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.

Errol Naidoo: remove religion as example of unfair discrimination from the Constitution

Errol Naidoo’s latest Family Policy Institute newsletter indicates quite a remarkable change of mind, at least if I’m correctly reading between the lines. In one section of it, he appears to be arguing that religion should not merit any special protection from discrimination under South Africa’s Bill of Rights. Here’s (part of) what he has to say:

There is a proposal to remove the ‘sexual orientation’ clause in the Constitution. This clause in the Bill of Rights serves only to provide homosexuals the power to demand special rights.

Homosexuals are protected as human beings in the Constitution like every other citizen. The sexual orientation clause provides special protections and privileges for their sexual preference and more importantly, provides legal sanction to penalise anyone who disagree with their lifestyle.

The clause in question (9.3) reads as follows:

The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.

So, following Naidoo’s logic, if the “sexual orientation” clause only exists to “provide homosexuals the power to demand special rights”, it’s surely also the case that this is true for the “religion” clause (and all the others), and he’d have section 9.3 read something like “The state may not unfairly discriminate directly of indirectly against anyone”.

This might be the first, and only, time that I can say he’s on to something which isn’t completely crazy…

Installing Cyanogenmod on your Samsung Galaxy S2

Just as with my earlier post on installing Ice-cream Sandwich on your GS2, the risks here are all yours. The chances of anything going wrong are small – but if they do go wrong, the possible consequences are large (you could, for example, kill your phone). Having said that, if you want to try CyanogenMod out, here’s the idiots’ guide.

In my experience, CM9 is faster and smoother than stock ROM’s. I find I get better battery life. It looks far more attractive (to my tastes), and now that themes are integrated, you’ll increasingly be able to customise the look to your preferences. It’s completely stable for daily use. A few things aren’t (fully) working yet: FM Radio (which will most likely never be integrated – but Spirit Radio works fine); TV-out (working, but imperfectly); Wi-Fi direct (coming soon); and auto-brightness (works, but slightly laggy). For a snapshot idea of what’s possible (and upcoming) with “pure” Google ROM’s like CM9, check this out.

This guide deals with only CyanogenMod 9 (currently Android version 4.04) and the Samsung Galaxy S2. Many devices are supported by CM9, though, so if you’ve come here looking for CM9 for some other phone, check out the CyanogenMod site. As before, I’m heavily indebted to the work of others here, especially Codeworkx – nothing I say is original.

Yes, you will lose your warranty if you flash CM9. No, Kies or OTA updates to your phone will no longer work. You’ll lose any Samsung-bundled apps, like Polaris Office, Social Hub and so forth. And the procedure does require a factory reset, so you’ll have to reinstall all your apps. Finally, MTN are my service provider – Vodacom users have had issues with SMS’es, and here’s how they fixed them.

But if you ever need to make a warranty claim, you can go and download the latest official firmware for your device from Samfirmware, flash it using my previous guide, and your phone will look “official” again. Except for one thing, namely the yellow triangle on boot, which indicates that it’s been rooted. To get rid of that, buy a jig from eBay for $3 or so.

If you’re on stock Samsung firmware, and haven’t rooted your phone

Download these 4 files

The steps required are identical to those in my previous guide.
  1. install Kies (if you don’t already have it). While you’re in Kies, de-activate the ”Run Samsung KIES automatically when device is connected” option, seeing as you don’t want it to interfere with Odin flashes (the procedure outlined here).
  2. connect your phone with the USB cable, let the PC recognise it and install drivers (if necessary – if you’ve used Kies before, it won’t be).
  3. disconnect the phone, and close Kies (important – check the system tray etc. to make sure it’s closed, because it interferes with Odin).
  4. Put the disconnected phone into ‘Download’ mode, which you do by a) powering down, then restarting by b) holding both volume down and the main button on front of phone in when pressing power. Hold all 3 until you see the screen pictured above. You’ll be asked whether you’re sure you want to go to download mode. You are.
  5. Launch Odin. Connect the phone with USB cable.
  6. A block of the Odin screen (ID:COM) should go yellow if everything is in order. If not, something is wrong, probably driver related – but you must not proceed with flashing anything.
  7. Click on the PDA button and browse to the resurrection edition  .tar.md5 you downloaded earlier (251Mb or so)
  8. Do not select any other options in Odin. And make sure you’ve used the PDA block, not one of the others.
  9. Click start to flash
  10. Don’t disconnect the cable or turn off the phone – it will reboot when it finishes.

You’re now running CM9, but won’t have Google apps installed. Let the phone finish booting, and don’t bother setting anything up – you’ll be doing a complete wipe of your phone in a moment. You should already have copied two files to your phone earlier – if you didn’t, copy them across to your SD card or internal memory.

