bigideas

Terry Sanderson’s latest missive on the National Secular Society’s web site states that “‘Aggressive secularists’ must start to live up to their name”. It’s a brief piece but it makes a useful jumping-off point to discuss the current stance of self-styled “rationalist” groups.

The Invisible Advisor

In an aside, Sanderson takes time out from his general point to claim that Tony Blair, when Prime Minister,

was unmoved by the demonstration of a million and a half people outside his Downing Street front door when he was Prime Minister. He (and his invisible advisor in the sky) knew best, and now more than a million people in Iraq are dead.

There has never actually been a demonstration outside Downing Street involving 1.5 million people, but I’m sure you know what he’s referring to. It’s certainly not clear that Blair was “unmoved” by such protests in early 2003. But let that pass; the important point is Sanderson’s claim — very clearly stated, I think — that the Blair government supported the American invasion of Iraq for religious reasons.

What evidence do we have for this? Well, it’s often stated that Blair was considering converting to Catholicism for a long time before leaving office, and the Pope held a private meeting with him to discourage him from sending troops to Iraq in February of 2003 (and he was moved, allegedly). He was still officially an Anglican at the time, but senior figures in the Church of England strongly and vocally opposed the invasion as well.

There’s no evidence I’m aware of of either of these churches advocating a pro-invasion policy, encouraging any government members to pursue such a policy, or preaching anything that might tend strongly in that direction. So why does Sanderson think that Blair’s “invisible advisor” is responsible for the alleged million deaths in Iraq?

The answer, I’m afraid, would appear to be very simple: for organisations like the NSS, much of what’s wrong with the world stems from religious belief. The last two of the NSS’s General Principles state this unambiguously:

• [The NSS] seeks to spread education, to promote the fraternity of all peoples as a means of advancing universal peace to further common cultural interests and to develop the freedom and dignity of mankind.
• To remove an impediment to these objectives, we demand the complete separation of Church and State and the abolition of all privileges granted to religious organisations.

It’s very clear from this that the NSS considers “privileges granted to religious organisations” to be “an impediment” to “fraternity”, “universal peace”, “common cultural interests”, “freedom” and “dignity”. It doesn’t indicate which other impediments there might be, or how such things are impeded by religion, or why they might be better achievable in its absence. But it’s easy to see why someone might think all those things. It’s a short leap from this to the assumption that religious belief lies at the root of anything you happen to disapprove of (does this remind you of anything?). In the case of Blair’s decision on Iraq that leap would seem to be entirely unfounded.

Aggressive Secularism

Why focus on what’s really a brief digression in Sanderson’s article? Because it’s telling. Opinions voiced by the NSS are, despite their name, not merely secular but anti-religious. There’s a very big difference. On their front page is a link to their shop, advertising a T-shirt bearing the slogan “atheist and proud of it”. They’re not merely campaigning for secularism — in a nutshell, the separation of church and state — but proselytising atheism. The more extreme wing of this particular movement can be seen on the web site of print magazine The Freethinker, with which the NSS “is proud to be very closely associated”.

Campaigning atheist groups are sometimes aggressive, as a glance over The Freethinker’s recent headlines shows:

• Scientology – daft and dangerous
• Mad sharia lawmakers want anti-snogging laws extended to non-Muslims
• Universal Human Rights die at the hands of Islamic states
• More horror from Planet Islam
• ‘Get off the bus, I have to pray’ says Muslim driver
• Nut case finds God, ditches Doctor Who
• Holy cow! Hindus accuse animal charity of “unlawful killing”
• Geert Wilders’ controversial film, Fitna, posted on LiveLeak
• At last, the Congo will outlaw child exorcisms
• Oh, no! – Not more crap from Planet Islam

The Freethinker isn’t published by the NSS, but I wonder whether this is the sort of thing Sanderson is thinking of?

Comparison with the Far Right

If so, it bears an odd but striking resemblance to the current strategy of the far-right British National Party. Here’s the equivalent sample — all the stories from their front page, except I’ve removed specifically party-political stories:

• Non-Muslims Deserve to Be Raped & Killed
• Muslim terror gang had list of targets court told
• They Know it’s Coming But They Won’t Tell You [financial story]
• The evolution of British maths teaching [joke about falling educational standards, with a swipe against Arabic "dominance"]
• Woolwich Crown Court: Eight men on trial on terrorism charges
• Breaking News: Jury out in second Wroughton Hammer Attack trial
• Don’t Mention Mohammed and the Mountain . .

