EALING HUMANIST ASSOCIATION

Extract from EHA BULLETIN issue 52, August 2003
 		EHA Bulletin edited by Raymond Carlisle, adapted for the web by Alex Hill
CONTENTS
The following chapters have been extracted from the Bulletin:
Front cover illustration: Banqueting House
Article: Atheistic Fundamentalism and its Contradictions
Book Review: The alternative to objectivity?
Editorial: For EHA, science (objectivity) is not enough
Report: Visit to the Banqueting House in Whitehall
Letter to the Editor: Homer, the Iliad, etc.
Exchange: The role of human culture
Report: Talking Lunch
Click chapter you want to view

Banqueting House, Whitehall
The Banqueting House, Whitehall Palace

Atheistic Fundamentalism and its Contradictions1
         In what follows I will attempt to explain my disillusionment with Ealing Humanist Association’s militant atheism (which members refer to as “humanism”, a term more usually employed in philosophy, sociology and the humanities in contexts unconnected with religion).
         EHA atheism comprises two logically distinct components, namely, (1) an argument that science can prove that “God” does not exist and (2) a claim that a belief in the existence of deities causes “harm”2, which is left unspecific but which is usually taken to imply bad consequences even though the individual believer may be a good person. Now you don’t have to be a behaviourist to recognise the impossibility of identifying the mental state of another person in the absence of any empirically observable behaviour. Alternatively you cannot tell from somebody’s bad actions whether they are motivated by religious or secular convictions. Was Augustine a good or a bad man when he wrote “I believe; help Thou my belief”?3 Are atheists better people than practising Christians? Was Stalin a militant atheist a better person than Salvation Army do-gooders?
         It seems to me that all this unscientific moralising is inconsistent with the importance attached by “Enlightened” humanists to our autonomy as sovereign, self-determining individuals capable of constructing the world on foundations that are wholly our own. One of the more disquieting aspects of EHA holism4, however, (the theory that the fundamental data of social analysis are not individuals but rather societal laws, dispositions and movements) is the affinity of its “guilt by association” with anti-Enlightenment creeds such as anti-humanism, nationalism and racism, where people are evaluated not on the basis of their personal attributes but according to factors over which they have no control. How can the actions of do-gooding Salvationists possibly have a knock-on effect on Islamic fundamentalism or a person’s relationship with family, friends or neighbours be impaired solely by virtue of the fact that they pray to some imaginary deity.
         There also seems to me to be more than a passing resemblance between the EHA’s attack on religionists and religious fundamentalists’ fulminations against homosexuals5. In each case, proponents are motivated not so much by a personal aversion to certain practices as by a fear that a minor concession will open up cracks in the theory which will widen and eventually bring down the whole edifice. For atheists to concede one exception, one example of religious behaviour which does not lead to harm would, it is feared, end up with the common-sense discovery that most Christians (fundamentalists naturally excepted), far from harming others actually try to be better people. On the other hand, their counterparts needing to believe that every word in the Bible is the true word of God dare not admit that many aspects of its teaching were peculiar to Middle Eastern tribal cultures irrelevant to Western culture two millennia later. In a similar way the EHA creed is a relic of nineteenth century free-thought when religion was a much more contentious subject6 for the literate classes than it is today. In neither case are these fundamentals aware that petty squabbling over out-of-date prejudices is more likely to alienate than encourage would-be converts.
         I have frequently pointed out that fellow EHA “humanists” are wasting their time sitting around talking about not-God when they have failed to persuade more than a handful of believers to amend their ways. I have tried but so far failed to persuade members that post-modernism presents a far greater threat to the Enlightenment values which underlie Western culture than Western religious practices (fundamentalism excepted) and suspect that I have no better chance of persuading the EHA to face the enemy behind7 than they have of getting religionists to take their arguments seriously.
         However it is not impossible that somebody reading my words and wondering whether I exaggerate the challenge of radical/post-structuralist/multi-cultural/relativist/anti-science /perspectivist/ anti-foundationalist/anti-evolutionist/constructivist nihilism of postmodernity will be motivated to learn more about an ideology which has insidiously invaded UK and US universities during the past twenty years.
         It will be noticed that I have just intentionally laid out a trail of post-modernist terms which can be looked in any dictionary of sociology (Oxford, Penguin or Collins). Should this enquirer wish to dig even deeper into the subject, I would commend to them the following books:
- Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition, the Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
- Gross and Levitt, The Flight from Science and Reason, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
- Noretta Koertge, A House Built on Sand, Exposing Post Modernist Myths about Science, Oxford University Press, 1998.
         If our patient reader values Enlightenment principles as other humanists profess to do so, I can guarantee that s/he will receive a cultural shock never to be forgotten.
Derek Hill

