By JAMES DAO - April 26, 2011
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — In the military, there are more than 3,000 chaplains who minister to the spiritual and emotional needs of active duty troops, regardless of their faiths. The vast majority are Christians, a few are Jews or Muslims, one is a Buddhist. A Hindu, possibly even a Wiccan may join their ranks soon.
But an atheist?
Strange as it sounds, groups representing atheists and secular humanists are pushing for the appointment of one of their own to the chaplaincy, hoping to give voice to what they say is a large — and largely underground — population of nonbelievers in the military.
Joining the chaplain corps is part of a broader campaign by atheists to win official acceptance in the military. Such recognition would make it easier for them to raise money and meet on military bases. It would help ensure that chaplains, religious or atheist, would distribute their literature, advertise their events and advocate for them with commanders.
But winning the appointment of an atheist chaplain will require support from senior chaplains, a tall order. Many chaplains are skeptical: Do atheists belong to a “faith group,” a requirement for a chaplain candidate? Can they provide support to religious troops of all faiths, a fundamental responsibility for chaplains?
Jason Torpy, a former Army captain who is president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, said humanist chaplains would do everything religious chaplains do, including counsel troops and help them follow their faiths. But just as a Protestant chaplain would not preside over a Catholic service, a humanist might not lead a religious ceremony, though he might help organize it.
“Humanism fills the same role for atheists that Christianity does for Christians and Judaism does for Jews,” Mr. Torpy said in an interview. “It answers questions of ultimate concern; it directs our values.”
Mr. Torpy has asked to meet the chiefs of chaplains for each of the armed forces, which have their own corps, to discuss his proposal. The chiefs have yet to comment.
At the same time, an atheist group at Fort Bragg called Military Atheists and Secular Humanists, or MASH, has asked the Army to appoint an atheist lay leader at the base. A new MASH chapter at Fort Campbell, Ky., is planning to do the same as are atheists at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.
Such lay leaders can lead “services” in lieu of chaplains and have access to meeting rooms, including chapels.
Chaplains at Fort Bragg near here have seemed open to the idea, if somewhat perplexed by it.
“You’re not a faith group; you’re a lack-of-faith group,” First Lt. Samantha Nicoll, an active atheist at Fort Bragg, recalled a chaplain friend’s saying about the idea. “But I said, ‘What else is there for us?’ ”
Atheist leaders acknowledge the seeming contradiction of nonbelievers seeking to become chaplains or receive recognition from the chaplain corps. But they say they believe the imprimatur of the chaplaincy will embolden atheists who worry about being ostracized for their worldviews.
Defense Department statistics show that about 9,400 of the nation’s 1.4 million active-duty military personnel identify themselves as atheists or agnostics, making them a larger subpopulation than Jews, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists in the military.
But atheist leaders say those numbers are an undercount because, they believe, there are many nonbelievers among the 285,000 service members who claim no religious preference on military surveys. Many chaplains dispute that interpretation, and say that most people in that group are religious, just not strongly so.
Those same statistics show that Christians represent about one million, or 70 percent, of all active-duty troops. They are even more dominant among the chaplain corps: about 90 percent of the 3,045 active duty chaplains are Christians, most of them Protestants.
Military atheist leaders say that although proselytizing by chaplains is forbidden, Christian beliefs pervade military culture, creating subtle pressures on non-Christians to convert.
As an example, they cite the Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, created to help soldiers handle stress and prevent suicide. The program requires soldiers to complete surveys assessing emotional, social, family and spiritual well-being. Based on their answers, some soldiers are asked to take “resiliency” training.
Atheists say the survey and training are rife with religious code words that suggest a deity or afterlife. The Army counters that the program is intended to determine whether a soldier has “a strong set of beliefs, principles or values” that can sustain him through adversity — and not to gauge religiosity.
Atheist and secular humanist groups in the military are hardly new. But at some bases, they have become better organized and more vocal in recent years.
Last fall, atheists at Fort Bragg objected to an event by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association called Rock the Fort. The base command, at the urging of its chaplains, provided some money and manpower for the event as well as a choice location on the post’s parade grounds.
A communication sergeant, Justin Griffith, argued that the event was an Army-sponsored platform for the Graham organization to recruit converts. The post commander, Col. Stephen J. Sicinski, denied that, saying soldiers were not pressured to attend. In a recent interview, the colonel said Rock the Fort was intended to boost morale as well as “bolster the faith.”
In response, Sergeant Griffith has recruited a star lineup of atheist musicians and speakers, including the writer Richard Dawkins, to headline a secular event, possibly for the fall. He calls it Rock Beyond Belief and has asked Colonel Sicinski to provide resources similar to what he gave Rock the Fort.
Colonel Sicinski has refused, saying the event will not draw enough people to justify using the parade grounds and that money from religious tithes, which helped finance Rock the Fort, cannot be spent on it. Sergeant Griffith has appealed.
A high school dropout raised near Dallas, Sergeant Griffith, 28, was a passionate Christian and creationist until his teens. Now his dog tags list his religious preference as atheist, and he is pushing to create MASH chapters on as many bases as possible.
He is also giving thought to becoming a chaplain himself, though it would take years: He would have to earn a graduate degree in theology and then be commissioned an officer. He would also need the endorsement of “a qualified religious organization,” a role Mr. Torpy’s organization is seeking to play.
Sergeant Griffith said he believed there were already atheist chaplains in the military — just not open ones.
“I support the idea that religious soldiers need support from religious chaplains,” he said. “But there has to be a line between supporting religious soldiers and promoting religion.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/us/27atheists.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Third Annual Bay Area Social Issues Documentary Film Contest (SI DocFest)
The Third Annual Bay Area Social Issues Documentary Film Contest (SI DocFest) will hold screenings and award ceremony at the Camera 12 Cinemas in downtown San Jose on Saturday, April 30th, 2011 from 2 to 6 pm. Tickets are $10, and can be purchased online or at the Camera 12 box office.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon - The perverse allure of a damaged woman.
By Johann Hari - Nov. 2009 - http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/
yn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?
Two new biographies of Rand—Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller—try to puzzle out this question, showing how her arguments found an echo in the darkest corners of American political life.* But the books work best, for me, on a level I didn't expect. They are thrilling psychological portraits of a horribly damaged woman who deserves the one thing she spent her life raging against: compassion.
