Stumbling and Mumbling

Privileging religion

What is a conscience? This is the question Brown opened when he said that "exercising your conscience will mean for Labour Party members a free vote" on parts of the embryology bill.
But, as Janine asks, why should conscience only permit a free vote  here? To take just one example, many Labour MPs consciences might - or should - stop them wanting to put people in jail for 42 days without charge. But there's little hope of a free vote on the Counter Terrorism bill.
What Brown means by "conscience", then, is "religious belief." Which raises the question: why should religious beliefs have a special status in politics that allows MPs free votes when they don't get them on other grounds?
Now, I'm by no means as hostile to religion as some, but I have three problems with this:
1. It treats the consciences of religious believers with a respect not given to those of agnostics. 
2. It gives too much respect to religious loyalties over others. It takes for granted what should be questioned - that one's loyalty to one's church should over-ride one's loyalty to one's party. But why should this be the case when - to take our 42 days example - loyalty to liberal principles is not  given similar status?
3. It privileges some forms of moral thinking over others.  Why should a belief founded  (perhaps loosely) in religious doctrine entitle an MP to a free vote when beliefs - which might be much more rigorously considered - founded in secular moral philosophy do not?

Rowan Williams & civil society

In saying that the UK's adoption of part of Sharia law is inevitable, I suspect the Archbishop of Canterbury is making the same mistake he made in calling for laws against "cruel speech." He's failing to see that there should be a (big) space between individuals and the law, a space filled by civil society.
In a free society, consenting adults should be able to settle disputes however they like; this might entail recourse to a coin toss, Sharia, Beth din or whatever. The job of UK law is merely to ensure that consent is free, informed and not too onerous.
This means that Sharia shouldn't and needn't be part of English law, but merely of civil society.
Similarly, the task of restraining cruel and thoughtless speech - insofar as this is necessary - should fall to civil society, not the law. Whatever the response to hatemongers like David Irving should be - protest, debate, ignoring him - it should not be the law.
Dr Williams, then, is failing to see that some things - many things - shouldn't be done by the law, but by free people.
But is the error his alone? I fear not. When the law is increasingly being used to "signal" what sort of behaviour the state deems acceptable, we are losing sight of its proper function is a free society - to allow people to freely choose their own lives.
And if people cannot "relate" to this function, or if it conflicts with their religious loyalties, then tough. Some things can't be negotiated.

In defence of the Archbishop

Several bloggers have criticised the Archbishop of Canterbury's call for laws against "cruel styles of speaking." I agree. But Dr Williams did make one very good point:

The assumption of the naturalness of one's own position is regularly associated with an experience of untroubled or uninterrupted access to the dominant discourse and means of communication in one's society.  If I can say what I like, that is because I have the power and status to do so.  But that ought to impose the clear duty of considering, when I engage in any kind of debate, the relative position of my opponent or target in terms of their access to this dominant means and style of communication...
The sound of a prosperous and socially secure voice claiming unlimited freedom both to define and to condemn the beliefs of a minority grates on the ear.  Context is all.

It grates on my ear too. 
Indeed, I suspect such attacks actually help serve reactionary ends. In equating religion with irrationality, Dawkins and Hitchens and their followers help (inadvertently) to perpetuate the idea that secularism and rationality are correlated.
This inference is not only illogical*, but wrong. Almost all secular life - including the pursuit of mammon - is infested with countless cognitive biases. And these biases can help provide an ideology that sustains capitalism, hierarchy and the existing order. In giving the impression that the only  (or even major) irrationality is religion, religion's critics help protect the illusion that mangerial capitalist society is rational.
In thise sense, they are objectively conservative. Which is why I have more fellow-feeling for classical liberal blogs than for those allegedly left-wing blogs which consistently condemn religious minorities whilst giving capitalism a soft ride. At least the former are attacking (one of) the right targets - those in power.
* All "As are B" does not imply "all not-As are not-B". But I suspect many fall for it.

Sacks on life after virtue

In decrying multiculturalism, Jonathan Sacks channels Alasdair MacIntyre:

What happens when we lose moral consensus? Morality is reduced to taste. “Good” and “bad” become like yum and yugh...
We have lost the basis of morality as a shared set of values holding society together. We are living “after virtue”; that is to say, in an age in which people no longer have roles and duties within a stable social structure. When that happens, morality becomes a mere façade. Arguments become interminable and intolerable. The only adequate answer to an opposing viewpoint is: “Says who?” In a debate in which there are no shared standards, the loudest voice wins. The only way to defeat opponents is to ridicule them.
If there is no agreed moral truth, we cannot reason together. All truth becomes subjective or relative, no more than a construction, a narrative, one way among many of telling the story.

