A Rough Introduction to Critical Thinking

A clip from the video Dara Ó Briain Talks Funny, with a partial transcript.

The clip embedded above is an excerpt from a video recording of Irish comic Dara Ó Briain (pronounced “dah-ra o-bree-an”) in performance at the Hammersmith Apollo Theatre in London in 2008. In this clip, he addresses himself to popular forms of ignorance and misunderstanding regarding matters of scientific knowledge (“a general kind of lack of knowledge about science,” as he says at 0:20). Ó Briain can be a bit rough on those who propagate defective forms of thinking (“Jesus, homeopaths get on my nerves!”), and his performance, being stand-up comedy rather than a lecture, does not include much presentation of evidence pertinent to the evaluation of claims: hence my description of this as a “rough introduction” to critical thinking. But his act shares with critical thinking the aims of exposing folly and revealing truth.

Of course, a performance like this is made to be seen and heard, not to be read in transcribed form. Nonetheless, I find much of it so pithy and so well said that I like to have the words before my eyes. So by all means, watch the video before you read what follows. But once you have watched it, if you find Ó Briain’s words as well chosen as I do, you may want to refer to the following transcript of the stretch of this performance running from about 1:40 to 4:20.

But there’s a kind of notion that “Every opinion is equally valid.” My arse! Bloke who’s a professor of dentistry for forty years does not have a debate with some idiot [eejet] who removes his teeth with string and a door, right? It’s nonsense! And this happens all the time with medical stuff on the television. You’ll have a doctor on and they’ll talk to the doctor and be all “Doctor this” and “Doctor that,” and “What happened there?” and “Doctor, isn’t it awful?”, right? And then the doctor will be talking about something with all the benefit of research and medical evidence, and they’ll turn away from the doctor in the name of “balance,” and turn to some—quack—witch doctor—homeopath—horseshit peddler on the other side of the studio!

And I’m sorry if you’re into homeopathy. It’s water! How often does it need to be said? It’s just water. You’re healing yourself; why don’t you give yourself the credit? Jesus, homeopaths get on my nerves, with the old “Well, science doesn’t know everything”! Well, science knows it doesn’t know everything, otherwise it would stop. But it’s aware of it, you know? Just because science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean that you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.

“Oh, well, the great thing about homeopathy is that you can’t overdose on it.” Well, you can fucking drown! I’m sorry: it seems harsh, and I used to be much more generous about it, but right now I would take homeopaths and I would put them in a big sack with psychics, astrologers, and priests, and I’d close the top of the sack with string, and I’d hit them all with sticks. And I really wouldn’t worry who got the worst of the belt of the sticks, right? Anyone who in answer to the difficult questions in life, to “I don’t know what happens after I die,” or “Please, what happens after my loved ones die?” or “How can I stop myself dying?”—the big questions—gives them an easy bullshit answer, and you go, “Do you have any evidence for that?”, and they go, “There’s more to life than evidence”: get in the fucking sack!

I’m sorry, “Herbal medicine! Oh, herbal medicine’s been around for thousands of years!” Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became “medicine,” and the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri, so knock yourselves out. “Chinese medicine, oh, Chinese medicine! But there are billions of Chinese, Chinese medicine must be working.” Here’s the skinny on Chinese medicine: A hundred years ago the life expectancy in China was 30. The life expectancy in China at the moment is 73. And it’s not feckin’ tiger penis that turned it around for the Chinese. Didn’t do much for the tiger either, if you don’t mind me pointing out.

There is one further joke at the expense of the Chinese before the next burst of laughter and applause from the audience, but I have omitted it, as I think it appears to disadvantage when transcribed.

How Many Forms of BS Can You Spot in This Utterance?

Newt Gingrich on his dark past: “There’s no question that at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard, and that things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”

Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich recently gave an interview to David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network. The first of the three clips posted by Brody at CBN.com (March 8, 2011) begins with him asking Gingrich the following rather elliptical question (the transcriptions that follow are my own):

You know the question, and I’m not going to ask it the way everybody else will ask it, but as it relates to the past, and some of those personal issues that you’ve had. You’ve talked about how God is a forgiving God, and I’d like you to expand upon that: as you went through some of those difficulties, how you saw God’s forgiving nature in all of that.

