JeremyStangroom.Com

Many of the philosophers who have written on the internet have argued that internet relationships are in various ways diminished compared to everyday, embodied kinds. For example, Hubert Dreyfus in his On The Internet argues that:

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.

Continue reading »

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 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.

A little while ago I received an email commenting on my writing ability. It contained phrases like: “you’d better pull your socks up”; “very, very disappointing”; and “you indulge in appalling syntax”. So it wasn’t exactly fan mail. But no big deal, if you put stuff out in the public domain, then you expect to get shot at.

Here’s another one, this time about one of the activities which are featured at TPM Online:

I find your questions biased, short-sighted and bigoted; and I find your test without merit or foundation… which makes you bass and without spiritual wisdom. Sad.

Okay, so that one’s a little odd, especially the bit about the freshwater fish, but there’s not much harm there. However, what about this little missive: 

…your litany of frauds and charlatans does not include a noble exception, the one modern philosopher who was neither a fraud nor a charlatan, but who exposed your own pretentious, social-climbing bullshit – Ayn Rand. So wallow in your pseudo-respectability and slash your wrists accordingly…You’re a pathetic wanker who deserves to perish from a surfeit of self-indulgent whim-worship. Do it, with my blessing, and that of any half-decent human thinker who miraculously remains alive on this earth in spite of your demeaning of philosophy and life.

This email was sent to me by the editor of an online journal promoting “freedom”, who was upset, as far as I can tell, by the failure of TPM to include any of the works of Ayn Rand in its shortlist of the greatest writings of Western philosophy. What makes it interesting is that it is indicative of a certain disregard for those we interact with on the internet. It is the disregard, evident to varying degrees in all the emails cited above, of treating people as though they don’t automatically warrant the respect which would nearly always be forthcoming in a non-virtual context. Consider, for example, that it is almost impossible to imagine saying the kinds of things contained in these emails to a stranger in a face-to-face situation. Yet probably many of us will be able to imagine including at least some of them in an email.

Part of the explanation for this difference has to do with some fairly obvious stuff about email communication. First, email is pretty much instantaneous. Therefore, it is just more likely with email that things will be said in haste which would not have been said had more time been taken for reflection. Second, the internet facilitates relatively anonymous communication. Consequently, in our virtual lives, we’re more likely to be interacting with people we’ve never met, we’re never going to meet, and whom we don’t know anything about. In such a situation, there is more chance that we will treat them as though they are not quite fully human subjects. And third, internet communication involves geographical distance, which removes many of the barriers to aggressive behaviour which exist in the non-virtual world. Not least, you’re not likely to get hit for sending someone an abusive email, whereas this is certainly a possible response to abuse in a face-to-face situation.

However, though these factors are all significant, they are only part of the story. What is also important is that the conventions which have grown up around email usage are much more loose than is the case with other forms of written communication. For example, when writing an email, many people think nothing of dispensing with: a salutation; capital letters; complete sentences; complimentary closing phrase; and even – though it is generally considered to be bad netiquette – correct spelling. The advantage of this informality is primarily speed, but it is an advantage often bought at the expense of a concern for the person who has to read the email.

The conventions of email are based on an assumption that what is important in communication is overwhelmingly the content of the message, not the perceptions and feelings of the person who receives it. This is very different from letter writing, for example, where many of the traditional stylistic conventions, some of which are still in common usage, are employed precisely to communicate a certain kind of, albeit ritualistic, regard for the recipient of the letter. To fail to include a salutation in a letter, for example, will, more often than not, be taken to indicate a lack of respect.

The claim here is not that people never show concern for each other when they exchange emails because clearly they do. It is rather that there is no requirement that they should show such concern; that day to day, in many of the short and perfunctory emails which people send, they do not show such concern; and that as a result there is a tendency for them to pay insufficient regard to how their emails are likely to be received when the content of their message suggests that such regard is required (as, for example, when they send a rude or abusive email). Or to put this another way, the informality and speed of email communication will in certain circumstances subvert what is arguably a moral requirement to treat those with whom we interact as fully human subjects.

Are philosophers immune to this tendency? Unfortunately not. Check out, for example, some of the emails about the Israel/Palestine conflict in the archive of philos-l (http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/philos-l.html), the premier mailing list for UK philosophers. You won’t learn anything much about the Middle East conflict, but you’ll find plenty of evidence of philosophers behaving badly in their virtual lives.

