ideological criminal

Noam Chomsky spoke recently on the topic of “What Next? The Elections, the Economy, and the World”, hosted by Encuentro 5. The talk was picked up by DN!.  The full transcript is below.  All linked material has been added by me.

Well, let’s begin with the elections. The word that rolls off everyone’s tongue is “historic”—historic election—and I agree with that. It was a historic election. To have a black family in the White House is a momentous achievement. In fact, it’s historic in a broader sense. The two Democratic candidates were an African American and a woman, both remarkable achievements. If we go back, say, forty years, it would have been unthinkable.

So something’s happened to the country in forty years. And what’s happened to the country, which we’re not supposed to mention, is that there was extensive and very constructive activism in the 1960s, which had an aftermath, so the feminist movement, mostly developed in the ’70s, the solidarity movements in the ’80s, and on ’til today. And the activism did civilize the country. It’s an important achievement. The country is a lot more civilized than it was forty years ago, and the historic achievements illustrate it.

And that’s also a lesson for what’s next. What’s next will depend on whether the same thing happens. Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below. And it’s up to—the answer to what’s next depends on people like you. Nobody else can answer it. It’s not predictable.

In some ways, the election—the election was surprising in some respects. Going back to my bad prediction, if the financial crisis hadn’t taken place at the moment that it did, if it had been delayed a couple of months, I suspect that prediction would have been correct. But not speculating, one thing surprising about the election is that it wasn’t a landslide. By the usual criteria, you would expect the opposition party to win in a landslide under conditions like the ones that exist today. The incumbent president for eight years was so unpopular that his own party couldn’t mention his name and had to pretend to be opposing his policies. He presided over maybe the worst record for ordinary people in post-war history, in terms of job growth, real wealth and so on. Just about everything the administration has touched has turned into a disaster. The country has reached the lowest level of standing in the world that it’s ever had, and the economy was tanking. Several recessions are going on, not just the one on the front pages, the financial recession, but there’s also a recession in the real economy, the productive economy, under circumstances—and people know it. So 80 percent of the population say the country’s going in the wrong direction. About 80 percent say the government does not work for the benefit of the people, it works for the few and the special interests. A startling 94 percent complain that the government doesn’t pay any attention to the public will. And on like that. Under conditions like that, you’d expect a landslide for the opposition, almost whoever they are. And there wasn’t one, which has raised some questions. So one might ask why there wasn’t a landslide. And that goes off in an interesting direction.

In other respects, the outcome was pretty familiar. So, once again, the election was essentially bought. Nine out of ten of the victors outspent their opponents. Obama, of course, outspent McCain. If you look at the—and we don’t have final records yet from the final results, but they’re probably going to be pretty much like the preliminary results a couple of months ago, which showed that both Obama and McCain were getting the bulk of their financing from the financial institutions and, for Obama, law firms, which means essentially lobbyists. It was about over a third a few months ago. Probably the final results will probably be the same.

And there is a—the distribution of funding has, over time, been a pretty good predictor of what policies will be like. For those of you who are interested, there’s very good scholarly work on this by Tom Ferguson at UMass, Boston, what he calls the investment theory of politics, which predicts the—which argues essentially that elections are moments when groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state, and has quite a substantial predictive success, gives some suggestion as to what’s likely to happen. So that part’s familiar. What the future is, as I say, depends on people like you.

The response to the election was interesting and instructive. It kept pretty much to the soaring rhetoric, to borrow the cliché, that was the major theme of the election. The election was described as an extraordinary display of democracy, a miracle that could only happen in America, and on and on. Much more extreme in Europe even than here. There’s some accuracy in that, if we keep to the West. So if we keep to the West, yes, it’s probably true that it couldn’t have happened anywhere else. Europe is much more racist than the United States, and you wouldn’t expect anything like that to happen. On the other hand, if we look at the world, it’s not that remarkable.

