Introduction 

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

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

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

Interview 

Freethinker: Why did you decide to write a memoir? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does consciousness come about in a Darwinian universe? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you have any future projects in the works? 

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

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

Further reading:

Darwinism, evolution, and memes

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

Science, religion, and the ‘New Atheists’

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

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

Secular conservatives? If only…, by Jacques Berlinerblau

Can science threaten religious belief? by Stephen Law

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

Christopher Hitchens and the value of heterodoxy, by Matt Johnson

Meaning and morality without religion

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

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

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

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

It is rare for a political memoir to be anything but a blandly written exercise in self-congratulation, and it is to Rory Stewart’s credit that his is lively, readable and self-conscious. His Politics On the Edge: A Memoir from Within is a valuable testament to the rot that has spread so far and so wide in British politics. He is also recognisably human in a way that slick careerists like David Cameron and Rishi Sunak are not. Stewart’s memoir reads like a memoir by an actual individual—another rarity of the genre.

Perhaps this is because Stewart came to politics late after a career in diplomacy and years of walking from Afghanistan to Nepal. Privileged his upbringing may have been, but he has had a full life outside of politics and evinces a genuine interest in people, places and principles—all things that are sadly lacking in much of our political class.

Stewart’s exposure of the farcical and ineffective inner workings of successive Tory governments since he was elected to Parliament in 2010 is damning. The scheming, dishonest, backstabbing, vulgar nature of politics is hardly news, but Stewart shows just how malignant the Tories have become ever since Brexit and the rise of Boris Johnson. His insights into the characters of figures like Johnson and Liz Truss, both of whom he worked directly under at different points of his political career, are as valuable as they are depressing, and expose them as the intellectual and moral pygmies that we already knew they were.

In the end, having failed in his bid for leadership of the party in 2019, Stewart resigned from the Cabinet and was purged by the victorious Johnson. This is another rarity in politics: Stewart had said he would not remain in the Cabinet if Johnson became prime minister, and, unlike so many who casually abandon their principles when they get in the way of ambition (Michael Gove springs to mind), he stuck by what he had said.

Would the Brexit debacle have gone ahead if Stewart had become prime minister? He states that he would have championed a version of Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement rather than the chaotic Brexit we actually got from Johnson or supporting a second referendum. Sensible as Stewart makes the May agreement sound, one wonders how he would have managed to get it through Parliament, given that May herself failed time and time again to do so. Appeals to sensible centrism had long since lost their persuasive powers in the Tory party.

One of Stewart’s less endearing characteristics is his somewhat self-important view of himself. In the book, he is a reluctant hero, come to save the Tories (and the rest of us) from a Johnsonian disaster. He is a defender of the centrist liberal consensus against right-wing radicals hell-bent on revolution. And he, the noble idealist, is slowly disillusioned by politics: ‘I felt myself becoming less intellectually inquisitive, coarser and less confident every single day.’ Elsewhere: ‘I began to feel that the longer I stayed in politics, the stupider and the less honourable I was becoming…’ In the end, Stewart seems to hate what he calls ‘this rebarbative profession’.

All this sometimes feels self-indulgent, albeit genuine. And, in fairness, Stewart does warn us from the outset:

‘I have tried to be honest about my own vanity, ambitions and failures, but I will have often failed to judge myself in the way that I judge others. I can see no way, however, of entirely avoiding the risks of personal memory in reconstructing a decade of life. The alternative would be blandness, evasion or silence.’  

In avoiding those literary sins, Stewart is very successful. But one does sometimes tire of the ‘centrist saviour’ mode in which he writes: ‘[If Johnson’s] lies took him to victory, his mendacity and misdemeanours would rip the Conservative Party to pieces, unleash the most sinister instincts of the Tory Right, and pitch Britain into a virtual civil war.’ Stewart, of course, saw himself as the one to save us all from that outcome.

Lest I give a false impression, I did enjoy the book, and I admire Stewart. He is honest, decent and self-reflective, despite the odd lapse into the sanctimonious. And he is fundamentally right about the disaster that was Boris Johnson and Brexit. Though how Brexit could have been anything but a disaster, whatever form it took, is beyond me—Johnson’s deal was not, after all, radically different from May’s.

But he also misses something very important: the Tory Party was already rotten long before Johnson came to power. Stewart is initially sceptical about David Cameron, but comes to see him as the ‘last representative of the old Blairite liberal order’. And he positively swoons over Theresa May—in a recent interview with her on the podcast he co-hosts with Alastair Campbell, he called May ‘one of my genuine political heroes’.

Yet it was Cameron who promised a Brexit referendum to appease ‘the most sinister instincts of the Tory Right’, and May who, as Home Secretary, presided over the ‘hostile environment policy’ that led to the wrongful deportation of scores of non-white British citizens. A study commissioned by the Home Office itself found that the Windrush scandal was a result of decades of racist policymaking.

In other words, the worst instincts of the Tory party were nurtured, if not completely welcomed, from at least 2010, not 2016, and Stewart’s failure to see that, not to mention his failure to do anything about it while in Parliament, was his most serious flaw. The journalist Nick Cohen, in his review of Stewart’s memoir, puts it more bluntly:

‘Stewart cannot tell the whole story because he does not understand the failings of moderate conservatism. The most glaring is its self-delusion. There was no way the party would accept him or any other liberal conservative as its leader. The Tories are a hard right-wing party now and becoming more right wing with every passing year.’

Cohen is slightly too harsh on Stewart, but he is essentially correct. Would we have been better off if Rory Stewart had become prime minister? Probably. But how likely was that in the first place with a Tory party like the one we have had for quite some time? Not very. Stuck in a bubble of centrist conservatism, Stewart cannot help but miss this essential point. He is a principled, decent man who has lived a very interesting life. He is also very enjoyable to read. But the ‘good chap’ theory of politics has always been a flawed and foolish one, and Stewart’s blind impotence in the face of his party’s embrace of catastrophic populism is not charming in the slightest.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on free thought. Or make a donation to support our work into the future.

The post ‘This rebarbative profession’ – Rory Stewart’s ‘Politics on the Edge’, reviewed appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

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

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

Interview

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

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

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

And you rebelled against this, presumably?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What other alternative Christianities could there have been?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who else among your subjects really stands out to you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you deal with critics of your work?

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

Is there less tolerance these days?

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

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

Aristotle, because he saw the beauty in living things.

And second, Athens or Jerusalem?

Athens. I think you know that!

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

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

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on free thought. Or make a donation to support our work into the future.

