Thank you to everyone who contributed to these blogs and made them a place of lively debate.
If you'd like to continue to explore ideas important to how humanity lives now and will live in the future please pay a visit to the BBC's Ethics and freethought messageboard.
You can still listen to and comment on the debates broadcast from the Nov 2006 festival weekend.
The BBC's Free Thinking Festival will return later in 2007. Hope to see you again then!
Best wishes,
Southendian - Radio 3 Host
The idea behind the whole project was, I guess, to thow open the bedroom windows and let a bit of fresh air into the speech output of Radio 3, though some observers may also have been reminded of George Orwell’s famous description of the BBC as ‘halfway between a boarding school and a lunatic asylum’ (actually he said ‘girl’s school’ but never mind).
So how did the experiment go?
The other discussions (to judge by the small sample I attended) were more problematic. They took a standard radio format, with four would-be experts guided by a presenter-chair who might or might not understand the subject under discussion. The difference was that they had a live audience in front of them, and that participants had been primed with the chosen buzzwords of the festival.
In the first place, everyone was asked to focus on ‘the future’. I must admit that I did not find that very helpful: ‘the future’, it seems to me, is not so much a well-formed topic as a soiled old rag-bag. You can hardly discuss anything at all, however ancient, without touching implicitly on things that have not yet come to pass, and you cannot explore what has still not happened except on the basis of what already has. So what could a discussion of 'the future' be about? My advice for the future: make the future history.
And as for the invitation to expatiate on what we’ll all be up to in the decades to come, may I please be excused? Most of us find it hard enough to know what we’ll be doing next week, and beyond that, the only certainty is that things are unpredictable.And the record of high-altitude punditry is not very encouraging. The BBC was already fussing with it sixty years ago, and in 1945 the historian A.J.P. Taylor offered his ha'porth on the Home Service: ‘Nobody in Europe believes in the American way of life, that is, in private enterprise’, he said: ‘or rather, those who believe in it are the defeated party, which seems to have no more future than the Jacobites in England after 1688.’ So much for private enterprise. The BBC is planning another Festival in Liverpool next year, but let’s hope they’ll give the future a rest.
Secondly, everyone was asked to be ‘provocative’. The word is as familiar as an old sock, but still it gets on my nerves. It’s not that hard to be provocative, after all: it means not caring too much about subtlety, precision, fairness or finesse, and being as boorish, laddish and egocentric as you like. Now if they’d asked for courage that might have been rather different.
Third, there was the banner under which the whole festival took place, namely ‘freethinkng’. The BBC seems to have thought that everyone would know what the word meant, and what’s more that we’d all agree that it is something we should aspire too. They had perhaps forgotten about T.S. Eliot’s notorious claim that ‘freethinking’ was a threat to British culture (actually he said ‘freethinking jews’, but never mind). As it happens, the ambiguities and paradoxes of freethinking have been the constant theme of this blog, from my first post at the end of July to this, which is my twenty-second and my last. Through my own 15000 words, and nearly 300 comments, we have seen how the concept of freethinking can sometimes refer to something rare and fine and beautiful; but we have also seen that it can mean nothing but unconscious subjection to commonplace, prejudice and cliché. There are none so servile, it seems, as those who are sure they are free.
I must admit I had was not sure what to expect when I started this blog. I talked to some blogocrats who advised me to observe the established conventions of the genre: very short posts, composed at high speed; unpredictable leaps from one topic to another; linking up with like-minded bloggers, funky photos, and revelations about peculiar private habits &c &c &c. I knew that would not come easily to me: I write in order to think, and thinking takes time, and anyway I don’t want to be part of any gang, even a cyber-gang. I was not a complete novice on the internet, and I knew that it can be (amongst other things) a hotbed for self-enclosed egotisms, where people one might politely call eccentrics advertise sets of opinions that have no unifying thread except the insistent strumming of ‘I, I, I’. (Virginia Woolf once said that ‘I, I, I’ was the characteristic refrain of men’s writing, and male behaviour in general: I think she had a good point, and I have been struck by the preponderance of men – or at least masculine avatars – in cyberspace, and indeed in comments on this blog. Is the blogosphere is masculine enclave, I wonder: is blogging especially for boys?) But does it have to be like that?
