My brother was murdered fifteen years ago. During this time, my mother has manifested less rage and fury towards the perpetrators than the New Atheists routinely aim in the direction of Chris Mooney.

Makes you think, doesn’t it…?

Probably.

Also explains ‘rock star behaviour’.

“Look mate, at least there’s the potential you’ll be a father if you shag a few women, but if you don’t… well, there isn’t. Stands to reason, don’t it!”

Not sure why I’ve started talking like an oik. But anyway that’s not the point. The point is this. Suppose my friend, captivated by my wisdom, then spends thirty years having sex with women. But – luckily for them! – they don’t get pregnant. He then comes back and says:

Oi, you said I had the potential to be a father. I’ve wasted thirty years of my life shagging women when it’s obvious I never had that potential!

So the question is: did he ever have the potential to be a father?

Okay, so let’s rule out the obvious point. He isn’t infertile. He’s just been unlucky. So maybe the thought here is we can say he had the potential since what we mean is something to the effect that if he had made choice x, and then y had occurred, he would have become a father. He had the potential – in fact, probably there were a large number of paths he could have taken which would have resulted in fatherhood – it just so happened he inadvertently made the wrong choices. But he could have made the right choices. So the potential was there.

Except maybe he couldn’t have made the right choices. It is not particularly counterintuitive to suppose that the choices we make we were always going to make. It’s a fairly standard line for people who think determinism is true. It doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t have free will – because it is possible to think that free will is compatible with determinism. But I’m not sure it leaves intact the idea we possess potentials we will never realise. If it doesn’t, then – assuming determinism is true (and perhaps even if it isn’t) – my friend was never potentially a father. It’s just neither of us knew it at the time.

(I’ve been musing about this stuff because of statements to the effect that: there’s more chance that x will happen if you do y. Presumably what we mean when we say that is something like: given 1000 people, more out of those who do y, will achieve x, than out of those who don’t do y. No problem. But just because it is true for an aggregate doesn’t mean it’s true for a single individual. And yes, I say this realising quite well that an aggregate isn’t anything other than a collection of single individuals.)

our sense of the reality of things and people and our ability to interact effectively with them depend on the way our body works silently in the background. Its ability to get a grip on things provides our sense of the reality of what we are doing and what we are ready to do…All this our body does so effortlessly, pervasively, and successfully that it is hardly noticed. That is why it is so easy to think that in cyberspace we could get along without it, and why it would, in fact, be impossible to do so.

It is easy to understand how philosophers come to make these kinds of arguments. Many important facets of our personal relationships seem to require face-to-face contact. Dreyfus, for example, argues that trust in another person is in part based on the experience that they do not take advantage of our vulnerability when given the opportunity to so in a face-to-face situation. Certainly it does seem to be true that we can have a level of confidence in people we meet in person that is not available in online relationships. Particularly, the opportunity for gross deception is minimised in a face-face-situation. The philosopher Gordon Graham, and countless other people, have pointed out that it is very easy to deceive people on the internet by inventing wholly imaginary personas – something which it is much more difficult to achieve in the non-virtual world.

It is for these and other similar reasons that many people claim that internet relationships are the poor relations of ‘real’, embodied relationships. However, one must be a bit careful before jumping too readily to this conclusion. One reason is that real-world relationships are subject to kinds of distortion that are at least partly absent from internet relationships. Consider, for example, the importance of physical attractiveness as a factor influencing the judgements we make about people. There is ample evidence demonstrating that we make unwarranted inferences about people on the basis of our perception of their attractiveness. For example, as a consequence of what psychologists call a ‘positive halo effect’, attractive people are considered more intelligent, more moral, better adjusted, nicer, more sexually responsive and more competent than their less attractive fellows. And, of course, it isn’t only attractiveness that influences the judgements we make about people. We also take our cues from age, sex, racial characteristics, style of dress, accent, social class, and so on.

The reason that these kinds of cues will often result in distorted judgements about people is because we make use of ‘implicit personality theories’ that rely on stereotyping. In other words, we tend to take our cue from these readily identifiable characteristics to place people into categories, and then we assume that they share the other attributes that we think are typical of the category. The philosopher Miranda Fricker has pointed to an interesting fictional example of this kind of process. In the novel To Kill a Mocking Bird, set in Alabama in the 1930s, there is a trial of a black man. The all-white jury genuinely do not believe his testimony, even though it is clear he is telling the truth. The important point being that in that culture, at that time, being black was a marker indicating – quite falsely – a lack of credibility. Not surprisingly, it is easy to find equivalent real-life examples of this sort of stereotyping. For instance, Rodney Karr found that gay males were rated more shallow, yielding, tense and passive than males labelled as heterosexual.

The significant point about internet relationships is that the characteristics we rely on to make judgements about people in the non-virtual world are largely invisible in the virtual world. The irony here is that it is precisely that facet of internet communication that makes gross deception possible – the absence of a face-to face-relationship – that undermines our tendency to stereotype. It is of course possible to overstate the significance of this fact. Even in relationships conducted entirely via the medium of the written word, we still make judgements about people which go beyond the evidence (especially if we’re talking about relatively casual relationships). However, it is likely that we do so largely on the basis of the actual content of our communication with a person, which, arguably at least, is more likely to be indicative of those aspects of a person’s character that they themselves consider to be salient.

