Ethical Record The Proceedings of the Conway Hall Ethical Society

Vol. 118 No. 4 £1.50 May 2013 EDITORIAL – UNIVERSAL BENEFITS VERSUS MEANS TESTS

The past few weeks have seen a curious phenomenon. Sections of the media and many people have suddenly become considerably exercised over the alleged injustice of certain ‘universal’ benefits, eg free travel passes for the over 60s, the winter fuel allowance for pensioners and free TV licences for the over 75s. The cry has gone up that rich people should not accept these benefits or should seek somehow to repay or refund them, or be subject to a means test before getting them, with all the extra bureaucracy this would involve. What’s been largely ignored in all this clamour is that millionaires are also entitled, should they wish to avail themselves of them, to free health care, free education (till 18) and free fire and police services, together worth potentially tens of thousands of pounds. But the country needs only a single means test and it already has it – income tax. A properly constructed income tax, whereby the rich are subject to progressively higher rates of tax, would take care of all apparent anomalies. This preserves the logical simplicity of the universal benefit system.

HELP SPREAD HUMANISM IN AFRICA Leo Igwe of Nigeria will distribute copies of Barbara Smoker’s Humanism to schools and groups in Africa which are desperately short of text books expounding the history and concepts of humanism. We have spare copies but need help with the postal charges. Send £10 to Conway Hall Ethical Society to send 10 copies or £20 for 20 copies (marked ‘Africa’). Thank you. 5th Edition SPREAD ENLIGHTENMENT!

COLLAPSING PYRAMIDS : MONEY, AUSTERITY AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS Ken MacIntyre 3 ADVENTURES WITH THE ENEMIES OF SCIENCE Will Storr 8 WITCHCRAFT AND DEATH IN UGANDA Leo Igwe 17 JOSEPH McCABE (1867 – 1955) – FEARLESS FREETHINKER Norman Bacrac 18 BOOK REVIEW - Leslie Scrase’s THE 4 GOSPELS THROUGH AN OUTSIDE WINDOW Jennifer R Jeynes 27 FORTHCOMING EVENTS 28 CONWAY HALL ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Main phone for all options: 020 7405 1818 Fax (lettings): 020 7061 6746 www.conwayhall.org.uk G.C. Chairman: Chris Bratcher G.C. Vice-chairman: Giles Enders Editor: Norman Bacrac Please email texts and viewpoints for the Editor to: [email protected] Staff Chief Executive Officer: Jim Walsh Tel: 020 7061 6745 [email protected] Administrator: Martha Lee Tel: 020 7061 6741 [email protected] Finance Officer: Linda Lamnica Tel: 020 7061 6740 [email protected] Librarian: Catherine Broad Tel: 020 7061 6747 [email protected] Hon. Archivist Carl Harrison carl @ethicalsoc.org.uk Programme Co-ordinator: Sid Rodrigues Tel: 020 7061 6744 [email protected] Lettings Officer: Carina Dvorak Tel: 020 7061 6750 [email protected] Caretakers: Eva Aubrechtova (i/c) Tel: 020 7061 6743 [email protected] together with: Brian Biagioni, Sean Foley, Rogerio Retuerma Maintena nce: Zia Hameed Tel: 020 7061 6742 [email protected] New Members We welcome the following new members to the Society: Richard Comaish, Beckenham, Kent; Stella Dessoy, London, W6; David Garcia, London, SE1; Chantal Glover, London, N22; Park Limpongpan, Godalming, Surrey; Morgan Philips, London, SE13; David Secker, Ealing, London; Anthony Taylor, Chelmsford, Essex; Joy Eleanor Wood, London, WC1N; Mazin Zeki, London, N15.

THE HUMANIST LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES The Humanist Library and Archives are open for members and researchers on Mondays to Fridays from 0930 - 1730. Please let the Librarian, Catherine Broad, know of your intention to visit. The Library has an extensive collection of new and historic freethought material. Tel: 020 7061 6747. Email: [email protected]

CONWAY HALL ETHICAL SOCIETY Reg. Charity No. 251396 Founded in 1793, the Society is a progressive movement whose aims are: the study and dissemination of ethical principles based on humanism and freethought the cultivation of a rational and humane way of life, and the advancement of research and education in relevant fields. We invite to membership those who reject supernatural creeds and are in sympathy with our aims. At Conway Hall the programme includes Sunday lectures, discussions, evening courses and the Conway Hall Sunday Concerts of chamber music. The Society maintains a Humanist Library and Archives. The Society’s journal, Ethical Record , is issued monthly. Memorial meetings may be arranged. The annual subscription is £35 (£25 if a full-time student, unwaged or over 65)

If you have any suggestions for speakers or event ideas, or would like to convene a Sunday afternoon informal, get in touch with Sid Rodrigues at [email protected] or 020 7061 6744.

2 Ethical Record, May 2013 COLLAPSING PYRAMIDS : MONEY, AUSTERITY AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS Ken MacIntyre Lecture to the Ethical Society, 17 March 2013 The financial crisis is a consequence of the nature of money in our modern banking system where almost all our money supply originates as credit created by private banks. As Adair Turner, Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, stated in a speech to the South African Reserve Bank in November 2012: The financial crisis of 2007/08 occurred because we failed to constrain the private financial system’s creation of private credit and money. The UK money supply increased eight-fold from the mid 1980s to 2008 from £250 billion to over £2 trillion {two million million. [Ed]}. Over the last 40 years, the removal of restrictions on bank credit creation has led to a giant banking pyramid scheme 1 which is now collapsing. Keynes’s advice in the preface to the 1935 General Theory is relevant in understanding the crisis: The ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are extremely simple and should be obvious. The difficulty lies not in the new ideas but in escaping from the old ones which ramify for those brought up as most of us have been into every corner of our minds. We must forget everything we are told about money, as we must ignore references to the ‘economic climate’ as if this was a natural phenomenon over which we have no control, like the weather. In his 1932 acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention, Franklin Roosevelt reminded his audience that we are dealing with social rules and conventions, and that these can be changed: Our Republican leaders tell us economic laws – sacred, inviolable, unchangeable – cause panics which no one could prevent. But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings. How Banks Create Money Turner’s credit excesses began with an obscure piece of legislation in 1971 (Competition and Credit Control) following which debt in the UK economy exceeded the capacity to pay by 2008. Banks were free to create money by making accounting entries in borrowers’ bank accounts. ...banks extend credit by simply increasing the borrowing customer’s current account... Paul Tucker, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England 2007 The pre-eminence of banking over all social and economic interests is the real meaning of the ‘free market’ revolution implemented in developed economies, notably by the governments led by Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. David Harvey 2 identifies the New York City financial crisis of the 1970s as a critical turning point in establishing the principle that financial institutions must be protected at all costs. ‘The market’ is an ideological Ethical Record, May 2013 3 construction which conceals the reality of power. That ‘the market’ plans economic activity better than any other agency is a secular myth. Yet this irrationality is accepted by all major political parties. In reality, all economies are planned. In our money system planning is carried out by the banking sector, proving disastrous in terms of economic stability. There have been 40 years of unprecedented volatility – four recessions, high unemployment, two major banking crises and asset price bubbles. The lessons of the Great Depression have been forgotten and the work of leading twentieth century thinkers such as Keynes ignored. The current recession has lasted longer than that of the 1930s. We are told that austerity is the solution, but tax rises and reductions in public expenditure amount to an assault on 100 years of social progress since Lloyd George’s budget of 1909 introduced the welfare state and the state pension. Why should we have chronic insecurity when we have the most productive society in history? Rather, the solution lies with changing the way money is created. Money Is Little Understood Money is a brilliant social invention which has enabled economic progress through the division of labour and technological innovation. But it is generally little understood by politicians, central bankers, commentators and economists. Only a tiny number of economists predicted the financial crisis because mainstream economics has no theory of money, debt or interest. Mainstream economists believe that the quantity of money in circulation has no impact on output or employment; that debt simply transfers spending power between parties (like lending someone £10 for a taxi fare); that banks are intermediaries, lending on savings, with no role in money creation. Policymakers’ lack of understanding has led to errors: banking bail-outs and austerity. The textbook explanation is that money originated as a means of facilitating barter in an economy dominated by the exchange of commodities. However, barter depends upon the ‘double coincidence of wants’. For example a shoemaker relies on the baker and his family needing shoes, otherwise he starves. Money overcomes this practical difficulty by establishing a system of exchangeable tokens. The problem with this invention (from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations ) is that there never has been any society based upon barter. Money is an abstract, a social relationship underpinned by the State, recognised since the time of Aristotle. Money has value because the State accepts it in settlement of taxes and so money is generally accepted in settlement of private debts. The origins of money can be traced to the time when subsistence agriculture gave way to economic surplus. The ancient rulers of Babylon and Egypt imposed debts on populations in the form of taxes as a means of controlling this surplus. Politics is about the struggle over economic surplus, cited by Marx and Engels in 1848 as the class struggle. Today the struggle is not between 19th century workers and bosses, but between a tiny financial elite and the rest of us. Money is political, but major decisions are made by a financial elite, narrowing the extent of public debate to gossip and the trivia of politicians’ misdemeanours.

