Introduction 

Brian Cox was born in Dundee in 1946 and has been a star of stage and screen for decades. His stage roles include Titus Andronicus and King Lear, and his film and TV credits include Sharpe, Manhunter (in which he played the first on-screen Hannibal Lecter), Rob Roy, Braveheart, Troy, X2: X-Men United, Churchill, and Succession. At the time this interview was conducted over Zoom (21 August 2024), Brian was in Glasgow about to start work directing on a new project. He couldn’t tell me much about this, except that it was something he had wanted to do for a very long time.  

Although we were pressed for time and the discussion could have gone on for much longer and in many directions, we covered a lot of ground, including Brian’s views on religion, acting as a form of humanism, the conflict in Gaza, sectarianism in Glasgow, Johnny Depp, Ian McKellen, Irn Bru addiction, and Scottish independence. All of this and more appears in the edited transcript of (and selected audio excerpts from) our conversation below.  

Interview 

Daniel James Sharp: Earlier this year, you caused a bit of a stir by labelling the Bible ‘one of the worst books ever’ and full of ‘propaganda and lies.’ But you also acknowledged the need people have for comfort and consolation. For you, though, theatre is the ‘one true church…the church of humanity.’ Is acting a form of humanism, then? 

Brian Cox: Yes. I don’t believe in churches, but if you need a church, theatre is the church of humanity. Acting is absolutely humanism. It’s based on who people are, what their belief systems are, how they’re plagued by their belief systems, and how they have to reconcile themselves to these belief systems—and when you think about it, in my view, that means reconciling themselves to something which is completely fictitious.  

It’s understandable that people need to believe in something because we live in an age where we’re so confused. What nobody ever talks about is where we are in our own state of evolution, because we’re clearly not fully evolved beings. If we were, we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing again and again. We wouldn’t have a Putin situation. We wouldn’t have a Netanyahu situation. I feel that we have to be evolved. We are evolving, but we are not there yet. We’re a long way off, and we are in danger of destroying ourselves because of our own stupidity. At the root of a lot of our problems is tribalism. Am I Islamic? Am I Jewish? Etcetera.  

The Jews were treated appallingly by Nazi Germany, and they then founded their own state. But now they have all sorts of problems there. There’s a great division among Jewry, including some great friends of mine, about what is happening in Gaza and elsewhere right now. Because of what happened on 7 October last year, a lot of them are very afraid, and we have to understand that. But the genocide that is being committed is inexcusable on any level, and you have to put it down to the extreme right-wing Jewish government—which is not wholly representative of the Jewish people. That’s very important to note. A lot of the Jewish people do not like what’s going on in Gaza. And anti-Semitism is not the answer, of course. Anti-Semitism is what gave rise to fascism and we have to be very careful about that.  

That is just one example of the danger of being beholden to belief systems. They trap us, they don’t liberate us. They may give us comfort, they may give us what they call faith, but at the end of the day, they are not helpful. They are not ultimately helpful to the human spirit, at all.

Just on the point about Israel and Palestine, I think it is also worth keeping in mind that it’s the same with the Palestinians as it is in Israel: Hamas is not necessarily representative of the Palestinians as a whole. 

Exactly, nor are the Yasser Arafats necessarily representative. It’s awful how they are using Gaza for their own ends. When it comes to these situations, I always feel for the children. They live in these conditions created by the mistakes of adults. I just cannot stand what’s happened to the children in Gaza. How many children have been killed? A disproportionate number of children have been killed because of these adults’ mistakes.  

I don’t in any way excuse Hamas at all. I do not excuse people who hide behind law-abiding citizens, innocents, because of their own disharmony with the system. Yes, I understand that Palestine has suffered a lot of persecution—psychological persecution as much as anything else—but I don’t excuse Hamas. I certainly don’t excuse what happened on 7 October, not at all. That was horrendous.  

But what has happened in Palestine as a result is also just appalling. This is where belief systems do not support you. They support your view over that view, but they’re not about harmony.  

I compare it with Glasgow, where I am right now. If you come to Glasgow, it’s quite ecumenical with its Islamic and Catholic populations. It’s quite free. Of course, it has its streaks of racism, and that is always going to be there—that fear that man has about his fellow that he can’t quite understand. But on the whole, Glasgow is doing well. 

I feel that we’re in such a state of setback at the moment. We are failing to understand how we’re evolving. We’re going through such horrific things at the moment, and the thing that stops us from evolving is being stuck in these belief systems.  

Could you explain a little more what you mean by these external belief systems being inimical to the human spirit? What is the human spirit? 

What is the notion of a freethinker? It means a person who thinks freely, without any trammelling of any kind. Their thinking is of a sense of liberation, the liberation of the human spirit (their actions might be a different matter, of course). I’m not a classified ‘freethinker’, but that’s what I would have thought a freethinker is. I rather admire and respect that.  

I’ve been thinking about why I’m talking to a freethinking magazine. I think because there is a problem at the moment with the cancel culture that we live under. There’s not a lot of free thinking going around. … Cancel culture is offensive and damaging to the human spirit. 

I believe in the human spirit. We don’t understand our own mystery. We try to codify it. ‘Say your prayers and it’ll all get better and then you’ll have something at the end of your life.’ But that’s a mystery, and nobody knows anything about that. All we know about is what we’ve got to deal with now, with our two legs, two arms, and two hands, and a head that can, perhaps, function. I feel quite passionate about that. We should give it the respect it deserves and not fall into these systems. 

My sister was a strong Catholic. She cleaned the church. But at the end of the day, when she was dying, I said to her, ‘Where do you think you’re going to end up?’ And she said, ‘It doesn’t really matter, does it?’ That was her conclusion after 90-odd years of life. And that’s the truth. It doesn’t really matter when it comes to those elements which are definable, but it does matter to something else that we don’t even know about. 

I did want to ask a little about your background. You’re from a working-class Scots-Irish Catholic family. And you’re in Glasgow right now, which, historically, was torn apart by sectarianism. 

Oh yes, Glasgow has always been sectarian, because of the Orange Order. The Glorious Twelfth. ‘Our father knew the Rome of old and evil is thy name…And on the Twelfth, I love to wear the sash my father wore.’ [Lines from Protestant anti-Catholic songs, the latter celebrating the ‘Glorious Twelfth’, the victory of the Protestant King William III over the deposed Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.] All in service of William of Orange, and what was he, except a good Proddie? 

The Catholics are good survivors because they’ve been hacked about ad infinitum. But there are also the acts that have been committed under the guise of Catholicism—the [Magdalene Laundries in Ireland], for example, and all those poor, misbegotten women who worked for them—so there is a lot of questioning there and nobody is exempt.  

And my sister, in the end, said that it doesn’t really matter. What does matter? We matter. Not our religion, not our faith, not our belief systems. We matter. Let’s try and understand who we are as a herd animal and as an individual animal. But we don’t even go there. Instead, we come up with all these stories that justify certain things.

And art is a way to understand ourselves. 

Yes. Art is the way I do that. Art is a way of looking at the world, and of looking at everybody in the world. From a dramatic point of view, we are looking at how human beings behave. What screws them up? What are their ambitions? What do they want? Why do they want it? Is it necessary? No, it’s not. Well then, why do they want it? Is it some kind of neurotic force at work or is it something else? That’s what actors do when we work on a role, we’re examining what’s going on. And that’s where all the belief systems can come into it. ‘Oh, I see, he’s Jewish, he’s got that kind of belief. Oh, but he doesn’t like being Jewish. Why does he not like that?’ Do you see what I mean? You’re creating an exploration of the human psyche, which to me is the great gift of acting.  

Who are your favourite actors? 

Spencer Tracy, for me, was the greatest screen actor ever, by far. He was extraordinary. He was very tormented, very Catholic, very guilt-ridden, but a great artist. The ease and the flawlessness and the way he negotiates stuff—tremendous. And he and [Katharine] Hepburn were extraordinary together. So, I think Hepburn is another of my favourite actors. 

Another is Cary Grant, who was a construct of a personality because of his horrific background, and he played all these wonderful, mysterious kinds of characters who just said, ‘I really don’t give a fuck.’ And of course, there’s [Marlon] Brando and Jimmy Dean, even though he didn’t live all that long. 

There are a few actors who grew better over time. Paul Newman got infinitely better as an actor as he got older. As a young man, he was a bit more confused.  

It’s a great craft, acting. And it is a craft. It’s a craft of human sensibility. Where are we coming from? Why are we doing it? What is it? What does it mean? What are we trying to achieve? And the truth is, we don’t know. We don’t know, because we’ve got all this other stuff that we have to deal with, that we’ve got to get through. 

That’s why I was interested in talking to somebody from a freethinking magazine. What is free thinking, and how free can thought really be these days? Or is there some impediment that makes it non-viable to think freely?  

I think it’s difficult to think freely at the best of times, but especially now. There’s so much pressure to conform to certain standards and ideologies.  

That’s right. And that’s why you’ve got to say, ‘Fuck it! I’m going to think freely.’ When the pressure is great, you don’t give up. It reinforces who you are. It looks as if you’re in doubt, but you’re dealing with a shit storm of meteors coming at you, and it’s very important to be able to think freely. I’m grateful because I think I’ve been able to do that for most of my life, and I didn’t even know I was doing it, and I did it because I didn’t have the usual constricts of family and parents and what have you. 

‘Fuck it, think freely!’ should be our new motto. You are well known for speaking your mind about politics, religion, and even fellow actors.  

I’ve got to shut up about fellow actors. I’m a bit naughty about that. It’s a hard game, and I sort of regret saying anything. And even if I did say something, it wasn’t meant as a damning criticism. It’s a question of taste. Not everybody likes everything other people do. I sort of regret calling Johnny Depp ‘so overblown, so overrated’ in my autobiography because he is fine in many ways. There are some things he isn’t fine at but, on the whole, he’s fine. He’s certainly very popular. It’s an imperious thing of me to do, to shoot on about somebody like that, because it’s a tough job.  

The best actors are children, and the greatest actors are the ones who can still be doing it at my age. I’m not saying I’m the greatest, just to be clear, but you know what I mean. I have great respect for people of my generation who are still doing it. 

In your autobiography, you talk about your and Ian McKellen’s different philosophies or styles of acting. I have a lot of admiration for both of you as actors.  

I love Ian, I really do, and I love him even more as he’s got older. He’s just a different style from me and naturally, I’m going to prefer my style, but that’s not about saying I’m any better. I’m not. I just prefer the way I work to the way he works.  

But he is a very special man in so many ways. He’s been a great champion, especially in the homosexual rights movement, standing up to Clause 28 and everything. He’s done phenomenal things in that way, so I have total respect for him. 

He’s a very sound man, in terms of his politics. I’ll still argue about the acting a wee bit. But as a man, I love him. We’ve known each other for a long time. We were neighbours recently. When I was doing the play Long Day’s Journey Into Night, he was next door doing Falstaff, where he sadly fell off the stage. I think that was a big shock for him.  

I was impressed that he was back on stage so quickly after that fall.  

Well, they gave that out, but he didn’t go back to do the job because it was too dangerous. The production should have taken into account the danger of being that far out on the stage. The upside of the accident is that it woke something in Ian. A shock like that is bound to wake something in you. He’s considerable, he’s absolutely considerable. He’s continued on his path and you can’t help but respect him.  

That’s the nice thing about getting older. You’re not beating tambourines anymore. You’re actually looking at people and saying, ‘Oh, well, I disagree. But my God! I respect that person.’  

It’s also great for viewers and audiences to have these different styles of acting. 

Of course. 

What do you make of the critique that actors should refrain from intervening in politics and the like—that they should stay in their lane? 

I think that’s a nonsense. Actors more than anything have an acute sensitivity to politics. If you’ve been in the game, you know that you can’t depend on it. It’s very fleeting.  

It took me a long time to come around to speaking up about things like Scottish independence, which I’m very interested in. I have never liked the name ‘Scottish National Party’, but I love the notion of the independent nature of Scotland.  

But I think that what we really require in these islands is federalism. We need each country to be self-standing on its own. These islands are a community. You can’t just say, ‘Oh, there’s Scotland, forget about the rest.’ 

Actors have a sense of that, of how they belong, and they also have a sense of not belonging. When you don’t belong in any one place, you get a broad view of what things are.  

Oh, you’re drinking Irn Bru!  

[Cue Irn Bru interlude. See audio excerpt.] 

I think that actors are very right to talk about stuff. We also have to talk about politics as it relates to our work. I think some of the practices that are happening to young actors now are despicable. Things like self-taping, where they’ve got to be their own technician and so on. They do these tapes and nobody even responds to them at the end of it. I find that appalling, so I will speak up about that, and I wish some of my fellow actors of my generation would also speak up about it. It’s our responsibility as the old regime of actors to say that what is happening to our young actors is not right. It’s not right that they lose the intimacy of a casting director.  

Some casting directors don’t work that way, of course. There’s a great casting director in Scotland, Orla O’Connor, who doesn’t do that. She believes in the relationship between people. But there’s a lot who do work like that. They used the excuse of Covid, and now they use the excuse of there being too many actors, and I say, that doesn’t matter. Common respect costs nothing.  

Do you think practices like self-taping will affect the quality of acting in future? 

I don’t think so. Actors are survivors, and you’ll get the talent no matter what. It’s just the battering that you get. It’s very wearing after a while, when you’re constantly not getting any response for what you’re doing. Young actors need some kind of response, even if they’re told they’re bad. And usually, they’re not bad, they just don’t fit into a particular project. But you’ve got to tell them, ‘Sorry, you’re not right for this project, and I’ll explain to you why you’re not right for it.’ 

Going back to politics, by advocating federalism, have you moved away from Scottish independence?  

No, not at all. I think federalism is the development of independence. We need to have a vision of how we live within these islands. We’re still a community, we’re still an island, like it or not. The border is a piece of land that’s flexible either way. At one point lots of people in the north of England were keen to be part of Scottish independence.  

I’m still pro-independence. I just think we’ve got to have a broader view of it, and federalism does that. We’re still very class-conscious in this country. I want to move away from that, to have a vision of what we want our country to be.  

We have to think about what an independent spirit means. To me, it means shaking off what we’ve suffered and endured for centuries. And we did it to ourselves, the Scots: we sold our Parliament out from under our feet in 1707 and became part of the United Kingdom. But that made us second-class in a way. For example, why did Prince William only go to see England at the Euros? That’s not very ‘United Kingdom’, is it? I think there’s still that attitude of, ‘Oh, the Scots are so tiresome.’  

When I was young, I couldn’t give a fuck about any of this. Now that I’m getting older, though, I think, ‘Hang on a second.’ In the project that I’m working on right now, my job is to honour the unity and the talent I see. People are delivering amazing work. And I want people to see that this is what Scotland can do. We can create stuff at a very high artistic level. But we don’t get that right now, we get reduced constantly. Our own culture is much older and more consistent than any other culture in these islands, because of the Celts that we all are.  

When I was younger, I was too ambitious. I didn’t care about any of this stuff. I just cared about me, but after a while, you get sick of that. And now, coming up to Scotland again, I see a kind of depression. It’s very difficult to describe but it’s there and it’s to do with permanently being defeated. We don’t need that. We can live through our defeat and learn from it. It shouldn’t make us depressed. It should do the opposite. It should free us more. It should make us think, ‘On, on.’ That’s how we’ve survived for centuries. We haven’t been browbeaten by it. It should make us think that maybe we could actually decide things for ourselves. That’s all I’m asking.  

Keir Starmer is absolutely against the breakup of the Union. It’ll never happen under a Labour government. He’s a stupid man—no, that’s not right, I’ll withdraw that. He’s very intelligent, but he’s very unspontaneous as a man. He’s limited in that sense. He doesn’t understand people’s feelings in Scotland and how necessary it is to nourish them, to make them blossom, to make them bloom.  

We’ve become so thwarted so much of the time, and that makes me sad because it is unnecessary. That’s why I believe in a United Federation, because I do think one of the things we are good at in Scotland is being very kind and considerate to others. All of those riots in England [in August], that would never happen in Scotland. We don’t do that. That’s not who we are. We are inclusive of our brothers and sisters who are Sikh and Islamic and so on. Of course, there will always be the headbangers. There will always be those who are afraid, who are intrinsically racist. You can’t avoid that. That’s something underdeveloped in the human spirit again. But on the whole, we’re really rather good at being inclusive in Scotland.  

For example, there was a meeting in Glasgow recently and what happened was quite stunning. About 30 right-wing people turned up. And against them you had the Indian, Irish Catholic, Scottish Presbyterian, and other communities all coming together. I think that is Scotland’s great gift. We’re good hosts. And that generosity of spirit is what I think could make us the nation that we should become.  

We’re out of time but thank you very much for talking to me. And good luck with your new project. 

My pleasure, it’s been nice to talk to you. Thank you very much. Take care. 

Related reading

‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner, by Daniel James Sharp

Israel’s war on Gaza is a war on the Palestinian people, by Zwan Mahmod

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

Britain’s liberal imam: Interview with Taj Hargey, by Emma Park

Can Religion Save Humanity? Part One, by Brian Victoria

Can Religion Save Humanity? Part Two: Killing Commies for Christ, by Brian Victoria

The far right and ex-Muslims: ‘The enemy of my enemy is not my friend’, by Sara Al-Ruqaishi

Reflections on the far right riots: a predictable wave of violence, by Khadija Khan

Free speech and the ‘Farage riots’, by Noel Yaxley

The post ‘F*** it, think freely!’ Interview with Brian Cox appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

In October 2023, a rather bizarre piece of news from Pakistan made the national and international news: a professor was forced by the clerics to apologise for teaching the theory of evolution and demanding basic human freedoms for women. Professor Sher Ali lives in Bannu, a Pashtun-majority conservative city in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan; many of its nearby villages are under Taliban control. Wanting to know more about this man standing up to the darkness in such a remote corner, I interviewed Sher Ali at the academy where he gives tuition to intermediate-level students. He is a well-read and humble person and provided much insight during our interview, a translated and edited transcript of which is below. I hope that the example of this brave and good man inspires others in Pakistan to embrace enlightenment over dogma.

Interview

Ehtesham Hassan: Please tell us about yourself. Who is Professor Sher Ali?

Sher Ali: I come from a small village in the area of Domel near the mountains. It borders the Waziristan District, not far from the Afghanistan border. My village is a very remote area and lacks basic facilities even today. In my childhood, we travelled for kilometres and used animals to bring clean drinking water to the village.

I started my educational journey in a school in a hut. In those days there was no electricity available so we would use kerosene oil lanterns to study at night. Luckily two of my uncles ran their schools in the village so I studied there. Both of them were very honest and hardworking. My elder brother would give us home tuition. After primary education, we had to go to a nearby village for further schooling. We would walk daily for kilometres to get to the school. We are four brothers and all of us are night-blind so we were not able to see the blackboard in the school. We would only rely on the teacher’s voice to learn our lessons and we had to write every word we heard from the teacher to make sense of the lessons. This helped sharpen our memories.