The corollary of this point is that in our internet relationships we have greater control over which aspects of our character we present to other people than we do in our everyday relationships. Of course, this is why people worry about deception on the internet (and it is a real concern – the individual who adopts a false persona in order to procure a sexual encounter with a vulnerable person behaves badly). But it is only part of the story. If by controlling which aspects our characters we present to people online we are able to avoid the more pernicious effects of our tendency to make judgements on the basis of unwarranted stereotypes, then it is possible we will develop online relationships which are, at least in some ways, less distorted and more real than most of our everyday, embodied relationships.

Author’s Note: I wrote this about ten years ago. I think it was more or less right back then. But much less so now, mainly because the online world is much more like the non-virtual world than it was ten years ago. The growth of social networking, instant messaging, video, etc, etc, means that our virtual relationships are likely to be more embodied, and have more dimensions, than was the case before this kind of technology became ubiquitous. This has brought advantages and disadvantages as per the essay.

I used to think I’d always be able to resist the temptation of illicit sex. But now I’m pretty sure that if I had offers like Tiger Woods, I’d behave exactly as he has done. The flesh is weak.

Yes, Madeleine Martin probably should have known better. Yes, the power relationship was likely asymmetrical. Yes, it isn’t a good idea for teachers to jump their students. But even so… let’s get some perspective here. It was sex that almost certainly both parties thoroughly enjoyed. It was just sex.

Here’s a newsflash for fifteen year old boys. If the worst thing that happens in your life is that you get shagged by your 39-year old teacher, then be thankful. And remember, there will almost certainly come a point in your life when you’ll be absurdly grateful if anybody wants to shag you.

Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene is the kind of book that changes the way that people look at the world. Its importance is that it articulates a gene’s-eye view of evolution. According to this view, all organisms, including human beings, are ‘survival machines’ that have been ‘blindly programmed’ to preserve their genes (see The Selfish Gene, p. v). Of course, extant survival machines take a myriad of different forms – for example, it is estimated that there are some three million different species of insect alone – but they all have in common that they have been built according to the instructions of successful genes; that is, genes whose replicas in previous generations managed to get themselves copied.

At the level of genes, things are competitive. Genes that contribute to making good bodies – bodies that stay alive and reproduce – come to dominate a gene pool (the whole set of genes in a breeding population). So, for example, if a gene emerges which has the effect of improving the camouflage of stick-insects, it will in time likely achieve a preponderance over alternative genes (alleles) which produce less effective camouflage. There are no such things as long-lived, altruistic genes. If a gene has the effect of increasing the welfare of its alleles to its own detriment, it will in the end perish. In this sense, then, all long-lived genes are ‘selfish’, concerned only with their own survival – and the world is necessarily full of genes which have successfully looked after their own interests.

There are good reasons for seeing evolution as operating at the level of genes. Alternative theories are either unworkable (group selectionism) or unnecessarily complex (individual selectionism). However, despite the fact that the central message of The Selfish Gene has become scientific orthodoxy, the book, and the ideas associated with it, have gained something of a reputation for extremism. In part, this is because they been subject to sustained criticism by a number of high profile, often media friendly, people working in the sciences and humanities. On the science side of things, critics have included Steven Rose, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould. On the humanities side, there have been, amongst others, David Stove, Hilary Rose and, perhaps most notoriously, Mary Midgley.

Midgley’s ‘Gene-Juggling’

Mary Midgley first turned her attention to Richard Dawkins’s ideas in her 1979 article ‘Gene Juggling’, published in the journal Philosophy. On the first page of the article, she had this to say about Dawkins and The Selfish Gene:

His central point is that the emotional nature of man is exclusively self-interested, and he argues this by claiming that all emotional nature is so. Since the emotional nature of animals clearly is not exclusively self-interested, nor based on any long-term calculation at all, he resorts to arguing from speculations about the emotional nature of genes, which he treats as the source and archetype of all emotional nature. (‘Gene Juggling’, pp. 439-440).

Unfortunately, as Andrew Brown – who, incidentally, is usually sympathetic to Midgley – points out in his book, The Darwin Wars, this is just about as wrong as it is possible to get about selfish gene theory.¹ It is wrong on a number of counts.

First: Dawkins makes it absolutely clear in The Selfish Gene that he is not using the word ‘selfishness’ – or its opposite ‘altruism’ – to refer to the psychological states, emotional or otherwise, of any entity. Rather, as he pointed out in his reply to Midgley (‘In Defence of Selfish Genes’), he gives the word an explicitly behaviouristic definition:

An entity…is said to be altruistic if it behaves in such a way as to increase another such entity’s welfare at the expense of its own. Selfish behaviour has exactly the opposite effect. ‘Welfare’ is defined as ‘chances of survival’….It is important to realise that the…definitions of altruism and selfishness are behavioural, not subjective. I am not concerned here with the psychology of motives. (The Selfish Gene, p. 4)

There are no grounds, then, for supposing, as Midgley did, that the central message of The Selfish Gene has anything to do with the emotional natures of man, animals or genes.

