Introduction

Simon McCarthy-Jones is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Trinity Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin. An expert in auditory verbal hallucinations, or ‘hearing voices’, he has also written a popular book on the nature of spite and its place in human culture.

In October 2023, McCarthy-Jones published Freethinking: Protecting Freedom of Thought Amidst the New Battle for the Mind. I previously reviewed this book (under its old title, Battle for Thought) for the Literary Review, together with Free Your Mind: The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist It (2023), by Laura Dodsworth and Patrick Fagan.

The below interview with McCarthy-Jones continues the Freethinker’s series of reflections on different aspects of free thought. Last Friday we published an interview with the human rights lawyer, Susie Alegre, about her book on ‘freedom to think’ as a human right. In February last year I interviewed Laura Dodsworth, whose views on free thought were shaped by her perspective as a journalist and critic of the Covid lockdowns.

In this interview, conducted via Zoom, McCarthy-Jones gives a psychologist’s perspective on free thought. We explore his idea of thinking as a shared process, as well as the threats that big tech poses to free thought, the pressure which public morality can put on our thinking, and the question whether our societies are in need of a ‘redemocratisation of thought’.

~ Emma Park, Editor*

The Freethinker: What are your academic interests within psychology, and how did you come to write Freethinking?

Simon McCarthy-Jones: For about a decade, my main area of research was auditory verbal hallucinations: the experience of hearing voices. A lot of people I talked to had been through child sexual abuse. So I started studying that area, looking at the effects of child sexual abuse on the brain, its impact upon physical and mental health, and more recently, thinking about how we can try and prevent child sexual abuse.

My interest in freedom of thought initially came more from personal experience than professional interest. In 2017, I found my mind captured to a degree I was uncomfortable with by Facebook. I found myself thinking about checking Facebook at all hours of the day, and it became very intrusive and disruptive. I was lecturing on the behavioural science principles that underlie the way Facebook grabs our attention, but it is one thing knowing about how it works, and quite another experiencing it. I was profoundly shocked by how powerful Facebook’s pull over me was.

A number of legal scholars at the time were writing about freedom of thought, in relation both to the digital world, and to ideas of cognitive liberty. And so I started to delve into the right to freedom of thought. When I did, I assumed that freedom of thought, like freedom of speech, would be extremely well defined by the courts, and it just was not. This bewildered me, because historically, free thought has been lauded for centuries – and yet this fundamental human right was not elaborated in the law at all.

That was exciting, because there was the opportunity to have some influence in developing the right along with the rest of the scholarly community. But that excitement soon changed into worry, because, as an absolute human right, freedom of thought looked as though it could have the potential to steamroll over any other concern, and become a powerful tool of lawfare. So I was concerned with how we could prevent it from being abused politically.

Freethinker: How do you understand the idea of ‘free thought’?

McCarthy-Jones: In psychology, people tend not to talk about thought as a concept in itself, but rather about different elements of thought. In the book, I identify four elements of thought: the ability to attend, the ability to reason, the ability to reflect, and the ability to have the courage to air one’s views or ‘think in public’. The first step is to work out what these elements of thought are, and how they interact. The next step is to ask how the right to freedom of thought can protect these constituent parts of thought.

There is also a question of what makes thought free. I largely see this as being about allowing the elements of thought to operate unhindered, allowing people space and time to reflect, and allowing them the ability to control their attention rather than being overwhelmed by psychological tricks. It is also necessary to create an environment where not too much courage is needed to think in public – where the barrier to public expression of your thought is not set so high that it scares people away from thinking together.

Freethinker: What about imagination – is that also part of free thought?

McCarthy-Jones: The ability to allow one’s imagination to let rip has to be central to creative thought, to artistic thought. And I am sure it would have an absolutely central place in free thought, that safe space to test out dangerous ideas.

Freethinker: You have identified four key elements of thought: attention, reason, reflection, and thinking out loud. Could you go through these in more detail?

McCarthy-Jones: As far as attention is concerned, we have all seen the malign effects of social media companies, which encourage us to have our attention focused on their product, regardless of our own goals. Within psychology, there is something called acceptance and commitment therapy, which is based upon the idea that many of our experiences can drag us away from our own freely chosen goals. Therefore, in therapeutic situations, psychologists encourage the client to work out what their goals are, to commit to pursuing them, and to let go of any experiences, such as negative emotions or intrusive thoughts, which get in the way of pursuing one’s goals.

I have concerns about social media and tech in general, and its ability to try and drag our attention away in ways that we may not be best placed to resist. It is not about designing worse or less engaging products. It is more about giving people options, so that if they want to detach themselves from the extremely powerful mechanisms of social media, it can be done more easily.

Freethinker: Your second element is the ability to reason. One might say that it is all very well being able to reason, but some people are just better than at reasoning than others. Can we all learn to reason freely, but in such a way that it is actually productive?

McCarthy-Jones: This comes back to Daniel Kahneman’s work on heuristics and the mental shortcuts that evolution seems to have built into our brain, which he outlines in Thinking Fast and Slow (2011). On the one hand, we have a reasoned, conscious thinking process. On the other, we have a second system which is quick, evolutionary, ancient, and which gives us rough answers or ‘rule of thumb’ thinking.

The question then is, if we want to engage our reasoning system and not be led astray by our rule of thumb thinking, how can we take charge? Plenty of those who work in marketing and who are trying to sell you things are going to try to engage your rule of thumb thinking in order to draw you into a thinking process which leads you to conclusions which your conscious, slow reasoning process might not support. So a key threat is people trying to use their knowledge of how we think to draw us away from our conscious reasoning and into avenues of thought which entice us to make the purchase or click on the link, but which are not necessarily what our reasoned thinking would lead us to do.

Freethinker: As far as you became aware in your research, do many corporations employ behavioural psychologists to work on the best ways to target advertising at people?

McCarthy-Jones: To my knowledge, yes. There is a huge industry of using psychology to try to make people buy things. That is one of the discipline’s key practical applications. I know that a lot of corporations have teams of psychologists trained in behavioural science to try to make advertising and marketing more effective.

Freethinker: To what extent can we as individuals resist the pull of advertising, marketing and other propaganda, the many techniques used by corporations and other organisations to push our thinking in certain ways?

McCarthy-Jones: Where the responsibility lies between individuals and corporations is a good question. On the one hand, you could deploy the government regulation of advertising and marketing to rein it in. But that infantilises us in the sense that it assumes that we are not able to think freely and rationally, and therefore we need this kind of protection. And it also impinges upon the free speech of marketers and advertisers.

One question is how much responsibility we want to place on ourselves as thinkers, and at what point we see ourselves as simply being overwhelmed by the amount that big tech knows about psychology and by the ways in which it is using the vast amount of data it has on us. At what point does the power imbalance between individuals and big tech become problematic? I think it is very difficult to know where to draw the line, and it is a conversation we all need to have.

Freethinker: What are the best techniques we as individuals can use to train ourselves to resist the onslaught of manipulation to which we are exposed every time we look at our phones or go online?

McCarthy-Jones: First of all, a position of humility, and a realistic awareness of our limitations, is important. We all tend to go online and think, ‘I am in control of my mind and nobody can manipulate me – other people may be affected, but not me.’ But it is important to be aware that in certain situations, we are all going to struggle to overcome the machinations of tech, and so the best tactic is to restrain ourselves in advance. One way of doing this, for example, is to use time management tools which limit the time you can spend on social media.

Secondly, advertisers encourage us to make impulsive choices in the heat of the moment. To counter this, it helps to create a space for reflection where we can come to decisions, especially important ones – to create a space offline where someone feels safe to think, and which involves trusted people with a diverse range of opinions who are also involved in good faith truth-seeking. Creating a space that is conducive to free thinking, which much of the digital world is not, can help us make good decisions.

Freethinker: You touch on the idea that the digital world is more likely to drown our thoughts than encourage them in your article for UnHerd. Could you expand on that – why is the world on our screens so antithetical to free thinking?