Alisa Rosenbaum (her original name) was born in the icy winter of czarism, not long after the failed 1905 revolution ripped through her home city of St. Petersburg. Her father was a self-made Jewish pharmacist, while her mother was an aristocratic dilettante who loathed her three daughters. She would tell them she never wanted children, and she kept them only out of duty. Alisa became a surly, friendless child. In elementary school, her class was asked to write an essay about why being a child was a joyous thing. She instead wrote "a scathing denunciation of childhood," headed with a quote from Pascal: "I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise."
But the Rosenbaums' domestic tensions were dwarfed by the conflicts raging outside. The worst anti-Jewish violence since the Middle Ages was brewing, and the family was terrified of being killed by the mobs—but it was the Bolsheviks who struck at them first. After the 1917 revolutions, her father's pharmacy was seized "in the name of the people." For Alisa, who had grown up surrounded by servants and nannies, the Communists seemed at last to be the face of the masses, a terrifying robbing horde. In a country where 5 million people died of starvation in just two years, the Rosenbaums went hungry. Her father tried to set up another business, but after it too was seized, he declared himself to be "on strike."
The Rosenbaums knew their angry, outspoken daughter would not survive under the Bolsheviks for long, so they arranged to smuggle her out to their relatives in America. Just before her 21st birthday, she said goodbye to her country and her family for the last time. She was determined to live in the America she had seen in the silent movies—the America of skyscrapers and riches and freedom. She renamed herself Ayn Rand, a name she thought had the hardness and purity of a Hollywood starlet.
She headed for Hollywood, where she set out to write stories that expressed her philosophy—a body of thought she said was the polar opposite of communism. She announced that the world was divided between a small minority of Supermen who are productive and "the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent" who, like the Leninists, try to feed off them. He is "mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned." It is evil to show kindness to these "lice": The "only virtue" is "selfishness."
She meant it. Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." She called him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy," shimmering with "immense, explicit egotism." Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough."
It's not hard to see this as a kind of political post-traumatic stress disorder. Rand believed the Bolshevik lie that they represented the people, so she wanted to strike back at them—through theft and murder. In a nasty irony, she was copying their tactics. She started to write her first novel, We the Living (1936), and in the early drafts her central character—a crude proxy for Rand herself—says to a Bolshevik: "I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one's right, one shouldn't wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them."
She poured these beliefs into a series of deeply odd novels. She takes the flabby staples of romantic fiction and peppers them with political ravings and rapes for the audience to cheer on. All have the same core message: Anything that pleases the Superman's ego is good; anything that blocks it is bad. In The Fountainhead, published in 1943, a heroic architect called Howard Roark designs a housing project for the poor—not out of compassion but because he wants to build something mighty. When his plans are slightly altered, he blows up the housing project, saying the purity of his vision has been contaminated by evil government bureaucrats. He orders the jury to acquit him, saying: "The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off!"
For her longest novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957), Rand returned to a moment from her childhood. Just as her father once went on strike to protest against Bolshevism, she imagined the super-rich in America going on strike against progressive taxation—and said the United States would swiftly regress to an apocalyptic hellhole if the Donald Trumps and Ted Turners ceased their toil. The abandoned masses are described variously as "savages," "refuse," "inanimate objects," and "imitations of living beings," picking through rubbish. One of the strikers deliberately causes a train crash, and Rand makes it clear she thinks the murder victims deserved it, describing in horror how they all supported the higher taxes that made the attack necessary.
Her heroes are a cocktail of extreme self-love and extreme self-pity: They insist they need no one, yet they spend all their time fuming that the masses don't bow down before their manifest superiority.
As her books became mega-sellers, Rand surrounded herself with a tightly policed cult of young people who believed she had found the One Objective Truth about the world. They were required to memorize her novels and slapped down as "imbecilic" and "anti-life" by Rand if they asked questions. One student said: "There was a right kind of music, a right kind of art, a right kind of interior design, a right kind of dancing. There were wrong books which we should not buy."
Rand had become addicted to amphetamines while writing The Fountainhead, and her natural paranoia and aggression were becoming more extreme as they pumped though her veins. Anybody in her circle who disagreed with her was subjected to a show trial in front of the whole group in which they would be required to repent or face expulsion. Her secretary, Barbara Weiss, said: "I came to look on her as a killer of people." The workings of her cult exposed the hollowness of Rand's claims to venerate free thinking and individualism. Her message was, think freely, as long as it leads you into total agreement with me.
In the end, Rand was destroyed by her own dogmas. She fell in love with a young follower called Nathaniel Branden and had a decades-long affair with him. He became the cult's No. 2, and she named him as her "intellectual heir"—until he admitted he had fallen in love with a 23-year-old woman. As Burns explains, Rand's philosophy "taught that sex was never physical; it was always inspired by a deeper recognition of shared values, a sense that the other embodied the highest human achievement." So to be sexually rejected by Branden meant he was rejecting her ideas, her philosophy, her entire person. She screamed: "You have rejected me? You have dared to reject me? Me, your highest value?"
She never really recovered. We all become weak at some point in our lives, so a thinker who despises weakness will end up despising herself. In her 70s Rand found herself dying of lung cancer, after insisting that her followers smoke because it symbolized "man's victory over fire" and the studies showing it caused lung cancer were Communist propaganda. By then she had driven almost everyone away. In 1982, she died alone in her apartment with only a hired nurse at her side. If her philosophy is right—if the only human relationships worth having are based on the exchange of dollars—this was a happy and victorious death. Did even she believe it in the end?
Rand was broken by the Bolsheviks as a girl, and she never left their bootprint behind. She believed her philosophy was Bolshevism's opposite, when in reality it was its twin. Both she and the Soviets insisted a small revolutionary elite in possession of absolute rationality must seize power and impose its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass. The only difference was that Lenin thought the parasites to be stomped on were the rich, while Rand thought they were the poor.
I don't find it hard to understand why this happened to Rand: I feel sympathy for her, even as I know she would have spat it back into my face. What I do find incomprehensible is that there are people—large numbers of people—who see her writing not as psychopathy but as philosophy, and urge us to follow her. Why? What in American culture did she drill into? Unfortunately, neither of these equally thorough, readable books can offer much of an answer to this, the only great question about her.
Rand expresses, with a certain pithy crudeness, an instinct that courses through us all sometimes: I'm the only one who matters! I'm not going to care about any of you any more! She then absolutizes it in an amphetamine Benzedrine-charged reductio ad absurdum by insisting it is the only feeling worth entertaining, ever.