Second: the very idea that Dawkins might think that genes have an emotional nature is so bizarre that it is hard to know what to make of it. One would be tempted to conclude that Midgley didn’t really mean it, except that she started her article in a similar fashion:

Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological. This should not need mentioning, but…The Selfish Gene has succeeded in confusing a number of people about it… (‘Gene Juggling’, p. 439)

Whatever she meant, two things are clear: (a) no reputable biologist thinks that genes have an emotional nature; and (b) genes can be selfish in the sense that Dawkins – and other sociobiologists² – use the term.

Third: Midgley was confused about levels of analysis. It isn’t possible to make straightforward claims about the behaviour of organisms from the fact that their genes are selfish. There is no requirement for individual organisms to be selfish in the service of their genes. Indeed, one of the central messages of The Selfish Gene is precisely that it is possible to explain the altruistic behaviour of individual animals in terms of selfish gene theory.

These kinds of mistakes are typical of Midgley’s article as a whole. Dawkins, in his response, claimed that the article had ‘no good point to make’ and argued that the details of her criticisms were incorrect because they were based on a misunderstanding and misapplication of a technical language. This conclusion is echoed by Andrew Brown, who states: ‘It has to be said that by the end of Dawkins’s piece…any impartial reader will see that she misunderstood him.’ (Darwin Wars, p. 92) Indeed, Midgley herself has conceded that she should have expressed her objections to The Selfish Gene ‘more clearly and temperately’. (‘Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism’, p. 365).

What’s Going On?

It is possible to tell a very complicated story in order to explain how it is that Dawkins’s ideas, and those of other sociobiologists, provoke the kinds of extreme reaction and misunderstanding characterised by Midgley’s ‘Gene Juggling’. At its most convoluted, this tale would include episodes dealing with: scientism; biological determinism; reductionism; metaphor; motives; moral theory; modes of explanation; levels of selection; and more. Happily, though, there is an alternative story to tell – less comprehensive, but with the advantage of clarity. It also gets to the heart of an important aspect of the worries that people have about sociobiological ideas. It is a story about moral and political commitments.

The proper starting point of this story is the constellation of ideas associated with what has become known as social Darwinism.³ The most general claim of the social Darwinists was that it is possible to make use of Darwinian concepts in order to understand society and the relationships that people have with each other. Specifically, they argued that societies progress because people aggressively pursue their own self-interest in competition with other people doing the same thing. They are competing primarily for economic success, and the ‘fittest’ – those people most adapted to the demands of competition – deservedly rise to the top. If a person is not successful, it indicates a lack of ‘fitness’, and, by extension, that they are not deserving of the rewards that fitness brings.

The nineteenth century social theorist Herbert Spencer is probably the best known exponent of social Darwinist ideas. In his view, social Darwinism translated naturally into a celebration of the individualistic, competitive ethos of laissez-faire capitalism. Spencer thought it quite natural that there were economic winners and losers under capitalism. He opposed social reform and government intervention to help those disadvantaged by the system, on the grounds that there should be no interference in what was a natural mechanism for sorting out the fit from the unfit. Not surprisingly, Spencer’s ideas were enthusiastically adopted by many capitalists at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly in the United States, as a means to justify their wealth and resist the call for social reform.

This kind of crude social Darwinism was relatively short-lived. Indeed, even by the first decade of the twentieth century, Spencer’s ideas were beginning to fall into disrepute. Nevertheless, social Darwinism remains a factor in the way in which people think about sociobiological ideas. Perhaps the major reason for this lasting impact is that the history of social Darwinism is tarnished by its association with some of the more shameful episodes of the twentieth century. Not only was it used to legitimate the painful consequences of untrammelled capitalism, it was also, for example: (a) implicated (though in a complex way) in the emergence of eugenics movements at the beginning of the century, something which led directly to compulsory sterilisation programmes in the United States and indirectly to Nazi concentration camps; (b) integral to ‘scientific racism’, which sought to ground racial discrimination in notions of biological superiority and inferiority; and (c) a contributor to an atmosphere of ‘war apologetics’ that was prevalent in Europe in the period leading up to the 1914-1918 war.

However, it is important to note that people tend now not to talk specifically about social Darwinism in relation to sociobiology. Rather, its impact is felt through people’s concern with a constellation of ideas which are linked by the fact that they are presupposed by social Darwinism. Of these, perhaps the most significant are: (a) the notion that the behaviour of human beings is solely determined by their biology (what is now called biological or genetic determinism); and (b) the idea that it is possible to invoke biology in order to justify particular social or political arrangements (as, for example, extreme right-wing political parties will, in order to justify their racist agendas).

Dawkins and Social Darwinism

Is it the case, then, that Richard Dawkins’s ideas in The Selfish Gene amount to a kind of social Darwinism? The answer to this question is a simple no. There is nothing in Richard Dawkins’s work which remotely adds up to social Darwinism. There are three main reasons why this conclusion is easy to draw.

First: Dawkins says clearly that he is not, unlike the social Darwinists, advocating any particular way of living. He puts it this way in The Selfish Gene:

I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave.… My own feeling is that a human society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. (The Selfish Gene, p. 2-3).

What Dawkins is doing here is flagging up the ‘is/ought gap’; that is, the fact that it is not possible to derive moral statements about how things ought to be from statements about how things stand in the world. For example, if it turns out that we are genetically disposed towards murder, it does not follow that we should, therefore, go around murdering people. Biological facts do not entail moral facts – a point, incidentally, which is ruinous for social Darwinism.

