Pickles and Warsi on secularism

In an earlier post I discussed Cameron’s speech on a Christian Britain. Now Eric Pickles and Baroness Warsi have made similar noises. Pickles said that under labour ‘Political correctness replaced common sense, people were left afraid to express legitimate concerns and frustrations.’ ‘We must be unafraid to insist on the common ground and common values that we all share.’

What’s good about this is the idea of mutual criticism, dialogue and interaction. What’s bad is assuming that the common ground and common values that do exist should be based on Christianity. This conflates the holding of the same view with the deriving of the same view in different ways. Rawls’ hope was that different individuals and groups could sign up to the same values but justify them from their own point of view. Greater dialogue and mutual criticism may generate that. For instance, many, though not all, religious people would support human rights by reference to their religious beliefs. As a result of Britain’s history, its values were derived largely from Christianity but in contemporary society how, if at all, would people justify their beliefs in values that are widespread, such as fairness, honesty, the right to a fair trial? Probably not from Christianity. Thus, to suggest that a return to Christianity will ground or secure a common set of values is a mistake because it fails to appreciate the extent of secularism.

To be fair to Pickles, having a high incidence of religion in a culture does not necessarily produce intolerance or oppression, though it certainly can. The Queen’s remarks that the Church of England is supposed to ensure religious freedom for all religions is an example of religious support for religious freedom (insofar as Anglican see their institution that way, which many do). A state government that understood itself to be religious could also legislate religious freedom as part of its belief-driven policy. It is increasingly recognized, of course, that religion and politics (and morality) are impossible to separate completely. Yet they are significantly separate in Britain, and whilst it is a good idea to seek to increase religious and moral considerations within politics, it is wrong to impose religion or to be blinded to the minority position that religion is in Britain.

Pickles wants to allow prayers at the beginning of council meetings, which is a point in favour of religious freedom but it seems a confused application of his principles: how does re-instating prayer at council meetings help? That is the least bit of common ground you could find in a largely secular country. I suspect Pickles’ confusion arises from the way in which the government and the judiciary seem to regard religion as primarily about beliefs. It isn’t. It is primarily a set of practices and a belonging to a religious community. Religious beliefs, like philosophical beliefs, are difficult to understand and make coherent, and most religious believers don’t have the time or energy (or ability in some cases) to hold to anything more than a relatively straightforward account of some beliefs. Many religious believers have at least this conceptual advantage over (often more educated) government ministers and judges: they know that in religion practice matters more than belief. Whilst beliefs and values, especially moral ones, may be shared quite widely, practices tend not to be. Atheists and Muslims can agree on the value of generosity, but not on praying five times a day. Christians and Buddhists may even agree on the importance of meditation, but they will do it in quite different ways. And so on.

Now onto Warsi’s speech. Warsi wants to promote social harmony and ensure faith has a ‘proper space in the public sphere’. Fine. Her method for achieving this is doubtful however: ‘People need to feel stronger in their religious identities, more confident in their beliefs. In practice this means individuals not diluting their faith and nations not denying their religious heritage. If you take this thought to its conclusion then the idea you’re left with is this: Europe needs to become more confident in its Christianity.’

As long as the majority faith and culture still make ‘equality and space for minority faiths and cultures’ then justice is being done in that respect. Secularism can do this, and so can many forms of religion. Equally, some forms of secularism and some forms of religion can suppress minority rights. At the risk of sounding parochial or nationalistic, the current British settlement strikes me as preferable to France’s more aggressive secularism or the near conflation of religious and national identity prevalent in America. We should be able to have our identities, but also recognize that we have multiple identities. Warsi seems to appreciate the first point but not the second. In France, national identity overpowers religious identity (from a policy viewpoint). In America, religious and civic identities are conflated or get along too easily. Rather, what is needed, as Andrew Shanks has suggested, is more of a dialectical relation between identities, not just religious and national but also gender, racial, class, membership in charities or parties, etc. This is not a dialectic that reaches a synthesis, but a dialectic that recognizes that our efforts will never be perfect, but keeps trying to improve or change as necessary. Warsi is right that confidence in identity can help fuel tolerance, but it can also fuel intolerance as the 19^th century American-Christian imperialist-missionary approach shows. We need not just confidence in identity but a way of being able to doubt it and question it, too. Again, that is what Shanks suggests.