Such is Brody’s delicacy that he never actually says what “the question” is. Perhaps he is presuming that his viewers will know that Gingrich is now on his third marriage; that his relationship with the woman who became wife no. 2 started while he was married to wife no. 1; that he initiated a divorce from wife no. 1 when she was recovering from surgery for uterine cancer; that his relationship with the woman who became wife no. 3 started while he was married to wife no. 2; that he initiated a divorce from wife no. 2 on the day when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; and that he has a history of further marital infidelities. (For Gingrich’s marital history, see the pages at About.com on Gingrich’s first and second marriages; for his other infidelities, see this article at Frontline.) These matters are presumably the “personal issues” to which Brody vaguely refers. Gingrich replies:

Well, I mean, first of all, there’s no question that at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard, and that things happened in my life that were not appropriate. And what I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet—I was doing them. I found that I felt compelled to seek God’s forgiveness—not God’s understanding, but God’s forgiveness—and that I do believe in a forgiving God. And I think most people, deep down in their hearts, hope there’s a forgiving God.

Now, to be fair, Brody did not ask Gingrich to confess his misdeeds, but only to tell how he understood God’s forgiveness in relation to those misdeeds, whatever they were. Nonetheless, to speak intelligibly of being forgiven, one must at lest acknowledge misconduct. And Gingrich does indeed get around to saying that he “was doing things that were wrong.” It is interesting, though, to see how much evasion and obfuscation he commits before he gets there. Consider his first sentence: At times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, I worked far too hard, and things happened in my life that were not appropriate. There are so many forms of dishonesty and cowardice packed into this fairly short utterance that it is instructive to try to identify them individually.

(1) Let us start with the most obvious one: “partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country.” One is reminded of Samuel Johnson’s remark upon the resort to patriotism by scoundrels. Here Gingrich suggests that the ultimate motive of his marital misconduct was love of country—or, as the headline of an article by Jack Stuef at Wonkette more satirically puts the claim, that “Newt Gingrich committed adultery because America made him horny.” By trying to attribute his bad conduct to a good motive, Gingrich follows the most commonly practiced strategy of reply to the bullshit interview question “What do you consider your greatest weakness?”, namely to admit to a weakness that is really a strength. In fact, he virtually repeats the best-known bullshit answer: “I sometimes care about my work too much!”

(2) To be sure, Gingrich includes the qualifier “partially,” as if sensing that, without it, his assertion might be a more blatant absurdity than even people who consider him a credible political figure would be able to accept. But that merely compounds the disingenuousness of his statement. The absurdity is not the idea that love of country can be the sole motive to betraying one’s marriage partner, but that it can be such a motive at all. The addition of the word “partially” is a sop thrown to those credulous or dull-minded enough to miss this point.

(3) Perhaps what Gingrich means to attribute to his love of his country is not his marital infidelities but only his working “far too hard,” with the implication that this in turn created the conditions leading to such misconduct. But how so? We have only the bare conjunction of the phrases “I worked far too hard” and “things happened in my life that were not appropriate.” There is no indication of how those two facts are supposed to be related. The attempt to draw blame from his conduct off into the forgivable or even laudable habit of “working too hard” is lost in vagueness.

(4) Compare the following two phrases:

(a) I worked hard.
(b) Things happened.

Notice that the speaker of (a) identifies himself as an agent, while the speaker of (b) does not identify any agent at all, but only uses the vague grammatical subject “things.” When Gingrich is speaking of conduct that may be reckoned to his credit, he identifies himself as an agent: “I worked far too hard.” When he is speaking of his misconduct—perhaps to describe him as “speaking of it” gives him too much credit; “obliquely alluding to it” seems nearer the mark—he disappears in a puff of evasion: “things happened in my life.” This is, of course, a variant of that watchword of the inveterately irresponsible, “Mistakes were made.”

(5) “Not appropriate.” I have saved the worst for last. I know of no phrase whose use so concisely manifests the collapse of moral intelligence as does this one. But that collapse is not at all peculiar to Gingrich; it can be observed wherever English is spoken. An epidemic of stultification seems to have robbed people of the command of intelligent moral vocabulary. Having apparently lost command of terms like “outrageous” (now more commonly used, idiotically, as a term of praise), “unconscionable,” “irresponsible,” “cruel,” “selfish,” “base,” “dishonest,” and so forth, to say nothing of simple and obvious ones like “bad” and “wrong,” people wishing to speak of misconduct find nothing at their disposal but a puffed-up term of etiquette.