Second: Dawkins explicitly disavows irrevocable ‘genetic determinism’; indeed, he has called it ‘pernicious rubbish on an almost astrological scale’ (The Extended Phenotype, p. 13). Genes affect behaviour. If you want to do Darwinian theorising, then you’ve got to look at the effects of genes. But there are no grounds for thinking that these effects are any more inexorable than the effects of the environment. Inevitability is not part of the equation. This is how Dawkins puts it in The Extended Phenotype:

Genetic causes and environmental causes are in principle no different from each other. Some influences of both types may be hard to reverse; others may be easy to reverse. Some may be usually hard to reverse but easy if the right agent is applied. The important point is that there is no general reason for expecting genetic influences to be any more irrevocable than environmental ones. (The Extended Phenotype, p. 13).

Third: Dawkins’s work is rarely specifically about human beings. Rather, he is dealing with general questions to do with evolutionary theory, many of which are only marginally relevant for understanding human behaviour. Moreover, he is on record as saying that he has little interest in human ethics and does not know a great deal about human psychology. (‘In Defence of Selfish Genes’, p. 558) Of course, the argument here is not that Dawkins’s work never has implications for understanding human behaviour. Rather, it is that where it does, it is not usually because human beings are specifically his subject, but because humans are evolved animals, and evolution is his subject.

Politics, Morals and Biology

If the ideas of Richard Dawkins cannot be construed as a kind of social Darwinism, what has social Darwinism got to do with the extreme reactions and misunderstanding that his work provokes? The answer is that it is the measure against which many people assess the merits of those biological theories they judge to have implications for the understanding of human behaviour.⁴ To appreciate the significance of this point, it is important to recall that social Darwinism remains a factor in people’s thinking because of its association with the horrors of things like racism, war and eugenics. Consequently, for many of those people whose political and moral inclinations are structured by notions of equality and common humanity, social Darwinism is a wickedness to be sought out and then vigorously contested wherever it might be found.

The consequence of this injunction to combat social Darwinism has been the emergence of a mindset amongst certain sectors of the educated public that undermines the proper examination of sociobiological arguments. It is a mindset which subjugates science to political and moral commitments. It results in sociobiological texts being read from a default position of suspicion. Any perception that the arguments they contain might conceivably be co-opted for the purposes of articulating a social Darwinist agenda – however this is construed – is taken as confirmation that this is where the sympathies of the author lie. And the scientific merit of sociobiological arguments is assessed in terms of the extent to which they fit with a political and moral agenda governed by notions of equality and common humanity.

It is easy to point to instances where this mindset prevails. For example, it is involved:

(a) In Mary Midgley’s confusion about selfish genes and selfish individuals; in her accusation that Dawkins’s ‘crude, cheap, blurred genetics….is the kingpin of his crude, cheap, blurred psychology’ (‘Gene-Juggling’, p. 449); and her statement that her main aim is ‘to show people that they can use Darwin’s methods on human behaviour without being committed to a shoddy psychology and a bogus political morality’ (‘Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism’, p. 369).

(b) In Steven Rose, Leon Kamin and Richard Lewontin’s claim that ‘Science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology’ (Not In Our Genes); and their argument that ‘…universities serve as creators, propagators and legitimators of the ideology of biological determinism. If biological determinism is a weapon in the struggle between classes, then the universities are weapons factories, and their teaching and research faculties are the engineers, designers, and the production workers.’ (Not In Our Genes).

(c) In Hilary Rose’s claims, in Red Pepper, that fundamental Darwinists, ‘with their talk of biological universals on matters of social difference are a political and cultural menace to feminists and others who care for justice and freedom’; that they are ‘obsessed by the desire to reduce organisms (including humans) to one determining entity – the gene’; and that sociobiology ‘has a history which varies from the dodgy to the disgusting on sexual difference’. (Red Pepper, Sept 1997, p. 23).

(d) In the furious reaction that greeted the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which saw: the American Anthropological Association debating a motion to censure sociobiology; a group of Boston scientists – including Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin – forming ‘The Sociobiology Study Group’, and noting in The New York Review of Books that theories that attempted to establish a biological foundation to social behaviour provided an ‘important basis…for the eugenic policies which led to the establishment of Gas chambers in Nazi Germany’; and Wilson himself being drenched with water by protestors at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in early 1978.

Conclusion

Richard Dawkins’s ideas, and those of other sociobiologists, then, provoke extreme reactions and misunderstanding because their critics believe them to be in conflict with the moral and political commitments that they hold. This fact stands independently of any considerations about the merit of the kind of science that Dawkins, and his colleagues, are doing. Of course, it is not unusual for ideology to affect the judgements that people make about scientific theories, and where these theories have implications for understanding human beings it is especially commonplace.⁵ But what it has meant in the case of sociobiology is that the public space for the debate about evolutionary ideas has become polluted by the hyperbole that almost inevitably occurs when the politically engaged feel their baseline commitments to be under threat.

