Ethical Record The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society Vol. 110 No. 6 £1.50 June 2005 THE ROOM This hospital has a room The State is watching. They made this room for weeping. No remission — for weeping. It has no crèche. No canteen. No washroom queue. no quick fixes. A father wonders if his boy is sleeping. A mother Only this queue for weeping. No lost property booth. No rakes her soul for healing. Neighbours in the corridor —one is screaming complaints department. Or reception. No office of second It moved from your child to mine. More come. Until the linoleum opinion. Of second chances. Its sons and daughters die with surprise blurs with tears and the walls are heaving. Until the place can't in their faces. But mothers must not cry before them. There is catch its breath —sour breath of pine. And at its heart a room for weeping. How hard the staff are trying. Sometimes this room.

they use the room themselves. They must hose it out each evening. Mario Petrucci (see page 12)

THE GANGES RIVER IS POLLUTED. SO WHAT? Roger Choate 3

REVIEW OF BARBARA SMOKER'S HUMANISM Chris Bratcher 8 LETTER FROM THE AMERICAS THE NEW EUGENICS Ellen Ramsay 11

FACING UP TO CHERNOBYL Mario Petrucci 12 DETERMINISM AND PRESCRIPTION Tom Rubens 14

THE AULD MORALITY OF BOTSIVANA Chris Bratcher 16

THE 'VACATION FROM WAR' CAMPAIGN 2005 21 VIEWPOINTS Peter Cadogan 22

BERNARD HUGHES (1925-2005) Marina Ingham 23

ETHICAL SOCIETY EVENTS 24

SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Tel: 020 7242 8034 Fax: 020 7242 8036 Website www.ethicalsoc.org.uk email: [email protected] Elected Officers Chairmanof the GC: Terry Mullins.SPES Hon. Representative:Don Liversedge. Vice Chairman:John Rayner.Registrar: Edmund McArthur. Editor, Ethical Record: Norman Bacrac

SPES Staff Administrative Secretary to the Society: Marina Ingham BA. Tel: 020 7242 8034 Administrative Officer: Victoria Le Fevre MA. Librarian/Programme Coordinator: Jennifer Jeynes Tel: 020 7242 8037 Archivist Malcolm Rees LLB

Conway Hall StatT Hall Manager: Peter Vlachos MA., DMS Lenings Assistants: Carina Kelsey, Nanu Patel Tel: 020 7242 8032 Caretakers: Eva Aubrechtova,Shaip Bullaku,David Wright Tel: 020 7242 8033

New Members David John Folley - Highgate; Gerry Gilbert - South London; Mark McIntosh - South London; Thérèse Gleitman (Rejoining) - South London

Obituary We regret to report the death of Eril Eugene Levine (obituary to appear in the July/August ER).

HUMANIST REFERENCE LIBRARY This is normally open for researchers from 2-6prn Mondays to Fridays It is best to arrange your visit Tel: 020 7242 8037 - Email: [email protected]

SOUTH PLACE 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, 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 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).

2 Ethical Record, June, 2005 THE GANGES RIVER IS POLLUTED. SO WHAT? The campaign for a clean Ganges Roger Choate Lecture to the Ethical Society, 16 January 2005

I'm what they call a backroom boy. You'll normally find me behind the scenes in Banaras, talking strategies and peddling press releases while running up impressive telephone bills. This is fairly normal behavior at an environmental pressure group like The Campaign for a Clean Ganges. We are trying to create heightened public awareness in India and abroad about cleaning the world's most important river - the literal lifeline for nearly 500 million people. That is about one person out of every 12 on this planet.

Our founder and leader is Dr. Veer Bhadra Mishra, who uniquely combines his roles as a professor of hydraulics and also as Hindu high (Mahantji) to press for cleanup of the river flowing alongside his ancestral home. Not surprisingly, the campaign seeks to combine Hindu cultural values with the empirical evidence of water contamination. This is not always easy.

In 1999 Time magazine nominated Mahantji as "hero for the planet" for awakening global opinion to the plight of the Ganges. That was the same year I finally sallied forth from my hometown of Stockholm to Banaras — also called Varanasi - to see if there was something useful I could do for his Campaign. I've been at it ever since, usually hunched over a computer, fugue-like, at our little office at Tulsi Ghat overlooking the huge waterway.

But let me insert an early footnote here. This is the last time I will use the word 'Ganges': her proper name is the Ganga. Like so many other problems in modern life, the fault of course is the British. Sometime in the early 19th Century a British cartographer hit upon the name Ganges. Nobody is sure how he concocted that particular word, but anyway it stuck.

Although, perhaps it should be noted that Hindus themselves have 107 other names for the Ganga. Names such as Bhagyavati, which means happy. Avyaya, which means imperishable. And Nitya suddha, which means eternally pure.

All these names point to the utter reverence that is attached to the river in Hinduism, as one of the world's major religions. In Hindu belief she is the mother of all rivers everywhere. Every river is Ganga. An Indian professor turning up at Harvard University gazed at the nearby Charles River and exclaimed: 'Oh, I see you have the Ganga here, too!'

Her spiritual status apart, the Ganga is by no means the world's biggest river, ,nor the longest. The Nile stretches more than 4,000 miles, while the Ganga is only 1,560 miles long. But Ganga supports more people than any other. Millions live along her banks. Without Ganga, their existence would be impossible. Bathing in it. Drinking it. Washing clothes in it, irrigating their fields, dying by it and then having their ashes borne away by it.

Ethical Record, June, 2005 3 The Goddess Can Kill So Ganga is worshipped by Hindus as a divine goddess who is, by definition, pure. But empirical evidence tells another story. In many stretches, poisons and filth blight the goddess. Heavy metals, pesticides, arsenic, mercury and even, in one place, reported traces of plutonium. And, of course, disease-causing fecal coliform. Fecal coliform is animal and human waste in water.

Every day our modest laboratory takes samples of fecal conform at one or more ritual bathing ghats. We have found that the fecal conform count can reach as high as about 67,000 times the accepted Indian standard for human bathing.

This count rises still higher at those ritual bathing areas near the drainage pipes that dump raw municipal sewage into Ganga. Drinking Ganga water in Banaras, needless to say, may not be salutary and could conceivably move you far more swiftly into the Next Life. Bearing in mind that up to 40,000 pilgrims arrive every day in the holy city, and you can easily understand what our campaign is all about. And because of Ganga pollution overall, across her entire length, millions suffer. To die of dysentery is a ghastly exit.

The great tsunami left around 300,000 dead and millions homeless. But every year the Ganga directly or indirectly is believed to perhaps contribute to the deaths of as many as 1,500,000 Indian children under the age of 5, struck down by waterborne diseases such as dysentery and diarrhea. These figures are extrapolated from estimates from the World Health Organization and other sources, and cannot be verified with any exactness. Specialists are constantly debating the numbers and the causes of waterborne deaths. But in addition to filthy water, we also know that poor hygiene is another important reason for child death in India and elsewhere in the developing world.

