The web site of Jeremy Stangroom.
This is simultaneously amusing and rather sad.
Most of all though it is more evidence – if more evidence is needed after the on-going shenanigans of the atheist wars (“Oh no, Chris Mooney is hosting a podcast!”) – that atheists, freethinkers (ha!), and the like, are no more rational than anybody else. (Probably).
Introduction
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.
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.
In the mid-1980s, microbiology hit the headlines in a big way with the rise of the AIDS epidemic. Since then, microbiological illnesses have rarely been out of the news: salmonella, Legionnaires’ disease, Ebola fever, necrotising fasciitis, anthrax, smallpox, foot-and-mouth disease, West Nile virus, MRSA and SARS have all been front page stories in the last twenty years. However, despite this coverage, there is still much confusion amongst the general public about the nature of the microbes which cause these illnesses. Particularly, many people are unaware that viruses and bacteria are very different things.
‘This is a bit of a hobby horse of mine,’ says Dorothy Crawford, Robert Irvine Professor of Medical Microbiology at Edinburgh University. ‘It is really very irritating that the media tend to label every nasty illness a virus. Viruses are actually very different from bacteria. In fact, about the only thing which they have in common, apart from the fact that they cause illness, is that they’re very small. But even here, viruses are in fact much smaller than bacteria; for example, you can’t see viruses without an electron microscope, whereas you can see bacteria with an ordinary light microscope. Indeed, until the electron microscope was invented, people weren’t at all clear about what viruses were; they thought that they were probably just very small bacteria, but in fact they’re very different.
‘Bacteria are single celled organisms, which have the ability to exist independently of other organisms,’ Crawford explains. ‘They are able to metabolise and to reproduce on their own. Viruses, on the other hand, are obligate parasites; they are only able to reproduce within a host organism. They can’t do anything until they get inside a living cell. Once they’re there, they have mechanisms which enable them to take over the cell, and to use the cell’s organelles in order to reproduce themselves. They have nucleic acid – DNA or RNA – so they have inherited characteristics; but apart from that there isn’t really much to them.’
The fact that viruses do not produce their own energy and cannot reproduce without hijacking the cells of a living host raises the question as to whether they are alive or not. Does Crawford have a view about this?
‘Well, it’s a question which I sometimes ask my students,’ she replies. ‘It’s a good debate, but I’m not sure how much it matters. Ultimately it hinges on how life is defined. If life is about reproduction, then viruses are alive; but if it is about the ability to metabolise, then they’re not. I guess, if pushed, I’d come down on the side of viruses not being alive. They just don’t seem to have life-like characteristics.’
Pro-Vivisection March
In May 2004, the British Government announced that it was establishing a new national centre which would fund work directed towards the aim of replacing, refining and reducing the use of animals in scientific research. Lord Sainsbury, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science and Innovation, marked the announcement by insisting that whatever the ultimate aim of the centre, it was clear that animal testing was currently necessary for proper scientific research. In this, he was echoing a statement which he had made some months earlier, reaffirming the commitment of the British government to animal research undertaken within existing regulatory frameworks.
However, this claim that animal experimentation is necessary for scientific research is not universally accepted. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is most keenly contested by the animal rights lobby. The National Anti-Vivisection Society, for instance, argues that ‘the fundamental flaw of animal-based research is that each species responds differently to drugs and chemicals, therefore results from animal tests are unreliable as a means of predicting likely effects in humans. Thus, animal experiments are unreliable, unethical, and unnecessary.’
Whilst this view might justifiably be regarded as being rooted in the hyperbole of a pressure group, the animal rights lobby is not alone in suggesting that the issues surrounding animal experimentation are difficult. For example, in a BMJ article titled ‘Where is the evidence that animal research benefits humans?’ (February 28, 2004), Pandora Pound et al noted in their first sentence that: ‘Clinicians and the public often consider it axiomatic that animal research has contributed to the treatment of human disease, yet little evidence is available to support this view.’ As a result of this claim, the UK media reported that scientists were beginning to doubt whether animal research was useful at all.
‘It was completely predictable that that phrase would become a kind of rallying call for the animal rights movement, and it is very unfortunate,’ says Professor Colin Blakemore, Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council (nb. Blakemore relinquished this position in 2007), when I mention the article to him. ‘But it is possible to counter the claim with the fact that the Royal Society has recently published a pretty comprehensive study which says that virtually every medical advance in the last century has depended on the use of animals in research at some point; or with the statement from the Department of Health, in its evidence to the House of Lords committee on animal experimentation, that the National Health Service could not operate without the foundation of the knowledge which animal research has built. The overwhelming view of the scientific establishment, and I’m not using that expression in a pejorative way, is that animal research is necessary for progress in medical science.
