Author: Jacques Rousseau

Jacques Rousseau teaches critical thinking and ethics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and is the founder and director of the Free Society Institute, a non-profit organisation promoting secular humanism and scientific reasoning.

On “quitting” activist (atheist) communities (or maybe, just changing strategy?)

Late last year, my friend Martin Pribble blogged – in a piece that was later adapted for Slate,

I’m through with being an “activist atheist”. That’s right, I no longer want to troll Facebook and Twitter for theists and tell them why they are wrong, I no longer want to make fun of theists for their unreasonable beliefs, and I no longer want to be part of the online atheist “community”.

I’m very sympathetic with much of what he expresses there, which by and large indicates a significant change of focus rather than a literal “quitting” of the community. After all, he’s still on the Internet, and he still talks about religion. Instead, what he was attempting to convey was a shift in strategy – less simply pointing out when and where religious folk say something that sounds silly, and more focusing on what we need to do to fill the spaces that religion seems to fill in people’s lives.

In defining and arguing for the priority of what he calls “methodological humanism” over fact-checking and refuting religious utterances, Pribble isn’t saying that you – as a hypothetical “firebrand” atheist – are doing something wrong. But some of the reactions (“The evident lack of self-awareness in this piece is awesome. Is it satire or is he really this dense?”) made it clear that to some, Pribble was having forbidden thoughts. If you’re an atheist, some twitterers seemed to be saying, it’s compulsory to call religious folk out on their every logical error, and to ignore any common ground you might find.

The quote above was from an atheist, but he received plenty of flack from religious people too (regardless of the fact that they seem to not have read, or carefully read, the piece in question. “Why in the world atheists feel the need to proselytize their beliefs is beyond me” hardly seems a fitting response to a piece that argues against proselytising, and “Impressive writing to fit so much hubris, bigotry, hatred, stereotyping, & intellectual bankruptcy into a short essay” just seems like someone, well, parodying exactly what Pribble is trying to steer away from.

We’ve got to try harder to see, and talk about, the nuance that’s available between the extremes. It’s difficult, yes, but that’s also where much of the truth lies. One size doesn’t fit all, and there’s no reason to reject someone else’s strategy simply because you – or one of your intellectual heroes – chooses a different path. And even if there are a number of errors or misrepresentations in a piece, that doesn’t always mean you can’t learn something from it.

Take, for example, this piece on Dawkins with the inflammatory title of “Richard Dawkins, shut up and listen“. There’s lots in there to find fault with, in particular, the consistently negative interpretation of Dawkins’ intentions in the Twitter exchange documented there. Dawkins is framed as an oppressor – never given the benefit of the doubt. As I’ve argued before, he adopts a particular tone and strategy on Twitter, and to my mind, it sometimes fails, and he’s sometimes wilfully misread.

But if you only focus on how Dawkins has been misrepresented in that piece, or if you only focus on what one commentator described “liberalism attempting to eat itself”, you might stand less of a chance of recognising whatever good might exist in the argument you’re addressing.

The last two paragraphs of the “shut up and listen” piece present a totalitarian and judgemental summary of an imagined Richard Dawkins, and are uncharitable to the extreme. But between the extreme of the (misrepresented) Dawkins and Dawkins’ misrepresentation (to my mind, at least) of Salya Shaban AlHamdi, we can find (via Dawkins) a reminder that identity politics are an easy (but lazy) shield against fair critique, and via AlHamdi, that the reminder in question often won’t be heard, if it’s said with a sneer.

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A South African “culture of entitlement”?

Stephen Grootes has a column titled “Analysis: A culture of entitlement that holds us back” in the Daily Maverick (disclosure: as many of you will recall, I used to write for them), and it’s causing some discontent on social media and in comments to the column. The discontent is due to the fact that Grootes is interpreted as “pathologising poverty”, and of perpetuating stereotypes regarding “lazy blacks”, waiting for handouts instead of getting on with things. Essentially, Grootes is being accused of expressing racist sentiments at worst, or of oversimplification at best.

The charge of racism isn’t explicit (at the time of writing this), but I’ve little doubt that it will come. Grootes has, at least, been accused of “enabling” racism in that he is thought to be providing a narrative that allows for dismissing poor people as simply lazy, rather than being victims of generations of oppression, that still compromise their prospects today.

My concern is this: both explanations could have merit, and both could be partially true, but only one of the two can be discussed openly without charges of racism or ill-intent being levelled at the author. In short, the concern Grootes was trying to address might be a forbidden topic – especially if broached by a white author.

But that simple analysis makes critical writing about race, poverty or politics in South Africa prohibitively difficult, in that most topics of conversation are going to be “about” black South Africans – that demographic is, after all, 79.2% of the population. Some (like Samantha Vice) would argue that white folk like myself (and Grootes) should accept our lack of credentials, an simply butt out of conversations like these entirely – but as I’ve argued before, that form of identity politics is unduly restrictive, infantilising both ourselves, and our conversations.

Instead, we need to address the arguments, rather than the utterer of those arguments. Of course black South Africans – easily identifiably as having been, and currently still (some will disagree with the “still”, but I’ve no doubt whatsoever that past privilege ripples into the future) relatively less able to secure loans, jobs, or access to universities – are going to have their potential artificially suppressed in ways that the (typical) white South African won’t. But it’s a separate issue as to whether there’s an additional problem – namely the “culture of entitlement” that Grootes speaks of.

Grootes is addressing the second issue, not the first. Yet, a racist reading of his column tends towards interpreting him as denying the first issue – in other words, playing into the hands of racists by implying that it’s simply because people are black that they are lazy, under performing, etc.

Of course poor people in this country will – by and large – happen to be black, simply because of the population demographics. But they – and others – might also risk falling prey to some grand narrative, including around entitlement. It’s happened before, with the “Rainbow Nation”, and can happen again – and a white man, no matter how privileged he might be – is allowed to talk about this as much as anyone else.

