Ares I-X No-Go

Today's non-launch of NASA's Ares I-X rocket was the closest thing I've had to excitement for a while. I didn't realise that watching a stationary object remain stationary for about 4 hours could be so...tense. It wasn't quite up to the standards set by Ron Howard's Apollo 13, but it easily beat the episode of 'Murder, She Wrote' being broadcast simultaneously on terrestrial TV.

The drama was such that by the end I wanted to throttle (who didn't?) mission weather officer Kathy Winters - the villain of the piece who sounded like she didn't even care whether the Ares launched when she constantly flip-flopped between green (go) and red (no-go) weather forecasts.

OK - so it wasn't really her fault. She was only following the new "Triboelectrification" rule, which insists on a no-go if high-level static-electricity-causing cloud lies in the flight path, but we the viewers were ignorant of the weather conditions; all we could feel was the interpersonal tension growing between the messenger and Mission Control.

There were some light-hearted moments too. The eventual removal of the 'sock' covering the probe at the tip of the Ares was literally uplifting, and I think we all joined in the cheering at Mission Control when it was finally de-snagged. And then, right at the last, the surprise announcement of a 90 minute launch delay, caused by shipping freight suddenly appearing near the launch site, was surely someone's idea of a practical joke. Luckily the delay lasted only 10 minutes (during which we were waiting for the latest on the triboeletrification clouds anyway) but what a roller-coaster!

The launch is now scheduled for 8am EDT tomorrow. That's midday GMT (or Zee-time, as the mission controllers refer to it on NASA TV) for space-watchers. Good luck, Ares, in your "unsustainable" venture.

The Priests

Poor Richard Dawkins. Despite all his efforts at undermining the influence of religion he's not been nominated for a Classical Brit award. Instead the panel have nominated The Priests (pictured left) for their debut album, which features hymns from the good old days when Sunday morning meant mass. Where is Dawkins going wrong?

One should really expect things to be different nowadays. The days of religion were numbered perhaps from the moment Blaise Pascal (in his mid-seventeenth century Pensées) sought to defend his belief in God by resorting to argument and abandoning revelation. Reasoned argument is a human device, not sacred but profane, and to rest God's existence on it puts God Himself on shaky ground. And the scientific revolution that paralleled Pascal's thinking further undermined the foundations of religion, as philosopher after philosopher showed that there was no area of nature that did not yield to human investigation. After Newton - and Alexander Pope's crushing "God said 'Let Newton be', and all was light" epitaph - God beat a retreat to heaven, and, under house arrest, was proscribed from ever again setting foot in the world of human affairs.

So how do The Priests get away with it? And get nominated for music awards for it? Is their album a precursor of a karate-suit-wearing comeback tour by God? Well, not quite. Most of the reviewers of The Priest's album on Amazon reveal their all too human motives behind their purchases: the need for easy listening and a glass of wine after a hard day, to chill out, etc, etc. And who could fault them? Forty years ago it was Mantovani. Twenty years ago it was Manilow. Today its Mass. Switch on and switch off.

It is a little bit worrying that today's easy-listening has an unmistakable God-fearing quality (in contrast to the liberating sound of Mantovani's cascading violin strings), but there's no accounting for musical taste. If The Priests hit the big time then good luck to them. What is more worrying, actually, is what all this says about the scientific revolution. If, in our quiet moments, we like to pretend we are back at Sunday mass or - worse - living the ascetic life in a monastery (witness the rise in sales of Gregorian chant), how serious is our commitment to the rational, godless universe in which we live?

That commitment is on the wane, but unlike Dawkins we must resist the urge to stamp about in frustration, blaming those who teach religion for the success of religion. Instead we must examine the scientific approach, adopted by Dawkins and many of the 'humanists' around today, that sees the world not only as godless but as virtually 'manless' too. In this scientistic view, man inhabits the world not as an independent thinker, capable of shaping the future on the strength of his own will, but only as a natural though admittedly complex by-product of evolution. Just read Dawkins's chapter on "The Roots of Religion" in The God Delusion to see what I mean: here man is placed in the petri dish while Dawkins (ironically adopting a God's eye view) marvels at his ignorance and susceptibility to events that occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago.

