26.09.11 The Belle’s Stratagem (Red Handed Theatre Company at the Southwark Playhouse)

A second chance to see this great production. The post-show discussion with Jessica Swales and some of the cast brought home how odd it was that such a great play has languished in obscurity for so long, and how much of a risk was involved in putting it on. I’m glad Swales did take that risk, and put so much work into editing three scripts into one and gathering a cast (out of more than a thousand who applied) who could do it justice. Compensation for working for an actor’s wage was having an enormous amount of fun, both in character and as a bunch of people doing what they love. (One reason they don’t get paid so much is that people like us bulk buy using the Southwark Playhouse season ticket scheme. We bought four tickets and still only spent one-third of the cost of a single ticket for the Old Vic Richard III.)

In the masquerade, Mr Hardy disguises himself as a woman (after working through a list of more likely candidates). In the original, Swales said, Cowley has him in Jewish costume. This was one of the few changes she made, to keep us from getting distracted by a casual anti-semitism, and it was a good call, especially as Robin Soans made a fine dame (maybe angling for panto work?).

London, Big Ben-style chimes, Lincoln’s Inn, the whole cast teaming onto stage singing a ding-dong song. The stage clears, and a sweet-natured Saville and his servant, Dick, are met by the dastardly Courtall. Cowley has introduced two main characters, not rivals in Sheridan’s sense but holding rival principles: should a man conquer or commit to a woman? One is embodied by a fresh-faced Jeremy Joyce as the scrubbed Saville and the other by an urbane Marc Baylis as the man-about-town Courtall.

One of my ongoing fascinations is with Darwin’s dangerous idea, and with evolutionary thinking more broadly applied. While gender is a cultural construct with political implications (for example, we can decide that differently gendered individuals should be equal before the law), the two biological sexes are different in ways over which we have much less control, if any. Sex is not just about the bits you rub together, but about how you behave, the psychological strategies you employ in seeking reproductive opportunities. Cowley didn’t know about Darwin, of course, but if this play is anything to go by she did know about mating strategies, and those of Saville and Courtall are opposites ends of the gallant spectrum.

Cowley puts her drama first, and allows her characters and situations to entertain and not lecture us. Still, if you’ve been paying attention, by the end you may have learned something about the great drama that is human nature. At this point in the play, however, we can simply enjoy Courtall’s theatrical terror at the prospect of meeting his country cousins – all “rusticity, innocence and beauty” – and go along with his characterization of them:

COURTALL. Cousins of our days come up ladies, and with the knowledge they glean from magazines and pocket books, fine ladies; laugh at the bashfulness of their grandmothers, and boldly demand their entrees in the first circles.

This seems a remarkably modern complaint, and it’s about to be given a late-twentieth-century twist. First, we glimpse some hope for Courtall when he admits that his “conscience twitched” him, but we know that twitch will not hold back his libertine appetite. Then, Saville cries out – “there’s a bevy of female Patagonians coming down upon us” – and they exit to make way for four pairs of fluttering eyes and swishing petticoats. The rhetorical question they put is:

Shall I tell you what I want, what I really, really want?

And the answer they supply is: zig-a-zig-aah. One poor guy in the front row catches the eye of Cassandra Bond’s character, who is scarily stary and starry eyed as she bears down on him. Jackie Clune, who is taller and has – how to put this delicately? – slightly more bulk than her three co-stars,
has to lower herself a little in her Little Miss Muffett Dress, and lower her voice to deliver the immortal line:

If you really bug me I will say goodbye.

Given this character is the “gumby wench” (my wife’s phrase!), this is possibly the most terrifying interpretation of an upbeat song imaginable. A brilliant insertion of grrl into Georgian manners.

Michael Lindall sweeps in as the handsome Doricourt, except some of the sheen has been dulled by the morning’s business at Pleadwell’s.

SAVILLE. Did your heart leap or sink, when you beheld your mistress?
DORICOURT. Faith, neither one nor t’other: she’s a fine girl, as far as mere flesh and blood goes. But . . . nothing more.
SAVILLE. Is not that enough ?
DORICOURT. No! She should have spirit! Fire!