My grandfather was a religious cleric and he wanted me to be one also and I was admitted to a madrasa for this purpose. Life in the madrasa was really bad. I had to go door to door in the neighbourhood to collect alms for dinner. Another very disturbing issue was sexual abuse. Many of my classmates were victims of sexual abuse by our teacher. This was very traumatic to witness, so I refused to go to the seminary again.

After completing high school, I came to the city of Bannu for my intermediate and bachelor’s degree at Government Degree College Bannu. For my master’s in zoology, I went to Peshawar University and I later did my MPhil in the same subject from Quaid e Azam University, Islamabad. In 2009 I secured a permanent job as a zoology lecturer and was posted in Mir Ali, Waziristan, where I taught for almost 13 years.

Can you please share your journey of enlightenment?

I come from a very religious society and family. I was extremely religious in my childhood. I would recite the Holy Quran for hours without understanding a word of it. I had memorised all the Muslim prayers and was more capable in this than the other kids. This gave me a good social standing among them.

When I started studying at the University of Peshawar, I visited the library regularly and started looking to read new books. I found a book about Abraham Lincoln which was very inspiring. Later, I read books on psychology and philosophy which gave me new perspectives. But even after reading such books, I was extremely religious. One thing I want to mention is that after the September 11 attacks in the US, I was even willing to go to Afghanistan for Jihad against the infidels.

During my studies in Islamabad, I met Dr Akif Khan. He used to discuss various ideas with me and he introduced me to new books and authors. He also added me to many freethinker groups on Facebook. In these groups, I met many Pakistani liberal and progressive thinkers and I regularly read their posts on the situation of our country. This had a substantial impact on my thinking. I started hating religious extremism and I even stopped practicing religion. This change enabled me to see that the Pakistani military establishment and clergy were responsible for the bad situation in my region.

In those days, I also read On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, which helped me deeply understand the idea of evolution and natural selection as opposed to creationism. I became tolerant and I started believing in pluralism. I began to realise that tolerance for opposing views is very important for the intellectual nourishment of any society. I changed my views from being based on religion to those based on scientific evidence. Any idea not backed by scientific evidence lost its charm for me.

What were the hurdles and obstacles you faced when you started preaching a rationalist worldview?

In 2014 I started a tuition academy where I was teaching the subject of biology to intermediate-level students. My way of teaching is very simple and interesting. I try to break down complex ideas and try to teach the students in their mother tongue, which is Pashto. Gradually my impact increased as more and more students started enrolling in my class. Students were amazed by the simplicity of scientific knowledge and they started asking questions from their families about human origins and the contradictions between religious views and the facts established by evolutionary science.

This started an uproar and I started receiving threatening letters from the Taliban. On the fateful day of 19 May 2022, I was travelling back from my college in Mir Ali to my home in Bannu when a bomb that was fit under my car went off. It was a terrible incident. I lost my left leg and was in trauma care for months. But finally, after six months, I recovered enough to start teaching again. I wanted to continue my mission because education is the best way to fight the darkness.

Could you tell us about the controversy over your teaching last year?

In September 2023, local mullahs and Taliban in Domel Bazar announced that women would not be allowed to come out in the markets and the public square. This was a shocking development. I was worried about the future of my village and surrounding areas if such things kept happening.

I, along with some like-minded friends and students, decided to conduct a seminar about the importance of women’s empowerment. In that seminar, I made a speech and criticised the decision to ban women from the public square I also criticised the concept of the burqa and how it hides women’s identity. I talked about the freedom of women in other Islamic countries like Turkey and Egypt. I clearly stated that banning any individual from the right of movement is a violation of fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution of Pakistan.

This speech sent shockwaves through Taliban and mullahs alike. Local mullahs started a hate/smear campaign against me. They started naming me in all their sermons and a coordinated social boycott campaign was launched against me. My father is 90 years old and he was really worried. My elder brother and my family were also being pressured. It was a very tough time for me. I feared for my family’s safety.

Ten days later, the local administration and police contacted me about this issue. They wanted to resolve the issue peacefully, so I cooperated with them and in the presence of a District Police Officer and more than 20 mullahs, I signed a peace agreement saying that I apologised if any of my words had hurt anyone’s sentiments. The mullahs then agreed to stop the hate campaign against me. But later that night, around midnight, I received a call from the Deputy Commissioner telling me that the mullahs had gone back on the agreement and were trying to legally tangle me using Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws.

I was advised to leave the city immediately, but I refused to leave my residence. The district administration then provided me with security personnel to guard me. During this period, I met many religious leaders who I thought were moderate and many promised to stand with me. A week later, I received a call from the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, telling me that a major wanted to meet me.

Since I was vocally opposed to the military establishment on social media, I feared that they might abduct me, but I still went to the cantonment to meet the intelligence officials. They talked about the situation and how to resolve it. The ISI asked the mullahs to stop the campaign against me. I had to apologise again in the Deputy Commissioner’s office in the presence of the mullahs to save my and my family’s lives and the photo of the event went viral on the internet.

After that incident, I changed my approach. Now, I don’t want to attract any attention for some time and I am waiting for the dust to settle. Currently, I see many horrible things happening in my city, but I can’t speak a word about them.

Please share your thoughts about rationalist activism in Pakistan.

A long time ago I made a Facebook post in which I called Pakistani liberal intellectuals ‘touch me not intellectuals’. They block anyone who even slightly disagrees with them. On the other hand, I have added all the religious people from my village on Facebook so that I can present them with an alternative. I sit with the youth of my village. I talk to them. In their language, I give them examples of the problems with religious ideas and military establishments. I support people in different ways. I give free tuition to poor kids and those from religious seminaries. I give small loans to poor people. I let people use my car in emergencies.

In these ways, I am deeply embedded in this society. Many people love me and stand for me and therefore acceptance of my ideas has increased over time. Most young people in my village are now supporters of women’s education and they do not get lured by the bait of Islamic Jihad.

This change, to me, is huge. Don’t alienate and hate people. Own them. Hug them and in simple language, by giving examples from daily life, tell them the truth. People are not stupid. Education and the internet are changing things.

Some people have compared what happened to you with what happened to Galileo. What are your thoughts on that comparison?

There are many similarities. One is the battle between dogma and reason, between religion and scientific evidence. One group believed in the freedom of expression and the other believed in stifling freedom of expression. In both cases, the rationalist had to face a large number of religious people alone. Galileo’s heliocentrism wasn’t a new thing at that time. He developed it by studying previous scientific thinkers. What I teach about evolution isn’t a new thing either. I just studied scientific history and now I am telling it to new generations.

However, there are many differences between the situations. Galileo was a scientist for all practical purposes. He invented the telescope, too, while I am an ordinary science teacher. Galileo’s case was purely scientific but mine is social and scientific. I spoke about women’s empowerment. The last main difference is that many hundred of years ago, the Church had little access to the world of knowledge, while today’s mullahs have access to the internet, so ignorance is not an excuse for them.

Related reading

How the persecution of Ahmadis undermines democracy in Pakistan, by Ayaz Brohi

From the streets to social change: examining the evolution of Pakistan’s Aurat March, by Tehreem Azeem

Surviving Ramadan: An ex-Muslim’s journey in Pakistan’s religious landscape, by Azad

Coerced faith: the battle against forced conversions in Pakistan’s Dalit community, by Shaukat Korai

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

The power of outrage, by Tehreem Azeem

The post The Galileo of Pakistan? Interview with Professor Sher Ali appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Jared Huffman is the Democratic representative for California’s 2nd congressional district and the only open non-believer in the US Congress. He is also at the forefront of the fight against Christian nationalism in America. He helped found the Congressional Freethought Caucus and the Stop Project 2025 Task Force. Andrew L. Seidel, constitutional attorney and author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American and American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom (and Freethinker contributor) had this to say about Huffman:

Rep. Jared Huffman is unafraid to publicly declare his belief in church-state separation and his lack of religion. That fearlessness is something we rarely see in American politicians, and it gives me hope for our future. There is no more stalwart defender of the separation of church and state than Rep. Huffman.

I recently spoke with Huffman over Zoom about his career and his opposition to the theocratic agenda of a future Donald Trump administration. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Interview

Daniel James Sharp: You are the only open non-believer in Congress. Could you tell us about that, and your personal background regarding religion?

Representative Jared Huffman: I had no intention of being known as the only open non-believer in Congress when I got elected back in 2012. I have been without religion for most of my adult life and in recent years came to sort of loosely identify as a humanist. But that was something I largely kept to myself. I had never been asked about it in politics. I’d spent twelve years in local government and six years in the California State Assembly and I could not imagine that it would ever come to be something I was known for in Congress.

But what I learned pretty early on is that there are all of these publications that want to know about the religious identification of people when they get to Congress. The Pew Research Center does this ongoing study about religiosity in Congress and there are all of these Capitol Hill publications that do surveys and ask you to choose your religious label. For the first few years, I essentially declined to answer those questions. I thought it was none of anyone’s business.

That changed when Donald Trump won the 2016 election and brought into government a growing number of strident Christian nationalists and an agenda that troubled me quite a bit and which I saw as deeply theocratic. I decided that this was something I needed to push back on.

However, it was hard to do that when I was keeping a little secret about my own religious identity, so I came out publicly as a humanist, making me the only member out of 535 in the House of Representatives and the Senate who openly acknowledges not having a God belief.

Do you think there are many other nonbelievers in Congress?

I know there are many more, but I’m the only one dumb enough to say it publicly!

Has coming out affected you politically?

I think that’s been an interesting part of the story. Conventional wisdom holds that you should never do that. And even in some of our more recent polls, atheists tend to rank lower than just about every other category in terms of the type of person Americans would vote for. So there was a lot of nervousness among my staff and from a lot of my friends and supporters when I came out in the fall of 2017.

But the backlash never came, and, if anything, I think my constituents appreciated me just being honest about what my moral framework was. I think they see an awful lot of hypocrisy in politics, a lot of fakers and people pretending to be religious, including Donald Trump, and I found that being honest about these things is actually pretty beneficial politically, and it also just feels more authentic, personally speaking.

Since Trump was elected in 2016, you have become very involved in resisting theocratic tendencies in government. You helped to found the Congressional Freethought Caucus in 2018, for example. Could you tell us how that came about?

Yes, that came next, after the Washington Post wrote a story about me coming out as a humanist. I think it was the next day after that piece was published that my colleague, Jamie Raskin, came to me on the House floor and said, ‘Hey, I think that’s great what you did, and I share the same concerns you have about the encroachment of religion into our government and our policies, we should think about some sort of a coalition to work on these secular issues.’ Conversations like that led pretty quickly to the creation of this new Congressional Freethought Caucus that we launched a few months later.

And what does the caucus do?

We support public policy based on facts and reason and science. We fiercely defend the separation of Church and State. We defend the rights of religious minorities, including the non-religious, against discrimination and stigmatization in the United States and worldwide. And we try to provide a safe place for members of Congress who want to openly discuss these matters of religious freedom without the constraints our political system has traditionally imposed.

It seems important to note that the caucus is formed of people from all different religious backgrounds. It’s not an atheist caucus.

Yes, it’s a mix, and it’s a mix that looks like the American people, which is different from Congress itself as a whole. The American people are getting less religious all the time and they are getting more religiously diverse, but Congress is stuck in a religious profile from the 1950s.

Do you think these changing demographics are part of the reason why there is this renewed Christian nationalist push?

I do. Religious fundamentalists correctly sense that their power and privilege are waning and that has caused them to become more desperate and extreme in their politics.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is an extreme takeover plan for a second Trump presidency to quickly strip away many of the checks and balances in our democracy to amass unprecedented presidential power and use it to impose an extreme social order. It’s a plan to take total control over not just our government but also many of our individual freedoms. And the Christian nationalist agenda is at the heart of it.

Do you believe Trump’s statements distancing himself from Project 2025?

No, they are deeply unbelievable and implausible. Trump is inextricably intertwined with Project 2025 and until very recently both Trump’s inner circle and the Heritage Foundation, who published the plan, were openly boasting about the closeness of that connection. As Americans have come to learn more about Project 2025 and what it would do to their lives, it has become politically toxic to be associated with it, and that’s why you see these sudden attempts by Trump and his team to distance themselves from it.

How did people become more aware of it? It flew under the radar for quite a while.

Indeed, it flew under the radar for over a year. But our Freethought Caucus and others in Congress founded the Stop Project 2025 Task Force two months ago and, thanks to our efforts and the efforts of many others in the media and outside advocacy groups, more people have come to know about Project 2025 and the threat it poses to our democracy. Project 2025 went from being an obscure thing very few had heard about to, just a couple of weeks ago, surpassing Taylor Swift as the most talked about thing on the internet.

Quite an achievement! So, how exactly do you stop Project 2025?

It starts by understanding it, by reading the 920-page document that they arrogantly published and proclaimed as their presidential transition plan. That document lays out in great detail exactly what they intend to do. Our task force has been doing a deep dive into that, working with several dozen outside groups and leading experts to understand what some of these seemingly innocuous things they’re proposing actually mean in real life.

They hide beyond technical terms like ‘Schedule F civil service reform’ and we have been able to understand and help spotlight that what that really means is a mass purge of the entire federal workforce, rooting out anyone who has ever shown sympathy for Democratic politics, anyone who has ever been part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion programme, anyone who has worked on climate science—or anyone else who has offended the sensibilities of MAGA Republican extremists. They want to reclassify these employees and summarily fire them. This would affect well over 50,000 people throughout the federal workforce.

And then, as creepy as that already is, these people would be replaced by a cadre of trained and vetted Trump loyalists who are already maintained in a database housed by the Heritage Foundation. Essentially, they plan to repopulate the federal workforce with their own political operatives. This is not self-evident when you read the technical stuff in Project 2025, but that is exactly what their plan entails.

Can you give another example of their plans?

Yes. There are several ways in which they plan to impose their rigid social order. One of these is to dust off old morality codes from the 1870s using a dormant piece of legislation called the Comstock Act. The Comstock Act criminalises things that can be seen as obscene or profane and one of the things it criminalised back in the 1870s was anything that could terminate a pregnancy. Using this dormant legislation, which many believe is unconstitutional, Project 2025 are proposing what would amount to a nationwide ban on abortion, strict nationwide restrictions on contraception, and the criminalisation of in vitro fertilisation—very extreme and dystopic things.

It seems that the best way to stop Project 2025 is to stop Trump from being elected in November.

That’s the best way. That’s the most definitive way. But even if we beat Trump in this election, now that we have seen the Project 2025 playbook, we are going to have to build some policy firewalls against their plans in the future. The threat won’t go away. We need to build our defences against this kind of extreme takeover of government. But that is going to be much harder to do if Donald Trump is in the White House and his sworn loyalists are populating the entire federal workforce and they have broken down all of the checks and balances that stopped Trump’s worst impulses in his first presidency.

In essence, that’s what Project 2025 is: a plan to remove the obstacles that prevented Trump from doing many of the things he wanted to do or tried to do the first time around and to allow him to go even further.

Do you have a ‘doomsday scenario’ plan in the event of a Trump victory?

Yes, but it’s less than ideal. It relies on a lot of legal challenges in a legal system that has been well-populated by Trump loyalists. It relies on mobilising public opinion in a system where democracy and the democratic levers of power will not mean as much, because, frankly, Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy. Of course, there is no scenario under which we would just let all of this bad stuff happen without putting up a fight, but the tools that we would have to stop Project 2025 would be much less reliable if Trump wins.

How would the implementation of Project 2025 affect the rest of the world? What would be the consequences for America’s friends and allies?

I think that’s an important question for your readers. There’s no doubt that Project 2025 is hostile to the rules-based international order and our alliances that have kept Europe mostly free of war for the past half a century and more. It is hostile to globalism, as they refer to it, meaning free trade and the kind of trade relationships that we have with the European Union and many others around the world. It is hostile to confronting the climate crisis and even to acknowledging climate science. All of these are things that I’m sure folks in Scotland and the UK and throughout Europe would be deeply concerned by.

And there’s no doubt that Project 2025 is fundamentally sympathetic to strongman authoritarian regimes. In fact, it was inspired by Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The folks at the Heritage Foundation took a little trip to Hungary to learn about how Orbán had advanced all of these conservative, nationalist, authoritarian policies. Orbán has influenced the American right wing in a big way. He’s a bit of a rock star in Donald Trump’s world.

And so is Vladimir Putin, to an extent.

Indeed.

What are the chances of beating Trump in the election, now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate?

A heck of a lot better than they were two or three weeks ago. My hope is that America is about to do what France did very recently. The French stared into the abyss of a right-wing authoritarian government and they realised what a scary and terrible prospect that was. In a matter of weeks, they united around a broad alliance to keep the far right out of power, and they succeeded. I think we are seeing a similar realisation and pivot from the American people. At least, I hope that is what’s happening. It certainly feels that way to me.

Looking in from the outside as an admirer of America, one thing I would like to see more of from the Democrats in particular is the patriotic case for secularism. The Christian nationalists and their ilk have claimed the mantle of patriotism, but their ideals are very far from the ideals America was founded on.

I think that’s a great point. And I know that you have worked with Andrew L. Seidel and others who are doing heroic work to recapture secular thought as part of what it means to be a patriotic American. I’m certainly all in for that. But the truth is that, though we did an incredible thing by separating Church and State in our Constitution, we have never done a great job of upholding that ideal. We have allowed Christian privilege and Christian power to influence our government for a long, long time, and in some ways what we’re struggling with now is a reckoning between the written law and the desperate attempts of Christian nationalists to hang on to their power and the founding premise of separating Church and State.

I suppose in some ways that’s the story of America. The battle between competing visions of America and trying to live up to those founding ideals.

Yes, that’s true. And the other thing that’s going on, I think, is that Christianity itself is in many respects changing around the world. I’ve spoken to secularists in Europe, in Scotland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and it does seem that there is a strain of fundamentalist Christianity that has become more pronounced in recent years, a strain that is hyper-masculine, focused on power, and militaristic. The old ‘love thy neighbour’ Christianity is falling out of favour. People are fleeing traditional Christian denominations and identifying with these extreme, fundamentalist versions of Christianity. And they even mock what they see as soft Christianity. There’s a violence to these strains, which we saw with the January 6th insurrection in a big way.

So there is a lot happening, and it is more than just a fight between secularists and religionists. It’s also an internal struggle within Christianity itself over some pretty core values.

Going back to your point about the influence of Orbán, it seems to me that it also works the other way around. You have American fundamentalists pouring money into right-wing groups in Europe and funding fanatics in Israel and Uganda. So what can people outside of the US do to help in the fight against American fundamentalism?

