How to Loose All Your Credibility in One Easy Step

It’s easy when you know how. A group of disaffected junior scholars decided to set up a panel called the Jesus Project. It is supposed to be launching a fearless investigation into whether or not Jesus existed. Now, when you are launching a fearless investigation into a question that almost nobody takes seriously anyway, you should be careful whom you associate with.

The Jesus Project is run from something called the Center for Inquiry which is an atheist pressure group whose main activity seems to be to run summer camps for the offspring of sceptics (no brainwashing there, then). The Project is to have fifty fellows and provides a list of them on its website. It is one of the funniest web pages I have ever seen.

Aficionados of Jesus Mythicism will recognise a few of the names – Robert Price, Richard Carrier, Herman Detering and Earl Doherty among them. Then we have the lunatic fringe – Freke and Gandy, who is hilariously described as “a renowned writer and an authority on world mysticism and classical civilizations” and Frank Zindler. With these names, it is quite clear that the Jesus Project is not to be taken seriously as a scholarly enterprise.

Then there are several real scholars. Sadly, they don’t all seem to approve of the project of which they are fellows. As shown here, John Kloppenborg, was listed as a fellow but not had any contact with it and April DeConick has ‘mixed feelings’. I see that Kloppenborg has now been removed from the list of fellows. I wonder how many of the others are fictitious as well.

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The Decline of Violence

My wife and I have just moved a delightful little village in the middle of Kent. While we were settling in, some of the neighbours came around to check us out. Surprisingly, none of them tried to kill us. They didn’t even form a posse to run us out of town.

In the context of human history, it is deeply strange that a new family could settle down with a different territory without fear of reprisals from the residents. You might think this is a triumph for private property, but it goes deeper than that. Even if we had moved into their back garden, they would have called the police rather than shot at us.

Given the carnage of the twentieth century, it is counter-intuitive but still true that the chances of being killed by violence have been falling, if irregularly and with upward blips, throughout history. In response to my recent post on mythical noble savages, a correspondent on my yahoo group recommended the book War Before Civilization by Lawrence Keeley. His description of all-out prehistoric war can be compared to the brutal but rule-bound prosecution of medieval warfare, as I discussed last month. Steven Pinker, in a recent essay, carries the story to the present day and notes that the casualty rate for the First and Second World Wars was nothing like as great as in earlier struggles even if the absolute figures were very high.

The question, if we accept the fact that human violence has decreased, is why did it? Pinker offers some thoughts in his article, correctly noting that we have not had time to evolve into more peaceful creatures. None of the three suggestions he makes quite add up, but the one with most mileage is, I think, Peter Singer’s. That is quite surprising given Singer is a pretty unpleasant piece of work in many respects, but he does seem to be groping towards a solution to the problem of the decline of violence.

Basically, he suggests that evolution gave us the ability to survive peacefully in small groups, the in-group. Many animals live in packs of a few families and defend their territory against all comers. Our closest relatives, the chimps, live in a pack, raid their neighbours, murder intruders and generally behave like real savages. Human beings, however, have figured out how to live in bigger groups and not resort to violence at the first instance. Somehow, we have accepted larger and larger in-groups who are to be initially trusted and treated as part of the tribe. This has had the inevitable effect that we use violence less often and the casualty figures drop.

The question neither Pinker nor Singer answer is why we have allowed our in-groups to increase in size. I suspect they would find the most likely solution disagreeable to their prejudices...

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Are Atoms Conscious?

Galen Strawson is a philosopher famous for his espousal of panpsychism. This is a spirited attempt (pun intended) to answer the hard problem of consciousness. The hard problem, of course, is the need to explain how we can have subjective experience in an objective world. In fact, there are many other formulations, but they all ask effectively the same thing – what is consciousness?

Strawson takes the hard problem seriously. For good, but not quite watertight, reasons, he rejects most common attempts at an explanation. Consciousness is real, he says, and cannot be written off as an illusion. He also rejects the idea of consciousness ‘emerging’ from unconscious matter by some mysterious process. Finally, he rejects dualism. All matter is the same and there is no special spiritual substance from which conscious minds can be constructed.