Surely we all know what “appropriate” means. A fur hat is not appropriate to wear with a linen suit; “fuck” is an inappropriate word to use in polite company; a Phillips-head screwdriver is not appropriate for driving slotted-head screws. The word “appropriate” is what logicians call a two-place predicate, one that indicates a relation between two things: paradigmatically, a is appropriate to b. What is not appropriate to one thing is typically appropriate to some other. To describe acts of marital infidelity as “things that were not appropriate” implies that their only fault is that they were done at the wrong time, on the wrong occasion, or with the wrong person, in some sense of “wrong” not yet specified—as, for instance, a plaid tie is wrong (inappropriate) to wear with astriped shirt.

Of course, it is safe to presume that Gingrich, like all other people who use this cretinous and obfuscating jargon, does not intend any of these implications. He surely does not mean that he chose the wrong women with whom to betray his wives, or the wrong occasions for doing so. But what does he mean? An associate with whom I was discussing Gingrich’s interview on Facebook made the comment: “The real mistake here is thinking that Mr. Gingrich attaches any meaning other than dog-whistle meaning to his words.” Setting aside the question whether Gingrich has pitched his whistle correctly for the evangelical Christian audience that he hopes to influence, this seems to me correct. When Gingrich describes his former conduct as “not appropriate,” there is not much to be said about what, if anything, he means by his words, in the sense of intending something capable of being true or false. Yet he surely means to do something by uttering those words. I would say that he means to indicate repentance without actually acknowledging misconduct. He does not admit to having acted selfishly, exploitatively, deceptively, cruelly, or irresponsibly; he does not admit to having acted at all; he simply describes “things that happened” in his life as “not appropriate.”

Well, that’s my attempt to analyze the utterance of this paragon of dishonesty and moral cowardice. Does anyone see anything that I have missed?

Tom Tomorrow on the BP Oil Disaster

How political conservatism distorts thinking about dangers to the public and the environment.

An addendum to my previous entry, on the absence of prophetic responses to the great oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico: Tom Tomorrow’s satirical reflection on the news (which you can read about in The Wall Street Journal here) that the spill might have been prevented if the Deepwater Horizon had used an emergency shutoff device called an acoustic trigger. “U.S. regulators don't mandate use of the remote-control device on offshore rigs, and the Deepwater Horizon, hired by oil giant BP PLC, didn't have one. . . . An acoustic trigger costs about $500,000, industry officials said.”

Of course, it rather spoils the satirical fun if you also read in the article that “the efficacy of the devices is unclear. Major offshore oil-well blowouts are rare, and it remained unclear Wednesday evening whether acoustic switches have ever been put to the test in a real-world accident.”

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Previous entry: The Prophets Are Silent

Next entry: Stephen Jay Gould on Science and Religion

Second Thoughts about What Pat Robertson Said

What is wrong with what Robertson said is what is wrong with a great deal of religious thinking. Explaining wherein the fault lies is not easy.

William Blake, Job

I have some emendations to make to my previous entry, on Pat Robertson’s theological explanation of the sorrows of Haiti.

(1) In that entry, I observed that, for all the outcry against Robertson’s remarks, there has been almost no discussion of what exactly makes them so outrageous. Subsequently, I discovered a piece by Lisa Miller, published in Newsweek on line under the sardonic title “Why God Hates Haiti,” that addresses the question that I had thought neglected. After a brief account of Haiti’s history of misfortune, Miller comments as follows on Robertson’s remarks:

In his narrow, malicious way, Robertson is making a First Commandment argument: when the God of Israel thunders from his mountaintop that “you shall have no other gods before me,” he means it. This God rains down disaster—floods and so forth—on those who disobey.

But Robertson’s is a fundamentalist view. It’s so unkind and self-righteous—and deaf, dumb, and blind to centuries of theological discourse on suffering by thinkers from Augustine to Elie Wiesel—that one might easily call it backward. Every Western religious tradition teaches that mortals have no way of counting or weighing another’s sin.