It’s hard to compete with the mountains of dark money spread around the world by billionaire Christian nationalists, but we’re not powerless. The good news is that most people don’t really want to live in an authoritarian theocracy. I think lifting up education and science and civil society around the world is essential, as is promoting the idea of keeping religion out of government, of letting people make their own private religious choices without being able to impose their morality codes on everyone else. It’s a huge challenge, but I welcome the influence of secularists in Europe and elsewhere to try to counterbalance this wrong-headed phenomenon that, unfortunately, is emanating from my country.

That seems like a good place to finish. Good luck in the fight, and in November.

I appreciate that very much. I hope to talk to you again after we have saved our democracy.

Related reading

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy, by Jonathan Church

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

The post ‘Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy’: interview with US Representative Jared Huffman appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Frank Turner is an English singer and songwriter whose music I have loved for years. His songs are wild and varied, sometimes sad and sometimes happy but always somehow life-affirming. He is a patron of Humanists UK and his secular and humanistic style, while rarely explicit, shines through all his music (at least to my ears). His tenth studio album, ‘Undefeated’, is out on 3 May, and in February I interviewed him about it.

Topics covered include Frank’s artistry; humanism and atheism; history and cancel culture; the greatness of Leonard Cohen and Taylor Swift; raucous middle age; the perils of social media; and defiance.

The Freethinker has not interviewed many creative artists lately. As someone who believes that godlessness and art are entwined, in that art is one of the things that makes life in a purposeless universe worth living, I could not resist the opportunity to talk to Frank. As such, this interview might feel a little different—not least because there is a lot more casual swearing than usual. So, be warned. Frank is a rebellious singer with a punk background, after all. Indeed, his individualism, discussed below, is an example of freethinking in an artistic context.

I have also tried to keep the informal verbal flow of the conversation intact in the edited transcript. Selected audio excerpts are included alongside the transcript.

You can pre-order ‘Undefeated’ here.

Interview

Daniel James Sharp: ‘Undefeated’ marks your return to independent music and it was recorded in your home studio. Why did you make that choice and what effect do you think it has had on your music?

Frank Turner: It’s a funny thing, the whole independent label business, because I’m not sure how much anybody else really cares about it. But it’s important to me. I have always been with Xtra Mile Recordings. For five records, starting in 2012, I was licensed to Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music company. It was an experiment, and I expected it to last for maybe one album. I imagined I’d be dropped instantaneously!  

I am quite proud that I finished my deal rather than getting dropped. At the end of the deal, they were keen to continue, and I was not. I don’t have any ill things to say about the past, but it felt like the right moment to return to the warm embrace of the independent world on the label side of things, and I feel very good about it.  

It’s not that I was ever really creatively constrained per se in the licensing years. But there were moments when I had to expend some firepower, if you like, on maintaining my creative independence, and that is no longer the case. I’m the wild, drunk captain of my own ship now, and very nice that is too.  

So I have now produced a record, which was awesome. That is not to say that I think I should have produced all my albums—that’s not true at all. Another part of it is that one of my lockdown projects was to learn how to produce music in order to produce other bands, and I’ve been doing that with the likes of The Meffs, Pet Needs, and Grace Petrie, among others. And I thought, ‘Wait, hold on, I could do this for myself.’ And I had demoed my last few records in more and more depth before the recording. So even for my previous album ‘FTHC’, it was a process of replacing my demo tracks with better quality, better-played performances. And I thought, I can supervise that. My band are amazing, they can be part of that. And on we go.  

I don’t want to use the word ‘comfortable’ because that sounds kind of flaccid, somehow. But I feel confident in where I’m sitting creatively at the moment, and that feels good, and I feel like I’m putting my best foot forward.

On your blog, you wrote that you ‘still have something to share with the world’ in ‘Undefeated’. So, what exactly is it that you want to share?

It’s important to say that it’s entirely legitimate for certain sections of the world to say that they don’t give a fuck about what I want to share, and that’s all good.  

In ‘Undefeated’ there is a lot of stuff about nostalgia. There was a moment in time when it was going to be a concept record about an argument between me and my 15-year-old self. It didn’t quite stay that high concept, which is probably for the best. But there is a fair amount of that kind of thing running through the creative DNA of the record. And there are songs about impostor syndrome, life in the creative arts, London Tube stations. So, lots of different things!  

I try to be quite strict on checking myself on whether I am repeating myself, or whether I am making a record just because that’s what I do. That seems robotic to me. And it seems creatively indefensible somehow. People can argue as to how successfully I’ve checked myself on this. But personally, I feel that I have new things to say, and people can listen to the songs and judge for themselves.

You are very keen on having a distinctive creative voice in your music. One of the pre-released songs from ‘Undefeated’, ‘No Thank You For The Music’, is very much about having an individual voice and having things to say as opposed to bowing to musical conformity. Where does that spirit come from?

I had the fortune or misfortune (to be decided at a later date) of being obsessed with punk and rock music when I was growing up. There is a sense of independence and defiance and rejection that comes with a lot of that music—everything from The Clash to the Sex Pistols and Black Flag through to all the modern stuff like Bob Vylan.  

I would also say that in terms of making a life out of being a writer and being a performer and all the rest of it, I don’t really see the point unless I’m doing it on my own terms. I’m not trying to complain about my lot in life. There is a fair amount of costs in my cost-benefit analysis of what I do, but the benefits vastly outweigh the costs. That is why I still do this. It’s fantastic. I’m very privileged. I’m not complaining. But if I was not free to have my own voice and to be my own writer and my own artist, then I’m not sure what the point of doing any of this would be for me. I’ve never been doing this because I want to be famous or because I want to be rich—fucking lol [as in ‘laugh out loud’, pronounced ‘lawl’]. The sense of being under my own steam is very much the point.  

‘No Thank You For The Music’ is a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to the gatekeepers of this world, and I’m very proud of it. I’ve always thought the idea of ‘cool’ in the creative arts was dumb. Fuck off! What does that even mean? And how lame would you have to be to care? More than a few times in my career, people have attempted to throw the insult at me that what I do is not ‘relevant’. I just think, what kind of a fucking loser cares about whether art is, quote-unquote, relevant. I don’t listen to music and I don’t engage with other types of art while looking over my shoulders to check whether other people agree with my opinion. Don’t be such a fucking coward. 

There are people who make it their business to try and gatekeep what is and isn’t ‘cool’ or ‘in’ or ‘hip’ or ‘permissible’. I just think that that is laughable. Those people should be laughed at. I think that they should be hounded from polite society with jeers. Just fuck off and leave everybody alone. I hope that that comes through in the way that I present my music, but it’s also about how I listen to music and how I engage with music as well. And I hope that younger people have the courage to ignore those types of people.

I love the line ‘Bees shouldn’t waste their time telling flies that honey tastes better than shit’.

I must admit, and in public for the first time [this interview was conducted on 8 February 2024], that that is actually a line from a friend’s grandmother. When I heard that, I thought, ‘I am putting that in a fucking song, goddamn.’ Credit where it’s due!

You are a patron of Humanists UK and, though your music is not explicitly godless (with some exceptions, like 2011’s ‘Glory Hallelujah’), it is very secular and humanistic. It’s about the love of life and humanity in the here and now. Is that conscious on your part?

It’s a reflection of how I see the world. My maternal grandfather was a priest, and he was a very smart and a very wise man, and I loved and respected him very much. In a way that the historian Tom Holland would endorse, I’m obviously culturally Christian—that is, in the way that Western culture broadly is post-Christian at the very least, up to and including modern progressivism. So that informs the way I see the world. But I don’t believe in the supernatural. I think that nature is super enough, thank you very much! But I’m wary of getting too deep into the Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens type of angry, finger-pointing atheism. That just seems a little needless to me a lot of the time.  

‘Glory Hallelujah’ was intended as a sort of atheist hymn. But at the same time, I never really wanted that to be my central cause in engaging with the world. But we play it from time to time and people enjoy it.  

Occasionally I get people who write me letters telling me that I’m going to hell. We got protested in Norfolk, Virginia, many years ago by some evangelical Christians who said that I was Satan. As somebody who grew up listening to Slayer and Iron Maiden and the like, I thought that was fucking awesome. It made my day. An absolute career highlight.

I think that ‘humanism’ is a useful word, though in many ways it is quite a nebulous word. The idea of attempting to engage with the world in a morally and ethically coherent way that is not reliant on theism, broadly writ, is something that interests me, and something that I support. But again, I’m at pains not to batter people over the head with this stuff.  

There’s a clergyman in the US who writes appreciatively about me and my music, and I think that’s great. I think it’s lovely. A little bit more pluralism and ecumenism in the world at large would be a good thing. I’m very comfortable hanging out with people who I don’t 100% agree with. And I think more people should get behind that.

And that clergyman isn’t the only one. There is a Catholic guy, a friar I think, who writes me private correspondence. He sends me long philosophical discourses which, when I have the free time to engage in philosophical debates, I will get into. There’s a lot of mutual respect in the room, I like to think. I find it very flattering that somebody wants to engage with anything that I put together in that kind of depth. It’s like, ‘Jesus Christ, dude, you’ve thought about this a lot!’

I absolutely agree about engaging with people who disagree with you. As it happens, we’ve published a few articles quite critical of Holland’s views on Christianity recently.  

The first thing to say is that I’m an abject fanboy for The Rest Is History, the podcast Holland and Dominic Sandbrook host. I think it’s phenomenal. I’ve been to see them live. I want to be their friend! They’re very good, and their approach to history is refreshingly dogma-free. History is something I care about a lot.  

I remember that there was a wonderful moment when I saw them live. Sandbrook commented that the business of being a historian is not a judgemental business. We shouldn’t judge the behaviour of people in the past and weigh them in a balance and try to find ways of feeling superior to them.  

That’s a misapprehension of what the study of history is supposed to be, in my opinion, and indeed in Sandbrook’s opinion, and it was quite comforting to hear somebody say that and see him get a standing ovation for it. That gave me a little bit of hope because the flipside is a kind of airbrushing, Maoist approach to history (and I know that’s a loaded description). That approach is bad news, both for our own historical record and culture and for the people who engage in that way with the world. I don’t think it’s very healthy.  

Another pre-released song from ‘Undefeated’ is ‘Do One’, which is another ‘fuck you’ type of song, isn’t it?

I’m glad you put it that way because I think it is a ‘fuck you’ song. ‘Do One’ is the first song in the album, and the first line sets the tone: ‘Some people are just gonna hate you’. There’s a wonderful quote that I read a few years ago, which was very psychologically useful to me, which came from, of all people, Eleanor Roosevelt. She essentially said that it takes two people to be humiliated. Ultimately, to be hounded, cancelled, chained, or whatever word we want to use, you have to agree to play the game on some level. And there’s something really liberating about being able to say ‘fuck off, I’m not playing.’

In the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty unimportant, but I’ve had people come at me on various issues over the years. There have been times when it was fucking horrible, and deleterious to my mental health, and there have been times when it has felt really unfair and done in total bad faith.  

There have been times when I have felt that people were picking up on an ill-phrased thing that I said. I do think it’s important to take that on board sometimes, but more often than not it’s a bad-faith form of argument.  

It’s been something I’ve spent a lot of time wrestling with and being affected by. And, as I say, it’s been catastrophic for my mental health at various times. But there’s something liberating about just saying, ‘don’t care, not playing, will not engage’. In practical terms, I don’t reply on social media and I don’t read the comments.  

There were days when I would be losing my fucking mind because of a couple of tweets from someone. And my wife would just be like, ‘What are you doing? Stop caring about this one person.’ That’s the other thing about the human mind. You can scroll past a hundred people telling you you’re great, but one person calls you a bastard and three days of my life goes down the toilet thinking about it.  

So the point of ‘Do One’ is essentially that I’m not playing that game anymore. And it took me more time than I would like to admit to figure that out, as the song says. I don’t want to be one of those people who just feeds off the hatred. With a certain kind of mindset, the people coming at you just become flies bouncing off a windscreen. You sleep better once you reach that point.

I think I have learned how to pick my battles a bit. There are days when one wants to engage with the good-faith arguments. In my line of work, it’s easy for people to confuse bad faith cancel culture and legitimate criticism, and I try to steer the right way through that. I’m certainly not above being criticised in terms of my ethics and actions and music.

I’m actually really interested in good music criticism. There have been times in my life when I’ve read a critique of an album of mine and I think, ‘Yeah, that’s a fair point’. There’s value in that. Historically, you can look at some of Bob Dylan’s output as being part of a conversation with Greil Marcus. There are fewer and fewer music journalists who write music criticism at that level these days, which is a sadness, I think.  

I’m not trying to sit here and say that I’m fucking perfect or anything like that, but hopefully, I can tune out the haters to a degree as well. In many ways, ‘Undefeated’ is saying, ‘I’m ten albums in, motherfucker.’ After that amount of time successfully touring and successfully releasing records, my music can’t be meritless. It’s landing with someone, otherwise I wouldn’t still be here.

So you feel that you have earned your place, to put it another way?

Hopefully, yes. I’ve got the scars to prove it.

You said of your previous album ‘FTHC’ that it was an attempt to be more rawly personal. Can the same be said of ‘Undefeated’?

I would say so, but in a slightly different way. I’m still at the point of figuring out the vocabulary to describe exactly what I mean by that. I’ve been using the word ‘defiant’ quite a lot. But ‘FTHC’ is quite an angry record, in retrospect. There’s a fair amount of bitterness in it. There are a lot of tracks about childhood and stuff that are not happy-go-lucky songs. In ‘Undefeated’, there is definitely a fair number of middle fingers being shown, but there’s a smile on the face at the same time. It’s a more fun place to be.

That’s not true of the whole album, though. There’s a track towards the end called ‘Somewhere Inbetween’ which is one of the rawest pieces of writing that I’ve ever done in my life. I’m both excited and nervous for that song to be released because I think that it’s…’unforgiving’ might be the word. Hopefully, the record is not monotonal, not monochromatic.

It’s an age-old question, and it applies to writers not only of music but of essays and memoirs and even novels, but how do you find the right balance? How much do you reveal? Can you ever fully reveal everything?

It depends on what type of art you are trying to make. I don’t think the Scissors Sisters spend very much time thinking about making confessional music, but they make great art. My taste of music leans towards the confessional, towards the raw and the brutally honest. Arab Strap is one of my favourite bands. I remember hearing their album ‘Philophobia’ for the first time, and just staring and thinking, ‘Is this motherfucker for real? Is he really saying this stuff out loud? Like, we can hear you, man!’ So I’ve always been interested in that sort of art.  

There are constraints on it, of course, one of which is consideration for others. It’s perfectly legitimate for me to be as raw as I want about myself. How legitimate it is for me to be raw about somebody else in the public forum is a more complicated question. In 2013 I put out a break-up record that had 13 songs about one person, and she was not appreciative of that. And I think that that is a legitimate response.  

It’s important to note that there is some artistry involved in the confessional style. I could sing out my diary, but I’m not sure anyone would give a fuck. The creative trick, the magic trick at the heart of it all in some ways, is to take the personal and make it feel universal, or at least that’s how it is in my corner of writing. Art is about empathy to a large extent, and I’ve spent most of my time as a writer trying to find a way of expressing my feelings that is useful, or that is interpretable, by other people who live different lives. I want it to be raw, and I want it to be honest, but I also want it to be accessible. And that’s a neat trick, and it’s not an easy one. If it was, we’d all be writing better songs. Finding that balance is tough. In a way, that’s the centre of my working life, looking for that balance.

At the risk of seeming entirely obsessed with songwriting, there’s a wonderful Leonard Cohen line—well, first we just need to establish the fact that Cohen was the greatest songwriter of the 20^th century.  

I’m so glad you said that—I completely agree! I say it all the time.

I like Dylan, but Cohen is an infinitely superior songwriter, in my opinion, and now people can shout at me. But the line is, ‘There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in’.  That’s one of the most profound couplets that I’m aware of in human writing. And it says something about the creative act as well. Finding that moment of damage can also be a moment of revelation.  

Salman Rushdie once said of the first three lines of Cohen’s ‘Bird on the Wire’ that, ‘Put simply, if I could write like that, I would.’ That’s some compliment.

It’s interesting to compare songwriting with other kinds of writing. Songwriting is a more bite-sized medium to work in. I’m sort of terrified by the concept of a novel. The idea of trying to sustain a creative idea over that amount of linguistic output gives me the fear, I’ll be honest with you. But, as that quote sort of outlines, the flipside is that there is a concision to good songwriting. That’s the thing I enjoy sometimes, and I think that’s what sets songwriting apart from poetry. In a song, you’ve got eight lines before you’re back in the chorus, so whatever you’ve got to say needs to be said now. I suppose you could add another 25 stanzas, but then you end up being Genesis, and nobody really wants that. And Cohen is the master of that kind of concision. I actually have a ‘Bird on the Wire’ tattoo in reference to that song. And that line, ‘like a drunk in a midnight choir’, is the most perfectly concise image. And God rest his soul. 

When you mentioned the break-up album, I thought, ‘Was that your Taylor Swift phase?’ And that makes me wonder if, looking back, you see distinct phases in your career?  

Yes, there are definitely phases in my career. If you look at the career arc of many artists—like Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Springsteen, Costello, Nick Cave, people like that—there often tends to be a slightly odd middle-aged phase. Whether Dylan being a Christian or, indeed, Cohen producing great songs with Phil Spector in the late 1980s, but with terrible production, or Neil Young being sued for not sounding like Neil Young. There are these creative lull moments for many artists. Actually, one of the reasons I’m terminally obsessed with Nick Cave is that I think that he’s somebody who sidestepped that, and I’m curious how he did so.  

Of course, it’s pretentious of me to compare myself to all the people I’ve just listed, but cut me a break. I feel like I’m in a moment where I’m trying to be raucously middle-aged. I’m 42. That’s definitely middle-aged. The world is full of variously named generations constantly trying to pretend that middle age and old age start later because they’re getting close to it. Fuck off, man, 42 is middle-aged! I’d like to be raucous and ill-mannered in my middle age rather than soft and flabby and reticent. 

Grow old disgracefully.

Exactly.

Incidentally, it’s worth throwing in that Taylor Swift is clearly an excellent songwriter, musician, and performer, and I think that the general disdain within which a certain type of person in the music industry (and it’s usually a guy) holds Taylor Swift is so obviously sexist at this point. Just stop it now. (Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the MAGA conspiracy nuts here.) She’s the artist of her generation. That’s the fucking end of that conversation. She’s arguably bigger than Michael Jackson, now. And, like Michael Jackson was the artist of the eighties, and there is no one to compare, so too with Taylor Swift. I think she’s a great songwriter, and I just had to get that off my chest.

She completely screwed my album chart plans, because she’s putting out a record two weeks before mine is released. And do you know what? I’ll let it slide.

‘Undefeated’ is about middle age, as you mentioned. So, what’s it like being middle-aged? To what extent are you the same Frank Turner you were 20 years ago?