The exact number of adult deaths due to contaminated water is not really known either. Eight out of 10 Indians are said to suffer from major stomach complaints at some stage in their lives, according to the WorldWatch Institute in Washington. When I asked an Indian colleague about this, he only laughed and said the figure is too low. "It should be 10 out of 10!" In Banaras, perhaps 40 to 45 percent of those who take a dip in the river regularly have skin or stomach ailments, according to doctors and state government health officials. A major hospital in Banaras has stated its concern about an alarming increase in skin infections and waterborne diseases along the great ghats.

A Direct Path To Salvation Despite all this, the religious significance of the Ganga looms larger. To bathe in the Ganga is thought to remove all sins - although even a single drop of the water grazing the cheek might conceivably cause skin rash. To die along the Ganga in the holy city of Banaras - and to have your ashes deposited into the river - can assure a direct pathway to salvation, Hindus believe. The soul is liberated and released from the cycle of birth, death and rebirth.

The Campaign for a Clean Ganga (Swatcha Ganga Abhiyaan) is one of the oldest environmental efforts in India. It all started back in 1982 when a group of concerned citizens in Banaras - most of them professors and engineers - were 4 Ethical Record, June, 2005 appalled by mounting levels of contamination in the river, and decided to do something about it, and formed the Sankat Mochan Foundation, which in turn launched the Campaign.

Led by Mahantji, the campaign played a leading role in pressuring the national government to take action. The national government heeded the call. In 1986 the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi came to Banaras and announced the launch of the Ganga Action Plan to clean the waterway in 29 cities.

Five years later Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. At the same time, it became clear that the Action Plan was not acting at all well. In most of the selected cities the wastewater treatment plants were plagued with problems or simply non- operational.

For instance: power cuts regularly occur in many parts of northern India because demand exceeds supply. There can be power cuts several times a day. When that happens, the plants simply stop, and it takes a long time to get them going again, long after the power has been switched back on.

Another problem: many municipalities cannot always afford to pay their electrical bills. This causes closures for long periods. Faulty engineering and faulty maintenance often plague the plants themselves. Meantime, there was - and is - continued dumping of raw sewage into Ganga by 103 cities. This grows exponentially every year because of steady migration from the Indian countryside into already crowded urban centres.

The Second Battle: For A Non-Electrical System So the dream of Rajiv Gandhi was unfulfilled. It became evident to the Campaign that our work was far from over. On the contrary, Indian and international environmentalists would have to fight a second battle to purify the Ganga.

This second battle would prove formidable. Forces arrayed against us now included the entire Action Plan bureaucracy of 27,000 people and also civil servants who wanted the failures hushed up. But critics were not cowed. The Auditor General of India stated that that the Ganga Action Plan "was formulated without proper assessment of actual ground realities."

So in 1992 the Campaign convened an international seminar in Banaras to assess river damage. We went on to propose a non-electrical wastewater treatment system that bypasses the problem of electrical supplies altogether. The system relies instead on photosynthesis and plenty of sunlight, which tropical India easily provides.

Municipal sewage is intercepted and diverted into a sewer line, and then moved by gravity some 2 miles to ponds on an island. Each of the four ponds has a special purifying function, utilizing microbes and algae to treat the water. Unlike conventional systems, the pond system effectively removes fecal-coliform, which is the main river pollutant in Banaras.

The 'pond system' plan — devised by our own engineers and the University

Ethical Record. June, 2005 5 of California - has been officially endorsed by the Banaras City Council. This decision has since been thwarted by illegal actions by the Uttar Pradesh state government that wants the old Action Plan resuscitated, even though it can never be made to work.

We have taken them to court. And the fate of Ganga and other Indian rivers may rest on this one constitutional case. The issue is this: Can a municipality determine the kind of environmental policies it wants, as stipulated in the Indian Constitution?

The legal process does tend to drag on in India, because the judiciary is overwhelmed by staggering caseloads. With our case still undecided, we are struggling to somewhat alleviate the environmental disaster in the holy city that sees around 80 million gallons of municipal sewage dumped into the river every day.

Our own squads of cleaners remove refuse and litter along the riverfront daily, and also remove animal carcasses and human corpses floating in the river itsek. In a recent demonstration project, we cleaned and beautified a stretch of seven ghats along the river in cooperation with the British High Commission. This is the first time in several generations that an attempt has been made to beautify the ghats: those flights of broad stone steps leading down to the river.

Flooding from Ganga has infected groundwater systems in towns near Banaras. So we implemented fresh water supply programs with assistance from Australian environmentalists. This specifically means drilling deep-water wells. Before that happened, an estimated 25% of the local population suffered from various waterborne ailments. Children were the main victims, infected by viral sores and rashes.

Hindu Given Pollution Updates We still have miles to go when it comes to public awareness in India. Many ordinary Hindus find it difficult to accept the thought that the river they regard as spiritually pure is in fact materially damaged. Nor is the concept of collective civic action very well understood.

To his credit, Mahantji has spearheaded a cultural démarche in attempting to reconcile traditional Hindu belief with the facts of scientifically measurable pollution. Instead of describing the river as a potential killer, he explains to devout Hindus that Mother Ganga is not feeling well. She can be cured by eradicating pollution.

So public awareness is high on our agenda. We give Hindu priests operating along the ghats regular pollution updates, and also convened the very first conclave of river priests to discuss more comprehensive measures. Meantime, we have staged workshops and seminars across the Ganga Basin to alert politicians and the public about river deterioration. We have also conducted environmental education programs in Banaras' schools and institutions.

6 Ethical Record, June, 2005 In 2003 we staged the nation's first Clean Ganga Day, in Kolkata (Calcutta), together with local partners. This 12-hour event consisted of a river seminar, student manifestations and a gala concert along the Hoogli River. Media coverage is vital for events like this, and Clean Ganga Day indeed received widespread attention. Its success led us straight to the nation's capital in New Delhi last August, where we staged Clean Ganga Day once again.

The event was covered by 18 international television channels, along with widespread national coverage. The Indian Express daily newspaper captured the overall mood at Clean Ganga Day, noting what it called 'the marked concern for the immediacy of the threat to Ganga.' The potentially deadly nature of certain pollutants and rising risk of epidemics were recurring themes.

The political climate in India seems to have changed somewhat with the transition last year to a centre-left national government guided by Ms Sonia Gandhi. This is perhaps an opening for the Campaign. In a meeting with us awhile back, Ms Gandhi expressed sympathy with the Campaign. It is clear that the great Ganga vision of her late husband, Rajiv Gandhi, still needs to be fulfilled.

Therei:is no good reason why a mighty river like the Ganga supporting so many human, beings is polluted in the first place. It is sometimes said that poor countries 'can't afford' environmental control. This is not necessarily true. Despite so many poor citizens — running at 52 percent - India does have both capital access and thanpoiver to clean the Ganga. Lacking is the political will.

• .Smashing through this firewall of political apathy is our job, because no great river — be it the Thames or Hudson — has ever been cleaned without public pressure being brought to bear. A ravaged holy river tells us that a way of life that lays waste to the environment is a way of life that cannot hold.

Further information: [email protected], or [email protected]

(The Campaign for a Clean Ganga is a voluntary effort, performing miracles on that proverbial shoestring. Contributions are always welcome! Private bank transfers to India are expensive. Instead, you may send your contribution directly to South Place Ethical Society, we will then transmit it on your behalf.)

INTERESTING EXHIBITION: NEW DAWN WOMEN: Exhibition of work by women active in the Arts & Crafts and Suffrage movement at the Dawn of the C20.

