Some New Zealand Songs I Like

Readers of my blog will know I like music quite a bit and in this post I thought I might recommend some songs.

My favourite bands are most usually Radiohead, Faith No More and Jeff Buckley (I know I date myself by picking these particulars) but there is no point me recommending any songs by these artists because everyone knows them already and what would be the purpose in recommending songs that everyone already knows? Being a New Zealander, I have grown up with Kiwi bands that were often excellent but failed to break into the European or American markets; these musicians deserve wider appreciation and so I thought I would mention a few in this post. Maybe some people in the Northern Hemisphere will want to have a listen. I won't be able to recommend every great Kiwi song from the last several decades, but I can suggest a short compilation tape. All of the following songs can be found on Youtube and I imagine on Spotify. Because these songs are relatively unknown outside Aotearoa, if you are interested in checking out these tunes, you should google not only the song's name but also the band.

I got into music when I was young by listening to vinyl records owned by my elder brother. One of the bands was The Doors. Another was the New Zealand band The Headless Chickens. This band is the first I want to talk about. The Headless Chickens can perhaps be described as Industrial Punk (I am no rock music critic and so don't know for sure if this is the best genre in which to place them). Forming in the mid 'eighties and dissolving for good in the mid 'nineties (I think), they dealt with very dark themes; unlike religious and morally-minded people who discuss social ills in terms of 'good' and 'evil', right and wrong, the social problems The Headless Chickens talked about they characterised in terms of 'health' and 'sickness'. I don't think the song-writers believed in free will and their music can often come across as nihilistic, something not uncommon during the period the band was extant. And yet there is a kind of mysticism to many of their songs, albeit a mysticism that is negative or maybe apophatic (if I can stretch the meaning of this word a little). When I was eight I would listen to their second album Stunt Clown over and over again, possibly unhelpfully considering how sinister the tunes often were. I found the album disturbing but was drawn back to it almost despite myself. Because this band was influential on me when I was young, I will recommend quite a few songs by them.

The first song I want to plug is the opening track of Stunt Clown, "Expecting to Fly". I had no idea what this song was about when I was eight but I think now that it probably describes what it was like to be involved in the gay community during the 'eighties. It's very dark indeed. I don't think any members of The Headless Chickens were gay themselves but they must have been familiar with this scene – and they approach the subject of suicidal ideation with considerable intelligence and the kind of compassion that can only come from a deep intuitive understanding of others' suffering and of evil, a capacity for empathy that may even have been painful. Like I say, I don't think any members of The Headless Chickens were gay but they were willing to gender bend a little, such as in the song "Mr Moon" (off the album Body Blow), perhaps the most beautiful song I know by them. This is another song I recommend.

Like many poems, songs by The Headless Chickens often don't completely make sense unless one has the key to unlock their meaning. The excellently slow-burning track "Gaskrankinstation" is narrated by a petrol-pump attendant who is being slowly poisoned by lead in car exhaust fumes but doesn't know it. I had no idea of this either when I was young, that people suspected a causal connection between lead ingestion and anti-social behaviour– but rumour that lead additives in petrol might cause brain damage must have been circulating in the underground even then in the early 'nineties, when the song was recorded, because it is definitely the subject of this song. "Railway Surfing", another tune which really demonstrates the lyrical chops of this band, concerns a recreational pastime enjoyed by delinquents, in London I think, in the era when it was written.

After the depressiveness of The Headless Chickens, it might be nice to recommend some lighter songs. "Heavenly Pop Hit" by The Chills is not as lyrically interesting as the songs I have already suggested but is a perfectly crafted little pop hit. The tune "Not Given Lightly" by Chris Knox is noteworthy partly because its title is lifted from a lyric in "Venus in Furs" by The Velvet Underground; this song is considered a Kiwi classic (although the title of Backup National Anthem goes to "Loyal" by Dave Dobbyn).

Another fine tune, "Jesus I Was Evil", can be credited to Darcy Clay. Darcy was widely considered the next big thing in New Zealand music on the basis of his first and only EP – but died before recording anything else. I was at his last concert. He played warm-up for Blur in 1998 or 1999 and performed solo a strange countrified cover of Elton John's "Candle in the Wind"; right after that performance, he went back to his girlfriend's house and shot himself. I confess I am unsure if Darcy's suicide followed so closely after the show I saw but I am fairly confident it did.

An institution in the New Zealand music scene is the band Shihad. I have seen them play several times and can attest to their absolute awesomeness live. In the early 2000s, Shihad attempted to break into the American market, signing up with a record label in Los Angeles, changing their name to Pacifier (this being shortly after the September 11th attacks and Shihad sounding too much like Jihad) and recording an album – but without commercial success. The record company was very controlling, forcing them to change their sound, perhaps in the hope they could turn Shihad into a Nickelback soundalike, but it didn't work, the band didn't like the company's interference and they came home a little while after, utterly disillusioned, and several years later changed their name back to the original moniker. Songs like "La La Land" and "My Mind Sedate" were written about their bad experience of America. The band hated their time there. Here in New Zealand, Shihad is considered the group that most everyone most wanted to succeed internationally, the group most deserving of it, the band which most should have made it – but didn't. The song I most want to recommend by them is not any of the ones I have mentioned above, though, but "Bitter" from their first album.

Sometimes New Zealand bands do make it overseas. Lorde is an obvious example, as arguably is The Naked and The Famous. Savage and Kimbra have also had some success in the States. If we go back to the 'eighties and 'nineties New Zealand successfully exported Crowded House – although we need to regard Neil Finn's band as in a way trans-Tasman, having had mainly Australians and currently an American in the line-up. (Crowded House was recently inducted into Australian Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.) It is hard for New Zealand bands to break into the global market and it seems that when one does, it results more from good luck than as a reward for musical quality. This is not to say that the ones that make it are bad, but that many don't that deserve to. The songs I have picked in this post are a little random I admit. There are many other great New Zealand songs and bands I could have suggested but haven't. Really this post was mainly an excuse to talk about The Headless Chickens, even though their greatest triumph, topping the New Zealand music charts with "George", happened over twenty years ago. It seems to me that the 'eighties and early 'nineties were the best periods in popular music generally, not just in New Zealand but around the world, even though the music then was much darker than what passes for pop music now. And yet all this fantastic music emerged from a Western society that was arguably physically sick.  It seems ironic somehow, that perhaps the best music is written in the worst times. Just to tidy up a little, I'll finish this post by saying one last thing: in writing it I have relied on memory and haven't fact-checked anything, so minor details might not be wholly correct. I have got into a bad habit of doing this in recent months, of relying on memory. But in future posts I promise I shall make more of an effort to research and cite sources.

Free Will and Supernatural Causation

Possibly the most important, the most fundamental, issue in philosophy and religious studies generally, is the issue of 'free will'. Free will is the great problem at the heart of both metaphysics and ethics. It seems that we need a concept of free will in order to account for the concept of personal responsibility and that we need a concept of personal responsibility in order to account for any moral system. If we would like people to choose right over wrong, we need to believe people capable of a choice. If we want to improve society by informing and educating people about social ills and encouraging activism (the project carried out by John Oliver's show Last Week Tonight, a political attitude termed 'meliorism'), we need to believe that informed citizens can freely act to improve society. It seems that the presumption that people have free will is a prerequisite for any faith in the possibility of moral action – but good arguments can be made that the feeling of free will is an illusion. And this is a significant problem. Is it possible to have morality without free will?

