This is the third in my irregular series of posts on science fiction and/or speculative fiction.
It will probably come as no great surprise to anyone that I didn’t watch Richard Dawkins’ new show Enemies of Reason: Slaves to Superstition on the ABC on Sunday night. It’s fairly well known I’m not a fan. But whatever your view of Dawkins’ work, it seems to me that tarot card readers are the least of the worries of anyone committed to the Enlightenment project. Perhaps someone who did see it could enlighten me, but if this is one of the practices Dawkins regards as pernicious, then I suspect his understanding of what constitutes reason is very ethnocentric and rather limited:
What about sticking pins into your body to free the flow of Chi energy and cure your illness?
It’s called Chinese medicine, I believe. Acupuncture by any other name.
I’d also want to put a big question mark about the too easy equation of “reason” with “progress” - for a whole range of reasons, including but not limited to whether history can actually be understood in this way and the Frankfurt School style critique of instrumental reason and the Holocaust. But all that’s by the by. I’d been hoping that I’d be able to recommend sitting down with a good book instead of watching Dawkins get his future told. One book in particular - James Morrow’s The Philosopher’s Apprentice. On the strength of a number of reviews, I’d been eagerly awaiting its appearance on the shelves of my favourite independent sf bookstore, Pulp Fiction, and I was pleased to see it arrive just when I was off work with the flu and needing some novelistic goodness. Alas, I was to be disappointed.
Faren Miller’s review in Locus Online gives a good sense of what it’s all about, and why I thought Richard Dawkins should probably read it.
In The Philosopher’s Apprentice, James Morrow brings a hapless “failed philosopher” to a tropical island where he has been hired to tutor a rich woman’s teenage daughter, not so much to acquaint her with his own former discipline as to revive her capacity for empathy and ethical feelings after some form of amnesia has wiped her mind of them. That’s what they tell him, at any rate. The truth is a good deal stranger.
Now, I was prepared to give this book some lovin’ for all sorts of reasons. Promising a combination of rich literary allusion (Doctor Moreau, the whole tradition of fantastic island tales, and much more) and philosophical and political seriousness, I wanted to like it. But the didacticism and the “I’m so smart and this writing is so cute” things killed it for me. It’s sort of Terry Pratchett without the self-reflexiveness and irony, in writing terms. Oh well.
But there’s some worth in Philosopher’s Apprentice - as a sort of diagnosis of the state of America (definitely not of the world). Edwina Sabacthani (get the reference?) is a fabulously wealthy biologist. She’s encamped, or rather en-mansioned on her private island - Isla de Sangre - somewhere in the Caribbean. She and a rather sleazy genetic engineer create three clones of herself - Londa, Yolly and Donya, all brought into existence at three different ages - a young girl, a girl on the cusp of puberty and the (of course) Amazon-esque and statuesque 17 year old Londa. All three are kept on different parts of the island, unaware of the others’ existence, and three teachers are hired for them (four actually, but one is a sort of tag team gay male couple) - told that they’re suffering from amnesia, and they have somehow lost their consciences along with their memories. Our hero, Mason Ambrose (remember St. Ambrose?) has just stormed out of his doctoral viva after being unable to resist the taunts of an Augustinian theologian. Ambrose is, naturally, a neo-Darwinian ethicist. (There are also some fun echoes of the campus novel here, and a treasure trove of post-structuralist jokes for those who are amused by such japes…) Sabacthani is dying, and she wants to experience motherhood in all its aspects - hence the three clones at different developmental stages.
I won’t do the spoiler thing, except to say that Londa (and her “sisters” to some extent) set out to save the world from “Corporate Christi” and the Republican Party and the forces of reaction and irrationalism. With a few billion dollars and a graphic novel about their exploits to kick it all off, not to mention a security guard force of Valkyries. The Titanic gets a resurrection, as do “immaculoids” - clones made from the DNA of aborted fetuses who are engineered to stage the ultimate “pro-life” protest. By now, you can probably see how I had problems with the sort of flipness that pervades the novel (although, dramatically, the first of the three sections is by far the most successful) and indeed with its gender and sexual politics.
Mason’s preferred method of instruction is via ethical dilemma. Londa gets a tour of various styles of philosophising and theologising, and subsequently veers unstably between the Crimson Kantian and the eschatological saviour (with a few more ethical personae thrown in for good measure). As Miller indicates in her review, Mason is blissfully unaware - until it’s far too late - that Enlightenment reason - in his philosophy - is just as capable of causing great horrors as it is of ameliorating them.
