2023 has been an eventful year for free thought, humanism and secularism. Below, Emma Park and Daniel James Sharp look back on some of the major issues that have been debated in the Freethinker this year.

I. Free speech, religion and the culture wars

Free thought and intellectual progress are not possible without a shared culture of free speech, open debate and a willingness to engage with different points of view. One of the Freethinker’s concerns this year has been with attempts to repress free speech, especially in the UK and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, and in the context of the ‘culture wars’.

In Ireland, a new bill on hate offences threatens to undermine free speech, not just about religion but on a variety of the most sensitive topics – in other words, topics on which open debate is crucial. In Wakefield, England, in February, a non-Muslim woman, presumably under pressure, donned a veil and made a humiliating public apology in the local mosque, because her autistic son had brought a copy of the Quran into school and it was accidentally scuffed. And Puffin has made attempts to censor Roald Dahl in the name of ‘sensitivity’.

Free speech at universities also remains under pressure, as illustrated by the case of Professor Steven Greer, who was hounded by Bristol University Islamic Society in a smear campaign that was supported by academic colleagues who should have known better. Daniel reviewed Greer’s book about his experiences.

Across the pond, Professor Alex Byrne’s contract for a book critical of gender identity ideology was cancelled by Oxford University Press, but has since been published by Polity. From a different perspective, former vice chancellor Julius Weinberg argued that ‘freedom of speech is not as simple as my right to express my ideas’.

To supporters of democracy in Hong Kong, the culture wars are all but an irrelevance. The suffocating control of the Chinese Communist Party, said Kevin Yam, forced campaigners across the political spectrum to work together.

II. Science, philosophy, and humanism

As well as exploring the issues of the day, the Freethinker has also explored some of their deeper philosophical and historical contexts.

We interviewed the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett about the relationship between philosophy and science, meaning and consciousness in a godless, Darwinian universe, and New Atheism. With historian Charles Freeman, we discussed the richness and variety of the ancient Greek mind and how the coming of Christian orthodoxy put an end to that tradition. And we caught up with the humanist and author Sarah Bakewell to explore different traditions of humanism.

Meanwhile, Matt Johnson and Daniel Sharp both contributed articles about one of the most famous freethinkers of recent years, the late Christopher Hitchens.

III. Islam and free thought

With the rise of Islam in Britain and across the West, it has become urgent to consider how far the religion can be compatible with Western values and approaches. To explore this question, we interviewed Taj Hargey, possibly Britain’s only liberal imam. Other contributors have explored the need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought around the world, why the hijab is not a good symbol for women, and whether it is possible to distinguish between religious and political Islam.

IV. Secularism

Secularism is the principle that religion and state should be separated, and that religion should have no undue influence on public life. In the UK, thanks to a combination of political apathy and entrenched privilege, we still have an established church and unelected clergy in Parliament. Paul Scriven, a Liberal Democrat peer, spoke to the Freethinker about why he introduced a bill to disestablish the Church of England.

With a general election on the cards for 2024, Stephen Evans of the National Secular Society discussed where the political parties stand on faith schools. Two recent events in which the NSS participated revealed some of the challenges involved in secularisation. Daniel also argued in an article for Only Sky that the Church of England’s record on gay marriage is another reason to hasten disestablishment.

Other contributors to the Freethinker have looked at secularism, its history and future, in Québec, Turkey and Wales, and the strengths and weaknesses of French-style laïcité.

Did you know that, while the advancement of any religion, as well as of humanism, is considered a charitable aim under English law, the advancement of free thought, atheism or secularism is not? See Emma’s piece for New Humanist.

V. Israel and Palestine

One of the year’s biggest events—the Hamas attack against Israel on 7 October and the ensuing war—has produced a wide range of often emotional and heated responses. In contrast to all this sound and fury, the Freethinker has published a series of articles dealing with the conflict from different and often disagreeing, but rationally and charitably argued perspectives.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid wrote about the ‘leftist postcolonial apologia’ for Hamas and argued that the Israel-Palestine conflict is, at root, a religious one, while in Emma’s interview with Taj Hargey, the imam was staunch in his support of the ‘occupied and oppressed’ Palestinians. Hina Husain wrote about her Pakistani upbringing and being inculcated with Islam-based anti-Semitism. Finally, Ralph Leonard responded to all these articles, arguing that the conflict is, in fact, inspired more by competing nationalisms than religious impulses.

VI. Republicanism

Free thought and secularism have been closely intertwined with republicanism in British history. The Freethinker has reinforced this link since its beginnings in 1881.

This year, we have continued in the same spirit of religious and political anti-authoritarianism, publishing a review by Daniel of the republican activist Graham Smith’s anti-monarchy book. Later in the year, Daniel interviewed Graham Smith in person at Conway Hall. Meanwhile, Emma delved into the archives to discover the connection between the Freethinker and Republic, of which Smith is the CEO.

See also Daniel’s article on the republican Thomas Paine’s influence on Christopher Hitchens and Tony Howe’s discussion of an even earlier famous British republican, John Milton.