Arts & Crafts and Political Emancipation Curated by SPES Member Irene Cockcroft

1 July — 28 September. Closed Thursdays

Watts Gallery. Down Lane, Compton Nr Guildford, Surrey GU3 ID() Tel. 01483 810 235 www.wattsgallery.org.uk £5 (£4 cones.)

Ethical Record, June, 2005 7 REVIEW OF BARBARA SMOKER'S HUMANISM [4th Edition, pubhshed May 2005 by SPES] Chris Bratcher We have cause to celebrate! Barbara Smoker's evergreen work is now back in [slightly more expansively set] print, with updated statistics (on the population explosion), and additional illustrations, and several more lively Donald Rooum cartoons. The Earth is now set upright on the front cover, and the rear sports an excellent photo of Barbara; it also states that the target readers are pupils at Key Stage 4 ot secondary education. All was achieved by term after considerable labour pains and some editorial midwifery by Norman Bacrac on behalf of the Society: I understand that the printer's parting from the Red Sea [where he was holidaying] to complete the production may take on the mythic status of a small secular miracle. The text has not appreciably altered. Barbara has a most pleasingly direct style, a fine turn of phrase, and a gift for compression, enlivened with anecdote. The work is a model of how to write for any age group, and rightly in this respect has not been revised. It is packed with perceptive comments that should give us all food for thought. Here is an example of what I mean, both as to style and content:

"One argument put forward in favour of keeping religion in schools is that without first-hand experience of religion you cannot understand what it means. But, as someone who hated team-games at school, I got some understanding of the joy that ball-game players can experience, not by my own forced participation, but by seeing others enjoy themselves in this way. So why not just show children films of religious practises, without expecting them to participate in them?

Some Christians have suggested, half jokingly, that humanists ought to be glad that so many children are put otT by religion altogether by having it drummed into them at school. But humanists are not glad about it. It can have an anti-educational effect if children are presented with questionable ideas as though they were as uncontroversial as the shape of Australia.. What is more, because morality is falsely associated with religion, they may even start behaving badly when they give up religion."

Most of the time, Barbara addresses her audience in the second person (vocative), but in the second paragraph above, and elsewhere, she talks about them in the third. There are really two books in one here (one to, and one about, children in education), and two voices — although clearly one and the same confident speaker. Should they have been separated out? To be entirely fit for purpose, perhaps, yes.

'Inherently Subversive' To talk critically to children about their education is inherently subversive. For example, she remarks that teachers often get round the question of whether religion is true by saying it is true for some, at the cost of misuse of the word "true": and that "the ruling class has always been in favour of religion". Such forthright and sometimes polemical comments are grand to see and largely justified, but they will militate against use of the book in schools where the prime requirement is to keep studiedly neutral, if not 'on message', so as not to cause offence or subvert pedagogic norms, whatever the true educational cost. Barbara herself recognises this. Will schools give houseroom and an imprimatur to a work that so directly and

8 Ethical Record, Jane, 2005 thoroughly demolishes other beliefs that parents may hold, and which may have a place in the syllabus? Dare I say, the book is too crusading against, and too awarding of respect only where respect is due, for its own good. So I fear the book will fail to reach its avowed market, and I suspect that the chief purchasers may be apostate god-parents.

This is a great shame, as the book is an excellent exposition of humanist beliefs. As she says. Humanism is not a set of doctrines, but an attitude to life. The book starts with the evolution of humanist thought (with generous space given to its origins in Ancient Philosophy), which is treated as a tradition with its fruition in modern science. Barbara covers the philosophical arguments perfectly adequately by simply answering the stock objections believers raise; including Dostoevsky's fear that if God did not exist, everything is permitted. The book is first rate on the humanist grounding of Ethics, and manages to crisply cover sexual diversity, as well as the big issues of abortion, euthanasia and stem cell research. For that reason alone it ought to get placed in any school or public library worthy of the name.

The Famous Names Problem Barbara covers how humanism is to be explored today, and its provision of ceremonies to celebrate life, and in social action. SPES gets due mention. She says that amongst our speakers in the past century are "many famous names", which she lists. Lists are always subject to argument, but the sad thing is that virtually none of the names on hers will be known to her target readership, and very few. I venture to suggest, to their teachers and their generation. Who, they may well ask. are Prince Kropotkin, Gilbert Murray, and Israel Zangwill? Perhaps they will be moved to find out, but I fear that these figures will be dismissed as totally unfamous today, and perhaps organised humanism likewise by association. The sole addition in this edition, I think, is A.C.Grayling [Also P. Atkins and C. Blakemore {Ed.}]. He has a long way to go to rival the fame of C.E.M.Joad, who had few competitors for the attention of Home Service listeners. That is the "name recognition" challenge today. The name that would have resonated most with teenagers is Philip Pullman. His hugely popular His Dark Materials trilogy stirred up Christian protest because it killed olf a god that was past its sell-by date, and . had heroes set against a church desperate to stop liberating scientific progress.

I am glad that Barbara highlighted Stephen Fry as a humanist. Not only is he, as she says, proof that there is room in humanism for laughter: humour is our greatest resource, and TV comedy is where we are best recognised, especially by the young. May I suggest the following for inclusion in the next edition that will surely come. The Monty Python creators of The Life of Brian have done more to demolish the nonsense than anyone else this last century. The creators of Father Ted have helped put the lid on the coffin of the Church in Ireland, in so far as help were needed. The iconoclast script-writers of The Sitnpsons are deeply humanist, and have defied the religious Right. Muslim stand up and sit com is making a mockery of fundamentalism in their community.

There are just a very few observations where I might differ. I think Barbara is wee bit hard on in dubbing him "an opponent of the humanist tradition" because of his theory of Forms (rather, than, say, because of his hierarchical society of The Republic). The former was not really an attempt "to understand the divine scheme of things", but to understand how it is that things had qualities in common; the woeful solution (which gives the concept of "god" more problems than it

Ethical Record, June, 2005 9 answers) was imported into Christian thought by St Augustine and .

Defining Atheism Barbara suggests that there is not much difference between saying that knowledge about any gods is impossible (agnosticism) and saying that one simply does not have any such knowledge and will therefore not assume that gods exist (atheism).

Atheism is usually defined as positively holding that gods do not, and usually, cannot exist. Barbara is quite right about the original meaning of agnosticism. It has however commonly come to be taken as a personal and more limited assertion: that although you have found no evidence for a deity, and act on the basis that one doesn't exist, you do not rule out the possibility, and even countenance evidence of same, usually to others . Flence the profession of agnosticism by those too polite or fearful to assert their atheism, rather than the other way round. It is too late to coin a separate word for this use, though it might ,thake a competition in the Ethical Record! The distinction today may indeed be a matter of politeness, although I recall its being fiercely debated in my own schooldays.

I am surely in a minority in parting company with Barbara over what she terms "sheer superstition", which she claims Humanism opposes in all its forms. The issue is what you include within it. She includes phenomena known as table- rapping, poltergeists, spoon bending and clairvoyance, which she dubs "tricks". My own lifetime of investigating such matters leads me, and other people whom I know to be Humanist and resolutely sceptical, to no such sweeping a conclusion, without thereby believing in a Spirit world.

