Ethical Record The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society Vol. 108 No. 5 £1.50 June 2003
GUEST EDITORIAL - SECULARISTS SHOULD DEFEND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
I do nor defend the right to do in the name of religious freedom that which would otherwise be unacceptable - such as human sacrifice. Nor do I urge secularists to be less rude about religion and the religious. I am all in favour of ridicule of religion and the religious; if they want to take 'offence' that is their problem. If the law is framed merely to protect their 'feelings', then publish and be damned.
Religion is only really harmful when, as in Iran, it is combined with state power or when, as in the US, religious people are able to use state power to get their views imposed as laws upon the rest of us, but even here it is the power structure that is the problem not the religion. I don't see that holding a belief in the garden of Eden instead of evolution is in itself harmful. If people pass on their beliefs to their children then that is simply a matter of freedom; better to have the pluralism this represents than to allow the ruling authority to dictate a single party line, which is the alternative.
Religious freedom is nothing special, it is the logical outcome of free speech, free association, privacyand other so-called rights specified in various conventions which most thinking people claim to support.
Secularists should not only defend religious freedom - they are in truth the only people who can. If you are a good Christian or a good Muslim you cannot defend real religious frcedom. Even Muslims who claim to be tolerant are not for example willing to defend freedom for pagans. We secularists do not favour one over the other and can more objectively consider the bad and good points of each.
Too many secularists want to restrici freedom of religious groups instead of defending maximum freedom for all. Objections are raised to religious radio and TV stations, but why should there be any greater restrictions on broadcasting than there are on publishing? Let the religious loonies have their TV and radio stations, their web sites and their newspapers and let us concentrate on countering them instead of trying to get the state to stop them. Let's stop being obsessed with what other people bel ieve. Edmund McArthur
WALKING STEWART: A GREAT FREETHINKER. Ron Heisler 3
AFRICAN AMERICANS FOR HUMANISM Bill Cooke 7
WHAT IS SO ATTRACTIVE ABOUT INFINITY? Ian Mordant 10 WOMEN AND EQUALITY - A REPORT Barbara Ward 16
MYSTICISM AND LOGIC: A Critical Response to Russell Christopher Hampton 17
ETHICAL SOCIETY EVENTS 24 SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WCIR 4RL. Tel: 020 7242 8034 Fax: 020 72428036 Website: www.ethicalsoc.org.uk email: [email protected] Officers Chairman of the GC Terry Mullins. Hon. Representative:Don Liversedge. Vice Chairman: John Rayner. Registrar: Edmund McArthur. SPES Staff Administrative Secretary to the Society: Marina Ingham Tel: 020 7242 8034 Librarian/Programme Coordinator:Jennifer Jeynes M.Sc. Tel: 020 7242 8037 Hall Manager: Peter Vlachos M.A. For Hall bookings: Tel: 020 7242 8032 Caretakers' Office: Tel: 020 7242 8033 Editor, Ethical Record: Norman Bacrac
COULD YOU MANAGE CONWAY HALL AND THE SOCIETY? SPES members asked to consider putting themselves or their (wise) acquaintances forward to help in this important work. The next election for the General Committee will be at the AGM on 28 September 2003. Nomination forms are available from the Admin. Sec.
SPES ANNUAL COACH OUTING
SUNDAY 6 JULY 2003 ON THE SECULAR TRAIL TO BRIGHTON.
Guides: Mike Howgate & Bill McIlroy
Coach leaves Conway Hall 0930h, returns 2000h
£12 coach fare
SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY keg. Charity No. 251396
Founded in 1793. the Society is a progressive movement whose aims arc:
the study and dissemination of ethical principles based on humanism, 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 arc in sympathy with our aims. At Conway Hall the programme includes Sunday lectures, discussions, evening courses and the renowned South Place Sunday Concerts of chamber music. The Society maintains a Humanist Reference Library. The Society's journal, Ethical Record, is issued ten times a year. Funerals and Memorial meetings may be arranged.
The annual subscription is .£18 (£12 if a full - time student, unwaged or over 65).
Ethical Record, June, 2003 WALKING STEWART: A FORGOTTEN GREAT FREETHINKER Ron Heisler Lecture to the Ethical Society, 23 March, 2003
The colourful life of John Stewart (1749-1822), who was generally known as Walking Stewart, has completely overshadowed his singular, often difficult, writings. But it remains a story worth the retelling before we get onto the substance of his thought. His idiosyncratic nature took a quite dysfunctional turn in his school years. His father, a prosperous London linen draper, sent him to a boarding school at the age of six, from which he had to be 'liberated' from the 'authority of its cruel pedagogue'. Harrow came next, from whence at the age of twelve, with the full approval of the staff, he passed on to Charterhouse, where he concentrated on 'play, sports, and illegal enterprises'. Later. Stewart recalled that 'the most important action of my life, in the production of happiness, was to uneducate myself, and wipe away all the evil propensities and erudite nonsense of school instruction.'
Stewart The Traveller Having been decreed an academic dunce, at the age of sixteen Stewart was sent by his father out to India as a writer in the service of the East India Company. This proved to be the Traveller's making. He learned several oriental languages. including Persian, and rose far. His integrity, however, disrupted his harmonious relationship with the Company, for he wrote a tasteless letter to the directors complaining of the endemic corruption among its officials. It was time for the parting of the ways, and Stewart landed up in the service of the despotic Nyder Ali, as an interpreter at first. Given charge of one of Hyder's regiments. he turned it into the army's most efficient fighting force, largely through the odd device of paying his men on time instead of embezzling their pay as was the custom. Involved in several battles, he was made a general. He also received a one inch deep gash in the crown of his head, which permanently marked him. A lingering wound, which Hyder's doctors could not cure. led him to seek permission to go back into East India Company territory to obtain English medical assistance. Hyder granted the request, but arranged for assassins to follow Stewart, who escaped by swimming across a river.
Next Stewart served as an interpreter to the Nabob of Arcot, becoming the Nabob's prime minister at one stage. In five years, the Traveller saved 14,000, with which he bought a life annuity. Tiring of India, he made his way back to England, mostly on foot. However, taking passage in an Arab dhow from the East Indies to cross the Persian Gulf, all was not plane sailing. A fierce storm arising, the Muslim crew were convinced Stewart had an evil spirit. They were on the point of throwing him overboard, but a satisfactory compromise was reached. He was immured in a hen-coop, which was slung from the main-yard, for a fortnight, food being shoved between the bars. Diogenes, it will be recalled, merely lived in a barrel.
Stewart walked through Persia and Turkey, studying the Turcoman people in the process, then across Europe. In England he became an instant celebrity and, no doubt with the backing of Sir Joseph Banks, was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1776. The following year, the Traveller published a long article, the first in English on Tibet and its religion, in the Society's Transactions. William Blake, the poet-artist, attended a literary salon in the 1780s which he satirised in a piece entitled An Hand in the Moon. The Blake industry has long puzzled over the identities of the characters Blake was making fun of The evidence in Stewart's own writings leave us satisfied that 'Steelyard the Lawgiver' was based upon Stewart. Ethical Record, June, 2003 3 The restless Stewart could not be confined to one town for long, however. Michael Kelly, the great opera singer, recorded meeting Stewart in Vienna, whilst he later travelled in the 1780s to the far North of Europe and, inevitably, to America and Canada. Dr Benjamin Rush, the well-known American revolutionary, met Stewart on some occasions, although paling somewhat at the Traveller's endless chatter.
Stewart - A Classic Enlightenment Radical l3ack in England, Stewart proceeded to publish his first book, The Apocalypse of Nature, in two volumes in 1789-90. This is a landmark in giving the first sketch of his philosophy, with its vital chapter on 'The Dialectics of Naiure'. The French Revolution intervened at this juncture to arouse Stewart's wild enthusiasm. He moved to Paris, where he invested £3,000 in French Funds. A classic Enlightenment radical, hard-line atheist and egalitarian, with plenty of interesting fads in addition, Stewart was embraced by spritely Gallic intellectuals as a soul-mate. There he became familiar with the great Condorcet and his mathematical formulae for depicting social phenomena. The Cercle Social, a faction of the revolutionary Girondists, pushed Stewart's name before the public. The journalist involved was Nicholas de Bonneville, Thomas Paine's bosom friend; and Paine and Stewart remained life-long friends, although with diverging politics.