Warsi doesn’t want religious discrimination against the ‘majority religious heritage’. Not wanting discrimination against the majority religion is fine – no faith should be discriminated against. And in some cases opting for current values or practices rather than accepting the values or practices of another religion or culture is also legitimate, for instance, refusing to accept forced marriage or honour killings, or allowing abortions. In order to do that, however, we need some justification for why we prefer our cultural values and practices, and for the vast majority of people in Britain that will not be based on Christianity but on secular arguments, even if the values in question have initially come from Christianity (though they may not have). For example, autonomy and the value of the individual are arguably nascent within Christianity, but it took the 18^th century revolutions and the Enlightenment to enable Christians to see that. So does valuing autonomy come from Christianity or the secularising Enlightenment?

I agree that we shouldn’t cover up our religious history but I’m  not convinced by her claim that ‘what drives us, what binds us and what inspires us is a history we are in danger of denying’. I don’t think most contemporary people are driven or inspired by the history of Christianity. Also I’m not convinced that secularism is as bad as she makes out: it’s telling that she didn’t give examples of this so-called ‘militant secularism’. But it is true that religions don’t understand themselves as private assent to a list of propositions; she does better than Pickles on that point.

Reviewing teaching

I found teaching difficult this term, as though I had to try to drag the enthusiasm out of the class. I had a small class, which helps with discussions, but it was an evening class, which doesn’t help, and on a Wednesday, which apparently was the end of two days of solid lectures for many of my students. That is, they were tired. Whether there was more to it than that I’m not sure (though I have my suspicions I won’t go into here). In the end, five of the essays were in the B range or above, which is pretty good. But I had three fails. Not good. One of these failed essayers asked for my help with a draft and then ignored it. I think next time I’ll require students to hand in an outline with a thesis statement and an argument, objection and reply, followed by another argument/obj/reply (a bit like Aquinas!).

I tried testing my students with four tests worth 5% of the grade each, instead of just an essay as in previous years. The idea was to assess for (not of) teaching. As I told my students, the point was to help them remember the theories as we went along (I’ve noticed in the past students just forget stuff we did a few weeks before (I probably did that as an undergraduate…)) I’m not sure it worked. Almost everyone got the same grade in their essay as when their essay and test scores were added together, which makes me think the tests didn’t really help the weaker students and were superfluous for the more able students. Given that it involves more work for me (marking and calculating), I was tempted to ditch this, but I think I’ll try it again next time (assuming there is one) because I’m going to change the syllabus.

The course is an ethics class in a theology degree (of varying kinds). I think as it stands the class tries to introduce too many ideas, though I like the history of ideas sweep of it. My plan is to change the structure and reduce the number of topics. I’ll do each theory lecture followed by a class that deals with a practical issue from the point of view of that theory. So they’ll start by reading Aristotle on virtue ethics, and then read Hirsthouse on virtue and abortion. I’ll repeat that structure throughout. This will help students understand the theory better by seeing it used; show an updated version of the theory as opposed to the original historical version of the theory; deal with practical issues alternate lectures and help keep up momentum and debate; break up the theory (which many struggle with); and provide examples of arguments and essay structure that the class can see and work through. The down side is that I lose the flow of the history of ideas and some of the political content, but I think concentrating how to understand and make arguments is more important.

So, it’s back to the drawing board once again, but I’m excited to see if I can make it a better course. I also want to see if I can draw out the theory they need to know from practical examples, so I may even do the practical issue first and then go onto the theory, but I find it tricky to get across the architecture of a theory when aspects of it come up randomly through debate. I guess we’ll see.

