ISSN 0014-1690 The Ethical Record Vol. 97 No. 5 June 1992
CONTENTS Page Marxist Philosophy After Marxism-Leninism Alan Spence 3 Annie Besant: her many lives Barbara Smoker 6 The Value of the Bible Leslie Scrase 8 The Just World And Depression Dorothy Rowe 12 The Free Market David Simmons 15 Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" reviewed by Ian Buxton .. 19 Historical Anecdotes No. 1 Michael Newman 23
PROGRAMME OF EVENTS AT THE ETHICAL SOCIETY
Conway Hall Humanist Centre, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, WC1 Lectures and forums are held in the library and are free (collection). JUNE Sunday, 14th I I am Lecture Rhyme and Reason.PETER HEALES, SPES appointed lecturer, explores some of the conflicts which exist between the imaginative and factual use of language.
3 pm Font= Couple Counselling.RITAUDALL, Adlerian Counsellor, asks what causes difficulties in a relationship? What can be done?
Sunday, 21st I I am Lecture From Charity to Janke. LORD JUDD, former Director of Oxfam, maintains "Charity is not cnough to fight poverty. Justice is essential".
3 pm Fonmr Theflame of the family.HELEN Lu S. WANG looks at the structure of the family, problems of single parent families and homosexuality.
. Thursday 25th 730 pm Forum: State Education —destroying our children's rights. Introduced by MICHAEL N EWM AN
Sunday 28th I I am Leclure Sartre attestation and Humanism. TomRUBENS. maintains that though the influence of Sartre's ideas has declined somewhat since his death in 1980, he remains a central figure in modern Humanism. This talk will examine how Sartre placed his existentialist philosophy in a Humanist perspective, and will look in some detail at his main arguments which are still challenging and controversial, and should lead to fruitful discussion. 3 pm Fort= Corporate intervention in contemporary art in the Reaganera CaiN-TAo Wu discusses corporate sponsorship of the arts and art collection in the USA.
Programme continues on page 24
The views expressed in this journal are not necessarily those of the Society
Published by the South Place Ethical Society, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1 4RL SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY
The Humanist Centre, Conway Hall 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Telephone: 071-831 7723 Hall Lettings: 071-242 8032. Lobby: 071-405 4125
Trustees Louise Booker, John Brown, Anthony Chapman, Peter Heales, Don Liversedge, Ray Lovecy, Ian MacKillop, Barbara Smoker, Harry Stopes-Roe. Appointed Lecturers Harold Blackham, T.F. Evans, Peter Heales, Richard Scorer, Barbara Smoker, Harry Stopes-Roe, Nicolas Walter. Officers Honorary Representative: Nicolas Walter, General Committee Chair:Diane Murray. Vice Chair: Louise Booker. Treasurer: David Williams. Editor, The Ethical Record. Norman Bacrac. Librarian: Edwina Palmer. Registrar James Addison. Note: The above officers were elected by the General Committee on 3rd June 1992 General Committee The General Committee comprises the above Officers together with: Richard Benjamin, Lesley Dawson, Govind Deodhekar, Martin Harris, Naomi Lewis, Don Liversedge, Alice Marshall, David Morris, Terry Mullins, David Murray, Michael Newman, and Barbara Smoker. Secretary of the Society: Nina Khare. Hall Manager Steven Norley. Sub-committee Convenors Finance: David Williams. Administrative: Steven Norley. Bicentenary: Nicolas Walter. Clements Memorial Prize: Raymond Cassidy. Development: Nicolas Walter. Exhibitions: Michael Newman. Frank A Hawkins Chamber Music Library: Mary Lince. Library and Bookstall: Edwina Palmer. Maintenance and Refurbishment: Steven Norley. Policy and Programme: Norman Bacrac. Rules and Standing Orders: Louise Booker, Sunday Concerts: David Morris. Annual General Meeting Resolution A Motion passed at the Society's AGM on 31st May 1992 called for consideration to be given to changing the name of the Society and that, for the time being and informally, the Society should be called 'The Ethical Society'. The General Committee Meeting on 3rd June therefore authorised a Change-of-Name sub- committee, (convenor Norman Bacrac), to discuss this. Members with opinions on this question may write to the sub-committee, c/o The Secretary. Extracts from such letters may be published in The Ethical Record. New Members N. Even, C. McMahon, U. Blumenthal, A. Hay, M. Fleury, D. Saunder, H. Whitby.
We regret to report the death of Edwin A. Mornard.
Membership of the Society includes subscription to The Ethical Record Non-members may subscribe to the journal for £10/year. Contributions should be sent to the Editor, at Conway Hall. Deadline for contributions for any month's issue is the first day of the preceeding month. Contributions should conform to one of the following standards: On Disc - Word Star, Word Perfect, MS Word. Include clearly legible print-out. Typewritten — A4 paper, double-spaced with wide margins, clear ribbon. Handwritten — A4 paper, narrow lined with margin. Printed, with clear distinction between capitals and non-capitals.
2 Ethical Record, June, 1992 MARXIST PHILOSOPHY AFTER MARXISM-LENINISM
Alan Spence SPES talk, 12 January 1992
Looking at the present state of affairs in the former Communist block of Eastern Europe, it is easy to see the reason for so many people to come to the conclusion that communism is dead along with its philosophy of Dialectical Materialism. However, the purpose of my talk is to cast doubts on this notion of 'death' and, by looking a little deeper into history, to see if there is not sufficient evidence there to affirm a belief that Socialism is irreversible within the former Soviet Union, and further express the view that the various nations of that union are now going through a necessary process of reconstruction, prior to a flowering of the roots of Socialism already sunk into the soil of these various nations. Included in this new era will be its philosophy, cleansed of the dogma into which it had fallen during the period of Stalin and his successors' rule. And that this will be restored to its true, critical and revolutionary nature.
Concentrating for the purpose I have in mind of substantiating the above from its philosophical side also requires a brief explanation of the origins of this philosophy and its founder, Karl Marx (1818-1883). Furthermore, it is necessary to provide a brief explanation of how this philosophy became moribund and inflexible dogma, and to indicate aspects which can be reactivated, if it is to continue to be creatively used as by Marx, its co-founder, Frederick Engels (1820-1895), and Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924).
In Capital, Vol.1, p.XXIX, Marx wrote that his method of enquiry has `to appropriate the matter in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out its inner connections... if this is done successfully... then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori [my emphasis] construction.' Therefore, for Marx, the a priori is a result, the base of which is production 'the production of material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but...their social existence determines their consciousness' (Critique of Political Economy, p.187); and the philosophy generated by this approach has been named Dialectical Materialism.
The contrast to this Materialism is that of Idealism. This philosophical approach can be defined by quoting from George Hegel (1770-1831). He wrote 'God created the world out of nothing...the world and finite things have issued from the fullness of the divine thoughts' (Logic, p.228). Hegel, though, besides being an Idealist philosopher, was also a developer of the Dialecticaltradition in philosophy, and this part of his work is integral to the philosophy of Man and Marxism.
This dialectical tradition had two main sources, both of them located in Ancient Greece. One of these concerned the role of coinage which had become a universal equivalent in the bartering that took place in the trading and market places of Athens and the other cities of Greece and its neighbours by 500 BC. The other root of this tradition was the debating process used in the democratic institutions of the free citizens of the Greek City State. To debate, or to buy or sell a commodity, essentially involves two sides of the matter. The proposition is put, say, to raise taxes, or the price a seller requires for a jar of olive oil. The opposite claims are made that there is no need to raise taxn or the price asked for the oil is too high. Debate ensues, agreement is either reached or the debate is terminated. If the latter, then both are black at square one. But if a satisfactory conclusion is reached, then all the parties conclude by a change either in the ownership of the commodity, of a new policy on taxation — and the opposites are resolved. This process of opposition and unity became Dialectics, and it became an analytical instrument the
Ethical Recor4 June, 1992 3 question-and answer procedure adopted by Socrates (470-399 BC), a theory ofknowledge in the writings of Plato (427-347 BC), and a scientific method of proof in the syllogistic method of Aristotle (384-322 BC).
Marx was educated in the Germany of Hegel. The thesis his doctorate in philosophy took as its subject was the materialist theories of Democritus (460-370 BC), which he contrasted with the materialism of Epicurus (341-270 BC). The title he chose for this was 'Difference between the Democritan and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature'. From his early days, therefore, Marx was steeped in philosophy. He was heavily influenced by Hegel and the new heights to which the latter lifed Dialectics, but also independently he took up a materialist strain of Greek philosophy which existed before and after Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Marx, of course, stiffened this with the materialism of the Renaissance and early capitalist period.
