The lecture was incorrectly advertised as “Philosophy and Humanism”. The subject was in fact Postmodernism and our speaker was Brendan Larvor of the University of Hertfordshire. He began by outlining his role as a member of the Philosopher’s Group of the British Humanist Association (BHA) explaining that, as philosophers, the group was well equipped to supply the logic needed by the BHA to achieve sound arguments when preparing their pamphlets and press releases.

One of the most important postmodernists is the French philosopher Jacques Derrida who was recently asked what he thought about the twin tower disaster on 11th September 2001. Part of Derrida’s reply was read to the meeting by John Bennett to give us a ‘clear’ idea of the obscurity of the language of postmodernism. We were all impressively baffled!

In order to understand postmodernism one has to spend a little time learning about the modernism it has attempted to displace. The cultural climate of modernism began in the nineteenth century and continued to the mid-twentieth century. It was characterised by an emancipation based on the science of man; an objective science of history. When this way of thinking began to fail and the separation of objective and subjective became blurred, postmodernism arose to take its place by denying any objective scientific certainty or any common denominator in nature to support objective thought.

Brendan summarised how the writings of Descartes, Kant, Marx, and Hegel had formed the basic world from which modernism grew and went on to suggest that postmodernists are often “disappointed Marxists”. The philosophy adopted in any age is a part of our culture, it reflects a “spirit of the age” or a Zeitgeist. As humanity slips through the centuries so philosophy expresses the culture of the age at any given time. Philosophy in this tradition indulges in a sort of Zeitgeist surfing to try to map these changes. Hegel, who thought of his own approach as if it were the last, has been assimilated into modern philosophical systems as they have slowly evolved.

Many academics in the humanities in America and France misuse the language and thoughts of science, particularly physics, in the pursuit of their discipline and become profoundly dismissive of scientific objectivity. This “war on science”, this intellectual posturing, is the subject of much criticism both from the more moderate philosophers and from physical scientists themselves.

As an illustration of how intellectually fragile the postmodernist position really is, Brendan cited the case of Alan Sokal’s brilliant spoof article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” which appeared in the cultural studies journal, Social Text in 1996. Sokal, a physicist, had invaded a bastion of postmodernism with an article full of their own misuse of the language of science and only let it be known that it was a spoof shortly after publication. The editors and the wider community of the social sciences were left in some embarrassment for having accepted the article uncritically simply because it had been such a good imitation of their own obscure style.

We thank Brendan Larvor for a very informative talk and for providing us with a great opportunity for a long discussion as we grappled with the language of philosophy, mathematics and the history of science.

The following comments are based on the preface and first ten chapters of a long book of 80 chapters in all.

The author describes his work as an "anthology of informed opinions ... a history of reason." If so, it is an anthology knitted together into a continuous narrative. Some 800 authors are cited, not all of them well-known (or known at all to me at least), many of them US, though I have come across Felix Adler, founder of the US ethical culture movement, as he was a mentor of Stanton Coit, the founder of the Ethical Union in the UK.

The author's main animus is directed against the "blind acceptance of feeble-minded authority": accordingly some of the authors quoted with approval are on the religious side of the fence. Typical of these are John Wren-Lewis (remember him? shades of 'Honest to God' ,1963) and Bishop Robinson, who saw the need to replace the ancient world-view with one more intelligible to modern people. (Whether the replacement is intelligible is another question).

The style of the book is clear and forthright: I particularly liked Americanisms such as the following (CH. 4): "souls [are] in the same category as the whangdoodle and the whifflebird." No need to ask what they are.

In case the author appears to some (British) readers to have overdone it, it may be worth bearing in mind the power of religion in the US, with its tele-evangelists, and the political power wielded by fundamentalists, especially with a republican President.

Alex Hill's response¹ to my appeal to the EHA to put a hold on their (quite justified) worries about religion and concentrate on the insidious challenge to Enlightenment scientific rationality posed by postmodernism, reinforces my complaint that humanists spend too much time in fruitless, repetitive arguments against invisible religionists oblivious of their arguments and of their very existence. It is only in Alex's short concluding paragraph that he gets round to the substance of my concerns, namely the need to oppose energetically relativism in all its present manifestations - postmodernism, social constructionism, anti-science, anti-humanism, pseudo-science, anti -realism, anti-foundationalism, perspectivism and the rest.

So, now we are in agreement, what can the EHA do about the problem?

