On lying to ourselves and others

A talk given to Skeptics in the Pub, at The Maypole, Cambridge, 28 June, 2016

It’s not usual for a speaker to say immediately what their approach is. In most talks, the audience members are left to decide for themselves: is this person a Neo–Darwinist, a proponent of Intelligent Design, a Buddhist; or one of those dying breeds – a Marxist or a worshipper of the works of Freud.

Well, for several decades I’ve been rebelling in a quiet way at having to call myself anything. It is true that I am what might be called a natural atheist, having never for a second believed in the existence of God. And if I wanted an intellectual underpinning for my disbelief, then I find this in the words of Karl Jasper, “If God spoke in the world, his voice would be irresistible.” Yet, if I call myself an atheist, it’s a bit of a conversation–stopper. I mean, why stop there? Why not call myself a nihilist, and embrace the Great Nothing? Because it is impossible to maintain such a stance, to resolutely deny any joy that happens my way, and thereby stop myself from becoming an existential Alf Garnett. So it is that I go along with the words of the British Humanist Association, and ‘celebrate the one life that I have’ – insofar as circumstances allow. However, I prefer to call myself – without the least pretension – a freethinker: open to all ideas, while being rigidly bound to none (except such things as there never being an excuse for the abuse of other people, animals, or indeed the natural environment).

The principle word in my title is lying, but this does not solely relate to the telling of outright lies. There are arguments that are subtle and smooth, but still characterised by deliberation, and that are intended to wrong–foot opponents. This might take the form of deliberate suppression of facts and figures that go against your argument – that is, against your interests. Or what I think is called the single instance induction fallacy may be introduced: as in, “My granny smoked twenty cigarettes a day, and lived to ninety.” The implication being that smoking is not harmful to health. However, it has to be allowed that many questions are simply too complex to admit of reasonable public or private debate. And, as we have seen with the EU referendum, this leads to shouting matches, and the attempt to hammer home supposed truths as if sheer force would make them right (and this, we may say, is probably the substance of most domestic arguments: they are not reasoned arguments, they are rows).

Dissimulation too, has speedy limits. Like a certain lord, not unfamiliar with spending time at Her Majesty’s pleasure, you may pretend that you have been to a certain university. But supposing you are asked what you studied, when you were at this university, which college you belonged to, and who your principal lecturer was? You may well have mugged up a bit on this, but it will be extremely embarrassing if – at a party – you meet someone who was at this university during the same years as you purportedly were. Once start down this path, and you will become ever deeper mired by the fantasy you have invented.

At this point I’d like to bring in some highly pertinent observations from literary criticism – specifically those set out with compelling clarity in Frank Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. According to Kermode a great deal of our reading is aimed not at discovering a range of meanings, but in reinforcing the truth as we see it. So, if we are a Marxist, a Freudian, a Christian, an atheist, a Buddhist, a Seventh Day Adventist, or whatever, we will seek to have our beliefs reinforced, and react angrily if they are not. So it is that we read for the truth as we see it. As for the idea of “the single sense, the truth.” There is no such thing, and it would be extremely odd if there were; odder still that it had eluded us over all these centuries. It is impossible to contemplate seriously any kind of apprehensible entity that we could label “The Truth”. It is the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. I do not see that this should worry us. The freer our minds are when reading, the better. Postmodernism has anyway already loosened all the moorings, and I do not see why we cannot read in a lighter frame of mind. We carry so much cramping mental baggage about, that it is wonderful when we allow ourselves to jettison any of it! Let us have an end to stultifying personal predilections; to unintelligent rubbishing of authors that we don’t happen to enjoy; and even of trying — too hard, at least — to get others to read our own favourites. Every good writer will give you enriching insights, but I would not recommend discipleship – else your life will be warped, and you will find yourself fairly constantly on the defensive as you try to quell your doubts. In fact there is a danger that the laces of your shoes will become tied to each other in a knot worthy of the writings of the medieval schoolmen.

But why go on with this dirty work? We could be free, and should train ourselves to be pleased when we find that we’ve got something wrong, and go home with a mind that is a little more finely tuned than it was before. Daniel Dennett even goes so far as to say that we “should seek out opportunities to make grand mistakes, just so we can then recover from them.” It is admittedly painful to find that we’ve been living with a particular illusion for years, or even decades. And it would be unkind – if not cruel – to go round deliberately disillusioning people (and I am anyway completely against proselytising). But this is not at all what I have in mind. Rather, we have, I think, to habituate ourselves to taking on views which – while they may be painful in the short run – will be beneficial in the long run.

I will conclude with these wise words from Jane Austen’s Emma:

“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken . . .”

A badge for all our lapels, wouldn’t you say?

