A previous article of mine mentioned a number of pitfalls into which many philosophers have fallen over the millennia. But what of those who have, more or less, overcome the philosopher’s curse(s)?  

The Modern Cosmopolitan

If pressed to name a philosopher who stands for sensible, resolutely non-mystical while deeply probing thinking, Karl Popper comes eminently to the fore. If, in addition, the search is for a thinker who confronts and makes advances in concrete issues, not just in philosophy but in society and in politics; and further, if someone is sought who made it a point to produce writing that is sturdily clear, Popper keeps, well, popping up.

He may well have been the most important philosopher of the twentieth and, so far, twenty-first centuries. And yet he was the very model of the philosopher who doesn’t assert what he or she imagines to be the definitive position on anything. His basic attitude is no more than that of proposing something that he considers workable, rather than laying down the law—a welcome attitude in philosophy (and, it goes without saying, further afield too). Popper’s writing is peppered with phrases like ‘where we believed that we were standing on firm and safe ground, all things are, in truth, insecure and in a state of flux’ and ‘most of our theories are false anyway.’

No, in the above statement on Popper’s importance, I did not overlook Wittgenstein, his old nemesis. Nobody made more significant contributions than Popper (and in more fields than Wittgenstein); the difference was that W. had charisma, which to P.—who didn’t—was a big irritant. In any case, their rivalry—which reached its high point in the famous episode with the poker—was a great pity, since they had so much in common. Not just that both were brilliant Viennese philosophers from wealthy, cultured Jewish families (although the Poppers were ‘merely’ rich, and the Wittgensteins were the Rockefellers, update that to the Bill Gateses, of Austria), but they were both enrolled in the same good cause, that of ridding philosophy of mumbo-jumbo and baseless dictums.

The above phrase ‘their rivalry’ perhaps requires some qualification: it was Popper who felt it was a rivalry, while Wittgenstein hardly considered him or anybody else to be his rival—virtually the only real intellectual respect he felt was for Bertrand Russell.

Popper’s texts are so clear that one may sometimes get the impression that one is reading a dumbed-down version of them, but that was just the way he wrote—and thought. One of his principal, and best-known, advances was to establish that what allows a statement to be considered scientific isn’t, as was commonly thought, that it be verified by experiment, but that it be possible, at least in principle, to try to disprove it experimentally (as opposed to metaphysical and mystical propositions, which can’t). Sometimes this ‘falsifiability’ principle has been likened to the earlier ‘fallibilism’ of Charles Sanders Peirce, although fallibilism seems closer not to this specific epistemological tool but to Popper’s overall position that our knowledge is fundamentally uncertain. In any event, Popper admitted that he wished he had known Peirce’s work earlier—and went so far as to write that Peirce was ‘I believe, one of the greatest philosophers of all time’.

He also had an answer to those who held that the falsifiability criterion was useless because any theory refuted by experiments could nevertheless be propped up by introducing additional hypotheses (‘It didn’t really fail, it’s just that there was an external factor that modified things’). He said: ‘As regards auxiliary hypotheses we propose to lay down the rule [notice the ‘propose’] that only those are acceptable whose introduction does not diminish the degree of falsifiability or testability of the system in question, but, on the contrary, increases it.’ His theory of knowledge was, essentially, that it advances by making conjectures, based on any source at all, and then submitting them to criticism (and after stating this theory he characteristically added, ‘which I wish to submit for your criticism’.)

Always wary of unforeseen, unintended consequences, in practical politics Popper showed the virtues of piecemeal, careful improvements above all-at-one-stroke ‘utopian engineering’. He dug political theory out of a morass born of a demoralising realisation about democracy, namely that people are capable of democratically voting for a Hitler or for religious extremists. He did it by pointing out that the key to a democracy, even above formal conditions such as the separation of powers, is to have mechanisms that don’t allow rulers who turn out to be incompetent, larcenous, or dictatorial, to do too much damage. It isn’t elections that define a democracy, he taught, but containment afterwards.

Popper championed freedom—his major book on this subject being titled The Open Society and Its Enemies—yet cautioned against ‘unrestrained’, i.e. entirely free, capitalism. He wasn’t perfect (he had all along been saying that nothing is). He could be self-aggrandising, aggressive, and hurtfully dismissive. In inviting criticism professionally, he was Dr Jekyll; in responding to it in person, he was Mr Hyde. He could also contradict his own thinking: take the just-mentioned issue of capitalism. His stance was that it was the state’s duty to defend the weak and poor, and wrote that ‘we must demand that the policy of unlimited economic freedom be replaced by the planned economic intervention of the state.’ And yet, out of his fervid anti-communism (based partly on errors he detected in Marx and very strongly on the dictatorial nature of the Soviet Union), he ended up not raising an almighty fuss when his teachings were misappropriated by Margaret Thatcher, the heartless and supreme political champion of untrammelled capitalism.

Then there was his fiercely critical attitude towards Israel. Popper never managed to get over the shock, as someone who grew up feeling entirely assimilated into mainstream Austrian society, of being pigeonholed as Jewish by the Nazis. It left him unwilling to even try to understand Israel’s dilemma, that of having to defend its very existence even as it was attempting to very hurriedly yet democratically work out its ultimate identity. This is a process that has normally taken nations scores or hundreds of years—he might have considered the case of his own country, Austria.

Popper must have known that Israel was born containing a welter of groups pushing wildly different interpretations of what it should be, including an intractable ultra-religious minority holding the balance of power. And yet over time, whilst permanently threatened by Arabs from outside, Israel actually increased, not decreased, the participation of its native Arabs in its institutions. Maybe it was Popper’s own past identity flux that led him to censure the Jews of Israel with startlingly disproportionate harshness. In any case, there is a time-hallowed, sadly applicable word that, among its meanings, includes that of finding far more fault with Jews than with others acting comparably or worse. That word is anti-Semitism.

The Ancient Savant

In a time long before and a country far away, there lived another thinker who deserves to be singled out for appreciation as a philosopher utterly determined to root out the bogus: Wang Chong (27 – c. 97 CE).

Not just clear-sighted, Wang Chong (alternative transliteration: Wang Ch’ung) was also courageous in a way that we today cannot—and thankfully need not—emulate (unless, of course, we happen to live under a fundamentalist religious regime and want to let it be known that we are deep-down sceptics who reject hocus-pocus and intend to subject received tenets to hard scrutiny).

In fact, for us, it’s easy not only as regards the politics (with the above reservation), but as regards the actual thinking. We can rely on all the demystifying work done by many notable philosophers and scientists in recent centuries. Wang, on the other hand, lived anciently—the precisely two-thousandth anniversary of his birth will take place three years from now—and in a China (in his case, under the Han dynasty, in its second or Eastern phase) that was steeped, as it almost always has been, in a culture of unquestioning obedience to power and obeisance to sacrosanct texts. His dubiousness had only a few thin precedents to go by. (By the way, the British new wave band Wang Chung, whose name gets prominent screen display in the recent film The Idea of You, was definitely not named after the savant.)

Our Wang was a Renaissance man avant la lettre, an encyclopaedic historian, astronomer, meteorologist, physicist, and so on, as shown in his compilation text Lunheng (variously rendered as ‘Measured Treatise’, ‘Disquisitions’, ‘Discussive Weighing’, ‘Balanced Discussions’, and other titles). But it was as a philosopher, one stubbornly unimpressed by authority, whether philosophical or political, that he most impresses us today.

Wang remained tied to a number of prevailing concepts, although he criticised and, when he saw the need, modified them—like destiny (ming) and vital energy (qi). But here’s the crucial thing: he demanded proofs for affirmations, spurned superstitions, belittled supernatural explanations, and dismissed the belief that things only happen because they are preordained. He held truth even above tradition (gasp!). The official worldview in his China was positively Panglossian (again, avant la lettre), the epitome of wishful thinking, in the sense that what was regarded as ideal was thought to be actually the case. For example, the worthy person will no doubt get ahead: it ain’t necessarily so, sang Wang. Good deeds are inevitably rewarded and bad ones punished: hardly, noted Wang. If the ruler is a good person and is happy, prosperity will necessarily smile on his subjects and even the climate will be benign: just not so, declared Wang.

And this is amazing: he got away with it. He wasn’t decapitated, or forced to drink hemlock (as Socrates had been 400 years earlier), or ordered murdered by his own son because his thinking was too free and offended religion (as happened to the great astronomer-mathematician Ulugh Beg of Samarkand 1,300 years after Wang’s time), or stabbed in the eye (as well as various other parts of the body, as happened to Salman Rushdie all too recently). While the year of his birth is generally accepted to have been 27 CE, so peaceful and unremarkable was his death that its date is only approximately known, set as c. 97.

Wang Chong. Here was a person who truly thought freely.

East, West

To complement the praise-fest, here are two thinkers (in a way, diametrically different from each other) whom I cherish specifically as historian-commentators of philosophy. People who don’t care to go into any one Western philosopher’s thinking in great detail but could use a very pithy one-volume overview of it all can be directed to Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy (1945). Alan Watts, even in a slim book like The Way of Zen (1957), elegantly renders a similar service as regards the East.   

Russell was, of course, himself a towering figure in philosophy as well as mathematics. In A History, he brings his big brain to bear on philosophy’s past—seeking to put it in its historical context—and he doesn’t just set forth the diverse thinkers’ positions. He gives his own assessments—and his commentaries can be acid. Kant, he says, ‘is generally considered the greatest of modern philosophers. I cannot myself agree with this estimate…’ Of Hegel’s Philosophy of History he writes, ‘Like other historical theories, it required, if it was to be made plausible, some distortion of facts and considerable ignorance. Hegel, like Marx and Spengler after him, possessed both these qualifications.’

And yet he is scrupulous in pointing out meritorious aspects even among theories he finds fault with. One complaint that can be made is that, with quite uncharacteristic modesty, he is comparatively, and disappointingly, brief about what he calls ‘the philosophical school of which I am a member’—logical analysis.

One way to describe the task pursued by logical analysis, and the overall current it forms part of, is (in loose terms—not Russell’s own), ‘Let’s sweep away the twaddle.’ Russell did a lot of sweeping himself. Alan Watts, on the other hand, is—how to put this?—in a different tradition. He is selling mysticism and ‘don’t think, float along’ elixir by the barrel. The reason to turn to him, as suggested above, is to obtain a compact outline of philosophical thinking, Eastern division. This he provides: in order to put the Zen in the mentioned book’s title in context, he gives a genial guided tour of Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism in general.

Watts writes with style and clarity—and affably works every gram of reasonableness he can into the narrative. His tone is quite the opposite of the sanctimoniousness his largely religious subject matter might tempt him into.

Zen is about gaining ‘Wow, I suddenly see it!’ moments. A personal takeaway: The Way of Zen not only describes such events, but actually generated one in me—with the small catch that what I suddenly saw wasn’t what Watts intended.

It concerned the issue of spontaneity. The Eastern philosophy that Zen distils sets enormous store by spontaneity; acting on reasoned decisions is for the unenlightened. In consequence, devotees strive strenuously to achieve that ideal attitude. Unfortunately for them, this is self-defeating—since striving for something is precisely the opposite of being spontaneous about it. But it turns out Zen has a wonderful solution up its sleeve. Can you help it, it asks the victims of this trap, if you can’t stop striving? No? Then your striving is itself spontaneous! So you have been spontaneous all along! Watts quotes a Zen master: ‘Nothing is left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh.’

The cleverness of the table-turning bowled me over. Wow, I suddenly did see something: namely, that with gambits like that, one can let oneself off any mental hook.

One can get away with anything!

Some philosophy-related further reading

‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman, by Daniel James Sharp

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

Atheism, secularism, humanism, by Anthony Grayling

A French freethinker: Emile Chartier, known as Alain, by Michel Petheram

‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’: interview with Alex Byrne, by Emma Park

‘The real beauty comes from contemplating the universe’: interview on humanism with Sarah Bakewell, by Emma Park

On sex, gender and their consequences: interview with Louise Antony, by Emma Park

Image of the week: Anaxagoras, by Emma Park

Image of the week: Portrait bust of Epicurus, an early near-atheist, by Emma Park

Can science threaten religious belief? by Stephen Law

Lifting the veil: Shelley, atheism and the wonders of existence, by Tony Howe

The post Two cut-the-nonsense thinkers who overcame the philosopher’s curse(s) appeared first on The Freethinker.

From earliest times, philosophers have been found labouring under a misapprehension: that, if it appeared to them to be only logical (or soul-satisfying, or ultimately just aesthetically pleasing) for the world to have this or that property—for things in reality to be some given way, and not another—then that was it. Things were actually so.

However, this is a delusion. The world, and all reality, material and nonmaterial, have no need to conform to what any philosopher, under his or her way of thinking, believes should be the case. And the delusion has been extensive enough throughout philosophy to constitute a curse, for it has kept many otherwise supremely brilliant and ever-so-subtle minds from suspecting that their conclusions might just possibly be resting on unwarranted or indeed solipsistic grounds. But it goes deeper than that: the delusion has often obscured the need, in tandem with the work of cogitation, to try, wherever possible, to actually find things out. This obscuring has even occurred in cases in which lip service was paid to the idea—which stretches back to Parmenides the Greek—of checking with reality.

