Introduction

Lawrence Krauss is a Canadian-American physicist and writer who has published prolifically, both for an academic audience and for the general public. His books include The Physics of Star Trek (1995), A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (2012), The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far: Why Are We Here? (2017), The Physics of Climate Change (2021), and, most recently, The Known Unknowns: The Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos (2023). He is currently president of The Origins Project Foundation and host of The Origins Podcast. For more information about these and other books by Krauss, see the relevant section of his website.

He is also known for championing science and rational thinking in public life and for a while was (in)famous as one of the so-called ‘New Atheists’ (on which more below). I recently spoke to him over Zoom to discuss his life, career, and opinions on religion and Critical Social Justice—or, more colloquially, ‘wokeism’.

Interview

Freethinker:  How did your interest in science start?

Lawrence Krauss: I got interested in science as a young person, for a variety of reasons. At least, I can tell you what I think they were. First, I think it is important that my mother wanted me to be a doctor and my brother to be a lawyer. She had convinced me doctors were scientists, so I got interested in science. Plus, a neighbour who was an engineer and his son helped me build a model of the atom, which impressed me.

But it was reading books by and about scientists that really got me interested. I remember reading Galileo and the Magic Numbers (1958) by Sidney Rosen. I think I still have the book somewhere. It impressed on me the idea of Galileo as a heroic figure fighting the forces of ignorance and discovering strange new worlds.

And then I continued to keep reading books by scientists—Richard Feynman, George Gamow, and others—and I had science teachers who encouraged me, which I think is important.

I still was not certain if I wanted to be a scientist per se, because I liked a lot of other areas. Probably the most significant course that I took in high school was a Canadian history course, by far the most intellectually demanding of any of the courses I took. Later on, I took a year out of university to work on a history book about the Communist Party of Canada during the Depression, using my access to the archives of Toronto. I still have that box of files and I will write that book at some point.

I originally thought I wanted to be a doctor, specifically a neurosurgeon. I did not know what a neuroscientist was. Neither of my parents finished high school and my mother in particular just wanted us to be professionals. So I thought of becoming a neurosurgeon. I did not even know what a neurologist was, but the brain interested me. I remember getting a subscription when I was a kid to Psychology Today. I also remember getting a subscription to the Time Life Books on science, so every month for two years I got a book on different parts of science.

Why did physics in particular end up attracting your interest?

For some reason, like, I think, for many young people, physics seemed sexier in the sense of dealing with fundamental questions, the big, deep questions of existence. And although I was interested in biology, that interest evaporated when I took a biology course in high school and dropped it within two weeks because it was just memorising parts of a frog and dissecting things. I just found it totally boring and not what I thought of as science. That was in the 1960s, before the great DNA discoveries of the 1950s had filtered through to the high school level, and so I did not get to experience the explosion of biology as a scientific discipline at the time. I have tried to make up and learn since then, and I think if I had been more aware at the time, I might have been seduced by it.

But by that time I was already in love with physics. I felt the allure of physics and physicists like Feynman and Einstein. A book that had a lot of influence on me was Sir James Jeans’s Physics and Philosophy (1942), which I read in high school. That got me interested in philosophy for a while, too, and it took me a while to grow out of that! Later on, I nearly took a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford in physics and philosophy. I am happy that I went to the United States to do my PhD in pure physics.

That is also one of the reasons why I write books. I am returning the favour to those scientists who got me turned on to science and I am always happy when I see young kids (and not-so-young kids) who tell me that my books inspired them to do science.

How did you get the gist of writing for the wider public rather than just for fellow professionals?

I also worked at a science museum when I was a kid. I did demonstrations at the Ontario Science Center, ten shows a day, and I think that was profoundly influential both in developing my ability to talk to the public about science and in figuring out what people were interested in. It also taught me how to improvise and it was useful for my lecturing in my later career.

Did you have a life goal in mind from early on, then?

No, I never had a plan that I was single-mindedly committed to. I know people like that, but I prefer to plant seeds and see which ones grow. Doing history was also influential in teaching me how to write. I have always been fairly political as well. I get angry at things and write about them. And I used to write op-eds when I was in graduate school, but they never got published. I think I sometimes write when I get angry or I need to get something off my chest.

But no, I never planned my career. Maybe because neither of my parents were academics, academia alone never seemed satisfying enough for me. I always wanted to reach out to the wider world in one way or another.

What was your first big break in writing?

At Harvard, I spoke at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science about dark matter, and then I wrote an article for Scientific American about it. That was my first bit of public writing.

How did you end up becoming a public figure rather than just an academic?

When I was at Harvard, a role model and former professor of mine, the Nobel Laureate Steve Weinberg (whose 1977 book The First Three Minutes had, incidentally been a big influence on me and shown me that a first-rate scientist could write for a wider audience) put me in touch with his publisher. I signed on to write a book. And that led to me writing for newspapers and speaking in public.

I later got involved in the fight against creationists trying to push their ideas in public schools, and I think that is where I got a national reputation for speaking out in defence of science. As an aside, that also revived my interest in biology, which I have always somewhat regretted not knowing more about. It is a fascinating area, in some ways probably more fascinating than physics now.

What are you most proud of contributing to science?

I always think that that is for others to judge. But I am proud of many of my contributions, maybe more proud than other people are. Looking back at my work, I am surprised at the breadth of topics I have worked on and the energy that I seem to have expended. It tires me out to look at it now!

But in terms of impact, I think I was one of the earliest people to appreciate the importance of astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology for understanding fundamental physics. An emerging area called particle astrophysics did not really exist when I was a graduate student and I got involved in that as one of the very earliest people working on that area and promoting the intersection of these two areas. By the way, it is always dangerous to work at the intersection of two fields, because people in each field might feel that you are part of neither, and it is hard sometimes. I remember when I worked at Yale the department never fully appreciated what was happening because they were not aware of particle astrophysics when I was doing it.

I think I made a bunch of significant contributions relating to the nature of dark matter and ways to detect dark matter. I think if one thing stands out, though, it is the paper I wrote with Michael S. Turner in 1995 that first argued that there was dark energy in the universe, making up about 70 per cent of the universe, the discovery of which won a Nobel Prize for Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess in 2011. That was one of the times that I realised something about the universe before anybody else did, and that was very satisfying. It was hard to convince myself that I was right at the time because I was unsure if the data were correct. I remember getting a lot of resistance until dark energy was discovered, and then everyone jumped on it immediately.

In your book ‘A Universe from Nothing’, you provide a model of how the universe came about without any divine input. What do you make of that book, which caused quite a stir, when you look back now? And how do you respond to criticisms from people who say that what you meant by ‘nothing’ was not truly ‘nothing’?

Obviously, I stand by what I wrote. In retrospect, there are some things I might try to explain more clearly. But I am pretty clear that the people who say I did not show how a universe can come from nothing have not really read the book. They might say I was just talking about empty space, which is not nothing, but I talk about far more than that. What one means by ‘nothing’ is a very subtle concept and we have changed our opinion of what nothing is, as I point out in the book.

And so what I am describing is ‘no universe’. The space and time in which we now exist did not exist. Now, was there a greater whole? Was it part of a multiverse at the time? Maybe. But that is not the important issue. The important issue is whether a universe like ours did not exist and then came into existence. And that is what I mean by ‘nothing’. It was not there, and then it was there. The space and the time that we inhabit and the particles that we are made of were not there. None of that existed. That is a pretty good definition of ‘nothing’, as far as I am concerned.

Now, there is a more subtle question. Did the laws of physics exist beforehand? Maybe, maybe not. But the point of my book was to show the amazing discoveries made by scientists demonstrating that empty space was not what we thought. And another point was to ask the question, ‘What would a universe that spontaneously emerged from nothing due to the laws of quantum gravity and survived for 13.8 billion years look like?’ It would look just like the universe in which we live! That is not a proof, but it is highly suggestive and fascinating to me.

It also, among other things, gets rid of the need for a creator, at least of our universe. That is not the reason I wrote the book, I wrote it to explain the science, but it does address that last nail in the coffin, if you like, that refuge of the scoundrels of religion. Darwin had done away with the design argument for life on Earth, and I think the arguments I gave in the book go a long way toward refuting the design argument for the universe. That is what Richard Dawkins talked about in his afterword to the book. I addressed the ‘god of the gaps’ argument, which had moved from biology to physics, and the question of why there is something rather than nothing, which seems to be a big question among religious people.

You were, of course, thought of as one of the figures of the so-called ‘New Atheism’. But you were critical of Richard Dawkins for the way he approached science and religion, and that is how you first met him. Is that correct?

I was one of the leading scientific ‘atheists’, but I never referred to myself that way, because it seems silly to describe oneself by what one does not believe. But yes, I was critical of Richard for his method. I thought that you could not convince people by telling them that they are stupid. I argued that one had to be a little more seductive and our dialogue continued. The first significant time Richard and I spent together was at a symposium called ‘Beyond Belief’ in California, and it was so productive and illuminating. We decided to write a dialogue on science communication and religion for Scientific American in 2007.

At that time I was a little more apologetic about religion. I became more combative for a while after seeing what religion was doing in the United States. I had a conversation with Sam Harris in which I argued that science cannot disprove the existence of God, but that you can show, for example, that the scriptures are inconsistent, and by not being forthright about that you are simply being fearful of offending people with the truth. It is quite simple: you can either accept science or believe that the Bible contains the truth about the natural world, but not both. Those perspectives are just fundamentally irreconcilable. Of course, plenty of religious people do not take the scriptures literally, and that is fine. Indeed, if you want to mesh your scientific and religious views, you have to take the holy texts allegorically.

For a moment there, I thought you were about to say something like Christopher Hitchens radicalised you.

Well, he did! Almost more than Richard did. His book God Is Not Great (2007) informed me of a lot of things about the sociology of religion that I was not aware of. I also learned a lot about the scriptures from Christopher. I had not realised how absolutely violent and vicious they were. They were just evil. I had read the Bible and the Quran when I was younger but I had not internalised them. I skipped over a lot of the crap. I probably learned more about the Bible from Christopher and Richard than anyone else. So, yes, Christopher radicalised me. Inspired by him, I called myself an anti-theist for a while, though now I call myself an apatheist.

So the New Atheist moment has passed?

I never liked that label. What was new about it? People have been not believing in God for thousands of years! Define ‘New Atheist’ for me.

I suppose I am referring more to the historical moment, of the mid 2000s until the early 2010s, when there was this very popular group of anti-religion people speaking up in public. That cultural moment has passed.

Yes, that cultural moment has gone, and for much the same reason as all movements disappear—though I do not like to consider myself as part of any movement—which is that they fragment, just like in Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), where you have the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. Incidentally, I think Life of Brian probably represents exactly what it was like at the time of Jesus, with all these messiahs going about.

The New Atheist movement, if you like, began to eat itself from within. It is a natural tendency for humans to become religious and dogmatic about things, and secular religion has taken over.

You are referring to Critical Social Justice, the term used by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay to refer to what is more colloquially known as ‘wokeism’. If ‘wokeism’ is a dogmatic religion, how has it become so powerful and has it corrupted science?

That is a big question. I have written about it in various places, such as my Substack, so it would be better for readers to delve into those pieces. But essentially, wokeism or wokeness has made certain ideas sacred and therefore beyond criticism. Wokeism is a secular religion that makes assumptions without evidence and when those assumptions are questioned, you are subject to expulsion and considered a heretic. It has stifled and stymied the free and open enquiry and discussion that is central to academia in general and science in particular. I gave loads of examples of how wokeness has corrupted science in a seminar for the Stanford University Classical Liberalism Initiative.

Do you think this problem is getting better or worse?

I think it is getting worse. But we are at a threshold right now. With elements of the woke left cheering on actual violence against Israel, while otherwise absurdly insisting that words are violence, perhaps a new light will be thrown on them, and things might change. But it has certainly been getting worse up until this point.

To finish off, do you have any future projects in the works?

I am very excited about my Origins Project Foundation and my Origins Podcast. We have lots of great new things going on there. And I will keep writing about the issues that concern me. I am also turning now, I think, to writing a scientific memoir, which is a whole new experience for me. I am excited about that, but I also feel some trepidation. It will describe the many amazing people I have interacted with both within and outside of science as well as my own experiences within academia and outside of it, some good, some bad, that I think will be of public interest.

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On Krauss’s most recent book, see the review and interview of Krauss by assistant editor Daniel James Sharp in ‘Merion West‘.

On biology, see further:

‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’ – interview with Richard Dawkins

On ‘New Atheism’, see further:

‘How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism’, by Nathan G. Alexander

‘Christopher Hitchens and the long afterlife of Thomas Paine’, by Daniel James Sharp

On science versus religion, see further:

‘Can science threaten religious belief?’, by Stephen Law

On satire of religion, see further:

‘On trial for blasphemy: the Freethinker’s first editor and offensive cartoons’, by Bob Forder

‘Religious Privilege 2 : 0 Pastafarians’, by Niko Alm

‘The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought’, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

On ‘wokeism’, see further:

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities – interview with Steven Greer

‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’ – interview with Alex Byrne

On the left, Islamists, and Gaza, see further:

‘Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution’, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The post ‘We are at a threshold right now’: Lawrence Krauss on science, atheism, religion, and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in science appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction 

Daniel C. Dennett is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, Massachusetts. One of the world’s best-known philosophers, his work ranges from the nature of consciousness and free will to the evolutionary origins of religion. He is also known as one of the ‘Four Horsemen of New Atheism’, alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.  

His many books include Consciousness Explained (1992), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995), Freedom Evolves (2003), Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006), Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (2013), and From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017).  

I recently spoke with Dennett over Zoom to discuss his life, work, and new memoir I’ve Been Thinking, published by Penguin: Allen Lane in October 2023. Below is an edited transcript of the interview along with some audio extracts from our conversation. Where some of the discussion becomes quite technical, links to explanatory resources have been included for reference. 

Interview 

Freethinker: Why did you decide to write a memoir? 

Daniel C. Dennett: In the book, I explain that I have quite a lot to say about how I think and why I think that it is a better way to think than traditional philosophical ways. I have also helped a lot of students along the way, and I have tried to help a larger audience. I have also managed to get the attention of a lot of wonderful thinkers who have helped me and I would like to share the wealth.  

As a philosopher who has made contributions to science, what do you think philosophy can offer science? Especially as there are some scientists who are dismissive of philosophy. 

I think some scientists are dismissive towards philosophy because they are scared of it. But a lot of really good scientists take philosophy seriously and they recognise that you cannot do philosophy-free science. The question is whether you examine your underlying assumptions. The good scientists typically do so and discover that these are not easy questions. The scientists who do not take philosophy seriously generally do pretty well, but they are missing a whole dimension of their life’s work if they do not realise the role that philosophy plays in filling out a larger picture of what reality is and what life is all about. 

In your memoir, you say that it is important to know the history of philosophy because it is the history of very—and still—tempting mistakes. Do you mean, in other words, that philosophy can help us to avoid falling into traps? 

Exactly. I love to point out philosophical mistakes made by those scientists who think philosophy is a throwaway. In the areas of science that I am interested in—the nature of consciousness, the nature of reality, the nature of explanation—they often fall into the old traps that philosophers have learned about by falling into those traps themselves. There is no learning without making mistakes, but then you have to learn from your mistakes. 

What do you think is the biggest and most influential philosophical mistake that has ever been made? 

I think I would give the prize to Descartes, and not so much for his [mind-body] dualism as for his rationalism, his idea that he could get his clear and distinct ideas so clear and distinct that it would be like arithmetic or geometry and that he could then do all of science just from first principles in his head and get it right.  

The amazing thing is that Descartes produced, in a prodigious effort, an astonishingly detailed philosophical system in his book Le Monde [first published in full in 1677]—and it is almost all wrong, as we know today! But, my golly, it was a brilliant rational extrapolation from his first principles. It is a mistake without which Newton is hard to imagine. Newton’s Principia (1687) was largely his attempt to undo Descartes’ mistakes. He jumped on Descartes and saw further. I think Descartes failed to appreciate how science is a group activity and how the responsibility for getting it right is distributed. 

In your memoir, you lay out your philosophical ideas quite concisely, and you compare them to Descartes’s system in their coherence—albeit believing that yours are right, unlike his! How would you describe the core of your view? 

As I said in my book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, if I had to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I would give it to Darwin because evolution by natural selection ties everything together. It ties life and physics and cosmology; it ties time and causation and intentionality. All of these things get tied together when you understand how evolution works. And if you do not take evolution seriously and really get into the details, you end up with a factually impoverished perspective on consciousness, on the mind, on epistemology, on the nature of explanation, on physics. It is the great unifying idea. 

I was lucky to realise this when I was a graduate student and I have been turning that crank ever since with gratifying results. 

How does consciousness come about in a Darwinian universe? 

First of all, you have to recognize that consciousness is not a single pearl of wonderfulness. It is a huge amalgam of different talents and powers which are differently shared among life forms. Trees are responsive to many types of information. Are they conscious? It is difficult to tell. What about bacteria, frogs, flies, bees? But the idea that there is just one thing where the light is on or that consciousness sunders the universe into two categories—that is just wrong. And evolution shows why it is wrong.  

In the same way, there are lots of penumbral or edge cases of life. Motor proteins are not alive. Ribosomes are not alive. But life could not exist without them. Once you understand Darwinian gradualism and get away from Cartesian essentialism, then you can begin to see how the pieces fit together without absolutes. There is no absolute distinction between conscious things and non-conscious things, just as there is no absolute distinction between living things and non-living things. We have gradualism in both cases.  

We just have to realise that the Cartesian dream of ‘Euclidifying’, as I have put it, all of science—making it all deductive and rational with necessary and sufficient conditions and bright lines everywhere—does not work for anything else apart from geometry. 

Why are non-naturalistic accounts of consciousness—‘mysterian’ accounts as you call them—still so appealing? 

I have been acquainted with the field for over half a century, but I am still often astonished by the depth of the passion with which people resist a naturalistic view of consciousness. They think it is sort of a moral issue—gosh, if we are just very, very fancy machines made out of machines made out of machines, then life has no meaning! That is a very ill-composed argument, but it scares people. People do not even want you to look at the idea. These essentially dualistic ideas have a sort of religious aura to them—it is the idea of a soul. [See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on consciousness for an overview of the debate over the centuries.] 

I love the headline of my interview with the late, great Italian philosopher of science and journalist Giulio Giorello: ‘Sì, abbiamo un’anima. Ma è fatta di tanti piccoli robot’ – ‘Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots’ [this interview appeared in a 1997 edition of the Corriere della Sera]. And that’s it! If that makes you almost nauseated, then you have a mindset that resists sensible, scientific, naturalistic theories of consciousness.  

Do you think that the naturalistic view of consciousness propounded by you and others has ‘won’ the war of ideas? 

No, we have not won, but the tide is well turned, I think. But then we have these backlashes.

The one that is currently raging is over whether Giulio Tononi’s integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness is pseudo-science [see the entry for IIT in the Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy for an overview]. I recently signed an open letter alongside a number of researchers, including a lot of the world’s very best on the neuroscience of consciousness, deploring the press’s treatment of IIT as a ‘leading’ theory of consciousness. We said IIT was pseudo-science. That caused a lot of dismay, but I was happy to sign the letter. The philosopher Felipe de Brigard, another signatory, has written a wonderful piece that explains the context of the whole debate. [See also the neuroscientist Anil Seth’s sympathetic view of IIT here.] 

One of the interesting things to me, though, is that some scientists resist IIT for what I think are the wrong reasons. They say that it leads to panpsychism [‘the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world’ – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.] because it says that even machines can be a little bit conscious. But I say that machines can be a little bit conscious! That is not panpsychism, it is just saying that consciousness is not that magical pearl. Bacteria are conscious. Stones are not conscious, not even a little bit, so panpsychism is false. It is not even false, it is an empty slogan. But the idea that a very simple reactive thing could have one of the key ingredients of consciousness is not false. It is true. 

It seems that antipathy towards naturalistic theories of consciousness is linked to antipathy towards Darwinism. What do you make of the spate of claims in recent years that Darwinism, or the modern evolutionary synthesis of which Darwinism is the core, is past its sell-by date? 

This is a pendulum swing which has had many, many iterations since Darwin. I think everybody in biology realises that natural selection is key. But many people would like to be revolutionaries. They do not want to just add to the establishment. They want to make some bold stroke that overturns something that has been accepted.  

I understand the desire to be the rebel, to be the pioneer who brings down the establishment. So, we have had wave after wave of people declaring one aspect of Darwinism or another to be overthrown, and, in fact, one aspect of Darwin after another has been replaced by better versions, but still with natural selection at their cores. Adaptationism still reigns.  

Even famous biologists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin mounted their own ill-considered attack on mainstream Darwinism and pleased many Darwin dreaders in doing so.  But that has all faded, and rightly so. More recently, we have had the rise of epigenetics, and the parts of epigenetics that make good sense and are well-attested have been readily adapted and accepted as extensions of familiar ideas in evolutionary theory. There is nothing revolutionary there.  

The Darwinian skeleton is still there, unbroken. It just keeps getting new wrinkles added as they are discovered.  

The claims that the evolutionary establishment needs to be overthrown remind me of—in fact, they are quite closely related to—the enduring hatred of some people for Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book ‘The Selfish Gene’.