McCarthy-Jones: I presume it is because the incentive is not to encourage free thought in us. The incentive for them is to capture our attention, first of all, which is generally anathema to free thought. Their incentive is to manipulate us into actions which fulfil the company’s goals rather than our goals, which means they want to encourage us to make impulsive decisions, to make emotions well up inside us so as to encourage instant engagement.

In one of your talks, you mention Bertrand Russell’s idea that the free thinker must be free of ‘the force of tradition, and the tyranny of his own passions’. Many online forums seem to be designed to exacerbate our emotions, to stir up negative emotions and make us act on them, so as to perpetuate our engagement with the site. That is not in the interest of free thinking. There are structural differences between our interests and the interests of a corporation. And I do not think the corporation’s interests are in us thinking freely. For instance, Google could design its products in a way that promoted free thought. But what incentive would it have to do so?

Freethinker: Going back to your four elements of thought, the third one was reflection. What do you mean by this?

McCarthy-Jones: I mean the space and time to make decisions. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf says that ‘a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself’. She effectively puts a financial price on the freedom of thought, saying that five hundred pounds a year gives us the power to contemplate – in the sense that you need to earn a certain amount per year in order to have the space, luxury and privilege to think freely. So there are socioeconomic factors which might make the ability to think freely into something of a privilege, because it does take time, resources and space. The question then is how we make that available to everyone, rather than just to a cognitive elite who are allowed to do the thinking for the rest of us – which I think is very dangerous.

Freethinker: That seems to be a theme that goes right back to Plato: the idea that you need σχολή, leisure, in order to think properly. Because if you are constantly busy earning a living, and if you live in cramped quarters where there is no space for you just to sit by yourself and reflect quietly, how are you ever going to have time to make progress with your thoughts? Which leads to the question, how can we as a society ensure that everyone has the time to think for themselves and has the ability and space to do so?

McCarthy-Jones: Some will point to universal basic income as enabling this type of situation. This solution may or may not be the best in other respects, but one of its potential implications would be that it would support democracy and would give people, should they choose, the space to engage in activities like thinking freely, which the confines of capitalism might not do.

From reading writers like Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn, my sense is that a hundred years ago, the average person was more easily able to engage in free thought and reflection upon society than they would be today. We seem to have gone backwards since then.

Freethinker: I suppose that these days, leisure time is big business for the entertainment industry – football, Netflix, shopping, holidays, and so forth. Even if most people have leisure time, it is viewed by these industries as a commodity which they do everything they can to capture. So perhaps one challenge for all of us is simply to resist throwing away our free time on organised fun, if you like. And maybe go to the library instead (if it has not already been closed down).

McCarthy-Jones: Another point is that you have to have the desire to think in the first place. Thinking is not easy. It provokes anxiety, particularly when you reach conclusions you feel ethically you have to act on. The easier course of action is to not know what one should be doing and just continue what one is doing.

You also have to have the sense that there is some point to your thinking. Because if you come to certain conclusions about your life, but you are not in a position to do anything with the conclusions you have reached, whether financially, socio-economically or more generally, you can start to feel powerless over your own life. If you are going to reach conclusions which you cannot do anything about, why even go down that road in the first place? Therefore it is important for free thought that our society should be one in which people feel empowered have a stake in their local community – so that their thinking matters. So that their ideas can result in action, rather than being merely for intellectual amusement.

Freethinker: Your fourth element is thinking out loud. How does this work?

McCarthy-Jones: Thinking takes courage – sometimes a very high level of courage. People like Jon Ronson have talked about the culture of online shaming, the incentives to pour scorn on other people’s views, which online media does, whether intentionally or unintentionally. This sets a barrier to free thought: for many people, the costs of thinking out loud in public are not worth the benefits. To the point that if one wants to think freely in public today, one needs to be either a billionaire or reckless or not aware of the dangers. This is an unreasonably high barrier.

Freethinker: In your book you propose that thinking is not just done in your head, but can also be done out loud, with other people, or in writing, say in a diary, or even through other activities such as searching the internet. How wide would you draw the definition of thinking?

McCarthy-Jones: There are two points here. One is the relationship between thought and speech, and the other is the social element of thinking. As to writing or typing, I suppose there are two kinds: one, where you know in advance what you are going to write, and the other, when you do not, but discover what you think by the process of writing it down. I am in that second camp: I never know what I am going to write until I start writing it. One of the things that came out of the book that surprised me was the idea that thinking may be at its most free when it is done with other people. The classical Western idea of thought is epitomised by Rodin’s Thinker: that it is an activity done on your own and in your head. But if a key purpose of thought is to reach truth, then we often seem to do that better when we think with other people.

In the book I cite a study which showed that when people were trying to solve the Linda problem, it was found that two people working together were more likely to reach the right answer than one person alone. And three people working together were more likely to reach the answer than two or one.

Freethinker: What would be the ideal group size?

McCarthy-Jones: The study on the Linda problem only went up to three. I imagine there will be diminishing returns from increasing the number beyond a certain point, but I do not know what that would be.

The name of your august publication, the ‘Freethinker’, suggests a very individualistic approach. I prefer ‘freethinking’, which I used in the title of my book, to denote an activity which can be shared.

Freethinker: If thought is a social activity, what implications does that have for speech? Is free speech an integral aspect of free thought?

McCarthy-Jones: From a legal perspective, as things stand, there is a very clear distinction. For obvious, practical reasons, it helps to keep the courtroom clean. You have an inner world, the forum internum, where thought happens. Then you have an external world, or forum externum, where speech happens. Unfortunately, this division does not stand up to any kind of philosophical or psychological inquiry, because thought extends out into theexternal world, while speech reaches into our internal world. If we are talking to somebody else in public and we are engaged in good faith truth seeking with them, I would see that as our thinking together. So if thought is an absolute right in human rights law, then I would see that kind of public speech as being in essence thought, and consequently in need of absolute protection.

Freethinker: You also suggest that a diary could be a form of externalised thinking.

McCarthy-Jones: Yes, that would be a kind of external mind. We are thinking through writing, therefore it is happening in the external world. We are making a mark on the external world. Somebody else could read our diary. The implications of this view would be quite profound, because if we recognise writing a diary as a kind of thought, we will want to give it the absolute protection of freedom of thought. Thus nobody will be allowed to look in our diaries – and they will not be able to be used as evidence against us in court. The same would apply to Google searches, to the extent that they represented our thinking: if the right to freedom of thought is absolute, then these searches should be treated as absolutely private.

Freethinker: And you would be in favour of this?

McCarthy-Jones: Yes. There are always slight concerns that this rule could be misused for what I would see as being substantial harms. But in general, if we could come up as a community with what we felt thinking was and give an agreed definition, then I think I would be happy to give external kinds of thinking absolute protection, just because of the importance of thinking to us. Because once we start limiting our freedom to think, everything starts to fall apart.

Freethinker: As far as speech is concerned, where would you draw the line between speech that is thinking and so should be absolutely protected, and speech that is not?

McCarthy-Jones: This can tie in fairly easily to existing jurisprudence, for example on defamation and true threats, by which I mean actual intentional threats of physical harm.

Freethinker: What about hate speech? Is this a greyer area? How far should speech about, say, protected characteristics or controversial topics be limited by the law?

McCarthy-Jones: That is a complicated question and I do not have a good answer. The only thing I would emphasise would be the importance of ensuring that forms of good faith truth seeking do not get penalised under hate speech laws. And that should be a matter for the courts to determine.

Freethinker: What about a middle ground case where someone is not particularly seeking the truth, but neither are they particularly intending to harm someone else – just having a casual conversation?

Freethinker: You also mention a 2021 UN report on freedom of thought, by Ahmed Shaheed, the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief. What is the significance of this report?

McCarthy-Jones: The UN report discusses four ‘proposed attributes’ of free thought: ‘a) freedom not to disclose one’s thoughts; (b) freedom from punishment for one’s thoughts; (c) freedom from impermissible alteration of one’s thoughts; and (d) an enabling environment for freedom of thought’.

My concern is what counts as a thought in the first place – whether it is confined solely to what takes place inside our heads, or whether it extends into the external world. If the right to freedom of thought is defined so as only to cover the forum internum, as a psychologist, I would consider that right not fit for purpose.