Problems with evidence-based medicine aren’t a license to make stuff up

In the paper that brought the idea of evidence-based medicine (EBM) to prominence, Professor David Sackett et. al. wrote that

Evidence based medicine is the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research. By individual clinical expertise we mean the proficiency and judgment that individual clinicians acquire through clinical experience and clinical practice. … By best available external clinical evidence we mean clinically relevant research, often from the basic sciences of medicine, but especially from patient centred clinical research into the accuracy and precision of diagnostic tests (including the clinical examination), the power of prognostic markers, and the efficacy and safety of therapeutic, rehabilitative, and preventive regimens.

In short, EBM is about integrating the best available research knowledge with the expertise of clinicians, who might – and often do – spot something that a model or a manual might not recognise as significant. As much of a naturalist as you might be – and I’m a very committed one – raw data exists in a context, and the context might often be a significant clue in telling you what data are relevant, and how they should be interpreted.

downloadSo I share some of Dr. Malcolm Kendrick’s concerns, when he writes that “EBM is now almost completely broken as a tool to help treat patients” thanks to the “evidence” being susceptible to corruption by vested interests, and pharmaceutical companies in particular. If you fund enough research, and suppress results that you don’t like, it’s certainly possible to end up with all the “evidence” pointing in a favourable direction. Favourable for you, that is, but not for the patient.

But the fact that something is funded by a pharmaceutical company doesn’t guarantee bias. There’s a difference between being cognisant of potential biases, and writing something off in advance, just because of whence it came. That sort of pre-emptive dismissal is a logical error called “the genetic fallacy“, and you can tell when it’s being committed if someone stops paying attention to the evidence at all, or starts claiming that they don’t need to even bother doing so. Like this, perhaps (from Kendrick’s post):

Some years ago I stated that I no longer believe in many research papers that I read. All I tend to do is look at the authors, look at the conflicts of interest, look at the companies who sponsored the study, and I know exactly what the research is going to say – before I have even read the paper.

I have also virtually given up on references. What is the point, when you can find a reference to support any point of view that you want to promote? Frankly, I do not know where the truth resides any more. I wish to use evidence, and the results of clinical studies, but I always fear that I am standing on quicksand when I do so.

We are at a crisis point. Medical research today (in areas where there is money to be made) is almost beyond redemption. If I had my way I would close down pubmed, burn all the journals, and start again, building up a solid database of facts that we can actually rely on – free from commercial bias. But this is never, ever, going to happen.

It’s rather alarming to see the person responsible for writing The Great Cholesterol Con – and for encouraging most of us to stop taking statins to lower cholesterol – professing “I do not know where the truth resides any more”. (If he really means that, a career in anthropology rather than medicine might suit him better, I’d suggest, in that he’s already learnt a key mantra of the field.)

Another peculiar thing you’ll find on his website represents quite a cunning stratagem. You see, he’s talked himself into a bit of a bind with this “don’t trust The Man” stuff – if he ever wants to sell you something like a drug, how could he offer you “evidence” in support of it’s efficacy, assuming that he or someone else with a vested interest was involved in that research?

Easy – by redefining what conflict of interest means. For him only, mind you – not for others, where it means that you can’t trust them, and don’t even have to read them to know that you can’t trust them. In his “Disclosure of Interest” page, he notes “I have become the medical director for a company making a heart health supplement called ProKardia”, for whom he does paid consultancy work. And here’s the cunning bit:

If I do write about ProKardia or any of the ingredients in ProKardia, in a positive light, you need to know that I have a financial interest. I did not use the word conflict of interest in this statement, as I do not believe I have a conflict. I have become involved in developing, and using, a product that I entirely believe to be a good thing.

Got that? He has a financial interest alone, but no conflict. Authors of papers with connections to something he doesn’t trust, or research sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, always represent a conflict – and you don’t even have to read the paper in question to know this. (Which, amusingly, means that even if they were to try to insert the same Humpty Dumpty clause into their papers, Kendrick would never read that either.)

I say “Humpty Dumpty clause”, because the book Alice in Wonderland contains this fabulous line: “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'”

It’s the same causal relationship to what words – and evidence – means that allows for claims that sugar is addictive (as addictive as cocaine, according to some), or that Harvard have endorsed low-carb high-fat diets. They haven’t – they’ve just said that carbs can sometimes be worse than fats, particularly the “bad”, saturated fats – yet the LCHF proponents cherry-pick this as support, even though the same group are explicit that the type of fat matters, and that animal fats remain something to be cautious about.

Or, it’s this casual relationship that allows for claims that Sweden has officially adopted the LCHF diet, even though the report – now finally available in English (the summary, at least), though that didn’t stop English speakers like Tim Noakes from relying on blog sources as authoritative on what it said – actually says (my emphasis):

in the short term (six months), advice on strict or moderate low carbohydrate diets is a more effective means of achieving weight loss than advice on low fat diets. In the long term, there are no differences in the effect on weight loss between advice on strict and moderate low carbohydrate diets, low fat diets, high protein diets.

I realise that this is just one element of the debate, which includes diabetes, heart disease and so forth. But these are two examples of scientists cherry-picking data that happens to support something they want to argue for – or that can be made to appear to support it, so long as you whip up enough hysteria, or persuade them that there’s some conspiracy afoot.

As Mark Wallace points out in piece for The Guardian on “addictive” sugar, “if the issue is people failing to act responsibly, then it won’t be rectified by treating them like children”. To that, we can add “treating them like fools”.

And when the same people doing the cherry-picking are giving themselves licence to simply ignore research they don’t like, and to dismiss conflict of interest issues (in their case, but not for you) with a regal wave, they stop being scientists, and start becoming shills.