VII. Free thought history

In June, we were saddened to hear of the death of Jim Herrick (1944-2023), former editor of the Freethinker. Bob Forder, NSS historian, wrote an obituary commemorating Jim’s lifelong dedication to free thought, humanism and secularism.

The composer Frances Lynch wrote a guest post about her rediscovery of Eliza Flower, a radical nineteenth-century composer associated with Conway Hall, who was neglected by the historical record because she was female.

We have also been reflecting on the history of the Freethinker and of the various non-religious movements in the UK. Former editor Nigel Sinnott kindly agreed to let us republish an article he wrote for the magazine in 1970 in which he discussed the complicated historical relationship between humanists and secularists. Historian Charlie Lynch introduced the recent book he co-wrote with two other academics charting the history of organised humanism in Britain, which Emma has also reviewed for New Humanist. And Bob Forder argued that free thought and secularism are inseparable.

VIII. The future of free thought

Artificial intelligence has made great strides in 2023. (We even used Dall-E, a generative AI model, to illustrate this post.) Given the exponential pace of development, it is clear that the implications need to be monitored very carefully. For instance, there are concerns that ChatGPT may be biased in favour of certain interpretations of Islam. And artificial general intelligence (AGI) may be just around the corner, making ethical oversight all the more urgent.

Emma and Daniel spoke about the nature of free thought and the challenges facing it today and in the future on the Humanism Now podcast, on Freethought Hour and to the Reading Humanists. Emma also spoke to the Central London Humanists about Pastafarianism, arguably the world’s fastest growing religion, and a topic about which there is much to say.

This year also saw the publication of two intriguing books about the impact of digital technology on free thought, one by Simon McCarthy-Jones, and another by Laura Dodsworth and Patrick Fagan. Emma interviewed Laura Dodsworth for the Freethinker and reviewed both books for the Literary Review. We will be looking further at the implications of digital technology for free thought in 2024.

Finally, a request for your support…

The Freethinker is an independent, non-profit journal and completely open-access. We are funded by donations and legacies given by generations of readers back to the 19th century – and not by big corporations or billionaires. To keep us going in the future, we depend on the generosity of readers today. If you believe in the importance of fostering a culture of free thought, open enquiry and irreverence, please consider making a donation via this link.

And don’t forget to sign up to our free fortnightly newsletter, to keep abreast of the latest developments in free thought in the UK and around the world.

Postscript: a merry Christmas of sorts from Christopher Hitchens…

The post Year in review: 2023 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.

An image published on 9th November 2023 by the European Space Agency, demonstrating the ever-increasing extent of scientists’ ability to see the universe through the collaborative use of space telescopes, in this case, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The image is centred on MACS0416, an expansive galaxy cluster about 4.3 billion light years away, with other galaxies visible around it.

More information on the ESA website.

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The post Image of the week: New super-deep view of the universe appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Dr Taj Hargey is one of the most dynamic, outspoken and controversial figures in Islam today. He is a citizen both of the UK and South Africa, and divides his time between the two. In South Africa, he is president of the Cape Town Open Mosque, which he founded despite virulent opposition from local clergy. In the UK, he is imam of the liberal Oxford Islamic Congregation and provost of the Oxford Institute for British Islam. OIBI was founded in 2021; according to its website, its aim is the ‘full integration of the British Muslim community into the UK mainstream’. Its board includes liberal Muslims and non-Muslims, among them Steven Greer, the law academic accused of Islamophobia, and Hargey’s wife, Professor Jacqueline Woodman, an NHS consultant and Unitarian Christian.

Hargey was born in Cape Town during South African apartheid. His family are Muslims of slave descent (as he himself puts it) from Malaysia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. He read History and Comparative Religion at the University of Durban. He then studied in Cairo and Leiden, before coming to Oxford, where he completed a DPhil on slavery in Islam at St Antony’s College. He then taught at universities in South Africa and the US before settling permanently in the UK in 2001.

I met Hargey at the White Horse pub in Headington, east Oxford, over lunch and a glass of water. In this interview, we discuss his interpretation of Islam, why he looks only to the Quran and not to later Islamic texts, and how he believes his interpretation is relevant to life in modern Britain. We also consider the tradition of free thought within Islam, the unholy alliance between the political left and Muslim fundamentalists in Britain, and Hargey’s plans for OIBI.

This interview was conducted before the outbreak of the present conflict in Israel and Palestine. Since then, Hargey asked to speak to me again, this time via Zoom, to outline his view of the conflict, and argue that the British mainstream media are unfairly biased in favour of Israel. This second interview is appended as the last section of the edited transcript below.

As always, writers and interviewees featured in the Freethinker are responsible for their own views. Our aim in publishing them is to open up the discussion, and thereby to foster, among people with different opinions, a culture of free, rational thought and shared humanity.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

What is your view about the status of the Quran?