Other Examples

Louis Proyect, Unrepentent Marxist, calls me a “Neocon scumbag” and “Creepy Crawly” (the mind boggles!).

Daniel Davies calls me a liar (in effect) (not email, though).

In both these instances, Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels tells the story.

Fluffy Bunny

Human beings are very good at believing things to be true just because they want them to be true. In some ways, this is a useful ability. For example, the belief that one will beat a normally deadly cancer is helpful if one is undergoing the painful chemotherapy required to give one any chance of survival at all. However, when it comes to our ability to discern the truth about the world, to assess evidence and argument according to the dictates of rational enquiry, our tendency to engage in wishful thinking is no help whatsoever.

Consider, for example, the part that it plays in the currently high profile debate over animal rights and vivisection. It is perfectly possible to object to animal experimentation on moral grounds: for example, one might hold that all life is sacred and that it should always be preserved. However, it is much more difficult to argue that animal experimentation is unnecessary because it has no scientific benefit. Colin Blakemore, one time head of the MRC (Medical Research Council), points out that:

Every drug, every form of advanced surgery, nearly every antibiotic, nearly every vaccine – the development of them all has at some stage involved animal testing… 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.

Yet the line taken by many anti-vivisectionists is precisely that animal research has little, if any, medical benefit. For example, the section on “Bad Science” on the SPEAK web site is headed up with the claim that “Using primates kills people”. Further reading reveals that 70,000 people in England each year are killed or disabled by drugs that have been tested on animals.

It is easy enough to demolish this kind of argument: whilst it is true that whenever a drug is associated with a bad outcome, then animal testing will have been part of its development (because all drugs are tested on animals), it is also true: that we judge that the risks associated with powerful drugs are worth it; that we would be worse off in terms of deaths and injuries had there been no animal testing; and that we are overwhelmingly better off in general as a result of drugs that have been developed using vivisection.

Perhaps what is more interesting than the details of the (risible) arguments employed by anti-vivisectionists is the neat correspondence they set up between the wished-for and the real; that is, between the almost visceral desire for a world where there is no animal experimentation, and the claim that by happy coincidence our world does not reward animal experimentation. This kind of wishful thinking short-circuits the necessity to engage in messy and complicated arguments about morality and the relative value of human and animal life. It constitutes both intellectual and moral cowardice.

There is an interesting contrast here with the position of the vivisectionists. They too desire a world without animal experimentation, but recognise that it is not available unless we forego benefits to medical research. Here’s Blakemore again:

If there are alternatives [to animal research], 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.

It isn’t just anti-vivisectionists who engage in wishful thinking, of course. In fact, wishful thinking is ubiquitous, which is something we need to worry about if we are interested in finding out the truth about things. Consider, for example, that the recent history of the social sciences is replete with examples of an almost childish desire to reconstruct the world through the filter of political, ideological and moral commitments. Marxist theorists spent a large part of the twentieth century falling over each other trying to explain why revolution hadn’t occurred quite yet; sociologists, desperate to detach human behaviour from biology, spent their time jumping through hoops in order to explain away data that suggested that at least some human attributes and behaviour are inherited; and anthropologists, even today, in the name of resisting Western hegemony, happily grant epistemological privilege to local and situated “knowledges”.

Even people ostensibly committed to rational enquiry fall into the trap of wishful thinking. It ill behoves humanists, self-appointed defenders of reason par excellence, to sneer at the likes of Philip Gosse for supposing that the fossil record has been planted by God, whilst they remain committed to the view that it will be possible to reconcile the human-centred aspects of humanism with what science teaches us about the natural world and our place in it. The jury is still out on whether things such as free will, moral responsibility and the idea of human progress will survive the increases in knowledge that science brings. To suppose otherwise is to engage in wishful thinking. It might be more subtle than the kind engaged in by anti-vivisectionists or Philip Gosse style Biblical literalists, and perhaps it will be passed off as understandable optimism, but it no less wishful thinking for that. It is just another example of the way in which ideological, moral and political commitments tend to infect the judgements that we make about the world.

During the last week of August 1835, the New York Sun, an American newspaper, serialised an article on its front page, which it claimed had first been published in the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The article started as follows:

[W]e have the happiness of making known to the British public, and hence to the whole civilized world, recent discoveries in Astronomy which will build an imperishable monument to the age in which we live, and confer upon the present generation of the human race a proud distinction through all future time.