I was heartened to read this piece, for two reasons. First, it goes beyond a mere emotional reaction to Robertson’s remarks to address issues of the nature and consequences of religious belief, as I think that one must do to bring to light what it is about those remarks that makes them deserving of condemnation. Second, it reminds us that Robertson’s remarks are deplorable even in a religious perspective—perhaps especially so. Not just any old religious outlook will lead one to the conclusion that Haiti’s afflictions are the consequences of Haitians’ having done things displeasing to God, not even if you throw in Robertson’s ignorant and bigoted identification of the Creole religion of (some) Haitians with a Satanic cult. No; it takes, in Miller’s apt word, a particularly backward theology to do that. (Ignorant, bigoted, backward, arrogant, callous, inhumane, smug, fatuous—one thing for which you have to give Pat Robertson credit is that he provides work for lots of adjectives!)

(2) It was rash of me to dismiss Robertson’s purported “true story” about a pact with the devil as “just more of the sort of lurid fantasy habitually extruded by the brains of right-wing religious fanatics like [him].” It is surely something more baneful than that. I offered the surmise that “in [Robertson’s] view any religious practice much different from the Evangelical Protestantism with which he is comfortable is Satanic worship.” That may be so, but it does not take account of the fact that the Haitians are of largely black African origin, as is the Vodou religion whose rites Robertson equates with Satanism. It is possible that Robertson’s bigotry is purely religious and not racial in nature, but, I think, not likely. The suggestion of an underlying racial bias adds to the ugliness of his remarks.

(3) I think that I was a bit glib about the relation between believing in God and the habit of attributing specific events to divine designs. I took for granted that the latter is separable from the former—that it is possible to believe in God while forswearing all judgments about divine intentions behind worldly events. Certainly the two are separable in principle. But the fact (assuming it to be a fact, as I think it is) that the vast majority of religious believers make such judgments is an indication of how difficult it is to have the one without the other. To believe that everything that happens does so in accordance with divine providence while making no judgments about how specific events bear a providential meaning would surely greatly reduce the comforts of religious life for most believers. On this point as on many others, the more that religious belief is purged of irrational elements, the less emotional appeal it can hold for most people.

(4) In my attempt to account for what was outrageous in Robertson’s remarks, I think I conflated two questions that require separate answers: (a) what principle led Robertson to such conclusions? and (b) what makes his conclusions so obnoxious? I would still say that his remarks rest on a presumption on his part of being able to identify God’s designs in worldly affairs. That presumption, combined with his bigoted assessment of Haitian history (see point (2) above), led Robertson to the conclusion that Haiti’s misfortunes are the return on a Satanic bargain, whether they are effected by Satan himself as part of the deal or by God in retribution for the original pact. The same presumption plainly underlies Robertson’s grandiose, politically opportunistic explanations of the September 11 attacks, the flooding of New Orleans, the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, and the incapacitation of Ariel Sharon by a stroke (all explained in the previous entry).

But what makes such conclusions obnoxious is something more. It is, as Lisa Miller points out in the passage that I quoted earlier (see (1) above), the presumption of being able to identify and weigh the sins of others—always, of course, with favor to oneself and disfavor to the others. Robertson embraces a religious doctrine according to which believers of said doctrine are deserving of God’s favor and non-believers deserving of divine retribution. To say that such a view is baseless, superstitious, or implausible (all of which I say it is) fails to touch on what is most deplorable about it, namely its self-serving arrogance and presumption. Robertson’s conclusions are certainly generated by faults of reasoning and judgment, but what is most objectionable in them is a matter of the human posture that emerges from his faulty reasonings and judgments. (I acknowledge that what I have written is not entirely clear; it seems to me that the question that I have been trying to answer—what is so outrageous about Robertson’s remarks?—does not yield to the familiar terms of either ethics or logic as commonly practiced.)

(5) A further point to be made about the evil done by Robertson and those who share his fondness for imputing earthly disasters to divine causes is that they reinforce a lack of interest in the demonstrable natural causes of such disasters and thereby reduce the likelihood of remedy. Elizabeth McAlister sums the matter up well in a piece for CNN titled “Why Does Haiti Suffer So Much?” (January 18, 2010):

For social scientists, there is nothing metaphysical about the question “Why Haiti?” Longstanding structural reasons have produced a dysfunctional system long in crisis. Beginning as a French slave society, the nation was founded at a severe disadvantage. France demanded enormous payment for abandoned property after the revolution, starting a cycle of debt that was never broken.

Deep and abiding racism prevented the U.S. and Europe from recognizing Haiti for 60 years. Trade was never established on even terms. The military ruled the state, culminating in the brutal Duvalier dictatorship, which the U.S. supported.