Aside from some very basic fundamentals, not much. And that’s how I want it to be. It’s a well-worn quote, but Muhammad Ali said something like, ‘a man who is the same at 40 as he was at 20 has wasted 20 years of his life.’ I don’t want to be the same person. There’s a curious sense of proprietorship that a certain type of music fan has that they want you to stay how you were when they discovered you, and I sympathize because I can see myself having that feeling about some musicians that I like, but also: fuck off, you’re boring! Life is about change, and I want to change and develop as an artist. I don’t want to repeat myself.

Again, this is not an original thought, but my experience of getting older is that there is a quid pro quo. Everything hurts more and hangovers last longer, and I spend more time worrying about sleeping than I used to—all this sort of shit—but I’m more confident in who I am and what I think about the world. That feels hard-won to me to a degree, and I’m grateful for it. And that feels like a direction of travel as well. I’m not sure that that’s a process that has reached its apotheosis for me just yet, and that’s fun. I like that idea. I like the idea of being in my 70s and really not giving a fuck. Good for me!

That reminds me of Rushdie again, who is one of my favourite writers—

I strongly agree, by the way. I think he’s absolutely sensational. I’ve just finished [Rushdie’s memoir] Joseph Anton and it was amazing.  

Actually, I think it’s in ‘Joseph Anton’ that he says this: something along the lines of his 40s being a man’s prime.  

That may be more true in the world of novels and fiction writers than it is in the world of musicians. But here’s hoping we can buck that trend.

Further reading on freethinking and secularism in art and music:

Porcus Sapiens, by Emma Park and Paul Fitzgerald

Reading list against nuclear war, by Emma Park

Can art be independent of politics? by Ella Nixon

Celebrating Eliza Flower: an unconventional woman, by Frances Lynch

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

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

The post ‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner  appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

In the last few years, researchers in several disciplines have become increasingly interested in the topic of free thought, its status as a human right, and its prospects of survival. Notable among the literature is Susie Alegre’s Freedom to Think: Protecting a Fundamental Human Right in the Digital Age, published in 2022. This was followed in 2023 by The Battle for Thought: Freethinking in the 21st Century, by Simon McCarthy-Jones – who has also given an interview to the Freethinker, to be published shortly.

Susie Alegre is an international human rights lawyer, author and deputy High Court judge. During her career she has worked in many challenging areas of human rights law, including counter-terrorism and extradition, anti-corruption measures in Uganda, and surveillance technology. Her latest book, Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being Human in the Age of AI, will be published on 2 May.

I met Alegre at the café at the back of the British Film Institute, on London’s South Bank. In the interview below, we discuss how she became interested in freedom of thought and why it matters, as well as its legal definition and relationship to freedom of expression. We also examine the problems which modern technology poses to our ability as individuals to resist manipulation, in a digital world which is designed to do just that.

~ Emma Park, Editor

The Freethinker: How did you come to your recent interest in digital technology and human rights?

Susie Alegre: After studying French and Philosophy at university, I came to the law in my late twenties. I spent two years living in Spain, where I first started working on conflict resolution issues in the Basque country. That was my first introduction to human rights law in practice, and showed me how the law can change society, and be used to protect people. After that, I came back to the UK and did my training as a barrister in the European Commission, and also briefly in the Council of Europe, which is where the European Court of Human Rights is, before coming back to practise in crime and extradition. One of the reasons I was attracted to crime was that it is the sharp end of the law, where the decisions being made affect people dramatically.

When I qualified in 1997, the Human Rights Act had not yet been passed, so going into practice as a ‘human rights lawyer’ as such was not a practical option. You could be interested in human rights, but when you were standing up in the Crown Court, you could not cite human rights to your average judge. I pivoted after a couple of years into policy, because policy was where you could really work with human rights law to change the ways our laws apply. By then, the Human Rights Act (1998) was up and running. I went to work for Justice, a UK-based human rights and rule of law organisation, on the Extradition Act 2003. I then worked for Amnesty International and other international organisations, including the UN and EU, and briefly as an ombudsman for the Financial Ombudsman Service.

I had come to work increasingly on issues related to technology, including the development of surveillance technology and the use of technology at international borders. But even though I worked on data protection, I had not really understood its fundamental importance until I first learnt about the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2017.

When I read about how data had been used to profile people, to understand their personalities, and to use that information to target them through social media, in order to change the way they thought or the way they behaved, it struck me that this was not a data protection question – or only in so far as data protection is a gateway to getting inside our minds. That set me off on a one-woman exploration of freedom of thought, as it was back in 2017. It also chimed with my earlier study of philosophy. When I started talking to people about freedom of thought, many were interested in it from a philosophical perspective, but there was almost nothing legal that you could find about it, despite its being included in the Human Rights Act.

Freethinker: Has a lot been written about freedom of thought since 2017 from a legal perspective?

Alegre: Yes. It has become a burgeoning area of interest among academics, including philosophers, psychologists and lawyers, who try to understand how the right can be made real and effective, but also to ask what it should mean, and what its limitations should be in practice. The right to freedom of thought has also appeared in international law instruments. The first example of it in international jurisprudence, I believe, was with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, who wrote a ‘general comment on children’s rights in the digital environment’ in 2021, which talks about children’s right to freedom of thought and how that could be affected by their engagement with technology and the use of algorithms in profiling.

Freethinker: Does Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights (on ‘freedom of thought, conscience and religion’) cover freedom of thought in your sense?

Alegre: Yes. The two relevant articles are Article 9 and Article 10 (which covers freedom of opinion and freedom of expression). There has been much academic discussion about the difference between freedom of thought and freedom of opinion or belief. The answer is completely unclear – there is not really any case law. You could argue that it is an academic question; that, ultimately, ‘opinion’ is a slightly more developed or more coherent thought, whereas ‘thought’ is pretty much anything that might be happening in your inner life. The UN Human Rights Committee has said that this inner aspect of thought or belief is protected absolutely in international law.

Freethinker: Whereas as far as freedom of expression goes, there are limitations.

Alegre: Exactly. What you can say or how you manifest your opinions or beliefs can be limited. But in the American Convention on Human Rights, which has been ratified by many Latin American countries (but not the US or Canada), ‘freedom of thought and expression’ are included together in Article 13, while ‘freedom of conscience and religion’ are covered by Article 12. Thus the question whether thought is distinct from opinion is a bit academic.

Freethinker: In your book you mention various historic texts, including John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), which is also a foundational text for the secularist, humanist and freethinking tradition in Britain. Do you think that On Liberty is still important for freedom of thought today?

Alegre: Yes. It is a key milestone in the development of thinking about freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Mill perceived that our freedom of thought can be curtailed by the pressures of society, in some cases more so than by draconian laws. Many European countries have much stronger legal restrictions on freedom of speech than we have in the UK. But even back then, Mill argued that Victorian prudery cast a much deeper pall over freedom of thought than, say, the official laws against criticising the government in France.

Freethinker: Would you agree that George Orwell is another important figure in this tradition?

Alegre: Yes, from a twentieth-century perspective, in terms of literature, George Orwell’s 1984 is important, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Those two books together illustrate different aspects of thought control. Whereas Orwell is concerned with authoritarian state control, Huxley is talking about control through pointless pleasure. Both have relevance for us in the twenty-first century. There is also Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report (1956), where inferences are made about people’s thoughts and used to prevent them acting, and The Hood Maker (1955), a short story of his about the importance of being able to effectively put a ring fence around your mind in order to prevent people from reading your thoughts. Ironically, these dystopian twentieth-century works of fiction have almost acted as a template for the ways that technology has been developed and used since then, rather than as a cautionary tale.

Freethinker: Speaking as a lawyer, how would you define freedom of thought and the right to freedom of thought?

Alegre: Freedom of thought has two aspects. The inner aspect, the forum internum, is protected absolutely: you can think whatever you like inside your head. The outer aspect is whether you are manifesting a religion or belief or expressing yourself effectively: expression is the outer aspect of freedom of thought and opinion. The ‘inner’ aspect is a lovely philosophical idea. But in the law, you need to know what exactly it means, how you protect it, and what you need to guarantee it.

The three key elements for the protection of freedom of thought identified by legal academics are: (i) the right to keep our thoughts private; (ii) the right not to have our thoughts manipulated; and (iii) the right not to be penalised for our thoughts alone. That first aspect connects to the other two, because if people know what you are thinking or think they do, they can manipulate you more easily, and take action to penalise you on that basis.

The drafters of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights recognised that inferences about what you are thinking can be as vital to freedom of thought as actually knowing your thoughts. I talk in the book about historical witch trials. If you are sitting in a Scottish village in the seventeenth century, and the Witchfinder General turns up and makes an inference about your being a witch based on the wart on your nose and the fact that you have a black cat, you are probably going to get burned at the stake, because the authorities are making inferences about you based on your personal data, regardless of whether you ever had a witchy thought or did anything that might ever be described as witchcraft in your life.

Similarly, today, our data is being sifted and analysed by companies so as to make inferences about how we think, what kind of people we are, what our interests are, and how we might be manipulated – or indeed, how we might be penalised. In financial services, your data is used to analyse whether you are a risky kind of a person, without necessarily providing any direct evidence to suggest that you are risky.

Freethinker: How far can freedom of thought and freedom of expression be separated?

Alegre: That is an important point. You cannot be penalised for your thoughts alone. It is what you do that matters, in legal terms. Freedom of thought gives you the space to reflect and decide not to do something stupid, illegal or dangerous. That is why, from a legal perspective, it is important that you are judged on what you do or say, not on what people think you might think or believe.

Freethinker: Is it possible to have freedom of thought without a very large degree of freedom of expression, which enables people to exchange ideas, disagree, change their minds?

Alegre: No. That is why the distinction between Articles 9 and 10 is academic. It is artificial. Article 10 includes freedom of opinion, expression and  information. Those three operate together. While you might be able to limit access to information, for example, in the interests of national security, you need a degree of reliable information in order to have freedom of thought. If you cannot access reliable information, then you cannot think freely. That goes back to the manipulation question: whether you are being starved of information or being given a warped version of information that is effectively manipulating your thoughts and not allowing you to think freely.

Freedom of thought also allows you to decide whether it is safe to say what you really think, to whom it is safe to say it, how it is safe to say it, and in what circumstances.

Freethinker: What do you see as the main challenges to freedom of thought today?

Alegre: The reason why there has been a huge development in data protection law and privacy law in the last twenty years is because our data is being used in ways and on a scale that it never was before. Technological innovation is increasingly gathering our data in order to understand who we are, to make inferences about how we are thinking and feeling, and to use that information to change us. They are selling a service that provides insights into our forum internum in order to manipulate it, and so change how we behave. Therefore, freedom from manipulation is crucial, because manipulation can make you do things that you would not have done otherwise.

Freethinker: I suppose that advertising, propaganda, marketing and campaigning are all ways of manipulating your mind. Every organisation of any size these days has a public relations team or press office. Do we ever receive any information that is not manipulated in some way?

Alegre: Well, it is all designed to affect our behaviour. The question is where it crosses the line between legitimate influence and unlawful manipulation.

Freethinker: Where would you draw that line?

Alegre: It depends on the context – it is always fact-specific. It would be a trap to think that there is some magical line that applies in every circumstance.

Advertising today is very different from that of the last century. Advertising online is based on data about our individual personality, our interests, and on real-time data about how we are feeling. That means that adverts can be tailored and targeted to hit us as individuals in particular emotional states. That is very different from walking past a billboard that is designed to persuade a certain demographic – it is about advertising that is using insight into our forum internum to actually change it.

This approach is similar in a way to subliminal advertising, which is banned in Europe, even though it has not been proved that it works. Clearly, in Europe, they recognise the dangers of manipulation. Having come out of the Second World War and the Nazi propaganda machine, they recognised that this technique could not be acceptable.

Freethinker: Is there a question of consent here? Take advertising on social media. We might tick a box saying we agree to their harvesting our data, but we do not really know what this involves.

Alegre: I do not think that people are consenting in such cases, because nobody really understands what the consequences are. I have written a book about it, but I do not really know where my data is going or how it is being used, either in online advertising or elsewhere. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties issued a report last year, showing that personal data, including location data from US and European judges, the military and politicians, were being sold on the open market to China and Russia. What happens to your data once it has been harvested is unclear, but it is certainly open to exploitation – and not only commercial exploitation.

Freethinker: Given that the internet is now an intrinsic part of our lives, and an enormous amount of data about us is online, what can we do to this to stop this leakage of information?

Alegre: As individuals, it is very hard. You can stop what you post, but recent research shows that just by the passive use of your smartphone, anyone getting hold of it can run analytics to get a profile of what kind of person you are, how you are feeling, what your interests are. All of that information is easily accessible, so you cannot switch it off – unless you go completely cold turkey offline, but frankly, that probably puts you in a particular profile in itself.

Freethinker: Isn’t the reality that most of us can no longer afford to live offline?

Alegre:  Yes – even to get a doctor’s appointment, or access your bank, it is very difficult to operate offline now. That does not mean we should despair. There are things you can do to limit your data trails, like using privacy friendly search engines such as DuckDuckGo. You can avoid having your phone with you all the time – if you are at home, you can switch it off. You can limit how much information is going in. But it will not change the fundamental problem.

However, there are ways that law can change the fundamental problem. There have been cases in Europe that challenge the legality of the whole online advertising business model. The European Data Protection Board found that Meta’s model was unlawful under existing European GDPR laws. The question then is, how do you enforce these laws against powerful tech companies?

Freethinker: Another thing you discuss in your book is technological developments which allow people’s emotions to be monitored through cameras and other devices – for example, the monitoring of children’s emotions in a classroom. How far advanced is that technology, and how much of a threat does it pose to freedom of thought?

Alegre: It is a huge threat. It is called emotion recognition technology, and it is being used in lots of different areas. There are companies in Spain that sell emotion recognition technology for shops. It could also be used in education and in the workplace. It is probably illegal once you apply the Human Rights Act to existing legislation. It needs to be banned because it is a clear use of technology to try to read people’s minds, which violates their ability to keep their thoughts private. Emotion recognition technology in education and the workplace is now prohibited under the EU’s new AI Act.

Freethinker: How effective is the technology at the moment?

Alegre: It is difficult to know how effective it is. It reminds me of Orwell’s ‘telescreen’ in 1984. In that kind of environment, you would learn to keep a bland, contented look on your face regardless of what you were thinking. It would have a chilling effect on what you would want to think, because you would be afraid that your thoughts could be read.

Freethinker: In the literature of the twentieth century, we often see the metaphor of individuals as cogs in a great machine. Today, it seems as though companies which harvest our data view us as little more than collections of data of greater or lesser commercial value. Is this not an inhuman and inhumane way of looking at people? And is social media designed to slot people into these different data sets?

Alegre: Yes. The idea of profiling is to be able to target you with rubbish that will keep you online so that you are easier to sell stuff to, which is why it is so hard to put your phone down. It is not you, it is the design of the phone. The design of social media is there to maximise your data and attention hours.

Coming back to freedom of expression, for me, the question raised by social media is not the content of what is said, it is the manner in which it is distributed. When data on you identifies whether or not you are someone who is susceptible to conspiracy theories, then if you are susceptible, you will be served up more conspiracy theories. It does not matter if the guy in the pub thinks the earth is flat and whispers about it in the corner; but if people are being monetised as vulnerable to specific messages, then the way those messages are delivered to them and the volume of those messages will affect their freedom of thought.

In my view, the arguments about freedom of expression are mostly red herrings. The problem is the use of data and the algorithms which push people in certain directions. The people who are interested in shouting loudly and being controversial are then driven to become even more extreme, because doing so allows them to harness those algorithms.

Freethinker: Would you also say that there is danger in the fact that, say, Google or Twitter can themselves censor things that they do not want to be published?

Alegre: Yes. It is about this kind of complete control. There is corporate capture of our information environment – there is no question about that. If you look at it from the freedom of thought perspective, you do not have to get bogged down in whose thoughts are right. It is more about the system and the ability to use our data to get inside individuals’ minds, capture our attention and monetise it.

Freethinker: Artificial intelligence has made rapid strides in recent years. What dangers does it pose to freedom of thought?

Alegre: AI poses lots of dangers. Firstly, AI is already seriously polluting the information environment because it is unreliable – it makes stuff up. It is everywhere on the internet – it is almost as if the internet is eating itself. The use of generative AI for writing, drawing and other types of creation risks curtailing our ability to think for ourselves. There is research about predictive text and how that limits your vocabulary or how you express yourself, because users become lazy.

There is a real danger that if people rely on these kind of tools, we will literally forget how to think for ourselves. That will have consequences not only for our vulnerability to manipulation, but also our sheer ability to survive. What happens if the lights go out and we cannot work anything out? For instance, there is increasing evidence that using GPS leads to reduced spatial awareness and even changes the shape of your brain. If you extrapolate from GPS and imagine what would happen if all of our critical thinking faculties were run using prompts, I think that is a huge danger.

Freethinker: Is there something to be said for detox periods in which you could just switch everything off?

Alegre: Honestly, I’m desperate to do that. It is something that we can learn. I use an app called Freedom, which allows me to effectively switch my phone off for periods of time, so that I can still get texts or receive calls, but everything else is off. When I have to concentrate, I use this app, because otherwise I cannot stop myself reaching for my phone – because that is what it is designed for. But once you click on the app and block everything, then your automatic reflex to reach for your phone gradually goes away, especially if you do it over long periods of time.

Freethinker: So perhaps we just need to change our habits and relearn the idea that being immediately contactable at all times is not absolutely necessary?

Alegre: Exactly.

Freethinker: Speaking as an author and lawyer, do you think it is possible to have a successful career without having a social media presence?

Alegre: I deleted my Twitter account last October. I am still on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. The ideal would be to get to a point where you can function without social media, or outsource that side of marketing. But I think we might be seeing the final days of that kind of social media presence, because what it does is to blur the lines between the personal and professional. If you want to have a great social media presence, you have to be personal.

Then you see people landing up in court because of rubbish they posted on Twitter, thinking that it would have no consequences. Actually, expressing yourself on social media can have serious consequences. But social media makes you feel that you have to be constantly commenting and expressing yourself, even in ways which are ultimately not safe. It blurs the line between the freedom to keep your thoughts private and the right to express yourself freely.  Social media accounts are looked at in all sorts of ways. For example, I went to the US in September, and when you file your visa waiver, you have to give them all your social media accounts. Which they presumably run through an algorithm to see if you are the right kind of person to allow into the country.

Freethinker: Should employers and governments should be allowed to access your social media accounts?

Alegre: Not really. But people should be a bit more sensible about the fact that, if you are publishing stuff to the world, you really are publishing stuff to the world. We should be able to complain about authorities making decisions based on things we said on social media. But it ultimately depends on what was said and the whole context. People need to understand that expression has consequences.