There is an aspect of man that is rooted in the past, that is biological and the result of evolutionary adaptation. But the scientistic view sees this as the whole story. And so it's not surprising that, especially now when a lot of the political meaning has been drained from current events, Dawkins and Co. are unable to provide meaning to those experiences - love, community, creativity - which have an undeniable human quality to them. Enter religion and the religious chill-out experience.

I'm not proposing that Richard Dawkins approach his manager with a view to putting in some studio time and recording a cover of The Rolling Stones' Monkey Man. The Priests and the Church seem to have the music angle sewn up, and atheists' hymns don't work. Instead we need a new science of humanism, that seeks to explain historic and contemporary events in terms of human agency, a sense of which both Dawkins and The Priests seem to lack.

Earth Hour: A Real Turn-Off

"Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven"

(Matthew 5: 16)

Earth Hour, invented almost two thousand years after these words were written, seems to take us back to a darkness even darker than that which followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, when men retreated from the bright open spaces of the poltical arena and cowered in the shadows of the churches and monasteries. But even the Christian-inspired Dark Ages paid lip service to the idea of light. Earth Hour sees light as the problem, if you can talk about its organisers 'seeing the light' at all.

Earth Hour wouldn't be so bad a campaign if it had a clear idea of what it wanted and was therefore able to shine a light on some kind of goal at which people could aim. But what did people actually do during Earth Hour? What inspirational acts are we to emulate? Well, in New Zealand they held a candle-lit concert (why not a pitch-black concert?), and the Earth Hour website shows crowds from around the world gathering to see the dark. The effort involved in this is minuscule - roughly the equivalent of lying down in a darkened room somewhere. Indeed, that is more or less what Boris Johnson said he would be doing during Earth Hour. So much for our political leaders.

Of course, the real effort all took place well before Earth Hour itself, behind the scenes as officials from the World Wildlife Fund met with civic officials and invited them to display their green credentials for the kids. Uppermost on the "Get Involved" page of the New Zealand Earth Hour website is the corporate pack geared not towards the likes of you and me but at businesses who want the publicity. The involvement of 'the people' comes much, much later, if at all. The people are as active in this campaign as pawns are in a game of chess. Sorry, St Matthew, there are no "good works" here.

I am in half a mind to organise a "Power Hour" to coincide with next year's Earth Hour, when the people can get together in the most brightly lit building in the city, and listen to loud music, with chilled or hot drinks, and with the standby buttons on every piece of electrical equipment switched on. We need to emerge from the darkness and shine a light on power, both electrical and political.

My Preferred Bid

A friend of mine has sent me an email requesting that I sign a petition on the number10 website registering discontent with the Government’s decision to award a £7.5bn Intercity Express contract to the Japanese rail consortium Agility (which includes Hitachi Rail) rather than to the UK-based firm Bombardier. As ‘an internationalist’ my gut reaction was “Why should I support the UK over Japan?” But things turned out to be a little more complicated…

Bombardier is not a UK firm at all; it’s Canadian. But it does manufacture trains in my hometown Derby. And the Japanese consortium apparently is “British led” according to major partner John Laing, and its bid includes plans to build “a world class rolling stock manufacturing facility” in either Ashby de la Zouch (Leicestershire), Sheffield or Gateshead (but disappointingly not all three). So what we have is not a fight between Britain and Japan, but an argument between two provincial towns about where the jobs should be based. Notwithstanding the pedantic and unproven point being made by the RMT union - that more UK jobs would have been secured if the contract had been awarded to Bombardier – this seems to be a parochial matter, beneath the loftier concerns of internationalists.

