The history of western atheism-4: Atheism spreads to the masses

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In his BBC4 TV documentary A Rough History of Atheism, Jonathan Miller points out that by the end of the 18th century, while skepticism of god and religion was gaining ground among the intellectuals and the elites, and was probably secretly quite widespread, the spread of atheism to the working classes was opposed (even by these enlightened people) because the elites feared that it would destroy the basis of their power. It was fine to discuss atheistic ideas around their dinner tables as long as the servants were not present. As James Mills said to his son, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, “There is no god but it’s a family secret.”
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Reflections on the Harry Potter books (no spoilers)

I read the last book in the Harry Potter series Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows about a week after it was released. It was necessary that I read it soon because I am surrounded by people who are die-hard Potter fans and they could not talk freely about it in my presence until I had done so.

This was a nice quality about true Harry Potter aficionados They tend to be very scrupulous about not wanting to spoil other people’s fun, and carefully avoid saying anything that might give the ending away. So even though I surf the web and read a lot of websites, I found it easy to avoid accidentally tripping into a site that had spoilers. Of course, very shortly people who have not read the book or do not care for the series or even actually hate it will learn what happened and will not hesitate to reveal the ending, thinking it silly to treat it with such care. Such people do not really understand the wonder that is in books.

The whole Harry Potter phenomenon has been curious. Children in general have loved the books, but the adult reaction has spread across the board. Many loved the books as much as children did. There were, of course, those religious people who objected to the books on the grounds that it promoted witchcraft. There were also those who did not themselves read them but thought that having children read long books was a good thing. Meanwhile some book snobs sneered that the Potter books were just childish escapism and that children would be better off reading Wuthering Heights or other elevated forms of literature.

Although I am not one who went to the extent of dressing up as a wizard and attending parties, I found all that hype to be harmless fun and cannot understand those who frowned on it as overblown. What can be so bad about people getting highly involved with books and having fun with them? I also found it hard to sympathize with those adults who measured the value of the series based on whether it encouraged reading in general. Some praised the books because they felt it provided a doorway for children to enter the world of literature. Others said that it had a negative effect and pointed to some evidence that said that Potter fans were not moving on to read other books because they did not have the same appeal.

I find this debate to be silly. Why must the value of books be measured by whether they serve any important function? Why can’t we just enjoy them just for their own sake? Clearly many, many people obtained a great deal of enjoyment from the books and that should be enough. Maybe the books encouraged them to tackle Beowulf next or maybe they went back to playing video games. Why should that influence our judgment of the books?

As for the books themselves, some people complained about the occasional uneven pacing where there seemed to be long stretches of time when little or nothing happened. This was especially true in the very last book. This was probably due to the books being firmly in the genre of British boarding school literature. In that genre, the stories follow two complementary schedules. One format is situated in the school or its environs and invariably starts with the beginning of the school year and the children arriving at the school from all over the country, the adventure beginning soon after, and ending just in time near the end of the school year when all the children disperse for the summer holidays.

The other schedule arises because the action is situated in a town and begins with children arriving home from boarding schools for the summer holidays, having an adventure whose end coincides with the end of summer and everyone then dispersing to their various schools for the new year.

J. K. Rowling follows the first schedule and this formula enforces a fairly rigid timetable on the adventure as she has to make sure that the plot is stretched out over nine months or so, and this requires a certain amount of treading water where the characters just fill in the time.

In the early books the reader does not notice this because there is a lot of character development, details about boarding school life, studying for tests, quidditch matches, and side plots that can be woven into the story, providing some humor as well. But in later books, as the emphasis shifted to the more serious and direct confrontation between the Voldemort and Potter sides, filling in the time gaps became more difficult although Rowling’s skill as a writer managed to hide it well most of the time.

The first time the stretching out showed for me was in book four Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in which the central action involved the Triwizard tournament. This involved teams from three different schools, two of whom sent a large contingent to Hogwarts for it. The tournament involved just three events that individually lasted at most a few hours each, and realistically the whole thing could have been completed over a weekend (or at most a few days) like most interschool tournaments, But in the book there were long intervals between the events that lasted months. Although accommodating a huge number of visitors at Hogwarts for so long a time would have been unrealistic, no satisfactory explanation was given as to why this was necessary.