Freethinker: Do you think that, in English law, there is a balance to be struck between freedom of expression and other considerations?

Alegre: Historically, in England and Wales, freedom of expression has been given a wider berth than perhaps it has in other countries. The US is on another level beyond the UK. But in Europe in particular, such as Spain, France or Germany, they are much readier to put legal restrictions on speech.

Freethinker: Historically, Britain was often considered a country of liberty. Was that a good tradition, do you think? And where are we now?

Alegre: It is very difficult to answer that. What we are perhaps going through now is a rebalancing act between freedom of expression and other rights, in particular, the right to a private life. Freedom of expression does not mean you can say anything, anywhere to anyone without consequences.

Freethinker: Finally, how can we as a society strengthen our right to freedom of thought and resist the threats that it faces on all sides?

Alegre: By questioning how we gather information, how we choose the information we get, and how information is gathered about us. In the online environment, we have lost the ability to choose. We are given the impression that we have access to an infinite amount of information – but in fact, we are individually being fed curated information. That is not the same as going into a bookshop and browsing; instead, we are being fed curated selections that will keep us online. Demanding a stop to being force-fed information through recommender algorithms based on ideas about us as individuals is the way that we can reboot.

The post ‘Nobody really understands what the consequences are’: Susie Alegre on how digital technology undermines free thought appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Lawrence Krauss is a Canadian-American physicist and writer who has published prolifically, both for an academic audience and for the general public. His books include The Physics of Star Trek (1995), A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (2012), The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far: Why Are We Here? (2017), The Physics of Climate Change (2021), and, most recently, The Known Unknowns: The Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos (2023). He is currently president of The Origins Project Foundation and host of The Origins Podcast. For more information about these and other books by Krauss, see the relevant section of his website.

He is also known for championing science and rational thinking in public life and for a while was (in)famous as one of the so-called ‘New Atheists’ (on which more below). I recently spoke to him over Zoom to discuss his life, career, and opinions on religion and Critical Social Justice—or, more colloquially, ‘wokeism’.

Interview

Freethinker:  How did your interest in science start?

Lawrence Krauss: I got interested in science as a young person, for a variety of reasons. At least, I can tell you what I think they were. First, I think it is important that my mother wanted me to be a doctor and my brother to be a lawyer. She had convinced me doctors were scientists, so I got interested in science. Plus, a neighbour who was an engineer and his son helped me build a model of the atom, which impressed me.

But it was reading books by and about scientists that really got me interested. I remember reading Galileo and the Magic Numbers (1958) by Sidney Rosen. I think I still have the book somewhere. It impressed on me the idea of Galileo as a heroic figure fighting the forces of ignorance and discovering strange new worlds.

And then I continued to keep reading books by scientists—Richard Feynman, George Gamow, and others—and I had science teachers who encouraged me, which I think is important.

I still was not certain if I wanted to be a scientist per se, because I liked a lot of other areas. Probably the most significant course that I took in high school was a Canadian history course, by far the most intellectually demanding of any of the courses I took. Later on, I took a year out of university to work on a history book about the Communist Party of Canada during the Depression, using my access to the archives of Toronto. I still have that box of files and I will write that book at some point.

I originally thought I wanted to be a doctor, specifically a neurosurgeon. I did not know what a neuroscientist was. Neither of my parents finished high school and my mother in particular just wanted us to be professionals. So I thought of becoming a neurosurgeon. I did not even know what a neurologist was, but the brain interested me. I remember getting a subscription when I was a kid to Psychology Today. I also remember getting a subscription to the Time Life Books on science, so every month for two years I got a book on different parts of science.

Why did physics in particular end up attracting your interest?

For some reason, like, I think, for many young people, physics seemed sexier in the sense of dealing with fundamental questions, the big, deep questions of existence. And although I was interested in biology, that interest evaporated when I took a biology course in high school and dropped it within two weeks because it was just memorising parts of a frog and dissecting things. I just found it totally boring and not what I thought of as science. That was in the 1960s, before the great DNA discoveries of the 1950s had filtered through to the high school level, and so I did not get to experience the explosion of biology as a scientific discipline at the time. I have tried to make up and learn since then, and I think if I had been more aware at the time, I might have been seduced by it.

But by that time I was already in love with physics. I felt the allure of physics and physicists like Feynman and Einstein. A book that had a lot of influence on me was Sir James Jeans’s Physics and Philosophy (1942), which I read in high school. That got me interested in philosophy for a while, too, and it took me a while to grow out of that! Later on, I nearly took a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford in physics and philosophy. I am happy that I went to the United States to do my PhD in pure physics.

That is also one of the reasons why I write books. I am returning the favour to those scientists who got me turned on to science and I am always happy when I see young kids (and not-so-young kids) who tell me that my books inspired them to do science.

How did you get the gist of writing for the wider public rather than just for fellow professionals?

I also worked at a science museum when I was a kid. I did demonstrations at the Ontario Science Center, ten shows a day, and I think that was profoundly influential both in developing my ability to talk to the public about science and in figuring out what people were interested in. It also taught me how to improvise and it was useful for my lecturing in my later career.

Did you have a life goal in mind from early on, then?

No, I never had a plan that I was single-mindedly committed to. I know people like that, but I prefer to plant seeds and see which ones grow. Doing history was also influential in teaching me how to write. I have always been fairly political as well. I get angry at things and write about them. And I used to write op-eds when I was in graduate school, but they never got published. I think I sometimes write when I get angry or I need to get something off my chest.

But no, I never planned my career. Maybe because neither of my parents were academics, academia alone never seemed satisfying enough for me. I always wanted to reach out to the wider world in one way or another.

What was your first big break in writing?

At Harvard, I spoke at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science about dark matter, and then I wrote an article for Scientific American about it. That was my first bit of public writing.

How did you end up becoming a public figure rather than just an academic?

When I was at Harvard, a role model and former professor of mine, the Nobel Laureate Steve Weinberg (whose 1977 book The First Three Minutes had, incidentally been a big influence on me and shown me that a first-rate scientist could write for a wider audience) put me in touch with his publisher. I signed on to write a book. And that led to me writing for newspapers and speaking in public.

I later got involved in the fight against creationists trying to push their ideas in public schools, and I think that is where I got a national reputation for speaking out in defence of science. As an aside, that also revived my interest in biology, which I have always somewhat regretted not knowing more about. It is a fascinating area, in some ways probably more fascinating than physics now.

What are you most proud of contributing to science?

I always think that that is for others to judge. But I am proud of many of my contributions, maybe more proud than other people are. Looking back at my work, I am surprised at the breadth of topics I have worked on and the energy that I seem to have expended. It tires me out to look at it now!

But in terms of impact, I think I was one of the earliest people to appreciate the importance of astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology for understanding fundamental physics. An emerging area called particle astrophysics did not really exist when I was a graduate student and I got involved in that as one of the very earliest people working on that area and promoting the intersection of these two areas. By the way, it is always dangerous to work at the intersection of two fields, because people in each field might feel that you are part of neither, and it is hard sometimes. I remember when I worked at Yale the department never fully appreciated what was happening because they were not aware of particle astrophysics when I was doing it.

I think I made a bunch of significant contributions relating to the nature of dark matter and ways to detect dark matter. I think if one thing stands out, though, it is the paper I wrote with Michael S. Turner in 1995 that first argued that there was dark energy in the universe, making up about 70 per cent of the universe, the discovery of which won a Nobel Prize for Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess in 2011. That was one of the times that I realised something about the universe before anybody else did, and that was very satisfying. It was hard to convince myself that I was right at the time because I was unsure if the data were correct. I remember getting a lot of resistance until dark energy was discovered, and then everyone jumped on it immediately.

In your book ‘A Universe from Nothing’, you provide a model of how the universe came about without any divine input. What do you make of that book, which caused quite a stir, when you look back now? And how do you respond to criticisms from people who say that what you meant by ‘nothing’ was not truly ‘nothing’?

Obviously, I stand by what I wrote. In retrospect, there are some things I might try to explain more clearly. But I am pretty clear that the people who say I did not show how a universe can come from nothing have not really read the book. They might say I was just talking about empty space, which is not nothing, but I talk about far more than that. What one means by ‘nothing’ is a very subtle concept and we have changed our opinion of what nothing is, as I point out in the book.

And so what I am describing is ‘no universe’. The space and time in which we now exist did not exist. Now, was there a greater whole? Was it part of a multiverse at the time? Maybe. But that is not the important issue. The important issue is whether a universe like ours did not exist and then came into existence. And that is what I mean by ‘nothing’. It was not there, and then it was there. The space and the time that we inhabit and the particles that we are made of were not there. None of that existed. That is a pretty good definition of ‘nothing’, as far as I am concerned.

Now, there is a more subtle question. Did the laws of physics exist beforehand? Maybe, maybe not. But the point of my book was to show the amazing discoveries made by scientists demonstrating that empty space was not what we thought. And another point was to ask the question, ‘What would a universe that spontaneously emerged from nothing due to the laws of quantum gravity and survived for 13.8 billion years look like?’ It would look just like the universe in which we live! That is not a proof, but it is highly suggestive and fascinating to me.

It also, among other things, gets rid of the need for a creator, at least of our universe. That is not the reason I wrote the book, I wrote it to explain the science, but it does address that last nail in the coffin, if you like, that refuge of the scoundrels of religion. Darwin had done away with the design argument for life on Earth, and I think the arguments I gave in the book go a long way toward refuting the design argument for the universe. That is what Richard Dawkins talked about in his afterword to the book. I addressed the ‘god of the gaps’ argument, which had moved from biology to physics, and the question of why there is something rather than nothing, which seems to be a big question among religious people.

You were, of course, thought of as one of the figures of the so-called ‘New Atheism’. But you were critical of Richard Dawkins for the way he approached science and religion, and that is how you first met him. Is that correct?

I was one of the leading scientific ‘atheists’, but I never referred to myself that way, because it seems silly to describe oneself by what one does not believe. But yes, I was critical of Richard for his method. I thought that you could not convince people by telling them that they are stupid. I argued that one had to be a little more seductive and our dialogue continued. The first significant time Richard and I spent together was at a symposium called ‘Beyond Belief’ in California, and it was so productive and illuminating. We decided to write a dialogue on science communication and religion for Scientific American in 2007.

At that time I was a little more apologetic about religion. I became more combative for a while after seeing what religion was doing in the United States. I had a conversation with Sam Harris in which I argued that science cannot disprove the existence of God, but that you can show, for example, that the scriptures are inconsistent, and by not being forthright about that you are simply being fearful of offending people with the truth. It is quite simple: you can either accept science or believe that the Bible contains the truth about the natural world, but not both. Those perspectives are just fundamentally irreconcilable. Of course, plenty of religious people do not take the scriptures literally, and that is fine. Indeed, if you want to mesh your scientific and religious views, you have to take the holy texts allegorically.

For a moment there, I thought you were about to say something like Christopher Hitchens radicalised you.

Well, he did! Almost more than Richard did. His book God Is Not Great (2007) informed me of a lot of things about the sociology of religion that I was not aware of. I also learned a lot about the scriptures from Christopher. I had not realised how absolutely violent and vicious they were. They were just evil. I had read the Bible and the Quran when I was younger but I had not internalised them. I skipped over a lot of the crap. I probably learned more about the Bible from Christopher and Richard than anyone else. So, yes, Christopher radicalised me. Inspired by him, I called myself an anti-theist for a while, though now I call myself an apatheist.

So the New Atheist moment has passed?

I never liked that label. What was new about it? People have been not believing in God for thousands of years! Define ‘New Atheist’ for me.

I suppose I am referring more to the historical moment, of the mid 2000s until the early 2010s, when there was this very popular group of anti-religion people speaking up in public. That cultural moment has passed.

Yes, that cultural moment has gone, and for much the same reason as all movements disappear—though I do not like to consider myself as part of any movement—which is that they fragment, just like in Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), where you have the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. Incidentally, I think Life of Brian probably represents exactly what it was like at the time of Jesus, with all these messiahs going about.

The New Atheist movement, if you like, began to eat itself from within. It is a natural tendency for humans to become religious and dogmatic about things, and secular religion has taken over.

You are referring to Critical Social Justice, the term used by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay to refer to what is more colloquially known as ‘wokeism’. If ‘wokeism’ is a dogmatic religion, how has it become so powerful and has it corrupted science?

That is a big question. I have written about it in various places, such as my Substack, so it would be better for readers to delve into those pieces. But essentially, wokeism or wokeness has made certain ideas sacred and therefore beyond criticism. Wokeism is a secular religion that makes assumptions without evidence and when those assumptions are questioned, you are subject to expulsion and considered a heretic. It has stifled and stymied the free and open enquiry and discussion that is central to academia in general and science in particular. I gave loads of examples of how wokeness has corrupted science in a seminar for the Stanford University Classical Liberalism Initiative.

Do you think this problem is getting better or worse?

I think it is getting worse. But we are at a threshold right now. With elements of the woke left cheering on actual violence against Israel, while otherwise absurdly insisting that words are violence, perhaps a new light will be thrown on them, and things might change. But it has certainly been getting worse up until this point.

To finish off, do you have any future projects in the works?

I am very excited about my Origins Project Foundation and my Origins Podcast. We have lots of great new things going on there. And I will keep writing about the issues that concern me. I am also turning now, I think, to writing a scientific memoir, which is a whole new experience for me. I am excited about that, but I also feel some trepidation. It will describe the many amazing people I have interacted with both within and outside of science as well as my own experiences within academia and outside of it, some good, some bad, that I think will be of public interest.

On Krauss’s most recent book, see the review and interview of Krauss by assistant editor Daniel James Sharp in Merion West.

On biology, see further:

‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’ – interview with Richard Dawkins

On ‘New Atheism’, see further:

‘How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism’, by Nathan G. Alexander

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

On science versus religion, see further:

‘Can science threaten religious belief?’, by Stephen Law

On satire of religion, see further:

‘On trial for blasphemy: the Freethinker’s first editor and offensive cartoons’, by Bob Forder

‘Religious Privilege 2 : 0 Pastafarians’, by Niko Alm

‘The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought’, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

On ‘wokeism’, see further:

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities – interview with Steven Greer

‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’ – interview with Alex Byrne

On the left, Islamists, and Gaza, see further:

‘Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution’, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The post ‘We are at a threshold right now’: Lawrence Krauss on science, atheism, religion, and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in science appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction 

Daniel C. Dennett is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, Massachusetts. One of the world’s best-known philosophers, his work ranges from the nature of consciousness and free will to the evolutionary origins of religion. He is also known as one of the ‘Four Horsemen of New Atheism’, alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.  

His many books include Consciousness Explained (1992), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995), Freedom Evolves (2003), Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006), Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (2013), and From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017).  

I recently spoke with Dennett over Zoom to discuss his life, work, and new memoir I’ve Been Thinking, published by Penguin: Allen Lane in October 2023. Below is an edited transcript of the interview along with some audio extracts from our conversation. Where some of the discussion becomes quite technical, links to explanatory resources have been included for reference. 

Interview 

Freethinker: Why did you decide to write a memoir? 

Daniel C. Dennett: In the book, I explain that I have quite a lot to say about how I think and why I think that it is a better way to think than traditional philosophical ways. I have also helped a lot of students along the way, and I have tried to help a larger audience. I have also managed to get the attention of a lot of wonderful thinkers who have helped me and I would like to share the wealth.  

As a philosopher who has made contributions to science, what do you think philosophy can offer science? Especially as there are some scientists who are dismissive of philosophy. 

I think some scientists are dismissive towards philosophy because they are scared of it. But a lot of really good scientists take philosophy seriously and they recognise that you cannot do philosophy-free science. The question is whether you examine your underlying assumptions. The good scientists typically do so and discover that these are not easy questions. The scientists who do not take philosophy seriously generally do pretty well, but they are missing a whole dimension of their life’s work if they do not realise the role that philosophy plays in filling out a larger picture of what reality is and what life is all about. 

In your memoir, you say that it is important to know the history of philosophy because it is the history of very—and still—tempting mistakes. Do you mean, in other words, that philosophy can help us to avoid falling into traps? 

Exactly. I love to point out philosophical mistakes made by those scientists who think philosophy is a throwaway. In the areas of science that I am interested in—the nature of consciousness, the nature of reality, the nature of explanation—they often fall into the old traps that philosophers have learned about by falling into those traps themselves. There is no learning without making mistakes, but then you have to learn from your mistakes. 

What do you think is the biggest and most influential philosophical mistake that has ever been made? 

I think I would give the prize to Descartes, and not so much for his [mind-body] dualism as for his rationalism, his idea that he could get his clear and distinct ideas so clear and distinct that it would be like arithmetic or geometry and that he could then do all of science just from first principles in his head and get it right.  

The amazing thing is that Descartes produced, in a prodigious effort, an astonishingly detailed philosophical system in his book Le Monde [first published in full in 1677]—and it is almost all wrong, as we know today! But, my golly, it was a brilliant rational extrapolation from his first principles. It is a mistake without which Newton is hard to imagine. Newton’s Principia (1687) was largely his attempt to undo Descartes’ mistakes. He jumped on Descartes and saw further. I think Descartes failed to appreciate how science is a group activity and how the responsibility for getting it right is distributed. 

In your memoir, you lay out your philosophical ideas quite concisely, and you compare them to Descartes’s system in their coherence—albeit believing that yours are right, unlike his! How would you describe the core of your view? 

As I said in my book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, if I had to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I would give it to Darwin because evolution by natural selection ties everything together. It ties life and physics and cosmology; it ties time and causation and intentionality. All of these things get tied together when you understand how evolution works. And if you do not take evolution seriously and really get into the details, you end up with a factually impoverished perspective on consciousness, on the mind, on epistemology, on the nature of explanation, on physics. It is the great unifying idea. 

I was lucky to realise this when I was a graduate student and I have been turning that crank ever since with gratifying results. 

How does consciousness come about in a Darwinian universe? 

First of all, you have to recognize that consciousness is not a single pearl of wonderfulness. It is a huge amalgam of different talents and powers which are differently shared among life forms. Trees are responsive to many types of information. Are they conscious? It is difficult to tell. What about bacteria, frogs, flies, bees? But the idea that there is just one thing where the light is on or that consciousness sunders the universe into two categories—that is just wrong. And evolution shows why it is wrong.  

In the same way, there are lots of penumbral or edge cases of life. Motor proteins are not alive. Ribosomes are not alive. But life could not exist without them. Once you understand Darwinian gradualism and get away from Cartesian essentialism, then you can begin to see how the pieces fit together without absolutes. There is no absolute distinction between conscious things and non-conscious things, just as there is no absolute distinction between living things and non-living things. We have gradualism in both cases.  

We just have to realise that the Cartesian dream of ‘Euclidifying’, as I have put it, all of science—making it all deductive and rational with necessary and sufficient conditions and bright lines everywhere—does not work for anything else apart from geometry. 