Now, when you press the power button and select “reboot”, you should see the option to reboot into “recovery”. Choose this. Once in recovery mode, do the following:

  1. Install zip from sdcard (volume up and down moves between options, and power selects an option)
  2. Either select “choose zip from sdcard” (if you copied those files to your sd card) or “choose zip from internal sdcard” (if you copied them to internal memory)
  3. Flash the CM9 Nightly build (the 4th file listed for download above)
  4. Flash the Google apps download
  5. Wipe data/factory reset
  6. Wipe cache partition
  7. Select “Advanced”, then wipe Dalvik cache
  8. Reboot

There you go – set up your phone, download your apps, etc. To get rid of the yellow triangle on boot, use TriangleAway from the Google Play store. Two other things you might find useful are Syncmypix (for Facebook contact syncing, which is unreliable in ICS generally, but especially in CM9) and an alternative launcher (so that you can put folders in your shortcut bar and so forth). I like Nova, but dig around on the Play store and try a few out.

Note: it’s quite common, on the first boot of CM9, to have no network data. For some reason, your APN settings aren’t read from your SIM card at first. A reboot has always fixed this problem for me – they’re back on the second boot, and then don’t disappear again.

For those who have already rooted.

If you have access to ClockWorkMod recovery (anyone who understands this won’t need further advice in this area, but just in case: reboot into recovery with power, home and volume-up. If you see a Clockwork recovery screen, you do), it’s really easy – just download the last two files linked above, boot into recovery mode and follow steps 1-8 in the list immediately above this.

While you’re at it, take Holomisa to the HRC

Take a look at the responses offered by Patekile Holomisa to Chris Barron’s questions in this weekend’s Sunday Times. I addressed his views in a Daily Maverick column reposted here, wherein I drew attention to the fact that his retrograde attitude towards equality seemed no less – if not more – offensive than dos Santos and Tshidi, whose racist tweets have recently caused such upheaval in the Twittersphere. (As a sidenote, the report on their “reconciliation lunch” with Mmusi Maimane is a wonderful example of how low journalistic standards can sink – “Dos Santos, who had plastered her face with make-up and pink blush” & “Thamane, 22, it has emerged, is not even a model” being two choice examples).

Holomisa has poked his head out of his cave for long enough to confirm that our suspicions are not at all unfounded, and that freedom is quite alright, so long as it’s according to cultural norms. And who defines cultural norms? Well, “traditional communities and traditional leaders”, apparently – except, that’s not quite true, because if you’re a gay person then your sexual preferences are “not part of our culture”. So, that leaves us with traditional leaders as the arbiters of cultural norms. And guess what – they’re all male, and will continue to be so, especially if the Traditional Courts Bill passes, and even if it doesn’t, because that’s the current status quo.

Gays and lesbians do what they do “despite of their culture”, according to Holomisa. But yet, this magnanimous man says they should be protected – “they can’t be assaulted, or raped or killed. According to the culture.” No, Holomisa, that’s not the only reason – it’s also according to law, which (currently) recognises sexual orientation as illegitimate grounds for discrimination. And one of the reasons for having this in law is that despite what you think the “cultural” rules are, people are discriminating against gays and lesbians. And exactly those people who you think define cultural norms are themselves frequently homophobic.

So it’s a cop-out to say that it’s “not because of the culture that they’re being assaulted and raped and killed. The culture doesn’t say they must be assaulted and killed and raped.” Because when “the culture” says “let’s remove the protections for gays and lesbians from the Bill of Rights” – as you are doing, Mr. Holomisa – then it is because of “the culture” that people are being assaulted and raped and killed. Because you know it’s happening, and you know it’s sometimes because of homophobia. And one way to change “the culture” is to put people in jail, often and always, when they assault, rape or kill (for whatever reason, but including as a result of homophobia).

Another way to change “the culture” is of course to tell people to stop doing these things. But that strategy isn’t working out too well, is it?

Racist models: apparently worse than homophobes in the legislature.

As submitted to Daily Maverick

In May 2011, a 13 year old lesbian was raped in Atteridgeville, Pretoria. We can’t say for sure whether this rape was an attempt to cure her of her lesbianism. But in June of that same year, Noxolo Nkosana was given a clear signal that her lesbianism was part of the motivation for her assault by two men, who reportedly taunted her with shouts of “Hey you lesbian, you tomboy, we’ll show you”. Then they did “show her”, stabbing her twice with a knife.

Nkosana was not raped, but Noxolo Nogwaza from KwaThema township near Johannesburg was less fortunate in being stoned, stabbed and raped by eight men in April 2011. She died as a result of these injuries. Many similar stories could be told, and have motivated increasing pressure on the government to consider recognising corrective rape as a hate crime.

Corrective rape is of course not the only threat faced by lesbian and gay people in South Africa. The Out LGBT Well-Being (Out) and UNISA Centre for Applied Psychology (UCAP) community survey (pdf) conducted in 2003 revealed widespread verbal and physical abuse motivated by homophobia, but also the finding that 62% of those who encountered such victimisation did not report their experience to the police.

In her 2004 paper Arranging Prejudice: Exploring Hate Crime in post-apartheid South Africa, Bronwyn Harris suggested that “Institutionalised heterosexism and homophobia, combined with negative social attitudes towards lesbian and gay people, create the conditions for hate crime and the reluctance to report it to the authorities. An important reason for this is the tendency towards the sensational, dramatic and exceptional, by the media. This selective bias in media coverage contributes to a tendency not to notice or report ordinary everyday experiences of hate victimisation”.