Cases in point of thinkers being sure that things are the way their intellect—and/or their hunches or their personal or social proclivities—has decided they should be are embarrassingly plentiful. Here are three.

One: the Zen position (which is not exclusive in Eastern philosophy) that an immediate subjective apprehension of reality is necessarily superior to reasoning or research.

Two: Gilles Deleuze’s argument that the foundation, ‘the absolute ground’, of philosophy equates with the plane of immanence. (By this, he meant a kind of soup—more precisely, a consommé—in which everything, ideas, things, the lot, coexist but without differentiation or delimitation of any kind. There, they are ‘in themselves’, which means immanence, not ‘beyond themselves’, i.e. in transcendence.)

Three: the Rig Veda’s account of the dismemberment of Purusha—primaeval man, mind, or consciousness. From his mouth came the Brahmins; from his arms, the warriors; from his thighs, the common people; from his feet, the menials; from his head, the sky; from his mind, the moon; from his eye, the sun; from his feet once more, the earth. Even if this is taken symbolically, as a poetic expression of myth, it is hard to deny that it expresses its originators’ view that society and the world ought to be organised hierarchically—and therefore, that that is how the world surely is organised.

If only such statements were phrased more tentatively. A philosopher might write, especially in areas of thinking that scarcely lend themselves to experimental probing, ‘This position I am stating is not one that I can prove to be the case—but it provides a solid, workable interpretation or model of the case. I see it as superior to previous models of how things are; so, until, and if, a better one is developed, it should stand.’ Yes, the philosopher might write something along those lines. But the chances are overwhelmingly that he or she won’t.

In some cases, the reason for this may be that the philosopher is afraid of not having the same impact, not gaining the same level of renown, if he or she seems to sound wishy-washy instead of categorical. (To be consistent: in the present essay, categorical statements are to be understood as meaning the best interpretation of the known facts thus far.) In the majority of cases, though, the reason philosophers don’t write that way is that it doesn’t cross their minds that their conclusions could be anything less than definitive. What goes for philosophers goes, equally or even more so, for theologians.

The above title, ‘The philosopher’s curse(s)’, obviously refers to a curse(s) that philosophers have lived under, not a curse(s) issued by them. The suggested plurality of curses is due to the fact that from the above overarching fallacy—‘I think so, therefore it is so’—follow others. They are derived or comparable to it, yet aren’t identical to it. Then there are also some that are unrelated to it. This article lists a total of six, including the Big One already mentioned.

Here’s the second—one which, although it can be seen as a particular case of the Big One, is distinctive enough to constitute a category unto itself. It is the belief that the material world that we see, hear, and touch is inferior and/or less real than some other, ungraspable one. This conception is widespread in Eastern philosophy, yet it is not restricted to it. Kant was also one of those holding that the material world is less real than the spiritual world (however that often woolly concept is defined). The mental mechanism by which mankind arrived at this idea is transparent: the world was found to be mysterious, dangerous, and incomprehensibly complex, not to mention often unfair. Unsurprisingly this led to a yearning for a superior, even if invisible, world, and from yearning, the next step was utter conviction that such a world indeed exists. 

Notice that when philosophers gave themselves the task of apprehending the nature of the alleged ultimate reality, of finding what lay behind the multiplicity of appearances, their respective speculations—or gut feelings—took them to different conclusions, about which, naturally, each was always convinced. The example that springs most immediately to mind is that of the Presocratics, each of whom identified different elements as the underlying substance/principle, or arche, of reality: water, air, or fire. But examples also range as far and near as the Buddhist thinker Nagarjuna, for whom the root of everything was the Void, or Schopenhauer, for whom behind all reality lay the Will, or Heidegger, for whom nothing other than Being fitted the bill.

It needs to be underlined here that the list of six fallacies refers to nefarious basic approaches in philosophy—not to the simple procedural errors or the writing vices that specific philosophers might fall into, even if the line between the two may not always be hard and fast. To illustrate: the listing doesn’t refer to unwittingly falling into some hooey or inconsistency that the very same philosophers may be arguing against. It doesn’t refer, either, to grating individual idiosyncrasies, like writing in a needlessly obscure way (with never an example to clarify the points being made) just to show off the author’s cleverness.

Nor does it refer to the fallacy of prior assumption, wherein a philosopher fails to notice, much less prove, some assumed point before continuing with his or her argument. The above-mentioned search for the ultimate reality behind the world provides a good example of this fallacy. The prior (unproven) assumption is that there is one such ultimate underlying substance. (Sometimes the philosophers’ brainwork led them to the conclusion that there is not one but two underlying substances which are opposite, complements, and rivals.)

Incidentally but significantly, why one or two ultimate realities? Why not five? Why not one hundred and one? Why not even none at all? They merely thought it obvious that there had to be one (or the two that are forever fighting it out between themselves) since they found the idea of a fundamentally heterogeneous and messy universe offensive. Many people (possibly most) still do, but this is no more than a preference—in this case, of an essentially aesthetic type. Preferences, and philosophies based solely upon them, do not establish fact.

Reality may on occasion agree with someone’s preferences about the way things ought to be (in which case they won’t agree with the preferences of others who have thought differently). But that will have been no more than coincidental—analogous to the case of someone obsessed with Tuesdays who declares, every day, ‘Today is Tuesday!’ and periodically happens to be right.

Here comes the third of the accursed philosophical delusions: the thought, often conscious but sometimes subconscious, that the way things are in the world depends on human understanding of them. George Berkeley, who took this idea furthest, condensed it in Latin: Esse est percipi—to be is to be perceived. For those who share this conclusion, the arguments are apparently so strong that they obscure the fact that if human understanding colours all facts about the world—or indeed precedes them—this only happens for humans. (If the philosophers fail to say so, it’s because they have failed to connect these particular dots, or because they do not attach any importance to the connection.) As for the rest of the world, it would go about its merry way, or grim way, if there were no humans to perceive it, and even if humans had never existed.

It boils down to this: it could be that, yes, human philosophy truly cannot prove there is a world outside of people’s thoughts and/or their perceptions—however, that’s hardly the fault of the world. The shortcoming belongs to human philosophy.

At the heart of any delusion that things are otherwise is human vanity, even if masked by sleight of brain. What is needed, in this as in so much else, is some humility. Not, in this case, personal humility, but a collective humility based on a true assessment of our standing as tiny creatures on the surface of a minute mote in the universe. Imagine that, one day, humans not only destroy the Earth but manage to create a black hole that swallows up the planet itself and also everything else in its vicinity. Even in that extreme case, the idea that the universe as a whole depends on humans or any of their attributes is an exhibition of hubris on a staggering scale. This, by the way, is quite typical of a lot of human thinking. Here’s a case in point: the idea that mighty planets, stars, and constellations make it their business to determine the characters and fates of humans.

The fallacy extends to science—even, or especially, in its most modern areas. The delusion appears whenever science neglects to say—or to see—that if something remains indeterminable, it may only be so to us. Science will never be able to precisely know, at one and the same time, a particle’s position and momentum. But that doesn’t mean that the particle doesn’t have a precise position and a precise momentum at any given time, even as scientists’ measurements are messing with them; it’s just unknowable to us, and therefore meaningless to us as scientists. The particle isn’t responsible for being knowable or meaningful to us.

We may not know if Schrödinger’s famous cat is alive or dead until the dust has settled. But at any given moment, the cat itself is either alive (even if dying) or dead: a certain scientific wave function keeps observers in the dark about the cat’s status—but that can mean little to it.

Einstein himself, who suggested Schrödinger’s thought experiment in the first place (albeit with a non-feline example), did refer to ‘reality as something independent of what is experimentally established.’ However, this standpoint of his didn’t gain much traction. What is true is this: science genuinely cannot advance except with what is experimentally established (actually, with what is experimentally disprovable). But science, human knowledge of the world, isn’t the same thing as the world—except when human self-importance conflates the two, or faulty thinking fails to distinguish between them.

Some bad philosophical habits that harden into curses aren’t as pervasive as the above ones, although they are still too frequent. (Always read ‘philosophical’ as ‘philosophical/theological’. The medieval Scholastic period was one in which philosophy and theology were particularly hard to tell apart, but there are plenty of other cases in which one has shaded into the other. In some religions the distinction is purposely meaningless.)

One bad habit—the fourth in the list—involves philosophers whose thinking has led them to results that are mutually contradictory or absurd in a way they wouldn’t normally countenance, or who find themselves forced to choose among alternatives when they would prefer to hang on to all options. They could question their original assumptions and start afresh; or they could accept that a few things may just be unsolvable (like finding a complete and consistent foundation for mathematics, which Gödel proved to be impossible). Instead, philosophers with the bad habit in question simply paper over the problem with a layer of mysticism.

Then, after the mystical attitude has shown the way to reconciling the antithetical or closing any annoying inconsistencies, if there are any remaining doubts about details, they can be declared solved through the invocation of a mystery: the obdurate details are not for human beings, or at least uninitiated human beings, to understand.

And if even that fails, mysticism allows direct appeals to supernatural agencies as a way out of philosophical dilemmas. Take the bitter medieval debates over the relationship between God the Father and God the Son, and then, between God the Son’s human and divine aspects: Father and Son could be decided to be mystically at once distinct and similar; the Son’s two aspects could be pronounced to be separate but commingled.

Then there is, for instance, Berkeley’s solution to the dilemma raised by Esse est percipi—namely, that things dematerialise the moment people close their eyes or look away and exist anew when they are perceived again. He fell back on God (he was, after all, a bishop). God, obviously being always awake and seeing everything, keeps everything in existence. Objection overruled.

A fifth fallacy: extrapolating one’s conviction, not to the nature of the world as in the first item, but to the minds of other people. Philosophers who fall for this are merely following a widespread human practice (although perhaps they, of all people, should know better). The practice is exemplified by those who repeat the dictum that ‘Everybody needs to believe in something’, originated by those who themselves need to believe and extrapolate their need to all others. The dictum can be refuted by simply pointing to people who do not believe in anything, in the specific sense of ‘believe’ that is meant here, and who do not miss it. But that would require going out to find if some such people do exist, and it is much easier to generalise in armchair comfort.

Descartes, too, was extrapolating to everyone else when he decided that perceptions are reliable if they are clear and distinct. He was clearly imagining that if they were clear and distinct to him they would be so to others—never conceiving that the person alongside him might be having a clear and distinct perception quite divergent from his own. Different people find different things to be unarguably evident.

And so to the sixth and final curse: a curse lurking in language. Philosophers may build up claims based on language phenomena that only occur in the tongue they happen to work in. German philosophers must guard against their language’s propensity for agglutinating words: putting together a single word for a concept tends to give it added substance (particularly since German nouns get Capitals). Thus, ‘being in the world’ is, in English, an idea; the equivalent German, In-der-Welt-sein, constituting just one (albeit hyphenated) word, is much more. In-der-Welt-sein, Heidegger’s concoction, becomes an actual Thing. (The usual English translation is ‘being-in-the-world’, the hyphenation carrying over to give it a similar standing.)

And consider Jacques Derrida’s key concept différance. The fact that in French it’s pronounced identically as under the usual spelling, différence, is innocent enough wordplay. But it’s not innocent that Derrida makes something out of the coincidence that in French différer can mean both ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’. A philosopher who thought in English might as well, when bringing up that ‘God’ is ‘dog’ written backwards, seriously find some significance in that fluke.

Philosophy is a wonderful enterprise. It is just a shame that its practitioners have fallen, again and again, into pitfalls that could have been avoided.

Philosophy-related further reading

‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman, by Daniel James Sharp

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

Atheism, secularism, humanism, by Anthony Grayling

A French freethinker: Emile Chartier, known as Alain, by Michel Petheram

‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’: interview with Alex Byrne, by Emma Park

‘The real beauty comes from contemplating the universe’: interview on humanism with Sarah Bakewell, by Emma Park

On sex, gender and their consequences: interview with Louise Antony, by Emma Park

Image of the week: Anaxagoras, by Emma Park

Image of the week: Portrait bust of Epicurus, an early near-atheist, by Emma Park

Can science threaten religious belief? by Stephen Law

Lifting the veil: Shelley, atheism and the wonders of existence, by Tony Howe

The post The philosopher’s curse(s) appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

At the Freethinker, one of our aims has always been to foster a culture of free speech and open debate. It was from this perspective that, as editor in 2022, I first became interested in the debate over the possible meanings of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, and the consequences for women, men and transgender people. There was a concern that voices critical of the claims of transgender activism were being suppressed or demonised across much of the mainstream liberal intelligentsia, both in Britain, America, and elsewhere. There was also a concern that transgender activists and their supporters might be putting pressure on public and private institutions to adopt their views unquestioningly.

