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.

To ask for evidence is not (necessarily) scientism

As submitted to The Daily Maverick

Respect is due to people, rather than to ideas. While it may be politically incorrect to say so, there is no contradiction between saying that someone has a misguided, uninformed or laughable point of view, and at the same time recognising that person’s worth or dignity in general. But our sensitivity to being challenged, and to having the intrinsic merit of our ideas questioned, often leads us to conflate these two different sorts of respect.

Respecting a person is partly a matter of not causing them unnecessary trauma through ridicule or contempt. It also requires not prejudging their arguments or points of view, but rather judging those arguments on their merits. But if it is established that those arguments lack merit (when compared with competing arguments on the same topic), there is no wrong in pointing this out. It is perhaps even a duty to point it out, assuming that we care for having probably true, rather than probably false, beliefs about the world.

Continue reading “To ask for evidence is not (necessarily) scientism”

On Hitchens and the defense of reason

As submitted to The Daily Maverick.

On hearing that Christopher Hitchens had been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, one response from a self-proclaimed man of god was the following post on Twitter: “God 1, Hitchens 0”. The motivation for such a callous response to a usually fatal disease (fewer than 5% of sufferers are alive after 5 years) is easy enough to trace: Hitchens, along with Dennett, Dawkins and Sam Harris, is one of the “4 Horsemen” of a groundswell of resistance to the unreason that is exemplified by religious faith, and he is thus a direct threat to the mysterious legitimacy that faith-based claims enjoy.

What our divine scorekeeper does not (of course) dwell on is the fact that according to his beliefs, all deaths are attributable to god, and that he could therefore just as well add another notch to this metaphysical bedpost if his mother, for example, were to die an equally unpleasant death. God’s victory is inevitable, as either she takes a believer “home”, or she smites down an unbeliever. Either way, a civilised response to human trauma is sympathy, rather than gloating.

Continue reading “On Hitchens and the defense of reason”

Mandela’s autopsy

As submitted to The Daily Maverick.

Yiull Damaso’s painting of an imagined autopsy of Nelson Mandela has provoked outrage similar to that generated by Zapiro’s recent Mohammed cartoon. The outrage is similar in its severity, and unfortunately also similar in its knee-jerk thoughtlessness. Most troubling, the similarities extend to having to hear yet another argument in favour of the censoring of free expression on the grounds of cultural or religious sensibilities.

The painting, adapted from Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp”, shows a deceased Mandela being autopsied by Nkosi Johnson, while FW de Klerk, Helen Zille, Desmond Tutu and others look on. It is, of course, the portrayal of Mandela as deceased that is causing most of the consternation, on the grounds that this portrayal consists, variously, of witchcraft, disrespect, a violation of dignity, and a “insult and an affront to values of our society” – at least according to ANC spokesperson Jackson Mthembu.

As with the Zapiro cartoon, we can and certainly should ask whether images like these are in unacceptably bad taste. If they are, we should say so, and hope that we can persuade artists of the legitimacy of our point of view. Having fewer offensive artworks in our purview would no doubt make for a more comfortable life. But one person – or one group, no matter how large – does not have the authority to define what counts as unacceptable and what doesn’t, except within their own cultural universe.

Continue reading “Mandela’s autopsy”

Pastor Michael returns

And he’s gone from being dishonest to being paranoid, delusional and threatening. Well, the “delusional” part is a given, I suppose, given the nonsense we know he believes in. Despite the fact that the mothership has tried to beam him out of the conflict (see Taryn Hodgson’s apology for the Christian mis-representation of the atheists here), he still insists that it’s the UCT Atheist and Agnostic Society who had intentions that “were not right to [him] at all”, and that the AAS is now “threatening him”.

His grievances are two-fold: first, he’s upset that we (myself on this site, and the AAS on their forum) published his correspondence with us. As I’ve explained previously, we were forced to do so because the reasons for myself and Tauriq withdrawing from the debate were being mis-characterised by Michael, as well as by websites run by Taryn Hodgson and Paintball Hammond. Despite the apology received, the mis-representations have not been removed from some[ref]The ACA website was edited in February to more accurately reflect the events[/ref] websites, so this reason for publishing the correspondence stands, and leads me to publish extracts from the most recent correspondence here also.

Continue reading “Pastor Michael returns”

Emancipate yourself from mental snobbery

For many years, I have been a coffee snob. But my entitlement to this snobbery is somewhat questionable, seeing as it stems from a few years spent as a barrista, back in the early 90’s when nobody knew what a barrista was. We did roast our own coffee, though, so were at least marginally authentic. And I could make funky layered drinks, after all. Given that most SA restaurants still today serve a cup worse than the one you can make at home, I certainly felt entitled to some snobbery at the time.

And “the time” lasted for a good 15 years, long after I had desisted from making layered lattes, and had instead begun digging myself  into theoretical holes so deep you needed a heidegger[ref]borrowed from the (absolutely tremendous) novel 36 Arguments for the existence of God: A work of fiction, by Rebecca Goldstein (partner to Steven Pinker)[/ref] to get out of them. But the time is now over, as I have gone and done one of the things that make real coffee snobs roll their eyes, and sometimes snort in disgust.