I am glad to say that my experience of blogging has not been as bad as I feared. I'm afraid I have failed to live up to the conventions of blogging; or, to put it differently, I seem to have defied the supposed laws of blogospheric gravity. Over the months I have groped my way from one entry to the next, following the argument wherever it took me, guided by some of the excellent comments I received, for which I am really grateful. The result has been, I think, not so much a series of disconnected opinions as a continuous inquiry, in which I at least have become a bit clearer than I was about the connections between freedom, thought and progress. Maybe you have too: in any case, if you have been, thank you for being patient. For the time being, the space remains open for comments (I may chip in with one or two of my own), but as far as posts are concerned, this one has been my last.
]]>The basic problem is this: most of us accept that on the whole the world is a better place now than it was a few decades ago or a few centuries ago, and yet when we consider day to day events, we are always inclined to think that more bad things are happening than good. So a form of prejudice seems to be at work here – another enemy of genuine freethinking: a prejudice in favour of bad news. How can we account for this prejudice?
I see what William Cope means when he says that people in power are always giving us false good news, and I understand the implication that we should welcome bad news because it restores the balance. But I do not quite agree: it seems to me that there are several forces at work – vested interests if you like – that tend to generate a prejudice in favour of bad news. Three in fact.
But it is not just those holding or seeking power who like bad news; so too do people in the news business. Trouble and strife (as has been said in several earlier posts and comments on this blog) are more saleable than peace and progress, and nothing will sell like stories that embarrass the rich and powerful. Second conclusion: the media that bring us the news have a bias towards bad news too.
And what about us, as consumers of news? Do we want to hear how well things are going? William Cope is disgruntled with Gordon Brown for talking up the British economy, but what exactly is the problem? Of course there is an element of prejudice here: a Finance minister would be falling down on his job if he said the economy was in poor shape, rather like an Archbishop speaking disobligingly about God. But that's not the whole story. Politics is (as I pointed out in my last post) an art of comparison, and the fact is that Brown does his boostering not only by telling us good news, but also by reminding us of bad news (about rising oil prices for example, or the cost of switching to renewables, or about the predicament of other economies, or of Britain in earlier decades).
Which brings me back to what I have been saying about moral exhibitionism, or ‘prejudices of self-display’. The great Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard had it about right when he said that the reason why journalists are so good at selling us their gloomy ‘opinions’ is that in our heart of hearts we want the news to be bad. They know, as Kierkegaard put it, that there is nothing we like better than the opportunity
to swoon before what is vile – and then to imagine that we are superior
So there’s a third conclusion: our moral vanity gives us a vested interest in disasters: perhaps that’s the most fundamental reason why bad news pleases.
Matt has a good point (if I follow him) when he suggests that it might be the other way round. Conservatives think that we should be content with the way things are (‘don’t knock it: it’s all we’ve got and it could be an awful lot worse’), whereas progressives think the current state of affairs is intolerable (‘things can only get better’). So who is the pessimist at this table?
What was missing from my earlier discussion was any reference to the element of comparison. Those with a taste for cliché may remind us that politics is the art of the possible, but we need to remember that it is also an art of comparison. Politics, you might say, is always comparative politics: to think politically is to put two different situations (two real, two imagined, or one of each) onto the scales of political justice: Athens or Sparta, Paris or Geneva, Canterbury or Rome, Socialism or Barbarism, Washington or Moscow.
And in the politics of the last two centuries (that is to say, since the invention of the concepts of ‘left’ and ‘right’) political comparisons have always involved a reference to time: they have been comparisons, essentially, of the present with the past and of the present with the future.
The classic right-wing conservative can then be defined as someone who will always welcome good news about the past because it heightens foreboding at any changes that may lie in the future. And the classic leftist progressive will welcome bad news about the ‘old immoral world’ (as Robert Owen called it), because it dramatises the contrast with the good news to come.
