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Philosophy of Economics Crash Course 4

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Philosophy of Economics Crash Course 4

Dr. Alexander Douglas specialises in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics. He is a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies. In this series, we will discuss the philosophy of economics.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Dr. Douglas, as previously discussed, a gap in knowledge, theory, and predictable consequences have developed in economics. When did this occur?

Dr. Alexander Douglas: Economics didn’t always seek status as a precise empirical science. Adam Smith famously declared disinterest in what he called “political arithmetic”. He might have been thinking of William Petty’s Political Arithmetick (1690), which attempted to advise the king on the specific economic effects of various policies. Smith, at least as I read him, was more interested in the moral psychology of economic activity, such as the sorts of motivations that drive people into economic interaction and the psychological effects of being engaged in it. I think he was closer to a novelist than a scientist. He sought to dramatize capitalism and present the sorts of character that inhabit it. There is a world of difference between this, and the ambition to use economic theory to forecast the specific effects of various policies or institutional changes.

The mania for the latter sort of calculated forecasting took off with the innovations in national accounting statistics that began with the development of the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States, and in other similar departments around the globe, in the middle of the twentieth century. Now economic aggregates are treated as the report card for the standing government. The government takes credit when the numbers look good. The opposition blames the government when the numbers look bad. Both agree to propound the illusion that the government somehow controls these numbers.

Jacobsen: What might be the upper limit in predicting human choices?

Douglas: I don’t know. Neuroscience might one day discover some algorithm that predicts precise behavioural outputs from easily-sorted classes of inputs. We’d then have a precise method for predicting behavioural responses of human agents to environmental changes. But, again, even if this were possible, who knows whether it would be of any predictive use. Huge differences in behavioural outcomes might be made by differences too small for the instruments to measure.

At any rate, I don’t see why we should be trying to predict human behaviour – or what I’d rather call human action. The eighteenth-century materialist Baron D’Holbach dreamed of a day when the government could “hold the magnet” to move its citizens around like iron filings, after having developed a complete science of psychological “magnetism”. He was, in other words, an early advocate of governance by manipulation of incentives – perhaps an ancestor of today’s proponents of “nudge” theory. I find this idea disturbing. I believe that the unpredictability of human action is a precious thing that should be preserved, and instead of trying to render human action predictable and thus controllable, I’d rather we strove to develop an ethics and a politics that fully embraces uncertainty. Maybe if we stopped trying to control each other so much, we’d find that the world is becoming less dangerous rather than more.

What really worries me is that in developing a theory that treats people as cipher-like “pleasure machines” – to use Geoffrey Hodgson’s term – and in designing our institutions on the basis of that theory, we will end up reducing people to what the theory treats them as being. Economists often say that their theory is value-neutral, that they aren’t telling us how people should be, but merely telling us how people are. They treat opposition to their project as a superstitious reaction against scientific enquiry. But they don’t consider that the prevailing theory of human nature can end up transforming human nature. For example, if you regard humans as little more than consumers, you might cover the landscape with advertising, seeking to tap into this lucrative monomania. Then when the advertising becomes so abundant that people have nothing else to look at, they really do become the monomaniacal consumers they were assumed to be. This is, I think, what Ruskin was getting at in the first part of Unto This Last. A key job for philosophers is to fight this tendency that degrades the human spirit in practice by underestimating it in theory.

Jacobsen: Could the rules for economic behaviour – exchange of products and services – become looser with weakened social ties, and thus loosen the Wittgensteinian view on “rules”?

Douglas: In the ‘Wittgensteinian’ view that I proposed (which may not really have much to do with Wittgenstein), rules are instantiated at the level of communities, not individuals. Certainly we could explain the exchange of products and services by identifying the various social rules that drive these exchanges, beginning our analysis at the level of the community rather than the individual. But in doing so we would be giving up a crucial principle of mainstream economics, namely methodological individualism: the principle that the unit of explanation for economic behaviour are individuals. Individuals, in mainstream economic theory, are supposed to have preference-orderings, which are rules governing their behaviour (“swap one apple for two or more oranges, but not less”).

The ‘Wittgensteinian’ argument I hinted at has the conclusion that preferences can’t pertain to individuals on their own. A rule requires a crowd in order to be concretely instantiated. A rule that isn’t properly binding has no concrete reality; it exists as a mere abstraction. But a rule that I impose on myself isn’t properly binding. I always have absolute power to exempt myself from the rule. The same holds for a small group, who can always conspire to excuse themselves. But a crowd develops an inner tendency towards conformism, exercising peer-pressure and the “tyranny of public opinion” to keep its members in the fold. If (concretely existing) rules are peculiar to crowds, then so are preferences. Individuals explore and experiment; it is the crowd that gives rise to the rigid preferences from which economists begin their analyses.

Jacobsen: How do economic choices (tendencies) change over the course of an individual’s life?

Douglas: Well, it is only in the middle of our lives that we can expect much from the Invisible Hand – and that’s only for those who are able and legally permitted to sell their labour. During childhood and old age, we can only count on what others are obliged to give us. I believe that our societies pitifully under-provides for the non-working population. Young children are packed into classrooms in ugly buildings, often taught by inadequately-trained assistants. The elderly languish in miserable and understaffed care facilities, or are left alone at home. Provision for the disabled is always strongly urged as it is inadequately funded. For centuries the domestic labour of women, unrecognised as a commodity by the market, was at best remunerated with a bare subsistence living; and to some extent this remains true. Meanwhile, income-earners get to enjoy the highest material standard of living in history: things that used to be luxury commodities – holidays abroad, designer clothing, exotic cuisine –are now mass-produced for widespread enjoyment by the waged.

John Kenneth Galbraith once depicted an American family meditating on “the curious unevenness of its blessings” – an engorgement of private consumer goods alongside threadbare public services. Today this unevenness translates into a massive inequality between income-earners, who can access the consumer goods with which the market is gavaged, and non-income-earners, who are stuck with the vanishing trickle of public services.

There is no reason to expect anything different according to standard economic theory. Why would a market society produce anything for those who have no commodities to offer in exchange, or are not permitted to exchange what they have to offer, or offer a sort of value that is not recognised as a legitimate commodity by the market? Critics of capitalism often focus on the exploitation of the worker, but, as Joan Robinson said, it is often worse under capitalism to not have your labour exploited – at least not in the labour market.

Jacobsen: Thank you once again Dr. Douglas.

Original publication in Conatus News.

Photo by Trevor Bobyk on Unsplash

Philosophy of Economics Crash Course 3

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Philosophy of Economics Crash Course 3

Dr. Alexander Douglas specialises in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics. He is a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies. In this series, we will discuss the the philosophy of economics.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is there a lack of consistency in the terminologies used by economists?

Dr. Alexander Douglas: There’s a question about whether economists use terms consistently. But there’s another pressing issue, which is the gap between the language academic economists use and the language of public discourse.

I wonder if the retreat of economics into higher- and higher-level mathematics has done damage to democracy. Although there was a near-consensus among macro-economists in Britain that first austerity and then Brexit were bad policies, the government received popular support for both. The problem was that the macro-economists could say what they believed, but they couldn’t really explain why they believed it. The official argument rested on some of the most complex mathematics in the world, and there was no convincing ‘entry-level’ version.

Effectively, macro-economists have to ask the public to trust their expertise, even though we can’t see into their black boxes. It was easy for the media to portray the economic experts as elites with hidden agendas and vested interests. Normally the way to fend off that sort of ad hominem argument is to say, “Never mind me or my motives, just look at my argument”. But you can’t do that when the simplest compelling version of your argument consists of hundreds of differential equations.

I think this is a major problem. There is no bridge between the concepts of academic economics and the concepts we use to think about our day-to-day lives. Politics happens in the domain of the everyday concepts.

Jacobsen: What do you think of  neuroeconomics?

Douglas: Neuroeconomics is very interesting and something I know little about. Philosophically, it raises more ‘conceptual bridge’ puzzles, this time between the scientific study of brain-events causing behaviour and the ordinary explanations we give for human actions. Some philosophers call this “folk psychology”. There are a range of opinions on this. The most extreme , “eliminative materialism”, suggests that our ordinary explanations, e.g. “Jane crossed the road because she prefers to walk in the sun”, are simply wrong and will one day be entirely replaced by explanations at the physiological/neurological level: Jane’s body moved in such-and-such a way because such-and-such events occurred in her brain. Standard choice theory in economics is, in my view, a regimented version of “folk psychology”. So one interesting question is whether the end game for neuro – economics is to entirely replace standard economics or whether it can somehow be fitted into the existing paradigm.

Jacobsen: What is the healthy perspective – the accurate view – on human economic decisions? What drives us?

Douglas: I’m not convinced that the individual economic agent is the right starting point. You can start instead at the sub-personal level, as the eliminative materialists propose. You can also start with institutions, which have their own ways of behaving that sometimes seem independent of the agents composing them. J.K. Galbraith’s entertaining book, The New Industrial State, is full of plausible-sounding claims about how committees, boards, and so on have their own strange ways of making decisions, which differ from the ways that individual people make decisions. His book on the 1929 stock market crash contains equally plausible descriptions of crowd behaviour, which can be very unlike the behaviour of individuals on their own.

Academic economists are beginning to study institutions in more formal and rigorous ways. The ‘New Institutionalists’ build models to explain why (rational) individuals might submit to the authority of an institution in order to avoid the transaction costs that accompany free exchange in the market. Economists like Herbert Gintis use models from evolutionary biology and game theory to model social norms and other emergent properties of social systems (properties that can’t be explained in terms of facts about the individual agents).