One of the arguments against free will is this. Every event, including every human action, has causes; every state of affairs arises from, is dependent upon, a prior state of affairs. Each new state of affairs emerges from the previous state of affairs as a consequence of immutable atemporal physical laws of nature. The universe is deterministic. If a person carries out an action, that action has causes themselves conditioned by previous causes; if we are so inclined, we can trace the chain of cause and effect back to situations entirely outside the agent's control, to genetics or to childhood experiences or family environment for example. No one is responsible for his or her actions, the buck never stops.

And yet we still feel that we have free-will. The feeling that we are original authors of our behaviour must then be an illusion; the impression that one has free will must be a self-deception. A great quote that illustrates this idea, the idea that the impression of free will arises from ignorance, is attributable to Spinoza (and can be found in the Wikipedia page on "Free Will"). "Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined." B de Spinoza Ethics[124]

Now, the proposition that the universe is deterministic being inconsistent with our intuition that we really do have free will, we might be able to salvage some conception of freedom and responsibility if we can show conclusively that the universe is not deterministic. In fact, the idea that the universe is not wholly deterministic is the lesson of quantum physics. Sometimes, according to quantum physics, events can occur for no reason at all. Quantum physics introduces the notion of pure chance; reality is aleatory. It becomes possible to argue, as some have, that free will arises somehow from random quantum fluctuations in the brain. A person may choose A rather than B but he or she could indeed have chosen B instead; there was nothing pre-determined about it. He chose A rather than B randomly, as the result of a dice-throw in the brain, a neuronal coin-flip. Quantum physics allows for the possibility of a cause sui. Does quantum physics prevent the notion of free will from being consigned to the bin of senseless concepts? To say that our apparent choices are the result of chance does not seem to me a persuasive or compelling defence of the notion of free will. Can I really be held responsible for a 'decision' arrived at randomly?  Events may occur as the result of a combination of prior events and quantum randomness, and this is as true of events that occur in the outer world as much as it is true of my own willed actions. It seems then, if we accept the quantum defence of free-will, that the notion of free will depends on a notion of inside and outside, of all what belongs to me and of all what belongs to others, of all what belongs to the rest of the universe.

Yet, generally, for defenders of the notion of free-will, quantum indeterminacy is a godsend; it provides a way out. For defenders of traditional science (the ones who don't wonder overmuch at the apparent existence of free-will), quantum indeterminacy is a sacrilege or heresy, something to be railed against. Einstein famously said, "God does not play dice with the universe!" Physicists such as Einstein believed fervently that the universe was deterministic and sought to save determinism from the threat posed by some interpretations of quantum physics by proposing 'hidden-variable theories'. It is not that the universe is wholly deterministic, rather the universe remains not fully knowable because we can't get at all the necessary information to sketch out a completely accurate picture of it. Some of the universe is hidden from us now, will perhaps be hidden from us forever. There are hidden variables at play.  According to Bell's theorem, any 'hidden-variable theory' must be non-local but this does rule such a theory out of the question and non-locality may, as I shall argue, not be a reason to discount any such theory. It is just such a determinist theory, a hidden-variable theory, that I want to sketch out below.

In the previous post, I talked about Cartesian dualism. According to Descartes, there is a spiritual world and a physical world, a world of the Soul and a world of the Body. Determinists, who oppose the notion of free will, generally also reject Cartesian dualism. The concept relevant to such determinists is 'causal closure', a term that expresses the idea that "no physical event has a cause outside the physical domain". There is no spiritual world, only a physical world that runs according to physical laws. Defenders of free will often (although not always) espouse Cartesian dualism. I wish here to point out something obvious. Even if we accept Cartesian dualism, we have no reason to accept free will also. We can accept Cartesian dualism and also reject free will.

What I am proposing is this. There are two types of causes in the world, physical and spiritual, two types of effects, physical and spiritual, and two types of laws, natural and supernatural. Both realms are deterministic. Spiritual events can cause physical events and physical events can cause spiritual events. There is no such thing as free will. But there is such a thing as a mystical reality.

Consider the following hypothetical example. A soldier in 12th Century Austria falls for a wench, marries her, has children, remains married to her his whole life and dies a couple of months after her from grief; eight-hundred years later this soldier, reincarnated in the body of a sociology studying hipster, encounters the love of his former life, reincarnated in the body of a Pixies' adoring punk, at a Starbucks, and falls in 'love at first sight'. He falls for her because he loved her in a previous life. In this hypothetical example, there is no free will: he does not choose to fall in love with the girl. His fall is caused. Yet his fall depends on ESP (the extrasensory recognition by a soul of its soul-mate) and it depends on the existence of former lives. Neither idea, ESP or reincarnation, is rational, scientific. But the event is still part of a causal chain. What I am describing in this little fable is supernatural causation.

In telling this story, I am not committing myself to the idea that reincarnation is a reality. I am merely inventing a fable which demonstrates how supernatural causation might occur. In this story, spiritual events bring about physical events and physical events bring about spiritual events. This way of approaching Cartesian dualism is sometimes known as 'interactionalist dualism' and can be contrasted with 'epiphenomenalism' which proposes that the spiritual domain and the physical domain run along parallel tracks but don't interact. Epiphenomenalism is useful if one wants to believe in Cartesian dualism but finds it impossible to relinquish belief in a deterministic, materialist universe. Quantum physics, however, offers a mechanism by which the physical and spiritual worlds could interact. According to quantum mechanics, sometimes a physical situation can yield two possible results and there is no rational, scientific way to establish which result will occur. If we believe in interactionalist determinism, we can suppose that the reason why A occurs rather than B is because of some immaterial cause, a 'hidden variable'. This hidden variable is non-local. We can call it Spirit, or God, or Mind, or a Higher Power. An event that can not be wholly accounted for by a scientific rational explanation, might be accounted for if we countenance the possibility of a divine or spiritual antecedent. The materialist indeterminacy of quantum physics allows for the possibility of supernatural causation.

It is possible then to be a Cartesian dualist and not believe in free will. In my own life, I find evidence for the existence of some kind of Fate or Destiny in the fact that several times in my life I have experienced precognition. I have experienced premonitions although I usually never understood the meaning of the premonition until after the event the premonition presaged has occurred. The idea of precognition may seem irrational but in fact it is not wholly irrational. All the laws of physics are time-reversible. According to the Third Law of Thermodynamics, entropy almost always tends to increase but this is another stochastic process; it is possible, although usually very unlikely, for the entropy of a system to spontaneously decrease.  In our everyday experience, if an egg falls off a kitchen bench and shatters, we take this as an indication of the direction of time's arrow– the reverse never happens. But in fact there is nothing in the laws of physics to prevent the pieces of a broken egg from spontaneously reassembling and jumping up onto the bench. It is extraordinarily unlikely, yes, but still possible. It never happens, yes, but it always might. If all the laws of physics are time reversible, why should it not be possible to remember future events in the same way as one remembers past ones? It seems the past stamps traces of itself on the present, but perhaps the future can leave traces on the present as well.