However, for those people who prefer their science to be driven by a desire to uncover the fundamental nature of things, and not by a desire to find spurious support for political and moral values, there is still some hope. For, according to Edward O. Wilson, the controversy surrounding sociobiology is essentially over. ‘The contrarians are ageing,’ he told Ed Douglas, in a recent Guardian interview. ‘No young scientists are joining. They are not handing on the torch but passing it around a smaller and smaller circle.’ If Wilson is right, perhaps there is hope for a future where articles like Mary Midgley’s ‘Gene Juggling’ don’t get published in reputable journals.

_______________________________________________________________________
Endnotes
¹ This is echoed by J. L. Mackie, whose original article in Philosophy, ‘The Law of the Jungle’, had motivated Midgley to write ‘Gene Juggling’. In a follow-up article he wrote: ‘Mary Midgley’s article is not merely intemperate but misconceived. Its errors must be corrected if readers of Philosophy are not to be left with false impressions, for it rests on a complete misunderstanding both of Dr Dawkins’s position and of mine.’ (‘Genes and Egoism’, p. 553).

² It should be noted that Dawkins is on record as saying that he doesn’t much like the term ‘Sociobiologist’ (but he has also said that he is willing to stand up and be counted as one).

³ Social Darwinsim is something of a contested concept. Consequently, there will be those who disagree with the way in which I use the term in this article. There is also disagreement about the history of social Darwinism. For an alternative treatment of this phenomenon, see Robert Bannister’s ‘Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought’.

⁴ Mary Midgley makes the same point in her article ‘Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism’ (pp. 366-367).

⁵ In this regard, the whole Lysenkoism affair in the Soviet Union is instructive.

References

Bannister, R., Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979).

Brown, A., The Darwin Wars, (London: Touchstone, 2000).

Carnegie, A., The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1976).

Dawkins, R., The Selfish Gene, 2^nd Edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 [1976]).

Dawkins, R., ‘In Defence of Selfish Genes’, Philosophy, vol. 56, no. 218 (1981), pp. 556-573.

Dawkins, R., The Extended Phenotype, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Mackie, J. L., ‘The Law of the Jungle’, Philosophy, vol. 53, no. 206 (1978), pp. 455-464.

Mackie, J. L., ‘Genes and Egoism’, Philosophy, vol. 56, no. 218 (1981), pp. 553-555.

Midgley, M., ‘Gene Juggling’, Philosophy, vol. 54, no. 210 (1979), pp. 439-458.

Midgley, M., ‘Social Genes and Social Darwinism’, Philosophy, vol. 58, no. 225, pp. 365-377.

Rose, S., Kamin, L. & Lewontin, R., Not In Our Genes, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).

Wilson, E., Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978).

This essay was originally published in 2002, and appeared in issue 2 of the journal Think.

The relationship was entirely consensual – indeed, it seems that there is the intention that it will continue once the teacher is freed from prison. The evidence in court was that the 15 year old girl was the one who pushed for the relationship to become sexual.

Regina Naughton, for the prosecution, said: “They began to have feelings which were not expected. Miss Goddard said she didn’t see her as a 15-year-old and they would have to wait until she was 16, or for three years. But flirting and the sending of text messages to each other began. The teenager described them kissing and then sleeping with each other, and it was at that point that the girl said she wanted a sexual relationship.

“The girl was told that if she felt anything was uncomfortable at any time they could stop. But the girl said it felt right,” she added.

There are a number of points to be made here.

First: There was talk in the court case about the “psychological injury” done to the 15 year old. Right – well there’d be a damn sight less psychological injury if people didn’t get so worked up about this kind of thing. It was a consensual relationship. They loved each other. Sure it might have ended badly. Yes, it’s possible the young girl would have ended up getting hurt. But is it really worse than getting shagged behind the bike sheds by some spotty 15 year old oik who doesn’t give a damn about you?

Second: No doubt there’s the thought that a 15 year old cannot properly consent to sex when the object of their lust is their 26 year old teacher. Fine. There’s something to that thought. But consent is never straightforward. There are all kinds of things that might undermine our ability to make a proper judgement about how we really feel – or will feel – about a sexual encounter. Maybe we’re lonely, or we haven’t had sex for a long time, or we feel unloved, or we’re desperate for a meaningful relationship. If people don’t have sex simply because they can’t be sure they won’t regret it in the morning, then not many people are going to be having sex.

Perhaps the idea is we’re morally bound to protect 15 year olds, but not 26 year olds, from the consequences of this kind of uncertainty. Well maybe, but this would have to be argued for, since it is not obvious that a 15 year old is going to be any more harmed by an ill-judged sexual encounter than an older person. Indeed, there are at least some reasons to think that the opposite might be the case.

Third: There’s an obvious point about proportionality in terms of the punishment meted out to the teacher in this case. Okay, so maybe on balance we don’t want teachers shagging pupils. But let’s get a grip here. Not all cases are equal. A predatory male teacher pressurising a young female pupil into sex is one thing; a female teacher having a consensual sexual encounter with a horny 15 year old boy is another; and the situation in this case, where the two protagonists were/are in love with each other, is a third thing. Arguably, only in the first of these cases is the teacher/pupil relationship morally relevant (though this is complex).

Okay, there’s more to be said here, but probably I’ve gone on long enough. Except consider briefly this story.

A dentist whipped off his trousers and paraded in front of his practice nurse wearing nothing but a leopard-print thong.