I’m sometimes tempted towards a much more radical view. There is philosophical literature that emerged from the work of the later Wittgenstein, concerning the nature of rule-following behaviour. One central claim is that rules can’t exist for an individual on her own; they can only exist for a whole community. Another is that the relation between a rule and the behaviour it governs can’t be captured by any causal relation – it is not the case, for instance, that knowledge of a rule causes behaviour in accordance with that rule. Rather, the relation is more akin to a logical connection: the rule and the behaviour stand in a similar relation to that of the premise and conclusion in an argument. I believe that preferences are effectively rules: a preference for A over B is a rule: choose A over B. This theory of preferences-as-rules, combined with the Wittgensteinian ideas about rules, suggests to me that both methodological individualism and the search for causalexplanations of choice-guided behaviour might be mistakes. If so, much of modern economics would rest upon a mistake.

Jacobsen: Can you imagine a future with ubiquitous artificial intelligence where mathematical models and algorithms could accurately predict all human behaviour?

Douglas: To the extent that the physical world is determinate then there should in principle be a system of equations that could accurately predict all human behaviour. Of course, the physical world might not be determinate. And even if it is, the finding of the relevant equations might be beyond not only our cognitive capacities but those of any cognitive system capable of existing.

Moreover, there is no reason to expect that any workable model will look anything like the choice theory used by economists. The perfect explanation of human behaviour might make no reference to choices at all; again, it might just track the motion of particles around the human brain and body, or it might track patterns at the institutional level. We don’t know what sorts of causes the perfect model would quantify over. Thus you don’t have to believe that there’s a perfect mathematical model of individual choice, even if you think there’s guaranteed to be a perfect causal model that explains and predicts all observable human behaviour.

Original publication in Conatus News.

Photo by Olivia Leger on Unsplash

Philosophy of Economics Crash Course 2

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Philosophy of Economics Crash Course 2

Dr. Alexander Douglas specialises in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics. He is a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies. In this series, we will discuss the the philosophy of economics.

Scott Jacobsen: With the words such as “capital,” “debt,” “money,” and “wealth,” what creates moderate levels of confusion over use in public discussion?

Dr. Alexander Douglas: Take “debt,” for instance, the subject of my last book. We apply one word to a wide diversity of cases: my debt to a friend, a household’s debt to a bank, a government’s debt to its bondholders. These cases have important differences, which are ignored if we assume the word to be perfectly univocal. I won’t say more about this example here, since I’ve written about it elsewhere.

Another example is “money.” We know that cash is money, but are bank deposits “money”? Some say yes, some say no, leading to unhelpful debates about whether or not banks can “create money” by making new loans. Many people don’t count UK Treasury Bills and Gilts as “money,” but traders do: they call them “securities accounts” and treat them just like term deposits at a bank. The ambiguity in the concept leads to confusion. But worse, if we restrict it to mean a certain class of financial assets, it loses almost all its explanatory power. In elementary textbooks, you find something called the Quantity Theory of Money, which tells you (among other things) that changes in the total amount of money, other things being equal, change prices. But the theory breaks down if you restrict the definition of “money” to a certain class of assets while people make payments by creating and circulating different sorts of assets. Thus, the term “money” is either imprecise or of no real explanatory value.

How about “capital?” An economics textbook might tell you that it refers to the various physical equipment that can be combined with labour to produce output. But can we quantify it? In what units? Weight, for instance, isn’t the relevant measure, since a lighter tool can be more productive than a heavier one – some sharp chainsaws weigh less than some blunt axes. We can measure capital by its monetary value, but then we can’t distinguish between, e.g., the loss or physical destruction of £100,000 worth of capital and a drop of £100,000 in the market value of existing capital. Meanwhile, Marx defined capital as power – the power of the capitalist to command labour and resources. Is Marx presenting a revision to the meaning of the term “capital,” or is he advancing a theory about what we all agree to call “capital?”

As for “wealth,” well – just what is it, and how should we measure it? Ruskin said there is no wealth but life. Was he obviously wrong?

Jacobsen: What have economists really tested against the data? What are some more established findings?

Douglas: There are lots of important recent developments in empirical economics. In the 80’s and 90’s, Alexander Rosenberg pushed a fairly critical line against economics. Drawing on some research by Wassily Leontief, he argued that economists had made almost no reliable precise predictions. Prediction is the gold standard of explanation in science: if you can’t predict it, how do you know you’ve properly explained it?

But recently, economists have developed new techniques for gathering data and testing theories – they no longer depend only on time-series data, which is notoriously inconclusive. They now design controlled laboratory experiments, which can be as simple as giving people choices with different parameters and seeing how they react – the growing field of behavioural economics uses techniques like this. They are also starting to employ the research of sociologists and others to study how different sorts of institutional contexts affect human behaviour. They have developed new ways of measuring crucial macroeconomic variables like rates of inflation and growth.

But there is still much room for criticism. Many core theories are still almost impossible to test. For example, if you try to measure the ‘price-elasticity of demand’ by seeing how the quantities purchased of some commodity change when prices change, you need to assume that the preferences of the relevant consumers are stable over time. You also need to abstract away from interactions between the market for that commodity with all the other markets in which the consumers participate.

Although I’m not an expert, I think that many macroeconomic models use variables whose values can’t be tested – the rate of technological change, the degree of institutional trust: since these floating variables can absorb any error margin between the predictions of the theory and what shows up in the data, they put an opaque screen between the theory and the data. Since these are the sorts of models that get used to guide economic policy, this should be of concern to society in general, not just to economists.

Jacobsen: You mentioned many names. From Jevons, Keynes, Smith, and Aristotle to Hausman, Rosenberg, Cartwright, Laws, Sen, Robinson, and Hicks. Logic, to an extent, forms the foundation for the ideas and thought processes. Here’s a general question, what is the logic below economics? The logic that gives rise to terms, which, as noted earlier, are used, even abused.

I ask because philosophies have logic. Thus, the philosophy of economics, seems to, at root, look at the logic of economics.

Douglas: One way to think of the theory of choice that underlies standard economics is as a sort of normative theory: it studies the choices that people should make, given their preferences, just as logic studies the sorts of inferences that people should make, given certain premises. The fact that people often make irrational choices or bad inferences is simply not relevant to the aims of the discipline in either case.

I think there is still some confusion in economics around this: there is a lot of slippage between a purely logical theory of choice, given some formal definition of rationality, and a predictively powerful theory capable of explaining what actually happens in the world. Sometimes the slippage is covered up by an appeal to ‘the long run:’ people might make irrational decisions in some cases, but if they repeat the choice-problem many times they will wise up and converge towards the formally rational outcome. I don’t buy it.

Jacobsen: Two questions for you: “Are economists justified in using abstract mathematical models?” and “Is Rational Choice Theory, which forms the basis of much economics, empirically unfalsifiable?”

Douglas: On mathematical models, it’s hard to say, since there are so many different sorts of mathematical models. Tony Lawson, whom I mentioned before, has come out very strongly against the use of mathematical models in economics. He thinks it just gets the ‘ontology’ wrong: neither individual people nor economic systems as a whole are elementary particles operating according to fixed laws. I think there is a lot in his argument.

One issue I have with mathematical models in economics is that they sometimes assume an optimum exists, with no solid mathematical argument for this. To give a simple example: suppose I set you the problem of choosing the greatest real number that is less than 5. There is no optimum solution – for any answer you give, there are an infinite number of better answers. If, on the other hand, I set you the problem of choosing the greatest real number that is less than or equal to 5, then there is an optimum answer: 5. Economic models sometimes assume that the optimisation problems they describe are like the second example without proving that they aren’t in fact like the first example.

On the other hand, the difficulty with non-mathematical theories is in testing them. I like to think of this in terms of René Girard, an anthropologist whose writing I admire. He has a single theory for explaining all human mythology and institutions, based on the centrality of what he calls the ‘scapegoating mechanism.’ He finds hints of this mechanism in the Upanishads, the plays of Shakespeare, and the phenomenon of global terrorism. I find his work profound and illuminating, but would I bet my life on its truth? No, because there’s no way to measure just how accurate, and therefore, just how predictively robust the theory is. It’s easy to find hints of the scapegoating mechanism in any story, but there’s no way to quantify just how much any story really conforms to the model.

With Rational Choice Theory, I can be briefer. Yes, in its standard form, it is empirically unfalsifiable. The problem is simple: the theory claims that people make the choices that maximise their preferences subject to constraints. But all we observe are the choices people make. If we take “preferences” simply to mean people’s patterns of choice – this is recommended in Paul Samuelson’s famous economics textbook – then the RCT is trivial: it just tells us that people choose what they choose. It can’t be refuted by any observation of choice behaviour. But if preferences are something other than patterns of choice, we can’t observe them directly, and again the theory can’t be falsified (nor verified) empirically.

Original publication in Conatus News.

Photo by Jonny McLaren on Unsplash

Islamophobia: The new tool to silence liberal Muslims

Khadija Khan
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Islamophobia: The new tool to silence liberal Muslims

Islamophobia has been twisted to be a synonym for blasphemy. It has become a tool in the hands of Islamists who use it to hound liberal and intellectual Muslims. This changes discourse and gullible people are misled into supporting the most conservative and regressive Muslim factions.     

The word ‘Islamophbia’ has become a most contested term in the post 9/11 era. The ambiguous meaning of this word ‘Islamophobia’ and its vague implications have made it rather contentious, which is why many feel wary about normalizing it into the socio-political discourse.

1997 Runnymede Report titled “Islamophobia”: A Challenge for Us All defined the term as—

“The term Islamophobia refers to unfounded hostility towards Islam. It refers also to the practical consequences of such hostility in unfair discrimination against Muslim individuals and communities, and the exclusion of Muslims from mainstream political and social affairs.”

The definition given above proved a challenge in relation to delimiting its dynamics. Presumably, the objective in introducing the term was to counter anti-Muslim bigotry.  But it is unclear how far it was supposed to entail other socio-political meanings or unstated assumptions.    

Therefore, it is essential to look at how the semantics of Islamophobia have played out before holding it up as the litmus test to gauge prejudice against Islam and Muslims, especially in an age when hard-earned freedom of speech is frequently trampled in the rush to protect religious sensitivities.