If precognition is indeed conceivable, and we live in a predetermined universe, the question then becomes, "Why is precognition not more often reported on?" I wish to tentatively suggest the following hypothesis. Knowledge of future events is not consistent with belief in free will, and so people unconsciously suppress or repress their knowledge of the future in order to preserve the illusion that they possess agency, that they have control over their lives. Individuals hide their knowledge of the future from themselves. The illusion that one has free will, that the future is not predetermined, is necessary for the well-being of both individuals and society generally. It is a necessary fiction. Knowledge that everything is fated is not something anyone can truly live with for very long, and true awareness that one's fate is predestined usually comes to people only in times of great stress or madness. I had a young acquaintance who, during a drug-induced psychotic episode once, hallucinated that a path was laid out in front of him and that every time he tried to step off this path, he felt sick. What meaning could this hallucination have other than that a person cannot fight his or her destiny but must surrender to it? (For a post that explores this idea in more detail, I recommend my interpretation of Donnie Darko "'Fate up against your will' – Donnie Darko's terrible lesson.")

In this post I have proposed two ideas: that there is no such thing as free will and that there is such a thing as supernatural causation. I want now to propose a kind of practical application of this theory. Psychiatrists have no idea of the cause of schizophrenia. Ten years ago they believed there might be a schizophrenia gene but they now know there isn't. Today psychiatrists often blame schizophrenia on drug use, ignoring the facts that many schizophrenics have never used pot and that many, many people have smoked pot without later developing schizophrenia. Why not suppose that the cause of schizophrenia lies in the spiritual realm rather than the physical realm? And that the precise causes of a person's madness differ from person to person? This proposal, that we should locate the aetiology of this 'disease' in the spiritual domain, may not be helpful. It may be better to suggest a more 'rational' explanation. But it can't be worse than what we have now. At the moment, what passes for rationality among psychiatrists is stupidity, cowardice and close-mindedness. Too much faith in materialism, too much emphasis on the body and not enough on the soul, is the problem, not the solution.

The idea that there might be no such thing as free will is a hard creed to live by. The issue of fate vs. free will was the subject of David Foster Wallace's student thesis when he was young and I suspect this issue troubled him, tormented him, his whole life. It seems that we need to have faith in free will even when rationally we know that the concept of free will is logically incoherent, insupportable. Consider the famous poem "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost. On a superficial reading it seems that he is describing a choice, a description of a decision freely made – yet if we read the poem closely we realise that this reading is false. The poet had no choice about which road to take. He had no choice at all.

'Situational Ethics'

One of my more popular posts , or to call them what they are, short essays, was I think "The Person and Her Situation." In it I proposed something I called 'situational ethics'. Admittedly this term is already taken, is someone else's intellectual property – I should find some other name for it, such as 'contextual ethics' or 'Cartesian ethics', but, the notion of the 'situation' being so central to the theory, until I am struck by some blindingly illuminating forked epiphany, I might as well stick with 'situational ethics' and hope some more original title will occur to me at a later moment. In tonight's Ost I want to talk about this theory a little more.

Fundamentally, the theory is based on a distinction between 'the person' and 'her situation'. The situation comprises that person's past and present, the people and institutions with which she interacts, her context, her milieux, her physical body, what she has seen and read and heard, even perhaps her beliefs. What some consider constituents of a person's identity, I view rather as constituents of that person's situation. Suppose one sees a homeless person on the street: one could 'other' that person, mentally put that person back in his or her place, by projecting the label 'homeless' onto him or her, in this way renouncing one's ethical obligation to respect the homeless person and remember that he or she is another human being. Or one can try to imagine the circumstances that might have driven this person onto the street – domestic violence, drug addiction, a failing Social Welfare system. The second operation seems to me more moral. The other day I was served at McDonalds by a girl wearing a hijab, a rare sight in Auckland. I could just tell myself that she is "Muslim/Other/Not-Me" – or I could wonder at her upbringing or consider the possibility that she has chosen to wear a hijab that day to express her solidarity with Muslims around the world who were affected by Trump's travel ban, or perhaps it is an aesthetic choice. Of course, I can't know her situation for sure unless I were to ask her questions, interrogate her, garner all that necessary information, and this might be seen as uncivil– but I can be sure that some causal situation underpins her decision to wear a hijab that day.

The basic idea behind what I am terming 'situational ethics' is that every human being is basically the same; what differs from person to person is each person's situation. The Christian precepts, "Love thy neighbour as thyself" and "There but for the Grace of God go I" are relevant here. If one understands another person's situation, really understands it, it becomes possible to empathise with that person. True empathy enables true compassion and arguably compassion is the basis of any real ethical system. Imaginative identification is the lesson of literature. When one reads The Lord of the Rings, one puts oneself in the shoes of one Frodo, hobbit, resident of the shire, tasked with the awesome duty of transporting the One Ring to Mount Doom. The reader is one with Frodo even though the reader's real-world situation differs from Frodo's fictional one. How would I behave if I were Frodo? Would I act differently? Has Frodo a choice? Or has he no choice at all?

I myself have a situation. I am 'white', 'male', 'thirty-something' and 'a New Zealander'. I live in an apartment and intend to study again this year. Some aspects of my situation are chosen but many are not. I do not consider any of these attributes part of my identity; rather I consider them part of my situation. Sometimes I can feel vague guilt about being white and male but there is nothing I can do about either. My skin colour and gender have consequences with respect to who I interact with, what jobs I can get, what friends I have. Even my friends, my social milieux, I haven't really chosen – I just acquired them more or less by accident.

Even a person's body is part of that person's situation. A person doesn't choose to have blue eyes or hazel eyes, a person doesn't choose his age or height, a person doesn't choose to be born with a harelip or Type-1 Diabetes. The person is not her body; she is something else. This is why I considered calling this theory "Cartesian ethics". It is a Dualist philosophy that draws a distinction between soul and body, between the Subject and her physical corporeal situation. All souls are the same; it is bodies and situations that differ.

What I calling 'situational ethics' is a kind of bastard child of Sartre's Existentialism. Sartre draws a distinction between the freedom of the Subject and 'facticity', facticity being a near synonym for what I am calling 'situation'. Sartre stresses freedom over facticity but I am stressing the reverse – and my focus is on what conditions must obtain to empathise with another, something I don't think Sartre talks about as much. To understand another we must understand her situation. I am arguing that people have much less freedom than Sartre argued. Yes, people make choices, decisions, but, once a decision is made, that decision becomes part of that person's situation, perhaps irrevocably. One can choose what to do but one cannot undo what one has once done. Suppose a girl tries to burn down her family home at seventeen and is consequently diagnosed 'schizophrenic'; that mistake and that label will perhaps haunt her for the rest of her life. Even ten, fifteen years later, when she tries to get out of the system and off the drugs, that one error will be used against her. If she is allowed to discontinue the medication, it will be argued, she will just try to burn down her house again. There is no escape. There is no salvation – unless something entirely outside the situation intervenes.