No robust civil society developed—there’s no vigorous tradition of PTAs and town planning boards. A brain drain evacuated top talent from the country, while the U.S.-subsidized farm industry sent surplus crops to Haiti, undercutting local prices there. Farmers abandoned their lands, flocked to the capital, and built the shanty towns that have now collapsed into rubble, burying the innocent and vulnerable, strong and powerful alike.

The suffering Haitians are enduring is a natural disaster worsened by human-made conditions.

Robertson cited the disparity between the comparatively good fortunes of the Dominican Republic, on the eastern half of the island of Hispaniola, and the terrible ill fortunes of the Republic of Haiti, on the western half of the same island, as evidence of the supernatural causation of Haiti’s misfortunes—as if no natural explanation were possible. The more that people embrace this kind of superstitious thinking, the less likely it is that anything will ever be done about the actual causes of suffering. (Chances are bad enough; that is no excuse for making them worse.) An earthquake is an uncontrollable natural event; the substandard building construction that makes an earthquake fatal to tens of thousands of people is not. Heavy rains are an uncontrollable natural event; the deforestation that makes such rains result in deadly landslides is not. And so on.

(6) Finally, no discussion of religious responses to the disaster in Haiti can be complete without some consideration of the Book of Job. Lisa Miller’s piece opens with the sentence: “Haiti is surely a Job among nations.” Subsequently, she quotes Rabbi Harold Kushner, the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Anchor Books, 1981), which is among other things a meditation on the Book of Job. (What Kushner is quoted as saying, by the way, is: “I think that it’s supreme hubris to think you can read God's mind.” I was struck by the fact that the rabbi chose the Greek “hubris” rather than the Hebrew “chutzpah.” But on reflection, I saw the justice of the choice: only the Greek word denotes a transgression upon divine prerogatives, the Heberew word signifying only a transgression upon human ones.) Plainly, if Haiti is a Job, then Robertson is a Job’s comforter of the worst sort. Kushner in his book provides a useful schema for understanding what that means:

To try to understand the book [viz., Job] and its answer, let us take note of three statements which everyone in the book, and most of the readers, would like to be able to believe:

A. God is all-powerful and causes everything that happens in the world. Nothing happens without His willing it.

B. God is just and fair, and stands for people getting what they deserve, so that the good prosper and the wicked are punished.

C. Job is a good person.

As long as Job is health and wealthy, we can believe all three of those statements at the same time with no difficulty. When Job suffers, when he loses his possessions, his family, and his health, we have a problem. We can no longer make sense of all three propositions together. We can now affirm any two only by denying the third. . . .

Job’s friends are prepared to stop believing (C), the assertion that Job is a good person. (42–43)

A characteristic of the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People that impresses the reader from the beginning is his humanity—a characteristic not universal among bearers of clerical titles, as recent events remind us. In the first chapter of the book, titled “Why Do the Righteous Suffer?”, Kushner disposes of the familiar attempts to reconcile the sufferings of the innocent and the just with belief in God—“They did something to deserve it,” “It’s for their own good,” “It’s for the best in the long run,” “God will make it up to them in the next life,” and so on—not so much for being unconvincing answers to a theoretical conundrum (though he does find them to be that) as for failing to offer the afflicted a possibility for reconciliation with God. His alternative solution is that God does not cause or allow all of our suffering: some things really do just happen, for no divinely providential reason at all. In terms of the schema above, Kushner gives up statement (A). In theological terms, he gives up the doctrines of divine omnipotence and providence: “God can’t do everything,” he says in the title of his seventh chapter (although, he adds, “he can do some important things”).

As strongly as Kushner’s ethos appeals to me, and as humane as I find his theological view, his attempt to derive the latter from the Book of Job seems to me to have little textual foundation. To me, the view implied by the Book of Job is just the view that Kushner attributes to Job himself:

Job sees God as being above notions of fairness, being so powerful that no moral rules apply to Him. God is seen as resembling an Oriental potentate, with unchallenged power over the life and property of his subjects. And in fact, the old fable of Job [i.e., the folk tale posited by biblical scholars as the antecedent of the scriptural text] does picture God in just that way, as a deity who afflicts Job without any moral qualms in order to test his loyalty, and who feels that He has “made it up” to Job afterward by rewarding him lavishly. (46–47)