Taylor on Hegel and Weber on politics

Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society is a condensation of the earlier and larger Hegel. The first chapter outlines Hegel’s philosophy and is very admirably done in such a brief space. Taylor takes the Absolute and Geist to be references God (rather than, say, culture or collective consciousness or general will). On Taylor’s account Hegel must prove that everything can only be understood with reference to Geist and vice versa, which is the aim of the Logic by starting with ‘being’ as the most empty category and showing it is dialectically related to nothingness and so becoming. This then grounds the relation between identity and opposition in the speculative form of reasoning, where A is A and A is not A, and we proper understanding comes only from the movement between these positions, not from frozen predicative propositions. Taylor is skeptical of Hegel’s proof here but thinks that Hegel still frames questions much more productively than many others, especially as regards to freedom. His importance springs partly from his attempt to combine the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, with the Kantian call for radical freedom, and the Romantic protest against the Enlightenment for an integral wholeness (what Taylor calls ‘expressivism’). Current society does not wish to lose the gains from the Enlightenment but still feels the force of the Romantic critique, so that Hegel continues to speak to us.

Hegel’s political philosophy is neither conservative nor liberal. Hegel wants to include Sittlichkeit, existing cultural obligations, within political philosophy and culture/institutions but by exposing it to the demands of reason. By contrast, he thinks Kantian Moralität is vacuous and this was why the Jacobin Terror was so destructive, because it could only be against any determinate political form. This Sittlichkeit involves three things (p.93): 1) what is most important in human life can only be attained in relation to a community; 2) this community must not be partial but be self-sufficient – and so it must be at the level of a state; 3) the community/state is important for us because it expresses the Idea (which means something like our most articulate form of self-consciousness so far, perhaps vaguely like Herder’s national spirit idea, except Hegel can ward off the dangers of nationalism through a dialectical openness to the collapse of a historical formation at the recognition of its limits and contradiction).

Another of Hegel’s critiques of absolute freedom is that it requires homogeneity, massive decentralization, and it cannot allow for the majority to impose its will on the minority, it cannot allow for some sort of political differentiation (which is necessary in a community as big as the state). Thus ideals of equality and participation lead to homogenization, loose people from their communities but then cannot replace them as forms of identity (except by bad nationalism, say). Modern society needs some way to generate meaningful differentiation without pitting the different groups against one another but knitting them into a larger whole (similarities with de Tocqueville and Montesquieu).

Max Weber’s ‘Politics as a vocation’ begins with the famous claim that ‘a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Politics is the attempt to share or influence power, within or between states, which ultimately rests on this right to use violence. Legitimation of claims to the right to force rest on tradition, charisma or legality. Weber contrasts politicians, whose task is to be passionate and take personal responsibility, with civil servants, whose task is to impersonally execute orders as if they agreed with them, with lawyers, whose task is to make strong technical arguments for interested parties (irrespective of the strength of their moral argument).

Towards the end of the essay Weber discusses the politician’s need to have a ‘passionate devotion’ to a cause, where passionate means ‘matter-of-factness’. That is, the politician must have ‘distance’ from events and people and a ‘sense of proportion’ to be able to act always in the interest of the cause. The politician will only be able to keep going because of this devotion to a cause and from a sense of faith (or hope) because the results of political action are ‘regularly’ different from what was intended. This leads to a fascinating discussion of the relation between ethics and politics. Weber denies that they are unrelated but equally that the same ethical considerations obtain in politics as they do in ‘erotic, business, familial, and official relations’. Since politics has the unique means of ‘power backed up by violence’ it has a unique ethics. Weber contrasts two attitudes that he calls an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ and an ‘ethic of responsibiliity’. The former advocates actions according to its own lights but does not consider the consequences of those actions as relevant to moral guilt or innocence; the latter acts on the assumption that the actor must account for the ‘foreseeable’ consequences of her actions. For example, the responsible actor must take into account the ‘average deficiencies’ of people. (Weber identifies the ethics of ultimate ends with religion and the Sermon on the Mount but it sounds Kantian). Weber also claims that the use of bad means to bring about good ends is unavoidable and that no ethical system can decide when and to what extent which bad means justify which good ends (presumably with certainty rather than offering any guidance at all). At the end of the essay Weber suggests these two ethics are supplementary rather than mutually exclusive, which we could perhaps understand in terms of the tension between political interests and values.