Doricourt anticipates heroes like D’Arcy, who demand more than just a pretty face, and Cowley is showing us how notions of decorum can backfire when it comes to love.

Cassandra Bond reappears as a worldly chicken-leg-eating maid, holding her palm out to a hack as he hands over one coin after another. Gossip is the real currency, of course, and Flutter is the chancellor of that particular exchequer. Villers marks him as one “who always remembers everything but the persons and the circumstances”. Christopher Logan’s superb Flutter scampers to and fro, not so much in the business of communicating information as making sure his camp presence is never absent for too long:

I never related a falsity in my life, unless I stumbled on it by mistake; and if it were otherwise, your dull matter-of-fact people are infinitely obliged to those warm imaginations which soar into fiction to amuse you; for, positively, the common events of this little dirty world are not worth talking about, unless you embellish them. . .

Odone avoids the evidence question

About halfway through the conversation between Richard Dawkins and Cristina Odone (accessed 26.09.11), he asked how she decided which parts of religious teaching and scripture to doubt and which to accept, adding:

RD: As scientists, we do it by evidence.
CO: You can’t boil everything down to evidence!

If you turn up the heat, and boil everything down only to find nothing, what then? The difference between people of faith like Odone and people of reason like Dawkins is that one expects to find some residue of evidence underpinning every belief while the other is happy with an empty pan. Reduction is not always a bad thing, especially if you’re trying to enjoy the good things in life, like gravy.

Christian beliefs, in particular, depend crucially on certain historical propositions being true, and how we usually determine the truth or otherwise of such beliefs is by appeal to certain types of evidence, often written but sometimes archaeological and so on. Scholars, of course, do not take documents such as the gospels on faith or at face value. (Even at face value, there are many deficiencies in the gospels as supposed accounts of historical events. For example, internal contradictions – in the absence of external corroboration to resolve the issue one way or another – cast doubt on the accuracy of many details.)

Dan Barker, who was an evangelist before seeing the light and becoming an atheist, was astonished to discover that the book he had lived by for so many years was not what it seemed, and refers us to Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman “for documentation of this fraudulent tampering with the bible” (Barker 2008, pp. 233–34). In a later book, Forged, Ehrman (2011, p. 5)  puts it bluntly:

The Bible contained errors. And if it contained errors, it was not completely true. Eventually I came to realize that the Bible not only contains untruths or accidental mistakes. It also contains what almost anyone today would call lies.

In Misquoting Jesus Ehrman (2005, p. 7) puts a key evidential question:

What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals!

If you’re Odone, of course, or anyone prepared to accept on faith alone, it doesn’t matter that we don’t have the autographs, because that would be boiling the Bible down to evidence.

Odone’s avoidance of the evidence question is unsurprising in someone who would also be unlikely to embrace the phrase “the God delusion”: the reason why someone is said to labour under a delusion is because their belief is not reasonable, not warranted by the available evidence. Someone who declares with absolute conviction that they are going to win the Lottery is deluded, as I’m sure Odone would agree. The reason why they are deluded is not because their belief is certainly false. After all, they might win the Lottery. It is simply because the chances are heavily weighted against their winning the Lottery, a judgement all reasonable people, considering the evidence, will reach.

This is why it is common to find religious believers operating an epistemic double standard. What is a reasonable objection to someone certain they will win the Lottery becomes an outrageous and offensive insult to someone certain they will win Everlasting Life. (The difference between the Lottery and Everlasting Life, of course, is that we know that people have won the Lottery.)

Crystal healing and the P12

I was waiting for a P12 to take me past Cathay Street when I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake. I’d checked online, but the schematic on the bus stop, which showed the bus only going as far as New Cross, didn’t tally with my expectations. I dealt with the cognitive dissonance between my beliefs about where the bus was heading and its actual destination by standing there, monitoring a rising tide of mild panic. I should have remembered something I’d heard on the radio, when Studs Terkel quoted James Cameron’s last column: “hope subsides, curiosity remains”.