‘Also, it is important to point out that there has been some misinterpretation of the data which Pound et al analyse in their paper. They found, and I think they’re right about this, that the transition between animal research and clinical application often lacks rigour in terms of a proper review of evidence. The eagerness of some scientists or drug companies to try out new treatments can lead to the misinterpretation or over-interpretation of data from animal research. But they only examined six areas of research, out of the many hundreds where it is well documented that animal experimentation led to clinical applications. Specifically, they looked at six comprehensive reviews of animal evidence and the associated attempts at clinical application.
‘In one of these cases, they found that despite clear evidence from the work of people like Michael Marmot that human health is linked to social status and responsibility, there is no analogue of this phenomenon amongst primates. But this isn’t surprising; it doesn’t work this way in primates. Marmot was looking at the civil service, which is not exactly the kind of environment you can easily imagine being mimicked in primate groups.
‘The other five cases were situations where clinical trials, or the preliminary treatment of human beings, had started on the basis of a cursory examination and often very optimistic interpretation of previous animal research. In every case, it turned out that the clinical technique did not work. In retrospect, when the animal research was thoroughly and systematically reviewed, it turned out that the results from the animal experiments didn’t justify the clinical application. So far from showing a mismatch between animal and human results, it showed a perfect correlation. The failure was in the transition between the animal results and the clinical studies.’
What then of the criticism that the small differences in the makeup of complex systems such as animals and humans can make a lot of difference in terms of how they respond to chemicals and drugs, and that, as a result, extrapolation from animals to humans is necessarily unreliable?
‘There are probably only two or three properly qualified people in the world who hold this position,’ Blakemore replies. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of physicians in the United States say that it is essential to use animals in medical research; and more than ninety-five per cent of British physicians say the same thing. So whilst it is important to listen to maverick opinion, it is clear we shouldn’t put too much weight on it when one considers that the American Medical Association, the Royal Society, the British Medical Association, and the General Medical Council all state that animal experimentation is necessary.’
Presumably then it must be possible to give specific examples of the importance of animal research which will settle the issue?
‘Yes, almost everything is an example,’ says Blakemore. ‘Every drug, every form of advanced surgery, nearly every antibiotic, nearly every vaccine; the development of all of them has at some stage involved animal testing. What more evidence is there? By law, every drug has to be tested on animals before it can be used on humans; you cannot get a prescription for a drug which has been developed in the last one hundred years which hasn’t been tested on animals. So when you ask for examples, just about everything is an example: every pain killer; every treatment for heart disease, kidney disease and cancer; chemotherapy; radiotherapy; surgical techniques; bypass surgery; open heart surgery; you name it, animals were involved in the research.’
So what are the motivations of the people who argue that animal research is unreliable and unnecessary? Are they just pursuing a particular moral agenda?
‘I’m not sure,’ Blakemore answers. ‘I know that Ray Greek, for example, has argued that his is not a moral position; he doesn’t object to the use of animals in medical research on moral grounds. He has said, much to the consternation of his own supporters, that if it took the death of 10,000 chimpanzees to find a cure for AIDS, then he would be in favour of it. His argument then is a factual one; that animal research doesn’t work. But I would be extremely critical of the evidence he cites to support his view. Mainly he makes use of excised quotations, which seem to suggest that eminent researchers doubt the value of animal research. But if you go back to the source of the quotations, you find that they are being used out of context, and that the thrust of the papers they appear in contradicts the argument the quotations are being used to support. I don’t call this evidence.’
Perhaps the area of animal research which causes most controversy is that which involves primates. In the UK, this issue became headline news at the beginning of 2004, with the announcement by Cambridge University that it had axed plans to build a new multi-million pound centre for primate research. The BBC reported that the decision to abandon the project was based in part on the spiralling cost of satisfying the requirements of animal welfare legislation and the need for security to protect against the threat of attack from animal rights activists. The decision was greeted with regret by many people in the scientific community. For example, Mark Matfield, director of the Research Defence Society, called it a ‘serious blow for British medical research’ and argued that ‘the government needs to bring in tougher legislation to tackle extremist campaigns, otherwise they will remain a threat to all medical science that depends on animal research.’
What is the importance of primate research? It accounts for only a tiny percentage of the total of animal research, so presumably there are some quite specific reasons for doing it?