Why are non-naturalistic accounts of consciousness—‘mysterian’ accounts as you call them—still so appealing? 

I have been acquainted with the field for over half a century, but I am still often astonished by the depth of the passion with which people resist a naturalistic view of consciousness. They think it is sort of a moral issue—gosh, if we are just very, very fancy machines made out of machines made out of machines, then life has no meaning! That is a very ill-composed argument, but it scares people. People do not even want you to look at the idea. These essentially dualistic ideas have a sort of religious aura to them—it is the idea of a soul. [See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on consciousness for an overview of the debate over the centuries.] 

I love the headline of my interview with the late, great Italian philosopher of science and journalist Giulio Giorello: ‘Sì, abbiamo un’anima. Ma è fatta di tanti piccoli robot’ – ‘Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots’ [this interview appeared in a 1997 edition of the Corriere della Sera]. And that’s it! If that makes you almost nauseated, then you have a mindset that resists sensible, scientific, naturalistic theories of consciousness.  

Do you think that the naturalistic view of consciousness propounded by you and others has ‘won’ the war of ideas? 

No, we have not won, but the tide is well turned, I think. But then we have these backlashes.

The one that is currently raging is over whether Giulio Tononi’s integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness is pseudo-science [see the entry for IIT in the Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy for an overview]. I recently signed an open letter alongside a number of researchers, including a lot of the world’s very best on the neuroscience of consciousness, deploring the press’s treatment of IIT as a ‘leading’ theory of consciousness. We said IIT was pseudo-science. That caused a lot of dismay, but I was happy to sign the letter. The philosopher Felipe de Brigard, another signatory, has written a wonderful piece that explains the context of the whole debate. [See also the neuroscientist Anil Seth’s sympathetic view of IIT here.] 

One of the interesting things to me, though, is that some scientists resist IIT for what I think are the wrong reasons. They say that it leads to panpsychism [‘the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world’ – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.] because it says that even machines can be a little bit conscious. But I say that machines can be a little bit conscious! That is not panpsychism, it is just saying that consciousness is not that magical pearl. Bacteria are conscious. Stones are not conscious, not even a little bit, so panpsychism is false. It is not even false, it is an empty slogan. But the idea that a very simple reactive thing could have one of the key ingredients of consciousness is not false. It is true. 

It seems that antipathy towards naturalistic theories of consciousness is linked to antipathy towards Darwinism. What do you make of the spate of claims in recent years that Darwinism, or the modern evolutionary synthesis of which Darwinism is the core, is past its sell-by date? 

This is a pendulum swing which has had many, many iterations since Darwin. I think everybody in biology realises that natural selection is key. But many people would like to be revolutionaries. They do not want to just add to the establishment. They want to make some bold stroke that overturns something that has been accepted.  

I understand the desire to be the rebel, to be the pioneer who brings down the establishment. So, we have had wave after wave of people declaring one aspect of Darwinism or another to be overthrown, and, in fact, one aspect of Darwin after another has been replaced by better versions, but still with natural selection at their cores. Adaptationism still reigns.  

Even famous biologists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin mounted their own ill-considered attack on mainstream Darwinism and pleased many Darwin dreaders in doing so.  But that has all faded, and rightly so. More recently, we have had the rise of epigenetics, and the parts of epigenetics that make good sense and are well-attested have been readily adapted and accepted as extensions of familiar ideas in evolutionary theory. There is nothing revolutionary there.  

The Darwinian skeleton is still there, unbroken. It just keeps getting new wrinkles added as they are discovered.  

The claims that the evolutionary establishment needs to be overthrown remind me of—in fact, they are quite closely related to—the enduring hatred of some people for Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book ‘The Selfish Gene’.

Yes, some people do. But I think that it is one of the best books I have ever read and that it holds up very well. The chapter on memes is one of the most hated parts of it, but the idea of memes is gathering adherents now even if a lot of people do not want to use the word ‘meme’. The idea of cultural evolution as consisting of the natural selection of cultural items that have their own evolutionary fitness, independent of the fitness of their vectors or users—that has finally got a really good foothold, I think. And it is growing. 

As one of the foremost champions of memetics as a field of study, you must be pleased that it is making a comeback, even if under a different name, given that earlier attempts to formalise it never really took off. 

Well, the cutting edge of science is jagged and full of controversy—and full of big egos. There is a lot of pre-emptive misrepresentation and caricature. It takes a while for things to calm down and for people to take a deep breath and let the fog of war dispel. And then they can see that the idea was pretty good, after all.  

You mentioned Stephen Jay Gould. In your memoir, Gould and several others get a ‘rogue’s gallery’ sort of chapter to themselves. How have the people you have disagreed with over the years influenced you? 

Well, notice that some of my rogues are also some of the people that I have learned the most from, because they have been wrong in provocative ways, and it has been my attempts to show what is wrong with their views that have been my springboard in many cases. Take the philosopher Jerry Fodor, for example. As I once said, if I can see farther than others, it is because I have been jumping on Jerry like he is a human trampoline!  

If Jerry had not made his mistakes as vividly as he did, I would not have learned as much. It is the same with John Searle. They both bit a lot of bullets. They are both wrong for very important reasons, but where would I be without them? I would have to invent them! But I do not need to worry about beating a dead horse or a straw man because they have boldly put forward their views with great vigour and, in some cases, even anger. I have tried to respond not with anger but with rebuttal and refutation, which is, in the end, more constructive. 

And what about some of the friends you mention in the book? People like the scientist Douglas Hofstadter and the neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey? 

People like Doug Hofstadter, Nick Humphrey, and Richard Dawkins—three of the smartest people alive! It has been my great privilege and honour to have had them as close friends and people that I can always count on to give me good, tough, serious reactions to whatever I do. I have learned a lot from all of them.  

Nick Humphrey, for example, came to work with me in the mid-1980s and we have been really close friends ever since. I could not count the hours that we have spent debating and discussing our differences. If you look at the history of his work, you will see that he has adjusted his view again and again to get closer to mine, and I have adjusted my view to get closer to him. I accepted a lot of his points. That is how progress happens.  

How do you differentiate between philosophy and science? In your afterword to the 1999 edition of Dawkins’s 1982 book ‘The Extended Phenotype’, for example, you say that that work is both scientific and philosophical. And in your own career, of course, you have mixed science and philosophy quite freely. 

I think the dividing line is administrative at best. Philosophers who do not know any science have both hands tied behind their backs. They are ill-equipped because there is just too much counter-intuitive knowledge that we have gathered in science. That is one of the big differences between philosophy and science. In science, a counter-intuitive result is a wonderful thing. It is a gem, a treasure. If you get a counter-intuitive result and it holds up, you have made a major discovery.  

In philosophy, if something is counter-intuitive, that counts against it, because too many philosophers think that what they are doing is exposing the counter-intuitivity of various views. They think that if something is counter-intuitive, it cannot be right. Well, hang on to your hats, because a lot of counter-intuitive things turn out to be true!   

What you can imagine depends on what you know. If you do not know the science (or what passes as the science of the day because some of that will turn out to be wrong) your philosophy will be impoverished. It is the interaction between the bold and the utterly conservative and established scientific claims that produces progress. That is where the action is. Intuition is not a good guide here. 

We all take for granted now that the earth goes around the sun. That was deeply counter-intuitive at one point. A geocentric universe and a flat world were intuitive once upon a time. 

Darwinism, the idea that such complexity as living, conscious organisms can arise from blind forces, is counter-intuitive, too.  

Yes. My favourite quote about Darwinism comes from one of his 19th-century critics who described it as a ‘strange inversion of reasoning’. Yes, it is a strange inversion of reasoning, but it is the best one ever. 

It strikes me that some of the essential differences between your view and the views of others hark back in some way to Plato and Aristotle—the focus on pure reason and the immaterial and the absolute versus the focus on an empirical examination of the material world. 

Yes, that is true. It is interesting that when I was an undergraduate, I paid much more attention to Plato than to Aristotle. Again, I think that was probably because I thought Plato was more interestingly wrong. It was easier to see what he was wrong about. Philosophers love to find flaws in other philosophers’ work! 

That brings to mind another aspect of your memoir and your way of thinking more generally. You think in very physical, practical terms—thinking tools, intuition pumps, and so on. And you have a long history of farming and sailing and fixing things. How important has this aspect been to your thinking over the years? 

It has been very important. Since I was a little boy, I have been a maker of things and a fixer of things. I have been a would-be inventor, a would-be designer or engineer. If I had not been raised in a family of humanists with a historian father and an English teacher mother, I would probably have become an engineer. And who knows? I might not have been a very good one. But I just love engineering. I always have. I love to make things and fix things and figure out how things work.  

I think that some of the deepest scientific advances of the last 150 years have come from engineers—computers, understanding electricity, and, for that matter, steam engines and printing presses. A lot of the ideas about degrees of freedom and control theory—this is all engineering. 

Since you mention degrees of freedom, whence free will? You are known as a compatibilist, so how do you understand free will in a naturalistic, Darwinian universe? 

I think there is a short answer, which is that the people who think free will cannot exist in a causally deterministic world are confusing causation and control. These are two different things. The past does not control you. It causes you, but it does not control you. There is no feedback between you and the past. If you fire a gun, once the bullet leaves the muzzle, it is no longer in your control. Once your parents have launched you, you are no longer in their control.  

Yes, many of your attitudes, habits, and dispositions are ones you owe to your upbringing and your genes but you are no longer under the control of them. You are a self-controller. There is all the difference in the world between a thing that is a self-controller and a thing that is not. A boulder rolling down a mountainside is caused deterministically to end up where it ends up, but it is not being controlled by anything, while a skier skiing down the slalom trail is also determined in where she ends up, but she is in control. That is a huge and obvious difference. 

What we want is to be self-controllers. That is what free will is: the autonomy of self-control. If you can be a competent self-controller, you have all the free will that is worth wanting, and that is perfectly compatible with determinism. The distinction between things that are in control and things that are out of control never mentions determinism. In fact, deterministic worlds make control easier. If you have to worry about unpredictable quantum interference with your path, you have a bigger control problem.  

I know that you have a long and ongoing dispute with, among others, the biologist and free will determinist Jerry Coyne on this. 

Yes. I have done my best and spent hours trying to show Jerry the light! 

Alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, you were one of the ‘Four Horsemen of New Atheism’. In your memoir, you say that you were impelled to write your book on religion, ‘Breaking the Spell’, because you were worried about the influence of religious fundamentalism in America—and you say that your worries have been borne out today. In your view, then, we are seeing a resurgence of dangerous fundamentalism? 

We are, yes, and we are seeing it across the world and across religions. I think that we have to recognise that a major part of the cause of this is the anxiety, not to say the terror, of the believers who see their world evaporating in front of their eyes. I warned about that in Breaking the Spell, and I said, ‘Look. We have to be calm. We have to be patient. We have to recognise that people are faced with a terrifying prospect, of their religious traditions evaporating, being abandoned by their children, being swept aside.’ No wonder that many of them are anxious, even to the point of violence.

In Breaking the Spell, I designed a little thought experiment to help those of us who are freethinkers, who are atheists, appreciate what that is like. Imagine if aliens came to America. Not to conquer us—imagine they were nice. They were just learning about us, teaching us about their ways. And then we found that our children were flocking to them and were abandoning musical instruments and poetry and abandoning football and baseball and basketball because these aliens had other pastimes that were more appealing to them. I deliberately chose secular aspects of our country for this experiment. 

Imagine seeing all of these just evaporate. What?! No more football, no more baseball, no more country music, no more rock and roll?! Help, help! It is a terrifying prospect, a world without music—not if I can help it! 

If you can sympathise with this, if you can feel the gut-wrenching anxiety that that would cause in you, then recognise that that is the way many religious people feel, and for good reason. And so we should respect the sorrow and the anger, the sense of loss, that they are going through. It is hard to grow up and shed religion. It has been our nursemaid for millennia. But we can do it. We can grow up. 

Is there a need for another ‘New Atheist’ type of moment, then, given the resurgence of religious fundamentalism and violence in the world? 

I am not sure that we need it. I am not going to give the New Atheists credit for this—though we played our role—but recent work has shown that the number of those with no religion at all has increased massively worldwide. Let’s just calm down and take a deep breath. Comfort those who need comforting. Try to forestall the more violent and radical responses to this and just help ease the world into a more benign kind of religion.  

And religions are doing that, too. Many religions are recognising this comforting role and are downplaying dogma and creed and emphasising community and cooperation and brotherhood and sisterhood. Let’s encourage that. I sometimes find it amusing to tease Richard Dawkins and say to him, think about this evolutionarily: we do not so much want to extinguish religion as get it to evolve into something benign. And it can.  

We need the communities of care, the places where people can go and find love and feel welcome. Don’t count on the state to do that. And don’t count on any institution that is not in some ways like good old-fashioned religion for that, either. The hard thing to figure out is how we can have that form of religion without the deliberate irrationality of most religious doctrine. 

And that is a difference between you and Dawkins. In ‘Breaking the Spell’, you did not expend much energy on the arguments for and against the existence of a deity, whereas Dawkins in ‘The God Delusion’ (2006) was much more focused on that question. 

Yes, but Richard and his foundation also played a major role in creating The Clergy Project, which I helped to found and which is designed to provide counsel and comfort and community for closeted atheist clergy. There are now thousands of clergy in that organisation and Richard and his foundation played a big role in setting it up. Without them, it would not have happened. So, Richard understands what I am saying about the need to provide help and comfort and the role of religion in doing so. 

You mentioned music earlier, which you clearly love as you devoted a long chapter in your memoir to it. So, what for you is the meaning of life without God and without a Cartesian homunculus?

Well, life is flippin’ wonderful! Here we are talking to each other, you in England [Scotland, actually, but it didn’t seem the moment to quibble!] and me in the United States, and we are having a meaningful, constructive conversation about the deepest issues there are. And you are made of trillions—trillions!—of moving parts, and so am I, and we are getting to understand how those trillions of parts work. Poor Descartes could never have imagined a machine with a trillion moving parts. But we can, in some detail now, thanks to computers, thanks to microscopes, thanks to science, thanks to neuroscience and cognitive science and psychophysics and all the rest. We are understanding more and more every year about how all this wonderfulness works and about how it evolved and why it evolved. To me, that is awe-inspiring.  

My theory of meaning is a bubble-up theory, not a trickle-down theory. We start with a meaningless universe with just matter, or just physics, if you like. And with just physics and time and chance (in the form of pseudo-randomness, at least), we get evolution and we get life and this amazingly wonderful blossoming happens, and it does not need to have been bestowed from on high by an even more super-duper thing. It is the super-duper thing. Life: it’s wonderful. 

I completely agree. I have never understood the appeal of religion and mysticism and ‘spooky stuff’ when it comes to meaning and purpose and fulfillment, but there we are. In your memoir, you discuss the thinking tools you have picked up over the years. Which one would you most recommend? 

It might be Rapoport’s rules. The game theorist Anatole Rapoport formulated the rules for how you should conduct any debate. These are the rules to follow if you want constructive disagreement. Each of them is important. 

The first thing you should do is to try to state your opponent’s position so vividly and clearly and fairly that your opponent says they wish they had thought of putting it that way. Now, you may not be able to improve on your opponent, but you should strive for that. You should make it clear by showing, not saying, that you understand where your opponent is coming from.  

Second, mention anything that you have learned from your opponent—anything you have been convinced of, something you had underestimated in their case.

Third, mention anything that you and your opponent agree on that a lot of people do not. 

Only after you have done those three things should you say a word of criticism. If you follow these rules precisely, your opponent will know that you really understand him or her. You have shown that you are smart enough to have learned something from or agree about something with him or her.

What Rapoport’s rules do is counteract what might almost be called the philosopher’s blight: refutation by caricature. Reductio ad absurdum is one of our chief tools, but it encourages people to be unsympathetic nitpickers and to give arguably unfair readings of their opponents. That just starts pointless pissing contests. It should be avoided. 

I know the answer to this question, but have you ever been unfairly read? 

Oh yes! It is an occupational hazard. And the funny thing is that I have gone out of my way to prevent certain misunderstandings, but not far enough, it seems. I devoted a whole chapter of Consciousness Explained to discussing all the different real phenomena of consciousness. And then people say that I am saying that consciousness is not real! No, I say it is perfectly real. It just is not what you think it is. I get tired of saying it but a whole lot of otherwise very intelligent people continue to say, ‘Oh, no, no, no! He is saying that consciousness isn’t real!’  

Well, given what they mean by consciousness—something magical—that is true. I am saying that there is no ‘real magic’. It is all conjuring tricks. I am saying that magic that is real is not magic. Consciousness is real, it is just not magic. 

Do you have any future projects in the works? 

I do have some ideas. I have a lot of writing about free will that has accumulated over the last decade or so and I am thinking of putting that together all in one package. But whether I publish it as a book or just put it online with introductions and unify it, I am not yet sure. But putting it online as a usable anthology in the public domain is a project I would like to do.  

Further reading:

Darwinism, evolution, and memes

‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’ – interview with Richard Dawkins, by Emma Park

Science, religion, and the ‘New Atheists’

Atheism, secularism, humanism, by A.C. Grayling

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

Secular conservatives? If only…, by Jacques Berlinerblau

Can science threaten religious belief? by Stephen Law

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

Christopher Hitchens and the value of heterodoxy, by Matt Johnson

Meaning and morality without religion

What I believe – interview with Andrew Copson, by Emma Park

Morality without religion: the story of humanism, by Madeleine Goodall

‘The real beauty comes from contemplating the universe’ – interview on humanism with Sarah Bakewell

The post Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

On 25 November, 2023, at the historic Conway Hall in London, I met Graham Smith, the CEO of the anti-monarchy campaigning group Republic—an organisation whose origin can be traced back through the pages of The Freethinker. Read more about that connection in ‘The Freethinker and early republicanism’. See also ‘Bring on the British republic’ for my review of Smith’s book Abolish the Monarchy: Why We Should and How We Will.

Smith was the guest speaker at the National Secular Society’s Members’ Day at Conway Hall, and I managed to talk to him in the foyer café before he went off to give his very well-received talk on the connections between monarchy and religion, and between secularism and republicanism. Below is an edited transcript of our short but illuminating conversation.

Interview

Freethinker: At the coronation of Charles III, you and several other anti-monarchy protesters were arrested [see links above for more]. Could you give us an update on how the case is going?

Graham Smith: There are no major updates. It has gone off to a judge for an application for judicial review. The assumption is that we will be granted the judicial review and then we will see what happens after that.

What are the historical links between secularism and republicanism?

If you look historically, you will very often see intellectual links between those arguing against the domination of established churches and those who opposed monarchy. There is an old quote, whose origin I cannot remember right now: ‘Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.’ [These are, in fact, the words of the 18^th-century Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot.]