For these reasons, the Freethinker has so far published four articles exploring objections to the claims of transgender activism: an opinion piece by the gender studies researcher Eliza Mondegreen; two interviews, one with the journalist and campaigner Helen Joyce, and the other with the philosopher Alex Byrne; and a report by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid on the spread of the ideology to South Asia.

It has been difficult to find any defender of at least some of the claims of transgenderism who would be willing to talk to us. We are therefore delighted to publish the below interview with Louise Antony, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (‘UMass’), who describes herself as a ‘socialist intersectionalist feminist’. Over a long and distinguished career, she has published widely on the philosophy of mind, epistemology, feminist philosophy and atheism. In October last year, she debated Alex Byrne at the Houston Institute on The Ontology of Gender.

I spoke to Professor Antony across the Atlantic via Zoom. Our conversation lasted three hours. Below is a condensed transcript of the interview, which she has read and amended to ensure that it accurately reflects her views.

Readers will observe that, in the gender debate, everything is open to question: language, science, subjective experience, objective fact, culture, nature, relations between the sexes, and what it means to be human. Hardly surprising, then, if this dialogue ends in a state of aporia or bafflement.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

The Freethinker: Which areas of philosophy have you been interested in over the course of your career, and how did you come to the gender debate?

Louise Antony: I started graduate school interested in the philosophy of language. When I went there, I discovered cognitive science. I was at Harvard. MIT is just down the road, and people there, like Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor and Ned Block, were diving into the idea that there could be a science of the mind, which was a view that had been in disrepute before the ‘60s. Behaviourism, which I did not find interesting, had, up till then, ruled the day. One of my teachers at Harvard, Willard van Orman Quine, said that we should study knowledge naturalistically: we should ask how we actually have knowledge. (This seemed to me exactly what cognitive science was doing, but ironically Quine never embraced it.) Quine’s philosophical outlook was called ‘naturalism’: it was the idea that philosophical questions are continuous with questions in science. That outlook coloured everything that I became interested in, including language, philosophy of mind, and the relationship between the science of psychology and the other sciences, in particular biology. Throughout my work, I have always wanted the philosophical claims we make to be consistent with and informed by the relevant science.

In the 1990s, I edited a volume of essays with my friend Charlote Witt called A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity. That was my entry into feminist philosophy. I also became interested, somewhat serendipitously, in writing about atheism and religion. I edited a book called Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, where I invited philosophers who self-described as atheists to talk about their relationship to religion.

Freethinker: As a woman, have you found that academic philosophy is a tough environment? And if so, has that changed at all over the years?

Louise Antony: From an early age, I was aware that I did things that girls were not supposed to do. One of the things that I got in trouble for was arguing with people. When I first started taking philosophy at Syracuse University, I had no idea what it was. But when I got into the classroom and found it was just arguing about things, I thought, yes. I found myself naturally fitting into the ethos of asking questions, making objections. I loved the norm that when you asked somebody a question or made an objection, they were supposed to say something relevant back to you. Philosophy felt like home to me. That is not every woman’s experience, but it was mine.

That’s not to say it was easy to be a woman in the academy – there was a lot of prejudice against women, and a lot of inappropriate treatment.  There were not many of us – that has changed a little.

Freethinker: How would you define your philosophical conception of feminism as you have developed it over the years?

Louise Antony: Feminists disagree about many fundamental things. What we all have in common, I think, is commitment to the full personhood of women and its social recognition and material support. Where we differ is over the things like the nature of the obstacles that need to be overcome, and what other changes are necessary, such as in the law. That kind of reform is as far as some feminists want to go. I and my socialist feminist friends want to go much further.

Freethinker: So you would describe yourself as a socialist feminist?

Antony: I am a socialist and intersectionalist feminist. The idea is that there are different parameters or vectors of oppression, and your social location is a matter of what point you are at in a multidimensional grid. Parameters include race, disability, economic status, relationship to geopolitics, and being a woman. The thing that women have in common is their occupation of a social role that fundamentallyinvolves the idea that women are for other people: for men, for children, for the elderly and sick, anyone who is in need of care.

Freethinker: What, in your view, is ‘sex’, what is ‘gender’, and how do they relate to each other?

Antony: I am a realist about biological sex. I think it is a robust dimorphism in the human species. There are intersex conditions, where an individual has some of the characteristics typical of one biological sex, but not all of them. The estimates of the occurrence of these conditions seem to range from about one and a half to three per cent. So I do not think the existence of intersex conditions means that we do not have a robust biological phenomenon here. This puts me at odds with many other feminists. However, I do not think that biological sex determines gender, which is a social construction.

In a paper I published in 2020, ‘Feminism Without Metaphysics or a Deflationary Account of Gender’, I drew an analogy between gender and parenthood. I use the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to refer to genders and the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ to refer to sexes. That is just an orthographic rhetorical convenience – the terms are highly contested, and indeed, in ordinary language, they are ambiguous.

I think the existence of the biological dimorphism explains why there are systems of gender – what I call ‘gender regimes’. By that, I mean social roles that are constructed and elaborated differently at different times and places in human history, but that all have the function of trying to discipline people into particular social roles on the basis of actual or presumed biological differences. The analogy with parents is that I call contributing biological material to the development of a child being a ‘progenitor’, a matter of biology, just as being ‘male’ or ‘female’ is a matter of biology. But not all progenitors are parents, and similarly not all male or female people are men or women.

When people ask if biological sex explains gender, my answer is that in a sense, it does, because the fact that we socially divide human beings into men and women, boys and girls is due ultimately to the biological dimorphism. But there is not a deterministic relationship between being biologically male or female and being a man or a woman. There is a lot of social elaboration that is necessary.

Freethinker: Don’t the central cases, whether in being a man or woman, or in being a parent, all have a biological foundation? On this view, the central case of being a parent is a biological parent; the central case of being a man or woman is biological.

Antony: I do not know. Statistically, there are probably more biological parents who are parents in virtue of biological connection to the child than there are other kinds of parents. But in contemporary society, in the United States, for example, there are a lot of adoptive parents, there are a lot of step-parents whom we do not think of as marginal cases of parents. The central cases of parents are individuals who accept and carry out responsibility for the physical well-being of the child, have a secure emotional connection to the child, foster the child’s psychological, intellectual, maybe spiritual development, and so forth. People who fit pretty squarely inside our conception of what it is to be a parent do not need to be biologically connected to the child.

 No one thinks of anonymous sperm donors as fathers. There are cases of a so-called ‘surrogate’ mother that are very difficult. There are cases where she has contributed the egg. There are cases where she is carrying an embryo developed from an egg contributed by some other woman. Is she a mother or not? There have been court cases of so-called surrogate mothers wanting to keep the child. I think that being a parent is not so much about whether you meet the biological condition, but about how much of the total conception of parenthood you fulfil.

In the case of gender, statistically, overwhelmingly, the individuals who are socially women are going to be biologically female. And similarly, the individuals who are socially men are going to be biologically male. I do not know how significant that fact is.

Freethinker: On both these questions – the definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and the definition of ‘parent’ – is there not an objection that you are putting the cart before the horse? In the case of parents, would it not be preferable to say that biological parents are, since ancient times, the natural kind, and foster parents, step-parents and so on are caregivers – substitute but not literal parents? This debate about progenitors versus parents, biological versus socially constructed men and women, is this only even possible nowadays because of where we are scientifically?

Antony: The donation of an egg to another woman who is going to carry a child is certainly a new thing. But adoption is an old institution. There are a lot of societies that institutionalise the bringing of a non-biological child into, say, a royal family. There has also been a widespread practice among women of getting pregnant by another man when their husband is impotent or sterile, without acknowledging this. So in a sense, sperm donation has been going on for a long time.

There is much that is very new to our species, technologically speaking, which is tremendously important in shaping our social life. But even if many of these questions only arise because of recent technological advances, what would follow from that about gender and sex?

Freethinker: One might think that what we mean by a man or woman, or a parent, is very old. Do innovations in science mean that we need to fundamentally revise central concepts like these? Or instead, do the possibilities of sperm donation and surrogacy, or of using surgery and medicines to become more like the opposite sex, not change the meaning of our central concepts, but simply expand their range?

Antony: In philosophical terms, I think concepts are primitive in the sense of being the smallest unit of thought. On this view, a concept like ‘dog’ gets connected in thought to dogs in the world by some process. I have spent a lot of my career trying to figure out what this process is. It has something to do with the causal relations between dogs and a tokening of that primitive element of thought, dog. Words then get their meaning by being attached to these concepts.

Now, what is it that ‘man’, as a concept in my mind, gets connected to in the world? That relation is fixed independently of what I think or believe about men, or what I want men to be. It just means that when I think a thought in terms of ‘man’, it is going to have a certain set of truth conditions in the world. That does not have any bearing on who that term should or does apply to in a public language which we share.

Whatever my concept of man is, when I talk with you, a kind of negotiation can go on between us about what we want that term to pick out. And this negotiation can be very explicit, as it is when we make laws like which people are going to be allowed into a bathroom when the sign says ‘men’.

What you are calling a concept, I would call a conception: a body of ideas, beliefs, emotional stuff – a big mess. There are some beliefs that are central to that conception, and there are some that are peripheral and that get changed all the time. Every time you change your mind about something, you are changing the conception associated with the component concepts.

Take the concept of flying. For the vast majority of our history on the planet, human beings could not fly. Can we fly now? We can get in airplanes and travel through the air. Is that ‘flying’? Does it matter? It does if you are writing legislation on flight safety. There has to be a legal use for the term ‘flight’ or ‘flying’ that covers that.

The whole debate over the concept of ‘man’ or ‘woman’ is misspent philosophical energy. What we should be figuring out is, do we want people to be able to use bathrooms that align with their sense of who they are? Do we want individuals who have gone through male puberty to play at an elite level in women’s sports? These are the questions that people really have about transgendered individuals.

Freethinker: That sounds like a practical answer. In the UK, there is an organisation called Sex Matters. According to their website, their aim is ‘to promote clarity about sex in law, policy and language in order to protect everybody’s rights.’ In other words, as far as I understand it, their position is that there are some areas of life where, regardless of what ‘gender’ may be, it is sex that matters – for instance as to whether biological males should be allowed in women’s prisons.

Antony: What do you mean by a ‘biological male’? I do not mean to say that ‘you can’t define “male” so we don’t have to talk about it’. But it is important to recognise that many trans individuals have altered their biology in important ways. If you have got an individual who has XY chromosomes, has had their penis removed and fashioned into a vagina – ‘fashioned’ is a bad word, I’m sorry, reconstructed as a vagina with a clitoris – has had their testes removed so they are no longer producing the same level of endogenous testosterone that they had been, is taking hormones, has developed visible breasts… Is this a man?

Freethinker: Certainly there are extreme cases of people who try to alter their physical condition.

Antony: They do not just try, they are successful.

Freethinker: Would you say that a man who had undergone these changes had in fact become a biological female?

Antony: I think that biological categories are fuzzy in general.

Freethinker: You did say that sex is real.

Antony: Sex is real. In nature, you can sometimes give definitions and characterisations of categories. But in biology, the category of ‘species’ does not have clean boundaries. Does that mean that there is a big issue about what is and is not a dog? In fact, there is a division of expert opinion about whether wolves and dogs are members of the same species or members of different species. Because when you have creatures that are at the boundaries of fuzzy categories like ‘species’, the criteria will not classify them clearly one way or the other.

Trans individuals, especially if they have undergone medical or surgical alterations, are at the boundary of the male-female categorisation system, just as intersex individuals are. For example, the runner Caster Semenya has never thought of herself as anything other than a woman, but in fact, she is an XY individual with very, very severe androgen insensitivity. Is Semenya a male or a female?

Freethinker: These are questions of biological categories. Semenya may well be right at the boundary. But are we talking about sex or about gender? You have mentioned people who go through some sort of biological change or have a specific biological condition. Should we make a distinction between asking, (a), whether a man who has had his penis cut off and so forth should be allowed in a women’s prison, and (b), whether a man who identifies as a woman but has not undergone any medical treatment should be so allowed? In all these areas – prisons, sports, et cetera – is it a matter of biological sex or is it a matter of gender self-identification?

Antony: It might vary from question to question. It depends on the particularities of the biological differences. On the question of whether trans individuals should be allowed to compete in sports categories according to their identity, the empirical evidence seems to vary between studies. Some say they should, others say it is dangerous for biological males to compete with biological females. But there are lots of things to take into account when we look at the particular case of trans individuals in sports.

Freethinker: Is there not a biological asymmetry here: unlike trans women in women’s sports, surely no one ever worries about trans men competing in men’s sports, because it is clear that they will never win?

Antony: It is not true that trans men never win. They do sometimes. Trans women do not always win in their categories – although they often do. Caster Semenya does not win every time she runs, but she wins a lot of the time. Just looking at her, you can see that she has more well-defined muscles than biologically paradigmatic women generally have.

One of the things that needs to be asked when addressing the sports question is safety. I do not take seriously the idea that having trans women or cis men competing in a different category from cis women arises from concerns about the latter’s safety. If people were concerned about the well-being of athletes, American football would not exist.