I doubt that the situation has changed much since then. After all, why would you think the police would care when those higher up the food chain include a homophobic Chief Justice, and a President who believes that “same-sex marriage is a disgrace to the nation and to God” – so much so that he’s willing to appoint a homophobic ambassador (Jon Qwelane) to a country (Uganda) that considered a bill legislating the imposition of the death penalty or life sentences on homosexuals?

Meanwhile, The House of Traditional Leaders have submitted a proposal to the Constitutional Review Committee, suggesting an amendment to section 9 (3) of the Constitution, which reads “The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex … colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth”.

It might come as no surprise that The House of Traditional Leaders is well-stocked with members of the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (Contralesa). The Constitutional Review Committee of the National Assembly, who will consider the proposed amendment, is chaired by ANC MP Patekile Holomisa – president of Contralesa.

For a little insight into Holomisa’s attitude towards social justice issues, consider his response to the Traditional Courts Bill, currently the subject of a public participation process. The bill, he says “is being rammed down our throats by a government that is half-hearted on the issue of traditional leadership and a government that is half-hearted in its support of traditional authority”.

An assortment of 20 or so civil society groups and individual activists also don’t like the bill, and stand in support of the UCT Law, Race and Gender Research Unit’s submission to Parliament. As their submission makes clear, the proposed bill “overtly privileges the interests of traditional leaders over those of other rural residents, in particular rural women”.

The bill removes checks and balances on the power of traditional leaders, eliminates women from decision-making, and allows forced labour as punishment. You can never ask for legal representation in matters before a traditional court, and there is no mechanism for opting-out of the system. Clearly half-hearted in its support of traditional authority, then, in that it stops way short of the public floggings that one might imagine Holomisa to think a minimally acceptable power to be enjoyed by himself and his fellow Neanderthals.

Over the last 17 years, the Constitutional Review Committee has rejected every proposal made to it for amending the Constitution. This one – to remove sexual orientation as grounds for protection against discrimination – has somehow made it through to being put forward for deliberation in the National Assembly. Simultaneously, the protection offered by the Bill of Rights on the grounds of sex or gender would seemingly be ignored in traditional courts.

It is surely beyond the realms of possibility that either the Traditional Courts Bill or the Constitutional amendment in question will be passed. But the fact that it’s possible for anyone to think it reasonable to propose them, or to defend them, is cause for shame on the part of those that do, and anger in the rest of us.

And we do get angry – the people of Twitter, for example, spent an entire day being angry about a racist airhead, many going so far as to report her to the Human Rights Commission. Somehow, though, what’s trending on Twitter seldom gives one the impression that human rights are at stake when women, gays or lesbians are told they’re less human than the rest of us.

The ethics of eating meat

As submitted to the Daily Maverick

It goes without saying that industrial meat production entails harm to animals. While much of this harm might be avoidable, the costs of producing meat ethically (if such a thing is possible) in sufficient quantities to satisfy a hungry market could end up making meat unaffordable to most. But lay debates on whether it’s ethically permissible to eat meat often don’t touch on these economic factors, preferring the extreme positions of either asserting human dominion over other animals, or the essential wrongness of killing animals for food (where, for most of us, this food source is fully replaceable).

The argument for human dominion is of course largely a matter of cultural habit, and as Peter Singer has pointed out in talking about speciesism, it is by itself difficult to distinguish from racism or sexism. In his paper “Eating animals the nice way” (pdf), Jeff McMahan succinctly highlights our prejudices on this matter by pointing out that “human intuitions about the moral status of animals are so contaminated by self-interest and irrational religious belief as to be almost wholly unreliable”.

The position that it’s always wrong to kill for food also seems extreme, in that it’s surely possible to imagine meat without suffering, even if only on a small scale. So, the harm caused and whether it’s needless or not, compared to the benefits of meat production and consumption, need to be part of the debate for our vegetarianism or our meat-eating to be ethical.

I’m of course already taking a stand in the paragraph above in not giving significant attention to some vegan positions, where the treatment of animals as a commodity is universally regarded as ethically wrong. This is simply because I’m not persuaded that we have a duty to maximise the lifespans of (some) other animals, because “being alive” is not something they can value. For those animals that do have a theory of mind, I’d think we would have that duty. As for chickens and cows, though, the issue of suffering seems to be what would determine the ethical status of meat-eating.

The position I’m taking is that, for a practice to be ethically wrong, someone or something’s interests need to be harmed. The thing being harmed needs to be capable of experiencing harm (whether emotional, financial, or other) – this is what it means to be a moral agent. However, even harm is in itself not sufficient for ethical wrongness, as some cases could justify causing a certain amount of harm in order to prevent a larger amount of harm.

When considering whether it’s ethical to eat meat, utilitarian arguments are most commonly marshalled in defence of the view that meat-eating is ethically wrong, due to the harms caused to animals. But the harms cited are not convincing, or are at least not an argument against meat-eating per se, but rather against the particular conditions under which most animal meat is produced.