Frederick Engels was the co-founder with Marx of Dialectical Materialism (the full name is cumbersome, so I suggest the name of Diamat, which is the way many commentators use it. He too was steeped in German philosophy. He differed from Marx in that his father was a manufacturer and put young Engels to the trade, eventually moving him to Manchester to take over his mill there. Therefore, after leaving Barmen (near Diisseldorf) grammar school his education was acquired through self-study. That he was energetic in this is shown by his essay on the German philosopher Schelling, whom he took to task for criticising Hegel, in 1842. Additionally, of course, there is his classic work on The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.This he wrote from observations from the Manchester in which he had become domiciled.
The other philosopher in the trio is Vladimir Lenin. Unlike Marx or Engels, Lenin did not have their grounding in German philosophy, but studied law. His first significant venture into philosophy was in 1908 when he wrote Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.This work was strong on materialism, but weak on dialectics. And he didn't make a breakthrough into the latter until 1914-16, when he undertook an intensive study of Hegel. These studies never appeared as a finished work, but were published as his Notebooks in the late 1920s in Russia, and in English in 1962.
Before 1917 Diamat had been a football amongst the many contending parties and individuals with socialist beliefs. Its first coherent exposition was in Engels' Anti-Dahring.This originated as a series of articles in a German workers' newspaper in 1876 and was published in book form in 1878. Extracts thereafter were published in French and English, though the complete work was not issued in English until 1935. In this work Engels wrote: 'Dialectics is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of Nature, human society and thought'. (Dialectics of Nature, p.158)). Supplementing the above, I quote from Hegel 'It is of the highest importance to ascertain and understand rightly the nature of Dialectics. Wherever there is movement, wherever there is life, wherever anything is carried into effect in the actual world, there Dialectic is at work'. (Logic, p.I 16).
These 'general laws of motion' consist of three moments or parts of one whole. For example, we can take the case of a family made homeless because their house has been repossessed by a Building Society. The fffst 'moment' is TheTransitionfrom Quantity to Quality.In this stage the couple save like mad to get together a sufficient quantity of money to get them over the hurdle of the deposit. Once achieved, a qualitative stage is reached and they can proceed to purchase the house. The second 'moment' is The Unity & Conflict of Opposites.Very topical in these days of massive Third World — and even the First World of America vis-a-vis Japan — debt.
4 Ethical Record, June, 1992 Between Debit and Credit there exists unity, one cannot be there without the other. And as for conflict, any of the vast numbers of houseowners could write a book telling about the conflict involved. (c) The third 'moment' is The Negation of the Negation. Our family has fallen on hard financial times. The wife had a baby, or the husband or wife was made redundant. The gap between debit and credit widened until the Building Society cancelled the contract and sent in the bailiffs to evict the family. Therefore: (a) When the house was purchased and occupied, the former state of homelessness was Negated. Now (b) dispossessed, home occupation is Negated. And being homeless again, the family is at square one and (c) a Negation of Negation has taken place.
Now it doesn't take a Diamat to work out the latter three stages and to understand their inseparable connection - which only goes to show that Dialectics is a natural human process of the brain which everyone who is sane possesses. What Diamat did was to classify this procedure and give it a framework for use as a scientific tool. And this took two and a half millennia - and its development is still in process.
Lenin, it was earlier said, came to understand Dialectics somewhat late in his political life; however, he had one gift which helped him to overcome this deficiency - he was a 'natural' dialectician, and this was expressed in his genius as a political strategist. The Bolshevik Revolution after the ending of military intervention from the capitalist powers was in deep trouble. To overcome this Lenin proposed what became known as his New Economic Policy. This introduced market forces back into the economy whilst keeping overall control firmly in the hands of the State - essentially the policy of Gorbachov. This policy was a success, and the Russian economy began to improve unmistakably. Its success created new problems which Lenin would have handled successfully. Unfortunately he died in 1924 and Joseph Stalin (1879 - 1953), his successor, was a very poor Marxist dialectician. His solution and that of the yes-men he gathered around him was to isolate the opposites of profit/exploitation, rich peasant/poor peasant, and then set to physically eliminate them. Then, the fear of another invasion from capitalism propelled Stalin into coercively industrialising the country, and he and the bureaucracy created to do this bonded Dialectics into a rigid command structure, which became known as Marxism-Leninism. The result has been the creation of an industrial society, with the majority of its population being working class (I would put the collective farm workers into this category), and large numbers of 'white collar' workers.
This system is now changing, and dramatically, painfully, and even dangerously so. So what of the future of Diamat?
Because everyone's brain is a natural dialectical instrument, and because the oddest thoughts can come together in that brain and be uttered as if they are majestic truths, we have to go back to Marx and the quote with which I opened this talk: `to appropriate the matter in detail, to analyse the different forms of development, to trace connections'. The difficulty, as Marx said, is that the result 'may appear...as a mere a priori construction'. And as a 'majestic truth' also appears as apriori constructions, the only way forward is to 'regard every historical social form as in fluid movement...and because [Dialectics] lets nothing impose on it...is in essence critical and revolutionary' (Marx, Capital, Vol.1, pxxx). If we take Marx's words as absolutely central to the way we think, study and engage in social and political practice, then by examining philosophy where it was left by Lenin, picking up the philosophical threads left by other Marxists such as Joseph Dietzgen (1828-1888), Fred Casey (1876-1956) and C.L.R. James (1901-1990), we can collectively put Diamat back and into its critical and revolutionary stride. Perhaps, however, to show we have left behind the old, bureaucratic dogmas of Marxism-Leninism, we should add to Diamat the prefix meta- (which means 'after'), and call this new era of philosophy Metadiamat. •
Ethical Record lune, 1992 5 ANNIE BESANT: HER MANY LIVES
Barbara Smoker SPES lecture, 3 May 1992
This Society features large in Annie Besant's life from her mid-twenties to mid-forties, and the people who shine most brightly through the latest biography of her — Annie Besant by Anne Taylor (Oxford University Press, £25) — which prompted me to give this talk, are Moncure Conway and his wife Ellen. They were always true friends to Annie in her many crises.
Born in 1847 into an upper middle-class London Irish emigre family that was reduced to comparative poverty by the early death of her father, the beautiful and passionate Annie Wood was captivated by the Celtic myths. Her intensive education, as a private boarder from the age of eight, was in the care of Miss Ellen Marryat — a devoted feminist educationist, who selected Annie as one of her protegees and turned her into a diligent, cultured, highly educated-young lady, with a knowledge of classical literature and several languages; above all, however, imbuing her with evangelical Christian values, the polarisation of good and evil, and the ideal of renunciation. This encouraged Annie's masochistic yearning for self-sacrifice in some world- shattering cause. And throughout her long, varied, influential life she was to devote herself to many such causes.
Though they were mutually incompatible causes, at each change of direction Annie was equally sincere. To those around her, and to us today, the changes are seemingly very sudden, but each was undoubtedly preceded by a great deal of secret reading and heart-searching thought. Her sincerity, however, was not always matched by strict honesty: this was sometimes sacrificed to self-dramatisation; and, though she would not have admitted to accepting the precept that the means, however shady, justified good ends, she often followed it in practice. And she was not above using her friends in this way — though it must be said that most of her friendships survived.
Each change of direction was associated wit h a charismatic leader with whom she forged a passionate (though almost certainly celibate) attachment, and who immediately took her up as his right-hand help and next in succession to himself. These leaders were all men, with the one exception of Helena P. Blavatsky — and she was a very mannish woman. Another physical thing they seem to have had in common was bright, penetrating eyes, as Annie had herself.
Annie evinced all the classical symptoms of grandiose, narcissistic masochism: like St Joan, Marie Stopes, Mother Teresa, and other charismatic women activists imbued with passionate Christianity, she saw her role as that of self-sacrifice to save the world.
On leaving the care of Miss Marryat, Annie continued her studies at home, but now choosing her own reading matter, which included Plato, and, more amazingly, the Early Fathers of the Church. The latter were mainly obsessed with the beliefs and practices of paganism — not doubting the truth of pagan myths and magic but denouncing them as evil, and to that end describing them in great detail. Thus were laid the foundations of Annie's perverse acceptance of Occultism and Hinduism in later life.
At this youthful time, however, her great ghostly lover was Jesus, and she was determined to devote her life to him. Had she been a Catholic, she would no doubt have become a nun; as a Protestant, she became a vicar's wife. This role, she thought, would enable her to live and work for Jesus. So, within a couple of weeks of meeting the Reverend Frank Besant, she became informally engaged to him. Long before the marriage, she realised that he did not attract her
6 Ethical Record June. 1992 physically and was no adequate Jesus surrogate, but her mother, Emily, refused to let her do anything so unladylike as to break off the `understanding' with Besant, though she herself disliked him.