Freethinker: In your book you also talk about access to information. Do you think this is a crucial part of the right to think freely?

McCarthy-Jones: Yes. If free thought is a kind of input-output mechanism, you need the input of information to be able to think freely. That speaks again to the importance of other people’s free speech as an input to your free thought. I think we need to create a redemocratisation of thought in the sense that this activity should not be left to a special class of academics or politicians who have special protections. If we are all voting in a democracy, we should all have the strongest protections for our free thoughts.

McCarthy-Jones: If we want to decide whether such a conversation should count as ‘thought’ I guess it is best to go back to what the right to freedom of thought is trying to protect. In addition to truth-seeking, this right is presumably trying to support our ability to govern ourselves, thereby creating a society that can be meaningfully said to be democratic. If a casual conversation helps support our ability to govern ourselves, then it could plausibly be deemed a form of external thought. The philosopher Joel Walmsley and I have been trying to think about this issue recently, but we really need the legal community to weigh in on the promise and problems of the whole idea of external thought.

Freethinker: Fundamentally, why is free thought so important? Why do we all need this ability to think freely – what can it do for our lives?

McCarthy-Jones: As we mentioned earlier, a key factor is self-government: the idea that we are autonomous creatures who can make decisions and be in control of our own lives, and that it is our ability to decide and make choices that in some sense contributes to our sense of dignity as thinkers. If we cannot think freely, we cannot be self-governing creatures.

Freethinker: Do you have any plans for another book?

McCarthy-Jones: Writing Freethinking has made me interested in trying to understand the democratic process better. I had not fully appreciated the intersection of free thought and democracy, and also the intersection of democracy and human rights.

One concern which came out of the book is how the right to freedom of thought can be developed in a democratic way, and whether it makes sense to talk about the democratic development of human rights – as opposed to, say, their evolution by unelected judges in the European Court of Human Rights. Human rights law seems to stand over our democratic institutions and determine what can and cannot be done in society. When people claim, for instance, that ‘human rights are not up for debate’, that seems contrary to the very idea of free thought and to rely on authority and legal norms rather than on reason. There seems to be a sense that human rights are revealed truths which we must get on board with rather than being the endpoint of a deliberative process.

*This piece is my last as editor of the Freethinker; from 1 April, Daniel Sharp will be taking over. I wish him and our readers all the best – EP.

The post The psychology of free thought: interview with Simon McCarthy-Jones appeared first on The Freethinker.

‘Thought is free, or it isn’t thought.’ 

This fine remark comes from Emile Chartier (1868-1951), a French thinker, writer, teacher and humanist best known under his pseudonym, Alain. He was a prominent intellectual figure in the France of the 1930s, but is unfortunately little known in the Anglophone world, and sparsely translated into English. He remains one of the rare thinkers to make the bridge between philosophy and literature: ‘the finest prose of ideas of the century’, as the contemporary philosopher, André Comte-Sponville, has said.

Having trained as a philosopher and started a career as a teacher that would lead to the prestigious lycées of Paris, Alain began in 1903 to contribute short columns to a radical local newspaper in Normandy. From 1906, this became a daily exercise which he continued right up to the outbreak of the First World War, making a total of over three thousand pieces. He called these brief essays propos (not an easy word to translate, implying both ‘proposals’ and ‘remarks’). Their concise and vivid style soon attracted a loyal readership and they were collected into published volumes. The starting point was often a precise fact or event, something seen in the street or read in a newspaper; at first mainly comments on politics, their subject matter broadened to include philosophy, literature, education, nature, religion.  He wrote, he said, to provoke his fellow citizens into thinking for themselves, to wake people up.

To return to the opening quotation, that thought is not thought unless it is free, this encapsulates a theme that runs throughout Alain’s work. As he wrote in his intellectual biography, Histoire de mes pensées (1936): ‘I’ve not reflected upon anything as much as freedom of judgement.’  What is it to think freely?  He provided two lapidary definitions. ‘To think is to weigh’ – penser, c’est peser, almost a pun in French. The second is perhaps his best known quotation: ‘To think is to say no’ (penser, c’est dire non). The second half of this quotation is even better: ‘Note that the sign for “yes” is that of a person falling asleep; while to wake up is to shake the head and say no.’

To elaborate: ‘The problem is always the same, we have to control appearances, through the view of a free mind, which arouses and re-arouses doubt and proof together… we have to begin by not believing everything and so navigate the problem with our own strength alone, to find ourselves lost and abandoned as was always the case for a human being who rejects pious lies, and to recognise ourselves as completely deceived by appearances, and to save ourselves by the constructions of understanding alone.’ He also gives this definition of ‘mind’ (esprit): ‘at bottom the power of doubt, which is to raise oneself above all mechanisms, order, virtues, duties, dogmas, to judge them, subordinate them, and replace them by freedom, which only owes anything to itself.’ This link between the freedom of the mind and the freedom of the individual can be seen as a precursor to the existentialism of the 1940s associated with Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus.

I have hinted at the variety of Alain’s interests. His propos, which he continued after the war, have been gathered into many published collections, the best known of which is Propos sur le Bonheur (one of the very few books of his to be translated into English, as Alain on Happiness). He also wrote major philosophical works after the war.  He is probably best known in France for his views on politics; he also developed sophisticated theories of perception and the imagination, but for the remainder of this article I shall focus on his humanism and views on religion.

As a thinker who avoided labels, Alain did not call himself a humanist as such. A label is a summary that must always leave something out. But it is clear enough that he is very close to it, in this definition: ‘the aim of humanism is freedom in the full sense of the word, which depends above all on a bold judgement against appearances and seductions… Humanism always aims at increasing everyone’s real power, through the widest culture – scientific, aesthetic, ethical. And a humanist recognises as precious in the world only human culture, through the outstanding works of all periods.’  We can see in this description the activity of the teacher he was, and remained in his writing. The ‘widest culture’: in his philosophy classes, as well as Plato, Descartes and Kant, he also taught Homer and Balzac; he wrote books on Balzac, Stendhal and Dickens, and commented on the poems of Paul Valéry, as well as on the arts in general  – the humanities, as he preferred to call them. Humanity lives in its works and that is where to seek it out: ‘human works, mirrors of the soul.’

Another area of humanity’s manifestations is its festivals, like Christmas and Easter. Alain reminded his readers that these are essentially pagan festivals which link us to nature and are, at the same time, powerful symbols and expressions of human feelings. Christmas promises rebirth, of which a newborn child is an image. Or, in another propos: ‘the images of Christmas are astonishing and even, when looked at closely, subversive. The child in a crib, between the ox and the ass, with the adoring kings from the Orient, this means that power isn’t worth a single grain of respect.’ Easter is resurrection of the earth. All Souls’ Day ‘falls where it should, when the visible signs make it quite clear that the sun is abandoning us…There is harmony between customs, the weather, the time of year and the course of our thoughts.’  

Alain remained firmly anticlerical all his life. In fact, in 1897 he managed to earn a headline in a local Catholic paper in one of his first teaching posts, after casting doubt on the existence of the devil and hell in a public lecture. The newspaper assured him, ‘No offence to the young man teaching philosophy in the lycée: Hell exists.’ Parents were advised to withdraw their children from his lessons. Yet he recognised that religions, like festivals, are also human constructions and activities. An anecdote he often recounted is that of being asked by a fellow soldier during the war, who had noticed that Alain was a non-believer, what he thought of religion. ‘It’s a story,’ he replied, ‘a fairy tale, which like all stories is full of meaning. No one asks whether a story is true.’ 

Alain’s meditations on religion culminated in a work published in 1934, Les Dieux, translated into English in 1974 as The Gods. Religious stories and practices, he argues, ‘are not facts, but thoughts.’ They express truths more vividly than theoretical and theological statements. Likewise, the gods themselves are human creations. ‘The gods refuse to appear and it’s through this miracle that never occurs that religion develops into temples, statues and sacrifices.’ And again, ‘the gods are our metaphors, and our metaphors are our thoughts’. There is no transcendence. There is nothing behind the signs and metaphors. All the mystery is man-made.