4 Ethical Record, May 2013 Coin and paper money are tokens of no intrinsic value. Today 97% of money is credit created electronically by banks. Take as an illustration the borrowing of £10,000 to buy a second-hand car. The bank credits your account with £10,000. Nothing is actually lent or borrowed. The terms ‘loan’ and ‘deposit’ are misleading. Banks simply sell credit which costs nothing to produce. £10,000 of new spending power has been created as both a liability and an asset of the bank. When the car is purchased, the dealer’s account is credited with £10,000 spending power. When the loan is repaid, the liability to the bank is removed, as is the asset. Money has been destroyed. In our current money system, which is based on debt, if all debt were repaid there would be no money in circulation and the economy would collapse. Politicians who want to encourage saving and less reliance on debt show how little they understand our money system. The money supply has to expand if economic activity and employment are to be maintained. During this recession, the opposite has happened. Since 2008 bank lending has been falling and the money supply has been contracting.

In the 1920s an increase in private debt led to the 1930s Great Depression. The boom of the 1920s unravelled and purchasing power collapsed as Americans started to pay off debt. But by 2007, with the removal of all controls on credit creation, private debt was far above that of the Great Depression. And added to the surge in UK household debt, there was a growth in debt between banks. This was halted in 2007 because of poor quality sub-prime mortgages, bringing down Northern Rock when it could not repay its short-term loans. Savings financed mortgages when it was a Building Society. This model worked well until banking controls were removed in the 1980s allowing building societies first to behave like banks and then to convert to banks. All the building society conversions ended in failure. In 2007-08, private debt expansion, the process which fuels economic growth in boom time, reached its limit and went into reverse, increasing Government debt

Ethical Record, May 2013 5 and linking the fiscal crisis to the ideology of austerity measures. However, a government is not like a household which must earn money in order to spend. If household earnings decrease spending must be reduced to avoid eventual bankruptcy. As the government has the sovereign power of issuing the currency, it cannot go bankrupt unless it chooses. The economy consists of three balances – private (households and firms), public (government and its agencies) and external (trade with the rest of the world). At any time all three sectors run a mix of surpluses or deficits which must collectively sum to zero. Ignoring external trade, a private sector surplus means a public sector deficit. Governments do not have any choice. In the recession the household sector went into surplus and bank lending contracted, reducing the money supply. Tax revenues collapsed as a result of declining economic activity. At the same time, public expenditure increased with unemployment and benefits rising. Richard Koo’s chart below 3 illustrates the generally inverse relation between household and government spending.

The unstable cycle of boom and bust is a direct consequence of giving control of money to banking interests. Austerity is moving wealth and power to a tiny financial elite, diverting government resources to banking subsidies in the form of massive bail-outs. Austerity is necessary to maintain the expansion of the money system which functions by constantly investing and reinvesting economic surplus.

As David Harvey described 4: This way of absorbing capital surpluses has got more and more problematic over time. In 1750 total global output was $135bn in today’s terms. By 1950, it’s $4trn. By 2000, $40trn. It’s now $50trn, and if Gordon Brown is right it will double to $100trn by 2030. You will need to find $3trn

6 Ethical Record, May 2013 of profitable investments. That’s a very tall order. Less and less goes into real production and more into speculation on asset values. Banking crises also affect Europe. Contrary to media spin, the Euro-zone crisis is not a function of lazy southern Europeans and their corrupt and profligate spending. The euro was always flawed because it had no formal mechanism for recycling trade surpluses from the north to countries in deficit, the much derided PIIGS 5. The private banking sector reinvested surpluses in asset speculation, creating spiralling property prices in Ireland and Spain. This mechanism has broken down leaving banks with losses which they are trying to recover by speculating in Euro-zone government debt. The real beneficiaries of Greek government bail-outs are private banks. In 2008-09 the UK government put £1trillion in loans, guarantees and share purchases into the banking sector and nationalised several banks. But the money borrowed by the government for these interventions was created by the banking sector itself. Private control of money has been viewed as unethical since ancient times. Aristotle regarded charging interest as unnatural. Basing money on interest- bearing debt leads to instability, poverty, inequality and the emergence of oligarchy, the rule by a few which both Plato and Aristotle considered unhealthy. Such a money system might be defensible if it produced public benefit, but it does the opposite. Neither is it transparent nor legitimised through any democratic process. There is no evidence that government money is inflationary 6. So, money creation should be by public agency, separate from credit, while banks should be required to match customer deposits with reserves. These simple measures would create price stability and end the boom-bust cycle. Principal Sources Where Does Money Come From? New Economics Foundation, 2012 Positive Money www.positivemoney.org 1 A fraudulent scheme in which investors pay a fee to the name at the top of a list in return for recruiting more investors in the expectation of receiving a large payment when their names reach the top of the list. Credit creation follows this pattern. 2 David Harvey Their crisis, our challenge; Red Pepper March 2009 3 Richard Koo, Chief Economist Nomura Bank, The World in Balance Sheet Recession; Real World Economic Review 2011 4 Op cit 5 Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain 6 See The Chicago Plan Revisited; working paper, The International Monetary Fund, 2012

THE 80 th CONWAY MEMORIAL LECTURE JEREMY BENTHAM: PROPHET OF SECULARISM by Philip Schofield Copies available at £4 inc post from the Conway Hall Ethical Society

Ethical Record, May 2013 7 ADVENTURES WITH THE ENEMIES OF SCIENCE Will Storr Lecture to the Ethical Society, 28 April 2013 I am here today in a slightly desperate attempt to promote The Heretics , my second book, the writing of which has left me £30,000 in the red and which, the last time I checked, was at number 13,289 in the Amazon book charts. The Heretics follows my first book, Will Storr versus The Supernatural , which, despite being reviewed well, sold so few copies that it was a struggle to get publishers interested in this one. I also have a novel, The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone , which was published in March, received a grand total of one review in the national press, and has generated roughly as many sales. My life so far has been a breadcrumb trail of failure. I failed academically, spent my childhood in trouble with parents, teachers and, eventually, the police. I was a kleptomaniac, developed a drinking problem, had a series of dysfunctional relationships with various women and spent most of my twenties in therapy. I am now nearly forty and find myself working in a dying industry. I have no job security, no savings, no pension and go through semi-regular periods of depression. So, these are the facts of my life. What I didn’t realise, until I made the journey that I recount in The Heretics , that, no matter how accurate all those facts are, they exist in a place that is at once so familiar to us, and yet so profoundly strange, that it took years of work, thousands of miles of travel and meetings with dozens of brilliant and fascinating minds before I began to finally recognise it. For they are that bizarre thing - a construction of facts that is, at once, completely true and completely untrue. They are a story.