The marriage was predictably disastrous — though it did introduce Annie to working among the poor, which presaged many of her later crusades. There was also the important incident of her stepping up into the pulpit when alone in the locked church one day, and beginning to speak to the empty pews. The words just flowed out of her, and her ringing tones echoed round the church. That was the moment when she realised that she was a born orator. She began writing for publication, but was horrified on receiving her first fee as an author to find that it legally belonged to her husband, who promptly confiscated it.
They had a son, Digby, and a daughter, Mabel, who was born prematurely — as a result, Annie was convinced, of Frank's violence during one of their frequent arguments. She then obtained a judicial separation from him, under the terms of which he was to have custody of Digby and she of Mabel. But there was no way she was ever able to get a divorce, and Frank lived almost as long as she did herself.
When Mabel was five, Frank applied to the courts to transfer the custody of his daughter to himself, mainly on the ground that Annie was failing to teach the child her prayers. This application was upheld — the little girl, just recovering from scarlet fever, being dragged away from her mother, struggling and screaming. It was the worst of Annie's many privations. However, on reaching adulthood, both Digby and Mabel sought out their mother, on pain of being cut off by their father.
Moncure Conway, having invited Annie to give lectures at the then South Place Chapel (regurgitating her studies in her own words and illuminated by her own experience), also persuaded her to visit the Hall of Science to hear Charles Bradlaugh, whose `brawling, swaggering' reputation made her fearful of him. Immediately captivated by his impressive oratory and powerful personality, she joined his National Secular Society, soon became one of its Vice-Presidents, and devoted herself to writing, lecturing, and pubfishing, as Bradlaugh's lieutenant, in the causes of Freethought, radical Liberalism, and democracy for Ireland and India.
When, charged with obscenity, Annie and Bradlaugh jointly defended the right to republish a sixpenny pamphlet on birth control, the case brought the subject to the attention of the general public for the first time, and this was the real beginning of working-class family planning. Although the pamphlet was aimed specifically at sexual behaviour within marriage, the two defendants were thereafter unjustly accused of advocating free love, and were widely suspected of being lovers.
Had they been free to marry, they would almost certainly have done so, but it is no less certain that their relationship remained celibate — as did all of Annie's succeeding passionate relationships, in one cause after another: with J.M. Robertson and Bernard Shaw (her Fabian phase), Edward Aveling and Herbert Burrows (revolutionary socialism), W.T. Stead (shared martyrdom), Madame Blavatsky and C.W. Leadbeater (Theosophy).
Annie was always careful about her appearance. In a famous photograph taken in 1885, she is wearing her `lecturing dress' — a black bustled dress with white scalloped edging around the Mary-Queen-of-Scots-style neckline. In later life, when her jet-black hair turned pure white, she always dressed in flowing white robes, relieved only by the Blavatsky jewels. It is significant that the Pope likewise always wears white, thus standing out from the crimson of cardinals and the purple of bishops.
Ethical Recoal June, 1992 7 To have been a main instigator of family planning would be achievement enough for one lifetime; but Annie was also partly responsible, through her organisation of the Bryant & May match-girls' strike, for the British trade union movement; through the London School Board, for the reform of free education and the distribution of free milk (to be stopped eight decades later by Margaret Thatcher, 'milk-snatcher') to the children of the London poor; and for setting up educational establishments in India. More dubiously, she discovered a new messiah — a young Hindu boy, Krishnamurti, whom she brought to Britain to be educated — but who later denied the mystical claims she had made for him.
Above all, perhaps, to the consternation of the British government, Annie prepared the way for Indian independence — though, dying in 1933, she did not live to see it. She was elected President of the Indian National Congress, and it was she who bestowed the title of Mahatma on M.K. Gandhi — a title which he himself repudiated, but which stuck —and who greatly influenced Nehru and other outstanding Indian politicians.
Without Annie Besant, and the important part that this Society played in her early adult life, the course of history, West and East, would have been very different. •
THE VALUE OF THE BIBLE
Leslie Scrase SPES Lecture, 10 May 1992
If I were to be the guest on Desert Island Discs,I would ask to allowed to exchange the Bible and Shakespeare for 150 books of my own choice. The Bible is not necessary reading, and considerable parts of it are utterly uninteresting and worthless, whatever their value may have been in days gone by. But there are a number of reasons why perhaps a few atheists should both read and study it. Some atheists read bits of the Bible in order to find sticks with which they can beat religious people. It is easy enough to do and it may be useful when Jehovah's Witnesses come to the door but it is not one of the reasons I have in mind.
The Bible is divided into three parts. The Old Testament is regarded with special devotion by Jews, Christians and Muslims; the apocrypha by some of them; and the New Testament by Christians and Muslims but not by Jews. Because of this devotion and because it was one of the first books to be printed, the Bible has been immensely influential in those pars of the world where Christianity has known a period of dominance.
As a result, a study of the Bible should add to our understanding of the society to which we belong and should help us to escape from the tabus and superstitions of the past. A study of Greek and Roman literature adds to our understanding of our society in much the same way. A study of the Bible should also help us to understand religious people better. One of the first things we shall discover is that religious people themselves look at the Bible from different viewpoints and come to different conclusions about it.
Some take the view that the books have been virtually dictated by God, and that the authors are little more than clerks reproducing his material. Others see the books as human and fallible attempts to express the mind and will of God through poetry, history, law, prophecy and so on. This kind of person feels that the books must be studied taking into account the historical and environmental circumstances which helped to mould them.
8 Ethical Record, June 1992 So an atheist who reads the Bible will do so in the hope that it will increase his understanding of his own society and of the religious people who live alongside him. He will try to understand why this book means so much to them. He will discover that part of its appeal lies in its quality as literature. When Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was guest lecturer at Oxford for a year, he used the book of Job as a literary text-book. The Authorised Version of the Bible and the works of Shakespeare have between them had an immense influence on the development of our language. And, of course, many authors still use them as ideas sources for their own works. Perhaps the best known popular present-day example is of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice with their musicals of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar
But perhaps the chief value of the Bible lies in the fact that its real study is the human animal. As a result it often displays considerable insight into human character and personality, and it is often thought-provoking, driving us to consider many of the perennial issues of the human situation.
When I was a Protestant Christian it was a part of the discipline of my life to study a passage of the Bible every day. Such study ensures that people are impregnated with the attitudes of the Bible and that those ideas and attitudes are constantly reinforced. Actually I'm not sure that 'study' is the right word. A youngster may study the Bible in order to get to know it and understand it. An older person uses the Bible more as a vehicle of free-ranging thought, and this can be as useful for an atheist as for a religious person. The idea is simply to let our minds play around with the things we read. Let me give you an example.
In the book of Genesis there is a curious little story about the tower of Babel. In the story God grows jealous of man because he is working together with such harmony and success and God feels that nothing will be beyond man's reach. So he scatters us all over the world and destroys our linguistic unity so that we all speak different languages. When I read that recently it seemed a complete waste of time. But then I found myself thinking about the many things which divide us from one another -- not the least of which is religion. And I began to think about the ways in which we strive to overcome those things so that we can work together in peace and harmony. Later that day I read Paul Kurtz in the New Humanist writing about 'The Limits of Tolerance.' His thoughts, particularly those about ethnicity, overlapped with my own and enable me to add another dimension to the ideas buzzing around in my head.
We don't need to read the Bible to make us think of these things. Paul Kurtz would have done part of it on his own. But perhaps we do need something, some form of disciplined reading or study which will compel us to do some solid thinking. We need to ensure that free-thinking does not go short on thinking.
A study of the Bible is sometimes a complete waste of time. If I remember rightly, Leslie Weatherhead, who used to be one of London's top Methodist preachers, reckoned that about a third of the Bible could usefully be scrapped. But parts of it are quite interesting and pleasant to read, and fairly frequently, if we allow it to, it will set us off on the kincrof free thinking session we have been talking about — and that will deepen and enrich our lives.
For example, the first few chapters of Genesis may lead us to think about evolution, our place in the world, our diet, personal and social responsibility, the care of the environment, slavery, the causes of human division and separation, the perennial problem of Palestine and Israel, human personality, the place of women in society, homosexuality, incest, race and marriage. That should be enough to be going on with.
Curiously enough, on none of these subjects do these chapters give us any real guidance. The
Ethical Record, June, 1992 9 Word of God is strangely silent. Subjects are raised but the serious business of think ing about them and establishing our approach to them is left to us. As the story of the tower of Babel made clear, and as humanists are constantly saying, man really is on his own. Unfortunately the Bible as a whole is less open than this.