These recent discoveries were nothing as mundane as a new planet or star. Rather, the article began by describing the how Sir John Herschel, the eminent English mathematician and astronomer, had developed a new telescope by means of which he was able to see things as clearly in space as it is possible to see them on Earth. Lots of technical detail followed about its construction and deployment, and then came the bombshell: The Moon is teaming with life.

Not just vegetation, though there is plenty of that, including forests, dark red flowers, lichen, and the like. But also many species of animals and birds: bison; mountain-top unicorns; pelicans; white stags; miniature zebra; hut-dwelling, bipedal beavers; and the most spectacular discovery of all, a race of furry, winged men:

We counted three parties of these creatures, of twelve, nine, and fifteen in each, walking erect towards a small wood…They were like human beings, for their wings had now disappeared, and their attitude in walking was both erect and dignified…They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of their shoulders to the calves of their legs.

The New York Sun went on to reveal that Vespertilio-homo, as Herschel had named these creatures, were rational, good tempered, able to engage in conversation, and were capable of producing works of art. Unfortunately, further revelations about the moon and its inhabitants were ruled out after Herschel’s telescope suffered a sudden and terminal breakdown (after it was pointed towards the Sun).

All this was of course an elaborate hoax. It is generally accepted that it was the work of Richard Adams Locke, a reporter working for the Sun at the time, who had been educated at Cambridge University. However, perhaps not surprisingly, it seems that many people were taken in by the story. The Sun’s circulation increased rapidly from about 15,000 people on the morning of the first article to 19,000 on the day that the winged-men were announced (though it should be said that there is some dispute about this).

A journalist later reported that

Yale College was alive with staunch supporters. The literati…looked daily for the arrival of the New York mail with unexampled avidity and implicit faith. It was the absorbing topic of the day. Nobody expressed or entertained a doubt as to the truth of the story. (Cited at the Museum of Hoaxes)

Edgar Allen Poe, it is said, stopped working on a follow-up to his The Unparalleled Adventure Of One Hans Pfaall because he felt he could not match Herschel’s moon discoveries. And a missionary society from Springfield, Massachusetts decided to send a group of missionaries to the moon in order to bring Christianity and civilisation to the Vespertilio.

However, not everybody was so credulous. The New York Commercial Advertiser, for example, said of the hoax that it was ‘well done’, but that it was simply unbelievable that such a telescope could have been constructed, especially without anybody noticing or passing comment on it. And the New York Herald openly accused Locke as being the author of the hoax. The New York Sun, for its part, never publicly admitted that the story was false, saying only that it would have to check with English and Scottish newspapers before coming to that conclusion. Nevertheless, the whole event has gone down in history as the first, and perhaps greatest, American journalistic hoax.

Sir John Herschel, when he first heard of the story, was amused, declaring that his own observations were never that exciting. However, he eventually became irritated by the whole affair. It seems that people who continued to take the story seriously never stopped asking him about it.

Hot or Not?

Physical attractiveness has certain advantages. Not only do you get to go on more dates if you’re good looking, but research by social psychologists such as Dion, Berscheid and Walster shows that you’re more likely than your less attractive fellows to be perceived as intelligent, pleasant, warm, well-adjusted, sexually proficient, and competent. The benefits of attractiveness start early. Karen Dion, for example, has found that the way that we judge the behaviour of young children is influenced by their physical appearance. Bad behaviour of children perceived to be attractive is more likely to be explained away as a temporary aberration than it is on the part of children perceived to be unattractive. The benefits extend into adult life. Did you get good marks at college? If so, then perhaps you were helped by your looks. Landy and Sigall have found that identical essays will receive significantly different marks depending upon the perception of the attractiveness of their authors. Needless to say, better looking means better marks.

There is an interesting point to be made here about the lives we  live in the virtual world. One facet of internet communication is the absence of many of the cues that we rely on to make judgments about people in the everyday world. If someone has the looks of a supermodel, then likely it won’t be an issue in email communication in quite the same way that it is in a face-to-face situation. Perhaps, then, there is a sense in which communication in cyberspace, especially when one considers that cues to do with sex, age, social-class and race are also frequently absent, is less distorted than it is in everyday life.

However, the internet has not escaped our obsession with beauty. For example, have a look at the web site Hot Or Not? It is a matchmaking service with a twist. You upload a photograph of yourself to the web site, then other visitors to the site are able to rank, on a scale of one to ten, whether or not you are “hot”. A visit to this web site will be enough to dispel the myth that we don’t agree about what constitutes attractiveness. If we didn’t, then each person would score more or less the same mark – because of the effects of averaging over a large number of votes – but they don’t, which goes to show that beauty is not solely in the eye of the beholder.