Although some of the reviews I read claimed that Morrow had succeeded in rendering Heidegger funny, I don’t think that’s what he was up to. In fact, Morrow, if not Ambrose, is most impressed by Heidegger’s notion of Geworfenheit - usually translated as “thrownness” - the phenomenological insight that the world precedes us and we’re thrown into it when it’s always already there (as are we in our experience of it). That’s a gross simplification, and there’s more on that here. But the key to Morrow’s own view probably lies in Ambrose’s despairing recourse to an anti-ethicist - John D. Caputo, who’s a Kierkegaardian of sorts, a proponent of the view (influenced by Heidegger) that decisions have no ethical seriousness if they don’t partake of the irrational leap in the dark. There’s a whole other discussion here, but perhaps we’ll leave that for another time. Anyway, as Londa turns to violence to save the world (not without a huge provocation, mind), all the book (and I’m not sure Morrow’s view is identical with the text’s) can fall back on in painting a (rather accurate) picture of the distortions of reason induced by its inability to cope with unreason plaguing American culture and politics is - the Aristotelian golden mean.
Ambrose and Londa (and he was quite infatuated by her Epicurean incarnation at this stage) had skipped Aristotle - too boring.
But Morrow is too clever to think that calls for moderation will get anyone anywhere in the midst of raging culture wars. Unfortunately, Morrow’s escape route is a sort of low level Swiftian satire, a whistling in the face of apocalypse that ultimately cannot mask the cry of despair that underlies it. And that’s where Philosopher’s Apprentice fails as a fiction, which is a real pity in my view, because it does diagnose the state of contemporary American culture with a very acute eye, and makes real philosophical splits transparent in their political and personal incarnations. It does a lot of good work in disrupting glib assumptions about reason and unreason. Wrestling with issues like this is very much what science fiction should be doing, but it’s got to work as fiction first.
Image courtesy of pbo31 on flickr - licenced under Creative Commons.
Oh poo, Mark! I was planning to read this book!
Nice post though!
Mark are you a closet Augustinian?
Not sure whether I’ll read the book, but I have to agree with your assessment Of Dwarkins.
Poo, I was looking forward to this book too.
Also agree with your assessment of Dawkins. I’m an athiest or at very least an anti-deist, but his views are so a) arrogant and b) much worse, profoundly ethnocentric that he’s not at all compelling. A friend bought The God Delusion and threw it across the room within about 2 chapters when she realised that he didn’t address Eastern religions or in fact any beliefs outside of the big three monotheisms at all! - pathetic, and where the hell was his editor?
Morrow’s work, as described, reminds me a lot of Sheri Tepper’s work - I do really enjoy her books, but it never ceases to frustrate me as a feminist how she’d adeptly analyse and diagnose, line up all her ducks in a row if you will,….then fail to take the final step.
I haven’t read it yet either, but it would be interesting to do a compare and contrast with Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, which is another very recent example of American political science fiction. A young adult novel - somewhat in the manner of midcentury dystopia - but about an America gone nuts with terrst hatin…
I haven’t got much to add to the conversation except: ROOOOWWWRRRRR! Lynda Carter! She’s the reason I gave up wearing open-fly pyjamas.
Ewwww! Do we need to know that, David?
Indeed David.
As Robert Terwilliger might have it, “capital knockers!”
Right! This is serious post. Discuss post not picture!
I’ll try Kim, but for men of a *ahem* certain age, that picture carries quite a hormonal load.
Focus on text not pictures, FDB. I’m sure men are capable of that!
Sorry Kim.
The deal with Dawkins is that he takes it as a priori that the rational bits of western civilisation have reached some kind of apogee and it’s beyond time to drag everybody else up the steep cliff face and away from the superstition of the past. Now, that’s the same kind of logic that the neo-cons use to justify invading other countries to institute democracy - not that you’d catch him agreeing with that crowd.
There seems to be a fundamental problem with this idea: humans aren’t rational in the sense that we all run a little model of the scientific method on our wetware. Dawkins might be able to, but my post above proves that I don’t. Some of the things I take to be pointers to a lack of deities, some people take as proof (the problem of evil for example). An actual, functional post-post-modern society will be formed around accommodation rather than assimilation, in the sense that most people can be convinced that separating cultural, political and corporate institutions is a good idea or at least tolerable. That’s what we should be aiming for, although a decent implementation of that ideal would spell the end of both Labor and Liberal parties in Australia. I suspect that even Wonder Woman couldn’t pull it off though, although I’d like to see her try.
Yep, the West is teh Best. It’s also the same sort of logic that enabled colonialism in the first place - those Others need to be saved from themselves and lifted into Enlightened reason. So hear we come with our guns, opium trafficking and forced trade concessions. Etc.
Well I quite enjoyed Morrow’s Towing Jehovah and Only Begotten Daughter - maybe he’s slipped a bit since those two.