Non-human animals can suffer pain. If we assume that causing them unnecessary pain is wrong – as I do – what follows is that we need to produce and consume meat in ways that don’t cause unnecessary pain. It would only be ethically wrong to eat meat, in principle, if meat production necessarily caused harm to animals. But meat can be produced under non-harmful conditions, and animals can be slaughtered without distress to themselves or other animals in their immediate environment.

As I say above, farming of this sort would be more costly than factory-farming, and this approach would mean a significant increase in the price of animal meat. But here again, there is no necessary harm – those who cannot afford to eat meat will not suffer significant harms through being forced to eat less or no meat, and farmers who cannot compete under these conditions would have to develop alternative ways of making a living.

There would certainly be some harms resulting here – to the farmers – but these harms would on balance be less than animal suffering under factory-farming. Again, though, the key point is that meat-eating per se would not be ethically wrong, even if certain market-orientations in the production and consumption of meat could result in more harms than others.

Regarding the more general economic arguments around the production and consumption of meat, if meat was a significantly more wasteful sort of foodstuff to produce than alternatives, the argument could be made that eating meat is ethically wrong. But only if a) we grant that we have moral obligations to others and/or the environment; and b) if we have good reason to believe that meat production is indeed more resource-intensive.

Point (a) does stand in need of support, but I’d imagine that most of us would accept its truth. But even if true, it remains possible that a significant price-premium on meat – putting it only in the hands (or rather, mouths) of the wealthy – could result in a net benefit to those less fortunate. The farmers and others involved in meat production could receive greater profits, and potential taxation revenue could be directed explicitly at poverty-relief, or feeding programmes (whether involving meat or not). Much could go awry with this sort of scheme, of course, but the practical problems of allocating this revenue are again not an argument from principle.

On point (b), the argument is far less settled than many seem to believe. It’s often cited as a truism that meat-production is vastly more resource-intensive, but evidence cited in books such as Simon Fairlie’s Meat: A Benign Extravagance offers good reason to be suspicious of this truism (as is often the case with dogmatic utterances of any sort).

It might well be the case that 50 years from now, we’ll look back in disbelief at our current dietary practices, perhaps considering them a form of savagery and exploitation. Our cultural practices don’t always overlap with what’s ethically right, and it can take time for us to realise this. And I can’t deny that part of the reason I eat meat is simply because I assume that it’s okay to do so, and refrain from (potentially) burdening my conscience by thinking about it too much.

But if it’s true that ethical wrongness entails actual, necessary, harms rather than potential harms, then arguments against meat-eating that appeal to potential harms (under existing rather than immutable conditions) aren’t persuasive. The precautionary principle is a poor justification for restricting liberty – if harms cannot be demonstrated, we should be free to eat whatever we like.

The burden of proof should always fall on those who want to restrict liberty, and as things stand, it seems to me that the only justified restrictions on what we eat relate to some ways of producing and eating meat – but not meat-eating in general.

This column was prompted by The New York Times, and their call for submissions to the Put Your Ethics Where Your Mouth Is contest.

Thinking fast and slow

As submitted to Daily Maverick

Two quite peculiar experiences stand out after returning from the Global Atheist Convention, held in Melbourne earlier this month. The first was at the instigation of Sam Harris, who guided the roughly 4000 atheists present in a session of mindfulness meditation. The second was watching our news cycle (or rather, social media commentary on it) from afar and at 8 hours remove.

The latter experience had the effect of highlighting the perception that little seems to change – that the same people kept saying the same things and the same entrenched positions kept leading to the same misinterpretations and squabbles. But in light of the quite alien – and for some, alienating – exercise in mindfulness, I couldn’t help but wonder whether we can do better and if so, how we’d go about it.

Harris’s talk was about death. The inevitability of death, and the absence of some sort of way of cheating it via an immortal soul, was used as a vehicle to ask us to reflect on wasted time and effort. We sometimes appear to live as if we might be immortal, deferring important decisions to quit smoking or patch up some relationship.

More crucially, some of us could be accused of not realising the full implications of our mortality – if this is the only life we have, it falls to us to improve our world, and we’ve neither unlimited time nor supernatural help to do so. An obvious, yet powerful, comment made by Harris was that it’s quite likely that many of us will spend our last months or years in regret for what we failed to achieve – but that being able to anticipate this regret seems to have little motivational force in the present.

The disjunction between thoughts of mortality and the significance of life, versus noticing that South Africans were again, and still, talking about whether Cape Town was racist or whether respect for cultural norms precluded criticism of polygamy was quite stark. I’m not suggesting that these conversations are unimportant. I’m rather observing that in having these conversations nobody ever seems to change their minds, or admit that they don’t have a well-justified position. And the debates never seem to take place with a greater degree of mutual understanding than in their previous iterations.