1 The Contradictions of Pure Subjectivity (footnote comments on the above).
2 Component (1) is not true I agree, but the wording is misleading. I would prefer to say God objectively is not a fact but a subjective fiction (being neither disproved by nor accepted by science, a culture which is not individual but global). Component (2) is a consequence of the Ealing Humanist Association emphasising the distinction between belief in science and belief in fiction. The tragic consequences of political leaders (Blair and Bush) believing in objective universal good and evil have involved not only Iraq but the western world. What further example of social harm from religion would Derek Hill require? Perhaps the continued foundation of faith schools with their production of ghetto life-styles may suffice?
3 A good or a bad man for whom? Augustine in a universal context was surely neither good nor bad as a whole. The application by President Bush of 'bad' to untried British captives in Guantanamo Bay is unacceptable in judicial terms, and this is close to the very point at issue between most thinking nationals of the US and of the UK.
4 The religious carry out unscientific (subjective) moralising too, only it is on a universalist scale.
5 A resemblance? Can we not say that subjective belief is learnt and its objective effects are preventable? Sexual orientation is of course inborn, already objective, and not susceptible to fulminations.
6 Why live then in the nineteenth century with religion? Its death-knell was sounded in the middle of that century. Far from being a petty squabble, Darwinism is a revolution in scientific (objective) thought which unfortunately has yet to take place for most people of the world.
7 Marxism had evolved in the nineteenth century into the beliefs of an enemy already defeated. It appears to several, probably most, of us in the EHA that nowadays its revival is being attempted by these philosophical eccentricities but that survival of the fittest in science (in objective terms) can and should be applied to theories as well as to biological species.
Raymond Carlisle

Book Review: The alternative to objectivity?
Poole R. Towards Deep Subjectivity
London: Allan Lane, 1971.
         Although a lecturer of English the writer obviously writes as a philosopher, with political tendencies. His attack is aimed against governments that do not display 'adequate objectivity'. Here terminology gets somewhat complicated since it is subjectivity that he claims to promote. The trouble is of course that it all depends on who speaks, or observes the scene. One man's subjectivity is never the same as anyone else's. Governments have their own subjectivity; and cannot become much more objective whatever Poole's promotion of the idea. Like individuals, they have priorities and emotions. The call to be 'adequately objective' represents the writer's unspoken admission that governmental opinions though different are no less subjective than his.
         Indeed, full objectivity - for which I read, and at times the writer reads, 'science' - can never be subjective. That is up to poets, governments and groups such as the Ealing Humanist Association, where we accept that the church and similar bodies are too tied to religious belief (dated and regionalised pre-science) to be effective in any humanity-wide endeavour.
R.C.

Editorial: "For the Ealing Humanist, science (objectivity) is not enough."
         What more then is needed? Religious belief? No, of course not - to use again my title of last month's book review (on Science and Religion. Are They Compatible?8). What then of subjectivity? Well, yes. That's what I'm suggesting. Here though we are up against problems of definition, which are discussed in this month's review (on Roger Poole's book9).
         Subjectivity admits personal, and corporate, priorities (responsibility, concern, plans), emotions (love, hate, anxiety, elation) and fantasies. Subjectivity involves being sensitive to the individual, or individual group, whereas being sensitive to the general (being scientific) is objective. Being religious and believing in God is we believe mistaken.
         Quotation marks round the heading above are intended to indicate that it is a discussion topic only (up for discussion by the Ealing Humanists). So far we have only the suggestion - that in Ealing two kinds of humanism be officially combined. Although each is of considerable significance in the world of today, quite what to call them involves this same problem of definition. It is simplest to say that for us one kind is associated with our President Arthur Atkinson and the other with our past Chairman and Meetings Secretary Derek Hill.