Postmodernist academics are much clearer people than your run of the mill theologians and, moreover, they control the curriculum in many university departments, an achievement beyond the wildest dreams of the most ardent Christian fundamentalists. So, the first task is to learn as much as possible about postmodernism²; I offered some specimen counter-offensives. Next, why not get a postmodernist academic to talk to the EHA. Then persuade the BHA to go on the offensive to demonstrate the dangers to our Western values posed by bogus but persuasive theories that deny that humans exist as separate, discrete individuals or that our emotions are personal, spontaneous expressions of an inner self which we call our personality. We are, it is argued, fragmented non-entities, the very nature of ourselves, our thoughts, feelings and experiences are the results of language, we do not "use" language but language "speaks" to us and we are locked into the prison-house of language, there is no reality outside us ...... and so it goes on nibbling away at the foundations of Western cultural and scientific humanist values while all the time humanists, who should be leading the counter-attack, sit around perfecting brilliant arguments against religion which will never make the slightest impact on deeply held beliefs beyond the reach of reasoned argument.

Over to you, EHA!

In the December 2003 issue of the Bulletin, you compiled a list of expressions under the heading, EALING-SPEAK, and some of us were confused, to say the least. To the uninitiated, it appeared to be a “glossary of technical terms”, a sort of consensus jargon used by members of the Ealing Humanist Association; we were confused.

Casual readers may have raised their eyebrows at some of the definitions: Is Agnostic really an alternative term for atheist? Is ethics really a synonym for morality? Is it satisfactory to refer to animal sense organs simply as a godless source of revelation? I believe that those who know you well are aware of your skill in recording and epitomising the various expressions that have been used in conversation and argument at EHA meetings. Am I right to assume that the list shows how words and phrases used in unrehearsed conversation are a mixture of careless usage, correct usage and unusual usage?

Unfortunately, I suspect most readers of the Bulletin, including myself, will not be aware of the subtleties which lie behind this compilation of Ealing-Speak and some have suggested “Raymond-Speak” would have been a better title. I am not sure of that because you were not describing YOUR use of words but I think you were trying to say how we, the EHA membership, have expressed ourselves in conversation and argument, no matter how inadequately.

It would be helpful to have a short explanatory note on what lies behind your compilation of Ealing-Speak, what are your motives and your plans for its further development? In the meantime, to pick on one item from your list which we all understand – coffee morning ... see you at the next.

Balthazar Gérard assassinated William of Orange, a believer in tolerance, in 1584 at the height of what is called The Reformation. However only the authority of the Roman Catholic Church was being challenged, not the whole concept of divine authority. As we can realise the newborn Protestantism of Luther and Calvin was in any meaningful sense only halfway there and of course only won over - or dominated over - one part of Christendom. Indeed the Catholics reacted vigourously in their Counter-reformation. Philip II of Spain, in a fatwa-like pronouncement, had placed a bounty on the head of William of Orange, now stadtholder in Delft and commander of the rebel Protestant army of the Low Countries.

The stadtholder was occupying what until then had been a convent. He passed from the dining hall, down the few steps at its threshold and into the vestibule. As he prepared to ascend a long flight of steps to his study - and in the course of what can only be described as a major absence of local security - the assassin emerged from behind a pillar.

Gérard, though a fanatical Catholic, had posed as a Huguenot soldier and carried two loaded pistols. After discharging them upon William he made good his escape only as far as the town wall and was then apprehended. As a presage to Guantanamo Bay, much more barbarously but with due legal process, Gérard was executed - as he must have foreseen. For many of us this fact places him alongside the Islamic suicide bombers of today who similarly count their devotion to God, Allah in their case, as more to be desired than life itself. Gérard too had been conned on the life he would find after death. Phillip's bounty was never sought.

I write now in Delft, having just been to see the pillar which had hidden Gérard, and two holes in the wall opposite the hall steps claimed to have been made by his bullets, which seems doubtful also in view of the primitive nature of the firearms at that period. At all events William was fatally wounded, managing only to say (in French, the language of Orange and not in the local Netherlands vernacular) "God have mercy on me and on the poor people". On the latter's account he need not have worried. His son Maurice took over military leadership with the result as we know that not one but two low countries are each now as politically independent as Spain itself and the southernmost, present-day Belgium, had not even shared in a 'full' Reformation . . . however restricted that reformation undoubtedly was.