Christian ethics and the state of nature

Occasionally when reading Christian ethical statements I have the feeling that they are slightly unrealistic, or that their critique of some secular institution or reality is unfair. I attribute this to the tendency of Christianity to focus on redemption, to look for it, to try to bring it about (all laudable), and to believe in its eventual triumph. What seems to happen as a result of this is that the tragic nature of the world is insufficiently weighted. An example of this may be Graham Ward’s critique of Hobbes’ anthropology. I think that although it may not be true all of the time, it is most of the time. So one must be careful not to deny other ways of being human (which Ward finds in the church), but neither should one pretend that it is straightforward to act this out in all other situations (and even less so for organizations). So, for example, it may well be the case that some local churches operate with an ontology of peace, or without scapegoating, but I suspect they can only do that because they are small and voluntary. Governments and businesses, by contrast, operate in a state of nature, and the state of nature puts massive constraints on your ethical choices. Now governments and business do sometimes, in some ways, answer to the call of ethics beyond their self-interest. This is admirable but it can only be an exception, not a norm, precisely because they are in a state of nature situation. For the church or Christians to criticise them for not behaving according to the church’s standards is therefore unfair, because the church is not constrained by the state of nature. Since governments and business do sometimes act morally such critique and conversation should not be closed off but encouraged, but I think a recognition of aforementioned constraints should be borne in mind by Christian critics who sometimes have what I would regard as slightly utopic views in this regard. This should not be taken as a baptizing of or resignation to the status quo. The gradual emergence of international institutions and standards suggests that some nations are, to a limited extent, beginning to be held morally accountable beyond self-interest. And some capitalists argue that capitalism needs to be reformed in this direction also. And this is surely a result of critique. I think the issue is one of the tone of that critique and the temptation to feelings of self-righteousness: ‘I’ve made my critique, that cannot be acted upon, and now I can relax and feel morally superior.’

 

A little bit of Hegelian-Christian ethics

Below is a draft section from a lecture I’ll be giving on Christian ethics later this term. Excuse the note-like form of some of it but any comments would be more than welcome. I’m mostly channelling Andrew Shanks and J Bernstein on Hegel.

The non-totality of Christian ethics

The Christian tradition is not a whole culture or form of life but requires some pre-existing culture on which to fix itself. In this process it transforms the culture and is transformed. It learns about itself and teaches the other. It does not possess all the truth there is. So assessment of other philosophies and cultures is needed in order to syncretize with them. This means Christianity is not always superior, not always in a position to judge. It must sometimes be judged. So the great errors of Christianity – Crusades, suppressing heretics, slavery, subjugation of women, persecution of homosexuals, colonialism – are not accidental to it so that we can say that’s not ‘true’ Christianity. They have to be owned up to and Christianity must be worked on to transform it so it changes and won’t do those things again.

Any ethical system or tradition must work to meet new situations and if it can be shown that an ethical system has nothing to say about a topic within ethics, then that is a problem for that ethical system. The question is whether the ethical system, or perhaps better, tradition, can take that on board and change to meet the criticism. MacIntyre perhaps suggests Christianity can do that as a self-enclosed, or self-sufficient, tradition. I’m suggesting that such a thing does not exist. E.g. it was Wilberforce’s liberalism as much as his Christianity that pitted him against the slave trade. If it can do that then it survives as a tradition, but necessarily in a changed form.

So Christianity needs openness to other traditions and humility. Must learn from them.