This urge exists everywhere, but why is it supercharged on the American right, where Rand is regarded as something more than a bad, bizarre joke? In a country where almost everyone believes—wrongly, on the whole—that they are self-made, perhaps it is easier to have contempt for people who didn't make much of themselves. And Rand taps into something deeper still. The founding myth of America is that the nation was built out of nothing, using only reason and willpower. Rand applies this myth to the individual American: You made yourself. You need nobody and nothing except your reason to rise and dominate. You can be America, in one body, in one mind.
She said the United States should be a "democracy of superiors only," with superiority defined by being rich. Well, we got it. As the health care crisis has shown, today, the rich have the real power: The vote that matters is expressed with a checkbook and a lobbyist. We get to vote only for the candidates they have pre-funded and receive the legislation they have preapproved. It's useful—if daunting—to know that there is a substantial slice of the American public who believe this is not a problem to be put right, but morally admirable.
We all live every day with the victory of this fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls. Alan Greenspan was one of her strongest cult followers and even invited her to the Oval Office to witness his swearing-in when he joined the Ford administration. You can see how he carried this philosophy into the 1990s: Why should the Supermen of Wall Street be regulated to protected the lice of Main Street?
The figure Ayn Rand most resembles in American life is L. Ron Hubbard, another crazed, pitiable charlatan who used trashy potboilers to whip up a cult. Unfortunately, Rand's cult isn't confined to Tom Cruise and a rash of Hollywood dimwits. No, its ideas and its impulses have, by drilling into the basest human instincts, captured one of America's major political parties.
Source: http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/
yn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?
Two new biographies of Rand—Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller—try to puzzle out this question, showing how her arguments found an echo in the darkest corners of American political life.* But the books work best, for me, on a level I didn't expect. They are thrilling psychological portraits of a horribly damaged woman who deserves the one thing she spent her life raging against: compassion.
Alisa Rosenbaum (her original name) was born in the icy winter of czarism, not long after the failed 1905 revolution ripped through her home city of St. Petersburg. Her father was a self-made Jewish pharmacist, while her mother was an aristocratic dilettante who loathed her three daughters. She would tell them she never wanted children, and she kept them only out of duty. Alisa became a surly, friendless child. In elementary school, her class was asked to write an essay about why being a child was a joyous thing. She instead wrote "a scathing denunciation of childhood," headed with a quote from Pascal: "I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise."
But the Rosenbaums' domestic tensions were dwarfed by the conflicts raging outside. The worst anti-Jewish violence since the Middle Ages was brewing, and the family was terrified of being killed by the mobs—but it was the Bolsheviks who struck at them first. After the 1917 revolutions, her father's pharmacy was seized "in the name of the people." For Alisa, who had grown up surrounded by servants and nannies, the Communists seemed at last to be the face of the masses, a terrifying robbing horde. In a country where 5 million people died of starvation in just two years, the Rosenbaums went hungry. Her father tried to set up another business, but after it too was seized, he declared himself to be "on strike."
The Rosenbaums knew their angry, outspoken daughter would not survive under the Bolsheviks for long, so they arranged to smuggle her out to their relatives in America. Just before her 21st birthday, she said goodbye to her country and her family for the last time. She was determined to live in the America she had seen in the silent movies—the America of skyscrapers and riches and freedom. She renamed herself Ayn Rand, a name she thought had the hardness and purity of a Hollywood starlet.
She headed for Hollywood, where she set out to write stories that expressed her philosophy—a body of thought she said was the polar opposite of communism. She announced that the world was divided between a small minority of Supermen who are productive and "the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent" who, like the Leninists, try to feed off them. He is "mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned." It is evil to show kindness to these "lice": The "only virtue" is "selfishness."
She meant it. Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." She called him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy," shimmering with "immense, explicit egotism." Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough."
It's not hard to see this as a kind of political post-traumatic stress disorder. Rand believed the Bolshevik lie that they represented the people, so she wanted to strike back at them—through theft and murder. In a nasty irony, she was copying their tactics. She started to write her first novel, We the Living (1936), and in the early drafts her central character—a crude proxy for Rand herself—says to a Bolshevik: "I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one's right, one shouldn't wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them."
She poured these beliefs into a series of deeply odd novels. She takes the flabby staples of romantic fiction and peppers them with political ravings and rapes for the audience to cheer on. All have the same core message: Anything that pleases the Superman's ego is good; anything that blocks it is bad. In The Fountainhead, published in 1943, a heroic architect called Howard Roark designs a housing project for the poor—not out of compassion but because he wants to build something mighty. When his plans are slightly altered, he blows up the housing project, saying the purity of his vision has been contaminated by evil government bureaucrats. He orders the jury to acquit him, saying: "The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off!"
For her longest novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957), Rand returned to a moment from her childhood. Just as her father once went on strike to protest against Bolshevism, she imagined the super-rich in America going on strike against progressive taxation—and said the United States would swiftly regress to an apocalyptic hellhole if the Donald Trumps and Ted Turners ceased their toil. The abandoned masses are described variously as "savages," "refuse," "inanimate objects," and "imitations of living beings," picking through rubbish. One of the strikers deliberately causes a train crash, and Rand makes it clear she thinks the murder victims deserved it, describing in horror how they all supported the higher taxes that made the attack necessary.
Her heroes are a cocktail of extreme self-love and extreme self-pity: They insist they need no one, yet they spend all their time fuming that the masses don't bow down before their manifest superiority.
As her books became mega-sellers, Rand surrounded herself with a tightly policed cult of young people who believed she had found the One Objective Truth about the world. They were required to memorize her novels and slapped down as "imbecilic" and "anti-life" by Rand if they asked questions. One student said: "There was a right kind of music, a right kind of art, a right kind of interior design, a right kind of dancing. There were wrong books which we should not buy."
Rand had become addicted to amphetamines while writing The Fountainhead, and her natural paranoia and aggression were becoming more extreme as they pumped though her veins. Anybody in her circle who disagreed with her was subjected to a show trial in front of the whole group in which they would be required to repent or face expulsion. Her secretary, Barbara Weiss, said: "I came to look on her as a killer of people." The workings of her cult exposed the hollowness of Rand's claims to venerate free thinking and individualism. Her message was, think freely, as long as it leads you into total agreement with me.
In the end, Rand was destroyed by her own dogmas. She fell in love with a young follower called Nathaniel Branden and had a decades-long affair with him. He became the cult's No. 2, and she named him as her "intellectual heir"—until he admitted he had fallen in love with a 23-year-old woman. As Burns explains, Rand's philosophy "taught that sex was never physical; it was always inspired by a deeper recognition of shared values, a sense that the other embodied the highest human achievement." So to be sexually rejected by Branden meant he was rejecting her ideas, her philosophy, her entire person. She screamed: "You have rejected me? You have dared to reject me? Me, your highest value?"