8 Kurtz P. Karr B. Sandhu R. (eds) Science and Religion. Are They Compatible? Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2003.
9 Poole R. Towards Deep Sensitivity. London: Allan Lane, 1972.

Cartoon by Cluff

Report 2 of visit 14/6/03 to Banqueting House, Whitehall SW1
         When we entered the New Banqueting House our small group almost gate-crashed a private luncheon by straying into the undercroft beneath the main hall. Upstairs though peace pervades. Rubens had been there. He had looked at two rows of windows, those double rows of natural lighting that could also be converted into elegant softness by hundreds of candles for evening receptions and parties. He had studied the exact dimensions and every aspect of the ceiling in preparation for his ceiling paintings, finished by 1634. He did not work on the pictures at source, as I had first thought, but completed the nine paintings at home, in his Antwerp studio.
         I will not go into detail about the subjects of the paintings; one must visit in person to take in the splendour. However, you sense Inigo Jones' architectural combination as you walk in, but looking up find yourself swept up by Ruben's majestic vision. It is impossible to take it all in at once.
         After the coolness of the vast hall, we ventured out into Whitehall and the stifling heat; then decided to walk to the Royal Festival Hall for some refreshment and a well-earned sit down! We went through Whitehall Place, noting the interesting buildings, and then over the new Hungerford Bridge to Southbank.
         Our group then indulged a leisurely sojourn in the RFH cafe, a pleasant setting for an interesting discussion. Unanimously we elected to make our outings once a month during the Summer period with yours truly a sole, so far, organiser. We then unhurriedly reached Waterloo underground station to go our separate ways.
John Bennett

Letter to the Editor
Editorial on Homer, the Iliad, etc. May 2003 Bulletin 49
         I first came across E. V. Rieu's translations at school: in the Classical Fifth, when I was 14. A master called Freddy Kay started us off on the Odyssey, not at the beginning but with Book 5 (Calypso) when Odysseus commences his adventures. We were given Rieu's plain prose Penguin translation as a crib to get the sense of the story while grappling with an artificial literary Greek "dialect" based on various regional varieties, and it was all very strange to schoolboys who had been first fed Xenophon and Thucydides.
         Some might have sniffed at this but it worked well. Even so Rieu has been criticised for losing most of the poetry of the original and it is probably showing its age (1945). There have been several more recent translations, e.g. that of Walter Shewring (OUP 1980).
         I have no knowledge of the sounds of Turkish, but in your transcription of English it looks as if you are using /ö/ to represent the central vowel or shwa (the "a" of English "above") while Alex (June 2003) is using a small square*. I think both your transcriptions of English are unduly explicit. A good example is the prepositions where the vowels in normal fluent speech are not given their full value since they occur in unstressed syllables, but weakened to a shwa: hence not [ov] but [öv] (to use your transcription). Bernard Levin once inveighed against politicians who say "thee" instead of "the". Nevertheless one sometimes hears it from a speaker who is "groping" for the next word and losing fluency, and in any case it occurs in a very short form before a following vowel as in "the orange". The IPA uses the term "approximants", for the "wurly" sounds /w/,/r/,/j/ and /l/, since the articulators are in close approximation but (unlike fricatives) with no audible turbulence. I too have no set of IPA symbols on my equipment, but Alex might add /3/ to his list of vowels, to represent the long central vowel of Southern British English (as in "bird" [b3d]), a most unusual sound in the world's languages and difficult to describe.
Charles Rudd
* Alex did not use the small square, but used the shwa
symbol 'ə' for the website. The Bulletin editor changed
that to a small square for the printed version. (See
Bulletin 50 of June 2003, article on phonetic spelling).
However not every computer has that shwa symbol in its
character set and may therefore show a small square or
other symbol instead.                            A.H.
The role of human culture
         Open letter to Arthur Atkinson, EHA President with editor's strongest assertions following a phone conversation (on Editorial: Humanists are always well-informed, in EHA Bulletin 50) which included the President's remark about a revelation 'in quotes' below.