Forgiveness and dissidence

The work of Andrew Shanks in God and Modernity gives this further support. ‘Magic’ is about consolation, about catering to people’s anxieties about material interests. You go to get a spell to seek good fortune (or bad fortune for someone else). ‘Religion’ is about the infinite ethical demand, about making things more difficult, furthering radical self-critique (what Christians call repentance). You don’t do this by insisting on your interpretation of things. On the contrary, we must be open to revising our beliefs when necessary.

Pre-theology= recognising being shaken.

Shanks interprets Heidegger: what matters is to own and assimilate the experience of shakenness, the encounter with Being. Any truth as correctness, any set of propositions, any philosophical project, will fall short of that. It is a relationship, attitude, not system or answers. This is being post-metaphysical.

Many religions have a central insight: the transcendent. We express it in cultural or confessional form but it is not the same as the Transcendent itself, which is beyond all formulation. Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics is the same thing. But Heidegger will still let us talk about being, just not let us think we have exhausted it or captured it (contrast with Kant’s noumenal/phenomenal). So we have serious cultural relativism: truth exists but our only access to it is through culture. So we can never claim to have the only right way. And, we need to preserve different cultures because they have different aspects of the truth that our tradition does not. (Is it possible to have the best or most complete account of truth? Perhaps if you thoroughly compared traditions, but you’re talking about accounting for all of reality so very difficult to judge).

What is needed, then, for us to maintain openness to truth, is a culture with coherence that can pay the ‘greatest possible respect to properly thoughtful conscientious dissent’. This requires mutual forgiveness. The church is supposed to have this cultural-ethic (Sittlichkeit) because it is founded on the crucified dissident revealed as God. The resurrection is God’s verdict ‘in favour of thoughtful conscientious dissent; a dramatic incitement to free-spiritedness, vindicating the necessary self-confidence, wherever appropriate, to be a dissident.’ (80)

BUT Christian theology, especially Christology, contains a risk or danger. ‘Instead of a universal divine vindication of shaken human individuality as such, we are presented at the level of Vorstellen with the exaltation of one particular individual, precisely in his particularity as the founder of the church; in effect, occluding the universalist symbolism. So the gospel is reduced to church-ideology, a pioneering example of what we nowadays call a ‘cult of personality’.’ (81) So (for Hegel) ‘it is only with the gradual emergence of the secular liberal state that we are…at long last finally enabled to comprehend the real truth for which the Incarnation stands.’ Hegel sees the secularization of the enlightenment as carrying forward the original gospel struggle for freedom that had been lost in church ideology. So this is a theological celebration of secularization, and the secular state, for the way it removes, at any rate, the grosser political motives for the distortion of the gospel.’  A church with power in competition with the state is more likely to hold onto the theology of the unhappy consciousness that suppresses dissent (before it can begin), i.e. that serves the libidino dominandi. So a secular state frees the church to be the church.

So what Shanks and Alison are recommending in their different ways is for the church to try to be a society or culture that is coherent and yet capable of maximum openness to disintegrative truth without disintegrating. To try to maintain a way of life and understanding that is as wise and truthful as it can see by its own lights, whilst being open to the possibility of other truths from other quarters. To try to be forgiving and open to all, universally inclusive. It is constantly on the verge of dissolving itself perhaps, because it is open to critique from others and from itself, open to changing its way of being depending on the influences it encounters. This would be an institutional embodiment of repentance and humility. Clearly extremely difficult. Shanks in fact thinks it is the most difficult form of society to create because it tries to hold together maximum space for and respect to dissidence with the coherency of a (malleable!) Sittlichkeit. I’m not sure any organization would want to claim to live up to this, and I’m not sure how far it’s even possible (how much patience do people have for the negative moment, bearing in mind this is a community open to those who will never read Hegel?!), and yet it seems to me to be a most worthy aim for a polity.