My Past Life I got my first inkling of the beguiling power of stories at the start of that journey, as I lay on a Sydney suburb, busily experiencing my own murder. My attacker was fat. He had a leather waistcoat and huge hairy shoulders. It took a full two minutes for him to pummel me to death with his hammer. It happened in Germany, in the fifteenth century, during a past life. I booked my appointment with Vered Kilstein, a past life regression therapist, because I have always been interested in people who believe strange things. I’d been journalist for more than ten years, and had come to realise that, time and time again, at the conclusion of my stories, I was hitting up against the same mystery. Why don’t facts work? When people believe odd things, you can hit them with any facts you like; it won’t make any difference. Facts, to these people, are like bullets made of smoke. I used to think that strange beliefs – in Gods, in aliens or in Hitler’s hitherto unappreciated love of the Jewish people – were stupid, ergo the people who believed them were stupid. But my father isn’t stupid. He was a working class boy from Keighley who won a scholarship to Oxford and spent years of his retirement earning a PhD. And yet he believes in heaven, the resurrection and the devil. The controversial historian David Irving is a demonstrably intelligent 8 Ethical Record, May 2013 man. He was highly regarded as a historian until he decided that Hitler was a friend of the Jews. During my assignments, I kept on meeting people who believed in crazy things, and yet were clearly anything but stupid. So how did they end up believing these things? If stupid wasn’t the answer, what was? After my session with Vered was over, I asked her to recount some of her proudest successes. I wondered if it was her experience that a high number of clients turn out to have been heroes of some sort – knights or kings or celebrities. ‘People who’ve had a profound effect on the world – the Cleopatras, the John Lennons – you could see them as sparks,’ she explained. ‘The soul has many sparks in it. So a lot of people may carry sparks of John Lennon.’ ‘Have you ever had a John Lennon?’ I asked. ‘Actually, I’ve had two John Lennons. And who’s to argue with that? Others have had more mundane lives. One lady was a twig. During my first regression I experienced myself as a blade of wheat.’ ‘A blade of wheat?’ ‘I was literally a blade of wheat. It was a very, very moving experience. I was quite dry and yellow.’ ‘How did it feel to be a blade of wheat?’ ‘Vast and empty and alone.’ ‘And now you’ve experienced yourself as a blade of wheat, do you sometimes feel guilty eating wheat-based products?’ ‘I am totally wheat-intolerant!’ {Coeliacs beware! [Ed]} Vered was great company. She was lucid and bright and very engaging. But in my view, she’d made a mistake. It seemed obvious, to me, that past lives were just some form of guided day-dream that takes place in a lightly hypnotised state. Why wasn’t it obvious to her? I found myself asking similar questions, some months later, when I arrived at the house of a homeopath in Sutton Coldfield. Gemma Hoefkins and Homeopathy Just like Vered, Gemma Hoefkens had incredible stories to tell me. Hers began in a GP’s surgery, with a doctor telling her that she was being silly. But Gemma was convinced that she was ill. You just know, don’t you, when something is wrong. Strange shapes and colours would waft and form in her vision. She would fall asleep on the sofa and nobody could wake her. She was having difficulties in the office – her managers kept insisting they had told her what to do, but she had no memory whatsoever of their doing so. They had begun to treat her as if she were stupid. Gemma was not stupid. She had qualifications: a degree. But she didn’t feel very clever when she sat in that chair in her doctor’s surgery, desperate for him to listen. Every time she went, he would say the same thing. There is nothing whatsoever to worry about. You’re just a young girl, being silly. They found six small tumours on her brain. Oh, it’s nothing too serious, they said. They’re benign. But then they found new tumours – on her spine. Chemotherapy made her sick. All her hair fell out. The tumours grew. She gained four stones in one month. She had an distended stomach, a swollen face. She had a wheelchair, a stick. Her sight became so bad that she couldn’t watch television or read. She could do nothing at all but lie there, thinking, I’m only twenty-six. It’s not my turn to die’.

Ethical Record, May 2013 9 One day, her oncologist visited her hospital bed. He said something strange. ‘Okay, Gemma, these are your options. You can stay here, you can go to a hospice or you can go home.’ Gemma was groggy and confused. She reasoned, ‘Well, sick people go to hospital. Dying people go to a hospice. And home – that’s for fit people.’ She was delighted. ‘Home, please!’ ‘Fine,’ said the doctor. ‘You’ve got those little pills and you’ve got Him up there. Make sure you have a happy Christmas.’ What an odd thing to say, ‘Have a happy Christmas’. It was only October. It was some time before Gemma realised that this was her doctor’s way of telling her that they had been wrong all along, that her tumours were malignant, that she had cancer and would be dead within four months. Despite her bleak prognosis and her new medication, which now only treated her symptoms, Gemma carried on taking the ‘little pills’ that her oncologist had referred to with his gently knowing smile. To her amazement, they seemed to work. By Christmas, her eyelids had opened up. Her sight returned. And the more of the little pills that she took, the better she became. A year later, Gemma called her oncologist’s office and asked why they hadn’t been in touch. She was angry. She knew why – it was because they had assumed that she was dead. When her oncologist next examined her, he wrote in his notes, ‘Gemma has made a remarkable recovery. Her case will remain a mystery.’ ‘But it’s not a mystery to you, is it?’ I said to Gemma, who’d been telling me her story in the modest lounge that now doubles as her consulting room. ‘Not to me,’ she smiled. The ‘little pills’ that Gemma had been giving herself were homeopathic. She believes that they not only saved her life, they also changed its direction for ever. She is now a licensed homeopath who claims to have not seen a doctor for fourteen years. The biggest problem with this powerful and dramatic story is this: it cannot be true. Water Has No Memory Homeopathy is based on the idea that water has a memory. But water doesn’t have a memory. There has been a lot of science done on this, that has looked, specifically, at the efficacy of homeopathy. The very best studies all tend to show that it has no benefit beyond placebo. Yet the industry that Gemma works within is worth four million pounds a year in the UK and billions in Europe and the US. Over fifteen thousand NHS prescriptions are issued for it annually. Over 40% of the British public think positively about it. Amongst users, satisfaction ratings in the UK score above 70%. I decided to broach the problem of empirical proof with Gemma. I began by asking about her practice as a homeopath, and whether the process of assessing which remedy to recommend to a patient was instinctive, or an exact science. She replied, ‘It’s an exact science — but it’s something that the scientists don’t understand yet.’ As you might have noticed, this response doesn’t make any sense. So I told her I’d read that, in an ordinary homeopathic dilution, a sphere of water a hundred and fifty million kilometres in diameter would only contain one

10 Ethical Record, May 2013 molecule of active ingredient. She said, ‘I’m not the best person to talk to about that.’ I asked, ‘What would your response be to a sceptic who says it’s diluted to such an extent that there’s actually nothing in it?’ ‘I’d say go and look it up.’ ‘Gemma, have you ever read any scientific studies that have looked at the efficacy of homeopathy?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Which ones?’ ‘Don’t ask me that question.’ So I asked her, ‘If you died and went to heaven and God sat you down and told you, “Gemma, I have to tell you – homeopathy is nonsense.” Would you believe him?’ She answered in an instant. ‘No.’ Over the last few years, homeopathy has become a topic of much controversy and protest. Sometimes, alternative medicine proponents recommend their treatments as a replacement for conventional medication - which is dangerous and unethical. But although Gemma herself believes homeopathy cured her cancer, she doesn’t recommend it as a replacement for proper treatment. Nevertheless, she’s been the subject of abuse. She’s been sufficiently disturbed by it that a part of the condition of my interviewing her was that I wouldn’t publish her address. To find out a bit more about what sceptical activists think about homeopaths, I sought the advice of well known sceptic named Steven Novella. He told me that amongst people who promote homeopathy, there are, ‘a certain percentage of psychopathic con artists. In any system where people believe in magic, con artists smell that. It’s like blood in the water to them. That aside, there’s the people who are just profoundly naive. Then there are the promoters. They’re really despicable because they get called out on the inaccuracy of the information they’re providing. For an alternative view, I decided to give Dana Ullman a call. “Oh, the sceptics,” he sighed. “They’re a mixed and motley crew. They’re medical fundamentalists who seek to purposefully misdirect the real issues in healthcare. Some are Big Pharma shills, others are just misinformed. A lot of them are science nerds. I have a science nerd in me, but the difference between me and the average science nerd is that many of them were abused as youngsters. They were hyper- rational and they had inadequate social skills and now they’re on the Internet getting their venom out. They’re bullying back. So my analysis of the reason why some of them are irrationally venomous – and you can use that term: I determine that many of them are irrationally venomous – is because they had a difficult childhood where they were abused and now they’re getting back.’ Now, whilst I was thinking about all this, and trying to puzzle out why otherwise intelligent people can come to believe, so sincerely, in unlikely things, I was working on a novel. I was thinking hard about the invisible rules that make a novel function. What is it that makes some stories infectious and others dull? The best stories always seemed to involve a central character – a hero - who is struggling against obstacles in order to make a better life. The heroes have allies in the form of wise men and helpers. They have enemies who stand in their way. That made me think about Gemma and her amazing, vivid and emotional story, in which she was the hero, fighting the malevolent forces of scepticism and conventional medicine. It made me think about Steven Novella and his

