Simon Blackburn on 9/11 and Faith
After reading Simon Blackburn's piece in The New Republic, I ran a search for him on the Google and found this also very excellent Voltaire Lecture for the British Humanist Association. I find Blackburn's writing to be very clear and representative of a lot of my thoughts (though he's a much better thinker than I am).
It would be easy to fill a volume with the horrors of monotheistically inspired ethics: the ethics of the sadistic God. But the only charge I shall press is this. The first and all too often the last virtue of any of the monotheistic religions is faith, because it is faith that holds the flock together, and defines Us, inside, against Them, outside. But faith is not a virtue. Faith is credulity: the condition of believing things for which there is no reason. It is a vice, and it inevitably encourages other vices, including hypocrisy and fanaticism. It needs to be said, loudly, that it makes no more sense to talk of faith-based schools or faith-based education than it does to talk of superstition-based science or terror-based debate. There have, of course, been educated and enlightened people who profess faiths, but their education and enlightenment happened despite their superstitions, and not because of them. Faith is by its essence the enemy of education, which teaches people to base beliefs on reason and on reason alone.
The rest of the talk goes into quite a bit of detail about the difference between toleration ("which is often, although not always, a good thing") and relativism ("which is never a good thing"). Toleration is "the disposition to fight opinion only with opinion: in other words, to protect freedom of speech, and to confront divergence of opinion with open critical reflection rather than suppression or force." By fighting with "opinion," he means something stronger than what one might first think of it; it includes marshalling of facts.
Toleration "is a characteristically secular virtue: there has never been and never will be a theocracy that can wholeheartedly applaud it. For the religious mind, many sayings are not to be assessed at the bar of truth or falsity, but at that of blasphemy, and to hold that a person blasphemes is to hold that that person’s sayings at least, and the person for preference, must be suppressed."
Relativism, "names a loose cluster of attitudes, but the central message is that there are no asymmetries of reason and knowledge, objectivity and truth. There are two relativistic mantras: “Who is to say?” (who is to say which opinion is better?) and “That’s just your opinion” (your opinion is on all fours with any other). There are only different views, each true “for” those who hold them. Relativism in this sense goes beyond counselling that we must try to understand those whose opinions are different. It is not only that we must try to understand them, but also that we must recognize a symmetry of standing. Their opinions “deserve the same respect” as our own. So, at the limit, we may have western values, but they have others; we have a western view of the universe, they have theirs; we have western science, they have traditional science; and so on. "
Relativism then bows to the absolutist. By making all opinions equal, then no aboslute opinions can be refuted. "The relativist will only hear the shouting and roaring and bawling of the Absolute in his own way. His ear is cocked so as to hear only ideology or politics, not the intended claim to absolute truth. It is no good insisting upon truth, objectivity, or reason when ears are so cocked, for such ears only hear more of the same, but louder."
As I read it, this seems on one level to be self-evident, though it takes a clear writer and thinker to articulate it so well, and perhaps to make it seem self-evident. One thing that often chagrins me is that many of those with whom I share certain values, namely a liberal/leftist politics, will tend towards a relativistic point of view. It's as if granting tolertion to their points of view, we must also grant the symmetry. Not all opinions are created equal.
We find that the relativist, at first blush a tolerant, relaxed, laid-back, pluralistic kind of person can suddenly seem to be a kind of monster. If I say that high tide this afternoon at Newhaven is at two o’clock, I do not want to be met with the patronizing response that if that works for me that’s great. That might be appropriate if I had just said something that strongly suggested I was mad, or if I were uttering the sentence in something like the spirit of a poetry recital, not as something to be accepted or rejected, but perhaps as something to be tasted and savoured. But this is not what I am doing when I voice some commitment. I expect my audience to engage with the commitment itself. To hear my saying just as a symptom, perhaps of my class or race or history, is failing to do this. It is regarding me as a patient. It is to think of me, in Peter Strawson’s wonderful phrase, as someone to be “managed or handled or cured or trained”. It is relativism itself that is here dehumanising
I've requested his book, Think, from the libraray, and look forward to digging into it. I think I'll also put his book Being Good on my list.
If you're at all interested in this stuff, I deeply recommend these two articles.
9:59:41 PM Permalink
|
|