The French Revolution turned sour, however. The liquidation of many of the Girondists by way of the guillotine, combined with Stewart's French Funds becoming valueless, turned him against t he Revolution, paranoid with fear of social upheaval, yet without altering or repudiating the mass of his ideas. The story survives that William Wordsworth, ardent Jacobin in Paris as he was, fled the French capital after Stewart had warned him that his life was at risk.
Back in London, where he had often met up with William Godwin, the anarchist, Stewart, now virtually penniless, attempted to earn his crust by giving public lectures in which he expounded his ideas. But the political atmosphere had become reactionary - authority suspected him - and economic survival proved near impossible. A state spy recorded in 1792 how 'Stewart, who went off [to France] with [Thomas] Muir. I heard on Monday, was in London last week, from whence he shipped himself off to Norway...' But during this period Stewart was engaged in editing a work by another friend, the Venetian Count Zenobio. To An Essay on Civil Government he appended one hundred pages of close printed notes, which arguably constitute the most advanced commentary on the French Revolution by any contemporary British author on the left. One prescient passage in particular deserves quotation:
Men are already beginning visibly to divide more by opinion than nations, tending towards a division into the two grand classes, not badly named Aristocrats and Democrats, i.e. the rich, masters, employers, oppressors, all on one side; and the poor, dependent, employed, and oppressed, all on the other; - the proprietors and non-proprietors; the rulers and ruled.
Stewart saw the working classes as a rising force in society; but his vocabulary for describing them was inadequate. Yet in one respect he anticipated Karl Marx remarkably, regarding the peasantry, whose 'mental processes' are *so totally suppressed, that extreme labour leaves' them `no time to acquire consciousness or intellectual existence.' Never invoking 'class consciousness' as such, he uses 'consciousness' on several occasions with a rich complex of meanings.
4 Ethical Record, June, 2003 Stewart Serialised in Carlile's The Republican Finding England inhospitable, Stewart placed his hopes on a sojourn in America, where he published several works. But he had not reckoned that whilst in the Old World religion was in retreat, the New World was a Puritan paradise, with the religious very firmly in the saddle. The Traveller's outspoken materialism and atheism aroused the fury of the hell and damnation stiffnecks, who discouraged his audiences. But it was in America that Stewart found a most important disciple in Elihu Palmer, the blind preacher. who was involved with what was dubbed the Columbian Society of Illuminati. A deist, Palmer's notorious work was The Principles of Nature, which was written, according to Palmer's widow, in consultation with Stewart, and which some asserted had a full chapter composed by the Traveller. Richard Carlite produced the first English edition in 1819, and for his pains, being found guilty of blasphemy, was sentenced to a year in gaol. Carlile was to serialise Stewart's 'Discourses' in The Republican in 1826.
Returning to England, the Traveller's life took yet another unexpected turn. The East India Company was settling the financial affairs of the late Nabob of Arcot. They agreed to pay Stewart £10,000, thus ensuring his creature comfort for the rest of his days. He was one of the most easily recognisable people in London; for a while he adopted Armenian headgear, and famously was to be seen every morning sitting by Westminster Bridge, contemplating the world as it went by.
Acquiring a house in Cockspur Street. Stewart installed an organ. for he loved music, especially by Handel; there a salon grew up, which many distinguished intellectuals keenly attended, for they enjoyed his company and ideas, Robert Owen being among the 'cherished friends' as well as the essayist Thomas de Ouincey. Wordsworth came on occasion. Buying annual tickets for the theatres. Stewart would attend primarily to hear the pit orchestras playing. rather than view the plays. He had little time for Shakespeare, whom he dismissed as 'a remarkable example of lettered imbecility,' producing 'the somnolency of intellectual life in the temperament of Britain with his lettered rubbish: He always refused to write an account of his actual travels, 'stating that his were travels of the mind'. And his prejudices, usually of a national type, never waned. The Irish were a particular butt. 'Man was an anticipatory animal,' he declared. the Irish 'were not'. But the Irish had qualities he appreciated as well: 'I have seen twenty Irishmen at Philadelphia beat the whole crew of a French privateer,' he once wrote.
Stewart - A Forefather of Ecology Stewart was a great experimenter in matters of food. Dr Rush. in 1791. reported that 'He formerly lived on animal and vegetable food alternatively, viz., animal in winter and Vegetable in summer, beginning on the 1st of May, after which time he had the best of health. He now lives wholly on two pounds of unleavened bread, with half a pound of cheese, or four apples. alternatively every day'. Stewart told how he had 'had a very dangerous gangrene' in his leg, curing it 'by a regimen of roasted apples, eating only half a dozen, with a small piece of bread, in twenty four hours: He recommended the use of the 'warm mud bath' as a regular practice. His end was mysterious. When he died, an empty bottle of laudanum was found in his bedroom. Suicide was suspected.
Stewart is a true forefather of the modern ecological movement, who saw that men 'have glutted on the Tree of Knowledge, on arts and sciences, and abandoned the Tree of Life, that is, the knowledge of Self in the laws of sensation, and the relation of men with all surrounding nature.' He aimed to 'harmonise' men with 'the great organism of the universe': and defined the state of nature as 'when appropriation of things and persons shall cease.' Ethical Record, June, 2003 5 Despite his ongoing interest in military affairs (he witnessed the battle of Jemappe), violence of any sort appalled Stewart. He insisted, in fact, that men must 'do no violence to any part of animal nature'. In the words of his friend, John Taylor, he maintained 'it was the eternal interest of man to exempt as much as possible all sensitive beings from pain, as, when he had lost the human form, he would become a part of all inferior animals of every description, and consequently the matter of which he once consisted would bear a portion of the pain inflicted' by any physical evil. Stewart was inevitably opposed to capital punishment. And a foe of slavery, he declared as an ardent feminist that 'the state of half the population of the globe, where the female is subjected to the male sex, is a state of far worse slavery'. He even quoted at length from Mary Wollstonecraft on the rights of women.
Stewart's materialism is an advance on the mechanistic systems pioneered by the French phdosophes such as d'Holbach, which he points out were trapped in the conundrum of cause and effect. If law controls everything in nature, then we end up with infinite chains of causality - a stultifying kind of determinism. Stewart argues instead that in nature 'we see order and disorder everywhere': and that 'even in gravitation, nature is subject to irregularity.' The 'causation must... possess within itself its own independent energy,' he concluded.
Stewart A Pioneer In Dialectics Stewart's was a form of pantheism with God left out, man, the world and the cosmos seen as a unity. The relationship of the parts with the whole was a recurrent theme with him. Where he is at his most original is in his discussions of dialectics - and here he is several years in advance of the German idealist philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. In fact, we can demonstrate how they would have known of Stewart and his ideas, the circumstantial evidence being quite compelling. His philosophic outlook equates with what today is usually described as 'realism'. Taking John Locke to task for 'confounding ideas with things, and probability with certainty, he rejected the empiricist ideology that dominated the British scene. For Stewart there was - to borrow a modern term - a 'deep structure' to reality, which men were capable of uncovering by the application of dialectics. He mocked any 'silly doctrines' that the 'mind can have no certitude beyond experience': and he argued that 'probability' can function quite as well as 'certitude', a position that makes much sense in some areas of science.
Logic, Stewart assures us, 'keeps man stationary in existence, dialectic leads on to the perfectibility of his nature.' He writes of language, 'this dialectic having no other quality but intelligibility, could not fail to bring all mankind to one common standard of good...' Dialectic for Stewart is bound up with change, with reform and improvement. Whilst logic (ordinary or scholastic) takes 'its criterion from the contracted relations of custom,' dialectic is to do with the 'perfectibility of custom'. 'Self,' by the operation of dialectic, 'is discovered to be an inseparable functional part of the great whole of existence.' Human 'intellect, in its attempt to approximate to progressive truth, must take in simultaneously all possible relations of an idea, which forms the true character of dialectic.' If some readers feel impelled at this point to exclaim 'shades of Hegelfl, they will have even more to exclaim as Stewart explains that 'The use of reason' leads us 'to move on a double centre, viz, the base of practice and the apex of theory.'