His less than subtle wooing tactics evidently paid off, because the couple began a passionate relationship involving sexual encounters in the surgery.

But three other nurses were offended by his conduct towards them, and yesterday he was brought before the General Dental Council to answer charges of inappropriate behaviour.

The panel heard that the dentist regularly groped nurses’ bottoms, twanged their knicker elastic and tried to undo their brassieres through their tunics.

The first thing to say is that we have no idea how much of this story is true. But here are some of the things the dentist is purported to have done.

When a new dental nurse, Miss C, joined in 2004 the dentist is alleged to have grabbed her bottom and poked her breasts.

‘When she would be walking up the stairs in front of him he would frequently grab her bottom. He followed her down the corridor and when she was alone, pushed on her breast with one finger and said words to the effect, "Are they real?".’

Miss C brushed off Barton when he approached her after work and asked ‘if she fancied some fun’, the hearing was told.

Another nurse, Miss D, did not like his ‘sexual behaviour’.

‘She noticed early on his behaviour was unusual – he would squeeze her sides and stand behind her. He asked her questions about her sex life and whether she had intercourse last night. She became embarrassed and uncomfortable about these conversations. But worse experiences were to come.’

…Barton became bolder and started to touch Miss D’s bottom in the surgery saying: ‘Let’s have a feel.’ She was shocked and unable to say a thing – she was too shocked to speak. The next day he said she should wear a thong. She simply felt unable to go to work so she eventually telephoned in and told the practice nurse what had been going on.’

The dentist stands to lose his licence to practice dentistry, but he is not going to prison any time soon. (And nor should he.) But is it really the case that his behaviour was significantly better than that of Helen Goddard – the trumpet teacher? It doesn’t seem that way to me.

Richard and Dan live in a society that is thoroughly and harmoniously religious. People are happy. They sing hymns together, burn incense, enjoy wearing robes and have a penchant for incantation. There exists little in the way of what we would recognize as education. Children are taught about God, sacred traditions, the importance of family and community, the truth of the Holy Scripture, but that’s about it.

Richard and Dan, however, do not share the religious sensibility of their fellow citizens. They were brought up by their parents – members of the renegade Enquiries at the Periphery – to be secular humanists. As teenagers, they were closeted away, and put through an intense educational program designed to teach them the overriding importance of science and scientific methodology. At first, Richard and Dan resisted the efforts of their teachers, preferring the simplicity of the beliefs of their early childhood, but the pressure from their teachers was relentless, and inevitably they came to embrace a scientific worldview.

However, their education has not made them happy. They are alienated from the society in which they live, and they find themselves wishing that they could be more like other people – that they could experience the exuberance of happy singing, the joy of worshipping the God they do not believe exists, and the togetherness engendered by a shared belief. But try as they might, they simply cannot believe. It is impossible. They know that their way of understanding the world is the right way, but they wish it were otherwise.

Richard and Dan live lonely, miserable, friendless lives. They are considerably less happy than they would have been had they not been born to proselytizing secular humanist parents. If you ask them about it, they’ll tell you that they were brainwashed as teenagers – that they were victims of a kind of abuse, which has left them unable to live as full members of their society.

***

The notion of brainwashing usually carries with it the idea that a victim has been forced or pushed to believe various things that are palpably false or absurd. The scenario above subverts this idea by asking us to consider whether it is right to describe as brainwashing the inculcation of a worldview that many people think is rationally justified. Richard and Dan are committed to the truth of secular humanism, but they claim that they cannot help but think that way – despite their desire not to do so – because of the nature of their upbringing and education. They have, in effect, been brainwashed.

A possible objection here is to insist that part of what defines brainwashing is that it involves employing specific psychological techniques – such as isolation and emotional manipulation – in order to ensure that people come to believe particular things. The trouble is that this definition seems to leave too much out. Consider, for example, that the scientist Richard Dawkins, and philosopher Anthony Grayling, and many others like them, have suggested that the normal religious education provided by churches, mosques and synagogues is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”.

Perhaps then what defines brainwashing is that it involves the passing on of beliefs that are presented as being unquestionably true. This allows in the teaching of religion as a kind of brainwashing. The trouble is that it also allows in an awful lot else. Just think about how history was taught for a large part of the twentieth century: facts and dates – no questioning, no dissent, and nothing to suggest that the details of history are contested. So was the teaching of history – and anything else taught in a similar fashion – a kind of brainwashing? Perhaps it was.

Maybe the only way to avoid the brainwashing charge is to cultivate a restless and questioning spirit in people through our educational practices. But here the case of Richard and Dan looms large again. They were both precisely taught to be restless and questioning, and it is their claim that they have been damaged as a consequence. For them, it is their inability to leave behind the legacy of their “enlightened” education that has left them isolated and estranged.

This is a reworking of a post that originally appeared on the Talking Philosophy blog.

Daniel Dennett

When Tony Blair first became leader of the Labour Party in 1994, the Sun newspaper, a British tabloid, took to calling him ‘Bambi’, presumably in the hope that the nickname would become established in the public consciousness. It did not, of course, for it lacked any kind of resonance with what people could believe about Blair. He wasn’t a child, his leadership was anything but childlike, and he lacked the requisite number of legs to be a baby deer. Not discouraged, the Sun was at it again in 2001, this time when Iain Duncan Smith became leader of the Conservative Party. In what was probably a desperate attempt to establish his man of the people credentials, it started to call him ‘Smithy’. A quite absurd conceit, given his double-barrelled name and former career as an army officer. Needless to say, this nickname didn’t catch on either, and almost universally in the UK media, Duncan Smith came to be known as IDS.