Efforts to make Islamophobia a legitimate term to define anti-Muslim bigotry haven’t stood up to rigorous testing. Yet it took no time before turning the label into a whip with which to strike down dissent, both within and outside Muslim communities.

The Runnymede definition of ‘Islamophobia’ may be sufficiently narrow to exclude disagreement and criticism of Islam and Muslims. But deployment of the term ever since has been vague and this has left interpretation of certain actions and words to the discretion of individuals to decide whether they are being criticised or victimised.

In the respect of ‘hostility towards Islam’ (the religion) it is doubtful whether anyone except the most intolerant religious fundamentalists are being protected by the Runnymede definition.

Few liberals would agree that religions themselves are owed protection against “hostility” since religious belief is not obligatory in modern secular states and freedom of conscience ought to include negative feelings towards ideas and doctrines.

Nevertheless, this term ‘Islamophobia’ has been used sweepingly not only to oppose smears against Muslims in general but also for rejecting all shades of criticism of Islam, or for persecuting and smearing critics of the most ultra-conservative interpretations of Islam. 

People like Irshad Manji, Shireen Qudosi, Usama Hassan, Zuhdi Jassar, Maajid Nawaz, Raheel Raza, Haris Rafeeq, Elham Manea, Qanta Ahmed and many more are calling out the ultra-conservative mores and traditions that have proved to fuel violent tendencies within Muslim communities, yet the term “Islamophobia” has been wielded time and again to silence them. 

Islamists have used the “Islamophobia” trope to intimidate these intellectuals along many others and to assail their integrity vis-à-vis liberal Westerners who have gullibly bought into the discourse and are misled into supporting the most conservative Muslims.   

It is a sad state of affairs that both sides are using the same language to reprimand dissenting voices calling out Islamist ideology that legitimates unequal treatment of women and the indiscriminate killing of innocent people.

This is how constant misuse of Islamophobia has made its authenticity irrelevant while reducing it to a leitmotif playing into the hands of Islamists and their acolytes.

Subsequently, regardless of its supposed functions and implications, Islamophobia has become a synonym for blasphemy by means of which Islamists smear dissent and hound liberal Muslims.

If anything could expose its hollowness, it is the sustained effort to lend Islamophobia legitimacy by implying that it is akin to racism, which not only deploys a flawed conception of what it is to be a Muslim, but also conflates the valid criticism of political Islam with anti-Muslim bigotry.

Muslims do not comprise a homogenous group. Neither have they belonged to a particular race, ethnicity or country.  Whereas race is theoretically constructed around biological markers which are unalterable, Islam is a ‘faith’ system that can be adopted and renounced at any time. Therefore, race and Islam can hardly be seen one and the same thing.

Likening the attributes associated with Muslims to racial characteristics in any way is delusory. It makes the debate around defining Islamophobia in terms of race orthogonal to the issue at hand. 

The language of Islamophobia has tended to persistently overshadow matters concerning prejudice and hatred against Muslims as well as the rampant radicalization within Muslim communities through a politicized version of Islamism.

Given the situation, the recent European Court of Human Rights’ affirmation of the conviction of an Austrian woman who criticized Islamic tradition and its prophet has made the matter more worrying.

Her remarks were considered to have gone “beyond the limits of a critical denial” of religious sanctity. The decision was highly criticized by human rights activists, scholars and victims of Islamic blasphemy laws around the world who described the ruling as infantilizing towards Muslims, while also making Islam immune to criticism.

The ruling marked a conspicuous blow to efforts to decriminalize blasphemy as a ‘crime’ since the decision came down in the midst of ongoing efforts to remove the ‘crime’ of blasphemy from the Irish constitution and the acquittal of Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian embroiled in a false case of blasphemy who remains in hiding because of Islamist threats to her life.

Meanwhile, the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) of British Muslims has chosen to retain the term ‘Islamophobia’ in a bid to define prejudice and hatred against Muslims, despite the word’s contentious connotations. There remains a lack of consensus on its definition among different sections of British society, including amongst Muslims.  

The poor selection of terminology has successfully derailed the debate about protecting people of Muslim heritage from bigotry while indulging all stakeholders in a deceptive game of semantics.

The proposed definition has failed to offer any practical measure to counter its misuse and/or to protect those with well-grounded arguments aimed at reformation of extremist political Islam and/or the preservation of human rights. Instead, the term affords their enemies an instrument with which to turn them into social pariahs.

Though APPG have claimed to have consultation with academics, lawyers, activists, victims groups and British Muslim organizations, however, they have virtually excluded from their consultations secular Muslims who consider Islamic jurisdictions and Muslim traditions at odd with liberal values.

As Lead Commissioner for Countering Exteremism Sara Khan explained unequivocally in response to the proposed definition of Islamophobia: “This failure to recognise that Muslims can be abused, attacked, even killed, by other Muslims because of their “Muslimness’ is a blind spot in our public debate and detrimental to the well-being of British Muslims and those of Muslim heritage.”

Therefore, this relentless campaign around defining Islamophobia appears to be an effort to give privilege to a particularly vocal and extremely conservative section of Muslim communities who seek impunity in leveling allegations of “Islamophobia” at dissidents who are liable to be punished either by blatant smears at best or by extrajudicial execution at worst. 

Conspicuously, the proposed definition of Islamophbia would likely increase hostility towards progressive people many folds, especially after they have criticized the term islamophobia for its misuse.    

Many shady Muslim organizations, such asMuslim council of British Muslims CAGE and MEND already resist calls for reformation and foster conservative attitudes and customs among British Muslims, such as imposition of the hijab in British primary schools, disparity and inequality in Islamic jurisdiction and unfair proceedings at sharia councils, by labeling critics ‘Islamophobes’.

Some of them sympathise with radical Islamist movements in the Muslim world. They smear people who have been trying to reconcile Islam and liberal values by questioning Islamic teachings and traditions that are incompatible with human rights.

This regressive attitude is clearly inimical to secularism, tolerance and basic human rights and is in conflict with democratic values aimed to provide equal opportunities to all citizens regardless of their caste, color, and creed.

Religion can be a force for good and evil on personal or highly political level so it is essential to keep the discourse open to critical perspectives and a variety of religious interpretations to draw a distinction between faith and political abuses of religion to impose social mores and fallible creeds on others who do not share the same beliefs.

A clear understanding of what religious freedom means entails the understanding that it should not breach fundamental liberties and must include freedom from religious coercion as well as freedom to practice one’s faith.

Laws in Western democracies already guarantee religious freedom and robustly protect individuals from discrimination based on their religious beliefs. Prominent members of Muslim communities should join in efforts to enforce the existing laws rather than seeking privileges above and beyond the same laws that protect their fellow citizens.

It is time that we move on from deploying contentious terms like Islamophobia to define anti-Muslim bigotry.  Deployment of this disputed term only emboldens Islamists to silence critics of Islam as well as the genuine bigots to continue their vile agenda of demonizing Muslims while painting them with the same brush.

Self-proclaimed Kashmir experts are mum on peaceful conduct of J&K Panchayat elections

Dr Simrit Kahlon
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Self-proclaimed Kashmir experts are mum on peaceful conduct of J&K Panchayat elections

Panchayat polls in Jammu & Kashmir have culminated successfully. The mainstream media has not given much attention to these polls, except for carrying official press releases before and after every phase. One reason for the lack of media interest was the attention being paid to assembly elections in five states across the country. A bigger reason, however, was the peaceful manner in which these polls were conducted.

A single incident of violence would haven been enough to change the discourse. One stray incidence of violence during Panchayat elections would have been enough for security forces to be hounded for their perceived ineptness. The “growing instability in the region” would have been hotly debated by the multitude of self-professed experts. This attitude of the media constitutes the bane of Kashmir where violence is highlighted more than anything else.

It is necessary here to dwell upon the political will and meticulous manner in which the Urban Local Bodies elections followed by the Panchayat elections have been conducted in Kashmir. There was considerable political opposition to the election to which the two mainstream local political parties –National Conference (NC) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) were complicit. They cited a flimsy reason of opposition to the move to remove Article 35-A from the Constitution as a reason to boycott the polls. Well, the said Article 35-A is very much there and the elections are over, so what have these parties achieved with the petulant posture? One cannot help but carry an impression that they were not willing to expose themselves to a grassroots political test and thus opted to remain out of the fray. It was self serving politics over the interest of people all the way.

The Hurriyat Conference, of course, was expected to put hurdles in the election process all the way and it stood by its reputation of negativity on being considerably boosted by the boycott call of the NC and the PDP.

The resilience with which Governor Satya Pal Malik overcame this opposition and decided to go ahead with the election has won the day for democracy. Today, these elections are heralded as a true example of how the democratic process should be conducted and those opposing the same are left with egg on their collective faces. 

Providing a safe environment for the elections and then ensuring their conduct without any unsavoury incident of violence was the biggest challenge faced by the administration. It is here that the security forces operating in the state come up deserving of the highest accolades. Security details were planned to the last detail and complete synergy of effort within the Indian Army, state police, para-military and intelligence agencies was ensured. 

While the Army kept the terrorist and foreign influence threat at bay, the police and para-military provided security to the polling venues and also kept paid miscreants at bay. Provision of timely intelligence input considerably helped these forces in doing their job well. Control rooms were established in all the districts across the state to respond promptly to any complaints of violation of the model code of conduct.

The Governor took a personal interest in the security arrangements by holding several review meetings. He went to the extent of obtaining sector-wise assessments of the prevailing security situation and arising challenges and consistently emphasised the crucial importance of maintaining a sustained close watch on the ground situation. His open appreciation of the coordination and synergy between the forces went a long way in building their morale and giving them the confidence to provide a conducive security environment for the elections.

The people soon gained confidence in the ability of the administration to conduct free, fair and secure polls and they came out in large numbers to vote for the candidates. At the end of it all the people had conclusively used their democratic right by recording 74% voting in the nine phases of Panchayat elections.