Sports categorisations are supposed to put people who are physically alike into the same category, so that the only determinant of the winner is talent and effort. But what happens in elite sports is that they select for freaks. If you are a man above seven feet tall in the United States, your chances are apparently one in seven of becoming an NBA basketball player.

Freethinker: Certainly some men are stronger than others, some women are stronger than others. But is it not the case that in general, men are just, as a matter of biological fact, stronger than women – by quite a considerable margin?

Antony: Who cares? What is the point of citing the average? My husband is exactly my height. He is below average height for males. I am probably a little stronger than the average woman of my age and height because I have a personal trainer who helps me to gain strength. The interesting questions are, what needs to be done, who can do it? If I need help getting something from a tall shelf in Whole Foods, I look for a tall person: I look along the parameter that is actually relevant to the task.

Freethinker: Wouldn’t a logical consequence of this position be that there is no point in having women’s sports at all, because women are almost never going to beat men? Why not just throw open women’s sports to all men?

Antony: Take boxing, where there are weight categories. The point of categorisation is to try to equalise for fixed physical conditions, so that winning reflects inherent talent and effort. In women’s sports and men’s sports, it is not just that men are bigger or stronger, it is that their physical talents are distributed in different ways. In basketball, upper body strength is an important feature. Even very tall women are not going to be able to compete at the most elite levels, are probably not going to shoot as well, or as far as the men at top levels. Sports categories are proxy indicators because you cannot really get into the precise physiological details.

In an ideal world, there might be exceptional tall women who would compete in an NBA height-based category alongside shorter men. The system that we have now excludes a lot of men from elite competition, when they could win if they played against women. The whole system of elite sports is going to leave out most of both of the populations of men and women.  A different category system would be more inclusive in many ways.

Freethinker: In which categories, if any, do you think biological differences between men and women matter, and how far? There are so many areas we could talk about: not only prisons, but medical statistics, women’s charities and refuges, whether trans women make appropriate representatives for women, trans women who want to date lesbians, and so on. Are there any areas where biological differences ought to be the starting point?

Antony: I do not want to say in a blanket way that trans women should be excluded from any of these designated women’s spaces. I am open to the possibility that there might be specific reasons why trans women should be excluded, but not qua trans women. If there is a support group for people who have suffered miscarriages, that is not open to all women to begin with, only to those who have had miscarriages. A trans man who suffered a miscarriage should be allowed in that space.

We have to look at why the space is designated as a women’s space, what the specific nature of the gathering is such that designating it a women’s space is a good proxy for the specifically pertinent characteristic of the space.

The cases that I struggle with are those where the space is a women’s space because of the presumption that women have been exposed to certain kinds of socialisation and social pressures. Women in academia suffer – from people not recognising them when they raise their hands at meetings, for instance. This is low-grade suffering, but not getting credit for contributions, having one’s published work neglected and so forth, can have a large impact on one’s career. Women like to get together and discuss what they can do about it.

From what I have read of the experiences of trans women in philosophy, they discover that they are not getting called on as much as they used to before they transitioned. And so they are beginning to understand in a different way what it is to be a woman in the field. But I think there might be spaces where trans women should be quiet and allow the experiences of women who have grown as women, have gone into the profession and been socialised as women, to take centre stage.

Freethinker: It is interesting that you might see the case for giving women more space in issues where they have suffered from discriminatory social, rather than biological, pressures. But returning to biology, as a woman, would you not agree that when you have a child, it completely changes you (speaking as someone who has also been through it) – and in a way that only someone who is biologically female can be changed? There are scientific studies on the way the brain changes during pregnancy.

Antony: The study that you refer to was very small – which is one of the many problems with brain imaging studies. I do think that pregnancy was a singular, extraordinary experience for me, but it is different for different people.  All experiences ‘change our brains’.

Freethinker: Would you agree that it is an experience that a man cannot have?

Antony: I have several female women friends who have not been able to become pregnant for one reason or another. Yes, pregnancy is a singular experience, and some people who cannot have that experience are very sad about that.  But why do we have to pick it out by proxy and say it is a woman’s experience? When you have a child, you stop being the main character in the story of your life. That is a profound change – whether you adopted the child or had the child biologically. But I am the same person I was before my pregnancies. My personality is the same. I have learned things from having children, but we learn things from a lot of the experiences that we have. I find it romantic and unnuanced to say in a blanket way that the biological fact of having  a child changes you in some uniform way.

Freethinker: Is it not the case that there are clear, obvious biological changes to your body once you have a child? The shape of your pelvis changes, your hair falls out, and so on. And I am not a scientist, but perhaps women in general also bond with their own child in a special, biologically grounded way, as mothers.

Antony: The literature on the biology of childbirth and motherhood is partisan. People have axes to grind. But women successfully raise children under all sorts of adverse circumstances, and women fuck up their children under all sorts of propitious circumstances. This single biological parameter does not provide much information about the quality of your connection to your child, or the nature of the way you relate to them.

Freethinker: Nevertheless, would you accept that bearing a child does make a difference to a woman, and is one experience that a woman can have and a man cannot?

Antony: It is true. I would like to have a penis, because I think there are some experiences that men can have that I would be interested in having. So what? Of course pregnancy and childbirth change you, but there is very little you can say in a general, uniform way about this change, except for the things that have to do with the social implications of being a parent – which are eminently changeable, and that affect adoptive and step-parents as well.

Freethinker: You might also say, as some feminists have been saying for a long time, that being a woman should in general not matter. Biological considerations aside, women should be able to do everything that men can do. Why not?

Antony: I do not want to frame my aspirations for women in terms of something relative to men. I want people to be able to flourish – that is the goal of feminism.

As a socialist feminist, I think there are things that we can do socially that we cannot do individually, or not do as well. Many of the things women have traditionally done – caring for children, educating children, caring for the sick and the elderly – these are responsibilities that ought to be borne socially. Social support for these things will help more children flourish, and will enable women to flourish in more ways.

Freethinker: What about other areas where biology might be said to be relevant to the way in which women and men are treated? For example, in prisons – where women might not want biological males to be there because they say they have flashbacks to a man who raped them. If, on the other hand, trans women are likely to be ill-treated in men’s prisons, why not have a third category of prisons, or prison facilities, for transgender people?

Antony: We’re going to build separate prisons for trans offenders? That is not going to happen. But it is not clear that we have to have what we think of as women’s prisons and men’s prisons. The particularities matter. You cannot just say there is a woman who is going to feel triggered if she sees a penis. That is not the end of the story – it is an element of what we have to consider.

Freethinker: Is it fair on biological women to allow trans women in women’s prisons?

Antony: This is going to sound like I am anti-woke, but I do think that talk of triggering has gotten out of hand. People can be triggered by stuff that is not systematic. If there was a spider in my prison cell, I would go nuts.

Freethinker: Do you think that biological women should ever have the right to a space which excludes biological men?

Antony: Not a fundamental right and not a right per se. Do you think people in general have a right to not be exposed to experiences that are triggering for them?

Freethinker: I would agree with you that there should be no blanket right, though I would have thought that there should be room for protection against triggering in cases, for example, of clear psychological trauma. But in the case of trans women in women’s prisons, might they not also pose the additional risk to women of actual physical harm?

Antony: I know of no evidence that cis women are more vulnerable to sexual violence, either in restrooms or in prisons, by the presence of a transgender woman. If you are a cis male rapist and you are after cis women, what better place to go than a women’s bathroom where there are likely not to be any other cis men? If it were a gender neutral bathroom, there would be a chance that there would be other cis men there to deter you from realising your intentions. A woman’s actual safety is not secured by having women-only bathrooms.  A cis-woman colleague of mine was assaulted in a ‘women’s room’ in our university building.

If you put a trans woman into a male prison, what is going to happen to her? She is going to be brutally assaulted and possibly killed, certainly raped, by some cis men in that prison. That is perfectly predictable. So why would you add to the already existing problem of rape and assault in male prisons by putting someone there who identifies as a woman?

Freethinker: But then, on the other hand, they might be a real threat to women if they went into a women’s prison. As in the case of Isla Bryson, who was convicted for raping two women as a man, and then transitioned during the trial; or the case of the violent offender, Tiffany Scott, who transitioned from man to woman during a life sentence and applied to be transferred to a women’s prison.

Antony: Did these individuals rape anyone once in prison?

Freethinker: No. In the event, Bryson was not in the women’s prison estate for very long, and Scott’s transfer was blocked. Scott had been previously been convicted of violent offences while in a men’s prison. Both Isla Bryson and Tiffany Scott also retain male genitalia. In any case, is the problem not that someone’s rights are at risk either way round?

Antony: I do not accept the assumption that a trans woman is more likely to commit a violent assault than a cis woman. Cis women commit battery and rape, too.

Freethinker: Although it seems well established that biological women in general commit a much small percentage of violent crimes than biological men. In any case, with a pre-operative trans woman, who still had male genitalia, would you accept that such a person would, in general, present a greater risk in a women’s prison than another woman?

Antony: Suppose I grant that such a person would be physically capable of raping a woman: still, how do we know when a person is sincerely claiming a gender identity that does not accord with their current physical properties? I would like to see some evidence that cis men dishonestly claiming identity as a woman is a serious concern. There is, in at least some people’s minds, an exaggerated likelihood that a biological male is going to the trouble of really pretending to be someone who identifies as a woman for the sake of winning some athletic competition or serving their time in a women’s prison. If you have someone who has been living as a woman and enduring the difficulty and opprobrium that that still brings with it in our societies, and they are doing it for a significant amount of time, that is good evidence that they sincerely have a different gender identity.

Trans women are people. To put a person into an environment where they are likely to suffer severe degrees of physical abuse is a serious harm. There is no conservative, harm-free alternative here. For a person who has the gender identity of a woman but the biological characteristics of a male, the question is whether the possibility that that person is going to cause severe psychic or physical distress to some women incarcerated in the same place, high enough to justify putting that person into a male prison – an environment where there is a high probability that they are going to suffer severe physical harm.

Freethinker: So is it a matter of weighing the risk to the trans person versus the risk to the women?

Antony: You say ‘risk to the women’. We need to consider all persons. I am not a utilitarian, but I do think it matters what the consequences of our actions are, morally speaking. And when you look at the consequences, you have got to look at not just the possibilities, but the probabilities. I would bet that most women prisoners are far more concerned about being raped by the guards than by a transgender woman. (See this article.)

Freethinker: Another problem with failing to distinguish between trans women and women on biological grounds arguably comes in scientific research and the compilation of medical data. Would it not be problematic if a trans woman was labelled female on the medical record, and then their data was used to contribute to a picture of how diseases affect women’s bodies? Would doing so not risk skewing the data – if you accept that women’s bodies are biologically different from men’s and have, to some extent, different susceptibilities to different diseases?

Antony: Maybe medical science should ask more directly about the conditions that they are concerned about. If you are an XX individual, there are certain regularities that are captured when we taxonomise in terms of men and women, whether those medical regularities are the result of innate biological differences or the differences that result from being socialised as men or women. Take, for instance, the appalling difference in the rate of maternal mortality between black and white women in the US. Is that the result of some biological similarity among black women versus white women, or is it the result of the social conditions under which black and white women typically give birth?

There are a lot of people who are uncontroversially women or uncontroversially men who are biologically atypical – and their data goes into the samples. That is why we have statistics to find central tendencies and to try to tease out causally relevant factors.

Freethinker: But men, for instance, can get prostate cancer. Women can’t.

Antony: That’s right.

Freethinker: Women can get endometriosis. Men cannot get endometriosis because they do not have a womb.

Antony: In this case, people without wombs cannot get endometriosis – including women who do not have wombs.

Freethinker: Is it not the case that people with XX chromosomes, which are found in every cell of the body, have different genetic susceptibilities to certain diseases and conditions from those with XY chromosomes? Women are more susceptible to breast cancer than men, for example.

Antony: Maybe so. But there is a much higher mortality rate for men who have breast cancer than women, partly because it is standardly believed that men cannot get breast cancer. It is clear that the parameter for effective medical intervention is being susceptible to breast cancer.

Freethinker: But how would we even know that biological men could get breast cancer in the first place, or that they had a higher mortality rate, if patients were simply able to designate themselves ‘male’ or ‘female’ on medical forms regardless of their biological sex? Wouldn’t the statistics get muddled?

Antony: Hang on. If somebody comes to the hospital with a lump that may be a sign of cancer, the diagnostic procedures are the same. Classifying them as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ does not add any information to the clinical situation.

Freethinker: But would it not add information for the future, for people down the line who wanted to know what percentage of biological males and females get breast cancer, whether one sex was more susceptible than the other?

Antony: Look, there are generalisations. It makes sense to put information about menstruation in places where girls are going to see it, despite the fact that some of those girls are going to be amenorrhoeic. There might be some androgen insensitive XY individuals among the girls. There may be some atypical XX individuals who are in the boys’ room. It is very difficult to craft generalisations in precise terms.