A further implication is that factual and historical questions are rejected. It does not matter whether Christ existed or not, whether he said this or that, here or there. The Gospels are less a historical record than like a great work of art that continues to speak to us. What matters is the truth in the story. When Jesus attacks the Pharisees in Matthew 23, for their shows of religion and their hypocrisy, what matters is whether what he says of them applies to some human beings, which might even include oneself. To ask whether Jesus actually said these words is to postpone that self-examination. In short, it is the morality taught by religion, explicitly and implicitly, that is important. ‘It is never the dogma that proves the morality; morality, as far as I understand it, supports itself; God adds nothing; paradise, hell, purgatory add nothing.’

The Gods also has a classification of religions, drawing on Hegel and Auguste Comte, which presents Christianity as a development of pagan religion, and an improvement in that it rejected sacrifices and oracles. It made everyone, slaves included, brothers and sisters. Alain liked to quote an anecdote from Chateaubriand’s Les Martyres. A pagan and a Christian meet a poor man. The Christian gives him his cloak. The pagan, knowing that the gods sometimes visited in the shape of a human being, says ‘No doubt you thought it was a god’. – ‘No’, replied the Christian, ‘I simply thought he was a man.’

For Alain, Christ appears as a new god who is human, who has lived the life of human beings, who was ‘weak, crucified, humiliated’ and who rejected power and force. He represents the free mind which is the final judge of all power, though the church, unfortunately, has always tended to associate itself with power. ‘The meaning of the cross is that the highest model of man lived poor and scorned by the great and that he died, punished for his virtues which denied ambition, desire, evil. It was a miserable fate, ennobled by thought, ended by an executioner.’

It is an interpretation of Christianity that leaves out the unrelenting god of the Old Testament. Stripped away are beliefs in miracles, in life after death, in divinely revealed truth, in original sin and redemption through sacrifice. There is also a refreshing avoidance of arguments about the existence or non-existence of god. (In fact, Alain has an argument that existence is not susceptible of proof.) To put it briefly, he interprets Christianity as a humanist religion.

This article can only give a taste of the richness of Alain’s writings, which are concerned with what it is to be a human being. How should we live? How should we live together? These questions do not age.

Find out more

There is an excellent website dedicated to Alain’s work https://philosophe-alain.fr/  Most of the material is in French, but there is also some English content: translations and a handful of articles, including a longer treatment of his discussion of religion.

The post A French freethinker: Emile Chartier, known as Alain appeared first on The Freethinker.

There are many ‘harams’ – things that are ‘religiously forbidden’ – in Nigeria: Boko (‘Westernisation’) is haram, atheism is haram, agnosticism is haram, secularism is haram.

This article is a brief story of how I fell into one of the harams, that is, how I became non-religious. To begin with, I will briefly explain how I became a Christian, my experience as a Christian, and finally, how I became non-religious, and the experience of being non-religious in Nigeria.

The thing led to my becoming first a Christian and then non-religious was the quest for meaning, a quest which originated from my horrible experience of poverty, hunger and starvation, and from the kind of person I am.

As a child, I was told there is God and that he is all-knowing. Inquisitive by nature, I asked my teachers, ‘How can he know all things? Do you mean God can hear and see my thoughts?’ Instead of an answer, I was shunned and treated like a fool for my supposed childishness and ignorance.

I was born in Kayarda-Banram, Bogoro Local Government Area, in Nigeria’s north-eastern Bauchi State, to a family and community racked by poverty and starvation. I have been through the experience of starving for days and have also seen others, especially the aged, starve to death. I have seen others hire themselves out to work for a whole day for a measure of grain, while still others around me have died from common diseases such as cholera, malaria and typhoid. I have heard the materially poor describe their brutal experiences of injustice and exploitation from their oppressors, the rich. Some rich men used their wealth to bribe the authorities and falsely claim the land belonging to the poor. Confronted with these horrible evils on a daily basis, I began to ask myself the age-old question: Why do people suffer, and what is the solution?

This question became the turning point in my life and the beginning of my quest for meaning and truth.

In search of an answer, while herding cows, I found a worn and torn book on the ground. I could not tell what it was about because it had no cover and most of its contents were removed or worn out. This book led me to the Bible, or the ‘Good Book’, as I preferred to call it. On one of the pages of the torn book was a subject that captured my attention: ‘The Book I Like the Most’. Reading through the remaining pages under this heading, I saw that the writer was talking about the Bible. He (the writer) gave the impression that the Bible was the Book of Books and contained an answer to every question. Before this time, although my parents were Christian, I had been ignorant of Christianity and never devoted myself to any Church activities other than, at most, the weekly Sunday worship.

Curious about my discovery and anxious for an answer to my questions, I borrowed my parents’ Bible and began to read it day and night with passion. Reading through the books of the Torah and taking them literally, I thought I had found the answer to my question: that sin, as Christianity proclaims, is the problem. Man must learn to blame himself for the problem of evil and suffering. Convinced by this answer – which I only later realised was simplistic –, I became a zealous Christian and a local evangelist, preaching repentance and a law-abiding life as the solution to this problem. I prayed and fasted, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks. I read the Bible every day, and never failed to go to the local shrine (the so-called ‘house of God’) and to participate in all its activities, such as choir, Bible study and Sunday School. I even founded a Bible Study Group.

I once led my group members out to Fulani settlements to evangelise [the Fulani are a primarily Muslim people in West and Saharan Africa]. After ‘preaching’ to one or two of them, a certain Fulani man confronted us. He could not believe that we had made the decision to preach to them on our own, that we were ‘sent’ to do so. He carried a cutlass to attack us with, but somehow changed his mind, and instead decided to report us to the community leaders. After he did so, we were fined three thousand naira! The news went viral and we, especially myself, became an object of mockery in the whole village, until I regretted my actions.

To demonstrate my commitment to my newly discovered faith, I decided to become a pastor for life. I had previously wanted to study biotechnology and atomic and nuclear physics, but I dropped all of these because the Good Book says, ‘Everything shall pass away’ (Matt. 24; Rev. 21). I was discouraged. I felt there was no point committing my life to something that would soon pass away.  I started to lead the life of a faithful Christian and pastor. As described above, I became more zealous and holier than the pastors in our village, so much so that everyone around called me a pastor, and I was happy. I conducted visits, gave alms, and did other ‘good deeds’. Every morning I made sure I went round the neighboring houses and greeted everyone. I dedicated my life to supporting the aged and the needy. I shared my food and served some with firewood to warm them, especially in the harmattan season.

In preparation for becoming a pastor, I decided to take a a Diploma in International Missions and Evangelism (2009-2012), and a BA in Theology (2014-2018). I served with the Church of Christ in Nations (COCIN) as a Local Church Council (LCC) pastor for eight months in 2013 before I left for my undergraduate degree at the Theological College of Northern Nigeria. While studying Theology at TCNN, I became more aware of numerous theological issues and debates over issues such as the Trinity, Christology, the tribe of Israel, and the inspiration and infallibility of the Bible.

After years of studying and wide reading, I found myself questioning religion and all the beliefs which I had once held as the absolute truth. I found myself asking the big questions: Does God exist? Did he create the world? How did we come here, and why? What is man? Is man inherently evil or good? What is final Destiny? What does it mean to be human? Will the future still be human? What kind of knowledge will guide us?

I began to think that these questions could not be answered by religion. No discipline or institution has the perfect answer to our questions and the solution to our problems. At best, religion is a social construct and a psychological tool for manipulation and enslavement; at worst, it is the problem which itself needs to be solved. We are humans, and there is no hope of becoming some sort of superhuman sinless beings. We are not created by gods and meant to become (like) them. To pattern one’s life after what one does not know and cannot be is not only mad but heinous.

I began to doubt many Christian teachings, such as the nature of the Trinity. Yet there was one more revolutionary question that led me to break with religion: the question of whether Adam was the first human on earth, and whether he even existed historically.

After researching into ancient history and mythology, I realised that the evidence indicated that the creation story, the very foundation of Christian theology, was a myth. It followed that the doctrine of the creator God, Satan, heaven and hell, sin, and the entire concept of Christology, were all a theological fabrication. I began to see religion as a game of deception and control, a system of manipulation, exploitation and enslavement, and a great brain robbery.