It is necessary here to understand the massive scale at which these elections were conducted. Jammu & Kashmir has 35,096 Panch Constituencies, 4490 Panchayat Halqas in 316 blocks throughout the state from which about 58 lakh people are eligible to vote for the elections. Jammu recorded 83.5% voter turnout, Ladakh 67.8% and Kashmir 41.3%. In Kashmir, where so much resistance to the polls was witnessed, 46% polling was recorded at Bandipura; 38.9 % at Baramulla; 38.8% at Budgam; 28.8% at Anantnag and so on.

This in an impressive turnout by all means and a rejection of the boycott calls by vested political interests. Even the threats of the terrorists did not keep the people away from poling! At the end of it all, democracy prevailed over forces of disruption and divisiveness.

The foreign forces and their local stooges that are attempting to wrest away the state from its historical roots with the Indian Union and democratic norms would be well advised to understand the futility of their efforts and stop their nefarious activities.

Governor Satya Pal Malik has, very rightly, called upon the media to also report such momentous achievements of the state that are the result of a strong, unbreakable bond between the people and the security forces, especially the Indian Army which ultimately results in confidence in the administration.

So far so good, but, the proof of the pudding lies in the eating! An honest thrust towards development through the medium of grassroots institutions will act as a panacea for all problems being faced by the people of the state. Things will definitely improve as the elected representatives go about doing their job with full support of the Union government and the state witnesses a new era of peace and prosperity. One hopes that the window of opportunity that has opened will be utilised optimally to bring about peace and prosperity in the trouble torn state.

Digital tech and data loss tears away poor, but boosts profit of big firms

Shivaji Sarkar
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Digital tech and data loss tears away poor, but boosts profit of big firms

The most coveted digitalization and hyper-globalisation have come for severe criticism by the UN (United Nations). It helps big firms, big countries and lead to concentration of financial and economic power. The worst sufferers are the poor emerging economies.

Trade wars and monopolisation of markets are creating mammoths and distorting markets. Digital tech is prying into the smaller economies and tearing them apart. The digitalization leads to decline in demand for physical goods, ongoing decline in their price, long-term decline in the demand fixed capital formation as a share of GDP and jobless growth, says UN Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in its 2018 report.

Global trade war is running towards a “deeper economic malaise” at a time when many countries are growing below potential, even as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) nations are doing better because of domestic demand. Among the BRICS only Russia is doing better than others because of rising oil prices.

The US and China have indulged in a bitter trade war, with both the countries slapping higher tariffs on each other’s imports. This year is unlikely to see a change of gear, the report said. The US government will gain $ 280 billion (Rs 19.6 lakh crore) in tariff revenues.

The digitization affects production through computer-aided design or any other 3-D software or artificial intelligence that creates digital models. The digital technologies are playing havoc in developing economies. Jobs are being outsourced to low-wage regions. This has caused stagnation of wages and has hit job creation.

The report says that the world economy is under stress. The immediate pressures are building around escalating tariffs and volatile financial flows. Behind these threats to global stability is a wider failure, since 2008, to address the inequities and imbalances of our hyper-globalised world.

After the global financial crisis, according to the report, the five largest exporting firms, on average, accounted for 30% of a country’s total exports, and the 10 largest exporting firms for 42%. Since 2008, global debt has soared from $142 trillion to $250 trillion, which is three times the combined income of every nation. This situation is worse than expected after global incomes failed to keep pace with rising debt levels.

The situation looks so familiar in Indian conditions though the nation has yet to realise that digitalization is not a solution. The stress the UNCTAD says is misplaced despite, according to the report, India is to have 7% growth. The report even quotes IMF 2018 observation that says that available evidence suggests the digital sector is still less than 10 % of most economies if measured by value added income or employment.

The report has also found that the ratio of global debt to GDP is one third higher than before the 2008 crash. And the situation was much worse in developed-world countries that had borrowed heavily in recent years from western banks offering ultra-cheap short-term loans. It quotes another estimate of digital economy being just 5% of global output and 3% of global employment.

The growing mountain of debt, more than three times the size of global output, is symbolic of that failure. “Private debt has exploded, especially in emerging markets and developing countries, whose share of global debt stock increased from 7% in 2007 to 26% in 2017,” it says. Over the same period, the ratio of debts racked up by non-financial businesses in emerging markets increased from 56% in 2008 to 105%.

While the public sector in advanced economies has been obliged to borrow, possibly like Air India or recent busting of IL&FS, more since the crisis, it is the rapid growth of private indebtedness, particularly in the corporate sector, which needs to be monitored closely; this has, in the past, been a harbinger of crisis. What a prophetic observation! Is not India suffering from the same syndrome that gigantic NPA (Non-Performing Assets) of banks represent? The growing corporate debt syndrome has almost bust into a political crisis.

It calls also for rethinking on ‘bank-isation’ of the society. The UNCTAD says developing countries will not be able to digitally leapfrog on their own. “While many developing countries are striving to develop their national e-commerce policies for linking their domestic producers and consumers to e-commerce platforms, there is a need to recognise the associated risks, especially as these platforms are international.”

It reduces the domestic markets and poor economies lose out on valuable data. This forces flooding of goods from mighty powers. It helps thrive unethical corporate.

The UNCTAD is also critical of WhatsApp and Google. It cited how European Commission fined Google Euro 2.42 billion for abusing its market dominance as a search engine by demoting shopping service of its competitors and denied European consumers a genuine choice of service and benefits of innovation. Is not India also becoming a Google prey and monopolization of groups like Amazon?

The corporate rent seeking is leading to market concentration. The UNCTAD wants breakup of the large firms to prevent the concentration. The US had applied anti-trust law to break monopolies, including on the giant AT&T.

The UN wants a check on national data transfer – is it targeting digital identity system – and wants that WTO to restrict governments’ outflow of the data of their producers and consumers. It is propagating for a strong regulatory regime. The lack of it is creating global disparity. The rich nations like the US and China are cornering global business and giving rise to trade wars.

Gains from e-commerce for developing countries can become a reality only if they protect national e-commerce platforms. This would improve the domestic and international market access of their producers. A Chinese e-commerce platform KiKUU operates in six African countries selling only Chinese goods

The UN organisation also does not support robotics and artificial intelligence. Robots are concentrated in very few countries, including China but it does not invalidate role of industrialization as a development strategy. The use of computers and telecom is estimated to be less than 1% for most countries between 2000-2014.

Strong regulations are needed in a digital world to create anti-trust laws. Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines have introduced regulations.

But such regulations are not wide. This is leading to a global crisis in productivity, market monopolies and high debt. A supposed game changer in reality is bestowing the world with untold difficulties.

Punjab’s political mud-slinging: Akalis vandalize Rajiv Gandhi statue

Jag Mohan Thaken
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Punjab’s political mud-slinging: Akalis vandalize Rajiv Gandhi statue

On the Christmas day a couple of workers of Punjab’s political outfit SAD (Shiromani Akali Dal) vandalized and blackened the statue of Rajiv Gandhi, India’s former Prime Minister at Ludhiana. Later on a few parliamentarians of Congress from Punjab reached the spot and cleaned the statue with water and milk.

The SAD was in power in Punjab till March 2017 when it was ousted by the grand old party Congress and Captain (retd.) Amarinder Singh took over. Rajiv Gandhi led the Congress government in India after he became country’s Prime Minister in 1984, immediately after the assassination of his mother Indira Gandhi.

Condemning the incident the Capt. Amarinder Singh tweeted: “Strongly condemn vandalisation of Rajiv Gandhi’s statue by @Akali_Dal_ workers in Ludhiana. Have asked Police to identify the guilty & take strict action. @officeofssbadal should apologise to people of Punjab for this obnoxious act.”

In an official release Amarinder Singh asked Sukhbir Singh Badal, son of former Punjab Chief Minister Prakash singh Badal, to stop indulging in petty politics. The Chief Minister of Punjab also asked Sukhbir Badal to immediately apologise for the obnoxious act of his party workers.

Sukhbir Singh Badal remained defiant however. Supporting the action at Ludhiana, he tweeted: “You @capt_amarinder should apologise to the Sikh sangat for failing them as CM and standing with hated Gandhi family. The community has shown what it thinks of Rajiv Gandhi in Ludhiana. Don’t disrespect the sentiments of Sikhs.”

Sukhbir Singh further added,  “If you @capt_amarinder have any ‘dard’ (pain) for the Sikh ‘qaum’ you would resign as CM and stand with community to expose Gandhi family for authoring and engineering genocide of Sikhs in 1984. But it seems you are made of stone. No amount of suffering of the community moves you.”

Congress supporters in Ludhiana clean Rajiv Gandhi’s statue with milk after Youth Akali Dal members
blackened it on Christmas. Photo: PTI

Lashing out at the Akalis, Captain Amarinder Singh said in their desperation to win public support, which the Akalis had completely lost due to their criminal acts of commission and omission in the last ten years of SAD-BJP rule, the Badals and their supporters were stooping to abominable levels. They are well aware of the fact that the Gandhis were never named or implicated in the 1984 riots, yet they continued to drag the family into the case to further their own political agenda, said the Chief Minister. He added that former Congress politician Sajjan Kumar had already been sentenced to life term by the court and others involved in the perpetration of the riots would also face legal action.

Had the Gandhis been involved in any way, they would have been named by at least some of the victims in the wake of the riots, Amarinder Singh observed, adding that while he had personally visited the refugee camps to meet the victims, Sukhbir had packed his bags and left for the US and was thus totally unaware of the developments at that time.

Philosophy of Economics Crash Course 1

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Philosophy of Economics Crash Course 1

Dr. Alexander Douglas specialises in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics. He is a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies. In this series, we will discuss the the philosophy of economics.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In correspondence with Dr. Stephen Law, completion of an interview, and then completion of the first Q&A on Philosophy with him, I reached out to him for a recommendation. He recommended you. Your specialty is the philosophy of economics, as noted in correspondence. This might seem confusing, as if an expertise in economics, as I thought – wrongly. So what is the philosophy of economics?