Stewart, in his radical phase, overflows with ideas of socio-political improvement. Republican and anti-aristocratic, he was much taken with utopian schemes of great imaginative force, which are as close to anarchism as to Marxism. In 1790 he proposed 'social subdivisions' consisting of `no more than one hundred males, 6 Ethical Record, June, 2003 and one hundred females; they should live in one house, eat at the same table, participate in labour and pleasure in common, and cultivate a general volition as their guide'. Twenty of these would form a 'community' and twenty communities might form a 'province'. In 1808 he advocated a future society in which 'there can exist no relation of kindred property or persons. Individuals must first be associated into residences or barracks, containing as many persons as can hear the familiar conversation of each other, which might amount to the number of one hundred, governed in all their conduct by the majority of voices.' Every week there would be assemblies 'in town meeting houses, containing two or three thousand persons,' whilst every month 'auditories of one million' persons would be held.
The blanket ignorance of British academics regarding Stewart's philosophic ideas, contrasting with the almost obscene way they have avidly pursued the tritest intellectual fads emanating from the Continent, speaks of an essentially impoverished milieu. Stewart's own reputation for eccentricity has not helped, it is true. And his writing style can be abominable - the spasms of brilliant insight are smothered by the dullness of so many passages littered with his endless neologisms. The British Mercury wrote brutally of The Apocalypse of Nature: 'The Critics say, that Walking Stewart has walked over all Countries, and his Phraseology over the English language. It is not yet absolutely known in what language it is written.' De Quincey had to admit of his friend that he 'was a man of genius, but not a man of talents; at least his genius was out of all proportion to his talents...' And de Quincey also confessed that the great Traveller was 'Crazy beyond all reach of hellebore'. But J.W.C.', writing in 1861, rightly said of Stewart: 'A rough man certainly, but the world wants rough men sometimes.' Ii
AFRICAN AMERICANS FOR HUMANISM Planetary Humanism in Action A Report by Bill Cooke
While a humanist activist in New Zealand, I tried to keep up to date with international trends in world humanism. But, since taking up the position of International Director of the Center for Inquiry, here in Amherst, New York, I have realised how much more there is to know about the movement. In this article I want to focus on just one aspect of the Center for Inquiry's work, about which I knew very little: its work in Africa.
Africa was largely ignored by the humanist movement until Paul Kurtz visited Gabon, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa in 1984. In each country Kurtz gave lectures and spoke to broadcasters and reporters. He noted that the press in apartheid South Africa was prepared to hear criticism of the paranormal, but even opposition journals were afraid to print criticism of religion. Several prominent journals decided not to run interviews of Kurtz, for fear of reprisal from outraged Christians. The visit of Paul Kurtz to South Africa also gave a huge boost to a recently-formed Humanist Association of South Africa. That same year, Kurtz also founded the IHEU's Growth and Development committee, which had the object of developing humanism outside of Europe. Kurtz chaired that committee until 2000.
Back in the United States, Kurtz decided to expand the role of the Council of Secular Humanism in 1989 when he hired Norm Allen to devote attention especially to African Americans, with the understanding that this should also include Africa itself. This was the first time Africa received any systematic attention from the humanist
Ethical Record, June, 2003 7 movement. And the organisation Allen established, African Americans for Humanism (AAH) was also the first to adopt a transnational approach to humanist development.
Alongside the creation of AAH in 1990, Allen was involved in drawing up the African-American Humanist Declaration. That both the Declaration and the AAH were transnational in outlook was illustrated by the inclusion of prominent humanists from Ghana and Nigeria on the Advisory Board of the AAH and as contributors to African American Humankm: An Anthology (Prometheus, 1991) Among the thousands of titles by Prometheus Books which have been distributed free or at nominal cost in Africa, this is one of the most commonly seen. The anthology brought together some classic documents of African American humanism, biographical outlines of early heroes for the cause, and essays by leading contemporary African and African American humanist • • thinkers. When the story of African humanism comes to be written a century from now, African American Humanism: An Anthology will be seen as a foundational text.
Early in 2003. Allen completed another collection of readings called The Black Humanist Experience, which featured humanists from Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Uganda and Ethiopia as well 'as the United States. The Black Humanist Experience complements the earlier anthology, concentrating mainly on personal odysseys to humanism. It should help dispel the widely held fallacy of the universality of religious belief among Africans and African Americans. This account from The Black Humanist Experience can serve as an illustration. It conies from the testimony of Micah Lamptey, who in 1991 was a student in Ghana. Having come home one weekend, Lamptey was watching television, and there was Norm Allen talking about humanism.
'What he said sounded very interesting and appealing to me, and immediately after the show, I told my sister that I had found where I belonged. She said I was crazy, but the next day I went to the office where the show originated and made inquiries as to how I could contact Allen.' (page 114)
Lamptey established contact with Allen, who sent him a number of books and Free Inquiry magazine and recommended others. As Lamptey said, 'I have enjoyed being a secular humanist ever since.'
While nobody doubts the ongoing value of the Prometheus titles journals like Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer, it was clear that AAH needed its own journal. So, in 1990 Allen launched the ongoing quarterly journal, the AAH Examiner. Edited by Allen and funded by the Center for Inquiry, the AAH Examiner remains the only transnational periodical devoted to the development of humanism in Africa and by Africans. The AAH Examiner is one of the least appreciated jo,trnals of world humanism.
Free Inquiry Skeptical Inquirer, the AAH Examiner, as well as literally thousands of Prometheus titles have been given away in Africa ovei the past fifteen years or more. Norm Allen has been to Africa twice, each time helping develop and publicise African humanism. These titles became the core of the libray at the Rational Centre in Ghana, when that library was put together. AAH has also smt Free Inquiry and several hundred Prometheus titles to the Ethiopian Humanist Organisation for distribution there. The AAH also helped the EHO establish a presenc.t. on the web for a variety of African humanist organisations. The AHAL site gives a v;triety of African humanist organisations exposure they would not get on their own. It is this constant flow of material to humanist organisations and individuals that represmts the Center's single most significant contribution to the development of humanism in Africa.
8 Ethical Record, June, 2003 The next step after providing literature is to help develop an indigenous humanist literature. In 1991 the Center funded the first Nigerian humanist newsletter, called The Sunray.Alongside the indigenous literature, the Center for Inquiry has also been active developing a cadre of leaders. Over the decade, the Center provided airfares for Ghanaian and Nigerian delegates to attend international humanist meetings in Belgium, in the Netherlands and in Mexico.
Ten years of work in Africa came to a head late in 2001 with the inaugural conference of the Nigerian Humanist Movement, held at the University of lbadan. This conference received relatively little attention in the humanist press around the world. But it wasn't just another conference; this was a landmark event in the development of African humanism. The theme of the conference was 'Science. Humanism and the African Renaissance' and it was attended by a broad range of academics, teachers and activists from around Nigeria as well as several Non-Governmental Organizations (NG05). A Ugandan delegate was also there, and reports of the situation in Ethiopia and Tanzania were heard.
Most delegates were strongly secular in outlook, and deplored the breakdown in commitment to a secular state in Nigeria. Dr G A Akinola, an historian from the University of lbadan, spoke for many delegates when he stressed the need to revive the Nigerian rationalist tradition. This was reiterated by speakers from the health sector, who lamented the influence of primitive health practices, frequently peddled by charlatans, out for a quick profit. This is not to say that all delegates were of the same mind. Jerry Obi-lkogbuo, a senior lecturer at the Federal University of Technology at Owerri in Nigeria, worried that secular humanism, which he distinguished from sacred humanism, alienated 'people from god. There was also disagreement over the role genetically modified foods should play in alleviating hunger on the continent.
At their best, conferences can energise participants, both from hearing interesting speakers, but more often simply from meeting new people: networking, as it's called. This conference was of unusual significance in that regard. For the first time, humanists in Africa heard their own voice, agreed on the serious issues of the day, and discovered they were not alone. After the conference, Deo Sekitooleko, secretary of the Ugandan Humanist Organisation, suggested a series of regional conferences around Africa to build on the momentum created at lbadan. That may well happen.
