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RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n JULY & AUGUST 2013 VOLUME 128 No4 RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n EDITORIAL Editor Caspar Melville News Editor Paul Sims Editorial Intern Anna Vesterinen Commissioning Editor Laurie Taylor Associate Editor Sally Feldman Cartoons Editor Judy Walker Designer Nick McKay COVER Illustration by Mark Poutenis www.markpoutenis.com Website www.rationalist.org.uk RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n MARKETING & DISTRIBUTION Business Manager Judith Walker Advertising info@newhumanist.org.uk Distribution Comag Specialist Telephone 01895 433 753 SUBSCRIPTIONS Subscriptions New Humanist Subscriptions, Trinity House, Sculpins Lane, Wethersfield, Braintree, Essex, CM7 4AY Email newhumanist@escosubs.co.uk Telephone 01371 851881 Fax 01371 851808 PUBLISHED BY RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n The Rationalist Association Registered charity No 1096577, a company limited by guarantee No 4118489 RA President Jonathan Miller Chairman Tess Woodcraft RA Board Sally Feldman Laurie Taylor Jose Gonsalves John Metcalf David Pollock Jonathan Stopes-Roe Stephen Sedley EDITORIAL OFFICES Merchants House, 5-7 Southwark Street, London SE1 1RQ Telephone 020 3117 0630 Fax 020 7407 7962 Email info@newhumanist.org.uk HONORARY ASSOCIATES David Aaronovitch Peter Atkins Lord Birt Colin Blakemore Alan Brownjohn Colin Campbell Philip Campbell Noam Chomsky Helena Cronin Richard Dawkins Sanal Edamaruku Ekow Eshun AC Grayling Trevor Gri ths Stuart Hall Tony Harrison Simon Heffer Richard Hoggart Ted Honderich Robin Ince Linton Kwesi Johnson Richard Leakey Stewart Lee Kenan Malik Haydn Mason Jonathan Meades Edwin Mullins Alice Onwordi John Postgate Philip Pullman Jonathan Rée Amartya Sen Alom Shaha Simon Singh Marcus du Sautoy David Starkey Ralph Steadman DJ Stewart Ian Stewart Hazhir Teimourian Claire Tomalin David Tribe Baroness Turner of Camden Arnold Wesker Francis Wheen Elizabeth Wilson Richard Wiseman Lewis Wolpert NEW HUMANIST, ISSN 0306-512X, is published 6 times a year by the Rationalist Association © 2013 New Humanist. Printed by Blackmore Ltd, Dorset. Distribution by Comag Specialist. FSC Certification number TT-COC-002714. The mark of responsible forestry © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. The views expressed in New Humanist are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Rationalist Association CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE FRANCIS SPUFFORD is an award-winning author whose books include Back Room Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin, Red Plenty and Unapologetic. On page 14 he argues that Iain MBanks should be considered one of our greatest ever science fiction writers. TERRI MURRAY is an author and recovering Catholic. She has taught A-Level philosophy at Hampstead College of Fine Arts &Humanities in London for ten years. On page 32 she brings some clear thinking to the increasingly muddled debate over the burqa. 4 New Humanist JULY & AUGUST 2013 KENAN MALIK is a writer and broacaster who writes widely on culture, politics and science. His history of moral thought will be published in April 2014. For this issue he travelled to Brussels to meet the renowned historian of the Enlightenment Jonathan Israel (page 24). DAVID WALTNER-TOEWS is a veterinarian, epidemiologist, scientist and popular author who specialises in diseases other animals share with people. On page 22 he reveals five things he learnt about poo, researching his latest book The Origin of Feces. ISABELL ZIPFELL is a photographer specialising in social and environmental issues. Before becoming a photographer she translated screenplays. Her photographs of the people who live on top of the Jharia coalfields in India are on page 34. Isabell lives in Berlin.
