Can a nation of atheists exist?

Voltaire versus liberal democracy

One test of a bullshitter is that they assume Voltaire would approve of modern liberal democracy. I don’t think that you can read either Candide or his Philosophical Dictionary and come away with that belief. Voltaire certainly didn’t suppose that society could be ruled by an appeal to enlightened self-interest. On the contrary, he wrote

All men are born with a sufficiently violent liking for domination, wealth and pleasure, and with much taste for idleness; consequently, all men want their money and the wives or daughters of others, to be their master, to subject them to all their caprices, and to do nothing, or at least to do only very agreeable things.

and

The question is then asked whether a nation of atheists can exist; it seems to me that one must distinguish between the nation properly so called, and a society of philosophers above the nation. It is very true that in every country the populace has need of the greatest curb, and that if Bayle had had only five or six hundred peasants to govern, he would not have failed to announce to them the existence of a God, rewarder and revenger.

But there is one sense in which Voltaire was a true precursor of the people who parade beneath the shroud of the Enlightenment today: he did not really believe in original sin. The thoroughly French or Eighteenth century cynicism about human nature he displays in the quotes above didn’t really go far enough. Even though Candide is a gloriously thoroughgoing romp against the idea of a benevolent God who will reward virtue and protect the innocent he thought it necessary for “The nation” – the common people and the peasants – to believe in that sort of God even if the philosophers found Him absurd.

The institution of religion exists only to keep mankind in order, and to make men merit the goodness of God by their virtue. Everything in a religion which does not tend towards this goal must be considered foreign or dangerous.

Against this I am on the side of Candide and, also I would say, of Christian orthodoxy and of realism: virtue is not enough; there is no salvation by works. You don’t have to be a philosopher to understand that the race is not to the swift and that life is radically unfair. I suppose you can reconcile these positions by believing in an afterlife when virtue is ultimately rewarded, but Voltaire did not. He thought it impossible for a man of intelligence to believe in absurdities. When his Philosophical Dictionary discusses Faith, he has Pope Alexander VI, a Borgia who became a byword for corruption, ask:

“what merit one can have in telling God that one is persuaded of things of which in fact one cannot be persuaded? What pleasure can that give God? Between ourselves, saying that one believes what is impossible to believe is lying”

Now you may say that a Borgia Pope is the very definition of a Devil’s advocate but in this instance I believe he speaks for the author.

So Voltaire wants a society where the commoners believe lies and the enlightened ones tell them these lies for the good of the state. This doesn’t look like the programme of the New Atheists, or of the defenders of the Enlightenment like James Marriott, arguing in the Times against the rise of superstition. It seems in fact to be exactly the opposite. Marriott, or Stephen Pinker, Carl Sagan, and every other East Coast liberal, wants the common people enlightened. They are not to believe lies or to trust superstition.

Voltaire would laugh at their crude Anglo-Saxon idealism: the people will never know better he’d say. Of course nearly everyone believes this privately, even if it is part of public piety to deny it. Humans are naturally incapable of disciplined thought without hard training and lifelong effort which few of us get and fewer still want. As Orwell observed, it takes effort to see what is in front of your nose – perhaps more effort than is needed to contemplate distant, more pleasing vistas.

But that’s not the only flaw in the programme. The assumption is that the philosophers – the elite – are better at finding truth than the common people. In some respects this is obviously true. We are better at abstract thought, better even at coherent thought, as Marriott points out when he laments the collapse of literacy. We should have been trained on a much wider base of historical understanding. But are we any better at avoiding self-deception? Are we any less hypocritical in the pursuit of self-interest? Look around you. Are Jewish space lasers any more crazy a superstition than the belief that Elon Musk might be worth a trillion dollars?

These fantasies are not descriptions of the external world. They don’t tell us what’s true. In fact they are absurdities. But only sometimes is the most important thing about an idea is that it’s false; often that’s the least interesting thing about it. Saying that one believes in these absurdities is not simple lying, as Voltaire and perhaps Marriott would claim. It is an act of social positioning. It makes a statement about who can trust you and who you do not trust. This is of much greater importance in most people’s lives than understanding gravity, or evolution. To believe in absurdities is often the rational choice.

If I’m right, the faith that we can abandon superstition is itself an absurdity, one which serves to signal out position in the enlightened elite. Only by believing something so obviously stupid can we show how very clever we are.

