Quotation for the day

In today's smug, self-righteous world of "rights and responsibilities", where we're all supposed to be furiously networking with anybody who might give us a bunk up the greasy pole and providing outstanding service to the almighty customer, whilst caring nothing for the economically "undeserving" poor, here's a deeply unfashionable thought:

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.

James D Miles (after Goethe)

I approve this message.

Bankers challenge serial killers for moral high ground

 It's been a hectic few days, hence the light posting and the time it's taken me to get round to posting a link to this little gem:

Dr Harold Shipman murdered 52 infirm old women in order to steal money from their wills, but bankers, get bonuses. Who is the real criminal, eh??

OK, my post title is a bit unfair - there's a lot more to the argument than this out-of-context piece of rhetoric (clearly intended to parody the more indiscriminate outbursts of furious people ranting on about how everybody who has ever worked for a bank is some kind of psychopathic Nazi looter who strangles kittens for breakfast and deserves to be strung up from the nearest lamp post). As such, the whole post and the extensive comments are very well worth ten minutes of your reading time.

Having said that, as an example of damning yourself with a homeopathically faint dose of praise, this one still takes the entire selection tin of all-butter luxury assorted biscuits.

The broad argument, for which I have some sympathy, is that 'bankers' is an incomplete shorthand for those responsible for the troubles that kicked off in 2008 and are still far from over. Other groups of people certainly dipped their hands in the blood. There were politicians who were supposedly more economically literate than the rest of us, but believed in (and took the credit for) a magic bubble that was supposed to inflate for ever without popping. There were mortgage brokers and estate agents, who shared a vested interest in the bubble with the banks and other loan providers. The credit rating agencies hardly covered themselves in glory. There were buy-to-let investors and ordinary house buyers who bought into the Property Ladder dream of homes as idiot-proof investment vehicles in an endlessly rising market, rather than just boring old places to have a life in. There was a government that systemetically lied about its deficit (ably assisted, it has to be mentioned, by bankers). And plenty more besides.

So there you have it, brethren. We are all guilty. We are all sinners. Do we all not look upon the mote in our brother's eye, yet consider not the beam in out own? I know I do.

This is all very well, up to a point, but you can spread the blame jam so thin that you discover that everybody and nobody is to blame. Many people went along with what was happening and were complicit, by what they did or failed to do, but the law has a concept of "controlling minds" in an organisation, the people with the knowledge and executive power to make things happen. In that sense, the fact that lots of other people went along with what was happening, were greedy or were dupes, doesn't get the controlling minds in the banks off the hook. As TG eloquently puts it in the comments:

A confidence man may prey on the ignorance, stupidity and greed of his marks; that doesn’t make him an honest businessman.

Agree or not, kudos for an interesting blog post that kicked off an intense, passionately-argued debate that I enjoyed reading and which mostly stayed far above tit-for-tat abuse.

Plutocrats ahoy!

Does anyone think the rich won't someday migrate to floating islands?

Asks Scott Adams. Short answer; I think they won't, because:

1. Why on earth (or on water) would the rich migrate when they're already doing very nicely, thank you, right where they are?

2. Say the rich are the first to take to the high seas to escape allegedly 'confiscatory levels of taxation'. At home (using the US example), a lot of those tax dollars fund a colossal military machine that makes damn sure that few people imagine they can mess with US nationals with impunity. Anyone care to guess how afraid pirates and terrorists are going to be of attacking giant undefended cruise liners full of immensely rich tax exiles, ripe for plunder and kidnap? Or do the the plutocrats intend to tax themselves sufficiently to support the immense cost of creating their own private army / navy, so they can continue to sleep sound in their luxury staterooms?

 3. I'll start believing when the mighty "Freedom Ship" starts being more than just mouth and trousers.

I've got immense respect to Scott Adams for having created the superb Dilbert strip and escaped the corporate rat race using his own creative talent, but some of his blog posts are lurching towards the wilder fringes of teapottery.

Be careful what you wish for

Before the last general election, I was one of those people who quite fancied the idea of a hung parliament. I hoped we might end up with this sort of scenario:

Belgium’s lack of government has one huge advantage in the current crisis: No one can pass austerity measures. Having no government may be the best option for Belgium right now, not because the underlying issues are intractable (although they are both intractable and, IMO, lame) but because no one can pressure a non-existent government to reduce deficits.

Jammy Belgians. All we got was this lousy coalition.

Rats.

Dr. Pangloss meets Samuel Beckett

The Fat Man on a Keyboard manages, in less than one sentence, to sum up the most astonishing and depressing feature of contemporary politics, namely 'the extraordinary strength of the ideological belief in the economic consensus in the face of its failure'.

It would be hard to come up with anything more succinct, although the people tasked with coming up with catchy slogans for the current political party conference season might also want to try Voltaire's ironic 'all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds' or Samuel Beckett's 'No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' to urge us forward on our shared journey towards the ultimate fulfilment of the ideologically correct Plan A.

