Eats shoots - and leaves

Prone as I am to indulge myself in over-punctuation, I have never felt able to become a signed-up member of the tribe of Lynne Truss, perhaps feeling that if written language is to be purged of inexactitude it requires, not just the application of punctuation marks in a far stricter fashion than ever bothered 'correct' writers in the eighteenth century, but the wilful re-spelling of many common words to ensure that the same one cannot mean both 'departs' and those green things hanging on plants.

So whilst I agree 'Eats shoots and leaves' means something quite different from 'Eats, shoots and leaves', I do not think the latter totally unambiguous and the dash in my title attempts, not entirely securely, to establish 'leaves' as a verb and not as a noun in an after-thought.

But, to get to the point, yesterday saw the announcement in one day of two pieces of momentous economic news.

The first was that a new record for the sale price of a work of art at auction had been established when Christie's sold Francis Bacon's triptych of Lucien Freud for £83 million - it hardly matters what the exact figure was. That was a lesser price than the recent private sale of Cezanne's Card Players, but, hey, it's a big number and a record, so what does it matter.

It is a further tribute to the power of language to introduce unintended interpretations that I have never been able to believe entirely in the achievements of anyone called Bacon. Perhaps it is the unfortunate meaning of a type of pig meat that does it, but I think actually it is the fact that some people persist in telling us, against all sense, that a Bacon wrote all the plays of William Shakespeare.

Francis Bacon

Nor have I ever been able to rid myself of the idea that the numerous modern members of the  tribe of Freud (including that rather dubious banker who inhabits some ill-defined circle of the British government) have been called into existence solely to provide case studies of the ideas of their illustrious Viennese progenitor.

However that may, or, more likely, may not, be, (see how the commas breed like rabbits - someone should cull them before they infect serious writing) we have a new record and an 'art market expert' (the art market, like Formula One, seems to have a gravitational attraction for confident women) was on hand to tell us that the sale demonstrated that art had become 'recession proof', by which she presumably meant just that there were now sufficient people with sufficient personal fortunes chasing a sufficiently limited supply of assets.

The other piece of news came from the graver source of the Governor of the Bank of England, who told us that the UK economic recovery had now, officially, 'taken hold' and that one no longer needed to be a certified optimist to regard the metaphorical economic glass as 'half-full'.

Time was, not so long ago, when such announcements were made by elected politicians rather than out-sourced to a foreign head-hunted head of a quasi-independent agency. Time past - or passed, but still these metaphors have to be chosen with care before being offered ceremonially to the attending multitudes.

Not so long ago one politician was consigned to life-time ridicule for affecting to identify the 'green shoots' of economic recovery prematurely. As if he were a country parson writing to The Times in February claiming to have heard the First Cuckoo of Spring when all he had actually heard was a wood pigeon. 

Back then the multitude were true believers in the rite (and right) of recovery and it was a grave offence for the high priest to offer a false augury to the people. Now few care, and the fate of a pair of modern artists whose work the populace actually finds rebarbative (never mind the art, think of the money) flutters more brain cells.

It is not so much that Dawkins has made atheists of us all as that, whilst the rich, with their yachts and bacon, have become 'recession-proof', most other people have become 'recovery-proof' in the sure and certain knowledge that, even if more people are making money again (or perhaps just the same people are making more money), it's not going to include them.

A yacht made of bacon - designed by Zaha Hadid

Not fit for purpose

According to one expert in evolution and development, Professor Georgy Koentges of Warwick University, the central problem is the impossibility of defining "fitness", whether in organisms, organs, cells, genes or even gene regulatory DNA regions. As a result, he sees both Dawkins and Wilson as "straw men" in this debate.

"Dawkins has a lot of unnecessary rhetoric in his review," he said this weekend. "He is usually on the spot, but it has to be said that some of his arguments are based on older models of calculating fitness. The difficulty is in assigning what Darwin called 'fitness' to a particular genetic feature. They are trying to set basic fitness conditions which they believe work over very long periods of time."

This is a fantasy. There is no such thing as a good or bad gene. It doesn't work that simply. Genes are used and re-used in different contexts, each of which might have a different overall fitness value for a given organism or a group."