I therefore started to hate religion. However, at first, knowing the attitudes to it in my immediate community and country, I kept my views to myself. I struggled with this for years until I discovered that concealment was psychologically more stressful than I could bear. Therefore, I took the risk and went public with my non-belief through Facebook.

My posts attracted attention and concern from many people (Christians, of course) across the country – so much so that I received calls from numerous people, some of whom I knew, some whom I did not and who would not reveal themselves to me, asking to be sure if I was actually the one posting anti-religious posts or if my Facebook account had been hacked. When I confirmed to them that I was the one, some lamented bitterly, some offered strong warnings of God’s pending judgement against my life, some just hung up in anger and never called me again or responded to my calls. Many ‘unfriended’ me. Some of my Facebook posts were adduced by TCNN as evidence of my unbelief or apostasy.

My decision to go public via Facebook caused a predictable response: although not physically persecuted, I was shunned by many friends, near and far, and openly discriminated against. No one wanted to associate with me any more – even some of my relations and close friends from Bauchi and Plateau states. I had become an abomination and an object of mockery. To convince others to avoid and hate me too, some of my former friends, online and in person, began a campaign of name-calling and slander: I was the ‘Devil Incarnate’, ‘Anti-Christ’, ‘Apostate’, ‘The Fool’, ‘Atheist’. All this began in 2020 and is still happening.

In 2021, I was served with a letter by TCNN asking me to leave and never come near the college premises again, because my presence there, as a non-religious person in a religious setting, was too conspicuous.

As if that was not enough, the college is still holding back my graduation certificate and, in 2023, wrote to COCIN, the Church that endorsed my application form for admissions to TCNN in 2014, to ask them to monitor me for a year. If I recant my agnosticism, they may consider giving me my certificate. If I remain an agnostic, they will withhold it, on the grounds that the certificate is given only to those who are found ‘worthy in character and in learning’. In other words, they are using religion and religion alone as a yardstick for measuring character and intellect. I have never harmed anyone or committed any crime. Yet despite this, and despite my studies, my lack of belief may mean that I am not considered ‘worthy in character and learning’.

None of this comes as a surprise: the society I live in is narrow-minded. At the national level, although Nigeria is in theory a democratic society, which should mean that citizens have the right to believe what they want as adults, in reality, religion dictates and controls every aspect of life. It almost seems like religion is the only national value, and the only law-abiding citizen is the religious one. Religious conformity is mistaken for goodness. Those who are non-religious – the freethinkers, agnostics, atheists and non-conformists – are all shunned and treated as socially and psychologically deviant citizens who deserve to be eliminated from society. They are neither listened to nor supported by society in general, nor by the government and religious institutions in particular. Rather, they are hated and persecuted, in the same way as I was by TCNN and individuals.

I tried to establish an open, non-religious society on several occasions, but was unsuccessful – owing both to a lack of financial support and to a lack of interest among friends, colleagues and others.

In 2022, I worked as a teacher of English Language and Literature in English for Senior Secondary students at a local college. In early January 2023, I started to teach the Hausa language to Junior Secondary students at another school. However, in July 2023, I resigned from my post so as to dedicate myself fully to my independent research and education. I hired a hall and opened a Centre for Creative Dialogue and Critical Reflection in Jos, Plateau State. I put up a sign outside in case anyone was interested, but no one was. I began to print and share posters, but again, no interest. It seems to me that critical thinking and questioning are ‘haram’ in Nigeria.

Even so, I still currently work as an independent research scholar in the humanities and the social sciences, although not affiliated to any research body or non-religious society. Given the lack of interest in my work, I no longer work at the Centre, but at home in my room, in Jos.

As a non-religious person, I now view life differently from how I did before. I approach it more philosophically, from a human-centred perspective. In my opinion, meaning is not to be found in religion. Rather, meaning in our lives derives from knowing that religion is an illusion, that morality depends on human reason, and that we have only one life to live. 

The post How I lost my religious belief: A personal story from Nigeria appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

~ Emma Park, Editor

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freethinker: You did say that sex is real.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antony: Did these individuals rape anyone once in prison?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antony: That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freethinker: Isn’t it the truth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Why the Enlightenment Matters, Adam Wakeling sets himself the ambitious task of defining the shift in thinking known as the Enlightenment that occurred in northern and western Europe between 1600 and 1800, and explaining how it made much of the modern world what it is.

Prosperous nations now enjoy benefits unimaginable throughout most of history, such as advanced health care, respect for human rights, free speech, tolerance, democracy, material comfort, scientific knowledge, education, and a reduction in wars and barbaric punishments. The author’s central thesis is that this is due to the Enlightenment. Of course, things are far from perfect – famine, disease, poverty, and dictatorship are still widespread, and the Enlightenment has an ambivalent record when it comes to racism and slavery. But today’s world would have been unrecognisable to the people of sixteenth-century Europe, when the book’s story starts.

Wakeling begins his narrative in 1553, with the burning alive of the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus in Calvinist Geneva. Servetus had denied the Trinity, proclaiming to the very end that Jesus was ‘the Son of eternal God’ and not the ‘eternal Son of God’. John Calvin, who had once been Servetus’ friend, approved of the heretic’s execution. This was the pre-Enlightenment world. In the fourteen chapters that follow, the author takes us through the unfolding story of the extraordinary changes that took place in northern and western Europe between 1600 and 1800, and gives us his explanation of why and how they happened.

His account is admirably comprehensive in scope, rich in historical detail, and highly readable. This reviewer is not an historian, and other curious non-historians will learn much about the manifestations and effects of Enlightenment thinking. Their common themes are principally the challenges to spiritual and political authority, and the rise of science and innovation. They include the effect of the Protestant Reformation on the breakdown of centralised authority in northern and western Europe and its role in promoting literacy. From these came the growth of toleration in the Netherlands, despite the efforts of the Dutch Reformed Church. In seventeenth-century England there was the end of rule by ‘divine right’ of English monarchs after the Civil War, and the subsequent  growth of alternative justifications for government found in the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and especially John Locke. Scholastic natural law theory was modified to include rights to property and political rebellion. Developments in just war theory, especially by Hugo Grotius, had already been made urgent by the excesses of religious wars. The eighteenth century saw Adam Smith’s attempt to provide a ‘science of man’ and his role in the decline of mercantilism and the burgeoning of free trade.

Also discussed in learned detail is the history of the Enlightenment in France, where it arrived later than in the Netherlands, England and Scotland. We read of the eventual success of the Encyclopédie despite attempts to suppress or censor it, and the influence of Enlightenment ideas about the ‘Rights of Man’ on the French Revolution. Of course, the Revolution’s bloodthirsty descent into Terror, largely engineered by the fanatical Maximilien Robespierre, caused many to doubt the whole Enlightenment project.

Running parallel to these rich narratives of political changes and their attendant wars is an account of how the scientific method became established. Aristotle had already made patchy attempts at empirical enquiry into nature but had been hamstrung by his teleological theory. His ideas had become embedded in the Catholic Church’s teaching as doctrines, despite their originally provisional nature, and it was only when the Church’s authority began to fracture that Aristotelian science could be questioned. Francis Bacon exposed some ‘idols of the mind’: errors or cognitive biases such as the ‘gambler’s fallacy’, excessive reliance on personal experience, the miscommunication of correct ideas and the spread of false ideas through existing systems of philosophy. Such issues still make it hard to discern truth from prejudice in science. Yet it was only after the patient observations and hypotheses of Galileo, Kepler and Newton, in part while trying to explain the anomalous behaviour of planets, that the geocentric view of the universe was dislodged, and otherwise inexplicable celestial movements could eventually be explained in terms of a universal theory of gravitation.

Wakeling shows how religious authorities tried to obstruct scientific thinking, not only in Europe but further afield. In fifteenth century Samarkand, for instance, the Islamic authorities destroyed an observatory, and in sixteenth century Constantinople, a similarly impressive observatory was closed by the Sultan amid concerns that its founder, Taqi ad-Din, would be prosecuted for heresy. But for some reason, the Enlightenment prevailed in northern and western Europe, whereas the pockets of Enlightenment thinking that had sprung up in other places, such as the Ottoman Empire and India, never took off. Moreover, in the eighteenth century, the nations where the Enlightenment occurred began to overtake the rest of the world in technological knowledge and economic power, and in the nineteenth century brought massive improvements to the living standards of ordinary people.

