As I was driving home this evening, I caught an interesting little story on NPR’s All Things Considered entitled Born in the ’50s: Beliefs, Now and Then
As Judge Samuel Alito testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Robert Siegel talks with Alito’s contemporaries — those who are 55 or so — to see how much they and their views have changed since they were 35.
And so they interviewed a number of people who, like Alito, were born in 1950, and asked them how their views had changed over the last 20 years. And I found this particularly interesting, because I too was born in 1950. So how have my views changed over the last 20 years?
In 1985, the most important things in my life were my children – then 11 and 8 – and my job; I’d just joined Sun Microsystems. I didn’t pay too much attention to US national affairs, because I hadn’t quite adjusted to the fact that we weren’t just going to be here “for a couple of years”. But I didn’t think much about England, either: I was appalled by Maggie Thatcher’s selfish ideology. I was a citizen of the world! Of course politics was important, but the critical issue was the life-or-death concern with nuclear confrontation. Those were the days of films like Threads and The Day After, and Reagan joking about nuking the Soviets. But I don’t remember people at work arguing about these matters: they were distant, and we were curiously impotent.
And nobody talked much about religion. For the most part, it was a respectful and tolerant period: the arguments in schools were about Title IX (equal funding for girls’ sports), not evolution. I was active on Usenet in the alt.atheism newsgroup, helping to author the FAQ and starting to read philosophy of religion texts. But it was only for my personal interest.
Today? I think my views have hardened over the years, not mellowed. I’m appalled by the excesses of intolerance and hypertolerance that have sprung up. We have seen the emergence of a dichotomy between fundamentalism and unprincipled relativism, both of which have no time for reason, debate, and balance. Whether it be Pat Robertson’s ayatollah-like pronouncements, or Tony Blair seeking to make it illegal to say things that might upset someone, the world seems to have gone mad. And I do blame religion for much of it, for elevating the myths of a bunch of Iron Age nomads above reasoned debate in the here-and-now.
But, friends tell me, this is unfair. There are many people who are both religious and tolerant, observant and scientific. And of course this is true. Yet I can’t help feeling that many of these people give aid and comfort to the bigots by refusing to live up to their principles. A topical example: Pat Robertson explaining Ariel Sharon’s illness as divine retribution. Why can those who argue with Robertson not take the next, logical step, and rip out of their Bibles those texts which support Robertson’s thesis of a bloodthirsty and vengeful deity? If they don’t believe in such a deity, why do they treat those gory texts as “holy”? Surely their ethical principles are more important than a piece of text that was arbitrarily included in a book by a bunch of old men in the fourth century? (And, yes, the same applies to the Koran, and every other “sacred” book.)
I know, I know: if you start doing that, the whole house of cards comes crumbling down. Rational thought has no place in this domain. Even Thomas Jefferson couldn’t pull it off.
This abuse of religious ideas permeates so much. We have an immoral war being fought with callous disregard for the lives of the innocent and the moral integrity of the USA and UK, with government-sanctioned torture, and it is all justified in Apocalyptic, almost Manichean language of freedom-lovers versus evil-doers.
I am much more cynical than I used to be, and less hopeful. I look at my grandson, Tommy, and I worry more about the world he will face than I did with my children. Do all grandparents feel that way? I hope I’m wrong. On the other hand, I’m learning so much these days – in computing, science, philosophy, travel. I’m still an engineer, but I spent more of my time thinking about how we practice engineering, as a collaborative, community effort. I expect to get back to product engineering in a year or two, but for now I’m learning and contributing in a different way. And that’s satisfying.
And curiously, I find myself more emphatically English than ever before. In part, it’s because America has become so alien. When George Bush Senior said “No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God”, I thought he was just pandering to his base. I was wrong. But in part it’s because of the Internet, and global communications. I read British newspapers every day, I watch English football and cricket, and PBS and BBC America bring me the news and the kind of entertainment that I grew up with. I never watch US programs (except for House, and the star of that series is as English as they come). I work with people around the world; in this respect I am a citizen of the world. Once or twice a year I return to England, and get in the rental car, and drive to Oxford: onto the M25, and then up the M40. And as I drive over the Chiltern scarp at Stokenchurch, and see the landscape spread out before me, I know I’m home.
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