His solution is simply stated: everything is conscious. Consciousness is a fundamental property of matter which makes itself felt when it is combined in certain ways. Thus each of the atoms that make up our brains brings a little bit of mind to the party. With enough atoms interacting in the right way, the party turns into an orgy of consciousness.

The obvious rejoinder to this would be if atoms are conscious, what are they thinking about? More seriously, is panpsychism plausible at all? Most people would say not, but actually nailing Strawson’s arguments is rather more difficult than you might suppose. A recent book, Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, contains an essay by Strawson, lots of comments by unconvinced philosophers and responses by Strawson to the comments. It is sympathetically reviewed by Jerry Fodor for the London Review of Books. Fodor is no more convinced than most other people but can see that the hard problem does things to our assumptions such that categories like ‘plausible’ don’t really apply to suggested solutions.

I find Strawson’s ideas have some merit. Although I am not a physicialist, I do think that the physical is an essential prerequisite to the mental. Brains seem to be doing something very obscure to generate conscious experience and I think it is something rather more basic than just producing epiphenomena. Atoms may not be conscious, but they must have some property that allows them to combine into things that are.

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Some personal notes

Last week I handed in my PhD thesis and I am now waiting nervously to find out when the viva examination will be. I know who the examiners are so at least that won’t be a surprise. I still haven’t found a publisher for my book. My agent, Andrew Lownie, is now pitching to American publishing houses where I think my sympathy towards Christianity’s contributions to the history of science are likely to play rather better than in the UK.

Despite all the rejections, I have learnt a great deal about the process of getting a book out. Enough people have said that my work is good enough to be published for me to feel comfortable on that front. More worrying is my lack of a profile. Most popular history is written by journalists or novelists because they have name recognition and plenty of friends in the media to ensure exposure for their work. Academics also write for the trade but their books tend to have one eye on the textbook market. Penguin’s various recent heavyweight tomes, such as Robin Lane Fox’s The Classical World and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation, all sell primarily to students and are expected to have a long shelf life to make up for their lack of up-front sales. Neither can exactly be called popular. Hawkwood by Frances Stonor Saunders (New Statesman arts correspondent); The Devil’s Doctor by Phillip Ball (New Scientist); History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr (BBC); and Persian Fire by Tom Holland (novelist) are more typical of popular history.

As for me, with neither a professorship nor a job in journalism, getting a book out is a struggle. Even Bede’s Library, which gets over 30,000 visitors a month, doesn’t seem to help (although the publishing industry has been notoriously slow to catch on to the internet and it may get them into trouble quite soon). As ever, I’ll keep you all posted.

At least handing in the PhD has meant I can now read what I like. I’m not really a fiction reader but I do like to be entertained. Of course, most academic books are rather turgid, but hopefully they are informative enough to make the effort worthwhile. If a book neither teaches me anything nor has any literary merit then I would rarely finish it. Recent examples of stuff not worth slogging through include Piers Paul Reid’s The Templars (another novelist turned amateur historian) and the derisory Human Touch by Michael Frayn (novelists turned philosopher). I will usually finish something that is easy reading even if it contains nothing new. Dawkin’s God Delusion and Bill Bryson’s History of Nearly Everything are good examples. Although I’ll finish them, I do tend to find them intensely annoying. The Holy Grail of the book world is something that both tells me a lot I didn’t know and keeps the pages turning at the same time. My current read, The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford (FT journalist) and Jonathan Sumption’s Albigensian Crusade fall into this category.

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Back Early from Holidays....

...we got fed up with the rain.

I see that Karen Armstrong is up to her old tricks again. The excellent Damian Thompson is having another go at her on his Telegraph blog. As I’ve previously said, I feel uneasy about some of the attacks on Islam but Armstrong badly needs to learn some facts and stop playing to the Muslim gallery. Her comment that Islamaphobia started with the crusades is especially cringe-worthy. I presume that the fear felt by Christians in eighth century Spain at the advance of the Islamic armies into Iberia wasn’t a phobia because it was completely justified. I wonder how Armstrong would classify the fear felt by those affected by the recent spate of bombings here in the UK. The UK media are being criticised by in the Guardian's CiF blog for reporting that these awful events are being perpetrated by “Asian-looking men” and elsewhere for not being open to the possibility of the bombers being Buddhists!