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

9 June this year marked the tenth anniversary of the death of the Scottish author Iain Banks. A self-declared ‘evangelical atheist’, Banks’s fiction is famous for its macabre, mind-bending narratives exploring the extremes of the human psyche; his 1984 debut novel, The Wasp Factory, concerns a psychopathic teenager who believes that the future can be ordained by the movements of wasps within a cruel maze of his own design. Despite a sizeable body of well-received fiction, it is Banks’s science fiction that he himself considered his best and most important work. He differentiated his two writing styles with the addition of a middle initial, M.

Iain M. Banks believed that science fiction is the only genre that seeks to tackle the effects of scientific and technological change on the individual and society. Banks’ vision of a utopian society is the ‘Culture’: a post-scarcity, space-faring, hedonistic, egalitarian, atheistic, communist utopia, run entirely by sentient artificial intelligences. The Culture is a ‘classic’ vision of utopia: their citizens want for nothing and live in a state of hedonist bliss, freed from labour to pursue higher human meaning. A reader would find it difficult to overlook the socialistic overtones of the Culture, where money is considered a crude form of rationing and other civilisations are frowned upon for the barbarism of their hierarchical societies and lack of empathy.

The first book of the Culture series, Consider Phlebas, is set during an intergalactic war between the Culture and a species of tripedal aliens that are on a religious crusade to proselytise the galaxy. The Culture—despite not being at threat themselves—consider it their moral imperative to intervene. Over the course of a nine-novel series, Banks fleshes out the Culture’s society. To a backdrop of vivid space-opera grandeur, spattered with lasers fights and spaceship battles, Banks confronts readers with a series of moral quandaries, including the extreme eventualities of being able to upload one’s consciousness into a computer, whether the Culture should intervene in the development of nascent alien societies to mitigate war and cruelty, and the recurrent theme of how citizens occupy their time when freed from economic servitude.

The edge-of-your-seat action and immense scope of the Culture series has long been a favourite of the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, the 39-year-old co-founder of Facebook, suggested one of Banks’s books, The Player of Games, for his book club to read. Jeff Bezos has been pushing for years to have Consider Phlebas converted into an Amazon TV series. Elon Musk, too, seems to have been so inspired by the Culture series that he considers himself to be the embodiment of its ideology: in a 2018 Tweet, Musk states ‘I am a utopian anarchist of the kind described by Iain Banks.’ Previously Musk had appropriated the names of two of Banks’s fictional spaceships for his reusable rocket landing barges: the ‘Just Read the Instructions’ and ‘Of Course I Still Love You’. The Link, Musk’s brain-computer-interface (BCI) device, is allegedly responsible for the deaths of  large number of primates and other animals. It was originally to be named the ‘Neural Lace’, the namesake of the fictional BCI technology used by the Culture.

In a 2010 interview, later posted on the literary website Strange Horizons, Banks was told that many critics and reviewers regard his utopian society as representing the libertarian ideal, to which Banks responded with astonishment, stating, ‘Have these people seriously looked at the problems of the world and thought, “Hmm, what we need here is a bit more selfishness”?’ Further, he created the Culture as ‘hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.’ So how is it that the technology-billionaire-class could see themselves in his writing?

A sizeable body of literature has been written about the ideological motivations driving the billionaires of Silicon Valley. One of the better-known polemical works on this subject is still the contentious, although arguably prescient, essay The Californian Ideology (1995), written by the British media theorists Andy Cameron and Richard Barbrook. In their essay, Cameron and Barbrook consider the conflicting ideologies of the founders of Silicon Valley, speculating on the nascent internet and predicting the birth of a new virtual social class who would rule the information age. According to The Californian Ideology, the Silicon Valley of the 1990s was dominated by liberal ideals and a feeling of technological optimism, often inspired by the hi-tech utopias described in the science fiction of writers like Isaac Asimov. Many technology-literate workers sought to break free from conventional forms of labour and leveraged their software skills to find niche employment in the unfolding dot-com boom. Because of the esoteric nature of their work and skills, workers were able to negotiate high wages and favourable working conditions.

According to Cameron and Barbrook, these workers were willing to abandon their larger utopian ambitions to become workers in the free market because of their belief in ‘technological determinism’. This refers to the theory that the technology developed by a society will firstly evolve according to its own internal rules, and secondly it will dictate the social structure, economics, and cultural growth of society. For the workers of Silicon Valley, the knowledge that the wheels of technological progress were turning, whether they were directly contributing or not, assured an inevitable technological utopia and freed them to capitalise on being skilled workers in a new era of the free market. Many predictions made in The Californian Ideology were proven incorrect, such as that the internet would be used solely to perpetuate Americo-centric, libertarian, neo-liberal ideals, and the idea of a new apartheid forming between the information ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. However, Cameron and Barbrook successfully highlight the paradox that is the marriage of free-market libertarianism and technological-utopianism still at work in California today.

This is perhaps how the billionaires interpret Iain M. Banks’s utopia. In the far-distant future, technological determinism will bring about a post-scarcity society inevitably of its own accord, without any single human architect. As observed in a blog post by the Adam Smith Institute, effective post-scarcity may only come about because of efficiency improvements created by the free market. Following this logic, the billionaires are not misunderstanding Banks’s utopian idealism; on the contrary, they believe they are actively working towards it.

The ardent belief that free-market principles must be defended, government oversight fought off, and responsibility towards society shirked, has created a host of serious social issues over the course of the last twenty years. The world is still reeling from the rise of the internet, itself a utopian technology, and the panoply of innovations to which it has given rise. To take but one example, the operation of run-of-the-mill social media presents a threat to liberal democracy that cannot be overstated. During the run-up to the 2016 US election, misinformation from the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group’s Internet Research Agency reached some 100 million Americans a month. That is not to mention the other ills associated with social media, such as isolation and climbing suicide rates. It is not immediately apparent that the recent products from Silicon Valley are moving humanity closer to a state of utopia.

The latest innovation out of California is vastly more significant than any product that has come before. Generative Artificial Intelligence has captured the zeitgeist; triggered a new arms race between China and America; raised questions concerning consciousness, humanity, and human expression; sparked labour strikes around the world; seeded a new scientific revolution; and caused serious concern among governments and pundits of an emerging existential threat. Most people will have been exposed to the technology in the form of the popular chatbot ChatGPT.

The unleashing of AI on the world—although the technology is in reality currently nothing more than an expert plagiariser—has many researchers screaming ‘AGI!’. ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ is the theoretical God-computer: an AI programme with agency, capable of assimilating information at the speed of light, and able to bring about its own efficiency improvements – that is, to evolve. AGI was the stuff of science fiction, the cornerstone of Banks’s Culture, Asimov’s robots, Agent Smith of The Matrix, and Skynet of Terminator. Now it is a goal towards which companies, governments and universities are actively working.