Freethinker: In statistical science, the way you make patterns is by amassing data. The patterns help you to make diagnostic predictions, even if they are not always accurate for all patients, who may differ amongst themselves. But even to compose the general pattern, don’t you need to have some parameters – some truth basis, such as knowing whether it represents males or females or both?

Antony: I was with you up to ‘truth basis’. What I am challenging is the claim that, for medical purposes, the proxy classifications, man and woman, are preferable characterisations. Take information about endometriosis. Why shouldn’t the pamphlets in the doctor’s office say, ‘If you have a womb, read this pamphlet’?

Freethinker: How about, ‘If you are a biological female, read this pamphlet.’ Wouldn’t that be the same thing?

Antony: Why not just say, ‘If you have a womb’? That is the specific circumstance where you need to be concerned about endometriosis. Why is it better to say ‘biological female’?

Freethinker: Because biological females may not all have a womb, but they almost all do. Even if they do not, their body still has most of the same features as other females. Would you not agree that biological males and females involve two types of body with some broad differences and which to some extent behave in different ways?

Antony: I agree that there is a robust sexual dimorphism in the human species, but it does not follow from that that we cannot do better than using the proxy categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’ for scientific purposes.

Freethinker: If you believe in sexual dimorphism, why not just use ‘male’ and ‘female’?

Antony: Because when we get down to specific conditions like endometriosis, we can do better even than male and female, because there are borderline cases and furthermore because there are trans cases. Those pamphlets on endometriosis might be picked up by a trans man with a womb.

Freethinker: Why not say ‘biological female’, then, since trans men are biological females?

Antony: Because the thing that I said is more informative and does not involve having to take a stand on this issue about the biological female.

Freethinker: Do you think that trans men are biological females or not?

Antony: I do not think they are biologically female. ‘Biologically female’ is a biological category that has fuzzy borders. Trans men are in the fuzzy border region.

Freethinker: What about trans men who are clearly biologically female – as presumably some of them are, especially, say, if they are pregnant and stop taking testosterone supplements and so forth?

Antony: I do not see the usefulness of the term ‘biologically female’. There are some lasting changes from having taken the masculinising hormones. What are we adding in terms of human well-being or understanding by insisting that a trans man who stops taking masculinising hormones in order to become pregnant is biologically female?

Freethinker: Isn’t it the truth?

Antony: I do not know if it is the truth, because you have not really told me what is required to be biologically male. My point is, what are we gaining either in terms of human well-being or understanding by insisting that we take those who are in the border and classifying them one way or the other? What is gained by saying, he is really a woman or she is really a man?

Freethinker: I was using the terms ‘biologically male’ or ‘biologically female’, rather than ‘man’ or ‘woman’, at this point.

Antony: But what you seem to be pressing on is a case where someone does not fit the full criteria for being biologically male or biologically female and insisting that I classify them on the basis of one of the determinants of being biologically male or biologically female.

Freethinker: You yourself have been talking about XX and XY individuals, rather than biological males and females. Is it not the case that an XX person cannot change all the chromosomes in their body to become XY, or vice versa? So in the great majority of cases, except for those very rare instances on the border, is there not a fairly clear sense in which someone is immutably either XY or XX?

Antony: I agree there is this classification. It covers, as I am prepared to concede, 98.5 per cent of the human race. But why insist that we apply the classification to the ones who do not fit the complete profile? Why do we have to decide whether somebody is biologically male or female? Even if the vast majority of human beings can readily be so classified.  There are individuals who look morphologically like XX females who have an XY karyotype.

Freethinker: One final question. For you as a socialist intersectionalist feminist, what is fundamentally at the heart of this debate about sex and gender?

Antony: I am a gender eliminativist. I believe that gender is real, but I think it should not be. People should be allowed to flourish in all sorts of different ways, depending on their different aptitudes, proclivities, characteristics and so forth. It is a fundamental injustice to try to package people into these socially preformed categories of man and woman, boy and girl. The elimination of that kind of categorisation is very important to me. As a feminist, I think that anyone who is being gender transgressive is putting us on the right road. So I want to give absolute support to trans people.

The post On sex, gender and their consequences: interview with Louise Antony appeared first on The Freethinker.

It is hard to tell the story of my transformation from a practising Muslim to a freethinker. It did not happen in a day or two. It took almost a decade.

I was born and raised in a moderately religious family in Pakistan. I was taught religion even before I could understand words. I was Muslim. I knew the greatest of all was Allah. I was supposed to worship Allah and do good deeds to make Him happy. When I turned seven, my parents told me that I had to pray five times a day daily. To begin with, I carried out some of my prayers and missed others, but within a few years, I was doing them regularly. I wore loose clothing. I fasted during Ramadan, and refrained from acts which are considered sins in Islam.

While doing this, I was studying journalism at a university in Lahore. I would go there in an abaya. I never stepped into the radio section of the department at that time because I thought it was wrong for men to listen to the voice of a woman from outside their family.

I had no plans to become a journalist. I was just studying it after one of my uncles suggested to my father that he put me in that field. Before my graduation I had decided to apply for a doctorate at a foreign university. I started applying for scholarships quietly. I was preparing the required documents, filling out long forms, and waiting for the results. I knew there would be a lot of resistance: in my family, as in most families in Pakistan, unmarried girls do not take decisions about their lives, especially ones like going abroad to study. I thought that once I had got the scholarship and admission letter, I would then speak to my family.

Before I could speak to them, however, they spoke to me. They had received a marriage proposal from our extended family. The man was a mufti, an Islamic cleric. My parents thought it would be the best proposal for me since I was religious: I used to pray regularly and cover myself before going out, and was not very social. I, on the other hand, had bigger dreams: to get a PhD and to teach at a university.

When my father informed me that my family had accepted a marriage proposal on my behalf, my world was shaken. I thought of the implications of being tied to the household of an Islamic religious scholar. It would undoubtedly mean a strict, orthodox life with rigid expectations as to how I dressed, spoke, and conducted myself in public.

As a 23-year-old, I wavered between the excitement of finally getting married and anxiety over what I would have to sacrifice. My dreams of graduate study abroad and a writing career seemed uncertain. I asked my family to ask them if they would agree to my getting a PhD and having a career after the marriage. If they said yes, I decided I would be happy to marry the mufti, otherwise I would decline his proposal. The answer was a clear no: they would not let me pursue my career after getting married. But this was because my family thought I would give up on my dream of graduate study and that it did not mean much to me.

According to a report of the Asian Development Bank, although women in Pakistan are increasingly pursuing higher education, only 25 per cent of those who do complete higher education end up working outside the home. They are married off as soon as they get their degrees, or sometimes even before that, but with the groom’s family promising that the bride will complete her education after the marriage. Many times, however, these promises are not fulfilled.

Despite their having rejected my conditions for marriage, and although I was reluctant, both families agreed to move forward with the engagement. It lasted for two years. In those two years, I was at least allowed to go to China to do a Master’s in International Journalism and Communication at a university there.

My time in China expanded my perspectives in the ways I had not expected. I went there to get a Master’s degree, but it proved a vital step along a path that I had never even thought to follow. As an international student far from home, I gained experiences that I had never had before. I attended lectures in which we would discuss values that were different from those in my home country. I had classmates from all over the world. We would gather in our spare time and talk about different subjects. Those conversations helped to open my mind a little. Over time, I realised that, in China, I was living a life free from the oppressive cultural and religious expectations of my homeland. I felt both safe and free.

Meanwhile, I was also talking to my fiancé. Our phone calls, in which he would dictate strict rules on my conduct and the people with whom I could associate, left me deflated. I confided in fellow Muslim women students who faced similar restrictions and, as it were, remote control from their families back in their home countries. We would talk about the cultures in which we grew up and then compare them with the culture we were experiencing in China. It was totally different. None of us wanted to go back to our Muslim majority countries.

This forced me to think seriously about why I and my fellow Muslim women students did not want to go back home. The answer was simple, but it took me a decade to work it out. The reason we did not want to go back home was the religion that was forced on us. We wanted to practise it in our own ways as independent women. We did not want guardians. We wanted our own identity.

It was the first time that I had started to think about the contradictions between the progressive values I yearned for and the religious dictates that I had followed unquestioningly when younger. I started to write blogs chronicling my evolving thoughts about women and their rights. Although I was mostly criticising the oppression of the traditional Pakistani culture which I had been raised in, I realised that the culture I was questioning was founded on a religious basis. The more I became concerned about patriarchy and autocracy, the more I began to doubt what I had previously accepted as infallible religious truth.

I then started to engage with progressive thinkers and academics. I found several YouTube channels where freethinkers were answering the questions I had been turning over in my mind for years. I started listening to their videos. I bought their recommended books. These also helped to clarify my thoughts.

The fact that I was writing publicly about how I was questioning the cultural structure in which women in Pakistan were held became a serious problem for my fiancé. Both families decided to call off the engagement. I am grateful to that relationship for making me what I am today. It helped me to turn towards the liberation of reason and made me an individual who believes in progressive values, including those which support a liberal secular society and democratic government, and which allow free speech and other freedoms to everyone without any discrimination.

The change did not happen in a day, but gradually. Instead of focusing on praying and fasting, I started instead to think about helping people in whatever way I could. I was a journalist; I started drawing attention to social issues in Pakistan, particularly those related to women, ethics and religious minority groups. As I and other journalists brought these issues to the attention of institutions which could resolve them, I would feel a sense of happiness and achievement.

As Simon Cottee discusses in his book The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam, while men question the teachings of Islam after not finding answers to their questions about the universe, women question it when they start to become uncomfortably aware of how they are being controlled and deprived of their rights. I felt the same, though for most of my life I considered myself a Muslim, a liberal one.

As I went further into questions of who I was and why I existed, I became less convinced of the existence of absolute truths about Islam, though more confident in my own moral compass. My idea of God grew broader than the way He was depicted in the orthodox scriptures. I felt closer to universal moral truths rather than narrow commands. This questioning process led me to realise the significance of the humanity that we all share.

I started to report on religious extremism and human rights violations, specifically those happening to women. It brought me the label of ‘bad woman’ in Pakistan. However, I realised that there were some people in my audience that appreciated my work. This appreciation gave me the courage to move forward with my journalistic career. This sense of support is the only thing that pushes the small minority of progressives in Pakistan to keep doing their work.

Now, back in Lahore, the azaan still echoes around me five times a day from multiple mosques at the same time. I think about the misuse of loudspeakers by these mosques. The local law permits them to use their loudspeakers for Friday sermons and call for prayers only. However, there are seven mosques in my neighbourhood. Some mosques use their loudspeakers for daily sermons and recitation. I cannot question this practice as a citizen of the country. I cannot even write about it in the local media as a journalist. I would put myself in danger if I did so.

In April 2017, the Indian singer Sonu Nigam described in a series of tweets how he was constantly ‘woken up by Azaan’ and questioned when this ‘forced religiousness’ would end in India. His tweets caused him lot of trouble. According to the Times of India, he has been placed on the hit list of the terrorist organization Lashkar-E-Taiba.

My transformation was neither planned nor easy. It is very difficult for most women in Pakistan and much of the Muslim world to freely question or leave religion as I have. Those who dissent often face threats or exclusion. The small communities of progressives and freethinkers that exist remain low-profile to protect themselves.

While this ongoing exploration at times feels lonely, it has connected me to liberal, freethinking communities abroad and at home. I feel more confident in myself, liberated, and connected with progressive values that are welcomed by people around the world. It gives me peace – more than I have ever received from the religion in which I was enlisted a few minutes after my birth.

The post From religious orthodoxy to free thought appeared first on The Freethinker.

9 February marks the birthday of the great revolutionary and freethinker Thomas Paine. Born in 1737 in Thetford, Norfolk, Paine emigrated to the American colonies in 1774 and penned the bestselling pro-revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense in 1776.

After America won independence, Paine returned to Europe, spending time in England and France. He became a firm supporter of the French Revolution and wrote Rights of Man (two parts, 1791 and 1792) in defence of it against its critics, especially Edmund Burke. Persecuted in England, he fled to France and was elected a member of the National Convention.

After falling afoul of the Jacobins, Paine was imprisoned and barely escaped execution. In 1802 or 1803, he returned to America, where he died in 1809. His later years were sad; he was ostracised by his fellow Americans for his radicalism and his fierce assault upon religion in The Age of Reason (three parts, 1794, 1795, and 1807). His life and work inspired radicals and freethinkers long after his death, even to this day, despite the opprobrium heaped upon him by conservatives and the faithful during his lifetime.

The image above is a 1792 caricature of Paine by Isaac Cruikshank. It is a good representative of how he was seen by the British establishment: as a dirty, dangerous, vulgar alcoholic, and an enemy of religious and conservative values. Indeed, Paine was the target of a splenetic campaign of vilification for his defence of the French Revolution and he was soon hounded out of the land of his birth by the reactionary government of William Pitt the Younger—which only goes to show how influential he was. In that sense, Cruikshank’s caricature of him is a compliment of a kind, and perhaps that is why, to this eye at least, it makes him look grandly triumphant.