She never really recovered. We all become weak at some point in our lives, so a thinker who despises weakness will end up despising herself. In her 70s Rand found herself dying of lung cancer, after insisting that her followers smoke because it symbolized "man's victory over fire" and the studies showing it caused lung cancer were Communist propaganda. By then she had driven almost everyone away. In 1982, she died alone in her apartment with only a hired nurse at her side. If her philosophy is right—if the only human relationships worth having are based on the exchange of dollars—this was a happy and victorious death. Did even she believe it in the end?
Rand was broken by the Bolsheviks as a girl, and she never left their bootprint behind. She believed her philosophy was Bolshevism's opposite, when in reality it was its twin. Both she and the Soviets insisted a small revolutionary elite in possession of absolute rationality must seize power and impose its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass. The only difference was that Lenin thought the parasites to be stomped on were the rich, while Rand thought they were the poor.
I don't find it hard to understand why this happened to Rand: I feel sympathy for her, even as I know she would have spat it back into my face. What I do find incomprehensible is that there are people—large numbers of people—who see her writing not as psychopathy but as philosophy, and urge us to follow her. Why? What in American culture did she drill into? Unfortunately, neither of these equally thorough, readable books can offer much of an answer to this, the only great question about her.
Rand expresses, with a certain pithy crudeness, an instinct that courses through us all sometimes: I'm the only one who matters! I'm not going to care about any of you any more! She then absolutizes it in an amphetamine Benzedrine-charged reductio ad absurdum by insisting it is the only feeling worth entertaining, ever.
This urge exists everywhere, but why is it supercharged on the American right, where Rand is regarded as something more than a bad, bizarre joke? In a country where almost everyone believes—wrongly, on the whole—that they are self-made, perhaps it is easier to have contempt for people who didn't make much of themselves. And Rand taps into something deeper still. The founding myth of America is that the nation was built out of nothing, using only reason and willpower. Rand applies this myth to the individual American: You made yourself. You need nobody and nothing except your reason to rise and dominate. You can be America, in one body, in one mind.
She said the United States should be a "democracy of superiors only," with superiority defined by being rich. Well, we got it. As the health care crisis has shown, today, the rich have the real power: The vote that matters is expressed with a checkbook and a lobbyist. We get to vote only for the candidates they have pre-funded and receive the legislation they have preapproved. It's useful—if daunting—to know that there is a substantial slice of the American public who believe this is not a problem to be put right, but morally admirable.
We all live every day with the victory of this fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls. Alan Greenspan was one of her strongest cult followers and even invited her to the Oval Office to witness his swearing-in when he joined the Ford administration. You can see how he carried this philosophy into the 1990s: Why should the Supermen of Wall Street be regulated to protected the lice of Main Street?
The figure Ayn Rand most resembles in American life is L. Ron Hubbard, another crazed, pitiable charlatan who used trashy potboilers to whip up a cult. Unfortunately, Rand's cult isn't confined to Tom Cruise and a rash of Hollywood dimwits. No, its ideas and its impulses have, by drilling into the basest human instincts, captured one of America's major political parties.
Source: http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
A skeptical perspective on the US war on Libya
The current intervention in Libya is scripted as being a defense of human rights and human lives. Obama has said that he refuses “to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.” Skeptics like me wonder if this “values” laden narrative is not just Orwellian language for defending American “interests,” the norm in American foreign policy. This skepticism is based on the following:
First, the question that immediately comes to mind is would the United States do the same thing if the Saudi Arabian government had attacked rebels trying to overthrow its government? Somehow I find this hard to imagine. Even now gross human rights violations are committed in Saudi Arabia. I wonder why Obama finds them more acceptable than what is going on in Libya.
After the Iranian elections a couple of years ago, demonstrators who were being slaughtered by the Iranian government asked for US help to stop the Iranian government from the deadly assault it carried out against its citizens. The same president Obama said back then that he was troubled by the violence, but stressed that it was up to the Iranian people to choose their leadership. Why was that different?
Second, what is very disturbing is that the opposition to Gaddafi is always called the “rebels.” There is no face to them except for the scruffy, disorganized, chaotic bunch of men that are shown on TV. Who are these people? What is their ideology and vision for Libya? They want to be in charge, but what do they represent? Are they better than Gaddafi and, if so, how?
This immense effort launched by the US and UN to arm, support, and advise these “rebels” with ambiguous and unknown views and values is not only dangerous, but supports the skepticism about what is really behind this. Could it be that the West wants to change the map of the Middle East for the 21st century, much like colonial powers did in the 20th century? Could it be that we are searching for a new and younger generation of dictators that would uphold our interests in that region of the world?
Third, how many other countries are we going to strike militarily? Would Syria be next? How about Yemen, Bahrain, or Jordan? How about the Ivory Coast, Somalia, or Congo? What about North Korea?
Fourth, there is no political infrastructure in Libya that would allow a new democratic government to be established if Gaddafi is overthrown. What does this mean in terms of US and NATO involvement after Gaddafi goes?
After Afghanistan was invaded, NATO designed a constitution for Afghanistan that does not meet Afghan reality and has proved to be useless in terms of establishing a democratic Afghanistan. The central government in Afghanistan is dubbed as the government of Kabul (as opposed to Afghanistan) and is basically an ineffective body.
I wonder if the Libyan “rebels” who are asking for foreign military aid to overthrow Gaddafi realize that they will not be in charge when Gaddafi goes. At best, NATO will design a Libyan constitution, probably without any concern for Libyan cultural and social realities. At worst, Libya will become a haven for tribal wars, where much like Iraq, it will provide fertile grounds for Al Qaeda infiltration.
Fifth, what is the goal that this war is trying to achieve? Is it to allow the “rebels” to take over? Is it to put a democratic government in place of the Gaddafi dictatorship? No clear goal has yet been articulated. How could the U.S. and the UN militarily attack a sovereign nation without a clear goal? Perhaps a change of regime is the goal. A change for an unknown and ambiguous end is not likely to improve human rights.
Lastly, if human lives and rights were the real issue, why wouldn’t we look at the prison system in the United States, with the highest total documented prison and jail population in the world? [1]
A U.S. warship fired more than 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Libyan air defenses in March[2]; at half a million dollars each, this is more than 50 million dollars. How many American children going to struggling public schools could benefit from these funds being applied towards their education? (According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights education is a human right.)
Why not start caring about human lives and rights at home? Don’t we Americans also deserve it?