If the technology that is currently emerging turns out to be as ‘revolutionary’ as is anticipated, and not just a means of, say, churning out bad poems, then that would surely be no coincidence. Today, we are facing a ‘poly-crisis’, as it has been called. The many crises include the Ukraine war, the reawakening of great power struggles between the West and China, rampant populism and ultranationalism, economic crisis, and above all the existential threat of climate change, which exacerbates each of the other crises. Market economies have, by design, overlooked the externality—a factor outside of the remit of a business model—that is the continuation of human life on Earth.

The climate change crisis, stemming from the greenhouse effect, has now spawned a series of abstruse, secondary cascading effects—each a crisis in its own right—that threatens near every facet of life on earth. Carbon offsetting efforts, amounting to little more than planting trees, are failing to account for the influence of microplastics on the ocean, for example. Previously, climate models suggested that the planet’s oceans sequestered around one third of annual human carbon emissions – but this may no longer be the case. Nor are carbon offsets able to compensate for the effects of large-scale industrial farming on top soil fungi networks, which recent studies suggest would normally sequester another third of atmospheric carbon. Artificial intelligence will influence all these crises, for better or worse.

AGI research is inexorable for several reasons. Perhaps the most immediate drive is geopolitical: Chinese researchers, under the direction of the CCP, are making significant progress in the field of artificial intelligence; whichever nation secures the technology first may become the reigning superpower. Free market principles are another driving factor. Each company will want to beat its competitors to the prize. Third, mitigating the climate crisis will require significant technological innovation and efficiency improvements for carbon capture and the cleaning up of pollution. The need for mitigating technology is immediate and perhaps AI is the only way to bring about the technological changes required for society, as we know it, to survive in the long term.

Ostensibly, GPT4, the latest AI model powering ChatGPT, cost in the region of one billion dollars to train. In the western world, the billionaires of Silicon Valley, with the aid of many poached PhD students (whose contribution is unacknowledged but likely to be substantial), may be the only group with the resources to create an AGI. Beyond cost, as with the esoteric technologies of the 1990s, the complexity of the software architectures involved have become extreme: often the processes are obscure even to the engineers themselves. Having broken this ground, however, the companies are unlikely to restrain themselves from pursuing further innovations. In this context, it is imperative that these companies invest in ‘alignment’: that is, in ensuring that an AI programme performs tasks that are in the best interest of a human user, thereby maintaining a sort of ‘moral compass’. The need for this in areas like social media is already clear. Without such investment, the rise of AI could well lead to an existential threat.

That effective artificial intelligence has come about in this way must be considered a misfortune. Lack of government oversight presents a problem, as does the concentration of technological power in the hands of a tiny, individualist, libertarian-leaning minority rather than in a democratic, multilateral effort with well enforced fail-safes. It is also unfortunate for the billionaires who must now attempt to control this technology. They can no longer sit idly and allow technological determinism to unfold of its own volition. AGI could be construed as manifest technological determinism. How the billionaires respond to this in practice will likely revolutionise societal structures in the very near future.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought. Or make a donation to support our work into the future.

The post Ethical future? Science fiction and the tech billionaires appeared first on The Freethinker.

In June 1643, amidst the furnace heat of civil war, Parliament issued a prohibition of unlicensed publications. This Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing rescinded freedoms that had existed since the abolition of the Star Chamber, a judicial court notorious for its abuses of power, in 1641. For two years, the unlicensed presses had churned opinion, controversy and fringe views, uninhibited by government censorship. ‘Licence’ is a complex word that points to the difficult relationship between individual and collective freedoms. It derives from the Latin licentia, which in turn is related to licet, ‘it is permitted’, but also licens, meaning ‘bold’ and ‘unrestrained’. When we drive with a licence, we are permitted a freedom by law. But if we drive licentiously, or without due restraint, we may find our freedoms legitimately encroached upon. Some liberties are granted for obedience, others are assumed by the individual regardless of established legal or social norms. In 1643, individual liberty of expression was curbed as State concern about licence in the public sphere led to the return of licensing. Those who printed without permission, or without giving an author’s name, risked having their books burnt and being sent to prison. Admittedly, this was preferable to being burnt as well as your books, which could happen under the Inquisition, and did, in some Catholic countries, through to the nineteenth century.

John Milton, now best known as the poet of Paradise Lost – itself a profound meditation on obedience and its limits – objected to the return of licensing. Why, he asked, fight to overthrow the tyranny of unrestrained monarchy and drain the cesspit of the Star Chamber, if only to usher back its spirit of control? This is the question that motivates his great prose work Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament [sic] of England, which was published towards the end of 1644, when he was 36 and already a well-known writer. True to his principles, and characteristically defiant, Milton gave his name, but published without a licence. He spoke with his actions as well as his words. Laws, he believed, could be defied where they conflicted with a strictly examined conscience. In Milton’s double revolutionary context, the importance of this cannot be overstated. The Protestant Reformation hinged on the belief that God’s light shone from within; it was not received via the external authority of Popes and bishops. Milton was also at war, in words at least, with a monarchy that, in his view, aped popish ceremony and dictatorial presumption. Absolute authority, Milton believed, exists only in heaven. Disobedience may have been disastrous for Satan and his fallen angels, and it did not work out well for Adam and Eve, but it was very much on the table for the freethinker in seventeenth-century England.

Milton had also published, the previous year, anonymously and without a licence, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: Restor’d to the Good of Both Sexes, From the Bondage of Canon Law, a radical (for the time) argument that divorce, then allowed only in very limited circumstances, should be possible simply on the basis of incompatibility between man and wife. This outraged the clergy, who saw it as promoting sexual licence. Milton’s tract was first published on 1st August 1643; the Ordinance for the Regulation of Printing had come into force in June. His tract was mentioned with disgust in Parliament by those arguing for censorship. Herbert Palmer, a Puritan clergyman, read a sermon to Parliament in 1644, stating that Milton deserved to be burnt for this tract.

If Milton broke actual laws by publishing Areopagitica, there is also something unruly about the form and manner of his work. He calls it a ‘speech’, addressed ‘to the Parlament of England’. But Areopagitica is not a speech – it is too long and rhetorically demanding for such purposes – and it was not given in Parliament, a forum where Milton had no licence to speak. Areopagitica first appeared in the more lowly form of a pamphlet – a transitory, rough and ready articulation, another bundle of pages in a Babel of public print.

Milton was provoking questions about the right to be heard but also, crucially, about authority. At this point, he had little licensed authority himself and was viewed in some quarters as a crackpot. His authority is thus assumed, with a verve that borders on arrogance; it is grounded in his deep learning, in the evident power of his intellect, and in the brilliance of his literary skills. He also possessed a deep conviction that truth was on his side and that truth, in the end, would shine through.