Here is the description of the image from the website of the British Museum:

‘Paine stands full face, looking to the left and smiling. He holds out his right arm, holding a pen and a long scroll; in his left hand is a dagger. On his back is a large bundle of weapons, shackles, and instruments of torture. He smiles slyly, his face is blotched with drink. He is neatly and plainly dressed; from his button-hole hangs an exciseman’s ink-bottle, inscribed ‘Gall’. His head is irradiated, with words inscribed between the rays: ‘Cruelty’, ‘Equality Madness’, ‘Anarchy Murder’, ‘Treason’, ‘Rebellion’, ‘Perjury’, ‘Atheism’, ‘Misery’, ‘Famine’, ‘National & Private Ruin’, ‘Ingratitude Idleness’, ‘Treachery’, ‘Injustice’. His scroll is inscribed: ‘Rights of Man [see BMSat 7867, &c] – Common Nonsense – Equality of Property &c. &c.’ He tramples on scrolls inscribed: ‘Loyalty’, ‘Magna Charta’, ‘National Prosperity’, ‘Religion’, ‘Protection Property’, ‘Obedience to the Laws’, ‘Morality’, ‘happiness’, ‘Industry’, ‘Personal Security’, ‘Inheritance’, ‘Justice’. Beneath the title is etched: ‘I am Ready & Willing to offer my Services to any Nation or People under heaven who are Desirous of Liberty & Equality Vide Paines Letter to the Convention.’ 26 December 1792. Hand-coloured etching.’

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Further reading on Paine and the radical and freethought traditions

The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones, by Eoin Carter

Image of the week: ‘The world is my country, to do good my religion!’, by Bob Forder

How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism, by Nathan Alexander

Introducing ‘Paine: A Fantastical Visual Biography’, by Polyp, by Paul Fitzgerald

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

Charles Bradlaugh and George Jacob Holyoake: their contrasting reputations as Secularists and Radicals, by Edward Royle

Freethought in the 21st century – interview of Freethinker editor Emma Park by Christoph De Spiegeleer of Liberas, a heritage and research centre for the history of the liberal movement and the freedom ideal in Belgium

Christopher Hitchens and the long afterlife of Thomas Paine, by Daniel James Sharp

Freethought and secularism, by Bob Forder

The post Image of the week: ‘Wha wants me’, a caricature of Thomas Paine by Isaac Cruikshank (1792) appeared first on The Freethinker.

A detail from Filippino Lippi’s late fifteenth-century fresco, held in the Carafa Chapel of the Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, venerating the thirteenth-century monk and theologian St Thomas Aquinas (seated in the centre). The influence of Christianity on the development of the western mind has been a topic of interest in the Freethinker of late: see my interview with the scholar Charles Freeman, which (inter alia) deals with this question, and Nick Cohen’s recent essay arguing that western values (whatever these might be) are not inherently Christian.

Freeman discusses Lippi’s painting at the beginning of his 2003 book The Closing of the Western Mind, and in doing so explains why it is germane to the now very prominent debate over Christianity’s role in the intellectual evolution of the western world:

‘The monk crushes a scowling old man beneath his feet. The old man is a personification of evil and he clutches a banner with the Latin inscription “Wisdom conquers evil”. The monk himself is none other than the great Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-74). Above him in a roundel are the verses from the book of Proverbs with which he chose to begin one of his finest works, the Summa contra gentiles, “a summary of the case against the heretics”, “For my mouth shall speak truth and wickedness is an abomination to my lips.” Also above him, on panels held by putti, appears a declaration of the importance of the revealed word of God: “The revelation of Thy words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.” The most important text, however, must be that which Thomas has selected to hold in his left hand; it is from the apostle Paul, SAPIENTIAM SAPIENTUM PERDAM, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise.” As this book will suggest[,] the phrase, supported by other texts of Paul which condemn the “empty logic” of “the philosophers”, was the opening shot in the enduring war between Christianity and science.

Here Thomas is in a position of authority, defending the revelatory power of God against “the wisdom of the wise”. Yet this “wisdom” is allowed some place. Alongside the saint sit four further personifications, in order from the left, those of Philosophy, Theology, Grammar and Dialectic. Philosophy (largely the study of formal logic), grammar and dialectic (the art of disputation) were the first subjects of the traditional medieval curriculum. However, though they may appear at ease alongside Thomas, they are clearly subordinate to the word of God, as preliminaries that had to be mastered before any advanced study in theology, the longest and most challenging course, could begin. Theology’s prominence over the others is shown here by her crown and her hand raised to heaven.

Below Thomas and his intellectual companions two groups of men stand back from a clutter of books and manuscripts. A debate has been in progress and it seems that its settlement has resulted in a disposal of discarded arguments. The reference here is to the fourth and fifth centuries when the [Roman] empire, newly if not fully Christianized, was rocked with debate over the nature of Jesus and his relationship with God. The Arians (followers of Arius) claimed that Jesus was a distinct and lower creation, divine perhaps but not fully God. At the opposite extreme the followers of Sabellius, a Roman cleric, claimed that the Godhead was one and Jesus on earth was only a temporary manifestation of that Godhead, in no way distinct from it. In the fresco Arius stands on the left, a serious and thoughtful man as tradition records, wearing yellow robes. In front of him a book bearing the words of his thesis, “there was a time when the Son was not”, lies condemned. Sabellius, shown as an austere Roman in a red robe, gazes down on his work with its own heretical assertion, that the Father is not to be distinguished from the Son, likewise condemned. Other heretics, including the Persian Mani (to the right of Sabellius in a furred hood [not visible in the detail above]), to whose sect St Augustine belonged before his conversion to Christianity, are in the crowd. These heretics had all been subject to specific refutation by Thomas in his works. What Thomas now upholds is the final solution to the issue, the doctrine of the Trinity. God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit have distinct personalities within a single Godhead. It is a doctrine, as Thomas himself wrote in his other great work, the Summa theologiae, that cannot be upheld by reason, but only through faith.

The “triumph of faith”, as depicted here by the Florentine painter Filippino Lippi, reflects the theme of this book. “Faith” is a complex concept but whether it is trust in what cannot be seen, belief in promises made by God, essentially a declaration of loyalty or a virtue, it involves some kind of acquiescence in what cannot be proved by rational thought. What makes faith a difficult concept to explore is that it has both theological and psychological elements. At a psychological level one could argue that faith must exist in any healthy mind. If we cannot trust anyone, have any optimism that all will be well, we cannot live full lives. Such faith will include positive responses to individuals, as evinced by those who met and travelled with Jesus. Here we cross a conceptual boundary because faith in Jesus, and in particular in the saving nature of his crucifixion and resurrection as taught by Paul, was of a different order from faith in the general sense that “all will be well”. With the elaboration of Christian doctrine faith came to mean acquiescence in the teachings of the churches – to be seen as a virtue in itself.

In the fourth and fifth centuries AD, however, faith in this last sense achieved prominence over reason. The principles of empirical observation or logic were overruled in the conviction that all knowledge comes from God and even, in the writings of Augustine, that the human mind, burdened with Adam’s original sin, is incapable of thinking for itself. For centuries any form of independent scientific thinking was suppressed. Yet, and this is the paradox of the Carafa fresco, it was actually Thomas, through reviving the works of Aristotle, who brought reason back into theology and hence into western thought. Once again it was possible for rational thought and faith to co-exist. We will meet the other Thomas, the Thomas who champions reason alongside faith, in the final chapter of this book.’

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The post Image of the week: Filippino Lippi’s ‘Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas over the Heretics’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

Sarah Bakewell is what you might call a non-organised humanist. That is not to say she is disorganised (far from it), but that she has developed her conception of humanism individually, over many years and to a large extent independently of the official humanist ‘movement’. Her previous books include a biography of Montaigne, a narrative study of Sartre and the existentialists, and two ‘true stories’ of eighteenth and nineteenth-century adventurers.

Bakewell’s latest book, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope, published by Chatto & Windus in March, represents her attempt to synthesise at least three distinct ‘humanist’ trends of thought that emerged, primarily in Europe, between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries: the literary culture of Petrarch and the Renaissance umanisti; the philosophical humanism of Voltaire and the Enlightenment; and the expressly non-religious, scientifically inclined humanism of figures like TH Huxley and those involved in early organised humanism.

Humanly Possible has already attracted attention. Bakewell has been profiled by the New York Times; her book has been reviewed by the philosopher Julian Baggini and Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and featured on BBC Radio 4. She also gave this year’s Rosalind Franklin lecture, held annually by Humanists UK, on the topic of humanist women.

I interviewed Sarah Bakewell in the British Library. Over a cup of tea, we explored some of her ideas in depth – from the relationship between humanistic and scientific humanisms to how to find meaning without religion.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Freethinker: How does Humanly Possible relate to your previous books, as well as to your own intellectual development?

Sarah Bakewell: It definitely grew out of the previous two books. The spark was thinking about Montaigne as a humanist, and what role the humanist tradition played in his education and his attitude, but also how he rebelled against and reinvented it, and was much less reverent towards it compared to other people of his father’s generation. And humanism was connected with existentialism: Jean Paul Sartre famously gave a lecture after the end of the Second World War, saying that ‘existentialism is a humanism’ – then he kept changing his mind about it.

I also wanted to understand more about the connections between the different forms of humanism and their development in different eras and contexts. Thirdly, it was about what humanism meant to me. I have always been a humanist, although for years I did not use the label.

Are there any translations in the pipeline?

Yes. There are a dozen or so on their way, including German, Italian, French, and two Chinese editions – one for Taiwan and one for China.

Will the one for China be censored?

One publisher, who I did not go with in the end, said that any mention of religion would need to be cut, which is strange in a book about humanism. It was different compared to the last book, where none of this came up. I think there has been a shift in how much publishers feel they have to self-censor. But there were certain compromises that I would not and did not make.

Was religion a part of your life growing up?

No. My background was absolutely atheist. My parents were non-religious. My father was brought up as a Baptist and he rebelled against that when he was a teenager, and had the whole church praying for his soul as a result. My mother was never a believer. So I was lucky in that I did not have to go through that painful, challenging process of rejecting what you have been brought up with. My grandmother, the Baptist one, did hope that she might be able to get me interested in religion. She sent me a children’s pictorial Bible, which I loved because it had great stories, like fairy tales, with beautiful illustrations. But I never took it literally.

Would you now consider yourself agnostic, atheist or something else?

Theoretically, I am inclined to say agnostic, simply because you cannot prove a negative. But I am more of an atheist by personal conviction. There are parts of what institutional religion does that appal me. But there are parts that I respect, because religious activity is a form of human activity and artistic creation. I enjoy going into churches, and even reading religious books sometimes. I love the beauty that can be found in religious traditions.

But for me, the real beauty comes from contemplating the universe, what we know about it and what we might still discover, the scale of what we see in the night sky and how it might all work. The desire to find out more about the universe inspires me much more than religious traditions.

When did you first start using the label ‘humanist’ for yourself?

About 15 years ago. Definitely before I started writing this book. I have never been much of a joiner of organisations, but I did join Humanists UK when I started writing it. Labels are not something I usually feel very drawn to using. I think that might be true of many humanists, who by disposition want something subtler and more individual.

How much of your research was in the UK and how much elsewhere?

A lot of it was in the British Library, where we are now sitting, as well as the Warburg Institute, the London Library and the Bishopsgate Institute. I spend a lot of time in Italy anyway [Bakewell’s wife, Simonetta Ficai-Veltroni, is Italian]. I did not do much research in Italian libraries, but I did try to find out more about the places where the humanists of the early modern era lived. Padua stands out, because it was important for university life and education, particularly in the history of medicine. Chapter 4 of the book is about medicine and humanism. In the medical university at Padua you can stand in the Anatomical Theatre [built in 1595] and imagine what it would have been like to be a medical student, seeing the anatomising of a body – a process which is of course so important for good medical education, and thus for better medicine, and thus for better human welfare.

Petrarch, who is the main character of Chapter 1, lived close to Padua towards the end of his life, and was involved with the university and the local community. I also visited Avignon, where Petrarch grew up, and Paris. I spent a few days in Chartres. The cathedral there has got nothing to do with humanism in the non-religious sense, but it had everything to do with the flowering of education and a proto-scholarly humanism that started there and in other French centres before it started in Italy. It gives you such a different perspective when you are in a place. I visited Basel, which was the closest Erasmus came came to having a home – in fact, he spent most of his time travelling around and said that ‘My home is wherever I keep my library.’ Which sums him up, really.

Your focus is primarily from fourteenth to late twentieth-century Europe. Why did you choose this period, and those specific starting and finishing points?

Petrarch marks the beginning of the self-consciously modern revival of classical learning in Europe. He saw himself as bringing the light back from the classical world and starting a moral as well as an intellectual revival. In that sense, he is often called the first humanist, so it seemed a sensible place to start. The story tends to focus mainly on Europe, with some reaching in other directions, particularly to America. That was deliberate, because I needed to impose some kind of structure, limit and coherence. The people involved were influenced by each other, read each other, and responded to each other’s work.