The final chapter of the book is especially interesting and potentially controversial, as it explores why the Enlightenment was successful in Europe and north America but not elsewhere. It brings us back to the author’s account, given near the start of the book, of what the shift in thinking that defined the Enlightenment really amounted to. In his view, it consisted of five simple elements: recognition of the limits of reason, empirical thinking, toleration of dissent, universality, and progress. Of course, in a broad sense the Enlightenment was a rational project, in that its thinkers used reason to question authority and dogma. But they rejected the notion that pure reason could reach truths that, as it happened, only empirical methods could reveal. Once dogmas were questioned, dissent was inevitable, and the issue of toleration became unavoidable. Wakeling argues that it was precisely this shift in thinking that explains the success of the countries where the Enlightenment took root.

This is controversial, not only because fashionable post-colonial theory is suspicious of the Enlightenment, but also because some writers think the flourishing of Western civilisation is traceable to Greco-Roman times and Christianity.

Wakeling’s rebuttal of the latter notion is, in essence, that the Enlightenment’s empirical style of thinking and its toleration of dissent amounted to a radical break with the past. There was much that was bad about the Greco-Roman world, and much of the history of Christianity is one of intolerance.

In reply, one might say that it was the best features of the classical world, such as Greek democracy and philosophy that inspired Western civilisation, and that it was not so much Christianity as its connection to state power from the fourth century onward that explains why the Enlightenment took so long to occur. As Wakeling concedes, Jesus reportedly said that his Kingdom was not of this world, and Christians were persecuted in the Roman Empire until 313 AD. These questions are of course complex, but whether or not Christianity ultimately contributed to the Enlightenment, Wakeling is persuasive in arguing that the latter was almost certainly a major factor in Western success, due to its distinctive style of thought.

I highly recommend this book both for scholars and the general reader. It is a rare combination of erudition and lucidity; it makes its thesis plain from the outset and it sets out its evidence clearly and thoroughly. Since it is primarily an historical analysis, it does not respond to contemporary philosophical critiques of the Enlightenment, such as that of Alasdair MacIntyre. Some thinkers might regard the Enlightenment view of human nature as naïve and lacking in spiritual insights into our darkest flaws: a world of rights and prosperity may be lacking in love and humility. But for all that, the Enlightenment provided fertile soil for the better as well as the worse aspects of humanity, and readers will find this stimulating book an invaluable resource.

Adam Wakeling, Why the Enlightenment Matters: The shift in our thinking that made the modern world, is published by Australian Scholarly Publishing, May 2023.

See also Wakeling’s article for the Freethinker, Do we need God to defend civilisation?

The post The Enlightenment and the making of modernity appeared first on The Freethinker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2023 has been an eventful year for free thought, humanism and secularism. Below, Emma Park and Daniel James Sharp look back on some of the major issues that have been debated in the Freethinker this year.

I. Free speech, religion and the culture wars

Free thought and intellectual progress are not possible without a shared culture of free speech, open debate and a willingness to engage with different points of view. One of the Freethinker’s concerns this year has been with attempts to repress free speech, especially in the UK and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, and in the context of the ‘culture wars’.

In Ireland, a new bill on hate offences threatens to undermine free speech, not just about religion but on a variety of the most sensitive topics – in other words, topics on which open debate is crucial. In Wakefield, England, in February, a non-Muslim woman, presumably under pressure, donned a veil and made a humiliating public apology in the local mosque, because her autistic son had brought a copy of the Quran into school and it was accidentally scuffed. And Puffin has made attempts to censor Roald Dahl in the name of ‘sensitivity’.

Free speech at universities also remains under pressure, as illustrated by the case of Professor Steven Greer, who was hounded by Bristol University Islamic Society in a smear campaign that was supported by academic colleagues who should have known better. Daniel reviewed Greer’s book about his experiences.

Across the pond, Professor Alex Byrne’s contract for a book critical of gender identity ideology was cancelled by Oxford University Press, but has since been published by Polity. From a different perspective, former vice chancellor Julius Weinberg argued that ‘freedom of speech is not as simple as my right to express my ideas’.

To supporters of democracy in Hong Kong, the culture wars are all but an irrelevance. The suffocating control of the Chinese Communist Party, said Kevin Yam, forced campaigners across the political spectrum to work together.

II. Science, philosophy, and humanism

As well as exploring the issues of the day, the Freethinker has also explored some of their deeper philosophical and historical contexts.

We interviewed the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett about the relationship between philosophy and science, meaning and consciousness in a godless, Darwinian universe, and New Atheism. With historian Charles Freeman, we discussed the richness and variety of the ancient Greek mind and how the coming of Christian orthodoxy put an end to that tradition. And we caught up with the humanist and author Sarah Bakewell to explore different traditions of humanism.

Meanwhile, Matt Johnson and Daniel Sharp both contributed articles about one of the most famous freethinkers of recent years, the late Christopher Hitchens.

III. Islam and free thought

With the rise of Islam in Britain and across the West, it has become urgent to consider how far the religion can be compatible with Western values and approaches. To explore this question, we interviewed Taj Hargey, possibly Britain’s only liberal imam. Other contributors have explored the need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought around the world, why the hijab is not a good symbol for women, and whether it is possible to distinguish between religious and political Islam.

IV. Secularism

Secularism is the principle that religion and state should be separated, and that religion should have no undue influence on public life. In the UK, thanks to a combination of political apathy and entrenched privilege, we still have an established church and unelected clergy in Parliament. Paul Scriven, a Liberal Democrat peer, spoke to the Freethinker about why he introduced a bill to disestablish the Church of England.

With a general election on the cards for 2024, Stephen Evans of the National Secular Society discussed where the political parties stand on faith schools. Two recent events in which the NSS participated revealed some of the challenges involved in secularisation. Daniel also argued in an article for Only Sky that the Church of England’s record on gay marriage is another reason to hasten disestablishment.

Other contributors to the Freethinker have looked at secularism, its history and future, in Québec, Turkey and Wales, and the strengths and weaknesses of French-style laïcité.

Did you know that, while the advancement of any religion, as well as of humanism, is considered a charitable aim under English law, the advancement of free thought, atheism or secularism is not? See Emma’s piece for New Humanist.

V. Israel and Palestine

One of the year’s biggest events—the Hamas attack against Israel on 7 October and the ensuing war—has produced a wide range of often emotional and heated responses. In contrast to all this sound and fury, the Freethinker has published a series of articles dealing with the conflict from different and often disagreeing, but rationally and charitably argued perspectives.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid wrote about the ‘leftist postcolonial apologia’ for Hamas and argued that the Israel-Palestine conflict is, at root, a religious one, while in Emma’s interview with Taj Hargey, the imam was staunch in his support of the ‘occupied and oppressed’ Palestinians. Hina Husain wrote about her Pakistani upbringing and being inculcated with Islam-based anti-Semitism. Finally, Ralph Leonard responded to all these articles, arguing that the conflict is, in fact, inspired more by competing nationalisms than religious impulses.

VI. Republicanism

Free thought and secularism have been closely intertwined with republicanism in British history. The Freethinker has reinforced this link since its beginnings in 1881.

This year, we have continued in the same spirit of religious and political anti-authoritarianism, publishing a review by Daniel of the republican activist Graham Smith’s anti-monarchy book. Later in the year, Daniel interviewed Graham Smith in person at Conway Hall. Meanwhile, Emma delved into the archives to discover the connection between the Freethinker and Republic, of which Smith is the CEO.

See also Daniel’s article on the republican Thomas Paine’s influence on Christopher Hitchens and Tony Howe’s discussion of an even earlier famous British republican, John Milton.

VII. Free thought history

In June, we were saddened to hear of the death of Jim Herrick (1944-2023), former editor of the Freethinker. Bob Forder, NSS historian, wrote an obituary commemorating Jim’s lifelong dedication to free thought, humanism and secularism.