On the subject of blogs, Daniel Hannan, also over at the Telegraph is always enlightening. In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that he is a close friend in real life. Once upon a time I was in favour of the European Union that Dan campaigns so vehemently against. I saw it as the modern reflection of medieval Catholic Christendom (whose borders it matches almost perfectly, aside from Greece and Romania), an alliance of civilised peoples united by a shared history and culture. Over the years I’ve become steadily more disillusioned and have now reached the point where, if our political masters ever deigned to ask us, I would vote for Britain’s withdrawal.

The problem is that the European Union is run as not a union of high culture and historical bonds, which are predominantly Christian. Rather it is run by an international elite of bureaucrats. Like everything else these meddlers touch, such as education or the BBC, the EU has become a complicated nightmare of political correctness and tribalism. On top of that, it is manifestly corrupt. Actually, if truth be told, the EU was always like this, but if there is one thing bureaucrats are good at, it is maintaining grand illusions and shouting down anyone who tries to puncture them.

Finally, if anyone is interested in the workings of UK politics, the best blog by far is Ben Brogan’s. He is the political editor of the Daily Mail, a paper for which I have a near pathological dislike. I’ve even trained my mother (a regular reader) to call it the Daily Bigot. Brogan’s blog, however, is essential reading (if wholly irrelevant to the normal subject matter of this Bede’s Library).

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Holiday

Off on holiday for the next fortnight. Posts will begin again as usual in the second week of July.

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Game Theory

The rules of medieval warfare that I was talking about on Monday are an example of game theory. I used a similar system when playing a board game called Britannica at university. The game was for four players who each took control of some of the tribes who invaded Britain during the Early Middle Ages. It began with the Romans and ended with the Normans. My long term strategy was to make sure that if anyone backstabbed me, I would do everything I could to destroy their chances in that game. I’d even throw away my own chance of winning to get revenge. Now in the short term, this was a silly idea because it meant I was more likely to lose the game. But my betrayer had no chance either so in the long term (we played each week) people stopped backstabbing me even if I left my troops in a vulnerable position.

Much later, I found out that my strategy had been discovered by game theorists and is known as tit-for-tat. Ethologists (who study animal behaviour) have detected a very similar strategy being used by non-humans and have noted that it is so successful that it confers an evolutionary advantage on organisms that use it.

In the idealised surroundings of playing Britannica tit-for-tat works well but in the real world it suffers from a serious problem. When we played our game, each week was a blank slate and I never carried my vendettas over (largely because I couldn’t remember who backstabbed me the week before). In reality, tit-for-tat can often descend into cycles of violence where retaliation leads to another counterattack which can carry on through generations. The obvious contemporary example is the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians where each Hamas suicide attack inevitably leads to a violent response by the IDF, which in turn leads to more attacks by the militants. Because there is no overarching authority, there is no way to end the cycle of violence and vendetta until one side or the other is defeated.

Of course, in nature, there is no overarching authority and so tit-for-tat is the best that evolution can come up with. We humans can make a better job of things because we use two additional tools. The first is empathy, which causes us to be nice to other people because we feel their pain. The second is the government has a monopoly on retribution that prevents us from taking matters into our own hands. Of course, this means that teaching children to respect authority is every bit as important as encouraging them to emphasise. We reap the benefits of living in a society much less violent than our ancestors. It is worth asking, as I will be in the next few weeks, how we got here.

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"Kill Them All!"

The most notorious aphorism of the Middle Ages is probably the comment of the papal legate Arnauld-Amaury during the sack of Beziers in July 1209, “God will know his own. Kill them all.” This was the first city to fall to the Albigensian crusaders and it certainly contained many more Catholics than it did Cathars. There has been some debate as to whether Arnauld-Amaury actually said the famous words, but general agreement that he would not have disagreed with the sentiment. After all, the Catholics had been sheltering the heretics, which was quite bad enough.