Ethical Record, May 2013 11 psychopathic con artists and Dana Ullman with his venomous bullies and the knightly hero and the two John Lennons who emerged from Vered Kilstein’s massage table. The Brain a Biological Machine As I was thinking about all of this, I was cramming my head with as much psychology and neuroscience as I could find. And, in them, I discovered some remarkable things. The human brain can be seen as a biological machine that receives information about the world in the form of electrical pulses. It receives those electrical pulses from the senses and weaves them into the recreation of the world that we experience as reality. That recreation exists only inside our head. As disconcerting as it might be to realise, the world that you experience as ‘out there’ is not really out there at all. The light is not out there, nor is the music, nor are the colours. They’re all a recreation. You are fooled into believing that you are a little person staring out of an empty head. You have become, in the words of neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith, ‘the invisible actor at the centre of the world’. This illusion is quite a feat. It’s believed that the brain takes in several million pieces of information at any given moment (one estimate, given by Professor Timothy D Wilson at the University of Virginia, estimates that figure to be around eleven million). How does the brain make sense of that superabundance of information? How does it present us with a stable and coherent present, in such a way that we’re not catastrophically confused? One way it does so is with story. The brain places you at the centre of its recreation of the world. It makes you the hero in a dramatic narrative which it populates with allies and villains. In an ordinary, healthy mind, it’s always, basically, the same story: you are the hero David struggling against Goliath in order to make a better life. This illusory process, which I call The Hero Maker, has a huge number of component parts, all of which have been demonstrated in a host of brilliant psychological experiments. We are fooled into thinking that all are opinions are the correct ones, that we’re better looking than we are, kinder than we are, more intelligent than we are and with better futures in store. Meanwhile ‘The Demon Maker’ turns people who stand in our way into villains. We’re tribal animals, exaggerating the shortcomings of those we don’t like, interpreting their motives as malevolent, often assuming that, if they don’t share our beliefs, it’s because they’re stupid or evil. For example, we might call them psychopathic con artists, and believe they’re bullies motivated by petty revenge because they were abused as children. Our brains cannot help telling stories. They are primed to weave them out of instances that they detect in the world of cause and effect. Professor Daniel Kahneman has observed that if a person reads the word ‘banana’ and then ‘vomit’ they tend to automatically weave a narrative in which the fruit caused the sickness. Tests on young children show that they often tend to assume a moral cause in the illnesses of others, their minds plotting a tale of good and evil which does not exist. Ancient religions were primitive attempts at explaining the world in a similar, yet much more complex way. Our brains build their model of

12 Ethical Record, May 2013 the world by observing causes and effects and then spinning a narrative - which may nor may not be true - to connect them. Humans are storytellers. That’s just what we do. I believe this explains the stubborn beliefs of some homeopaths and past-life regression therapy proponents. They see their sugar pills and their imagined former lives, then experience the very real benefits of the placebo effect. But their brains make a mistake. They have no way of identifying a placebo effect in action on them. Instead, they identify the cause of their improvement as sugar pills of their past life daydream. Of course, in the case of Gemma, placebo can have had no effect on her cancer. That apparently happened to go into remission at about the same time as she began her homeopathic treatment. It was a coincidence. But brains seem to dislike coincidence. So, just like the person who automatically assumed the banana caused the vomiting, Gemma connected her remission with her pills. Hers was clearly an extraordinarily powerful experience. It’s hardly surprising that she made a mistake about cause and effect. Lord Monckton and Climate Change We tend to believe what we feel to be true, not what we’re told is true. These instinctive feelings guide us to a grand narrative that we tell about about the world. Men like the climate change denier Lord Monckton, who was born rich, was educated at Harrow and then Cambridge and went on to serve as an advisor to Margaret Thatcher, believe that the forces of the left - who seek to fight unfair privilege and redistribute wealth - are evil and motivated purely by envy. He thinks that the strikes that Thatcher broke in the 1980s were part of a Cold War plot by the Soviet Union. Another arm of the same plot was to attack the west’s energy infrastructure, via bogus campaigns by green groups. The scientists who work in climate change are today, he says, working from the KGB play book. The ultimate aim of the EU is to institute one world government. He is a plucky David fighting these awesome forces. He is a hero. As he lives his life, Monckon - like all of us - is constantly bombarded with information that his Hero Maker illusion is wrong. One of the things that happens when we’re confronted with good evidence that we’re mistaken about our dearly held beliefs is known as confirmation bias. When we’re in the grip of confirmation bias, we accept all the evidence that supports our view uncritically and we find ways of rejecting all the rest. We examine the views of our foes as would a prosecution lawyer, finding tiny flaws and using them to discount the whole argument. We dismiss our foes as ignorant and biased. And, when all else fails, we forget the things they’ve told us. One of the devilish tricks that confirmation bias plays means we experience the process as an even-handed assessment of evidence. We believe we have been fair, when we’ve been anything but. The poisonous result is that, often, evidence that we’re wrong only serves to convince us even more that we’re right. David Irving and Hitler I experienced the process of confirmation bias vividly on a tour of World War II sites with the controversial historian David Irving. The focus of Irving’s

Ethical Record, May 2013 13 discredited theory is that Hitler was a friend of the Jews who would’ve been appalled if he’d known about the horrors of the holocaust, which were actually organised in secret by his subordinates. As you might imagine, there’s a lot of evidence that this view is rubbish, and that Hitler not only planned the annihilation of the Jews, but predicted it before it even happened. In a speech that he gave on 30 January 1939, Hitler said, “Today I want to be a prophet once more: if the international finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the Boleshevisation of the earth and thereby the victory of the Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” “Unfortunately you’ve got a problem with language,” said Irving. “At no point does Hitler anywhere say, ‘we’re going to liquidate the Jews’.” “He says ‘annihilate’.” “He uses a very common word in Germany, which is ‘ausrotten’. Then he says it’s a ‘prophetic warning for the Jews’. That’s a weird phrase.” “But he’s saying…” Irving shook his head dismissively. “You’re not, you’re not, you’re not, fine tuned.” I thought for a moment. I tried to tune myself up. “It means he’s looking into the future,” I said. “Predicting.” “Yes,” said Irving. “That’s right.” “Predicting the annihilation of the Jews.” “But you would say ‘warning’ to the Jews. You wouldn’t say ‘prophetic warning’. The speech itself is six pages, single spaced on a piece of paper. The actual reference to the Jews is three lines long. Only three lines in one column. Only that.” They were three lines. They were in one column. And they prophesied the annihilation of the Jews. “But the word he uses for annihilation is ‘ausrotten’,” he said. “That’s a word in German which came to mean liquidation.” According to Irving, the meaning of ‘ausrotten’ has changed since 1939. He knows this, because he has studied its use in a number of Hitler’s speeches, and amassed several period dictionaries in preparation for the Lispstadt trial. {Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt. [Ed]} Back then, he says, it meant ‘extirpation’, a word with a Latin origin whose literal definition was ‘pulling the roots out’. Compared to today, its implication to Hitler’s audience would have been mild. “He was, at that time, using the word effectively to mean ‘emasculation’.” “And that also goes for the later speech when he said the annihilation had begun?” “He never said that.” I looked down at my notes. “December 12th 1941, in a speech that recalled his prophecy of 1939, he said, ‘The world war is here. The annihilation of the Jewry must be a necessary consequence’.” “He’s now saying the world war is going to lead to the destruction of the ‘Judentung’, which is this vague concept of the Jewish entity.” “For an outsider,” I said, “it’s hard to square that quote with the idea that Hitler somehow wasn’t up for the annihilation of the Jews.” “There’s a great temptation here to extrapolate backwards from history and say, ‘Well, this happened, therefore he was saying it’. I’ve been more selective.” “It sounds to me like he’s up for an annihilation.” “That’s because you’re prejudiced by the history that has been propagated since the end of World War II. I can’t do that. I’ve got to go back to the meaning of the words at the time. What you’re doing is reading between the

14 Ethical Record, May 2013 lines.” “It’s not between the lines. It’s on the line.” “It depends how you translate the words.” What ‘Ausrotten’ Means I found myself once more in the dilemma that is often faced when debating experts, no matter how controversial. Any argument can be closed-down by an appeal to any evidence at all, as long as you are unfamiliar with it. Without immediate access to a 1939 English-German dictionary, I realised, there was nothing I could do. Eight weeks later, it finally arrived. From a second-hand book dealer in America – my Cassell’s German-English dictionary. I can now know how listeners would have interpreted Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ about the ‘ausrotten’ of the Jews in 1939, because that is the year in which this dictionary was published. So what did the word imply back then? Emasculation? Or extermination?:- Ausrott -en, v.a. extirpate, exterminate, root out. Comp. -ungs-kreig m war of extermination. Eighteen months after this, a historian contacted me to say that Irving was even more wrong than I’d given him credit for. Hitler didn’t, in fact, use the word ausrotten in 1939. He used ‘Vernichtung’. The historian sent me the translation, from a period dictionary. It is ‘To destroy completely’. Who knows if Irving’s mistake was honest? If it is true that, during our discussion, he’d forgotten which word Hitler used in his speech, he would only be exhibiting the same symptoms of confirmation bias that we all show, at one time or another. Some believe that he is calculatingly dishonest - that he knows he’s wrong and, for some reason, has devoted his life and risked everything to promote nonsense. I think that Irving believes he’s right.