The BNP are at pains to show off their no-longer-openly-racist policies, but they have a problem: one of their core values is anti-immigration. What’s more, as can be easily seen from the comments on their site, at least some of their supporters openly remain unreconstructed racists.

A way to speak against immigration without using racist language is to attack the religions of the people who are immigrating. So it suits the BNP to attack Islam, because to many people Islam in the UK is a recent thing (which it isn’t) and Muslims are invariably immigrants (which they aren’t). It’s racism by approximate proxy.

The BNP’s aims are, therefore, entirely different from those of the NSS. While ridiculing Islam, for instance, the BNP support Christianity as a state religion, which the NSS constitutionally opposes. The two disagree on gay rights, too, which the NSS supports but the BNP wants rolled back. An NSS press release on the Griffin acquittal called his views “repugnant”. And, of course, the NSS doesn’t oppose immigration.

To be clear,then, I’m not claiming that the secular movement has been infiltrated by the far right, or that it has sympathies with far right politics. I’m certainly not suggesting any kind of co-operation between the NSS and the BNP, such as has been claimed by MP Stephen Green. The NSS have found themselves in some odd company in the past, but that’s not their fault; if you turn up to a demo, you can’t be sure who you’ll end up standing next to. I spent much of the allegedly 1.5-million-strong 2003 march in the proximity of Queer Pagan, not a group I was familiar with or whose core values I’d wish to endorse.

Neither the NSS nor the BNP is a specifically anti-Islamic organisation; each has far broader concerns. An Islamic secularist is no contradiction, but stories about Muslims making unreasonable “demands” and refusing to “integrate” are popular, sensational and attention-grabbing. What’s more, many people will instinctively agree with the editorial line, just as the BNP hopes when they run similar stories. Some of those people will be decent folks who haven’t met many Muslims or thought about it very much. Some will be plain nasty.

At times the structure and rhetoric of these stories is extremely similar between the two organisations. In this respect The Freethinker‘s language is far more strident, and closer to the BNP’s, than that of the NSS web site. The two groups, although their aims are very different, are appealing to the same set of popular prejudices and using the same language to do so.

Relativism and Absolutism

Is this any more than innuendo? Does anything of substance lie behind the similarities in focus and style? Or am I merely repeating the myth that anyone who criticises the actions of a religious person must be intolerant? I think not, and I see one reason why a certain kind of atheist secularist might be attracted to the right’s rhetoric.

Butterflies and Wheels (“B&W”) is a web site whose self-described aims are to combat “pseudoscience”, “epistemic relativism” and “schools of thought whose truth claims are prompted by the political, ideological and moral commitments of their adherents”. A large number of its front-page articles are negative stories about Islam, despite no mention being made of any specific religion, or indeed of religion in general, amongst those aims. I mention the site, however, because it’s also reflective and intelligent and because politically it would be hard to find a perspective further removed from that of the BNP.

B&W has an “in focus” feature on cultural relativism that sets out the underlying position more carefully than most. Specifically, Ophelia Benson points out that tolerance and diversity sometimes conflict with other important values:

And this is where the hard choice comes in, where the competing goods have to be sorted out. One can decide that tolerance and cultural pluralism trump all other values, and so turn a blind eye to suffering and oppression that have tradition as their underpinning, or one can decide that murder, torture, mutilation, systematic sexual or caste or racial discrimination, slavery, child exploitation, are wrong, wrong everywhere, universally wrong, and not to be tolerated.

One can hardly disagree with most of this, and there’s nothing paradoxical in it. Clashes of values happen all the time. Even just this lunchtime, I fancied a chicken katsu curry but decided to have sushi because it was healthier. Values can come into conflict in trivial everyday matters like this or in really important ones like those Benson refers to, but the logical structure remains the same.

I’m not sure that the case for “moral realism and universalism” (Benson’s phrase) is made quite so easily, though. Simon Blackburn in his accompanying article has some fun knocking down a kindergarten version of “relativism”, but it’s not nearly strong enough to deal with anyone sensible who disagrees with the view espoused.

This commitment to a kind of “absolutism” (Blackburn’s term), though, runs very deep in the secular movement.