A more extreme version of the Hot Or Not? phenomenon emerged a few years ago on the LiveJournal blogging community. LiveJournal allows users to create online communities, which are organised around particular topics. The Nonuglies community was established for beautiful people only. To join, it was necessary to post a picture of yourself on the community to see if existing members rated you as a beauty. If they didn’t, then they would tell you so. Bluntly. Here is an example:

You are one ugly bitch [shudder] . You are practically the epitome of ugliness. Double chin, horrid braces, no eyelashes, limp, boring hair, big ears, absolutely no color, shapeless eyebrows, no fashion sense…

Why bother mentioning such gratuitous and crass nastiness? Partly because the Nonuglies community was incredibly successful. It is credited with being the inspiration for a huge number of spin-off communities, including communities for teenagers, gays, lesbians and couples. Morever, there are also communities that are devoted solely to chatting about the Nonuglies phenomenon.

But also because the existence of communities such as these raises a number of interesting philosophical issues. The members of the Nonuglies community were criticised for their cruelty. It was pointed out that many of the people who were judged to be ugly were very young, possibly vulnerable, and were quite likely to be hurt by the criticism and abuse which came their way. The response to this criticism tended to be that people know what the community is for before they post their pictures, so if they don’t want to have their looks criticised, they shouldn’t get involved. However, the problem with this response is that it just isn’t clear that the fact that a person accepts the possibility that they might be hurt justifies the act of hurting them. For example, many people will consider a wager which involves a toss of a coin and a fifty-fifty chance that a person will either receive £1,000 or be electrocuted to be morally suspect, especially if the person taking on the wager has a strong need for the money.

It is an interesting point about closed communities on the internet, such as Nonuglies, that there is no real possibility that dissenting voices will be heard. Gordon Graham makes this point in his book, The Internet: a philosophical enquiry. He argues that the internet encourages the formation of pure confluences of interest.

Surfers have the opportunity to seek out kindred spirits and to pass over the sort of reforming and refining influences that operate in the normal processes of learning.

If Graham is right, then given the centrality of attractiveness in the non-virtual world as a source of esteem and kudos, it was probably inevitable that some of the beautiful people of the world would band together to form a community such as Nonuglies in an attempt to reclaim a birthright threatened in the virtual world by the fact that cyberspace is normally blind to the body beautiful.

Ramin Jahanbegloo has devoted his entire intellectual life to the project of fostering dialogue between different cultures and societies. However, in April 2006, his endeavours were brought to an abrupt, though temporary, end, after he was arrested and imprisoned by Iranian authorities when on his way to a conference in Belgium. His imprisonment provoked an international outcry. It seemed that he was being punished  – possibly even tortured – simply for his contact with the West. In May 2006, four hundred leading intellectuals, including Chomsky, Habermas and Rorty, signed a letter demanding his immediate release. However, it was not until the end of August that he was finally freed.

Despite this brush with what he says was “inhumanity” and “evil”, Jahanbegloo remains absolutely committed to the project of fostering dialogue and interconnections between human beings and cultures.

“The most important thing I got out of my own experience with evil and the inhuman is that one should not live in bitterness, but rather with a sense of humanity,” he tells me when we meet at the University of Toronto, where he has just become the Dean’s Distinguished Visitor in Human Rights. “One should always try to find ways of remaining ethical in the face of evil and to look for the humanity in the inhuman.”

This imperative to engage with the other, to always seek dialogue and points of connection, is a thread that runs through all his thoughts about the challenges of the modern world. For example, his notion of democracy is founded on the idea that it is necessary to engage with people in what he says is “a daily effort of interconnectedness, dialogue and tolerance”. According to Jahanbegloo, democracy is not simply a matter of safeguarding certain individual rights.

“I think the main goal of democracy is to reduce violence,” he says. “It is not enough simply to talk about rights. We have to add duties into the mix. This is how democracies will improve. If there is no way to talk about shared common values, if one is simply satisfied that these have been defined within a constitution, then things are not going to move forwards.”

The scope and effectiveness of dialogue, of course, is a hot topic at the moment. The processes of globalisation and mass migration of people have brought the West increasingly into contact with different traditions, and particularly with Islam. The “clash of civilisations” thesis holds that we’re likely dealing here with incommensurate beliefs and values, which will limit the usefulness of dialogue. I mention, as an example of the kind of event which suggests that there is little room for an accommodation between two divergent traditions, the row over the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that were published by the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten.