I have referred to the first chaptcrs of Genesis and it is to that book which I now wish to turn. Since receiving the invitation to speak to you, I have read Genesis with some care, and I'm bound to say that I've found the experience fascinating. After all, it is over twenty years since I last read it.
Genesis is a book of beginnings. That is the meaning of the name. It speaks of the beginning of all things, of humans, of evil and judgement, and of Israel. Most people who set out to read the whole of the Bible begin with Genesis. Many of them get no further. The book begins with a liturgical prose poem of great quality, a poem expressing the belief that God created all things. Religious people have done themselves no favours by their own misunderstanding of this poem. It was never intended as a scientific or historical account of the way things came into being. It was simply a poem for use in worship, a poem designed to enable people to praise God for his creation. If we understand that we may come to respect the poem even though we reject its fundamental assumption.
That assumption is that the natural world is all the work of God the creator. There are some religious people who believe that statement in a full-blooded way. They see God as being directly responsible for every detail of the natural world. But there are many more who would limit God's function to being the divine spark behind the whole process of evolution. Such a viewpoint is also common among people who have no real religious belief. They just feel that there must be something somewhere behind it all. In his recent Conway Memorial Lecture, Hermann Bondi suggested that it is 'very difficult to quarrel with' this view.
It may be difficult to quarrel with that view, but it is not one that I share. Atheists do not believe in God, either as a creator or as anything else. But we cannot prove that there is no such being. Our general view is that the natural world is in a constant state of evolution, of becoming. We now know a great deal about its earlier stages of development, but there is a great deal that is still unknown. Many religious people share that general view. The only difference between them and us lies in their concept of God as the starting-point.
The poem of creation makes four more statements. The second is the statement that God's work of creation is 'good' — the natural world is good. Clearly that is not meant in a moral sense. The natural world is amoral. In a moral sense it is neither good nor bad. What is meant is that God has done a good job of work and has every right to be pleased with it. But if we allowed the concept of God, would that be true? If we had been creating the natural world, would we have chosen to make it as it is?
The world of nature is often terrifying and destructive. It is often cruel, harsh and unpleasant. From choice, none of us would wish to live in a world of earthquakes, volcanoes, storms, floods, famine or disease. Nor would we choose a world where living creatures tear one another apart. That doesn't mean that the world of nature is all bad. It gives most of us a general feeling of security. We talk of terra firma — the solid earth on which we live. And we are often thrilled and overwhelmed with its beauty.
The statement that the world of nature is good is meaningless. Religious people need to explain why, if their God is all he is cracked up to be, the world is so often such an unpleasant or impossible place to live in.
10 Ethical Record, June, 1992 The third statement our poem makes is that humans are God's masterpiece. We are God's crowning work, made in his own image, and given authority over the rest of creation. It is certainly true that we seem to have achieved a measure of dominance in the world at the moment. It has not always been so, and there is no guarantee that it will always be so in the future. Atheists do not believe that man has a divine right to dominance. Most of us would go further and say that we have no right to dominance at all. We have already caused the extinction of many creatures and plants. If we do not learn to treat the natural world with proper respect and understanding, we shall cause the demise of many more, probably including ourselves. After we are extinct, the next phase of evolution will see the rise to dominance of some other species.
Religious people would agree with much of this, but they see it in slightly different terms. They see our lack of understanding as a failure to grasp God's natural law. They see our misuse of the world and its resources as sin. Any harmful results flowing towards us from our misuse are therefore the judgement of God.
Whether we look on these things in a religious way or simply as a natural process of cause and effect, the message is the same. We need to learn to understand the world we live in and to treat it properly. The consequences of failure are dire and inescapable.
There are many people who would see the fourth statement of the poem as a small part of using the world and its resources properly. Genesis i, 29 - 30 tells us that the vegetable world is ours for food; in fact it goes further and suggests that all animals and birds will feed on the vegetable world as well. If that idea is taken seriously, we should perhaps ask why it is that God has created so many animals and birds with the physical capacity, aptitude and digestive system to be carnivorous.
But if we return to the world of humans, the question of whether we should or should not be vegetarian is one which divides us whether we are religious or no. Those who would turn to the Bible for guidance will find none. If Genesis I, 29 - 30 tells us that the vegetable world is ours for food, Genesis IX, 3 shows God as a later stage of human history telling us that 'every creature that lives and moves' is available for our food.
Anything and nothing can be proved from the Bible. As we have seen, one of the intriguing things about the book of Genesis is that, whatever else you find there, it is very hard to find anything that could be called the word of God.
Even the last statement made in the poem is no exception. It is the statement that God blessed the seventh day of the week and made it holy because he finished his work in six days. Nothing is said at this stage about the behaviour expected of us on the seventh day. That comes later on in the Bible. Our chaotic and restrictive Sunday laws are the direct result of this poem and the commandment which later arose out of it. Whatever our attitude to Sunday, none of us can approve of the law as it stands, not would most of us have any time for such organisations as the Lord's Day Observance Society.
But it is useful to remind ourselves that rest and holiday are essential parts of life. Without them we soon become taut and often reach breaking-point. Rest and holiday enable us to relax and drain away the stresses and tensions of life. It is in our times of relaxation that we are free to build those deep companionships which are the basis of happy and satisfying life.
There are times when, for all the wrong reasons, the Bible gets it right. The same is true of all sorts of other primitive wisdom. Instead of mocking the ancients from our citadels of greater knowledge and learning, we do well to listen to what they have to say. Once in a while, as happens sometimes with 'alternative medicine', the experience of the ages can teach us a thing or two worth learning. •
Ethical Record, June, 1992 1 l THE JUST WORLD AND DEPRESSION
Dorothy Rowe SPES lecture, 10 May, 1992
If ever you have been depressed, or if someone close to you has been depressed, you will know just how confusing the situation can be. Part of the confusion arises because psychiatrists will insist, even though their own research does not support their belief, that depression is a physical illness, caused by a metabolic change deriving from a depression gene. However, most of our confusion arises because we do not understand just what we are as human being.
To understand ourselves we need to understand two things about our universe and ourselves. First, that although the world appears to us to be divided into separate objects —people, cars, houses, trees, planets — actually everything that exists is an ever-changing interconnectedness. Second, that what we see as divisions in the world are the structures which we have learned to create.
We are meaning-creating creatures, and we cannot step outside the individual world of meaning which each of us creates. If we know that everything that exists is interconnected and that we create the divisions in this interconnectedness, we have to hand the tools which we need to understand ourselves. When we are children we are given many different tools which will allow us to operate effectively. We are given the tools for writing, doing mathematics, making music, playing games, but we are not given the tools to understand ourselves because these tools have serious implications for those people who want to have power over us.
If we understand that we each create our own world of meaning, we shall know that there are no Absolute Truths of the Universe, but that there are as many truths as there are people to create them. If we understand this, we know that we are individuals in our own right. If we understand this, we cannot become obedient, unquestioning children and citizens. Instead we become a threat to all authority. So it has never been in the interests of the Church and the State to let us know what we need to know about ourselves.
It is because we do not understand ourselves that our lives are filled with suffering. Very little of our suffering comes from natural causes. Just about all of our suffering comes from what we do to one another and to ourselves. I could illustrate this in many different ways, but here I want to illustrate it in terms of that most terrible of experiences, depression.
If ever you have been depressed you will know that being depressed is very different from being unhappy. When we are unhappy, no matter what terrible things have happened to us, we still feel close to other people. They can comfort us and we feel comforted. But when we are depressed there is a barrier between us and the rest of the world. We can see other people doing loving, comforting things to us, but none of that love and comfort crosses the barrier to warm us. When we are unhappy, even if there is no one else to comfort us, we comfort ourselves. We speak to ourselves in a kindly way and do things which make us feel better. But when we are depressed we speak to ourselves and cruel, criticising ways, and we do nothing to make life easier for ourselves. Indeed, we have become our own worst enemy.
The essence of the experience of depression is a profound sense of isolation. We are alone in a prison.
People who are depressed describe their experience in many different ways. 'I'm at the bottom of a black pit'; 'I'm walking along an endless tunnel', 'I'm inside a black balloon', 'I'm trudging
12 Ethical Record, June, 1992 across an endless desert', but all these images have the same meaning. The person is alone in a prison. The person cannot break through the walls of the prison, and, though the torture is terrible, somehow the person does not want to break through. If ever you have tried to help a depressed person, you will know how you can actually feel the barrier between you and the person, and how all your attempts to help somehow fail.
We cannot understand why our attempts to help fail so long as we think that depression is something totally bad and which must be got rid of as soon as possible. Once we see that depression has a very important purpose, we can also see what best we can do to help the person.