Let us stay with a classical leftist for a while.
]]> In 1843, the twenty five year old Karl Marx moved to Paris with his beautiful new wife. They loved each other to distraction, they had a tiny baby, and they lived in an atmosphere of frenetic excitement, though in a state of poverty and domestic chaos that was not entirely to Mrs Marx’s taste.Karl looked around him and he saw the past:
Bestial barbarisation … man returns to living in a cave, except that it is now contaminated with the breath of civilization … Filth, this stagnation and putrefaction of man, literally the ‘sewage of civilisation’, comes to be the element of life for him … the worker has become a neglected child….
Then he looked again – looked specifically at the groups of workers who were forming clubs where they discussed a new-fangled French concept called ‘socialisme’ – and he saw the future:
Association, society and conversation … are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-worn bodies.
It is a perfect piece of classical leftist rhetoric (though it appears in notesbooks that were not published till fifty years after Marx's death): piling on the bad news about the past that still haunts the present, and talking up the good news about the new life that is beginning to stir within it.
Was Marx allowing his observations to be distorted by his predilections? Was he prejudiced? No doubt he was. And indeed, though he could not have known it, one person had already rumbled this rhetoric twenty years before Karl Marx went to Paris.
Referring to the religiously inspired radicals of the eighteenth century, sick with their hatred of ancient tyranny and drunk with their love for the coming epoch of freedom, William Hazlitt had written that they
have a pleasure in believing that every thing is wrong – in order that they may have to set it right
An elementary form of self-display I'd have thought. Or is it a kind of political Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy: conjuring up symptoms that show that the world is in danger, so that you can cast yourself in the role of saviour?
]]>But for the time being let’s stick to pessimism as a theoretical attitude. It is, I think you would agree, pretty prevalent in our times. In politics in particular, people tend to be more receptive to bad news than good. In fact if you took what people say seriously, you would have to conclude that they think everything in society has been going from bad to worse for at least a century, if not since history began.
But we know it’s not true. In Britain in the last century, for instance, there has been a vast expansion of literacy, and of intellectual attainment in general, and mutual tolerance, and stunning improvements in health and longevity; but who wants to talk about that when they could spin a story about a failing school, sectarian violence, or deaths from hospital-acquired infections?
But why are we so unreceptive to good news?
]]> One reason for the bias in favour of bad news lies, no doubt, in the logic of the media-business, where news is simply a commodity on the market subject to laws of supply and demand. And the demand for a story depends not so much on the amount of truth it contains or the amount of research that went into it, as on the amount of embarrassment it would cause certain people, especially if they are pompous and powerful. (This kind of market does not work so well on a small scale: local newspapers contain much less bad news than national ones, and parish newsletters virtually none.)But isn’t there another reason for our love of bad news? Something to do with us, the readers, rather than them, the journalists and media moguls? Something to do with vanity, or with what we’ve been calling the prejudices of self-display? (Many thanks, by the way, for some very interesting comments on Michael Tippett’s valiant pro-Nazi remark.) If we are peculiarly receptive to bad news, and uninterested in good news, is it really because we think that hopes are always more likely to be disappointed than fulfilled? Or is it merely because of how we want to appear, to ourselves and to others: that we don’t want to seem naïve, or easily satisfied, or indeed optimistic?
Call me an optimist if you like, but I suspect that much of our pessimism is mere posturing.
I suspect we do, and will come back to the point in a later post. But here’s a preliminary concern:
I’ve never understood what people think they’re doing when they describe themselves as ‘optimists’ or ‘pessimists’. Assuming that they’re not engaged in a high metaphysical argument about Leibniz’s Theodicy, all they seem to be saying is that they have a personal disposition to look on the bright or the dark side of things. In which case they are just confessing to a bias and we ought to take heed and avoid relying on their judgments. It’s like someone who says ‘I always put too much vermouth in the martini’ or ‘I always overcook the vegetables’: the only sensible response is not to trust them when they offer to mix you a drink or cook you a meal.