“I do not believe that cultures clash per se,” Jahanbegloo responds. “The clash is between intolerant people within different cultures – it’s a clash of intolerances. The Danish cartoons example is certainly relevant here. The key thing is that whilst freedom of expression is a right in the West, there is no compulsion to act upon that right. Just because we have the right to do something does not mean that we should neglect our duties towards other people. In the Danish case, the clash is between different absolutists in different cultures. People who believe in moral and political pluralism practice their rights in a way that leaves space for others. It has to do with listening and learning. It is not about whether there is the right to publish the cartoons – constitutionally speaking, of course it is legitimate – it is about the fact that it is necessary to think about the consequences of one’s actions if one does not want to harm people, and that puts limits on free speech.”

The problem with this response is the standard thought that we should not be constrained in our actions and speech simply because some people happen to find some particular thing offensive. Supposing people are offended by literature featuring homosexuality, for example. Would this mean that it shouldn’t be published?

“I’m just saying that we have to look at our priorities,” says Jahanbegloo. “You don’t have to think against others to do a work of dissidence. There is no need to forget the other. If the Danish cartoons had been accompanied by an effort to make the Danes understand about Islam, then that would have been an important thing to do, but this didn’t happen. It was accompanied by a lot of prejudice towards Muslims. In Denmark, if you are a veiled woman, it is very hard to get a job. That is a prejudice.

“I would say that in our global world the issue of not harming other people is not just about rights. It also has to do with the problem of understanding each other. We live in an interconnected world, so if we want a better future, we have to be more aware of what we say and how we act.”

There is still the worry that Jahanbegloo is asking us to give up too much here. For example, the nature of religious identity means that I could potentially “harm” a Muslim just by talking about the Prophet Muhammad in a certain kind of way – perhaps by questioning the veracity of the Qur’an. Does this mean that I need to modify how I talk about Muhammad?

“Well, you have a responsibility to learn more about the Prophet Muhammad, that’s the first thing,” is the rather caustic reply. “Why should somebody talk about something they don’t know about? And why is it in always in a very satirical way. This is part of the process of demonization of the East by the West.”

This is not a particularly persuasive response. Take, for example, somebody like Ibn Warraq, who wrote the book Why I Am Not A Muslim. Unless the bar is set unreasonably high, he surely passes the knowledge test. So has he behaved badly by writing his more polemical books?

“It depends on the goals you have in speaking in a particular way,” says Jahanbegloo. “If the goal is to stop dialogue, and to hurt other people, then I would say that was not ethical. But if the goal is to reduce violence, then you need to consider how you’re going to engage with other people. Monologues do not make for a good dialogue. I would go back to the Socratic principle of engaging in a dialogue, and not just speaking in one direction.”

This seems to take us straight back to the problem of the radical incommensurability of beliefs and values. It is possible that there simply cannot be a dialogue about certain kinds of things. It is certainly very hard to imagine any real dialogue occurring if one wanted to write a book questioning whether Muhammad is a historical figure, for example. We’re not necessarily talking about scorn and derision here; perhaps just straightforward critical, historical enquiry.

“I take an Isaiah Berlin view about this,” Jahanbegloo tells me. “One can accept that there are plural values, but at the same time think that there is room for shared values or universal norms. I do think that whilst we might have some incommensurable  values in different cultures, there are also values that we share because we belong to one humanity:, for example, in all religions there is this idea that killing is wrong.”

Again, I think this response is too trite. It is certainly true that the Qur’an holds that killing certain kinds of people is bad. But it would be hard to argue that the Qur’an is particularly opposed to the killing of infidels, for example.

“But that depends on how you define infidels,” Jahanbegloo insists. “It depends on how you read philosophical and religious texts. I distinguish between soft reading and hard reading of texts. Fundamentalists are always those who read philosophical and religious texts in a hard way. But, on the other hand, there are those who have a soft reading of Islam; or take the Dalai Lama who has a very soft reading of religion in general.”

But however you read the Qur’an – and, sure, you can explain away the rather unfortunate passages about the Jews, for example, – it is very difficult to deny that  atheists and polytheists are subject to horribly violent sanctions. It doesn’t require a tendentious reading to come to that conclusion.