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[editorial] REASON COMES OF AGE Where would we be without the Enlightenment? This dizzying period of intellectual innovation – also known as The Age of Reason, which suggests its importance to us – laid the foundations for everything we now know as rationalism. In its challenge to the revealed truth and institutional power of religion, its reconstitution of philosophy from the ground up and the founding of the empirical method, it is an era that is justly celebrated. But it’s also hotly contested. Kenan Malik describes these disputes in the preamble to his interview with the great historian of the period, Jonathan Israel, author of a widely acclaimed three-volume history of what he calls the “Radical Enlightment”. Malik’s own history of moral thought will be published early next year and in the conversation between the two you can see the legacy of the Enlightenment in action. Though they agree on the broad brushstrokes they do disagree – over how atheist the period really was, for example – and this kind of productive disagreement is part of what makes the Enlightenment such a fascinating moment. Once revealed truth and timeless certainties are robbed of their divine dazzle and the power to silence dissent, disagreement is inevitable. It is also part of the fun. have registered, to find out what they want from this nascent community. The top choice was a “Rationalist Manifesto” – a statement of community values, which we will be working on over the next few months. Coming a close second was that members want us to be more involved in campaigns. We have recently launched two initiatives to meet this need. The first, “World of Blasphemy”, is an article series published on our website, taking a country-by-country look at how blasphemy laws are being used to punish and silence dissent, and providing links to what you can do about it. On page 10 Anna Vesterinen, who is producing the series, explains more. Our second campaign is the Apostasy Project, which aims to provide information and support to those seeking to leave their religion. Turn to page 8 for more on this innovative project and find out how you can help. SMART APES ON A PIFFLING PLANET Finally to our cover star, the novelist Iain Banks, who died on 9 June. Banks was not only a great friend of the magazine but one of the very greatest science fiction writers, according to Francis Spufford, who remembers him On page 18 we meet materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett, who appears to relish intellectual battles with many of the major figures in the philosophy of mind and evolutionary biology, while on page 38, in his interview with yet another combative exemplar of free thought in action, Professor Steve Jones, JP O’Malley finds that the geneticist’s new book is an extended and at times testy argument with the Bible. These three intellectual heavyweights suggest that the spirit of the Enlightenment – irascible, combative, taking nothing on trust – is alive and well in our contemporary intellectual culture. APOSTASY, BLASPHEMY, CAMPAIGNS As many of you will know, we launched a new website in January (rationalist.org.uk) and asked visitors to the site to register as founder members of our online community. We conducted a poll, among the more than 3,000 people who conducted a poll, among the more than 3,000 people who on page 14. Alongside the sheer range of his imagination, and his commitment to reason and humanism, one of the remarkable things about Banks was his self-deprecating sense of humour, something that can be conspicuous by its absence from public atheism (an issue addressed in Michael Bywater’s short story on page 29). Banks, like that other atheist sci-fi humorist Douglas Adams, was able to undermine religion so effectively because he could see that in its portentous absurdity it rivals the very best that science fiction has to offer. The last word goes to him: “I’ve always felt that one ought to retain just the tiniest, sliveriest wee bit of agnosticism to season what is basically outright atheism, on the grounds that – in the end, after all – each of us is just a solitary smart ape on a pi ing little planet in an ungraspably big universe, and the sheer bleeding obviousness of there being no supreme deity could itself be a huge cosmic joke on the part of a particularly annoying and mischievous god.” ■ INSIDE THE MIND OF DARWINIAN DANIEL DENNETT > PAGE 18 “The mind is a material phenomenon in the same sense that digestion and reproduction, and photosynthesis are. There is no ‘wonder tissue’.” INSIDE THE MIND OF DARWINIAN DANIEL DENNETT “The mind is a material phenomenon in the same sense that digestion and reproduction, and photosynthesis are. There is no ‘wonder tissue’.” JULY & AUGUST 2013 New Humanist 5