These cavils over content do not mar a story well told, a cage so well put, an ideal so very well expressed: remember, "Humanism stands for the open mind in the open society". It has already achieved iconic status, as 'Smoker on humanism'. It is one strong, distinctive voice. For this reason above all, it should not be tampered with.

NOW OUT - THE NEW EDITION OF HUMANISM

A new, revised, 80-page edition of Barbara Smoker's book Humanism (for secondary schools and as a general introduction to this important subject) has been published by South Place Ethical Society. The text is considerably improved, updated, and expanded, with more illustrations. ISBN is 0 9023 6823 0. The cover price is £6.50, but is £5.00 (post free) to members of SPES!

Copies of Barbara Smoker's previous book, Freethoughts (239 pages) are still available from her @ £10, post free.

10 Ethical Record, June, 2005 LETTER FROM THE AMERICAS THE NEW EUGENICS Ellen Ramsay

Secularists may not realize that there are some troubling scholars who hove been trying to attach themselves to the scientific movement in evolution. A new group of eugenicists have emerged who claim to be using the work on the human genome project and twin research to add their own perverse perspective to the gene versus environment debate in human development.

In 1994 Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray published a notorious volume entitled, The Bell Curve (The Free Press), which caused such a controversy in the United States that it made it to the best sellers list; probably the intention of the authors. The book was based on use of discredited IQ studies to make the eugenic argument that blacks have low intelligence compared to whites and are overpopulating and that the poor and single mothers have low IQs and are to blame for their position in society. The book provoked strident criticism in the scientific community and an immediate outpouring of counter-publications inuluding Russell Jacoby's anthology The Bell Curve Debate (Random House 1995). They and others in the scientific community have pointed out that Herrnstein and Murray's book is port of a disturbing trend by neo-conservatives to change public policy and attack social spending.

In 1995 in Canada, J. Philippe Rushton, who was educated at University College London, published Race, Evolution and Behaviour in which he repeats the race-intelligence idea saying that blacks are inferior to whites and whites to Asians. He starts the book with a quote by Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, and tries to place himself in the tradition of Dominion evolutionary theory, even citing Richard Dawkins book, The Selfish Gene (p. 15). He purports the preposterous theory that there is a relationship between the size of a man's brains, his 10, and the size of his penis. To any intelligent reader, the book is clearly a hoax. A quick . scan of Rushton's sources shows that he has relied on the work of already discredited eugenicists in the US and Great Britain and is vague about his own research. He alludes to a study of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (1978) where he says he used the issue of helmet size to determine brain size!

The inclusion of penis size into his perverted equation seems to be based on a study conducted somewhere (a condom coMpany?) about whether men found condoms fit properly, were too small, or too large. It is too absurd to be taken seriously. However, Rushton is professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario in Canada and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is also president of the Pioneer Fund which funds such spurious research. Other studies currently being sponsored by the fund look at women and intelligence, criminal behaviour, and homosexuality; which is all very worrying.

It is a travesty that public money and public institutions are supporting such divisive interlopers in the universities under the guise of free speech when clearly on both academic and intellectual grounds these people have no place in public education or the scientific movement on evolution.

Ethical Record, June, 2005 II FACING UP TO CHERNOBYL Mario Petrucci Lecture to the Ethical Society, 6 March 2005

Mario Petrucci's most recent poetry collection Heavy Water, is based on first-hand accounts of the Chernobyl disaster. Winner of the Arvon Prize, it has been described by The Daily Telegraph as `Heartfelt, ambitious and alive'. But what of Seamus Heaney's warning not to "rampage permissively in other people's sadnesses"? Petrucci relates how his book came into being and grapples with the ethical issue of how far writers should explore, in their creative work, the narratives and sufferings of others.

Last Wish (Chernobyl, 1986)

You bury me in concrete. Bury me For each tomb that's hidden a green in lead. Rather I was buried soldier turns. None decomposes. with a bullet in the head. Nothing for worms.

You wrap me in plastic. Wash me A shoe. A pencil. Break one thing in foam. Weld the box airless I left. Give some small part of me and ram the box home. ordinary death. You seal me in powder. Cut the hair last. Then take the trimmings and seal them in glass.

I have a belief (writing is, after all, an act of faith) that some authentic nexus always exists between an artist and their chosen subject; that there is always possible some brush with the universal. I believe also — perhaps mistakenly — that we can communicate something from that deep place where all experience, however bleak, is compassionately sensed. It seems to me that Arundhati Roy lends support to this belief when she tells us: "Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world... it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative — they colonise us. They commission us. They insist on being told." That is how I felt when composing Heavy Water. Commissioned.

At that time I had found, quite by accident, a genuine rarity: Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl (translated by Antonina Bouis). Rare, not just because of the devastating subject — a subject of crucial importance at any of the levels at which we 'sound' ourselves in order to understand what we are; but because Alexievich demonstrates that most sensitive of instruments: a fine and uninvasive sensibility which permits the testaments of ordinary people to pass onto the page so as to concentrate and amplify them into the realm of the extraordinary. Peasant, teacher. Wife, soldier. Fireman, cameraman. The official, the child. Common voices, uncommonly eloquent. I felt I could trust the profound effect Bouis's translation had on me: how the individuality, tone and pressure of the voices seemed to push through into English so powerfully, so insistently, that my 12 Ethical Record, June, 2005 writing usually felt already three-quarters-done.

And yet, I still felt uneasy about picking up the pen. Until I found, in Voices from Chernobyl, Ludmila Polyanskaya. "Where are our intellectuals? Writers? Philosophers?" she cries, "Why are they silent?" There is also the grim reasoning of Alexandr Renansky who — in spite of sensing the inherent "sinfulness of art", how it is always "peering into another's life" — reassures us that art, nonetheless, is "like the plasma of an infected person, can serve to inoculate". And are we not infected by Chernobyl in so many different ways? Many of these ways are far from clear. "It is the attempt to place Chernobyl in a series of well-known catastrophes" Alexievich tells us, "that is keeping us from understanding it". In other words, and at the risk of gross understatement: Chernobyl is absolutely unprecedented. The task of an authentic re-membering of Chernobyl in any artistic or literary context will therefore be difficult and painful, if not impossible. So why attempt it at all? Alexievich, entering her own book but briefly, provides part of the answer when she refers to Chernobyl as "missed history". Nevertheless, I recall how the opening poem in my first book Shrapnel and Sheets drew flak from some quarters for taking on the subject of war crimes in Sarajevo in the first person. So, should missing histories such as these be broached by those who were not there?

On April 26 1986 at 1:23 am, into the cool dark of an early Saturday tnorning, the Chernobyl power station erupted.

Such a bald fact. Thanks to writers like Alexievich, herself irradiated in her efforts to record the event, it is a fact fleshed out by human voices. Voices that may never find peace. And yet, Chernobyl is hardly a newsworthy topic now, in the West, is it? Late one January night, at around lam, after a day of filling in tax returns, it meant little more to me than a familiar chain of letters on the spine of a library book my partner had propped open on her bedside table. I picked it up in idle curiosity — then disappeared into my study for two months. Eighty two poems arrived in that time. As I intimated earlier, writing Heavy Water felt less like composition, more like taking dictation. Those men and women. The innocent courage of their children, whose words prise open your heart even as they shatter it. They refused to be ignored. Were too insistent. They continued to speak to me, beyond the point at which Alexievich's book stopped.