This is not something that I would condone! But the sentiment is that these things are very much linked and so the opposition to them is linked and always has been. And certainly, the National Secular Society and Republic have quite a lot of overlap in terms of our interests and members and so on, even though we have not really worked together. I think it is difficult to argue for a secular state without arguing for the abolition of the monarchy and vice versa.

Could you have a secular monarchy? 

No, I do not think you can. You can have a non-secular republic—in Ireland, God gets a mention in the constitution, and for many years the Irish constitution gave a privileged position to the Catholic Church. But I do not think that makes intellectual sense. You also have disestablishment in monarchies like Sweden and Norway, but that is a bit of a halfway house because the monarch is still a member of one church and is very much a churchgoer, and thus that church is privileged through that relationship even if it is technically, by law, not established. I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy. [For an alternative view, see Emma Park’s interview with Paul Scriven, a Liberal Democrat peer who introduced a disestablishment bill in the House of Lords on 6 December.]

Does one or the other—republicanism or secularism—have to come first?

It is hard to say. I think it may well be that the monarchy goes first because it is the bigger, more potent symbol of everything that has to change in Britain. I do not think there is the same appetite for disestablishment in the way that there is an appetite for abolishing the monarchy. It is interesting that over the last 25 years, we have seen a lot of pressure to get rid of the House of Lords, the monarchy, and the established church. Hopefully, the Lords will go in the next one or two years. And these three things are all connected.  I think we will see them all unravelling—one will go, then another, then another. Though in which order it will happen, who knows?

How was your anti-monarchy book received?

On the whole, it has gone down well. I got a couple of annoying reviews from monarchists, which is a good sign. One of the reasons I wrote it is because there is not enough literature about the monarchy and why it should be abolished. Most books about the royals are just inane nonsense.

Even though the history books talk about many of the monarchs being thugs and murderers, there is always this undertone—‘Oh, isn’t the monarchy so great and interesting? And don’t worry, they’re not like this anymore!’. But that history is one of the reasons we should get rid of them—not because they are still doing things like that, but because it is a celebration of that history, which is not a reason to celebrate.

Have you had any thoughtful reviews from monarchists?

Yes. Surprisingly, The Telegraph’s review was the most interesting. The reviewer described herself as a ‘soft monarchist’, which is a term I use in the book, and she really engaged with my arguments. She thought monarchists should be worried because there are lots of cracks in their armour and lots of weaknesses in their position, and they should be alert to that.

What is the strongest argument for the monarchy in your view? I have always thought it was the superficially convincing one made by, among others, George Orwell: that it is a check on political extremism because it diverts extreme emotion away from politicians. In other words, it prevents tyranny.

Yes. The fact that Orwell, a respected writer, made it, means that it is an argument that is taken seriously. Churchill said something similar—that if they had kept the Kaiser, Germany would not have had Hitler. But these claims are completely ahistorical. Two of the Axis powers were monarchies. The Italian king Victor Emmanuel III put Mussolini in power and sat there for 20 years and let him get on with it. And the Kaiser was keen to put his family back on the throne under or with Hitler. So, if anything, the Orwellian argument shows the weakness of monarchy.

And, of course, Emperor Hirohito was not just a monarch, but apparently a divine being.

Indeed! The problem is that that stifles critical thinking and it stifles opposition, and those things are very important if you want to avoid things like imperial conflicts.

How do you think Charles III is doing as king?

That is like asking how a chair is doing as a chair. It just sits there and is a chair, and he just sits there and is a king. He does not have to do anything. He just is. And people judge them [monarchs and royals] by their own standards, so if they go around waving and allowing their acolytes to say good things on their behalf, then that is judged to be fine, so long as there is not some huge scandal. The bar is set incredibly low.

But Charles is a man who is accused of exchanging honours for cash. He is accused of handling millions of pounds of cash from Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, a Qatari businessman and former Prime Minister of Qatar accused of having links with al-Qaeda. He is accused of lobbying behind the scenes for all sorts of things. He is not a good head of state. Anybody could be a good king because being a monarch is about biological descent alone, but to be a good head of state is to be someone who is principled, eloquent, accountable and accessible, and on all these scores Charles is dreadful.

In terms of religion, Charles was never going to be genuinely ecumenical or for all faiths, and certainly not for those who do not have a faith. The royals pay lip service to ecumenicism, and I think some people were really surprised by how much Charles doubled down on all the feudal religious nonsense during the coronation—but it was because he believed all that nonsense!

One of the problems is that you do not get to ask Charles questions directly and challenge him about these issues. So it is all about reading the tea leaves and believing people like Jonathan Dimbleby when it comes to the true beliefs of the royals.

Have you ever met Charles? Or been in the same room as him and tried to ask him a question?

I have been within shouting distance! I have been almost as close to him as I am to you now, calling out questions, but obviously, he just blanks me. That is the one thing the royals are good at, blanking people. They just blank people they do not want to acknowledge, including their own staff.

What would a British republic with a written constitution look like?

It would look like a modern, grown-up democracy where we would have a fully elected parliament. We would still have a prime minister but they would not have the same power, derived from the Crown, that they have now. We would have clearly defined limits to that power and these limits would be policed and monitored by an elected head of state. The head of state would be there to be our ambassador but also to guard our constitution. So a republic would just take all the nonsense out of it. And if we want pageantry and ceremony, we can do that. Other republics, like France and Greece, do it quite well.

Having a republic would ultimately mean that our constitution and our politics would be done in a serious, intelligent, accountable way.

What is the single, essential thing that makes the monarchy and our political or constitutional system rotten, in your view?

The fact that we still have the same system we had after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688-1689. All that has happened since then is that there have been compromises between those in Parliament and those in the Palace. There has never been a serious democratic evolution that shifts power to the people in this country. Instead, we have had the centralisation of power propped up and disguised by all the trappings of the monarchy—that is the big problem.

Is it anti-British to be anti-monarchy?

I would say it is very pro-British to be anti-monarchy. Being against anything bad is being in favour of where you live. One of the things that annoys me the most about monarchists is when they say that we would not be anything without the monarchy. I think that is the least patriotic thing you could say. To rubbish this amazing country of 65 million people by saying that it would not be much without this very, very tedious and ordinary family—that is a weird and unpatriotic thing to say.

And, of course, there is also the great British tradition of republicanism and radicalism, which is just as much a part of our patriotic heritage as the monarchy.

Yes. History is written by the victors, by those in power, and we do not get to hear about the radicals. And when we do hear about them, they are dismissed as fringe people, while everyone else is just getting on with their lives as serfs and plebs.

Yet the anti-slavery movement was one of the largest, if not the largest, working-class movements in British history. You do not hear about that. You only hear about William Wilberforce and the anti-slavery MPs.

We have a long history in this country of fighting against the things that monarchy represents, and we just have to continue until it is gone.

What is the future of British republicanism?

We will win. I think that the monarchy will come to an end. I think that people have realised in the last twelve months that that is quite likely. There is no longer this sense of an immovable object. I think that republicans will continue to see the polling shift in our favour. Support for the monarchy has dropped significantly over the years. Once support for the monarchy drops below 50 per cent, we will see things unravel in quite good order.

Would you care to venture a prediction as to when exactly the monarchy will go?

No. I suppose I would say that there is a reasonable chance that Prince William will become king, but I think the chance of his son George becoming king is quite small.

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Further reading on secularism and republicanism:

Image of the week: Charles Bradlaugh’s study after his death, by Walter Sickert, by Bob Forder

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

Is all publicity good publicity? How the first editor of the Freethinker attracted the public’s attention, by Clare Stainthorp

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

Freethought in the 21st century – interview of The Freethinker editor Emma Park by Christoph De Spiegeleer

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

The post ‘I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy’: interview with Graham Smith appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

On the afternoon of Wednesday 6th December 2023, Paul Scriven, a Liberal Democrat peer, introduced his private member’s bill, the Disestablishment of the Church of England Bill, in the House of Lords, after it had been selected by ballot.

In the UK Parliament, the first reading of a bill is usually a mere formality, with the meat of the debate being reserved for the second reading – which may happen a few months later, if there is time and circumstances do not intervene.

When Lord Scriven, however, ‘beg[ged] to introduce a bill to disestablish the Church of England, to make provision for the protection of freedom of religion or belief, and for connected purposes,’ there were noises of dissent halfway through – apparently from the Conservative government’s side.

And when the Lord Speaker, Lord McFall of Alcluith, asked the House whether they were ‘content’ to let the bill be read a first time, there was vociferous opposition, to the point where he initially responded that the ‘not contents’ had it, before changing his mind. The full drama can be seen (and heard) in the video clip linked in Lord Scriven’s tweet below.

A brief history of (dis)establishment

The origin of the establishment of the Church of England was Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy in 1534. This made him the ‘Supreme Head of the Church of England’ and required that his subjects swear an oath of loyalty recognising his marriage to his second wife, Anne Boleyn, after he had unilaterally decided to cancel his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

The Act of Supremacy was repealed under Henry VIII’s Catholic daughter when she became Mary I, but then re-enacted in 1558 under Elizabeth I. Section VIII, entitled ‘All Spiritual Jurisdiction united to the Crown,’ is still in force today.

The last time a bill was introduced into Parliament that would have disestablished the Church was in 1991, in Tony Benn’s Commonwealth of Britain Bill, which would also have abolished the House of Lords altogether and removed the constitutional role of the monarchy. However, the bill’s second reading was repeatedly deferred and there was never a full debate.

In January 2020, another Liberal Democrat peer, Dick Taverne, introduced a private member’s bill on one aspect of disestablishment: the House of Lords (Removal of Bishops) Bill. This passed its first reading, but fell by the wayside during the pandemic.

Other points in recent history at which disestablishment or the removal of the bishops from the Lords was considered are recorded in a paper on ‘The relationship between church and state in the United Kingdom’, published by the House of Commons Library in September.

The 2018 debate

Disestablishment was briefly debated in the House of Lords on 28 November 2018, under Elizabeth II. A Labour peer, Lord Berkeley, asked the Conservative government ‘what assessment they have made of the case for the disestablishment of the Church of England.’ The laconic answer, from Lord Young of Cookham, was, ‘My Lords, none.’

Lord Berkeley pointed out that attendance at the Church of England was falling rapidly, and that ‘half of British people have no religion’. He therefore proposed that it would be time for Charles, when he became king, ‘to embrace this secular state’ and swear an appropriately non-religious oath. This led to a discussion about the status of the Church of England and constitutional reform.

For anyone who thinks that the bishops in the Lords are a mere relic, their entrenched place in the establishment can be illustrated by a few quotations from this debate. Lord Young argued that the bishops in the Lords ‘add a spiritual dimension to our discussions. They speak with a moral authority that escapes most of us…The bishops seek to heal religious conflict and promote religious tolerance and inclusiveness.’ In a word, the government’s policy was ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’. Without a trace of self-interest, the Lord Bishop of Worcester proposed that ‘the established Church is a significant force for good.’

Lord Scriven’s Bill

About 24 hours before the Disestablishment Bill was introduced, I interviewed Paul Scriven over a cup of tea in the House of Lords. An edited version of the interview is below. We discuss his motivations for bringing the bill, even though it is almost certainly doomed to fail, and why he is bringing it now, of all times. We also look at the relationship of the Church to the monarchy and of disestablishment to wider constitutional reform; and whether the bishops or other religious leaders really have any claim to moral authority.

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

Freethinker: How did you come to introduce this bill?

Paul Scriven: A little bit by accident. I entered the Lords reluctantly, as I do not agree with an unelected second house. In 2014, Nick Clegg wanted to put a number of peers in, like me, who believed that when the time came, we would vote for a reformed elected chamber. I am quite a nonconformist by background. I grew up on a council estate in Huddersfield and have always rallied against authority. When I have seen unfairness, I have fought it. Then Nick finally beat me down and got me into this place. Now that I am here, I realise it is a place where you can champion causes which are important to improve either individual lives or the state of the nation or internationally.

I was an agnostic when I came in. I have sat and watched the Bishops’ Bench for the last nearly ten years, and their views on social matters have made me a confirmed atheist. It is quite clear they are way behind the curve on where the vast majority of Britons are, whether on same-sex marriage or women or a number of issues. If that is Christianity in action from the Church of England perspective, then I do not want anything to do with it. They do not represent modern Britain – that was clear from the 2021 census.

Has being gay influenced your perspective on this issue?

I find some churches’ views on being gay baffling. Others are clearly more progressive. It is hurtful at times having to hear that you are not equal, even though they say that God loves you – and then it is quite clear that they do not like my kind of love. That is wretched. It has not driven me to my position. I just think that, on a wider number of issues, listening to the bishops has made me not want to be associated with what I see as predominantly white old men arguing about how to keep an institution together and very conservative in their views.

I also find it absolutely bewildering that in the UK Parliament, there is only one institution that is guaranteed places, and that is the 26 Anglican bishops who sit in the House of Lords. In 2023, how on earth does a Church which has 0.9% of the population [in England] in regular attendance at a Sunday service have an automatic right to be in Parliament, determine laws and have influence and power beyond its relevance to most people?

More broadly, why is it that the Church of England has so much influence, power and a special status in our society, when those who want to practise any faith or belief should have equality? The time now is ripe for disestablishment – especially when you consider what a diverse country we are, in terms not just of our faith, but of our cultures and beliefs. It seems ridiculous that one religious denomination should have a special status that goes back to a king wanting a divorce in the 1500s.

In terms of tactics, the next general election has to take place no later than January 2025. Did you ever consider leaving the bill until the next government?

Very few private member’s bills actually become law. In all honesty, I think it is more likely that snow will fall in hell than that my bill will get through this time. It is important, though, to raise the issue, because of the diversity of beliefs and faiths revealed by the 2021 census. I could stay quiet and hope for the next government to have a different view, which I think highly unlikely. It will have a large legislative programme and probably the disestablishment of the Church of England will not be among its priorities.

If the bill falls, I can file it again at the start of the next Parliament. I am looking at this in the longer term. During the debate in the second reading, I will be able to listen to people’s objections and amend the bill, which will hopefully strengthen it next time round.

Is the bill officially supported by the Liberal Democrats?

No, as a private member’s bill it is not. It is not an issue which I discussed with my party first. I am sure that as the debate happens and as the bill progresses, there will be cross-party support from all over the House. My guess is that there will also be opposition from people of different parties too.

How did the drafting process work?

I had been in touch with the National Secular Society (NSS) over a number of issues, and I just said to them, I think now is the time to introduce the private member’s bill for disestablishment. We had a discussion and they told me what was important to them. I also had discussions with Humanists UK (HUK). There were a number of issues which both organisations wanted in the bill. To actually draft the bill in appropriate parliamentary language, I worked with the House of Lords Private Bill Office.

Apart from the NSS and HUK, did you work with any other organisations on the bill?

Those were the two organisations that reached out and spoke to me. I have had quite a lot of emails from people in the Church of England supporting disestablishment. They have told me that, for them, there is a real feeling that disestablishment could be liberating. They would no longer be seen as an organ of the state, and would be able to start doing things based on their true mission, which were not either weakened or diluted by their Church’s established status.

Have you asked the bishops for their point of view?

I talked to the Bishop of Sheffield briefly about it. They will probably disagree. And when we get to the second reading, they will have arguments as to why they want to keep their privileged status and their seats in Parliament. However, they do not come from a position of neutrality. It will be interesting to see if they all have the same view.

Is your argument for disestablishment premised on the state of the Church of England now, or is it a matter of principle, or both?

It is a matter of principle. No faith or belief should have a special status. People should be able to pursue their belief or religion equally.

One possibility sometimes mooted by supporters of religion is that, instead of simply having 26 bishops, the major religions and Christian denominations in the UK could all have allocated seats. What would you say to this?

Religions do not have a monopoly on morals, they do not have a monopoly on insight. You only have to look at some of the child abuse scandals in the Church of England and how they were covered up to realise that. If an individual within a church or a belief system has such significant impact that they can help influence the House of Lords in its present form, then they should by all means be individually nominated. But it should not be the very fact that they are an office-holder or attached to a particular religion.

One common view about the bishops in the Lords is that, well, they are quite nice, and are probably overall a good rather than a bad influence on legislation. How would you respond to that?

They are an influence. It is not for me to determine whether they are good or bad. They have a vested interest to ensure that they can use this place to ingrain their privileged position. On a number of occasions, I have been on the same side of the argument as the bishops, such as in the Illegal Migration Bill. But the fact that they are bishops does not mean that they should automatically be here and able to make those points.

Is there an analogy between bishops and hereditary peers, in terms of their lack of democratic legitimacy?

Being a hereditary peer depends on which womb you came out of. But even the hereditary peers in the Lords are now elected before they get here, unlike the bishops, who are plonked in because of the church they are in.

The peers are chosen by the world’s smallest electorate…

Yes. But the bishops come because they decided to study a certain theological doctrine and then they have climbed the greasy pole within a particular church. It is very odd to me.

What about the technicalities of disestablishment? I have heard some Anglicans saying that they support disestablishment in theory, but in practice it would simply be too difficult to disentangle all the knots that bind Church and State.

Isn’t that interesting? What they are really doing is arguing that they have got their fingers and their claws in so many parts of our constitution that it would be too difficult to touch it. On that argument, quite a lot of legislation would never get done.

My bill is not specific about the technicalities. It asks that, within six months of its being passed, a committee is set up for a year to look at the legal implications of what needs to happen to disestablish the Church of England. The committee would be made up of relevant legal practitioners and people who are specialists in the constitution and in law to do with the Church of England. A report then goes to the Secretary of State, and within six months of receiving that report, the Secretary of State has to produce a detailed legal bill on disestablishment. I am not saying this is going to be easy. There are going to be some very difficult conundrums in there, for example over the Act of Union.

Difficulty should not be a reason for not legislating, but for doing it carefully, with good legal minds and an appropriate timescale.

In terms of the implications of disestablishment, the Church of England owns a lot of property. What do you say should happen to it?

I do not want to get into a big argument about this. My bill says that property will go to the Church’s General Synod. And the sovereign will no longer have the title ‘Defender of the Faith’.

Talking of the monarchy, is getting rid of it a logical next step after disestablishment?

No, that does not automatically follow. There are many functioning constitutional monarchies in Europe where the monarch is not head of the church. So one does not follow from the other. Personally, I am not a republican. I believe in a European-style constitutional monarchy.

What sort of a coronation would you envisage post-disestablishment?

A non-religious one, which would crown the monarch as the constitutional monarch of the country, not as the head of a particular faith. It could be quite interesting to develop a new coronation.

Presumably the monarch would no longer be obliged to be Anglican?

Yes. This is not rocket science. Religion would come out of the coronation, and the monarch would no longer be the ultimate boss of the Church of England.

What about other religions with a presence in Parliament? As things stand, do they have much influence behind the scenes?