My view on the world runs completely counter to 'essentialism'. I believe a person is not defined by his or her prior actions –  although if he has done wrong I also believe he should apologise for his mistake and atone. This is how he shows that he is not the same person as the one who made the mistake. A couple of years ago the Prime Minister of this country became the object of international ridicule for pawing at a waitress's pony-tail. In an interview with a reporter here recently he said something like 'People would react differently if they knew my side of the story'. What could Key possibly say to exonerate himself? Did she compel him to grab her pony-tail somehow? Key's lack of remorse or self-knowledge seems to me worse than the actual incident. Shouldn't he just admit that he has a bit of a compulsive fetish for pony-tails – but is trying to get over it?

What I have been calling 'situational ethics' (which I now admit is closer to Existentialism than I realised when I first talked about it) is based on something like Cartesian Dualism. I am not however making a metaphysical claim. I am not saying that there is both a spiritual world and a physical world. Cartesian Dualism is problematic. One difficulty it faces is that it is difficult to know what belongs to the realm of the soul and what belongs to the realm of the body. Do pleasure and pain belong to the soul or to the body? Every human is a corporeal entity, we eat and shit, shave occasionally, menstruate once a month. We could define the domain of the spiritual by subtracting everything from our experience that is physical – but then there would not be much left. Happiness and unhappiness seem to arise out of one's situation. Do souls in heaven fuck or do they just sit on God's left hand and sing Hosannas? I have been celibate on Earth so long, it seems unfair to have to be celibate in Heaven as well.

This theory, as I just said, is not a metaphysics; rather it is a kind of fiction on which we can base an ethical system. It is a story that can help us become more virtuous. It resembles in this way Nietzsche's theory of Eternal Recurrence. When Nietzsche proposed this rhetorical gambit, this modern myth, he was not saying that we literally live our one life over and over again for all eternity – he was saying rather that we should endeavour to conduct our lives as though this were the case, as though it was true. Likewise  I am not literally saying that there are two realms, spiritual and physical, that all souls are the same and only bodies and situations differ. Rather I am saying that we should try to live our lives as if this were the case. And that this way of looking at the world is the best way to help us understand others. It is a kind of necessary fiction.

At this point in the essay, I want to change the topic. Bear with me – I will come back to the original thesis soon. I want to talk about sexuality again, briefly. On his show a little while ago Stephen Colbert mocked vice-president for his homophobia, joking that Pence believed homosexuality to be "a choice that can be cured". This was funny because everyone knows that people are born one way or the other and can't change – right? Liberal heterosexuals generally don't take this essentialist notion to its logical conclusion. If homosexuality is a congenital condition, like Spina Bifida or Motor Neuron Disease, it is possible that there are many people out there who are gay but who might not want to be, an idea that makes ordinary heterosexuals uncomfortable. Even when people say sexuality is innate, deep down they want to believe it a choice, that gay people want to be gay. Films like Pride (there are other examples but I can't think of any offhand) present the idea that gay people want to come out and are happier when they do so. But when you think of many famous gay men such as Freddy Mercury, George Michael, Alan Turing (Oscar Wilde perhaps?), none of them came out voluntarily; all were outed. I am unsure what conclusion to draw from this but the reader can perhaps go further.

When I was a child I often listened to George Michael and I want to say a couple of words about him. He died recently, of course. Songs like "Faith", "Jesus to a Child" and some famous pictures of him wearing a crucifix earring suggest that he was a Christian. Still he was outed as a result of performing "a lewd act" in a Californian public bathroom in 1998 – I see shades of what happened to John Nash back in the 'fifties. Now, ordinary atheistical heterosexuals, as I used to be, might see Michael's assumed Christianity as a kind of cover, a plausible alibi or hypocritical imposture, a diversion. A real Christian wouldn't perform any kind of lewd act in a public bathroom. Yet after his death it was revealed that in semi-retirement Michael had donated millions of dollars anonymously to various charities. Perhaps Michael's faith was genuine, perhaps he was something that would have seemed unthinkable, a contradiction in terms, a few years back - a Christian homosexual. This might seem an odd appellation to give to a man who released a song in 1988 called "I Want Your Sex", a song that was banned by many commercial radio stations. But apparently Michael intended this song to be about sex within a committed monogamous relationship. (My source for all this, by the way, is Wikipedia and various Women's Magazines.)

To return to the original topic, I should say, again, that I am opposed to essentialism. Sexuality is not innate and neither is schizophrenia. Conditions like this belong to the person's situation rather than the person. Perhaps what happened to George Michael in that bathroom was at best a mistake, at worst entrapment. Perhaps Michael accepted the label applied to him as a result of this event because he knew it was impossible to fight back. We live in a very unforgiving era. But perhaps this might change.

On Religion

In the ever-ongoing series of skirmishes between the believers and the non-believers, the religious and the secular, the faithful have a powerful weapon at their disposal, the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Unapologetically Catholic talk show host Stephen Colbert directed this interrogative at unrepentantly atheistical Ricky Gervais recently and poor Ricky was unable to offer any answer at all. This question, arguably intended as rhetorical, originated with the seventeenth-century co-creator of calculus Leibniz and can be unpacked into two different queries: "What is the cause of the universe?" and "Why is the universe the way it is and not some other way i.e. why for instance does Planck's constant have the value it does and not some other value?" This question is so devastating because atheists almost always have difficulty answering it, while religious people can simply respond "God". But the religious position is less secure than it seems. When you think about it, the religious person's answer explains nothing. The question is "Why is there something rather than nothing?" –– and God is arguably something, not nothing. If a religious person answers his own question by saying "God" the atheist can simply retort, "And why does God exist?" Unless the religious person wants to propose that God created himself, all he's done is displace the problem a step,  moved it up or down the ladder a rung. What caused the First Cause? The religious answer answers nothing. The atheists do in fact have ways of dealing with this question, could talk about the principle of plenitude or the anthropic principle. Ricky was caught off-guard – it is not fair to spring Leibniz on an unsuspecting guest.

In this post I am going to talk about religion a little but perhaps I should say something first about this blog. I have almost no idea who is reading it or how many people are reading it and so often take cues for what to write about from the late night comedic programs I follow. I saw the most recent episode of Last Week Tonight and almost got the feeling that some of its writers must have read my blog because they seemed to be dilating on a subject I talked a little about in the post "Consensus Reality"; in the same episode John Oliver cautioned his viewers to get their news from responsible, credible news sources and not "some idiot's blog". Well, I'm an idiot and I keep a blog but if you're reading it, dear reader, it can't be wholly idiotic. More pertinently, I watched an episode of Real Time in which Bill Maher brought Jim Jeffries into the discussion, interestingly not long after I mentioned both of them in a post. Jim said that he didn't mind either religious people or atheists but he hated agnostics, saying that he always wants to tell them "Get off the fucking fence!". In this post I want to try to get off the fence.