OK, lofty or not, it still seems to matter to some people. The friend who forwarded me the email containing the number10 link for one. In fact I daresay that quite a few of my friends and acquaintances have friends and acquaintances of their own who work for Bombardier in Derby, and for whom the Intercity Express contract would have meant better job security. And in a previous entry on this blog I said that charity begins at home, so doesn’t the fraternal spirit on which internationalism rests begin locally, with friend helping friend, always willing to lend a hand and sign a petition on each other’s behalf?

Actually, no. But it’s not the locality that puts me off – I’m probably more ready to support the actual workforce at Bombardier, Derby than the potential workforce at Ashby De La Zouch. And I think we’d all be a lot better off if we got to know a friend of a friend. The thing that turns me off the whole idea of supporting Bombardier is actually the petition itself. The words - composed by some news editor at the Derby Evening Telegraph - are hardly inspiring:

We believe that the Government should change its mind on its decision to select Japanese-led consortium Agility ahead of Derby train-maker Bombardier as the preferred bidder for a £7.5bn contract to build new Intercity trains.

Such a polite request, expressed in New Labour management-speak, directed at our man in Number Ten! Let us sincerely hope he reads it and has a Pauline conversion about the DoT officials’ preferred bidder. Or rather let us not waste our valuable time in trying to engender such abject parochialism initiated by that champion of abject parochialism the local paper. If instead we want to forge new ties with fellow workers in our home town then why not do it direct? Why not visit them at their workplace and get to know them personally instead of mediating the whole relationship with a brief missive on abject parochialism directed to Gordon Brown?

I work for a local authority where job cuts have been announced. This potentially gives me something in common with the Bombardier workers whose managers doubtless now have their excuse at the ready when at some future point in time they announce reductions. A real bread-and-butter issue like this could foster stronger ties which would not necessarily stop at the city boundary – they could reach into Ashby De La Zouch, AND Sheffield AND Gateshead. It is a little early to be saying workers of the world unite, but surely any burgeoning internationalist spirit we have could stretch this far?

The Selfless Giant

In my local paper (Derby Evening Telegraph) tonight there are two letters that more or less sum up the prevailing attitude to the economic crisis and the prospect of job losses. The first is a letter in the form of poem entitled "Looming cloud of redundancy". It begins "Redundancy is in the air, the chopper is ready to fall", and it ends poignantly with the words "No thought for our future - who cares?" Aww, poor thing.

The second is signed by public sector union Unison (among others) and goes by the heading "Global public health care plea". It urges readers to sign a pledge demanding that the World Bank insist that private healthcare provision be extended to people in the world's poorest countries. What a noble gesture!

It's easy to be angry at Unison, an organisation that gets a large chunk of its funding from ordinary people who expect it to concentrate on defending their living standards, for choosing instead to promote the rights of complete (though no doubt thoroughly likeable) strangers in the furthest corners of the Earth. But before we all start clamouring for "British jobs for Britishers" let us recall how hard it is these days to appear in the least bit selfish. Unison might be paid to defend its members pay and working conditions, but putting this into practice and actually asking for something for its members is not a straightforward task for union reps, which is why I am not a member.

Then again, not being a member of a collective organisation is no solution to this problem. Writing poetry to send to the local newspaper might at best win you some sympathy (similar to the heartfelt feeling I expressed at the end of the first paragraph), but can you eat sympathy? Can you impress the neighbours with sympathy? Can you get Sky Sports on sympathy?

Whatever happened to selfishness? Not the sort that gets condemned in soap operas and Tonight with Trevor MacDonald, but the sort that identifies the interests of one's own family and friends as one's own (wait a minute - that is the sort that gets condemned on Trevor MacDonald, especially when a builder is involved). Not so long ago, this sort of selfishness was known as charity-that-begins-at-home. It was assumed that community interests might be served if people first looked after themselves and their immediate neighbours, like ripples spreading across a pond. That's the sort of thing promoted by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (pictured) in his book Cosmopolitanism - a sort of universalism that grows through people responding to each other through immediate connexions unhampered by cultural barriers.