Why should anybody (secular) get married?

ban-marriage-bigOne of my final tasks for the year just ended was to write a test on the Civil Union Act, which regulates civil partnerships and marriages in South Africa. If I achieve over 80% on this test, an official-looking letter will arrive sometime in 2014, attesting to the fact that I am now a marriage officer, authorised to solemnise civil unions.

In light of deciding to take this test and become a marriage officer, I’d been planning to sketch an argument for why marriage is a reasonable state to enter into. That task has been made either slightly easier – or more difficult, perhaps – thanks to Tauriq Moosa having subsequently posted rebuttals to some common arguments for marriage at The Guardian‘s “Comment is Free” blog. Easier, in that half my job would be achieved through defeating his negative arguments, but also potentially more difficult in that if I can’t do so, my positive arguments would need to be all the stronger.

I’ll start with Tauriq’s post (the informality is explained by the fact that we know each other socially, and “Moosa” would thus be jarringly formal). To put it really crudely, I’m of the view that his post is open to charges of being somewhat disingenuous in how it represents marriage. I say this because while it purports to be a critical analysis of some alleged myths about marriage, the exploration of those myths seem to be little but a prologue to get to an expression of Tauriq’s own view, expressed in his conclusion as follows:

For myself, I can see no reason that sufficiently makes marriage, in general, a viable option worth wanting or supporting. I would much rather live in a society that had little interest in my relationship life, but protected me and everyone nevertheless. It’s not a black-and-white situation of total societal interest or disinterest. Keep marriage, if you so want, but it shouldn’t hamper or restrict others from benefits or equal treatment, especially when there appears so little reason for having it.

The reason why the “myths” are little but a prologue (in other words, serving little argumentative function) is because by Tauriq’s own evidence, they are no longer widely believed to be true. So, they are being trotted out as straw men, with Tauriq arguing against a minority position, in order that he can defeat those straw men on the way to (and as a motivation for) asserting his own view. Asserting your own view is of course the point (or part of the point) of an opinion column, but here, his view is granted extra (yet illusory) credence through the demolition of the straw man.

It’s an entirely separate issue whether the minority view in question is a good one or a bad one. The point I’m making so far is simply limited to the fact that my own view doesn’t get bolstered to any great extent through showing that a minority of people believe the opposite. Defeating a fringe position, in other words, is no cause for celebration.

I say that the myths no longer have any social currency, and that subscribing to the myths is a fringe position, because of exactly the evidence Tauriq himself cites – that increasingly, people aren’t bothering to get married. He cites data showing the US marriage rate to currently be at the lowest it has been in a century, with 31 marriages per 1,000 married women now, compared to 92.3/1000 in 1920.

The same decline in the rate of people getting married is evident across Europe (the graph below, note, is tabulated per 100 1000 people, not 1000 women)

 eurostat-marriage-rates

You can see plenty more data like this (including on how many women are getting married, and at what ages) on Philip N. Cohen’s website, where the post containing the table above asserts that “marriage decline is both worldwide and real”. So it doesn’t seem, contra Tauriq, that “we should thoroughly reassess the importance of marriage” – it seems like we already have. So do we still need to explode the “myth” that marriage is useful, virtuous, necessary and so forth? Or, is going through the motions of doing so just a pretext to express a (supposedly) contrarian view (yet, one that seems fairly widely held in the end)?

Furthermore, contrary to the perception endorsed in Tauriq’s post, it’s not clear that those who do chose to get married also get divorced in higher proportions (at least, not in the UK and USA). In the UK, the Office for National Statistics does record a step-change in divorce rates in the early 1970s, but notes (pdf) that this “rise is often attributed to changing legislation (the Divorce Reform Act 1969 and Matrimonial Causes Act 1973) and changing attitudes in society”. Leaving aside this step-change, they report that long-term divorce rates seem to have remained stable. This is apparently also true in the USA, though the data are apparently incomplete. I’ll not pin anything on the existence of a trend one way or the other though, as doing so incompetently will no doubt incur the wrath of the guild of demographers.

I’ll move on to the four “myths” that Tauriq lists, as it is here where I’ll interject thoughts regarding the positive argument for marriage (whether or not we think of marriage as a religious institution).

“Myth” 1 – It’s tradition

Here, Tauriq rightly points out that none of “tradition, religion, family and/or culture” are sufficient to justify marriage (“or any activity”). Sure, but so what? It’s true, as he points out, that arrangements that depend solely on those sorts of (often coercive) factors would often involve moral wrongs or adherence to archaic norms, but this is little but another straw man. What if a) a couple want to be married; and b) it happens to be the “right thing to do” according to their tradition, culture, family or religion? Should they refuse, or quell their desire to be married, simply because other people only get married because of (b)? For people who meet criterion (a), (b) is not a problem – it would arguably only make their marriage more meaningful, both to themselves and to other members of that community/culture/religion/etc.

“Myth” 2 – It’s a public declaration of love

Tauriq argues that marriage is

about “showing” we’re settled, our partners are “off the market”, and we’re in a position to build a family. Most of this, however, is a display for others. Plenty of monogamous couples maintain stable, healthy relationships without rings or certificates to “prove” loyalty

Sure, many do, but it’s entirely unclear how this adds up to the public declaration of love being a myth, or inconsequential, for those of us who do appreciate tokens of commitment such as rings, and symbolic events for attesting to that commitment, such as weddings. The view here seems a fairly misanthropic one, which simply rules out the possibility of others having a more charitable disposition to these sorts of rituals. Of course it’s true that for some people, marriages can be nothing but meaningless theatre – but then one can argue against those sorts of marriages, rather than dismiss the possibility of marriage always being theatre.

The loss of objectivity (cf. the misanthropy mentioned above) is found in passages like

who are we trying to prove our love to? Our proof should be our treatment of each other: anything else is addition, not basis. There is more to be worried about if we need to “secure” someone, like a raging animal, with a ring or certificate or other public stamp.

