virtual philosopher

Confronting Prejudices: a taxi driver and The Daily Mail

When my train to London was late yesterday, unusually for me, I took a taxi to get to my appointment. Perhaps my mistake was asking to be taken to Westminster, but instantly the taxi driver began a rant that gradually descended into racism. At times I wondered if I was in an Ali G spin-off and being taken for a ride in both senses - that pendant hanging from the mirror - did it have a concealed TV camera?  Stephen Lawrence, he told me, must have said something to the people who killed him (though he agreed that wouldn't have justified murder) - his evidence: apparently Lawrence is giving the black power closed fist salute in all the photographs of him (this from someone who declared he doesn't read the newspapers or watch TV - so where does he see these photographs?) 'Why does one murder get all the attention' People are killed all the time.' (I tried rather feebly to point out that a racist murder has a symbolic value as well as the tragedy that it is for the individual and those he left behind).

In the course of a 15 minute ride he made comments about how he believed that black lesbians get preferential treatment when it comes to doing 'the knowledge', Eastern Europeans are the ones who rob cabbies at knife or gunpoint (no, it had never happened to him), and so on. He was a cheerful, friendly sort of man, and my attempts to stop the flow of racism by engaging him in a discussion of his prejudices were pathetic. I felt sullied by the whole experience, caught off-guard and weak at not confronting him more robustly...and possibly just getting him to stop the cab and get out. What really annoys me is that when I jumped out in heavy traffic I instinctively left a tip, despite my disgust at his views and disappointment about him matching up to the worst stereotypes of a London cabby - almost to the point of caricature (he even used the classic phrase 'what's it all about then?')...I'm still not absolutely sure I wasn't the victim of some kind of performance artist or reality TV stunt.

And then, again very unusually for me, I read Monday's The Daily Mail which was lying around at home (it was free at the gym) and while it's coverage of some topics fitted by stereotypical view of that newspaper, I was blown away by the leading letter to the editor: it was about Sartre's existentialism! Andew J. Smith from Roehampton University had written a clear response to a review of a prurient book about Sartre's and de Beauvoir's supposedly 'essential' relationship..He points out that, "far from being the 'bible or our licentious times'...existentialism is a philosophy which demands that all of us ask ourselves a very personal question: what gives my life meaning?" I don't  agree with this as an encapsulation of Sartre's existentialism (since he answers that question rather than invites us to ask it - Sartre's answer is  the choices I make, the sum of what I actually do). But how prejudiced of me not to expect to find existentialism being discussed in the letters page of the Daily Mail...

Free Speech has To Respect Religion Says UN Leader - How Exactly?

It is not clear to me how it is possible to live up to the latest UN pronouncement on free speech. You can read a Reuters' Report on this here.

If all those who speak, write, express their views have to respect all religious sensitivities, then what can anyone say? Some religious group is likely to be offended by almost any expression of a view. Does the UN want to stop us watching The Life of Brian, Jerry Springer the Opera, etc? Will atheists have to keep quiet about their beliefs for fear of offending religious sensitivities? Watch out Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and co. And how does all this square with the US First Amendment?

Philip Hensher wrote an interesting piece in The Guardian on this topic in 2006.

Time to Get Out of Our Armchairs?

If you want to stay sharp you should do some aerobic exercise. That's the message coming from current brain research. Read about it here.
 

Presumed Consent and Organ Donation

The British Government is thinking about implementing an 'opt out' policy on the donation of body parts. The presumption will be that everyone with suitable body parts has consented to having them used post mortem unless they have explicitly removed their consent. This seems, on the face of it, a good idea, particularly if it delivers more organs for transplant. But not everyone is happy. Mick Hume has some critical points to make (particularly in relation to recent political history) in his article in Spiked.

Listen to a discussion on this topic on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze (only available until Tuesday 22nd Jan.)

Zizek on Violence: Misleading About Free Speech

I picked up Slavoj Zizek's book Violence today which has some good jokes, some thought-provoking cultural references and some interesting ideas all delivered with panache. But ultimately I don't trust his judgement. Here's why.

No Socrates, Zizek like many postmodernists, poses as one who knows, who can see through ideology and diagnose the short-sightedness of those in the grip of naive enlightenment ideas or systemic violence that is more or less invisible to most of us. We dim-sighted ones naively rail against what he calls subjective violence (or what we traditionally call 'violence'), apparently blind to systemic and symbolic violence.

Unfortunately when he comes to discussing 'historian' David Irving he seems to commit symbolic violence himself (I feel liberated to use 'violence' in this metaphorical sense by Zizek's own practice). On p.92 of Violence, in the context of a discussion of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, Zizek suggests that the freedom of the press in the West is not as extensive as we like to believe because we can't tolerate questioning of the Holocaust. He writes

'...we should examine the various prohibitions and limitations which underlie the so-called freedom of the press in the West. Isn't the Holocaust a sacred and untouchable fact? At the every moment when the Muslim protests were raging, the British historian David Irving was in an Austrian prison serving a three-year prison term for expressing his doubts about the Holocaust in an article published fifteen years earlier?' (Zizek, Violence, 2008, p.92)

Does Reading Literature (and even Philosophy) Improve Moral Character?