Conscience in Hegel. (Bernstein tapes). Conscience is not a property of the agent but exists only in agents by virtue of the type of community they inhabit. The community must recognise the possibility of taking a position with respect to your action and yourself. It must recognise a ‘duplex structure’ to acts: they have intentional content (what I intend to do) and expressive content (how I relate to myself in doing this act). We can disagree with someone’s action but recognise they did it in conscience. So we disagree with the content of the action (its intent) but not its form (its expression). Just as there can be no private language, there can be no isolated conscience. For conscience to exist, there has to be a linguistic expression of how to relate to oneself in action that allows for this disagreement about content but respects the form. (Antigone is a tragedy because they didn’t have this possibility. That is why individuality is an advance. Once people are no longer exclusively defined by their social roles this possibility can emerge).

What type of community can recognise this? Two types are possible. The ‘hippy community’: PS §655 Conscience is ‘the moral genius which knows the inner voice of what it immediately knows to be a divine voice; and since, in knowing this, it has an equally immediate knowledge of existence, it is the divine creative power which in its Notion possesses the spontaneity of life. Equally, it is in its own self divine worship, for its action is the contemplation of its own divinity.’ So everyone does what their conscience tells them and that must be right, no matter what it is. But really this denies the possibility of really serious disagreement. We’re meant to feel that no-one can hurt anyone else. So this is a denial of the significance of action. This is the community elevated at the expense of the individual because there’s nothing the individual can do to challenge the community.

On the other hand we need a community that recognizes the significance of action and the place of the individual. It allows for the negativity of action, i.e. that significant action can challenge and oppose the current norms. E.g. civil disobedience – against the laws of the community for the sake of the community. Or the church (ideally!) where we recognize differences of opinion and that they really do matter and that we have to forgive one another for doing what we think is wrong and keep talking. So, e.g., the Anglican communion in which they are strenuously disagreeing about homosexuality’s place in the church but (some) are trying to keep talking nonetheless. So you just have to accept that it’s painful. So it may seem as though the Anglican church is failing because it is being torn apart and it may well split, but that is precisely its success. Whereas the Orthodox and Nazarenes and many Catholics aren’t even having the conversation (some RC are). So they seem united and strong on this front and that is precisely their failure. That’s success and failure in the kingdom.

Now the norms of the community come from social use and creation, from culture. But that means they cannot be eternal or infallible. And the way to respond to this philosophical situation is not with a theory but with a confession: to admit that our norms that we are proposing are as ungrounded as the community norms that we are opposing. So if you commit significant moral action that is outside/in disagreement with your community, you know this, you recognise that others legitimately disagree with it. In a sense you act knowing your act may be wrong or evil. This is the situation of modernity (as opposed to traditional societies). This is why forgiveness and confession are so essential. We reach a philosophical impasse (there’s no way to decide who is right) and so we must be willing to admit we have trespassed the community’s norms and be willing to take the punishment, but equally the community must be willing to forgive. And all must be willing to talk about who may be right.

(NB: this is not the same as criminal action. Criminal action doesn’t seek to change the community’s norms, it seeks simply to violate those norms for personal gain. The thief doesn’t want everyone to go around stealing nor does he wish to be caught. The protestor, however, is self-conscious about breaking the norms and deliberately does it in public precisely so the community can question its own norms.)

So think back to RW and Shanks. Disagreement in the church without any way to know in the immediate future who is right (perhaps church will decide over time). This is possible and the church should be the type of place that allows for this possibility, that is open to the shaking this gives to our beliefs, that works through the trauma of it. Of course we try to create a coherent culture, but at the same time we must be open to the disintegrative truth, the truth that our culture has overlooked. We must be open to our victims (since we have an innocent victim at the heart of our worship).

So this is about attitudes. It’s about how we approach dialogue and debate. For instance, having the attitude of knowing you’re right before you start a debate is wrong. The attitude of not being open to changing your mind. E.g. in debates about homosexuality in the church, for instance, if you are convinced already that you are correct and there’s no possibility of changing your mind.