“Okay, but you had exactly the same problem in the West for many years. These things need to be discussed and resolved. Take John Locke’s Letter on Toleration: it’s interesting that he had no toleration for atheists. If we just focus on the fact that Christianity equals the inquisition, or that Judaism equals ultra-conservative Jews, then there is no way that you can have a dialogue among faiths and religions. We shouldn’t focus purely on the negative aspects of each organized religion. We also have to look at what people do with their beliefs. It is very interesting that in the twentieth century there were two ways of reading Christianity. You had Martin Luther King’s nonviolent way – you know, the Sermon on the Mount; and you had the ultra-conservative way of reading it, where it becomes almost hate speech.

“You find the same thing in Islam. The Taliban and al-Qaeda use the Qur’an for their own goals. They’re not interested in dialogue.”

There is a difference between Christianity and Islam, though. The West experienced a fairly profound Enlightenment period in the 18th Century. Of course, there was also an Islamic Enlightenment, but it was stamped out. There just hasn’t been this same process of mainstream, internal criticism. There is no equivalent in Islam of Voltaire or the Encyclopedists.

Jahanbegloo  is not convinced by what he sees as my overly negative portrayal of Islam.

“I really think there is a big problem with the way that you’re characterising Islam,” he tells me. “We have this tendency to judge Islam just in terms of the news and media – you know, all the rather shocking events. But it is the wrong thing to do. If we want to judge Islam, then we have to go back to its traditions and the history. If you look at Islamic history, you’ll find that there is an attempt to think about atheism and about how to live with different cultures, as for example in Andalusian Islam.

“In addition, I would say that amongst today’s Islamic pluralists, not just in Iran, but also in Nigeria, Morocco, Egypt and Lebanon, there is an effort to create a new Enlightenment. There are a great number of people with Islamic backgrounds trying to engage with this project. The West must try to engage them in dialogue, not simply isolate them by saying that they are just a small number of people. It is tough, but it was also tough in the West. You know, many people forget about the killing of Protestants in Europe. The Western tradition is taken for granted by Westerners. Nobody looks back at the effort it took to get you here.”

But surely this isn’t right. Part of the reason that some people in the West are exercised by this kind of thing is precisely because they don’t take the Enlightenment for granted. Isn’t this why we worry about the encroachment of religious authoritarianism?

“Well, it is certainly taken for granted by those people who just think that secular values are universal values, that they are the best values, and that these values alone should be employed in the political framework of Europe,” Jahanbegloo replies. “Take the situation in France for example: there are five million Muslims living there. They are not Arabs, they are French, and it is necessary to engage in dialogue with them. Look at the situation in Britain – the fact that some British Asians do not feel British and are attracted by fundamentalist views  is partly because they haven’t been engaged in dialogue, which has created what we might call mental ghettos. It is a huge problem. In most European countries, Muslims have been rejected, and they’ve been pushed towards the periphery.

“It goes back to the issue of how you educate people, how you engage with them. There is a need to be understood, to be taken into account. Does Europe want to be a continent of diversity or not? Do we have a monolithic view of Europe or a multicultural view? If you don’t engage the younger generation in the work of democracy, if you don’t help them to see themselves as citizens, then you increase the likelihood that they will be attracted by fundamentalist ideologies. It’s very important that Europe should have governments of dialogue. They have to be flexible towards the new issues and problems of the world – some of which have to do with multiculturalism and globalization.”

Jahanbegloo has always stressed the role of intellectuals in the project to deepen the connections between cultures and to bring about democratisation. I wonder how optimistic he is about their ability to achieve social change?

“The intellectuals in the Middle East could certainly play a very important role,” he tells me. “Priority number one is for them to engage in an inter-cultural dialogue. This is a philosophical and ethical imperative. It is important to embark upon this project before we think about the more pragmatic stuff. There is a tendency for governments just to think in terms of Realpolitik, and to ignore the possibility of a rich inter-cultural exchange. This is why I engage in this kind of dialogue: young people need to know more about the West.”

He explains that in Iran the dialogue with the West tends to take place within the institutions of civil society – in journals, artistic performances and intellectual settings. He is optimistic that this intellectual engagement with young people can drive social change.

“In the Middle East, intellectual ideas have always been effective in the process of modernization and democratization. Even in the Gulf States, the younger generation of people in governing bodies do not think the way their grandfathers used to think. They have a less tribal view of Islam, and a less feudal view of politics. The fact that today they engage culturally and politically in their societies shows that things are different. They don’t want to repeat what their grandfathers were doing.