Not as much as the established church. There are people of faith – Christian, Muslim, Sikh – or of no faith, like the Humanists, who try to exert influence on legislation. But the difference is that it is equal and they have to win the argument. They have not got an ingrained position. I would not want to stop that. One of the purposes of my bill is to defend people’s right to have faith and non-belief, and to be able to pursue that equally.

One of the arguments that will get thrown about is that I am anti-religious. What I actually want to do is level the playing field between the influence of all faiths and beliefs.

Taking a step back, how far are we from full-scale House of Lords reform?

It is going to be a long journey. At the age of 48, I came here naïvely thinking I would be a turkey voting for Christmas. I am now 57, and I have worked out since being here that the evolution of the British system is not always as fast as you want it to be. To reform the House of Lords would take a lot of effort and heartache. I do not think Labour will do it in their first term, but if they get in for a second term, then there may be some significant reform. My guess is that it will be in steps rather than a big leap, which is the way that the British have tended to go for their revolutions for many centuries now. The removal of the hereditary peers and the bishops might be one of the first possible reforms in terms of moving to a democratically elected chamber eventually. Other reforms might include lowering the size of the House, fixing a retirement age for peers, and changing the way that peers are selected.

As you say, disestablishment may not be high on a Labour government’s list of reforms. Indeed, why should it be high on anyone’s agenda, when we have so many other problems in the UK to deal with?

Things that affect people’s lives every day, such as the health service, the economy, housing, safety, are always going to be there. I am not suggesting for one moment that the disestablishment of the Church of England should take priority over the health service, for instance. What my bill intends to do is to raise awareness so that when the time is right and government space becomes available, there will be public understanding and the pressure to deliver disestablishment. Eventually, the public will say, ‘Now is the time for change.’

And when will ‘eventually’ be?

I cannot give you an answer. We are getting the ball rolling; maybe it will happen in my lifetime, maybe it won’t. But we shall keep pushing for it. And hopefully it will become such a public discussion that, one day, the government will make time for it.

The post ‘This is not rocket science’: the Disestablishment of the Church of England Bill 2023 appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Charles Freeman is a scholar of the ancient world, perhaps best known for his books Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean (first edition 1996) and The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (2003). The latter argued that the rise of an enforced Christian orthodoxy in the fourth century shut down a millennia-long Greek tradition that prized open-mindedness, argument, and freethought.

I recently met with Freeman over Zoom, both of us appropriately sipping a glass of wine, to discuss his life and work. In particular, we discussed his new book The Children of Athena, which explores, through portraits of major thinkers from the historian Polybius (c.200-c.118 BC) to the mathematician Hypatia (c. AD 355-415), how the Greek intellectual tradition continued to thrive under the Roman Empire until the coming of Christian orthodoxy. Below is an edited transcript along with some audio extracts from our conversation.

Interview

Freethinker: In various of your books, you make mention of your own engagement, throughout your life, with the classical world. So how did this lifelong fascination start?

Charles Freeman: Well, I was at one of the traditional public schools where they did more classics than anything else. We read Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus and the playwrights in the original Greek, so I got some idea of the real versatility and curiosity of the Greek mind, and I much preferred it to Latin. I found the Greek mind much more interesting. I loved the literature and the curiosity about the world that you see, for instance, in the Greek playwrights of the fifth century BC. So it always lingered in the back of my mind that the Greek mind was something special.

When I got a place at Cambridge, I was going to do history. But my father, who was ex-army and struggled as a farmer, said that we did not have much money. My great-great grandfather was a top classicist at Cambridge and one of my great uncles, who died very young, was also a top classicist, so there was a classical tradition in the family. But we were a slightly impoverished family with a very traditional English background, so my father said I was better off with a degree in law because that would make me some money.

And you rebelled against this, presumably?

I think that over the time that I studied law at Cambridge I actually read more history books than law books! I got very bored with the law. I mean, you really have to master the law, and you are not going to be able to change it unless you become prime minister! And I realized by the end of my time in Cambridge that I would never become a lawyer.

But as a present to me for deciding to do law, my father had arranged for me to go to Rome for six months, and I worked like a slave at the British School there. My first job was mending Etruscan pottery and then I was allowed to go out onto excavations and so on [more in the audio extract above]. I was keen on archaeology, but I realised that I was much too harum-scarum to ever be an archaeologist. I noticed that the good archaeologists always had their trenches absolutely neat and tidy, and my trenches were a bit of a muddle.

After I left Cambridge, I went out to teach in Sudan. I did not know what to do in life, like so many people after university, but I did work on one of the sites on the Nile during my Christmas holidays at the ancient site of Meroë. I had also dug at Knidos, which was a Greek city in what is now in Turkey.

So I kept all of this experience at the back of my mind, but then I became a normal history teacher and I ended up working with the International Baccalaureate, which was just beginning in the late 1970s. I worked for 10 years at a sixth-form college in Oxford. And so I was working with modern history.

I finally got a job as chief writer on a 12-volume world history, which enabled me to go back to my interest in the ancient world. The whole project eventually collapsed, but I was able to publish my sections on ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome as a single book for Oxford University Press. That gave me an academic basis from which to study the ancient world, and I have been working on that ever since, writing all kinds of books about it. In the early 2000s, I also began conducting my own tours of ancient sites, and I have kept that up, too.

How did you come to write ‘The Closing of the Western Mind’?

After I had written a book called The Greek Achievement in 1999, I decided that I wanted to write about the Greeks under the Roman Empire. I was fascinated by what actually happened to Greek philosophy when it came up against Christianity. And the end result of that was Closing, which made my name as a slightly alternative, freethinking author.

Your interest is in cultural and intellectual history, as opposed to kings and queens and battles. Why does that fascinate you so much?

I have always been interested in ideas and the way that ideas develop through history, and which ideas are taken up and which are rejected. This was embedded in me by my work with the International Baccalaureate, because there is a compulsory part of the curriculum called ‘Theory of Knowledge’. It is a course in critical thinking, with philosophical underpinnings, and I taught it for 10 years. I got very fascinated by it, and then I was asked to be an examiner, where we set questions based on the whole range of intellectual disciplines. I worked with brilliant minds from all over the world, and we came from all different kinds of disciplines, and I think that embedded the interest in ideas and critical thinking in my mind. I think that has enriched my approach to academic work, too.

That sounds rather similar to the ancient Greek tradition you have written so much about, with its commitment to open-ended enquiry and its great breadth.

Very much so. With my new book The Children of Athena, I have been able to explore all the different ways in which the Greek mind worked. Having had a very solid, traditional education, these Greek thinkers had a good foundation for very clear thinking, and for very diverse forms of thinking, which is really attractive to me.

Before we discuss your new book in more depth, can you talk a little about ‘Closing’ and your 2020 sequel of sorts, ‘The Awakening’ (published in the US as ‘The Reopening of the Western Mind’)?

Closing was concerned with the openness of the Greek mind, its versatility and curiosity, not only through the classical period but through the great Hellenistic period when figures like Archimedes and Hipparchus were flourishing. There were two main strands of Greek philosophy, one inspired by Aristotle’s fascination with the natural world and one inspired by Plato’s focus on the immaterial world, which he saw as being the ultimate reality. I argued that Platonic thought was integrated within the Christian tradition while Aristotle was forgotten until he came back into the university in the medieval period.

And in ‘Closing’, you argue that this Greek intellectual tradition was stifled by the emergence, from the fourth century onwards, of an enforced Christian orthodoxy. Do you think some of your critics misconstrued this as rehashing the now unfashionable idea that antiquity was followed by an age of darkness and ignorance?

I think the title is a good title, but it comes across quite strongly, which might be a reason for that misunderstanding. In The Awakening, I made a point of addressing the very traditional debate between the view that the medieval period was one of innovation versus the idea that it was an age of darkness. I think I was quite fair. I was determined in The Awakening to give full chapters on the medieval university, medieval philosophy, and medieval science, to really explore those in depth, so that I was not vulnerable to critics who might say I was leaping straight from antiquity to the Renaissance and ignoring medieval achievements.

What do you make of historians like Tom Holland, who in his 2019 book ‘Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind’, argued that Christianity essentially made the modern world?

One of the frustrating things about Dominion is that it does not mention the emperor Theodosius and his Council of Constantinople of 381, which fully declared the Trinity, and basically that said everybody who disagreed with its formulation of Christianity were ‘demented heretics’. This made Christianity into an authoritarian religion allied with the imperial Roman state. And it has continued as such ever since! We still have 26 bishops in the House of Lords, and throughout history, they have always been forces for conservatism.

I wrote a book in 2009 called AD 381 because I saw that year as a turning point in European history. This was when Christianity became an authoritarian and conservative religion and when the revolutionary aspects you can find in the Gospels were abandoned. You can see a resurgence of those radical ideas in the seventeenth century, with the birth of the Quakers and other radical Christian sects during the English Civil War. You could also see that in early Christianity, but that tradition was destroyed in the fourth century.

Holland is a distinguished classicist and a very good writer but in Dominion he completely missed the way in which Christianity was integrated into the authoritarian setup of the Roman Empire and how it developed very conservative, authoritarian views. Christianity became a very conservative force in a way that it did not need to be. Christianity was shaped by political and historical forces and could have taken a different path, as shown by the Quakers, who went back to the more radical, earlier forms of Christianity.

What other alternative Christianities could there have been?

I also do feel that I am very heavily criticised for this view, but Augustine had far too much influence. I am an Origen man. Origen, a theologian of the third century, was a sophisticated biblical scholar who thought Greek philosophy could be brought into Christianity. He also disbelieved in eternal punishment. And that is another problem I have with Holland’s book: he writes a very effusive defence of Origen but does not discuss Origen’s theology in great depth. And then later, he very briefly mentions that Origen was declared heretical when the Trinity was proclaimed in 381!

Surely Holland should have probed what heresy meant and discussed why one of the greatest Christian intellectuals was declared a heretic. I felt that Holland did not in any serious way probe into the many problems of Christianity. As it happens, I have been thinking of writing a book called Europe and Christianity: The History of a Troubled Relationship. That is quite a good title, I think. It would, among other things, look at the conflicts between medieval states and the papacy.

The big ethical issue about Christianity is the ethics of exclusion. Jews, Muslims, pagans—you are either in or you are out. And Holland should have probed this more deeply. Why was Origen, one of Christianity’s best sales agents, declared heretical?

Holland might have it that Christianity was a great vehicle for universalism, in that it declared us all to be made in the image of God. But of course, as you say, there are the saved and the damned, which is almost the entire point of Christianity.

Yes, and so you have the problem of Calvinism and the predestination issue. Do you know whether you are saved or not? And then you have the problem with original sin.

Desiderius Erasmus, the great Renaissance scholar, said that he got more out of reading one page of Origen than he did reading ten pages of Augustine. I think that says a lot. Erasmus is one of my heroes. He is so broad-minded. And Martin Luther, when he heard of his death, said that Erasmus was going to hell! The Catholic Church put Erasmus’s works on the Index of Prohibited Books and there is still that very traditional Catholic argument that Erasmus caused the Reformation, which is, of course, not true. There were many other factors which made the Church vulnerable to a reformer who could articulate an alternative theology.

To go back to Holland, perhaps the main problem with his thesis is that he seems to believe that there is just one version of Christianity, and it is the version that happens to align with modern values and that everything else was just an aberration, not ‘true’ Christianity.

Yes. Christianity, for example, buttressed the apartheid regime in South Africa. The Nazis had a Christian church. And, as I said, there were radical Christianities, like the Quakers. So Christianity could be interpreted in every kind of political context.

That sounds similar to the problem with theology that you outline in ‘Closing’, namely that there is an endless proliferation of interpretations in Christianity because there is no rational foundation or agreed-upon set of first principles from which to build. That is why both the defenders and the opponents of slavery in the American South could claim, with equal justification, that God was on their side.

Michael Taylor has written a very good book calledThe Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery, which discusses the Christian, biblical sources used by the defenders of slavery. He stresses how much the Christian churches were in favour of slavery. Remember that it was the Pope who granted the Portuguese the right to enslave Africans back in the fifteenth century. So slavery starts off with a Catholic imprimatur, if you like. Of course, Protestants defended slavery too, even though we hear more about the Christian abolitionists these days.

Moving on to your new book, ‘The Children of Athena’, how does it relate to your previous work?

The book is about how the Greek mind was fertile and intellectually diverse for centuries under the Roman Empire. There was no dogmatism, no sacred canon, no absolutely authoritative texts, no non-negotiable doctrines. All that came in with Christianity. I think the intelligent reader will pick up that theme right at the end of the book, but I did not want to preach. I just wanted to show that the Greek mind was fertile right to the very end.

I have been criticised by some conservative Christians in the past, who say that the Greek mind was stagnant by this period, and that Christianity came along and saved it. So I am trying to argue, in Athena, against that view, without preaching, to show that the Greek mind was alive and well in the period up to the early fifth century.

In the book, you say that Plutarch (c.AD 46—after AD 119) is probably the most appealing of the thinkers you discuss. Why?

I would have loved to have had a landed estate next to Plutarch’s! I would like to have been able to wander over in the cool of the evening for a glass of wine with him. He is a wonderful mind, because he is not only a philosopher, but also a very good historian, and he is very penetrating on the individuals that he includes in his Parallel Lives. He is also a very good practical philosopher, on things like how to control anger and what values you should express in public life. He says that you must be humble and that you must sort out your personality before you enter public life, which is something that I think is still relevant today.

Here is a telling story. Plutarch was far from home when he heard of his young daughter’s death, and he wrote a very moving letter to his wife, a very humane letter, which should be much better known than it is. It shows what a sensitive individual he was, quite apart from being a philosopher and historian. He is my favourite of the figures I discuss in the book.

How did you choose which figures to include in the book?

They were all intellectuals. And the idea was to show the diversity of the figures that I covered. And I obviously had to choose individuals whose material was relatively extant, so that I could get a sense of how they thought and what they achieved. Strabo the geographer (c. 63 BC—c. AD 25) and Dioscorides the botanist (c. AD 40—c. 90), for instance, left behind a lot of material that still survives. And Galen (AD 129—216), of course, the top physician of his day, also left behind an enormous amount of work. The figures I discuss argued for their own place, really, because of what we know about them and the legacy they left behind, which I discuss in a chapter called ‘Afterlives’ at the end of the book.

You include a lot of information on the world these thinkers inhabited, particularly its physicality. How important was this to you?

I think quite important. Particularly for Athens, which I know well. I have been to Sagalassos [an ancient Greek city in modern-day Turkey], the city that I describe in one of the book’s interludes, two or three times, and it is a wonderful site that has been beautifully excavated by the University of Leuven. I also know Aphrodisias with its ancient Sebasteion temple, having visited it three or four times. I have also led tours around the Peloponnese and southwestern Turkey, so I have a good feel for the sites.

The Greeks were wonderful at choosing sites for settlement. Sites had to be close to fertile land and sources of water. The Romans put aqueducts up in many Greek cities, too, so the Greeks and Romans collaborated. In the book, I quote Strabo’s statement that the Greeks chose wonderful sites, while the Romans came and put in pavements and sewers and so on. Basically, all the dirty work!

One of your subjects is the second-century travel writer Pausanias, who is a great source for understanding the sites of the ancient world.

Yes. I think he’s increasingly respected now. He was considered rather pedantic once upon a time, but the more excavations go on, the more they actually find out that he was accurate and that therefore he should be relied on as a guide.

Another figure you discuss is Lucian of Samosata, the fearless second-century satirist whose anti-religious works led to him being mostly disregarded until the Renaissance. Tell us more about him.

An enormous amount of Lucian has survived because he has been very popular throughout the ages. Erasmus was a great fan of his, as were the Renaissance humanists in general, who were much more relaxed about using classical sources than had been the case previously. In the Renaissance, people like Boccaccio, who also admired Lucian, got away from the strict Catholic tradition of dismissing heretics and pagans. They were much more relaxed during the Renaissance.

Who else among your subjects really stands out to you?

Well, my editor particularly liked my chapter on Dioscorides, the botanist, because he had cures for all sorts of ailments.

Then there is Epictetus, the first and second century Stoic philosopher. My son is a psychologist who works in Los Angeles with the meditation app Headspace, and Epictetus could be read today as a guide to mindfulness. So I put my son on to Epictetus!

Ptolemy, the second century astronomer and mathematician, was brilliant. He had quite an extraordinary mind.

Galen, of course, is the top doctor. He understood nerves and pulses [see audio extract, left, for more]. He was well ahead of his time, but very arrogant. He certainly would not have been a nice chap to meet, but if you had an illness, he was the man to go to.

I quite enjoy Plotinus, the third century philosopher. He is quite difficult to understand, but he was certainly a prominent intellectual. His idea of the One influenced Augustine quite a lot.

The theologian Clement of Alexandria (c.AD 150—c.215) wrote beautifully and had a more optimistic outlook on Christianity. Origen, of course, was a brilliant intellectual, and I am pleased to see that he is coming back into favour.

Themistius, the fourth century court orator, always survived. Whenever a new emperor came along, he would say, thank goodness we have you now, the last one was hopeless. And then that emperor died and he would say the same to the next one!

So I think all of the figures I write about have something to say for themselves.

One of the unfortunate things about people like Galen was that as Christian orthodoxy became more rigid, they were frozen into place as absolute authorities. That happened to Aristotle eventually, too. And the open-minded, questioning, empirical method of these thinkers was almost forgotten. Do you think that today, something similar is going on with the narrowing of public discourse? Can we learn from the Greek tradition once more?

Yes, I think it is true that people are very quickly pigeonholed. The breadth of intellectual thought has diminished. We are in a narrower world. I think part of it is that people do not have enough time to read. I come from a tradition where it is assumed that you read widely, and I am not sure people read as widely as they used to. Partly because they do not have the leisure to do so. But there has also been a narrowing of political discourse.

How do you deal with critics of your work?

I noticed with the reception of my book The Closing of the Western Mind that people were open to the arguments, and I do not mind critical reviews that are thoughtful and make good points when disagreeing with me, but I have had one or two reviewers who have not really grasped the ideas behind the book and so they were not able to criticise it effectively.

Is there less tolerance these days?

My wife and I were just talking about this. She asked me if I was able to talk freely during this interview, and I said that the things I talk about are not really difficult topics. But yes, we were discussing what you cannot talk about now.

A couple of quick-fire questions as we approach the end of this interview. First, Plato or Aristotle?

Aristotle, because he saw the beauty in living things.

And second, Athens or Jerusalem?

Athens. I think you know that!

To finish off, do you have any future projects in the works?

I think I will see how The Children of Athena goes. I am beginning to run out of ideas, I think. I feel that I have done a good corpus of books, so we shall see. I am very happy with the range of books I have written. Even if I never wrote another book, I have completed a whole corpus of interlocking books which say what I wanted to say. But I always have ideas bubbling up in my head.

The post ‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman appeared first on The Freethinker.