The composer Frances Lynch wrote a guest post about her rediscovery of Eliza Flower, a radical nineteenth-century composer associated with Conway Hall, who was neglected by the historical record because she was female.

We have also been reflecting on the history of the Freethinker and of the various non-religious movements in the UK. Former editor Nigel Sinnott kindly agreed to let us republish an article he wrote for the magazine in 1970 in which he discussed the complicated historical relationship between humanists and secularists. Historian Charlie Lynch introduced the recent book he co-wrote with two other academics charting the history of organised humanism in Britain, which Emma has also reviewed for New Humanist. And Bob Forder argued that free thought and secularism are inseparable.

VIII. The future of free thought

Artificial intelligence has made great strides in 2023. (We even used Dall-E, a generative AI model, to illustrate this post.) Given the exponential pace of development, it is clear that the implications need to be monitored very carefully. For instance, there are concerns that ChatGPT may be biased in favour of certain interpretations of Islam. And artificial general intelligence (AGI) may be just around the corner, making ethical oversight all the more urgent.

Emma and Daniel spoke about the nature of free thought and the challenges facing it today and in the future on the Humanism Now podcast, on Freethought Hour and to the Reading Humanists. Emma also spoke to the Central London Humanists about Pastafarianism, arguably the world’s fastest growing religion, and a topic about which there is much to say.

This year also saw the publication of two intriguing books about the impact of digital technology on free thought, one by Simon McCarthy-Jones, and another by Laura Dodsworth and Patrick Fagan. Emma interviewed Laura Dodsworth for the Freethinker and reviewed both books for the Literary Review. We will be looking further at the implications of digital technology for free thought in 2024.

Finally, a request for your support…

The Freethinker is an independent, non-profit journal and completely open-access. We are funded by donations and legacies given by generations of readers back to the 19th century – and not by big corporations or billionaires. To keep us going in the future, we depend on the generosity of readers today. If you believe in the importance of fostering a culture of free thought, open enquiry and irreverence, please consider making a donation via this link.

And don’t forget to sign up to our free fortnightly newsletter, to keep abreast of the latest developments in free thought in the UK and around the world.

Postscript: a merry Christmas of sorts from Christopher Hitchens…

The post Year in review: 2023 appeared first on The Freethinker.

A round-up of recent and upcoming talks by the Freethinker editorial team, as well as a couple from the National Secular Society and Conway Hall.

• Editor Emma Park appeared on Episode 5 of the Humanism Now podcast, to discuss free thought, free speech, and the state of humanist, secularist, atheist and free thought movements in Britain today.

• Emma will also be speaking about free thought, humanism and the ‘two cultures’ to the Reading Sunday Alternative on 26 November.

• Assistant editor Daniel Sharp spoke to John Richards, president of Atheism UK, on Freethought Hour. Topics included free speech, Iran, Islam in Britain, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and more.

• ‘Let’s talk to each other’: Bradlaugh Lecture 2023 for the National Secular Society by journalist Nicky Campbell, on the topic of free speech and public debate.

• Don’t miss: ‘Condoms, Sponges and Syringes: The 19th century pioneers of family planning’, by Bob Forder, Freethinker contributor, board member of Secular Society Limited, and historian of the National Secular Society. ‘The ability of individuals to control their fertility is a basic right, with important social and economic consequences ranging from women’s liberation to the relief of poverty,’ said Forder. The lecture will take place in Conway Hall, London, at 11am on Saturday 4th November.

We understand that the UK branch of an American evangelical anti-abortion group will be protesting against Forder’s talk tomorrow. We don’t know why, as a discussion of birth control in the Victorian period hardly seems high on the list of things that such groups should be worrying about. Let’s see whether they turn up…

7/11/23: Update on the anti-abortion protests now available here.

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By Western ideological standards, Cardinal Joseph Zen, the former Roman Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong, would hardly be considered a progressive. On social issues, he has previously opposed legislation extending anti-domestic violence laws to same-sex couples. On liturgical matters, he is a staunch defender of the pre-Second Vatican Council Tridentine Latin mass. At the level of Vatican ecclesiastical politics, he pals around with the likes of the late Cardinal George Pell, who aside from being doctrinally conservative, was also implicated in shielding paedophile priests in Australia.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Hong Kong pop singer, Denise Ho. So outspoken has she been about LGBT rights, at least by Asian standards, that she was once banned from performing in Malaysia over her LGBT identity. She has campaigned for gay marriage rights in Hong Kong. She once said, ‘[w]e can be openly gay as someone else can be Christian or Muslim,’ seemingly implying that homosexual and religious identities are mutually exclusive.

If Zen and Ho were in the West instead of in Hong Kong, it is likely that they would have nothing to do with one another except as adversaries. For many decades now, self-declared ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’ in the West have fought never-ending culture wars over various social and identity-related issues. These include religion, rights related to sexual orientation and identity, reproductive rights, race, language, national identity (in the UK’s case, this is particularly apparent in relation to Europe) – you name it.

Political and culture-war affiliations in the West are linked increasingly with social as opposed to economic identities. Particularly in places like places like the United States and Australia, the traditional alliance between secular progressives and religious voters from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and those who emphasise economic justice over issues of personal morality, is unravelling. Centre-left political alliances have attracted less religious support.

But Zen and Ho are not in the West. Far from falling in with Western culture war faultlines, they have made common cause in the fight for democracy and autonomy in Hong Kong. Zen is an old warrior on this front, having been involved as early as 2003 in backing mass protests against China’s first, aborted attempt to impose national security laws on Hong Kong. In addition to her LGBT rights advocacy, Denise Ho became identified with Hong Kong’s democracy movement when she openly supported Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement, which involved mass protests for genuine universal suffrage.

Then came the protests of 2019. What started as mass protests against the Hong Kong government’s proposed legislation allowing for extradition to China expanded to a full-blown resistance movement for democracy and against authoritarian police brutality. As the period of the protests lengthened from days to weeks to months, the number of protesters being arrested mounted. From the outset, organisations were set up to provide various forms of assistance to those hurt or arrested by Hong Kong’s increasingly authoritarian regime.

Once such organisation was the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, which was named after the date (12 June) of the first major episode of indiscriminate police brutality during the 2019 protests. According to its website, the fund provided ‘humanitarian and relevant financial support to persons who are injured, arrested, attacked or threatened with violence’; the support provided was primarily ‘legal, medical, psychological and emergency financial assistance’.

The fund was overseen by a board of trustees. Its members included Joseph Zen and Denise Ho. The fact that Zen and Ho were, by Western standards, ideological opposites on culture wars issues, did not appear to be a problem for them in co-operating on the cause of democracy in Hong Kong and resistance to authoritarian violence. In overseeing the fund, they stood together, they were arrested together, and they were convicted together.  

In the democracy movement, and the resistance to China’s authoritarian overreach in a Hong Kong that had been promised at least 50 years of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ as part of the deal in China’s resumption of sovereignty, Zen and Ho’s co-operation was not unique. Benny Tai, the initiator of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, is a devout Christian who contributed to a Chinese language anti-LGBT rights book. Yet he is currently on trial under Hong Kong’s National Security Law with LGBT rights figures such as Ray Chan and Jimmy Sham for their joint involvement in a 2020 informal primary election.

The well-known, and now also jailed, Hong Kong democracy activist, Joshua Wong, had his run-ins with his socially conservative father. Yet his father was also the one who inculcated pro-democracy ideas into him from a young age (link in Chinese), and was highly supportive of his activism. And prior to its disbandment in 2021, an umbrella organisation called the Civil Human Rights Front organised many of Hong Kong’s largest protests in favour of democracy and against the erosion of human rights. Its member organisations include a diverse assortment of religious, feminist and LGBT rights groups, as well as political parties and anti-Communist trade unions.

So what kept Zen, Ho and these various groups, whose views on issues in the Western culture wars varied wildly, working together, right up until the point when China imposed a draconian National Security Law on Hong Kong in July 2020 to crack down upon resistance? This is a question that has not really been discussed and analysed within Hong Kong itself. It was as if the fact of co-operation between these individuals and groups to resist China’s authoritarian overreach was taken as a given. Nobody made a big deal about any ‘cross-ideological grand alliances’. And yet, on further reflection, whether conceptually or as a matter of factual circumstances, these people’s and groups’ decision to put aside the culture wars and face a greater adversary together as one makes sense.

