TURBULENT PARASITES

A piece appeared in the Guardian newspaper on August 23rd 2002. You can read it here. The piece, entitled "Parasites on Religion" was written by Giles Fraser, a Church of England vicar and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford. Mr. Fraser attacked 'a humanist agenda which is almost totally parasitic upon religious belief itself - humanists are largely defined by what they are against'.

Mr Fraser proceeded to assert that, in the face of horrors such as the recent murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, 'secularists' are impoverished because they can't resort to religious language and concepts to articulate their horror, or conversly in other circumstances to articulate beauty.

There are a number of responses possible to Mr. Fraser's thoughts ranging from irritation at the smug arrogance of his presumption that those with a religious faith have an exclusive grip on understanding horror or beauty, to an observation that his method is essentially the cheap-shot one of setting up a straw man, labelling it as his antagonist, and knocking it over with a wet sponge. More particularly one might observe that Mr Fraser shares with the majority of second and third rank British philosophers a penchant for an analysis based around discussion of '-isms' and formal belief structures. As we watch the ...isms and ..osophies shuffle and shimmey around the Palaise d'Academe I suppose we must give credit where it is due for the neat trick of organising a barndance in an ivory tower while we must also point out that there isn't much room left for a decent Strip the Willow or a tumble in the hay.

However some of Mr. Fraser's points do merit at least a response and especially I think it is important to attempt a rebuttal of his notion that 'humanists' and 'secularists' [who are incidentally no more a homogenous group than are 'religionists'] are defined by what they are against rather than what they are for.

It probably says more about Fraser than his antagonists when he asserts that "The challenge is to make humanism something more than reactive or unobjectionably inane". Quite to whom this is a challenge is not clear and it rests upon a notion of an homogenous -ism that is humanism. Indeed it is based on the egotistical assumption that religious explanations are sufficiently important to those of us who don't share them that we will go to the trouble of wrestling with them in order to find reasons to reject them. The fact is that for many of us our non-theistic beliefs are not based upon a conscious searching for ways to reject a religious explanation. Rather, they arise from our attempting to make sense of our existence in the cosmos as we experience it and finding that the ways in which our ideas travel are not those travelled by those for whom the broad categories of 'religious' explanation make sense. Foxholes are teeming with atheists who have concluded that a loving God wouldn't abandon them to such horrors.

Nor is it necessary for us to "defend and expound ... a big story". Where is there such an imperative? To defend against what? Fraser is simply trying to force the rest of us to trammel ourselves within the tired old tramlines of intellectual systems and structures of belief. This kind of discourse might pass for intellectualism on the margins of Oxbridge but hey! so what? Nor, actually, does his position appear consistent even within the linguistic and logical traditions of British academic philosophy, reducible as it is to the proposition that "A has a 'big story', B does not have a 'big story', therefore A's 'big story' is to be preferred". Eh? What? You don't need to be able to parse Frege's truth tables to see a hole in that one.

Of course some do feel under such an imperative and do make the effort to elaborate a 'big story', probably most notably in recent times Richard Dawkins, especially in "The Blind Watchmaker". Personally I feel under no particular imperative to elaborate and expound a counter-explanation and while I have some thoughts on this (who doesn't?) I'm not conceited enough to think that they amount to that much - although they do underpin my conceptions of ethics and to that extent I have elaborated them, at least to my own satisfaction, although I would say as a 'little story' rather than a big one. On the whole I am content just to be, to love, and to follow my notions of ethical behaviour.

And so to the "impoverishment" of "secularists". Frankly I find that it is Fraser's thought which is "impoverished" - its poverty consisting precisely in its inability to conceive of a discourse about the cosmos which does not resort to concepts of "otherness" and the super-natural when the going gets tough. Resort to the super-natural does a disservice to the natural in all its vast strangeness and beauty. We are conscious beings made out of the very stuff of stars: where is the poverty in that?

(Professor Richard Dawkins, whom Fraser takes a pop at in the article, replied a couple of days later in a letter.)

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