These are minor quibbles but may help to explain why in Deathly Hallows, the middle section had our hero and his friends wandering around in the woods with no clearly discernible purpose. Although compressing the time would have tightened the pacing, that would have resulted in the adventure ending before Christmas, something that Rowling presumably felt she had to avoid.

All in all, this was a very good series of books. Rowling handled emotions well, dealing with tragedy and death without being maudlin, with love without being sappy, and drawing moral lessons without being preachy.

Shafars and Brights

(Today being the Labor Day holiday, I am reposting an item from July 21, 2005, edited and updated.)

Sam Smith runs an interesting website called the Progressive Review. It is an idiosyncratic mix of political news and commentary with oddball, amusing, and quirky items culled from various sources thrown in. Mixed with these are his own thoughtful essays on various topics and one essay that is relevant to this series of posts on religion and politics is his call for “shafars” (an acronym he has coined that stands as an umbrella term for people who identify with secularism, humanism, atheism, free thought, agnosticism, or rationalism) to play a more visible and assertive role in public life and to not let the overtly religious dominate the public sphere.
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The history of western atheism-3: The first published atheist

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In his BBC4 TV series A Rough History of Atheism Jonathan Miller awards the honor of being the first published atheist to France’s Paul Henri Thiery, Baron D’Holbach (1723-1789). As the Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on him says:

His most popular book, Système de la nature (1770) (“The System of Nature”), published under the name of J.B. Mirabaud, caustically derided religion and espoused an atheistic, deterministic Materialism: causality became simply relationships of motion, man became a machine devoid of free will, and religion was excoriated as harmful and untrue. In Le Christianisme dévoilé (1761; “Christianity Unveiled”), published under the name of a deceased friend, N.A. Boulanger, he attacked Christianity as contrary to reason and nature.

It is said that the Baron’s salon was a congenial meeting place for all manner of freethinkers, including Benjamin Franklin during his stay in France, but some of his guests were so alarmed at the inflammatory nature of the speculations that occurred that they stopped coming. Even a nobleman like D’Holbach had to be cautious about his views, as atheism was grounds for persecution and even execution, so his works on these subjects were published pseudonymously.
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Charles Darwin in his own words

I have written a lot about the theory of evolution and in the process have quoted short excerpts from various authors, Charles Darwin included. (Please see here for previous posts in this series.)

But in going back and reading the first edition of On the Origin of Species (1859), I am struck by how prescient Darwin was in anticipating the objections that would be raised against his theory and why. He could well have been talking about the situation today, except that then the people who were skeptical and who he was trying to persuade were his scientific colleagues. Nowadays scientists are almost all converts to natural selection (as he predicted might happen) and it is religious lay people who make the same objections he addressed long ago.

To get the full flavor of Darwin’s thinking and his style of writing, here is a somewhat long passage from his conclusions, where he summarizes his case (p. 480-484). The sections in boldface are my own emphasis. (Darwin’s complete works are now available online.)

I have now recapitulated the chief facts and considerations which have thoroughly convinced me that species have changed, and are still slowly changing by the preservation and accumulation of successive slight favourable variations. Why, it may be asked, have all the most eminent living naturalists and geologists rejected this view of the mutability of species? It cannot be asserted that organic beings in a state of nature are subject to no variation; it cannot be proved that the amount of variation in the course of long ages is a limited quantity; no clear distinction has been, or can be, drawn between species and well-marked varieties. It cannot be maintained that species when intercrossed are invariably sterile, and varieties invariably fertile; or that sterility is a special endowment and sign of creation. The belief that species were immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was thought to be of short duration; and now that we have acquired some idea of the lapse of time, we are too apt to assume, without proof, that the geological record is so perfect that it would have afforded us plain evidence of the mutation of species, if they had undergone mutation.

But the chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species has given birth to other and distinct species, is that we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps. The difficulty is the same as that felt by so many geologists, when Lyell first insisted that long lines of inland cliffs had been formed, and great valleys excavated, by the slow action of the coast-waves. The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations.

Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume under the form of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the “plan of creation,” “unity of design,” &c., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject my theory. A few naturalists, endowed with much flexibility of mind, and who have already begun to doubt on the immutability of species, may be influenced by this volume; but I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality. Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for only thus can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.