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Wall art illustration from: 20+ Powerful Street Art Pieces That Tell The Uncomfortable Truth

Smoke gets in your eyes

I cannot be certain what, as a boy, I thought about cigarette smoking. However, I seem to remember associating it with rather scruffy men in drab clothes and cloth caps who were relegated to the upstairs of buses, where they smoked Player’s Navy Cut, Craven ‘A’, Senior service, Gold Flake, Wills Wild Woodbine, and other popular brands of the 1940s and 1950s. The bus smokers coughed, gasped – hence ‘gaspers’ for cigarettes – and would no doubt have spat were they not confronted with the wonderfully worded Expectoration Prohibited (and how it was that we all knew what this meant remains a slight mystery to me: we didn’t even know of its Latin origin – and I imagine that Hawking Prohibited would have taken on an entirely different meaning...). Certain it is that people smoked everywhere, and smoking on trains was only completely banned in 2005.

I do remember that, as children, we tried to make our own cigarettes out of dried leaves and heaven knows what else.¹ What we used for ‘cigarette paper’ I have no idea, but I do know that the results where abominable (and as well try to make ‘tea’ out of dried leaves from an English garden). My father once put some tobacco in a small plastic toy pipe I had. And when I drew on it I found it so horrible that I flung the pipe across the room. This was, I have to say a singularly irresponsible act on my father’s part, but luckily it had a good effect. My only other attempts to smoke occurred when I was a teenager. Desperate to appear ‘cool’ – long before that word had its current meaning – I tried smoking in pubs (under–aged). But I found that the tobacco made me feel nauseous, and – as I had a particular horror of throwing up – I gave up all experiments with tobacco. Someone said, “You’ll get used to it.” But I distinctly remember thinking, “What a stupid thing to get used to.” So it is that I am grateful for one example of wisdom at an age not much given to that level of judgement.

A group of British soldiers arrive in England 

after the evacuation of Flanders. One pipe, 

and three cigarettes

“Might I ever have taken up smoking?” Well, I can think of one situation when it might have been highly likely. Had I been born early enough to fight in the Second World War, I might well have. I can easily imagine that cigarettes might have been second only to food and drink in my rations. I’m sure that in such a situation I would have forced myself beyond the nausea phase; and that without compunction. War is hell, and plain tobacco is probably the only drug that can help to quell fear without compromising efficiency and accuracy of fire power. Not that I imagine modern western soldiers are encouraged to adopt these coping strategies from the past. Avoidance of immediate confrontation – where possible – is the watchword now. Besides, at eight stone, which I was at eighteen, I cannot see myself being deployed to the front line!

Since then, the ‘war against tobacco’ – to deploy a decidedly inaccurate phraseology –has reached proportions unimaginable to those born either pre– or post-war. In 1979, when I started working at Dillons flag–ship bookstore – in Malet Street, London – it was not uncommon for booksellers to smoke on the shop floor, or even carry a lighted cigarette with them when showing a customer to a section that was of interest to them. As for the cash office, heaven help the secondary smokers! Things were scarcely better when, in 1988, I transferred to one of Dillons’ new, out of London, University City bookstores. It seemed that nearly everyone smoked, and the tea room atmosphere was appalling now I think back on it.    

This latter situation was mirrored – and writ large – on the London Underground when smoking was restricted to a single carriage per train. The carriages were filled with a near–smog of carcinogenic particles; the floor littered with fag ends; and the walls turned a yellow–brown: a deadly reflection, I imagine, of the state of the smoker’s lungs.

A collection of Picasso's
cigarette boxes. From The Artists
of my Life, by Brassai. Thames &
Hudson, 1982, O/P

My paternal grandfather was, alas, a chain smoker, and would reach for the lighter even before he got out of bed in the morning. My father was a pipe smoker; and when he was at the typewriter it seemed that the machine would hardly work unless my father was wreathed in smoke! ² It would seem, however, that such glamour and faux confidence that used to attach itself to the cigarette – Rita Hayworth, Clint Eastwood, and much of Hollywood, French noir, and films across the board – is all but exhausted. Yet, whether the cigarette gave cachet to Picasso – rarely photographed without a cigarette in his hand – to Sartre, or Edith Sitwell, it was still a noxious, mass–produced drug, promoted by greedy manufacturers who cared not that it killed (then as now). Yet, take the cigarettes out of the classic films and you will kill them! That is just one of the many paradoxes we live with. And any attempts to remove such are just about as fruitless and plain stupid as many of the current PC measures that would kill our spirit – were we to let them.