Dr. Alexander Douglas: I don’t have expertise in building economic models, collecting economic data, or any of the things economists specialise in doing. I’m not a good person to ask about the economic effects of Brexit, or of raising the minimum wage, or of changing the tax code, or anything like that.

I’m interested in tracing out the meanings of economic concepts. Words like “money,” “capital,” “debt,” “wealth,” and so on are used to great effect in public discourse. But when we look closely, they are often used in equivocal, confused, and contradictory ways.

I also look at the logical coherence of economic models. Economists often claim to have tested their theories against the data, thus discouraging criticism from non-economists who don’t know the data as well. But the job of the philosopher is always to ask: what have you tested against the data? Some theories suffer from logical inconsistencies that make it unclear regarding what it even means to say that they have been empirically tested. If I propose that all tall men are short, it’s hardly reassuring to know that I have tested my theory against the data. How would that work?

SJ: How did this interest in the philosophy of economics originate for you?

AD: I’ve always been interested in economics, but I began writing on it around 2011. I was becoming increasingly annoyed at the way, as I saw it, politicians and the media were using the concept of debt in an unreflective and illogical way to manipulate the public. I wrote my book, The Philosophy of Debt, in an attempt to clarify the concept and reduce its undeserved rhetorical power.

My main specialisation is in the history of philosophy, recently with an emphasis on the history of logic. But in a way, the history of economics is part of the history of logic. Many of the founders of modern economics were logicians – Stanley Jevons, for example, and John Maynard Keynes in a way. Even Adam Smith began as a professor of logic. To a certain extent, economics can be seen as a branch of logic: the logic of human decision-making, or what Aristotle might have called, the art of practical syllogism.

SJ: Who seem like some of the foundational names in the field?

AD: Daniel Hausman should probably get credit for founding the modern university sub-discipline known as “philosophy of economics.” Alexander Rosenberg was another pioneer, though he switched to philosophy of biology, as he tells it, upon discovering that economists have no interest in what philosophers have to say! Nancy Cartwright has done important work on the methodology and ontology of economics, as has the economist, Tony Lawson. Amartya Sen is both an economist and a philosopher and often brings the two disciplines together into a unity.

For the sort of philosophy of economics that interests me, the work of Joan Robinson is very important. Robinson published a book in 1962, Economic Philosophy, that still has relevance in the probing questions it asks about the conceptual foundations of the discipline. Other departures into philosophy by economists – John Hicks’s, Causality in Economics, for example – seem comparatively shallow to me.

SJ: What core concepts and sub-fields define the philosophy of economics?

AD: The dominant strand of philosophy of economics examines the methodologies employed by economists to see how they can be justified as ‘good’ science. For example: are economists justified in using abstract mathematical models, often based on unrealistic assumptions about human capacities, to explain observable economic phenomena? If models are successful at making predictions, does it matter if they contain unrealistic assumptions? Is Rational Choice Theory, which forms the basis of much economics, empirically unfalsifiable? Is it therefore unscientific? Etc.

Another strand looks at the ethical aspects of economics. Political economy and welfare economics involve ethical questions. Some philosophers of economics look at the moral foundations of welfare economics (is preference-maximisation a good measure of welfare?), explore what political philosophy has to say about economic policy (is economic efficiency relevant to justice?), and related enquiries.

A final strand – the one that most interests me – questions the logical coherence of economic theories. For instance, economic models often define a timeless equilibrium, in which the values of many interdependent variables are solved simultaneously, even while the models are meant to represent causal sequences; in which, what happens at an earlier time determines what happens at a later time. This can lead to terrific logical conundrums. Older models face a different logical problem: they describe sequential exchanges of one homogenous good, measurable in a standard unit, while proposing to represent exchanges of incommensurable goods that can’t be counted by a single standard unit. The way in which economists use seemingly innocent terms like “preference,” “expectation,” “capital,” “labour,” etc. often open out to these deep conceptual puzzles.

A final strand – the one that most interests me – questions the logical coherence of economic theories. For instance, economic models often define a timeless equilibrium, in which the values of many interdependent variables are solved simultaneously, even while the models are meant to represent causal sequences; in which, what happens at an earlier time determines what happens at a later time. This can lead to terrific logical conundrums. Older models face a different logical problem: they describe sequential exchanges of one homogenous good, measurable in a standard unit, while proposing to represent exchanges of incommensurable goods that can’t be counted by a single standard unit. The way in which economists use seemingly innocent terms like “preference,” “expectation,” “capital,” “labour,” etc. often open out to these deep conceptual puzzles.

Original publication in Conatus News.

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

Suffering’s Stewards

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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Suffering’s Stewards

By Scott Douglas Jacobsen

The Roman Catholic Christian Church Pope Francis – the guy who thinks he is the only Pope should look into the Discordians, adjacent to the Church of the SubGenius and its SubGenii – remarked on the problems with drug abuse or, less moralistically, substance misuse in the context of Duterte (Romero, 2018).

But this requires some context on Christian conceptualizations of suffering through time right into the present, which will, in due course, include commentary on Christian ideas of suffering, substance misuse, drugs, and the brain, and harm reduction in the Philippines and global context.

The image of pain, suffering, and misery sits at the Cross of the Roman Catholic Christians and other Christians, with the assumption of the redemptive work in a sacrifice of God made flesh, where the Salvifici Doloris states the meaning of suffering “illuminated by the Word of God” and reflected in the words of “Saint Paul” (John Paul II, 1984).

In this Christian context, of the largest sect and others, the meaning of suffering and pain, the purported mystery of suffering evokes “compassion,” “respect,” and intimidation and retains its plumbed linkages to a “need of the heart” and the “deep imperative of faith” (Ibid.).

Within this framework of the world, the alleviation of suffering is seen as only through Christ at the Cross and through no other, as this, simply put, is an emotional need and an imperative of religious faith and, therefore, an inexplicable and mandatory part of faith in Christ for a true Christianity.

Christianity, and its representatives in the largest sect and its highest offices to the supposed Vicar of Christ on Earth become guardians of this suffering, because without such sacrament of suffering and pain the redemptive power of Christ in a fallen world, so-called, would remain unneeded; the Roman Catholic Christian Church would become outmoded and irrelevant to the concerns of a mature and critical-minded, empirically informed, and logically coherent person of the future.

Intimations of this can be seen within the advanced industrial economies of the world which, historically speaking, were predominantly Christian and serious in their faith but, over time, they began to lose hold and slipped in their adherence to the faith, in degree and raw numbers. Throughout the 20th century, we witnessed a historic rise of the non-religious, of the individuals without the need or even basic want for a traditional religious life.

In this, we also, at least in North America, developed the post-WWII Healing Revival Movement with a wide range of people preaching the Gospel with renewed vigor and proclamations of the end times and purification of the world for the benefit of the Good and Christian – synonyms within the framework propounded for centuries, hence the sociocultural assumption of nonbelievers as amoral if not, worse, inherently immoral – including Rev. Billy Graham, Oral Roberts – who some during the higher heights of faith in Sigmund Freud labeled “Anal Roberts,” William Marion Branham, Jack Coe, Jack Moore, A. A. Allen, T. L. Osborn, Gordon Lindsay, F. F. Bosworth, Ern Baxter, Paul Cain, Kenneth Hagin, and O.L. Jaggers (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2018).

All lunatics, charlatans, or ignoramuses in their own rights. The fourth option, of course, is knowledgeable; however, these individuals did not know much about the world but had, as per the statement by Hawking, neither ignorance nor knowledge but the illusion of knowledge, which, in the end, analysis, is far viler and the enemy of real knowledge about the reality abounding around us. To quote the late cosmologist once more, religion is based on authority. Science is based on evidence. Approximately, one can apply the same categorization sweep in the analysis of prominent creationists in history including Ken Ham, Kent Hovind, Immanuel Velikovsky, Duane Gish, and others. A lesson in life, learn to detect pseudoscience and nonsense and then move on, which saves time.

Famously, even the within-the-faith beloved supposed Saint Mother Theresa of Calcutta, also known as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, the writings of the late purported saint remain littered with commentary on suffering and the importance of pain and suffering, as this retains a sense of the redemption of Christ.

Bojaxhiu states, “Suffering, if it is accepted together, borne together, is joy. Remember that the Passion of Christ ends always in the joy of the Resurrection of Christ, so when you feel in your own heart the suffering of Christ, remember the Resurrection has to come—–the joy of Easter has to dawn. Never let anything so fill you with sorrow as to make you forget the joy of the Risen Christ” (Lau, n.d.).

Suffering shall be accepted as a joy; a joy as the “Risen Christ” (Ibid.). The nature of the framework represents an assumption of a resurrection from the dead, i.e., the death, burial, and three days later resurrection of Christ in so-called defiance of death.

The only crux, so to speak, of the issue of suffering from Christian theology, remains with the supposed resurrection and in the power of the sacrifice of a God-man, of God made flesh, on a Cross, through a form of Roman capital punishment.

Without veracity to these claims of a resurrection and to its panacea power for the supernatural moral blights of sin for all time – past, present, and future, the notion of Christian alleviation of suffering, or need for recognition of suffering as joy in realization of its reflection in Jesus’s or Yeshua Ben Yosef’s murder, becomes nothing.

