Theocracy, theocracy, a theme for thee but not for me ...

In New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple takes on the recent spate of atheist books:

The new atheists are quite right to see the threat of theocracy in Islamism. But in attacking all religion, they are like the French government which banned not only the wearing of the headscarf in schools, but the wearing of all religious insignia whatsoever, despite the fact that wearing a Star of David or a crucifix has and had a completely different social signification from wearing a headscarf. In the name of non-discrimination, the French government failed to discriminate properly: and proper discrimination is, or ought to be, practically the whole business of life. If there were large numbers of Christians or Jews who were in favour of establishing a theocracy in France, who had a recent record of terrorism, and who terrorised each other into the wearing of crucifixes and Stars of David, then the banning of those insignia would have been justified too. The wearing of the headscarf should be permitted again when Islam has become merely one personal confession among others, without the political significance that it has now.

In attacking all religion so indiscriminately, the atheist authors are, I am sure inadvertently and unintentionally, strengthening the hand of the Islamists. In arguing, for example, that for parents to bring up a child in any religious tradition, even the mildest of Anglicanism, is to abuse a child, with the natural corollary that the law should forbid it (for how can the law permit child abuse?), some of the authors are giving ammunition to the Islamists, who will be able with justice to say to their fellow-religionists, See, it is all or nothing. If you give the secularists an inch, they will take a mile. No compromise with secularism is possible, therefore; cleave unto us.

And I will spoil no more for you.

Physician and essayist Theodore Dalrymple doubts God but dismisses "new atheists"

Theodore Dalrymple takes on the "New Atheists" in City Journal, and it is all the more interesting because he himself has doubted the existence of God since a school assembly at age nine.

He thinks but little of this spate of anti-God works, saying, for example:

This sloppiness and lack of intellectual scruple, with the assumption of certainty where there is none, combined with adolescent shrillness and intolerance, reach an apogee in Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith. It is not easy to do justice to the book’s nastiness; it makes Dawkins’s claim that religious education constitutes child abuse look sane and moderate.

and also

Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.”

But I will spoil it no more for you.

Toronto journalist David Warren writes to say,

Hitchens & Dawkins are, or were, both capable of charm & wit -- including, even, self-deprecatory wit. It disappears in their atheist tracts. What appears in its place is just the worst sort of narrow, sneering, vindictive,
religious-style bigotry, that any religious person is supposed to be on his
guard against. Which is to say, they do not know what they are talking about; it is "beneath them" even to do the most elementary research into the actual histories & actual beliefs of the people they are attacking; & they will throw any missile that comes to hand, without considering its provenance. It is the flavour of Ulster at its very worst; or worse still, for there is not even a thin pretence of charity.

Dalrymple is by contrast modern, "post-Christian" European at its best. He is not a believer, but he does, actually, know something about Christianity, & he is aware of the need to retain specific virtues -- including charity, including humility -- that were inculcated in the Christian tradition. He is deeply concerned about the preservation of civilization (see his writings on every other subject; for he is a brilliant observer of post-modern life, from the angle of having been a doctor in places like prisons).

I got the same impression as Warren in both cases (the neo-atheists and Dalrymple), but didn't manage to put it half so well.

P.S.: David Limbaugh comments on Christopher Hitchens here.

Language: Theodore Dalrymple takes on materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker

Materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker of Harvard, who was recently mixing it up with eminent bioethicist Leon Kass, also attracted the attention of highly literate retired prison psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple. In "No, Dr. Pinker, it's not just from nature," Dalrymple recalls that many of his patients from the prison culture simply did not fit the stereotype of the "human animal" as "hardwired for language", a stereotype that owes much to Pinker's work. On the contrary, he finds, not only is there no such hard wiring but the lack of it is both apparent and devastating:

With a very limited vocabulary, it is impossible to make, or at least to express, important distinctions and to examine any question with conceptual care. My patients often had no words to describe what they were feeling, except in the crudest possible way, with expostulations, exclamations, and physical displays of emotion. Often, by guesswork and my experience of other patients, I could put things into words for them, words that they grasped at eagerly. Everything was on the tip of their tongue, rarely or never reaching the stage of expression out loud. They struggled even to describe in a consecutive and logical fashion what had happened to them, at least without a great deal of prompting. Complex narrative and most abstractions were closed to them.