Several eminent naturalists have of late published their belief that a multitude of reputed species in each genus are not real species; but that other species are real, that is, have been independently created. This seems to me a strange conclusion to arrive at. They admit that a multitude of forms, which till lately they themselves thought were special creations, and which are still thus looked at by the majority of naturalists, and which consequently have every external characteristic feature of true species,—they admit that these have been produced by variation, but they refuse to extend the same view to other and very slightly different forms. Nevertheless they do not pretend that they can define, or even conjecture, which are the created forms of life, and which are those produced by secondary laws. They admit variation as a vera causa in one case, they arbitrarily reject it in another, without assigning any distinction in the two cases. The day will come when this will be given as a curious illustration of the blindness of preconceived opinion. These authors seem no more startled at a miraculous act of creation than at an ordinary birth. But do they really believe that at innumerable periods in the earth’s history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues? Do they believe that at each supposed act of creation one individual or many were produced? Were all the infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created as eggs or seed, or as full grown? and in the case of mammals, were they created bearing the false marks of nourishment from the mother’s womb? Although naturalists very properly demand a full explanation of every difficulty from those who believe in the mutability of species, on their own side they ignore the whole subject of the first appearance of species in what they consider reverent silence.

It may be asked how far I extend the doctrine of the modification of species. The question is difficult to answer, because the more distinct the forms are which we may consider, by so much the arguments fall away in force. But some arguments of the greatest weight extend very far. . . I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.

Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction. We see this even in so trifling a circumstance as that the same poison often similarly affects plants and animals; or that the poison secreted by the gall-fly produces monstrous growths on the wild rose or oak-tree. Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.

And then the very last, almost poetic, words in the book (p. 490):

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Darwin’s achievements are truly magnificent, putting him in the same class as Einstein and Newton, among the greatest scientists of all time.

POST SCRIPT: The Larry Craig incident

Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) has taken some strong “family values” and anti-gay stands in the past, despite long standing rumors that he himself was gay. The recent news report that he had pleaded guilty to “lewd” conduct in a public restroom has caused speculation that his career is now over.

It is despicable to harass gays with anti-gay rhetoric and legislation, becoming even worse if those doing so are secretly gay themselves. But Talking Points Memo expresses well my unease with what happened to Craig in the most recent episode. It is not clear from published reports that he did anything that really warranted his arrest and that he was, as Josh Marshall says, essentially caught in a Catch-22 caused by his own risky behavior.

Glenn Greenwald documents the brazen contradictions that right-wingers are indulging in the way they respond to the recent Craig revelation, the reports that surfaced back in 2006 that he was gay, and the recent case of Senator David Vitter (R-Louisiana), another “family values” champion who was found to be a customer of prostitutes.

The history of western atheism-2: The beginnings of modern atheism

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

The philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) may have unwittingly been the trigger for the revival of freethinking during the Enlightenment. Although he always asserted his own fidelity to the teachings of the church, the clarity of his thinking about the mind-body relationship exposed some of the fundamental problems and contradictions that inevitably accompany religious beliefs.

Belief in god has always required a kind of dualistic ‘two different worlds and two different kinds of matter’ way of thinking, but usually left unexamined the thorny questions of how the two interacted. Descartes’ exposition on this duality and his attempts to find a way by which the world and matter of god interacted with the world and matter of people exposed the difficulties with dualism, problems which plague thoughtful believers to this day as they try to reconcile a scientific perspective with religious faith.
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Reflections on the working poor

(Text of the talk given by me to the first year class at the Share the Vision program, Severance Hall, Cleveland, OH on Friday, August 24, 2007 at 1:00 pm. The common reading for the incoming class was David Shipler’s book The Working Poor: Invisible in America.)

Welcome to Case Western Reserve University! The people you will encounter here are very different from the people described in David Shipler’s book The Working Poor: Invisible in America and I would like to address the question: what makes that difference?

Two answers are usually given. One is that we live in a meritocracy, and that we got where we are because of our own virtues, that we are smarter or worked harder or had a better attitude and work ethic than those who didn’t make the cut. I am sure that everyone in this auditorium has been repeatedly told by their family and friends and teachers that they are good and smart, and it is tempting to believe it. What can be more gratifying than to be told that one’s success is due to one’s own ability and efforts? It makes it all seem so well deserved, that there is justice in the world.