An Orrful dilemma

on hating your own voters

One of the strangest things about the National Conservative movement is how much the leaders hate their own potential voters. If you look only at the Christian Conservative aspect, as represented by Danny Kruger, Miriam Cates, and so on, their assault on bureaucratic market liberalism has two major aims. They want to replace the Welfare state – in fact the whole modern state – with something explicitly Christian and, they imagine, much more effective. This is basically the Welby / Carey model of evangelical effectiveness: if only power is concentrated in the hands of the right leaders, then God will see to it that we prosper. There’s no reason to suppose it would work out any better in government than it did for the Church of England.

That’s because it just doesn’t scale. What works at a parish level does not and cannot work at a higher level of organisation. This applies whether or not God is brought into your plans. At the same time, the fact that it does work at a local level means that there will always be a reservoir of support among small businessmen and other people who see it working where they operate. That’s the foundation of a lot of the gut support for Reform and what used to be the Conservative Party.

But if you’re a National Conservative, the class whose economic interests you wish to support are also to a very large extent the people you want to deport on racist grounds. Sorry, on grounds of “Community cohesion”. The vast majority of immigrants are not in fact scroungers but enthusiastic capitalists and they would cheerfully vote for a slimmed down state – but they won’t vote for a party which wants to expel them for the colour of their skin.

Small boats, bronze age edition.

The same reasoning applies with double force to the social policy aims of the Nat Cons. They want to renationalise the sexual market and to ensure that it works to the benefit of society rather than as the present anarchy. They want more babies, but only in more families. They also believe that both men and women would be happier under the neotraditional dispensation, because that’s what God made them for but when the common people are too blinded by selfish lusts to see this truth the state must show them the error of their ways. This is another idea that has a natural constituency in its social conservative form. Even the progressives who would denounce it as crypto-fascist are either themselves committed to the state’s imposing a particular (and very different) sexual morality through schools, the tax system and so on, or unusually committed to those children that they do have. Many of course manage both.

But the social conservative vote in this country is overwhelmingly religious, and therefore overwhelmingly non white.

At this point the Christian portion of the Orrful coalition splits off from the straightforwardly racist. The Christians would be happy to deport only the Muslims. Some of them I suspect believe that this is the only way England can survive. But the racists would deport all Christians who are not white, too. To that extent “Muslim” really is just a code word for “Brown”. This is certainly how the Home Office sees it, as appeared when attempts were made to let in Christian refugees from Syria because they were being persecuted by Muslims in the big refugee camps.

Perhaps the African immigrant Christians here would also be happy to deport all the Muslims, but they are not going to part of a Reform coalition because they too would face deportation.

And that is the second prong of the Orrful dilemma. When you come up with a program that makes enemies of most of your natural voters you really need to think again. It seems to me that there is an opening here for political parties willing to work with non-white social conservatives, and once upon a time the Conservatives might have been one of them. But they are bent on suicide.

That Harper's piece

Oh yes, there are nastier things than Trump

On October 5th 1956 Kingsley Amis wrote to Philip Larkin:

Actually I have been a bit of an old fool, getting tied up with a young woman here, not to say really tied up, just started fucking her what [...] Now she shows me a fixture list of the Swansea and Dustr lustr District Rugby Football Club, pointing out all the Home matches, which are marked with an H. Her husband always goes towatch twatch to watch them when they play at home see. Her meaning beng, then you CAN SLIP IN AND SLIP IT IN BACH. The fixture card seems to go like this A (away) HHHHHАНННН haha to you if you see what I mean. Just shows you doesn’t it. Shall have to plead impotence, phallic stricture, boils on the knb, knob that is, hernia, clap &c. Awkward really. Oh what a sodding fool I am. Oh what am I gong to do. Wunk meself to death I’d rather [...]

Of course, technology has made this easier to achieve, and if you want all the ghastly details they are here but be warned, there are more of them than you can probably stomach. The piece could with advantage have been edited more closely around what I suppose we have to call the nut graf.

The whole piece was repugnant and hard to unread. I renewed my subscription on the strength of it.

The joys of scholarship

finding the dirty bits of the Faery Queene

You have to get about 400 pages into the Fairy Queen before finding a joke in the footnotes, but this one must have given the editor real satisfaction.

So naturally one turns to Book three, Canto ten, verse 48 to find the hapless Malbecco forced to listen while his wife has a real good time with the pizza delivery boy Satyr of her choice.

In defence of Spenser, I should note that Britomart and Amoret, though they share a bed and share their hearts, maintain their chaste behaviour, and do nothing to excite Dr Paglia.