All my life I have most usually been an atheist. I was raised atheist by atheist parents (although I went to Sunday school when I was little). Later in life as a side-effect of terrible stress, I felt, often, that I might need to adopt a religion but, having been always an atheist, I had no default religion to fall back on. Should I become a Catholic because I quite like Pope Francis? Should I start attending Anglican services because I was baptised an Anglican? Should I become a Buddhist, a Jainist, a Scientologist, a follower of some Vedic religion? It seems all religions are equally valid paths to a higher truth, and all equally pretty much baloney, are all a little mystical insight mixed with a lot of fiction. Nowadays, I simply describe myself to others as a flakey hippie, a person who consults his Magic Eightball in times of uncertainty and half-believes his daily horoscope, and leave it at that.

People come to religion in different ways. Most folk are raised within a particular religion or are assimilated into one by friends or pavement-pounding evangelists. Some come to religion because of mystical experiences and I am in a way one of those. In this blog I have talked sometimes about my experiences when psychotic. Readers might want to know – how much of this stuff do I really believe? The answer is 'not much'. For example, during the summer of 2009 and 2010 when I was continually talking with Jess and Jon, I thought Jess's dad was Mark Sainsbury, then a current affairs show host here in New Zealand; when I started spending time with the real Jess in 2011, I found this 'fact', like many others I thought I had learned about her, to be not only false but silly. In very early 2010, Barack Obama told me (in my head of course) that he had met me once in Hawaii; years later I established that it wasn't possible for me to have met him because the year I visited Hawaii he was already living and working in Chicago. And yet I still find it difficult to suppose that I made everything up. Often it seemed that profound truths were being revealed to me, in cryptic or coded form, that my delusions and hallucinations had hidden meanings even if I couldn't understand what was happening at the time they occurred. I would often receive premonitions of future events but these premonitions didn't help me predict these events; I wouldn't know what an adumbration signified until the event it presaged had actually occurred, sometimes a day later, sometimes many years later. Thus my identification as a flakey hippie. It is difficult to remain a strict rationalist when one has experienced both clairvoyance and precognition.

In 2011, I remember, I met the real Jess for coffee at a bookshop. She looked at me bleary-eyed and said, "I heard you on the radio last night!" She apparently had heard me talking about etymology on the National Program and even had woken up her mother to say, "Andrew's on the radio!" At the time, I found it flattering that she could imagine this about me but also knew it to be something like an hallucination or delusion. I was (then as now) unemployed and not then the author of a world-famous blog. To spell it out, there was no reason anyone in the world would have wanted to interview me on the radio. It was silly. I told her, perhaps patronisingly, what I then believed about psychosis, that it was 1% truth, 99% bullshit. I wish I hadn't said this now. In a way she had latched onto a deeper truth. Even though what she had heard that night was all 'in her head', if life had turned out differently for me, it  might not be that incredible for someone to interview me about etymology on National Radio.

Psychosis can profoundly unsettle a person's idea that life is meaningless. I have talked a little about the psychotic episode I experienced in 2009 and 2010 – but the most profound and harrowing mystical experience I ever suffered did not occur in 2009 or 2010 but in 2014 and before I talk about it I need to set the scene a little by mentioning an issue in theology and religious studies generally, the debate between those who think God is 'immanent' and those who think God is 'transcendent'. To say God is immanent is to say that He is omnipresent, everywhere, to say that He permeates, pervades, saturates all creation; to say God is transcendent is to say that He is separate from the universe, exists outside of it, is independent of it. This problem may seem hopelessly obscure. Indeed it is an issue that only really bothers mystics and those who have had mystical experiences. I can't see your average bible-thumper expending much mental energy on a problem so seemingly recondite, abstruse, but it has engrossed many serious thinkers about religion for thousands of years.

Around Easter 2013, as I have said before, I started voluntarily seeing psychiatrists again; I wanted, as I have also said before, it finally on the record that I was straight. In late January or early February 2014, I was unofficially put under the Mental Health Act and 'persuaded', by which I mean coerced, to go to a Respite facility. I suddenly went from taking no medication at all to taking 10 or 12.5 mgs of Olanzapine every night, along with the sleeping pill Zopiclone and the anti-anxiety medication Lorazepam. I was being bullied into taking all these drugs and it had an dire effect upon me; it felt most of the time like I'd had a lobotomy. The time I spent at this 'Respite facility' was truly horrible. I literally thought I was in Purgatory. I spent every waking moment thinking about Jon and Jess. Every day social workers or nurses, people I had never met before and would never meet again, would visit me to assess how mad I was. After two or three days there when I could bear it no longer, I ran home to my mother and didn't go back. Shortly after this 'observation period' I was officially put under the Mental Health Act, meaning that ever since I have been legally compelled to come into the treatment clinic every four weeks to receive a long-acting injection of 300mgs of Olanzapine. I felt then and have felt since that I was officially diagnosed schizophrenic, and put under a Compulsory Treatment Order, basically for saying that I was straight.

It was during my last night at this 'Respite facility' that I had my most awful religious experience. Very early in the morning I woke up, left my room and went into the yard for a cigarette. When I turned my gaze to the night sky, I observed that, although the clouds remained motionless, the stars were moving incredibly fast. The firmament was literally wheeling over me. I felt like I was at the centre of the universe, that time itself had accelerated, that I was having a first hand experience of something like God. Up until that night, the times I had thought of God, I had thought that if He existed He would be Immanent; that night it became apparent that he was Transcendent, that He abided completely outside of his creation. Not only did He transcend it, He was omnipotent, capable of completely suspending every law of physics people normally think inviolate. All the rules physicists had ever discovered were utterly arbitrary and He could change them at His slightest whim. He was transcendent, He was omnipotent, but more than that, He was utterly foreign, utterly alien, absolutely inhuman. He certainly wasn't 'omni-beneovalent', he wasn't benevolent towards anyone in the least. It was a paradox. At the one time I was having a first-hand experience of God, I was the centre of the universe; on the other hand, He didn't give a shit about me, simply didn't give a shit about any individual human at all. He wasn't my Father, He wasn't my friend, He wasn't human in the slightest. I was the centre of Universe but the Universe was completely indifferent to me. It was the lowest point, the absolute nadir, of my life.

It might be that if I were to pick a religion, the best choice would be Gnosticism. Perhaps a person doesn't pick his religion, perhaps a person's religion picks him. Gnostics are known for having religious experiences inspired by contemplation of the stars. I seem to have been being nudged towards Gnosticism for a long time. Gnostics, as I mentioned in the post "An Interpretation of A Couple of Rock Songs", often have religious experiences such as the one I experienced and some songs that are arguably Gnostic include "Violet" by Hole, "Just a Man" by Faith No More, "The Passenger" by Iggy Pop and "Let Me In" by REM.

I don't know whether I have expressed this religious experience perfectly. If the reader wants to read a short story I wrote that alludes to this experience, I recommend "Starlight", an earlier post in this blog.