Like all of us, he has a narrative about the world that he’s vulnerable to. His family has a long and proud history of service to British Empire, which he admires to this day. Another admirer of the Empire - a man who really understood its benevolent genius - was Adolf Hitler. The man that Irving blames for Empire’s demise is Winston Churchill. Perhaps this gives us a clue as which man, instinctively, Irving casts as hero and which as villain. In the world, as he experiences it, Irving is a brave, brilliant and unfairly persecuted warrior of truth. He has been attacked, expelled and imprisoned for his beliefs. A powerful array of biased antagonists have spent years doing all they can to destroy him. And yet, here he is - alone, a plucky David against the mighty Goliath, battling for freedom, truth and knowledge. He knows that Hitler was a friend of the Jews, so any evidence that he comes across that suggests otherwise, no matter how convincing it may appear, MUST be incorrect. And those that smear Irving as an antisemite are incorrect - he has come to his views on the nature of the Jews after a life-time of historical research and personal experience. The label ‘antisemite’ implies mistake. But he is not mistaken. At least, that’s how he feels. That is the story that his brain has weaved for him. His brain has created these stories out of thousands and thousands observations

Ethical Record, May 2013 15 of cause and effect. The stories make sense of the intuitive hunches he has about Hitler, Churchill, the Empire and the Jews. Decades of study mean decades of confirmation bias. Decades of his becoming more and more convinced that he is right. Irving’s reality is just as believable for him as yours is for you or Gemma the homeopath’s is for her. And this is why facts don’t work. The exchange you just heard between me and David Irving was not an academic disagreement about an arcane point of WW2 history - it was an attack on Irving’s very idea of himself and his entire world that’s more than thirty years in the making. The definition of a word in a 1939 dictionary won’t be enough to destroy all that, just as the conclusions of a climate paper won’t destroy the world of Lord Monckton, with its evil leftist plots that he is battling bravely. We All Have Our Stories No matter how sincerely and irresistibly people like Irving, Monckton or Gemma the homeopath hold their beliefs, we must condemn them where they do harm. But we should also have the humility to understand that we all have our own Hero Maker narratives, and that we need them. They give our lives meaning and focus. They protect us from a hostile world. They give us hope and esteem, and encourage us to keep on struggling to make better lives. But they can also lead us into error. You can spot when someone is in the grip of their Hero Maker narrative. That’s when their stories of the world are too consistent: when the Christian refuses to acknowledge that the atheist can have a moral compass without God, that Christian is clearly wrong. And when the atheist refuses to accept that the Christian might benefit psychologically from their faith or that the scientific reality of a meaningless life followed by a worm- eaten death is actually really depressing – that’s their hero narrative. Our stories can work against truth. They operate with the machinery of prejudice and distortion. Their purpose is not fact but propaganda. Tales of straightforward heroism or villainy might be useful shortcuts for the brain that seeks to parse the world, and place us heroically at its centre, but we should always remember that these stories are never true. And that goes, too, for the story I told you at the beginning of this talk. It was all real, what I said, about the debt and the stealing and the therapy and The Heretics being at 13,289 in the charts. That’s the story that my annoying brain tends to pick out for me to live amongst, mostly. But it’s also true that I live in a gorgeous village with a fantastic wife and the best dog in the world, whose name is Parker. I’ve made a pretty good living out of writing for ten years, now, and have been lucky enough to see much of the world as a result. As for my books, my novel did get only one review but it was really good, whilst The Heretics was book of the week in The Independent and got 5 stars in the Telegraph. So the lesson that I try to learn - although, granted, it’s not always easy - is that the world is filled with stories. If we become overwhelmed by the worst possible tale of ourselves, or if we lazily accept stories that we instinctively ‘feel’ to be true, then they can bring harm. But once we’re aware of their incredible power, freedom from the seductive allure of stories can bring truth and hope and empathy.

16 Ethical Record, May 2013 WITCHCRAFT AND DEATH IN UGANDA Leo Igwe Attacks and killings of people suspected of witchcraft and malevolent magic continue unabated in different parts of Africa. A local newspaper in Uganda, the Daily Monitor , has just reported the brutal murder of a man ‘accused of being a witch’ in a local village. The man, Siraje Kayondo, was waylaid on his way from the garden by machete-wielding persons. They tied him up and beheaded him. According to the report, they threw his head into a bush and dumped his body on the roadside. In January, Kayondo was accused of killing two members of his community through witchcraft. A local mob burnt down his house and he was forced to flee the community. Kayondo came out of exile to cultivate his garden when he was waylaid and killed. Such gruesome murders of suspected witches take place in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and in other countries in Sub Saharan Africa. In Uganda, the belief in witchcraft and ‘black’ magic is very strong. The term witchcraft evokes fear in the minds of people across the country. Very often people attribute death, diseases or any misfortune to witchcraft. Witchcraft accusations often take place among neighbours, family or community members. People hate or react violently to anybody suspected of using occult powers to harm or destroy. A witch is generally seen as an ‘enemy within’ who should be eliminated. Many Africans are turning to witchcraft as they try to manage and respond to uncertainties in their lives. They use witchcraft to explain or cope with cases and instances of misfortune. They believe witches are responsible for their poverty, misery, unemployment, marital or childbirth difficulties. Many people in Africa also believe in the power of witchcraft to enhance their political and economic fortunes. A recent survey carried out in Uganda says that more ‘literate Ugandans’ are using witchcraft to get and secure their jobs. According to the survey, “A majority (66% of those interviewed) said witchcraft was a common practice at workplaces while 16% were undecided about its prevalence. Although 17% said witchcraft was not common at workplaces, only 4% strongly believed in what they were saying. Of those, 60% of the respondents, mostly males, testified that they had either heard or seen signs of witchcraft in their offices. In that group, the majority were aged between 18 and 20 years, followed by those in the 41-45 age group and others between 36 and 40 years. Astonishingly, others use witchcraft either to harm or hurt workmates, besides seeking favour and power at workplaces, as reported by 17% of the interviewees.” This survey clearly reveals how obsessed the so-called literate people in Uganda are by this ancient superstition. It shows how ineffective the literacy and educational program in Uganda is and has been. Since the colonial days, there Ethical Record, May 2013 17 have been efforts to eradicate witchcraft beliefs and related abuses through legislation. But these efforts have also proved ineffective. In many African countries, the practice of witchcraft is a crime punishable by law. Witchcraft accusation is also an offence. But these legal provisions have not deterred people across the region from persecuting or murdering in cold blood any suspected witch or wizard. A major anti-superstition campaign is urgently needed in Africa to save the people from the dark and destructive influence of witchcraft and other irrational beliefs.

JOSEPH McCABE (1867 – 1955) – FEARLESS FREETHINKER Norman Bacrac Lecture to the Bromley Humanists, 11 April 2013 Joseph McCabe ought to be much better known than he is for his enormous contribution to free thought writing and lecturing in the first half of the 20th century . Joseph McCabe was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire in November 1867, the 2nd of 8 children, 4 boys and 4 girls. His father had left Ireland because of the poverty there (in 1848 there was a terrible famine and many died). In England he worked as silk weaver. His mother was English and had converted to Catholicism on marriage. She probably wanted Joseph to enter the church. When still a child, the family moved to Gorton, a suburb of Manchester. They lived opposite to the church and monastery of St. Francis. In McCabe’s memoir, Eighty Years a Rebel , written in 1947, he noted that this building had ‘etched itself in my mind’. Joseph was a model pupil. As he knelt before the altar, he imagined that God might sweep him up to heaven. He left school at thirteen to be an errand boy, but then rose to be a clerk. At 16, he agreed to the suggestion that he begin to study for the priesthood. In his first year he taught himself Latin. Brother Antony At 18, he became a novice, and was renamed ‘Brother Antony’. He went to the Franciscan monastery at Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland. This was to prepare for the taking of vows, vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. Although he found the monastic life depressing, he decided to ‘grin and bear’ it. The monastery friars indulged in flagellation – three times a week, they would retire to their cells and flog themselves with knotted cords (or at least, pretend to. Often they would just bang the knots on a table so as to make a loud noise. I guess from his use of the 3rd person, McCabe did not flog himself). Then came the first twinges of doubt: “gradually there emerged from the grey waters of my thoughts the fundamental doubt that was to haunt me for the next ten years and in the end lead me to sanity and freedom.” [from 80 years a rebel ] When he expressed his doubts, these were ridiculed – ‘How dare he, an ignorant boy, doubt what great men had believed?’ Feeling guilty, he tried to emulate his conception of a medieval saint, spending hours in intense, wordless prayer. He took his vows in 1886, aged 19. 18 Ethical Record, May 2013 During his next ten years as a monk, the Vatican was dominated by two very reactionary popes, Pius IX and, from 1878, Leo XIII, whose Syllabus of Errors listed no fewer than 80 principal errors of the day. These included “the errors of progress, liberalism and modern civilization” [c/f the fundamentalist Islamic doctrine Salafism widespread today]. Leo also proclaimed in his Providentissimus Deus of 1890 the inerrancy, ie lack of any error, of the Bible. Joseph McCabe studied for five years at Forest Gate in Upton, London, the central training college for Franciscans. There he learnt what was taught about scholastic (Thomist) philosophy, ecclesiastical history, canon law, moral and dogmatic theology. His lecturer insisted on what’s known as the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch, ie that Moses himself had written the first five books of the Bible (which includes an account of Moses’ death), which were therefore literally true. McCabe of course had his doubts about that, as did many theologians at that time (Some wanted to “quietly drop the Old Testament overboard”. It was back in the 1830s that David Friedrich Strauss had written The life of Jesus and the so-called ‘Higher Criticism’ of the Bible was well- known to advanced thinkers of the time, especially in Germany and France. SPES Studies Strauss in 1840 Incidentally, a course of lectures on Strauss’s work had been given as early as 1840 at the South Place Ethical Society (when it was at South Place). McCabe noted that whereas in a University, such as Cambridge, the subject matter is delivered impartially, at a seminary or monastic college such as he was attending, the material is delivered so dogmatically that anyone who disagrees is considered feeble-minded or, more likely, dishonest. There’s no question about the very poor quality of the teaching given by McCabe’s tutors, so much so that in the course of five years he and other students procured the removal of six of the teachers there (for such things as dementia, drunkenness etc) McCabe was obviously so much brighter than any of the staff that, at only 23 years old, he was appointed the professor of philosophy and ecclesiastical history at Forest Gate. As a priest, one of his functions was to hear confessions and to ‘play God’ by forgiving the sinner of his or her sin. Being quite innocent of the world until he started hearing confessions, he was ignorant of the sexual activities that were often elaborately described to him. He disliked being a confessor. Also, his growing familiarity with how monastic institutions realistically operated meant that when young girls, under 16, confessed to him their desire to enter a convent, he would try to dissuade them, knowing they were unlikely to have any true idea what they would be getting into and what they were giving up by adopting the vows of chastity etc. In theory, once they realised they had made a grave mistake, they could renounce their vows by appeal to the Pope, but in practice this would never happen – they would endure their confined existence in silence. At this time, and for the next seven years, he still believed that Catholicism did have the resources to satisfy all his misgivings about it. Such questions as: Why was there so little science taught, for example? Why was there so little understanding of modern advances in knowledge? Let us recall that there existed an Index of Prohibited Books , books one was not allowed to read. This amazing document was not abolished till 1966! Even a subject as important as