To which one can only say “of course, and the caricature doesn’t help make the case”. I don’t know many married couples, to be sure, but I’ve never met one – or even heard of one – that disagrees with the relationship being the important thing in the marriage, with the ring, certificate and so forth being mere legal or symbolic devices that attest to that relationship (for whatever, and various, reasons). Tauriq then says:

Furthermore, as high divorce rates show, being tied to one person doesn’t work out for many, especially for the rest of our lives. Compromises can be made. Couples now swing, maintain open marriages, and so on. But this should only make us question why we’re still devoted to the “one true love” ideal in the first place.

As suggested above, the divorce claim might not be an easy one to substantiate. But the fact that fewer people are getting married – and that the ones who do get married are increasingly open to the sorts of compromises or arrangements he mentions – indicates that we’re (in the majority, I mean) no longer “devoted to the “one true love” ideal in the first place”. To borrow a phrase, this should only make us question why anyone is still saying that we are.

Myth 3 – Married couples make better parents

One one level, of course this is a myth – as Tauriq points out, it’s good parents who make good parents, and being good at that job has nothing to do with your legal standing in relation to a partner or partners (if there are any partners at all, seeing as a single parent can be just as “good”).

Having said that – from a purely pragmatic point of view – if it is the case that a child will accrue certain advantages (or rather, avoid disadvantageous treatment) though her parents being married, married couples would as a side-effect “make [for] better parents”. So, if you know that you are living in a society in which these prejudices exist – and that you have no ability to overturn them in your lifetime – this would be an entirely rational reason to get married.

Myth 4 – You get better legal and financial benefits

I see no reason to disagree with this, in general (and here, Tauriq doesn’t mean that it’s an actual myth, but rather that while true, it’s not a reason to get married but instead a reason to overturn the laws in question). It’s true that in many jurisdictions, married couples accrue certain advantages, and it’s also true that some relevant and archaic laws need revision here, such as in cases where same-sex marriages aren’t recognised. But as I note above, for some people this presents an entirely rational reason for getting married, unless of course we can all be persuaded to boycott the institution until the relevant laws are changed.

To conclude

Why should anyone have to pass a government’s arbitrary, and usually archaic, notion of what constitutes a stable relationship to obtain benefits? If much can be done from a legal and contractual side without marriage, then marriage loses all credibility.

For some people, a legal relationship is what marriage is, though – again, the straw man comes to the fore, where Tauriq seems to think that most people are still living out some sort of fairytale when getting married. Any contract requires a legal definition, and any legal relationship – whether you call it marriage or not – will not differ what what Tauriq is railing against, except it usually won’t be accompanied by a fun party.

Besides, you can play this game with anything, and I hope the reductio will help make the case that singling marriage out is itself somewhat arbitrary. Why should you have to conform to some arbitrary mark on a calendar to have a birthday party? Why can’t you just trust me when I say I’ll repay my home loan, instead of us having to sign this piece of paper? Why can’t I just go in there and help myself from the buffet, without paying for my meal?

Part of what gives a game significance is that there are rules, and that the rules are commonly understood by all the players. Yes, rules can be bad (prohibiting same-sex marriage, for example), and we need to change those bad rules. We are however doing so in much of the world, and our pace in doing so is improving all the time. When people get married – or do anything – for bad reasons, we can criticise their choice. This bears little relation to whether that choice, when properly understood, is a good one or not. A final quote, before I wrap this up:

My point isn’t eradication of marriage, but rethinking marriage’s importance and assumptions. This could help open all people up to different kinds of sexual and romantic interactions they might otherwise never experience – or, at the very least, increase tolerance, since society isn’t rewarding only one kind of relationship. It could help lessen stigma and actually treat all citizens – single, in relationships or otherwise – with respect. Marriage’s benefits, of stability, legal ease and economic pay offs can still be met, without institutionalisation.

To a large extent, the post reads as rethinking entirely constructed, stereotyped, and mostly, uncharitable assumptions regarding the importance of marriage. Some people inside marriages are themselves already open to many different kinds of interaction than they might have been in a marriage 50 years ago, and already be getting married for non-stereotypical reasons. I’m concerned that Tauriq might need to “open up” to the possibility of those kinds of marriage existing too. If he did, “it could help lessen stigma”, and help him treat all married couples “with respect”.

Marriage’s benefits – at least the legal ones, and some of the economic ones – cannot be met without “institutionalisation”, as they would require some form of legal contract, whatever you end up calling that contract. But that’s not the reason I got married, and I don’t think it’s the reason most people get married (though I have no data here).

The analogy I’m fond of in explaining why secular folk still see value in marriage comes from Scott Atran’s work in the evolution of religion, but in particular the insights he integrates via Richard Sosis and Candace Alcorta. Public signalling of a commitment – especially where that signalling is expensive (not only or even necessarily in terms of money, but in terms of consequences) – creates strong incentives to not cheat the co-operative system. It increases co-operation, because the demonstration that you’re playing the same game, by the same rules, has been witnessed by people whose judgements you value, who can do you reputational harm, and who can assist you where necessary also. All of these relationships increase in strength through shared involvement and commitment to rituals that are in essence (but not in effect) arbitrary.

This is the same principle as lies behind behavioural psychology experiments like StickK.com. I wrote about StickK 6 years ago, wondering how long it would survive, and I’m pleased to see that it’s still going strong. Basically, it’s a vehicle for putting your reputation, or your wallet, on the line – you might commit R5000 to a bigot like Errol Naidoo, for example, if you fail to lose 5kg by March (or whatever), and the website’s public record (and enforcement) of this tends to increase compliance. Because you really don’t want to give him your money, you lose the weight.

Reliable signals of commitment tend to be more costly. Sometimes, like in the case of weddings, this can mean “more extravagant”. (For related interesting reading, investigate the “handicap principle“.) And I know that part of Tauriq’s concern here is that he wants us to be better humans, and to not need these sorts of tricks to make us respect each other, or honour our commitments. And perhaps one day we won’t need them at all.