“It’s likely that even Saudi Arabia will change. Certainly women’s organisations and associations are pushing for a liberalisation. Also, you should not underestimate the work of the trans-nationals – those people from Saudi or the UAE who live in London or who are studying or working there. They don’t just learn about British football or cricket. They also learn about the work of citizenship – about how to be a responsible citizen. Teaching tolerance and citizenship must be one of the priorities of democratic societies.”

I ask him whether his experience of being imprisoned has undermined his optimism?

“Absolutely not. It has helped me to understand that there is no way one can proceed or succeed with hatred, or resentment, or revenge. When you’re a prisoner in solitary confinement, especially if you’re a dissident, you do ask questions about why people need to humiliate each other in order to show their own greatness, which of course happens at all levels of politics. Somebody such as Gandhi didn’t need to humiliate people. He was always looking for the noble side of human beings. It was very important for him to engage in dialogue with the human behind the inhuman.

“Since we have been talking about freedom of speech, and individual rights, it bears saying that it isn’t possible to find meaning in the way we act and speak unless we take the other into account. Also, we need to think of our engagement with the other as a process of exchange, a way of going beyond the axis of monologue and prejudice that is created by those social, political and ideological ideas that stop our democratic engagement with other people and other cultures.”

This originally appeared in Issue 41 of The Philosophers’ Magazine.

Operation Ore was big news in the UK for a while. It was, in the words of the BBC, the largest police hunt of internet paedophiles there has ever been in that country. It started after the United States Postal Inspection Service passed to the UK police a list of more than 7000 people who had allegedly used their credit cards in order to access web sites featuring child pornography. To date, nearly 4000 people have been arrested in the course of the investigation.

It is, of course, a good thing if this investigation prevents the occurrence of harm to children. Nevertheless, it does bring to light a number of interesting and difficult questions about ethics, the internet and sexual imagination.

Paedophilia is normally taken to mean the sexual attraction of adults to children. The first point to make, therefore, is the obvious one that viewing child pornography is not synonymous with paedophilia. Indeed, it is difficult to see how it is possible to draw any general conclusions about a person from the simple fact that they have looked at pornographic images of children. Consider, for example, that such a person: might be a regular user of child pornography and also might pursue face-to-face sexual encounters with children; might have viewed these images out of curiosity, been shocked to find that they were sexually aroused by them, but have no intention of looking at them again; or might have looked at these images because they were curious about the internet, but have no particular interest in pornography.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that the internet is a relatively new technology. Prior to its advent, possession of child pornography, correctly or incorrectly, was widely perceived to be a good indicator of a propensity to engage in the physical abuse of children. But the internet has removed many of the barriers which in the past might have deterred relatively casual “pornophiles” from amassing collections of photographs. Easier access means that increasing numbers of the simply curious will have viewed this kind of material. In sum, then, the relationship between the use of child pornography, paedophilia and child abuse is complex.

However, it is an important point that the absence of a sexual response when viewing pornographic images of children is not sufficient to guarantee that this activity is morally acceptable. There are apparently strong arguments which suggest that simply viewing child pornography is a moral wrong. For example, one such argument is that the supply of these kinds of images follows the demand for them, and that if people view these images – certainly if they pay for them – they are part of a process which necessarily involves children being harmed.

This is a persuasive argument, but it has its problems. For instance, whilst it is plausibly levelled at the person who regularly downloads child pornography from a commercial web site, it is much less convincing when applied to the person who occasionally downloads a picture from an internet newsgroup.

Also, there is a suspicion that the primary function of these kinds of arguments, regardless of their veracity, is to provide a rational underpinning for prior moral convictions. In other words, even if there was no harm associated with adults finding children sexually arousing, people would still think it wrong; but arguments which show that there <i>is</i> harm associated with these desires perform the useful function of solidifying this baseline moral commitment.

This line of thought raises another thorny issue which is integral to the debate about pornography on the internet. This concerns whether sexual imagination, <em>in and of itself</em>, is the kind of thing about which it is sensible to make moral judgements. For example, if a person fantasises that they are a rapist are they, <em>for those thoughts alone</em>, deserving of our moral condemnation?