Yes, some people do. But I think that it is one of the best books I have ever read and that it holds up very well. The chapter on memes is one of the most hated parts of it, but the idea of memes is gathering adherents now even if a lot of people do not want to use the word ‘meme’. The idea of cultural evolution as consisting of the natural selection of cultural items that have their own evolutionary fitness, independent of the fitness of their vectors or users—that has finally got a really good foothold, I think. And it is growing. 

As one of the foremost champions of memetics as a field of study, you must be pleased that it is making a comeback, even if under a different name, given that earlier attempts to formalise it never really took off. 

Well, the cutting edge of science is jagged and full of controversy—and full of big egos. There is a lot of pre-emptive misrepresentation and caricature. It takes a while for things to calm down and for people to take a deep breath and let the fog of war dispel. And then they can see that the idea was pretty good, after all.  

You mentioned Stephen Jay Gould. In your memoir, Gould and several others get a ‘rogue’s gallery’ sort of chapter to themselves. How have the people you have disagreed with over the years influenced you? 

Well, notice that some of my rogues are also some of the people that I have learned the most from, because they have been wrong in provocative ways, and it has been my attempts to show what is wrong with their views that have been my springboard in many cases. Take the philosopher Jerry Fodor, for example. As I once said, if I can see farther than others, it is because I have been jumping on Jerry like he is a human trampoline!  

If Jerry had not made his mistakes as vividly as he did, I would not have learned as much. It is the same with John Searle. They both bit a lot of bullets. They are both wrong for very important reasons, but where would I be without them? I would have to invent them! But I do not need to worry about beating a dead horse or a straw man because they have boldly put forward their views with great vigour and, in some cases, even anger. I have tried to respond not with anger but with rebuttal and refutation, which is, in the end, more constructive. 

And what about some of the friends you mention in the book? People like the scientist Douglas Hofstadter and the neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey? 

People like Doug Hofstadter, Nick Humphrey, and Richard Dawkins—three of the smartest people alive! It has been my great privilege and honour to have had them as close friends and people that I can always count on to give me good, tough, serious reactions to whatever I do. I have learned a lot from all of them.  

Nick Humphrey, for example, came to work with me in the mid-1980s and we have been really close friends ever since. I could not count the hours that we have spent debating and discussing our differences. If you look at the history of his work, you will see that he has adjusted his view again and again to get closer to mine, and I have adjusted my view to get closer to him. I accepted a lot of his points. That is how progress happens.  

How do you differentiate between philosophy and science? In your afterword to the 1999 edition of Dawkins’s 1982 book ‘The Extended Phenotype’, for example, you say that that work is both scientific and philosophical. And in your own career, of course, you have mixed science and philosophy quite freely. 

I think the dividing line is administrative at best. Philosophers who do not know any science have both hands tied behind their backs. They are ill-equipped because there is just too much counter-intuitive knowledge that we have gathered in science. That is one of the big differences between philosophy and science. In science, a counter-intuitive result is a wonderful thing. It is a gem, a treasure. If you get a counter-intuitive result and it holds up, you have made a major discovery.  

In philosophy, if something is counter-intuitive, that counts against it, because too many philosophers think that what they are doing is exposing the counter-intuitivity of various views. They think that if something is counter-intuitive, it cannot be right. Well, hang on to your hats, because a lot of counter-intuitive things turn out to be true!   

What you can imagine depends on what you know. If you do not know the science (or what passes as the science of the day because some of that will turn out to be wrong) your philosophy will be impoverished. It is the interaction between the bold and the utterly conservative and established scientific claims that produces progress. That is where the action is. Intuition is not a good guide here. 

We all take for granted now that the earth goes around the sun. That was deeply counter-intuitive at one point. A geocentric universe and a flat world were intuitive once upon a time. 

Darwinism, the idea that such complexity as living, conscious organisms can arise from blind forces, is counter-intuitive, too.  

Yes. My favourite quote about Darwinism comes from one of his 19th-century critics who described it as a ‘strange inversion of reasoning’. Yes, it is a strange inversion of reasoning, but it is the best one ever. 

It strikes me that some of the essential differences between your view and the views of others hark back in some way to Plato and Aristotle—the focus on pure reason and the immaterial and the absolute versus the focus on an empirical examination of the material world. 

Yes, that is true. It is interesting that when I was an undergraduate, I paid much more attention to Plato than to Aristotle. Again, I think that was probably because I thought Plato was more interestingly wrong. It was easier to see what he was wrong about. Philosophers love to find flaws in other philosophers’ work! 

That brings to mind another aspect of your memoir and your way of thinking more generally. You think in very physical, practical terms—thinking tools, intuition pumps, and so on. And you have a long history of farming and sailing and fixing things. How important has this aspect been to your thinking over the years? 

It has been very important. Since I was a little boy, I have been a maker of things and a fixer of things. I have been a would-be inventor, a would-be designer or engineer. If I had not been raised in a family of humanists with a historian father and an English teacher mother, I would probably have become an engineer. And who knows? I might not have been a very good one. But I just love engineering. I always have. I love to make things and fix things and figure out how things work.  

I think that some of the deepest scientific advances of the last 150 years have come from engineers—computers, understanding electricity, and, for that matter, steam engines and printing presses. A lot of the ideas about degrees of freedom and control theory—this is all engineering. 

Since you mention degrees of freedom, whence free will? You are known as a compatibilist, so how do you understand free will in a naturalistic, Darwinian universe? 

I think there is a short answer, which is that the people who think free will cannot exist in a causally deterministic world are confusing causation and control. These are two different things. The past does not control you. It causes you, but it does not control you. There is no feedback between you and the past. If you fire a gun, once the bullet leaves the muzzle, it is no longer in your control. Once your parents have launched you, you are no longer in their control.  

Yes, many of your attitudes, habits, and dispositions are ones you owe to your upbringing and your genes but you are no longer under the control of them. You are a self-controller. There is all the difference in the world between a thing that is a self-controller and a thing that is not. A boulder rolling down a mountainside is caused deterministically to end up where it ends up, but it is not being controlled by anything, while a skier skiing down the slalom trail is also determined in where she ends up, but she is in control. That is a huge and obvious difference. 

What we want is to be self-controllers. That is what free will is: the autonomy of self-control. If you can be a competent self-controller, you have all the free will that is worth wanting, and that is perfectly compatible with determinism. The distinction between things that are in control and things that are out of control never mentions determinism. In fact, deterministic worlds make control easier. If you have to worry about unpredictable quantum interference with your path, you have a bigger control problem.  

I know that you have a long and ongoing dispute with, among others, the biologist and free will determinist Jerry Coyne on this. 

Yes. I have done my best and spent hours trying to show Jerry the light! 

Alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, you were one of the ‘Four Horsemen of New Atheism’. In your memoir, you say that you were impelled to write your book on religion, ‘Breaking the Spell’, because you were worried about the influence of religious fundamentalism in America—and you say that your worries have been borne out today. In your view, then, we are seeing a resurgence of dangerous fundamentalism? 

We are, yes, and we are seeing it across the world and across religions. I think that we have to recognise that a major part of the cause of this is the anxiety, not to say the terror, of the believers who see their world evaporating in front of their eyes. I warned about that in Breaking the Spell, and I said, ‘Look. We have to be calm. We have to be patient. We have to recognise that people are faced with a terrifying prospect, of their religious traditions evaporating, being abandoned by their children, being swept aside.’ No wonder that many of them are anxious, even to the point of violence.

In Breaking the Spell, I designed a little thought experiment to help those of us who are freethinkers, who are atheists, appreciate what that is like. Imagine if aliens came to America. Not to conquer us—imagine they were nice. They were just learning about us, teaching us about their ways. And then we found that our children were flocking to them and were abandoning musical instruments and poetry and abandoning football and baseball and basketball because these aliens had other pastimes that were more appealing to them. I deliberately chose secular aspects of our country for this experiment. 

Imagine seeing all of these just evaporate. What?! No more football, no more baseball, no more country music, no more rock and roll?! Help, help! It is a terrifying prospect, a world without music—not if I can help it! 

If you can sympathise with this, if you can feel the gut-wrenching anxiety that that would cause in you, then recognise that that is the way many religious people feel, and for good reason. And so we should respect the sorrow and the anger, the sense of loss, that they are going through. It is hard to grow up and shed religion. It has been our nursemaid for millennia. But we can do it. We can grow up. 

Is there a need for another ‘New Atheist’ type of moment, then, given the resurgence of religious fundamentalism and violence in the world? 

I am not sure that we need it. I am not going to give the New Atheists credit for this—though we played our role—but recent work has shown that the number of those with no religion at all has increased massively worldwide. Let’s just calm down and take a deep breath. Comfort those who need comforting. Try to forestall the more violent and radical responses to this and just help ease the world into a more benign kind of religion.  

And religions are doing that, too. Many religions are recognising this comforting role and are downplaying dogma and creed and emphasising community and cooperation and brotherhood and sisterhood. Let’s encourage that. I sometimes find it amusing to tease Richard Dawkins and say to him, think about this evolutionarily: we do not so much want to extinguish religion as get it to evolve into something benign. And it can.  

We need the communities of care, the places where people can go and find love and feel welcome. Don’t count on the state to do that. And don’t count on any institution that is not in some ways like good old-fashioned religion for that, either. The hard thing to figure out is how we can have that form of religion without the deliberate irrationality of most religious doctrine. 

And that is a difference between you and Dawkins. In ‘Breaking the Spell’, you did not expend much energy on the arguments for and against the existence of a deity, whereas Dawkins in ‘The God Delusion’ (2006) was much more focused on that question. 

Yes, but Richard and his foundation also played a major role in creating The Clergy Project, which I helped to found and which is designed to provide counsel and comfort and community for closeted atheist clergy. There are now thousands of clergy in that organisation and Richard and his foundation played a big role in setting it up. Without them, it would not have happened. So, Richard understands what I am saying about the need to provide help and comfort and the role of religion in doing so. 

You mentioned music earlier, which you clearly love as you devoted a long chapter in your memoir to it. So, what for you is the meaning of life without God and without a Cartesian homunculus?

Well, life is flippin’ wonderful! Here we are talking to each other, you in England [Scotland, actually, but it didn’t seem the moment to quibble!] and me in the United States, and we are having a meaningful, constructive conversation about the deepest issues there are. And you are made of trillions—trillions!—of moving parts, and so am I, and we are getting to understand how those trillions of parts work. Poor Descartes could never have imagined a machine with a trillion moving parts. But we can, in some detail now, thanks to computers, thanks to microscopes, thanks to science, thanks to neuroscience and cognitive science and psychophysics and all the rest. We are understanding more and more every year about how all this wonderfulness works and about how it evolved and why it evolved. To me, that is awe-inspiring.  

My theory of meaning is a bubble-up theory, not a trickle-down theory. We start with a meaningless universe with just matter, or just physics, if you like. And with just physics and time and chance (in the form of pseudo-randomness, at least), we get evolution and we get life and this amazingly wonderful blossoming happens, and it does not need to have been bestowed from on high by an even more super-duper thing. It is the super-duper thing. Life: it’s wonderful. 

I completely agree. I have never understood the appeal of religion and mysticism and ‘spooky stuff’ when it comes to meaning and purpose and fulfillment, but there we are. In your memoir, you discuss the thinking tools you have picked up over the years. Which one would you most recommend? 

It might be Rapoport’s rules. The game theorist Anatole Rapoport formulated the rules for how you should conduct any debate. These are the rules to follow if you want constructive disagreement. Each of them is important. 

The first thing you should do is to try to state your opponent’s position so vividly and clearly and fairly that your opponent says they wish they had thought of putting it that way. Now, you may not be able to improve on your opponent, but you should strive for that. You should make it clear by showing, not saying, that you understand where your opponent is coming from.  

Second, mention anything that you have learned from your opponent—anything you have been convinced of, something you had underestimated in their case.

Third, mention anything that you and your opponent agree on that a lot of people do not. 

Only after you have done those three things should you say a word of criticism. If you follow these rules precisely, your opponent will know that you really understand him or her. You have shown that you are smart enough to have learned something from or agree about something with him or her.

What Rapoport’s rules do is counteract what might almost be called the philosopher’s blight: refutation by caricature. Reductio ad absurdum is one of our chief tools, but it encourages people to be unsympathetic nitpickers and to give arguably unfair readings of their opponents. That just starts pointless pissing contests. It should be avoided. 

I know the answer to this question, but have you ever been unfairly read? 

Oh yes! It is an occupational hazard. And the funny thing is that I have gone out of my way to prevent certain misunderstandings, but not far enough, it seems. I devoted a whole chapter of Consciousness Explained to discussing all the different real phenomena of consciousness. And then people say that I am saying that consciousness is not real! No, I say it is perfectly real. It just is not what you think it is. I get tired of saying it but a whole lot of otherwise very intelligent people continue to say, ‘Oh, no, no, no! He is saying that consciousness isn’t real!’  

Well, given what they mean by consciousness—something magical—that is true. I am saying that there is no ‘real magic’. It is all conjuring tricks. I am saying that magic that is real is not magic. Consciousness is real, it is just not magic. 

Do you have any future projects in the works? 

I do have some ideas. I have a lot of writing about free will that has accumulated over the last decade or so and I am thinking of putting that together all in one package. But whether I publish it as a book or just put it online with introductions and unify it, I am not yet sure. But putting it online as a usable anthology in the public domain is a project I would like to do.  

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on free thought. If you can, please consider making a donation to support our work into the future.

Further reading:

Darwinism, evolution, and memes

‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’ – interview with Richard Dawkins, by Emma Park

Science, religion, and the ‘New Atheists’

Atheism, secularism, humanism, by A.C. Grayling

How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism, by Nathan Alexander

Secular conservatives? If only…, by Jacques Berlinerblau

Can science threaten religious belief? by Stephen Law

Christopher Hitchens and the long afterlife of Thomas Paine, by Daniel James Sharp

Christopher Hitchens and the value of heterodoxy, by Matt Johnson

Meaning and morality without religion

What I believe – interview with Andrew Copson, by Emma Park

Morality without religion: the story of humanism, by Madeleine Goodall

‘The real beauty comes from contemplating the universe’ – interview on humanism with Sarah Bakewell

The post Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett  appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

On 25 November, 2023, at the historic Conway Hall in London, I met Graham Smith, the CEO of the anti-monarchy campaigning group Republic—an organisation whose origin can be traced back through the pages of The Freethinker. Read more about that connection in ‘The Freethinker and early republicanism’. See also ‘Bring on the British republic’ for my review of Smith’s book Abolish the Monarchy: Why We Should and How We Will.

Smith was the guest speaker at the National Secular Society’s Members’ Day at Conway Hall, and I managed to talk to him in the foyer café before he went off to give his very well-received talk on the connections between monarchy and religion, and between secularism and republicanism. Below is an edited transcript of our short but illuminating conversation.

Interview

Freethinker: At the coronation of Charles III, you and several other anti-monarchy protesters were arrested [see links above for more]. Could you give us an update on how the case is going?

Graham Smith: There are no major updates. It has gone off to a judge for an application for judicial review. The assumption is that we will be granted the judicial review and then we will see what happens after that.

What are the historical links between secularism and republicanism?

If you look historically, you will very often see intellectual links between those arguing against the domination of established churches and those who opposed monarchy. There is an old quote, whose origin I cannot remember right now: ‘Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.’ [These are, in fact, the words of the 18^th-century Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot.]

This is not something that I would condone! But the sentiment is that these things are very much linked and so the opposition to them is linked and always has been. And certainly, the National Secular Society and Republic have quite a lot of overlap in terms of our interests and members and so on, even though we have not really worked together. I think it is difficult to argue for a secular state without arguing for the abolition of the monarchy and vice versa.

Could you have a secular monarchy? 

No, I do not think you can. You can have a non-secular republic—in Ireland, God gets a mention in the constitution, and for many years the Irish constitution gave a privileged position to the Catholic Church. But I do not think that makes intellectual sense. You also have disestablishment in monarchies like Sweden and Norway, but that is a bit of a halfway house because the monarch is still a member of one church and is very much a churchgoer, and thus that church is privileged through that relationship even if it is technically, by law, not established. I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy. [For an alternative view, see Emma Park’s interview with Paul Scriven, a Liberal Democrat peer who introduced a disestablishment bill in the House of Lords on 6 December.]

Does one or the other—republicanism or secularism—have to come first?

It is hard to say. I think it may well be that the monarchy goes first because it is the bigger, more potent symbol of everything that has to change in Britain. I do not think there is the same appetite for disestablishment in the way that there is an appetite for abolishing the monarchy. It is interesting that over the last 25 years, we have seen a lot of pressure to get rid of the House of Lords, the monarchy, and the established church. Hopefully, the Lords will go in the next one or two years. And these three things are all connected.  I think we will see them all unravelling—one will go, then another, then another. Though in which order it will happen, who knows?

How was your anti-monarchy book received?

On the whole, it has gone down well. I got a couple of annoying reviews from monarchists, which is a good sign. One of the reasons I wrote it is because there is not enough literature about the monarchy and why it should be abolished. Most books about the royals are just inane nonsense.

Even though the history books talk about many of the monarchs being thugs and murderers, there is always this undertone—‘Oh, isn’t the monarchy so great and interesting? And don’t worry, they’re not like this anymore!’. But that history is one of the reasons we should get rid of them—not because they are still doing things like that, but because it is a celebration of that history, which is not a reason to celebrate.

Have you had any thoughtful reviews from monarchists?

Yes. Surprisingly, The Telegraph’s review was the most interesting. The reviewer described herself as a ‘soft monarchist’, which is a term I use in the book, and she really engaged with my arguments. She thought monarchists should be worried because there are lots of cracks in their armour and lots of weaknesses in their position, and they should be alert to that.

What is the strongest argument for the monarchy in your view? I have always thought it was the superficially convincing one made by, among others, George Orwell: that it is a check on political extremism because it diverts extreme emotion away from politicians. In other words, it prevents tyranny.

Yes. The fact that Orwell, a respected writer, made it, means that it is an argument that is taken seriously. Churchill said something similar—that if they had kept the Kaiser, Germany would not have had Hitler. But these claims are completely ahistorical. Two of the Axis powers were monarchies. The Italian king Victor Emmanuel III put Mussolini in power and sat there for 20 years and let him get on with it. And the Kaiser was keen to put his family back on the throne under or with Hitler. So, if anything, the Orwellian argument shows the weakness of monarchy.

And, of course, Emperor Hirohito was not just a monarch, but apparently a divine being.

Indeed! The problem is that that stifles critical thinking and it stifles opposition, and those things are very important if you want to avoid things like imperial conflicts.

How do you think Charles III is doing as king?

That is like asking how a chair is doing as a chair. It just sits there and is a chair, and he just sits there and is a king. He does not have to do anything. He just is. And people judge them [monarchs and royals] by their own standards, so if they go around waving and allowing their acolytes to say good things on their behalf, then that is judged to be fine, so long as there is not some huge scandal. The bar is set incredibly low.

But Charles is a man who is accused of exchanging honours for cash. He is accused of handling millions of pounds of cash from Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, a Qatari businessman and former Prime Minister of Qatar accused of having links with al-Qaeda. He is accused of lobbying behind the scenes for all sorts of things. He is not a good head of state. Anybody could be a good king because being a monarch is about biological descent alone, but to be a good head of state is to be someone who is principled, eloquent, accountable and accessible, and on all these scores Charles is dreadful.

In terms of religion, Charles was never going to be genuinely ecumenical or for all faiths, and certainly not for those who do not have a faith. The royals pay lip service to ecumenicism, and I think some people were really surprised by how much Charles doubled down on all the feudal religious nonsense during the coronation—but it was because he believed all that nonsense!

One of the problems is that you do not get to ask Charles questions directly and challenge him about these issues. So it is all about reading the tea leaves and believing people like Jonathan Dimbleby when it comes to the true beliefs of the royals.

Have you ever met Charles? Or been in the same room as him and tried to ask him a question?

I have been within shouting distance! I have been almost as close to him as I am to you now, calling out questions, but obviously, he just blanks me. That is the one thing the royals are good at, blanking people. They just blank people they do not want to acknowledge, including their own staff.

What would a British republic with a written constitution look like?

It would look like a modern, grown-up democracy where we would have a fully elected parliament. We would still have a prime minister but they would not have the same power, derived from the Crown, that they have now. We would have clearly defined limits to that power and these limits would be policed and monitored by an elected head of state. The head of state would be there to be our ambassador but also to guard our constitution. So a republic would just take all the nonsense out of it. And if we want pageantry and ceremony, we can do that. Other republics, like France and Greece, do it quite well.

Having a republic would ultimately mean that our constitution and our politics would be done in a serious, intelligent, accountable way.

What is the single, essential thing that makes the monarchy and our political or constitutional system rotten, in your view?

The fact that we still have the same system we had after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688-1689. All that has happened since then is that there have been compromises between those in Parliament and those in the Palace. There has never been a serious democratic evolution that shifts power to the people in this country. Instead, we have had the centralisation of power propped up and disguised by all the trappings of the monarchy—that is the big problem.

Is it anti-British to be anti-monarchy?