The Quran says that it is a revelation from the divine. The Quran that we have today, 1445 years after the Prophet’s death, is exactly the same as it was then. The evidence of early manuscripts dating from the early seventh century supports the claim that the Quran existed during the lifetime of Muhammad. Muslims are taught that he was a conduit, the channel for divine revelation. He was not the author or the architect of Islam’s sacred scripture. One proof that Muhammad was only a conduit is that he is only mentioned by name four times, and is often castigated. Now if you are the author of a document, and not just a vehicle for someone else, do you go about rebuking yourself?

I suppose the Christian fathers did.

Yes, but the Christian fathers did not claim to be Jesus, so that is different. In fact, in one set of Qur’anic verses, God confirms that the Quran is a revelation from the Lord of the world – and if you, Muhammad, tamper and distort these messages, I, God, will seize you by the right hand and sever your throat.

Does viewing the Quran as the word of God ultimately rely on an act of faith – on believing in God in the first place?

Yes. But for myself as a historian, the fact that there are no fundamental discrepancies between the manuscripts of the Quran over 1500 years is an indication that it has a celestial origin, because the basic message has remained untampered with. This message is that there is one God, one humanity, one destiny. We will all be held accountable for the mad, the bad and the sad things that all humans do. The Quran says explicitly that it is a guide for humanity and that it is both timely and timeless.

I firmly believe there is an afterlife because I do not think that my existence here could have enough purpose otherwise. If you have met, say, a deeply devout monk or nun, they have attained certain harmony in their lives that the rest of us do not have. Rather than capitalism and consumerism, this enslavement to which we are addicted, this enlightened nun or monk has achieved something better. They are no longer prisoners of the material world. That for me is indicative of genuine spirituality.

I suppose the humanist response to that would be that spirituality, or a sort of philosophical equivalent, can be found in contemplating the universe as it is.

I do not have any issue with humanists and secularists. What I am against is belligerent atheists and belligerent Muslims, intolerant Jews and intolerant humanists who believe that theirs is the only way. The Quran says that there is no compulsion in matters of religion. People should not be forced to believe something against their will. The Quran says that God alone is sovereign on the Day of Judgement.

You have spoken about the importance of the afterlife. How do you think non-believers will be treated there?

It is presumptuous of me to think that they will be burnt in fire. The atheist may not believe in God, but, like the believer, he also does not think he can go through life without accountability. God will be, I think, just and equitable with the atheist. Because if he is not, I do not want to believe in a Creator like that.

The Quran says that Muslims have a double duty: first, to promote unqualified monotheism; second, to relentlessly pursue universal justice and virtue. If people do unjust, wicked things, then in terms of Qur’anic Islam, I have to resist and oppose them.

That strikes me as a very individualistic approach.

Yes, but Islam is both individualistic and collective. For example, we pray daily alone. Once a week we go to the collective of the mosque. The individual soul matters. The Quran states repeatedly that no soul will bear the burden of another. In contrast, the Christian view of vicarious atonement – of inherited sin, because of Adam and Eve’s indiscretions – is illogical. But we individuals are also part of a collective. John Donne said it beautifully, that no man is an island.

What is the function of the collective?

It should help the have-nots. The Quran tells me and every observant Muslim, that every day you are tested to see if you will do good. Take, for example, the Ukrainian refugees, the starving Yemenis, the displaced Rohingya and what has happened in the civil war in Sudan – we cannot sit on the fence. We need to take a position and to help.

If there were in fact no God, would that matter to you?

Yes, it matters to me in the sense that I do not believe creation could have happened without the Creator.

Does that not raise the question, who created the Creator?

No, there is no need for that because the Creator is the ultimate source.

At the Freethinker, we have previously considered traditions of dissent and free thought in the Islamic world. From your perspective as a scholar of Islam, to what extent has there been room in the history of this religion for adopting different perspectives?

The Quran says repeatedly, Do you not understand? Can’t you see? Why don’t you use your reason? The Quran declares that people who do not want to think are worse than cattle. In early Islamic history, free thinking was not a Christian invention – it was a Muslim invention. A group called Mu’tazilah were the original free thinkers in Islam. They ruled for about 200 years until they were crushed by the orthodox. They believed that the Quran was for free thinking and the right to dissent and to be nonconformist. What I am doing is a new Mu’tazilism – it is not something that I have invented.

Scientific inquiry is a requirement. That is why, for example, I am so proud to be part of the assisted dying movement. I am the only imam involved – the only Muslim scholar and theologian. But I believe that, if I have incurable stage five cancer and I am suffering horrendous pain and causing distress to my loved ones, I should not subject them to six months, a year of more of the same.

You advocate an interpretation of the Quran which considers it both within its historical context and as timeless. Would you say that its ban on eating pork still needs be followed by Muslims today?

It has been proved that in hot climates, if you do not husband pork properly, there is a great deal of illness and disease associated with it. You could argue that, with modern animal husbandry, there is probably less. But the Quran says very clearly that the flesh of the pig is prohibited, nothing about its skin for example. I think that today this prohibition just has a historical legacy – and I am happy to admit that. But because of that heritage, it would be difficult to overturn it. Jews do not eat pork, Muslims do not eat it.