There is still no Plan B.

Why science education matters

I'm looking wistfully at our four chickens and wishing I'd studied harder in science class. Don't get me wrong, I quite like the chickens. They're starting to reliably produce fresh eggs. They're even quite companionable. With their round, staring eyes and jerky, mechanical head movements, they're not the sort of creatures you can get sloppily anthropomorphic about, but they're quite pleasant to be around as they fussily scratch in the dirt, cluck gently and do that comical little run when you throw them scraps to eat. OK, they seem to expel the equivalent of their own weight in bodily waste every couple of days, but nobody's perfect. and, besides, it's good for the roses. But they could be so much more

When Arkhat Abzhanov (who clearly worked very hard in science class) looks at chickens, he sees something far more exciting. He sees a Lost World of genetic possibility. Archimedes was supposed to have said that, given a big enough lever and a place to stand, he could move the whole world. Abzhanov thinks that, given a big enough research grant and some chickens, he could recreate dinosaurs. How cool is that?

Just think, a bit more concentration and it could have been me, elegantly clad in my Blofeld-style Mao suit, sitting in my executive swivel chair, meditatively stroking a chicken and contemplating the day when I will dominate the world with my dinosaur legions. There would be a few minor technical challenges, like attaching frickin' laser beams to their heads, but my loyal henchpeople should be able to sort those out. The one serious problem with my master plan might be one of scale. Apparently the dinos Abzhanov is trying to recreate are of rather sub-T Rex dimensions. In fact, they would be about the same size as .. er ... chickens.

Mind you, if the world domination idea didn't work out I could at least have opened Newport Pagnell's equivalent of Jurassic Park. Given the diminutive size of the Maniraptors, it would have been less of a safari park and more of a petting zoo, but it would have been a start. Although even the petting zoo idea might be challenging if the little critters turned out to be bad-tempered. As Basil Fawlty said of Manuel's pet rat, 'Cuddle this, you'd never play the guitar again!'

Maybe a few legal disclaimers would sort this one out:

All children under the age of fifteen must be accompanied by an adult.You must be at least 1.8 metres tall, and unable to play the guitar, to cuddle the dinosaurs. Dino World (Newport Pagnell) Ltd accepts no liability whatsoever in respect of any loss of limb(s) and/or face suffered as a result of cuddling the dinosaurs.

I'm no lawyer, but it might just work; if not, maybe it's for the best that I'm stuck with boring old genetically unmodified chickens.

A point of view

When Richard Dawkins goes off on one about religion, I usually find myself in agreement, but very occasionally I wish he'd change the record. He's bang on the money when it comes to fundamentalists of the Islamic or Christian variety, patriarchy and the oppression of women, paedophile priests, the wilful blindness of creationists, the bloody history of religious wars and the way that religion fuels the tribalism that keeps such conflicts going.

There are, however a lot of religious people in the world who don't fall into any of these categories; perfectly decent, good people who happen to believe in something I find unbelievable, but who display kindness, integrity, courage and any number of other qualities that would do credit to any human being, regardless of his or her belief system. In the world's more open and liberal societies, most religious people are like this, getting on with their own lives and believing in their own beliefs and allowing other people who live by other belief systems to get on with their own lives unhindered.*

So, for a lot of the time, in a lot of the world, the fact that many people believe in what I'd consider to be weird things, doesn't strike me as a pressing problem. I think, for example, that the happiness of this nation would be better served by a reduction in the number of people without work, or more equal access to a good education, than by a reduction in the number of people sitting in pews listening to self-appointed wise men telling improbable fairy stories on a Sunday.

All quiet on the home front, then? Well, not exactly. Just when I feel like saying, 'good point, well made Professor Dawkins, I totally get it, but can you move on and talk about something else now', up pops some affronted talking head with a killer argument that's supposed to put all these uppity secularists back in their place. And, invariably, the furious rebuttal is so slippery and shoddy and badly thought out, so condescending that I feel that I'm having my intelligence systematically insulted by somebody too lazy to frame a convincing argument and remember why Dawkins (and Hitchens and P Z Myers and all of the other eloquent free thinkers out there) need to keep turning up the volume. If they didn't, their signal would be drowned out by counterblasts of incoherent noise.

The philosopher John Gray made a bit of incoherent noise on Radio 4's A Point of View this morning. Gray's a respected philosopher and J G Ballard, no less, was impressed by the quality of his philosophising. The quality of his talk about the things that "extreme atheists" don't understand was considerably less than stellar, though. There's a short precis of his talk on the relevant BBC web page and the whole things's available in iPlayer for a while.

His talk purports to be a well-considered demolition of the naive misconceptions of the more vocal secularists. All he can actually manage to do, as far as I can see, is to furiously mow down straw men like a runaway combine harvester at a scarecrows' convention. Viz:

Straw men 1 and 2:

'Extreme atheists do not realise that for most people across the globe, religion is not generally about personal belief. Instead, "Practice - ritual, meditation, a way of life - is what counts."'