There is one important point to grasp about the remark, however. Arnauld-Amaury was not issuing an order. Beziers had fallen by storm and its population were going to get slaughtered as surely as night follows day. The papal legate was merely giving his stamp of approval to something that was going to happen anyway. Why would he do that? Partly, it was because he had to keep the army on side. He couldn’t afford to deny the crusaders, who were a volunteer force, the spoils of war. But mainly, I think, it was because he understood and approved of the medieval rules of war.

The rules were really quite simple. If a town or castle surrendered, then the terms of their surrender would be regarded as sacrosanct. If, however, the attacking army took their target by assault, then there would be no mercy. Again and again, even during the Albigensian Crusade, garrisons could march out of a castle that they surrendered while anywhere that refused to capitulate would, when it eventually fell, be reduced to a smoking ruin. Clearly, in the long term, this worked to everyone’s advantage. If you want your opponents to surrender, then you have to ensure that the pay off for doing so is as great as possible. Thus, you cannot trick them into surrendering and then slaughter them, because no one would ever believe you again. You would have to besiege or assault every village you came to and thus never get very far. Likewise, if you let the population be after they have held out against you with all their might, you send out the message that others have nothing to loose by resisting.

This is why the slaughter after the fall of Jerusalem was not the great atrocity that we commonly believe, but simply par for the medieval course. Even then, the Arab garrison who shut themselves in the castle were able to negotiate their safe surrender. In fact, what I find so surprising was how often medieval garrisons were allowed to retire unmolested and how completely safe conduct was respected.

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The Albigensian Crusade

I’ve just finished reading Jonathan Sumption’s The Albigensian Crusade. It is a good bit of popular history, told at a cracking pace from the original sources, in the tradition of Steven Runciman and John Julius Norwich. Sumption is an interesting character because he manages to combine his role as historian with being one of the highest paid QCs (a senior barrister) on the London legal scene. He is currently working his way through the Hundred Years War (two volumes out at the rate of about one a decade). When the last volume came out he admitted he never saw his children as he was either in court or in his private library. Despite his wealth and reputation, I felt rather sorry for him.

Still, The Albigensian Crusade is excellent. I mentioned the Cathars a couple of weeks ago and had always believed that the crusade had been what wiped them out. Apparently not. The crusade was defeated and when its leader, Simon de Montford, was killed at Toulouse in 1218, it fell apart. His son, to whom leadership had passed, had to return to Northern France. Eventually, it was the French monarchy who gained the County of Toulouse, not by conquest but by an advantageous marriage. The Cathars were destroyed after the crusade when Raymond, Count of Toulouse, allowed papal inquisitors to operate in his territory. They went after the Cathars lay protectors and slowly, over the next century, managed to dismantle the whole edifice. The last remaining remnants of Catharism were the villagers of Montaillou captured in 1326.

What was odd about the Albigensian Crusade was how little it seemed to differ from the internecine conflict that had characterised life in Languedoc before the crusaders even turned up. The region was a patchwork of petty lords and nobles who spent most of their time and energy fighting each other. You can romanticise that kind of manly culture, but it must have been a hellish place to live. The crusaders were simply another army added to the mix. The region did not finally know peace until it was absorbed by the French. The result was a century of unprecedented wealth and growth before the Black Death and the Hundred Years War devastated the entire region in the fourteenth century.

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Moving house.....

Been moving house this week so very little time for blogging. Here’s a couple of articles to fill the gap.

Firstly, a P.S. to my rant on Monday against content-free education. It’s an open letter from a physics teacher and well worth reading. I suspect the problems he rages against are common to both the UK and the US. Physics was my first degree and I actually interviewed for several jobs as a physics teacher. Glad I didn’t get offered anything, judging from this.

Secondly, the usually excellent David Aaronvitch proves Pinker’s Law. This law, regular readers will know, states that any analysis of human behaviour or development that takes no account of genetics will be worthless. Aaronvitch’s vacuous article demonstrates this by concluding the reason for differences in attainment by toddlers is about culture. Rubbish David, it’s about genetics. You can easily figure out my own comment among the responses to the article.

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