If you say, ‘I’m an optimist, so I think the problem of climate change is going to solve itself’ then surely you’re undermining your persuasiveness: the fact that you have a sunny personality is not going to help prevent global warming. And equally, if you say ‘I’m a pessimist, I think we’re all going to fry’, you’re making a bonfire of your credibility once again: you’re implying that you have chosen your analysis not on the basis of evidence or arguments, but simply because you’re an old grump – which could be true, but is hardly relevant.
But that’s not the only paradox about optimism and pessimism.
]]> It’s always struck me that Pangloss, the wacky optimist in Voltaire’s Candide, contains more depths than he’s usually given credit for. (Perhaps indeed he’s more complex than Voltaire himself realised.) It’s usually taken to be ridiculous that he sticks to his catchphrase – ‘everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ – while the world collapses around him. Is he mad, we wonder? Can’t he see how bad things really are? Is he wearing rose-tinted spectacles? Is he perhaps wrapped up in a rose-scented whole-body condom?Wait a minute though. The fact that things are going badly does not mean that they could have gone better. Stuff happens, as they say; perhaps stuff is bound to happen. And when Pangloss says that in spite of it all, it’s the best of all possible worlds, he need not be deluding himself with a kind of philosophical prozac; he might be making the sober assessment that, terrible as things are, they really could not be better. In which case his optimism is as pessimistic as could be: and who needs pessimism, if this is where optimism leads?
]]>The prejudices of self-display are, I suggested, amongst the vices that dance attendance on progressive politics, rather as the prejudices of self-interest are typically found amongst the vices of conservative politics.
But we need to push the analysis a little further.
I am still bothered (to put it mildly) by those would-be progressives who, if I am right, are guilty of the prejudices of self display – who think they get round the need for serious political analysis by shouting about their commitment to peace, love and human rights. (Peace in Darfur, they will say, ignoring the fact that there may be no way of preventing genocide except by means of war.)
There is a marvellous fictional depiction of this problem in Albert Camus’s 1956 novel The Fall (La Chute), whose hero gives up being a brilliant human rights defence lawyer because he is sickened by the smugness of his own good conscience.
And here is a real life example, from the great musician Michael Tippett (1905-98). Tippett was a British national treasure, decorated as Commander of the British Empire, Companion of Honour, and of the Order of Merit. But he was also a high-principled radical: president of the Peace Pledge Union, and a man of the left, the conscience of CND. But come a little closer: here is what he wrote to a friend in 1936:
My one hope is that the British Empire will go under and Hitler win…. I hate the empire as I hate nothing else. It is the key pin of world Capitalism and it is our job to bring it to the ground.
My question is not, was Tippett right to prefer the Third Reich to the British Empire? What I wonder is, what can have led him to this judgement? Not a concerted study of world politics, surely, or an assessment of the best route to socialism. Was he perhaps actuated by the prejudice of self-regard?
The most plausible answer, I think, is prejudice. which is why there has been so much traffic about prejudice on this blog recently.
But what is prejudice exactly? In the coming days and weeks I want to try to clarify and define it, and I would appreciate your help: facts and anecdotes about prejudices, your own and other peoples, and also ideas about the different classes they fall into, and the different kinds of threat they pose.
Here's my starter.
]]> I suppose we all know that prejudice is a Bad Thing, and I guess we all know why. Prejudice is a kind of bias that deforms our capacity for good judgement. By definition, we are never really aware of our prejudices: we always like to imagine that we are freethinkers – that we consider every issue on its merits, even ‘objectively’, and that we reason about it with a fair and open mind; but to the extent that we harbour prejudices, we will in fact be enslaved by forces of which we know nothing, and whose very existence we may want to deny.If I asked you to come up with a dozen examples of prejudices – other people’s prejudices, let’s say – I bet that nearly all of them would involve a kind of blind selfishness combined with compulsive hostility to those who are regarded as strangers or outsiders (racism or sexism for example). These are what I would call prejudices of self-interest: a combination of prejudice in favour of yourself and those you identify with, and prejudice against anything that you see as a threat or a challenge: Germans, for instance, or logic, or art students, or philosophers, or atheists.