None of this is surprising. If your aim is to coin, ex nihilo, a name or epithet which quickly gains widespread public acceptance, the chances of success are not great. Even the media, with its ability to talk daily to massive audiences, fails as often as it succeeds. Thus, for every ‘Slick Willy’, you’ll find that there is a ‘Bambi’, for every ‘loony left’ a ‘Doris Karloff’.

This is a comforting thought for a secularist at the present time. For a rather unfortunate meme has lately infected the minds of some leading exponents of a naturalistic worldview. It is a meme which says that it would be a good idea if people without belief in things supernatural started to call themselves ‘brights’.

The meme started with two people from Sacramento, California. Though atheists, Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell did not want to be referred to as being ‘godless’, so they came up with the word ‘bright’ to better describe their naturalistic worldview. Their hope is that other nonbelievers will also use the word, and that it will become an umbrella term for the whole range of naturalistic philosophies (i.e., atheist, agnostic, humanist, etc.). They have setup a website, The Brights Net (www.the-brights.net), to this end, and have attracted a number of high profile advocates, including Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, both of whom have written articles supporting the idea.

It is easy enough to understand the efficacy of this meme. The naturalistic philosophies of the non-religious do not play the same kind of high profile role in political and civic life as do the supernaturalist ideas of their religious counterparts. This is the case particularly in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, where, for example, assorted bishops get to sit on various ethics committees simply because they are bishops. Given this situation, any intervention which promises to raise the profile of naturalistic thinking is bound to be attractive at first sight. The trouble is that it doesn’t take too many more sights of the brights idea to realise that it is badly flawed.

First, ‘bright’ is just the wrong word. How it was chosen in the first place isn’t quite clear. It seems to have had something to do with the fact that it is a ‘positive’ and ‘memorable’ word; and also that it is sufficiently puzzling or enigmatic when used as a noun – ‘I am a bright’ –that it invites the response, ‘What’s a bright?’, thereby allowing a person to talk about their naturalistic worldview. But there are major problems with the word.

The first is that its enigmatic quality is indicative of a fundamental arbitrariness in its relationship to the phenomenon that it names. It’s the let’s call Tony Blair ‘Bambi’ problem. Dawkins imagines that a bright might have a conversation which goes like this:

‘”What on earth is a bright”? And then you’re away. “A bright is a person whose world view is free of supernatural and mystical elements….”

“You mean a bright is an atheist?”

“Well, some brights are happy to call themselves atheists. Some brights call themselves agnostics. Some call themselves humanists, some freethinkers. But all brights have a world view that is free of supernaturalism and mysticism.”’

(Richard Dawkins, ‘The future looks bright’, The Guardian, June 21^st 2003)

All very nice, except that the conversation is far more likely to go something like this:

‘What on earth is a bright?’

‘A bright is a person whose world view is free of supernatural and mystical elements.’

‘Right. So why the word “bright” then?’

‘Err. Well it’s a positive word. And memorable.’

‘So is the word “truffle”, but you wouldn’t call yourself a truffle. So why “bright”?’

‘Well, it’s what this couple from Sacramento came up with… and it is a very cheerful word!’

The arbitrariness of the choice of the word ‘bright’, though undermining its potential as a meme, would not matter so much were it not for the fact that one of the established uses of the word is as an adjective meaning ‘clever’ or ‘intelligent’. The problem here is that in the absence of an obvious reason to explain how it is that the word ‘bright’ designates a person who espouses a naturalist worldview, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that what is being suggested is that it is more intelligent to embrace naturalism than it is to embrace supernaturalism.

It must be said that the supporters of the brights idea are quite clear that the word should not be taken to be an adjective in this way. However, this does not make the problem go away. It should be obvious why it does not. For starters, there is the trivial point that you cannot strip a word of its associations simply by denying that you intend them. [1] Nor can you do so by using the word in a slightly strange way (i.e., as a noun). If someone announces that they’re a bright, then likely it will occur to their audience that what they actually mean is that they are bright. The fact that they will also be unable to explain why the word ‘bright’ is appropriate as a label for someone with a naturalistic worldview will do nothing to allay this suspicion.

There is also a slightly more complex point to be made here. To be an atheist in the United States – and also in some ways in the United Kingdom – is to set oneself against the dominant culture. There is, therefore, a tendency to associate atheism with a certain kind of intellectual independence. This is reflected in the names of the groups with which many atheists associate themselves (e.g., freethinkers; skeptics; etc). And it also underpins the anti-intellectual sentiment of much of the religious sermonising characteristic of Christian fundamentalism. The problem with the word ‘bright’ is that it is too easily seen as confirming this link between atheism and intellectuality. Or to put this more precisely, if people with no belief in god begin to self-identify as brights, they run the risk of apparently confirming what many religious people already suspect about them, that they consider themselves to be better or more intelligent than people who believe in a god.