But perhaps, many of us already don’t need them, and instead just enjoy them. Perhaps the ritual, and the state of being married, can actually have significance for us, rather than simply being ceremonial or arbitrary. Yes, some people chose this form of commitment unthinkingly, and marriage as a social convention is often accompanied by wrongs such as paternalism.

It doesn’t need to be, though, and criticisms like the one I deal with above admits to very little nuance, instead succumbing to as crude a set of generalisations as those it purports to critique.

A year without God

imagesYesterday, I was alerted to a peculiar piece on the Huffington Post that describes an ex-pastor’s plan to live as an atheist for a year. I say “peculiar” (and my Tweet yesterday said “bizarre”) because atheism is an ontological position, not a lifestyle. An ontological position, in short, is what you hold to be true. Leaving aside perennial (and sometimes technical) debates about whether atheists are all agnostics, or should call themselves agnostic, a crude summary of things is that atheists have the ontological view that god(s) do not exist, and religious believers have the view that god(s) do in fact exist.

Neither of these positions seem to be something you can “try on”, like you might try on a pair of trousers to see if they fit, or if you like their style. In fact, the whole project reminds me of a sort of Pascal’s Wager in reverse, and therefore open to at least one similar criticism, namely that it’s pretty difficult to “fake” belief or disbelief. Pascal responded to this by arguing that if you apply yourself to religious study, and immerse yourself in religious community, the belief or faith will arrive in time, and your feigned position will become a sincere one.

I don’t want to be snide about Ryan Bell’s (the ex-pastor in question) project here, partly because there’s no reason to be – he certainly seems well-meaning and sincere – and partly because his open-minded approach, and the engagement he’s been trying to have inside the church till now reminds me of Chris Stedman (someone who I think worth taking seriously). Also, I have no doubt that some of the more intemperate atheist bloggers will soon unload their scorn upon him, and perhaps a corrective to that is a useful thing for its own sake. But the model Bell is following seems flawed, in that it confuses lifestyle with ontology, and furthermore, I fear that it obscures two important details.

First, Bell is arguably already an atheist. The lack of conviction he describes, and the lack of closeness to the church, its teachings and its god, offers quite a clear indication that he’s already “lost his faith”. So, one way of putting his resolution would be to say something prosaic like “former pastor decides to leave the church”, and that’s hardly a story.

Dennett and LaScola’s new book, “Caught in The Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind, offers numerous examples of religious leaders who have lost their faith (you can also read a paper of theirs on this topic for free). Most of these people continue simply going through the motions, but when they stop doing so, it seems a bit dramatic to describe it as a switch to atheism – they are returning to a default state, without the add-on of strange metaphysical beliefs. So framing it as “trying on atheism” feeds, I fear, into the canard about atheism being just like a religion, with its own rites and texts and so forth.

I’d rather suggest that Bell is leaving the church, and proceeding with living a regular secular life. And that makes him just like many people who profess religious belief, in that for both the UK and the USA, it seems to be increasingly common for self-identified religious people to not go to church, not read the Bible (or other text), and not pray. In the UK, the RDFS survey and YouGov data showed evidence of this trend, and each new Pew “Religion and Public Life” report for the USA reveals decreasing consensus as to what it means to be “Protestant” (etc.) in terms of how you live and what you believe.

As you’ve no doubt heard, the fastest-growing “religious” group is the nones, i.e. those who claim to have no religion. One-fifth of the USA public (and a full third of adults under 30) say that they have no religion. Bell, in other words, can be described as shrugging off a needless accessory, rather than “trying out” some other belief system. He’ll be living a secular life, and nothing need change beyond that. At some point – and as I say above, perhaps that point has been reached, and he just hasn’t acknowledged that – he’ll stop believing in God. And it’s then that he will be an atheist, rather than simply “someone who doesn’t pray or go to church”.

The second important issue that I think Bell’s experiment runs the risk of obscuring is highlighted in this quotation:

I will read atheist “sacred texts” — from Hobbes and Spinoza to Russell and Nietzsche to the trinity of New Atheists, Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett. I will explore the various ways of being atheist, from naturalism (Voltaire, Dewey, et al) to the new ‘religious atheists’ (Alain de Botton and Ronald Dworkin). I will also attempt to speak to as many actual atheists as possible — scholars, writers and ordinary unbelievers — to learn how they have come to their non-faith and what it means to them. I will visit atheist gatherings and try it on.

To speak of learning “how they have come to their non-faith” is an interesting way of putting it, in that it seems to presume that faith is the default. I’m reasonably confident that it’s not, and that if we could wave a magic wand and eliminate all religion today, it would never gain the traction that it currently has ever again – there simply wouldn’t be sufficient numbers of people who would find religious claims plausible for that to happen.

But this isn’t the detail I wanted to highlight. Instead, notice how something which you could also describe as simply “educating yourself” gets framed here as a noteworthy or exceptional task. In highlighting this, I certainly don’t mean to pick on Bell – in this, he’s simply an example of what I think is very common, namely that too few of us (whether religious or not) bother to do the work of properly understanding what the “opposition” is saying, or even what our own intellectual traditions’ arguments are.

I doubt it’s an exaggeration to say that after reading those books, Bell will be more informed regarding atheist arguments than the vast majority of atheists. Given that he’s already (I presume) well-versed in religious arguments, I look forward to following his thoughts during this “year without God”. But the second detail I wanted to highlight is that educating oneself, and reading what your strongest critics say about what you believe – is something religious folk should do in any case, not only when they’re “trying on” atheism, to see if it fits.

Homeopathic anecdotes aren’t data either

When I tweeted the negative sentiment below, about the author of a book on how to ‘treat’ your toddler with homeopathy, little did I know that the irate replies would still be coming in 6 hours later.

homeopathyYes, my tweet was hyperbolic, and the answer to my question – in a direct sense at least – is most probably zero. But what the question hopes to provoke is reflection on the indirect consequences of recommending that parents treat one-year-old babies with homeopathic ‘remedies’ instead of medicine. Even if, as one person admonished me, the book claims to “aid basic ailments like constipation and insomnia. Hardly life-threatening.”