That might be evidence, of a kind, that Chernobyl's potency continues to operate in us. As a 'lapsed physicist' I know that Chernobyl is still active. Active in the air we use to speak about it, in the blood we use to think about it. Chernobyl. It is far too late for any official 'statistics', however conservative, to reverse the mushrooming of that word beyond its mere significance as a place-name. It joins the spectrum of proper nouns linked with tragedy and loss, a spectrum at whose extremity we find that final ironic sign: Arbeit Macht Fret As with Three Mile Island, the Somme or Hiroshima — and whether we like it or not — all manner of associations and issues have become entangled around Chernobyl. One of these is the way in which our society can misjudge risk: dangerous technologies need to be assessed in a 'multiplicative' way, so that tiny risks are 'out-voted' by immense consequences. But society is eerily silent, it seems, on such issues.

No doubt, Chernobyl will need — will demand — its respectful silences; but

Ethical Record, June, 2005 13 not any silence of denial or neglect. Its voices are owed too much. Hot news. Chernobyl may no longer be; but it continues to speak in the culture, through the many fragments of memory, reportage and image it has engendered. I feel infected, and inoculated, by it. I fully accept we must be wary of writers and media who make capital on misery — or. for that matter, who gloss facts or leap to convenient or melodramatic conclusions — but I am equally convinced that with all our potential and actual misfires it remains the on-going task of journalists, historians, artists and philosophers to continue with the human, and humane, effort of trying to remember and understand.

And let us not underestimate the act of 'remembering', the putting back together of separated parts. For, even when understanding is in short supply, remembering remains a civilised and civilising act. Is it not part of our job as writers — individually if not collectively — to reclaim lost voices; or at least to listen out for them, to be prepared for their sudden, sometimes terrible, commissions? Writers should feel free (with sensitivity) to tackle missing histories, even if those histories are not — on the surface — their own, even if it means sometimes getting it wrong. We owe at least that to all who are rendered sec-through by political, social or intellectual neglect. Those who have been exposed to the invisible should not become so. Heavy Waer is born of my own urge to remember. In an age of Holocausts, I offer it up as a raised hand.

NOTE: Mario Petrucci has written for such journals as Resurgence, Enviammenial Waves and The Environmentalist on subjects as varied as large-scale dams, population control, globalisation, science and creativity, sustainability, the rights of future generations and Ivan Illich. Heavy Water is available from Enitharmon Press (www.enitharmon.co.uk). For further information on the author visit http://mariopetrucci.port5.com where a number of his articles may be found.

DETERMINISM AND PRESCRIPTION by Tom Rubens.

Does the deterministic thesis of universal, continuous causation amount to the view that every human action, no matter how momentous, is merely part of a mechanism? For if universal causation does obtain, then every action is an effect as well as a cause, a link in an unbroken chain, a component of a mechanistic continuum. And, if so, is reference to action bound to be nothing more than description / explanation: a statement of causal linkage, and therefore only of fact, of what is ? Can it, then, never be a statement of what ought to be i.e. prescription?

Indeed, does determinism place the very act of prescribing within its descriptive framework, seeing it as just another link in a mechanistic sequence? Hence is there no space at all in determinism for discourse and argumentation of a prescriptive kind, as distinct from mere causal analysis of prescriptive acts? Is there, then, no going beyond the descriptive process, no way of breaking free of it into a sphere of advocacy and exhortation which is autonomous of cause, and which in turn appeals to autonomy in its hearers?

In considering these questions, we should begin by noting that many

14 Ethical Recorth June, 200.5 determinists accept Flume's argument that the regularities of event-sequence which we observe in nature are not in themselves proof that causality actually exists. According to this argument, causality, and therefore causal laws, are our interpretations of regular sequence. constructions we place on it. These interpretations are certainly very reasonable ones—arguably the most reasonable possible; but interpretations they remain.

Further. most determinists concede that the postulate of universal causation, in addition to being a construction, is a working hypothesis only. They accept the prevalent view in modern physics that what are called causal laws are only statistical regularities, implying probability, not invariability. Thus, the regularities which occurred in the past will probably, but not certainly, recur in the future.

. These modifications of the argument for determinism are important, to acknowledge. Nevertheless. determinists continue to regard their position as--to repeat—a workino hypothesis, on which to base prediction and action. Hence we return to the core issue of mechanism: the assumption, albeit provisional and non- dogmatic, of an unbroken continuity of cause and effect; and to the relation between this assumption and the question of prescriptive discourse.

Prescription Is Morally Valid Even Though It Has Causes Given the centrality of the assumption, the view of the morally-concerned determinist logically has to be that prescription does have a place within a causalist framework, and that it is compatible with causal explanation. In other words, prescription is morally valid even though it has causes, and even though its impact on its audience is also caused. Its validity can be argued for from an intentionalist standpoint: in terms of the morally approvable effects which the prescription intends. The intentionalist argument clearly focuses on the intrinsic character of the prescriptive act, the distinctive status it possesses within the causal network. To have this status, the act does not, and does not need to, separate itself from the mechanistic continuum. Being an effect in no way demeans it.

It will be seen that a key feature of this position is its rejection of a traditionally held view in moral philosophy (associated especially with Judeo- Christian thought) that an act can only be moral if it is uncaused and therefore the expression of an absolute and unconditioned free will.

To focus on the intrinsic status of an act as a component of a causal sequence is to argue that no prior factor can bestow that status. In other words, the act is not given its character by its cause. That character is constituted by the act itself. In this sense, cause remains extrinsic to the act, while at the same time being, of course, its sine qua non. Effect has one identity, cause another.

GALHA Film Festival 8/9 July at the Screening Room, Covent Garden Hotel, 10 Monmouth Street, London WI. Heart of the Beholder will be shown on Friday at 7pm and Saturday at 3pm. Latter Days will be shown on Saturday at Ipm and 5pm. Tickets to for one film, 1110 for two booked at the same time. ADVANCED BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL. Postal bookings: GALHA, 34 Spring Lane, Kenilworth, Warwickshire, CV8 21-113. Tele hone: 01926 858450. htt ://www.galha.onilevents/future.html Ethical Record, June, 2005 IS THE AULD MORALITY OF BOTSWANA and nearer home: The Ethical observations of Alexander McCall Smith Chris Bratcher Lecture to the Ethical Society, 13 February 2005

Alexander McCall Smith has produced the literary and best selling triumph of recent years in a gently progressing series of tales of• manners and female detection set in Botswana — formerly Bechuanaland. To my surprise, almost no- one attending had read them. They had missed out not only on a rare source of sustained pleasure, but on a plea for the currently fashionable cause, "Respect", made far more powerfully than our politicians can by a running commentary, in character, on the morally faulty ways of the modern world. It is a defining aspect of McCall Smith's books, and a prime reason for bringing them to your attention.