Hope that I was on the right route was indeed fading fast, but my curiosity kicked in and I made enquiries. A woman confirmed that I was mistaken about the P12: it was the P13 I wanted. The slight inconvenience of having to check the facts and the epistemic (if hardly epic) humiliation at being proved wrong were more than compensated for by the resolution of that dissonant state of mind and a feeling of relief at being able to get on with my day.

Later that week my wife attended a family funeral, and met a women she didn’t know who commented on the amethyst necklace she was wearing. Amethysts, apparently, are “very healing”. The moment passed without my wife pulling out a copy of Trick or Treatment and reading chapter and verse on all things alternative. Sometimes in social situations it seems best to pull a veil over the elephant in the room. (Sceptics should of course be wary of veils, given how useful they are to purveyors of bullshit, as Stephen Law (2011b, pp. 35–36) explains in a section on the Veil Analogy.)

With the benefit of hindsight and from within the safety of a hypothetical, I imagined my wife saying, calmly, and with sincere concern for the woman’s well-being, “You realize those things don’t actually work? I mean, I’d hate you to get sick because you didn’t see a doctor.”

Now imagine if someone had come up to me at the bus stop and said, “You know this bus doesn’t actually go beyond New Cross? I mean, I’d hate for you to be late for an appointment because you got on the wrong bus.”

Here are two possible responses:

• “I don’t care what you think about it, I’m not going to change my belief about the P12.”
• “Thank you for taking the trouble to point out my false belief about the P12, I really appreciate it.”

One of these responses would be thought of by most people as bordering on the rude if not downright insane. The question is, why is that same kind of response perfectly acceptable when beliefs held on faith are challenged?

The ruminations of John Gray, Part I

In a Point of View (accessed 23.09.11, available as a podcast) called “Believing in belief” (16.09.11), John Gray argues that the scientific and rationalist attack on religion is misguided. Apparently, atheist critics overrate the importance of belief to religious believers. (If he’s right, shouldn’t they then be called religious experiencers or religious practitioners?) He begins with Graham Greene’s conversion, in which the author was more impressed by his priest talking about “the challenge of an inexplicable goodness” than by any arguments for the existence of God.

Gray conveniently passes over the word “inexplicable”, which for the religious is almost as useful as the word “mystery” in their efforts to avoid stretching themselves intellectually. Is it reasonable, however, to claim that goodness is “inexplicable”? While no sensible person would attempt to give an all-purpose explanation relevant to all situations, surely, if we are so inclined, we can explain good behaviour in all sorts of ways, without reference to the supernatural? For example, Dennett (1995, p. 403) cites John Dewey, who thought Darwinism should be the foundation of any naturalistic theory of meaning:

“I only insist that the whole story be told, that the character of the mechanism be noted—namely, that it is such as to produce and sustain good in a multiplicity of forms.”

Priests, of course, aren’t known for their digressions into Darwinian thinking while preaching about the good.

Greene admitted to not being that bothered about the arguments for religion: he simply accepted the truth of the propositions on offer (why those propositions, the Christian ones, and not some other set, such as those belonging to Islam?). Should we admire him for this? I certainly don’t, although Gray seems to think that we should. For me Greene is like the shipowner in W. K. Clifford’s essay “The Ethics of Belief” (Clifford 1999, pp. 70–96). He too couldn’t be bothered to check the facts, and simply accepted that his ship was seaworthy without taking reasonable measures to ensure that it was. The consequences for those on board when the ship sank were immediate and devastating. The consequences of Greene’s epistemic complacency were not as obviously grievous (though how do we count the lives lost to superstition through the ages?), although, as Clifford argues, he is as morally culpable, for “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”.

(It’s interesting that Clifford’s spiritual journey was in the opposite direction to that of Greene. In the introduction (ibid., p. xii), Timothy Madigan writes that, deep in the study of Aquinas, Clifford at first revelled in supporting Catholic doctrines, but the impact of evolutionary theory altered his views. Greene, if he couldn’t be bothered with arguments for God, could hardly be expected to read On the Origin of Species.)

Gray moves on to the “dull debate on atheism”, in which religion is mistakenly reduced to a set of beliefs, or propositions about the world the truth or otherwise of which can be decided by appeal to the evidence. Ignoring his personal judgement on what counts as “dull”, two points can be made.

