Poison

The last post was a result of musing on what a silly old buffer Sir Robert Winston is, and wondering why C list celeb scientists like him and Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield are encouraged by the comfortable, middle-low-brow guardians of public opinion to patronise and mislead us. Winston has a snip in g2 today, his usual chuntering guff. It’s about religion. It shows no sign of reflection, analysis, reading, understanding. It’s not so much that a lot of it is wrong, it just does not begin to address the issues he pretends to address. Assertions like “Nor should we blame religion for the various Crusades in Europe” puts us in an intellectual landscape I guess well below five good GCSE passes, and the second rate biographer’s habitual “would have”, as in “We had less protection against repeated changes of climate than other species - yet we survived. Human spirituality would have played an important part,” are an embarrassingly clumsy way of lying about what we know and what we don’t know.
I want to know whether this is important, this substitution of comfortable, soft centred irrational guff for stringency. It may be. Politicians and corporations thrive on it, because it’s a camouflage for convenient lies. (“The science tells us...” has the same intellectual standing as “The Pope tells us...” as if Science was an oracle which you visited and it gave you a precise and unambiguous answer*). Demagogues thrive on the kindly wooliness of pundits. It allows Tiny Tony Torture to pretend that it is of no importance that for cash he’s handing out control of schools to bigots who believe in Creationism. It allows the idea of intelligent design to be presented as if it were other than pure tosh, as if Occam had never flashed his razor. It allows despicable buffoons to pontificate about torture on the basis of an idiot hypothesis about one terrorist knowing where the bomb is that is going to blow up the whole planet, but refusing to reveal all without being given a good torturing. (For a reworking of this argument see More thumbs up for torture, though I rather fancy substituting Blair and his cabinet for kittens.)

Society today is genuinely nicer than it was even twenty years ago. We are more tolerant, more accepting, less judgmental (I’m not, but most people are). But with every good a bad creeps in in disguise. Sir Rob is clearly a good and kindly man. I think his celeb status allows him to seep a sort of chronic poison.

*A Greek philosopher walked into the mountains because a fortune-teller told him he would die that day with a blow to the head and he wanted to be away from people and the tall roofs of houses from which hard things might at any moment plummet down. So he walked into the wilderness and passed the day far from the works of men. At evening as he turned for home an eagle flying high in the sky dropped a tortoise on his head.