Ethical Record, May 2013 19 Copernicus’ heliocentric view of the solar system was not removed from the Index till 1758, over 200 years after its publication. McCabe suspected it was because it was thought that science would inevitably lead to materialism and rationalism and away from the cosy, medieval religious world-view cultivated in the seminaries. At that time he believed Catholic doctrine was compatible with these advances in knowledge so he wanted to incorporate these changes in the syllabus. He made a strenuous effort to seek the views of the more sophisticated exponents of the faith. He spent the years 1893 and 1894 studying philosophy and oriental languages at the Catholic University in Louvain in Belgium. This was considered to be one of the two or three best RC colleges in the world. He met one of the ablest philosophers there, Magister D.J.Mercier, who indicated to McCabe privately that he didn’t approve of the doctrine of eternal punishment after death, ie hell. It’s interesting to note here that refusal to believe in hell, a place of eternal torment to which all non-Christians and even the wrong type of Christian, would go, was the main point of dissent (from the protestant Anglicans) made by the founder of SPES, Elthanan Winchester, back in 1787, over a hundred years earlier. It was his congregation in Finsbury that developed into the South Place Religious, later S.P. Ethical, Society (now called Conway Hall E.S.). McCabe noted that none of the 19th century’s most prominent philosophers, such as John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, TH Green, figured in the courses at Louvain, which concentrated on rote-learning Thomas Aquinas and his later followers. In spite of that, McCabe’s colleague, Magister Mercier, believed they had reconciled the strict demands for traditional teaching emanating from the Vatican with modern thought, but Joseph McCabe was not so sure. Nevertheless, being an outstanding student, he was offered a Ph.D., but as a Franciscan, he had to refuse the award. In 1894, McCabe was ordered to return to Forest Gate to teach. His doubts were still growing. In 1895, he was appointed Principal of a tiny Catholic College of St.Bernadine in Buckingham, set up by a somewhat eccentric philanthropist. This gave him the time and space to think out just where he stood – what his future would be – could he spend the rest of his life in the Church? He listed the pros and cons for God’s existence and for the probability of life after death. He decided the arguments for God were “bankrupt”. When his superior, Father David realised this, he sacked him from his position as Principal of St.Bernadine and ordered him to retire to a secluded friary at Chilworth, in Surrey. McCabe disobeyed the order, which would have amounted to banishment, and left the church altogether. He could not stay in the church living a lie like so many others did. In his book The Religion of Woman (1905) he wrote: “The impotence of a clergyman when he abandons his own profession is so pathetic that, for every one who leaves and suffers, scores remain behind. They are in many cases writhing under the burden of creeds in which they do not believe.” This book, The Religion of Woman, also contained an appeal for women to “rise and shake from their sex once and for all this stigma of indifference to intellectual

20 Ethical Record, May 2013 movements, this insinuation of mental inferiority, this suspicion that they care not whether their basic ideas are true or untrue.” His action meant he had become an apostate. He was treated badly by the church he had left. It couldn’t accept that anyone could have genuine doubts and valid intellectual reasons for giving up religion. He was falsely accused of theft from the College. For example, he’d taken with him a telescope which he had been given as a present. The Church demanded he return it to the giver, on the ground that as Franciscans had taken the vow of poverty, they could not have their own possessions. Fortunately, the friend willingly gave the telescope back to McCabe. Other people, who he thought were close friends, wrote him letters bemoaning his downfall into sin. Some time later, even his sister, a schoolmistress at a Catholic school, tore down posters advertising a public lecture he was due to give, although his mother accepted his decision and his father was content to see his name in big letters. McCabe Meets The Rationalists and Ethicals He was penniless. In 1896, aged 28, he travelled to London and met FJ Gould of the Rationalist Press Committee, (this was just before the RPA was started) who suggested he write a pamphlet entitled From Rome to Reason . He wrote Modern Rationalism in 1897. Thus began his lifelong association with the various freethought groups. His first major writing was Twelve Years in a Monastery , an autobiographical account of his experiences and his view of the state of the church, compiled at the suggestion of Sir Leslie Stephen (father of Virginia Woolf and an influential agnostic). In his introduction to its 3rd edition, dated 1912, McCabe wrote, “I look back with astonishment on features of that system which had almost faded from my memory, and I’m amazed to think that such a system still commands the nominal allegiance of large numbers of educated men and refined women. The Rome of history we all know – the Rome which retained the bandage of ignorance about the eyes of Europe for a thousand years, and, while exhibiting a spectacle of continuous and unblushing immorality in its most sacred courts, employed the rack and the stake to intimidate any man who would venture to impugn its sanctity or its truth.” In a note appended to the 3rd edition, McCabe said that “Cultivated Catholics groan under the rule of Pius X., and believe he is ruining the Church. It is a singular commentary on the dogma of papal inspiration.” McCabe said that people may feel that the Reformation chastened the RC church, and in the last two centuries it had grounds to claim to be better than the reformed churches, but he didn’t think so. The writings of all the opponents of the church were on the Index of Prohibited books because any work “against the faith” was prohibited reading. McCabe’s book Twelve years in a monastery was therefore also prohibited to the Catholics under pain of hell, even if not expressly put on the list. As Catholics dare not read the originals, Catholic journals can get away with misrepresenting an argument. McCabe had been assured by a London priest that his book had reduced the flow of ‘converts’ from the English to the Roman church. He went on to say that “when he looks back upon that system across sixteen years’ experience of

Ethical Record, May 2013 21 ‘worldly life’ [the term used in the monastery]…. he had since found a sweeter and happier life, and finer types of men and women, in that broad world. He now “looked back with a shudder on the musty, insincere and oppressive life of the cloister from which he was happily delivered.” Leslie Stephen helped him to publish his Peter Abelard (1901) and St. Augustine and his Age (1902). Utilising his knowledge of history, he also wrote excellent biographies of Talleyrand (1906) and Goethe (1912). In 1898 he was appointed as full-time lecturer at the Leicester Secular Society, which had been founded by George Jacob Holyoake about 50 years earlier. Holyoake’s secularism involved more than just the separation of church and state. It encompassed a political reform idea allied to the co-operative movement. McCabe was only at Leicester for a year but during that time he met Beatrice Lee (1881 – 1960) whom he married a year later. They had four children. McCabe Translates the Riddle of the Universe McCabe became very well-known in rationalist circles especially after the publication in 1902 of his translation of Ernst Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe. This book sold a quarter of a million copies and was translated into many languages. Haeckel was a keen expounder of Darwin’s evolution and a materialist; he believed Germany was being ruined by Catholicism with the result that he was slandered by the clergy – falsely accused of plagiarism of his biology. Haeckel asserted that matter and energy were aspects of the material universe, and that life and mind were also products of matter. These beliefs made him a materialist. Moreover, Einsteins’s famous equation E = mc 2, dating from 1905, actually confirmed this point by showing that energy too had mass and momentum. Nevertheless many writers in the twentieth century, such as James Jeans and Arthur Eddington proclaimed that materialism was dead.