What about alcohol?

God is not against red wine. God is against drunkenness. For example, if the Muslim out there wants a glass of red wine or spirits and he is not inebriated, I do not think it is really wrong. But I do not drink alcohol myself.

And polygamy?

Polygamy is also misunderstood. In seventh-century Arabia, when Muhammad was alive, a woman was the possession, the chattel of the men in her life. First her father, then her brother, then her husband and son. After a major battle in which many men were killed, a temporary permission was given to Muslim men to marry up to four widows (not virgins). And the Quran also says you can only marry up to four provided you treat them equally. That was and remains a key caveat. Now, I do not know about you, but I do not think I can love two people equally and on the same level.

As for Muhammad, he married his first wife, who was 15 years older than him, at the age of 25, and remained monogamous with her until her death. After that, his later wives were result of tribal allegiances and political links – the Quran gave him a special dispensation. Altogether, the Islamic permission for men to marry more than one wife was a limited licence for specific circumstances. It was later hijacked and misinterpreted by the orthodox clergy to apply to all men, especially in countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait. But the thrust of Islam is monogamy.

What about women’s hair and face coverings?

My intention is to bring Muslims back to the Quran, because the Quran repeatedly asserts that it is enough by itself. Regrettably, most Muslims have been conditioned to believe in supplementary sources: the Hadith, the Sharia and the fatwas. This toxic trio has undermined the purity and originality of the Quran. Take the word ‘hijab’. It is mentioned eight times in the Quran, but not once does it refer to a hair covering. The terms burka and niqab are nowhere to be found in Islam’s transcendent text. If a woman wants to cover her hair, I have no issue. However, if she says this is an Islamic requirement, then I will tackle that, because it is a blatant lie, a preposterous untruth.

Does food need to be halal?

Halal is the biggest racket in this country and other parts of the Islamic world. Muslim entrepreneurs claim that Muslims can only eat meat which is slaughtered in a certain manner in the name of God. But this orthodox interpretation is from the old country – it makes little sense in Britain today. I say, with all due respect, that God made this food and I thank the Lord for giving it to us. That is how I make it halal. All of these dietary ideas have to be revisited and restored to their pristine Quranic ethos.

Your interpretation of the Quran is much more liberal than many people’s, including that of many Muslims in Britain.

Yes, but my liberalism is derived purely from the Quran itself. I come from a fairly orthodox, Sunni traditionalist background and I was a committed young Muslim teenager. But as a student, I spent eleven years as a free thinker and spiritual wayfarer. I tried transcendental meditation, I attended Jewish Kabbalah, Sufi, Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Baha’i – all types of religious manifestations.

When I embarked on my research at Oxford, I discovered that the programmed version of Islam that I had been spoonfed as a child was codswallop: they had brought me up on populist Islam and not Quranic Islam. When I discovered that, it was like a light bulb going on in my head: I realised that I had been misled. In the Quran there is an emphasis on reflection, rationality and logic.

If Muslims in Britain would just go back to the Quran, jettison the Hadith, discard the Sharia and ignore the fatwas, we would have no extremism or fanaticism. We would just have mutual coexistence and peaceful harmony.

In Britain, how widespread is your interpretation of Islam?

It is a minority view at the moment. If we have to use rough percentages, I would say about 75 per cent are traditionalists, orthodox, fundamentalists, and intolerant of others. Then we have about 5 per cent who have left Islam, the ex-Muslims. Then we have about 15 to 20 per cent of people like me who are searching for the truth and want to see an Islam that is rooted in and relevant to this society: an allegiance to the Islamic faith stripped of cultural accretions and dogmatic traditions that themselves have no foundations in the Quran. An Islam that is not linked by an umbilical cord to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt or Morocco, etc.

How do your British and Muslim identities relate to each other?

I have multiple identities. I am Muslim, British, South African, and there is no incompatibility or confusion. I choose to live in Britain because it allows me freedom. The type of forward-looking rational Islam that I am promoting – I cannot do it in Saudi Arabia, Iran or Pakistan. I can do it here freely. For that reason, I am very attached to Britain, and also for historical reasons. Britain was the colonial power in South Africa, the mother country. We looked up to the UK, to Shakespeare, the British Parliament, cricket, football, all these cultural, political and historical connections. I lived for 15 years in the United States, but I never felt at home there. Here in Britain, I feel at home.

You left America to settle in the UK not long before the 9/11 attacks. What impact did the attacks have on your life and your way of thinking?

Of course, I was shocked and stunned like everyone else. Nearly 3,000 people were killed. We did not know for sure at the time, but it was most likely that Muslims were responsible. And so, I went to the main mosque in Oxford. Two of my colleagues went to the other two smaller mosques. Guess what the imam said that Friday? Nothing. It was as though this catastrophe had never happened.