Part of the problem might be that we forget how young we are, and therefore how little experience we have of making sense of each other. While modern humans originated around 200 000 years ago, most of us still lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers until around 10 000 years ago, when agriculture started allowing for the formation of permanent settlements, trade, cooperation and the formation of complex societies.

If you start the clock those 200 000 years ago, we’ve only lived in societies for 5% of our existence, and in complex societies for less than 2%. The skills most useful for flourishing during the other 95% of our history aren’t equally useful today, yet they continue to determine many of our responses to modern challenges. Essentially, we’re pattern-making creatures, who survived through being able to do things like predict the movements of animals and the changes of seasons. We look for structure, and we’re so well-trained and efficient at this that it happens without thinking – and perhaps often in ways that are entirely inappropriate to a more complex modern world.

Daniel Kahneman’s recent book Thinking fast and slow details many of the ways in which our cognitive habits let us down through placing undue weight on surface over substance. He refers to System 1 and System 2 thinking to explain this, where System 1 sees patterns, and generates an “obvious” (and time-saving) answer.

But this answer is often wrong, because it’s mostly designed by humans who lived during that other 95% of our existence, and not by us. We need to remind ourselves to think more slowly and to be suspicious of the first, intuitive response. System 2 isn’t as easily fooled by misleading patterns because it’s a more careful judge of available evidence rather than impressions, and we can force it into action simply by being a little more patient and a little more cautious.

Besides reminding ourselves to think a little slower, I’d also suggest that there’s room for improvement in the way we talk. Tallyrand said that “language was invented so that people could conceal their thoughts from each other”, and while that might often be true, it also seems true that our language often serves to preclude rather than encourage debate, whether through the use of lazy, stereotypical categories or through moralistic outrage.

If we want to get better at understanding ourselves and cooperating to improve our world, we need to realise that we constantly make mistakes. Not only mistakes related to particular choices, but mistakes that involve how we choose, because they’re a feature of how we think. And we perhaps give too little thought to training the mind versus simply acquiring information.

This was the point of the meditation exercise described above. As Harris pointed out, while most accounts of practices such as these are contaminated by metaphysics, that shouldn’t prevent us from recognising that it’s possible for us to weigh evidence less subjectively and to do a better job of distinguishing between the significant battles and the petty squabbles.

A joke sometimes told about philosophers is that we’re inclined to say things like “we know it’s possible in practice, but is it possible in principle?” While watching the Groundhog Day-debates take place from my hotel room in Melbourne, I couldn’t shake the feeling that sometimes our principles seem immune to revision, regardless of the evidence. And that maybe, we should start by throwing them away – or at least by remembering that they are products of brains that were evolved to cope with a different world to the one we actually live in.

Brief thoughts on the Global Atheist Convention (#atheistcon)

Earlier today I completed the seemingly endless sequence of flights that brought me back from the Global Atheist Convention, held over this past weekend in Melbourne. Both a feeling of being distinctly sleep-deprived and/or jet-lagged, as well as the fact that I need to write up and reflect on the notes I took during various presentations, mean that all I’d like to offer now are some very general impressions. First, Melbourne was quite charming – well-worth a visit if you get a chance.

But while a large amount of time was spent sitting in the sun eating and drinking with fellow heathens, the conference was what we were all there for. On the whole, it was a great event – certainly the best such gathering that I’ve been to, partly because of the great line-up of speakers, and also because of the organisation. There were no parallel sessions, so you could attend everything, and timekeeping was meticulous (well, except for the fact that some people in post-talk Q&A should have been given far less time, or no time at all in some cases. Like the guy who asked why it is that evolution hasn’t resulted in a brain that’s larger than the universe).

Of the 4000 in attendance, you’ll no doubt find dispute as to what the highlights and disappointments were. One thing I found to be a weaker element was the proportion of time set aside for comedy, where a fair amount of this comedy was geared at the ridicule of religion. Now I don’t mind that per se, but at a conference billed as a “celebration of reason”, it didn’t always seem appropriate to pluck the low-hanging fruits of religious absurdity. In fact, one of the highlights was the contribution made by the one theologian (Marion Maddox) who participated in the official events – she came across as far more strongly in support of secularism in education than the atheists on that panel. Another problem with the comedy was that some of it – Jim Jefferies in particular – didn’t quite manage the balancing act between provocation and offence in his jokes involving gender.

Peter Singer was also disappointing. He gave what amounted to an overview of Steven Pinker’s new book on the decline of violence in modern civilizations. It seemed a lucid and comprehensive overview of Pinker’s book (I haven’t read the book yet), but filled a slot in the programme that could perhaps have been better utilised through Singer presenting some of his own ideas. But the presentations that were good were very good, starting with a Dennett talk on free will on Thursday night (at the University of Melbourne, and not part of the official conference programme). Dennett did a great job of summarising the key elements of his compatibilist position, and it was somewhat of a pity that there wasn’t more discussion of this, especially in light of the new Harris book, and Harris’s explicit disagreement with Dennett on this topic.