The Ibadan conference was a transnational effort. It was funded by the Center for Inquiry and organised by Leo lgwe, executive secretary of the Nigerian Humanist Movement. But for the momentum of the conference to be preserved, Nigerian humanism needed to be put on a surer footing. With this in mind, the Center for Inquiry went into partnership with the Nigerian Humanist Movement and established the first Center for Inquiry on the African continent. This is the most promising project being undertaken to develop humanism in Africa. Prometheus Books donated 3600 books for the library. Early in 2003 the Center for Inquiry—Nigeria moved into its own office in lbadan.
At the time of writing, new projects are in the pipeline. More African students are going to be brought to Amherst for the Center for Inquiry's summer programme, and a humanist adoption service is being investigated. As Free Inquiry put it in 1990, (Vol 10, No.2, p5) while 'such modest projects no doubt pale in comparison with the massive efforts to convert Africa...to Christianity, we are making some headway.' 1:1
Ethical Record, June, 2003 WHAT IS SO ATTRACTIVE ABOUT INFINITY? Ian Mordant Ian Mordwa launched his new book "The Symmetries of 11 September" at Conway Hall on 20 Febuaty 2003 Lecture to the Ethical Society, 16 March 2003
This talk is being given as ferocious allegations are being traded back and forth over the coming war in Iraq. I will not tell you to take one side or the other, but may help you to think about one aspect of democracy, namely the level of discussion that dominates the press. radio, television. I think that much of the discussion around Iraq has been of a very low level; it has been via various infinities as I argue later.
Infinities Of Feeling For now, I illustrate my interest in infinities of feeling using one of the best known poems in the English language, William Blake's poem London, from his Songs of Innocence and Experience, written between 1789-1794:
'I wander thro' each charted lane, How the Chimney sweepers cry, Near where the chartered stream cloth flow, Every blackening Church appals, And mark in every face I meet, And the hapless soldiers sigh, Marks of weakness, marks of woe. Runs in blood down palace walls.
In every cry of every Man. But most thro' midnight's streets I hear, In every Infant's cry of fear, How the youthful harlots curse, In every voice: in every ban, Blasts the new-born Infant's tear, The mind-forgd manacles I hear. And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.
Now this poem certainly works, in that no one can doubt that it conveys a scene of utter degradation, but how does it succeed in doing so? Firstly the sounds of the poem. such as the ow sound, as in flow, woe. Also no saving grace of any kind • is suggested. the bleakness is completely unbounded. Feelings which are unbounded in intensity are, I think, of infinite intensity. It is this infinity which is what makes the poem work.
In a poem of 16 lines, at least 12 of them contain an explicit each or every, or an implicit every via the word the, amounting to equating a whole with a part. Are we really to believe that there was no such thing as a happily married couple anywhere, in the whole of London of 1789? That each and every couple was absolutely sunk in pain and regret at being alive and at having brought a child into the London of 1789? That every infant was left to cry its head off, uncared for? That each and every carriage carrying each and every newly married couple was really a hearse, if only they knew?
I believe then that these 'everys', explicit and implicit, construct infinities, they make London of Blake's poem infinitely bleak, infinitely repulsive. Of course there were strongly painful things in the London of those years: poverty, homelessness, instances of children starving to death, of mother's prostituting themselves to get money to buy food for their children and so on. But I can't help thinking that this was not worse than much that went on in the countryside, where poverty I suspect was just as real.
Not only that, but London was also the centre of political agitation against the very things that Blake was protesting about. Thus Blake knew members of the 10 Ethical Record, June, 2003 London Corresponding Society, which had been formed in 1792. and whose main criterion for membership was:
. "Are you thoroughly persuaded that the wealth of these kingdoms requires that every adult person in possession of his reason, and not incapacitated by crime, should have a vote for a member of parliament?"
Blake's poem I conclude works by means of symmetrisations; each of those everys is a symmetrisation, and produces the unrelieved degradation of his poem.
Now if my belief that Blake's London works via the ow sound and via infinities is correct, then we ought to be able to see other instances of other famous poems in the English language working in the same way. I can think of another well worn example, namely
In Flanders fields the poppies grow, Between the crosses row on row
There is the ow sound again in 'grow' and 'row on row'. But 'row on row', is surely completely unbounded in extent and it is I suggest the very unboundedness that produces an infinity. In this case its infinities of pity, sadness and loss inevitable in the losses marked by crosses 'row on row.' It catches us immediately, and I suggest that it is the infinity that the language evokes which captures us.
So what do I believe about perceptions of infinity? Well in my book, The Symmetries of September 11111, I argue that infinity can be the most seductive experience. For example, it is very seductive to feel unboundedly accepted by someone you badly want to accept you. Indeed so seductive that this fantasy powers an entire industry, namely the Mills and Boon industry. The opposite of this is also true: to feel infinitely unwantable and unlovable produces a well known condition of pathology, namely depression. Depression has its own infinities not only in the intensity of feeling, but the way in which a depressed person can go on and on and on. That the infinities of depression could be seductive seems at first sight ridiculous, but that is what students of the unconscious implicitly believe.
Considering Infinities I think that some infinities are what I call authentic, that is to say, they are not evoked via poetic language, or other forms of artifact. Thus I believe that the universe is infinite in space: I just can't see how therc can be some finite boundary like a garden fence that marks the end of the universe. What about the other side? How can that not also be in the universe too?
These are questions of topology {The universe could be finite in volume yet unbounded [Ed1} - what is meant by a boundary, how dimension is defined and so on. But the universe does seem to me to be infinite in length.
I also think that the universe is infinite in time. Thus I just do not believe in the creation of the universe, and if there was a bie bang 15000 million years ago, then this was very likely not the first big bang that's ever been or ever will be. Scientists talk about THE big bang as if there has only ever been one and this was THE beginning of the universe. However, an article by Freeman Dyson in Scientific American a year or two back pointed out the laziness of this usage of THE big bang. I suspect that there have been an infinity of big bangs, and will continue to be.
Ethical Record, June, 2003 II Both the infinity of space and the infinity of time seem to be examples of what I call authentic infinities. The existence of such infinities seems to me the only logically rigorous theory of the universe, one which does away with First Causes, Last Causes, etc. If this is so, there must be laws of necessity of some kind, which require the existence of the universe. We may be able to discover such laws, or not.
Equating A Whole To A Part Stan and Donna are having a marital quarrel, which builds up until she turns on him and screams 'You bastard'. Now Donna knows that Stan has a bastardy part, but in that moment, all of Stan is being equated to that bastardy part. At that moment he is all bastard, only bastard, wholly bastard. A whole, namely all of Stan, has been equated to a part, a negative part. At that moment Donna loathes the image she has of Stan, could perhaps kill him. It is this process of equating some whole to just one attribute which produces an infinity.
We can see this in two ways:
I. One whenever some whole is equated to some part it produces an infinity; this is a piece of mathematics that I illustrate in my book.
2. The perception of any single attribute will always seem infinite. Thus consider pure whiteness, not white clouds nor white walls, but just whiteness, pure whiteness. I experience such an image as entirely unbounded and infinite in extent.
We see this operating in a well known instance: thus on her wedding day, a bride in a Christian wedding is dressed all in white. This whiteness conveys an image of infinite purity, as it is meant to. Again a very seductive infinity.
Take another example of a single attribute, whose very singleness feels infinite, namely the dark. I think that it is the unboundedness or infinity of the dark which is in part why infants can find the dark so terrifying, because the infinity is of aloneness, abandonment. It's a terrifying infinity, and perhaps insomniacs suffer from it too?
Now this process of equating some whole to one of its parts has a name; it is called symmetrisation. It is a very ironic type of symmetry. "lb equate some whole to one of its parts is to treat them symmetrically, but it is of course an absurd symmetry. That is what symmetrisation is.
A Detinition of Symmetrisation So far I have illustrated symmetrisation, but I have not defined it. A definition of symmetrisation would say that when symmetrisation produces a fantasy it does so by treating two things symmetrically which a more detailed acquaintance with the attributes of the material would not lead you to do. One example is of course when some whole is equated to one of its parts. But not all symmetrisation is like this. Thus many years ago a man with schizophrenia said to me
'We have a Siamese cat at home. He is thinking of me.' Now what I assume was going on was that he had been thinking of his cat, and that 'I am thinking of the cat' had become, `He is thinking of me'
These two sentences had been treated symmetrically, the subject 'I' has become the object 'me', and the object, 'the cat', has become the subject, 'He'. Most 12 Ethical Record, June, 2003 of us, of course, would not treat subject and object as interchangeable, as syrnmetrical.