Fun With Pronouns

An indication of the ever increasing globalisation of the world we live in today is not only that it seems everyone on the planet takes an interest in American politics, TV programs and movies but also that we all share a global language – English. It seems sometimes that most Scandinavians speak English better than many of my friends in this country, friends who possess it as a first language. Sometimes I feel a little embarrassed that English is the only language I really know but then New Zealand is very far removed from other countries. Unlike Brits, New Zealanders can't take a short train trip under the English Channel to France and immerse themselves in a foreign culture. It is perhaps a pity. There is research that suggests bi-lingual folk are generally smarter than people who only possess the one language, perhaps because these people often undertake the complex mental task of translating concepts between different tongues, and New Zealanders like myself who only speak one language perhaps miss out.

Yet, if are to have a global language, we could do worse than English. English has two qualities, I understand, that make it unusual and make it suitable for being a global language. First, it is grammatically much simpler than most other languages – English doesn't have nearly as much in the way of complex declensions and conjugations as a language like German does. Second, English has an enormous lexicon, much larger than most other languages. English speakers have at their disposal an enormous smorgasbord of possible locutions, a multitude of synonyms for any one particular concept, often stolen from other languages, and this enables writers in English to enrich the texture of their prose by continually substituting one word for another. This variation in word-choice is even considered a marker of good style.

But English is far from perfect and one of its problems is to do with pronouns, a problem that is the main subject of this post.

Consider the sentence, "If a person wants to go to Heaven, he should try to be good." What's wrong with the sentence? The solecism it commits is that seems to imply that all people are male, a gendering of language that could be construed as sexist. But it is a problem not easy to fix because English lacks a gender-neutral third-person pronoun applicable to people. You could use the word "it" as in "If a person wants to go to Heaven, it should try to be good" but this obviously doesn't work because, in English, the word "it" is reserved for inanimate objects and animals we don't like. One could say "one" as in "If one wants to go to heaven, one should try to be good" but this pronoun is equally unsuitable in many situations and, even when it can be used, it can make one sound as hopelessly old-fashioned and affected as if one were trying to emulate the Queen of England.

When this issue of gendered language first became salient, in the 'eighties I think, many academics, both male and female, rushed to the other extreme, seeking to display their progressive politics prominently by employing female pronouns in such situations, by saying things like "If a person wants to go to Heaven, she should try to good". But this practice is equally frowned upon in academia today, has also been abandoned, and the preferred convention currently is to use the word "they", as in "If a person wants to go to Heaven, they should try to be good". I don't like this manoeuvre either: the subject abruptly changing from singular to plural in mid-sentence offends my sense of good grammar. I think noun and pronoun should agree in number. It is an issue hard to resolve. In this blog I have tried to overcome the problem of gendered language by saying "he or she" as in "If a person wants to go to Heaven, he or she should try to be good" but this is very cumbersome and I have not always done so consistently.

I have been interested in this problem for a long time. When I was twenty I wrote an essay about Kathy Acker (I think) in which I talked about the relationship between writer and reader; throughout I employed the pronoun "she" for writers and "he" for readers. Part way through the essay, when changing role from a reader of Acker to a person writing an essay about her, I started using the pronoun "she" to describe myself. It seemed to me a playful way to tackle issues of sexism and language, to have the essay perform its argument, but it may possibly have got me into trouble. Language and sexual politics are both mine-fields and you have to careful when navigating either.

Another pronominal issue in English is that the second-person pronoun "you" is both singular and plural. Once upon a time English distinguished between singular and plural forms of this pronoun – we had "thee" and "thou" as well as "you". "Thee" was singular and "you" was plural. Over time,  however, "thee" and "thou" vanished for good, an impoverishment of the language in my opinion. Now here in New Zealand an interesting phenomenon that in some way redresses this devolution of the language has arisen: in Maori and Pacific Island communities, people distinguish between singular and plural forms by saying not only "you" but also "yous". For instance, in South Auckland, it is not uncommon to hear sentences like "If yous kids don't get a move on, yous'll be late for school!". I don't know how this fantastic linguistic innovation originated – but I really like it. I once considered writing a novel that uses "you" and "yous" throughout but I suspect I could only get away with such a novel if I set it in Mangere; it wouldn't work if I set it in Denver, Colorado.

English is in very many ways imperfect. To move from pronouns to adjectives, if I say a movie is "terrible", am I saying I didn't enjoy it or am I using an older meaning of the word, saying that it is 'terror-inducing'? Sometimes I feel that the language has deteriorated over the last hundred years, that semantic drift has reduced it, and wish we could return to the English used in the nineteenth century at a time when people actually read books. And so many political issues involve language and could be clarified if we could establish common terms and common meanings. Should we talk of ISIS as Trump and much of the media do, or should we follow Barack Obama and Al Jazeera and speak of ISIL? Consider the word "liberal". I often use this word in this blog and, when I do so, have in mind the meaning it has in much current American discourse. Here in New Zealand though, people tend more to assert political allegiance by saying which party they support, Labour or National or the Greens or whatever; the terms Right and Left are less frequently used and the word "liberal" is almost unknown, is as rare as hens' teeth – although people have certainly heard of "libertarians" and "Neo-Liberals" even when they are not quite sure what these names designate. There is considerable uncertainty here about whether 'libereralism' is a movement of the Right or the Left. I wrote something like an article once in which I described myself as a liberal and this is something else that may have got me into trouble.

Whether we are talking about the absence of a gender-neutral third-person pronoun in English, the use of the word "yous" among Pacific Islanders in South Auckland, or the precise meaning of the word 'liberal', one thing is clear. Language is political. Political Correctness is predicated on the notion that we can regulate social attitudes by regulating language. I don't know if this is right or desirable but, certainly, if we need to debate something, all parties need to agree on the meanings of the words they use. And this is a never-ending process.

Hilary Clinton and Feminism

Is it permissible for a man to talk about Feminism? In my last post I discussed attitudes towards Islam among liberal commentators and I feel that I had a right to do so even though I am not a Muslim; in the same way I feel that I should be allowed to discuss the current status of the women's movement even though I am not a woman. What I try to be is an observer, someone who looks at the world and draws conclusions about it based on what has happened and what I see to be happening. Feminism under one name or another has been around a long time. The Suffragette movement started more or less at the end of the nineteenth century and the heyday of the Woman's Liberation Movement was the nineteen-seventies. In this post I want to argue that today, in 2017, Feminism has pretty much won.

Of course the view I just expressed is controversial. One hypothesis among many offered for Donald Trump's electoral victory is that it was driven by sexism. Ordinary Americans didn't like the idea of a woman running the country and voted against Hillary Clinton basically because she had ovaries. Several different people I know have offered this opinion, that she lost because of sexism. The idea that the patriarchy actively or passively prevents women from ascending to positions of power is emblematised by the metaphor of "the glass ceiling" – symbolically, because Hillary expected to win, she held her election night party in a convention centre with a glass ceiling. Her win would be final confirmation that the glass ceiling had been broken; her loss conversely was a sign that the glass ceiling still remains intact. Apparently we still live in an irredeemably male chauvinist world.