Most people would agree that there is something inherently hateful about that kind of prejudice; they would probably denounce it as reactionary, even fascistic; and they would count themselves lucky to live in a liberal society (like ours perhaps) where mainstream politicians, on the whole, seek to expose, denounce and defuse it, or even to eliminate it through leadership and legislation.
But there is another kind of prejudice that may be just as pernicious, though as far as I can see no one pays it much heed: not the prejudice of self-interest but the prejudice of self-display (or perhaps vanity would be a better word, or self-love, or narcissism or amour-propre).
The prejudice of self-display is what happens when your judgments are deformed not so much by a desire to win measurable benefits for yourself and your kin, perhaps at the expense of others, but by a desire to make yourself and your kin seem superior to other people. You may think that you are simply seeking the most trenchant and truthful analysis of a problem, when in fact all you’re doing is adopting opinions that you think will make you look good to others and feel good to yourself.
The prejudices of self-display seem to come in several different varieties: there is moral self-display (‘look at me, so pure and incorruptible!’); intellectual self-display (‘look at me, so acute and ungullible!’); political self-display (‘look at me, so peace-loving and non-violent!’); academic self-display (‘look at me, so well-versed in the latest research’); personal self-display (‘look at me, standing firm and unflinching against the tides of fashion or convention’). And no doubt lots of others.
It seems to me that if the prejudice of self-interest is the peculiar vice of conservative-leaning democrats, then the prejudice of self-love is the peculiar vice of their progressive-leaning counterparts. Conservatives say: vote for me if you want to prosper more than others; progressives say: vote for me if you want to feel more virtuous than others. To me at least, it is not clear which of these approaches is more likely to make the world a better place.
I am trying to collect examples of the prejudices of self-display, and I must say the internet seems to be a pretty fertile seedbed for them. Even, if I may say so, the Freethinking blogs. Comments, examples and anecdotes please.
]]>In the first place, the indispensability of logic. As I said the other day in what I thought a dry and boring, but necessary, post on ‘Logic, or how to think’, we should always try to work out the logical entailments of what we affirm or deny. What is logic after all? It is simply what happens when thinking becomes self-conscious, just as arithmetic is what happens when counting becomes self-conscious.
If people’s sums don’t add up, we tell them to check them and try harder, and won’t be very impressed if they retort that they are freethinkers, and as far as they’re concerned the world itself is unarithmetical. And we should be just as impatient with our home-grown illogicians, who claim that the world itself is illogical, and even imagine that they are speaking in the noble name of ‘freethinking’ as they do so. The world is complex and full of surprises, no doubt: but that only goes to show that we need to keep checking our logical compass.
Secondly, the problem of prejudice. When I said we should try to free ourselves from prejudice, I did not mean that we could ever succeed, still less that we could ever know that we have succeeded. But that need not stop us being on our guard against the effects of our own prejudices – excavating our unconscious reasons for thinking as we do, and correcting intellectual distortions due to our own laziness, vanity, and self-regard. That, I suspect, is the best route to the only kind of freethinking worth having. (I plan to come back to the problem of intellectual narcissism in a later post.)
And two of my intellectual heroes had some fine things to say on this point.
]]> The great philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, who died four years ago at the age of 102, liked to remind his students that thinking never comes from nowhere: there is no zero-point of the mind, no intellectual garden of Eden. Those who fancy that they have escaped from prejudice (typically, in Gadamer’s opinion, the apostles of Western scientific enlightenment) are actually slaves, he thought, to the oldest prejudice of all: the prejudice against prejudice.Gadamer was one of the most generous of men, and would have been delighted to find his doctrine prefigured in the history of freethinking itself, particularly in the writings of the essayist William Hazlitt, who was himself brought up as a radical rationalist: in every sense a child of eighteenth-century enlightenment values.