I would say it is very pro-British to be anti-monarchy. Being against anything bad is being in favour of where you live. One of the things that annoys me the most about monarchists is when they say that we would not be anything without the monarchy. I think that is the least patriotic thing you could say. To rubbish this amazing country of 65 million people by saying that it would not be much without this very, very tedious and ordinary family—that is a weird and unpatriotic thing to say.

And, of course, there is also the great British tradition of republicanism and radicalism, which is just as much a part of our patriotic heritage as the monarchy.

Yes. History is written by the victors, by those in power, and we do not get to hear about the radicals. And when we do hear about them, they are dismissed as fringe people, while everyone else is just getting on with their lives as serfs and plebs.

Yet the anti-slavery movement was one of the largest, if not the largest, working-class movements in British history. You do not hear about that. You only hear about William Wilberforce and the anti-slavery MPs.

We have a long history in this country of fighting against the things that monarchy represents, and we just have to continue until it is gone.

What is the future of British republicanism?

We will win. I think that the monarchy will come to an end. I think that people have realised in the last twelve months that that is quite likely. There is no longer this sense of an immovable object. I think that republicans will continue to see the polling shift in our favour. Support for the monarchy has dropped significantly over the years. Once support for the monarchy drops below 50 per cent, we will see things unravel in quite good order.

Would you care to venture a prediction as to when exactly the monarchy will go?

No. I suppose I would say that there is a reasonable chance that Prince William will become king, but I think the chance of his son George becoming king is quite small.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on free thought. If you can, please consider making a donation to support our work into the future.

Further reading on secularism and republicanism:

Image of the week: Charles Bradlaugh’s study after his death, by Walter Sickert, by Bob Forder

Introducing ‘Paine: A Fantastical Visual Biography’, by Polyp, by Paul Fitzgerald

Is all publicity good publicity? How the first editor of the Freethinker attracted the public’s attention, by Clare Stainthorp

Charles Bradlaugh and George Jacob Holyoake: their contrasting reputations as Secularists and Radicals, by Edward Royle

Freethought in the 21st century – interview of The Freethinker editor Emma Park by Christoph De Spiegeleer

Christopher Hitchens and the long afterlife of Thomas Paine, by Daniel James Sharp

The post ‘I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy’: interview with Graham Smith appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

On the afternoon of Wednesday 6th December 2023, Paul Scriven, a Liberal Democrat peer, introduced his private member’s bill, the Disestablishment of the Church of England Bill, in the House of Lords, after it had been selected by ballot.

In the UK Parliament, the first reading of a bill is usually a mere formality, with the meat of the debate being reserved for the second reading – which may happen a few months later, if there is time and circumstances do not intervene.

When Lord Scriven, however, ‘beg[ged] to introduce a bill to disestablish the Church of England, to make provision for the protection of freedom of religion or belief, and for connected purposes,’ there were noises of dissent halfway through – apparently from the Conservative government’s side.

And when the Lord Speaker, Lord McFall of Alcluith, asked the House whether they were ‘content’ to let the bill be read a first time, there was vociferous opposition, to the point where he initially responded that the ‘not contents’ had it, before changing his mind. The full drama can be seen (and heard) in the video clip linked in Lord Scriven’s tweet below.

A brief history of (dis)establishment

The origin of the establishment of the Church of England was Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy in 1534. This made him the ‘Supreme Head of the Church of England’ and required that his subjects swear an oath of loyalty recognising his marriage to his second wife, Anne Boleyn, after he had unilaterally decided to cancel his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

The Act of Supremacy was repealed under Henry VIII’s Catholic daughter when she became Mary I, but then re-enacted in 1558 under Elizabeth I. Section VIII, entitled ‘All Spiritual Jurisdiction united to the Crown,’ is still in force today.

The last time a bill was introduced into Parliament that would have disestablished the Church was in 1991, in Tony Benn’s Commonwealth of Britain Bill, which would also have abolished the House of Lords altogether and removed the constitutional role of the monarchy. However, the bill’s second reading was repeatedly deferred and there was never a full debate.

In January 2020, another Liberal Democrat peer, Dick Taverne, introduced a private member’s bill on one aspect of disestablishment: the House of Lords (Removal of Bishops) Bill. This passed its first reading, but fell by the wayside during the pandemic.

Other points in recent history at which disestablishment or the removal of the bishops from the Lords was considered are recorded in a paper on ‘The relationship between church and state in the United Kingdom’, published by the House of Commons Library in September.

The 2018 debate

Disestablishment was briefly debated in the House of Lords on 28 November 2018, under Elizabeth II. A Labour peer, Lord Berkeley, asked the Conservative government ‘what assessment they have made of the case for the disestablishment of the Church of England.’ The laconic answer, from Lord Young of Cookham, was, ‘My Lords, none.’

Lord Berkeley pointed out that attendance at the Church of England was falling rapidly, and that ‘half of British people have no religion’. He therefore proposed that it would be time for Charles, when he became king, ‘to embrace this secular state’ and swear an appropriately non-religious oath. This led to a discussion about the status of the Church of England and constitutional reform.

For anyone who thinks that the bishops in the Lords are a mere relic, their entrenched place in the establishment can be illustrated by a few quotations from this debate. Lord Young argued that the bishops in the Lords ‘add a spiritual dimension to our discussions. They speak with a moral authority that escapes most of us…The bishops seek to heal religious conflict and promote religious tolerance and inclusiveness.’ In a word, the government’s policy was ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’. Without a trace of self-interest, the Lord Bishop of Worcester proposed that ‘the established Church is a significant force for good.’

Lord Scriven’s Bill

About 24 hours before the Disestablishment Bill was introduced, I interviewed Paul Scriven over a cup of tea in the House of Lords. An edited version of the interview is below. We discuss his motivations for bringing the bill, even though it is almost certainly doomed to fail, and why he is bringing it now, of all times. We also look at the relationship of the Church to the monarchy and of disestablishment to wider constitutional reform; and whether the bishops or other religious leaders really have any claim to moral authority.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

Freethinker: How did you come to introduce this bill?

Paul Scriven: A little bit by accident. I entered the Lords reluctantly, as I do not agree with an unelected second house. In 2014, Nick Clegg wanted to put a number of peers in, like me, who believed that when the time came, we would vote for a reformed elected chamber. I am quite a nonconformist by background. I grew up on a council estate in Huddersfield and have always rallied against authority. When I have seen unfairness, I have fought it. Then Nick finally beat me down and got me into this place. Now that I am here, I realise it is a place where you can champion causes which are important to improve either individual lives or the state of the nation or internationally.

I was an agnostic when I came in. I have sat and watched the Bishops’ Bench for the last nearly ten years, and their views on social matters have made me a confirmed atheist. It is quite clear they are way behind the curve on where the vast majority of Britons are, whether on same-sex marriage or women or a number of issues. If that is Christianity in action from the Church of England perspective, then I do not want anything to do with it. They do not represent modern Britain – that was clear from the 2021 census.

Has being gay influenced your perspective on this issue?

I find some churches’ views on being gay baffling. Others are clearly more progressive. It is hurtful at times having to hear that you are not equal, even though they say that God loves you – and then it is quite clear that they do not like my kind of love. That is wretched. It has not driven me to my position. I just think that, on a wider number of issues, listening to the bishops has made me not want to be associated with what I see as predominantly white old men arguing about how to keep an institution together and very conservative in their views.

I also find it absolutely bewildering that in the UK Parliament, there is only one institution that is guaranteed places, and that is the 26 Anglican bishops who sit in the House of Lords. In 2023, how on earth does a Church which has 0.9% of the population [in England] in regular attendance at a Sunday service have an automatic right to be in Parliament, determine laws and have influence and power beyond its relevance to most people?

More broadly, why is it that the Church of England has so much influence, power and a special status in our society, when those who want to practise any faith or belief should have equality? The time now is ripe for disestablishment – especially when you consider what a diverse country we are, in terms not just of our faith, but of our cultures and beliefs. It seems ridiculous that one religious denomination should have a special status that goes back to a king wanting a divorce in the 1500s.

In terms of tactics, the next general election has to take place no later than January 2025. Did you ever consider leaving the bill until the next government?

Very few private member’s bills actually become law. In all honesty, I think it is more likely that snow will fall in hell than that my bill will get through this time. It is important, though, to raise the issue, because of the diversity of beliefs and faiths revealed by the 2021 census. I could stay quiet and hope for the next government to have a different view, which I think highly unlikely. It will have a large legislative programme and probably the disestablishment of the Church of England will not be among its priorities.

If the bill falls, I can file it again at the start of the next Parliament. I am looking at this in the longer term. During the debate in the second reading, I will be able to listen to people’s objections and amend the bill, which will hopefully strengthen it next time round.

Is the bill officially supported by the Liberal Democrats?

No, as a private member’s bill it is not. It is not an issue which I discussed with my party first. I am sure that as the debate happens and as the bill progresses, there will be cross-party support from all over the House. My guess is that there will also be opposition from people of different parties too.

How did the drafting process work?

I had been in touch with the National Secular Society (NSS) over a number of issues, and I just said to them, I think now is the time to introduce the private member’s bill for disestablishment. We had a discussion and they told me what was important to them. I also had discussions with Humanists UK (HUK). There were a number of issues which both organisations wanted in the bill. To actually draft the bill in appropriate parliamentary language, I worked with the House of Lords Private Bill Office.

Apart from the NSS and HUK, did you work with any other organisations on the bill?

Those were the two organisations that reached out and spoke to me. I have had quite a lot of emails from people in the Church of England supporting disestablishment. They have told me that, for them, there is a real feeling that disestablishment could be liberating. They would no longer be seen as an organ of the state, and would be able to start doing things based on their true mission, which were not either weakened or diluted by their Church’s established status.

Have you asked the bishops for their point of view?

I talked to the Bishop of Sheffield briefly about it. They will probably disagree. And when we get to the second reading, they will have arguments as to why they want to keep their privileged status and their seats in Parliament. However, they do not come from a position of neutrality. It will be interesting to see if they all have the same view.

Is your argument for disestablishment premised on the state of the Church of England now, or is it a matter of principle, or both?

It is a matter of principle. No faith or belief should have a special status. People should be able to pursue their belief or religion equally.

One possibility sometimes mooted by supporters of religion is that, instead of simply having 26 bishops, the major religions and Christian denominations in the UK could all have allocated seats. What would you say to this?

Religions do not have a monopoly on morals, they do not have a monopoly on insight. You only have to look at some of the child abuse scandals in the Church of England and how they were covered up to realise that. If an individual within a church or a belief system has such significant impact that they can help influence the House of Lords in its present form, then they should by all means be individually nominated. But it should not be the very fact that they are an office-holder or attached to a particular religion.

One common view about the bishops in the Lords is that, well, they are quite nice, and are probably overall a good rather than a bad influence on legislation. How would you respond to that?

They are an influence. It is not for me to determine whether they are good or bad. They have a vested interest to ensure that they can use this place to ingrain their privileged position. On a number of occasions, I have been on the same side of the argument as the bishops, such as in the Illegal Migration Bill. But the fact that they are bishops does not mean that they should automatically be here and able to make those points.

Is there an analogy between bishops and hereditary peers, in terms of their lack of democratic legitimacy?

Being a hereditary peer depends on which womb you came out of. But even the hereditary peers in the Lords are now elected before they get here, unlike the bishops, who are plonked in because of the church they are in.

The peers are chosen by the world’s smallest electorate…

Yes. But the bishops come because they decided to study a certain theological doctrine and then they have climbed the greasy pole within a particular church. It is very odd to me.

What about the technicalities of disestablishment? I have heard some Anglicans saying that they support disestablishment in theory, but in practice it would simply be too difficult to disentangle all the knots that bind Church and State.

Isn’t that interesting? What they are really doing is arguing that they have got their fingers and their claws in so many parts of our constitution that it would be too difficult to touch it. On that argument, quite a lot of legislation would never get done.

My bill is not specific about the technicalities. It asks that, within six months of its being passed, a committee is set up for a year to look at the legal implications of what needs to happen to disestablish the Church of England. The committee would be made up of relevant legal practitioners and people who are specialists in the constitution and in law to do with the Church of England. A report then goes to the Secretary of State, and within six months of receiving that report, the Secretary of State has to produce a detailed legal bill on disestablishment. I am not saying this is going to be easy. There are going to be some very difficult conundrums in there, for example over the Act of Union.

Difficulty should not be a reason for not legislating, but for doing it carefully, with good legal minds and an appropriate timescale.

In terms of the implications of disestablishment, the Church of England owns a lot of property. What do you say should happen to it?

I do not want to get into a big argument about this. My bill says that property will go to the Church’s General Synod. And the sovereign will no longer have the title ‘Defender of the Faith’.

Talking of the monarchy, is getting rid of it a logical next step after disestablishment?

No, that does not automatically follow. There are many functioning constitutional monarchies in Europe where the monarch is not head of the church. So one does not follow from the other. Personally, I am not a republican. I believe in a European-style constitutional monarchy.

What sort of a coronation would you envisage post-disestablishment?

A non-religious one, which would crown the monarch as the constitutional monarch of the country, not as the head of a particular faith. It could be quite interesting to develop a new coronation.

Presumably the monarch would no longer be obliged to be Anglican?

Yes. This is not rocket science. Religion would come out of the coronation, and the monarch would no longer be the ultimate boss of the Church of England.

What about other religions with a presence in Parliament? As things stand, do they have much influence behind the scenes?

Not as much as the established church. There are people of faith – Christian, Muslim, Sikh – or of no faith, like the Humanists, who try to exert influence on legislation. But the difference is that it is equal and they have to win the argument. They have not got an ingrained position. I would not want to stop that. One of the purposes of my bill is to defend people’s right to have faith and non-belief, and to be able to pursue that equally.

One of the arguments that will get thrown about is that I am anti-religious. What I actually want to do is level the playing field between the influence of all faiths and beliefs.

Taking a step back, how far are we from full-scale House of Lords reform?

It is going to be a long journey. At the age of 48, I came here naïvely thinking I would be a turkey voting for Christmas. I am now 57, and I have worked out since being here that the evolution of the British system is not always as fast as you want it to be. To reform the House of Lords would take a lot of effort and heartache. I do not think Labour will do it in their first term, but if they get in for a second term, then there may be some significant reform. My guess is that it will be in steps rather than a big leap, which is the way that the British have tended to go for their revolutions for many centuries now. The removal of the hereditary peers and the bishops might be one of the first possible reforms in terms of moving to a democratically elected chamber eventually. Other reforms might include lowering the size of the House, fixing a retirement age for peers, and changing the way that peers are selected.

As you say, disestablishment may not be high on a Labour government’s list of reforms. Indeed, why should it be high on anyone’s agenda, when we have so many other problems in the UK to deal with?

Things that affect people’s lives every day, such as the health service, the economy, housing, safety, are always going to be there. I am not suggesting for one moment that the disestablishment of the Church of England should take priority over the health service, for instance. What my bill intends to do is to raise awareness so that when the time is right and government space becomes available, there will be public understanding and the pressure to deliver disestablishment. Eventually, the public will say, ‘Now is the time for change.’

And when will ‘eventually’ be?

I cannot give you an answer. We are getting the ball rolling; maybe it will happen in my lifetime, maybe it won’t. But we shall keep pushing for it. And hopefully it will become such a public discussion that, one day, the government will make time for it.

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Further discussion

Bishops in the Lords: why are they still there?

Blasphemy and bishops: how secularists are navigating the culture wars

Bishops in the Lords: Dick Taverne interview – National Secular Society podcast

The post ‘This is not rocket science’: the Disestablishment of the Church of England Bill 2023 appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Charles Freeman is a scholar of the ancient world, perhaps best known for his books Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean (first edition 1996) and The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (2003). The latter argued that the rise of an enforced Christian orthodoxy in the fourth century shut down a millennia-long Greek tradition that prized open-mindedness, argument, and freethought.

I recently met with Freeman over Zoom, both of us appropriately sipping a glass of wine, to discuss his life and work. In particular, we discussed his new book The Children of Athena, which explores, through portraits of major thinkers from the historian Polybius (c.200-c.118 BC) to the mathematician Hypatia (c. AD 355-415), how the Greek intellectual tradition continued to thrive under the Roman Empire until the coming of Christian orthodoxy. Below is an edited transcript along with some audio extracts from our conversation.

Interview

Freethinker: In various of your books, you make mention of your own engagement, throughout your life, with the classical world. So how did this lifelong fascination start?

Charles Freeman: Well, I was at one of the traditional public schools where they did more classics than anything else. We read Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus and the playwrights in the original Greek, so I got some idea of the real versatility and curiosity of the Greek mind, and I much preferred it to Latin. I found the Greek mind much more interesting. I loved the literature and the curiosity about the world that you see, for instance, in the Greek playwrights of the fifth century BC. So it always lingered in the back of my mind that the Greek mind was something special.

When I got a place at Cambridge, I was going to do history. But my father, who was ex-army and struggled as a farmer, said that we did not have much money. My great-great grandfather was a top classicist at Cambridge and one of my great uncles, who died very young, was also a top classicist, so there was a classical tradition in the family. But we were a slightly impoverished family with a very traditional English background, so my father said I was better off with a degree in law because that would make me some money.

And you rebelled against this, presumably?

I think that over the time that I studied law at Cambridge I actually read more history books than law books! I got very bored with the law. I mean, you really have to master the law, and you are not going to be able to change it unless you become prime minister! And I realized by the end of my time in Cambridge that I would never become a lawyer.

But as a present to me for deciding to do law, my father had arranged for me to go to Rome for six months, and I worked like a slave at the British School there. My first job was mending Etruscan pottery and then I was allowed to go out onto excavations and so on [more in the audio extract above]. I was keen on archaeology, but I realised that I was much too harum-scarum to ever be an archaeologist. I noticed that the good archaeologists always had their trenches absolutely neat and tidy, and my trenches were a bit of a muddle.

After I left Cambridge, I went out to teach in Sudan. I did not know what to do in life, like so many people after university, but I did work on one of the sites on the Nile during my Christmas holidays at the ancient site of Meroë. I had also dug at Knidos, which was a Greek city in what is now in Turkey.

So I kept all of this experience at the back of my mind, but then I became a normal history teacher and I ended up working with the International Baccalaureate, which was just beginning in the late 1970s. I worked for 10 years at a sixth-form college in Oxford. And so I was working with modern history.

I finally got a job as chief writer on a 12-volume world history, which enabled me to go back to my interest in the ancient world. The whole project eventually collapsed, but I was able to publish my sections on ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome as a single book for Oxford University Press. That gave me an academic basis from which to study the ancient world, and I have been working on that ever since, writing all kinds of books about it. In the early 2000s, I also began conducting my own tours of ancient sites, and I have kept that up, too.

How did you come to write ‘The Closing of the Western Mind’?

After I had written a book called The Greek Achievement in 1999, I decided that I wanted to write about the Greeks under the Roman Empire. I was fascinated by what actually happened to Greek philosophy when it came up against Christianity. And the end result of that was Closing, which made my name as a slightly alternative, freethinking author.

Your interest is in cultural and intellectual history, as opposed to kings and queens and battles. Why does that fascinate you so much?

I have always been interested in ideas and the way that ideas develop through history, and which ideas are taken up and which are rejected. This was embedded in me by my work with the International Baccalaureate, because there is a compulsory part of the curriculum called ‘Theory of Knowledge’. It is a course in critical thinking, with philosophical underpinnings, and I taught it for 10 years. I got very fascinated by it, and then I was asked to be an examiner, where we set questions based on the whole range of intellectual disciplines. I worked with brilliant minds from all over the world, and we came from all different kinds of disciplines, and I think that embedded the interest in ideas and critical thinking in my mind. I think that has enriched my approach to academic work, too.

That sounds rather similar to the ancient Greek tradition you have written so much about, with its commitment to open-ended enquiry and its great breadth.

Very much so. With my new book The Children of Athena, I have been able to explore all the different ways in which the Greek mind worked. Having had a very solid, traditional education, these Greek thinkers had a good foundation for very clear thinking, and for very diverse forms of thinking, which is really attractive to me.

Before we discuss your new book in more depth, can you talk a little about ‘Closing’ and your 2020 sequel of sorts, ‘The Awakening’ (published in the US as ‘The Reopening of the Western Mind’)?

Closing was concerned with the openness of the Greek mind, its versatility and curiosity, not only through the classical period but through the great Hellenistic period when figures like Archimedes and Hipparchus were flourishing. There were two main strands of Greek philosophy, one inspired by Aristotle’s fascination with the natural world and one inspired by Plato’s focus on the immaterial world, which he saw as being the ultimate reality. I argued that Platonic thought was integrated within the Christian tradition while Aristotle was forgotten until he came back into the university in the medieval period.

And in ‘Closing’, you argue that this Greek intellectual tradition was stifled by the emergence, from the fourth century onwards, of an enforced Christian orthodoxy. Do you think some of your critics misconstrued this as rehashing the now unfashionable idea that antiquity was followed by an age of darkness and ignorance?

I think the title is a good title, but it comes across quite strongly, which might be a reason for that misunderstanding. In The Awakening, I made a point of addressing the very traditional debate between the view that the medieval period was one of innovation versus the idea that it was an age of darkness. I think I was quite fair. I was determined in The Awakening to give full chapters on the medieval university, medieval philosophy, and medieval science, to really explore those in depth, so that I was not vulnerable to critics who might say I was leaping straight from antiquity to the Renaissance and ignoring medieval achievements.