First, because the reply presumes that parents can diagnose a basic ailment in the first place. If a parent is told that her child’s constipation can be treated with homeopathy, she might persist with that course of treatment for long enough that the problem becomes more than “basic”, requiring proper medical attention. And the time wasted in seeking that, or in not giving the child proper medicine, could indeed be life-threatening. Ask Gloria Sam, the 9-month-old who died when her (perfectly treatable, and not life-threatening) eczema was ‘treated’ with homeopathy instead of a visit to a GP.

Second, because the book claims more than that, and my critic was cherry-picking examples. Other things that homeopathy can treat, only according to the Amazon blurb, are “breathing difficulties” and “vomiting”, both of which seem to be things that you’d hope concern parents more than simply inspiring the application of some sugar pills or water (in other words, a homeopathic “medicine”).

Because that is of course the third, and most important reason. Trial after trial has shown that there’s nothing to it beyond the placebo effect, something that a group of friends and I satirically demonstrated by joining the 10:23 protests a couple of years ago, where we each downed a bottle of a homeopathic ‘remedy’ (I think mine was arsenic). Here’s James Randi doing the same, taking a bottle of ‘sleeping pills’ as he often does to make this point (the clip also includes him making other arguments worth hearing).

[ted id=835]

And no, there’s no good evidence to suggest it has to be more than placebo, “because it works on animals” – we’ve got no reason to believe it works on animals any better than it does on humans (in fact, the perceived effect on animals seems to simply be an effect on humans, in terms of how they perceive the treatment and health of their pets).

But evidence isn’t what defenders of homeopathy are interested in. For them, anecdotal evidence is ‘argument’ enough, even though they would never stop to think about how they would reject similarly weak claims if they came in a version they don’t like. Kitten blood! It works for me! Crystals! Prayers to the Pink Unicorn! (Or, prayers to a ‘real’ god, just not one of the ones you happen to believe in.)

Racists defend their views with anecdotal evidence, as do sexists – reality is ignored in favour of confirmation bias. And we don’t think that doing so is a good, or a reasonable thing to do. Because the evidence is meant to matter, and the evidence isn’t “up to me”, and the experiences I might have had or not had. Part of the point of science is to provide us with resources that offer objective guidance, because we go into decisions knowing that – by and large – we’re too prone to various cognitive errors to be trusted.

The point is that a double-standard applies in people who are willing to defend their consumption and prescription of homeopathic ‘remedies’, in that they are willing to accept a very low standard of evidence on the grounds that the risks are low – “any responsible homeopath”, I’m told, “will advise their patients to take antibiotics where necessary, or to seek conventional treatment”.

But some homeopaths are less responsible than others. The coroners report was pretty clear in highlighting how Penelope Dingle would have suffered far less harm if not for her homeopath’s advice, and more generally, as Ben Goldacre makes clear in the Lancet, homeopaths simply get in the way of effective treatment:

Homoeopaths can undermine public-health campaigns; leave their patients exposed to fatal diseases; and, in the extreme, miss or disregard fatal diagnoses. There have also been cases of patients who died after medically trained homoeopaths advised them to stop medical treatments for serious medical conditions.

More prosaically, you’re simply wasting money if you spend it on homeopathy. This is one of the most annoying #middleclassproblems for me – alongside things like anti-vaccination sentiments, or obsessions with angels, or The Secret – in that it’s only the middle and upper classes who have the luxury of glamorising their anecdotal evidence in such a fashion. If homeopathy worked so well – given that it’s possible to produce it so cheaply – why would Bill Gates (etc.) not simply distribute it to those dying of malaria instead?

Of course “Western” or allopathic, or “chemical” (pick your favourite pejorative term) can’t cure everything. Nothing can. But homeopathy doesn’t outperform a straight placebo, meaning that any good effect you observe after taking a homeopathic remedy can’t have anything to do with that remedy. And much of ‘regular’ (by which I mean, real) medicine does. Furthermore, the stuff that doesn’t work – and the doctors that are quacks – tend to get driven out of the market over time.

Except for homeopaths, partly because of this almost religious devotion to “alternative” medicine (and the associated conspiracies around mainstream medicine), and partly because what homeopaths say, and prescribe, involves completely unfalsifiable claims. And that’s a bad thing – not only in general, but particularly when lives are at stake.

Check out What’s the Harm for a partial catalogue of homeopathy’s victims.

Should Muslims handle pork and wine?

halal signOn hearing that Muslim staff at the UK supermarket chain Marks & Spencer could now refuse to sell pork and wine, the decision seemed to be an instance of making too great a concession to religious sensibilities. I’ve shied away from gratuitously offending those with religious beliefs for some time now, but being opposed to Blasphemy Day, for example, doesn’t mean that you need to commit to respecting every demand made in the name of some or other god.

There are various reasons to think that Muslims should not be able to opt-out of handling wrapped and sealed pork, or alcohol in bottles. On a broad political or legislative level, allowing them to do so would result in a private choice incurring a very public cost. In a secular society like the UK, USA or South Africa, my decision to adhere to a particular belief system that comes with costs doesn’t commit anyone else to bearing those costs – and here, all (pork- and alchohol-buying) shoppers would encounter the inefficiency of not having all cashiers available to them.