Appiah's philosophy is by no means perfect but at least it avoids the abstract universalism expressed by Unison, wherein we accept without question that the complete stranger is more of a brother to us than our own brother.

Where does it leave us when facing job cuts? Well, first thing is not to assume that just because you might want to keep your job, defend your pay, or even ask for more, you are somehow being immoral. In pushing for these things you might find that you end up forming immediate ties with people whom you previously thought existed only beyond some cultural barrier. And forming a handful of these ties will probably do more good morally than all the business plans put together by your employer for surviving the credit crunch. Universalism - the view that all men are my brothers, and that all old people are my granny and grandpa, etc - begins with a bit of selfishness.

We don't need poetry. We don't need to think of those less fortunate on the other side of the world. Let us talk to our neighbour, and let him talk to his, about the problems we face here and now. And let us rediscover the chain that links us to our neighbours across the globe.

Great Scott! You want how much?

I doubt that, when Captain Robert Falcon Scott (pictured left) was seeking sponsorship for the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910, any of the industrialists he approached said to him “Oh, so you’re doing it sponsored? Who for?” Today when I see on the BBC website that a group of celebrities are seeking sponsorship for their assault on Mount Kilimanjaro, I suspect that the meaning of the word ‘sponsorship’ has significantly changed over the past 100 years.

Of course, the sponsorship that goes on nowadays is so much more worthwhile – it provides income for that multi-million pound industry called “charity”; it gives the BBC and ITV something to film; and it makes a lot of fund-raisers feel good about themselves. I daresay it even sometimes helps homeless kids and starving Africans and the like, but these are, naturally, of lesser concern. From the BBC website it is clear that the main focus of the event is not the malaria bed nets (don't get me started on those) for Tanzanian tots, but the sheer celebrity of those grizzled adventurers Chris Moyles, Ronan Keating, and Denise Van Outen. Not having the Edwardian equivalents of these aboard the Terra Nova when it set sail was, I suppose, Captain Scott’s first and costliest mistake.

I don’t object to fund-raising; I don’t object to helping other people (whether or not they are ‘less fortunate’ than I); I don’t even object to people entering fun runs, walking the Great Wall of China or having their heads shaved. But put all this together into a filmed (and doubtless podcast) charity event and it all becomes so bloody objectionable.

Lately a new – and particularly morbid – ingredient has been added to this mix: doing it ‘in memory’ (why not ‘in remembrance’?) of someone. Every year thousands of women throughout the UK ‘race’ a distance of 5km, few of them gunning for Tirunesh Dibaba's 14:11.15 world record, but most of them wearing a picture of a dead person on their T-shirt. This is the women-only ‘Race for Life’ organised by Cancer Research UK. Now, I wouldn’t knock cancer research – more money should be poured into this. But I would knock Cancer Research for the way the whole Race for Life has been promoted. The aim seems not to be the raising of funds so that more scientists can peer through more microscopes at more cells; the aim is to get women to take part in a shared experience of grief. But grief won’t cure cancer.

The event-sponsorship-celebrity-grief cocktail is mixed in bad taste, and it fuzzes the focus that we once had on what we consider worthwhile human achievements. The meaning of sponsorship needs to be reclaimed as the provision of cash that enables any of these worthwhile human achievements to be undertaken. If you want to be charitable, then help someone you know (charity does begin at home), or just make a straightforward donation yourself, but don't go asking me for 'sponsorship'. We need to sponsor genuine exploration, whether this be of Mount Kilimanjaro, the South Pole or of the nuclei of human cells.

A Strange Point in Strange Fruit

In his 2008 book Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong In The Race Debate Kenan Malik makes what I consider to be a strange point. Taking a lead from historian Jonathan Israel, Malik distinguishes two strands of the Enlightenment: a mainstream strand and a radical one. Why should he do this?

Prior to reading Strange Fruit the only distinction I had made within the rich thought of that period in human history was between anyone who even loosely associated themselves with the project of human progress (with its attendant themes of education, science, deism and atheism, liberty, equality, etc), and those conservatives (De Maistre, Burke et al) who were firmly against it. Of course there were certainly differences between the Enlightenment thinkers (for the period was extended in time and place) but to introduce a more formal division between these thinkers as a key to understanding them is, I think, a bad move.