I've got several problems with this.
1. The loss of moral consensus long predates multiculturalism; the above passage could easily have been written 50 years ago. Indeed, it could be religion rather than multiculturalism that is the root of problem. In claiming that goodness and morality derives from God, religion fosters the erroneous belief that morality loses its roots when God's existence is doubted. And that in turn leads to emotivism.
2. What's the link between the virtue ethics Sacks believes we have lost and religion? I suspect it's weak. Religion has for a long time been stronger on rule-based morality - what we shouldn't do (the 10 Commandments all begin "thou shalt not") - than on virtue ethics, what we should do.
3. The political class is part of the problem he describes. Party politics, with its amoral pandering to the interests of a handful of voters as described by the Daily Mail and its sub-rational use of advertising slogans, is the exemplar of a debate with no standards which is won by the loudest voice. As MacIntyre made clear, managerialist politics - with its lust for power without empirical or moral basis - is the embodiment of life "after virtue."
Sacks ducks this point.
4. Why should we suppose that the sort of communities that would underpin virtue are equivalent to nations? Surely, given the crimes committed in the name of nationalism, we might suppose the opposite.
The question: "how can I be a good person?" can be answered well if one regards oneself as a Jew, Muslim, Mancunian, father, doctor, economist or whatever. Can it be answered so well if one regards oneself as British - especially as Britain is an artifice constructed by power?
5. Sacks decries the fact that we choose to expose ourselves to a "selectively edited version of reality," reading and seeing only the viewpoints we want. But mightn't this be part of the solution to life after virtue? As MacIntyre said at the end of the book of that title, if the barbarians are ruling us, one solution is to close our communities, to quarantine ourselves from the infection.

Dawkins' inconsistency

Here's a curious statement from Richard Dawkins (via Norm):

When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. [emphases mine.]

The highlighted phrases illustrate Dawkins' use of the heuristic of social proof - he seems to believe Jews are small but monopolize US foreign policy because others tell him so.
But you could use exactly the same method to believe in God - or at least to be agnostic. God exists as far as many people can see - indeed, many more, for much longer, than believe in Jews' influence on foreign policy.
So, why is Dawkins happy to use social proof in one context, but reject it so violently in another?
It would be too glib to say this is an example of how rational people cease to be rational in thinking about politics, because there's something to be said sometimes for the use of social proof.

Integrating Muslims

What social policies might reduce Muslims' religious extremism? Exactly the opposite ones to what you might think, according to this new paper.
The authors find that Muslims' attitudes to religion and ethnic identity differs systematically from that of other ethnic minorites in the UK.
Among Muslims, people with high incomes, in managerial occupations and who live in areas of low unemployment are more likely to have a strong sense of religious identity and are more likely to be hostile to family members marrying white people.
Economic success, it seems, breeds more intense religious feelings. Kafeel Ahmed and Shehzad Tanweer, both rich and successful and terrorists, conformed to type.
These results are based upon  a survey of ethnic minorities taken in 1993-94, which predates the salience of Islamism.
This implies that there's a nasty trade-off. Policies that reduce economic inequalities between Muslims and white non-Muslims might not help reduce  religious extremism.
There's also a more general point. The idea that economic success leads people to converge towards liberal humanist values might be wrong.

Women, catholicism and the welfare state

In the last 150 years, all developed economies have enlarged their welfare states and given women more political power. Is there a link between these developments?
Yes, says this new paper - but only in non-Catholic countries.
To see the thinking, consider a man in a country where women are disenfranchised. Should he support female suffrage? He’ll weigh two competing considerations:
1. If the wage gap between men and women is low, he’ll support female suffrage. This is because fewer women will vote for higher taxes, and some richer women might vote for lower taxes. So enfranchising women won’t raise his tax bill.
2. If he’s got traditional attitudes to women, he’ll oppose their enfranchisement.
Where attitudes to women are relatively egalitarian, point 2 has less force. So women will be enfranchised even if they earn a lot less than men. There’ll then be more voters supporting higher taxes and a bigger state. But in traditional societies, point 2 has force. So women will only be enfranchised later, when their incomes are higher. Their support for big government will therefore be smaller.
Roughly speaking, attitudes to women are more conservative in traditionally Catholic countries; women got the vote in Spain and Italy much later than they did in  Scandinavia. So you’d expect the link between women’s enfranchisement and the growth of the welfare state to be smaller in Catholic countries.
And this, finds Graziella Bertocchi, is exactly what happened. In non-Catholic nations, women’s suffrage expanded the state. But in Catholic nations, it didn’t.