Another answer is that luck plays an important role in educational success. I suspect that most of us were fortunate enough to be born into families that had most, if not all, of the following attributes: stable homes and families, good schools and teachers, safe environments, good health, and sufficient food and clothing. Others are not so fortunate and this negatively affects their performance in school.

But there is a third possibility that is not often discussed and that is that the educational system has been deliberately designed so that large numbers of people end up like the people in the book, people who not only have failed but more importantly have learned to think of themselves as failures.

This idea initially seems shocking. How can we want people to fail? Aren’t our leaders always exhorting everyone to aim high and succeed in education? But let’s travel back in time to the beginnings of widespread schooling in the US. In those early days, schooling was unplanned and focused more on meeting the needs of the learner and less on meeting the needs of the economy.

Recall that this was the time when the so-called robber barons were amassing huge personal wealth while the workers were having appalling working conditions. There was increasing concern that as the general public got more educated, more and more would realize and resent this unequal distribution of wealth.

This fear can be seen in an 1872 Bureau of Education document which speaks about the “problem of educational schooling”, according to which, “inculcating knowledge” teaches workers to be able to “perceive and calculate their grievances,” thus making them “more redoubtable foes” in labor struggles. (John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of US Education (2003) p. 153, now available online.)

This was followed by the report in 1888 that said, “We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes.” (Gatto, p. 153)

The rising expectations of the general public had to be dampened and this was done by creating an education system that would shift the focus away from learning and more towards meeting the needs of the economy. And the economy then, like now, does not need or want everyone to be well educated.

After all, think what would happen if everyone got a good education and college degrees? Where would we get enough people like those in the book, willing to work for low wages, often with little or no benefits, at places like Wal-Mart so that we can buy cheap goods? Or at McDonalds so that we get cheap hamburgers? Or as cleaning staff at restaurants and hotels so that we can eat out often? Or in the fields and sweatshops so that we can get cheap food and clothes? As the French philosopher Voltaire pointed out long ago: “The comfort of the rich depends upon the abundance of the poor.”

One of the most influential figures in shifting education to meet the needs of the work force was Ellwood P. Cubberley, who wrote in 1905 that schools were to be factories “in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products… manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.” (Gatto, footnote on page 39 in the online edition of the book.)

He also wrote: “We should give up the exceedingly democratic idea that all are equal and that our society is devoid of classes.”

The natural conclusion of this line of reasoning was spelled out in a speech that Woodrow Wilson gave in 1909, three years before he was elected President of the United States. He said: “[W]e want to do two things in modern society. We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” (The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 18, 1908-1909, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1974, p. 597.)

So a third possible answer to why all of us are different from the people described in Shipler’s book is that the educational system is designed to make sure that only a small percentage (us) will succeed and a much larger percentage (like the people in the book) will fail.

But it is not enough to simply exclude people from success as they will resent it and rebel. After all, all people have had dreams of a good life. As Shipler writes on page 231: “Virtually all the youngsters I spoke with in poverty-ridden middle schools wanted to go on to college. . .Their ambitions spilled over the brims of their young lives.” They dreamed of becoming doctors, lawyers, nurses, archeologists, and policemen. But those dreams have to be crushed to meet the needs of the economy. But crushing people’s dreams carries risks.

The poet Langston Hughes warned what might happen in his poem A Dream Deferred:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up 

like a raisin in the sun? 

Or fester like a sore– 

And then run? 

Does it stink like rotten meat? 

Or crust and sugar over– 

like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags 
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

In order to prevent people with crushed dreams from exploding, you have to make them resigned to their fate, to think it is their own fault, to consider themselves failures and unworthy. How do you do that? By making them repeatedly experience failure and discouragement so that by the time they reach high school or even middle school, their love for learning has been destroyed, they have been beaten down, their hopes and dreams crushed by being told repeatedly that they are lazy and no good, so that should not aim high and instead should they think of themselves as so worthless and invisible that it does not even matter if they show up for work or not.