This is what Hazlitt wrote in an essay dating from 1815
There is … no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice. For this last implies not only the practical conviction that it is right, but the theoretical assumption that it cannot be wrong…. Nor do we know of any class of disputants more disposed to take their opinions for granted, than those who call themselves Freethinkers….’
‘Those who call themselves Freethinkers’: yes indeed, we should never trust people who brag about their own intellectual virtues, or who take themselves to be infallible and beyond criticism. Such sentiments may count as ‘freethinking’ of a kind, but, as Hazlitt went on to say, they ‘are necessarily adverse to any great enlargement of mind, or original freedom of thought.’
]]>And it seems to me that’s what’s now happening on Freethinkinguk.
I am keen to offer you a few more titbits about the history of freethinking, as well as further comments on democracy, prejudice, the idiocy of the internet, free speech, and the ways in which religious ideas continue to influence people who imagine they have got beyond them. These themes, and several others too (the history of the future, the politics of resentment) are jostling in my in-tray. And I must admit I'm not sure I’ll be able to fit them all in before the plug is pulled on the Freethinking blogs, which is due to happen in about six weeks. In any case they will all have to wait a little longer, while I attend to some themes that have germinated here on freethinkinguk in the past few days
There have been some exceptionally interesting comments on my last two posts (‘Humble Opinions’ and ‘A short history of freethinking’), and I want tease out one particular strand in them, which I fear might otherwise gets lost. It's about the nature of logic.
]]> Nadim offered a terrific response to ‘Humble Opinions’. Amongst many other good points, he observed that people tend to see their opinions as a kind of private property. This means that they experience criticism as if it were an assault or a mugging, or at any rate a violation of their rights.What’s wrong with this proprietorial attitude toward thinking? Fundamentally, that it presupposes that thoughts exist on their own. Whereas in fact thoughts operate in teams or networks: and each thought is the thought that it is because it is different from millions of others, and incompatible with many of them. You cannot affirm one thing without committing yourself, willy nilly, to lots of others, many of which you will not even be aware of. Working out these hidden implications is a large part of the task of thinking.
A willingness to have your thoughts exposed to criticism is therefore more than a matter of modesty and good manners: it is a matter of logic.
Now some commenters (eg Number 11 and Mark Astill) seem to think that logic is a tiresome external constraint, a bit like the rules of etiquette. They appear to believe that flouting the rules of logic is no more reprehensible than eating your pudding with a soup spoon.
But that is a complete misunderstanding. Logic, as they say in the business, comprises constitutive rules, rather than mere regulative ones. It is not a constraint on what you can meaningfully say, so much as a condition of saying anything meaningful at all. You cannot say anything about the world without denying something else, and there is not much point in saying anything if you cannot imagine how anyone could disagree with it. Take away the rules of logic and you will be left with no meaningful statements at all, only babble.
]]>But first I need to discharge an old promise by explaining a little of the history ‘freethinking’, and the part Bishop Berkeley played in its downfall. If I’m right, the story points to a paradox in the idea of freethinking – a paradox that has not lost its capacity to trip people up.
]]> The words ‘free-thinking’ and ‘free-thinker’ entered the English language at the end of the seventeenth century, as sneering labels for outlandish atheists. But they were soon adopted as a badge of pride by thinkers we would now call ‘deists’ – thinkers who rejected the specific doctrines of Christianity, but retained a generalised belief in a deity.The conceit of the self-styled ‘free-thinkers’ was effectively exploded in 1732, when the Irish philosopher and Anglican clergyman George Berkeley published a satire on them called Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher.
The butt of Berkeley’s humour is an aging 'man of fashion called Alciphron, one of those who ‘fancy themselves Free-thinkers’, and like proclaiming their devotion to ‘Truth’ and ‘Liberty’.