What do you make of historians like Tom Holland, who in his 2019 book ‘Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind’, argued that Christianity essentially made the modern world?

One of the frustrating things about Dominion is that it does not mention the emperor Theodosius and his Council of Constantinople of 381, which fully declared the Trinity, and basically that said everybody who disagreed with its formulation of Christianity were ‘demented heretics’. This made Christianity into an authoritarian religion allied with the imperial Roman state. And it has continued as such ever since! We still have 26 bishops in the House of Lords, and throughout history, they have always been forces for conservatism.

I wrote a book in 2009 called AD 381 because I saw that year as a turning point in European history. This was when Christianity became an authoritarian and conservative religion and when the revolutionary aspects you can find in the Gospels were abandoned. You can see a resurgence of those radical ideas in the seventeenth century, with the birth of the Quakers and other radical Christian sects during the English Civil War. You could also see that in early Christianity, but that tradition was destroyed in the fourth century.

Holland is a distinguished classicist and a very good writer but in Dominion he completely missed the way in which Christianity was integrated into the authoritarian setup of the Roman Empire and how it developed very conservative, authoritarian views. Christianity became a very conservative force in a way that it did not need to be. Christianity was shaped by political and historical forces and could have taken a different path, as shown by the Quakers, who went back to the more radical, earlier forms of Christianity.

What other alternative Christianities could there have been?

I also do feel that I am very heavily criticised for this view, but Augustine had far too much influence. I am an Origen man. Origen, a theologian of the third century, was a sophisticated biblical scholar who thought Greek philosophy could be brought into Christianity. He also disbelieved in eternal punishment. And that is another problem I have with Holland’s book: he writes a very effusive defence of Origen but does not discuss Origen’s theology in great depth. And then later, he very briefly mentions that Origen was declared heretical when the Trinity was proclaimed in 381!

Surely Holland should have probed what heresy meant and discussed why one of the greatest Christian intellectuals was declared a heretic. I felt that Holland did not in any serious way probe into the many problems of Christianity. As it happens, I have been thinking of writing a book called Europe and Christianity: The History of a Troubled Relationship. That is quite a good title, I think. It would, among other things, look at the conflicts between medieval states and the papacy.

The big ethical issue about Christianity is the ethics of exclusion. Jews, Muslims, pagans—you are either in or you are out. And Holland should have probed this more deeply. Why was Origen, one of Christianity’s best sales agents, declared heretical?

Holland might have it that Christianity was a great vehicle for universalism, in that it declared us all to be made in the image of God. But of course, as you say, there are the saved and the damned, which is almost the entire point of Christianity.

Yes, and so you have the problem of Calvinism and the predestination issue. Do you know whether you are saved or not? And then you have the problem with original sin.

Desiderius Erasmus, the great Renaissance scholar, said that he got more out of reading one page of Origen than he did reading ten pages of Augustine. I think that says a lot. Erasmus is one of my heroes. He is so broad-minded. And Martin Luther, when he heard of his death, said that Erasmus was going to hell! The Catholic Church put Erasmus’s works on the Index of Prohibited Books and there is still that very traditional Catholic argument that Erasmus caused the Reformation, which is, of course, not true. There were many other factors which made the Church vulnerable to a reformer who could articulate an alternative theology.

To go back to Holland, perhaps the main problem with his thesis is that he seems to believe that there is just one version of Christianity, and it is the version that happens to align with modern values and that everything else was just an aberration, not ‘true’ Christianity.

Yes. Christianity, for example, buttressed the apartheid regime in South Africa. The Nazis had a Christian church. And, as I said, there were radical Christianities, like the Quakers. So Christianity could be interpreted in every kind of political context.

That sounds similar to the problem with theology that you outline in ‘Closing’, namely that there is an endless proliferation of interpretations in Christianity because there is no rational foundation or agreed-upon set of first principles from which to build. That is why both the defenders and the opponents of slavery in the American South could claim, with equal justification, that God was on their side.

Michael Taylor has written a very good book calledThe Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery, which discusses the Christian, biblical sources used by the defenders of slavery. He stresses how much the Christian churches were in favour of slavery. Remember that it was the Pope who granted the Portuguese the right to enslave Africans back in the fifteenth century. So slavery starts off with a Catholic imprimatur, if you like. Of course, Protestants defended slavery too, even though we hear more about the Christian abolitionists these days.

Moving on to your new book, ‘The Children of Athena’, how does it relate to your previous work?

The book is about how the Greek mind was fertile and intellectually diverse for centuries under the Roman Empire. There was no dogmatism, no sacred canon, no absolutely authoritative texts, no non-negotiable doctrines. All that came in with Christianity. I think the intelligent reader will pick up that theme right at the end of the book, but I did not want to preach. I just wanted to show that the Greek mind was fertile right to the very end.

I have been criticised by some conservative Christians in the past, who say that the Greek mind was stagnant by this period, and that Christianity came along and saved it. So I am trying to argue, in Athena, against that view, without preaching, to show that the Greek mind was alive and well in the period up to the early fifth century.

In the book, you say that Plutarch (c.AD 46—after AD 119) is probably the most appealing of the thinkers you discuss. Why?

I would have loved to have had a landed estate next to Plutarch’s! I would like to have been able to wander over in the cool of the evening for a glass of wine with him. He is a wonderful mind, because he is not only a philosopher, but also a very good historian, and he is very penetrating on the individuals that he includes in his Parallel Lives. He is also a very good practical philosopher, on things like how to control anger and what values you should express in public life. He says that you must be humble and that you must sort out your personality before you enter public life, which is something that I think is still relevant today.

Here is a telling story. Plutarch was far from home when he heard of his young daughter’s death, and he wrote a very moving letter to his wife, a very humane letter, which should be much better known than it is. It shows what a sensitive individual he was, quite apart from being a philosopher and historian. He is my favourite of the figures I discuss in the book.

How did you choose which figures to include in the book?

They were all intellectuals. And the idea was to show the diversity of the figures that I covered. And I obviously had to choose individuals whose material was relatively extant, so that I could get a sense of how they thought and what they achieved. Strabo the geographer (c. 63 BC—c. AD 25) and Dioscorides the botanist (c. AD 40—c. 90), for instance, left behind a lot of material that still survives. And Galen (AD 129—216), of course, the top physician of his day, also left behind an enormous amount of work. The figures I discuss argued for their own place, really, because of what we know about them and the legacy they left behind, which I discuss in a chapter called ‘Afterlives’ at the end of the book.

You include a lot of information on the world these thinkers inhabited, particularly its physicality. How important was this to you?

I think quite important. Particularly for Athens, which I know well. I have been to Sagalassos [an ancient Greek city in modern-day Turkey], the city that I describe in one of the book’s interludes, two or three times, and it is a wonderful site that has been beautifully excavated by the University of Leuven. I also know Aphrodisias with its ancient Sebasteion temple, having visited it three or four times. I have also led tours around the Peloponnese and southwestern Turkey, so I have a good feel for the sites.

The Greeks were wonderful at choosing sites for settlement. Sites had to be close to fertile land and sources of water. The Romans put aqueducts up in many Greek cities, too, so the Greeks and Romans collaborated. In the book, I quote Strabo’s statement that the Greeks chose wonderful sites, while the Romans came and put in pavements and sewers and so on. Basically, all the dirty work!

One of your subjects is the second-century travel writer Pausanias, who is a great source for understanding the sites of the ancient world.

Yes. I think he’s increasingly respected now. He was considered rather pedantic once upon a time, but the more excavations go on, the more they actually find out that he was accurate and that therefore he should be relied on as a guide.

Another figure you discuss is Lucian of Samosata, the fearless second-century satirist whose anti-religious works led to him being mostly disregarded until the Renaissance. Tell us more about him.

An enormous amount of Lucian has survived because he has been very popular throughout the ages. Erasmus was a great fan of his, as were the Renaissance humanists in general, who were much more relaxed about using classical sources than had been the case previously. In the Renaissance, people like Boccaccio, who also admired Lucian, got away from the strict Catholic tradition of dismissing heretics and pagans. They were much more relaxed during the Renaissance.

Who else among your subjects really stands out to you?

Well, my editor particularly liked my chapter on Dioscorides, the botanist, because he had cures for all sorts of ailments.

Then there is Epictetus, the first and second century Stoic philosopher. My son is a psychologist who works in Los Angeles with the meditation app Headspace, and Epictetus could be read today as a guide to mindfulness. So I put my son on to Epictetus!

Ptolemy, the second century astronomer and mathematician, was brilliant. He had quite an extraordinary mind.

Galen, of course, is the top doctor. He understood nerves and pulses [see audio extract, left, for more]. He was well ahead of his time, but very arrogant. He certainly would not have been a nice chap to meet, but if you had an illness, he was the man to go to.

I quite enjoy Plotinus, the third century philosopher. He is quite difficult to understand, but he was certainly a prominent intellectual. His idea of the One influenced Augustine quite a lot.

The theologian Clement of Alexandria (c.AD 150—c.215) wrote beautifully and had a more optimistic outlook on Christianity. Origen, of course, was a brilliant intellectual, and I am pleased to see that he is coming back into favour.

Themistius, the fourth century court orator, always survived. Whenever a new emperor came along, he would say, thank goodness we have you now, the last one was hopeless. And then that emperor died and he would say the same to the next one!

So I think all of the figures I write about have something to say for themselves.

One of the unfortunate things about people like Galen was that as Christian orthodoxy became more rigid, they were frozen into place as absolute authorities. That happened to Aristotle eventually, too. And the open-minded, questioning, empirical method of these thinkers was almost forgotten. Do you think that today, something similar is going on with the narrowing of public discourse? Can we learn from the Greek tradition once more?

Yes, I think it is true that people are very quickly pigeonholed. The breadth of intellectual thought has diminished. We are in a narrower world. I think part of it is that people do not have enough time to read. I come from a tradition where it is assumed that you read widely, and I am not sure people read as widely as they used to. Partly because they do not have the leisure to do so. But there has also been a narrowing of political discourse.

How do you deal with critics of your work?

I noticed with the reception of my book The Closing of the Western Mind that people were open to the arguments, and I do not mind critical reviews that are thoughtful and make good points when disagreeing with me, but I have had one or two reviewers who have not really grasped the ideas behind the book and so they were not able to criticise it effectively.

Is there less tolerance these days?

My wife and I were just talking about this. She asked me if I was able to talk freely during this interview, and I said that the things I talk about are not really difficult topics. But yes, we were discussing what you cannot talk about now.

A couple of quick-fire questions as we approach the end of this interview. First, Plato or Aristotle?

Aristotle, because he saw the beauty in living things.

And second, Athens or Jerusalem?

Athens. I think you know that!

To finish off, do you have any future projects in the works?

I think I will see how The Children of Athena goes. I am beginning to run out of ideas, I think. I feel that I have done a good corpus of books, so we shall see. I am very happy with the range of books I have written. Even if I never wrote another book, I have completed a whole corpus of interlocking books which say what I wanted to say. But I always have ideas bubbling up in my head.

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The post ‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Alex Byrne is not necessarily the sort of person whom you would have expected to become involved in the ‘culture wars’. After an initial career in advertising, he studied philosophy at Birkbeck, King’s College London and Princeton, and then did a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. In 1994 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an Instructor in Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, where he is now a professor. Up till a few years ago, his research centred on abstract philosophical questions like the nature of ‘colour’.

Byrne became interested in the disputes over the meaning of sex and gender in about 2017, after learning about an early academic furore over the analogy or disanalogy between transgenderism and transracialism. He then had a ‘ringside seat’ in the trans debate, or gender debate as it is also known, when his wife, Carole Hooven, was ‘cancelled’ by certain people at Harvard University for publicly expressing her view that sex is biological and binary. His own book, Trouble with Gender, was under contract to Oxford University Press, but the latter withdrew from the contract last year. He discussed the possible reasons for this in an article for Quillette. Trouble with Gender will be published by Polity on 27 October 2023.

I interviewed Professor Byrne across the Atlantic via Zoom. In the edited transcript below, we explore the origins of his interest in the trans debate and his later experience of it, what the debate is actually about, his reasons for writing a book about it, and how a philosopher can contribute to the debate by making clear distinctions.

We also consider how the atmosphere in philosophy departments has changed in recent years, and whether philosophers have a duty to defend words against their destruction.

On debating the trans debate: polite notice

The Freethinker is committed to open, well-reasoned and civilised discussion, in particular on issues where dogma, authoritarianism or fear have led to the suppression or distortion of certain points of view. We are also opposed to extremism and fanaticism of any kind, considering such qualities incompatible with our guiding principles of liberty, reason and humanity. Further discussion here.

We have endeavoured to find contributors to oppose the views advocated in previous articles on the trans or gender debate, but our invitations have so far been met with silence or refusal. If there is anyone out there who has experience or expertise on this topic, and who thinks that the various arguments put forward by Alex Byrne, Helen Joyce and Eliza Mondegreen are fundamentally flawed, we would be delighted to hear from you. Please get in touch via this link.

As always, any opinions expressed below are the sole responsibility of those expressing them.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

Freethinker: How did you get into philosophy in the first place?

Alex Byrne: It was a rather convoluted route. I think that is true of many philosophers. I started off doing mathematics and physics and then I worked in advertising in London for a number of years. And while I was doing that, I went to Birkbeck College in the evenings to study for a second undergraduate degree in philosophy. I had always been interested in philosophy, but in Britain at the time, it was very hard to put a name to the sorts of issues that I was interested in. I did not realise that there was an actual subject that dealt with these problems and questions that fascinated me. One formative episode was when I saw Men of Ideas by Bryan Magee. I also read AJ Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, and found it completely enthralling. I believed for a while that logical positivism was the solution to all philosophical problems – I was soon disabused of that.

Looking back over your career in the philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics, what are the contributions you have made to these fields of which you are the most proud?

That is a difficult question. You should really ask someone else about my contributions, such as they are. I have done a lot of work on perception, and in particular the perception of colour. Most of this has been with David Hilbert, a philosopher at the University of Illinois, Chicago. We have written many papers together defending the view that colours are physical properties. In particular, they are just ways of altering the incident light. This is quite a controversial view in the philosophy of colour – a little subdiscipline of philosophy. One view that is perhaps more popular than our physicalist view goes back to the ancient Greeks, that nothing actually is coloured. Even though it seems or looks as if tomatoes are red and grass is green and the sky is blue, in fact, this is just some sort of global illusion and nothing is really coloured. Or at best, if something really is coloured, it is an item in the mind, a mental image or picture.

I think it was Democritus who said, ‘By convention hot, by convention cold, but in reality atoms and void…’

Yes. Democritus is the standard source for this eliminativist view. As that quotation brings out, it is not just colour that is supposed to be an illusion or only in the mind or a matter of convention. It is also other perceptible properties like heat, tastes, smells, sounds and so on.

How and why did you move from this rather abstruse subject to sex and gender?

I had always been interested in sex differences and the explanation of sex differences – why males and females of our species in particular differ in some trait. Also I had always been interested in issues of free speech and was temperamentally inclined towards an absolutist position about speech. And then, in 2017, the philosopher Rebecca Tuvel published a paper called ‘In Defense of Transracialism’, which appeared in the leading journal of feminist philosophy, Hypatia. There was a huge fuss about this paper, which essentially argued that the same courtesies and tolerant attitude granted to a transgender person like Caitlyn Jenner should be extended towards a transracial person like Rachel Dolezal.

The whole message of Tuvel’s paper was very progressive, and you might have thought that, within feminist philosophy, her paper would have been praised. But instead, the opposite happened: it was widely condemned as having the potential to cause great harm to various communities. An open letter appeared signed by many academics, including Judith Butler, the author of Gender Trouble, calling for the paper’s retraction. It was not retracted in the end, fortunately, but it brought home to me very vividly that philosophy at that time had an extremely intolerant side, opposed to academic freedom, which I thoroughly disapproved of.

You mentioned Judith Butler’s book, Gender Trouble. Your book is called Trouble with Gender. Is that a deliberate allusion?

Yes. It is also an allusion to Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham, the British science fiction writer.

You talk about the trouble that Tuvel’s paper caused in academic philosophy. When I was at Oxford in the 2000s, the Philosophy Faculty had a reputation for competitive, no-holds-barred debate. From what I have heard, that was true of many philosophy departments at the time. Is it still the case today? Is frank discussion still possible in university philosophy departments?

Yes, it certainly is, although I think that, over the years, that style of open combat and trying to tear the speaker down has changed. Back in the day, when an invited speaker came to deliver a talk at a colloquium, the attitude of some philosophers was, ‘We have to go into the talk with the aim of humiliating the speaker or destroying his or her ideas, and if we do that, then that is a satisfactory colloquium session.’ Sometimes philosophers went too far in that regard, and the result was that the discipline was less hospitable and welcoming to some people than it should have been.

Now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction: the emphasis is much more on constructive criticism and telling the speaker that his or her paper was excellent and incisive and a great contribution to the topic at hand. There is much more overt praising of speakers at the end of talks than there used to be. And as far as hot-button topics like sex and gender go, unfortunately it is not possible to have a freewheeling discussion without some people getting offended or hurt. As a result, we do not have no-holds-barred discussions about what women are or whether sex is binary.

This timidity came as something of a surprise to me. Philosophers talk a big game. They say, ‘Oh, of course, nothing’s off the table. We philosophers question our most deeply held assumptions. Some of what we say might be very disconcerting or upsetting. You just won’t have any firm ground to stand on after the philosopher has done her work and convinced you that you don’t even know that you have two hands. After all, you might be the victim of an evil demon or be a hapless brain in a vat.’

But when the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing. When there is the real prospect of being socially shamed or ostracised by their peers for questioning orthodoxy, many philosophers do not have the stomach for it.

In your experience, is that true on both sides of the Atlantic?

Yes.

Apart from the trans or gender debate, are there any other issues that cause this amount of friction?

At the moment it is mainly sex and gender. Race is another topic with plenty of no-go zones, in philosophy and elsewhere. Interestingly, in the subdiscipline called the philosophy of race, it is perfectly acceptable to argue for a biological theory of race – that what it is to be black or east Asian or white is to have a certain kind of ancient ancestry, a pure matter of biology, in some broad sense. 

Why is it that this issue of what a person is, or rather, what a woman is, has become such a huge bone of contention among so many people?

That is a good question. I am not sure what the answer is. The question, what is a woman, was asked most famously by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949). And feminist philosophers have been obsessed with the question ever since. But it has never before had the valence that it has now. I suspect that part of the explanation is that in the UK, for example, organisations like Stonewall started hanging their hat on the slogan that ‘trans women are women’. If they had said instead, ‘trans women are trans women’, or ‘trans women deserve to be treated as women’, there is no reason why the issue of what a woman is would have become so contentious. It is quite surreal the way the ‘what is a woman’ question is now used as a kind of ‘gotcha’ question to ask politicians.

In response to this question, for instance, Keir Starmer, the current Labour leader, said in 2021 that it was ‘not right’ to say that only women have a cervix. Then in March this year, he said that, ‘For 99.9 per cent of women, it is completely biological … and of course they haven’t got a penis.’ Finally, in July, he decided that a woman is an ‘adult female’. And as you point out in your book, ‘woman’ was Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2022. Is there a sort of fixation on this question? Why is it always about women?

Of course it is ‘what is a woman?’ – rather than ‘what is a man?’ Not because the ‘woman’ version of the question is harder to answer, but because issues of access to various spaces – sporting competitions, prisons, shelters and so on – are really only an issue for women; there is not a corresponding issue for men. Generally speaking, men could not give a fig about whether trans men are included in men-only sporting contests or use men’s changing rooms or are in the male prison estate. In fact, I think most trans men would very wisely choose to be in the female estate rather than the male estate.

This is one of those rare examples, like the Beatles, where the direction of cultural export goes from the UK to the US. The ‘adult human female’ slogan started in the UK, in 2018, when the infamous billboard went up that quoted the then Google dictionary definition: ‘Woman, wʊmən, noun, adult human female’.

It was only some years later that this made its way over the Atlantic, when Matt Walsh, a conservative commentator who is very popular over here, made a documentary called What is a Woman? The answer that Walsh’s wife gives at the end of the documentary is that a woman is an ‘adult human female’. To get to that rather unexciting point, Walsh interviewed many experts – including, memorably, a gender studies professor – who were completely unable to answer the question coherently.

To sum up, what is really at the heart of the trans debate? What exactly is it about?

That is a good question. There are specific questions or specific issues that divide the so-called gender-critical side from the trans-activist side. One question is about the nature of women and men. What is it to be a woman or a man? Another question is about the nature of sex. Are there two sexes or more than two? Or is sex in some sense socially constructed? Is the notion of sex in good order anyway? Maybe it should be completely junked. And another question is about gender identity. Do we all have gender identities? And is a misaligned gender identity the explanation of why some people suffer distress at their sexed bodies?

There are all these specific issues which are hotly debated. And then, of course, there is the even more contentious issue of how to treat children and adolescents with gender dysphoria – whether to give some of them puberty blockers, for example.