That was the trigger for me: I decided this had to change. That is when my colleagues and I started the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford, a small religious organisation that would provide Friday prayers, offer an alternative narrative to other clergy, empower women, engage in interfaith dialogue and so forth. I had all those ideas before, but 9/11 was the trigger to do something concrete.

How big is the Muslim Educational Centre now?

We fluctuate. When there are communal events, there are around 50 or 70 people. They are free-thinkers like myself as well as a good number of non-Muslims. People of other and no faiths come because they want to hear a palatable, logical interpretation of Islam.

You are also the imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation. How does one become an imam?

This is both the strength and the weakness of Islam. To become a Christian minister, you have to go through formal schooling. That can be a weakness, because the appointments are top-down. In Islam, any man – only a man, sadly – who is knowledgeable, virtuous and pious can become an imam. The weakness is that any Tom, Dick or Harry can also become one. The strength of Islam is that it allows a grassroots leadership to emerge. The weakness is that this grassroots leadership, if it is not properly self-regulated by the congregation, can lead to fanaticism and intolerance.

At the Open Mosque that I established in Cape Town, there are five foundational principles. First, we follow the Quran alone. Second, we believe in gender equality. In the mosque, there is only one door, through which both men and women enter; inside, men and women pray together, just separated by an invisible metre, so that worshippers can focus. Third, the Open Mosque is non-sectarian – we admit all denominations. Number four, we are intercultural, not multicultural – all different cultures can come together. The last feature that the Muslim clergy do not like in South Africa, is that we are independent. All are welcome, Muslim and non-Muslim.

We have been going for nine years now, and during that time, the clergy have sent their Muslim thugs four times to fire-bomb us. Once they sent a bunch of killers with AK-47 machine guns to shoot me – luckily, I was not there that evening. The community is quite small, about fifty people, mainly because the clergy has scared all the local Muslims and told them that if they attend the Open Mosque, they will not be given a formal Islamic burial ceremony.

In conservative Muslim families, how much pressure is there on individual members not to become more liberal?

The pressure is very great. For example, the women are told, if you do not cover your hair, you are no longer a Muslim, you are defying the prophet. Most Muslim men wear beards, because Muhammad did. But that was the fashion of his day, not mine. I will never wear a beard. Superficial symbols, external emblems like that do not make me a Muslim. I am a Muslim from within.

As you mentioned earlier, in Britain, about 75 per cent of the Muslim population are conservative. Do you think they are less integrated into British society than they were, say, twenty years ago, and if so, how can they become better integrated again?

Yes, I do think they are less integrated now. This situation has come about because most of the imams in British mosques are, on the whole, imported from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India and the Middle East. Because they do not know about British society, the culture, the history of this country, they cannot provide adequate guidance and effective supervision to people living here. They give the solutions of the old country, but those will not work here. That is the biggest problem. The solution is to have a new generation of British-educated imams who have been taught to think liberally and to look to the Quran alone.

Is that something you are trying to do with the Oxford Institute of British Islam?

The aim of the Oxford Institute of British Islam is to promote and champion an Islam that is integrated, inclusive and indigenous to this society. Through publications, conferences, seminars, workshops, we are providing a valid alternative to fundamentalist Islam. We show that from the Quran, that their views regarding, for example, female genital mutilation, are nowhere mentioned in the Quran (they are mentioned in the Hadith), and should not be tolerated.

This idea of ‘us’ versus everyone else, perceived as ‘Kaffirs’ or non-believers: the Quran does not talk like that. The Quran says we should come to a common understanding and fight for common causes. Common causes for us now include climate change, homelessness, economic disparity, food banks – how we can provide and help those who are really at the bottom of the barrel.

Who is funding OIBI?

At the moment it is funded by our members, but none of them are wealthy. We are looking for rich Muslim donors. We do not want to take any money from abroad. We only want British money, preferably Muslim money, without strings attached.

How many members have you got at OIBI at the moment?

Right now, about 60. I think the first five years will be a hard slog. But we have a valid message for modern Muslims. The indoctrinated message that they have from fundamentalism is the message of yesterday. Our message is for today and tomorrow.

Would you agree that in recent years, fundamentalist Muslims often seem to have fallen in with hard left-wing progressives? If so, how has this come about?

The reason why we have this unholy alliance between the British Left and the Muslim fundamentalists is that the British Left have a guilt complex of colonialism, imperialism and white racism. They think they can make amends by kowtowing to identity politics. But they are actually shooting themselves in the foot, because when they support these fanatical Muslims, that does not advance the cause of the Left in this country, it only exposes them as useful idiots who are being exploited by the fundamentalists to advance their own reactionary agenda.

An argument sometimes made by the same left-wing progressives is that criticising cultural practices like wearing the veil should be avoided because it plays into the hands of Islamophobic right-wing bigots. What is your response to that argument?