Depression is not an illness, but a defence which we all can use when we feel our very self falling apart. This happens whenever we find that we have made a very serious error of judgment, when we discover that there is a serious discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it actually is. When that happens we feel ourselves falling apart, shattering, disappearing. When this happens, we feel that greatest fear we can ever know, a fear worse than the fear of death.
We can come to terms with the idea of our death, if we can believe that we have played a part in the world and that some important part of us will continue on after our death — be it our soul, our spirit, or our children, or our work, or just in the kindly memories of our friends. But when we discover we have made a serious error of judgement — when we discover that the person we loved does not love us, or the firm which we thought valued us does not — we feel that we must have got everything wrong for all of our lives.
When we were tiny babies, even before we were born, we were building up a whole structure of meaning which is, in fact, our self We are our structure of meaning; our structure of meaning is us. When we discover that we have made a serious error of judgement and fear that every judgement we have made is wrong, we feel our structure of meaning crumbling. We feel our self crumble, and we fear that we shall be annihilated. It will be as if we had never existed.
Throughout our life we devise many defences against the annihilation of our self. Depression is one of these. Not everyone can use this defence. You see, only good people can get depressed. But then most of us are taught very early in life how to be good.
When we are born we come into the world full of unselfconscious self-confidence. But within a space of a few months, or even weeks, we are taught by our family that we are not satisfactory. • To be accepted by the family, we have to learn to be clean, unselfish, unaggressive and obedient. We strive to do this because we know that we are dependent on our family's love and concern.
Throughout childhood we make many sacrifices in order to be acceptable to our family and to society. As little girls, we have to give up all the competitive, assertive aspects of our self and become feminine. As little boys, we have to give up all the nurturant, vulnerable aspects of ourselves in order to be masculine. The only way we can accept these sacrifices is to be able to assure ourselves that some benefit will come to us to compensate us for our sacrifices.
When we were small children we discovered that there was a law which said, 'If you are bad you will be punished.' Being logical, we worked out that there must be another law which said, 'If you are good you will be rewarded.' Some of us were born into families which allowed us to see that these were not laws of the universe but simply rules for co-operative living. But most of us were born into families which encouraged us to generalise these laws into absolute laws of the universe. We were taught that we lived in a Just World where goodness was rewarded and badness punished. All religions teach that we live in a Just World. Religions differ only on how
Ethical Record, June, 1992 13 they define good and bad, punishment and rewards. Even in families where no religious doctrine is taught, parents can teach the doctrine of the Just World when they show that they believe that they expect to be recompensed for their sacrifices. There are many people who say, 'There must be something beyond all this,' and many parents who say, 'After all I've done for you....'
Beliefin a Just World gives a great sense of security. As children we needed to have hope that one day all our sacrifices would be rewarded. So, when we constructed our life story —the story of 'Where I came from, where I am now, what my future will be' — we each created our own individual story, but most of us constructed a story whose central theme was, 'In the future I shall be rewarded.'
Most little girls construct a story of Prince Charming and living happily ever after; and most little boys construct a story of gaining fame and wealth and earning the admiration of all men and the love of all women — though there are many variations on both these themes. As we enter adult life we proceed, so we think, to live out our story.
However, as John Lennon once observed, 'Life is what happens while you're making other plans.' Sooner or later, we all discover that there is a discrepancy between our life story and the life we are living. Sometimes the discrepancy is not so great that we cannot make some adjustments to our story. We decide that, while we didn't get what we wanted, what we had got was quite acceptable. But sometimes the discrepancy between our life and what we expected is too great to be dealt with by minor modifications.
This is what happens when we suffer a great disaster. The disaster might be the break-up of our marriage, or the loss of our work that was our whole identity, or serious illness, or the death or illness or injury to someone we loved, or it might be the slow realisation that we have wasted our life. When the disaster happens we discover that we have got our judgement wrong. We have been good and we thought that our goodness kept ourselves and our loved ones safe, but we were wrong. We feel ourselves falling apart, crumbling, disappearing. We ask ourselves, 'Why has this disaster happened to me?'
When we believe in the Just World, there are only two answers to this question. We cannot give the third answer, that the disaster happened by chance, because the belief in the Just World rules out chance. All we are left with is that the disaster was caused by someone else, or we ourselves caused the disaster.
If someone else caused the disaster to us, it means that the system of justice in the Just World has failed to operate in our case. We feel angry, resentful, bitter. Our society is full of angry, resentful bitter people, people who with their every complaint are saying, 'I've been good and I haven't been given my reward.'
But if you have been taught that it is wicked to get angry and that good people always blame themselves and feel guilty, you will choose the second explanation. This disaster occurred because I am a wicked person and deserve to be punished. 'If I had really been good my husband would not have left me — my firm would not have laid me off — my child would not have died of cancer.' Now your structure of meaning is back in place; everything is explained; you are safe — safe in the prison of depression.
When you turn against yourself and say that you are wicked, you must immediately cut yourself off from other people. If other people see how bad you are, they will reject you, and you must protect them from the evil inside you. You cut yourself off from your past, because everything you remember of your life is evidence of how wicked you are. You cut yourself off
14 Ethical Record June, 1992 from your future, because all that lies ahead of you is punishment for your wickedness. You cut yourself off from your environment and from life itself, because you are so wicked you do not deserve a place in the scheme of things. You have cut yourself off from everything and everybody, and you are in the prison of depression.
Depression is not an illness, but a defence which we all can use when we feel our very self falling apart. This happens whenever we find that we have made a very serious error of judgment, when we discover that there is a serious discrepancy between what we thought our fife was and what it actually is. When that happens we feel ourselves falling apart, shattering, disappearing. When this happens, we feel that greatest fear we can ever know, a fear worse than the fear of death.
In reviewing our life and the meanings we have created so as to be able to relinquish our defence, we need to make two discoveries. One is that we are not the bad, evil, unacceptable person we thought, but had come to believe that of ourselves through our experiences in childhood. We need to come to see ourselves, not as some tragically flawed figure, doomed to live a tragic life, but as on ordinary person who had been unlucky in many ways but whose future was full of interesting possibilities. The second discovery we need to make is that the world is neither just nor unjust, but simply is. We cannot make ourselves safe by being good; but, equally, we do not have to purchase good fortune by being good.
We can discover that it is not what happens to us which matters, but how we interpret what happens to us. We cannot be responsible for most of what happens to us, but we are responsible for how we interpret what happens to us. Only by understanding and accepting this can we cease to be obedient children of whatever age and become instead independent adults. •
THE FREE MARKET
David Simmons SPES talk, 8 December 1991
Since 1979 the free market has been a key aspect of the Conservative Government's policies. It has argued that past economic sluggishness, poor performance, and low status as a nation can all be solved by a dose of free market economics. This view is part of a rising ideology called the New Right that is gaining popularity throughout the world. In the United States it was known as Reaganomics, in Britain it has been called supply side economics, but it is best known as Thatcherism. It is part of an ideology that says that the affairs of a nation are best dealt with not by the government, but by individuals. The government, so it is said, does not have the right to interfere in the individual's decisions.
But, before we consider that any further, what is the free market? It is in essence the unhindered operations of traders in the market, buying and selling voluntarily. They are well informed, they know what they want, and because they only buy and sell voluntarily, we know that there is no coercion involved. Consumers buy goods that attract them, simply because they want those goods.
In eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Britain, most politicians thought that free trade and laissez faire were the best policy proposals for the country. That is, we should have unrestricted trade with the whole world, and the government should not interfere in economic policy. Laissez faire allowed business owners to send children up chimneys and down mines,
Ethical Record, June, 1992 15 keep slaves, abuse their servants, and feed their workers with pigswill. It was one of the saddest eras of British history.
In the 1970s, the Conservative party was so proud of its contribution in ending laissez faire that it published a history of Conservative reform, with a 'chapter entitled 'The Revolt against Laissez Farm'. This fisted such legislation as the first Factory Act (1802), and Act banning children less than nine years old from working in factories (1819), and the legalisation of trade unions. And following the 'principle that it is the duty of the Government to look after the health and conditions of the people', Sir Robert Peel set up the forerunner of the Ministry of Health in 1845 (Conservative Social and Industrial Reform).
But progress was slow, and many writers, such noben Owen, were appalled at the treatment given to the poor and to the average worker. Writers like Owen sought a new way of arranging the economy while Karl Marx argued that the free market was not an effective way of getting goods into people's hands. It was a power structure, controlled by the same people who controlled industry, so the benefits of the market were allocated unequally. To avoid this, following Marx's principles, the Soviet Union sought to allocate all goods by the State. This was known as the command economy. The State would say what would be produced, where it would be produced, and might even say who would get the resultant product.