Any revolutionary power base, the thing Parliament was becoming, begins as a challenge to existing authority, in this case, to the ‘divine right’ assumed by Charles I. The very logic of such a power base, that of dissent, entails the prospect of its own undoing at the hands of the next stage of the revolution. This is the toothpaste that Edmund Burke tried to put back in the tube after 1688, arguing for a monarchical reset based on limited powers and a flavour of mystique. Arguing from the French revolutionaries’ descent to government by guillotine, he proposed a pragmatic status quo based on an aesthetically pleasing but disempowered hereditary monarch. Authority is necessary, but it cannot operate without a foundation or generally accepted centre. Burke believed that the jewels, golden coaches, and ceremony of monarchy provided exactly this.

Milton would have hated any such idea as a very real hell on earth, as a sagging and cynical crypto-papist State. He believed that authority must rest on the consent of individual reason as it works towards the discovery of truth. And golden coaches were of no use for this journey. To him, all people were part of God’s creation, endued with a conscience and a reasoning capacity to distinguish right from wrong. They were able to make their own decisions about how they should be ruled. They were not sheep to be tricked into the fold, distracted by glittering gewgaws. To the Christian fundamentalist, the answer was simple: to hold up the Bible as the answer to all questions. But Milton was too well-educated to think of Scripture as a set of rules. He knew it for what it is, a linguistic and textual smorgasbord, full of symbols, allegories, parables and poetry. It required educated and judicious interpretation, and it is this process, rather than static diktat, on which true authority must be based. A ruler justifies his authority, writes Milton, when his ‘prudent spirit acknowledges and obeys the voice of reason from what quarter soever it be heard speaking’. The key phrase here is ‘what quarter soever’; we must be ready to hear all rational voices, to plunge into the ocean of opinion in order to become expert swimmers. Those who write with evil intent, to promote popery and undermine the commonwealth, must be identified and stopped; complete freedom of speech has never been entertained by the wise. But those who are simply misguided, or plain wrong, must be allowed their say, even where – especially where – it conflicts with current official views. This is not some TalkRadio idea of ‘free speech’: ignorant people should not be taken seriously on subjects where their authority is based on nothing more than easily swayed emotion. It is to recognise that, in our fallen world, it requires great skill to extract truth from the vast deserts of error and evil that surround us. Licensing, Milton argues, will blunt our capacity for critical thought, leaving us vulnerable to seductive but dangerous words. Censorship, he writes,

‘will be primely to the discouragement of all learning and the stop of truth, not only by disexercising and blunting our abilities in what we know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made both in religious and civil wisdom.’

Given that some parliamentarians had been mutilated for expressing their beliefs (William Prynne, for example, had his ears ‘cropped’), Milton’s language could not be more immediate. For him, a lack of ears symbolised an urgent duty to listen. Authority should not be hereditary; it must be earned through hard work, and that work is the work of the mind, of knowing the world, and of knowing the minds of others through their words. Not the abstractions of the ivory tower, but working things through while embattled on all sides by contending voices:  

‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.’

The price of free thought for Milton was a moral obligation to go to war amidst words, to be a soldier in the cause of truth and collective prosperity. Those who silence voices will never keep the world pure. Their licence to remove the liberty of others will simply cheapen virtue by attaching it to the dubious privilege of an unexamined and unenquiring life.

For a bibliography of our articles on free speech and free thought, see: Free Speech in the Freethinker.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought. Or make a donation to support our work into the future.

The post Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’: liberty and licensing appeared first on The Freethinker.

During the coronation of King Charles III, the Metropolitan Police arrested 64 people, most of whom they claimed were there to disrupt the inauguration of our new head of state. Six of these were members of the group Republic, which seeks to abolish the monarchy. They were detained for 16 hours.

What terrible disruption did these nefarious republicans have in mind? Were they planning to plant bombs in letterboxes? Were they going to throw paint at the King’s golden carriage? No. They were there to hold up some placards in protest against the institution of monarchy. They liaised with the Met for months before the coronation and, so far as we know, had no plans to do anything seriously disruptive, let alone illegal.

The Republic protesters were arrested because the police suspected they were going to ‘lock-on’ to objects so that they could not be easily removed. This power was given to the police by the absurd and draconian Public Order Act 2023—which was passed shortly before the coronation, perhaps not so incidentally.

The arrests were an affront to the very idea of British liberty. Graham Smith, the head of Republic, has denied that he and his fellow protesters had any equipment which would have allowed them to attach themselves to anything. But even if they did, they would have simply been victims of legal rather than illegal illiberalism.

Worse, the coronation arrests form part of a pattern. At the King’s Accession Proclamation in Oxford last September, one man was arrested for shouting three words: ‘Who elected him?’ Not long afterward, in London, another man was threatened with arrest for walking while holding a blank sheet of paper: he was told by an officer that he would probably be arrested if he dared to write ‘Not my king’ on it.

Meanwhile, King Charles III, the supposed defender of our constitution and our liberties, has been silent throughout it all. Is not the monarch, symbolically at least, supposed to be the ultimate guarantor of our freedom?

Enter Graham Smith once more, who, fresh from detention, has recently released a book making the case against the monarchy and for a republic. In writing Abolish the Monarchy: Why We Should and How We Will, Smith has done all republicans a great favour: here, in one slim volume, is the ultimate knockdown of the royals, which shreds every one of the usual monarchist arguments and presents an inspiring vision of a future British Republic.

Smith’s book is tightly argued and very well-researched: a testament to his decades of republican activism. Every monarchist should read it. If they remain unconvinced upon closing it, they either have a brilliant case for monarchy that has yet to be made or their brains have simply gone so soft from Windsor worship that they are unable to change their minds.

Most of the arguments Smith presents will not be new to staunch republicans like me, but they are argued so well and backed up so strongly that one envies his knowledge and skill. Even one well-versed in the perfidy of the Windsors might discover new lows. Did you know, for example, that, in the 1960s, the late Queen Elizabeth II successfully lobbied for the royal household to be exempt from race discrimination laws and that this exemption still stands today?

Not that Abolish the Monarchy is merely a personal attack on the royals, though there is plenty of that. It is, fundamentally, a book about our constitution and our principles. Smith argues that the monarchy is the source of many of our political woes, not because the monarch has day-to-day political power, but because the near-limitless power of the Crown is now invested in the Prime Minister:

‘This idea of Britain’s parliamentary democracy as the blueprint the world has taken to its heart, of Britain as one of the oldest, most stable democracies in the world, is founded on a bargain that has suited the interests of both the royals and the political classes alike. The reality is somewhat different: a parliament that has stumbled from one reform to the next, begrudgingly moving on the issue of suffrage while slowly centralizing power in the hands of the House of Commons, and then concentrating power further into Downing Street. Simply put, who has power and why in Britain, is a matter of historical contingency. We could do a lot better.’