First, people who say we should not be criticising the burka (facial masking) or the hijab (hair covering) might as well say that we should not criticise female genital mutilation. If they are happy to reject FGM, why are they so keen to avoid criticising another cultural practice – wearing the burka or hijab – when it can also cause harm? The British Left has been seduced and brainwashed by the fundamentalists into thinking that the hijab, the niqab, the burka are all intrinsic to Islam. No, they are essentially cultural practices and have nothing to do with Qur’anic Islam.

On the topic of Islamophobia, the Muslim Council of Britain and the All Party Parliamentary group on British Muslims have defined this concept as follows: ‘Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.’ What is your view of this definition?

I do not think that Islamophobia is based in racism. Muslims come from all races. There are white Muslims too. Hostility against Muslims is not based on race. It is based on a feeling of bigotry, hostility and antagonism that is related to religion rather than race. These bigots are against the Islamic faith. But Muslim stupidity can increase anti-Islamic sentiment – for instance, if organisations like the Muslim Council of Britain fail to acknowledge that some Muslims have been complicit in terrorism, promoting sharia law and other egregious things. Even if, individually, we have not been complicit in these crimes, we as a collective need to acknowledge that they have originated among Muslims.

The issue of free speech regularly crops up in instances of alleged Islamophobia – for example, in Steven Greer’s case. Would you say that there is a valid distinction to be drawn between criticising ideas like Islam or any religion, and criticising the people who practise it?

Everyone should have the right to criticise everyone and everything. That includes religion. I, as a Muslim, criticise Islam all the time. I am a Voltairist: I will defend to the death your right to say something, even when I do not agree with you. There is no contradiction in my being a Voltairist and being a Muslim. Islam talks about the fact of free speech: if there is no free speech, free will and free choice, how can there be a God that you can believe in? Because then you are being forced into believing – and Islam does not talk about coercion. In fact, the word ‘Islam’ has a double meaning. First it means ‘peace’ and second, ‘submission and surrender’ to the Creator. The word ‘Muslim’ simply means ‘he or she who has submitted to the divine’. Free expression is integral to Quranic Islam, but not to Hadith-Sharia Islam.

Is there such a thing as the sin of blasphemy?

The Quran says, People will blaspheme, but leave them alone, I (the Almighty) will deal with them. As to apostasy, the Quran says people of course will leave their faith. In the morning they will believe one thing and next day they will believe something else. The Quran declares time and again, leave the apostates, I, the Creator, will deal with them.

Do you think that the way that Muslims are presented in the media and in advertising is doing Islam a disservice?

Absolutely. For example, if you see any BBC publication involving a Muslim woman, she is wearing the hijab. Why is that the defining norm, when it is not a requirement of the Quran? It is a sort of unspoken propaganda. They are telling the audience that Muslims have a uniform – I have a beard, you have a hijab – and that makes us Muslim. How absurd!

Presumably you want everyone in Britain to understand these types of issues better.

Yes, that is why this is part of the remit of the Oxford Institute of British Islam. I believe that, if we start from the grassroots, no one will take any notice of us. For this reason, OIBI is more of a scholarly think tank, driving a rational and intellectual analysis of Qur’anic Islam.

And you are not yet affiliated to Oxford University?

No, we want to take our time but remain autonomous. We are currently negotiating with one or two colleges. We then hope to make institutional connections with the university. We want to be an alternative to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS), which cost around £100 million to build, and we want to provide something of real everyday practical use for Muslims in Britain.

[The 13 trustees listed on the OCIS website include HRH Prince Turki Al Faisal, HRH Sultan Nazrin Shah and other leading figures from Malaysia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Nigeria, Indonesia and Qatar, as well as four non-Muslims. Saudi Arabia is among its major funders. It is an independent institution, although its governance structure includes several Oxford academics, and it has close associations with various colleges and faculties – Ed.]

Are there any other projects you are working on at the moment?

I am now sort of retired, although I still supervise some graduate students. I want the Open Mosque in Cape Town and OIBI to provide a legacy of a pluralistic, pertinent and progressive Islam. If we succeed in getting this message across to some Muslims, it will be a great achievement. We want to appeal not only to the taxi drivers and supermarket workers, but also to the movers and shakers: the academics, scholars, lawyers, dentists, doctors, engineers, architects, teachers and technocrats.

• • • • • • • • • 

Addendum: Taj Hargey’s position on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and response to a few additional questions from the Freethinker

I want to make it crystal clear that this is not a fight between Islam and Judaism. It is not a fight between Muslims and Jews. It is a fight between European settler colonialism and legitimate Palestinian resistance. People in the UK, Muslims and others, need to understand this. This has nothing to do with Jews and Muslims or Islam and Judaism. It is to do with a colonial settler project that was funded and supported and initiated by Europeans, mainly out of collective guilt, especially after the Holocaust. Half a million people were recently out on the streets of London protesting this barbaric onslaught against Palestine, and the total disproportionate vengeance by a right wing, fascist Israeli government – that is what it is: Netanyahu and others are right wing, ultra-fascist zealots. They are in control of Israel and they are inflicting disproportionate vengeance.