In the main programme, I thought Dennett, Krauss and Harris the standout presentations, along with the “3 horsemen” panel, now with Ayaan Hirsi Ali added as a horsewoman (she was always meant to be part of the conversation that resulted in the 4 horsemen DVD, but had to withdraw at the last minute). Hopefully this will all appear on YouTube at some point, and I’ll certainly say more about these later on, once I’ve had a chance to read and think about my notes from those talks. Harris was probably the most provocative, and you can get a sense as to why I say that by reading Martin Pribble’s post about his talk. It was a thoughtful reflection on the inevitability of death and what that means for how we should live, but the thing that made a bunch of us feel rather weirded-out was the session of mindfulness meditation that he decided to get these 4000 atheists (and therefore probably skeptics too) to participate in.

And yes, these sorts of things easily give rise to accusations that we were indulging in some sort of “religious” gathering ourselves. This is also something I hope to write about later, including a confession that I was rather disappointed by the way some of our number responded to the Christian (on Saturday) and Muslim (on Sunday) protesters that gathered. Both of these groups of protesters said things they shouldn’t have – especially the Muslims with their “burn in hell” chants directed at Ali – but there were times when I thought the atheists crossed over from justified retorts into juvenile insult.

Lastly, I’d say there were many who felt deeply moved by the Hitchens tribute that was screened, and then also by the memories of Hitchens recounted by Dawkins and Krauss (especially the latter, as Krauss was a close friend of Hitch). The video of the tribute is below, and is well worth watching. In summary, I’m very glad to have been there, and to have met many great people – see you all again in two years.

“New atheists”, stridency and fundamentalism

As submitted to the Daily Maverick.

During the Easter period we had the usual opportunity to read and hear plenty of content on religion and atheism, including ongoing debate around “New atheists” and their alleged stridency or militancy. But regardless of how particular individuals in this debate might choose to engage, we shouldn’t forget that it’s not automatically strident or militant to assert a point of view, no matter how much any participant might disagree with the view being expressed. More importantly, we shouldn’t forget that tone has absolutely nothing to do with the truth or falsity of what is being said.

Yes, atheists can be dogmatic. Anyone can be dogmatic, but while Catholics (for example) have little choice but to consider the Pope as at least broadly representative of their world-view, atheists have no obligation to fall into line behind a Dawkins or anybody else. One key advantage of an evidence-based worldview is that you can be persuaded by good arguments, and not persuaded by weak ones, regardless of who makes those arguments.

This isn’t to say that some atheists aren’t fundamentalist, nor that some aren’t uncritical disciples of some bestselling celebrity atheist. Both sides of these culture wars make the mistake of over-generalising, and both sides make the mistake of being unwilling to pick and choose between various potential points of view, based on the quality of the arguments for those points of view.

As I’ve argued previously, there are better and worse ways to encourage reflection on these issues – one way that certainly seems unhelpful to me is to caricature a point of view into labels such as “Islamophobic”, or to lump an incredibly disparate group of people together into a collective of “New atheists”. Some atheists are frequent offenders in this regard in asserting that “Muslims” or “Christians” believe one thing or another.

We should all stop doing this, but it might sometimes be slightly more difficult than atheists like to think it is. If you start from a position of thinking that a naturalistic worldview (in other words, one that can’t accommodate at least gods or souls, but often – and certainly for me – even things like free will) is our best guide to the truth, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you have an epistemological advantage over others, more generally.

Atheists can be fundamentalists, not only in their atheism, but also on other emotive topics like climate change or fracking. They might also be fundamentalist in their blanket rejection of any possible good coming out of religion, which can lead them to be hostile and demeaning towards people who don’t share their views.

But fundamentalist atheists typically only cause offence and irritation, while fundamentalist religious folk have been known to cause significantly worse outcomes – although these are becoming increasingly rare, at least outside of theocracies. (Lest someone feel inclined to yell out “Hitler” here, let the man speak for himself: “My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter.”)

The Kim’s of North Korea are themselves gods, so their misdeeds clearly can’t count as evidence of evil atheism. Stalin was a fanatical Marxist, possibly a psychopath, and while he was certainly strongly opposed to religion, his potential atheism hardly seems the most plausible explanation for his atrocities. One could problematise any such example, and just as atheists shouldn’t cite the Reverend Fred Phelps as representative of Christians, Christians shouldn’t think of these murderous dictators as representative of atheism. Fanaticism, not only belief, kills – and the only question of importance is whether one type of belief (broadly metaphysical) is more likely to lead to fanaticism than the other (broadly naturalistic).

Of those readers that are Christian, few – hopefully none – will read the Bible as a literally true handbook on science, history or morality. Instead, it’s a sounding board for debate against the backdrop of a commitment to a certain sort of life, exemplified in the figure of the Biblical Jesus. That this is a better route to peace, economic equality and so forth than a fundamentalist reading of any religious text goes without saying, and critics of religion who don’t recognise this are certainly not playing fair.

But that this route is better doesn’t mean it’s the best route, and this is the point that is often emphasised by more sympathetic critics of religion. If we were to imagine starting afresh, disregarding the centuries of privilege that religious viewpoints have enjoyed, we’d arrive at a different understanding of religion.