I can see the appeal of the division. A great many Enlightenment thinkers - especially those in France for obvious reasons - developed the ideas that had begun with the religious scepticism of Descartes in the early 17th century and took these to their logical political conclusions: atheism, absolute equality, and eventually revolution. In more recent times the extremist nature of this philosophy has been dismissed as 'reason gone mad', and so it is a worthwhile task to reclaim such ideas as being entirely appropriate to the conditions of the time, and perhaps to outline the conditions of their becoming appropriate again.

So there is a case for favouring the radicals as Malik does here:

The mainstream Enlightenment of Kant, Locke, Voltaire and Hume is the one that we know and that provides its public face. But the heart and soul of the Enlightenment came from the radicals, lesser-known figures such as d'Holbach, Diderot and Condorcet.
(Strange Fruit, Oneworld Publications, 2008, page 88)

Now, I've nothing against celebrating these "lesser-known" thinkers, but the danger is this: in aligning ourselves with them, and against the thinkers of the so-called mainstream Enlightenment, we potentially cut ourselves off from an even more radical philosophy: dialectical materialism. Much as I admire and agree with the remark attributed to Diderot that "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest", Rousseau's "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains" (from The Social Contract) is altogether more shattering, locating the contradictions highlighted by the philosophes not in religion or the monarchy but in the very structure of society. Malik doesn't say whether he considers Rousseau as belonging to the radicals or the mainstream, or whether he had a foot in both camps, but at the time Rousseau clearly distanced himself from the salons attended by the radicals. He was hardly a man of action; more the solitary walker.

Ditto Kant, whom Malik does label as "mainstream". Admittedly, Kant never left Konigsberg his entire life, and didn't write his famous Critique of Pure Reason until he was nearly 60 years old, but he was an admirer of Rousseau and the philosophy that was born of his transcendental idealism revolutionised the relationship between the subject and the object – after his Critique of Judgement no longer were these to be seen as separate spheres with problematic links but as two intimately related aspects of man's existence.

To dismiss Kant as mainstream – notwithstanding the adoption of much of his philosophy by conservative thinkers in later years – is to deprive oneself of a key to understanding the development of dialectical philosophy and Marxism. There is much more to revolution than the evisceration of priests and the throttling of monarchs.

It is strange that Malik makes this distinction because the argument in Strange Fruit doesn't rely on it. Had he claimed that the Enlightenment in general was characterised by a commitment to equality and a refusal to see indigenous peoples as 'alien', I'm quite sure that no one would have challenged that point. But by separating out the radicals he is at one point forced to make the rather silly claim that David Hume was a conservative and that he was “forced to acknowledge” the importance of political equality and human unity (page 91), as if the Hume's philosophy would naturally have been that of Burke were it not for the threats of Diderot.

Strange Fruit is an important book for understanding the scientific and political history of the race debate, and for arriving at a view on how racism and anti-racism should be treated today. But that section on the two Enlightenments sticks out like a sore thumb. What we need instead is an argument that links both these strands, bringing together both its radical and dialectical characteristics.

Good for Goodwin

Some pretty harsh words have been exchanged between Sir Fred Goodwin (ex chief of Royal Bank of Scotland) and the rest of the world (led by HRH Gordon Brown and his non-suave crony Lord Myners) over the decision by Sir Fred to not fall on his sword and surrender his "obscene" £650,000-a-year pension (according to Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, although personally I think it would be "lovely") . It was, I suppose, inevitable that both sides would sink to the level of calling each other's behaviour "inappropriate", "unjustifiable" and "unacceptable", but that's the executive class for you: they don't pull punches.

