Obscene Desserts in the news

Well, not exactly. But I have run across a couple of articles related to things I've written about recently.

First, in the Guardian, John Gray (the John Gray who teaches at the London School of Economics, not the Mars and Venus guy) has just reviewed Michael Burleigh's very intriguing-sounding book Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda. In doing so, he finds cause to make reference to the Cathars, about whom I also recently wrote while critiquing the highly questionable (OK, outright batty) idea that religion primarily brings people together.

(The review's title, 'Apocalypse Soon', also resembles another post of mine...but I'm not claiming any particular creativity there, though I am using it as an excuse to cite something from the archives.)

In fact, Gray uses the case of the Cathars - among others - to make what sounds like a fundamental criticism of Burleigh's argument:

Downplaying the role of the church in the crimes of the last century is part of a larger default in Burleigh's analysis. Medieval Christendom was hardly an oasis of peace. It was racked with savage wars and campaigns of systematic extermination that prefigure those of modern times. The crusade against the Cathars launched by Pope Innocent III at the start of the 13th century led to the deaths of around half a million people, many by mass hanging, drowning or torture. Violent millenarian movements repeatedly convulsed late-medieval and early-modern Europe. In the early 16th century, a communist New Jerusalem was established in the city of Munster in northwest Germany that had many of the features of later secular regimes, including the methodical use of terror. The extraordinary savagery of modern political religion does not come from giving up Christianity. It is a secular version of the faith-based violence that has been an integral part of Christianity throughout its history.

(Gray's own book Straw Dogs is one with which I've wrestled more than most others during the past couple of years: infuriating and depressing and thought-provoking...and, I must say, more convincing each time I read it.)

Secondly, in the New York Times, there is an article by Nicholas Wade entitled 'An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong' which is well worth looking at even if it remains more or less on the surface level of this fascinating topic.

In large part, the short article focuses on the work of Harvard biologist Marc D. Hauser, particularly his new book Moral Minds.

Both atheists and people belonging to a wide range of faiths make the same moral judgments, Dr. Hauser writes, implying “that the system that unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine.” Dr. Hauser argues that the moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate neural machinery for language. The universal grammar is a system of rules for generating syntax and vocabulary but does not specify any particular language. That is supplied by the culture in which a child grows up.

The moral grammar too, in Dr. Hauser’s view, is a system for generating moral behavior and not a list of specific rules. It constrains human behavior so tightly that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every society — do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don’t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don’t cheat, steal or lie.

But it also allows for variations, since cultures can assign different weights to the elements of the grammar’s calculations. Thus one society may ban abortion, another may see infanticide as a moral duty in certain circumstances. Or as Kipling observed, “The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Katmandu, and the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.”

Attentive Obscene Desserts readers will recall that I discussed related topics not all that long ago, paying particular attention to contributions by Frans de Waal and Peter Singer.

Just another timely reminder - were any really necessary - that the cutting edge of today's Zeitgeist resides here in southwestern Germany.