When faced with the choice between centuries-old texts that includes a bunch of weird injunctions, bad science and so forth, but which also contains passages that are inspirational, we’d be far less inclined to take them seriously today if they were not so embedded in our cultures. They might well continue to serve a powerful role in our lives, but they wouldn’t lead to wars or to children dying while having demons cast out of them.

There are of course also more recent books that can serve the purpose of inspiration or guidance without including false or outdated claims, capable of interpretations that allow for misery. And while it’s true that many, perhaps even most, religious believers don’t reach for those interpretations, others do find them plausible – and it’s this ongoing possibility that is at issue for many atheists, particularly of the non-fundamentalist sort.

The believers of the type highlighted by the recent Dawkins survey are of little concern to me, because they aren’t the sort to bomb abortion clinics or fly planes into buildings. But those who are inclined to do such things could count the moderate believers as being among their number (even while recognising their relative lack of commitment), and that larger number is the one generally cited in censuses or when a politician says that we are a “Christian” country.

As I often remark to my religious friends, if they were more active in denouncing Errol Naidoo, Fred Phelps, or Boko Haram’s Abubakar Shekau (not equivalently evil people, of course), many atheists would be left with little to do – at least in the supposed “name” of atheism. The (majority) of religious believers share many of the goals that non-believers do, and I do think it an obstacle to these shared goals that stereotype and caricature are so prevalent in the language of both the faithful and the faithless.

Leaving aside these regular misrepresentations of religious believers, it nevertheless remains true that atheists have things to legitimately be angry about – and also that it’s sometimes difficult to express these concerns without appearing to be dogmatic and hostile. While concerns around winning a public-relations battle shouldn’t lead us to forget those things that motivate the anger, persuasion remains impossible unless people are willing to communicate.

I don’t believe that encouraging communication needs to (or should) entail things like Alain de Botton’s “Atheism 2.0”, but it at least needs to involve dealing with real people and their sincere beliefs instead of preconceived versions of these, designed for ridicule. But those sincere beliefs can be criticised, and doing so isn’t necessarily shrill, strident or militant. Labelling them as such can be a way of simply ignoring them, just as labelling a religious person as a superstitious fool can be a way of ruling them out of (a conception of) rational discourse.

We should all care about eliminating unfounded or dangerous beliefs, whether ours or our opponents’. At root, this is a key premise of naturalistic or atheist positions, and it’s indeed a pity that many who hold those positions sometimes appear as dogmatic as those they criticise. But how ideas are expressed only makes a difference to how they are received – not to their truth. All of us could sometimes do with a reminder of this, whether we celebrated Easter or just a few days off work.

President Zuma on religion and “humanity”

As submitted to the Daily Maverick.

It’s always a surprise to find oneself agreeing with Floyd Shivambu, but if President Jacob Zuma really did say what he’s reported to have said at a church service on Sunday, he should certainly face his day in court. Not only a court involving advocates and charges of corruption, but also the court of public opinion, where he should be found guilty of a gross lack of judgement in using intolerant and divisive rhetoric to divert attention from the ANC Youth League’s criticism of him.

If a Helen Zille tweet speaking of “education refugees” can result in a week of widespread outrage, how is it the case that Zuma can effectively say that the non-religious have no humanity without (at least) equivalent levels of outrage? In fact, he should not only face criticism from the public and censure from the party, but if you support the hate speech provisions in our law, this should perhaps also be a matter for the courts.

“We need to build our nation because presently we have a nation of thugs. This is a task faced by the church. Fear of God has vanished and that means that humanity has vanished”, is what Zuma is reported to have said to the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa. We do indeed need to build our nation, but as I’ve previously argued, when it comes to moral leadership Zuma is hardly the man for the job.

The church can certainly play a part – a large and possibly effective part, seeing as the majority of South Africans are members of some church or another. And when the church focuses on respect, love, compassion and other sorts of virtuous qualities, I wish them all possible success. But when the church that our new Chief Justice belongs to endorses the view that homosexuality is a sickness that can be “cured”, it should be immediately clear that churches have no monopoly on morality.

My previous columns have frequently discussed the absence of a positive correlation between religious belief and moral virtue, but this is not the point here. Whether it’s true or not that religion can encourage those virtues, the fact remains that non-believers are in no way handicapped when it comes to discerning right from wrong. We use different standards to do so, yet mostly end up with the same conclusions as the religious do.

This is obviously so, because most of these conclusions are obvious ones that anyone living amongst others would reach. We all have an equal investment in social cohesion and freedom from fear, and shared rules make those goods possible, regardless of how we reason our way to them. In South Africa, as in many poor countries, humanity “vanishes” largely because people are materially insecure, and resort to opportunism to address those insecurities.

If your life is miserable, you’re less invested in the future, and more invested in seizing opportunities where you find them. The narrative of a harmonious “rainbow nation” only gains traction if you have reason to care for the welfare of others, and it’s not always the case that we do. The church can provide reasons of this sort, yes – but stronger and more universally respected reasons are secured when people have jobs and food, perhaps along with a government they can trust to not exploit them.