We’d also need to determine which sorts of beliefs allowed for these sorts of concessions, as there’s in theory no end to the number of religious demands that could be made of employers. This point was made in amusing fashion by MoDawah (@kingofdawah) – ‘expert on everything’ and ‘media Muslim’ on Twitter, who said things like:

  • Just heard that Hindu employees of Aldi don’t have to sell any goods that they fear may be a reincarnated ancestor of theirs #diversity
  • Tesco just announced Atheists don’t have to sell anything that they don’t believe exists #diversity
  • Waitrose announces that Nihilist members of staff don’t have to sell anything that negates one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life

As to whether this concession is even demanded by the Muslim faith (as opposed to certain Muslims just feeling uncomfortable selling these goods), I was alerted to an analysis of the issue by an apparently authoritative Shaykh, who makes it quite clear that Muslims can sell pork and alcohol (though, not in their own supermarkets):

It would be permitted to work on the check out of a supermarket that sells things Muslims consider impermissible (such as pork, alcohol, wine, or food items with haram ingredients). One’s earnings will be lawful (halal).

One could also point out that it would hardly come as a surprise to an employee at Marks & Spencer that these products are on sale there, and that you’d therefore encounter someone wishing to buy them on a regular basis. Reasonable accommodation can be made, certainly – I can understand an employee talking to a supervisor, saying “I would like to be excused from X”, but X can’t be some core competency of the job, like a cashier being asked to sell things to customers.

The long and short of it might be something like: “why did you take the job, if you knew you couldn’t perform it for religious reasons?”

Even though the concession in question doesn’t seem required by Islam, and even though it also introduced inefficiencies, my initial reaction to reject it was nevertheless tempered on reflection, when I considered whether it was possible to accommodate this sensitivity (because it’s not a legal requirement of Islam) without introducing those inefficiencies, and of course without putting us on a slippery slope which commits us to respecting all sensitivities (which would be impossible).

For example, monitoring the demand for halal checkout lines (where pork, alcohol, etc. would not be sold) could allow us to designate the required number of lines as such, then clearly signpost them as such so that someone wanting to buy pork or alcohol doesn’t get turned away when they reach the front of the line.

But this idea wouldn’t be simple to implement at all, and would introduce inefficiencies of its own. Employing people to work on the halal checkout lines leaves you with the problem of what to do with them when demand drops, or when you calculate it wrong. While you might have assumed that you need to bring in three “halal cashiers” on a particular day, you might find you only need one. Don’t send two of them home, though – first because you might not be allowed to, given their conditions of employment and relevant laws, and second because there might be a sudden rush of Muslim customers. The HR complications, in other words, might be significant.

Lastly, there’s a general issue raised here that is rather tricky, in that there are a number of historical concessions to religion that were made before religion and secularism became so politicized and public, and in a time where we were far more willing to politely live and let live, rather than taking to Twitter to shout about nobody respecting what we feel entitled to (there is of course the other side of that coin, where we’ve learnt more about what our rights are, and are now expressing legitimate grievances more often too).

Conscientious objection is one, but dis-analogous because it seems self evident that it’s asking a lot more to put a gun in someone’s hand and ask them to kill, versus putting a scanner in someone’s hand, and asking them to ring up some pork chops. Likewise, it seems a clearer violation of someone’s sensibilities to ask them to perform abortions if they have a religious objection to doing so.

But here in South Africa, marriage officers can lodge an objection to performing gay marriages, and become legally exempt from having to officiate under those circumstances. Even though I’d never want a homophobe to officiate my wedding – regardless of whether or not I was gay – should he or she get to have the option of refusing? I think not. Those of you in other parts of the world will no doubt know of similar concessions already made, and that you might ideally want to revise.

Not all preferences can be accommodated. Regardless of whether it’s a religious issue (as in this case) or not (imagine an environmentalist cashier, and how he or she could develop a principled objection to selling some item, or a vegan, or a Pollan-ite), the answer can’t simply be to accede to any demand, because as I’ve argued before, that means those who complain the loudest winning a disproportionate number of battles.

And the answer which seems in principle correct – namely operating as a secular organization, and only making these concessions on an ad hoc basis – is certain to offend some religious sensibilities, some of the time. What this seems to mean is that it’s the religious sensibilities that need to change, rather than the rest of us needing to feel their impact on our secular lives.

[Edit: today, Marks & Spencer are saying that allowing Muslims to refuse to sell these things was never their policy.]

Towards a free society and Thinking Things Through

FSI Thinking Things ThroughOn December 3, the Free Society Institute (the secular humanist NPO that I founded here in South Africa) held their third conference, titled “Thinking Things Through“. It was a one-day event, featuring talks on science, freedom of speech, secularism and more. The channel containing all 6 presentations, as well as the panel discussion that rounded off the day, can be found here on YouTube.

My contribution argued that secular humanists – especially in the context of the developing world – should recognise that religion might not be our most pressing concern. The evidence for a negative correlation between religion on the one hand, and education and financial upliftment on the other, seems to be growing.

Second, the sorts of religion that folk in the developed world adhere to is typically nowhere near as concerning as the fanaticism you’ll find in some parts of the world. In summary, the us/them discourse that permeates much of the atheiosphere could well be confusing far more than it clarifies. Watch for yourself, and feel free to comment.

Politics, science, and the art of the possible

Green policy_0Otto von Bismarck observed that politics is “the art of the possible”, but the statement holds true in many more domains than that. It’s only trivially true to say that anything is constrained by what is possible and what is not – yet that sort of retort is usually as far as the conversation might go (on social media in particular).

It’s more likely that Germany’s first Chancellor was trying to say that there’s frequently a mismatch between our ideals and what can reasonably be achieved. Not, in other words, that things are literally impossible – more that we need to bear the trade-offs in mind when making judgements as to whether people are doing a good job or not.

Cognitive biases like the Dunning-Kruger effect describe how we overemphasise our own expertise or competence, leading us to ascribe malice in situations where the explanation for someone’s screw-up is most probably simple incompetence, or simply that the job in question was actually pretty difficult, meaning that expecting perfection was always unreasonable. (As some of you would know, this paragraph describes a more gentle version of Hanlon’s Razor – “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”.)