The No. I Ladies Detective Agency Series The No. I Ladies Detective Agency has been serialised on Radio 4 and is available as an audio book, and Anthony Minghella, the director of The English Patient, is making a film of it. 2.5 million copies have been sold in the U.S.A. gather Laura Bush is a great fan: don't let that put you off! The sequels are: Tears of The Giraffe; Morality For Beautiful Girls; The Kalahari Typing School For Men; The Full Cupboard of Life; and In The Company of Cheerful Ladies. They do not have to be read in order, because a part of their unusual charm is that they recapitulate the protagonists' natures and histories - sometimes several times in each volume - in the best oral tradition of storytelling.

Reviewers have quipped that the heroine, Mma Precious Ramotswe, is the African Miss Marple, and that "The Body in the library" is now in the mud hut. You should not expect that sort of detective story. The two or three investigations Mma and her assistant undertake in each volume are not of grand crimes with multiple suspects. The mode is closer to Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City transported to the bush, with much sly comedy thrown in. Mma Ramotswe is not like Miss Marple. She shares an eye for human folly and weakness, and a talent for solving people's problems, but her own life needs solutions. She is certainly not unshockable. Like her assistant, Mma Makutsi, and her suitor, garage proprietor Mr J.L.B Maketoni, she is frequently dismayed by current standards of behaviour. In their view, a selfish new morality is boding to displace the old decent, respectful ways in which they and the presumed gentle reader were brought up. Fortunately. Mma is built of sturdy stuff, as she is a person of traditional build as well as morality (her dress size is 22).

ln their roles as ingénues, the three characters act as moral litmus paper. In that respect, the saga reminds me of Voltaire's Candide. As in that moral tale, a solution, or here, litmus test, is to cheerfully get on with cultivating one's garden.

The perennial topic, over regular tea breaks, is "why do the unscrupulous prosper" — in getting a leg over, securing a job or a husband, or doing shoddy work - and what made them able to act so casually. Mma Makutsi, a typist of unheard of proficiency seemingly doomed to become an old maid, is particularly aggrieved by the success of "bad girls" — a self-evident category of trollops who

16 Ethical Record, June, 2005 couldn't care less about secretarial qualifications, and hoover up all the desirable men in bars, whether married or not. Although McCall Smith gently makes fun of his characters' tendencies to pronounce on the way of the world, and Youth in particular — one can imagine them writing to the Botswana Daily Telegraph — his heart is with them, and he clearly shares something of their alarm at what is being abandoned, or simply not taught.

Overview Of Other Books McCall Smith describes his set of novellas, "2 and a half Pillars of Wisdom" as entertainments for adults. Featuring Prof Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, authority on Portuguese irregular verbs, they display his talent for the droll, and his eye for pretence, particularly in the German academic vein. Some friends have loved this; I found his manner rather lugubrious, and prefer his set of short stories, Heavenly Date and other Flirtations [1995]. - Several of these are dark, with real human wreckage apparent, despite being shot through with dead-pan humour. For example, one concerns newly weds where the husband is simply not inclined to consummate the marriage. This may sound like a comedy of manners, but it is not. It is one of several studies of young people entering that state without preparation or seeming scope for comparisons, and being impelled to take an arbitrary way out. It is also a sensitive study of unrecognised latent homosexuality, and/or narcissism. Another tells of how a young girl, with great talent, is shackled to a red neck as a consequence of her first date, partly engineered by selfish but well-intentioned parents, to the probable ruination of her entire life.

McCall Smith is no fan of that sort of old morality. [We have a comic example in the No I series: nouveau riche Mr Patel wants his daughter followed, for fear she may have a boyfriend; so she apparently invents one to spite him — Mnna disapproves of the whole assignment, and tells Patel he will cause what he most fears.]

The collection reminds me of Grahame Greene, particularly his May we borrow your husband? I don't think McCall Smith suffers in comparison. Both writers set their stories in a multiplicity of colonial — and occasionally old Europe — worlds that they know inside out. McCall Smith brings these up to date. Greene is, I suspect, a conscious model — he also self-deprecatingly described his lighter novels as "entertainments". More importantly, both are deliberate writers of contes morales.

McCall has recently written The Sunday Philosophy C/ub [a body sounding unnervingly like Philosophy for All], set in Edinburgh, where success has caused him to take a sabbatical from being the Professor of Medical Law. This book, the first of a projected new series, shows him to be no slouch at formal as well as practical Ethical analysis. Questions like who is my neighbour, what is truth, and whether and to what extent you should tell it, and how is moral sensitivity to bc transmitted to an uncomprehending generation, are again raised, in a country with a traditional morality to call on, and clear light. I will return to this.

Ethical Record, June, 2005 17 African Genesis McCall Smith grew up in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Some twenty years ago he travelled around Matabeleland, collecting traditional folk tales told to children. These African equivalents of Aesop's fables were published in 1989 as Children of Wax. He also spent several years at the University of I3otswana; his The Criminal Law of Botswana remains the definitive and in fact, only book on the subject. Following the success of the "No 17 series, a friend there, a native Setswana speaker, collected and translated for him a further set of tales. The collections are now published together as The Girl who married a Lion.

The stories are not just of ethnographic interest, and are not all morally cautionary. The tales in the No 1 series are fables in the same tradition. Morality for Beautiful Girls, for example, contains a comic version of a familiar story: an investigation to select the morally fairest of three would-be beauty queens, to see who is fit to represent Botswana. The collection has a preface by Mma Ramotswe. I quote from it:

"Everybody feels a little bit sad when they think of their childhood, because the world we knew then seems so far away... But then you heal- these old stories - and suddenly everything comes back. You are there 'again, sitting with your Aunt outside her house, and it is quiet, and the sky is empty and the sun is on the land. And you think: I am a lucky person to be listening to these stories that happened in another place, just around the corner, in the days when the animals could speak. And the sadness goes away and your heart is full again.

I•shall put this book on my desk and read it when there is nothing much to be done in the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency. And I shall choose one of the stories and ask my assistant whether she remembers it. And she will laugh, and say yes, and we shall think about that story while the kettle is boiling and we are preparing our tea. That is what we will do." Precious Ramotswe, The No I Ladies Detective Agency, behind Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors ..."

[NB — for fans: the latest book reveals that Mma Makutsi has gone off red bush tca, and was. only drinking it out of politeness. Sadly, her new teapot for non- traditional tea gets used as an oil can by the garage apprentices! This is Proust de nos jours !]

The Utopian Botswana background Now for some geography and politics. Part of the appeal of the series is the setting. I3otswana has three times the landmass of the United Kingdom, but is largely made up of the Kalahari desert. Most of the 1.5m population live in small towns along the SE border. Here, edited, is what McCall Smith said about Botswana in an US book tour.

It "particularly chimes with many of the values which Americans feel very strongly about - respect for the rule of law and for individual freedom. I hope that readers will also see some of the great traditional virtues in Afria - in particular, courtesy and a striking natural dignity. I was living in Swaziland, in 1980, and I used to drive across the Transvaal and go and stay with friends in Botswana. As you went over the border, the atmosphere of repression and fear lifted and you felt you were in a good place. Maybe we want to believe in a good place; maybe we

18 Ethical Record, June, 2005 do need to think that there is something like Eden somewhere. It's often described as "the gem of Africa" [diamond mining is the major earner]; that's a bit of a cliché, but there is a reality behind it: Botswana has been consistentiv democratic since independence; it's been extremely well run; they've observed the principles of constitutionalism which is very, very significant; and they have had very little corruption. They've secured a great moral triumph in that they have been a moral state."