But beyond listing these questions, it is not clear to me that there is some sort of overarching issue which is really what the whole trans debate is about. Everyone sensible in this debate thinks that trans people should be afforded the same dignity and rights as everyone else. They should not be discriminated against, they should receive proper health care, they should be treated with respect in day-to-day life just like their fellow citizens, and if some adults wish to transition, they should be able to.

Is the struggle for trans rights analogous to the historic struggle for gay rights?

No, it is not, because there is no particular right being demanded that trans people lack.

Are there points at which women’s rights and trans rights, whatever these are, will inevitably clash, or do you think there is a way of reconciling them?

I would not put it in terms of a clash of rights, but there certainly are points of conflict. The most obvious of these is in sports. If you are a trans woman and you live your life as a woman and are treated by most people as a woman, it is at least understandable that you would wish to join the women’s team or take part in women’s sporting competitions. On the other side, women have an interest in having female-only categories for many sports. So there is a clear conflict of interest there. Another clear conflict of interest is in the case of prisons.

Let’s talk about your book in a bit more detail. In the ‘acknowledgements’ section, you say your greatest debt is to your wife, Carole Hooven, who was a lecturer on human evolutionary biology at Harvard. In 2021, she published T, which was a popular science book about testosterone. Last year, she wrote an article describing how she was accused of transphobia by certain members of Harvard for explaining on Fox News that sex is binary and biological. To what extent have your wife’s experiences influenced your own interest in the trans (or gender) debate and your views about it?

As a result of the episode you mention, Carole is no longer a lecturer in human evolutionary biology at Harvard. She has a position as an associate in the psychology department, in Steven Pinker’s lab. When this whole affair snowballed, it became apparent that it was not feasible for her to continue teaching in her old department. So she left. Carole’s experiences influenced the book a great deal. In addition to witnessing the backlash against Rebecca Tuvel, Kathleen Stock and other philosophers like Holly Lawford-Smith, I got a ringside seat when it came to Carole’s own cancellation over sex and gender.

That experience made me more determined to write a book on the topic. It is not that I am a particularly courageous person, but it did seem to be extremely unchivalrous to stand by and do nothing when I knew that I had things to say. And many philosophers were promulgating various confusions and mistakes which, I thought, I was in a position to correct.

Where would you put yourself politically?

I am a boring centrist. I have no political affiliation to speak of. I have always voted Democrat in the US. Temperamentally, I think I would really like to be a conservative, but I have never found an intellectually satisfactory way of being one. Socially, I have liberal views of the sort held by most academics.

In your introduction to Trouble with Gender, you write that your book is not about the ‘vitriolic political issues’ associated with the trans debate. Nonetheless, it was refused publication by Oxford University Press, after previously having been accepted. Why do you think OUP refused to publish your book in the end?

This is speculation on my part, but it is worth looking at the immediate history, in particular the fuss over Holly Lawford-Smith’s book Gender Critical Feminism, also published by Oxford University Press. Announcement of its publication produced two petitions of complaint. As I discussed in Quillette, one of these was signed by the OUP Guild (the union representing OUP staff in New York). The other was signed by ‘members of the international scholarly community with a relationship of some kind, or several kinds, to Oxford University Press’. The letters protested against the publication of Lawford-Smith’s book and told OUP to change its procedures so this sort of thing would never happen again.

As for my book, it is not as if OUP should have been surprised by what I actually produced, because I wrote a proposal, eagerly accepted at first, which accurately described the final manuscript. OUP’s single formal complaint against the book, namely that it did not treat the subject in ‘a sufficiently serious or respectful way’, is ludicrous. At least, I hope that readers will find it ludicrous.

Do you think that OUP’s response to your book is a symptom of the way things are going in academia at the moment? Is there a cowardice and an unwillingness to deal with arguments that challenge a particularly entrenched view about things?

Yes, for sure. It is a worrying trend. It is the same phenomenon as the philosophers who talk the talk but do not walk the walk. To put it another way, when academic publishing is subjected to a genuine stress test, it completely fails, even though the advertising beforehand was that it would work perfectly. OUP publishes all sorts of controversial philosophy books, which defend views that other philosophers think are ridiculous, misguided, or completely wrong. Often, in the pages of OUP philosophy books, the author will criticise other philosophers in the most uncompromising terms. It also happens that OUP philosophy books are reviewed by other philosophers in an extremely critical way.

So you might think that OUP would gladly publish a book on a hot topic like sex and gender – maybe that book would get trashed by other philosophers, but this is just the way of academic publishing, and nothing to be ashamed of. That is not what happened.

Your book is designed for a popular rather than an academic audience. Did you intend it to stir up controversy or make inflammatory claims?

No. I knew that some of the claims would be controversial. For example, there is a chapter in which the view that women are adult human females is defended. There is a chapter on sex which defends the orthodox view of what sex is and tries to expose various confusions surrounding this topic. There is a chapter which argues that gender identity, at least as people popularly conceive of it, is a myth. All these are inflammatory claims, but I did not intend to provoke or stir up controversy. No doubt I will, though. The book has eight chapters, and each one will annoy some people.

What does your book contribute to the trans debate that has not been said before?

It is a very different book from, say, Helen Joyce’s Trans or Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls. It deliberately does not take a stand on any social and political issues. It is not written from a feminist or gender critical perspective. It just brings the tools of philosophy to bear on the questions that everyone seems to be asking these days and tries to sort things out. The fact that it is not about social and political issues gives me more room to treat these topics in the detail that they deserve.

I would regard it as a success if readers discovered how you can actually argue about these issues. They do not even have to have to agree with what I say; they just have to see how evidence and argument can be brought to bear on questions like, ‘what is a woman?’ or ‘does everyone have a gender identity?’ Normally, in public discussions of these issues, people do not really argue, in the sense that one side presents evidence and reasons and then the other side counters or presents their own evidence and reasons. They start shouting at each other instead.

What can a philosopher specifically contribute to a debate about sex and gender? Should it not be left to the biologists and psychologists?

I hope that my book demonstrates exactly what a philosopher can bring to the table. Philosophers are good at making crucial distinctions, being relatively clear and precise, and being able to set out arguments in the appropriate way, so that you see why the conclusion follows from the premises. It is not possible to master all academic disciplines in one life, so we need contributions from different specialists. That includes the biologists and the psychologists, but sometimes their discussions of these topics are flawed because they lack a crucial tool from the philosophical toolkit. But it must be admitted that philosophers also have their blind spots and weaknesses.

You observe in your book that ‘a concerning feature of debates around sex and gender is the attempt to prevent distinctions from being made by prohibiting or redefining certain words.’ How far would you argue that sex and gender should be distinguished, and why?

In one way sex and gender should not be distinguished at all, because one of the many senses of the word ‘gender’ is simply ‘sex’. That is, ‘gender’ is sometimes just a synonym for ‘sex’; in this sense, sex and gender are the same. Because ‘gender’ has many other meanings, and to avoid confusion, I think it would be a good idea only to use the word ‘gender’ to mean sex. That is my first point.

My second point is that there are all these other things which we definitely want to distinguish from sex. For example, we want to distinguish being male from being masculine. Everyone going back to the ancient Greeks has seen that there is a distinction here. You can be a feminine male or a masculine female, and one sense of ‘gender’ is as a label for masculinity and femininity. We need to distinguish being male from being masculine, but there is absolutely no reason to use the word ‘gender’ to mark that distinction.

Another distinction we would want to make is that between being female and being a woman. There are numerous females who are neither humans nor adults, so there are females who are not women. On anyone’s view, there is a distinction here. You should not identify being female with being a woman, even if you think that all women are female. Now another sense of ‘gender’ is as a label for the categories man, woman, boy, girl. But again, it is a terrible idea to use the word ‘gender’ to mark this distinction between being female and being a woman.

Another distinction is between being female and having a female gender identity. Assuming we can make sense of the notion of ‘gender identity’ in the first place, we need to distinguish between being female and having a female gender identity, because some males can have a female gender identity, for example. Yet another sense of ‘gender’ is ‘gender identity’. But yet again, it is a bad idea to use the single word ‘gender’ to mark the distinction: we already have the phrase ‘gender identity’ and we should use that instead.

It is sometimes argued that the claim that trans people cannot change gender is incompatible with a humane (or humanist) outlook. Or that to require trans people to live in the sex which they are ‘assigned’ at birth, rather than accepting that they can change, is contrary to their human rights. Therefore, it is argued, to be ‘gender critical’ is fundamentally a right-wing, if not extremist, position, and harsh and oppressive to trans people. What would you say in response to this line of argument?

I am not a gender critical feminist, but it is not part of their position that people should not transition. And if people do transition, it is not part of the gender critical position that they should be discriminated against or their human rights should be reduced or downgraded. If you think of transitioning as it was always thought of, as a palliative measure to deal with gender dysphoria, then assuming that this actually works, at least for some people, it is hard to see what objection there could be to it, because it is an effective medical procedure to deal with a troubling psychological condition. It is not that people transition just for the hell of it or to gain access to women’s spaces. They transition because life has become unbearable living as their natal gender or natal sex.

Like many people on the side of free speech in debates of this kind, you quote from George Orwell’s 1984 in your book. You choose the part where Syme, a worker on the Newspeak dictionary, says,

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words … Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’

In your view, how far is the whole of the trans debate – or gender debate – really a battle about words?

In one way, it is not about words at all. Take the question of what a woman is. That question is not about the word ‘woman’, although of course I have asked it using the word ‘woman’. I am interested in people of a certain kind, women, not in any English words.

But in another way the trans debate is about words. Various trans activist projects concern language: if you can stop people from using various words or get them to use other words or phrases instead, then the various distinctions that the activists do not want to be made, become a lot harder to make. One example of this is the frequent replacement of ‘sex’ with ‘sex assigned at birth’. If you want to get people to stop talking about the fact that we come in male and female varieties, then one excellent way of doing it is to try and enforce a rule where you never say that someone is ‘female’, but instead that she was ‘assigned female at birth’. This has the effect of suggesting that people’s sex is a matter of some doubt or speculation – that maybe no one really knows what sex people are.

Similarly, for expressions like ‘cervix havers’ or ‘uterus havers’ – if you want to avoid the suggestion that any adult female person is a woman, then substituting ‘uterus haver’ for ‘woman’ is an effective way of doing that. Language is extremely important if you are an activist – for the reason that Orwell identified in that quotation.

Do you think that philosophers have a duty to defend words against their destruction?

They have a duty to defend established ways of making valuable distinctions. One very valuable distinction is between males and females. To the extent that people are trying to prevent others from making that distinction, philosophers, I suppose, should step in and say, ‘no, stop, that’s a bad idea’. But that is not to say that anyone will listen to us.

In your experience of academia in the US and elsewhere, how far would you say that free and open enquiry and debate are under threat in today’s environment? 

We are going through a bad patch – I do not think there is any doubt about that. But the pendulum will swing back sooner or later. There are already many signs of pushback; books seem to be coming out all the time explaining what went wrong and how we can correct things. I have a book that just came out called The Identity Trap by the Johns Hopkins political scientist Yascha Mounk, all about the origins of so-called ‘wokeness’ – which is of course closely connected to this present cultural moment and the enthusiasm for cancelling speakers and shutting down certain kinds of speech.

So there is already some momentum in the other direction, and, if history is any guide, these things come in waves and recede eventually. But that does not mean that we should just sit back and do nothing.

Do you hope that your book will help to push the pendulum back in the other direction?

I hope that in a very small way it will widen the Overton window and broaden boundaries of acceptable speech to some extent – whether people agree with the conclusions or not.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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On academic freedom, see further:

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities – interview with Steven Greer

Free speech at universities: where do we go from here? by Julius Weinberg

And on the trans debate:

‘A godless neo-religion’ – interview with Helen Joyce

‘The falsehood at the heart of the trans movement’, by Eliza Mondegreen

The post ‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

Sarah Bakewell is what you might call a non-organised humanist. That is not to say she is disorganised (far from it), but that she has developed her conception of humanism individually, over many years and to a large extent independently of the official humanist ‘movement’. Her previous books include a biography of Montaigne, a narrative study of Sartre and the existentialists, and two ‘true stories’ of eighteenth and nineteenth-century adventurers.

Bakewell’s latest book, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope, published by Chatto & Windus in March, represents her attempt to synthesise at least three distinct ‘humanist’ trends of thought that emerged, primarily in Europe, between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries: the literary culture of Petrarch and the Renaissance umanisti; the philosophical humanism of Voltaire and the Enlightenment; and the expressly non-religious, scientifically inclined humanism of figures like TH Huxley and those involved in early organised humanism.

Humanly Possible has already attracted attention. Bakewell has been profiled by the New York Times; her book has been reviewed by the philosopher Julian Baggini and Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and featured on BBC Radio 4. She also gave this year’s Rosalind Franklin lecture, held annually by Humanists UK, on the topic of humanist women.

I interviewed Sarah Bakewell in the British Library. Over a cup of tea, we explored some of her ideas in depth – from the relationship between humanistic and scientific humanisms to how to find meaning without religion.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Freethinker: How does Humanly Possible relate to your previous books, as well as to your own intellectual development?

Sarah Bakewell: It definitely grew out of the previous two books. The spark was thinking about Montaigne as a humanist, and what role the humanist tradition played in his education and his attitude, but also how he rebelled against and reinvented it, and was much less reverent towards it compared to other people of his father’s generation. And humanism was connected with existentialism: Jean Paul Sartre famously gave a lecture after the end of the Second World War, saying that ‘existentialism is a humanism’ – then he kept changing his mind about it.

I also wanted to understand more about the connections between the different forms of humanism and their development in different eras and contexts. Thirdly, it was about what humanism meant to me. I have always been a humanist, although for years I did not use the label.

Are there any translations in the pipeline?

Yes. There are a dozen or so on their way, including German, Italian, French, and two Chinese editions – one for Taiwan and one for China.

Will the one for China be censored?

One publisher, who I did not go with in the end, said that any mention of religion would need to be cut, which is strange in a book about humanism. It was different compared to the last book, where none of this came up. I think there has been a shift in how much publishers feel they have to self-censor. But there were certain compromises that I would not and did not make.

Was religion a part of your life growing up?

No. My background was absolutely atheist. My parents were non-religious. My father was brought up as a Baptist and he rebelled against that when he was a teenager, and had the whole church praying for his soul as a result. My mother was never a believer. So I was lucky in that I did not have to go through that painful, challenging process of rejecting what you have been brought up with. My grandmother, the Baptist one, did hope that she might be able to get me interested in religion. She sent me a children’s pictorial Bible, which I loved because it had great stories, like fairy tales, with beautiful illustrations. But I never took it literally.

Would you now consider yourself agnostic, atheist or something else?

Theoretically, I am inclined to say agnostic, simply because you cannot prove a negative. But I am more of an atheist by personal conviction. There are parts of what institutional religion does that appal me. But there are parts that I respect, because religious activity is a form of human activity and artistic creation. I enjoy going into churches, and even reading religious books sometimes. I love the beauty that can be found in religious traditions.

But for me, the real beauty comes from contemplating the universe, what we know about it and what we might still discover, the scale of what we see in the night sky and how it might all work. The desire to find out more about the universe inspires me much more than religious traditions.

When did you first start using the label ‘humanist’ for yourself?

About 15 years ago. Definitely before I started writing this book. I have never been much of a joiner of organisations, but I did join Humanists UK when I started writing it. Labels are not something I usually feel very drawn to using. I think that might be true of many humanists, who by disposition want something subtler and more individual.

How much of your research was in the UK and how much elsewhere?

A lot of it was in the British Library, where we are now sitting, as well as the Warburg Institute, the London Library and the Bishopsgate Institute. I spend a lot of time in Italy anyway [Bakewell’s wife, Simonetta Ficai-Veltroni, is Italian]. I did not do much research in Italian libraries, but I did try to find out more about the places where the humanists of the early modern era lived. Padua stands out, because it was important for university life and education, particularly in the history of medicine. Chapter 4 of the book is about medicine and humanism. In the medical university at Padua you can stand in the Anatomical Theatre [built in 1595] and imagine what it would have been like to be a medical student, seeing the anatomising of a body – a process which is of course so important for good medical education, and thus for better medicine, and thus for better human welfare.

Petrarch, who is the main character of Chapter 1, lived close to Padua towards the end of his life, and was involved with the university and the local community. I also visited Avignon, where Petrarch grew up, and Paris. I spent a few days in Chartres. The cathedral there has got nothing to do with humanism in the non-religious sense, but it had everything to do with the flowering of education and a proto-scholarly humanism that started there and in other French centres before it started in Italy. It gives you such a different perspective when you are in a place. I visited Basel, which was the closest Erasmus came came to having a home – in fact, he spent most of his time travelling around and said that ‘My home is wherever I keep my library.’ Which sums him up, really.

Your focus is primarily from fourteenth to late twentieth-century Europe. Why did you choose this period, and those specific starting and finishing points?

Petrarch marks the beginning of the self-consciously modern revival of classical learning in Europe. He saw himself as bringing the light back from the classical world and starting a moral as well as an intellectual revival. In that sense, he is often called the first humanist, so it seemed a sensible place to start. The story tends to focus mainly on Europe, with some reaching in other directions, particularly to America. That was deliberate, because I needed to impose some kind of structure, limit and coherence. The people involved were influenced by each other, read each other, and responded to each other’s work.

I thought about ending with a more substantial survey of where humanism is now. But this has already been written about by others, and it is still very much a live story, changing and developing. I did not think I could do it justice unless I had a large section on it. And I am more of a historian by temperament.

You read philosophy at university. It seems to me that you are a little ruthless with Plato and Aristotle, writing that they ‘were (in most respects) not very humanistic’, and preferring Democritus, a fragmentary Presocratic, and the obscure sophist Protagoras. What made you take this approach?

From the fragments that we have of Protagoras, he and Democritus were in many respects proto-humanists, in the tradition of materialist philosophy. There is one fragment of Protagoras which says, ‘as to the gods, I know nothing about them’. This and other Presocratic sources suggest that, because we cannot know anything about the gods, it is not worth spending time worrying about them. There is a similar tradition of materialism in ancient India.

Your book talks about Cicero’s idea of humane studies, including in his speech in defence of Archias, where he identifies a ‘common bond’ between the ‘arts that concern humanity’. How far are these ideas a starting point for Renaissance humanism?

The Ciceronian idea of the ‘human and literary studies’ is really at the foundation of Renaissance humanism. This interest in Cicero was kick-started by Petrarch, who really admired Cicero, although he did criticise him as well. But others came along after him who thought Cicero was an almost godlike figure and could not be questioned, and that his style in Latin should be imitated absolutely. There was a tension between the kind of humanists who were obsessed with classical models and the ones that were more questioning and critical.

You point out that Renaissance humanists like Petrarch were concerned about literary style even when writing in an emotional state or about distressing topics. Is this an idea that would be worth considering for modern humanists?

We still recognise the importance of speaking and writing in an articulate way, though it does not go under the name of eloquence any more. But sometimes we are suspicious of the veneer of polished speaking. There is the idea, which started with the Romantics, that beautiful words mean nothing, and just cover up authentic feelings. This idea was alien to the Renaissance humanists, who would have said that deep feeling should be communicated as powerfully as possible. They also took from classical literature the idea that real eloquence must always be allied to virtue, or goodness.

We seem to have a double standard. On the one hand, we – at least I – do not trust the likes of Boris Johnson, who uses Latin quotations elegantly and is educated in the tradition of eloquence and classical reference, without that necessarily being a reflection of goodness or honesty. On the other hand, we can also be judgemental about people who do not express themselves very fluently.

Among the people you mention in your ‘Acknowledgements’ is Andrew Copson, the CEO of Humanists UK. To what extent did you consult with him or any humanist organisations during your research and writing?

I talked to Andrew, who was very helpful, and to one or two other humanists. Almost as a matter of principle, though, I mainly worked with my own idea of what I wanted to write. I did not not want to feel that I was presenting a view of humanism that was officially sanctioned by humanist organisations. Although I did include Humanist International’s Declaration of Modern Humanism (2022) as an appendix.

Is there anything in the 2022 Declaration (the latest version of the Amsterdam Declaration of 1952) that you would disagree with or want to modify?

No. One change I agree with is the emphasis on the need for humanism to involve respect and concern for the rest of the natural world and for other species, not only for human beings. There is a misconception out there that humanism is the same thing as anthropocentrism and that it implies not caring about other species.

Why should humanists care about other species?

On the simplest level, because we cannot survive without them. We are of this planet, and woven into the biodiversity around us. The general humanist approach also involves a sense of responsibility for the impact we can have on the planet. We have considerable powers technologically and by sheer force of numbers; I think we need to own up to that responsibility.

You identify ‘freethinking, enquiry and hope’ as consistent aspects of humanism throughout your period of study. Why these three?

These three points apply to all the widely divergent forms of humanism that I discuss in the book – not just modern humanism of the secular or non-religious sort, but also the scholarly and literary humanism of the Renaissance and the philosophical interest in human well-being and dignity of the Enlightenment.

To what extent can we really talk about a single humanism running through all these different threads?

I tackle that in the opening pages of the book. It is there in the word: they are all practices or ways of thinking which have the human realm as the centre of their concern – whether culture, literature and the studies of the humanities, or human nature and well-being. And modern humanism involves a sense of morality and meaning that comes from human relationships and human concerns.