I condemn unequivocally what Hamas did on 7th October. There are no ifs and buts about that. But the question is, how many people will be the right exchange rate? At the moment, twelve or thirteen thousand Palestinians from Gaza are dead. 1300 Jews are dead. So, the current ratio is one to ten. What will be the exchange rate in another week’s time, another month’s time? One to 20? When is this madness going to stop? And why is it all Western European countries in particular, who have got a real stain on their collective history of being anti-Semitic for 2000 years, culminating in the Holocaust, supporting the Zionists in Israel. In 1917, Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary at the time, declared that Britain would favour the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. If you look at Belfour’s legacy in history and his background, he was a rabid anti-Semite. He felt that the way to deal with anti-Semitism in Britain was to get rid of the Jews altogether and send them to Palestine. That is an uncomfortable part of British colonial history. We do not want to know – we want to whitewash it.

These are the points that people really should understand. When you have the world’s largest open-air prison, which Gaza is and still remains, what are the occupied and oppressed supposed to do? I am not for one minute applauding or justifying or condoning what Hamas did. They did something totally brutal, inhuman, unconscionable. But the veneer has now been stripped from what Israel is doing. It presented itself all this time as a democratic, civilised society, but now we have these right wing, ultra-fascist Zionists ruling the roost. People in Britain, especially the right-wing press, fall over themselves to accommodate Zionism. We must never tolerate a colonial project that ignores the indigenous inhabitants. We should accommodate Jews, yes. Accommodate Judaism, yes. But to say that Zionism and Judaism are inextricably linked and they are the same, or they are synonymous, is totally nonsensical.

Any scholar worthy of his or her salt should read two books on this issue, one by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and the other by the Palestinian American historian, Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance.

Of course, Israel should exist. But it must not exist on the basis of confiscated, stolen, expropriated and annexed lands.

In your view, what is the best way of resolving the present conflict?

I think initially there should be a two-state solution. But the ultimate goal should be a one-state solution, a democratic state where everyone has equal rights.

Should that be a state of Palestine or Israel?

No, it should be a bi-national state – both of them. I think we will have to go through a preliminary phase first, which is to have this two-state solution as an interim for 20-30 years, to build confidence and see what can be done in bringing these two peoples together.

What are the barriers to an ultimate one-state solution? Do you think it is realistic that Muslims and Jews in such a fraught area will ever be able to live together in harmony?

Historically, Muslims and Jews lived together very amicably for the most part, until the introduction of this political ideology called ‘Zionism’ in the late nineteenth century. Zionism is an invention of secular atheist Jews that started in Europe. Its forefather was Theodor Herzl, an Austrian Jewish journalist.

On the other side, to what extent would you say that some Islamic regimes are responsible for stirring up anti-Semitic feeling in the Israel-Palestine area?

Arab nationalism will take any excuse to foment friction and tension. But the root cause of this conflict is not between Islam and Judaism, between Muslims and Jews, but between Zionist colonial settlers and the legitimate Palestinian resistance. That is the fight. And so, yes, there are going to be some regimes in the Arab world and elsewhere that will want to stoke it, but you cannot get away from the fact that this is a colonial enterprise. Israel would never have been able to exist without the unwavering support from European and Western powers.

Isn’t religious hatred also part of this conflict?

Islam is not anti-Jewish. It is against injustice and oppression regardless of background and belief.

Presumably you would want to distinguish between Hamas, the regime, and the Palestinians, just as you would want to distinguish between Netanyahu’s regime and the Israelis?

Yes. We have to be consistent here. My beef with the British establishment is that they are not consistent. If they were consistent, they would not be blindly supporting the Zionist Israelis. Consistency will lead to fairness and impartiality. But there is no fairness or impartiality from the British establishment or from the rulers and movers and shakers in this country. It is a reflex action to support the Zionists, because they cannot make the distinction between a Zionist and a Jew. And Israel had deliberately obfuscated this distinction.

The BBC has been criticised for not calling Hamas a terrorist organisation. In your view, is it a terrorist organisation?

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Margaret Thatcher called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. Why can’t we use neutral terms – why are we using one-sided terminology? In this context, Israel benefits from using that terminology, because you demonise the other. Hamas are all Sunni fascists, as far as I am concerned. But they think that all’s fair in love and war, because they are fighting what they perceive as oppression. Who are you or who am I to tell them how to fight?

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Further reading

A different view of the Israel-Palestine conflict

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

On the hijab

The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women, by Khadija Khan

On Islam and the West

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

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie

The radicalisation of young Muslims in the UK: an ongoing problem? by Khadija Khan

The post Britain’s liberal imam: Interview with Taj Hargey appeared first on The Freethinker.

A round-up of recent and upcoming talks by the Freethinker editorial team, as well as a couple from the National Secular Society and Conway Hall.

• Editor Emma Park appeared on Episode 5 of the Humanism Now podcast, to discuss free thought, free speech, and the state of humanist, secularist, atheist and free thought movements in Britain today.

• Emma will also be speaking about free thought, humanism and the ‘two cultures’ to the Reading Sunday Alternative on 26 November.