So, we had a clutch of topics for discussion outside the books. Do we need to think that there is "something like Eden somewhere"? Can there be there such a thing as a moral state, and if so, is this it, given that AIDS is rampant in Botswana, with reportedly over 40% of adults infected? Can or must ideal states exist in isolation? Is the Botswana of the novels the best of all possible worlds, an Utopia, the realisation of Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, or "Prester John", or even G.K.Chesterton or, say, John Major's lost worlds of Merrie England under an African sun?

If so, what is the key? Here is one. The Agency solves almost all its caseload, from lost children to errant husbands, from bullying to light fingering, because everyone or someone knows everyone else, or their Mum. Morality can assert itself because no one in the end can hide in anonymity, except perhaps by fleeing to South Africa. Most often Mma Ramotswe's triumphs come from, or result in, shaming miscreants, face to face. This is contemporary penal theory, but in a land where conviction and sentence are one event.

I mentioned, in doing an appreciation of Bernard Williams last year, the importance of honour and shame in Greek Ethics; notions which Judeo-, with their emphases on the law and salvation, displaced. The communities of Botswana are like Greek city states [or East Enders], with natural sanctions of shame and exile. Notably it does not work with Mma Ramotswe's ex-husband: he is beyond the pale. Eden depends on its occupants, as well as its social boundaries.

Grass Roots Morality All this would be too high falutin' for Mma Ramotswe. She sums up bad behaviour as selfishness. She has read of Existentialism, and dismisses it. in a wonderful parody, as just a licence to be self-centred. Her ex-husband, she thinks, would have espoused existentialism like a shot. She is a conservative, resting Ethics on the Old Botswana certainties of what is right and wrong, intermingled with Sunday School lessons; but when-she thinks about the causes of delinquency — particularly bullying - [apart from faults innate to males, for which nothing can be done], she concludes that they come down to lack of example, and maltreatment as infants.

A couple of metaphors are hidden in the books, which I think express McCall's message. One is cattle, the traditional source and means of holding wealth in the country. Those who do not like watching and assessing them are thought strange. Botswanas with an eye for cattle know the beasts individually, and can recite their lineage. As for cattle, so it is, McCall implies, with people.

The other is the pair of garage apprentices. Cars for them are status and

Ethical Record, June, 2005 19 passion wagons. Perpetually dropping waste, spreading oil with their fingers and resenting being nagged about it, driving Mr J.L.B Matekoni to distraction by their lack of nous, preoccupied with ways of impressing the local talent, both street shrewd and gullible, they are perfectly observed youth. I could rhapsodise over the comedy they generate; but my point is that they are serving, and represent, moral apprenticeships, too. Their elders are nonplussed by their lack of awareness.

They are unparented urchins taken on out of the kindness of Mr J.L.B Makteloni's heart; as are the pair of orphans he is prevailed upon to unofficially adopt, without clearing it with his fiancee. The latter are young enough to absorb the nurture and ways of a happy home, despite their bushman origins. The physically handicapped older sister is interested in motor mechanics; her brother is not: it is not a matter of dexterity or sexual stereotyping. [McCall is hot on that: The Kalahari Typing School for Men is set up by Mma Makutsi for bosses who wish to learn to type on the quiet] The apprentices, by contrast, are handicapped in terms of moral education; late in the series they volunteer that the boss is the Dad they wished they had — which leaves him, as ever, stumped for words.

McCall Smith makes a compelling case for both fathers and mothers, or rather, people able to perform unstintingly in each role, particularly in the aftermath of AIDS. In The Sunday Philosophy Club, yet another female character, Grace, the cleaner, who has views rather like Precious, opines that 'Boys need fathers'. Isobel, who is plainly the voice of the author, corrects this: "Boys need a parent is what Grace should have said."

Attenders asked whether McCall Smith is religious. The younger garage apprentice takes to religion as a route to girls. This gives rise to a highly amusing church award ceremony, at which Mma can only escape interrogation by the pastor by feigning to be overcome by the weight of her sins. The boy grows out of it: my guess is that McCall Smith has done likewise, but is not hostile; he clearly approves of anything that instils community, moral sympathy and considerat ion.

One last key to Utopia is doing something about unfairness. Morality for Beautipl Girls ends with Mma Ramotswe deep in thought about men and Mma Makutsi. "It was absurd that she should go through life thinking the less of herself because she had no husband. She deserved to have something to look forward to other than a bleak existence in one room. Everyone deserved more than that, even in this unlucky world ... We shall change all that, thought Mma Ramotswe, because it is possible to change the world, if one is determined enough, and if one sees with sufficient clarity just what it is that has to be changed."

What has all this done for Botswana? You can do a Mma Ramotswe tour in Gaborone: you can do either the one-day tour or the two-day tour. You can go and see her birthplace. You can go to the orphanage, the orphan farm, which is in real life called the SOS Children's Village at Tlokweng, and they will actually put on the orphan band for you if you make arrangements. It's lovely. If you have tears, prepare to shed them.

20 Ethical Record, Jane, 2005 THE 'VACATION FROM WAR' CAMPAIGN 2005 Vacation Sponsorships for refugee children and youth from the war zones in the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East

Under the auspices of the Committee for Basic Rights and Democracy's campaign 'Vacation from the War', more than 17,000 children and youth from war zones have met to share thcir vacation time over the past eleven years. The children come from Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Kosova/o and Serbia, all states with a very bitter and fresh memory of civil wars. Local peace committees cooperate with the Committee in order to give the kids a good time. For all of them it is the first time to meet the 'others' who in their home countries are still regarded as enemies. It is remarkable how fast these children play, dance and sing together but also talk about their fate and mourn together, ignoring the borders and prejudices.

Since summer 2002 the 'Committee' also organized and financed encounters for 370 young people from Israel and Palestine (Westbank!). Another 200 students have been invited to Germany for the summer 2005. Stich encounters are still completely unthinkable in the Middle East. In a letter to the donors the participants described their gratitude and the difficult process they had to go through.

"... This seminar was a unique experience. What is seldom possible for us under our daily circumcetances was granted here: we shared with each other our thoughts, our points of view and daily lives with great sincerity. Almost all of us were born and raised in Israel/Palestine. For tnany this meeting was the first opportunity to have met a flesh-and-blood person of the other side. The atmosphere in the seminar was one of mutual respect, understanding, and a sense of equality Different topics were discussed, such as the economic and cultural differences in our every-day-lives, issues of human rights conditions, the historical perspective and other deeply relevant and affecting issues...-

To come to know one other in an atmosphere full of empathy and joy may help to heal the. deep psychological and physical wounds and to overcome prejudices. Young people who are moved by this experience will tell their families and friends what happened to them.