How Is Symmetrisation Itself Produced? I have said when symmetrisation produced a fantasy it involved 'treating two things symmetrically which a more detailed acquaintance of the attributes of the material would not lead you to do'
So far as the war poetry is concerned, I suggest that early death, eg on the battlefield, is an excellent example of symmetrisation: a whole has been equated to a part, namely the life that could have been, has been equated to the part which was actually lived, before the early death intervened. Early death must thereby always produce infinities of loss, grief and sadness. But what is unusual is that symmetrisation produced by early death is not due to abstraction: symmetrisation due to early death, eg in war, is all-too real!
And sure enough the infinities of agony produced by early death are surely authentic infinities: the one person with whom you could have had an ecstatic life of happiness has instead been killed on the battlefield. This is because the symmetrisation that produced this infinity was not via evasive abstraction, which is what happened when Donna shouted, 'You bastard'.
The poem about Flanders Fields is a fascinating combination of both authentic and inauthentic infinities. It is authentic for the reasons I have just discussed — the symmetrisation due to early death. Now the First World War was of course vastly murderous, and some 11 million died in it. But some 21 million died in the flu epidemic that came right at the end of that war. But when we read that poem we don't think of this that twice as many people died from flu in 1919 as from the war itself.
But in the First World War, perhaps for the first time a whole people, including its middle and upper class were experiencing the danger of life that the rest of the population knew so well. A whole was experiencing a danger normally known only by a part.
Time Inherently Asymmetric Time is inherently asymmetric: thus tomorrow is always, but always, after today. But suppose a symmetrisation occurred, then the asymmetry of time could be lost. In that case, the effect would be timelessness. This is exactly what death in one sense produces. Indeed it is about this timeless aspect of death which again forms some of the most famous lines of poetry in our language:
'They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old, Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn
Again I suggest that the effect of the poetry is produced by symmetrisation, which produces the timelessness. It again produces infinities of pity and of loss.
Reasoning Inherently Asymmetric Reasoning is another example of something inherently asymmetric. Now if symmetrisation is applied to something so asymmetric as reasoning, then symmetrisation ought to be able to destroy someone's ability to reason. I suggest that one example of this is exactly the tendency to freeze at the sight of a mathematics Ethical Record, June, 2003 13 problem: many people's ability to reason from the information given to the sblution of the problem dies on the spot.
To sum up my ideas: I believe that it is infinity that is seductive, and a process which produces infinities is therefore very powerful. Inauthentic infinities are produced by the equating of a whole with a part, and I believe Blake's poem is an example of this process. Early death really does equate what would have been that whole life to just the part that was lived. This is therefore a real not fantasied symmetrisation which also produces infinities of loss, horror and sadness.
Genocide Always Intolerable in 1279, Vietnam invaded Kampuchea to destroy the Pol Pot genocide. The United Nations condemned thc invasion, and the United States upheld this condemnation and hence the legality of the UN. As a result the United States continued to support the seating of the Pol Pot representative of Kampuchea at the UN for the next ten years. Yet was the UN doing the best thing in condemning the invasion by Vietnam? The invasion was definitely illegal in international law, for Kampuchea was not, in 1979, threatening to invade Vietnam, something the 8 million people of Kampuchea, devastated by genocide, were hardly in a position to do to a Vietnam of fifty million people.
What I think this example shows is that to try to make the legality of the Security Council an absolute is in fact a symmetrisation: yes it's the best place to START from, but to stick to it irrespective of all other details, is to make the legality of the Security Council into a symmetrisation. where the frequent fact that obeying Security Council resolutions is best is equated to its ALWAYS being best.
To what extent are the feelings of moral superiority that we easily feel always inauthentic infinities? To what extent is moral condemnation always a symmetrisation? It seems to me that there is a danger that this is also always so. This is because no two human beings, and no two human societies are wholly different and that not all the moral beams are ever only in your brother's eye. Nietzsche's answer was that the moralities that had come down to us so far were symmetrisations, and the feelings of taking the moral high ground were inauthentic infinities. Do we accept this? I suspect that he is sometimes correct.
Thus 1 do think a legality that outlaws genocide is superior to one that doesn't. In that regard I note that Turkey has never yet admitted its genocide of the Armenians in 1915, 85 years ago. In this regard, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, formed in 1969, has never, as far as I know, condemned Turkey over this. This is not because it declines to make political stances, for it often does. Is the silence on Turkish genocide in the name of Allah the Compassionate OK then — that the infinities of that genocide have been just too much for a religious integrity to handle? Certainly I think that before Turkey is admitted to the European Union we should make it an absolute precondition that they admit, and take responsibility for, the genocide of the Armenians of 1915.
When there is a conflict, the parties to a conflict do their best to make out that between the two conflictual parties it's all difference, only difference, completely difference. Take the Christian and Islamic religions for example: what could be more different, only different, purely different, than heaven and hell? There is heaven, where God resides, wholly triumphant, infinitely wonderful in every way. By contrast hell is infinitely horrible, obnoxious and unbearable in every way. Contrast between heaven and hell could hardly be greater! 14 Ethical Record, June, 2003 Notice too that heaven and hell do however share one attribute: the attributes of each are quite unbounded in intensity and extent. The attributes are infinite.
Take the Nazis: we see the same pattern when we consider their characterisation of the Aryan man versus the Jewish man. The Aryan is utterly sublime, the highest version of the human. Jewishness by contrast is the site of every kind of degradation, and moreover each such is infinite in amount.
Take Karl Marx: he tended to make out that capitalism was a huge site of exploitation, where every relationship was supposedly perverted into cold, exploitative, selfish self-interest. Communism by contrast would see a society which could inscribe in its banners 'To each according to his need'. If capitalism is such an exploitative hell, communism was made to sound like a post-exploitative heaven.
To see a present day example of all this, take the Middle East and observe what usually happens if a journalist tries to compare Palestinian liamas with the Israeli terrorist organisation, the Irgun. Whether it's an Israeli or a Palestinian being interviewed, the chances are s/he will respond to such a comparison with the howl. 'There's no comparison'. Again there is only difference, wholly difference. Why is there allegedly 'no comparison'?
Intelligence Can Destroy Inauthentic Infinities Intelligent political acts that short circuit terrorism do not produce inauthentic infinities, indeed they arc the asymmetries that destroy inauthentic infinities. They help de-infinitise. That's one reason that they don't evoke much enthusiasm, don't get the blood racing the way the brass bands of war do. When a settlement is eventually hammered out in the Middle East I predict that large minorities on both sides are going to be filled with infinities of anger at the concessions made to the other people: on each side large minorities will engage in symmetrisation of the kind: 'Those people came, and killed our children, and we make concessions to them!'
If symmetrisation and the infinities of rage that they produce operates, it may well be that a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, will have to be done under conditions of martial law, with police on both sides shooting rioters on the spot and perhaps parliament buildings will have to be protected with tanks, the way the French National Assembly had to be protectedin 1961, when the French settlers in Algeria,The so-called pied noirs, attempted to overthrow General de Gaulle.
Inasmuch as the press does little to destroy the symmetrisations on both sides on the Middle East, it is complicit in these symmetrisations. If so, then journalism consists of inauthentic, and indeed, parasitic infinities.
Ian Mordant's book The :5'ynimetries of September I I th is available at Karnac Books, Finchley Road, NW3.
TIIE HUMANIST REFERENCE LIBRARY The Library at Conway Hall is open for members and researchers from Tuesday to Friday from 1400 to 1800
Ethical Record, June, 2003 15 WOMEN AND EQUALITY A Report by Barbara Ward
The Barbara Diamond Memorial Lecture - 'Women in their Generations: the Family in International Relations given by Professor Margaret Blunden, Deputy Vice- ChanceHof; External Affairs, University of Westminster, on Wednesday, 14 May 2003.
Prof. Blunden introduced her subject with UN statistics in Amartya Sen's book Development as Freedom and queried the equality of survival of boys compared to girls, asking what will be the impact of increased levels of young men.