First, I don’t recognize the debate: the atheists I read all understand perfectly well that religious experience and practice are both important, in addition to belief. For example, the long historical perspective of Lewis-Williams (2010, p. 115) accepts that “science developed in the cocoon of religion” and that humans in a range of cultures were “struggling with a rickety structure of interlocking religious experience, belief and practice”.

Gray must have listened to some very ill-informed atheists if he thinks that we regard science and religion as making equivalent bids to describe the world. He is rather conveniently overlooking the crucial difference between the “two different ways of knowing about the world and life – science and supposedly revealed knowledge”. Even if religion were just a set of beliefs, it would still be fundamentally opposed to the scientific project, which places revealed knowledge in the category of psychological experience. (This is not a dogmatic refusal to “see the light”, of course, since there are plenty of ways in which a rational person might be persuaded that such knowledge was indeed of divine origin.)

Second, on the importance of beliefs within religion, Gray mistakenly generalizes a conclusion when in fact there is a fascinating variation: it may come as a surprise to him that not all religions are the same. Here is Bart Ehrman (2011, pp. 6–7):

Most people today don’t realize that ancient religions were almost never interested in “true beliefs.” Pagan religions—by which I mean the polytheistic religions of the vast majority of people in the ancient world, who were neither Jewish nor Christian—did not have creeds. . . Truth was of interest to philosophers, but not to practitioners of religion. . . Religion was all about the proper practices: sacrifices to the gods, for example, and set prayers. . . .

He contrasts this aspect of pagan religion with the predominant view of many Christians, which is that “if Free-will Baptists are right, Roman Catholics are wrong”, to take two sects at random. Erhman continues:

Christians insisted that it did matter what you believed, that believing the correct things could make you “right” and believing the incorrect things could make you “wrong,” and that if you were wrong, you would be punished eternally in the fires of hell. Christianity, unlike the other religions, was exclusivistic. It insisted that it held the Truth, and that every other religion was in Error. . . . The Christian religion came to be firmly rooted in truth claims, which were eventually embedded in highly ritualized formulations, such as the Nicene Creed. As a result, Christians from the very beginning needed to appeal to authorities for what they believed.

Note the description of the Nicene Creed as a “highly ritualized formulation”: here, belief becomes part of ritual, and cannot be separated in the naive way Gray imagines.

We are only two minutes into a ten-minute broadcast, and Gray has already notched up an impressive list of misrepresentations and misconstruals. He then refers to “the confident assertions of the New Atheists” (a dog whistle phrase no doubt interpreted by some as “the arrogance of the New Atheists”), which is a bit rich, since in any argument it is the religious who rely on unsupported statements of belief (the epistemic dimension of faith): the New Atheists have an annoying habit of actually backing up their claims with reasoned argument and evidence. As for confidence, this comes through beliefs being grounded in fact, rather than being plucked from fantasy. It is also a highly contingent confidence: again, all the New Atheists I have read know that they might be wrong, that they might be proved to be wrong. What is so provoking to the priestly caste and to their strange bedfellows such as Gray is that we are unlikely to be convinced by a couple of verses in a two-thousand-year-old book, or by any amount of ritualistic moaning and eye-rolling.

Two and a half minutes in and Gray aligns himself alongside Wittgenstein (the philosopher’s equivalent to Einstein). He reiterates the view – certainly mistaken with respect to Christianity – that religion is not really about beliefs.

What practitioners believe is secondary, if it matters at all. The idea that religions are essentially creeds, lists of propositions that you have to accept, doesn’t come from religion.

Gray concedes that there are areas of life where “having good reasons for what we believe is very important”, but if rigorous procedures are useful for establishing the facts in laboratories and courts of law and hospitals, and so on, why is that epistemic discipline suddenly dispensable when investigating, for example, the existence and activities of deities? Surely, on such important matters (and don’t the religious love to talk about the “big questions”?), we ought to take more care over establishing the facts of the matter? Indeed, if pressed, a Christian must discriminate between the voice of God heard as supposedly by Abraham and the voice of God as supposedly heard by Peter Sutcliffe, and how is this to be done except by appeal to some standard of reasoning that does not get bogged down in question-begging circles? Of course, as an atheist I don’t believe it can be done, and presumably Gray agrees, so why this limiting of the scope of reason?