Unfortunately, the complexity of this planning task was enormous. To plan the goods properly, one needed to plan the production of the goods themselves, the materials needed to make them, the tools needed, and any machinery necessary, plus the training and housing of the workforce. It was a daunting task. In the Soviet Union, this involved a number of state agencies and ministries. Even with this huge state apparatus, only 2 per cent of the Soviet economy was planned — 40,000 goods out of two million.
Overall, the planned economy was found to be inefficient, wasteful and slow to change. It could not deal with changes in fashion, changes in technology, or changes in social needs. And in many cases it could not even provide functioning products. The factories of the Soviet Union produced tractors without batteries, pairs of shoes with two right shoes, and hospitals with no running water.
So, although the period of laissez faireshows us that the market fails, comparison with the Soviet Union tells us that the market succeeds. The problem is that in the past, left and right have taken these two insights, and turned them into the complete answer. The left has argued that the market fails, and that governments must intervene. The right says that the market solves all problems, and no intervention is needed. Not surprisingly, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Part of the answer lies is reappraising what the free market is. First, we have to define it. One could say that there is no such thing as 'the market', so that one cannot generalise about what it is, or what it does. There is the market for executive saloons, or the market for non-alcohol wine substitutes, or the market for sub-standard housing. In some markets, price is more important than in others. In some markets, quality is so important that price becomes marginalised. In other markets, consumers can only afford the very cheapest and quality is totally ignored.
It is said that the exchanges which occur must be voluntary; but they can only be truly voluntary if the actors are fully informed about the situation, and have equal power regarding the conclusion of an agreement. For example, if a consumer buys a product unaware that it is of low quality, then we can say that the consumer has not taken part in that exchange freely and voluntarily, because necessary information with which to judge the transaction was not available.
16 Ethical Record June, 199? Also, if a company offers work to a group of people (a nation, a town), the company may be able to take its work elsewhere. The people may not be able to find jobs elsewhere. So for the workers of Taiwan, Malaysia, Bhopal or nineteenth-century Britain, an offer of work is not a simple matter. It is not something that can be resolved in discussion, in which both parties to the discussion are of equal power. The people need the jobs. The company can take its employment wherever it likes. One cannot really call the resultant agreement a voluntary one. The degree of power varies, so that in some situations one might say the consumer is acting voluntarily, but in others they are not. They may be partly informed, and lack the power to demand a better agreement.
One of the most powerful influences is the government. Another is big business. The worst problems occur when the two collude. Adam Smith said that rarely do business leaders gather, without the talk turning to some way of harming the public's interest. 'In the fairly numerous cases where government and industry have become closely intertwined, the public interest has clearly suffered' (Graham K. Wilson, Business and Politics).
The usual form of this collusion is lax enforcement of regulations. For example, competition policy should impose limits on the acquisitions carried out by the corporation. It should not be allowed to grow by acquiring other companies, without demonstrating the social benefits of its acquisitions. Health and safety policy is also laxly enforced, with the Inspectorate so poorly staffed that it cannot inspect the average factory more than once every ten years.
Another form of this collusion is de-regulation — the belief that the economy is constrained by unnecessary rules, and that by abolishing as many of these rules as possible the economy can simply assert itself. People will be able to get on with the simple job of running a business. That is; let us not interfere with these people, they know what they want, and by fortunate coincidence, that they want happens to be the best thing for all of us. One of the things they want is the removal of unnecessary hindrances, such as trade unions or regulatory policy. 'Even in a free market, however, there are things that the government has to do. It has to make sure that customers are not cheated; it has to make sure that firms do not get together to raise the price of goods which are not really in short supply at all; it has to protect the environment from pollution; it has to decide what goods and services (like health or education or the police) should be kept in the public sector. In other words, it has to lay down the framework of law and regulation in which the market works. In fact the government is also so deeply involved in the economy itself that it cannot really take an altogether "hands-dr approach to economic policy even if it wants to.' (The UK Economy, NIESR).
That is, regulations are needed. But how extensive must regulation be? Starting in 1979, the Thatcher Government liberalised the British economy in a nurnber of areas — the Stock Market, public transport, housing, banking, building societies, etc. At the same time, nationalised industries, such as the Post Office and British Telecom, have been stripped of their monopoly privileges. In all these cases, the removal of rules has in theory at least, opened up the relevant market to greater competition.
But, in the words of James Madison, 'If men were angels, no government would be necessary.' In other words, part of the reason that we need rules is that human beings are variable. Just as some of them are good, others are selfish or less than honest. They evade taxes, or take money from corporate pension funds. Sometimes the regulation is needed to prevent criminal acts, in other cases it is because in the absence of any restraint, people with some form of commercial power would misuse that power.
Ideally, the de-regulation of a previously protected market should allow new entrants, thus
Ethical Record June, 1992 17 creating competition. This in turn will, according to market theory, lower costs and therefore lower prices. This was the intention with buses and British Telecom. With BT, Mercury has been so ineffective that it has not provided any meaningful competition. In fact, it only survives (on government orders) at the whim of BT. So although BT is technically no longer a monopoly, it still has the same dominant position in the market as before. What the Tories have failed to recognise is that the mere existence of another company in the market does not mean that the industry is genuinely competitive. One needs a large number of independent, thriving companies, all seeking — and able — to expand their market share.
With the bus industry, 'deregulation has not been as successful as its supporters hoped, mainly because competition has not generally manifested itself on the scale or in the form required' (P.J. Romilly, The deregulation of bus services in Britain,' Economics, Autumn 1988). It is worth noting that in Sheffield, where the local council had to cut its funding for the buses, the de-regulation led to chaos, poor services, delays, and long waits; whereas in Oxford, where the local council doubled its subsidy to the buses, de-regulation led to an improvement in services. This lesson — the need for proper funding — should be noted by the Conservatives. Cuts in British Rail funding have turned the service on some lines into a joke. Some London companies are refusing to employ people who have to travel in from Southend, because the Southend line is so bad; commuters are now offered special certificates to show the boss, to prove that they were late because of the poor transport.
There is also the problem of market failure. This is a standard concept in economics, and relates to effects which occur outside the market. These effects are not outside the realm of economics, and many economists are yen/ concerned about them. For example, companies do not like to spend money on training, research, or investment, even though these things are essential to their own commercial well-being. So governments must intervene to persuade businesses to do things that are in their own interest.
Some market failures are referred to as externalities — that is, an effect occurs that is outside the market. If a person goes for a drive in their car, they are using their product as it was intended. But in the process, they are creating pollution that is 'consumed' by other members of society. As more and more people choose to travel by car, not only does pollution increase, the cost of transport also increases. 'The US Department of Transport estimates that nearly three billion gallons of gasoline were burned up in 1984 (about four per cent of the country's annual consumption) as American motorists stewed in traffic jams' (Michael Renner, 'Rethinking the Role of the Automobile', WorldwatchInstitute, June 1986).
At current prices, this is £6 billion a year simply wasted But petrol is not the only cost. Hundreds of motorists, lorry-drivers, delivery-drivers, and so on are all stuck in those traffic jams, trying to deliver their goods on time. The total cost of British traffic jams is estimated at £15 billion a year. A large part of this cost is due to the fact that public transport is so poor. When the government asks that British Rail or London Transport covers its costs, it is saying that the only standard by which to judge public transport is the difference between the costs of operation and the revenue from customers. But this is ignoring all the externalities.
When the banks and building societies were de-regulated, they were allowed to compete with one another. They did so desperately, to take — or protect — the newly opened market. And perhaps they lent money to borrowers who would not have qualified under the old rules. The result was that when interest rates rose, bad debt and repossessions also rose.
To say that market forces alone should set prices has the same effect, ignoring the externalities
18 Ethical Recorcl June, 1992 of a public service. In the case of public transport, those externalities include less pollution, reduced journey time, and a lower cost of distribution for industry. But all economic policies have external factors of one sort of another, and often involve social costs. Sometimes the social costs outweigh the economic benefits, and throws into question our need for that policy.
Perhaps the market is the most efficient way of creating wealth, but is it the best way of allocating wealth? Are we not rich enough already? And does our enrichment in some way impoverish the homeless and the poor? If it does, that may be too high a price to pay. The solution is not difficult. In the cases where an un-regulated market leads to socially unacceptable outcomes, then it must be regulated. The powerful, the unscrupulous, the Robert Maxwells of industry or the BCCIs of banking, must have controls imposed on their activities. The free market can only be justified if all can benefit from it. •
BOOK REVIEW
DELEGITIMISING...DEBUNKING...EXORCISING THE "GHOST IN 77IE MACHINE"
A review by Ian Buxton of "Consciousness Explained" by Daniel C. Dennett. Published by Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, at £20.
