Reviewed Book: After the Ice

John McDonnell, Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington agreed to talk to the EHA at the invitation of our president, Arthur Atkinson. The subject of his talk Peace and Humanism was dealt with in a refreshingly rational way as he probed some of the practical problems of dealing with world conflict.

At various times in the past we have been under the impression that society was moving positively away from age-old fears, myths and religious superstition towards a more rational view of life. However, there have been occasional reversals and we, in these post 9/11 times, are currently experiencing a severe reversal led by George W. Bush with his own personal Christian fundamentalism and his ignorant talk of crusades. Bush is aided by Tony Blair with his attempts to put religion high on the political agenda particularly in education.

Any debate on the massive humanist and secularist protest over the Iraq conflict has been discouraged or ignored. On one side of the conflict we see the Christian Augustinian concept of a just war and on the other the concept of holy war - Jihad. Many moderate religionists are embarrassed by their own extremists.

Why are there wars? The rise of Hitler was due to insecurities following economic failure and we presently face the bad economic consequences of globalisation and of environmental threats - such as the threat of losing access to natural resources, principally oil, but, especially among the poorer nations, the increasing difficulty of maintaining reliable water supplies. Thus conflicts may arise but is there any means of resolving conflict other than the old idea of going to war?

There has been an evolving initiative in the process of conflict resolution, especially in Europe, through state by state cooperation. A Hobbesian law-abiding process in the 18th century led to the sharing of experience between states in the 19th and then the 20th century saw such ideas develop into the League of Nations followed by the United Nations after World War II. It is worth remembering that, owing to opposition in Congress, the USA never participated in the League of Nations despite it’s being the creation of President Woodrow Wilson.

What governmental structures are needed to urge society away from the traditional war-like solutions for dealing with conflict? One hopeful suggestion is an “Orwellian” Ministry of Peace to supplement and then replace the Defence Ministry, previously a Ministry of War. Timely prevention of conflicts throughout the world would be its aim in the short as well as in the long term. Proposed activities would include the funding and early dispatch of mediators to areas where conflict threatens. A bill to this effect was debated in Parliament and several military personnel expressed their interest, contrary to what was expected.

The failure of President Clinton's intervention in Somalia set back US policy through fear of repetition. But had non-military intervention come many years earlier it could well have been effective.

In the presence of so much fundamentalist reaction to global problems there is little room for development of the much-needed rational thought from which more lasting solutions might emerge. Around Tony Blair there is a coterie of believers in his own confidence of infallibility and in his projects of military intervention. He patently failed to draw lessons from his earlier conflict-reduction successes in Northern Ireland - inherited in part from John Major.

A questioner asked whether conflicts in Africa, for example in the Sudan and Rwanda, weren't tribally based. The speaker considered that shortages of land and other resources were underlying tribal conflict and of even more fundamental importance. The best hope of progress lies in reason and understanding in contrast to the widespread low educational attainment that leads to fundamentalism.

The problem of Afghanistan and the irrational support of the arms trade were discussed. “The last place you should look for rational debate is in the House of Commons” was the speaker's comment. He said also that the weekly meetings of the parliamentary Labour Party were dominated by a platform of leaders who are, in effect, ‘one’s employers’. Hence, younger Members are in the position of ‘employees’ at an interview board and they are hardly likely to overtly pit an opinion against those who have the power to promote and demote them. Thus ‘dedication to a cause’ is an early casualty.

Gordon Brown however has led a little-publicised multiparty body, the Pool for Conflict Prevention. A budget has been dedicated and thus the Treasury is involved along with other ministries, notably International Development. N.G.O. representatives have been sent to potential conflict areas as peace promoters and funds are available for the training of lawyers in human rights abuse cases - with less potential for corruption than hitherto.

Another questioner spoke of internal problem areas needing to take precedence over global issues. Early discussions with young-Moslem groups in the UK were certainly needed with a multifaceted approach. And, in any case, was it not the role of the Foreign Office to promote peace and to ward off impending conflict?

