire to make a display of her own purity. Doesn't she just know that God is mighty proud of her for conforming to His will? . . The chief mullah of Saudi Arabia proclaims that the Earth is flat and that anyone who teaches otherwise is a friend of Satan(17): won't he himself be thrice blessed by Allah for making this courageous stand? A group of rabbis in Jerusalem try to ban the showing of the film Jurassic Park on the grounds that it may give children the idea that there were dinosaurs living on earth sixty million years ago, when the scriptures state that in fact the world is just six thousand years old(18): are they not making a wonderful public demonstration of their own piety?

What we are seeing, as often as not, is pure self interest. In which case, we should not even allow a mitigating plea of good intentions on the part of the parent or other responsible adult. They are looking after none other than themselves.

Yet, as I said, in the end it hardly matters what the parents' intentions are. Because even the best of intentions would not be sufficient to buy them "parental rights" over their children. Indeed the very idea that parents or any other adults have "rights" over children is morally insupportable.

No human being, in any other circumstances, is credited with having rights over any one else. No one is entitled, as of right, to control, use or direct the life-course of another person -- even for objectively good ends. It's true that in the past slave-owners had such legal rights over their slaves. And it's true too that, until comparatively recently, the anomaly persisted of husbands having certain such rights over their wives -- the right to have sex with them, for instance. But neither of these exceptions provides a good model for regulating parent-child relationships. Children, to repeat, have to be considered as having interests independent of their parents. They cannot be subsumed as if they were part of the same person. At least so it should be. Unless, that is, we make the extraordinary mistake that the US Supreme Court apparently did when it ruled, in relation to the Amish, that while the Amish way of life may be considered "odd or even erratic" it "interferes with no rights or interests of others"(19) (my italics). As if the children of the Amish are not even to be counted as potentially "others".

I think we should stop talking of "parental rights" at all. In so far as they compromise the child's rights as an individual, parents' rights have no status in ethics and should have none in law.(20)

That's not to say that other things being equal parents should not be treated by the rest of us with due respect and accorded certain "privileges" in relation to their children. "Privileges", however, do not have the same legal or moral significance as rights. Privileges are by no means unconditional, they come as the quid pro quo for agreeing to abide by certain rules of conduct imposed by society at large, and anyone to whom a privilege is granted remains in effect on probation: a privilege granted can be taken away.

Let's suppose that the privilege of parenting will mean for example that, provided parents agree to act within an agreed framework, they shall indeed be allowed -- without interference from the law -- to do all the things that parents everywhere usually do: feeding, clothing, educating, disciplining their own children -- and enjoying the love and creative involvement that follow from it. But it will explicitly not be part of this deal that parents should be allowed to offend against the child's more fundamental rights to self-determination. If parents do abuse their privileges in this regard, the contract lapses -- and it is then the duty of those who granted the privilege to intervene.

Intervene how? Suppose we -- I mean we as a society -- do not like what is happening when the education of a child has been left to parents or priests. Suppose we fear for the child's mind and want to take remedial action. Suppose indeed we want to take pre-emptive action with all children to protect them from being hurt by bad ideas and to give them the best possible start as thoughtful human beings. What should we be doing about it? What should be our birthday present to them from the grown-up world?

My suggestion at the start of this talk was: science -- universal scientific education. That's to say, education in learning from observation, experiment, hypothesis testing, constructive doubt, critical thinking -- and the truths that flow from it.

And so I've come at last to the most provocative of the questions I began with. What's so special about science? Why these truths? Why should it be morally right to teach this to everybody, when it's apparently so morally wrong to teach all those other things?

You do not have to be one of those out-and-out relativists to raise such questions -- and to be suspicious that any attempt to replace the old truths by newer scientific truths might be nothing other than an attempt to replace one dogmatism by another. The Supreme Court, in its judgment about Amish schooling, was careful to warn that we should never rule out one way of thinking and rule another in, merely on the basis of what happens to be the modern, fashionable opinion. "There can be no assumption," it said, "that today's majority is 'right' and the Amish and others are 'wrong'," the Amish way of life "is not to be condemned because it is different".(21)

Maybe so. And yet I'd say the Court has chosen to focus on the wrong issue there. Even if science were the 'majority' world-view (which, as we saw earlier, is sadly not the case), we'd all agree that this in itself would provide no grounds for promoting science above other systems of thought. The "majority" is clearly not right about lots of things, probably most things. But the grounds I'm proposing are firmer. Some of the other speakers in this lecture series will have talked about the values and virtues of science. And I am sure they too, in their own terms, will have attempted to explain why science is different -- why it ought to have a unique claim on our heads and on our hearts. But I will now perhaps go even further than they would. I think science stands apart from and superior to all other systems for the reason that it alone of all the systems in contention meets the criterion I laid out above: namely, that it represents a set of beliefs that any reasonable person would, if given the chance, choose for himself.