I mean ‘freethinking’ in the broadest sense of not taking anything on authority alone – whether that be the authority of religious institutions or political ones. ‘Enquiry’ is linked to that, but it involves asking questions and undertaking intellectual investigations in a more active sense – something many of the humanists did with gusto.

‘Hope’ is a little different. We cannot just be naïvely optimistic, but a humanist does have some sense that we can use our faculties and talents and our abilities to improve the well-being of other people and of other living things, to achieve a better politics, to solve our problems to as large an extent as we can. It was well summed up by Bertrand Russell, who features towards the end of the book precisely for what he said about the need to have hope in ourselves. Today, many people are in despair over the state of the world. But I think that losing hope is an abdication of responsibility and also risks being a self-fulfilling prophecy. We have to have some sense that we are capable of using our best abilities constructively.

Your book focuses primarily on individuals who were humanist in different ways. Was your choice of characters a personal one, or were you influenced by other accounts of humanism?

I was influenced by who I was interested in and who had something new to contribute. I tried to ensure that everybody that features in the book advances the story in some way, or stands for a wider process. I did not want to write a reference book merely listing lots of names, but something that was fun to read.

You use photographs to illustrate some of your main characters. Where did you find them, and why did you decide to add this pictorial element?

I took many of them from picture libraries. I wanted to have images to make it easier on the eye, but I did not want it to be just portraits. I tried to choose images that were a bit different or unexpected. In a few cases, there are contemporary political cartoons of people, rather than portraits, and in other cases, pictures of title pages or manuscripts that illuminate the text in some way.

Did you make any surprising discoveries during the course of your research?

There were a lot of things that were surprising to me, because when I write books, I find out a lot as I go along. I think that is more fun for the reader too, because we are going along together. Some of the characters were more interesting than I expected them to be – for example, Matthew Arnold, who wrote Culture and Anarchy, which I had had on my shelves for years but never read because I thought it would be boring. He is conservative and Victorian sometimes, but his writing is interesting, and he is endearing and enjoyable from a humanist point of view – I warmed to him. Wilhelm von Humboldt is another character who was full of surprises, not least his kinky fantasy life.

Your book discusses the debate Matthew Arnold had with TH Huxley about the relative importance of the humanities and literary studies versus the sciences. In 1959, CP Snow revived this debate with his Rede lecture on the ‘two cultures’. These days, it seems, if anything, too easy for scientists to take pot shots at the humanities for their irrelevance, lack of rigour or stagnation in the morass of literary theory. How far can the literary and scientific approaches to life, or more specifically literary and scientific humanism, be reconciled?

The clue to it is, again, in that idea of human studies. The universe is physical; we are physical beings. Some people would see that as invalidating all of the ‘human studies’ or humanities, as if they are somehow irrelevant because they do not correspond to how the universe is. But human studies are not irrelevant to us, because we are human beings. We are social and cultural by our nature, and so the human realm is enormously interesting to us. It is the sea in which we swim all the time – it is language, culture, communication, society, politics. The two cultures are connected, I think, not contradictory.

You say you like contemplating the universe. This reminds me of Kant’s idea of sublimity: ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’. Is there an argument that the scientific perspective is fundamentally inhuman because its focus is on the very big and the very small, on the objective and not the subjective human experience? Isn’t the human, from the scientific point of view, just a collection of processes or cells or atoms?

Yes, but the paradox is that the science that we do, the ability to visualise and study the very large or the very small, is a human activity. There is no getting away from the human, for us. One of the things that is fascinating about science as a human activity is that it does try to set aside human preconceptions, perspectives, prejudices, and to work from the evidence – and that is a truly impressive thing to do. But even that – working out scientific methods, testing hypotheses, looking for falsifications and evidence – is still a human activity.

At the end of the book, you briefly mention posthumanism and transhumanism. How might the development of technologies like artificial intelligence affect humanism, and what it means to be a human, in the future?

This is a difficult question, because we do not know where we are going and things are moving very fast. We are already closely integrated with our technology, and are likely to be ever more so. Is there a line that we would one day cross, when we would no longer be the same? Have we crossed it already? I do not know the answer to that because it is all developing under our noses. I am wary of simplistic answers as to whether there will always be some human ‘essence’. I really do not know.

Your book was published in March this year, and you have said elsewhere that you spent about six years writing it. Those years were also a very eventful period in Britain. Did the turbulent political atmosphere have an effect on your book?

It was quite dramatic because I started working on it in early 2016, and then Brexit happened, and Trump. Since then, there have been all sorts of further blows to our sense of confidence in human common sense, if you like. I tried to keep reminding myself of what Bertrand Russell and others have said, that the greater the challenge to our sense of hope in ourselves, the more we actually need that hope – and the more we need a sense of faith in ourselves and in our processes, in our better political institutions, legal protections, free press, and the ability to talk openly about issues and to establish effective media of communication between countries. Altogether, we need more of our good qualities rather than just giving up on them.

Bertrand Russell [1872-1970] also experienced growing up in a hopeful time and then having to realise that things would not always simply get better and better. That is not how human history has ever gone. There will always be complications, steps backwards, obstacles and wrong moves, but it is wiser to expect that and not to be naïvely optimistic. And, as always, it is up to us. If things are going to be even a bit better in this world, we are going to have to do it.

Does the humanist have a natural political stance? Or should humanists today subscribe to any particular political views about anything?

No. I do not think there is any inevitable connection with any particular political viewpoint. In the nineteenth century, Humboldt and Mill were classical liberals, but Matthew Arnold, whose views about culture and education had much in common with theirs, was a small ‘c’ conservative. I am more interested in how the humanist dimension works with various political positions.

Where would you put yourself on the political spectrum?

I would say I am a humanist liberal.

Does the humanist today have a moral obligation to be involved in any sort of political campaigning or activism, or can they live a quiet life?

Personally, I live a fairly quiet life – I am not a political activist. That is just me. So I have to say that it is not necessary to be politically active in order to be a humanist! But looking through history, a lot of humanists were politically active, or became so. Bertrand Russell, for example, started as a scholarly logician, mathematician and philosopher, but was politicised by the First World War and decided from then on to write political material as well, and campaign for political causes. Renaissance humanists were often engaged with the politics of their city and their environment. Humanists are often drawn to political activity because it goes with the idea that it is up to us to make the world that we want to have.

You emphasise the importance of freethinking and enquiry to humanism – which leads naturally to the question of how important you think free speech is today, and where you would draw the line. How far should free enquiry go?

I am drawn to the free speech end of that continuum: I think things should be talked about. If we are ever going to say that something should not be talked about, we had better give a very good reason why not. There are certain things that disturb me when I hear them said, but I am not sure that the best method of stopping people from saying them is just to silence them. I would want to ask why people might be saying those things, what that implies about us as a society, and where we should go from there.

Your book is full of references to happiness, human fulfilment, and the need for connections between people. Is writing a way in which you make connections?

There is a relationship with the reader. But part of the nature of writing is that you do not know what everybody who reads it thinks or wants to say back to you. I think that is as it should be. It is nice to hear back from readers, but that is not the primary reason why I write. It is a way of discovering things for myself as I go along, and taking other readers with me. It is like walking along a path together, but without knowing who the readers are – that is part of the appeal. I like the idea that people could make something out of the book that I would never dream of.

A recurring motif in the book is the idea that humanists can, in a sense, live on in their writings after they are dead. Is this also a motivation for you?

No. Most of the things that any individual does gradually fade away out of view after they are dead. Even those we think of as timeless classics – Plato and Aristotle and Protagoras – it is too early to say whether they are all going to endure. They became fragments. There would be an egocentric arrogance in thinking that somehow your words are going to live on. But I do spend a lot of time pottering around in second-hand bookshops and libraries and picking up obscure and forgotten books from a hundred years ago or more. I love the idea of reading something that has not survived in more than a few copies, and yet finding the voice of the author still talking to you.

You talk about hope as an ingredient of humanism. In the very long term, of course, the earth will probably be swallowed by the sun, and the human race may well have died out long before then. Where can humanists find hope, given that, on a cosmic scale, we are, by all appearances, so fundamentally meaningless?

On that scale, I do think we are completely meaningless and forgettable, as is everything to do with this planet and the very fact that we have existed at all. But we have got much more immediate things to worry about, and we could find ourselves disappearing a lot sooner than that. We are still a very young species – dinosaurs were around for an enormously longer time than we have been. Also I do not believe in God, so even if I wanted to find meaning there, that is not an option. Would I be happier if I had this great sense of meaning? No, because to me it would not be a genuine source of meaning. Actually, I find it exhilarating to think about the size of the universe. The fact that we are tiny does not bother me.

Final question: what is your next project?

I have not got one yet. I am having a little interlude to see what might arise next. And even if I did have one, like most writers, I probably would not want to talk about it.

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope, by Sarah Bakewell, was published on 30 March 2023 by Chatto & Windus.

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The post ‘The real beauty comes from contemplating the universe’: humanism with Sarah Bakewell appeared first on The Freethinker.

Born in 1971, Woodhouse studied business at Aston University, Birmingham. Although growing up in a broadly Anglican tradition, he became an atheist in his teens, and turned to humanism, attracted by its emphasis on positive moral values; this has led him, more recently, to veganism and sentientism.

Woodhouse’s podcast on sentientism has run for over 150 episodes. Guests have included the philosopher AC Grayling, the journalist Henry Mance, and Ingrid Newkirk, president of the controversial animal rights group PETA. In episode 76, the activist Peter Tatchell claimed that ‘humanism will evolve into sentientism’.

I met Jamie Woodhouse at a café in Edgware, north London. He ordered a coffee with plant-based milk, while I had a peppermint tea. In this interview, we discuss Woodhouse’s path to sentientism, what the concept actually means, and its relationship with humanism and veganism.

Is sentientism internally consistent? Is a sentientist necessarily vegan? What circumstances would justify the use of violence against people in order to protect animals? Would it matter if a species, including our own, became extinct? Can sentientism save the world?

Comments are open below.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Freethinker: How did you get into sentientism?

Jamie Woodhouse: I had a corporate career, mostly as a consultant. I still do some ad hoc consulting, but I mainly work on a portfolio of different projects that relate to charitable causes, NGO work, and open data initiatives. The sentientism project has become more and more central – it has become a personal mission.

Over the years, I came to view humanism as a combination of a naturalistic understanding of the world and a universal compassion. But it always concerned me that humanism was too centred on our own species. When I was about 25, I became vegetarian. Many years later, I began to realise that the ethical reasoning that led me to vegetarianism should, by implication, lead me to veganism. I went vegan about five or six years ago, but this also made me have another look at humanism.

The reason I care about other humans is not that we happen to share the same species, but because they have a capacity to suffer and flourish and they want to live. If sentience is the reason I care about other humans, why should I not extend that care to all sentient animals?

Is anyone else involved in the sentientist movement – if there is one?

There is a movement, but it is anarchic, informal, unorganised – no governance, no money, no membership. There are many people who are working on different aspects of it who would not necessarily label themselves sentientists. At the same time, the commitment to a naturalistic understanding of the world goes back through history, predates religion, and, I would argue, predates humanity as well. Non-human animals have, in a sense, a naturalistic way of understanding the world. They are using their senses, they are trying to explore and to develop beliefs and understandings about the world to help them survive. That is a putative sort of basic naturalism.

Another ancient source of sentientism is the idea of ahimsa, which simply means ‘do no harm’, and which is central to Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. Sentientism is also based on the idea that we should care about one another – this idea runs through religious worldviews as well as humanism, but arguably also predates humanity. Non-human animals often care about each other. They did so long before humanity arrived on the scene.

How far is it possible for sentientism, as a single worldview, to be consistent with ethical pluralism? Surely some moral attitudes are inconsistent with others?

Sentientism is pluralistic in the sense that there are lots of different ethical systems you might apply once you adopt a ‘sentiocentric’ moral scope that cares about all sentient beings. But if you have an ethical system that carves out or disregards or ignores some group of those sentient beings, then it is clearly not sentientist. Or if you have a nihilist ethical system, or maybe a morally relativist ethical system that says that some group of sentient beings do not matter, that does not qualify. You have to have universal compassion for all sentient beings. But once you do, you can apply it in many different ways.

Does ‘universal compassion’ entail that we must not kill animals?

I have tried to suggest that we set some form of baseline – a minimum degree of compassion for one another. We would expect this compassion to be universal, not just for friends or family. Similarly, a humanist might ask what the minimum was that he or she could expect from another human. Compassion or moral consideration means that no sentient being should be needlessly harmed or killed. That is the suggested baseline.

What does ‘needlessly’ mean? What about animals that can harm humans, such as mosquitoes, poisonous snakes, or lions?

Many people would agree with the naturalistic commitment of sentientism in theory and many people will agree with the sentiocentric commitment in theory. But when it gets to the implications, it gets tough. Just like humanism, sentientism does not have all the answers – it is not a complete ethical system. It just says that we should have serious moral consideration for every sentient being that is involved. There might well be situations where we would need to harm or even kill other sentient beings – but as with harming or killing humans, we would need a strong justification.

Some sentientists will argue that all sentient beings are equal and will push for an egalitarian approach. Others will argue that even if we have a universal compassion for all sentient beings, there is still an ethical basis by which we might differentiate between them.

What would an ethical basis of differentiating between animals be? Something like a hierarchy of levels of consciousness?

That is probably the most common way of doing it. People might look at factors like longevity, richness of experience, the different types of interests that different beings can have, and they might use that to apply some form of differentiation that could guide their approach in difficult situations.

Some animals can, of course, flourish more than others. In particular, humans can flourish and have experiences to a much higher degree than any other species that we know of – can’t they?

A naturalistic and scientific approach will help us understand whether that is true or not. Different sentientists will disagree, but in my view, there are types of experience, interests, needs, that humans can have that non-humans probably do not have – just as there are types of experience that a dolphin or a bat might have that we cannot. We can experience existential angst. I can worry about things that other animals might not. This is important and valid; we should use a scientific approach to determine how far these differences hold.

However, it can work the other way around too. Suppose you were to rewrite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a Universal Declaration of Sentient Rights. The right to education might seem not to make sense for non-human animals. But if you think broadly enough about education, maybe it does – the right of a mother to teach her children how to live as an animal, in a way, is a right to education. As to the rights that are the most fundamental to humans – the right to family life or to food and shelter, the right not to be tortured or killed – these foundational needs and interests are relevant to all sentient beings because they are so central to our common evolutionary history. At the same time, humans have ways of mitigating suffering that are not available to non-human animals. So it is possible that their experiences of pain might be worse than ours.

Peter Singer has views about degrees of self-consciousness and ‘personhood’ that are similar to sentientism. On this basis, he has argued that infanticide could be morally acceptable in some circumstances. Would you agree?

This is another area where ethical pluralism comes in: people answer in different ways. My view is that the best way of approaching these situations is to genuinely and deeply consider the best interests of the being we are talking about in every respect. I can imagine situations in which it would be in the being’s best interests for their life to be ended. Or there are situations where individuals choose that for themselves. The best we can do is to imagine ourselves in their position and ask ourselves what we would want – and have some humility about it. But that does not mean that sentientism is going to answer every question clearly and easily.

Isn’t there a need to work out some generally applicable principles?

The danger is that the desperation for clear principles can lead us to a position where we are more confident than we really should be. Having clear principles does not necessarily mean that they are right, or that they lead to the right conclusions. We are apes who have evolved to survive on the Savannah: sometimes we are just not going to know what the best thing is to do.

Is there a difficulty that other animals do not have compassion for one other, or for us, in the way that you are saying we should for them? How can we make sense of the fact that our relationship with them is so asymmetrical?

Universal compassion is the right starting point, but it might lead us to other principles that we then apply in our lives, depending on the ethical system we choose. If we put anything else before universal compassion, we will risk causing needless harm to some sentient beings because we have excluded them. This is a clean dividing line. If you do not warrant moral consideration, you do not warrant compassion and are outside of our moral scope. Anything can be done to you with impunity. You can be tortured, killed, treated like an inanimate rock. That is a serious exclusion. There is no logical or philosophical reason for excluding any sentient being, any suffering from moral consideration.

Does sentientism, therefore, advocate a sort of unilateral disarmament by humans – that we should give up our rights and allow animals to live without any interference from us?

In some parts of the animal advocacy and the vegan movement, activists have, understandably, come to be so cynical about the human race and our track record that they have lost compassion for humans and humanity. One of the things I want to do with sentientism is to reset that balance and remind everybody that humans are sentient beings too, and warrant serious moral consideration.

If you look at all of the habitable land on the earth, humans themselves take up less than one per cent of it. All of us, human and non-human beings, have plenty of space. What occupies most of the land is agriculture. That is one area where there is a conflict, because agricultural land takes away space from free-ranging animals. If you took all of the agricultural land we use today and switched everybody to using plant-based agriculture, it would free up three quarters of the land.

Isn’t the reason why so much space is taken up by fields, agriculture, and animal products, that there are so many people in the world? Wouldn’t a better solution in the long term be to gradually lower the human population to a more sustainable level, rather than for everyone to become vegans?

That is one approach. The latest projection is that the human population will peak at around ten billion – our growth rate seems to be flattening off already. My worry with those who suggest a more radical population reduction is that, in the past, the only way that people have achieved those sorts of population reductions was through abject horror.

There can be an interesting tone that comes through some of those conversations, where there is an implication that the people who will survive will be of a certain type and that those who will not will be of a different type.

Doubtless population control could be used as a pretext for genocide. But respectable people have also supported it: see, for example, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Could not the human race agree that in the long term it would be better if we could find voluntary ways of controlling the population?

Autonomy is important, as is people’s ability to take intelligent decisions about whether to have families. But I am nervous about those downsides because I see them coming through in many debates. People start out from a good place and end up in ecofascism or somewhere extremely dark. I am not sure how we would navigate that path and I am not sure that many humans want to go down that route.

On the other hand, we cannot have indefinite population expansion.

No, but I think we will flatten off at ten billion and we will be fine. There are much easier strategies than population control which avoid its ethical downsides. There may be eight billion humans on the planet, but there are about 100 billion farmed animals just on land, and another 1-2 trillion farmed aquatic animals. If we have a population problem, we can either choose to look at eight billion humans or we can choose to look at 100 billion farmed land animals. The latter is an easier problem to solve ethically.

That is partly what leads me to think that the Earth’s carrying capacity is already much higher than what is needed to support even ten billion humans. If we freed up three quarters of the agricultural land we could rewild and put up solar and wind energy facilities, or public parks, and the carbon capture through the reforestation would be enormous. Or we could grow more plant-based food – so instead of freeing up three quarters of agricultural land, if we freed up half of it, we could double our current food production with the other quarter.

Is it not the case that population control could reduce all types of environmental damage caused by humans, whereas veganism and sentientism focus only on one particular type of damage, namely the use of land for farming animals?

It could, but we would need to think very carefully about how our economy would work in that context. Often the economy and the poorest humans are harmed when the population falls. We would need to find an intelligent way of managing that. Ethical population management and veganism could complement each other.

However, my main reason for wanting to transition away from farming animals is that this practice is needlessly harming and killing sentient beings that do not want to be harmed and killed. This is independent of environmental concerns.

How far would the sentientist distinguish between the rights of humans and other animals in particular situations? For example, what about the damage to animal habitats that is being caused by the construction of new housing developments?

It depends on which ethical system you apply. If new housing needed to be built in an area where there were wild animals living, instead of killing those wild animals, they could be rehoused or encouraged to move to another place. As far as the effect on insects is concerned, the science about them is developing rapidly at the moment. It is thought that the more social ones are sentient, but the simplest ones may not be sentient. You could also take estimates of their degree of sentience into account. We need to act with compassion for all the sentient beings involved.

Should wild animals – sentient ones, at least – be given a legal right to the land they inhabit?

Some go beyond sentientism to extend moral concern to the environment, or plants, rocks, rivers and trees. Personally, I believe that all value strictly comes back to sentience: the view that the experience of things, the feelings you and I are having every second, is the root of all value and all moral worth. I view plants, rocks, rivers, trees and the environment instrumentally. I appreciate them and care about them deeply, but only because of their impact on the sentient beings, not because a tree, a rock or a house has its own intrinsic worth. I am not sure that wild animals have the same sense of ownership that we do, although many have an appreciation for territory and the homes they build.

What would happen to all the farm animals if they were no longer farmed?

At the moment, farmed animals are force-bred. When you stop this practice, the population of farm animals will naturally come down over time. I am comfortable with the idea that the population of farmed animal species would ultimately reduce towards zero – with any remaining animals being cared for in sanctuaries.

So there would be no intrinsic harm if any particular species disappeared altogether?

There is no intrinsic value in any particular species. What matters is the existence, experience and will to live of the individual sentient beings. Often we humans value a species for aesthetic reasons, but ultimately it is the individual sentient beings that matter.

On that line of reasoning, would you be equally happy with the idea that humans might become extinct one day?

It would be a shame, because we have enormous positive potential, and I see value in our experiences, our lives and our flourishing. But again, what matters to me is individual human beings, not humanity as a species or as a construct.

Surely people have often been motivated by the desire to perpetuate the human race and improve life for future generations beyond their own death?

I think this is important to the degree that it is important to the individuals – including those potential future individuals.

Aren’t you adopting a relativistic morality?