‘Take my word for it,’ says Alciphron: a human being is no more than ‘a piece of Clockwork or Machine’, and – ‘take my word for it’ – ‘conscience is a whim and morality a prejudice.’ His friend (we must take his word for it) even has a conclusive disproof of the existence of God, though he cannot now quite remember how it goes.
‘Take my word for it’, says Alciphron: but as his words descend into bluster, he clings to his special privilege as a ‘Free-thinker’:
Above all the Sects upon earth it is the peculiar privilege of ours, not to be tied down by any Principles. While other Philosophers profess a servile adherence to certain Tenets, ours assert a noble freedom, differing not only one from another, but very often the same Man from himself. Which method of proceeding, beside other advantages, hath this annexed to it, that we are of all Men the hardest to confute.
‘Take my word for it’, says Alciphron: ridicule is the most potent weapon of free-thinking. But it turns out that the last laugh is on him. His freethinking has nothing of the noble freedom of the courageous warrior for truth, but only the base freedom of the coward and the self-infatuated fool.
So far so Berkeley.
His story suggests that freethinking can mean two very different things. First there is the effort to free ourselves from the constraints of cliché, prejudice, vanity and convention: a fine thing, but not so easy. And secondly, there is the refusal to respect the constraints of logic, rationality, and evidence, which is considerably easier. The second kind of freethinking involves freedom of a kind, but it has nothing in common with thinking.
]]>Of course the word ‘freedom’ is only a word, and if you like you can stretch it to cover people who are simply following their whims or wafting in the winds of fashion. But in that case freedom ceases to be something worth aspiring to or fighting for: it means being the puppet of your passions and your past rather than the controller of your present and your future.
If freedom is to be really desirable, then it must have a relation to something beyond what you happen to want – a relation, as I said, to something like reason, responsibility, even truth.
Reading the comments coming into this blog over the past few days, I notice several new versions of the old freethinking chestnut – the idea that criticising someone’s ideas, or perhaps refuting them, may mean infringing their right to their own opinions.
In addition I am glad to find some real-world discussion about which regimes are better than others from the point of view of freedom.
I shall quickly take up both these points (my hobbyhorse about the history of freethinking will have to remain in its stable for the time being). First I shall refer you once again to the case of the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, and secondly I shall try to draw your attention to the difference between thinking and having opinions.
]]> (a) If you have not already done so, please check out the case of Ramin Jehanbegloo. He is the Iranian philosopher who was imprisoned for his hospitality towards western, secular ideas (towards freethinking in fact). He has now been released after apparently repenting what he had done. Assuming that this is a genuine change of mind (there is no direct way of knowing – maybe Ramin himself does not know), what does it tell us about freethinking? (Note: this is not an easy question.)(b) It is a cliché of modern political culture – especially in the United States, for reasons I have touched on before – that everyone has, or should have, a right to their own opinions. I’m afraid I don’t find this proposition as uplifting as some of you do: It's not that I'm against rights; but I do not care much for opinions. To describe someone’s thoughts as opinions is to degrade them to the level of what, as we say, they ‘happen to think’, which implies that any opinion is as worthy as any other that may momentarily swim through your mind; but in that case all opinions are boring and – unless we are engaged in the dark arts of marketing – we should not waste our time on them.
The tricky but vital point is that holding opinions is not the same as thinking; indeed it may even be its absolute opposite. The thinker is not the same as the opinion-holder; in fact they ought to be bitter antagonists (though they may be fighting their fight within one and the same person). The more opinions you have, it seems to me, the smaller your chances of thinking. The worry about the internet is that by enabling opinions to proliferate like weeds, it may threaten the survival of thinking. For thinking, as many philosophers have said, takes time; and opinions are for those who cannot or will not take the time to think.
It is not surprising that the word most often associated with ‘opinion’ is ‘humble’: opinionising, as distinct from thinking, has a lot to be humble about.