‘Yes, that’s right,’ Blakemore confirms. ‘To get a licence for primate research requires that a very special case be made; not only that animals are necessary for the research, but also that it must be primates, that no other animal will do. Moreover, particular attention is paid to the question of suffering; it is much harder to get a license where primates might suffer than it is in the case of say mice. Also, the number of animals to be used, and the objectives of the research will be taken into account. What this means is that research with primates will be of great strategic importance in terms of its potential to deliver results, and it will be work which simply cannot be done with other species. We’re talking here primarily about three main areas of research: endocrinology, where for many of the hormone systems, the monkey is the only model which has the required likeness to human beings; neuroscience, because of the similarity between the organisation of the primate and human brain; and some areas of vaccinology, particularly, for example, in attempts to develop AIDS vaccines.’
The specific worry about primates has largely to do with their cognitive abilities; particularly, there is the possibility that they are self-aware; self-conscious, rather than simply conscious. The philosopher Peter Singer, for example, in his book In Defence of Animals, asks why we are willing to lock up chimpanzees in primate research centres and subject them to painful experiments when we would never think of doing the same thing to a retarded human being who had lesser mental abilities. Singer concludes that it is only speciesism which explains this difference. What does Blakemore make of this kind of argument?
‘I know the arguments, and would keep an open-mind on the nature of the evidence about something like primate self-awareness,’ he replies. ‘But I think it is very important to hang on to one strong moral principle, which is that there is a clear distinction between our responsibilities to our own species and our responsibilities to other species. Most people, given the choice between saving the life of a human or an animal, will think that their primary obligation is to the human being. I’m very fond of animals, I have kept pets all my life, but if it came to a choice between my cat, which has lived with us for some seven years, and is very much a part of the family, and the life of one of my daughters, I would not have the slightest hesitation in saying that the life of my daughter should have priority; and I think that most people would feel the same way. They might love animals, but they see that human beings are just different.’
The response which somebody sympathetic to the Singer view would likely offer to this argument is that at least part of what leads us to the thought that humans are different from animals might be present in a primate and absent in a severely disabled human being.
‘Yes, the idea that all that matters is sentience,’ says Blakemore. ‘But we need a firmer foundation than this to base our judgements upon. In the end, all it amounts to is an anthropomorphic claim about what it must be like to be a monkey. However, this can lead to serious errors of judgement, such as that of Peter Singer himself, when he argues that there is a line to be drawn in terms of sentience somewhere between rats and fish. But why? Just because we can’t get ourselves into the mental life of a fish, doesn’t mean that a fish is not sentient. The correct starting position is that it is possible that all living animals with a nervous system have some kind of experience. Therefore, we have a responsibility to all species to minimise suffering, but on top of this we have a primary obligation to our own species. This is a very normal, biological principle. You see it in virtually every species; they treat their own species differently from other species.’
So when Singer talks about speciesism, would Blakemore be happy to accept that as his position?
‘Yes, that is exactly my position,’ he confirms. ‘But I don’t accept that “speciesism” is a pejorative term; I’m quite happy to defend the position. In the end, you have to draw a line; you couldn’t walk down the street if you really believed that to kill any living thing was a sin or immoral because you’d be worried about the small insects under your feet. There is an extreme version of Buddhism which holds to that position, but taken to its logical conclusion it is ridiculous; you’d end up never moving because you’d be worried about hurting microbes. So it is necessary to draw the line somewhere. The only firm line on genetic and morphological grounds is between our own species and other species. But the fact that we’re justified in treating our own species differently doesn’t mean that we have a kind of Cartesian license to treat other species in any way that we want; because of our own moral status, we have an extended moral obligation towards the rest of the world. It is just that this moral obligation doesn’t entail that we have the same responsibilities to other species as we do to each other. So I’m a speciesist, and I would defend that position.’
At the end of 2003, it was reported that Blakemore had been turned down for a knighthood because of his support for vivisection; and that, as a result, he was considering his position as the head of the Medical Research Council. ‘It has nothing to do with whether I particularly deserve an honour, that is neither here nor there,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. ‘The mission statement of the medical research organisation which I now run includes a specific commitment to engaging with the public on issues in medical research. How can I now, in the present circumstances, go to MRC scientists and ask them to take the risk of being willing to talk about animal experimentation with this indication that doing so will reduce their standing and their reputation in the eyes of the government?’
Was he reassured by the government’s response to this situation that it fully accepted the need for animal research, and that it admired and supported those scientists who had been on the front line in the struggle against animal rights extremists?