In their dealings with authority, they were at a huge disadvantage—a disaster, since so many of them depended upon various public bureaucracies for so many of their needs, from their housing and health care to their income and the education of their children. ...

He adds, a propos Pinker's insistence that there are no "better" or "worse" ways of expressing oneself:

I need hardly point out that Pinker doesn’t really believe anything of what he writes, at least if example is stronger evidence of belief than precept. Though artfully sown here and there with a demotic expression to prove that he is himself of the people, his own book is written, not surprisingly, in the kind of English that would please schoolmarms. I doubt very much whether it would have reached its 25th printing had he chosen to write it in the dialect of rural Louisiana, for example, or of the slums of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Even had he chosen to do so, he might have found the writing rather difficult. I should like to see him try to translate a sentence from his book that I have taken at random, “The point that the argument misses is that although natural selection involves incremental steps that enhance functioning, the enhancements do not have to be an existing module,” into the language of the Glasgow or Detroit slums.

I'm definitely in Dalrymple's camp here because, like him (though only in a volunteer capacity), I have often found myself writing letters to authorities on behalf of persons in difficulties. What has so often struck me is that some people only clearly grasped the nature of their problems after I had explained them clearly in a letter I was composing, to be sent to someone else.

No doubt Pinker is right in thinking that humans have a natural tendency to construct language of some type. But all language is not equally useful for everything. Put another way, words are tools. If the only tools I know how to use are big and heavy, I can't do fine work. And just as some jobs require fine tools, some missions require carefully chosen words. There is nothing "natural" about any of that. Our language is an artistic inheritance built up over centuries of use and refinement. For various reasons, as Dalrymple notes, some people never got most of the toolkit of their culture (not nature), and it shows.

Often, I helped my friends in difficulty most by teaching them words so that they could think their way through difficulties that they had been trying to feel their way through. Post-modernists would, of course, say that I was "imposing my uptight Anglo-Canadian culture", and to some extent that is true. To help people navigate a system dominated by Anglo-Canadians, I taught them the Anglo-Canadian words of power.

It is the case with all words of power that once you know them, you find that you can think clearly about things that were fuzzy before. You can reject the new thoughts if you want, but you cannot go back to a time before you knew them.

Anyway, enjoy Dalrymple's graceful and interesting essay.

Thinkquote of the day: Theodore Dalrymple on a fundamental error of materialist psychiatry

Commenting on statistical studies of suicide (suicidology), psychiatrist Dalrymple notes,

The importance of what goes on in the minds of individual human beings is ... implicitly denied, in favor of vast impersonal forces that statistical regularities supposedly reveal and that supposedly determine people's behavior. Thus suicidology joins the other great intellectual movements of the twentieth century - Freudianism, Marxism, and more recently, sociobiology - in denying consciousness any importance in human conduct. On this view, thought is irrelevant to action; and, simply apprehending the intellectual currents of their time, ordinary people actually begin to experience themselves as unable to affect their own behavior. Many patients have described to me how they took the pills because, like Luther posting his theses on the cathedral doors, they could do no other.

- from "Goodbye, Cruel World," one of the essays in Life at the bottom (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), pp. 22-23.

The failing war on consciousness is, as it happens, one of the topics that Mario Beauregard and I cover in The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

Service note: I haven't been blogging much here lately because I reorganized the template of the Post-Darwinist and lost all the links, the ads, and the site meter! It has taken a while to sort out the various problems.

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, which keeps tabs on the intelligent design controversy.