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RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n

RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n

JULY & AUGUST 2013 VOLUME 128 No4

RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n

EDITORIAL Editor Caspar Melville News Editor Paul Sims Editorial Intern Anna Vesterinen Commissioning Editor Laurie Taylor Associate Editor Sally Feldman Cartoons Editor Judy Walker Designer Nick McKay COVER Illustration by Mark Poutenis www.markpoutenis.com Website www.rationalist.org.uk

RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n

RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n

MARKETING & DISTRIBUTION Business Manager Judith Walker Advertising info@newhumanist.org.uk Distribution Comag Specialist Telephone 01895 433 753

SUBSCRIPTIONS Subscriptions New Humanist Subscriptions, Trinity House, Sculpins Lane, Wethersfield, Braintree, Essex, CM7 4AY Email newhumanist@escosubs.co.uk Telephone 01371 851881 Fax 01371 851808

PUBLISHED BY

RATIONALIST a s s o c i a t i o n

The Rationalist Association Registered charity No 1096577, a company limited by guarantee No 4118489 RA President Jonathan Miller Chairman Tess Woodcraft RA Board Sally Feldman Laurie Taylor Jose Gonsalves John Metcalf David Pollock Jonathan Stopes-Roe Stephen Sedley

EDITORIAL OFFICES Merchants House, 5-7 Southwark Street, London SE1 1RQ Telephone 020 3117 0630 Fax 020 7407 7962 Email info@newhumanist.org.uk

HONORARY ASSOCIATES David Aaronovitch Peter Atkins Lord Birt Colin Blakemore Alan Brownjohn Colin Campbell Philip Campbell Noam Chomsky Helena Cronin Richard Dawkins Sanal Edamaruku Ekow Eshun AC Grayling Trevor Gri ths Stuart Hall Tony Harrison Simon Heffer Richard Hoggart Ted Honderich Robin Ince Linton Kwesi Johnson Richard Leakey Stewart Lee Kenan Malik

Haydn Mason Jonathan Meades Edwin Mullins Alice Onwordi John Postgate Philip Pullman Jonathan Rée Amartya Sen Alom Shaha Simon Singh Marcus du Sautoy David Starkey Ralph Steadman DJ Stewart Ian Stewart Hazhir Teimourian Claire Tomalin David Tribe Baroness Turner of Camden Arnold Wesker Francis Wheen Elizabeth Wilson Richard Wiseman Lewis Wolpert

NEW HUMANIST, ISSN 0306-512X, is published 6 times a year by the Rationalist Association © 2013 New Humanist. Printed by Blackmore Ltd, Dorset. Distribution by Comag Specialist. FSC Certification number TT-COC-002714. The mark of responsible forestry © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. The views expressed in New Humanist are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Rationalist Association

CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE

FRANCIS SPUFFORD is an award-winning author whose books include Back Room Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin, Red Plenty and Unapologetic. On page 14 he argues that Iain MBanks should be considered one of our greatest ever science fiction writers.

TERRI MURRAY is an author and recovering Catholic. She has taught A-Level philosophy at Hampstead College of Fine Arts &Humanities in London for ten years. On page 32 she brings some clear thinking to the increasingly muddled debate over the burqa.

4 New Humanist JULY & AUGUST 2013

KENAN MALIK is a writer and broacaster who writes widely on culture, politics and science. His history of moral thought will be published in April 2014. For this issue he travelled to Brussels to meet the renowned historian of the Enlightenment Jonathan Israel (page 24).

DAVID WALTNER-TOEWS is a veterinarian, epidemiologist, scientist and popular author who specialises in diseases other animals share with people. On page 22 he reveals five things he learnt about poo, researching his latest book The Origin of Feces.

ISABELL ZIPFELL is a photographer specialising in social and environmental issues. Before becoming a photographer she translated screenplays. Her photographs of the people who live on top of the Jharia coalfields in India are on page 34. Isabell lives in Berlin.

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