McCabe taught for three years at Stanton Coit’s West London Ethical Society from 1901 to 1904, lecturing on logic and history. He also wrote the first book for the newly formed Rationalist Press Association, Religion in the Twentieth Century in 1902 and he wrote for its magazine, The Literary Guide. He was recruited as a regular lecturer of the South Place Ethical Society in 1902, after the retirement of Moncure Conway. He would lecture to the Society all his life. McCabe gave about 220 lectures to the South Place Ethical Society. McCabe was now a fervent atheist and humanist. This, from 1905: “The world grows more humane as it discards Christianity. The Pope, in his perplexity, says it is the old practice of the devil imitating the angels of light… I have not said, of course, that the world grows more humane because it discards Christianity. I believe the fact is that it discards the old dogmas because it is growing more humane. But, in either case, it is one of the most undeniable facts of modern history that humanism in philosophy has been accompanied, step by step, with humanity in character. The Rationalist believes that, when our philosophy of life is wholly humanist, the humanity of men and women will be greater than ever.” McCabe’s optimism at this time now seems a trifle na ïve. He went on: “Within this century war will be abolished, and twenty million men withdrawn from its bloody business to the arts of peace. … Garden cities and other experiments in

22 Ethical Record, May 2013 betterment are being multiplied…. I am convinced that religion is unnecessary in any shape or form... There will probably be an enormous growth among us, as the Churches decay, of Sunday Lecture Societies, Rationalist, Secular, Ethical, Humanitarian, and other Societies. If all these could be gathered into one national federation in each country, offering mutual help and comparing experiences, but having no shadow of priestly influence and no dogma but the free and rational guidance of humanity, we should have a successor to Christianity that would retain all its advantages and avoid all its defects.” McCabe’s rate of writing was quite phenomenal. In the 15 years from 1899, he wrote 57 books. This works out at one book written or translated every 10 weeks. In 1913, he wrote the first of the RPA’s ‘Inquirer’s Library’ series on The Existence of God . In this he wrote scathingly of Christianity: “The majority of Christians, we will suppose, would regard … the Jehovah of the Old Testament, the deity who knew jealousy and anger, as a crude anthropomorphic dream of the early Hebrews, and confine themselves to the God of the later Jews, and of the New Testament. Yet this implies that a deity conceived as the very embodiment of justice could condemn incalculable millions for the sin of two human beings {Adam and Eve}; that a bloody sacrifice was needed to appease the divine anger at that transgression; that this atonement could be made vicariously by one who was innocent {Jesus}; and that, by an incomprehensible process, God finally atoned to himself for the sins of men.” Later in the book is an example of McCabe’s materialism {following T H Huxley’s epiphenomenalism}: “Quite recently, a scientific man attempted to show in the Hibbert Journal that there are cases in which an emotion (a state of consciousness) interferes in the chain of physical processes. An injured man, for instance, becomes angry, and certain actions proceed from his anger. The answer is simple enough. Every state of consciousness has a correlative state of nerve-process (an emotion is accompanied by a nerve-storm, for instance), and it is the nerve–process which leads to the subsequent actions.” McCabe admired the austere materialism of the Roman Stoics, who, he said, “ridiculed the very ideas of spirit and free will: which we are asked to regard as the indispensable bases of any moral conduct.” He also affirmed what he took to be the Epicurean ideal of happiness. Underlying these was Shelley’s hero Prometheus’ vision of peace, happiness, liberty and enlightenment. However McCabe did not believe there was a ‘law’ of evolutionary progress. He understood Darwin’s main point that evolution depended on chance mutations. There was no “principle within the living organism which impels it onward to a higher level of organization.” (1931) Natural selection was the destruction of the less fit. Problems with Darwinism Now in the 1890s and the first two decades of the twentieth century, there were genuine problems in defending Darwin’s theory of evolution. Although most people accepted the fact that evolution had occurred and that the special creation of animals and mankind by God in six days was a myth, there were unsolved problems in the science and misunderstandings about its implications for public policy.

Ethical Record, May 2013 23 For example, there is the problem of the age of the Earth. Whereas biology demanded billions of years for evolution and therefore the age of the Earth and sun, the physicists, such as Lord Kelvin, had the problem of finding the source of the sun’s energy. How could it continue to pour out such astronomically vast amounts of heat for so long? One answer was that the sun was shrinking under its own gravity, and just as a ball accelerates as it falls down, so atoms at the sun’s surface would speed up as they were pulled towards its centre, and thus would generate its high temperature. But Kelvin computed that this could last only 10 million years, not the thousands of millions required. Another source for the sun’s heat output, perhaps tongue in cheek, was that even if the sun had initially been composed of the best Welsh anthracite coal, and supplied with enough oxygen to burn it, that too would become exhausted in a few million years! The correct answer began to be understood with the discovery of nuclear energy at the beginning of the twentieth century. We now know that it’s the tremendous heat energy released when nuclear particles get really close to each other, as happens when hydrogen nuclei join together to make a helium nucleus, that is the source of all the stars’ energy. This of course is the process which occurs in the hydrogen bomb. As our sun has only used about one fifth of its store of hydrogen so far, it will continue to shine for billions of years. A more serious problem for the origin of species was the lack of knowledge of genetics. Darwin could not really explain why, when a new, advantageous adaptation by chance appeared in a population, it would not soon become blended with the general unchanged population and thus lost. Darwin wondered about the extent to which acquired characteristics could be inherited. The answer was that change at the genetic level was not gradual but discontinuous. Unnoticed by Darwin, there were units, as Gregor Mendel had found back in the 1860s for, say, peas with smooth or with wrinkled skins. These alternatives could be passed down the generations and were not blended or gradually reabsorbed. This concept about the inheritance of genes was used by Weismann in about 1905 and became a standard doctrine in biology in the twentieth century. Questions about the mechanism of evolution still rumble on today, where we have to consider what’s called ‘epigenetics’. This is where dormant genes can be ‘switched on’ or ‘switched off’ by environmental causes. The truth is that there is an interaction between heredity and environment. In 1934 McCabe anticipated what is called The Modern Synthesis , the credit for which is usually given to RA Fisher and Julian Huxley. Now McCabe believed, following his hero Robert Owen, that character and behaviour could be greatly influenced by environment (think of Owen’s model community of New Lanark) – it was not totally fixed by one’s parents. McCabe was therefore against the popular idea of the time that the poor were unfit and would outbreed and lower the average intelligence – and public policy should be directed to minimise this alleged effect - eugenics. He thought that with the right environment, everyone was educable, although he did later accept that some people might suffer from hereditary defects. He always rejected ‘social Darwinism’, a “pseudo-scientific application of evolutionary views to social problems”. He thought “stupid” the idea that

24 Ethical Record, May 2013 conflict between people was necessary. McCabe criticised Nietzsche’s mistaken view that natural selection required the strong to destroy the weak. One might add that if conflict was so natural for human behaviour, it would not be necessary to advocate it. He similarly rejected the notion of the inherent superiority of certain ‘races’ at a time when other rationalists, eg Arthur Keith argued that racial struggle was important. Keith thought Piltdown Man was genuine whereas McCabe was sceptical. CEM Joad (unfortunately a SPES speaker) averred that the inferiority of blacks was “self-evident”. McCabe described the word ‘nigger’ as a ‘contemptuous expression’; he thought Africans’ backwardness was due to their isolation, not to their racial inferiority. McCabe never accepted Haeckel’s racism, nor did he accept the then common European assumption of their inevitable superiority over all other world cultures. McCabe maintained a crowded programme of lectures to all parts of the country and articles for magazines. He gave in all more than 4000 lectures. He was said to be the best lecturer on evolution in Britain. He lectured in New Zealand in 1910, whose secular education system he admired. He also toured Australia, North America and Europe on behalf of the RPA. From 1916 to 1919 he worked for the wartime Information Department, being fluent in many languages. McCabe’s ‘Little Blue Books’ Whilst on a busy tour of America in 1925, McCabe met Emanuel Haldeman- Julius (1889 – 1951), a publisher of specialist tracts. At first, McCabe was contracted to write 50 of these, called ‘Little Blue Books’ on controversial subjects. He was eventually to write over 140 of these for Haldeman-Julius by 1947 of which nearly 2 million were sold. He wrote for 6 or 7 hours per day for over 50 years. His marriage ended in 1925, probably because of his extraordinary life-style.