So, instead of paying attention to the arguments and their merits when it comes to something like blood deferrals for gay men, we claim prejudice. Or, when someone dies after taking the advice of a homeopath too seriously, some of us might be too quick to call the victim stupid or overly gullible, instead of focusing on those who knowingly (because some quacks are of course victims themselves) exploit others for financial or other gain.

The point is that some problems are difficult to solve, and certainly more difficult than they appear to be from a distance, or from the perspective of 20/20 hindsight. So, when you accuse your local or national government of racism, or being anti-poor, or some other sort of malice, it’s always worth pausing to think about the problem from their point of view, as best as you are able to. They might be doing the best they can, under the circumstances.

In case you aren’t aware of two recent resources for helping us to think these things through more carefully, I’d like to draw a recent comment in the science journal Nature to your attention, as well as a response to it that was carried in the science section of The Guardian.

In late November this year, Nature offered policy-makers 20 tips for interpreting scientific claims, and even those of you who aren’t policy-makers should spend some time reading and thinking about these (though, don’t sell yourselves short in respect of not labeling yourself a policy-maker, because on one level of policy, you’d want to include for example parenting. And what you choose to feed your children, or the medicines you give them, would usually be informed – or so one would hope – on scientific claims of whatever veracity.)

The Nature piece talks about sample size, statistical significance, cherry-picking of evidence, and 17 other import issues, many of which you’d hope some scientists would themselves take on board – not only those scientists who might play fast-and-loose with some of the issues raised, but also simply in terms of how they communicate their findings to the public. If you’re asked to provide content for a newspaper, magazine or other media, the article highlights some common areas of confusion, and therefore helps you to know where you perhaps be more clear.

Second, and in response to the first piece, The Guardian (who had also re-published the Nature list) gave us the top 20 things that scientists need to know about policy-making. And this piece I’d commend to all of you, but especially the armchair legislators that routinely solve the country’s political problems on Twitter, or make bold claims about how little or how much governments might care for the poor, and so forth.

In short, making policy is difficult, and doing good science can be difficult too, because among the things we can be short of is time, money, attention, the public’s patience, and so forth. In the majority of cases, both policy-makers and scientists might be doing the best they can, under those situations of constraint. So before we tell them that they are wrong, we should try to ensure we at least know what they are trying to do, and whether they are going about it in the most reasonable way possible, given the circumstances.

They don’t get the luxury of ignoring what is possible and what is not when doing the science, or making the policy. When criticising them, we shouldn’t grant ourselves that luxury either.

Things worth reading on South Africa, Mandela and fake sign-language

With so much content being produced on the average day, it’s easy for some of the most worthwhile pieces to pass you by, no matter how good your network of curators might be. Today, three pieces were published that I think worthy of your serious attention, and to them I’d want to add something written earlier this week. These four columns are superb, and because I suspect that the regular readers of this website would agree, I’d like to highlight them here.

First, Ivo Vegter’s Daily Maverick column on the old South African flag that he keeps as a reminder of where we’ve been as a country, and how we got to where we are today. Ivo and I are less than a year apart in age, and my experiences overlap considerably with those expressed in the column. But it’s not the veracity of the historical details that is most important in this column, rather the way in which Ivo captures the  mood of the time, and the soothing effect that Mandela had on a fractured nation.

As I’ve written before, though, that balm came at a cost – any grand mythology tends to do so, because they encourage us to substitute honest (and painful) self-reflection with optimistic cliches (the “Rainbow Nation”) or an inflated sense of our value to the rest of the world (to think that we belong in the BRICs, for example). Honest self-reflection about South Africa is what the second column, by Chris Roper (Editor-in-Chief at the Mail & Guardian) focuses on. In “The lies Nelson Mandela taught us“, Roper reminds us that we’re not special nor exceptional, and that nobody in the rest of the world has an obligation to think we are. Mandela allowed us to believe the opposite, and telling us these lies, Roper says, might well have given us a

kick-start as a nation. But they have run their course. It’s time to trade Mandela’s lies for Jacob Zuma’s truths, hard truths though they be. The truths of our extreme ordinariness and of our distressing propensity for the three isms of the apocalypse – nepotism, despotism and cronyism.

Third, and in a similar vein, Sarah Britten brings us a Thought Leader column (also on the Mail & Guardian website) on “The eloquence of the fake-signing man” – a title that readers would surely recognise as darkly ironic, in that Thamsanqa Jantjie (the “fake signer” in question) could hardly be less eloquent (in terms of the job he was paid to do) than he actually was on the day. Instead, he speaks eloquently, and tragically, of lowered expectations and standards in South Africa – on how convincing bluster can win the day, even if you have nothing of consequence to contribute to a debate, to a classroom, a Parliament, or a Presidency.

Which neatly (almost as if by design!) brings me to the fourth column, by Tony Weaver in the Cape Times. This column is arguably about what happens when you do your job well, but offend those with power and thin skins in doing so. Weaver’s “Man Friday” column is a first-hand account of the Cape Times newsroom on the night and early morning that Mandela died, and of how well the editor, Alide Dasnois, marshalled the various resources at her disposal to produce what Weaver describes as “the best newspaper I have ever worked on”, and which was also voted as “one of the 14 best front pages in the world” by Time Magazine.

Dasnois was relieved of her position that morning, just as many South Africans were first hearing of Mandela’s death. In writing this tribute to her editorship, for the same publication, Weaver has effectively told Dr Iqbal Surve (chairperson of the newspaper group in question) that whatever his strengths might be, defending editorial independence – and judging the quality of an editor – aren’t among them. Let’s hope he doesn’t lose his column for saying so.

To the four columnists who wrote these pieces – thank you. I know that it’s sometimes rather frustrating to put such energy and thought into constructing a column, only to find that it serves mostly as troll-fodder. There will be (and are) trolls aplenty on two of the columns already, but also many who, like me, are grateful and feel enriched thanks to work such as this.