Norman Geras has an interesting post on normblog about whether or not reading literature (and maybe even philosophy) improves our moral character. It's a response to a supposedly knock-down argument against the idea that it does put forward by Stanley Fish. You can read Fish's piece  from the New York Times here: 'Will The Humanities Save Us?' 

On the question of whether or not reading philosophy improves moral character (a question Norm sidesteps), the answer surely depends on which philosophy you read and in what state of mind. That is, unless you think that it is the act of reading  itself that is morally improving. Critical reading, and a concern for consistency, might be thought a stimulus to the kind of reflection that is a pre-requisite of acting morally at all, I suppose...but having the pre-requisite won't guarantee the result (but see earlier post about the UNESCO official line on the value of studying philosophy).

A New Scottish Enlightenment?

According to a recent article (read it here) the numbers of students studying Philosophy in Scottish schools have gone up by 41 per cent in the last five years. Like Australia, Scotland seems to be a fertile country when it comes to producing philosophers of note given the relatively small population...is it something in the water perhaps?

Free Speech - Peter Tatchell TV interview

Peter Tatchell debates issues about free speech and its appropriate limits with the President of the Oxford Union, Luke Tryl  (who just gave a platform to David Irving and Nick Griffin) and Brendan O'Neill from Edge. You can watch this half-hour debate here (should open in a new window). Tatchell makes a clear and reasonable case for limits to free speech in certain circumstances. Oddly Tryl seems to feel he has an obligation to give a platform to extremists.

Who Says Science and Religion Don't Conflict?

A professor at London's Institute of Education, Michael Reiss, wants science teachers to handle questions about Creationism sensitively. This seems harmless. But may not be. It depends how this is interpreted. If a pupil from a religious background who believes in Creationism questions Darwinism when it is taught, then of course that  pupil needs answers. Science teachers need to answer the student's questions - and no doubt would answer without having read Reiss's book. But there is surely not an obligation to give much time to discussing the ideas or treat them as scientifically respectable in any way. These are science lessons. If we go down this route, then we may end up needing to include some alchemy in Chemistry lessons as a serious alternative to empirical science. The real danger here  is that this will be seen as an admission that Creationism (or alchemy) is a theory that merits discussion in a scientific context...something that has proved disastrous in the US educational context.

This is a bit like the issue of including papers by Holocaust deniers in an academic History conference. Only some false ideas are sufficiently coherent and evidence-based to justify their entry into the debate. Just by discussing some of the wilder ideas alongside evidence-based ones they are inadvertently given far greater respectability than they deserve. Creationism as an idea-virus is a good subject for sociological study; but given the US experience, educationalists should be wary about lending it as a 'theory' a seriousness that it does not in the least deserve...we might end up taking seriously the idea that thunder is caused by Zeus's anger too. Something like ten percent of students in the UK seem to believe in Creationism in some form according to Professor Reiss; but probably more than that believe in astrological predictions too...but that doesn't mean science lessons should get sidetracked into discussions of the evidence base for astrology (I'm an Airies by the way so of course I would be aggressive about this).

I like Dr Hilary Leevers's response that science teachers would be teaching evolution not creationism and so should not need a book to tell them how to "delicately handle controversy between a scientific theory and a belief". This raises interesting questions about what the role of a science teacher is. Surely it is at the most basic level to teach students about science, its methods and value. It is also to model good scientific practice which is certainly not to take all beliefs equally seriously.

If a Holocaust denier asks a question in a History lesson we wouldn't expect a History teacher to treat the student's position as just another belief: the point would be to show why this is not a position that a historian could hold without denying overwhelming evidence, and then move on swiftly. Presumably we wouldn't want a History teacher to engage in an extended debate about the actual evidence at this point as that would give deniers a credibility as part of the evidence-based debate that they don't merit (I support  Deborah Lipstadt's action here - she declines to appear on the same platform as deniers such as David Irving, despite having refuted Holocaust denial in great detail in an English court following a libel action from Irving. For more on that, see her excellent book History on Trial).

Philosophy: Lived and Important

I came across this passage in a book by Bryan Magee today (Popper in the Fontana Modern Masters series):

"He believes that philosophy is a necessary activity because we, all of us, take a great number of things for granted, and many of these assumptions are of a philosophical character; we act on them in private life, in politics, in our work, and in every other sphere of our lives - but while some of these assumptions are no doubt true, it is likely that more are false and some are harmful. So critical examination of our presuppositions - which is a philosophical activity - is morally as well as intellectually important. This view is of philosophy as something lived and important for all of us, not an academic activity or a specialism, and certainly not as consisting primarily in the study of the writings of professional philosophers." (Magee, 1973, p. 15).

This is a neat encapsulation of the value of philosophical thinking for everyone. But this critical examination of presuppositions has to be well-executed; otherwise  dogmas may do less harm than sloppy thinking. The difficult of philosophy isn't that it is a technical subject; it is in avoiding rationalization and rhetoric. Other people's prejudices and reasoning errors are much easier to spot than one's own...Nietzsche put it too strongly when, in Beyond Good and Evil, he accused philosophers of involuntary autobiography under the guise of impersonal reasoning; but you can see why he said it. Smug rationalization is as dangerous as unquestioned prejudice...