So, let’s take, say, the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere: Haiti and Bolivia. In Haiti, there was an election in 1990, which really was an extraordinary display of democracy, much more so than this. In Haiti, there were grassroots movements, popular movements that developed in the slums and in the hills, which nobody was paying any attention to. And they managed, even without any resources, to sweep into power their own candidate, a populist priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. That’s a victory for democracy, when popular movements can organize and set programs and pick their candidate and put him into office, which is not what happened here, of course. I mean, Obama did organize a great large number of people and many enthusiastic people, what’s called in the press “Obama’s Army.” But the army is supposed to take instructions, not to implement, to introduce, develop programs and call on its own candidate to implement them. That’s critical. If the army keeps to that condition, nothing much will change. If it, on the other hand, goes the way activists did in the ’60s, a lot could change, one of the choices that has to be made. However—so that’s Haiti. Of course, that didn’t last very long. A couple of months later, there was military coup, a period of terror. I won’t go through the whole record, but up to the present, the traditional torturers of Haiti—France and the United States—have made sure that there won’t be a victory for democracy there. It’s a miserable story, contrary to many illusions.

Take the second poorest country, Bolivia. They had an election in 2005 that’s almost unimaginable in the West, certainly here, anywhere. The person elected into office was indigenous. That’s the most oppressed population in the hemisphere, that is, those who survived. He’s a poor peasant. How did he get in? Well, he got in because there were, again, mass popular movements, which elected their own representative. And they are the source of the programs, which are serious ones. There are real issues, and people know them: control over resources, cultural rights, social justice, and so on. Furthermore, the election was just an event that was a particular stage in a long continuing struggle, a lot before and a lot after. There was day when people pushed the levers, but that’s just an event in ongoing popular struggles, very serious ones. A couple of years ago, there was a major struggle over privatization of water, an effort which would in effect deprive a good part of the population of water to drink. And it was a bitter struggle. A lot of people were killed. But they won it, through international solidarity, in fact, which helped. And it continues. Now that’s a real election. Again, the plans, the programs are being developed, acted on constantly by mass popular movements, which then select their own representative from their own ranks to carry out their programs. And that’s quite different from what happened here.

Actually, what happened here is understood by elite elements. The public relations industry, which runs elections here—quadrennial extravaganzas essentially—makes sure to keep issues in the margins and focus on personalities, character, and so on and so forth. They do that for good reasons. They know—they look at public opinion studies, and they know perfectly well that on a host of major issues both parties are well to the right of the population. That’s one good reason to keep issues off the table. And they recognize the success. So, every year, the advertising industry gives a prize, you know, to the best marketing campaign of the year. This year, Obama won the prize, beat out Apple Company, the best marketing campaign of 2008, which is correct. You know, it’s essentially what happened.

Now, that’s quite different from what happens in a functioning democracy like, say, Bolivia or Haiti, except for the fact that it was crushed. And in the South, it’s not all that uncommon. Notice that each of these cases, there’s a much more extraordinary display of democracy in action than what we’ve seen, important as it was here. And so, the rhetoric, especially in Europe, is correct if we maintain our own narrow racist perspectives and say, yeah, what happens in the South didn’t happen or doesn’t matter; the only thing that matters is what we do, and, by our standards, it was extraordinary, a miracle, but not by the standards of a functioning democracy.

In fact, there is a distinction in democratic theory, which does separate, say, the United States from Bolivia or Haiti. The question is, what is a democracy supposed to be? That’s actually a debate that goes back to the Constitutional Convention. But in recent years and the twentieth century, it’s been pretty well articulated by important figures. So at the liberal end, progressive end, the leading public intellectual of the twentieth century was Walter Lippmann, a Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy progressive. And a lot of his work was on a democratic theory, and he was pretty frank about it. He took a position not all that different from James Madison’s. He said that in a democracy, the population has a function. Its function is to be spectators, not participants. He didn’t call it the population. He called it the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders. The ignorant and meddlesome outsiders have a function, namely to watch what’s going on and to push a lever every once in a while, then go home. But the participants are us, us privileged, smart guys. Well, that’s one conception of democracy. And, yeah, that’s—essentially we’ve seen an episode of it.