Beyond that, Vacation Games for children are once more to be planned in Palestinian cities and refugee camps. Please support this exemplary project in the politics of peace. Urge your friends to participate. Thank you for your efforts

One sponsorship is $130. To support the campaign "Vacation/rom War" please make out a cheque to Vacation from War and send it to: Helga Dieter, Flussgasse 8, D- 60489 Frankfurt, Germany. Tel. #49-69-7892525, Fax. #49-69-78803666, Email. [email protected] Web. www.vacation-from-war.com

Or send it to the Account (inside Europe without fees): Komitee, Nr. 8013055 Volksbank Odenwald International, Zip: Iban De 34508635130008013055, BIC-Code Genode 51 MIC Ethical Record, June, 2005 21 VIEWPOINT

Durkeim On Society Chris Bratcher (There is no such thing as society, ER May 2005) quotes one sentence from Durkheim's posthumous Sociology and Philosophy (1924) but makes no reference to his classic work that bears powerfully on our own South Place Debate - his The elementary forms of the religious life (1912).

Durkheim was concerned about religion as a human phenomenon like science, art, history or philosophy, without regard to mere denominations. To do this he focussed on the religions of hunter-gatherer society, most especially those of the aborigonal peoples of Australia whose cultures had been recently brilliantly observed by very able white Australian witnesses based at Alice Springs.

He found that the Arunta people did not believe in God, nor were they polytheists. They did not believe in an after-life or in any kind of heaven. They had no sense of sin, hell, divine punishment or grace. They had no prophets, saints or saviours.

In place of morality they had elaborate customs, mythology, ancestor worship, rituals and taboo. For a serious behavioural breach the penalty was death by bone-pointing. Officiants used a prescribed ritual to point a bone at the offender and cast him out of the clan. He then sat down, no one touched him and in three days he was dead. Thus the power of social being.

Durkheim's rational conclusion was 'that social data exist independently of individual facts.' In more modern terms that means we were social beings by virtue of our simian genes long before we became human. And that is why Mrs Thatcher was, and is, so totally wrong.

However no society is more religious than that of aboriginal Australia. They believe that everything, animate and inanimate is what it is and what it does because it is moved by an inner in-dwelling spirit. The spirit world is the real world and the world we know is merely is extemal expression. This explains sickness, good luck, bad luck, natural disasters, failures of any kind - and successes likewise. It is all due to the spirits. The purpose of religion is to petition the spirits, thank them by gifts and sacrifices, utter blessings and curses in their name, cast-out evil spirits and submit, in the end, to spirit judgement. The spirits are the sacred objects of aboriginal society and they are not supernatural. There is no God-up-there.

Durkheim's conclusion for our society in our time? It is that religion, properly understood, is a complex of beliefs and rituals about the sacred. And no two people have the same sacralities! Thus the present total chaos in religions everywhere.

If A wants his sacred object to be God - then well and good! If B prefers `the truth' - then fine! If C wants reason and science - why not? If D just worships money, then he does not lack company! If E elevates Manchester United to the godhead- so be it.

22 Ethical Record, June, 2005 I am currently reading R.F.Foster's amazing Life of W.B.Yeats and am interested to find that Yeats's own sacred object was 'reality'. I don't know anything to beat that! And that is what Moncure Conway taught. In his use of the word 'sacred' as a proper secular-religious term he anticipated Durkheim by some 22 years. In his Centenary of the South Place Society, written in 1893, he contrasted the old invocation and the new. He quoted the old Unitarian inscription on the foundation stone of the Chapel in South Place "Sacred to one God, the Father:" Then he added: 'We have really, though not literally, added another foundation stone: "Sacred to the Supreme Light and Fire, to Reason and Love in their struggle with Unreason and Inhumanity." ' So be it! Peter Cadogan - London NW6

BERNARD HUGHES (1925-2005) Bernard Hughes who was 80 years old but looked younger

If you love computers more than you care for your neighbours you may well be alone at your own funeral. This nearly happened to Bernard Hughes, but for the gang of four (and the men in black suits and the pianist who reverently played Bach) who attended his humanist farewell at the West London Crematorium, rounding up the ceremony by the canal, at Sainsbury's Ladbroke Grove, to share anecdotes of the man who very much kept to himself, while enjoying a nice large Starbuck café latte.

Ian (Buxton) and Graham (Russell) made macabre observations about how such a big man could fit in a slim coffin. Did they sat on the lid, was he still frozen, and would the wood be recycled? Martin Harris said nice words about Bernard: he was surprisingly well read, loved science, classical music, lectures on topics of ethics and philosophy and the plays of Bernard Shaw. But he was predominently a political man, the communist of a bygone era, who believed all hope for humanity had vanished with the collapse of the Soviet empire, and blamed Gorbachev for all the ills that followed in East and West.

Instead of having peaceful days as he expected, Bernard's last marriage was shortlived due to his possessiveness, and acrimonious due his stubbornness. He then suffered a series of strokes which affected his short term memory and his ability to walk without pain, finally confining him to a hospital bed where he stopped communicating with others, then lost the will to live.

I was pleased to hear that as he got older and grumpier, Bernard frequently visited restaurants where he spent comfortable moments indulging in the savings he kept for himself. Bernard was a good man and he helped me once with my computer. Today was a sad day for some of us at SPES. Marina Ingham

The views expressed in this Journal are not necessarily those of the Society.

Ethical Record, June, 2005 23 PROGRAMME OF EVENTS AT THE ETHICAL SOCIETY The Library, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, WC1R 4RL. Tel: 020 7242 8037/8034 Registered Charity No. 251396 Websile: www.ethicalsoc.org.uk email: [email protected] No charge unless staled

JULY 2005 Sunday 3 SKENE MEMORIAL LECTURE 2005 1100 THE SIGHTED WATCHMAKER: How We Came To Be So Different Prof. Ray Talks, University of Manchester

1500 PROGRESS OF THE RELIGIOUS SYMBOLS BAN IN FRANCE Video (postponed from 15 May)

Sunday 10 1100 NOT 42 OR THE MEANING OF LIFE IS A MISTAKE: A Look At Recent Suggestions About the Meaning of Life Chris Bratcher

1500 'PITY THE POOR UNBELIEVER' and OTHER VERSES WITH A SECULAR STING IN THE TAIL Sue Lord

Sunday 17 1100 DAN CHATTERTON: ATIIEISTIC, COMMUNISTIC SCORCHER Terry Liddle (talk postponed

In the Brockway Room, showing 'Art on a Shoe String' Exhibition 1500 WHY I PAINT James McColl Smith. the Artist

Tuesday 19 18.30 JAZZ APPRECIATION GROUP Video

FOR YOUR.D1ARY SPES ANNUAL REUNION 2005 1430, Sunday 25 September Keynote Speaker, Refreshments. Kindred Organisations bring greetings All Humanists and Friends welcome

GAIAINFil in, Festival Friday 8th July and Saturday 9th July at the Screening Room, Covent Garden Hotel, 10 Monmouth Street, London WI. Heart of the Beholder will be shown on Friday at 7pm and Saturday at 3pm. Latter Days will be shown on Saturday at Ipm and 5pm. Tickets I:6 for one film,110 for two booked at the same time. ADVANCED BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL. On linebookings and further information: http://www.galha.org/events/future.html Potal hookings: GALHA, 34 Spring Lane, Kenilworth, Warwickshire, CV8 2HB. Telephone: 01926 858450.

Puhlishrd by the South Place Ethical Society, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square. WC I R 4RL Printed Py J.G. Bryson (Printer) Ltd. 156-162 Iligh Road. London N2 9AS ISSN 0014 - 1690