Sorry, but I have to come to the rescue of Dawkins here. I agree with many of the comments about his writing, and the implicit assumption of a ‘trajectory’ of reason that has culminated with current Westrrtn thought (an idea, incidentally he shares with Bertrand Russell, that well known neo-con). But Dawkins work has come from a situation where religious fundamentalists in the US have undermined scientific research and education for their own religious ideological reasons, and frequently for political purposes. The “creationists” in the US have subverted scientific curricula, turned right-wing thought into dogma, and rational (ie based on reason) debate into a thing of the devil.
Dawkins work “The Blind Watchmaker” directly attacked this type of unscientific thinking, “The God Delusion” is an attempt to critique the politics of it.
The work is definitely ethno-centric, but I think it needs to be read in the context of the culture that has driven him to write it.
Thank heavens that at least the ABC is now broadcasting a program promoting reason, and on a Sunday to boot. What a change from, say, “Psychic Investigators”, which deservedly won Marena Manzoufas, Head of Programming at the ABC, the Australian Skeptics Bent Spoon Award last year. Worse, Aunty had aired the show in the Catalyst timeslot.
(Disclaimer, I’m no expert on Dawkins, and have not read the book[s] in question)
Kevin: Whilst I can appreciate that context, it seems obvious from others’ reactions that he wasn’t explicit about that context, which seems like an easy enough request. Being overly insular is only a long-term problem if you fail to recognise or acknowledge it.
Like Kevin, I have mixed feelings about Dawkins as well but there is a context to his views that needs to be noted. Fer crying out loud, a substitute teacher in the US was dismissed for the crime of wizardry just the other week.
Next thing you know there is going to be an outbreak of penis theft in Idaho.
A few points I’d make about Dawkins:
(1) As I said in the post, Morrow accurately captures the real threat irrationality and reaction pose in America - however much of this has nothing to do with religion per se but just manifests itself as such. A lot of it is actually about the use and manipulation of these themes by political and corporate power structures to further their own interests. Thus to convince people that they should be rational has little effect, because the stronger force is actually the entrenched manipulation of the media and the electorate by what FDR called - accurately - “malefactors of great wealth”. America is also not the rest of the world, and is not in fact Dawkins’ culture.
(2) Combating irrationalism by demanding people be rational doesn’t work, just as appealing for moderation in an arena of value incommensurability doesn’t work.
(3) Dawkins himself has no awareness of the degree that the borders between irrationality and rationality are somewhat arbitrary, whether at the level of the constructedness of rationality or whether even within the scientific method much of the intellectual work is non-cognitive, affective, subconscious and/or relational.
(4) The story of “progress” is not just one told by the Neocons - it’s a broader worldview which has very pathological outcomes.
(5) Dawkins, in his popular writing and broadcasting, is functioning as a polemicist rather than as a scientist. There’s nothing wrong with being a polemicist, but one should admit that’s what one is doing, rather than disingenously adopting a mantle of disinterested expertise.
(6) It is possible to disagree with Dawkins, and even to regard him as a poor writer and a sloppy arguer, and still be concerned with the things he’s concerned with. In fact, I’d argue that nature of his critique leads to misdirected action which is never going to solve or ameliorate the problems he is concerned with. That’s something Morrow understands, as I also said in the post.
Gummo, it’s the first of Morrow’s books I’ve read. I should say, as with all book reviews, I’d stand by what I perceive to be my analysis of the conflicts and tensions in the text, and of the work the text is trying to do, but aesthetic judgement of his characterisation, plotting and style is going to be a large bit personal to me! So I’m not saying that others won’t enjoy it - as fiction - even if I didn’t. As a piece of didacticism, and a work which illustrates some deep fractures in American culture and also the inability of the current intellectual framework adopted to shift them much, if at all - it’s worth reading. There’s also one big ethical dilemma in the book which is more real than a lot of the moral casuistry Ambrose poses to Londa - how does one react without violence when reason fails to convince and violence is being done?
Ps - Calum, I don’t think I’m an Augustinian except insofar as we are all Augustinians now!
Mark, you’ve been on fire the last week - and thank you for posting your thoughts. (Although I think “Malefactors of great wealth” was Teddy, not Freddy.) May I posit a question for you?
As a piece of didacticism, and a work which illustrates some deep fractures in American culture and also the inability of the current intellectual framework adopted to shift them much, if at all - it’s worth reading.
Is it actually possible for these fractures to be cured (or even ameliorated) in our lifetime?
Thanks, Down and Out! I have a feeling it’s related to being in the finishing stretches of thesis writing.
The question is a good one. I don’t know the answer!
arielladrake, Dawkins goes to great lengths to provide the very context Kevin is talking about in The God Delusion. It’s not Dawkins fault if his critics ignore the context and therefore misrepresent his argument.