1. Extreme atheists?

How are they extreme? They don't force anybody to think the way they do. Their only weapons are argument and persuasion. People we call religious extremists, are described as "extreme" because they seek to enforce their beliefs on others, using methods including ostracism, the threat of supernatural punishment,   caste prejudice, intimidation and the murder of people who disrespect their beliefs or even dare to believe different things. At the very least, a person would have to subscribe to a set of beliefs that is untenable without denying a large, coherent body of well-attested evidence before they deserve to be called "extreme". Moderate religious people who don't do any of these things don't get labelled as extremists - why do middle-of-the-road secularists who don't threaten anybody deserve this sort of name-calling?

2. Religion is not about personal belief?

This is Gray's strongest argument, but that's not saying much. Granted, religious observance has plenty of fringe benefits that have nothing to do with supernatural beliefs. For a Christian these might involve a quiet moment in the week, the whole community getting-together-with-friends-and-neighbours vibe, a cup of tea and a hob nob with the vicar after service, singing in the choir, the rota for cleaning the brass rubbings / arranging flowers, bell ringing, putting a penny or two into the charity box, an Easter egg hunt for the kiddies, celebrating the life's rites of passage, etc, etc I'm certain that equivalents exist in other traditions.

I don't believe the stories told in holy books about how the universe was created, or about supernatural events or about supernatural beings and their actions. Where required, however, I'll turn up for carol services, hatch, match and dispatch events, and so on, that happen to take place in a church or equivalent.

Is John Gray really saying that people who label themselves as religious and go to regular devotions are like just me - agnostics who don't believe in the truth of the creed being preached, but just turn up occasionally because it's what people do? If so, that's another dirty secret the Pope's been keeping very quiet.

I don't know, but it's reasonable to assume that for most people who practice some sort of religion it is, at least partly, about belief. If John Gray can cite some research that convincingly suggests that a substantial proportion of people who are motivated enough to regularly attend religious services don't actually care whether the creed being preached is true or not, I'll start to be interested in his point.

Straw man 3:

'Central to religion is the power of myth, which still speaks to the contemporary mind. "The idea that science can enable us to live without myths is one of these silly modern stories."'

I wonder who these scientists are who think we can live without myths? Presumably the ones who have never read a fictional story, have never seen any films other than documentaries, have never seen a TV drama or a play, or a musical, or an opera, have never played a video game and wouldn't have a clue what you were talking about if you mentioned Prometheus or Procrustes or the Trojan Horse. We're all of us, scientists included, surrounded by myths and consume them daily. I can't think of any scientists - "extreme" atheists included, who call for humanity to live without myths.

Gray seems to think of scientists as cartoonish, dessicated Gradgrindian calculating machines,  as emotionless as Science Officer Spock, or a brain in a box, self-absorbed geeks cut off from "normal" society and its culture. And then he's got the brass neck to accuse rationalists of caricaturing the religions they criticize.

There are quite a few scientists who think that people ought to be able to distinguish myth from reality, but that's something else entirely.

Straw Man 4:

'In fact, he argues, science has created its own myth, "chief among them the myth of salvation through science....The idea that humans will rise from the dead may be incredible" he says, "but no more so than the notion that humanity can use science to remake the world"'.

Really? I'm not exactly deafened by a chorus of scientists preaching 'salvation though science'. I hear plenty arguing that knowledge is better than ignorance and that humanity has gained incremental improvements to the quality of human life on the back of scientific discoveries - antibiotics, transistors, that sort of thing. But salvation, ultimate truth and such like are religious concepts that you don't generally hear hear serious scientists claiming they can deliver. If you were desperate to find a scientific/technological prophet, you could cite people like the computer scientist, Ray Kurzweil with his millenarian vision of the "singularity", but he's hardly mainstream.

In reality, most scientists I've read or heard make cautious, testable, evidence-based claims about specifics, leaving the sweeping generalisations about the nature of things to the clergy.

It doesn't take another high-falutin' philosopher to refute John Gray's caricature - I'm quite happy to leave it to comedian Dara O'Brian to finish off this straw man. People who come up with the auld 'well science doesn't know everything", as if scientists had ever claimed such a thing, get on Dara's nerves because:

Well, science knows it doesn't know everything, otherwise it'd stop... Just 'cos science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.

Just when you find yourself about to say 'Dawkins! Leave it! 'He's not worth it!' up pops somebody like John Gray and makes you remember that he's not just there to speak up against the crazies in the world's unfortunate Islamic Republics or the Tea-Partying Bible-Belt of the USA. He's also there to remind us that some of our own respected talking heads and public intellectuals need to raise their game and sharpen up their arguments, rather than clogging up the public's ears with this sort of chicken shit for the soul.

 * With a few exceptions.