The population very often doesn’t accept this. As I mentioned, in just very recent polls, people overwhelmingly oppose it. But they’re atomized, separated. Many of them feel hopeless, unorganized, and don’t feel they can do anything about it. So they dislike it, you know, but that’s where it ends. In a functioning democracy, like, say, Bolivia or the United States in earlier stages, they did something about it. That’s why we have the New Deal measures, the Great Society measures. In fact, any—just about any step—you know, women’s rights, end of slavery, go back as far as you like—it doesn’t happen as a gift. And it’s not going to happen in the future.

The commentators are pretty well aware of this, although they’re not going to—they don’t put it the way I’m going to. But if you read the press, it does come out. So, take our local newspaper at the liberal end of the spectrum, the Boston Globe. You probably saw right after the election a front-page story. The lead front-page story was on how Obama developed this wonderful grassroots army, but he doesn’t have any debts, which is supposed to be a good thing. So he’s free to do what he likes, because he has no debts. The normal Democratic constituencies—labor, women, minorities and so on—they didn’t bring him into office. So he owes them nothing.

What he had was an army that he organized of people who got out the vote for Obama, for what the press calls “Brand Obama.” They essentially agree with the advertisers: it’s Brand Obama that his army was mobilized to bring into office. They regard that as a good thing, accepting the Lippmann conception of democracy: the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders are supposed to do what they’re told and then go home.

The Wall Street Journal, at the opposite end of the spectrum, also had an article about the same thing, roughly the same time, talked about this tremendous grassroots army that had been developed, which is now waiting for instructions. So what should they do next to press forward Obama’s agenda, whatever that is? But whatever it is, the army is supposed to be out there taking instructions and press for it. Los Angeles Times had similar articles. And there are others.

What they don’t seem to realize is that what they’re describing, the ideal that they’re describing, is dictatorship, not democracy. Democracy, at least not in the Lippmann sense, the approved—I pick him out because he’s so famous, but it’s a standard position—but in the sense of, say, much of the South, where mass popular movements develop programs, organize—to take part in elections, but that’s one part of an ongoing process—and bring somebody from their own ranks to implement the programs that they develop. And if the person doesn’t, they’re out. OK, that’s another kind of democracy. So it’s up to us to choose which kind of democracy we want. And again, that will determine what comes next.

Well, what can we anticipate if the popular army, the grassroots army, decides to accept the function of spectators of action rather than participants? There’s two kinds of evidence. There’s rhetoric, and there’s action. The rhetoric, we know. It’s very uplifting: change, hope, and so on. Change was kind of reflexive; any party manager this year who read the polls, including the ones I cited, would instantly conclude that our theme in the election has to be change, because people hate what’s going on, for good reasons. So the theme is change. In fact, both parties, for both of them, the theme was change, you know, break from the past, none of the old politics, new things are going to happen. The Obama campaign did it better, so they won the marketing award, not the McCain campaign.

And notice, incidentally, on the side, that the institutions that run the elections, the public relations industry, advertisers, they have a role. Their major role is commercial advertising. I mean, selling a candidate is a kind of a side role. In commercial advertising, as everybody knows, everybody who’s ever, say, looked at a television program, the advertising is not intended to provide information about the product, right? I don’t have to go on about that; it’s obvious. The point of the advertising is to delude people with imagery and, you know, tales of a football player or a sexy actress who, you know, drives to the moon in a car or something like that. But it’s certainly not to inform people. In fact, it’s to keep people uninformed. The goal of advertising is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices. Those of you who’ve suffered through an economics course know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. But industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to undermine markets and to ensure—you know, to get uninformed consumers making irrational choices.

And when they turn to selling a candidate, they do the same thing. They want uninformed consumers—you know, uninformed voters to make irrational choices based on the success of illusion, slander, invective, you know, body language or whatever else is supposed to be significant. So you undermine democracy pretty much the same way you undermine markets. Well, that’s the nature of an election when it’s run by the business world, and you’d expect it to be like that. There should be no surprise there. And it should also turn out that the elected candidate doesn’t have any debts. So you can follow that Brand Obama can be whatever they decide it to be, not what the population decides that it should be, as in the South, let’s say.

I might say, on the side, that this may be an actual instance of the familiar and usually vacuous slogan about clash of civilizations, that maybe there really is one, but not the kind that is usually touted.