Four and a half minutes in and we are told that art and poetry are not about establishing facts. Goodness, I was convinced that Twombly painting I saw last week was an actual representation of Bassano, the village in Teverina! Scientific inquiry “is the best method we have for finding out how the world works”. Goodness, a second true belief emerges from the oracle! As if to make up for this sudden lapse into truth telling, Gray quickly soils the airwaves with a hackneyed claim:

If we know one thing, it’s that we know our current scientific theories will turn out to be riddled with errors.

Error is always a possibility in many areas of science, but this is a crude characterization that ignores the certainty of much of our hard-won knowledge. For example, if we survive for a million years, it is unlikely that the number 92 will ever be discovered to be the wrong number of naturally occurring elements. This is, as Larry might say, pretty, pretty, pretty certain. We are never going to come up with a “better” estimate.

Five and a half minutes in and we are told that religion is a collection of myths or stories that captures something science can’t. Has he ever spoken to a Christian? Did he get the impression that the historical veracity of the gospels was an optional extra? Were heretics burned at the stake because they didn’t like a story?

That Gray is confused by the concept of truth is illustrated by the use of the word in his reference to the “truth of scientific theories”: theories, like arguments, are collections of linked propositions, and in themselves cannot be either true or false. Only propositions can describe facts about the world.

Myths can’t be verified or falsified in the way that theories can be.

Again, this is loose talk. There is a sense in which you can prove a theory right or wrong, but really you are finding weaknesses or strengths in chains of argument. Again, truth is a property that resides in premises and conclusions, not in arguments.

Symptomatic of this muddled thinking is the following vague claim:

I’ve no doubt that some of the ancient myths we inherit from religion are far more truthful than the stories the modern world tells about itself.

An example of one of these “silly modern stories” is that science enables us to live without myths. Well, I try to live myth-free, and there’s nothing silly about that at all. The fact that I try to live without myth doesn’t mean I live without stories. Moreover, I resent the implication that a respect for science and reason necessarily devalues storytelling. Quite the contrary, in fact, since once you ditch worn-out myths you can get on with some real creative business.

Six minutes in:

There’s nothing in science that says the world can be finally understood by the human mind. If Darwin’s theory of evolution is even roughly right, humans aren’t built to understand how the universe works. The human brain evolved under the pressures of the struggle for life.

Again, from someone who has just accused the New Atheists of making “confident assertions”, this takes the biscuit. In summarizing chapter thirteen of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, one of those New Atheists shows why Gray is probably wrong:

When generate-and-test, the basic move in any Darwinian algorithm, moves into the brains of individual organisms, it builds a series of ever more powerful systems, culminating in the deliberate, foresightful generation and testing of hypotheses and theories by human beings. This process creates minds that show no signs of “cognitive closure,” thanks to their capacity to generate and comprehend language.

(Dennett 1995, p. 400)

Gray continues:

Darwin’s theory is unlikely to be the final truth. . . we’ll always be surrounded by the unknowable. . . science has become a vehicle for myths, chief among them the myth of salvation through science. . .

Excuse me? Salvation? Apparently, some of us are deluded into thinking that science may help “humanity march onwards to a better world”. Now, Raymond Tallis may have gone off the rails in large parts of Aping Mankind (2011), but he’s spot on with this remark, aimed at Gray and his ilk:

Contempt for the idea of progress has always been attractive to some because it justifies sparing yourself the effort of trying to leave the world a better place than you found it. (p. 4)

Gray continues:

Evangelical atheists who want to convert the world to unbelief are copying religion at its dogmatic worst. They think human life would be vastly improved if only everyone believed as they do, when a little history shows that trying to get everyone to believe the same thing is a recipe for unending conflict.