At every instance, the world community is interconnected. This interconnection influences the various aspects of every nation and people in these nations. In Libya, the world has given Gaddafi a Carte Blanche to do as he wishes by politically isolating him as long as he has been in existence, instead of engaging him. The US habit of bombing or politically isolating countries whose leaders it doesn’t agree with or protecting dictators that it agrees with it places some responsibility on the US for events in these countries. This approach has been expensive and counter to democracy and human rights. This type of foreign policy is not based on diplomacy, but on brute force, much like what Qaddafi is employing. Obama’s assertion that this time it’s for human lives and rights appears insincere and an insult to our intelligence.
The least we deserve is that our president provides real evidence that this is improving human lives and rights.
Armineh
Monday, April 11, 2011
Fifth Annual GREENLIGHT Earth Day Film Festival
April Event - The Fifth Annual GREENLIGHT Earth Day Film Festival - April 21, 2011
The GREENLIGHT Earth Day Film Festival is a celebration of Earth Day featuring film projects that explore environmental citizenship and show how individual actions can reduce environmental impacts. Films featured at the 2011 Festival will be produced by local artists, with an emphasis on student-produced films.
Enjoy films produced locally, inspired globally at this festive green-carpet affair!
What: Fifth Annual GREENLIGHT Earth Day Film Festival
Where: Cubberley Theater, 4000 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto, CA
When: Thursday, April 21, 2011. Meet at entrance at 6:45 p.m. Show is 7:00-9:00 p.m.
Admission: Free! After-five attire is encouraged.
For more information, visit www.cityofpaloalto.org/environment/greenlight.asp
The GREENLIGHT Earth Day Film Festival is a celebration of Earth Day featuring film projects that explore environmental citizenship and show how individual actions can reduce environmental impacts. Films featured at the 2011 Festival will be produced by local artists, with an emphasis on student-produced films.
Enjoy films produced locally, inspired globally at this festive green-carpet affair!
What: Fifth Annual GREENLIGHT Earth Day Film Festival
Where: Cubberley Theater, 4000 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto, CA
When: Thursday, April 21, 2011. Meet at entrance at 6:45 p.m. Show is 7:00-9:00 p.m.
Admission: Free! After-five attire is encouraged.
For more information, visit www.cityofpaloalto.org/environment/greenlight.asp
Movie Night
You (and your friends and family) are invited to attend a movie night at our house on Saturday April 23rd at 5:00 PM.
Movie: Amreeka (96 minutes – 2009 PG-13)
Description: Eager to provide a better future for her son, Fadi (Melkar Muallem), divorcée Muna Farah (Nisreen Faour) leaves her Palestinian homeland and takes up residence in rural Illinois -- just in time to encounter the domestic repercussions of America's disastrous war in Iraq. Now, the duo must reinvent their lives with some help from Muna's sister, Raghda (Hiam Abbass), and brother-in-law, Nabeel (Yussuf Abu-Warda). Cherien Dabis writes and directs.
Please RSVP by April 20th.
It’s a potluck, so bring along something to share.
We look forward to seeing you then,
Armineh & John
Movie: Amreeka (96 minutes – 2009 PG-13)
Description: Eager to provide a better future for her son, Fadi (Melkar Muallem), divorcée Muna Farah (Nisreen Faour) leaves her Palestinian homeland and takes up residence in rural Illinois -- just in time to encounter the domestic repercussions of America's disastrous war in Iraq. Now, the duo must reinvent their lives with some help from Muna's sister, Raghda (Hiam Abbass), and brother-in-law, Nabeel (Yussuf Abu-Warda). Cherien Dabis writes and directs.
Please RSVP by April 20th.
It’s a potluck, so bring along something to share.
We look forward to seeing you then,
Armineh & John
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
“Equal Justice Under Law” is in severe jeopardy
John Broderick and Martha Minow describe how funding cuts to civil legal assistance will affect the most vulnerable people in the country and communities. See: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/blogs/the_angle/2011/04/budget_cuts_thr.html
Humanists in the legal profession should take what they say as a call to action: "As deans and teachers of law students, we urge our students to carry on the vision of “equal justice under law.” This founding value should not be left on the cutting-room floor."
Humanists in the legal profession should take what they say as a call to action: "As deans and teachers of law students, we urge our students to carry on the vision of “equal justice under law.” This founding value should not be left on the cutting-room floor."
Monday, April 4, 2011
AC Grayling: 'How can you be a militant atheist? It's like sleeping furiously'
In his new book, The Good Book: A Secular Bible, the philosopher sets out his manifesto for rational thought. He talks about why religion angers him, the power of philosophy – and his mane of hair
Decca Aitkenhead
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 3 April 2011
In the unholy trinity of professional atheists, AC Grayling has always tended to be regarded as the good cop. Less coldly clinical in tone than Richard Dawkins, less aggressively combative than Christopher Hitchens, Grayling approaches the God debate with a gently teasing charm that could almost – but should never – be mistaken for conciliation. "Yes, I'm the velvet version," he chuckles.
So he insists that his new book does not belong in the same canon as Dawkins's The God Delusion and Hitchens's God Is Not Great. "No, because it's not against religion. There's not one occurrence of the word God, or afterlife, or anything like that. It doesn't attack religion, it's a positive book, there's nothing negative in it. People may think it's against religion – but it isn't." But then he says, with a mischievous twinkle: "Of course, what would really help the book a lot in America is if somebody tries to shoot me."
With any luck it shouldn't come to that, but Grayling is almost certainly going to upset a lot of Christians, for what he has written is a secular bible. The Good Book mirrors the Bible in both form and language, and is, as its author says, "ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who've really experienced life, and thought about it". Drawing on classical secular texts from east and west, Grayling has "done just what the Bible makers did with the sacred texts", reworking them into a "great treasury of insight and consolation and inspiration and uplift and understanding in the great non-religious traditions of the world". He has been working on his opus for several decades, and the result is an extravagantly erudite manifesto for rational thought.
In fact everything about Grayling is extravagantly erudite. We meet at his south London home, where he sits surrounded by teetering piles of books, great leaning towers of learning, and the conversation frequently detours into donnish tutorial mode. Spotting me glance at one of the volumes, which bears the title Epiphenomenalism, he launches at once into a detailed explanation of the concept – but then breaks off in delight as his dog trots in and rolls at his feet.
"Ooh, look at you, Misty!" he gurgles, bending to rub her stomach. "Ooh, you like that, don't you! Why don't you play outside? Oh, you want to stay and be interviewed? Ooh, you'd make an interesting interviewee, wouldn't you!" Then, moments later we are back in a tutorial. "If you're not careful," he smiles, "I'll explain the inter-substitutivity of co-referential terms salva veritate," and sure enough he does.