Agricultural communities have traditionally and historically favoured boy babies as additional labourers on the family land. Prof. Blunden quoted a harrowing passage describing rural practices of 'allowing' two sons to one daughter and the common practice of neglecting, even drowning, unwanted females.
Urban and industrial development has led to a natural surplus of women to men in Europe and North America and in most developed countries of the world - with the exception, shown on an astonishing graph - of China and India, plus a few African countries, where men now outnumber women 120:100. It seems that the argriculturalists' preference for boys has spread there to the urban, educated classes. Technological progress (ultra-sound amniocentesis) may be costly but Prof. Blunden said the saving of dowries for unwanted females, for example, would be ten times as much.
Such a level of 'favouring' boy babies over girls would include preferential food/health care, e.g. passive killing.
Will such a surplus of males lead to increased violence? Unmarried young men (in the 24-35 age group) are 3 times likelier to kill another male than married ones. Fukuyama tells us that one of our basic problems is to control the aggression of young males. Solutions include:- educate the girls; help stabilise male/female relationships; ensure employment of young men; or expect war and international violence.
Is war more likely when the ratio of males to females is exceptionally high? It may seem so but Prof. Blunden ended more hopefully, reminding her audience that biology isn't destiny.
HUMANIST LUNCH
Main Speaker Sally Feldman, Assoc. Editor, New Humanist, Head of Arts & Media at Westminster University;
Jazz Duo
£20 inc. one free drink. Book quickly, with BHA 020 7079 3580
1200noon Saturday 21 June 2003
16 Ethical Record, June, 2003 MYSTICISM AND LOGIC A Critical Response to Bertrand Russell's 1918 Essay* Christopher Hampton Lecture to the Ethical Society, I June 2003
Systems arc demolished, and other systems take their place. But whether in face of the history of the 20th century it can be argued that each significant replacement represents a step up the ladder of man's mastery over himself and the world has to be doubted. Russell claims that his kind of thinking (which he dates from Galileo) represents a considerable step, a great sequence of steps, up the ladder, because it has a greater accuracy in respect to facts, and a less fallible method of accumulating them. Its success, indeed, 'proceeds with ever-increasing velocity' because it is not, he asserts, 'as in art, dependent for progress upon the appearance of continually greater genius'. But this affirmation assumes, in the first place, that the accelerating velocity of science is in itself, as a detached pursuit of understanding, a good thing, and unlikely to bring us (as he suggests the study of art does) to despair. Secondly, and quite erroneously, it assumes that art is itself connected with some sort of quantitative advance, as if each epoch were successively committed to bettering or capping the last. And thirdly it assumes that science does not depend for progress upon its geniuses. And in making these assumptions, Russell vigorously maintains that scientific methods are the only genuine means of progress - though at the same time he rejects the concepts put forward by the evolutionists. 'The future, though we cannot see it', he interprets them as saying, 'will be better than the past or the present', while in actual fact 'what is real is an impulse and movement towards a goal which like the rainbow, recedes as we advance'.
But in setting up his own concept of progress as if it were some kind of panacea for the world's ills, he makes an assumption which has to be questioned. It is, one must ask, any more justifiable than to equate the pursuit of science with 'happiness' and that of art with 'despair'? In this respect, turning his attention to literature, Russell maintains that 'the habit of being unable to recognise merit until it is dead is too apt to be the result of a purely bookish life' - which may well be true. But if it is, this is not the fault of the books we read but rather of the person who leads the purely bookish life, no matter what the bookish life is spent in pursuit of - whether it be literature, mathematics or physics. The recognition of merit is a matter of perception, awareness and curiosity, and these qualities are more likely to be quickened and sharpened than diminished by the intensive and qualitative reading of books. But this would seem obvious. It is thus not very convincing to suggest, as Russell does, that literature is only a kind of refuge into which we can retire (as 'to the trim gardens of a polished past') against 'what is new and growing'. It may be quite the opposite.
Literature can have an awakening and activating influence upon us. Whether or not what is new and growing is 'shocking to the man of sensitive taste', our interest in it and our response to it will depend upon other qualities than our taste. In fact, taste is itself determined by the depth and intensity of a whole range of responses. And if the reader retires into literature and uses it as a refuge, a 'mild narcosis', a 'substitutive satisfaction' (in Freud's words) to escape the misery and boredom of daily life, it is a trifle presumptuous to assume that this is the book's fault - that a work like The Divine Cotnedy or King Lear is in itself a refuge, a 'substitutive satisfaction', a 'trim garden'. Nor is it less presumptuous to claim that In the study of art our attention is perpetually rivetted upon the past'. For a person of sensitive taste is also, at least in theory, capable
*Mysticism and Logic, Pelican (1953) Ethical Record, June, 2003 17 of thinking and or making distinctions. There is no reason in fact why we should not be as committed to order and to clarity as even a philosopher. And by what step of logic is it possible for Russell to assume that the study of literature rivets our attention upon the past any more than it does upon the present? After all, as a reader, I inhabit my own present, and respond to the book in the context of the historical conditions of the world I am actually living in. And it could further be argued that the great work of art acts upon us through its own flexible present - a temporal and spatial context which takes on its actuality and its interactive continuity from the responsiveness and sensibility of the person experiencing it. To study the Odyssey is to make what we can of its potentialities, its dramatic confrontations, the challenges Ulysses undergoes through the 19 years of his journey home towards Ithaca. And in making that journey with him, we re-make it in the present; respond to the challenge, and take on the complex process which tests Ulysses in terms of our own experience, testing ourselves and our own world through the medium of Homer's precise embodiment of the cosmic struggles of his protagonist.
Or does Russell really mean that to study the Odyssey is to evade reality and its problems and to indulge in mere 'substitutive satisfactions"? That if we do this and by doing it refuse to conform to the rigidly mechanistic standards of the logical positivists, we are refusing the present, shrinking from 'new and growing' forms of thought and achievement? That in turning to Homer, Dante and Shakespeare as against the imperative injunctions of the scientific attitude (or as a relief from them) we are retiring into a bookish world, the outmoded unscientific world of literature and art which the languages of science and technology and the philosophy of logical atomism have moved on from? This would be to adopt a symptomatic and essentially non-dialectic view of the functions of literature and philosophy as if they were incompatible; or to dismiss the findings of literature as invalid. It is possible even to consider the achievements Russell terms new and growing - products of abstraction such as the solutions of Weierstrasse and Cantor ('probably the greatest achievement of which this world has to boast') - as having vicious and shattering consequences for that essentially pre-Copernican invention Man, whose life, viewed outwardly, against the mechanisms of the cosmos, is such a 'small thing'.
But whether or not we are justified in regarding such achievements with suspicion, for Russell these achievements are the basis for his confident assertion about 'the essential splendour of contemporary things, or the hope of still greater splendour in the future' - which is to assert that the concept of human progress in the sphere of abstract knowledge if not elsewhere, is valid. The problem with such assertion is that it would have to take into account the catastrophic effects of the application of abstract knowledge upon the record of human society in the 20th century, as upon the atomistic and de-centred psychology of men and women living under the malign shadows cast by that 'essential splendour'.
There is a dictatorship of the abstract by which, in the hands of lesser men than Russell,
'The average of the average man Becomes a dread Leviathan, Our million individual needs. Omissions, vanities and creeds, Put through the statistician's hoop, The gross behaviour of a group...
18 Ethical Record, June, 2003 And it could be argued that
'The flood of tyranny and force Arises at a double source; In Plato's lie of intellect That all are weak but the Elect Philosophers, who must be strong, For, knowing Good, they will no Wrong, United in the abstract Word Above the low anarachic herd'.