So, let’s go back to the evidence that we have, rhetoric and actions. Rhetoric, we know. Now, what are the actions? Well, so far, the major actions are a selection of—in fact, the only actions are a selection of personnel to implement Brand Obama. The first choice was the Vice President, Joe Biden, one of the strongest supporters of the war in Iraq in the Senate, a longtime Washington insider, you know, rarely deviates from the party vote. And the cases where he does deviate are not very uplifting. So he did break from the party in voting for a Senate resolution that prevented people from getting rid of their debts by—individuals, that is—from getting rid of their debts by going into bankruptcy. That’s a blow against poor people who are caught in this immense debt that’s a large part of the basis for the economy these days. But usually, he’s a kind of straight party-liner, votes with the Democrats on the sort of ultra-nationalist side. The choice of Biden was a—must have been a conscious attempt to show contempt for the base of people who were voting for Obama and were organizing for him as an antiwar candidate.

Well, the first post-election appointment was for Chief of Staff, which is a crucial appointment, determines a large part of the President’s agenda. That was Rahm Emanuel, one of the strongest supporters of the war in Iraq in the House. In fact, he was the only member of the Illinois delegation who voted for Bush’s effective declaration of war, and again, a longtime Washington insider, also one of the leading recipients in Congress of funding from the financial institutions and hedge funds and so on. He himself was an investment banker. That’s his background. So, that’s the Chief of Staff.

The next group of appointments were the maiden problem that the—the issue, the primary issue that the government’s going to have to face is what to do about the financial crisis. Obama’s choices to more or less run this were Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, from the Clinton—secretaries of Treasury under Clinton. They are among the people who are substantially responsible for the crisis. Actually, one leading economist, one of the few economists who has been right all along in predicting what’s happening, Dean Baker, pointed out that selecting them is like selecting Osama bin Laden to run the war on terror.

Yeah, I’ll finish. This saves me the problem of talking about what’s coming next, so I’ll finish with the elections.

Well, let me make one final comment on this. There was meeting on November 7th, I think, of a group of couple of dozen advisers to deal with the financial crisis. Their careers were—records were reviewed in the business press. Bloomberg News had an article reviewing their records and concluded that these people—most of these people shouldn’t be giving advice about the economy. They should be getting subpoenas, because they were—most of them were involved in one or another form of financial fraud. That includes Rahm Emanuel, for example. It said, you know, what reason is there to think that the people who brought this crisis about are somehow going to fix it? Well, that’s a good indication of what’s likely to come next, at least if we look at actions. We could, but I won’t. You can bring this up, ask what we expect to see in particular cases. And there’s evidence about that from statements from Obama’s website.

I’ll mention just one thing about Obama’s website, which gives an indication of what’s happening. One of the major problems coming is Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s pretty serious. Take a look at Obama’s website, under issues, foreign policy issues. The names don’t even appear. I mean, we’re supposed to be ignorant and meddlesome outsiders. We’re not supposed to know what Brand Obama is. So you can’t find out that way. The statements that you hear are pretty hawkish. And it doesn’t change much as you go through the list. But I’ll wrap up here. So it’s up to you to continue.

When I was in Frankfurt in late September, I went to the Museum für Moderne Kunst and happened to catch the opening of Taryn Simon’s An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. I was blown away. Simon’s photography is both stunning in its asthetics and astounding in its subjects. Moreover, the irony of having to travel to Germany to get a glimpse of a young and powerful artist exposing the unseeable in American culture and society was not lost on me. I didn’t make the connection at the time, but I knew of Simon’s earlier work from a New Yorker article about her book The Innocents, whose subjects have been accused and convicted of crimes they did not commit, often photographing them at the site of the crime. Simon’s work is smart beyond her years; each piece carries with it its full semantics and rattling insight into the pathology of everyday American life, and yet the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The MMK was also exhibited photographs from Larry Clark’s haunting Tulsa, which documents methamphetamine use among Clark and his friends, including a photo of a young pregnant woman shooting up meth. Another connection I didn’t make at the time was that Clark is the director of the film Kids.