Stupid Archbishops

Two Archbishops have made foolish statements today.
First, former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey calls for tougher immigration controls.
Leave aside the economics of this. Where's the Christianity, the compassion for people worse off than ourselves - those without the good fortune to be born English? And doesn't migration play an important role in the Christian story? What's the second book of the Bible called?
Lord Carey speaks of "the importance of Christian identity" to the UK population. But this, surely, is a reason for encouraging immigration - all those Polish Catholics and Caribbean Pentecostalists.
Second, John Sentamu says:

A well-raised child is a benefit not only to the parents but also a gift to tomorrow’s world. Hence when a married couple on a low income have children below the age of 11, one of the parents should be given the incentive to stay at home and be paid a living wage, if they also commit themselves to voluntary work in the community.

Again, leave aside the economics of this - the higher taxes on non-parents, the fact it'll give incentives to every scrounger to have even more kids. Leave aside too the question of how one can stay at home and work in the community, omnipresence being confined to the Almighty.
Instead, just ask: what are people doing having children if they can't raise them properly?
John Stuart Mill was clear on this:

To bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime. (On Liberty, V.12)

What Sentamu seems to be saying, then, is that low income parents are committing  moral crimes. This seems like an unchristian slur to me. And surely, in those cases where it's true, shouldn't the Church be condemning the selfishness of the parents as well as encouraging help for children?

Religion in egalitarian politics

Johann Hari raises a tricky question. Writing of Brown’s “social Christianity” as the basis of his commitment to egalitarianism, he asks:

I think faith is a dangerous form of bad thinking - it is believing something, without evidence or reason to back it up….Yet at the same time, when there are so many Murdochian pressures on a British Prime Minister dragging them to the right, pressing him to fellate the rich, isn't it good to have a countervailing pressure to help the poor - even a superstitious one? If religion drives Brown's best instincts and whittles down his worst, should we still condemn it?

I say yes. It’s just incoherent to use religion to argue for equality, into three senses.
First, religious-based arguments don’t permit the possibility of persuasion. If a Christian says: “the Biblical prophets tell us to help the poor” an opponent could reply: “the Bible has no authority, as God doesn’t exist.” And the debate stops there.
Redistributive policies then become merely a way of the Christian imposing his private beliefs onto others. Other people therefore become tools of his own will, rather than moral agents in their own standing, with beliefs of their own which we should address. This is an odd thing for an egalitarian to do.
Secondly, religiously motivated arguments assume that one party has superior access to a “truth.” This surely is a strange thing for an egalitarian to believe.
Thirdly, religious appeals undersell equality, as there are countless secular ways to argue for it; see here and the papers collected here.
I should stress here that my beef is not with religion as such. It’s about the role it should play in politics. In an egalitarian polity, in which people should be persuaded rationally of policies, religion should have no place – even if it is true. Religion might motivate political beliefs, but it shouldn’t, and needn’t, be the public justification for them.

The myth of the Protestant work ethic

Max Weber was wrong - the Protestant work ethic doesn't lead to economic success. That's the claim of this beautiful paper.
Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann show that Weber was correct in the sense that, at the time he was writing, Protestantism was associated with economic success. They show that in 1871 there was a strong correlation across 453 Prussian counties between prosperity and the proportion of the population who were Protestant.
However, this correlation is wholly attributable to the fact that Protestant counties had higher literacy rates - which was, in turn, the result of Martin Luther's demand that children be educated to read the Bible themselves.
Controlling for literacy, they found, removed any link between Protestantism and prosperity. There's just no work for the Protestant work ethic to do.
Protestants were richer than Catholics because they were better educated, not because they were harder working or more frugal.
This has (at least)  implications. First, it suggests the direct contribution of culture to economic success might be over-rated. What looks like a cultural effect might instead be a contribution of human capital, with culture affecting prosperity only via  human capital.
Secondly, it's evidence that religion, even in a quite dogmatic form, can have positive benefits.
Thirdly, now that even Catholics are universally educated, the presumption that Protestantism is economically superior might be wrong.
Another thing: here's a paper which shows how its emphasis upon education affected the history of Judaism.