He also got into dispute with some members of the RPA. This was partly over their differing assessments of Holyoake and Bradlaugh, but seemed to turn on a trivial financial point: the American organiser of his Chicago lecture had ordered about £120 worth of RPA books from the RPA but failed to pay for them. The RPA held McCabe responsible for the debt, while McCabe absolutely refused to accept any responsibility. My opinion is that McCabe was right and the RPA should not have made an issue of this but written off the debt. McCabe remarked at a meeting to discuss this matter that (the RPA directors) “were turning upon a man who has literally grown grey in the service of the Movement.” McCabe never forgave the RPA, although he conceded in his autobiography ( 80 years a rebel ) that he could be intransigent. Bill Cooke, author of A rebel to his last breath , his comprehensive biography of Joseph McCabe, says that McCabe “had hoped that the world of freethought would be a tight band of brothers, working with the same level of seriousness toward truth, as the monastic ideal aspired to be. Petty jealousies and ignoble little ambitions, whether among underemployed priests or prominent unbelievers, were equally intolerable to McCabe, and quickly exasperated him.” McCabe had composed a Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists in

Ethical Record, May 2013 25 1920 and the Rationalist Encyclopedia in 1948. In this, he was quite able to write honest and dispassionate accounts of the work for rationalism of some of the veteran RPA rationalists (Edward Clodd, JM Robertson, Charles Goreham, GW Foote, Charles Watts) who were at odds with him over his difficulties with the RPA. He still produced books for them in the 1930s and 40s. In 1940 he complained in The Literary Guide that he was the only Hon. Associate of the RPA “who professes atheism and materialism”. Although a supporter of the Soviet Union, he did not subscribe to dialectical materialism, the attempt to combine scientific materialism, historical materialism and economics, thinking it a pretentious and unnecessary addition to materialism. Nor did he believe in any Law of automatic progress, although he did recognise the real advance in ordinary peoples’ standard of living between 1825 and 1925. He was a republican, regarding monarchy as anachronistic in the 20th century. He would abolish the House of Lords and disestablish the Church of England. He was a feminist and advocated the equality of women and more liberal divorce laws. McCabe Forecasts German History Bill Cooke also noted that McCabe’s “feel for German history was excellent.” In his 1932 book Can We Save Civilization? , he predicted the victory of the Nazis in 1933, an alliance between Germany and Russia and Germany then defeating France, Poland and Czechoslovakia. McCabe was very critical of Vatican policy in the 20th century especially its support for the fascist or right- wing regimes in Spain, Italy and Germany. This is clear from his book The Papacy in Politics Today ( PPT). This was first published in 1937 and last revised in 1951; in its preface he writes: To the Vatican, Socialism, especially in its extreme Communist form, meant Atheism. In 1933, Hitler was supported in the Reichstag by the Catholic Centre Party. Thyssen said “Pacelli (the Pope) put Hitler in power”. German bishops said in 1941 “a victory over Bolshevism would be equivalent to the triumph of the teaching of Jesus over that of the infidels.” The German churches supported Hitler’s invasion of Russia until 1942/3, when the tide of war began to turn against the Nazis.

The RPA’s Literary Guide belatedly opened the traditional collection from friends for old campaigners on their 70th birthday. McCabe received £241.17s.7d in June 1938, eight months after his 70th birthday. He needed the money as he had no regular source of income at that time, although he wrote ‘Blue Books’ for Haldeman-Julius until the latter’s death in 1951. In 1946, South Place Ethical Society arranged a special event for Joseph McCabe in recognition of his completing 50 years of lecturing to it. He was presented with £100. He gave his last lecture to the South Place Ethical Society on 28 Feb 1954. He died on 10 Jan 1955. Note. Much of the detail of the above was taken from Bill Cooke’s biography of McCabe, Rebel to his last breath (2001) which is in the Conway Hall Library.

26 Ethical Record, May 2013 BOOK REVIEW THE 4 GOSPELS THROUGH AN OUTSIDE WINDOW: a commentary by Leslie Scrase. United Writers Publications, Cornwall (2013) Longtime friend and occasional speaker to the Ethical Society, Leslie Scrase has added to the 20 books he has written with this ‘appreciative but critical’ commentary on the three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke plus John. He can authoritatively claim extensive knowledge of said Gospels as he went to a Methodist boarding school as an evacuee during the Second World War and after National Service in the Navy attended a Methodist Theological College followed by working as a Methodist Minister for 20 years. Furthermore he read, he says, the Old Testament once every three years and the New Testament every year. It took 12 years before ‘that great weight’ of Christian belief was lifted and he had become a ‘complete atheist’. He still seems troubled to me however by the trauma of rejecting one of his former core beliefs, that Jesus ‘is both perfect man and perfect God’. He still seems addicted to, if not obsessed by, the Palestinian prophet, Jesus of Nazareth. His style is easy to read if not simplistic: ‘Jesus is full of contradiction’ There is a danger, into which he falls, of bathos at the end of such quotes as ‘Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.’ The commentary is ‘After all that has gone before, these words just don’t add up’. Also he says Jesus claims that his authority came direct from God. Scrase comments, ‘Some of his teaching was sublime and is of permanent value. But his actual claim doesn’t hold up.’ There is much quoting from the Gospels. I can believe Scrase knew them inside out. My suggestion is, however, that he has extracted everything of value from them already and he should spend the rest of his time in more valuable (to Humanists) pursuits such as listening to classical music and going to the theatre. Jennifer R Jeynes

CONWAY HALL EVENING CLASSES, MAY 2013 Historic Holborn venue Conway Hall is running the following evening classes which have been specially developed for a general audience by members of the Humanist Philosophers’ Group: Brendan Larvor, Peter Cave and Prof. Richard Norman: Exploring Humanism: a 6 week basic introduction to what Humanism is and what Humanists believe and do. Aspects of Humanism: an 8 session, 16 hour in-depth course on the history and philosophy behind Humanist beliefs. Applied Ethics: a 5 part look at differing approaches to moral thinking and action throughout history. Death and Dying: 4 sessions exploring the significance of death, from murder and suicide to terminal illness; the meaning of life and immortality. Each course will be tutored by members of the London School of Philosophy. The second round will run from 1 May until 19 June 2013. Each session will be priced at £10, but there is a discounted rate of £7 per session if two whole courses are booked. To make a booking or for more information about dates, tutors and further details on course content, please email [email protected] or call 020 7061 6744 or look up www.conwayhall.org.uk/courses

Ethical Record, May 2013 27 FORTHCOMING EVENTS Conway Hall , 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, WC1R 4RL. Tel: 020 7405 1818 Registered Charity No. 251396 For programme updates, email: [email protected] Website: www.conwayhall.org.uk Admission to Sunday morning lectures is free for members of CHES and £3 (£2 conc) for non-members. For other events, no charge unless stated. MAY 2013 Sunday 5 HUMAN RIGHTS: ARE WOMEN HUMAN ENOUGH TO 1100 HAVE HUMAN RIGHTS? Naomi McAuliffe Wednesday 8 Music Up Close: BOW WAVES 1930 Presenter: Jonathan Byers £10 Saturday 11 SPECIAL EVENTS: LONDON RADICAL BOOKFAIR 2013 1000- 1700 Sunday 12 WHEN RELIGIONS FALL APART 1100 David V Barrett Sunday 19 INSIDE BRITAIN'S CREATIONIST SCHOOLS 11.00 Jonny Scaramanga attended a fundamentalist Christian school in the '90s Sunday 26 REBELS, INFIDELS AND TROUBLEMAKERS: 1100 the life, times and contents of Bishopsgate Library Library and Archives Manager Stefan Dickers JUNE 90TH BIRTHDAY OF BARBARA SMOKER - All Welcome Sunday 2 13.00: Drinks and buffet lunch 14.00: Tributes. 15.00: Cutting the birthday cake. Saturday 8 Centre for Inquiry UK and Conway Hall Ethical Society present 1030-1400 CAN SCIENCE SOLVE EVERY MYSTERY? Peter Atkins, David Papineau, Peter S. Williams Can science answer every question? Should scientists show a little humility and acknowledge there are questions that only religion can answer? Are science and religion “non-overlapping magisteria”, as the scientist Stephen Jay Gould claimed, or is science capable of showing that religion is false, as Richard Dawkins believes? Presented and chaired by Stephen Law (Provost of CFI UK). (indicative prices not confirmed) £7 (£4 students) Free to friends of CFI UK. Tickets on door.

CHES’s SUNDAY CONCERTS Artistic Director: Simon Callaghan Doors open at 1730 Concerts start at 1830 Tickets £9; students £4; under 16 free Full details on: www.conwayhallsundayconcerts.org.uk

Published by the Conway Hall Ethical Society, 25 Red Lion Square, WC1R 4RL Printed by J.G. Bryson (Printer). 156-162 High Road, London N2 9AS. ISSN 0014 - 1690