In successive end-December 2003 issues of the New Scientist there are articles that tell us much about subjectivity. The first, Einstein on Acid, presents work by Metod Saniga; an astrophysicist who draws on "near-death experiences, LSD and mescaline trips and ... fits of mysticism or madness". The second, The Case of the Mysterious Mind, reports the use of the phenomenonology of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) to solve the relationship between mind - specifically consciousness - and brain.

As you too may conclude on reflection the articles confuse initial, maximally-varied proliferation of ideas with their final, independent, maximally-inclusive selection. I suggest that unless these two operations are performed in succession, progression of knowledge will not occur. Only the second operation can genuinely be called scientific - the first has its closest affinity with religion.

llse Meyer, a longstanding Ealing Humanist, escaped to England in 1 October 1933, one of the first "refugees from the Nazi oppression" as the British government labelled her and her compatriots. Last October Ilse turned her mind to happier times with a party at her home in Parliament Hill in South End Green to celebrate 70 years of living in Hampstead and her forthcoming 97th birthday.

Ilse was born in Berlin in 1906, her father a doctor who during World War I looked after Russian prisoners of war in Spandau. In 1931 Ilse married Ernst, who was an accomplished musicologist.

Together they moved to England. Ilse says: "At that time we were beginning to understand the evil of the Nazis but in those early days nobody could yet foresee the full beastliness of it." The first five years in England were difficult: with no permit to stay or work both Ilse and her husband had to reapply to remain in the country every six months, and every time they worried they would be expelled. Then war broke out. With the end of the war Ernst returned to Berlin leaving Ilse, a single mother in a society used to married couples and families.

Only in the last couple of years has she needed a stick to walk and she missed going on the Anti-war in Iraq march in February but says she was there in spirit.

Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Dewey and Rorty argue that the notion of knowledge as accurate representation of an objective reality by special mental processes and intelligible through a general theory of representation needs to be abandoned. The mind is not something about which we should have a philosophical view. Knowledge is not something about which there ought to be a "theory" and which has "foundations". Anti-foundationalists reject the claim of analytical philosophy as committed to the construction of a permanent, neutral framework for enquiry. The notion that there is a framework only makes sense if we think of it as imposed by the nature of the knowing subject, by the nature of his faculties of the nature of the medium within which he works. According to William James, the American pragmatist, truth is "what it is better for us to believe" rather than as the accurate representation of reality. The notion of "accurate representation" is simply an automatic and empty compliment which we pay to those beliefs which are successful in helping us to do what we want to do.

•Objective religion is responsible
The advertised topic was in reaction to the current wave of terrorist atrocities. An apology was made by the Bulletin's editor, who had instigated the announcement, on its failure to gain more response. But his own comment was that perhaps it would be more accurate to regard objective religion, only, as responsible for suicide bombing. A further stage in the separation of subjective and objective belief appears in the second editorial of this issue. Tony Constable defended the religion practiced by those who were not attempting to proselytize. He said that help for sufferers of many types of misfortune was more likely to be available from the many Salvation-Army-type recruits, despite their naive subjective beliefs, than from most humanists.

•Post-modernism
Continuing discussion from the previous Thursday Meeting, John Bennett said that French philosophers, with the exception of Foucault, were the mainspring of a new nihilism which was failing to find its deserved repudiation, unlike the Marxism which had so often been the precursor. Titles were banded about with little more attribution than to one writer or to one book. In the case of Jaques Derrida less even than that could be said, since he was unhappy to have his views classified in any way¹.

•The Truth
In his opposition to any group claiming a monopoly of 'truth' and attempting to shove it down the throats of others Tony supported, rather, the view that truth was never reached. As it was not a word used² by Ealing Humanists, Raymond Carlisle seconded the substitution of John's favoured 'hypothesis' - which only finally reached any confirmation as a result of a process of ('scientific') acceptance among most of all available experts - to denote concepts initially restricted to any group of believers.

•Humanism - two main types?
A step-wise presentation by Raymond concluded the meeting. Using the hostess's coffee table top, identical elliptical discs with the letter P inscribed and with a pen to represent a double-tipped arrow, he attempted to explain in 10 steps a model for illustrating objective and subjective in respect of humanism. When it came to stage 10 he asked the other discussants if they were still with him, which he found had been so up to then. Several other paired descriptions were then offered for 'essential humanism' as contrasted with 'traditional humanism' (respectively associated with Arthur Atkinson and Derek Hill) but no better consensus emerged.