Yes, is the answer suggested by the philosopher Gordon Graham, in his book <em>The Internet: a philosophical enquiry</em>. He argues that the causing of an outward harm is not the only mark of a moral wrong. “In an older language,” he writes, “there are gross appetites and interests. People can resist them, fail to do so or wilfully indulge them. Which they do is relevant to moral character, just as whether people’s thoughts about others are charitable or uncharitable, contemptuous or sympathetic, are morally relevant facts even if their outward treatment does not specially reflect these attitudes.”

As ever, though, these arguments are not conclusive. Most significantly, they appear to presuppose what they need to demonstrate; namely, that there <em>are</em> such things as gross appetites and interests where there is no outward harm. Also, it seems possible to come to the opposite conclusion to the one reached by Graham. For example, it doesn’t seem particularly counter-intuitive to argue that the person consumed by uncharitable feelings, who nevertheless behaves charitably, in some sense behaves heroically.

The fact that there are complicated arguments to be had about the internet, pornography and sexual imagination in no way mitigates the harm that some children suffer at the hands of pornographers and predatory child molesters. However, what it does mean is that it isn’t possible to arrive at the truth about the internet, child pornography and its consumers by uncritically taking the tabloid line, and indeed it seems the BBC line, that Operation Ore is about unmasking more than 7000 dangerous perverts.

In his essay, The Median Isn’t the Message, Stephen Jay Gould recalled that when he was first diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma, a rare form of cancer, his consultant suggested that maybe he shouldn’t read too much about his condition. Gould, of course, ignored the advice, and headed straight for Harvard’s medical library. He soon discovered why ignorance can be bliss; his illness was incurable and the median mortality after diagnosis was only eight months. Happily, Gould beat the odds, and survived his mesothelioma, but not before he had terrified himself (though he has since died of an unrelated cancer).

Ivan Noble

This happened more than twenty years ago. Nowadays it doesn’t require a trip to the library to scare yourself witless; just a few mouse clicks will do it. Ivan Noble, who recently died of brain cancer, documented his two year struggle with the disease on the BBC Online website. His third entry, titled ‘Net Terrors’, written shortly after his diagnosis, tells how he was browsing the internet at four one morning, when he came across a site where a patient with the same tumour had asked a doctor how many people with their condition were still alive three years after diagnosis. The reply was ‘none’. Noble, quite sensibly, decided that, for a while at least, he was going to stay clear of medical web sites.

However, there is one group of people who cannot stay clear of such sites. They are the internet hypochondriacs; or, as they have been called, the cyberchondriacs. In the past, hypochondriacs would scour medical dictionaries and the like in order to track symptoms and self-diagnose; now they interrogate search engines and visit online forums. It’s a growing problem. An American study in 2003, found that eighty percent of adult internet users had at some time used the net to research illness related subjects; and some six percent use it for that reason everyday. According to Dr Trefor Roscoe, a GP and computer specialist, doctors are now being inundated by patients with cyberchondria or ‘internet printout syndrome’, as it is also called.

Of course, there is nothing new about hypochondria; the syndrome has been recognised since the days of the Roman physician Galen. But the problem with the internet is that it meets and fuels the hypochondriac’s obsessive need for health-related information in a way which no other medium has managed. Brian Fallon, the co-author of Phantom Illness: Recognizing, Understanding and Overcoming Hypochondria, is in no doubt that in this regard the internet has made things worse for the person suffering health anxiety.

The trouble is compounded by the fact that the information on the internet is unregulated. This is the perennial problem for anybody who uses the internet for the purposes of research. Information is frequently deprived of the authority which makes it reliable. Therefore, if you’re suspicious that the tingling in your limbs means that you have multiple sclerosis, it is a certainty that in time you’ll find someone on a health forum willing to confirm your suspicions; or, if you’re feeling tired, and suspect that it might be the sign of some serious illness, it won’t be long before somebody suggests that you have lupus or some other weird autoimmune disease.

Fallon advises his patients to stay clear of the internet: ‘In a loose sense, a hypochondriac becomes almost addicted to looking up information, examining himself, and getting reassurance from other people. Checking just makes things worse.’ Ivan Noble also struck a cautionary note:

It is wonderful that so much information is available and that patients can be as well informed as they want to be. But it is very difficult to filter that information. It is not possible to start to search the net and hope to see only encouraging news. Along with the details of therapies, diets and clinical trials, there is cold, clinical information out there about how many people die and how they die. Link leads to link and it is easy to terrify oneself like I did.

Hypochondriacs beware, then; the internet can seriously damage your mental health.

Related Post: I’m an internet hypochondriac.