Who does he think will read The Good Book? "Well, I'm hoping absolutely every human being on the planet." He's sure that a lot of people will wonder just who he thinks he is, to have written a bible, but doesn't appear particularly troubled by this prospect. "The truth is that the book is very modestly done. My wife did give me a card," he giggles, "that said, 'I used to be an atheist until I realised I am God'. And I know that on Monty Pythonesque grounds there's a good likelihood that in five centuries time I will be one, as a result of this." He lets out another little chuckle. "But I certainly don't feel like one now, that's for sure."
The little jokes and kindly bearing can make Grayling sound quite benignly jovial about religion at times, as he chuckles away about "men in dresses" and "believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden", and throws out playfully mocking asides such as, "You can see we no longer really believe in God, because of all the CCTV cameras keeping watch on us." But when I suggest that he sounds less enraged than amused by religion, he says quickly: "Well, it does make me angry, because it causes a great deal of harm and unhappiness."
He is very cross, for example, with the question in the current census that asks: "What is your religion?" The British Humanist Society has just conducted a poll that asked those surveyed if they were religious – to which 65% said no. But when asked, "What is your religion?" 61% of the very same people answered Christian. "You see, they say, 'Oh well, nominally I suppose I'm Christian.' But two-thirds of the population don't regard themselves as religious! So we have to try to persuade society as a whole to recognise that religious groups are self-constituted interest groups; they exist to promote their point of view. Now, in a liberal democracy they have every right to do so. But they have no greater right than anybody else, any political party or Women's Institute or trade union. But for historical reasons they have massively overinflated influence – faith-based schools, religious broadcasting, bishops in the House of Lords, the presence of religion at every public event. We've got to push it back to its right size."
Atheists, according to Grayling, divide into three broad categories. There are those for whom this secular objection to the privileged status of religion in public life is the driving force of their concern. Then there are those, "like my chum Richard Dawkins", who are principally concerned with the metaphysical question of God's existence. "And I would certainly say there is an intrinsic problem about belief in falsehood." In other words, even if a person's faith did no harm to anybody, Grayling still wouldn't like it. "But the third point is about our ethics – how we live, how we treat one another, what the good life is. And that's the question that really concerns me the most."
It's only in the past decade that these three strands of thought have developed into a public campaign against faith – but it wasn't the atheists, according to Grayling, who provoked the confrontation. "The reason why it's become a big issue is that religions have turned the volume up, because they're on the back foot. The hold of religion is weakening, definitely, and diminishing in numbers. The reason why there's such a furore about it is that the cornered animal, the loser, starts making a big noise."
Even if this is true, however, the atheist movement has been accused of shooting itself in the foot by adopting a tone so militant as to alienate potential supporters, and fortify the religious lobby. I ask Grayling if he thinks there is any truth in the charge, and he listens patiently and politely to the question, but then dismisses it with a shake of the head.
"Well, firstly, I think the charges of militancy and fundamentalism of course come from our opponents, the theists. My rejoinder is to say when the boot was on their foot they burned us at the stake. All we're doing is speaking very frankly and bluntly and they don't like it," he laughs. "So we speak frankly and bluntly, and the respect agenda is now gone, they can no longer float behind the diaphanous veil – 'Ooh, I have faith so you mustn't offend me'. So they don't like the blunt talking. But we're not burning them at the stake. They've got to remember that when it was the other way around it was a much more serious matter.
"And besides, really," he adds with a withering little laugh, "how can you be a militant atheist? How can you be militant non-stamp collector? This is really what it comes down to. You just don't collect stamps. So how can you be a fundamentalist non-stamp collector? It's like sleeping furiously. It's just wrong."
If Grayling does have one fundamentalist article of faith, it is that all of us are capable of understanding philosophy. He grew up in a colonial family in what is now Zambia, where the grownups' chief preoccupation was adultery, leaving him free to bury himself in books. He first read Plato at 12, and says enthusiastically, "Anybody could read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in the bath, it's great stuff!" – although I suspect his idea of an easy read may not be the same as yours or mine.
The author of 30 books, he is a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College in London, and a supernumerary of St Anne's College, Oxford, as well as a UN human rights activist. But he is probably best described by that phrase that tends to make the British uncomfortable – a public intellectual.
"I spent the first half or more of my career in the ivory tower writing technical philosophy, but I recognised very early that academic philosophy is a very narrow part of the field. This is one of my big things: that philosophy belongs to everybody. Until 100 years ago philosophy did belong to everyone. Today, unfortunately, it's become very jargon-laden and scholastic, so it's become very specialised. But a lot of the stuff I've written has been trying to show people that this is part of the conversation mankind has with himself, about all the great questions. We're all intelligent monkeys, 99% of us are perfectly capable of understanding this, and I feel reasonably confident that given enough time and typewriters I could explain most of what goes on in technical philosophy to someone who has no background in it at all."
Is there a sniffy faction within the world of philosophy that takes a dim view of attempts to make the subject more widely accessible?
"Oh, I'm absolutely sure of it. But I also think that attitude has moderated considerably over time. Ten to 15 years ago, when I started to try to do this, I'm pretty sure there was a lot of sniffing going on." He does a bit of his own sniffing, though, a moment later, when I mention the popularity of bestselling writers whom he has described as quasi-philosophers.
"Hmm, yes, the [Alain] de Bottons and so on," Grayling murmurs rather sorrowfully. "He's a perfectly nice fellow, but it's not philosophy. It's cream-puff stuff. What worries me is that someone will go to it thinking, 'Ooh, this is an opportunity to think and find out something', and then they find that it's actually very shallow and doesn't have deep roots. And I do think that people who do this kind of thing should really have done some work and got engaged in something serious, and then they won't make too many mistakes when it comes to trying to introduce others to it."
Nobody could doubt that Grayling has "really done some work". He first had the idea for The Good Book as an undergraduate, and it certainly reads like the opus of an out-and-out workaholic. "I think all of my family would say I was to some extent a workaholic," he agrees, smiling wryly. He lives with his second wife, a novelist, and their 11-year-old daughter, but also has two grownup children from his first marriage, and one can't help suspecting that they all help him connect with a world that wasn't reading Plato at 12.
He attributes his workaholism to the death of his sister, who was murdered in South Africa in her 20s. His feelings towards the continent of his childhood, and of his sister's death, are so painfully tender that it's only in the last year that he has been able to eat any tropical fruit at all. "I've just been able to start eating some mango," he says quietly.