This centralisation of power, and the powerlessness of our head of state in the face of it, is one of Smith’s favourite themes. Without an elected head of state and a written constitution, we are left at the mercy of parliamentary sovereignty—which in practice means the supremacy of the government. There is almost nothing stopping the Prime Minister of the day from legislating for whatever they wish, so long as they have an unassailable parliamentary majority. And this is not even to mention the sweeping powers, not subject to any sort of democratic process, afforded to the Prime Minister by the royal prerogative and the Privy Council.

Of course, we are unlikely to become a dictatorship, as Smith acknowledges. We have a strong liberal democratic culture despite the flaws in our constitution. But we would be better off with proper constitutional guarantees of our liberties, rather than trusting their safekeeping to Prime Ministers with monarchical powers. And these flaws can still threaten our democracy even if we never become a full-blown authoritarian state—think, for example, of the Queen’s helplessness in the face of Boris Johnson’s 2019 prorogation of Parliament, which the Supreme Court held to be unlawful.

Another of Smith’s most important points is that Britain’s transformation into a democracy is incomplete. All that we have gained over the centuries has had to be wrested away from the clutches of monarchs and politicians, and our liberal culture owes little to them – least of all to the monarchs. All we lack now is a properly democratic constitutional system. A liberal democratic culture without a written liberal democratic constitution and all the structures that flow from such a constitution is one always at the mercy of the dishonest and the mendacious, just as a written constitution is hardly worth the paper it is written on if there is no democratic culture in place to uphold its spirit. Right now, we have one, but not the other.

But what if we had both? What if we also had a written constitution, a fully democratic parliament, and an elected head of state—that is, what if we had a secular democratic parliamentary republic?

Would Britain be soulless? Would it be (to caricature the monarchist position) just another boring country? The answer to both questions is no. We would still have our history and our culture, and we would have finally fulfilled the promise of our long and honourable democratic tradition.

No president would be perfect, but they would be accountable, and they would represent us in a way no monarch ever could. Personally, I would prefer a head of state who could effectively enforce a written constitution and bravely lead the way in defending liberal values. Think of Václav Havel and Mary Robinson, two presidents who proudly supported Salman Rushdie in the 1990s while our own head of state, the great champion of our vaunted liberties, was silent. Our monarchs seem to have spent more time secretly lobbying for tax exemptions than standing up for liberty.

If there is one criticism I would make of Abolish the Monarchy, it is that it is at times too tame, too moderate. This is part of Republic’s strategy to widen its appeal, but it does a disservice to the genuine radicalism at the heart of the republican position. This is why Abolish the Monarchy does not quite fit into the great British pamphleteering tradition epitomised by Thomas Paine.

Certainly, Smith is right that demanding a British Republic is not to advocate a replay of the French Revolution, and that we already have most of the pieces in place to create a democratic parliamentary republic. But there is something revolutionary about the spirit of republicanism. As he points out, republicanism is essentially the demand for a true liberal democracy: ‘[republicanism is about] more than replacing one head of state with another—it’s about rebalancing power between government, Parliament, and people. … The challenge is to take what we have and make it democratic, top to bottom.’ Republicans should not be so coy about the radicalism of this project.

The monarchy is by definition undemocratic, if not anti-democratic, as well as sectarian and secretive. Almost all the members of the Royal Family are, in this republican’s view at least, negligible human beings. If the royals are stunted by their upbringing, a republic would set not only us but them free, too. For republicans, the Crown is not the bedrock of our liberties, but rather the fount of all that is rotten and fetid in our politics. The constitutional monarchy is an insult to the best of our history and culture. In short: bring on the British Republic.

Graham Smith, Abolish the Monarchy: Why We Should and How We Will, published by Penguin, 1 June 2023.

See also: The Freethinker and early republicanism: the letter by a ‘librarian from Colchester’ that led to the formation of Republic

Graham Smith (not that type of republican), interview on the National Secular Society podcast.

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

The post Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed 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.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought.

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

On April 26, I returned to my alma mater, the University of Edinburgh, to attend a film screening hosted by the Edinburgh chapter of Academics for Academic Freedom. The film, Adult Human Female, is a gender-critical documentary, which is all you need to know to understand why it has caused such a fracas.

The academics had tried to screen it last December but the event was disrupted and shut down by a gang of activists who took offence at the film’s content. I had not tried to attend that time, but thought I should go along to the rescheduled showing on 26th April. As it happens, I am not particularly interested in the gender wars. I have my criticisms of the radical feminists as well as the gender ideologues. But the gender debate is, among other things, a central free speech battle, and free speech is something I care about very much. I wanted to express solidarity with the organisers.

There was a loud protest outside the venue—a crowd of people behind a barrier, a loudspeaker blaring out cheesy music, and speeches about how evil the film was. Fine, I thought. They have every right to protest. But then I discovered that masked activists (apparently, or at least officially, unaffiliated with the protestors) had shut off all entries to the venue. University security could not remove them for fear of escalation, so the screening was cancelled.

You may say this is just another drama in the long, slow, agonising death of academic freedom and free speech at British universities. But familiarity should not breed complacency. Disruptions like the one I have just described should always inspire anger. They cannot be allowed to become normal, unremarkable events. Masked activists shut down, essentially by force, a screening of a film about an important and controversial matter of public concern – on a university campus, no less! If important and controversial issues cannot be debated at universities, then what exactly is the point of having them in the first place?

The details of the gender debate and of the disruption on 26th April are not the point here. The point is that the threat to academic freedom and free speech posed by ideological zealots – or self-righteous bores, as I prefer to call them – is real and dangerous. I bring up the Edinburgh example only as a recent illustration of this threat, and one which occurred shortly before I read Professor Steven Greer’s new book – and because it recurred to me often as I read it.

Falsely Accused of Islamophobia: My Struggle Against Academic Cancellation relates Greer’s experience of being silenced by people who did not like what he was saying. Greer’s story is in many ways different from the Edinburgh disruption, but at the same time shares some important features with it and with other recent attacks on free speech at universities. [See our interview with Greer – Ed.]

Greer, Professor Emeritus of Human Rights at the University of Bristol, was the target of a complaint by Bristol’s student Islamic Society (BRISOC) that he was an Islamophobic bigot who had, inter alia, mocked the Quran in a lecture and denied that Uighur Muslims were being persecuted in China.

The complaint was, as the merest glance at the evidence shows, full of lies and misrepresentations. In February 2021, BRISOC went public with their complaint and targeted Greer with a social media campaign designed to intimidate him into apologising or resigning. Later that year, Greer was completely cleared of all charges by the university. Throughout all this, the University of Bristol, and Greer’s own Law School in particular, were either useless in the face of, or actually compliant with, BRISOC’s harassment of Greer.  