I thought about ending with a more substantial survey of where humanism is now. But this has already been written about by others, and it is still very much a live story, changing and developing. I did not think I could do it justice unless I had a large section on it. And I am more of a historian by temperament.

You read philosophy at university. It seems to me that you are a little ruthless with Plato and Aristotle, writing that they ‘were (in most respects) not very humanistic’, and preferring Democritus, a fragmentary Presocratic, and the obscure sophist Protagoras. What made you take this approach?

From the fragments that we have of Protagoras, he and Democritus were in many respects proto-humanists, in the tradition of materialist philosophy. There is one fragment of Protagoras which says, ‘as to the gods, I know nothing about them’. This and other Presocratic sources suggest that, because we cannot know anything about the gods, it is not worth spending time worrying about them. There is a similar tradition of materialism in ancient India.

Your book talks about Cicero’s idea of humane studies, including in his speech in defence of Archias, where he identifies a ‘common bond’ between the ‘arts that concern humanity’. How far are these ideas a starting point for Renaissance humanism?

The Ciceronian idea of the ‘human and literary studies’ is really at the foundation of Renaissance humanism. This interest in Cicero was kick-started by Petrarch, who really admired Cicero, although he did criticise him as well. But others came along after him who thought Cicero was an almost godlike figure and could not be questioned, and that his style in Latin should be imitated absolutely. There was a tension between the kind of humanists who were obsessed with classical models and the ones that were more questioning and critical.

You point out that Renaissance humanists like Petrarch were concerned about literary style even when writing in an emotional state or about distressing topics. Is this an idea that would be worth considering for modern humanists?

We still recognise the importance of speaking and writing in an articulate way, though it does not go under the name of eloquence any more. But sometimes we are suspicious of the veneer of polished speaking. There is the idea, which started with the Romantics, that beautiful words mean nothing, and just cover up authentic feelings. This idea was alien to the Renaissance humanists, who would have said that deep feeling should be communicated as powerfully as possible. They also took from classical literature the idea that real eloquence must always be allied to virtue, or goodness.

We seem to have a double standard. On the one hand, we – at least I – do not trust the likes of Boris Johnson, who uses Latin quotations elegantly and is educated in the tradition of eloquence and classical reference, without that necessarily being a reflection of goodness or honesty. On the other hand, we can also be judgemental about people who do not express themselves very fluently.

Among the people you mention in your ‘Acknowledgements’ is Andrew Copson, the CEO of Humanists UK. To what extent did you consult with him or any humanist organisations during your research and writing?

I talked to Andrew, who was very helpful, and to one or two other humanists. Almost as a matter of principle, though, I mainly worked with my own idea of what I wanted to write. I did not not want to feel that I was presenting a view of humanism that was officially sanctioned by humanist organisations. Although I did include Humanist International’s Declaration of Modern Humanism (2022) as an appendix.

Is there anything in the 2022 Declaration (the latest version of the Amsterdam Declaration of 1952) that you would disagree with or want to modify?

No. One change I agree with is the emphasis on the need for humanism to involve respect and concern for the rest of the natural world and for other species, not only for human beings. There is a misconception out there that humanism is the same thing as anthropocentrism and that it implies not caring about other species.

Why should humanists care about other species?

On the simplest level, because we cannot survive without them. We are of this planet, and woven into the biodiversity around us. The general humanist approach also involves a sense of responsibility for the impact we can have on the planet. We have considerable powers technologically and by sheer force of numbers; I think we need to own up to that responsibility.

You identify ‘freethinking, enquiry and hope’ as consistent aspects of humanism throughout your period of study. Why these three?

These three points apply to all the widely divergent forms of humanism that I discuss in the book – not just modern humanism of the secular or non-religious sort, but also the scholarly and literary humanism of the Renaissance and the philosophical interest in human well-being and dignity of the Enlightenment.

To what extent can we really talk about a single humanism running through all these different threads?

I tackle that in the opening pages of the book. It is there in the word: they are all practices or ways of thinking which have the human realm as the centre of their concern – whether culture, literature and the studies of the humanities, or human nature and well-being. And modern humanism involves a sense of morality and meaning that comes from human relationships and human concerns.

I mean ‘freethinking’ in the broadest sense of not taking anything on authority alone – whether that be the authority of religious institutions or political ones. ‘Enquiry’ is linked to that, but it involves asking questions and undertaking intellectual investigations in a more active sense – something many of the humanists did with gusto.

‘Hope’ is a little different. We cannot just be naïvely optimistic, but a humanist does have some sense that we can use our faculties and talents and our abilities to improve the well-being of other people and of other living things, to achieve a better politics, to solve our problems to as large an extent as we can. It was well summed up by Bertrand Russell, who features towards the end of the book precisely for what he said about the need to have hope in ourselves. Today, many people are in despair over the state of the world. But I think that losing hope is an abdication of responsibility and also risks being a self-fulfilling prophecy. We have to have some sense that we are capable of using our best abilities constructively.

Your book focuses primarily on individuals who were humanist in different ways. Was your choice of characters a personal one, or were you influenced by other accounts of humanism?

I was influenced by who I was interested in and who had something new to contribute. I tried to ensure that everybody that features in the book advances the story in some way, or stands for a wider process. I did not want to write a reference book merely listing lots of names, but something that was fun to read.

You use photographs to illustrate some of your main characters. Where did you find them, and why did you decide to add this pictorial element?

I took many of them from picture libraries. I wanted to have images to make it easier on the eye, but I did not want it to be just portraits. I tried to choose images that were a bit different or unexpected. In a few cases, there are contemporary political cartoons of people, rather than portraits, and in other cases, pictures of title pages or manuscripts that illuminate the text in some way.

Did you make any surprising discoveries during the course of your research?

There were a lot of things that were surprising to me, because when I write books, I find out a lot as I go along. I think that is more fun for the reader too, because we are going along together. Some of the characters were more interesting than I expected them to be – for example, Matthew Arnold, who wrote Culture and Anarchy, which I had had on my shelves for years but never read because I thought it would be boring. He is conservative and Victorian sometimes, but his writing is interesting, and he is endearing and enjoyable from a humanist point of view – I warmed to him. Wilhelm von Humboldt is another character who was full of surprises, not least his kinky fantasy life.

Your book discusses the debate Matthew Arnold had with TH Huxley about the relative importance of the humanities and literary studies versus the sciences. In 1959, CP Snow revived this debate with his Rede lecture on the ‘two cultures’. These days, it seems, if anything, too easy for scientists to take pot shots at the humanities for their irrelevance, lack of rigour or stagnation in the morass of literary theory. How far can the literary and scientific approaches to life, or more specifically literary and scientific humanism, be reconciled?

The clue to it is, again, in that idea of human studies. The universe is physical; we are physical beings. Some people would see that as invalidating all of the ‘human studies’ or humanities, as if they are somehow irrelevant because they do not correspond to how the universe is. But human studies are not irrelevant to us, because we are human beings. We are social and cultural by our nature, and so the human realm is enormously interesting to us. It is the sea in which we swim all the time – it is language, culture, communication, society, politics. The two cultures are connected, I think, not contradictory.

You say you like contemplating the universe. This reminds me of Kant’s idea of sublimity: ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’. Is there an argument that the scientific perspective is fundamentally inhuman because its focus is on the very big and the very small, on the objective and not the subjective human experience? Isn’t the human, from the scientific point of view, just a collection of processes or cells or atoms?

Yes, but the paradox is that the science that we do, the ability to visualise and study the very large or the very small, is a human activity. There is no getting away from the human, for us. One of the things that is fascinating about science as a human activity is that it does try to set aside human preconceptions, perspectives, prejudices, and to work from the evidence – and that is a truly impressive thing to do. But even that – working out scientific methods, testing hypotheses, looking for falsifications and evidence – is still a human activity.

At the end of the book, you briefly mention posthumanism and transhumanism. How might the development of technologies like artificial intelligence affect humanism, and what it means to be a human, in the future?

This is a difficult question, because we do not know where we are going and things are moving very fast. We are already closely integrated with our technology, and are likely to be ever more so. Is there a line that we would one day cross, when we would no longer be the same? Have we crossed it already? I do not know the answer to that because it is all developing under our noses. I am wary of simplistic answers as to whether there will always be some human ‘essence’. I really do not know.

Your book was published in March this year, and you have said elsewhere that you spent about six years writing it. Those years were also a very eventful period in Britain. Did the turbulent political atmosphere have an effect on your book?

It was quite dramatic because I started working on it in early 2016, and then Brexit happened, and Trump. Since then, there have been all sorts of further blows to our sense of confidence in human common sense, if you like. I tried to keep reminding myself of what Bertrand Russell and others have said, that the greater the challenge to our sense of hope in ourselves, the more we actually need that hope – and the more we need a sense of faith in ourselves and in our processes, in our better political institutions, legal protections, free press, and the ability to talk openly about issues and to establish effective media of communication between countries. Altogether, we need more of our good qualities rather than just giving up on them.

Bertrand Russell [1872-1970] also experienced growing up in a hopeful time and then having to realise that things would not always simply get better and better. That is not how human history has ever gone. There will always be complications, steps backwards, obstacles and wrong moves, but it is wiser to expect that and not to be naïvely optimistic. And, as always, it is up to us. If things are going to be even a bit better in this world, we are going to have to do it.

Does the humanist have a natural political stance? Or should humanists today subscribe to any particular political views about anything?

No. I do not think there is any inevitable connection with any particular political viewpoint. In the nineteenth century, Humboldt and Mill were classical liberals, but Matthew Arnold, whose views about culture and education had much in common with theirs, was a small ‘c’ conservative. I am more interested in how the humanist dimension works with various political positions.

Where would you put yourself on the political spectrum?

I would say I am a humanist liberal.

Does the humanist today have a moral obligation to be involved in any sort of political campaigning or activism, or can they live a quiet life?

Personally, I live a fairly quiet life – I am not a political activist. That is just me. So I have to say that it is not necessary to be politically active in order to be a humanist! But looking through history, a lot of humanists were politically active, or became so. Bertrand Russell, for example, started as a scholarly logician, mathematician and philosopher, but was politicised by the First World War and decided from then on to write political material as well, and campaign for political causes. Renaissance humanists were often engaged with the politics of their city and their environment. Humanists are often drawn to political activity because it goes with the idea that it is up to us to make the world that we want to have.

You emphasise the importance of freethinking and enquiry to humanism – which leads naturally to the question of how important you think free speech is today, and where you would draw the line. How far should free enquiry go?

I am drawn to the free speech end of that continuum: I think things should be talked about. If we are ever going to say that something should not be talked about, we had better give a very good reason why not. There are certain things that disturb me when I hear them said, but I am not sure that the best method of stopping people from saying them is just to silence them. I would want to ask why people might be saying those things, what that implies about us as a society, and where we should go from there.

Your book is full of references to happiness, human fulfilment, and the need for connections between people. Is writing a way in which you make connections?

There is a relationship with the reader. But part of the nature of writing is that you do not know what everybody who reads it thinks or wants to say back to you. I think that is as it should be. It is nice to hear back from readers, but that is not the primary reason why I write. It is a way of discovering things for myself as I go along, and taking other readers with me. It is like walking along a path together, but without knowing who the readers are – that is part of the appeal. I like the idea that people could make something out of the book that I would never dream of.

A recurring motif in the book is the idea that humanists can, in a sense, live on in their writings after they are dead. Is this also a motivation for you?

No. Most of the things that any individual does gradually fade away out of view after they are dead. Even those we think of as timeless classics – Plato and Aristotle and Protagoras – it is too early to say whether they are all going to endure. They became fragments. There would be an egocentric arrogance in thinking that somehow your words are going to live on. But I do spend a lot of time pottering around in second-hand bookshops and libraries and picking up obscure and forgotten books from a hundred years ago or more. I love the idea of reading something that has not survived in more than a few copies, and yet finding the voice of the author still talking to you.

You talk about hope as an ingredient of humanism. In the very long term, of course, the earth will probably be swallowed by the sun, and the human race may well have died out long before then. Where can humanists find hope, given that, on a cosmic scale, we are, by all appearances, so fundamentally meaningless?

On that scale, I do think we are completely meaningless and forgettable, as is everything to do with this planet and the very fact that we have existed at all. But we have got much more immediate things to worry about, and we could find ourselves disappearing a lot sooner than that. We are still a very young species – dinosaurs were around for an enormously longer time than we have been. Also I do not believe in God, so even if I wanted to find meaning there, that is not an option. Would I be happier if I had this great sense of meaning? No, because to me it would not be a genuine source of meaning. Actually, I find it exhilarating to think about the size of the universe. The fact that we are tiny does not bother me.

Final question: what is your next project?

I have not got one yet. I am having a little interlude to see what might arise next. And even if I did have one, like most writers, I probably would not want to talk about it.