And Russell, in his 1918 philosopher's view things, does little to diminish this with his categorical assertions. For in stressing the superiority of scientific methods of approach to the problems of the world, he encourages abstraction and discounts the problems of 'our million individual needs' as irrelevant. But this is in effect to simplify and hence to distort and to falsify the complex distinctions between things; or to reduce the inherent complexity of the problems of the human world and the practical energies of people's lives to the equations of abstract logic, which cannot pretend to define them. When, for instance, Russell states that 'the despair arising from an education that suggests no pre-eminent mental activity except that of artistic creation is wholly absent from an education which gives the knowledge of scientific method', he is falsifying a number of distinctions that demand to be kept clear, and simplifying a complex issue to the point of absurdity. His statement assumes, one, that there exist two very different forms of education, the first based upon 'artistic creation' and the second on 'scientific method': two, that these categories are somehow mutually exclusive and opposed in their methods, and that artistic creation is in fact enshrined in the schools as a pre- eminent mental activity pursued at the expense of other activities; three, that despair arises from the first kind and not from the second, and that therefore scientific method is superior to artistic creation, and, four, that an education in the humanities is aimed at making (or rather failing to make) artists of us all rather than at giving us knowledge and understanding of ourselves and our world. 'In arts', he states, 'nothing worth doing can be done without genius: in science even a very moderate capacity can contribute to a supreme achievement'. And this too makes false assumptions which betray an unfair bias in favour of science. It is unfair because the first half of the equation is not conversant with the facts. For it is surely undeniable that in art a great deal that is worth doing can be done without genius. It isn't genius, one might point out, that makes a thing worth doing, but the delight of doing it. There are thousands without genius (and even without talent) who write poems or play the piano or read or listen to music, and who do so for the sheer pleasure of the activity and the modest satisfaction they derive from it rather than for the applause of a ruthless competitive market. And these people would rightly be indignant to be told that their pursuits are worthless.
In this light. Russell's diktat would appear to be based on very questionable premisses. If it was intended to demonstrate that science is constructive and useful and art useless as a means of education and progress, what sense does it make to set science against art in this way, even in an attempt to correct an imbalance? In doing so, Russell seems to imply that art enlightens no-one, and that it is only worth studying if you are (or hope to become) a genius; which is clearly not so. The truth is that for most of us works of art, the products of genius, are there to be experienced, explored and shared, as forms that illuminate reality, enhance and quicken our perception of the ways people deal with the world they live in, and thereby help us the better to live our own lives. Why should artistic creation lead us, then, to despair? On the contrary, great works of art are often affirmative and celebratory; and even in facing up, as Hamlet, Othello and Ethical Record, June, 2003 19 Lear do, to tragedy and despair, and in probing the depths of human endurance, they help us to understand ourselves and others more deeply. We study them for pleasure' and catharsis and enrichment and recognition and self-knowledge. We study them for the impersonal insights they offer us into the mental and emotional conflicts that affect human beings, all those 'paradoxical and even mutually negating anecdotes in the history of a human heart' that art 'anneals into verisimilitude and credibility'. And they are there to be responded to in these positive, life-enhancing ways; to cast light in upon the mind and ease it of strain; to feed it, definitely, as Ezra Pound put it, as 'nutrition of impulse'. Therefore, wherever despair results from an education based upon literature and art as pre-eminent mental activities, it is not these activities as such that are to blame, but rather the methods (perhaps even the scientific methods) by which they are taught, or by which barriers are raised against all they have to offer.
It may be that for some of us, as for Russell, 'the desire for a larger life and wider interests, for an escape from private circumstances, and even from the whole recurring cycle of birth and death', is 'fulfilled by the impersonal, cosmic outlook of science as by nothing else'. Where that leaves the oppressed and the deprived, people who do not have the privilege of Russell's position is another matter. But for many of us, the most fulfilling experiences, quickening our awareness of the greater world beyond us, may be found in the cosmic visionary outlook of art. There is no question of the one or the other being superior; they are different and complementary. Where science provides us with data for the mechanical functioning of the universe, the arts are concerned with 'lasting and unassailable data regarding the nature of man, of immaterial man, of man considered as a thinking and sentient creature'. And in this context it is our business not to escape from the recurring cycle of birth and death, but intimately to register and to celebrate the diverse forms it takes as manifestations of organic continuity and human creativeness, the cyclic order and the rhythms of the cosmos itself.
At any rate, in the quest for truth, there can ultimately be no room for dogma. This is as true of the work of art as it is of the mathematical equation. But unlike the mathematical equation. the work of art demands more than a capacity for abstract detachment. Though in the control of structure and form, as in the unfolding and interweaving of parts, detachment is essential, it is what the work of art has to say about the human condition that matters - the depths of its penetration of reality, its intellectual and emotional intensity, the energy and inclusiveness of its view of things. Cold and detached, transcending the impurities of the condition to which we belong, climbing away from them to sit high on our Olympian mountain-top, we may suppose ourselves capable of knowing one kind of truth or another, but we can have little hope of understanding the lives of those who are involved in the game of life or the intricate illogical forces that govern their lives unless we are down among them, perhaps even (as Heine says) standing 'with the great masses at the portals of their wisdom'.
In Mysticism and Logic. Russell the philosopher is not, however, concerned with human problems as such. The philosopher in him declares that ethical notions, notions of good and evil, right and wrong, etc., are 'serious obstacles to the victory of scientific method in the investigation of philosophical questions', because 'they interfere with that receptivity to fact which is the essence of the scientific attitude towards the world'. To regard 'ethical notions as a key to understanding of the world', he says, 'is essentially pre-Copernican. It is to make Man, with the hopes and ideals which he happens to have at the present moment, the centre of the universe and the interpreter of its supposed aims and purposes'.
20 Ethical Record, June, 2003 In other words, unless or until he is able to free himself from the prison of the self by attaining an absolute objectivity towards all things, Man must remain totally inadequate as a measure for the universe. Since subjective judgements are fallacious and unreliable and can be shown by logical analysis to be so, they cannot ever serve as keys to truth, and are therefore in this sense valueless, since philosophical questions answered faultily must necessarily remain unsolved. According to Russell's terms, this is true. In his view, an understanding of the World cannot be arrived at by ethical notions because what he means by 'world' has no logical relation to 'ethics. 'In thought... tho'se who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires'.
True. But then much philosophy in the past concerned itself with man rather than with things, though it may have proposed and argued theories which sought to embrace the universe. And in this philosophy ethical notions were put forward, in essence, as part of an attempt to mould keys to the understanding of humanityit could hardly have• been otherwise. Since humanity was the subject at issue, it was naturally man than many pre-Copernican (and post-Copernican) philosophers desired to understand, whether at the centre of the universe or not. Now, though, it appears that man is no longer fit to be the subject of philosophy. He has been put in his place, relegated to a small and finite part of the vast indeterminable world of matter, whose form as a whole (if it has a whole) we are incapable of grasping. And looked at objectively, in relation to the vastness of the universe rather than in the heavily biassed terms of his own condition, he tends to look so diminutive and puny as to seem a complete irrelevance. Nevertheless it is a fact that all of us who happen to be men, or women, or children, do have an unarguable and instinctive awareness of our own unique place in the universe, and our senses tell us that we are not amoebic - that, alive in time and space, we are capable of a great deal more than the diminutive amoeba can ever conceive. And it happens to be true that most people at one time or another come face to face with problems they very much need to find answers for - human (and social) problems. problems of thought and feeling, of doubt and belief, of value and purpose, of relationship, that the philosophers of scientific method seem to prefer to ignore. One . might (if one had sufficient compassion) go as far as to say that even a single amoebic child is as deeply relevant and valuable as anything the abstract universe has tb offer. To make these points is not to attack science as such, but rather, as Sir Herbert Read has written, to criticise 'its moral or immoral application to human society - the • narrow-minded logic of scientific rationalism, the false ethic of objectivity, the brutality and complacency of all those who in the name of progress drive their machines over the tender shoots of all that is human and beautiful'. The philosopher mav be able to provide general propositions to define certain significant facts or coliections of facts; but general propositions - however great a control they give us over the mechanisms of the outer world - are no substitute for the experience of the 'recurring cycle of birth and death' or the historical-social conditions which determine our lives and define our place in the world; and they may, in the hands of the few who (having mastered the abstracts) consider themselves superior to these conditions, lead to greater betrayal and enslavement of people than ever, as in fact they have done in the 20th eentury. What the ordinary suffering human being seeks is not general propositions but particular solutions to particular problems - a philosophy that will actually address the chanaing material conditions of his or her life, by which 'the reality and power of thought' can become a focus for the practical energies of people and their human-sensuous needs. In this sense, the scientific philosopher's equations are meaningless not only because they are beyond the scope of most of us but also because they are essentially indifferent to our needs. Ethical Record, June, 2003 21 'Down here we grope still, tethered in the dark. Although precision instruments record the higher triumphs, where do they take us but up through fantasies of space to dust?