In matters epistemological, for instance, one finds claims to the effect that the “scientific method” — by which is usually meant an idea involving the formation of general laws by induction from sense-data — is the only valid justification for truth-claims. This is a view that needs defending, but the only justification usually offered is that we’ve been able to run some successful empirical programmes, which is neither here nor there.

In ethics, there’s a corresponding notion that there’s an objective and universal set of ethical laws. Presumably the idea is that these can be determined either by rational thought or empirical investigation. It’s not clear to me what would count as evidence in the latter case and ethical philosophy hasn’t reached any consensus using the former method, so confidence in “moral absolutism” seems misplaced.

Atheism, Naturalism and Faith

Nationalisms are often thought of as irrational; secularism, on the other hand, prides itself on its rationality. But I think this “absolutism” comes close to capturing what these very different groups have in common, and why their tactics are so similar despite their different goals. To describe why, I’ll take a detour into something I’ll call atheism*, which is a specific kind of atheism that’s recently gained much popular currency. I’ll keep it as brief as I can.

Atheists* hold to a particular metaphysics known as Naturalism. By their lights, what exists is what the natural sciences tell us exists. Indeed, one can go further and say, with Quine and Putnam, that what we ought to believe in is whatever science requires to make it work. For a naturalist what exists is what successful science posits, no more and no less. To believe in less is to deny the efficacy of the practice that led to your being able to read this post and do lots of other more useful things. To believe in more is mysticism.

On its own, this idea isn’t enough to save us from radical skepticism, though. To do that atheism* requires a belief that the things science tells us are in some way right, and that they can’t be as well described any other way. For otherwise science becomes merely a bedtime story, and what exists can change from century to century without one set of beliefs being any better than another. Essential to the atheist’s* world-view, then, is a belief that the sciences are progressive, gradually climbing a mountain whose summit is Truth.

The atheist* certainly holds a faith position. This is an observation that atheists* decry, but it’s straightforwardly, analytically true if by “faith position” we mean “a belief for which no evidentce can be offered”. It’s impossible to find any evidence for the view just stated because it’s a view about what counts as evidence to support a view. Any evidence-based defence would be circular, and any other kind would be inconsistent with the exclusivity of the view expressed.

Despite this, atheists* exhibit an unhealthy certainty in their triumphant naturalism. Having accepted that position, all religious beliefs become absurd; but of course religious folks simply don’t accept it, and as I’ve just suggested I don’t see why that makes them irrational or stupid. I’m not a religious person, but I don’t accept it either.

Intolerance

Not all atheists are atheists*, and not all secularists are atheists. This is a distinction that gets lost. Here’s a quote from an Independent newspaper piece about the NSS by Patrick Hussey, approvingly hosted on the web site of the British Humanist Association:

The NSS is, I suppose, atheism’s bulldog. It is a media-savvy group that functions as the protesting voice for the anti-theist lobby. It’s a movement that’s growing all the time according to Terry Sanderson, vice-president of the NSS.

The anti-theist lobby? Maybe the NSS wouldn’t choose those words, but they do ring true. (As an aside, Hussey’s right about the BHA: their angle is less dogmatic and more balanced, sensible and positive).

Importantly, too, not everyone who holds a religious belief is an irrational extremist. But nuances don’t mean much to the absolutist. You’re either with us or against us. You’re either rational or irrational. You’re either a Muslim or you’re not. This is, of course, precisely the same mechanism by which the BNP’s demonisation of non-Christian religious groups operates. Perhaps it also reminds you of the black-and-white certainty exhibited by some religious groups, too.

It’s easy to see the consequences of atheism* in the headline-writing at The Freethinker. The units of currency are “Muslims”, “Jews”, “Catholics” considered as homogeneous masses. The fact that there are many kinds of Muslim is irrelevant, since they all hold to a faith position that’s anathema to the atheist’s* naturalism. It’s irrelevant, too, that these groups are made up of people, and that the rights and duties and liberties of each of those people aren’t dependent on their membership of a group.

We find the same kind of story-selection and coverage on the BNP’s side; the difference is only that their absolutism is a different one. They put their faith in the notion of a “culture”, and the idea that cultures are strongest and most interesting when relatively small and isolated. Before you dismiss it, have you ever complained about Western cultural imperialism?

If it wished, the NSS could engage with debates about how to accomodate a diversity of metaphysical beliefs and cultural practices into British life, and how a secular state offers the only equitable way of so doing. Instead of cleaving to popular prejudice it could make a useful, sane contribution to a topic that’s badly polarised.