It’s true, then, the Roman Catholic Christians did it: ex nihilo. They created something from nothing, more suffering than necessary through its enshrinement and as guardianship for access to the joy of Christ’s self-sacrifice at the Cross. Unnecessary suffering within a secular referent frame becomes immoral because of the tacit premise of a supernatural moral realm; whereas, to the Roman Catholic Christian Church, the secularly seen unnecessary suffering becomes necessary suffering via reflective qualities with the penultimate sacrifice of Christ for the so-called sins of humankind. That is to say, the well-being moral matrix of humanism stands opposed to the meta-physicalistic ethic of Christianity; although, if one takes the words of the Utilitarian ethicist and political philosopher John Stuart Mill seriously in Utilitarianism, the foundation of the ethics of wellbeing writ broad and deep with a eudaemonistic view of human life and their relations with one another becomes the moral nature of the Nazarene:

I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent’s own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as you would be done by, and to love your neighbour as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality. As the means of making the nearest approach to this ideal, utility would enjoin, first, that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness, or (as speaking practically it may be called) the interest, of every individual, as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole; and secondly, that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole; especially between his own happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct, negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes; so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human being’s sentient existence.(Mill, 1863)

This could lead into commentary on the ongoing and overwhelming sexual abuse of children and nuns entering into the news cycle at a rapid pace; however, this will not be the focus of this article (Dancel, 2018; Gomes, 2018; Pierce, 2018; Regencia, 2018; Macdonald, 2018; Long, 2018). Mill took a naturalistic frame of the Nazarene reflective of the morals of Utilitarianism, where the Roman Catholic Christian Church holds fast to the notion of supernatural lessons and an ethical gradient within this meta-material world of grace to sin.

Of the many foci within the categorization of pain, misery, and suffering of the Roman Catholic Christian Church, we can, also, come to the realization of the ongoing and international problem with the pain and death created through the substance misuse crisis around the world (WHO, 2018a; WHO, 2018b).

If we look at the deaths associated with the drug epidemic around the world, we can find approximately 70,000 to 100,000 people dying from opioid-related overdoses, alone, per annum, and as many as 99,000 to 253,000 deaths from to illicit drug use, circa 2010 (UNODC/WHO, 2013).

The main deaths from these substances are men (NIH, 2018a; NIH, 2018b). These statistics from the National Institutes of Health in the United States replicate to other parts of the world. This does not seem like a spiritual problem, as in some spiritual-moral realm corrupted and influencing the men to become addicted in the short- and long-term. One which damages families and communities, and leaving men to die alone.

The basics of addiction, rather than a spiritual-moral framework in years past filled with theological arguments and references to revelation, comes from a functional comprehension of the architecture of the mind, of the brain as an organic sense input receiver and information processor, as we are evolved organisms with imperfectly coordinated but good enough consciousnesses; where these systems can be hijacked by the substances, the neural networks can be, without context, activated based on the ability of the addictive substances to cross the blood-brain barrier and remain active and suitable for locking into neurotransmitter sites at gap junctions. It is well-known as the “biology of addiction” (NIH News in Health, 2015). One common and among the most lethal substances, and which is legal in several nations around the world, remain alcohol, which makes for a good example.

Dr. George Koob, the Director of the NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, stated, “A common misperception is that addiction is a choice or moral problem, and all you have to do is stop. But nothing could be further from the truth… The brain actually changes with addiction, and it takes a good deal of work to get it back to its normal state. The more drugs or alcohol you’ve taken, the more disruptive it is to the brain” (Ibid.).

The Director of the NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, Dr. Nora Volkow, notes the decreased activity in the frontal cortex in individuals who harbor addictive tendencies or outright addictions, whether to alcohol or other substances; they take the substance in spite of the costs of losing “custody of their children” or real threats of a potential rightful entrance into a penitentiary (Ibid.).

These experts in the functional neurological and behavioral aspects of addiction do not mention the spiritual world or spiritual problems, or alternate and inexplicable dimensions apart from the ordinary, but these medical professionals and research directors at the highest level in the world direct attention to organized matter, a brain, and its malfunctions, e.g., the poor functional capacity of the frontal lobes and, in particular, the frontal cortex of the unfortunates suffering with or through addiction.

As Professor Adele Diamond of The University of British Columbia explains with regards to the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex, the poor functioning of the DPfC, in particular, or the PfC, in general, can impair function in most important areas of personal and professional life, and associated with many mental disorders, including attention and conduct disorders, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders, even schizophrenia, and can impact physical health with poor health habits in either exercise or diet, reading and writing achievement, dependability, violent and emotional outburst events and degrees of said moments, retaining of a job let alone a career, levels of productivity, and success and harmony in work or marital life, and so on (Diamond, 2012).

A material, physical, or natural structure with impairments expresses widespread life problems, i.e., not a spiritual-moral issue by necessity and, by the principle of parsimony or Occam’s Razor, far more probable as a neurological impairment issue. This leads to some implications in the legal and social, and law enforcement, aspects of substance misuse epidemics. There has been a wide range of calls for the decriminalization of drugs to deal with this international problem, as would be a humanistic orientation based on evidence of the reduction in harms to the general public at all levels. That is to say, compassion- and science-based solution to this international problem. [Ed. I have written on this before and reference common knowledge within the international community on this subject matter, as well as prior references from other articles.]

The calls have been from the UN General Assembly Session on the Approach to the World Drug Problem (UNGASS) in its 2016 unanimous conclusion, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, through drug policy and the Sustainable Development Goals, and others (UNODC, 2018; Yakupitiyage, 2017; UNODC, 2015; Sustainable Development Goals, n.d.).

The United Nations and the World Health Organization issued a joint statement calling for decriminalization of all drugs in 2017 (WHO, 2017). The Former Portuguese Prime Minister and Secretary-General of the United Nations António Guterres called for the decriminalization of all drugs while the Prime Minister of Portugal; same while the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the prior Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon did the same (Secretariat to the Governing Bodies UNODC, 2018).

Some nations made continuous calls for decriminalization. They enacted the changes, including the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and Portugal, and other countries (Travis, 2014; Vastag, 2009). The questions about this issue of drugs or substances with deadly or addictive potentials around the world remains the ways in which the substances are dealt with via the criminal justice system, the system of jurisprudence, and the assumptions floating within the public consciousness influencing the conscience of the general populace of a nation, including the Philippines.

If we look at the situation with the nation for me, Canadian society, in other words, we can note the ways in which the punitive approach to substance misuse has been an utter failure, even worse in the nation south of our border, i.e., the United States of America.

The punishment of the misusers, in fact, based on the firm and robust evidence showing the increase of the use, the severity of the outcomes, and how this punishment methodology simply leaves more people without support and possibly addicted/deceased, and the prison population filled more than before within the nation-state, based on the implementation of policies set forth with a punitive approach.

Most often, the poor and minorities within a state are the majority of the victims here; thus, if poor, male, and a minority within a nation, then the greater the likelihood of falling victim to injury, addiction, or death via illicit substance intake, whether orally, anally, or injections (Fellner, 2009; NIH, 2018a; NIH, 2018b). In general, this is counter-complemented by an evidence-based methodology towards the issues of substance misuse: harm reduction, which amounts to both a philosophy and a methodology (Harm Reduction International, 2018).

Much akin to the humanistic approach, as noted, harm reduction provides a basis for the implementation in societies around the world with a reason, science, and compassion foundation in the management of substance misuse as a human issue and a social health problem primarily, and secondarily as an issue of law enforcement. For example, if decriminalized, the black market in this sector becomes nullified.

The alternative to mostly punishment is harm reduction (Harm Reduction International, 2018). One major aspect of compassion would be the implementation of decriminalization, as per the national and international calls, and compassion oriented policies, programmes, and initiatives in order to alleviate the suffering of those at the bottom of society.

These methodologies can be as simple as needle exchange programs or safe injections sites. Others, if the population of young postsecondary students, can be an emphasis on naloxone kits on campus, which blocks the opioid receptors of the body and stalls overdoses for time to return the young person to the hospital. These remain solutions bound to a realistic view of a free country, likely, harboring illicit substances or licit substances that will be misused, and then the role of the government should be to protect and help the public in the most evidence-based way possible, which means the harm reduction approaches, while also respecting the bodily autonomy and choices of the Filipino/Filipina.

More than 1,000 Canadian citizens died in the province of British Columbia alone, which prompted an emergency task force to examine the issue and the evidence. This led to the proposals for more extensive harm reduction approaches, not less, where this mirrors the situation with Portugal under Guterres.

Humanistic approaches do not imply for all time or inherent completeness of philosophical foundation, in a symmetry with the logical findings of Kurt Godel about the incompleteness of any standard mathematical system proclaiming consistency or the inconsistency of any mathematical system proclaiming completeness, because the fundamental basis in science – process, discoveries, and substantiated empirical theories – amounts to a philosophy of discovery about the natural world and, therefore, an ethic, by implication incorporating it, becomes one of a wondrous continual searching, probing, retaining, integrating, and refining of inherent compassionate sentiments of the human heart reflected in the Golden Rule to the advanced scientific and technological landscape of the world today.

This brings us back into the subject matter of suffering and the context of Christianity, the Pope, Duterte, and harm reduction. As the Roman Catholic Christian Church from the previous Pope to a saint noted on the Christian conceptualization of suffering, as they live in a worldview of the teleological bound within this notion of God as a Logos or the source of absolute truth without room for deviancy – the Logos way or the highway (to hell, even paved with good intentions, presumably), the suffering in the world must have some God-given purpose.

Suffering comes from a fallen world but is extant due to some ultimate teleological purpose with God’s divine plan, even while the standard position of the Roman Catholic Christian Church is acceptance of Theistic Evolution with, in many eyes, humanity as the crowning achievement of creation. From an evolutionary viewpoint without teleology, a naturalistic worldview, the pain, suffering, and misery remain products of evolution carved via natural selective processes from natural disasters to reciprocal altruism to mate selection to kin selection to punctuated equilibrium and so on, without teleology. Kropotkin noted the factor of mutual aid in evolution at any rate.

The pain and suffering are seen as necessary and, potentially, needing encouragement or even praise as reflective of the joy identified with the notion of a crucified Christ, i.e., the ultimate in suffering and sacrifice then victory over the death of the mortal coil.