And the same applies to freethinking too. It’s a word with a lot of history: in the eighteenth century, certain dissident protestants liked to refer to themselves as ‘free-thinkers’ – but they were roundly rebuked and ridiculed, and not without reason. They flattered themselves absurdly, according to their critics. (There was a very funny satire on them by Bishop Berkeley, for instance: he thought that their confidence that they represented freethinking only proved that they knew nothing either about freedom or about thinking.) But I had better rein in this historical hobbyhorse, or at least save it for a later outing. The essantial point remains: you do not prove that you are free by saying or thinking that you are.
At first sight, it may seem that freedom means doing what you like and following your every whim. But you do not need to think about it very long to realise that iit nvolves something more: something like reason, responsibility, even truth. Freedom is like love: it can be tough, even hard. And that is why – with all due respect to some commenters on this blog – respecting someone’s freedom may mean questioning what they’re saying, especially when they claim that they are acting in a spirit of freedom. And of course it works the other way too: if you want to be free, then you have to welcome it when other people criticise what you are saying. (Of course if they rage at you irrelevantly or unintelligently then that is a different matter; but even then, you have to wonder if they may not have a point after all.)
Do you mind if I don't link up to every comment that I'm replying to here? I'm grateful for them all and I'm trying to respond to them all, in my way.
But first we need to agree about the meaning of respect.
One commenter has got shirty with me because I pointed out that, as far as I could see, he had made a logical mistake. (He thought that being able to change your mind was the same as being unable not to change your mind – as if being able to fall asleep were the same as not being able to stay awake.) He took offence, and now he alleges that I have failed to practice the kind of respect that I preach.
]]> Respect involves taking people seriously, listening to what they have to say, and being willing to learn from it. But that in turn means holding them to certain standards of relevance and truth. Exempting your interlocutors from criticism means indulging them like pets or little children: not being respectful, but smothering them in patronising indifference.Is there room for respectful exchanges of ideas on the internet and in blogland? Or is this simply a place where cyber-Crusoes can post their arbitrary ideas in the confidence that no one will subject them to rigorous scrutiny? A bit of both I suppose; but I increasingly think that it’s more one than the other.
]]>In any case it’s nice to do a cyber-handshake with my fellow freethinker, and I hope I can cheer her up a bit, while leaving some of the commenters on Open Minds and Empty Heads climbing the lamp posts in Logic Lane.
The idea of democracy is as old as western philosophy, and on the whole very few people have had a good word to say for it. But I think I have a notion of democracy that may recommend itself to Esther Wilson and others.
I think I can dicriminate four different meanings of the term.
(b) Democracy as representation. Today, most people’s idea of democracy is anchored in the idea of representation: rulers are supposed to be ‘representatives’ of the ruled, and subject to recall or deselection at regular intervals. (The idea is often associated with Locke, and with the American revolutionaries who thought they spoke for him, but it is also part of the conceptual currency of socialism and communism.) The unique selling point of this idea is that it can create an emotional bond between the individual and the state (in other words it generates nationalism). Democracy as representation means that people take pride in their state if it does well (possibly expressing it in violence); equally, it means they get sulky and resentful (and probably violent) if it does not.
(c) Democracy as discovery. Here is a lovely idea, worked out by some of the French Revolutionaries. The rationale for jury trial is that if all the jurors, or a substantial majority of them, can agree on a verdict, then the verdict is almost certainly correct. (Freak misjudgements and biases should cancel each other out to leave the truth shining bright.) But – so the argument goes – the state is like a court, seeking to make decisions on contested issues. Therefore, what method of political decision making could possibly be more reliable than convening the biggest jury possible: namely the citizenry as a whole. Can a majority out of millions possibly be wrong? (The French revolutionaries thought not.)
(d) Democracy as respect. Here’s the sense of democracy that interests me most (it’s been behind all my posts so far): we need to recognise that in politics, as in philosophy and lots of other things, no one can ever be sure of being wholly in the right; and in any case you can always learn something by listening, attentively and respectfully, to what other people have to say, and, where you disagree, explaining why. A democracy of mutual respect: that’s what would put a smile on my grumpy face. I think some people are beginning to get the hang of it, in fact – so perhaps the future is brighter than we might think.
Eh Esther?