‘Yes, I was,’ he replies. ‘But actually, what was almost more important was the widespread support that came from the scientific community and the media. The support from the media, in particular, was quite extraordinary and a big surprise; virtually the entire spectrum made strong statements about the importance of animal experimentation. So the debate served a useful purpose; it produced a kind of national solidarity, which was much needed. This is also reflected in public opinion. The latest opinion poll shows ninety per cent of the population in support of animal research. It is significant that there is no other major issue where you get this kind of consensus; we still treat the issue of animal research as if it is highly controversial, as if the public haven’t made up their mind; but they have made up their mind.’
The opinion poll which Blakemore refers to here was couched in a particular way; specifically, people were asked for their opinion about animal research on the assumption that certain criteria had been met. For example, one question asked whether people could accept animal research for medical purposes, where there was no other alternative. But, of course, it is precisely the claim of the animal rights lobby that there are alternatives to animal research.
‘Well, if there are, let’s see them delivered by those people who claim that there are,’ Blakemore responds, when I put this to him. ‘I have faced the whole range of arguments from those who are opposed to animal research. I have enormous respect for people who simply say that they don’t care about the range of benefits which are the result of animal experimentation; they don’t deny that there have been these benefits, but they don’t want any part of them because they think that animal experimentation is wrong. It is very difficult to maintain this position, because we all do well as a result of advances in medical techniques; for example, we all benefit from the fact that people are vaccinated, and from our knowledge of the importance of public health. But I understand and respect this position.
‘However, I have very little respect for people who say that animals are so very different from human beings that animal research has no relevance for understanding humans; or that all treatments which have been developed on animals are dangerous to humans; or that animal researchers enjoy what they’re doing, that they’re basically sadists, and that anyway, it is only really about filling the pockets of the drug companies. This is not a parody of the kinds of arguments which are made; and I have no time for them. They are rationally indefensible. If there are alternatives, let’s see them. We want them. I don’t know of a single person who uses animals in their research who wouldn’t rather use an alternative. Moreover, there is a great paradox here: the alternatives to animal research which do exist have been developed by researchers who have previously experimented on animals. I’ve had grants to develop alternatives, I’ve done a lot of work on tissue cultures, and I use computer simulations for a lot of my work, yet I’m accused of being a villain because I’ve also experimented on animals.’
Extracted from What Scientists Think (pub. Routledge) by Jeremy Stangroom.
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 21st 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.
There are a number of candidates for the single most powerful idea in the history of the sciences and humanities. Nicolaus Copernicus’s heliocentric view of the Earth’s place in the universe is certainly one, as is Einstein’s theory of relativity. However, for the breadth of its application, and the impact that it had on modern civilisation, it would be hard to beat Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.
Until Darwin’s The Origin of the Species was published in 1859, it was hard to see how the natural world could have been anything other than designed. The significant point here is its complexity. As William Paley famously argued, it seems almost unimaginable that something as complex and highly wrought as the human eye could possibly have emerged purely by natural mechanisms. The eye just appears too precisely specified to be anything other than the creation of an intelligent entity (by which just about everybody means God). Darwin’s importance is that he showed exactly how this kind of “design” could have occurred without a designer.
Darwin was influenced by Thomas Malthus’s famous essay on population, in which Malthus argued that the capacity of a population to sustain itself tends not to keep up with its rate of growth. The lesson that Darwin took from this is that the living world is necessarily thoroughly competitive (“red in tooth and claw”, as one of his disciples later put it). Life is characterised by a struggle for existence – or, more exactly, for reproduction – since any species will tend to produce more individuals than can be sustained. It was this insight that led Darwin to his theory of evolution by natural selection.
Every species manifests some variation in the inherited traits of its members. Take foxes, for example: some foxes will be able to run faster than other foxes; some will have better eyesight, better hearing, sharper teeth, and better camouflage. Variations that give an individual a competitive advantage (e.g., sharper teeth and better eyesight) will tend to be passed on more often than variations that put an individual at a disadvantage (e.g., a birthmark that makes its bearer a sitting target). Therefore, given enough time, helpful variations will come to be much more numerous than less helpful variations. So long as there are always new variations for natural selection to operate upon, then evolution will carry on in this way indefinitely.
This is a hugely powerful idea. It answers Paley’s challenge to explain how the eye could have emerged naturalistically: by means of tiny, incremental steps, each one beneficial in its own right. In Darwin’s day, the mechanisms of inheritance, and the source of the variations upon which natural selection works, were not known. It was only at the turn of the twentieth century, with the rediscovery of the ideas of Gregor Mendel, that this became clearer. One hundred years later, we now know that genes are the units of inheritance; and that, every so often, they mutate to produce new characteristics in an organism, which are then subject to Darwinian selection.
Darwin’s importance simply cannot be overstated. He was the founder of modern biology; the person who, in Huxley’s phrase, put the world of life into the domain of natural law.