I should probably say that again, and put it in context. I argued earlier that the only circumstances under which it should be morally acceptable to impose a particular way of thinking on children, is when the result will be that later in life they come to hold beliefs that they would have chosen anyway, no matter what alternative beliefs they were exposed to. And what I am now saying is that science is the one way of thinking -- maybe the only one -- that passes this test. There is a fundamental asymmetry between science and everything else. What do you reckon? Let's go to the rescue of that Inca girl who is being told by the priests that, unless she dies on the mountain, the Gods will rain down lava on her village, and let's offer her another way of looking at things. Offer her a choice as to how she will grow up: on one side with this story about divine anger, on the other with the insights from geology as to how volcanoes arise from the movement of tectonic plates. Which will she choose to follow?

Let's go help the Muslim boy who's being schooled by the mullahs into believing that the Earth is flat, and let's explore some of the ideas of scientific geography with him. Better still, let's take him up high in a balloon, show him the horizon, and invite him to use his own senses and powers of reasoning to reach his own conclusions. Now, offer him the choice: the picture presented in the book of the Koran, or the one that flows from his new-found scientific understanding. Which will he prefer?

Or let's take pity on the Baptist teacher who has become wedded to creationism, and let's give her a vacation. Let's walk her round the Natural History museum in the company of Richard Dawkins or Dan Dennett -- or, if they're too scary, David Attenborough -- and let's have them explain the possibilities of evolution to her. Now, offer her the choice: the story of Genesis with all its paradoxes and special pleading, or the startlingly simple idea of natural selection. Which will she choose?

My questions are rhetorical because the answers are already in. We know very well which way people will go when they really are allowed to make up their own minds on questions such as these. Conversions from superstition to science have been and are everyday events. They have probably been part of our personal experience. Those who have been walking in darkness have seen a great light. The aha! of scientific revelation.

By contrast conversions from science back to superstition are virtually unknown. It just does not happen that someone who has learnt and understood science and its methods and who is then offered a non-scientific alternative chooses to abandon science. I doubt there has ever been a case, for example, of someone who has been brought up to believe the geological theory of volcanoes moving over to believing in divine anger instead, or of someone who has seen and appreciated the evidence that the world is round reverting to the idea that the world is flat, or even of someone who has once understood the power of Darwinian theory going back to preferring the story of Genesis.

People do, of course, sometimes abandon their existing scientific beliefs in favour of newer and better scientific alternatives. But to choose one scientific theory over another is still to remain absolutely true to science.

The reason for this asymmetry between science and non-science is not -- at least not only -- that science provides so much better -- so much more economical, elegant, beautiful -- explanations than non-science. Although there is that. The still stronger reason, I'd suggest, is that science is by its very nature a participatory process and non-science is not.

In learning science we learn why we should believe this or that. Science doesn't cajole, it doesn't dictate, it lays out the factual and theoretical arguments as to why something is so -- and invites us to assent to them, to see it for ourselves. Hence, by the time someone has understood a scientific explanation they have in an important sense already chosen it as theirs. How different is the case of religious or superstitious explanation. Religion makes no pretence of engaging its devotees in any process of rational discovery or choice. If we dare ask why we should believe something, the answer will be because it has been written in the Book, because this is our tradition, because it was good enough for Moses, because you'll go to heaven that way ... Or, as often as not, don't ask.

Contrast these two positions. On one side the second century Roman theologian, Tertullian, with his abject submission to authority and denial of our personal involvement in choosing our beliefs. "For us," he wrote, "curiosity is no longer necessary after Jesus Christ nor inquiry after the Gospel."(22) This being the same man, I might remind you, who said of Christianity: "It is certain because it is impossible." On the other side the twelfth century English philosopher, Adelard of Bath, one of the earliest interpreters of Arab science, with his injunction that we all make ourselves personally responsible for understanding what goes on around us. "If anyone living in a house is ignorant of what it is made, .. he is unworthy of its shelter", he said, "and if anyone born in the residence of this world neglects learning the plan underlying its marvelous beauty .. he is unworthy .. and deserves to be cast out of it." (23)

Imagine that the choice is yours. That you have been faced, in the formative years of your life, with a choice between these two paths to enlightenment -- between basing your beliefs on the ideas of others imported from another country and another time, and basing them on ideas that you have been able to see growing in your home soil. Can there be any doubt that you will choose for yourself, that you will choose science?

And because people will so choose, if they have the opportunity of scientific education, I say we as a society are entitled with good conscience to insist on their being given that opportunity. That is, we are entitled in effect to choose this way of thinking for them. Indeed we are not just entitled: in the case of children we are morally obliged to do so -- so as to protect them from being early victims of other ways of thinking that would remove them from the field.