It is one thing for Russell to declare with dogmatic finality that 'many of the topics that used to be placed among the great mysteries - for example, the natures of infinity, of continuity, of space, time and motion - are now no longer in any degree open to doubt or discussion'. It is quite another to work out what this is supposed to mean in comprehensible human terms. 'Those', Russell continues, 'who wish to know the nature of these things need only read the works of such men as Peano or Cantor; they will there find exact and indubitable expositions of all these quondam mysteries'. It sounds so startingly simple. But what kind of stance are we, the obtuse and uninitiated many, tethered in the dark, to adopt towards it? Are we to accept the abstruse formulas of mathematicians, beyond our knowledge, as implying the end (or the beginning of the end) of these basic, 'quondam' mysteries? If so, perhaps we can also do away with all the other so-called mysteries that puzzle us, and regulate ourselves infallibly before them. Are we to believe that with certain mathematical equations which satisfy certain precise and beautiful hypotheses proposed about the nature of the universe, we shall also have the power to satisfy the 'unsolved historical contradictions of human nature'? How is it possible for the uninitiated to tell? Whether or not the natures of infinity, continuity, space, time and motion have in fact been resolved beyond doubt or discussion, the claim is so astonishing that we can do no more than take Russell's word for it, since hardly anybody is likely to be in a position to dispute the findings of Peano and Cantor. We do not have the keys that would enable us to share these exact and indubitable expositions. One is tempted to ask, as Fleine asked, thinking of Germany's distinguished philosophers: 'What benefit to. the people is the grain locked away in the granaries to which they have no key"?
To conceive of a world governed by such absolute one-sided solutions is to conceive of a world governed by the abstracts of the mind and its applied machines - a world aimed at breaking the deadlock of doubt and death, with Man (or rather certain chosen supermen among the species) adopting the stance of God - and an exclusively male God at that. And in such a world little thought is likely to be spared for the problems of our unscientific irrational animal nature, however much attention it demands. The whole 'subjective apparatus', and the ways in which it reflects and embodies the complementary opposites that make sense of it, will be swept aside as utterly irrelevant. And in its place no doubt the communicators of the future will emulate Russell's superior example - the two philosophers who sit down to begin an argument by saying: 'Let us calculate'. The grounds for debate are defined not by words, even if words may have a subsidiary part to play, but by mathematical symbols; and the discourse will proceed with a sequence of algebraic letters, defined by a series of emotionless, impersonal equations in the development of which the human being will have become so much the master of his baser needs that his mind will work out all his problems (they will all be abstract) automatically, as a robot brain works problems out. It will be the perfect solution - the brain functioning as a logical, methodical machine, detached, passionless, insensate, clinical, leaving the body, that biological- psychological system of organs and nerve-ends and blood and muscle and flesh behind to function at another level altogether, excreting as a ship excretes its oil, its copulative mechanism working as a ticket-machine works when you push the right button, without love or hate or pleasure or desire. And who can deny, given such untrammelled means, that Man (that is, the superior male, freed from his bodily needs) has it in his power to rise above himself? Having conquered desire, the 'natural terrain' of his animal Ethical Record, June, 2003 beginnings, with the natures of infinity, etc., solved, and with the moon - Leopardi's 'uncorrupted riser' - made a stopping-place for outer space, what is to stop him eventually putting on a higher nature, discarding his flesh-and-blood system for another more durable one, perhaps with replaceable parts? Who knows what new machines will not emerge as vehicles of conquest to 'break the deadlock, ape the stance of God', solving the problems of senility and death too, and finally eradicating that foolish and infuriating capacity primitive men and women have for poetry and song and love and sex?
But in that case we would need to make ourselves another species - a species as much superior to man, the language animal, as man is to the ape. And maybe man (if there were any of his species left) would have the same relation to this superior species as the ape to the amoeba. He could then perhaps be kept as a pet, or locked up in some superior kind of zoo, like Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim ('So it goes!), and watched by this new species indulging in primitive and savage habits such as reading books or playing the violin or making love or writing with a pen or kicking a ball around or worshipping some strange god or acting in a tragedy by Shakespeare - watched not with amusement or pleasure, of course, but with 'disinterested curiosity' (a curiosity essentially dis- integrated) in a manner parallel to that of the human animal watching apes performing in a cage. And whereas we would give our apes a banana or a bit of bread, the new species will give his animals a book or a piece of music or a man or woman, and record all data with minute precision, in the calculating manner of the scientist registering the mechanisms of an obsolete but incomprehensible invention.
And no doubt Russell himself, particularly in the light of his own descent from the mountain-top into the arena of the animal world of human problems, would be regarded by this new species, this robot product of the mind, as one more inmate of this superior kind of zoo LI
SUMMER EVENING CLASS PERSPECTIVES ON MIND
TUTOR: Steve ASH
ALL WELCOME - NO CHARGE
THE LIBRARY, CONWAY HALL, WCI 1900-2100h
JUNE Tues 17 Minds and Brains: Materialism, Physicalism & Identity Theory
Tues 24 Mind Programs: Functionalism & Analytical Materialism
JULY Tues I The Ghost & The Machine: Non-Reductive and Anti-Physicalist Materialism
Tues 8 The Problem of Consciousness: Qualia & Intentions
The views expressed in this journal are not necessarily those of the Society. Ethical Record, June, 2003 23 PROGRAMME OF EVENTS AT THE ETHICAL SOCIETY The Library, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, WCIR 4RL. Tel: 020 7242 8037/8034 Registered Charily No. 251396 Websile: www.Ohicalsoc.org.uk email: [email protected] No charge unless stated
JUNE 2003 Sunday 8 1100h GEORGE HERBERT PERRIS (1866-1920): A Case Study of an Ethicist and a Radical, Robert Gomme 1500h THOMAS MORE's UTOPIA: A 2Ist Century Perspective John Rayner Friday 13 GALHA MEETING. QUENTIN & PHILLIP - The friendship of author 1930 Andrew Barrow with Quentin Crisp & poet Phillip O'Connor in 1940s. Sunday 15 1100h THE FIRST FREEDOM - FREE SPEECH. Robert Hargreaves Author of The First Freedom, A History of Free Speech (2003) 1500h THE HIDDEN VICTIMS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE. George Rolph of Mankind Tuesday 17 1900-2100h PERSPECTIVES ON MINI) I of 4 Evg. Class. Minds and Brains: Materialism, Physicalism & Identity Theory Steve Ash. Saturday 21 1200md HUMANIST LUNCH f20 Book quickly with BHA 020 7079 3580 Sunday 22 110011 'LOST ICONS' Complains the Archbishop of Canterbury. Should we be pleased? asks Christopher Bratcher 1500h THE DISCOVERY OF DNA IN 1953 (video) Tuesday 24 1900-2100h PERSPECTIVES ON MINI) 2 of 4 Evg. Class. Mind Programs: Functionalism & Analytical Materialism Steve Ash Thursday 26 I 900h BOOK LAUNCII - A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION TO ATHEISM Julian Baggini, Humanist Philosopher. OUP RefreShments Sunday 29 1100h THE WORK OF THE CENTER FOR FREE INQUIRY (New York) AND INTERNATIONAL HUMANISM Bill Cooke JULY Tuesday 1 1900-2100h PERSPECTIVES ON MIND 3 of 4 Evg. Class. The Ghost & The Machine: Non-Reductive and Anti-Physicalist Materialism Steve Ash Sunday 6 COACH OUTING 2003 SECULAR TRAIL 1'0 BRIGHTON, Leaves 0930h RLS 0930h, returns 2000h112 Book : Marina/Jennifer 0207 242 8034/7 Tuesday 8 1900-2100h PERSPECTIVES ON MIND 4 of 4 Evg. Class. The Problem of Consciousness: (Naha & Intentions Steve Ash Thurs 10 1900h BARBARA SMOKER'S 80th BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION All welcome. Refreshments
Published by the South Place Ethical Society, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square. WCIR 4RL Printed by J.G. Bryson (Printer) Ltd. 156-162 High Road. London N2 9AS ISSN 0014 - 1690