And eke fayre Amoret, now freed from feare, 
More franke affection did to her afford, 
And to her bed, which she was wont forbeare, 
Now freely drew, and found right safe assurance theare. 
Where all that night they of their loves did treat, 
And hard adventures, twixt themselves alone, 
That each the other gan with passion great 
And griefull pittie privately bemone.

 

Academic slaughter vi

In which we reach the end with a startling display of hypocrisy

No one doubts that the situation of the Yanomamö and of the other indigenous peoples of South America is truly dreadful. “Their poverty is beyond poverty” says Frank Salamone. It is sometimes true that contact increases the horrendous infant mortality rates. What was odd was the belief to which Tierney seemed to appeal, that anthropologists could do something for the Yanomamö — could struggle on their sides — by ritually blaming themselves; better yet, by blaming other, unethical anthropologists for the evils of the world. It made about as much sense as the Yanomamö blaming measles on the wicked spirits sent from a neighbouring village, which is to say it probably did make people better about a situation they could do nothing to change.

Bill Irons, the Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University who was Chagnon’s representative on the panel, was rather blunter. “People cultivate guilt for their own purposes. Pointing out how guilty everyone is has become part of the standard PC culture: somehow, slinging mud at everybody has become some kind of redeeming act. It is hardly fair to hold Napoleon Chagnon responsible for a Brazilian gold rush, or Venezuelan government corruption.”

Professor Les Sponsel has a narrow, finch-like face and a smile of great charm. As one of the authors of the email that first attacked Chagnon and was later found to be a pack of lies, you might have expected him to have interesting views on ethics; and he does. His voice cracked with sincerity as he asked the meeting:

“I have three questions for us to consider in the coming months. The first is, what have the Yanomamö contributed to us? The second is, what have we contributed to them, both for good and bad? The third is, how are professional ethics and human rights involved? “This is not about science versus whatever: it is not about corruption in Venezuela, Brazil or the USA, This is about professional ethics.”

Professional ethics are clearly quite different from the amateur ones that say things like “thou shalt not bear false witness”, but when I pressed him on the question of whether he should not at the very least have checked these allegations of genocide against a colleague before passing them on, he grew quite heated.

“I’m not a medical doctor. My role, ethically was to alert the AAA because of my concern with human rights. After that, the only role I had was to respond to questions when people asked me in a civil, polite manner.

“I and Terry Turner wrote that memo to the two top people in the organisation and sent copies to four other people in the committee on ethics. Whoever leaked it is the one who should be sanctioned or censured. It is most regrettable, most irresponsible, most appalling; and I am most infuriated that some person has basically stolen it ... That people then steal it and gossip!”

“We were not making any allegations … May I repeat. We were not making any allegations. We were just summarising the allegations in Tierney. I am completely at peace with my conscience.”

Chagnon, he said,

“simply cannot face up to criticism constructively. He says that he is being attacked from professional jealousy, or by fools”

By this stage, he was even more indignant than when he had been accused of amateur ethics.

“Terry Turner and I have established our reputations. We’re not fools. There’s no reason for us to be professionally jealous and when he says that, he’s just not facing up to criticism constructively.”

It is true that after the conference Professor Chagnon described Professor Turner and Professor Sponsel as “Absolute zeros.” But the thing that most impressed me about Professor Sponsel was his unshakeable conviction his own rightness: at least of Professor Chagnon’s wrongness.

“I think there’s a lot of substance in Tierney’s book for the reasons I mentioned earlier. It’s not all false. There’s no way. One reason is that he has quotations and paraphrases and summaries by Chagnon himself which can be checked. And let me also say this. Let’s hypothetically say that the book is 100% a fabrication. Nevertheless what as that book done. It has stimulated a concern for the Yanomamö and for professional ethics within anthropology like never before.

“I think Patrick Tierney is a noble investigative journalist and I believe that people are innocent until they proved guilty.”

And there matters, for the moment, rest. Tierney continues to go an American talk shows to plug his book. In parts of South America it already believed as a matter of fact that American scientists are using vaccination programs to conduct huge experiments (one of the anthropologists to speak in Tierney’s defence, a Ugandan, announced that the Ebola virus, too, had been introduced by scientists from the US and Europe). Chagnon broods over legal action.

The war between Bisaasi-teri and Konabuma-teri continued for thirty years after the first axe murder; and when the old enemies made peace at a great feast, it was partly to form an alliance against a third village.

Looking back, 25 years later, what strikes me most about this story is the way it prefigured everything that later went rotten in progressive academic culture. Leslie Sponsel when on to publish extensively on “Spiritual Ecology” and non-violence.