• Assistant editor Daniel Sharp spoke to John Richards, president of Atheism UK, on Freethought Hour. Topics included free speech, Iran, Islam in Britain, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and more.

• ‘Let’s talk to each other’: Bradlaugh Lecture 2023 for the National Secular Society by journalist Nicky Campbell, on the topic of free speech and public debate.

• Don’t miss: ‘Condoms, Sponges and Syringes: The 19th century pioneers of family planning’, by Bob Forder, Freethinker contributor, board member of Secular Society Limited, and historian of the National Secular Society. ‘The ability of individuals to control their fertility is a basic right, with important social and economic consequences ranging from women’s liberation to the relief of poverty,’ said Forder. The lecture will take place in Conway Hall, London, at 11am on Saturday 4th November.

We understand that the UK branch of an American evangelical anti-abortion group will be protesting against Forder’s talk tomorrow. We don’t know why, as a discussion of birth control in the Victorian period hardly seems high on the list of things that such groups should be worrying about. Let’s see whether they turn up…

7/11/23: Update on the anti-abortion protests now available here.

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The post Freethinkers in conversation 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.

New signs of life elsewhere in the galaxy? The BBC recently reported that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope may have detected evidence of the molecule dimethyl sulphide (DMS), which on Earth is ‘only produced by life’, on planet K2-18b, which is 120 light years away and nearly nine times the Earth’s size.

Could Jesus have visited other planets? More here.

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The post Image of the week: planet K2-18b appeared first on The Freethinker.

Anaxagoras (c. 500-428 BC) was a Presocratic philosopher from Clazomenae on the coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). He came to Athens to practise philosophy in around 480 BC – although most of the details of his biography are uncertain – but was banished around 20-30 years later for impiety. He reportedly claimed that the sun, moon and stars were not gods, as was traditionally believed, but made of natural substances (metal, earth or fiery stones). He seems to have spent the rest of his life in Lampsacus, back in Asia Minor.

According to an apocryphal story related by the biographer Diogenes Laertius, Anaxagoras predicted the fall of a meteorite in 467 BC. He probably speculated on many topics now considered part of ‘science’, including astronomy, meteorology and physiology, and seems to have thought that the universe was made up of a mixture of elements that were set in motion by Mind (nous).

The above image is from a fresco by Eduard Lebiedzki, after a design by Carl Rahl (1888), in the portico of the University of Athens.

The post Image of the week: Anaxagoras appeared first on The Freethinker.

The above image is of page 190 of the Freethinker, vol. 102, no. 12, December 1982. It includes a letter by Albert E. Standley, which led to the formation of Republic, the anti-monarchy campaign group. The current CEO of Republic, Graham Smith, was arrested for protesting against the coronation on 6th May 2023.

Standley’s letter was one of several published in the Freethinker on the abolition question. The meeting which it inspired is described by Smith in Abolish the Monarchy, p. 194, as follows:

‘It was on the Queen’s birthday, 21 April 1983, that a small band of republicans met in London in response to a letter in the Freethinker magazine from librarian Albert Standley. The letter proposed the formation of a society that would advocate republican ideals and promote the alternative to the monarchy.’

The text of Standley’s original letter is reproduced below:

‘ALTERNATIVES TO MONARCHY

‘Philip Harding, commenting (October) on Julia Atkinson’s article on the monarchy (August) admits that the British so-called constitutional monarchy (we don’t have a constitution!) is imperfect, but falls back upon two well-worn and unsupported assertions: “it works well enough” and “there’s nothing better to replace it”.

‘I should like to see a Republican Association formed, among whose members would surely be such rationalists as those who support the NSS and even pragmatists of Mr Harding’s mould, which would work to put forward logical and viable alternatives. It would also publicise the view that the Head of any truly democratic State must be chosen by, accountable to and removable by its people. Would anyone like to join me in launching such a body?

A. E. STANLEY

55A Netley Road, Barkingside, Ilford, Essex’

Note: Standley’s surname is printed as ‘Stanley’ in the above issue of the Freethinker. However, this appears to be an error: he is referred to as ‘Standley’ both by Smith and elsewhere, including in an article by Roy Greenslade in the Guardian, published on 28 March 1994 (‘Down the Royals! Up the Republic!’). Greenslade discusses a recent pro-republican dinner in the Cholmondeley Room in the House of Lords that was

‘organised by Republic, a little-known pressure group founded 11 years ago by Albert Standley, a librarian from Colchester, and Terry Liddle, then a second-hand book salesman from south London. Like-minded Labour party supporters and humanists, both found they also agreed that the British monarchy was not only an anachronism but a barrier to a genuinely classless and egalitarian society. So, one foggy night at London Bridge station, they decided to set up Republic.’

See also:

• Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed by Daniel James Sharp.
• Graham Smith (not that type of republican), interview on the National Secular Society podcast.

With thanks to Dan Bye for research into Standley’s name.

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The post The Freethinker and early republicanism: from the archive 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.