And we have done that. Currently we have an educational system in which people do primarily blame themselves for failure. As Shipler writes in his preface: “Rarely are they infuriated by their conditions, and when their anger surfaces, it is often misdirected against their spouses, their children, or their co-workers. They do not usually blame their bosses, their government, their country, or the hierarchy of wealth, as they reasonably could. They often blame themselves, and they are sometimes right.”

So does this mean that everything that our proud parents and teachers have told us about how smart we are is false? No, that is still true. What is false is the widespread belief that all the other people are poor because they are intrinsically stupid or lazy or incompetent.

You are now in a place that values knowledge and inquiry and has the resources to satisfy your curiosity about almost anything. And all this knowledge is freely shared with you, limited only by your own desire to learn. But all that knowledge that you can gain should not to be used to distance yourself even further from those who have not been as fortunate as you, or to think of yourself as superior to them.

All this knowledge is given to you so that you can become a better steward of the planet, so that you will try and create the kind of world where more people, in fact all people, can live the same kind of life that you will lead.

POST SCRIPT: Bye, Bye, Fredo

Alberto Gonzales surely must rank as a front-runner for the worst Attorney General ever, despite strong competition from people like President Nixon’s John Mitchell. In fact, the administration of George W. Bush has strong candidates for the worst ever nods in all the major categories: President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and National Security Advisor.

Truly this is an administration that can only be described in superlatives.

The history of western atheism-1: The ancient origins

In the BBC4 TV program Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, host Jonathan Miller states flatly right at the beginning, “This series is about the disappearance of something – religious faith. . . The history of the growing conviction that god does not exist.”

(The full three hour, three-part series can be seen starting at the beginning here. The price you pay for it being on YouTube is that each hour is chopped up into six ten-minute segments in order to meet the time restrictions. But the video and sound quality are excellent.)

Miller did a nice job of summarizing the rise and fall and rise again of freethinking. Strictly speaking, his is a survey of atheism just in the western world. In the eastern world of two millennia ago, the widespread acceptance of Confucianism, which placed very little emphasis on a god, and Buddhism, which required no belief in god, suggests that atheism was not perceived as negatively as in the west.

The Miller documentary is structured quite traditionally. It is long on voice-over narration by Miller as he walks through various imposing historical churches, museums, and other buildings and gazes upwards at portraits and statues of the people he is talking about, interspersed with interviews with scholars. It is Miller talking to the viewer in an informal, chatty way, interweaving the history of disbelief with his own journey to a comfortable atheism. But what it lacks in drama and glitz, it more than makes up in the low-key, understated charm that is characteristic of good BBC documentaries. The second and third hours are especially good as the pace picks up.
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The journey to atheism

(I am taking a short vacation from new blog posts. I will begin posting new entries again, on August 27, 2007. Until then, I will repost some early ones. Today’s one is from August 8, 2005, edited and updated.)

In a comment to a previous post, Jim Eastman said something that struck me as very profound. He said:

It’s also interesting to note that most theists are also in the game of declaring nonexistence of deities, just not their own. This quote has been sitting in my quote file for some time, and it seems appropriate to unearth it.

“I contend we are both atheists – I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you reject all other gods, you will understand why I reject yours as well.” – Stephen F. Roberts

The Roberts quote captures accurately an important stage in my own transition from belief to atheism. Since I grew up as a Christian in a multi-religious society and had Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist friends, I had to confront the question of how to deal with other religions. My answer at that time was simple – Christianity was right and the others were wrong. Of course, since the Methodist Church I belonged to had an inclusive, open, and liberal theological outlook, I did not equate this distinction with good or evil or even heaven and hell. I felt that as long as people were good and decent, they were somehow all saved, irrespective of what they believed. But there was no question in my mind that Christians had the inside track on salvation and that others were at best slightly misguided.
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Waiting for the Rapture

(I am taking a short vacation from new blog posts. I will begin posting new entries again, on August 27, 2007. Until then, I will repost some early ones. Today’s one is from May 9, 2005, edited and updated.)

I am a huge fan of the English comic writer P. G. Wodehouse, especially of his Jeeves and Wooster books. The plots are pretty much the same in all the Jeeves stories but the smoothness of Wodehouse’s writing, his superb comic touch, and his brilliant choice of words make him a joy to read. Even though I have read all of the Jeeves books many times and know all the plots, they still have the ability to make me laugh out loud.
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