How exactly (or even roughly) does one go about defining "consciousness"? Until fairly recently, the kind of answer given would have depended on the overall philosophical outlook of the (perhaps somewhat ambitious) would-be describer. The word, like the physicist's "energy" has been ludicrously overused, abused and distorted until it has almost entirely lost any descriptive utility which it once might have had. In the context of the mind-body problem, it certainly does not mean cognitive acknowledgement, as it does when it appears in such political contexts as "feminist consciousness-raising" or Marxist "class consciousness". It means quite simply that annoying epistemological enigma which stubbornly refuses to be neatly pigeonholed into any overall ontological niche.
The essence of the problem is this: if the mind is to be explained in terms of a "spiritual" or otherwise non-physical reduction basis, how is it able to "interact" with the so-obviously material brain in such a precisely correlated manner, in both a causal and consequential sense? How indeed is this presumed "interaction" intended to escape the principle of the Conservation of Energy? This is the problem facing one of the major, still widely prevalent (although generally disreputable, from a "scientific purist" viewpoint) approaches, known as dualism, and generally correlates with a religious perspective on reality, ever since explicitly first formulated by Descartes. Alternatively, if the whole of reality is ultimately to be reduced to explanation in terms of the laws of physics, then how can one possibly hope to account for such perplexing phenomena as "qualia" — those scientifically elusive yet vitally immediate discriminable components of the unending stream of sensation which washes over us throughout every waking and dreaming moment from birth until death? Examples are the peculiarly distinctive "redness" of red or the felt quality of pains, as opposed to their causaVphysiologjcal descriptions. This is the principal problem facing that other major approach to the conundrum: that of materialism or as it is more commonly now known, physicalism. The latter perspective has inspired numerous variants on the "identity theory" theme during the post-war years, wherein all subjective mental effects are held to be identical with certain (thus-far indescribable) brain processes. Although these two schools of thought dominate literature on the mind-body
Ethical Record, June, 1992 19 problem, minority "hybrid"schools exist, such as neutral monism (Bertrand Russell) and epiphenomenalism. The latter is often mistakenly attributed to T.H. Huxley, according to Dennett, who claims that in its explicitly philosophical clothing, the thesis was first advanced by CD. Broad in 1925.
It would seem that at last the tide has begun to turn conclusively in favour of physicalism throughout the course of the past decade. A new interdisciplinary cognitivefield, science, has arisen as a result of the overlap between that originally 19th century discipline, neurophysiology, and those two 20th century progeny, artificial intelligence (hereafter, AI) and cognitive phych logy. In a manner reminiscent of the discrediting of the "rationalistic" philosophy of the mediaeval scholastics and of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant, the death of the plausible legitimacy of dualism has gone almost unnoticed by "main-stream" philosophy, being in contrast virtuallyafait accompli in the philosophy of science. It is precisely developments within science itself which have led to its demise as a seriously-to-be-considered set of propositions, in the same way that the successive development of non-Euclidean geometries, special relativity and quantum mechanics sounded in turn the death-knell of Kant's epistemological synthetic a priori categories of "absolutely intuitive" geometry, "absolute" and mutually independent space and time, and "absolute" causality respectively. As science with increasing confidence begins its final assault on consciousness — that last, seemingly intractable outlier of mystical/religious obscurantism — it is one of the striking ironies of the situation that those most intimately involved with the empirical aspect of this challenging field are the neurophysiologists who very often (as in the case of Sherrington and Penfield) remain dualists. Most recently this has been particularly apparent in the case of Eccles whose curiously meandering exposition of dualism in "The Self and Its Brain" must rank as one of the most lengthy "scientific" non-explanations of modern times. For of course, theessential Achilles' Heel of dualism preciselyis its principled inability to suggest any explanatory mechanism.
Dennett is, of course, a philosopher, and so eschews the more esoteric discourse within Al, particularly concerning the relative virtues of "connectionism" versus "GOFAI" (Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence, whose name alone indicates the pace of advance since the sixties, when connectionism first branched off with M insky & Papert's study of "Perceptrons", building on the seminal work of McCulloch & Pitts in 1943). Nevertheless, he takes the eminently commonsense view (still resisted by those such as Jerry Fodor) that since the only hardware in the brainis in fact a vast multiply connected series of arrays of neurons, then connectionism must be the way forward, Dennett asserts that in particularlinguistic thinking exists in virtue of the implementation of a "serial virtual machine" (like the logic-processing of existingprogrammable computers)onto the brain's massivelyparallel neural architecture, and this is where his unifying theme of the destruction of the "Cartesian Theatre" comes in. Descartes, as the proponent of "dualism-interactionism", asserted that "the soul" somehow interacts with the brain via the pineal gland. Over half of Dennett's book is concerned with the painstaking dismantling of our intuitive prejudices as to the existence of a "central meaner". He takes a hard, clear look at a wide variety of perceptual illusions, showing how we thereby bolster the delusion of the "unified self'. The brain is clearly modular in operation, and many of its information-processing (IP) activities are nowhere near as simultaneous as we fondly suppose, but are retrospectively the object of "rational reconstruction", to use the philosopher Rudolf Carnap's beautifully apposite phrase. The "knower" in an absolute, panoptic, sense is thus a cultural artefact.
In further illustrating the almost axiomatic fiction of the concept of the unified "conscious Dennett draws the suggestive analogy of the centre of gravity of a system of mutually associated massive bodies. Such a locus, whilst apparently "coordinating" the mechanical behaviour of the component bodies of the system, may in fact seldom coincide with any actually
20 Ethical Record, June, 1992 existing piece of matter (indeed typically never, of most binary star systems). As Dennett aptly says: "The chief source of the myth of the Cartesian Theatre after all is the lazy extrapolation of the intentional stance all the way in". Unity of action and (apparent) unity of consciousness mask the fact that many parts of the brain are poorly coordinated, and much of consciousness is due to lack of the necessary "hard-wiring". Dennett regards verbal thought, for instance, as a recently developed internalisation of the overt social device which preceded it, and whose residue lingers on in the often solipsistic babble of pre-socialised infants. Thus in the absence of the needed hard-wiring, in verbal thinking we "talk to ourselves", employing the only possible way of allowing one part of the brain to access the memory store and computational power of another. This idea is reminiscent of W. Ross Ashby's ("Design For a Brain", 1951) that much extended IP, in order to be effective, may involve feedback loops which actually go outside the system doing the IP.
It is pleasing to see that he regards memory and phenomenal awareness as indistinguishable in the extremely short term and many of the examples drawn from cognitive psychology bear out the idea that consciousness (which is after all essentially "here and now") is a kind of echoic memory. The persistence of a purely psychological "unity of self" in an ensemble of poorly connected or even practically completely disconnected subsystems is borne out by Roger Sperry's classic "split-brain" experiments, performed from the 1960s onwards. In order to limit severe cases of epileptic discharge from propagating all over the entire brain, Sperry abolished direct communication between the cerebral hemispheres by completely severing the interconnecting corpus callosum, thus confining the seizure to less than half the brain. However, under other than highly idealised laboratory conditions, the subjects' "sense of self' seldom appeared to be radically compromised. In addition, the fact that there is no exact isomorphism either spatially or temporally between e.g. speech ability and the relevant neuroanatomical features also tends to bear out this discovery.
The second main pillar of Dennett's "distributed" argument (resembling somewhat the material substrate to which he alludes) is that brains, as IP systems, have content, and not necessarily propositional — such a capacity only arises with the onset of abstract linguistic capacity, a relatively recent evolutionary development. Dennett claims that the starting point of sentience is "aboutness", not sensation (the already-mentioned qualia). Strictly speaking, he denies the existence of qualia, but lays no claim to the label "eliminativist", since he does not deny our "ineffable" sensations (which I would have regarded as synonymous with qualia) merely the illusory subjective "terminus" of our impressions. Gratifyingly, I find that he has developed an explanation of qualia which very closely resembles my own speculations. What I would regard, briefly as a problem of the incommensurability of socially mediated proposition- based language with respect to the IP activities concerned with sensory input to the brain (themselves mediated by untranslatable "machine code",, thus making "qualia" a function of our descriptive ignorance of the processes underlying our capacity for perceptual discrimination). Dennett regards as pre-linguistic neural "judgements" made by the brain. He demonstrates what we ordinarily ta ke to be the -plenum" of waking consciousness to be much more of a vacuum, illustrating this for example by means of one of my own favourites, the fingertip fixation test which demonstrates the much greater image-processing power of foveal versus peripheral vision. However, Dennett adopts a much wider pespective than mine on the question qualia. By relating his analysis to a global theory of mind which in its nuts and bolts approach can truly be described as scientific, he invites very favourable comparison with the kind of non-empirical but nevertheless highly lucrative pseudotheoretical psychological systems advanced by such "giants" of the past as Freud and Jung which have masqueraded as "scientific" for almost a century.