In later life Darwin said he wished he had called his theory natural preservation, rather than selection, but even the preservation of certain genes down the ages is no proof that they are good.

"To use a simple human example, someone with the perfect set of genes for walking with two legs might die early because they jump off a cliff," said Koentges.

"Equally, there are many things that survive in biology for no beneficial reason, like male nipples. They are 'bystanders' of other important processes. They result from underlying genetic processes that in the opposite sex are absolutely essential for our survival as mammals."

Like other scientists commenting on this "tit-for-tat" dispute between Wilson and Dawkins, Koentges also detects the old struggle between those who focus purely on the gene and those who see it as "an anthropological insult to our own feeling of self-belief".

"The field has moved on, and so should we all," says Koentges.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jun/24/battle-of-the-professors

Getting it straight

Shock Horror!

Does Richard Dawkins exist?

Following the non-divine revelation that Richard Dawkins cannot recite the full title of Darwin's Origin of Species whilst standing on his left leg and rubbing his stomach (or even from a sedentary position), research has revealed that 96 per cent of those who claim to believe in the scientific method and scientific, non-religious explanations of the universe read their horoscopes at least once a month.

Commenting that non-believers clearly do not know what they believe, the Archbishop of Canterbury has denounced the 'monstrous regiment of sham rationalists', the waste of divine resources, and called for the 'dismantling of the tyrannical apparatus of the scientific state', the expulsion of 'so-called scientists' from the House of Lords, the compulsory baptism of all infants, and a change in the judicial rubric from 'beyond reasonable doubt' to 'beyond divine displeasure'.

Professor Dawkins was unavailable for comment.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation for the Public Understanding of Insignificant Facts about Religious Experience has discovered that a truly shocking number of Professing Christians (we are all Professors now, whether we will or no - at least when sat down before the Office of the Unholy Inquisition) is unable to distinguish between Beelzebub and Lucifer, and, worse still, cannot name the first book of the New Testament. Had they, like me, been sent by their parents to Sunday school for a few years in their impressionable youth (Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man' Baltasar.) they might have learnt the little rhyme 'Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Acts and Romans follow on,' and thus been assured of eternal salvation (or at least the eternal ministrations of Professor Dawkins) from then on.


Lucifer - the bearer of light

Fear not! I have faith the miraculous Mr Gove is on the case. Perhaps Addison and Steele would have done it better. In his old age, one of the favourite books of Edward Lear, who knew a thing or two about nonsense, was Addison and Steele's Spectator.

God in a box

Some thoughts on this topic have long been sinking to the bottom of my mental pending tray, but they were brought to the surface when I awoke on Saturday morning to a BBC World Service programme on science in the Vatican in which Professor Richard Dawkins was briefly interviewed. He summarised his objections to religion with the assertions that bad deeds have often been perpetrated in the name of religion (suicide bombers for example); that, although we did not know and perhaps could not know what happened in the first pica second after the moment of creation, it did not help our understanding to speculate about a personal god who answered our individual prayers (probably the white beard was not mentioned but we were in that territory); and that the proper, the profound reaction to the world in which we live was a sense of wonder.

Professor Dawkins ...

That reinforced my impression of Professor Dawkins as a man with no real curiosity about the nature of religious experience, an impoverished conception of art, and probably little understanding of political conflict and social organisation. That triple impression may have deterred me from giving Professor Dawkins’s ideas the attention they deserve, but, in the true spirit of the internet, I do not intend to let ignorance stand in the way of opinion.

... and acquaintance

To take the points in different order, I did once see a television programme with Professor Dawkins in discussion with like-minded people where he was at pains to explain that his atheistic belief (I think he actually, with intellectual nicety, characterised himself as an extreme agnostic) did not to any degree prevent him from appreciating religious art. He was, he said, capable of luxuriating in (perhaps it was wondering at, wonder seems to play a prominent role in his aesthetic and moral view) the beauty of a religious painting or piece of music (the B minor mass perhaps) without paying any attention to its inherent or explicit religious meaning – and then afterwards he came out of that reverie back to the real world, the world of evidence based understanding.