Reading bell hooks today, I came across this:

In retrospect, I see that in the last twenty years I have encountered many folks who say they are committed to freedom and justice for all even though the way they live, the values and habits of being they institutionalize daily, in public and private rituals, help maintain the culture of domination, help create an unfree world. In the book Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, Martin Luther King, Jr. told the citizens of this nation, with prophetic insight, that we would be unable to go forward if we did not experience a “true revolution of values.” He assured us that

the stability of the large world house which is ours will involve a revolution of values to accompany the scientific and freedom revolutions engulfing the earth. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing”-oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.

Today, we live in the midst of that floundering. We live in chaos, uncertain about the possibility of building and sustaining community. The public figures who speak the most to us about a return to old-fashioned values embody the evils King describes. They are most committed to maintaining systems of domination—racism, sexism, class exploitation, and imperialism. They promote a perverse vision of freedom that makes it synonymous with materialism. They teach us to believe that domination is “natural,” that it is right for the strong to rule over the weak, the powerful over the powerless. What amazes me is that so many people claim not to embrace these values and yet our collective rejection of them cannot be complete since they prevail in our daily lives.

From Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.

Tanya Reinhart has apparently died of a stroke in New York. Reinhart was one of the few critics of Israel that I felt could consistently be relied upon for sharp, correct, and just analysis of Israeli policy and advocacy for Palestinian rights. So many other intellectual big hitters have let me down, but not her. Her books, Israel/Palestine: How To End the War of 1948 and The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003, have been listed on ideological criminal’s very short “Recommended Books” list since the beginning. Israel/Palestine in particular is perhaps the best account of the conflict and a must read for anyone interested in the context of the occupation and a way forward to a just peace. Concise, unflinching, demystifying and well-written, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Her voice will be missed. The world needs far more of her intellectual integrity and sense of justice.

Noam Chomsky, her PhD adviser, has written a eulogy which appeared on CounterPunch today, and Democracy Now! played excerpts from a 2004 interview and a February 2007 talk given as part of the Israel Apartheid Week.

Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, popular science writer, and Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, is a highly regarded and widely read scientist. His latest book, The God Delusion, lays down his case for Atheism and against religion.

This book is not the kind of book I would pick up and read on my own, but it was sent to me with overwhelming enthusiasm from my father who had recently read it. Normally, any discussion of religion, even one which repudiates it, I find boring and my brain immediately shuts down in response. But, I’m generally in search of common ground between my and my father’s ideological convictions, and atheism is one of them (gay rights, immigration rights, drug decriminalization, and widespread disgust with Democrats have proved to be other commonalities; beyond that, things diverge, rapidly). So I gave it a whirl. Despite its breezy and accessible style, I found the book hard to read at length. It ended up taking me a month or so to read, putting it down and reading other things during breaks. Part of the problem is that Dawkins says everything no less than three times, and part of it is that chunks of the book are silly to the point of indigestion.

Dawkins’s book first lays out the kind of religion that is the subject of his attack. It is a fairly restricted concept, but one embraced by a large group of people throughout the world. The concept is that of a personal, all powerful, supernatural being that is responsible for the existence of the universe and all phenomenon within. The three Abrahamic religions fall under this concept, but Dawkins casts his net wide: “I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.” Having established a “God Hypothesis,” Dawkins turns to historical arguments and “proofs” for God’s existence and his own argument “Why there almost certainly is no God.” Both of these chapters are of the silliest kind. His argument against God’s existence is one from a complexity point of view: the complexity of the universe we observe could be explained by reference to a being that willed it, but anything complicated enough to design the universe would need, in turn, for its own complexity to be explained in some way. An infinite regress lies here. QED. On the other hand, Darwinism provides an explanation for the observed complexity that presupposes no such complex being arising from nothingness.