Sentientism rejects the sort of relativism that accepts a group’s agreed ethics regardless of the harms they cause. Instead, it is trying to value the perspective of other sentient beings in the same way that they do. That standard should apply to every group.

If you take the view that what matters is each person’s experience to them, then, once that person had died – or once all people had died – there would be no more experiences to matter. Can the long-term survival of the human race be of any concern to the sentientist?

Extinction would be a shame, because there is positive value in experiences and good lives as well. I am not advocating human extinction. I would love to see humanity persist, continue and improve. Part of the reason for this is that there is catastrophic suffering in the non-human world, for example among free-ranging animals. One of the possibilities of humanity continuing is that we might actually be able to mitigate that suffering or help those free-ranging animals in some way. Many humans already do this on a small scale.

Without humanity, there is just biological evolution. And gene propagation evolution is amoral, harsh and brutal. Despite the terrible track record of humanity so far, the prospect of benefit to all sentient beings might be greater if we persist in the future than if we do not.

Would you see humans as the moral arbiters of the other species?

It is less about being moral arbiters than just being ethical and caring about morality. It is not about us as arbiters deciding one way or the other, it is just about having a motivation to help others.

I am also not suggesting that humans are the only beings that have the capacity to be moral or to care. However, we are able to use our rationality and power to extend our compassion in a much richer, more impactful way than other species. We have already demonstrated we have the power to cause greater suffering than other species – it would be good to set that right.

Must the sentientist be vegan?

I would suggest so. There are some who call themselves sentientists who disagree. They have found some way of rationalising their consumption of sentient animal products, but I think they have made mistakes. There is so much noise and hyperbole with veganism that it can feel like a club, a cult, an identity, but it is not any of those things. It is simply a philosophical stance and a set of actions that aims, as far as is possible and practicable, to avoid needlessly causing suffering, death or exploitation. When you put it like that, it is hard to understand why the idea gets so much resistance.

On the question of diet, would it not be possible to have a compromise in which everyone in the world cut down on animal products but did not abandon them completely?

Cutting down is better than not cutting down. Is it good for people to be a bit less racist or sexist, or to cut down on exploitative labour? Yes – the less of these things you do, the better. The system of farming animals is an ethical horror. Reducing can be a step along the way. If there is an argument to reduce, there is an argument to reduce a bit more and a bit more – and to bring these bad things to a complete end.

You draw an emotive analogy between eating animal products and being racist or sexist. Racism and sexism, it could be argued, are morally wrong in human terms because they involve one human harming another. But there are things about eating animal products that all humans can share in: not only in dietary terms, but also because so much of world food culture, as well as clothing and other artefacts, depends on them.

Someone who is defending racism might say the same thing – that racism benefits the racist – that supremacy benefits the supremacist. In doing so, they exclude the perspective of and harms done to those they oppress. But benefits to oppressors do not justify the harm done by oppressing others.

Intra-human and intra-species forms of oppression are very different, but there are some common themes. One is that ending bad things is better than just reducing them. Another is that we should work to end them while having compassion for those implicated and those trapped by immoral social norms – however difficult that might be.

Which comes back to the question of whether the animal’s perspective should be treated on an equal footing with the human’s.

It does not have to be equal. It should be in accordance with their interests. Being farmed for food does not accord with even a minimal level of moral consideration outside of a sustenance or a survival situation.

What about the argument that many farm animals only exist because people have bred them in order to be farmed?

This is called the ‘logic of the ladder’. If you have two choices between a being not existing at all or being brought into existence, having a short, happy life, having one bad day and then being killed for food, you might argue that the latter was preferable. But this does not work for humans, because otherwise, farming toddlers and babies would be ethical. For the same reason, it does not work for animals. The fact that we may have created them does not mean we are justified in then hurting or killing them because we enjoy the taste of their flesh – whatever deal we might have done with ourselves in advance.

Is killing a cow as bad as killing a baby?

I would not say it is, but they are both bad and needless. That is why I reject the ‘logic of the ladder’: even at the point where you walk towards a non-human sentient being with a knife, because you have bred it to be killed, that being will look you in the eyes and will not want to be hurt and killed.

What we are getting to there is the point is that sentientism does not distinguish between humans and non-human animals in the way that a human might. You do not see the human as having any particular moral claim on other humans that other animals do not have.

I would not put it quite that way. Being a member of a species does not carry any moral significance, even the human species. There might be other reasons why you would want to care in particular ways about humans, and that could be about the potential for them to do good in the future. It might be their longevity, it might be the richness of their experience. But their membership of a particular species is not in itself relevant.

You have identified two core aspects of sentientism: evidence-based reasoning and universal compassion. Where does the principle of universal compassion come from?

It can just be a choice. Sentientism is neutral about moral realism and moral anti-realism. A sentientist would reject a ‘divine command’ theory that derives moral imperatives from God or a relativism that accepts whatever a particular group agrees as moral. Instead there are sentientists who think there is no such thing as an objective moral truth, but that we construct it various ways. There are others like me who ground their morality in a naturalistic understanding of what it is to be a sentient being – for example not liking suffering and not wanting to die.

So there are different ways of answering your question. Factors could include enlightened self-interest, the benefits of reciprocity, the ‘warm fuzzy feeling’ moral behaviour can give. For people who are committed to a rational way of understanding the world, there is an attraction to having an ethics that is coherent and consistent. We do not like cognitive dissonance. If we acknowledge that we already have compassion for at least some other sentient beings, for humans and for companion animals and for some charismatic wild animals, for example, we already feel that compassion, and we choose to care about them. If we want to be consistent and coherent, we should extend that compassion to every sentient being.

Is it possible to be consistent unless you have principles against which to judge your consistency, judging, say, the hierarchy of different animals with different creative senses?

I am not saying that becoming a sentientist fixes all those problems. There is so much more complexity to work through. Sentientism does not answer everything. It just answers the question of moral scope: who should and should not be included in our moral consideration.

If the scientific consensus were that humans need to eat animal products in order to have a healthy, balanced diet, would you stop being a vegan?

I think that is unlikely.

But suppose it were the case.

I genuinely do not know. Cultivated meat will fix that problem for us. But the scenario is almost inconceivable, because meat is just a collection of nutrients – and we can get those nutrients from elsewhere. Your question is similar to asking a humanist whether, if science discovered that we could only be healthy by eating each other, they would become a cannibal.

To many people around the world, having a diet that includes some animal products, such as cheese, butter, eggs, meat and fish, is strongly preferable to a purely plant-based diet. Does this matter?

I think that, as we cultivate plant-based meat and dairy replacements, those differences will erode to nothing. In any case, marginal taste preferences and social norm compliance are not a sufficient justification to mutilate, harm or artificially impregnate non-human animals, or to separate them from their families.

Can animal testing be justified, for example, in the interests of scientific progress?

There might be situations where it is justifiable, but they are extremely rare and getting rarer all the time. Similarly, testing on humans can be justifiable in some circumstances – for example, the vaccination trials during the Covid pandemic, where people volunteered to participate in trials.

Do you think that science needs to be directed by sentientist principles?

I think everything does. A humanist would say that we should motivate even our intellectual pursuits by some sort of ethical framework. No sphere of human interest should be exempt from ethics.

Animal rights organisations such as Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty have sometimes been involved in violent protest. Can violence against humans to protect animals ever be justified?

I can imagine situations where it could. If I saw my neighbour torturing his dog in his front yard and the only way I could stop him doing it was to put him in a chokehold, I would do it. In the UK, if someone is hurting their pet, the police can be called out and that person will be prevented, by force if necessary, from continuing to do so. If people thought of farmed animals as they think of their companion animals, we would all be on the same page.

Your family has a rescue dog as a pet (or ‘companion animal’). How compatible is the practice of keeping pets with sentientism?

There are different points of view about this from within sentientism and animal advocate communities. Some people argue that all forms of pet ownership are exploitation. I do not agree – I think it is possible for us to have positive interspecies relationships. I would end the deliberate breeding of companion animals. But in terms of rescue animals, providing a happy home and a positive life for one that already exists can be a positive thing for the animal concerned.

Do any environmental considerations need to come into play when deciding whether to have a pet?

Yes, they do. It is like having children. Our children are going to have an environmental impact. Companion animals have an environmental impact. All life causes some impact. That is unavoidable.

Can dogs be vegans?

Not in the sense that it is a philosophical stance, but modern science shows they can thrive on a completely plant-based diet. It is becoming clearer that there is can be positive health benefits for dogs and cats from plant-based diets. There are nutritionally complete, vet approved products out there on the market today. The process of making animal-based foods is often so brutal that it destroys many of the nutrients that dogs and cats need. The animal-based food makers add synthetic supplements to put these nutrients back into their products. Plant-based producers use exactly the same supplements.

What are your personal aims in talking about sentientism to people – on your website, your podcast, or in interviews like this one?

I want to persuade eight billion humans to agree with me, thereby helping to solve all of the world’s problems. In a way, that is not even a joke. These problems seem to be caused either by a failure of compassion – we have excluded certain humans or other sentient beings from our moral scope – or a failure of evidence, reasoning and understanding. Sentientism has implications for our personal choices, our institutions and politics, from local to international. If people applied sentientist principles at every level of human endeavour and governance, that would be a good thing for us human sentients, for non-human sentients and for the world we all share.

The post Can sentientism save the world? Interview with Jamie Woodhouse appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

An expert on human rights might seem to be an unlikely target for censorship by a British university. Yet this is what happened to Steven Greer, emeritus Professor of Human Rights at Bristol Law School and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Royal Society of Arts, in the years leading up to his retirement in 2022. As reported by the Free Speech Union and elsewhere, in October 2020, the president of the Bristol University Islamic Society (BRISOC) complained to the authorities that Greer’s module on ‘Islam, China and the Far East’, on the Human Rights in Law, Politics and Society (HRLPS) unit, was ‘Islamophobic’. In February 2021, despite being warned not to go public about a matter still under investigation, BRISOC set up an online petition that featured a photograph of the professor next to a sign saying ‘Stop Islamophobic teaching’.

In July 2021, Greer was cleared of all allegations after an independent enquiry lasting five months. Nevertheless, he claims, some of his colleagues in the Law School effectively prevented him from teaching the module again in the last of his thirty-six years there. Moreover, ‘Although the complaint [against Greer] was not upheld,’ as the university publicly admitted, the latter also ‘recognised BRISOC’s concerns and the importance of airing differing views constructively.’ Greer argues that the university’s conduct ‘sent a clear signal’ that he was ‘guilty of Islamphobia in spite of having been officially exonerated.’ His latest book, Falsely Accused of Islamophobia: My Struggle Against Academic Cancellation, which contains a full record of his ordeal, was published by Academica Press on 13 February 2023.

In January 2022, as a direct consequence of the BRISOC scandal, Greer was appointed to a non-stipendiary Visiting Research Fellowship at the Oxford Institute for British Islam, a fledgling UK charity whose stated aim is to develop ‘an authentic Islam that is rooted in and relevant to life in 21st century Britain…and which has taken on board the useful nuances and good personality of British life and culture without compromising any of the fundamentals of the faith.’ He later became OIBI’s Research Director.

I met Greer over tea in Piccadilly, London. In the interview which follows, he talks to me about the origins and course of the campaign of vilification against him, including its allegations of Islamophobia, and his response. We explore the reasons for the failure of his fellow academics and Bristol University to defend his right to responsible scholarly discussion about Islam.

Greer also looks back on his youth in Belfast during the Troubles, his early research into counter-terrorism in Northern Ireland, and his assessment of Prevent, the UK government’s controversial counter-extremism strategy after 9/11. Finally, we consider two knotty problems: how Islam can be best integrated into and accepted by modern British society, and how we in the UK can move beyond the polarising mindset of the culture wars.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

Freethinker: Do you have any religious or spiritual beliefs?

Steven Greer: I would describe myself as a freethinker – one who inclines towards classic liberal values: human rights, democracy, rule of law, and open markets with a touch of Oriental mysticism and Buddhism. I have a sense of the spiritual, if you like. But my interest in Buddhism is open-ended – it is more about contemplation and meditation. This is possible without endorsing its finer points, except perhaps for the basic ideas of impermanence and insubstantiality.

Could you tell us a bit about your background and where you grew up?

I come from Belfast and grew up in a very devout, liberal Methodist family. My parents were not very political and were uncommonly anti-sectarian. I suppose that gave me the opportunity to think for myself. I went to a state grammar school. Looking back on that, the thing I value most was that our teachers also encouraged us to think for ourselves.

Today, would you see yourself as Irish or British?

I am British-Irish or Irish-British – I have had both passports for decades. That was another thing that was unusual in my upbringing, because my father in particular always insisted that we recognised our Irish identity. It has become fashionable recently for more Protestants in Northern Ireland, and people further afield, to claim Irish citizenship, particularly because of Brexit. I was ahead of the game. However, I am proud of both my British and Irish identity, and I recognise the strengths and flaws of each. In both cases, there have been negative and positive elements.

What are your research interests?

My research was initially motivated by my experience of growing up in the Troubles, which blighted my teenage years. There were gangs roaming the streets, you could easily get caught up in fights, and you could be blown up or shot at a moment’s notice. I was very perplexed by this: why was it happening? How had I ended up in such a dysfunctional society? I yearned to find out more. I studied law at Oxford from 1976-79, but I was disappointed by it intellectually. It was very dry and limiting. Then I went to the LSE to study sociology, and then back to Belfast for a PhD in counterterrorism law.

I ended up writing a book about the ‘supergrass’ system in Northern Ireland: a series of trials in the 1980s on the evidence of informants, which was deeply controversial on both sides of the sectarian divide. It was one of the few things that, in the counter-terrorist framework, both Loyalists and Republicans vehemently objected to, partly because they were very worried about it decimating their ranks. It may well have done. But it did so in a way that was difficult to defend by any credible conception of civil liberties and the rule of law: there were not enough legal controls, there was little corroboration, and it all happened in a non-jury context.

My intention was to have a career that straddled law and sociology. But there were more jobs in academic law than sociology. I was initially obliged to teach traditional legal subjects. In the mid-1990s, however, the law school at the University of Bristol was mildly criticised in a teaching review for not having a human rights course. So I said, ‘I’ll do that.’ It was not until 2005 that I had the first opportunity to design a unit that fully coincided with my interests. This was a socio-legal or social science course, which I called ‘Human Rights in Law, Politics and Society’, and which provided a platform from which to observe global current affairs through the lens of human rights, or vice versa.

Where does the study of Islam fit into all of this?

In the post-Cold War context of 2005, in addition to western liberalism, the two biggest kids on the block were political Islam, which had been on the rise since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, plus China and the Far East. Islam, China and the Far East are ideologies or a ‘geopolitical spaces’ which offer self-conscious alternatives to Western liberalism. The fact that there was a rapidly expanding literature about human rights in all these contexts made it possible to add a module on Islam, China and the Far East to the HRLPS course, which I then taught without incident for 13 years.

The fact that I have served the University of Bristol productively and faithfully for 36 years makes my experience all the more bitter. I had some of the best students in the law school – the more reflective and more thoughtful ones who wanted to look over the legal parapet and see the lie of the land beyond. Many of them were Muslim. Nobody had any issue with the unit or module whatsoever until, almost out of the blue, the University of Bristol Islamic Society (BRISOC) decided everything I had been saying about Islam was Islamophobic.    

It is important to separate the intellectual debate about Islam and human rights from the scandal that developed. BRISOC lodged a complaint with the University in October 2020 without bringing it before any of the law school’s half a dozen or so informal mechanisms first. It was signed by the president of BRISOC, a medical student, who was ostensibly acting on behalf of anonymous students, but who had never attended my course himself.

Ultimately, after a vitriolic campaign by BRISOC on social media, and after a senior academic at the University of Bristol had investigated my conduct, in July 2021, I got a very gratifying email saying I had been completely exonerated of all charges [see a fuller account in Greer’s conversation with the Bristol Free Speech Society, and in his book].

However, I was told I was not allowed to tell anybody except my family and close friends until I, the university, and BRISOC had drafted a joint statement, which never happened. There was then the question of what I was to teach in my last year before my retirement in 2022. I wanted to deliver the topic on Islam, China and the Far East again, to prove that I had been vindicated. But two junior colleagues, who were due to take the unit over, decided to remove the module from the syllabus, precisely for the reasons the enquiry had rejected. This decision was immediately approved by the Law School. I then went on sick leave for three months because there was no way I could have gone back into the Law School with a cloud like that hanging over my reputation and integrity.

In October 2021, after BRISOC had unsuccessfully appealed against my exoneration, the University issued its final public statement, which said, ‘the complaint has not been upheld…[but] we recognise BRISOC’s concerns and the importance of airing differing views constructively.’ It also said that my course had been altered to respond to the new conveners’ ‘wish to deliver the material in a context that is both broad-reaching and respectful of sensitivities of students on the course.’ I was absolutely furious because, in spite of my exoneration, this statement made it look as if I had been let off on a technicality, and that there might have been substance to BRISOC’s complaint after all. This was not only a smear on my reputation and integrity; it compounded the risk that BRISOC’s campaign posed to my physical safety.

When my sick leave ended, the Law School and the University also declined to authorise my return to work and in fact obstructed it.

Did your two colleagues who decided to cut your module give reasons for their decision?

I was told expressly in an email that it was to avoid further complaints and to prevent ‘othering’ Muslim students. This was, of course, totally in defiance of my exoneration.

What were BRISOC’s charges against you?

They claim that everything the authoritative academic literature says about Islam, particularly about Islam and human rights – which is all I was discussing in the class – is Islamophobic.

Let me give you an example. It is universally accepted that in its early history, the Islamic faith spread very rapidly through war and conquest in the first instance, driven mostly by material motives – power and booty, basically. And then it stabilised through trade and conversion. Within a few decades of Mohammed’s death, a huge Muslim empire had been established extending from the shores of what is now Portugal to the Himalayas. BRISOC claims that to make such an observation is Islamophobic. Yet there is not a scholar or historian who knows anything about the history of Islam anywhere in the world who would dispute it. BRISOC also claims that it is Islamophobic to observe that traditional Islam does not regard men and women as truly equal. Yet, according to the Qur’an, a man can have four wives, but a woman can have only one husband. That is plainly unequal. On divorce, children also typically go to the husband, and not to the wife.

What was BRISOC’s response to these points?

They have no answer. That is precisely the point. And it graphically illustrates the current crisis of academic ‘cancel culture’: the people who want to take their opponent down through vilification and victimisation do not want to engage in debate about the substance of the issues themselves. They just want to say, ‘You are a racist, Islamophobe, transphobe, etc. – because you have said things we do not like, that we think are Islamophobic, transphobic, homophobic, and so on.’ But if you ask them to tell you why something you have said is Islamophobic, their response is, ‘We are not going to tell you – it’s just the way it is.’ There is no debate. If we had had a debate I could easily have demonstrated how ignorant BRISOC is about the history of their own faith.

What is your view about using cartoons of Mohammed as a teaching aid in a lecture theatre at a university? Have you ever done so, or would you have done so?

No. It is obviously very dangerous. There is a huge risk even if, like the unfortunate US Art history teacher Professor Erika Lopez Prater, you take great care and only show representations of Mohammed painted by a highly respected medieval Muslim scholar for devotional reasons. Professor Lopez effectively lost her job for doing so.

We seem to be in a strange situation where academics and university administrators who are not Muslim are themselves suppressing people who want to discuss Islam. How have we got into this situation?

Fear – of two kinds. One is the fear of some kind of violent reprisal. But I do not think this is the dominant one. The most prominent is the fear, on the part of university administrators, of being seen as hostile to a minority, Muslims in my case, and of losing income from students as a result. It is as brutal as that. We have not used the term ‘woke’ in our conversation yet. But that is what it is.

On the subject of ‘woke’, what is your experience of the ‘culture wars’ and ‘cancel culture’ at university?

What the University of Bristol has done to me is a classic example of ‘wokeism’ and cancel culture. It is based upon many of the classic features, for example, the attitude that ‘we must be so concerned for and so sympathetic to (certain) minorities that they can never be criticised for wrongdoing. Whatever they say, whatever complaints they have, must be taken at face value and those who have offended them must be sanctioned.’ That is exactly what happened in my case. The university’s attitude seems to have been, ‘BRISOC was offended by your teaching and although you were cleared of wrongdoing we are still going to bend over backwards to placate them, we are going to take the module off the syllabus and you are effectively going to be frozen out for the remainder of your career.’

The ‘remainder of my careeer’ happened to be a very short time span. But had I been a younger man, less well advanced in my career, it would have been much more costly for me to have taken the stand I did. In fact, I probably would not have done so. I probably would just have capitulated myself.

Whose opinion are university administrators worried about?

They seem to be most worried about the opinion of angry militants and their supporters on the illiberal or ‘regressive’ left who dominate the social sciences, humanities, law and the arts in British universities. I have seen this perspective gain currency over the course of my career. As a result, I am no longer sure where I am now myself on the political spectrum. I spent most of my adult life on the centre left. I was, for example, a member of the Labour Party for 30 years, until I left in 2013, when I saw the leftward direction the party was taking.