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 ¹ One experiment of mine that was successful was to send up a tiny rocket – above the garden. I filled the bottom of a cylindrical cigar container with the heads of matches, put some smaller tin object on top of these, and then screwed the top down. I then carefully set this on a wire tripod above a small fire of twigs, and waited for the match heads to light / explode, blast the head off the cigar container, and launch my ‘rocket’. This was so successful that I never did find where it landed!

² My grandfather died of lung cancer and my father of a heart attack. The latter caused by the insidious narrowing of the arteries which takes place over the decades. The arteries are narrowed temporarily during the act of smoking, but over time this narrowness becomes permanent.

Why I am an atheist

If God spoke in the world, His voice would be irresistible.

Karl Jasper
___________

I am what I suppose could be called a natural atheist, never having believed in the existence
of God for a second. But, in a very real sense, I am an atheist because my parents, grandparents, and best friends have also been atheists. My mother, in particular had what can be described as an intense dislike of the church. As a child she had been forced to attend services and to be confirmed; and she thought the whole business ridiculous and tedious. For doctrine “as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.” And did Christ ever laugh? Was he possessed of a sense of humour? Not as he is presented in that work of subtle propaganda and relentless anti–Semitism, entitled the New Testament. So why drag a village child from the woods and haystacks to present her with deathly doctrines, culled from that most unreliable of sources: a book written by we know not whom about a man whose very existence has to be questioned? And which is very thin gruel, even for adults. Religion is not for children. And adults should be freethinkers: open to all ideas, and bound to none. If the Archangel Gabriel appeared to me tomorrow, then I would convert. But I know, and you now, that this is never going to happen. Such things 'happened' centuries ago, and are on a par with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the Nights of King Arthur. They are not history, they are myth. 

As a result of my mother’s experiences she determined to leave me entirely to my own devices, and I have never attended a church service – with the exceptions of weddings and funerals. School assembly I could not of course avoid; but all I remember is the aching boredom of it all – and a particular dislike of ‘All things bright and beautiful...’ What about all things grim and terrible: did God create them as well? “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.” But it didn’t wash: the latter was palpably untrue, and God seemed guilty of a profound dereliction of duty. But, “Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.” But it isn’t true: ships go down; earthquakes kill thousands; and diseases spread like the agents of hell. “Life is appalling!” said Cezanne; and, taken in the spirit in which he expresses it, so it is.

It is said that religion gives meaning to life. But I see not how. I may believe in a certain doctrine on a Thursday, but can I hold it in the small hours of Friday – that time of the very nadir of confidence? I doubt it; for there is no absolute certainty, and I cannot believe that most officiating ministers do not live a lie. They have to, for they dare not admit a doubt, less the entire painted veil collapses, and Piers Plowman returns to the soil that he knows how to work, and the seasons that he knows how to counter. Vast cathedrals never were in the mind of the putative Christ as presented in the Synoptic Gospels. “Give up all that ye have, and follow me.” “It is no wonder that the church has never been able to take Christ seriously.” And we may wonder if the fishermen followers were not unutterably gullible, and under the spell of a first century Derren Brown. “Who is my mother? and who are my brothers?” What a truly delightful sentiment.

Well, we are orbiting the sun at 9 kilometres per second. And if we want to consider our size in relationship to the universe, there are about 500 million atoms on the head of a pin, and it is entirely possible that the earth is less than the size of one of those atoms – in the unimaginable immensity of the universe. Well, as Albert Schweitzer has written, “We are entirely ignorant of what significance we have for the earth [which we may easily imagine is none]. How much more then may we presume to try attribute to the infinite universe a meaning which has us for its object, or which can be explained in terms of our existence!” And I do not anyway want to be doing the will of someone who can perfectly well do it Himself. Religion would anyway give no meaning to my life, which – in any numinous or ontological sense – I suspect has absolutely none. As the painter, France Bacon, has said, “Man has learned that the game is not worth the candle; therefore he must deepen the game.” So we must, and in truth we do not measure our enthusiasms against the size of the universe: the staggering complexity of which does not enter into our domestic pursuits, and for most of our days does not enter into our thoughts at all. A life without thinking would be intolerably dull, yet – for balance we need some equivalent of Candide's garden, or Hume's friends, Backgammon, and wine.

Well, I’ll end with this piece from John Cowper Powys’s The Art of Happiness, Bodley Head, 1935:

We can all love, we can all hate, we can all pity ourselves, we can all condemn ourselves. We can all admire ourselves, we can all be selfish, we can all be unselfish. But below these things there is something else. There is a deep strange, unaccountable response within us to the mystery of life and the mystery of death; and this response subsists below grief and pain and misery and disappointment, below all care and all futility.  

And the startling thing about this response is, that it is independent of love, independent of pleasure, independent of hope, and can continue, as long as we remain true to ourselves, in spite of all reason, to the end of our days.