No need to ask whose side you are on, because these days no one likes a banker, eh? But before we all dance on the grave of HBOS and side with Lord Myners in expressing distaste, let us ask what it is Fred Goodwin is being accused of. Not overseeing the disastrous-in-hindsight takeover of ABN Amro (all sides agree on that), and not for being a massively-paid executive (as Myners can claim to have been), but simply for not "listening to the public's pleas" (according to Gordon Brown on the BBC's new website, as if great swathes of ordinary people have been falling on their knees before Sir Fred, asking him to reconsider) and for having "no sense of shame" (according to Liberal Democrat Vince Cable on same page).

So, in Gordon Brown's eyes the problems of the UK economy are reduced to the problems of bank lending, and the problems of the banks are reduced to the remuneration of their directors, and the problem of remuneration is reduced to the low moral sense of those in receipt. I suppose if Sir Fred wept as he collected his pension (not from the Post Office) every month, then we would all feel a little better, and the economy would start to get 'back on track', delivery prudent year-on-year growth!

And, by the way, what good is this sense of shame? What good does it do us to feel guilty about taking home the money we feel we have earned? Once we sacrifice this, then we surely sacrifice that last ounce of self-respect that we need to defend the relative few pleasures we can afford for ourselves and our families. In October 2008, JCB workers in Rocester, Staffordshire sacrificed their salaries for the sake of saving 500 jobs, showing great "team spirit" by "looking after the needs of one another rather than the needs of the individual". In January 2009, JCB announced 700 job losses all the same. Perhaps senior management at the plant felt emboldened by the workforce's "team spirit"?

Coming back to the 'banking crisis', as a news item the whole thing is absurd - the UK Prime Minister publicly involed in a hoo-hah with someone who until quite recently was his man on the inside of the banking industry, hiding behind Lord Myners at the same time, while all around the productive economy - the thing that actually provides jobs, standards of living, a good excuse to get out of the house, etc - is failing. In such times, cowardly words such as "inappropriate" and "unacceptable" from the mouths of politicians smack of utter weakness in the face of larger forces that they have failed to understand.

So my 'plea' to Sir Fred is this: you may be a complete banker, deserving no more than 3% of your annual pension (and only then to be drawn at 65), but do not surrender it in the face of accusations of you having no sense of shame. Let your tight-fisted selfishness be a lesson to us all!

The Fourth Plinth

"It is important to say that simply standing for an hour is a worthy thing to do..."
(Antony Gormley, Today, Radio 4, 26 February 2009)

The problem here is that Antony Gormley does not merely want to say it; from July he wants 2400 people to spend 100 days trying to demonstrate it to the public on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth. Sounds like a rubbish world record attempt but it is actually art, and Antony Gormley - like all rubbish world record holders - considers himself an artist. But can the worthiness of simply standing for an hour be successfully demonstrated?

Perhaps outside a well-known High Street fashion outlet on Boxing Day morning, just before the "SALE" begins, standing (in a queue) could be shown to be if not worthy then at least worthwhile. Quid pro quo. But what will the 2400 volunteers be offered for giving up their time? Nothing but an opportunity to put themselves on display before the London 'masses' that clearly spend all their time admiring the Fourth Plinth. What a senseless waste (especially for the poor individual who has to stand there between 4am and 5am on the 92nd day).

But wait! There is more to be got from this so-crazy-it-just-won't-work enterprise:

"Maybe we'll discover what we really care about, what our hopes and fears are for now and for the future"
(Antony Gormley, BBC World Service, 25 February 2009)

Hmmm. More likely we'll discover what we really just don't care about...another 'clever' art installation. (Even the title - One & Other - is 'clever', ie. a consumptive pun.) And how will we discover anything other than a few dance moves from the few exhibitionists who volunteer (myself included) and the unimaginative contents of Mr Gormley's surely burnt-out mind? The 2400 volunteers are hardly going to be allowed to thrash out a few ideas of their own. For one thing, they won't be together, in the same place at the same time. For another, they will be selected so as to be a 'representative' sample of all walks of life. Got an idea of what we should really care about? About hopes and fears for the future? Great! Oh, you're an unemployed construction worker? Sorry, friend. Got enough of those already. Next please!