His main empirical base is provided by perceptual experiments. For instance, the fact that
Ethical Record, June, 1992 21 people are able to "feel" prostheses after short familiarity with their use, even improvised ones such as pencil tips, supports Dennett's thesis that the "experiential" component of consciousness (qualia) is largely judgemental. Summing up his attitude to quail's, Dennett asks: "Are pains real? They are as real as haircuts and dollars and opportunities and persons and as real as centres of gravity, but how real is that?"
He parodies the acausal role of qualia in epiphenomenalism by supposing the existence of "epiphenomenal gremlins" in the cylinders of an internal combustion engine, which are supposedly as physically undetectable as are quaila in the epiphenomenalist account, but nonetheless "there all right". This perspective bears a more than casual similarity to Laplace's use of Occam's razor in dismissing the God hypothesis on the grounds of superfluity — an hypothesis in my view as hilarious as Dennett's fictitious account.
Summing up his theory, Dennett says: "In some regards, you could say that my theory identifies conscious experiences with information-bearing events in the brain, since that's all that's going on", but strictly resists the "identity theorist" tag because of what he terms the "heterophenomenological" view. Briefly, this asserts that the external observer can construct a phenomenological description of an experimental subjects's own experience which does not correspond to the subject's own phenomenology. Thus the experimenter can accept the subject's sincerity about his/her own experiences without actually believing such an account, but can usefully accept such material as data and, relying on its internal consistency, treat it to all intents and purposes asi jit were true. The dilemma facing an"orthodox" identity interpretation in such dircumstances is whether or not to "identify" neural processes with something which may after all merely be the subject's own judgemental fiction (and thus that of all of us, hence "folk psychology"!).
He points out the (evolutionarily speaking) "narcissistic" nature of our qualia-schernata: "Nature does not build epistemic engines" and in the beautiful phrase: "We are the inheritors of evolved quality-detectors that are not disinterested reporters, but rather warners and beckoners, sirens in both the fire engine and Homeric senses."
It is difficult to summarise a book which is witty and informative throughout and which I personally find very exciting. It avoids the dry prolix style of much of philosophical academe and is readily accessible to the interested non-specialist. It is a refreshing contrast to those such as Searle who — sadly all too typical of philosophers as a whole — seemingly confuse literary excellence with the incapacity to see the sometimes unwelcome implications of their own premisses. In my opinion, such commentators often confuse "self-evidential" conservative incredulity as to the rich explanatory potential of physicalism with hard conceptual analysis.
There is a wealth of detail in this book which space forbids me even to mention, but it is clear that Dennett is pointing the way towards what will ultimately be a complete descriptive analysis of the phenomenal mind in terms acceptable to (physical!) science. He refers to similar ideas by Ray Jackendoff in his book "Consciousness and the Computational Mind", indicating that Jackendoff considers there to be not so much a mind-body problem as a mind-mindproblem in the sense that the task facing science is to correlate the phenomena/ mind with the computational mind (also my view, as I have previously indicated) about which many problems not so much philosophical but decidedly scientific still remain. Such a development, paralleling all the other separate assimilations of past philosophical "Great Problems" by purely scientific methodology, would represent humanity's definitive emergence from the long dark tunnel of our species' supernaturalistic adolescence into the clear fresh air of mature reason. •
22 Ethical Record, June, 1992 HISTORICAL ANECTDOTES NUMBER ONE Michael Newman CHRISTIANS TRY TO BAN FREETHOUGHT This is the first of a series of historical anecdotes to celebrate the forthcoming SPES bicentenary in 1993. During the two hundred years there have been many changes, an exciting evolution from a dissenting congregation that was Christian but did not believe in damnation, to become the Humanists of today. These stories will cover freeing slaves, sex scandals, the public promotion of science, the birth of SPES, our support of hospital patient libraries...many stories never published before frhly dug from our archives. So keep your eyes peeled to this page each month. Our first story is not very old and reflects the intolerance directed against Humanists. The World Union of Freethinkers was founded in Brussels in 1880 under the patronage of Charles Bradlaugh; its first international congress was held in 1881 in London. In 1937 the National Secular Society, Rationalist Press Association, South Place Ethical Society and the Ethical Union (later, with involvement from RPA, to become the British Humanist Association) sent an invitation to the Freethinkers to host their conference in London. This was accepted and the conference organised for September 9-13 1938, to be held at Conway Hall with events at the new Scala Theatre and at Bradlaugh's tomb. The vicious campaign against this Congress was primarily organised by the Roman Catholics, being led by Cardinal Hinsley. In Church and national papers allegations were made that the Freethinkers were using London as a last resort after being refused admission to several other countries and that the conference was being organised and funded from Moscow as a cover for Communist agitation. The Church Times stated on February 18, 1938 that, 'The avowed object of this international meeting is to assail the Church as the friend of capitalism and the enemy of social reform, and to defend the Bolshevist persecution in Russia'. In March 1938 the Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh sent the Prime Minister, on behalf of his Priests, a resolution requesting the banning of the 'anti-God Congress' that filled them with 'horror' and 'outrage'. Soon a member of Parliament, Captain H.M. Ramsay, took up the fight, submitting a request to the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare to prohibit the Congress. This was signed by seventy MPs and members of the Christian Defence Union. Hoare replied that the meeting was not illegal but, 1should strongly deplore the holding here of a Congress of this character, and I am in fullest sympathy with the feelings which have prompted the protest against the holding of this Congress, the organisers of which hold and propagate beliefs repugnant to the sentiment of the great mass of Christian people in this country.' Whilst Cardinal Hinsley was making public warnings to the government of violent protest if the Congress went ahead, the persistent Captain took the issue into the chamber of the House of Commons. His Bill attempted to 'Prevent the participation by aliens in assemblies for the purpose of propagating blasphemous or Atheistic doctrine, or in other activities calculated to interfere with the religious institutions of Great Britain'. The Bill was defeated but received the support of 170 MPs. There followed protest meetings and a 'March of Reparation to God' but the Congress, with such British speakers as JBS Haldane, Lancelot Hogben, Hyman Levy and HG Wells and others from throughout the world, was a great success. It ended by passing resolutions supporting the Spanish Republicans, the resolve of 'Czecho-Slovakia' to struggle for its freedom and democracy, declaring sympathy to all oppressed people and condemning the horrific persecution of the Jews. On 13th September 1938 the foreign guests had been taken to Bradlaugh's tomb at Brookwood Cemetery. They were shocked to find the bronze bust of Bradlaugh stolen and the grave covered by a poster and a potty. The poster, with a large swastika, read: 'Judah - Beware. Christian England is rising against you (Pi.). Beneath this sod lies another.' (Ref: World Union of Freethinkers, Report of the International Congress, CA. Watts & Co, 1939).
Ethical Record, June, 1992 23 JULY Sunday, 5th 11am Lecture Frederick Banda. TERESA GORMAN M'. maintains that Bastiat has made a unique contribution to the promotion of a simple understanding of the free market which has an enduring relevance to today's political debate.
3 pm Lectme The Islamic State and Democratic Principla; Iran, a case study.PARVIZ OWSIA makes an analysis of the fundamentalist trend in the Islamic Republic of Iran; its evolution, modification and possible future direction.
Sunday, 12th 11 am Lecture Reform or Revohrtion: the Russian example.MARK GALEOT11, lecturer in International History, University of Keele, states Russian society has always been prey to attempts to reform by revolution — fast, bloody and dramatic. These have always failed, illustrating the need for longer term development.
3 pm Forum What next for The Ethical Society?An opportunity to exchange ideas for future meetings of the Society and ways to increase its impact. SPES EVENING CLASS Controversies in Evolution Tutor Mike Howgate, MSe Tuesdays 6.30 pm to 8.30 pm in the Lthrary, Conway Hall AdmisMon £1 including refreshments 16 June From reptile to mammal - if s all in the ears! 23 June 'Theories of the origin of flight 30 June Why marsupials should be winners 7 July Umenal environments - adapting to life undergrotmd 14 July Where did Eve come from?
LONDON STUDENT SKEPTICS In Room 3C of the University of London Union Building on Malet Street at 7.30 pm. 15 June The GreatHuman Detective Story - British Humanism's first video followed by planning for next year and drinks.
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