Conceptually speaking, in order to have a culture war, one needs an environment that tolerates it. This would involve the existence of, or even respect for, freedom of speech, assembly, association and conscience, as well as a democratic government obliged to take account of the strength in numbers that culture warriors claim to represent. But when these basic freedoms are under threat and are undermined by an authoritarian government, everyone, no matter what his or her opinions, is at risk. It therefore made sense for those with ideological differences in Hong Kong to work together to resist authoritarian attempts to silence them all.

The campaigners’ concerns about being silenced are justified by the facts. China has a track record of cracking down on civil society groups of all stripes. It has cracked down on both Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as on Uyghur and Hui Muslims. It has cracked down on LGBT advocacy groups. It has cracked down on civil society generally to the point of collapse. And in the case of Hong Kong, the fears of being silenced were realised. Since China’s full-scale crackdown against the city started in 2020, at least 58 civil society groups have folded, and those that remain have become muted.

China’s programme of cracking down on diversity of opinion and dissent does not stop at its own borders. It seeks to silence dissidents living abroad with surveillance and threats. Its ‘United Front’ operations in the West are little more than influence, interference and infiltration operations designed to undermine democratic processes. Its intimidation tactics have in the last year or two started escalating to the point of going after families of popularly elected Members of Parliament who have been critics of China. This has happened in places such as Britain (creating obstacles to the university applications of Iain Duncan-Smith’s children) and Canada (attempts at intimidating the family of Michael Chong MP). 

Despite the real threat that China presents to the West’s relatively free and democratic way of life, many participants in Western public debates remain consumed by their obsession with the culture wars. If anything, the tenor of the disputes appears to have deteriorated since around the mid-2010s, coinciding with the onset of Trumpism and, in the UK, the Brexit movement. What had once at least been relatively reasoned if ideological arguments over controversial issues has now descended into puerile name-calling, with terms like ‘woke’, ‘fascist’ and ‘TERF’ being bandied about almost at random. And on the question of the threat posed by China, ideological cultural warriors have used it either to go down the ethno-nationalist ‘yellow peril’ path (eg ban all overseas students from China) or to engage in insidious anti-Western whataboutery (eg dismissing atrocities against Uyghurs because Australia treated its indigenous people poorly).

These exacerbated divisions and name-calling merely play into China’s hands. Moreover, the continuation and intensification of the Western culture wars has in itself taken an authoritarian turn, in which both sides manifest a lack of tolerance and respect for opposing viewpoints. The way the China issue has played out in the context of the culture wars, with the two sides as usual adopting equally extreme positions – either in support of a racialised approach in dealing with China or in defence of its authoritarianism – is but a case in point.

This is fertile ground for China to push its anti-democratic agenda beyond its borders, such as through disinformation campaigns. The West’s ability to resist is weakened by its own internal obsessions and intolerances. And while China cannot necessarily impose itself on the West as quickly or as directly as it has done in Hong Kong, it has shown itself capable of establishing firm footholds and exercising control over apparently democratic processes. Take, for example, China’s secret funding and compromising of candidates for elected office in Canada, its disinformation campaigns about the political system in Australia, its illegal funnelling of political donations to both major parties in New Zealand, and its suppression of Hong Kong dissident protests in the UK. Activities such as these are stepping stones towards displacing the Western liberal democracy-based world order led by the US, and replacing it with a China-led authoritarian world.

There is a real risk that by the time the bickering cultural warriors realise that their freedoms and rights are being undermined by a greater force, it could be too late.

This is where the examples of Joseph Zen, Denise Ho, Benny Tai, Ray Chan, Jimmy Sham, Joshua Wong and his father, and various ideologically diverse groups in the now-defunct Hong Kong Civil Human Rights Front, are instructive for the West. Of course, it may be said that despite their refraining from fighting culture wars and standing in solidarity in resisting authoritarian China, they have suffered setback after setback. What is the point of cross-ideological solidarity if it makes no difference in the end?

Except it very probably did make a difference. China’s push to erode and ultimate destroy Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedoms did not just start in 2019. It had been taking place for many years under the radar, even at local community levels. By putting culture wars to one side in the face of a common threat, pro-democracy Hong Kong activists and groups with divergent views on social issues played an important role in holding the line against China, until the dam broke upon the state’s full-scale crackdown in 2020. This crackdown has been all-encompassing, ranging from mass arrests and the jailing of dissidents, to the dismantling of civil society groups, education curricula and electoral systems, to the removal of politically sensitive books from libraries, to the general silencing of all criticism of authority by ordinary people.

Hong Kong is under China’s sovereignty and is ultimately subject to its authoritarian whims. The odds were therefore stacked against Hongkongers even though they were relatively united. The situation is different for Western democracies, where China needs more time and must use less direct methods to gain influence.

Where those engaged in socio-political discourse in the West are willing to set aside their internal differences to resist China’s efforts, they stand a much better chance at keeping China’s creeping authoritarianism at bay than Hongkongers ever had. In contrast, however, for Western democratic societies that choose to continue to allow themselves to be consumed by the culture wars, China’s efforts to undermine and, potentially, control them will be left relatively unopposed. The West’s inward-looking obsession with the culture wars, or just inertia, has, for example, enabled the Chinese government to open up secret police stations in many Western countries to facilitate the intimidating of its critics there. It is only in the last year or so that they are being discovered and gradually looked into by Western governments.

For those in the West who are caught up in arguing ceaselessly about their ideological differences, trying to set all that aside and work together to resist a more nefarious force may appear difficult. But the likes of Joseph Zen and Denise Ho have shown that it can and should be done. Internal squabbles may be a tolerable or even acceptable part of political discourse when democratic ways of life are not under threat. However, they become a luxury that one can ill afford when the distraction they afford opens the door for authoritarian encroachment.

As China becomes increasingly assertive in imposing its influence and control around the world, it is high time for the voices on both sides of the culture wars to lay aside their differences and give solidarity a chance. Hong Kong has shown the world how, even in the most difficult of circumstances, solidarity between erstwhile adversaries matters when confronted by an authoritarian giant. If Hongkongers can do it, then so can those in the West.

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June is Blasphemy Month at the Freethinker. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines blasphemy as ‘profane talk of something supposed to be sacred; impious irreverence.’

While ‘blasphemy’ in a strict sense might be confined to words spoken or written in violation of religious shibboleths, it can also be used more broadly of criticism, satire, mockery, ridicule or insult of any deeply-held belief. As such, it can be a weapon of the dissentient individual against the dominant ideologies and received opinions of the day.

‘In our times,’ J.S. Mill wrote in On Liberty, ‘every one lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship.’ In making the case for the importance of ‘diversity of opinion’ to intellectual progress, he observed that no one person or faction is likely to have a monopoly on truth in any subject, especially on moral questions.

Rather, he argued, ‘truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness … if either of the two opinions has a better claim than the other, not merely to be tolerated, but to be encouraged and countenanced, it is the one which happens at the particular time and place to be in a minority.’

In our polarised era, perhaps unusually, there are two (or more) sets of dominant opinions and accompanying taboos, depending on which newspaper you read or which political party you listen to. All such taboos, however, are anathema to the culturally liberal, open-minded and freethinking sort of person, whose attitude, rather than any specific opinions, this publication hopes to defend.

What with the unparalleled opportunities for self-expression afforded by social media, no one could say that strong opinions on controversial topics were in short supply. What is less common is the ability to entertain, discuss and criticise different views, and even laugh at them, without suffering the consequences from those who disagree. You might even receive a visit from the police for committing a ‘non-crime hate incident’ and be told to ‘check your thinking’.

This month, we will be construing ‘blasphemy’ in its widest sense and using our freedom of speech, both serious and satirical, to dissect sacred cows of many breeds. Under English law at least, and whatever the Merseyside Police might say, being offensive is not an offence – not yet.

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