That idea of art is perhaps not so immediately seen as inadequate as it would have been in the time of F R Leavis, who formed (as some may guess, looking at the literary references on this blog) my approach to literature and art, but it plainly comes close to ‘art for art’s sake’, which is equally out of modern fashion, or, more interestingly, aligns Professor Dawkins somewhat with the judge in the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who, thinking apparently that such a book might be all very well in the gentleman’s library or club, asked the members of the jury to consider whether they would be content to have their ‘wives or servants’ come across it.

Would you, Professor Dawkins, be content for your wife (I ask entirely hypothetically: I do not even know whether the Professor is married) to listen to the B minor mass, or your servants (college servants perhaps)? Well perhaps not they, but the lumpen mass that you find so depressingly prone to believe in the gentleman with the long white beard – they might be persuaded to religious belief by it, or have their belief confirmed, as I am sure many have.

I used to find it rather cheap and facile to compare ‘militant atheists’ with religious enthusiasts, but I was struck forcibly in the television discussion by how closely Professor Dawkins and his colleagues resembled the enforcers of religious orthodoxy in both manner and apparent motivation: these god-believing people were, to Professor Dawkins, strangely and pathetically in error; both for their own good and for the good of society they must be made to recant.

It becomes a social project. The tools of the inquisition are not to hand, but there is the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science whose 'mission ... is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering' and those buses proclaiming ‘There is, probably, no god’, despite the scrupulous qualifier, are as importunate and environmentally dreary as any wayside pulpit, and as hopelessly ineffective.



Looking for the evidence

The picture heading the official website is strangely reminiscent of popular and proselytising religious imagery, eyes cast aloft to the clouds, if not the heavens. One is almost tempted, an an act of cyber graffiti, to add the flowing white beard.

It is strange that anyone who conceives they have a social or intellectual duty to argue against religious belief should concentrate on the question, does god exist? To someone engaged in religious inquiry that must appear almost the last question that matters – if it matters at all. Isn’t that what all the fuss was about with the former Bishop of Durham?

The concerns of religious enquiry must be, ‘What is the true nature of existence?’; ‘How do I as an individual relate to it?’ and ‘How should one conduct one’s life to enhance that relationship?’

As the central character in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead puts it, if one conceives of god as the author of existence, what does it mean to ask, does god exist? He also remarks that almost nothing of value can be said about belief in god from a defensive position. I take him to mean that religious enquiry is a quest for understanding of something that is never likely to be directly grasped. Yet to ask whether ‘god exists’ one must posit a distinct conception, and whatever one chooses is likely to be inadequate or illogical so that the answer to the question whether it exists will almost certainly be, no. That, however, hardly exhausts the question, and, in any case, people embarked on Professor Dawkins’s enterprise seldom bother to engage with belief in its most artistically or intellectually accomplished forms. The most publicised recent debate on religion (available through the Dawkins Foundation website) was held between Christopher Hitchens and none other than that deep religious thinker Tony Blair. I rest my case.

The charge remains that some terrible things have been done in the name of religion. Professor Dawkins conceded only that some people ‘may’ have done good in the name of religion. Such a concession seems grudging to the point of stupidity. Inevitably someone motivated by their religious belief quietly to tend the sick or the poor will get less attention than the suicide bomber killing by the dozen, but to entertain the possibility that none such exist – well, you may think that, Professor, but no sensible man could possibly believe it.

There is research to show that suicide bombers are usually not particularly religiously devout, even in Islamic conflicts, and of course it was the avowedly non-religious Tamil Tigers who first developed suicide bombing.

Professor Dawkins is, I think, a little disingenuous in blaming religious belief, of itself, for all the horrors committed in its name. Until historically recently (and to some extent even now) all societies and states have had an avowedly religious affiliation, and it is organised human societies that have a propensity to barbarism, oppression and aggression. Modern secular states scarcely have a better record. Randolph Bourne, the early twentieth-century American writer, about whom I have posted before, has much of interest to say on that subject in War is the health of the state.

So, Professor Dawkins leaves me more puzzled than persuaded, and I find it a relief that his ideas and programme receive less attention than a while ago. I wonder what Richard Steele of the eighteenth-century Tatler and those polite gentlemen in the coffee house would have made of it.