Greer has since retired from Bristol and has become the Research Director at the Oxford Institute for British Islam. He is currently pursuing litigation against his old university. In Falsely Accused of Islamophobia, he aims to put his story down comprehensively, rebut publicly all the allegations made against him, and persuade universities and academics to take the threat posed by what he calls ‘illiberal leftism’ more seriously.

In writing this book, Greer has provided a document that is very valuable to those of us who care about academic freedom and free speech. He forthrightly defends himself and expertly dismantles the pathetic case that was made against him. And, in a chapter reflecting on the broader trend of illiberal leftism on campuses, he shows that ‘cancel culture’ and the like are not right-wing myths but real – and dangerous – phenomena.  

Perhaps even worse than the cases of campus authoritarianism that make the headlines are all the cases which are less dramatic in their cause, and which do not garner as much media interest, but are no less chilling in their effects. Indeed, although it is impossible to know how many students and academics have self-censored in fear of the consequences they could face for expressing an unfashionable opinion, it is almost certainly a large number. Greer cites the cases and the data to prove that cancel culture and campus illiberalism are, even if their extent is sometimes exaggerated, very much not merely products of right-wing fantasy.

There are, however, some stylistic problems with this book. In some ways, it is too academic. For instance, chapters are mapped out at the beginning and summarised at the end, textbook-style. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make for sometimes repetitive, bloated reading. It certainly makes it less engaging.

Greer also uses language—“snowflakery” or “wokeism”—that is likely to put off the very people he is trying to reach. To be clear, he defines these terms correctly and uses them in very precise ways. He is not frothing at the mouth and screaming ‘TRIGGERED SNOWFLAKES!!!’ Unfortunately, however, his use of this language will make it easier for his enemies to dismiss him as just such a frother.

Finally, the book could have done with a more thorough copy-edit. The overuse and occasional misuse of commas is distracting. For example: “What might be done to tackle these toxic trends and to cultivate a more tolerant and less censorious, hair-trigger, environment?” Or: “The Committee, thus not only presumed to know more about the scope and remit of my research than I do myself; it also ignored the fact that…” Perhaps I am being pedantic and allowing my inner English teacher to come out, but this sort of thing is grating and destabilises my reading experience.

I said that Greer’s story is different from the Edinburgh film disruption, but that many of the core issues at stake are the same. This is true, so far as it goes, but it is not the whole story. There is one aspect of Greer’s case that distinguishes it from other campus controversies: it is a controversy involving one very sensitive religion.

Greer is correct to point out the strange alliance between ‘woke’ authoritarians and often-conservative Muslim students. In short: the latter are ‘oppressed’, so the former must stand with them in all things. Illiberal leftism is indeed at the root of many of our contemporary campus woes. But Greer’s story is about how he was targeted by an Islamic group – and yet, for some reason, he spends very little time on this part of the problem.

There are a few mentions of Salman Rushdie and Charlie Hebdo; and Greer writes, shockingly, of feeling so threatened that he had to leave his home for a few days. But mostly he blames illiberal leftism and elucidates the ways in which the Bristol Islamic Society’s complaint fits into that ideology. Indeed it does, but is there not another interesting and important story to be discussed here?

They may use the language of ‘wokeism’, but cries of offence and calls for retribution have long been used by illiberal Muslims. In fact, such cries have been used by all powerful religions throughout history. The illiberal leftists are neophytes in comparison. Could it be that the causal relationship is the other way around? That is, have the ‘woke’ inherited their brittleness from the religious impulse, rather than conservative believers adopting ‘woke’ language for their own ends? No doubt the original, godly offence-takers will adopt whatever garb seems most alluring at any given moment, but still, they did it first. It would have been interesting to hear Greer’s views on this subject.

Another difference between typical illiberal campus culture and Islamic illiberalism is that the latter comes with very real threats of violence and even murder. Think of Samuel Paty and the Batley schoolteacher in hiding for displaying an image of Mohammed to his class. Religious fanatics are past masters of cancel culture, in a much more sinister sense of the term. Greer’s neglect of the Islam(ism) theme is a puzzling oversight. But perhaps this is slightly unfair—after the trauma of being targeted by an Islamic mob, and with the examples of Paty and countless others in mind, Greer might be forgiven for glossing over the topic in this way.

I was also disappointed that Greer takes the silly word ‘Islamophobia’ at face value. Such an imprecise word, and one which has so often been used to demonise all critics of Islam as bigots, is a word not worth having. In defending himself from what he once or twice more properly calls ‘anti-Muslim prejudice’, Greer arguably gives too much ground. Defining Islamophobia as ‘visceral prejudice against Muslims and Islam based on myth, caricature and misrepresentation’ shuts off quite a lot of what I am sure Greer would consider legitimate criticism of Islam. The Charlie Hebdo cartoons were, quite literally, caricatures. Why should hatred, even blind, stupid hatred, of a particular belief system be equated with prejudice against a group of people?

By lumping together ‘visceral prejudice against Muslims and Islam [my emphasis]’, Greer makes easier the job of the fanatics who wish to equate the criticism of ideas and beliefs with bigoted hatred of an entire, and very diverse, demographic. Perhaps this is simply an issue of tone: as an academic specialist who has spent many years comparing human rights in the West, in Islam, and in Asia, Greer may be inclined to be cautious and careful.  

Still, the choice is surely not between vile bigotry and respectful disagreement. Ruthless satire and the mockery of sacred beliefs—even hatred of and disgust at certain ideas—do not a bigot make. That is why terms like ‘anti-Muslim prejudice’ or ‘anti-Muslim hatred’ are preferable. They are much more precise and do not conflate bigotry against people with criticism, however savage or merciless it may be, of ideas. I think Greer would agree with this, but sometimes he comes off as too defensive. Again, perhaps this is understandable, given everything he has been through. Indeed, his descriptions of the personal consequences of the campaign of vilification against him are the book’s most moving, and angering, parts.

All in all, Greer’s book is an essential addition to the literature on cancel culture and academic illiberalism. And it is heartening to see him still fighting the good fight despite everything he has been put through. Those who ought to be ashamed are the Bristol Islamic Society and Bristol University itself, along with all those colleagues and acquaintances who sided with Greer’s harassers or, perhaps even worse, maintained a cowardly silence in the face of all the lies and the intimidation.

It is to be hoped that more academic victims of cancel culture will write their own stories in future. If they do it half as comprehensively as Greer has, then they will have achieved something extremely important: they will have rebuked – and exposed – their persecutors.

Falsely Accused of Islamophobia: My Struggle Against Academic Cancellation, by Steven Greer, was published by Academica Press on 13 February 2023.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought.