It should be noted that Mark has a poor understanding of Dawkin’s work and his underlying motivation. For example, Dawkins does not apriori dismiss tarot card reading or chinese medicine as outside the bounds of reason. He certainly does *not* limit “reason” to a subset of Western thought. He does, however, demand that if you make knowledge claims (eg. pinning a needle here will help relieve pain there) then the burden is on you to provide evidence in support.
If you cannot provide evidence then your claims are not reasonable and we have every right to ignore them. If you *can* provide - and continue to provide - evidence (ie. the needle *did* relieve pain) then your claims are provisionally accepted until such time as counter-evidence presents itself.
The philosophical position that underlies this model and its terms of trade (ie “knowledge claims”) is actually a subset of Western rationality - vis. British analytical philosophy (or a rather old fashioned kind thereof). Even within analytical philosophy these days, “justifiable true belief” and “knowledge claims” have been unpacked and called into question. I don’t know whether Dawkins knows this. There are many other - and in my view more valid - ways of understanding what constitutes knowledge, efficacy and reason.
However, although I anticipated that dissing dear old Dawkins would prove controversial, he’s actually not my main focus for the post. So I’m going to decline to discuss him further, because to elucidate what I’m getting at in the paragraph above would steer it a long way from what I’m actually interested in discussing here. Others are free to take it up, because it’s legitimate to discuss him on this thread, but I’m just saying he’s not really my main interest in what I was writing.
Mark:
I agree with your implicit statement that political and economic power groups are the basis of the Christian Right in America. Furthermore, appeals to ‘reason’ are sometimes used to further the aims of these groups, and co-opt the disadvantaged at their own expense. I also agree with you that “the boundaries between irrationality and rationality are somewhat arbitrary”. This doesn’t mean, however, that there is no such thing as a ‘rational’ conclusion - a conclusion that most people (anywhere) would consider reasonable, or an irrational conclusion - a conclusion that most people would see as not reasonable.
Now I know I assume a priveleged position here - the role of ‘most reasonbable people’ and who might or might not sit in such a group. But this is not a positivist, objectivist or an empiricist argument - I can hold any of these positions but still make the statement above.
But the essential thing here is actually about addressing the mis-use of reason to, effectively, capture and enslave people to a cause. In my view, it is this that Dawkins is trying to do, which is why I have tried to come to his rescue.
There is an entire industry in the US that attempts to use ‘reason’ to ‘prove’ the stories in the Bible. In my view - and as you have alluded to above - this is an industry that attempts to mould people’s thinking to the will of the existing power structures (consider the use of imlicit and sometimes explicit religious arguments in the invasion of Iraq, for example).
In my opinion, Dawkins is asking people to see through religiously and politically inspired arguments to ask people to genuinely seek ‘evidence’. Again, I know it appears that I assume a privileged position for certain types of ‘evidence’ - this also need not be the case, and arguments based on a range of ‘evidence’ including spiritual and emotional can become part of the mix - so long as they are stated as such.
I have not read Morrow, and I think I should. I enjoyed your post, and would like to discuss it some more, but they are making me do some work here ….
Thanks, Kevin. I’m happy to acknowledge Dawkins’ good faith and good intention.
I do not wish to hijack the thread, so I’ll just point out that:
is not the same as
Kevin Brady wrote:
Are we talking about the endless excursions to Mr. Ararat looking for Noahs’ Ark and the rest of the bonkers Christian based archaeology? Or just the disinformation factories like the Discovery Institute? IMHO they are two completely different things - one relatively skeptically looking for evidence of biblical happenings, the other a politically motivated campaign rather than a genuine attempt at furthering knowledge.
I am not sure that most Mt Ararat excursions are’sceptical’. I think they go (most anyway) with an intention to ‘prove’ what isn’t there. There are a few sceptical enquiries, but there are enough Christian films that will prove to you that Noah made it to Mt Ararat.
Perhaps the wrong word Kevin - not skeptical perhaps. However, I’d like to draw a distinct line between the kind of naive search for physical evidence of biblical events vs. the distinctly political nature of “intelligent design”. They appear to me to be motivated by two distinct movements - one looking for proof for the unbelievers, the other suppressing possible avenues of unbelief. The former is amusing but not dangerous or offensive, the latter is absolute poison.
Yeah, OK, David Rubie I’ll accept that, with some reservations - I think some of them are indeed ideologically driven. The folk I was refering to were probably the latter. You mention the Discovery Institute, but this is only one of the multi-million dollar organisations that are involved in this chicanery. It is a massive industry in the US, with theme parks and assorted paraphernalia. My particular beef is its impact on education. As I said above, in my view it is a way to subvert critical thinking (or any sort of thinking really) in the population at large.