From a completely different angle, Richard Burridge, Imitating Jesus: anti-apartheid theology in South Africa imitated Jesus when it ‘listened to the ‘voices of protest’ and opened up the interpretative community to include those who were suffering under it’. So who are our victims and how can we hear what they’re saying?

Singer and Darwin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYYNY2oKVWU

Can you be a Marxist and an environmentalist?

Here’s an idle thought. A Marxist is committed to the overcoming of capitalism. This isn’t going to happen any time soon. The world’s rainforests have a high chance of being destroyed by 2060. So if you want to save the rainforests you have to advocate for the modification of capitalism rather than its overthrow; namely, that rainforests be given a higher monetary value as they exist than as the raw materials and products that deforestation produces. (Possible objection: that this modification would spell the end of capitalism. Possible but unlikely). I know this uses market mechanisms to overcome political problems but maybe that’s the best chance we have at the moment.

Northcott on Carbon Emissions Trading

Michael Northcott gave an interesting seminar at Durham yesterday in which he critiqued CET for relying on market mechanisms to solve political problems. He thinks this reliance on the market for everything, which neoliberalism has fostered for the last 30 years, has deformed us in that it has shaped us as agents who are less able to co-operate, partly because we don’t believe in it. This means when politicians get together to try to hash out deals (e.g. at Copenhagen) they a) think of market solutions first, b) are less able to govern by face-to-face agreement and negotiation, trusting instead to ‘government by algorithm’.

Why informal education is elitist

This is not a criticism of informal education. Informal education is a good thing. ‘Elitist’ has bad connotations in our society but what I mean can be explained quite easily if one understands the basic idea of virtue ethics. This idea is that our purpose in life is to become excellent human beings and that this requires certain excellences and skills, called virtues. The combination of these gives us practical wisdom. So people who have a large number of these skills and excellences, such as insight, ability to think through consequences, courage, honesty, humility, love, etc (different groups have different lists), are better at being human beings than people without such skills and excellences. That’s right. It sounds somehow wrong or bad to say it in a liberal society but that’s the theory and I think it’s true. It doesn’t mean some people’s lives are worth more than others. It doesn’t mean that some people deserve more help or wealth or anything than others. It just means that they’re making a better go of the project of being a human person than some other people. So when I say informal education is elitist, I mean that it assumes the educators are doing a better job of being humans than the people they are educating.

This is in fact a vital presupposition for informal education to take place. Informal education assumes at least the following: a) some people are oppressed (and usually that they don’t realise it); b) the informal educator is not in this position, at the very least because they do know what is going on. That is why the informal educator has the crucial task of raising consciousness, conscientization. But usually the informal educator has skills and excellences that the people they are educating do not have. This means they are better people than those whom they are educating. Of course, part of the point of such education is to enable the educatees to learn those skills and excellences and become independent and aware. All I am really saying is that the initial difference should be acknowledged because it’s there and because it has at least one effect.

The effect is to do with people’s freedom. Freedom is often thought of as lack of constraint, which is an important part of freedom, but not all of it. People also need certain skills and the ability to exercise them in order to be fully free. For instance, if one is unable to control one’s temper, and can fly off the handle at various times, then one does not have full self-control and is at the mercy of their emotions. This is not to be fully free. That’s just one example, but I think that we should therefore acknowledge that not everyone is equally free in reality, even though they are defined as such by the law. If not everyone is equally free, it is important that they are not expected to take responsibility for too much too soon. Of course, no-one can take responsibility for someone else in one sense, but people often need long term support to develop their full freedom and responsibility. Anyone involved in informal education will know this already, but I think all the talk about democracy in informal education can occasionally obscure the above ideas.

people and animals

Most people think people are more important than animals. So if you had to choose between saving the life of an animal or a person, most people would choose the person every time, irrespective of the animal. But let’s say it was a choice between a person and the last two animals of a species. What if it was a really bad person vs. the existence of dolphins? Are there any people you’d be willing to sacrifice for the existence of mosquitoes?