The post Cancel culture and religious intolerance: ‘Falsely Accused of Islamophobia’, by Steven Greer appeared first on The Freethinker.

As W.H. Auden put it, ‘If the criterion of art were its power to incite to action, Goebbels would be one of the greatest artists of all time.’ Were this true, we would be living through a modern-day Renaissance.

However, as Jed Perl argues in Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts (Knopf, 2022), this is certainly not the case.

The so-called ‘culture wars’ are a polarising force. The media would have us believe that the woke ‘Left’  want to abolish ‘art proper’ for ideological propaganda, whilst the elitist ‘Right’ strive to preserve a clearly defined concept of art accessible to only the privileged.

Perl counters these inflammatory and amorphous positions by reasserting the universal nature of art. He does this by proposing the idea that art is independent from politics. In its own separate realm, he suggests, art is characterised by a dynamic relationship between authority and freedom. This argument – not entirely original, but uniquely crafted for the current artistic climate – provides a nuance on seemingly polarised positions.

A cursory read of Authority and Freedom is not recommended. Although some terms are difficult to grasp with immediate fluency, it is not possible to fully grasp the central thesis without them. Paramount to this is Perl’s concept of ‘form’, which he uses to distinguish the different types of art (fine art, poetry, fictive prose, music etc.). Within these categories of form, there are certain laws that we must learn if we are to communicate as artists. For example, we can only achieve resemblance in a portrait in oils if we first master the medium itself: untutored amateurs dabble with oil paintings at their peril.

Once we have mastered ‘form’ – the different rules that distinguish and characterise the distinct types of art  – then we can begin to communicate our innermost thoughts and perceptions. In this way, engagement with form ultimately provides the means for free human expression.

Form is therefore the limit to but also the measure of freedom, constituting a boundary within which creativity thrives: ‘Artistic freedom always involves engaging with some idea of order, which becomes an authority that the artist understands and acknowledges but to which the artist doesn’t necessarily entirely submit.’ For example, musicians exercise freedom within the constraints of musical scores: ‘Interpretations, even in classical music, vary dramatically.’ Perl also illustrates this point in the context of drama: ‘Every performance of King Lear is an exploration of the possibilities of King Lear.’

Perl’s argument becomes especially pertinent to contemporary debates once this fundamental understanding of ‘form’ is grasped. Why, for example, should Western artists not allowed to appropriate work from other cultures? The artistic practice of pastiche without borders or chronology is a free exploration and affirmation of form, independent of politics.

To embark upon an imaginative joyride journey of form is exhilarating: it is a way of delving into the past to embellish artworks with glorious past treasures. Art’s magical power – the ‘irresponsible, irrepressible, liberating’ sensation – should not be circumscribed by any political filter. We cannot force someone to feel happy, sad or neutral. Emotions are immediate and inwardly uncontrollable – and this is the universal human condition.

The tension between authority and freedom (the ‘lifeblood of the arts’) is natural to this human spirit. If the rhythm of this careful balance is tipped too much either way by the dominance of authority and the erosion of freedom, or vice versa, then artistic quality  is compromised. To this end, we should be suspicious of attempts to impose ideological rules on the arts: of the prohibition on certain authors against creating certain characters, or of the retrospective editing of books by ‘sensitivity readers’.

Used as a tool of authority, art becomes thinly veiled propaganda concealed beneath a moralistic mask. Perl criticises ‘the insistence that works of art … are validated (or invalidated) by the extent to which they line up (or fail to line up with) our current social and political concerns’. An observation by the American novelist Flannery O’Connor illustrates this idea: ‘“art is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made; it has no utilitarian end.”’ However, crucially, this is not to say that art cannot have an impact on the real world. O’Conner continues, ‘“If you do manage to use it [art] successfully for social, religious, or other purposes, it is because you make it art first.”’ In this vein, Perl argues that art proper is neither elitist nor alienated from real life. Rather, its independence is the key to its relevance because it is implicit and timeless. To make art requires courage. The discipline of form provides a space for free exploration of thought and feeling. Once completed, the artwork is severed from the umbilical cord of its creator and thrown into the world to live its separate life.

Artistic creation is therefore the exercise of godlike powers. In recent years, however, the idea of the ‘Great Artist’– understood to be a singular creative genius – has been criticised and ‘deconstructed’. Calls for the redistribution of power have underpinned a shift towards artistic collectives (seen, for example, in the sharing of the Turner Prize), an emphasis on oppressed identities as conferring the prime artistic value, and the conflation of the artist’s moral behaviour with the aesthetic value of their work.

To counter this trend, Perl redefines the artist as a creator: a single-minded individual who dutifully dedicates themselves to art because it is a calling that comes from within, rather than a political programme imposed from without. Immune from transient whims and demands, the artist pursues a lifelong vocation to become fluent in a language which is uniquely their own, but comprehensible to all.  

Both historically and at present, this artistic vocation is typically an option only for those who can escape the daily demands of reality – or, at least, be willing or able to take short-term risks, including the absorption of associated costs. When immediate demands or material limitations invoke too much authority, that crucial alchemical balance is poisoned, and the creative flow is interrupted.

However, Perl does not suggest that only the elite can produce ‘great’ art. Thankfully, given the current emphasis on ideologically-driven equality, diversity, and inclusion policies, there is another way forward. By recognising and removing the obstacles which impede uninterrupted artistic creation and the academic exploration of form, we can revive ‘great’ art in a way that is more widely accessible than ever before.

The removal of such barriers amounts to the recovery of human agency, and faith in the idea that everyone has something valuable to express.

The diverse examples and voices Perl invokes add support to this message, even if they obfuscate the book’s already diffuse structure. If we are living at a time when art has been desecrated by the demand for political relevance, artists must be mobilised with a manifesto or call to action. Towards such a manifesto, Perl’s book offers no easy assistance. Indeed, this is the great paradox: Perl argues that the immediate relevance of art is a risk to its applicability, but his beautifully written text is itself very artful.  

Theoretical intricacies aside, the artist or general arts enthusiast will surely be left with a changed perspective. Perl’s short book is a refreshing take on culture today built on the authority of the past, all the while providing guidance for the future.

This paradox reinstates the central question: should art be revered for its didactic power, or does its greatness inhere within its implicit and timeless potential? Perhaps it is up to the reader to decide.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought.

The post Can art be independent of politics? appeared first on The Freethinker.