If you really want society to discover something about itself, then the artificial constraints of the Fourth Plinth are simply not going to help. Assuming that plenty of people do have something interesting to say (and if they don't, why bother?), then the build up to the 'unveiling' will necessarily consist of an X Factor-style panel consisting of Boris Johnson, Trevor Phillips and Gormley himself turning people away on the basis of their 'walk of life'. At no point will those ideas be exposed to peer judgement. And at no point will a public debate about hopes and fears ensue.

I say it's time to turn off the waste of money that is the Fourth Plinth. Let's just stick a 50-foot statue of Nelson bloody Mandela there and be done with it once and for all.

God's Truth?

One of the better points made by Dawkins in The God Delusion is about how religious thought acts counter to the inquisitive spirit. Those who are determined to find God like to find Him in the 'Gaps' between scientific explanations. So if we do not fully understand the transition from ape to man, say, we posit God as providing the helping hand. Arthur C Clarke posited the black monolith, but the effect is pretty much the same: we stop asking questions about the important things concerning man's development and instead start asking questions about abstract and absent things such as God or super-intelligent extra-terrestrials. Never mind that scientists are looking into something and developing workable and even elegant secular explanations, God - we are told - got there before them and has already provided the answers. In His world, truth (or rather Truth) is given only to those who do not question.

Of course, real truth is never actually given; it is extracted out of the nature of things by those who ask and attempt to answer the right questions. Scientists know how to ask the right questions within the narrow confines of the laboratory, but who is asking these questions in the world at large? Who is asking, for instance, whether the current economic crisis is really the fault of a handful of bankers, or whether it symptomatic of a problem of manufacturing productivity? More to the point, how could such questions be tested and answered outside the controlled environment of the lab?

Here we must venture into the world of politics, but not your everyday, madam-speaker-type politics. Not the politics of the professional politicians, but a politics born of an idea that has the potential to change someone's mind (OK, for the moment we'll leave aside the notion of theory becoming a material force when it grips the masses). So outside the laboratory change is not measured by comparing the outcome of an experiment against a control; change is measured in terms of numbers of people who now see things otherwise.

The truth is a standard of man, not God. But it is not ours in any ornamental sense. It is what we must continually extract and consume through our engagement with the world and our fellow man. It begins in the simple act of conversation, especially a conversation in which one party suddenly interrupts the other and says "Actually, you're wrong..."

The Dawkins Delusion

"Isn't it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about?"
(Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, page 354, Black Swan edition, 2007)

"Our society...has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them. ... Please, please raise your consciousness about this."
(The God Delusion, page 381-2)


Granted, religion is odd, and that the Creator, if He existed, would have better things to do than worry about me "not doing as I was told" and "fighting with my brother" (sins I officially confessed to many times as a child), but what is odder is Richard Dawkins's belief that he will win people over to his way of thinking by accusing them of abusing their children at the same time as being mindless automata, unable to throw off the chains of thought bequeathed to them by their parents. This is the Dawkins Delusion and let us pray it does not persist as long as the God one.

It does raise the question, however, of why religion (or rather the belief that there is more to life than THIS) persists? If all Dawkins can offer in its place is his marvelling at how we would find we are related to the merest insect if only we would take part in some feature-length episode of Who Do You Think You Are? then of course people are going to turn away from his teachings. With all due respect to Great Uncle Pond Skater, there is of course more to human existence than its evolutionary history and, it must be admitted, the utterly marvellous way we have come to be. There is also art and literature, language and science, socialism and barbarism, none of which can be explained by natural selection.

Moreover, there are also those twin, nagging feelings in the backs of my and (I hope) your minds that (i) other people are essentially the same as me, yet (ii) there is something that makes them alien to me. But that mystery is not God (and we are not 'fallen'); it is Man. Or, to bring things down to earth, it is the way that ordinary men and women have made their society. Let us commence, therefore, the proper study of mankind.