“It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period.”
- G. K. Chesterton
Here is part of an email I received last Friday which contains the gist of my correspondent's remarks:
I am requesting that you remove the abstract on nurturing gifted students from your blog, also remove any reference to Professor Laura (including his name) and I'd like that done as soon as possible please, today if feasible. I do not want to take further action but I will if the comments are still there next week. I feel I have to do this before any more damage is done to others that don't deserve it.
Here is another bit:
Considering you did not stay for the whole of Prof Laura's presentation, and that those who have posted on your blog have not even attended
any of or only one of his talks how can you justify comments like 'I have met the enemy!' That's disgusting! considering all the amazing
work that Professor Laura has done for others. How can you defame someone like that?
I think it is rather more disgusting that I could have googled Ronald Laura and not immediately found any criticism of his ideas or the way he presents them. If you have ideas that you believe are worthwhile, and you are at all interested in truth- as I am- then you hunger and thirst for criticism, for it is in responding to criticism that your ideas are tested and improved. If you are interested in convincing other people of the truth of your ideas- as I am- then you also welcome criticism of the way you present them, because this enables you to present them better. Even if you are not interested in truth, but only want to be transgressive in an adolescent way- as I hope I am not- then you have a positive need for reactionaries to jump up and down criticizing you. Otherwise, what would be the point?
I do not need to send my criticism explicitly to Ronald Laura, because I know he will find it. The beauty of the web is that all this criticism can take place in a completely public forum, and anyone can join in. Anyone who can find value in our competing visions of truth can derive value from it. Anything stupid I say is open to the world, as anything stupid he says is open to the world.
Users of the Web are perfectly capable of taking on board conflicting opinions and making up their own mind. If I told people to look up something Noam Chomsky wrote, they would find plenty of material on the Web written by other people who bitterly disagree with Noam Chomsky. If I told them something by Cardinal Pell could be useful to them, they would find plenty of harsh words directed against Cardinal Pell and his ideas. If I directed them to the work of Richard Dawkins, they would find no end of web-pages saying he was talking rubbish. If I asked them to google ‘string theory’ they would immediately find people claiming it is fraudulent drivel. If I asked them to google ‘global warming’ they would find pages claiming it is a vast left-wing conspiracy to abolish property rights, and pages claiming anyone opposing extreme measures to combat it must be a knuckle-dragging shill of Big Oil.
What is so uniquely fragile about Ron Laura that he should be shielded from all this? If he does not want to be part of this world, he should not post stupid things on the Web. My friend Klaus Rohde asserts on his blog that it is ‘common sense’ that John Howard should be put on trial for war crimes. This is vastly more insulting than anything I have written about Ron Laura, yet Klaus is yet to tell me of any good friends of Mr Howard writing him to demand he not 'defame' our former Prime Minister.
I do not intend to take down any of these posts. That said, should any readers with a legal background have the opinion that anything said could be likely to be construed as defamation, please let me know, as I have no wish to be sued by a rich and powerful Professor!
Update: I found a version of Ronald Laura's analogy about the Garden of Eden on the ABC website. It is not entirely clear whether he really thinks clothes are a bad idea, but that would explain his concern with developing washboard abs:
If there is a single defining characteristic of the modern age, then as I see it, it's probably the mindless commitment we have to technology as the panacea for virtually all our ills. In fact we have committed ourselves and been so bedazzled by technology if you like, that we have essentially theologised technology. We've turned it into a way of, I suppose, taking on the pretence of playing God ourselves. In the Garden of Eden story the serpent tempts Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. She then in turn tempts Adam to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. When he does, they suddenly become shamed and conscious of what seems surprising in itself, their nakedness.
Now within that context, occurs the first act of technology if you like, namely the sewing of the figleaf. They sew the figleaf and turn to technology to do that, as a way of covering their external nakedness. I want to suggest that the problem at the outset was never their external nakedness, it was their internal nakedness. Their shame in respect of alienation from God, their disobedience, their failure to live by way of honouring the beauty of the garden, the gift of the garden, the gift of their life in relation to God.
So in essence what I'm saying is that by virtue of sewing the figleaf, and covering their external nakedness, what they actually really do is turn away from the deeper problem, and what it does is to apply or appeal to technology as a way of avoiding having to confront the wages of their actual sin. The sin of disobedience, the sin of alienation, the sin of not living as God would have them live in the garden.
So for me the story is very powerful as I've recast it as a way of saying that first of all the Garden of Eden story, in this sense, needn't be construed as a past and defined event which occurred long ago in time. I see it as a dynamic event, unfolding constantly in history in the way it reproduces itself through our interactions with nature and each other. We're constantly as a race, a group, humankind, presented in beautiful garden scenarios which unfortunately we continuously despoil.
In fairness I also read the hardcopy text of this article, from 1986, which is actually quite reasonable. His theology of transcendence is not particularly new- I'm sure I've read C. S. Lewis saying essentially the same thing, and before him, St. Augustine (So possibly it goes back to Plato- what did they teach me in those schools?)- but it appears that once upon a time Prof Laura was doing intellectual work of some value, before he went off the rails into a technology-is-evil obsession.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
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5 comments:
I have no legal background at all Mr. Fellows, but from my shaky understanding of defamation what you've written looks like statements of opinion and not statements of facts and thus hardly ripe for claims of defamation. Plus, it's not really in the interest of the public to know these opinions, which would be another point in favor of you not being sued.
Case closed. My bill is in the mail.
I think it is one of the vices of blogs that if you make an anonymous criticism, it is discredited for hiding behind anonimity. If you put your name to a criticism, you risk threats (whether idle or realistic) of action to punish you for said criticism.
"...given that there is a grain of truth in Lovelock’s ideas, it now seems to me reasonably likely that there would be a negative feedback mechanism tending to minimise the effects of any carbon dioxide we add...."
But is there a grain of truth in it? And if it is, could it be effective only on very small scales? Global warming, as experienced now, is on a fairly large scale. Humans don't like to be roasted sitting on their buttocks helplessly. They rather want to do something, even if it finally turns out to be useless. - But, of course, the chances may be quite good that we can do something useful.
Well, I would say, yes, there is a grain of truth. Google would assure you of the same, or you could more pleasantly probably manage to convince yourself by a walk through a mosaic landscape at different stages of environmental degradation, such as we have around here.
[Humans] rather want to do something, even if it finally turns out to be useless.
Yes, this is part of the infuriating charm of humans! As I (or perhaps one of my evil alternate selves) have said previously, the natural response: 'there oughta be a widget to fix this,' is often productive and is to be encouraged; the natural response 'there oughta be a law to fix this,' is often counter-productive and is to be discouraged.
When an orator, by the mere magic of words and a golden voice, persuades his audience of the rightness of a bad cause, we are very properly shocked. We ought to feel the same dismay whenever we find the same irrelevant tricks being used to persuade people of the rightness of a good cause.
The belief engendered may be desirable, but the grounds for it are intrinsically wrong, and those who use the devices of oratory for instilling even right beliefs are guilty of pandering to the least creditable elements in human nature. By exerting their disasterous gift of the gab, they deepen the quasi-hypnotic trance in which most human beings live and which it is the aim and purpose of all true philosophy, all genuinely spiritual religion, to deliver them.
- Aldous Huxley, ‘The Devils of Loudon’, 1952
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