Part of Dawkins argument is that the God’s existence or non-existence should be subject to the same scientific scrutiny as any other phenomenon. His claim is that a universe in which God exists would be very different from one in which God does not exist. Thus experimentation can shed on light on which we find ourselves in. Again, this all seems silly to me. Deductive reasoning alone can provide no insights into the nature of the universe in general, and with regards to God’s existence in particular. Deduction is concerned only with meaningless symbols. To relate to the outside world, we must endow the symbols with meanings—assumptions we suppose to be true. Analytic proofs of God’s existence (non-existence) would either presuppose God’s existence (non-existence) axiomatically, or prove the existence (non-existence) of any concept that could be substituted for the God symbol in the proof, i.e. my dog, unicorns, the color blue, etc. This is true despite the efforts of the logical big hitters from Aquinas to Gödel (arguments due to the latter were not taken up by Dawkins, despite Gödel being the most important logician of the past century and a man who truly believed God’s existence to be provable through formalism alone). On the other hand, empiricism seems a hopeless avenue as well due to the special nature of the God concept Dawkins wishes to refute. What could count for evidence against God’s existence? What can stand up to the trump card that is “God works in mysterious ways”? Surely the kind of God that Dawkins wishes to disprove is one capable of creating a universe in which there is no evidence of its existence. In fact, I would imagine this is the universe believers would assume we live in and that it is the nature of faith to stand within a context devoid of evidence. I bring these points up not because I wish Dawkins had dealt with them more thoroughly, but because I wish he hadn’t addressed them at all. It gets us nowhere with regard to a discussion of what role, if any, religion should play in society. The rest of the book stands just as valid independent of these two chapters, and thus are stronger without these early claims that God most probably does not exist: arguments which are unlikely to hold sway over believers since I, an unflinching atheist, find them dubious.

Another contention of Dawkins, and one that I find much more agreeable, is that religion and its consequences should not be placed beyond the realm of reason and debate (wholly different from whether God exists or not, in my view). “A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts—the non-religious included—is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other.” He goes on to quote an impromptu speech by Douglas Adams (to which Delusion is dedicated) in Cambridge, shortly before he died (transcribed in his posthumous book The Salmon of Doubt):

Religion … has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? — because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you’d like; everybody will have an argument but nobody is aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says ‘I musn’t move a light switch on Saturday’, you say, ‘I respect that’.

Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics verse that, Macintosh instead of Windows — but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe … no, that’s holy? … We are used to not challenging religious ideas but it’s very interesting how much furore Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.

Dawkins makes an example of the undeserved respect of religion in the realm of conscientious objector status, an example I find compelling and personally feel the status quo to be abhorrent:

By far the easiest grounds for gaining conscientious objector status in wartime are religious. You can be a brilliant moral philosopher with a prizewinning doctoral thesis expounding the evils of war, and still be given a hard time by a draft board evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector. Yet if you can say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker you sail through like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate you may be on the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself.

Dawkins strengthens his argument from a disavowal of the special status of religion to one of disavowal for religious institutions in general, however “moderate” they appear. His argument there is that moderate religious structures pave the way for superstition and tolerance in the face of violence when it is predicated on religious grounds. He recounts a number of crimes such as sexual mutilation, the murder of doctors who provide abortions, the current war in Iraq, the God given rights of Jews in Israel, executions for “thought crimes”, etc., all of which Dawkins argues are supported in part by moderate religious structures that pave the way for, and make palatable, the eventual fundamentalism they engender. This I find to be Dawkins most daring thesis and one which I support. It constitutes only one chapter, but an important one at that. Make no mistake, Dawkins is arguing not only for atheism, but against religion.

Following this chapter is another important chapter which lays down another thesis worthy of support. Dawkins, as he says in the preface, would like believers to walk away from the book as non-believers. I find that unlikely. But he would also like to see a change in consciousness about how society talks about the religion of children. He wants us all to collectively shudder when we hear the words “Christian child” or “Muslim child” or “Mormon child”, etc. We should find the language no more strange than “Marxist child” or “Republican child” or “Beatnik child”. A child may descend from Muslim or Christian or Marxist parents, but that doesn’t mean that they ascribe to that system; instead, they should be described as “children of Marxist parents”, etc., until they are of an age to decide their own affiliations to religious, political, and economic identities. This seems very reasonable and uncontroversial. But then Dawkins drops a bomb in second to last chapter: religious indoctrination of children is child abuse. The chapter places this kind of abuse of children far above and beyond the damage, on the whole, caused by priestly sexual abuse. He writes, “Once, in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.” Mealy-mouthed, Dawkins is not. He quotes the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey’s 1997 Amnesty Lecture at Oxford, which argues for freedom of speech in all but the special case of educating children:

Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas—no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no God-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith.