If it’s only fear of God that keeps religious people from breaking laws or harming others – or even from having humanity – then we should be seeing far worse moral crises in secular countries than we do in religious ones such as ours. And what does lacking humanity mean? Are secular folk simply lacking some moral property, or are we somehow not even human on Zuma’s reckoning? And what does it say about the moral character of the religious when the implicit claim is made that without religion, they’d suddenly discover or rediscover the impulse to rape, rob and murder?

Whether you call it “humanity” or not, President Zuma, many of us don’t do these immoral things due to the belief that it’s wrong to do them. As much as I’m willing to say that your religious beliefs are false, I’ll only start saying that you lack humanity when you act like you lack humanity – not only because you have a different worldview to mine.

Like perhaps now, where you essentially tell me and all other non-believers that we are qualitatively inferior to you and other believers. You – the man who hasn’t gone more than a couple of months without some press coverage on things like rape trials, dodgy arms-deal allegations, shady friends, financial mismanagement, corruption or reckless sexual behaviour.

I get that you need to defend yourself against the current round of attacks from Shivambu and others, and that you’re heading into a delicate situation in Mangaung later this year. You’re entitled, and would be expected to, defend yourself by rallying religious support. But you can do so without calling my humanity into question. Choosing to do so is divisive, inflammatory, and intolerant of any worldview that doesn’t accord with your belief in God.

And it certainly seems to lack humanity to me. But then, perhaps I lack the necessary qualifications to speak as a human at all.

What’s the harm? Well, homeopathy could (indirectly) kill you.

The letters Penelope Dingle sent to Francine Scrayen make for very sad reading. Scrayen was “treating” Dingle’s cancer, diagnosed in February 2003. Dingle’s sister is now suing Scrayen, and it’s easy to understand her motivations for this on reading not only the letters, but also the coroners report following Dingle’s death :

In my view the deceased’s rectal cancer was present and causing bleeding and other symptoms from at least 31 October 2001. During the period 31 October 2001 until at least the end of November 2002, the deceased regularly described the symptoms of her rectal cancer to a homeopath, Francine Scrayen. It was not until November 2002 that Mrs Scrayen and the deceased discussed the possibility of reporting her rectal bleeding to a medical practitioner and it was not until 5 December 2002 that she first reported those problems to a doctor.

I accept that Mrs Scrayen believed that the deceased had suffered from haemorrhoids years earlier and the bleeding and pain was “an old symptom coming back”, but a competent health professional would have been alarmed by the developing symptoms and would have strongly advised that appropriate medical investigations be conducted without delay.

As I’ve said before, pseudoscience doesn’t only cause the (relatively trivial) harm of lightening the wallets of the gullible. When it’s taken seriously, it can not only result in these sorts of tragic stories, but also helps to contribute to a general climate of unreason, where people become less discerning about what to believe and why to believe it. In fact, an increasing concern is the ways in which this climate of unreason can be leveraged in favour of political and economic interests. Conspiracies are attractive to many folk, because we sometimes prefer grand narratives to the conclusions reached via the application of Occam’s Razor (on this topic, Rosenberg’s new book The Atheists Guide to Reality makes for good reading).

Alternative medicine that works is simply called “medicine”, as Dara o’Briain reminds us here:

The Dingle story is now a few years old, but it’s back in the public eye thanks to the recent publication of the coroners report and Dan Buzzard’s highlighting of that report’s contents. And now, Scrayen has sent Buzzard a cease and desist letter, demanding that he retract his allegations regarding her complicity in Dingle’s suffering and her potentially avoidable death. You can read Buzzard’s two posts on Scrayen via that last link, and it’s difficult to see how Scrayen thinks he’s done anything wrong – except, of course, for exposing her as a dangerous quack.

It is ultimately the consumer’s fault if she makes choices which endanger her own life. The issue here, though, is that while Dingle (and most of us) live(d) in a society which protects us from all sorts of misrepresentation and fraud, that protection is absent in the case of things like homeopathy. The politically-correct, relativistic way in which opinions and evidence are treated make us afraid to tell people that what they believe is sometimes nonsense, and sometimes dangerous nonsense.

Medical aid schemes should of course not reimburse for homeopathic treatments. Pharmacies, who are associated with treatment and good health, should ideally not sell them, no matter how profitable exploiting the gullible can be. Pharmacies are of course free to sell anything legal, though – my point is more that it’s unfortunate that they often don’t take any proactive role in reminding consumers that what they’re buying is pure placebo, and shouldn’t take the place of medicine.

Most important, perhaps, is that in an age of manic labelling of everything consumable, down to the most minuscule ingredient, it’s an almost criminal neglect that legislation doesn’t exist to force producers of homeopathic remedies to spell out the simple fact that a glass of water will “treat” your ailment just as effectively as a homeopathic “remedy” will.

Also see Angela Meadon’s post on this, reminding Scrayen that she can’t bully Buzzard into silence, and that the Streisand effect might well result in her attempts to do so having the opposite effect to what she hopes.