The trial of Ashfaq Masih will mean little to people in Britain today. It could be suggested that it means even less in Pakistan, where his alleged crime took place. Masih was a Pentecostal Christian who owned a bicycle repair shop in Lahore, the capital of Punjab province in eastern Pakistan. In 2017, he was arrested following an oral disagreement with a Muslim customer after the latter refused to pay his bill. The man in question, Muhammad Irfan, told Masih not to charge him for the repair to his bicycle as he was a devout Muslim. Masih refused, supposedly telling Irfan that Christ was the true prophet. His lawyer, Riaz Anjum, told Morning Star News, ‘Masih rejected his request, saying he only followed Jesus and wasn’t interested in Irfan’s religious statutes as a Muslim.’ The police charged the 31-year-old with disrespecting the prophet Mohammed. He was to spend the next five years in prison awaiting trial.

When he appeared in court, Masih testified that he had been deceived by the shop owner, Muhammad Ashfaq, and the businessman Muhammad Naveed, who owned a nearby bicycle repair shop. Masih told the court in Lahore that Naveed was jealous of his success and had conspired with Ashfaq to destroy his business. The case was riddled with errors. Irfan, who was the primary witness, failed to show up to court to testify, while according to Masih’s lawyer, statements from other witnesses ‘were contradictory’.

Despite a clear lack of evidence against him, Judge Khalid Wazir sentenced the now 36-year-old to death. On July 4, 2022, Masih was sentenced to death by hanging.*

The tragic case of Masih is no outlier. As reported in Morning Star News, between October 2020 and September 2021, 620 people were murdered in Pakistan for their beliefs. The country ranks second behind Nigeria for the number of Christians killed for their religion. 

Blasphemy, defined as speaking or acting in a way that is critical of or offensive to God, is still prevalent in four out of ten countries in the world. According to an analysis conducted by the Pew Research Centre, of the 198 countries and territories they studied, 79 criminalised blasphemy. Among these, penalties ranged from fines to prison sentences and public lashings.

While this research found blasphemy laws on the statute books on all five continents, the region where these laws were most commonly located was the Middle East and Africa, where 90 percent of the 20 countries studied had laws criminalising blasphemy. It is here that the penalties for blasphemy carry the severest punishments. It is predominantly countries in this region—Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia—that carry the death sentence for blasphemy. 

Britain has officially abolished blasphemy laws—except, it seems, as far as concerns one religion, Islam. I found myself thinking about Masih recently as details of an incident at Wakefield began to emerge. In February, four boys were suspended from Kettlethorpe High School after slightly damaging a copy of the Quran. Rumours were spread—notably by the Labour councillor Usman Ali—that the holy book had been ‘desecrated’. In truth, the book was lightly scuffed, suffering minor damage to the front cover. Still, to placate a vocal minority of Muslim reactionaries, the police were called, and it was recorded as a non-crime hate incident. The 14-year-old autistic boy who had brought it into the West Yorkshire school on a dare was deluged with death threats. It led to his mother effectively begging the local mosque for forgiveness; to complete this shameful act of submission, she was required to cover her hair.   

Just a few miles away from Kettlethorpe is another West Yorkshire school, Batley Grammar, the scene of another moral panic over blasphemy two years ago. It was here that a religious studies teacher was forced to go into hiding after showing his students cartoons of Mohammed during a class about free speech. Once again, religious fundamentalists got involved and showed up outside the school’s gates, causing it to shut down for days. A local Islamic charity, Purpose of Life, published his name online. The Yorkshire Examiner reported that the teacher sought police protection after receiving numerous death threats. To this day, the teacher is said to be in hiding. 

In modern Western society, no one should be prosecuted for blasphemy. Using the threat of imprisonment or death to criticise an idea is the very definition of tyranny. This archaic legislation is like something out of medieval times—or the Old Testament, as it is appropriately called. Unfortunately, incidents like Wakefield are not a new phenomenon. Britain has been heading in an illiberal direction for years. 

The seeds of surrender to Islamist intolerance were first sown 30 years ago with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses. The book’s perceived blasphemy led Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa, effectively condemning the author to death, in 1989; last summer, a New York assailant came disturbingly close to claiming the bounty set on Rushdie’s head. It is worth recalling that the first protest against The Satanic Verses happened not in the streets of Peshawar or across the Middle East, but in Bolton on 2nd December 1988. 

Incidents like this, with their associated threats of violence, arguably show that Islam must be treated differently from other religions. If the UK yields to the demands of religious extremists, it will be sanctioning the spread of a de facto blasphemy law. Freedom of expression and religion are essential in a free and liberal society. The freedom to criticise, question, mock and insult a religion is as important as the freedom of its adherents to practise it. 

Offence can act as a catalyst for social change. In 1976, Denis Lemon, the editor of Gay News, was put on trial for blasphemy for publishing a homoerotic poem about the death of Jesus Christ. The poem by James Kirkup, The Love that Dares To Speak its Name, was included in issue 96 of Gay News and depicted a Roman centurion fantasising about having sex with Christ’s crucified body. Lemon’s subsequent conviction started a debate about blasphemy laws, eventually leading to their abolition in 2008 and expanding freedom of speech for all of us.  

In contrast, since the Masih case, Pakistan has legislated for even stricter controls on blasphemy laws. In January, its National Assembly passed the Criminal Laws (Amendment) Act 2023, increasing the power of the state to impose even more draconian punishments and widening the definition of blasphemy to include insulting figures connected to Mohammed. 

Time will tell if Pakistan will row back on its antiquated constitution. In the meantime, there is much to be done in Britain. Much of the blame has to lie with the moral cowardice of modern-day progressives, who are unwilling to confront religious authoritarianism and defend the values that define a liberal democratic country such as this one. Failure to address this uncomfortable issue has meant that it has been outsourced to the far right. It is a sad indictment of a country in decline.

Worse, the enforcement of blasphemy laws in the UK is a stain on the vast majority of Muslims living here, who are peaceful, law-abiding citizens. Blasphemy laws, de facto or otherwise, infantilise Muslims by robbing them of their agency. It implies they require special rules and regulations to protect their feelings, making them seem incapable of living in a society that upholds liberal values. 

It has been over one hundred years since the death of John William Gott, the last individual imprisoned in Britain for the crime of blasphemy. Yet through our failure to act and speak up in defence of freedom of speech, it may not be long until someone else is put in prison for this ‘crime’. Rights are universal and non-negotiable; you cannot opt out of them. Offence must not be a motivating factor in what people can and cannot say. There is no right to not be offended. These are lessons that contemporary progressives need to learn. Liberty is a wonderful thing, guaranteeing both secular and religious people the freedom to believe what they want. If we wish to live in a free society, we must be free to blaspheme. We owe it to the next generation to keep reinforcing these points. But most of all, we owe it to people like Asfaq Masih. 

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on freethought.

*Correction, 21/5/23: This article originally reported that Asfaq Masih had been ‘executed by hanging’. It has now been amended to state that he was ‘sentenced to death by hanging’. We have not been able to verify whether the sentence has yet been carried out (see further report here).

The post The perils of dropping a book appeared first on The Freethinker.