I think that, in British universities, there has been a drift over the past decade or more, towards greater extremism, less tolerance, a greater willingness to vilify and victimise opponents, and to regard them as enemies rather than colleagues with a different, though legitimate, point of view. When I first arrived at Bristol, most of the staff were centre left politically, but academically conservative. But without my fully realising it, the whole institution has been shifting further and further towards the left, particularly over the past decade or so. Colleagues whose views were centre-right were squeezed out of the Law School. Life was made so uncomfortable for them that they moved elsewhere.

You might have thought of the tradition of Western scholarship in all fields, humanities and sciences, as being about the disinterested pursuit of knowledge – that this should be the ideal of liberal education. How do academics today who are so far on the left reconcile their dogmatic views with this idea of disinterested scholarship? Or do they not think that such a thing exists anymore?

Since they will not engage in these debates, it is difficult to say. But I think, from reading the literature and from what I know about some of my own former colleagues who are on that wavelength, that they view ‘disinterested scholarship’ as itself an obstacle to the ‘liberation’ of those oppressed minorities whose ‘emancipation’ they seek to facilitate.

Are the academics themselves in these oppressed minorities?

Sometimes, but usually not. Typically, they are people who regard themselves as the ‘allies’ of putatively subordinate or oppressed groups, and who are trying to fight their battles for them. One of the grievances I have with this is that, quite often and quite plainly, people who belong to these so-called ‘oppressed minorities’ do not subscribe to the political profile that the ‘wokes’ want to impose upon them. The ‘wokes’ want them to be angry, hostile and aggressively asserting a sectional identity. They do not want them to integrate. And anyone who belongs to such a minority but does not subscribe to this ideology is simply regarded as a traitor to the cause.

Take my case, for example. One of the questions it raises is why it happened when it did. One of the triggers seems to have been that I am a vocal defender of the government’s Prevent counterterrorism strategy. The people who regard me as their enemy had been trying to discredit me for this reason for some time. In 2018, some colleagues from another university denounced me and one of my Bristol colleagues on twitter as racist and Islamophobic because we publicly defended Prevent. Another of my own Bristol colleagues then jumped on the bandwagon and retweeted the denunciation, adding that we were suffering from ‘white psychosis’. We complained to the Law School, arguing that it should not tolerate one of its own staff falsely denouncing other colleagues as racist and Islamophobic, and endorsing a demand that they be sacked as unfit to work at any academic institution. Nothing was done about it. The colleague in question is still in post and has, in fact, since been promoted.

Is there any evidence that the Prevent strategy has increased Islamophobia?

No. The reason is that hardly anybody knows about it. The activists are hyper-aware of it. But the general public, including Muslims, generally have not heard of it.

The other thing that has happened in academic life, which is a source of great dismay to me, is the prostituting of social science. What I mean by this is that social science has become a vehicle for prejudice. Studies are being conducted and published which have no scientific credibility. Typically, those involving surveys do not employ random sampling but are driven by a self-selected group of people who tend to share the objectives of those who have conducted the survey. So the entire exercise is constructed in a manner which confirms the prejudices of the researchers.

One of the few randomly selected surveys about public attitudes towards Prevent found, for example, that very few Muslims knew about it. That knocks on the head the claim that Prevent is turning Muslims into a suspect community, and fuelling Islamophobia.

The reasoning of the anti-Prevent movement is also a classic exercise in illogicality. The argument goes like this: ‘Prevent is Islamophobic and racist. Therefore, anyone who denies that it is Islamophobic and racist, must themselves be Islamophobic and racist.’ Any logician would tell you that this is a logical fallacy, because the premise – that ‘Prevent is Islamophobic and racist’ – is precisely what is at issue.

You could argue that there are many logical fallacies in the ‘woke’ approach.

Yes – it is based on prejudice. The tragedy is that it warps something that is actually, on a more sensible interpretation, very worthy. Like many, I am in favour of social justice, inclusivity, diversity and equity in the academy and everywhere else, but not on ‘woke’ terms. However, according to the ‘wokes’, if you have a conception of social justice that differs from theirs, you are the enemy and part of the problem, not part of the solution. Therefore, you have to be silenced, not debated with.

The Oxford Institute for British Islam is a young organisation. Could you tell us a bit about it?

The Provost and originator of the OIBI, Dr Taj Hargey, originally from South Africa, is the imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation. He wants to promote a liberal and progressive version of Islam globally, and particularly in Britain. His wife, Dr Jacqueline Woodman, is a Unitarian Christian and gynaecologist. The idea behind OIBI is to establish a think tank and research academy that can study and debate Islam in the UK and promote a liberal conception of the faith. I was originally invited to become OIBI’s first non-stipendiary visiting research fellow and later became its first Research Director.    

The profile and position Muslims have in Britain is primarily for them to determine. But those of us who are not Muslim should help them to address this challenge in a way that is positive for everybody. Muslims have the prime responsibility to deal with the issues of Islamism, jihadism and the threat of terrorism, because only they can authoritatively demonstrate their inconsistencies with any legitimate interpretation of Islam.

What is the future of Islam in Britain?

Religions can be both forces for good and for bad. The key lies in how they are interpreted and what is done with them. Islam is no exception. The message of the Oxford Institute is that Islam takes on distinctive forms according to the environment in which it is found.

Like Christianity?

Yes. Therefore the challenge for organisations like OIBI is to try to mould both Islam and its environment – a kind of autopoiesis or symbiosis. The precise details are matters for negotiation, consideration and reflection.

Muslims are here in this country to stay. They are our neighbours and friends. Nobody could seriously think, and it would be terrible if they did, that they should be expelled as Jewish people once were. The challenge is to ensure they manage to live here in a way that is decent, fair, makes them feel at home, and contributes to society in a way that we can all appreciate and understand. A particular feature of this challenge is to find ways of persuading younger Muslims that they can have an authentic Islamic faith and still be part of Western liberal democratic society.

How can we in Britain move beyond the polarisation of the culture wars?

One of the lessons I have learned from my own, very sour experience is that when people try to shut you down, you should respond by saying more, not less. But finding ways of doing so can become more difficult as a result.

Update, 9/5/23: see also our review of Greer’s book by Daniel Sharp.

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The post British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities: interview with Steven Greer appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Until three years ago, Laura Dodsworth was a photojournalist, known for Bare Reality, a project in three series in which she interviewed women and men about their private parts and took pictures of them. But in March 2020, Covid reached the UK and everything changed.

Dodsworth’s experiences of lockdown motivated her to write A State of Fear (2021), a bestselling if controversial book which David Aaranovitch lambasted in The Times as ‘a covidiot’s guide to the pandemic’ and ‘an outrageously dumb book selling conspiracy hooey’. She also turned her photographer’s gaze on the effects of lockdown on people’s lives, authoring one photo-essay called ‘2 metres’, on the impact of social distancing, and another with Nina Murden on the ‘ideological significance of face masks’.

‘The freethinker,’ as Bertrand Russell once put it, ‘will not bow to the authority of others, and he will not bow to his own desires, but he will submit to evidence.’ If the idea of ‘freethought’ brings to mind the radical-liberal, secular humanist tradition represented by Russell or J.S. Mill, then Dodsworth is not your typical freethinker. She describes herself as ‘between social conservative and libertarian’, although her political views are ‘in flux’. She appreciates the value of hierarchy and social order, and has some sort of religious ‘faith’.

During the pandemic, though, she ran a podcast entitled ‘Freethinking with Laura Dodsworth’. And just recently, she has finished a book, co-authored with Patrick Fagan, called ‘Free Your Mind’, subtitled ‘the new world of manipulation and how to resist it’. Fagan himself was formerly Lead Psychologist at Cambridge Analytica. He has criticised the government’s Behavioural Insights Team, or ‘Nudge Unit’, for its ‘authoritarian maternalism’ during the pandemic. Fagan’s own website describes him as ‘turning minds into money’ through his ability to ‘nudge people’s behaviours’ – which does make you wonder if there is not a certain inconsistency somewhere. ‘Free Your Mind’ will be published by HarperNonFiction on 8th June.

I caught up with Dodsworth over coffee on the fifth floor of Waterstones, Piccadilly. We discussed her experience of the pandemic, the origins of her two latest books, and why, for her, freethinking is fundamentally about knowing your own mind.

The interview raises many questions. Does the individual matter – even in a pandemic? Did Britain’s intelligentsia fail to think critically? Is the political cause a new form of religion? Are we all more easily manipulated than we would like to imagine? Comments are open below.

~ Emma Park, Editor

The interview

Freethinker:  What was your personal experience of lockdown?

Laura Dodsworth:  It was horror. There was very little about the experience that was not horrific. The fear that was instilled in people, the way people reacted out in the countryside where I live – they would jump to the edges of lane, seemed almost to bury their faces in bushes. People were so jumpy and frightened about contact with others. While that might have been a reasonable response at the beginning, we now know it was an excessive response. So much of that was down to the way the government amplified fear, used martial language, and put us onto a wartime footing.

A lot of my own work got knocked off the table at the beginning of lockdown, which was worrying. Self-employed people were not well looked after by the state at the outset. As a single mother who has to earn a living, I was also worried about how I would be able to help my children with their education. My sons were 13 and 15 at the time, and in different state schools. In some subjects, we had no contact with teachers at all. It was obvious that their education was suffering.

I was horrified and appalled by the impact of lockdown on society. There are so many things that we should value as a society. One is good health, evidently, and not curtailing the natural length of our lives. But we should also value freedom of movement, freedom of thought, the ability to work, the ability to worship, the ability to be educated. You cannot do all that within the four walls of your home. I experienced difficulties as a result of lockdown, but, to me, it was obvious that other people would experience much greater hardship. I was stunned that so many people – commentators, the media, people I knew – were not considering how lockdown would affect the most disadvantaged. So I decided to photograph and interview women in single-room accommodation in London.

I remember I was driving around the motorway to East London to meet one woman. It was just a few weeks after the beginning of lockdown. It was rush hour, and the motorway was deserted. It was disorientating – it made me feel as though I was in an apocalyptic film. I have spoken to other people who went out in lockdown and said how beautiful London was when the streets were empty. But I could not enjoy it because, for me, it was a sign of devastating disruption.

What was lockdown like for the women you interviewed and their families?

There was one woman and her son who lived in a room with no windows, no ventilation. That is illegal. But there are people who live like that. Her son had a really bad cough, which I would attribute to mould – the property was sub-standard. There was another family where the boy had developed anxiety quite badly. He would not put his feet on the ground because he was worried about insects and rats in the property. Normally he would go to school and escape, but now he was in this room the whole time. Since the start of lockdown, he had already made one attempt on his life. He was under ten years old. I found these stories heartbreaking.

Some people said that the ultimate point was that people should be provided with better accommodation. Yes, they should. But more immediately, nobody should ever have been told to stay indoors in lockdown. It was not safer for them to be in single rooms at that time. It was a cauldron of stress and anxiety and missing out on school. These children really needed school. They needed their free school meals. They needed the education, the pastoral care and the escape from their living arrangements. And as children and young women, they were at vanishingly small risk from the virus.

Did other people’s responses to the lockdown surprise you?

There was an exchange on Facebook among my “friends” – in air quotes – where somebody who was a nurse and therefore a key worker, with all the prestige that meant at the time, was saying that she had seen a window cleaner’s van on the roads. She was outraged that a window cleaner was out disobeying lockdown because he was not a key worker: he had no right to be out – he could be spreading the virus. She had seen him, of course, while out in her car going to work. But that was okay, because she was a nurse.

This woman was an active Labour Party member, and the whole Facebook thread was about how wrong it was that a window cleaner was out in his van. What everybody had forgotten was that he was just somebody trying to earn a living, trying to do labour for money, probably for himself and his family.

I was surprised that people who were left wing, who I had thought of as good critical thinkers in the past, wanted to scapegoat somebody for trying to earn a living. It did not take much critical thinking to realise that he was not killing people by being out in a van on a road. I found that kind of response horrifying.

How was the course of your career affected by the lockdowns?

My three Bare Reality books involved interviewing people and turning the interviews into first person stories [accompanied by photographs]. Otherwise the only journalism had been writing about my own projects, although I had studied journalism in my 20s. When lockdown started, for the first time, I had a reason to research and write, which I had not had before. At the time, I felt very much like an outlier. In fact, somebody who had commissioned me before in the media messaged me to say that I was one. But no innovative thinking, no great art, no scientific discovery, no entrepreneurship has come from anywhere except the outlying regions. You always need people who can think outside of the group and outside of the box. To be called ‘outlier’ as an insult shocked me.

How did you come to write State of Fear ?

When China shut its borders in early 2020, I looked at the footage and I thought, ‘That’s terrible – those poor people being shut in their apartments.’ I never thought that we would do anything that mad. When we did, I realised that the things I had taken for granted – the freedom to leave the house, to work and to have relationships, but also freethinking – were illusory, because if they were real, they could not have been curtailed so easily.

A censorship machine kicked in very quickly. I was stunned to watch the mass evocation of fear and compliance. The SPI-B minutes about increasing the level of perceived threat seemed to indicate a real departure from how we used to think of ourselves in Britain – from ‘Keep calm and carry on’. So I started researching, initially for an article, how the government had used fear to make people follow their rules.

I mentioned the idea to my publisher. He said, ‘That’s interesting – do you think there is a book in it?’ I started to think about it, and realised that there was. I knew it could make me unpopular and that it could be the end of my career in the media. But the direction that society was travelling in was so bad, the economy was going down the pan – everything was going so wrong, I thought I might as well commit to doing it.

What are the main points that you want the reader to take away from the book?

There were pandemic plans. The government did not use them.Normally you would not use fear to increase compliance with a lockdown. The government did. People do not realise how much ‘nudge’ and behavioural insights are embedded into the government’s way of doing business. The ‘Nudge Unit’ is keybecause it was set up within the Cabinet Office and was part of policy since its inception.

[Note: the Behavioural Insights Team, or ‘Nudge Unit’, is now independent of the UK government and fully owned by Nesta, a registered charity that describes itself as an ‘innovation agency for social good’.]

There are also behavioural scientists throughout other departments. Other bodies include, or have included, the British Army’s 77th Brigade, the Rapid Response Unit, the Counter-Disinformation Unit, and the Research Information and Communications Unit. ‘Nudge’, censorship, surveillance and polls are thoroughly symbiotic with each other.

Another key point is there was never an exit strategy for the use of fear and behavioural science during the pandemic. If this had been a lab experiment, the scientist asking you to take part in it would have had a plan for how to de-escalate your fear and get you back to a safe place. There was never a plan for how to de-escalate people’s fear of the virus. When the SPI-B advisors were recommending that the level of threat was increased, they never had a plan for how they would bring people back down from that heightened emotional state.

The use of fear and nudge is fundamentally anti-democratic because it moves the Overton window for policymaking. Once you have frightened people, you have softened them up for policies they never would have accepted otherwise. The campaign of fear and the lockdowns have created mental health, economic, social and cultural effects that we will take decades to come out of. That is why it is really important to understand how propaganda and psychology can be weaponised against people.

Was there a tendency in public discourse to stress the importance of the collective and to portray individualism as selfish? Does respecting people as individuals still matter – even in a pandemic?

I think people were forgetting the lessons learned after the World Wars. All the great thinkers of that time, from Arendt to Jung, talk about the importance of the individual. Hitler used to amass people in huge groups, shout at them, and create big shows – because then people lose themselves in the group; they are more likely to identify with the group and be capable of bad things. It is very important to hold on to your own sense of values.

What are the worst legacies of our society’s response to the pandemic?

The pandemic was an epiphany for me, because it was the first time I understood how much we are lied to, and how much the media gets on board with upholding lies. Even now, we are told the ‘cost of living crisis’ is due to Brexit, but we are never told it is due to lockdowns. The worst legacy is that, having seen how people can be manipulated en masse, we know that it will be done again. But I have faith in the individual, and in people’s ingenuity, agency and power to say no, and to think for themselves.

Talking of which, you have done a podcast on ‘freethinking’. What, in your view, does ‘freethinking’ mean?

Everybody wants to be an individual and everybody wants to know their own mind. No one says, ‘I don’t want to know my mind, I just want to be told what to think all the time.’ Everybody wants to be able to think for themselves regardless of influence – to develop their own thoughts and arguments. A second point is that, once you have have the confidence in what you think, you must have the confidence to express it. There is some value in knowing your own mind, but if you never express it to anybody and you follow the flow against your better judgement, you have not gone the whole way. Clarity of thinking and courage in expressing your thoughts are both important.

It is a question of practice. Once you have done it, once you have been in the outgroup and unpopular once, it gets easier. There is also the satisfaction of knowing that you have done it because you have been guided by your own thinking, conscience, morals and values.

Has free speech become a ‘right wing issue’? If so, why?

I do not think people on the left trust people to know their own minds and think and speak for themselves. They like top-down policies and collectivism. But I am apolitical. I spoilt my last ballot and if there was an election tomorrow, I would spoil it again.

The response to lockdown was partisan. Trump said that he did not like lockdown, and so everybody on the left decided to coalesce and oppose people like him, rather than to think for themselves. It became a partisan issue – both in the UK and the US – and it should never have been. But I do not see the paradigm in terms of left versus right. I think it was about authoritarianism versus – I cannot say ‘liberalism’, that does not mean anything – versus freedom of thought and speech. If people were actually freethinkers, this would not have happened.

The suggestion that people on the right wing must be exploiting free speech for their own ends is nasty and ungenerous. The people that stand up for free speech have often done so to the detriment of their reputation and career – I have experienced it myself. I am lucky that State of Fear was a bestseller, because there are plenty of places that may never commission me again. I lost professional contacts and friends. If you stand up for free speech, it is not to further your career or your reputation.

In an extreme situation like the pandemic, where the government was ruling in this manipulative way and in disregard of Parliamentary process, would there be a case for civil disobedience?

Yes, I think there can be a case for that. Take the Milgram experiment, where people were told by men in white coats to give patients what they thought were real, even fatal electric shocks. People will conform – they will obey authority. What we saw in the pandemic was that these tendencies will be mercilessly exploited to encourage us to follow rules. Throughout history, governments have asked their people to do things that are morally wrong. In such cases, there can be a moral compunction to disobey.

How important is freethought in dealing with the manipulation of our behaviour by others – whether in the government, the media or elsewhere?

In the short term, it is the only answer. The government’s deployment of behavioural science  is anti-democratic. We have never been consulted on it. It causes harms. There were people who developed Covid Anxiety Syndrome or a whole range of mental health problems as a result of lockdown. People lost jobs; businesses went under. What the government was able to achieve by making people comply with the Covid regulations was the most depressing act of self-destruction our country has seen in our lifetime. Where is the oversight? Who is the regulator? What ethical framework is the ‘Nudge Unit’ operating in? The answer is, they have no ethical framework.

We cannot rely upon the people who enact these programmes to oversee them safely or to curtail them. It is too useful. The only answer is for the individual to take some agency in educating themselves and in learning how to spot when they are being manipulated. You, the individual, can learn to spot when you are being manipulated – it is like learning how a magician does his tricks.

Can freethinking help us to work out our moral values?

Absolutely. You have to know your own mind, which means you have to know when you are being influenced and be able to let it happen if you choose, or not to let it happen. What people need to do is to be brave and bold about speaking up when they do not agree, and not be afraid and feel that they have to follow the crowd.

Can you tell us more about Free Your Mind?

The aim is for people to free their minds. It really is that simple. If you want to be a freethinker, this book will help you to get there.

Increasingly, we live in a world of manipulation, because governments all around the world are using propaganda, as they always have, but combined with more sophisticated techniques from social psychology. These in turn have combined with technology, to give us the propaganda in digital environments. We are all on our devices all the time. We are exposed to thousands of marketing messages and news items every day. We are constantly bombarded by information telling us to buy this, vote for that party, believe this, support that charity.

To know your own mind, you have to be able to recognise the influences that are trying to penetrate it. There may be times when you want to let it wash over you, but it should always be your choice.

Each chapter sets out a principle and then illustrates it using interviews, our own theories, cultural references and the latest research in behavioural science and psychology. The chapter finishes with three rules that people can follow to back up the principles. You can read it chapter by chapter and come away with practical ideas about how you can be more psychologically resilient and less susceptible to mind manipulation.

Does freethinking necessarily go with an outlook that is critical of religion?

I don’t know. Since lockdown, I have become more sympathetic to religion than I have ever been. I have faith, but that does not mean I agree with everything that I hear in a church service or read in the Bible.

Because we are in a post-religious world, people are reaching from the collective unconscious, without even knowing it, for a new religion. Look at what came out of the pandemic, the way people wore masks: many religions have covered parts of the face or the head. There were images in the media of elderly people spaced out in cathedrals waiting for their vaccination. Altar cloths were covered with NHS rainbows. In some of those images, you could almost see an intersection of the old religion and the new one.

The human mind is incredible. The things that people are worried about now, like artificial intelligence or ChatGPT, were created by our minds. But the mind should not be enslaved by other people. Your own mind is like treasure. It is everything: how we perceive the world, how we think, the font of all our achievements. And so it should be free.

Update, 5 August 2023: see also Emma Park’s review of ‘Free Your Mind’ by Dodsworth and Fagan, and ‘The Battle for Thought: Freethinking in the 21st Century’, by Simon McCarthy Jones, in the Literary Review.

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The post ‘You have to know your own mind’ – interview with Laura Dodsworth appeared first on The Freethinker.