Continue reading “Emancipate yourself from mental snobbery”

The hand of god, revisited.

Originally published in the Daily Maverick.

Uruguay’s Luis Suarez cheated in order for his team to beat Ghana in the Wold Cup quarter final. Of this there can be no doubt, for Suarez admitted as much in boasting that his was the new “hand of God”. There can also be no doubt that the referee did the right thing, according to the rules of the game. We can however doubt the rules themselves.

But there are some red herrings in the responses I’ve encountered to Suarez’s actions. First, it’s not obvious that he should be cast as a villain in this case. If we were being honest, many of us might admit that we would prefer that members of our own team sacrificed themselves in this way in similar situations. The rules of the game, as they currently stand, reward such sacrifices. If Siphiwe Tshabalala could have won South Africa the game against Uruguay by doing a Suarez, we might admire his honesty, yet perhaps regret it in equal measure.

Continue reading “The hand of god, revisited.”

Africa is not a country: football and nationhood

As submitted to The Daily Maverick.

In the minutes before Ghana took on the USA in the first round of 16 game, a friend and I were discussing where our support lay. She wanted Ghana to win, and I expressed a preference for a USA victory. I wanted the American team to win on grounds of their footballing culture, in that the approach the USA has taken to professional football of late seemed a better example of what the South African team and football administrators should aspire to.

I can understand why South Africans, and Africans in general, like the idea of one of “our” teams doing well. But it doesn’t quite make sense for me, as a football fan, to support teams simply because they represent an African nation, because there is much about Africa that is difficult to support. From female genital mutilation in Egypt and homophobia in Malawi, to assorted human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, there are things about this continent that clearly expose a fundamental divide between Africa as a collective concept, and the sort of world I’d prefer to live in.

As an example of African football, Ghana is of course also a complicated example, given that only one of their squad of 23 actually plays football in Ghana. When the vast majority of the national team lives and works outside of the nation reflected on the covers of their passports, to what extent does it still make sense to think of them as representatives of Africa?

Continue reading “Africa is not a country: football and nationhood”

Mandela’s Robben Island getaway (and other weirdness)

It isn’t often that I find myself agreeing with the folk at African Christian Action. Perhaps this is because I don’t do enough drugs, or because I like things to make sense – I don’t know. But when I recently came across their review of Invictus, I thought that we could finally agree on something, seeing as their headline of “Invictus Idolatry” made it clear they didn’t like the movie. Don’t be confused by the title tag of the African Christian Action review, which might cause your browser to tell you that the article is titled “PROLIFE: Aborsie – Die Feite”. The article is instead an account of why Invictus is evil. And this is indeed true, as I’ve mentioned before.

But while I thought it was a crap movie on the basis of being a mawkish, poorly scripted, glacially-paced and poorly acted account of a largely imagined period of South African history, the African Christian Action (ACA) reviewer didn’t like it because Mandela was a “terrorist” who didn’t really even have such a hard life while imprisoned.

Continue reading “Mandela’s Robben Island getaway (and other weirdness)”

Is Google making us stupid?

As submitted to The Daily Maverick.

It is not the Internet, or Google, that is making is stupid – it’s our brains. We’ve never been as smart as we’d like to think we are, and the current fashion of looking for reasons why we feel less clever than before partly amounts to a hope to find excuses – someone to blame – for our attention deficits.

It is of course true that there is more information available to us than ever before, and the amount of available information grows exponentially every day. But there has always been more information available than we can comfortably pay attention to, at least since Gutenberg made printed material available to the masses.

What changed are our cultural dispositions in terms of agency and blame – we used to understand that mastering a field took time and effort, and that work was required to filter signal from noise. Now, we blame the noise, even as we no longer invest the time and effort required for mastery of a field.

Continue reading “Is Google making us stupid?”

The vuvuzela discriminates against smokers

More on the vuvuzela, as submitted to The Daily Maverick.

Any claim made repeatedly does not become increasingly true in proportion to the number of repetitions. Yet, according to much of what you read on websites where the vuvuzela is discussed, it is now taken for granted that this musical instrument is “part of our culture”. Furthermore, one gets the impression that many believe it to be a long-standing part of our culture, such that its existence and continued use is beyond criticism. Attempts to raise questions about its cultural status – or more prosaically, about its value – are frequently deflected by accusations of “lacking gees” (on the civilised end of the debate), and of simple racism at the less civilised end.

Something being part of any given culture is, however, not a reason to regard that thing as being good. Instead, we should remember that things become part of cultures because people value them – whether we’d prefer they did so or not. Our culture has come to value democracy, because we regard democracy as having properties that are valuable to us. We don’t simply value democracy because we see it defended in the media every day (or at least, we shouldn’t). To value something simply through habit or programming is a prejudice, which puts it on the same epistemic level as sexism or racism.

Continue reading “The vuvuzela discriminates against smokers”