The problem with the idea that the West is still a patriarchy and that Hillary lost because of sexism is that, although the US may still not have elected a woman leader, very many other Western countries have. Here in New Zealand, we had our first woman Prime Minister, Jenny Shipley, in 1997. Helen Clark, New Zealand's first elected female Prime Minister, came to power in 1999 and held office until 2008. Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of the UK in 1979 and led it until 1990; Britain currently has a female Prime Minister in the form of Theresa May. If the moment when the glass ceiling breaks is the election of a female leader, it has long since been broken in New Zealand, in Britain, and in many other countries around the world.

Established wisdom has it that women are more left-leaning and liberal than men. Feminism has historically been a left-wing phenomenon; historically right wing conservatives have tended to be anti-women, anti-Feminist. And yet, in France, the leader of the far-right nationalist Front National party, who stands a fair chance of becoming President, is a woman, Marine Le Pen. In 2008,  John McCain picked Sarah Palin, a darling of the Tea Party, as his running mate. And of course we can think of the truly odious Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party in Australia. It seems even Far Right Conservative constituencies are embracing woman leaders and this, more than anything else, perversely, shows that Feminism has won – even the fascists are willing to follow female leaders these days.

It would be easy to say that Hillary lost because she was a woman, that her gender was the reason why men voted against her – and why women should have voted for her. But during the Primaries last year politically informed young liberal women turned out in droves not for Hillary, but for Bernie Sanders. In an interview with Gloria Steinem, Bill Maher asked her why she thought this was so and she laughingly replied something like, "I think the girls just want to be where the boys are at." Steinem was immediately subjected to a barrage of liberal condemnation. How dare she suggest that young Democrats could be so shallow? Personally, I liked Steinem's opinion. So what if young people are basically interested in love, sex and having a good time? Is that really so bad? Even if Steinem had strayed a little off-message, the support Sanders received among young women suggests that the fight for gender equality is not as relevant to college students today as it would have been fifty years ago. I don't know for sure why Trump beat Clinton but, although sexism may have played a part, I don't believe it to be the full explanation.

It should be remembered that Hillary was born in 1947 and participated in the Women's Liberation movement of the 'seventies. She is as much a product of her time everyone else. This may seem a  sweeping thing to suggest but one could argue that she and many of her supporters are of an older generation who may not have fully recognised that the world has moved on.

I know that proposing that, at least in some key areas and in developed countries, Feminism has won the battle against male chauvinism, I am likely to be saying something quite unpopular. I am of course aware, as female commentators often point out, that there is still a pay gap between men and women, that women on average earn significantly less than men. But I think a pay-gap is unavoidable and may always be the case – for one simple reason. It is women who have children. In a truly post-Feminist world, some argue (including Steinem I think), men will play an equal part in raising infants, but an argument can be made that the most important relationship small children have is with their mothers and that this relationship during infancy is integral to future emotional and psychological well being. And so long as women feel the need to take time out from their careers to raise babies, it is inevitable that there will be a pay gap.

The domain of problems confronted by Feminism is broad. I have focussed on equal employment opportunities and equal pay, issues one could argue are either settled or are being settled, but there are other political issues, such as abortion, which remain still very much current. I want now to consider another issue that seems still very much current, the objectification of women. I know I am digressing but bear with me. Many Feminists feel strongly that men who notice and pass comment on the appearances of women are chauvinist pigs and to some extent they are right. We of course now have such a chauvinist pig in the White House. But it is possible to go too far in this direction, in criticising men simply for having eyes and for reporting on what they see. Rather than making men feel guilty or ashamed for having libidos, an alternative and more empowering Feminist strategy might be to recognise that women also have libidos and often objectify men. This strategy seems better to me because it is sex-positive rather than sex-negative. It seems that there are two types of Feminist, those who basically don't like men and those who, while still fighting for women's rights, still quite like individual men and are generally sex-positive. Gloria Steinem, Virginia Woolf and Penelope Fitzgerald, Feminist writers I am very fond of, fall into the second camp I believe.

The other night, when walking in town, I dropped into a bar to use the bathroom. On the way out of the bar I was accosted by a girl who barred me from exiting for a time, made me dance with her and called me 'cute'. It was humiliating. I immediately filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission.

I joke about my reaction of course. The truth is that I didn't know how to react to a woman coming onto me so strongly and wasn't that night in a positive enough mood to do anything about it. The point though is that there is nothing wrong with men and women noticing that members of the opposite sex are attractive, just so long as one respects the other person's space. Yes, Trump's actions on Howard Stern's radio show where he would rate women on a scale of one to ten were boorish and crass, but perhaps he could have ameliorated the offensiveness of his attitudes by also rating himself out of ten as well – as Jim Jeffries does in some of his comedy routines. If Trump were honest, capable of stepping outside his own narcissistic bubble, he might be forced to admit that in the eyes of most women, I imagine he's a zero.

I think Clinton made a mistake in framing the electoral campaign as a Feminist fight and should have focussed much more on issues. (Perhaps I am wrong in saying this and she did try to focus on issues but, if so, the media didn't cover it.) Hillary and her aides calculated, I think, that a movement to elect America's first woman president would attract as much support, be seen as just as historic a milestone, as the movement to elect America's first black president. But racism and sexism are two different problems. One can argue, as I have in this post, that the U.S. is coming close to defeating sexism but it is not even close to defeating racism. In saying that in many key areas Feminism has won, I feel I need to make clear that I am not diminishing the importance of the struggle. I consider myself a Feminist insofar as men are allowed to be Feminists. Women's reproductive rights, to take a very important example, remain an issue of serious contention in the U.S. if not here in New Zealand or in Britain. But it needs pointing out that many women are Pro-Life rather than Pro-Choice and this suggests that this fight should not be framed as a Feminist issue, as a battle between men and women, but rather as a conflict between secular liberalism and religious fundamentalism.

If Hillary Clinton lost it was not because she was a woman but because she failed to read the mood of the electorate. I don't know precisely why Trump won and I don't think anyone does, although liberals have speculated widely as to the cause of his victory. I suggested in a post ("The End of Capitalism") that the working class turned against the 'liberal elite' in a misdirected reaction to many decades of Neo-Liberal policies –but I might have been wrong. Sam Harris has argued that it was the result of the Left's failure to recognise and tackle the evil that is Islam but I think this is wrong as well. Perhaps Trump simply managed to tap into and speak for an enormous sea of silent resentment and self-loathing just beneath the surface of American society. Whatever its cause Trump's victory was an utter catastrophe. I wish to God that Hillary had won instead.

On Fundamentalism

Bill Maher is one of the comedians slash commentators that I view regularly – on Youtube because I don't have HBO; I enjoy Maher's show very much because it is funny, informative and refreshingly direct, 'non-PC' in the sense that he spares no-one's feelings and doesn't care if he offends the over-sensitive... but this does not mean I agree with Maher on every single issue. Earlier today I saw Maher's interview with Sam Harris in which they discussed the war on terror. Maher and Harris seem to agree that one of the biggest issues facing the U.S. (and maybe the world) today is 'Islamic extremism'. Neither endorses Trump's 'Muslim ban', nor would either like their shared position to be described as a hostility to all Muslims, but both regard Islam itself as a kind of evil idealogy that needs to be fought somehow, through rational argument or through supporting 'moderate Muslims' or 'ex-Muslims'. I don't know whether any readers care at all about my views on the issue of 'Islamic extremism'. But, this being my blog, I can say what I like and feel I want to offer an opinion.