However, lacking the evidence or firm evidentiary basis for the claims in the narratives of a Christ who died and rose from the dead a la Lazarus, or the biological evidence to show natural means by which death has ever been forestalled indefinitely and even reversed then or now, the teleological view of suffering becomes less cosmic, more parochial, and akin to the Evolution by Natural Selection posited by Darwin in 1859 (On the Origin of Species) without a teleological lens on the development, adaptation, and speciation of species.

Suffering becomes another unavoidable aspect of the evolved organisms of Earth useful for long-term species survival while also, given the aforementioned sentiments and inquiring ethical discovery linked to science, becoming something human beings can alleviate, not only in themselves but in others as per the Golden Rule.

Some individuals seem to have less of this. Duterte, in particular, admitted to extrajudicial killings, stated, “What is my sin? Did I steal even one peso? Did I prosecute somebody who I ordered jailed? My sin is extrajudicial killings” (Human Rights Watch, 2018a).

In the anti-drug fervor of the nation, of the Philippines, more than 12,000 people have been killed, including men, women, and children (Ibid.), based on conservative estimates from “the nongovernmental groups Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates and the International Drug Policy Consortium, as well as media outlets including the Sydney Morning Herald” (Ibid.).

There has been, also, the efforts to push an independent investigation via the UN into the killings associated with this so-called War on Drugs, which amounts to the punitive or punished oriented approach, in contradistinction to the harm reduction approach, mentioned before (Human Rights Watch, 2018b). This harsh tone and tough talk are not new from Duterte.

In a May 2015 election campaign rally, he, in a strong suggestion of a punitive approach to drugs, exclaimed, “If I became president, you [alleged criminals] should hide. I would kill all of you who make the lives of Filipinos miserable. I will definitely kill you. I do not want to commit this crime. But if by chance per chance God will place me there, stay on guard because that 1,000 [killed in Davao City] will become 100,000” (Rappler.com, 2015).

Golez quoted the Roman Catholic Christian Pope spokesperson, Salvador Panelo, stating, “This is precisely the rationale behind the President’s war on illegal drugs in the Philippines: to save the young and future generations of Filipinos from the drug scourge… Laudable developments have been achieved by the current administration in this regard, notwithstanding the noise coming from the loud minority composed of his detractors and critics here and abroad” (Golez, 2018; Romero, 2018).

In short, Duterte and the Pope speak in different tones but support the same social and law enforcement right-wing ideological perspective, which, in accordance with all evidence available to us, will not only maintain the terrible conditions but make them worse or exacerbate them for individuals and society.

As per the calls for decriminalization and the empirical robust support for harm reduction methodologies, the Pope and Duterte should take a complete about-face in their commitment, as they currently rely on an anti-science conservative agenda that harms the public and has resulted in, potentially 12,000 or more killings when a perfectly functional and evidence-based approach sits before them with support from the international community from the United Nations to the World Health Organization.

The implications of more suffering and then working to stamp this out does not sit apart from the work of mostly male world leaders working to maintain a tough-guy image and in the Christian conceptualization of human suffering as a derivation of a good reflective of the redemptive self-sacrifice of Christ at the Cross; but for God’s sake, the evidence and the naturalistic ethics bound to the sciences of the mind better suit the modern world and will, in fact, do what the purported holy figure and strongman want in their triumphal declarations: reduce the drug abuse or substance misuse problem – so, stop being the guardians of unnecessary suffering and death, and misery, and pain.

Then, maybe, we can thank heaven, literally or metaphorically.

References

Dancel, R. (2018, December 5). American priest arrested in the Philippines for alleged sexual abuse of up to 50 boys. Retrieved from https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/american-priest-arrested-in-the-philippines-for-alleged-sexual-abuse-of-up-to-50-boys.

Diamond, A. (2012, September 27). Executive Functions. Retrieved from http://www.devcogneuro.com/Publications/ExecutiveFunctions2013.pdf.

Fellner, J. (2009, June 19). Race, Drugs, and Law Enforcement in the United States. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/06/19/race-drugs-and-law-enforcement-united-states.

Golez, P. (2018, December 2). Pope’s drug remarks ‘relevant, timely’ in Philippines drug war: Palace. Retrieved from https://politics.com.ph/popes-drug-remarks-relevant-timely-in-philippines-drug-war-palace/.

Gomes, R. (2018, September 3). Philippine bishops vow to prevent clerical sexual and other abuse and cover-ups. Retrieved from https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2018-09/philippines-bishops-clerical-abuse-valles-cbcp.html.

Harm Reduction International. (2018). What is Harm Reduction?. Retrieved from https://www.hri.global/what-is-harm-reduction.

Human Rights Watch. (2018a, September 28). Philippines’ Duterte Confesses to ‘Drug War’ Slaughter. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/09/28/philippines-duterte-confesses-drug-war-slaughter.

Human Rights Watch. (2018b, February 1). Philippines: Endorse UN Inquiry into ‘Drug War’ Killings. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/01/philippines-endorse-un-inquiry-drug-war-killings.

John Paul II. (1984). Apostolic Letter Salvific Doloris of the Supreme Pontiff John Paull II to the Bishops, to the Priests, to the Religious Families and to the Faithful of the Catholic Church on the Christian Meaning of Suffering. Retrieved from w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1984/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_11021984_salvifici-doloris.html.

Lau, J. (n.d.). Mother Teresa on Suffering and Death. Retrieved from www.jameslau88.com/mother_teresa_on_suffering_and_death.html.

Long, H. (2018, December 6). 13 Catholic clergy connected to central AL accused of sexual assault of children. Retrieved from https://www.wsfa.com/2018/12/06/catholic-clergy-connected-central-al-accused-sexual-assault-children/.

Macdonald, N. (2018, August 26). By secular standards, the Catholic Church is a corrupt organization: Neil Macdonald. Retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/grand-jury-report-1.4798291.

Mill, J.S. (1863). Utilitarianism. Retrieved from https://www.utilitarianism.com/mill2.htm.

NIH. (2018a, July). Sex and Gender Differences in Substance Use. Retrieved from https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/substance-use-in-women/sex-gender-differences-in-substance-use.

NIH. (2018b, August). Sex and Gender Differences in Substance Use. Retrieved from https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/substance-use-in-women.

NIH News in Health. (2015, October). Biology of Addiction: Drugs and Alcohol Can Hijack Your Brain. Retrieved from https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2015/10/biology-addiction.

Pierce, C.P. (2018, December 20). The Catholic Church Is a Worldwide Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice. Retrieved from https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a25643425/catholic-church-sex-abuse-scandals-michigan-oregon-alaska/.

Rappler.com. (2015, May 25). Duterte: ‘Am I the death squad? True’. Retrieved from https://www.rappler.com/nation/politics/elections/2016/94302-rodrigo-duterte-davao-death-squad.

Regencia, T. (2018, December 5). Philippines’ Duterte: ‘Kill those useless bishops’. Retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/12/philippines-duterte-kill-useless-catholic-bishops-181205132220894.html.

Romero, A. (2018, December 2). Palace welcomes Pope Francis’ statement on need to combat drug problem. Retrieved from https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2018/12/02/1873580/palace-welcomes-pope-francis-statement-need-combat-drug-problem.

Secretariat to the Governing Bodies UNODC. (2018). 61st session of CND, video message by Mr. António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=kF-6t0FdYG0.

Sustainable Development Goals. (n.d.). 3 Good Health and Well-Being. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/health/.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2018, September 1). Mother Theresa. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mother-Teresa.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2016, July 14). Revivalism. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/revivalism-Christianity.

Travis, A. (2014, October 30). Eleven countries studied, one inescapable conclusion — the drug laws don’t work. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/30/drug-laws-international-study-tough-policy-use-problem.

UNODC. (2015, November). Drug Policy and the Sustainable Development Goals. Retrieved from https://www.unodc.org/documents/ungass2016/Contributions/Civil/Health_Poverty_Action/HPA_SDGs_drugs_policy_briefing_WEB.pdf.

UNODC. (2018, June 26). World Drug Report 2018: opioid crisis, prescription drug abuse expands; cocaine and opium hit record highs. Retrieved from https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2018/June/world-drug-report-2018_-opioid-crisis–prescription-drug-abuse-expands-cocaine-and-opium-hit-record-highs.html.

UNODC/WHO. (2013). Opioid overdose: preventing and reducing opioid overdose mortality. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/opioid_overdose.pdf?ua=1.

Vastag, B. (2009, April 7). 5 Years After: Portugal’s Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results. Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/portugal-drug-decriminalization/.

WHO. (2018b). Management of substance abuse: Facts and figures. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/information-sheet/en/.

WHO. (2018a). Management of substance abuse: information sheet on opioid overdose. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/information-sheet/en/.

Yakupitiyage, T. (2017, June 22). “Big Reflection” Needed on Opioid Crisis. Retrieved from http://www.ipsnews.net/2017/06/big-reflection-needed-opioid-crisis/.

—

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the Founder of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal and In-Sight Publishing. He authored/co-authored some e-books, free or low-cost. If you want to contact Scott: Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.com.

Original publication in Humanist Alliance Philippines International.

Photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash

A Secular Women’s History Moment

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
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A Secular Women’s History Moment

By Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Rev. Gretta Vosper of West Hill United Church in Scarborough, Ontario, went through an approximately 3-year ordeal – almost 4 in fact – in the uncertainty of station in the Christian denomination The United Church of Canada, arguably the most progressive sect in the nation and much of the world (not my opinion alone).

Take, for example, the fact of the matter as the first church to permit the ordination of women, circa 1936 with Lydia Guchy (University of Toronto, 2017; BC Conference of the United Church of Canada, 2018).

Also, we can take Vosper stating that The United Church of Canada is the “most progressive denomination in the world, as far as I’m concerned” in a podcast with Ryan Bell (Garrison, 2016).

In a conclusion-of-the-ordeal article, following the first article a couple years prior, Garrison (2018) notes, “Vosper hopes to create resources for the development of secular communities that have these multilayered social connections within them.”