It's a rare moment when Grayling's scrupulously rational mind allows for a glimmer of something more emotionally subjective. But, of course, most people's lives and judgments aren't really guided by rigorous reason at all – which must be maddening to him. So I wonder what he makes of humankind's perverse attachment to non-rational impulses.
"I think they are failing in their responsibility to themselves as intelligent beings. By not being sufficiently reasonable. If you really press them, just ask them, aren't you glad that the people who built the aeroplane you fly in used reason? Aren't you glad that the pilots were trained according to reason? Aren't you glad that your doctor or train driver thinks about what they do and uses reason? And they will say yes. Then you say, 'Well, OK, if that's the case then how about applying it to your own life as well?'"
We've come to the end, and I have one more question. Can I ask, I venture tentatively, about your hair?
"Oh God, my hair."
He is invariably described as the lion-maned philosopher, so I'm curious to know how he maintains his magnificent locks. "Well, I don't really use very many products," he says. "It must look very artificial, but it isn't, and I do get a lot of stick for it. I put a bit of sticky stuff just to hold it up there – I don't know what the brand is, it's a sort of little thing of hairspray. I mean any sticky thing will do just to keep the front up."
It must require a lot of attention, though, doesn't it? "No, it doesn't really, but I do get a lot of stick for it. You see, I used to have very, very long hair in the 60s, so this is very restrained for me. But I said to my kids a few years ago, I'm going to shave all my hair off, I keep getting all this stick about it – I'm going to shave it all off. They said: 'No! You won't look the same, it won't be you.'"
He says he isn't remotely vain, but he does look like someone who cares a great deal about his appearance. "Ooh, well, that's very kind of you to say," he smiles. "I'm not self-conscious or aware of myself. I just give the wrong impression with this hairstyle. This may seem an odd thing to say, and I'm sure psychologists would pounce on this, but actually – well, actually, I don't sort of exist. The rest of the world does, and I'm really interested in it. If there's a group of people sitting round, and I think about it afterwards, I always fail to remember that I was there, if you see what I mean."
So when he sees himself in group photographs?
"Oh, I'm surprised to see there I am! Yes, very surprised."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/03/grayling-good-book-atheism-philosophy?CMP=EMCGT_040411&
Decca Aitkenhead
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 3 April 2011
In the unholy trinity of professional atheists, AC Grayling has always tended to be regarded as the good cop. Less coldly clinical in tone than Richard Dawkins, less aggressively combative than Christopher Hitchens, Grayling approaches the God debate with a gently teasing charm that could almost – but should never – be mistaken for conciliation. "Yes, I'm the velvet version," he chuckles.
So he insists that his new book does not belong in the same canon as Dawkins's The God Delusion and Hitchens's God Is Not Great. "No, because it's not against religion. There's not one occurrence of the word God, or afterlife, or anything like that. It doesn't attack religion, it's a positive book, there's nothing negative in it. People may think it's against religion – but it isn't." But then he says, with a mischievous twinkle: "Of course, what would really help the book a lot in America is if somebody tries to shoot me."
With any luck it shouldn't come to that, but Grayling is almost certainly going to upset a lot of Christians, for what he has written is a secular bible. The Good Book mirrors the Bible in both form and language, and is, as its author says, "ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who've really experienced life, and thought about it". Drawing on classical secular texts from east and west, Grayling has "done just what the Bible makers did with the sacred texts", reworking them into a "great treasury of insight and consolation and inspiration and uplift and understanding in the great non-religious traditions of the world". He has been working on his opus for several decades, and the result is an extravagantly erudite manifesto for rational thought.
In fact everything about Grayling is extravagantly erudite. We meet at his south London home, where he sits surrounded by teetering piles of books, great leaning towers of learning, and the conversation frequently detours into donnish tutorial mode. Spotting me glance at one of the volumes, which bears the title Epiphenomenalism, he launches at once into a detailed explanation of the concept – but then breaks off in delight as his dog trots in and rolls at his feet.
"Ooh, look at you, Misty!" he gurgles, bending to rub her stomach. "Ooh, you like that, don't you! Why don't you play outside? Oh, you want to stay and be interviewed? Ooh, you'd make an interesting interviewee, wouldn't you!" Then, moments later we are back in a tutorial. "If you're not careful," he smiles, "I'll explain the inter-substitutivity of co-referential terms salva veritate," and sure enough he does.
Who does he think will read The Good Book? "Well, I'm hoping absolutely every human being on the planet." He's sure that a lot of people will wonder just who he thinks he is, to have written a bible, but doesn't appear particularly troubled by this prospect. "The truth is that the book is very modestly done. My wife did give me a card," he giggles, "that said, 'I used to be an atheist until I realised I am God'. And I know that on Monty Pythonesque grounds there's a good likelihood that in five centuries time I will be one, as a result of this." He lets out another little chuckle. "But I certainly don't feel like one now, that's for sure."
The little jokes and kindly bearing can make Grayling sound quite benignly jovial about religion at times, as he chuckles away about "men in dresses" and "believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden", and throws out playfully mocking asides such as, "You can see we no longer really believe in God, because of all the CCTV cameras keeping watch on us." But when I suggest that he sounds less enraged than amused by religion, he says quickly: "Well, it does make me angry, because it causes a great deal of harm and unhappiness."
He is very cross, for example, with the question in the current census that asks: "What is your religion?" The British Humanist Society has just conducted a poll that asked those surveyed if they were religious – to which 65% said no. But when asked, "What is your religion?" 61% of the very same people answered Christian. "You see, they say, 'Oh well, nominally I suppose I'm Christian.' But two-thirds of the population don't regard themselves as religious! So we have to try to persuade society as a whole to recognise that religious groups are self-constituted interest groups; they exist to promote their point of view. Now, in a liberal democracy they have every right to do so. But they have no greater right than anybody else, any political party or Women's Institute or trade union. But for historical reasons they have massively overinflated influence – faith-based schools, religious broadcasting, bishops in the House of Lords, the presence of religion at every public event. We've got to push it back to its right size."
Atheists, according to Grayling, divide into three broad categories. There are those for whom this secular objection to the privileged status of religion in public life is the driving force of their concern. Then there are those, "like my chum Richard Dawkins", who are principally concerned with the metaphysical question of God's existence. "And I would certainly say there is an intrinsic problem about belief in falsehood." In other words, even if a person's faith did no harm to anybody, Grayling still wouldn't like it. "But the third point is about our ethics – how we live, how we treat one another, what the good life is. And that's the question that really concerns me the most."