Passing over the egregious slur (evangelical, conversion, dogmatic – and the worst of it is to imply that at the heart of every atheist is the void of unbelief), take the example of scientists trying “to get everyone to believe the same thing” when that same thing is atomic theory. Far from “unending conflict” the scientific project brings together people of all nationalities and backgrounds, regardless of class or gender or sexual orientation, in ways unimaginable to any religion, and it generates harmony out of disagreement (as opposed to fatwas and hatred).

What we believe doesn’t in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live.

And doesn’t what we believe influence how we live? The beliefs of religious parents who prefer prayer to proven medical treatment, and whose child has appendicitis, may destroy that child’s life with their false beliefs.

It is not that we atheists want everyone to share the same beliefs. Far more important is that we examine how we arrive at those beliefs, what prejudices and assumptions were present at their formation, what biases were at work, and whether they are backed by reason and evidence or held in conflict with reason and evidence.

Of course it matters how we live. But, strange as it may seem, it is non-believers who take belief more seriously than believers.

20.09.11 The Belle’s Stratagem (Red Handed Theatre Company at the Southwark Playhouse)

A fabulous production of a brilliant play by Hannah Cowley (1743–1809). In her programme note, the director, Miss Jessica Swales (I’m copying the programme’s period style of address), describes how she dusted off Cowley’s manuscript and was struck by “the authoress’s progressive parlance and ideas” and her claim – most unusual for 1780, and not so common in 2011 – that “women create their own destiny and that a man might want more than beauty in a wife”. Whatever next? Women being allowed to vote? Swales continues:

Miss Cowley, in 1780, seems to be in the same predicament as my friends and I. We debate the confounding expectations of the sexes and question the merits of marriage, commitment and adherence to social mores. What has changed?

Not much, which is one reason why this play is not of archival interest only but a fascinating and hugely entertaining slice of social comedy. Joseph Macnab is superb as Sir George Touchwood, a husband in an almost permanent state of bug-eyed apoplexy over his wife’s alarming notions of independence:

Heaven and earth, with whom can a man trust his wife, in the present state of society? Formerly there were distinctions of character amongst ye. . . grandmothers were pious, aunts circumspect, old maids censorious, but now, aunts, grandmothers, girls, and maiden gentlewomen are all the same creature, a wrinkle more or less is the sole difference between ye. . . And what is the society of which you boast? A mere chaos, in which all distinction of rank is lost – in a ridiculous affectation of ease, and every different order of beings is huddled together. In the same select party, you will often find the wife of a bishop and a sharper, of an earl and a fiddler. In short ’tis one universal masquerade, but where all assume the same disguise of dress and manners.

Touchwood exaggerates, of course, as he frets over the whole of society turning into one big masquerade. Indeed, far from ‘the same disguise’ the costume supervisor Miss Nicola Fitchett has fitted out the cast with a magnificent range of period dress. In the script (accessed 23.09.11), there is a whole page of instructions, a ‘flowered satin vest, silk stockings, pumps and latchets’ for Doricourt, ‘black shoes and paste buckles’ for Hardy, and a ‘white satin slip leno dress, trimmed with silver, white plume of feathers’ for lucky Letitia (the Belle with the Stratagem). Miss Fitchett seems to have followed these instructions in both letter and spirit, to create a wonderful set of costumes for the actors to inhabit in their diverse characters.

One of those productions worth seeing twice, and we’ve already got a couple more tickets for next Monday.

Bankers not too bothered about non-material rewards and penalties, shock, horror

News of another rogue trader losing his bank a few billion made me wonder, who was on the other end of these trades? And why haven’t they come forward? If I lose a fiver in the park, and someone finds it later that day, I’m down five pounds but that lucky person is (five) quids in. The financial debit and credit columns are clear enough, as is the ethics of the situation: the finder can’t reasonably be expected to do the right thing (in principle) because handing back the money is impossible (in practice).

The ethical situation is completely changed, of course, if the five pound note was not loose but in a wallet, with contact details. Then, most of us would agree that there is a duty on the finder to take reasonable steps to return the wallet to its rightful owner. That there is a duty is one thing, that a person responds to that duty quite another. Indeed, as Frank puts it (1988, p. 73), finding “a wallet full of cash in a deserted park is a golden opportunity” – for someone prepared to cheat, that is, for someone without a conscience.