Dear Arthur
         It is our human culture, not our senses, that 'reveal the world' to us, one world anyway. Without any of the usual senses I would not of course have communicated with other humans. But that is not to say that my sense organs themselves are the most important link in the chain.
         More fundamental are the centres in my brain, absent from most animal brains, which interpret signals from my sense organs according to what I have learnt. Without such centres I could still respond by reflex action: but to deny their function as that most essential in "revealing the world" is to be out-of-date in science as surely as denying the discoveries of the Darwinian Enlightenment of 150 years ago.
         The former denial involves being about 100 years - certainly 50 - out-of-date in science and being an animalist, to coin a word. Both denials are I believe incompatible with humanism.
         With best wishes, yours sincerely Raymond. 30/06/03

Dear Raymond
         Many thanks for your letter.
         I think we are in disagreement over a very trivial matter. How the messages from our sense organs are conveyed to our brain, is of little importance. The vital thing is that they get there enabling the brain to interpret them. But without these messages from our sense organs, we should be unaware of what is taking place in our environment. Throughout evolution animal sense organs have developed as a result of which we have been able to survive and create civilisation.
         To talk about the existence of centres in our brain which process the signals from our sense organs, involves asking how the brain works. Neither you, nor I nor anybody else fully understands this. But it does not make us unscientific or out of date.
         Unfortunately playing down the role of our sense organs plays into the hands of religious people who want to claim the reality of divine revelation which is beyond the understanding and appreciation of our senses.
         As for human culture revealing the world to us, we should know nothing about it without our sensation.
         I suggest that we either transform our exchange of views from an argument to a discussion, or close the conversation down. It is becoming a fruitless diversion from our main interest in the promotion of humanism.
         As always, Arthur. 01/07/03

Talking Lunch
• Honorary Centenarian
         As an extension of the Fifty-plus "Club", Raymond Carlisle suggested a further way of opposing the negative image of ageing. Honorary Centenarian awards could not though be viewed as an honour to be welcomed until this image had become a positive one. Nevertheless adopting the principle of the award would encourage the idea of celebrating a lifetime's culmination. An alternative to 'going to heaven' would have been set up against religious beliefs in an after-life.
         John Bennett saw positive advantages since there was so much age discrimination in today's world. Maggie Adams did not feel discriminated against as a consequence of age but agreed that others, such as relatives of hers, would not be at all pleased to be congratulated on reaching 50, still less 100. This lack of pleasure Raymond accepted as part of our present value-system but repeated, that it could be changed as a result of the type of practice being proposed.
         J D Stewart was against discrimination, whether positive or negative, on any grounds and thought merit would find its own recognition in a just society. Alex Hill favoured a mix of young and old rather than favouring the older section of humanists. Charles Rudd saw advantages in more recognition of the older group.

• Anti-Blairism
         was the predominant political stance of the group. John and Steward recognised the Blairite promises as illusory, they said, at the outset but now they were obviously so. But it was possible to describe all 3 present main political parties as fascist, Stewart added, if fascism be defined as totalitarianism with a set of values derived from the Roman Catholic Church. Cheryl Blair was emphatically a Catholic with influence in religious matters over her husband and the other party leaders were themselves convinced Catholics. John said further there were almost 300 new criminal offences introduced by the legislation of the present government and that foundation of 70 notorious 'faith schools' had been agreed by them.
R.C.

         The agenda of the EHA committee meeting had been too full to allow a decision on whether to devote any special attention to the 50 to 100 age group. Much less was time available to discuss whether the terms Subjective and Objective were officially acceptable as varieties of humanism. Application of the latter dichotomy to the historical quarrel between atheists and religious believers is of sufficient importance though for its discussion among Talking Lunchers to proceed at the next opportunity.
J.B.
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