According to our speaker, the Foreign Office had short-term goals relating primarily to what benefited Britain primarily in matters of trade and it was therefore not serving any serious peacemaker role. In fact the business-oriented role of the Foreign Office was often in conflict with the idea of a peaceful approach to dealing with embryonic conflict. But, on the other hand, a Ministry of Peace, when established, could well use the standard consultative practice to good effect in resolving conflict well before it becomes yet another seething battlefield.

ARC & RC

If objective, never; if subjective, only when we keep them to ourselves - would be one answer. Towards objective false perceptions, that exist in the world outside of ourselves, we mostly have a strangely passive attitude.

"Freedom-fighter martyrdom and suppression of women is part of their religion. We should defend ourselves if we are threatened personally but if not, let them believe in the religion if they want."

"I know that complementary/alternative medicine is not the answer to my mother's cancer but we don't believe in allopathic medicine."

"Smoking, heavy drinking, drugs, unprotected sex, over-eating all mean taking unnecessary risk but I tell them they'll come to no harm."

"Leaving women so exposed to unwanted pregnancy and AIDS infection is wrong. However, George Bush (and the Pope) won't tolerate the issue of condoms."

Although we can hear remarks such as these almost daily, our respect for the individual's perceptions or reliance on the individual conscience would be regarded as tolerance gone mad if applied to serial killers, paedophiles or bribery in the police.

Why tolerate what objectivist religions are doing to our communities? Their putting the blame on "a few bad apples" or "the extremists" is surely not acceptable any longer. No amount of blame-shifting can rectify the consequences of perceptions that are contrary to scientific evidence.

If an individual chooses to believe in God objectively or in other false perceptions he or she can at least be prevented from teaching nonsense to children or from collecting - or voting - financial support for those who attempt to misinform.

There is an ongoing discussion among Ealing humanists on the place of animals in human society. It is objectively wrong for us to inflict unnecessary suffering on sentient beings. Where animal vivesection is concerned this is illegal and rare. There are those however who claim that knowledge derived by such means is somehow immoral always faulty, in that it leads to false claims on the safety of drugs in humans. They support their wild assertion by that nefarious technique employed by Jehovah's Witnesses (as we ourselves experience if discussion is pursued with our Sunday callers) - selective quotation from scientific literature. Science of course is, on the contrary, the consensus of the widest possible community of experts. We humanists recognize that persistent, small-minority science is not science at all, but religion.

"In 1939 Vladislav Iosifovich Ravdonikas, head of the State Institute for the History and Material Culture of Stalinist Russia, received the results of excavations undertaken on . . . Oleneostrovski Moglinik cemetery [which] implied that its people had been farmers - at least, it did so if one followed the Marxist theory of social evolution . . . As he worked in Stalin's Russia and archaeological observation were made to confirm the pattern of evolution as laid out by Frederick Engels, Ravdonikas had to do just that. . . . Ravdonikas was quite wrong. The people . . . had lived at least 4,000 years earlier than Ravdonikas had proposed." pp 168, 169

The science of one lot of humanity thus became outdated by the science of the world scientific community. In religions too of course it's the same thing. A curiously persistent form of outdated science is taught to believers. Coincidentally "After the Ice" is an archaeological account that refers often to religions.

For those, few perhaps, who have not heard of the book already I should explain that Professor Mithen has written a layman's textbook of prehistory in the form of a novel. His fictional hero John Lubbock visits in turn the most well known archaeological sites - at the times around when they were inhabited. He reacts subjectively to the landscapes encountered and, oddly, participates in the human activity he finds without communicating with anyone there. (They would attempt to kill or capture Lubbock if they knew he wasn't one of them, or so readers will assume.)

What can this overfull but fascinating book - all of 622 pages - tell us laymen about the nature of pre-history? Time is measured in kilo-years rather than in centuries. Locations, however, are also the locations of history. Symbolism and religion (unscience), though often still obscure in pre-history, are as important there as they are historically in human affairs. Only individual personalities are missing, except as human remains.