We have evolution largely to thank (not religious codes of behaviour) that there are relatively few people who are completely lacking in conscience. The second murderer in Richard III is not someone you'd invite home, but even he admits to having been troubled by his conscience: “it made me once restore a purse of gold that, by chance, I found” (1.4.125–26). The irony is that, within his world, he feels shame for this act, while the rest of us would feel a warm glow of doing good.

A golden opportunity, Frank suggests, is one in which it pays to cheat, because there’s little chance of detection or harm to reputation. (Incidentally, this is why a reputation for not cheating doesn’t tell us much (ibid., pp. 74–75): “Not having a bad reputation is not the same thing as being known to be honest. The kinds of actions that are likely to be observed are just not very good tests of whether a person is honest.”)

Frank’s book exposes the inadequacies of the self-interest model of human behaviour (under which it is perfectly rational to steal the wallet) and argues for the commitment model, in which emotions play a strong role. An honest individual “is someone who values trustworthiness for its own sake” (ibid., p. 69) and who isn’t always on the lookout for an instant material payoff. Precisely because he has this attitude, “he can be trusted in situations where his behavior cannot be monitored” (as in the park, picking up lost wallets).

What is preventing cheating is the presence of a strongly felt emotion, without which we would be much worse off:

If the psychological reward mechanism is constrained to emphasize rewards in the present moment, the simplest counter to a specious reward from cheating is to have a current feeling that tugs in precisely the opposite direction. And because it too coincides with the moment of choice, the matching law does not discount it relative to the competing material reward. . . . it says that nonmaterial rewards and penalties may also matter. . . . there will be advantage in being able to suppress the impulse to cheat. We can thus imagine a population in which people with consciences fare better than those without. (p. 82)

We don’t need a psychologist to tell us that there is a “tendency for immediate rewards to appear misleadingly attractive” (p. 77), but I find Frank’s argument for the commitment model illuminating and persuasive. (If we all behaved like bankers, the model would be thoroughly disproved!) Being emotionally predisposed to regard cheating as unpleasurable is a good explanation for why people with a conscience are better able to resist the temptation to cheat, to take those immediate rewards.

I later read Simon Goodley’s report (accessed 18.09.11) on the UBS loss, in which an anonymous hedge fund trader admitted:

Of course there are bound to be people on the other side [of the UBS losses] who made miraculously large sums of money that weren’t authorised. They will be kept quiet. You won’t hear about it.

Marina Hyde’s comment piece (accessed 18.09.11) also points out that we only ever hear about the unauthorized losses, and that rogue trades are always losing trades. Bankers, it seems, are very good at keeping quiet about all those wallets they find in the park.

Since banking is all about taking golden opportunities, this should hardly come as a surprise. The competitive world of banking naturally weeds out individuals who are not so good at taking golden opportunities. As important to select out are the cheaters who get caught. Some do slip through, of course (we don’t live in a perfect world for banking, thank goodness), and – like Nick Leeson, Jérôme Kerviel and Kweku Adoboli – end up embarrassing their employers on the front pages every few years, almost as regular as Swiss clockwork.

The mental gymnastics of mental reservation

The depravity of a large number of priests, supposed beacons of moral rectitude and figures of trust within the community, is now an established fact. These individuals are a few bad apples, some will say. Perhaps many of them did act alone, although the case of the deaf and dumb boy in Italy, abused by sixteen different priests, does raise horrible questions of criminal conspiracy.

Excuses are often couched in clichés, but let’s take the apple analogy a bit further. These bad apples were not just bobbing around in fetid corners of society, independently rotting and infecting their locality. They were bound within the bosom – the strongly hooped barrel, if you will – of the Catholic Church, which went to some trouble to both conceal their crimes and protect them from outside enquiry.

We should not of course be surprised that people of faith resist enquiry, since enquiry is driven by reason and is no respecter of dogma or doctrine. We should also not be surprised that people of faith are capable of duplicity. After all, why should believing in things that are patently untrue make you more honest than your neighbour? If anything, a mind used to deceiving itself may be more likely to deceive others, so complacent has it become over questions of truth.