A community was the point the entire time. Vosper remains a person oriented around the construction of community. She has also been labeled a “brave woman,” and rightly so (Thomas, 2018). The reason, as noted by Thomas, “… her situation grabbed headlines when she wrote a letter to the church’s spiritual leader after the January 2015 terrorist massacre at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper office in Paris. Her point: Belief in God can motivate bad things” (Ibid.).

More pointedly, Vosper denounced the belief in a supernatural “being whose purposes can be divined and which, once interpreted and without mercy, must be brought about within the human community in the name of that being” (Longhurst, 2018).

This was, in part, a basis for Vosper, personally, to be unable and unwilling to reaffirm the original vows during ordination in The United Church of Canada. There was supposed to be a hearing for Vosper, and then delays in the hearing occurred for some time – until recently.

As reported by Longhurst, “…before that hearing took place, the Toronto Conference and Vosper reached a settlement on Nov. 7 to let her keep her job” (2018). However, the church released another statement in reaffirmation of some beliefs following the announcement of the reaching of a settlement (The United Church of Canada, 2018a).

“In a brief joint statement, the Toronto Conference, Vosper and West Hill Church said the parties had ‘settled all outstanding issues between them,’” as reported by Longhurst (Longhurst, 2018; The United Church of Canada, 2018b).

The articles, since the November 7 press statement, continue to come out, even more than one month later (Stonestreet, J. & Morris, 2018; Bean, 2018). According to Vosper’s lawyer, Juliana Falconer, there was a rational calculation on the costs and benefits of a continuation of the disagreement, for all parties (Ibid.).

Douglas Todd, a long-time religion and belief commentator, lamented the lack of open reasoning for the decision by The United Church of Canada (Todd, 2018).

Todd argues The United Church of Canada is the main source of “worm theology,” which amounts to engagement in identity politics and followers who “perceive themselves as fundamentally flawed, guilty and unworthy” (Ibid.).

While also considering the prior statement of The United Church of Canada, we can see the earlier tone, as declared:

The Committee read the submissions and listened very carefully to determine whether Ms. Vosper’s beliefs are in essential agreement with the statement of doctrine of the United Church. This is a crucial question asked of all potential ordinands to determine whether they are suitable for ministry within The United Church of Canada.

We have concluded that if Gretta Vosper were before us today, seeking to be ordained, the Toronto Conference Interview Committee would not recommend her. In our opinion, she is not suitable to continue in ordained ministry because she does not believe in God, Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit. Ms. Vosper does not recognize the primacy of scripture, she will not conduct the sacraments, and she is no longer in essential agreement with the statement of doctrine of The United Church of Canada. (Henderson, 2016)

But with some cultural knowledge or research into the belief of clergy in congregations around North America, there is a long history of doubting leaders alongside the larger disbelieving laity, who may simply suspect but not explicitly know about one another.

One such project was set forth by Tufts University Professor Daniel C. Dennett and Independent Qualitative Research Consultant Linda LaScola, called The Clergy Project (The Clergy Project, 2018). (If you look close at the banner collage image at the top of the main webpage of the website, you can see Vosper’s photo.)

Vosper simply becomes another in a long line of brave individuals, as noted by Thomas (2018), working to expand the landscape of Christian and other spirituality in the early 21st century. A woman freethought pioneer within the tradition of The United Church of Canada.

The conclusion of the ordeal for Vosper has left some letters to the editor with laments, including the following from Steve Thorkildsen, “What will be next? School principals who don’t believe in the value of educating children? Doctors who don’t believe the natural progression of diseases should be interrupted? Engineers who spurn precision and believe that approximations are close enough? Our new Age of Reason doesn’t seem so reasonable to me” (Hamilton Spectator, 2018).

But even within The United Church of Canada, the head of the denomination is happy to keep Vosper (Stonestreet & Morris, 2018). Discomfort from some on the outside and resolute comfort, even happiness, on the inside.

One commentary, by Antonio Gualteri (2018), openly opined, “Now I wonder if the terms of the settlement between the two parties were based more on labour law than theology, though we may never know given the condition of confidentiality.”

In a nuanced view, he considers the critical issue not the atheism of Vosper but the approach to the Bible. While, at the same time, Vosper has spoken to these subtler concerns in prior writing, as cited in the article by Gualteri (2018).

That is to say, she (Vosper) states, directly, the problematic contents of the texts comprising the Bible with the “obscure,” “irrelevant,” and “dangerously prone to misguiding” contents of it (Gualteri, 2018; Vosper, 2016).

Perhaps, in other words, the issue remains not Vosper’s approach to the Bible, but, rather, with the applicability of the purported holy text to much of modern secular life and spirituality in standard interpretations, in contradistinction to the noteworthy but, likely, wrongly – inversely so – placed concerns of Gualteri (2018).

Vosper, in response to a question about “atheist minister” being, supposedly, an oxymoron, stated, “Not if you understand the history of biblical and theological study. For well over 100 years, we’ve questioned the authority of the Bible and recognized it was written by humans. When you do that, everything is up for grabs, including the idea of a supernatural God.”

She seems correct, in part, but this tradition of questioning of the Bible by prominent and intelligent women exists much farther into the historical record, including back to some of the earliest women geniuses in the Western philosophical tradition (Adler, 2018).

I speak, of course, of one of the few great women polymaths permitted to flourish, for a time, in the ancient world: Hypatia of Alexandria. She had a number of distinct statements about fables, myths, miracles, superstitions, and religions:

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth — often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.

Taking the historical account and comparing to the current, we can see, at a minimum perhaps, an amicable solution, as per the joint statement, to the updated (a-)theological stances of Vosper within the “most progressive denomination in the world” and another woman, Hypatia, outside of the church in the ancient world, i.e., cut to pieces and mutilated to death by a Christian mob.

Both “brave” but, certainly, different contexts. In a sense, for the church and the Western critical tradition, and the popular reactionaries to freethinking women, this is, certainly, progress, of a kind, once more – and within a suitable Western tradition and Christian denomination.

References

Adler, M. (2018, November 23). Atheist minister Gretta Vosper is free to continue her West Hill work. Retrieved from https://www.toronto.com/news-story/9042831-atheist-minister-gretta-vosper-is-free-to-continue-her-west-hill-work/.

BC Conference of the United Church of Canada. (2018). Rev. Lydia Emelie Gruchy. Retrieved from https://bc.united-church.ca/rev-lydia-emelie-gruchy/.

Bean, A. (2018, December 12). Lost in the debate over Trump’s silence during the Apostles’ Creed: a bigger issue for progressive Christians. Retrieved from https://baptistnews.com/article/lost-in-the-debate-over-trumps-silence-during-the-apostles-creed-a-bigger-issue-for-progressive-christians/#.XBokr2hKiM8.

Garrison, B. (2016, October 4). Atheist Pastor Deemed Unsuitable for Ministry. Retrieved from https://thehumanist.com/news/religion/atheist-pastor-deemed-unsuitable-ministry.

Garrison, B. (2018, December 3). Case Against Atheist Pastor Dismissed. Retrieved from https://thehumanist.com/news/religion/case-against-atheist-pastor-dismissed.

Gualteri, A. (2018, November). Gretta Vosper’s atheism isn’t the problem. Retrieved from https://www.ucobserver.org/columns/2018/11/gretta_vosper_united_church/.

Hamilton Spectator. (2018, November 22). Nov. 23: Pardon the turkeys, jail the kids, gender identity isn’t a theory and other letters to the editor. Retrieved from https://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/9046012-nov-23-pardon-the-turkeys-jail-the-kids-gender-identity-isn-t-a-theory-and-other-letters-to-the-editor/.

Henderson, S. (2016, September 22). A Message from the Sub-Executive of Toronto Conference Regarding the Review of the Rev. Gretta Vosper. Retrieved from https://torontoconference.ca/2016/09/message-sub-executive-toronto-conference-regarding-review-rev-gretta-vosper/.

Longhurst, J. (2018, December 1). Opinion split after atheist minister keeps job. Retrieved from https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/faith/opinion-split-after-atheist-minister-keeps-job-501694981.html.

Stonestreet, J. & Morris, G.S. (2018, December 18). When “Christianity” Is Pointless: Why Real Faith Makes Demands. Retrieved from https://www.christianheadlines.com/columnists/breakpoint/when-christianity-is-pointless-why-real-faith-makes-demands.html.

The Clergy Project. (2018). The Clergy Project. Retrieved from http://clergyproject.org/.

The United Church of Canada. (2018b, November 7). Statement on the Rev. Gretta Vosper. Retrieved from https://www.united-church.ca/news/statement-rev-gretta-vosper.

The United Church of Canada. (2018a, November 7). The United Church of Canada Responds to the Joint Statement on the Rev. Vosper. Retrieved from https://www.united-church.ca/news/united-church-canada-responds-joint-statement-rev-vosper.

Thomas, W. (2018, November 30). How to tell if your minister is also an atheist. Retrieved from https://www.niagarathisweek.com/opinion-story/9060407-how-to-tell-if-your-minister-is-also-an-atheist/.

Todd, D. (2018, November 17). Douglas Todd: Atheist Rev. Gretta Vosper’s case reveals a church’s ‘worm theology’. Retrieved from https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-atheist-rev-gretta-vospers-case-reveals-a-churchs-worm-theology.

University of Toronto. (2017, February 2). Changing roles of women in the Canadian churches. Retrieved from individual.utoronto.ca/hayes/xty_canada/xn_women.html.

Vosper, G. (2016, June 30). My Answers to the Questions of Ordination. Retrieved from https://www.grettavosper.ca/answers-questions-ordination/.

—

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the Founder of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal and In-Sight Publishing. He authored/co-authored some e-books, free or low-cost. If you want to contact Scott: Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.com.

Original publication in Canadian Atheist.

Photo by Michael D Beckwith on Unsplash

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