This is, in fact, the only view of God that I find in the text. To me it seems that God figuratively picks Job up by the scruff of the neck and thunders at him, “Can you compare your powers to mine? No, you can’t! So shut up!” (38:1–40:2 and 40:6–41:26); to which Job meekly replies, “Yes, Sir; I will, Sir” (40:3–5 and 42:1–6). The theological lesson taught by God’s answer to Job, so far as I can tell, is either that divine might makes right or that God’s power is so far beyond our comprehension that it is senseless for us to apply our notions of justice to God. If any of the three propositions in Kushner’s scheme is to be given up, it must proposition (B), that God is just—not because it is false, but because when we attribute justice to God, we really have no idea of what we are talking about. Kushner takes the passage about Leviathan (40:25–41:26) to mean, literally, that God is only able with great effort to subdue the giant sea serpent, and thus to mean, figuratively, that “even God has a hard time keeping chaos in check and limiting the damage that evil can do” (49–50). Rabbi, you’re a mentsh for trying to find such a humane view in scripture, but I just don’t see it there.

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Pat Robertson, Propagandist for Atheism?

There have been many reports of what Robertson said about Haiti and many condemnations of it; what is missing from public discourse is an account of what exactly is outrageous about what he said.

First, just so that it’s clear what I’m talking about, here are the notorious words uttered by Pat Robertson on his program The 700 Club on January 13, 2010 (transcription from Media Matters, where the video can also be seen):

And, you know, Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, “We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.” True story. And so, the devil said, “OK, it’s a deal.” And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other. Desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle. On the one side is Haiti; on the other side is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, et cetera. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to God. 

Of course, Pat Robertson’s notion of what constitutes a “true story” can be gauged by the crackpot theory of a two-hundred-year-old plot for global domination by Jewish bankers, Freemasons, the “Illuminati,” and other Satanists that he expounded in his 1994 book The New World Order. An account of its contents may be found in Michael Lind’s Up from Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America (New York: Free Press, 1996), pp. 99–120, or on line in “New World Order, Old World Anti-Semitism,” an article by Ephraim Radner that appeared in Christian Century for September 13, 1995. A single paragraph from Radner’s article will give you the flavor of Robertson’s thinking:

Robertson traces the historical progress of this conspiracy, back to Lucifer and his machinations in antiquity. In the modem era the conspiracy has been promoted through a small secret society founded in late 18th-century, Bavaria called the Illuminati, whose members purportedly infiltrated Freemasonry, organized the French Revolution, recruited Friedrick Engels and other communists to their cause and orchestrated the Bolshexik takeover of Russia. Through their control of international banking, the Illuminati-dominated servants of Satan, according to Robertson, have imposed a system of national and private credit and interest that has saddled the nation with debilitating and enslaving debt, robbing the American people at once of their independence and their control over their religious life.

Getting back to Robertson’s more recent outburst of paranoiac idiocy, one should note that his so-called “true story” actually has what might be described, if misleadingly, as a historical basis. The event that presumably caused his febrile brain to conceive that the Haitians swore a “pact to the devil” was a religious ceremony that reputedly took place on August 14, 1791, at Bois Caïman in what is now Haiti under the leadership of a slave and vodou priest or houdon named Dutty Boukman. (Whether this event actually occurred seems to be a matter of dispute.) Boukman reputedly prophesied on that occasion that the slaves of Saint-Domingue (as the colony occupying the territory of what is now the Republic of Haiti was then called) would rise up and overthrow their white masters. On August 22, an uprising began, in the course of which Boukman was captured and killed by the French authorities. The revolt continued without him, and in two years’ time, slavery in Saint-Domingue was at an end. By the end of 1803, the Haitians had overthrown and expelled the French (who, by the way, were under the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte at the time; Napoleon III was not born until 1808).

The idea of a pact with Satan, as far as I can gather, is just more of the sort of lurid fantasy habitually extruded by the brains of right-wing religious fanatics like Robertson. I suspect that in his view any religious practice much different from the Evangelical Protestantism with which he is comfortable is Satanic worship.