What is surprising is that there is a special term for the duplicity condoned by the Church: mental reservation. The following is from Michael Nugent’s piece (accessed 16.09.11) on what the Cloyne Report had to say about Bishop Magee:

The lying, deliberately misleading and unethical behaviour exposed in the Cloyne report must be seen alongside the previous revelation that Archbishop Desmond Connell of Dublin was happy to knowingly mislead people by a process that he described as ‘mental reservation’. As Connell explained in 2009, “There may be circumstances in which you can use an ambiguous expression realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be.” Indeed, the Cloyne Report [21.20] refers to two accounts of the same meeting having different end times, and suggests that “It may be that that time difference was also of some assistance in performing the mental gymnastics of mental reservation in the manner of recording the details of the meeting.”

The Irish Catholic Hierarchy of course tells the truth about many things (which is a pretty low hurdle for ethical behaviour), but it is unsafe to assume that telling the truth is their default position, without further corroboration, in cases where it is in their interests to mislead us. Even if they insist that they are not lying or misleading us, they might be lying or misleading us when they say that. Or they might be practicing ‘mental reservation’. Based on their record whenever they have been independently investigated about dealing with child sexual abuse, that is the most prudent default position to take.

In going about our daily business, we expect people to communicate as best they can, and we cut them some slack if they don’t achieve perfect lucidity. Who hasn’t had difficulty saying precisely what they meant to say? We’re all vaguely aware of just how quirky language can be:

• The bishop was drunk.
• The water was drunk.

This pair of sentences (from Thouless and Thouless 2011, p. 16) illustrates the kind of ambiguity that we usually try to avoid or clear up in conversation. We normally engage in acts of communication in good faith (and atheists have no problem with this sense of faith, a word that is itself multiply ambiguous), and so it is surprising that people of faith deliberately seek to create ambiguity. One clue as to why this might be the case is contained in a later remark of Thouless and Thouless (p. 28):

We can only hope to settle a question of fact by using observations or research to discover what is really the case. Then we have to use words to convey the case to other people as clearly and unambiguously as we can.

Ultimately, of course, people of faith have settled questions of fact about their religious beliefs by faith, not by “observations or research”, so why should they worry overmuch about ambiguity?

A gold mermaid sofa

Both the church and the army have a taste for bling. Bishops and dictators will have you believe such extravagance is for the glory of god or the state, but I suspect it is really because self-aggrandizing men (and a few women) subscribe to the sophisticated principle best articulated by the Daily Mash: shiny thing make it better.

One sign of change in Libya is that the gold mermaid sofa which belonged to Colonel Gaddafi's daughter can now be openly and safely ridiculed. Marina Hyde adapts George Orwell's famous observations on the goosestep: "a gold mermaid sofa is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army". She goes on:

Bin Laden understood the terrible threat of people laughing at him, which he deemed a fate worse than death. Death he was ready for, he would often say, but in 2006 he admitted in a taped address: "I fear to be humiliated." As well he might. It is incredibly difficult to fight ridicule.

Especially if that ridicule is combined with philosophical insight, as in the very wonderful Jesus and Mo cartoons.

It may be no coincidence that these two tendencies – of the church towards dogmatism and the army towards militarism – have both generated huge quantities of fear throughout history and led to censorship of all kinds. One has the means of inflicting pain in the here and now while the other promises pain in the supposed hereafter (although the church also used to be quite handy with the thumbscrews, to help you make spiritual progress).

Shiny things tend to be expensive, of course, and in order to pay for them, you either need to do useful, productive work, or be in a position to coerce whole populations into supporting your projects. Both the fear of God and the fear of a bullet work wonders in this regard.

In his contribution to the 2011 Secularism Conference, Nick Cohen stressed the importance of combating fear if we want to maintain our modern, liberal, secular society. Poking fun at gold mermaid sofas is not what he had in mind, but the freedom to do so certainly is.

Random Joke #4

An Arab sheik says to an American tourist, “Mr Smith, your wife, she is beautiful. I have to have her. I will trade you her weight in gold.”

Mr Smith says, “Give me a few days.”

“To think it over?”

“Hell, no. To fatten her up.”