Helmintholog

Sam Harris asks¹ why we should respect George Bush for saying that he talks with God in the privacy of his bedroom. If he said that he talked to God using a magic telephone, then people would think him mad. So, asks Harris, what difference does the absence of a telephone make?

This isn’t the unanswerable question that he thinks it is. The difference is that the magic telephone offers a strictly private revelation. When the lunatic hands his magic telephone, to someone else, the recipient hears nothing. Prayer’s not like that. People who pray do tend to hear things, at least some of the time; and they do agree that they are, or ought to be, hearing things from the same source.

Harris objects: why is a shared delusion preferable to a private one?

Because it can be criticised and made less delusional. It can be integrated into the other knowledge of the group. You cannot tell a schizophrenic with a magic telephone that the voices aren’t really telling him to kill someone. He knows. But people who pray are some of the time different. What’s more, they are committed to the belief that they are different. Hearing God is a social activity. Protestantism, or modern semper reformanda Islam is much closer to lunacy in this respect. But the cure, however incomplete and partial, is more likely to be better religion than an attempt to abolish it: “God said this but he meant that” is a more productive way to do things than “God never said that, you stupid greedy hick hahahaha”. See the entire history of Judaism for examples.

¹ I read it earlier this week, but buggered if I can find where.

Is religiously inspired morality a crane or a skyhook? That is to ask: when a religious person attempts to build their character in a particular direction, are they building on pre-existent morality, or hoiking down something from God or the bible? I would claim it is self-evident that they are building on pre-existent moral urges and predispositions; more, that each successive act of willpower or moral exertion builds on the ones before. To this extent they are using, in Dan Dennett’s terminology, cranes. They are building themselves, step by step, on previously built foundations, using techniques that have worked before. What’s more, I don’t see how that morality could work otherwise. It is possible that some charismatics disagree with me and suppose that a single intervention from above could change everything. I think that the Catholic doctrine of grace might be interpreted that way, though I don’t know enough about that. But in general, my experience of Catholics is that they expect grace to build on nature, in the phrase.

The point of this is that it suits both sides often to think of religious belief is working like viral DNA: it takes over the pre-existing character and moral judgement and zombifies it. Yet, while we can think of people who are like that for a while, how long do they last? As Eileen Barker’s work showed, most Moonies grow up. So do most Christians of my acquaintance, and most atheists, too. But if you naturalise religion in this way, you take away a lot of of the fun from atheism. The atheist, too, wants to struggle with principalities and powers, or at least with skyhooks and memes.

I know this isn’t widely accepted, but that only shows I’m right: it seems to me that differences in temperament are much more profound than differences in creed: that how you believe is more important than what you believe.

One small thing that puzzles me about the speech in Regensburg last week: why was the English translation notably more offensive than what the Pope actually said? If you compare the English and German versions on the Vatican website, the English has “only wicked and inhuman things” for a phrase — nur Schlechtes und Inhumanes — which seems to me and to both dictionaries I have consulted actually to mean “only bad and inhumane things”. In both cases, a mild adjective has been substituted by a much harsher one. Why? If anyone has asked the Vatican, no answer has apeared in print. Yet this one detail seems to me to be a point at which the degree of offence offered to Muslims was clearly increased.

So we might assume that someone in the Pope’s entourage wanted the clash of civilisations reading, even if he didn’t himself; and I remain convinced that he didn’t. This reading is strengthened by Cormac going on the radio this morning to express doubt about whether Turkey should join the EU. What I thought was slimy about that was the way he justified it by claiming that the Turks had not approached EU standards of transparency, democracy, and so on. Well, which EU? Are they really that much worse than the Rumanians, the Bulgarians, or the Croats?

Is found, I think, towards the end of a long article by Sam Harris in the L.A. Times about the evils of Islam, fanatical faith, suicide bombers, architects putting down their set squares to hack off the necks of journalists, etc:

The … failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

Given the amount of approving quotes of Sam Harris in the new Dawkins book on religion, this might prove rather embarrassing. On the other hand, it does show very clearly what a shallow and jejune understanding of other cultures Sam Harris must have always had.

George Carey teaches me Christian humility. No matter how sure I am of my own righteousness, I begin to doubt it when I see him galumphing up to join me at the barricade. So, should I reconsider the defence of Ratzinger, now that Lord Carey has come down in favour of Jihad and Crusade?

Lord Carey, who as Archbishop of Canterbury became a pioneer in Christian-Muslim dialogue, himself quoted a contemporary political scientist, Samuel Huntington, who has said the world is witnessing a “clash of civilisations”.
Arguing that Huntington’s thesis has some “validity”, Lord Carey quoted him as saying: “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”
Lord Carey went on to argue that a “deep-seated Westophobia” has developed in recent years in the Muslim world.

OK: this is a report in the Times. It may not fairly represent what Carey meant.¹ For all we know, he quoted Huntingdon in order to disembowel him. But the point about Carey is that he had a shrewd political sense on questions that did not touch his self-importance. One shouldn’t take his remarks at face value as an analysis of the situation: rather they represent a second-order analysis — his answer to the question “what should a World Spiritual Leader say in this situation?” and from that we conclude that he thinks that a struggle is inevitable, if not under way.

Now this is a question of fact, to some extent independent of the value question about whether such a struggle should exist. Clearly, you can make a struggle more likely by pretending it has already begun. But, just as clearly, you can’t make one vanish, after it has begun, just by denying its existence.

There is a secondary question, in the event of a clash of civilisations , which is whether it should be pursued by violent means or not. To take an example from an earlier period, one could be in favour of fighting communism while also believing it right to minimise the amount of fighting communists.

Thinking in these terms brings a little clarity to the debate. It leads to three possible positions among non-Muslims. Let’s call them, for short, Cole, Ratzinger, and Carey.

The Cole position is that there is no global struggle between Islam and Christianity. It follows that this non-struggle should certainly not lead to violence, and, where it seems to, both faiths have been perverted.

The Ratzinger position is that there is such a struggle but we must not talk in those terms. The two faiths are rivals and do threaten each other’s well-being. Nonetheless, violence is wrong. Persuasion must proceed by peaceful means. (The status of this “must” is a little unclear. How do I compel you to be peaceful?)

The Carey position seems to be that there is a struggle, both physical and ideological; they are being violent. So we must talk about the struggle and be prepared to use violence to defend our position. I’m using here “we” in the broadest sense. I can’t remember what he thought about the Iraq war, but he would certainly be in favour of the “Christian” side in Nigeria or Darfur.

I think I am a Cole-ite, though Ratzinger clearly has a case. But the Carey-ite prophets have a certain self-fulfilling quality. At some stage, if there are enough of them, they will become right.

¹ In my experience, assuming that his speeches meant anything did violence to the quality of his argument. But I may be misjudging this one. I haven’t seen it.