RC

The small group consisting of Tony Constable, Alex Hill, Maggie Adams and Charles Rudd had a pleasantly informal discussion on a typical miscellany of topics.

•We first dealt with the practical matter of completing the entry of our EHA book list into an ‘Access’ data base. The discussion widened a little, in typical EHA fashion, into talk of recent developments in computer hardware and recent work on hardwiring the brain to a microprocessor to overcome blindness. However, to be practical and down to earth, we are able to report that the EHA book list is now fully installed on a data base and copies of the book list will be generated for circulation at the next Thursday meeting.

•We briefly discussed progress in Iraq, surrounded as we had been for the previous week with vivid images of Saddam Hussein, looking little wiser in his sad decline. Anthony Grayling’s essay from this week’s ‘Times’ was read and briefly discussed. It’s title, ‘Baghdad’s Latest Shift in Power’, cunningly encapsulates the content of the essay. Grayling summarised the historical background to this poor country’s mishandling by British and other Western powers since the creation of modern Iraq in 1921. The essay concluded by reflecting on how so much of Iraq’s early history hinged on Winston Churchill’s order in 1911 for the British Naval Fleet to change from coal-fired to oil-burning engines!!

•We then went on to discuss the great need that many of our fellow human beings have for religious ceremonial functions. While it is playfully understandable for a bride to dress up as a princess for her wedding ceremony, it is less easy to sympathise with all those grand rituals such as coronations or the election of bishops where priests dress up in colourful elaborate costumes which provide badges of office and recognition of status. This topic of discussion was prompted by recent images of the colourful ceremony at St Alban’s Cathedral where Jeffrey John was installed as their new dean. Such spectacles are apparently needed by the simple folk who still practice the ancient art of religious worship. Solemn religious ceremonies are pageants; they are pure ‘theatre’ - miles removed from reality - and part of an ancient religious tradition going back to the primitive Shamans whose power lay solely in the art of deception. Humanists are generally accused of having no substitute to fill this basic primitive need for ritual, but perhaps we should simply recommend to those in need of theatre to try The Globe or The National Theatre! This idea is not new; the multitudes flocked to see Shakespeare in Elizabethan England and this is thought to have been a popular response to the loss of church ritual as Catholicism gave way to the less ritualistic reformed Church. The difference is that the faithful were duped by the serious solemnity of church ritual whereas nobody doubts that a good Shakespeare drama is pure make-believe.

•We then discussed the possibility that the strong fashion for creationism in the USA may perhaps have reached its climax with the possibility of a return to sanity on the distant horizon. Many of the trends in this country are imported from the USA with a certain time lapse so that we remain healthily out of phase with the trendy transatlantic world - though, perhaps, we should allow some degree of home grown initiative where the phase difference is in the reverse direction. In the case of creationism, we may appear to be more rational in the UK and have little regard for such patent absurdity. But watch out! Creationism may well be creeping slowly into the British psyche with a gentle helping hand from a Prime Minister who is so addicted to the idea of ‘faith schools’. The rise in religious fundamentalism does not pass unnoticed. Christian worship as represented by the Anglican church may be in the welcome state of decline apart from those great ceremonial occasions, coronations and such like, where we are all assumed to belong to a ‘National Church’ (whose costume department is almost as good as the National Theatre’s). But the moribund established church may go into reverse with the growth of evangelical enthusiasms deriving from the Alpha movement, for the middle class Christians it serves, and from the true evangelical fervour of the pop variety for the rest. Creationism may still play only a minor role in the formal expression of religious education in this country but evangelical fervour, influenced by the even stronger fervour of non-Christian origin, could shift the emphasis in the foreseeable future. So, there is the unattractive prospect for humanists and other rationalists in the UK; while watching the American enthusiasm for creationism slowly decline, we may, due to that phase difference, have to witness a British version on the increase.

Anthony Constable