But the benighted and delusional character of Robertson’s version of history, however interesting, is really not the issue. What has made his remarks notorious is the fact that they identify the earthquake in Haiti, and other misfortunes that have dogged the history of that nation, as divine retribution. This sort of utterance on his part is nothing new. As Media Matters points out, Robertson has a record of indulging in such prophecy:

• Remember when Jerry Falwell said, two days after the events of September 11, 2001, “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the A.C.L.U., People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen’”? He said that when he was appearing as Robertson’s guest on The 700 Club, and Robertson’s reply was, “I totally concur.” Though Robertson seems subsequently to have tried to put some distance between himself and Falwell’s remarks (he described them as “totally inappropriate,” a phrase that in the perverted moral discourse of the present day passes for severe condemnation, though really it only faults Falwell’s choice of occasion and not the content of what he said), he also issued a written statement that made his stance on this issue perfectly clear: “We have insulted God at the highest level of our government. Then, we say, ‘Why does this happen?’ It is happening because God Almighty is lifting His protection from us.”


• On The 700 Club for September 12, 2005, Robertson intimated—though he did not plainly assert—that the occurrence of the Hurricane Katrina disaster and terrorist attacks on the US was due to the legality of abortion here (transcript again from Media Matters):
  
  
  

  We have killed over 40 million unborn babies in America. I was reading, yesterday, a book that was very interesting about what God has to say in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood. And he used the term that those who do this, “the land will vomit you out.” . . . You look at the book of Leviticus and see what it says there. And this author of this said, “Well, ‘vomit out’ means you are not able to defend yourself.” But have we found we are unable somehow to defend ourselves against some of the attacks that are coming against us, either by terrorists or now by natural disaster? Could they be connected in some way? And he goes down the list of the things that God says will cause a nation to lose its possession, and to be vomited out. And the amazing thing is, a judge has now got to say, “I will support the wholesale slaughter of innocent children” in order to get confirmed to the bench.

• On The 700 Club for January 5, 2006, Robertson attributed the stroke that paralyzed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the murder of his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin to their having tried to divide God’s land, in defiance of biblical prophesy. Robertson said (transcript again from Media Matters):
  
  
  

  The prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who, quote, “divide my land.” God considers this land to be his. You read the Bible, he says, “This is my land.” And for any prime minister of Israel who decides he going carve it up and give it away, God says, “No. This is mine.” And the same thing—I had a wonderful meeting with Yitzhak Rabin in 1974. He was tragically assassinated, and it was terrible thing that happened, but nevertheless, he was dead. And now Ariel Sharon, who was again a very likeable person, a delightful person to be with. I prayed with him personally. But here he is at the point of death. He was dividing God’s land, and I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations or United States of America. God said, “This land belongs to me, you better leave it alone.”

  By the way, the passage to which Robertson alludes is this one:
  
  
  

  For behold, in those days and at that time, when I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem, I will gather all the nations and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. And I will enter into judgment with them there, on behalf of my people and my heritage Israel, because they have scattered them among the nations and have divided up my land, and have cast lots for my people, and have traded a boy for a prostitute, and have sold a girl for wine and have drunk it. (Joel 3:1–3, English Standard Version)

  Setting aside the question of how anyone in his right mind can take a bit of ancient literature purported to record divine utterances as a title deed to an entire country, it is obvious that the passage promises divine judgment upon foreign nations that have conquered the land of Israel and dispersed the Israelites among other nations, not upon Israelites in possession of the land who have given away some of it.
  
  

So Robertson has been at this sort of thing for a while, and we can expect that as long as he is with us he will provide more of it. What I find curious, and rather frustrating, about the reaction to his remarks in public written media is how elliptical the comments have been. Trolling through the Google and Google News search results for “Pat Robertson Haiti,” what I find, besides bare reports of what he said, consists almost entirely of remarks or exclamations on how outrageous, offensive, absurd, insane, moronic, insensitive, inhumane, and so on it is, or he is. What I have not found is an explanation of what exactly is outrageous, offensive, and so on about it.

Perhaps it is felt that the point is too obvious to merit explanation. Well, I grant that it is obvious that what Robertson said is outrageous and so on. I do not question that for a moment. What I want to know is: why is it outrageous? What makes it so? Is it the idea that the catastrophes that have befallen the people of Haiti—mutatis mutandis the people of New Orleans, of New York City, of the United States, and so on—are in some measure the fault of the victims? Is it the idea that the victims, or some of them, or some of their ancestors, have incurred God’s wrath? Is it the pretense to prophetic knowledge of how God works in the world? Is it not the thoughts themselves but merely the act of giving public utterance to them? (Were they merely, as Robertson said of Jerry Falwell’s remarks about the September 11 attacks, “totally inappropriate”?) It may well be that different people have different reasons for being outraged by Robertson’s remarks. But if there are so many reasons, why have I heard so little about any of them?