Does this matter? Yes it does, if one is interested in convincing people of the merits of a naturalistic worldview. To start with, there is the obvious point that people are more likely to be receptive to new ideas if they feel that they are being treated with respect. But perhaps more worryingly, a movement which self-identifies as a movement of brights makes itself a hostage to rhetorical fortune. It is extremely easy – and, it must be said, very tempting – to parody the whole idea of a brights movement. And, of course, this is exactly what the enemies of a naturalistic worldview will do should the idea take off. The brights movement will find itself transmogrified into a ‘We’re smarter than you’ movement. And, at that point, protesting that the word was chosen simply because it is ‘warm’ and ‘cheerful’ will just result in more parody and more laughter.

‘Bright’, then, is the wrong choice of word to designate a person with a naturalistic worldview and as an umbrella term for a movement. But substituting a different word won’t make the brights idea a good one because it is muddle-headed for other reasons. Perhaps the most interesting of these has to do with what appears to be an unspoken assumption about people with a naturalistic worldview.

The assumption seems to be that the rejection of supernaturalism is enough to qualify someone as a person without religion. This claim is only unproblematic if one defines religion as involving supernatural beliefs. However, there is at least an argument that the sphere of the religious can be extended to include aspects of the secular world. It is an argument inspired by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. He claimed that the realm of the sacred is distinguished by the separateness of its objects from those of the world of the profane, and by the system of interdictions which prevents them from being denied. [2] If one accepts this conception, then there are secular phenomena which qualify as sacred. So Durkheim talks of ‘common beliefs of every sort connected to objects that are secular in appearance, such as the flag, one’s country, some forms of political organisation, certain heroes or historical events’, which are ‘indistinguishable from beliefs that are properly religious’; and he notes that ‘Public opinion does not willingly allow one to contest the moral superiority of democracy, the reality of progress, [or] the idea of equality, just as the Christian does not allow his fundamental dogmas to be questioned.’

It is easy to understand what Durkheim is getting at. It is only necessary to attend a meeting organised by a group like the Socialist Workers Party to become very quickly aware that people can hold secular beliefs to be every bit as inviolable as religious beliefs often are for the religious. Of course, this point is already well understood. For example, in a review of Steven Rose et al’s Not in Our Genes, Richard Dawkins, commenting on their arguments against ‘genetic determinism’, has this to say: ‘The myth of the “inevitability” of genetic effects has nothing whatever to do with sociobiology, and has everything to do with Rose et al’s paranoiac and demonological theology of science. [my italics]’ (Richard Dawkins, New Scientist 24 January 1985).

What this means for the brights idea is that the criterion of a naturalistic worldview is no guarantee that people will be free of the kind of thinking which is quite reasonably described as ‘religious’. Or to put this another way, it is no guarantee that people will not be committed to beliefs, or sets of beliefs, which are beyond rational scrutiny in the same way as are many of the beliefs which are associated with theism. Possibly the supporters of the brights movement will not deny this, but rather claim that it does not matter too much, that their expectation has never been that they will create a movement of absolutely rigorous thinkers, each one holding up their beliefs to the light of reason. Fair enough. Except for two further points.

First, there is just a suggestion in some of the writings of the supporters of the brights idea that they see themselves as the true inheritors of the Enlightenment tradition. Well, it just isn’t this clear-cut. First off, the belief in a deity, in and of itself, does not rule out an attitude towards this world which is entirely consistent with the Enlightenment emphasis on reason and the progress of human knowledge. But perhaps more significantly, many people who qualify as brights would have a decidedly ambivalent attitude towards the products of the Enlightenment. Just consider, for example, that many Marxists would agree with Rose et al that ‘science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology.’ (Not in Our Genes). And that from amongst the whole caboodle of postmodern thinkers, at least some will be prepared to commit to agnosticism, and will no doubt claim something like ‘that progress in social thought is not possible without a thorough critique of the Enlightenment, whether for its justification of the domination of nature, or its authoritative support for belief systems like scientific racism or sexism, or for the monocultural legacy of its assumptions about rationality.’ (Andrew Ross, The Sokal Hoax).

Which thoughts lead on to the second point about the kind of movement the brights idea is likely to foster. It is certainly going to contain some odd bedfellows. Scientific atheists and Marxist atheists will be united in thinking that there is definitely no god, but they’ll fight like cats and dogs over the fate of the bourgeoisie. The agnostics will irritate both groups by sitting on the fence, whilst freethinkers drive themselves crazy trying to find a viewpoint unique to themselves. The skeptics will watch the whole thing from afar with slightly cynical smiles, and the postmodernists will talk past themselves, as per usual. As for the rest of the world? They won’t see past the name. And laughter and parody will be the result. Therefore, one can only hope that the ‘bright’ meme fails on its evolutionary journey.

Footnotes
[1] The observant reader will notice that there is an echo here of the criticism that some people have made of the language of Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. For the record, I think the criticism is misplaced in the case of The Selfish Gene.
[2] There’s obviously a lot more to Durkheim’s argument than this mere bald assertion. See his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life; and also, for a summary of the argument I’m making here, J. C. Alexander’s The Antinomies of Classical Thought: Marx and Durkheim (Routledge, 1982), pp. 242 -250.

This article was originally published at ButterfliesandWheels.Com.