It's only in the past decade that these three strands of thought have developed into a public campaign against faith – but it wasn't the atheists, according to Grayling, who provoked the confrontation. "The reason why it's become a big issue is that religions have turned the volume up, because they're on the back foot. The hold of religion is weakening, definitely, and diminishing in numbers. The reason why there's such a furore about it is that the cornered animal, the loser, starts making a big noise."
Even if this is true, however, the atheist movement has been accused of shooting itself in the foot by adopting a tone so militant as to alienate potential supporters, and fortify the religious lobby. I ask Grayling if he thinks there is any truth in the charge, and he listens patiently and politely to the question, but then dismisses it with a shake of the head.
"Well, firstly, I think the charges of militancy and fundamentalism of course come from our opponents, the theists. My rejoinder is to say when the boot was on their foot they burned us at the stake. All we're doing is speaking very frankly and bluntly and they don't like it," he laughs. "So we speak frankly and bluntly, and the respect agenda is now gone, they can no longer float behind the diaphanous veil – 'Ooh, I have faith so you mustn't offend me'. So they don't like the blunt talking. But we're not burning them at the stake. They've got to remember that when it was the other way around it was a much more serious matter.
"And besides, really," he adds with a withering little laugh, "how can you be a militant atheist? How can you be militant non-stamp collector? This is really what it comes down to. You just don't collect stamps. So how can you be a fundamentalist non-stamp collector? It's like sleeping furiously. It's just wrong."
If Grayling does have one fundamentalist article of faith, it is that all of us are capable of understanding philosophy. He grew up in a colonial family in what is now Zambia, where the grownups' chief preoccupation was adultery, leaving him free to bury himself in books. He first read Plato at 12, and says enthusiastically, "Anybody could read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in the bath, it's great stuff!" – although I suspect his idea of an easy read may not be the same as yours or mine.
The author of 30 books, he is a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College in London, and a supernumerary of St Anne's College, Oxford, as well as a UN human rights activist. But he is probably best described by that phrase that tends to make the British uncomfortable – a public intellectual.
"I spent the first half or more of my career in the ivory tower writing technical philosophy, but I recognised very early that academic philosophy is a very narrow part of the field. This is one of my big things: that philosophy belongs to everybody. Until 100 years ago philosophy did belong to everyone. Today, unfortunately, it's become very jargon-laden and scholastic, so it's become very specialised. But a lot of the stuff I've written has been trying to show people that this is part of the conversation mankind has with himself, about all the great questions. We're all intelligent monkeys, 99% of us are perfectly capable of understanding this, and I feel reasonably confident that given enough time and typewriters I could explain most of what goes on in technical philosophy to someone who has no background in it at all."
Is there a sniffy faction within the world of philosophy that takes a dim view of attempts to make the subject more widely accessible?
"Oh, I'm absolutely sure of it. But I also think that attitude has moderated considerably over time. Ten to 15 years ago, when I started to try to do this, I'm pretty sure there was a lot of sniffing going on." He does a bit of his own sniffing, though, a moment later, when I mention the popularity of bestselling writers whom he has described as quasi-philosophers.
"Hmm, yes, the [Alain] de Bottons and so on," Grayling murmurs rather sorrowfully. "He's a perfectly nice fellow, but it's not philosophy. It's cream-puff stuff. What worries me is that someone will go to it thinking, 'Ooh, this is an opportunity to think and find out something', and then they find that it's actually very shallow and doesn't have deep roots. And I do think that people who do this kind of thing should really have done some work and got engaged in something serious, and then they won't make too many mistakes when it comes to trying to introduce others to it."
Nobody could doubt that Grayling has "really done some work". He first had the idea for The Good Book as an undergraduate, and it certainly reads like the opus of an out-and-out workaholic. "I think all of my family would say I was to some extent a workaholic," he agrees, smiling wryly. He lives with his second wife, a novelist, and their 11-year-old daughter, but also has two grownup children from his first marriage, and one can't help suspecting that they all help him connect with a world that wasn't reading Plato at 12.
He attributes his workaholism to the death of his sister, who was murdered in South Africa in her 20s. His feelings towards the continent of his childhood, and of his sister's death, are so painfully tender that it's only in the last year that he has been able to eat any tropical fruit at all. "I've just been able to start eating some mango," he says quietly.
It's a rare moment when Grayling's scrupulously rational mind allows for a glimmer of something more emotionally subjective. But, of course, most people's lives and judgments aren't really guided by rigorous reason at all – which must be maddening to him. So I wonder what he makes of humankind's perverse attachment to non-rational impulses.
"I think they are failing in their responsibility to themselves as intelligent beings. By not being sufficiently reasonable. If you really press them, just ask them, aren't you glad that the people who built the aeroplane you fly in used reason? Aren't you glad that the pilots were trained according to reason? Aren't you glad that your doctor or train driver thinks about what they do and uses reason? And they will say yes. Then you say, 'Well, OK, if that's the case then how about applying it to your own life as well?'"
We've come to the end, and I have one more question. Can I ask, I venture tentatively, about your hair?
"Oh God, my hair."
He is invariably described as the lion-maned philosopher, so I'm curious to know how he maintains his magnificent locks. "Well, I don't really use very many products," he says. "It must look very artificial, but it isn't, and I do get a lot of stick for it. I put a bit of sticky stuff just to hold it up there – I don't know what the brand is, it's a sort of little thing of hairspray. I mean any sticky thing will do just to keep the front up."
It must require a lot of attention, though, doesn't it? "No, it doesn't really, but I do get a lot of stick for it. You see, I used to have very, very long hair in the 60s, so this is very restrained for me. But I said to my kids a few years ago, I'm going to shave all my hair off, I keep getting all this stick about it – I'm going to shave it all off. They said: 'No! You won't look the same, it won't be you.'"
He says he isn't remotely vain, but he does look like someone who cares a great deal about his appearance. "Ooh, well, that's very kind of you to say," he smiles. "I'm not self-conscious or aware of myself. I just give the wrong impression with this hairstyle. This may seem an odd thing to say, and I'm sure psychologists would pounce on this, but actually – well, actually, I don't sort of exist. The rest of the world does, and I'm really interested in it. If there's a group of people sitting round, and I think about it afterwards, I always fail to remember that I was there, if you see what I mean."
So when he sees himself in group photographs?
"Oh, I'm surprised to see there I am! Yes, very surprised."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/03/grayling-good-book-atheism-philosophy?CMP=EMCGT_040411&
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