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope, by Sarah Bakewell, was published on 30 March 2023 by Chatto & Windus.

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Portrait bust of Epicurus (c. 341-270 BC), a Greek philosopher who argued that the universe was made of atoms and empty space. The gods, too, were made of atoms, and played no part in human affairs; the soul died with the body and there was no afterlife. Copy of a Greek original dating from c. 275-50 BC, in the Hall of the Philosophers, Capitoline Museums, Rome.

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Religious dogma inevitably hinders progress. Theological codification, in turn, institutionalises societal decay. Today, nowhere is this more starkly visible than in Muslim communities.

Much of what ails the Muslim world today is rooted in Islamic text. From the subjugation of women to violence against freethought, many of the human rights abuses in Muslim-majority countries are justified via Islamic scripture and jurisprudence.

Democracy remains sidelined in these countries, with even aspiring secular states granting constitutional sovereignty to Islam. The glaring lack of modern Muslim contributions to science, technology and global development owes much to the Quranic undermining of the value of life in this world, in turn upholding a fixation with a collectively imagined ‘afterlife’.

Yet merely stating these obvious, not to mention ominous, realities can get critics accused of ‘Islamophobia’, even when the critics themselves come from within Muslim communities. This refusal by the community at large to acknowledge the symptoms naturally hinders any cure for the ailment: the imposition of Islam on Muslims.

Vedic faiths such as Hinduism allow for intrinsic dissenting space within the religious domain, while some Christian and Jewish traditions have been able to forge identities that are not bound by literal adherence to their scriptures. Muslims, meanwhile, are forced to accept absolute Islamic authority, even if they individually lack canonical devotion – leading lives in accordance with the scriptures – or ritual practice. This approach not only sustains Islamic inertia in Muslim communities, it intrinsically views any irreverence of Islam as something alien.

From Taslima Nasrin to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, many of the staunchest critics of Islam from within the tradition have not only had their books banned in Muslim countries, they have been discredited as outcasts. Their own critiques of Islam seem to reciprocate this rejection by betraying the parlance of an outsider, sometimes showing the same disdain for Muslims as they would for Islam. Salman Rushdie, the attack on whom in August was another grim reminder of the price of mocking Islam, has long been pigeonholed as a ‘blasphemer of Muhammad’, despite decades’worth of writings about the Indian subcontinent, including its multi-pronged identity crises.

The security threats facing Rushdie over four decades explain why those Muslim-heritage authors who have focused the entirety of their writings on the rejection of Islam, such as Ibn Warraq and other vocal ex-Muslims, have had to use pseudonyms to dodge Islamic blasphemy codes and the violence that inevitably follows. These authors too are dismissed as unrepresentative voices, even as anonymous atheism escalates across Muslim countries. This has meant that the overwhelming majority of the writing and scholarship on Islam that is produced worldwide, including in the West, continues to be done from within the confines of the religion.

A common theme among these contemporary thinkers arguing for Islamic modernity, including Reza Aslan, Khaled Abou El Fadl, Shahab Ahmed and Mustafa Akyol, is the endeavour to stretch the restrictive boundaries of Islam, but not to erase them. Even when thinkers such as Abdolkarim Soroush challenge scriptural authority, they do so from the perspective of human fallibility, not as a rejection of divinity: in other words, they justify contentious Islamic commandments in terms of the limitations of human comprehension and not in terms of the absence of a supernatural origin. Thus Muslim authors, from Islamists to modernists, continue to treat almost identically held Islamic doctrines as the starting point of their arguments. This is also why the ‘Medina state’, traditionally the first Islamic regime built by Muhammad, continues to be presented as a superlative embodiment of both an Islamic and a secular realm by the ideologically antipodal advocates of the same religion.

The treatment of the much touted ‘Golden Age of Islam’ is no different. There is no doubt of the significance of Arab and Muslim contributions towards science and philosophy between the 9^th and 15^th centuries AD, but that had little do with Islamic scriptures. All attributions of scientific advancement of that time to the Quran or Hadith (the sayings of Muhammad) depend on a kind of ‘Texas sharpshooter fallacy’, with the credit being claimed after the inventions and discoveries had been made.

Meanwhile, many of the practitioners of Islamic thought and jurisprudence, such as Abu Hanifa, Maalik Ibn Anas, Ibn Idrees Shafiee, Ahmad ibn Hambal, Ibn Abi Aqil, and Ibn al-Junayd, continue to be identically venerated as absolute authorities in Sunni and Shia Islam, and much of today’s Islamist hegemony is rooted in their writings and the schools of thought they founded. Yet it was the rationalist, not the religious, philosophy that was the most noteworthy contribution of the early Muslim authors to global thought. For which, many of the humanist Muslim philosophers were targeted as heretics.

A paradigm case is the 12^th century philosopher Ibn Rushd, Latinised as Averroes, who has been dubbed by many the father of Western secular thought. Rushd argued for pluralism in Islamic jurisprudence. His challenge to Islamic orthodoxy resulted in his being banished from Cordoba. Thus, while Ibn Rushd continued to inspire Western philosophy and political thought in the Middle Ages, his works remained largely sidelined in the Muslim world until the 19^th century.

Like Ibn Rushd, many early Muslim rationalists, such as Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi, were deemed heretics. Most notable among their critics were Al-Ghazali and Ibn-e-Tamiyyah – two of the theologians that have had the longest-lasting impact on Muslim thought and continue to be cited to substantiate Islamist politics. Similarly shunned were the Muʿtazila, the rationalists that challenged Quranic literalism and sought to subordinate theology to reason between the 8^th and 10^th centuries in what today is Iraq, inspiring modern liberal theologians like Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd.

Looking at the fate of even those rational thinkers of the time who did not explicitly reject Islam or theism, and who were largely looking to reconcile science and reason, it is clear that irreverent scepticism and freethought were not exactly embraced even in the celebrated periods of Islamic rule.

Today, it is common in the Islamic world to eulogise past empires from the Ummayad to the Ottoman, as well as the ‘Golden Age of Islam’. But this narrative betrays an academic revisionism which enforces an Islamophilic understanding of the Muslim past and present. This reintepretation of history is taking place, while at the same time the cultural relativist narratives of Orientalism and ‘Islamophobia’ are used to silence criticism or enquiry into Islam for ideological reasons. Intellectual progress in the Muslim world is currently hindered by scholarly bias in favour of Islam and its history, where making the obvious link between jihadism and Islam, or probing the veracity of claims in Islamic tradition, is deemed to be targeting Muslims as a whole. To change this, Muslim heritage thinkers not only need to embrace rationalism, but also to rekindle irreverence for Islam. In fact, the long history of Muslim countries contains many examples of irreverence and the questioning of religion.

One notable example was the 9^th-century philosopher, Abu Bakr al-Razi, a deist who criticised Islam and mocked the very idea of Quranic revelations. In Fi al-Nubuwwat (On Prophecies) he challenges the Quranic claim that a text like it cannot be produced:

‘Indeed, we shall produce a thousand similar, from the works of rhetoricians, eloquent speakers and valiant poets, which are more appropriately phrased and state the issues more succinctly… You are talking about a work [the Quran] which recounts ancient myths, and which at the same time is full of contradictions and does not contain any useful information or explanation.’

Al-Razi’s contemporary Ibn Al-Rawandi was an outspoken antitheist, described by historians as someone who upheld ‘atheistic ideas, the negation of Allah, the denial of Quranic prophecy, and the vilification of the prophets’. His Kitab al-Zumurrud (The Book of the Emerald) is presented as a theological dialogue in which he is a participant, called ‘the heretic’, arguing that ‘Muhammad’s own presuppositions and systems show that religious traditions are not trustworthy. The Jews and Christians say that Jesus really died, but the Quran contradicts them.’

Abu al-Alaa al-Maarri, a renowned 10^th-century poet and anti-religion deist, used parody and sarcasm in his assault on Islam, even satirising the Quran in Al-Fuṣul wa al-Ghayat (‘Paragraphs and Periods’). A famous couplet of his in Arabic is translated as:

‘Muslims are stumbling, Christians all astray,
Jews wildered, Magians far on error’s way.
We mortals are composed of two great schools
Enlightened knaves or else religious fools.’

Abu Nuwas also used satire in his poetry in the 8^th century, not just to target the Abbasid Caliphate, but even to express mockery for Islamic scriptures via homoeroticism. In one exchange he is reported to have used Quranic verses to woo a male lover.

As with much of early Islamic history, there is debate over the accuracy of the reported heresies that many of these dissidents, and others like them, were charged with. Their successors have often attributed their blasphemies to lies made up by rivals, or sectarian attacks, so as to sanitise those critiques that could be reconciled with Islam.

Conversely, there also are question marks over the sincerity – not to mention authenticity – of those rationalists who worked within boundaries of permitted Islam. Conflating deism or pantheism with Islamic characteristics could simply have been a means to avoid being censored and attacked, or even to make their ideas palatable for realms immersed in Islamic theology. The Egyptian philosopher Abdel Rahman Badawi argued in ‘From the History of Atheism in Islam’ that some sceptics steered clear of targeting belief in Allah as a whole, since it made their works likelier to be banished. This was the case with many anti-theistic ideas of the time that have only managed to survive till today via literature that counters those critiques.

Today, the ideological self-confinement of Muslim thought within Islamic boundaries is likewise an exercise in self-preservation and acceptability. Certainly, the attempt to reconcile religion with modernity can aid progress in Muslim countries. For example, it should not require complete rejection of Islam for aspiring Muslim scientists to deny the Quranic description of a flat earth, as long interpreted by Islamic scholars, even as recently as the 20^th and 21^st centuries. However, to seek to confine all intellectual enquiry within the bounds of Islam, however widely interpreted, is to prevent ideological pluralism. This in turn will keep Muslim freethought outside the realms of acceptability. In other words, as long as enquiry in Muslim countries is required to be sanctioned by religion, it will be limited in what it can achieve.

The authorities who hinder freethinking about Islam in this way, whether through sharia enforcement or via the ‘liberal’ denial of space for Islamic dissent, are actively suppressing the progress of Muslim thought. In doing so, they are hindering the intellectual growth of a quarter of the global population. It is only through unabashed irreverence and unapologetic rejection that Islam will find its due place in the modern world. That will finally allow Muslims to collectively embrace secular laws, to make intellectual progress on a par with other advanced countries, and to conduct their lives free from the hindrance of theological doctrine.

Today, however, whether in Islamist theocratic regimes like Iran, the now ostensibly liberalising Arab monarchies, or the heavily Islamised (though officially secular) democracies such as Indonesia, Islam remains a source of absolute power in the vast majority of Muslim states. The first step on the path to Muslim freethought needs to be a root-and-branch reform of the Islamic regimes themselves.  

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AC Grayling, the newly elected Honorary President of Atheism UK, will be giving a talk on ‘Proving Atheism’ at Conway Hall, London, on Tuesday 29th November 2022 at 19:30. Tickets can be purchased here, or by putting ‘Proving Atheism’ into Eventbrite.

Atheism UK, which is staging this event, was set up in 2009 by some activists who were frustrated by the failure of existing non-believer organisations to effectively challenge religious bodies, which enjoy many privileges in the UK. To be clear, most of us also belong to the National Secular Society and Humanists UK and consider them to do good work – just not rapidly enough! In fact, that was one reason, apart from his eminence, that we were so pleased when Grayling accepted the invitation to be our Honorary President: he is also an Honorary Associate of the NSS and a Vice President of HUK, and we are hoping for improved co-operation.

Our position is that, since we are all born without language, we cannot possibly be aware of any god at birth. The concept of god cannot be communicated to us before we can speak, and therefore, first, religions have to be taught and, second, we are all born atheists (without belief in a god). Atheism is our birthright. Unfortunately, it is often stolen from us later in life by those who wish to control us and surf on our incomes.

I am pondering what Grayling might be going to say for two reasons. Firstly, for many years he avoided describing himself publicly as ‘an atheist’. Many of us have been there. My own efforts at publishing books in this subject area some years ago went out under the pseudonym ‘Elliot George’. This is a reversal of George Eliot, the pen-name of Mary Evans.

Why were we historically shy about declaring our atheism? I suspect it was because nobody wants to rock the boat of society; no-one wants to identify themselves as a leper. And that is what it has been like throughout much of my life. I remember my mother advising me not to talk about religion or politics at the dinner table in order to keep the discourse congenial.

Not any more, though. Faithlessness is now mainstream. Several polls have recently revealed the UK to have a small majority of ‘nones’: people with no religious faith. The trajectory is towards normalising non-belief. Atheism is losing the taint of being a ‘dirty word’ – as it should.

The other reason I am wondering what Grayling might be going to say is because of the title of his talk. It contains the word ‘proving’. Can that be done for an absence of theism?

AC Grayling will be delivering the same presentation at the Darwin Day Celebration organised by Greater Manchester Humanists in association with Northern Atheists, on 10th February 2023 in the Friends’ Meeting House, 6 Mount St, Manchester, M2 5NS.

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