In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parent to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.

Dawkins cites testimony from a number of correspondents who suffer psychological damage from their religious upbringing and quotes interviews from his documentary Root of All Evil? in which he talks to Pastor Keenan Roberts whose

[...] particular brand of nutiness takes the form of what he calls Hell Houses. A Hell House is a place where children are brought, by their parents or their Christian schools, to be scared witless over what might happen to them after they die. Actors play out fearsome tableaux of particular ’sins’ like abortion and homosexuality, with a scarlet-clad devil in gloating attendance. These are a prelude to the pièce de résistance, Hell Itself, complete with realistic sulphurous smell of burning brimstone and the agonized screams of the forever damned.

When Roberts is asked by Dawkins about the possible psychological trauma, Roberts responded, “I would rather for them to understand that Hell is a place that they absolutely do no want to go. [...] I think there’s a higher good that would ultimately be achieved and accomplished in their life than simply having nightmares.” I was taken aback by some of the things attributed to religious figures throughout The God Delusion, Hell Houses being one of them. I told myself, if such things do exist, then the kind of religion Dawkins was critical of is an overly simplistic kind of faith and worship, a parody, far more base than what is actually practiced (in part because I share an office with a rather intelligent and reasonable young scientist who also has aspirations of becoming a rabbi); but it was a day or so after reading these passages that I got The Evangelical War on Science, a segment on the “Crooks and Liars” video podcast to which I subscribe. The segment is an excerpt of Alexandra Pelosi’s HBO documentary Friends of God. After seeing just a few minutes, I knew that Dawkins was in fact characterizing the mainstream US evangelical community, and probably far from parodying them, he is being generous. (The dogma exhibited toward children in Friends of God also lends credence to Dawkins claim of abuse).

Taken together these last two chapters (the real final chapter is only a conclusion, allowing Dawkins to repeat himself again) constitute the most interesting and provocative substance in The God Delusion. The much milder midsection focuses on Darwinian explanations for the existence of religion in societies, the roots of morality (again with a Darwinian basis) with reasons for being good in a God-less universe, and the mutability of the moral zeitgeist as evinced by history. Although not nearly as silly as the early does-he-or-doesn’t-he-exist business, these three chapters are largely boring and unenlightening, to me, at least. Yes, of course, one can be good even if God doesn’t exist. So what? The stranger phenomenon for me is that some believers find this difficult to accept, whereas I’ve always felt a person with God on their side is far more capable of doing horrendous acts since the “Will of God” would seem to trump all worldly concerns (I’ve always found it disgusting that, at least in the Big 3, personal morals are subordinate to God’s Will—as if we should act in an immoral way if God desires it; when God asks you to sacrifice your son, the correct answer is ‘fuck you’, not ‘yes, masta’).

So I can’t share the same effusive praise my father had for it. There are two good chapters that are thought provoking and fairly bold. Moreover, I find them very close to being right. On the other hand, I wish that Dawkins had a little more of the philosopher in him. Constructing air tight logical structures is not his forte. The meandering give-and-take prose leads to an overall softness in his arguments. Better would have been to drop the does-he-doesn’t-he crap. The thesis of childhood indoctrination as child abuse stands just as solid even if we suppose God exists and the Bible is literally true. Likewise the thesis that moderate religion paves the way to extremism and violence is logically independent. What a leaner, stronger argument it would have been had he left the silly crap out.

Finally, at a few points in the book (admittedly not many, but more than once), Dawkins dabbles with analysis of current affairs. He does this once very early on in the book (page 1): “Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres”, etc. etc. Certainly, religion plays a role in all of the things he mentions, some more than others. But to suppose that religion is the key element of these conflicts, or moreover that were there no religion, these conflicts would simply not arise, is not only fanciful, but dishonest. It strikes me as no better than the “because they hate our freedoms” rhetoric. There are serious geopolitical factors at play; they are ignored at great peril. It’s unfortunate that as highly regarded an intellectual as Richard Dawkins can fall into such ignorant tripe on his opening page, no less.