I have, as of the moment of writing, seen only one published comment on Robertson’s remarks that contains any analysis or explanation at all: an entry by Ronald Lindsay in the blog of the Center for Inquiry under the title “One Cheer (Amid a Chorus of Boos) for Pat Robertson.” Lindsay offers Robertson a left-handed commendation for exposing by his example the absurdity of religious belief. He writes:

In recent years, in response to increased critical examination of religion, many liberal religious apologists have claimed that these critiques of religion have it all wrong. There is no all-powerful, personal God, overseeing and intervening in our world, who guides hurricanes away or toward land depending on His will. Instead, there is only some nebulous spirit or life-force that fills us with joy, and makes us want to join hands and sing “Kumbaya.” In fact, some scholars, such as Karen Armstrong, argue that religion is not about belief in a personal God at all, but about commitment and activity.

For the ordinary believer this is all rubbish. Ordinary believers—and they do believe—have faith in a robust God, who can deliver them from evil (or not). Pat Robertson reflects the views of the ordinary believer. You see them all the time on TV being interviewed after some natural disaster. They claim they prayed to God to spare them from the tornado/hurricane/earthquake and God answered their prayers. Notably, the people who died can’t speak to the issue of why their prayers were not answered, but Robertson at least tries to offer an explanation. The victims were cursed for some reason, and in the case of Haiti it was because of an imprudent pact with the Devil. (Is there ever a prudent pact with the Devil?)

Of course, Pat Robertson’s claim is absurd. But his claim usefully underscores the absurdity of religious belief in general, instead of obscuring it with a veil of touchy-feely doubletalk.

In other words, Robertson, in Lindsay’s view, is a reductio ad absurdum of religious belief, and thus a walking argument for atheism. Sophisticated apologists for religion like Karen Armstrong try to disown the excesses of such cranks, but their notions of what it means to believe in God have little bearing on what ordinary religious people actually believe. Ordinary religious people believe in a God that intervenes in the affairs of the world to reward the faithful and punish the unfaithful—the God of Pat Robertson, or something very like it. Many of them may dislike Robertson’s conclusions, but they are committed to the same premises and the same logic. His absurdities are therefore theirs.

Thus Lindsay. Now there is an obvious non sequitur here. Granted that, as Lindsay claims, the lofty sophistications of theology do not reflect the beliefs of ordinary religious people, and granted that, as he also claims, the beliefs of ordinary religious people entail the absurd conclusions of a Pat Robertson, it does not follow that Robertson’s conclusions exhibit “the absurdity of religious belief in general.” All that follows is that they exhibit the absurdities of common forms of religious belief.

That conclusion, however, seems to me notable by itself; and it suggests to me an explanation of why so little has been said about what was outrageous in Robertson’s remarks. Most people who believe in God, I suspect, would disavow any claim to prophetic insight. They would deny that they know what worldly events may be attributed to God’s influence, or what God “means” by them. Yet nearly all such people believe that worldly events do show God’s influence and that God does mean something by them. So even if they disclaim knowledge of how God works in the world, they feel free—or perhaps “compelled” would be more like it—to venture judgments about such matters. The lone survivor of an automobile collision says, “God must have kept me alive for a reason!” Oh, and did he cause everyone else to be killed for an equally good reason? Someone makes repeated efforts to succeed in a certain line of work before finally giving up: “God must have meant me for other things.” Well, that is one way to reassure yourself that you made the right choice: pretend that your perfectly ordinary human decision had divine authorization. And so on.

People who think this way may find Robertson’s conclusions offensive because it is inhumane toward the victims of catastrophe to believe such things; or they may condemn his giving public utterance to such conclusions as “totally inappropriate”; neither objection has anything to do with the truth or falsehood of the conclusions. Such objections leave standing the possibility that what Robertson says, his historical delusions aside, may be perfectly true: they merely fault him for saying or perhaps merely believing such things. I suspect that the reason why we do not hear much about what is outrageous in his remarks is that identifying it means identifying what is outrageous in widely and strongly held religious beliefs, namely the idea that God’s actions and intentions can be discerned in worldly events.

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