Then -- let me catch the question from the back of the hall -- "How'd you like it if some Big Brother were to insist on your children being taught his beliefs? How'd you like it if I tried to impose my personal ideology on your little girl?" I have the answer: that teaching science isn't like that, it's not about teaching someone else's beliefs, it's about encouraging the child to exercise her powers of understanding to arrive at her own beliefs.

For sure, this is likely to mean she will end up with beliefs that are widely shared with others who have taken the same path: beliefs, that is, in what science reveals as the truth about the world. And yes, if you want to put it this way, you could say this means that by her own efforts at understanding she will have become a scientific conformist: one of those predictable people who believes that matter is made of atoms, that the universe arose with the Big Bang, that humans are descended from monkeys, that consciousness is a function of the brain, that there is no life after death, and so on. . . But -- since you ask -- I'll say I'd be only too pleased if a big brother or sister or school-teacher or you yourself, sir, should help her get to that enlightened state.

The habit of questioning, the ability to tell good answers from bad, an appetite for seeing how and why deep explanations work -- such is what I would want for my daughter (now two years old) because I think it is what she, given the chance, would one day want for herself. But it is also what I would want for her because I am too well aware of what might otherwise befall her. Bad ideas continue to swill through our culture, some old, some new, looking for receptive minds to capture. If this girl, because she were to lack the defences of critical reasoning, were ever to fall to some kind of political or spiritual irrationalism, then I and you -- and our society -- would have failed her.

Words? Children are made of the words they hear. It matters what we tell them. They can be hurt by words. They may go on to hurt themselves still further, and in turn become the kind of people that hurt others. But they can be given life by words as well.

"I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing," -- these are the words of Deuteronomy -- "therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live."(24) I think there should be no limit to our duty to help children to choose life.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted for several of the ideas here to James Dwyer, whose critique of the idea of parents' rights stands as a model of philosophical and legal reasoning.

REFERENCES

1. Christopher Cherniak, "The Riddle of the Universe and its Solution" (1978), reprinted in The Mind's I, ed. Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, New York: Basic Books, 1981.

2. Vladimir Mayakovsky "I" (1912), in Mayakovsky and his Poetry, trans. George Reavey, Bombay: Current Book House, 1955.

3. Statistics from sources quoted in Nicholas Humphrey, Soul Searching: Human Nature and Supernatural Belief, London: Chatto and Windus, 1995.

4. National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators -- 1996, Washington D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1996.

5. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Ch. 11, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.

6. Jesuit divine (apocryphal).

7. Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture, p. 119, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

8. "Home schools: How do they affect children", APA Monitor, December 1996.

9. Court ruling Iowa, 1985, cited by James G. Dwyer, "Parents' religion and children's welfare: debunking the doctrine of parents' rights," California Law Review, 82, 1371-1447, 1994.

10. Schumaker, John F, Wings of Illusion, p. 33, London: Polity Press, 1990.

11. See, for example, the review by Jerome Kagan, "Three pleasing ideas," American Psychologist, 51, 901-908, 1996.

12. Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture, p. 218, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

13. Richard Dawkins, "Viruses of the mind," in Bo Dahlbom, ed. Dennett and His Critics, pp. 13-
27, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.

14. Johan Reinhard, "Peru's Ice Maidens," National Geographic, June 1996.

15. Supreme Court ruling, 1972, cited by James G. Dwyer, "Parents' religion and children's welfare: debunking the doctrine of parents' rights," p. 1385, California Law Review, 82, 1371-
1447, 1994.

16. Supreme Court ruling, 1986, cited by James G. Dwyer, "Parents' religion and children's welfare: debunking the doctrine of parents' rights," California Law Review, 82, 1371-1447, 1994. p.1409

17. Cited by Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, p.325, New York: Random House, 1996.

18. ibid.

19. Supreme Court, 1972, cited by Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture, p. 120, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

20. See the extended discussion by James G. Dwyer, "Parents' religion and children's welfare: debunking the doctrine of parents' rights," California Law Review, 82, 1371-1447, 1994; "The children we abandon: religious exemptions to child welfare and education laws as denials of equal protection to children of religious objectors," North Carolina Law Review, 74, 101-258, 1996.

21. Supreme Court, 1972, cited by Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture, p. 120, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

22. Tertullian, 2nd century, The Prescription of Heretics.

23. Adelard of Bath, 12th century, Astrolabium.

24. Deuteronomy, Ch. 30, v. 19.

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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

Me and my Honda Blackbird CBR 1100

Me and my Honda Blackbird CBR 1100

My photo, sadly not my bike.

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

WH Auden For the Time Being A Christmas Oritorio

Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish and The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Age, when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.