Maher and Harris both dislike Islam, yes, but their dislike of Islam is part of a deeper antagonism towards all religions generally. On The Daily Show once, Maher said his show was founded on two premises: "Drugs are good and religion is bad". (Jon replied equivocally "I agree with one of those statements".) Harris has written books attacking Christianity as well as Islam and was considered one of the 'four horsemen of the New Atheism' along with Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The New Atheists believe not only that there is no God or Gods but that religion is the cause of all worldly problems and that atheists should go forth and proselytise, persuading religious people through rational argument to put their trust in science rather than the false idols of superstition. The New Atheism is aggressive, Fundamentalist, almost evangelical. It is also absurd. Imagine a New Atheist in Utah, like some reverse Jehova's Witness, knocking on Mormons' doors and telling each new potential convert, "There is no God, life is meaningless, you're stupid, everyone you know is stupid and everything you've always believed is wrong. Here's a pamphlet about Darwin and a copy of Being and Nothingness by John-Paul Sartre. Have a nice day." It seems pretty evident that telling a person that he or she is stupid not the way to win friends and influence people but this seems arguably to be the strategy of Harris and the other horsemen.

For most of my life, I should say, I was a kind of New Atheist myself. I had absolute faith in science. I must give off a kind of lost-sheep vibe though, because people would often approach me on the street to try to convert me to their religion, sometimes Christians but more often Hare Krishnas waving copies of the Bhagavad Gita. I would never engage these people for long, not because I thought I might be assimilated, but rather because I worried that I might accidentally convert someone to atheism and I didn't want to deprive anyone of any comforting illusions he or she might have. I was that sure of my atheism. I now think that it is fairly ridiculous to think that one can persuade a committed Christian to stop being 'stupid' and 'ignorant' – and a story about a friend of mine, Stevie, illustrates this. Stevie, a poet and rock musician very influenced by Radiohead among others, who, thanks to Tinder, had a different sexual partner every week when I knew him, is also a committed Christian who said to me once, "Give me one reason why you think the Resurrection didn't happen and I'll prove you wrong." It seems unlikely that I could accidentally convince Stevie to give up his faith.

The idea that we can persuade religious people through rational argument to abandon their beliefs and embrace atheism is plainly silly. Yet it is what the New Atheists believe. This is not the only mistake Fundamentalist Atheists make though. The other reason why Maher and Harris are misguided is because they misunderstand the role religion plays in people's lives. For most people, religion is not an alternative to science but rather a supplement. As President Obama pointed out to Maher in an interview Maher conducted a couple of months ago, there are many scientists who are religious. (In the same interview, Maher claimed that atheists were a persecuted minority and Obama replied, "In my experience, I don't see that.") Yes, there are a few oddball Christians out there who believe the world was created in 4004BC and that Noah brought dinosaurs aboard the ark, but most Christians, and I suspect most Muslims, are not anti-science. Religion, for most people, is a marker of identity, of moral values, and of group allegiance. If someone says "I'm a Mormon" or "I'm a Scientologist" or "I'm a Buddhist", he or she is not usually making a metaphysical assertion about the world and its history, rather the person is making a statement about who he or she is. When Islam is attacked by people like Maher and Harris, it can only be construed by Muslims as an attack on their shared sense of self, as a kind of hate-speech. And this can only encourages borderline individuals to consider or endorse violence, to go over the edge.

The New Atheists see something wicked in religion itself. Maher and Harris condemn Islam for many reasons, but one reason in particular is that they believe Islam is inherently misogynistic. What they don't take into account is the genuine possibility that a person can be both a Muslim and a feminist – an example being Nadiya Hussain, the British Muslim woman who won the Great British Bake Off in 2015. Nadiya, who has a high public profile, openly wears a hijab (not a burkha), not because she is forced to, but because it is an expression of her Islamic identity and her membership of that community. Nadiya wears a hijab in the same way cute Christian goth girls wear silver crucifixes around their necks, as a token of who she is. A hijab is not a burka. I am no expert on the Quran but I believe Muhammad only instructed his female followers to cover their hair – and so countries which force women to wear full burkhas are taking the Prophet's injunction, I believe, much further than the religion actually requires. This practice says more about these societies than their official religion. And yet Maher presented a picture of women in burkhas as though it were irrefutable evidence that Islam is irredeemably anti-progressive.

Apparently, liberals often argue that organisations such as ISIL and Al Qaeda represent an extremist fringe and should be compared to the Ku Klux Klan, an argument that Maher calls a "false equivalence". The problem with this comparison, the reason it is false, Maher suggested in his talk with Harris, is that the Muslims have "armies of terrorists" whereas the Ku Klux Klan don't. Now, if liberals sometimes commit the logical error of drawing "false equivalences", Maher sometimes commits the error of regarding the extreme as representative of the whole and of over-simplifying. Islam is not to blame for ISIL. ISIL was born in the hell of the Syrian civil war, a war which began in peaceful protests against autocratic dictator and which quickly devolved into a monstrous and unwinnable bloodbath. In a civil war, there is no middle ground; the moderate democratic opposition was squeezed out of existence. Suppose a civil war erupted in the United States between white crackers in the centre and South of the country and the multi-cultural liberal communities of the East and West coasts? It is indeed possible to imagine an alt-right 'army of terrorists' emerging, made up of white supremacists and former survivalists, blowing up black churches and attacking mosque and synogogues. The equivalence is not so far-fetched as Maher makes out.

I like Maher but I am not a big fan of Sam Harris. Harris is articulate and interested in dialogue, but he is not a particularly subtle thinker. I read with interest the debate he had with Noam Chomsky about American foreign policy and I thought Chomsky won. (I feel sure, incidentally, that Chomsky is an atheist but, unlike Harris and the other horsemen, Chomsky feels no need to force his atheism down other people's throats.) I also heard a pod-cast Harris made a little while ago in which he suggested that the reason Trump won was because the Obama admininstration had failed to identify and tackle the real enemy – Islam. The problem with his argument is simply this. New York and Los Angeles, multi-cultural cities which actually have large Muslim communities, voted overwhelmingly for Clinton; the hinterland where no Muslims live at all voted Trump. In the South, people's only exposure to Muslims and 'the war on Terror' is through Fox News. It seems that when you actually know Muslims it becomes harder to hate them.

Obama, as I have said before, has steadfastly refused to use the term 'Islamic extremism' and rightly so. Using the term 'Islamic extremists' would be about as helpful as the British government during the Troubles characterising the IRA as 'Catholic extremists'. I know how much Maher likes and admires Obama and so perhaps he should entertain the idea that Obama might have been right about this issue. The root cause of terrorism is social and political, not religious. Of course, it is as hard to change the opinion of a committed Atheist as it is to change the mind of a committed Christian or Muslim... but I hope Maher might consider it.