The Timewatch team are currently at Stonehenge, as part of a major archaeological dig exploring the theory that the rocks were intended to heal the sick. This is the first dig on the site in half a century. Follow the dig online, and share your views in the Timewatch forum.

Blogging about

Ethics Bites

In the week when of the great war photographers, Philip Jones Griffiths, died, Richard Norman talks about what is wrong with killing - and in particular killing in war - as part of the podcast Ethics Bites. This isn’t an arbitary link: Philip Jones Griffiths, like Richard Norman hated war.

His photographs of the Vietnam war, published in his book Vietnam Inc. showed with compassion and visual power the horrors of war and the human cost on all sides (the text of the book removed any ambiguity about the message).

Griffiths presented the particularised photographic case for pacifism, Norman provides a theoretical underpinning. For both the photographer and the philosopher, respect for human life is paramount.

Richard Norman makes the point that we often lose sight of the human consequences of going to war. He isn’t an absolute pacifist. He recognizes that there are justifications for some wars - but not many. The position he defends is known as pacificism (which can easily be misread as ‘pacifism’ but is subtley different). A photographer like Griffiths can keep this human cost of war in our minds by his memorable documentary images. Philosophers can argue us out of our complacency…if you are prepared to listen and think.

Links

Magnum in Motion ‘Vietnam’ podcast by Philip Jones Griffiths 

Further Reading

Richard Norman Ethics, Killing and War, published by Cambridge University Press

About the author

Nigel Warburton is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the Open University. His podcasts, Philosophy: The Classics and Philosophy Bites, have proved surprisingly popular, regularly topping the iTunes podcast chart. Ethics Bites is his third podcast.

I’ve been watching BBC’s The Passion this weekend. As with any costume drama, part of the fun is spotting familiar faces in unfamiliar guises. Much has been made of James Nesbitt’s performance as Pilate. I’m also struck by Denis Lawson, who played Cardiac Consultant Tom Campbell-Gore in Holby City a while ago, in the role of Annas, one of Jesus’s chief accusers. Meanwhile Robert Powell, who was ITV’s Jesus of Nazareth in 1977, now plays Holby City Nurse Consultant and coke-head Mark Williams. What goes around comes around, I guess.

Still healing the sick: 'Former Jesus' Robert Powell tends Frank Mills in Holby City

The production is good value in other ways, too. Although most draw on the insights of biblical interpreters and archaeologists, no film or television series can exactly depict the world of the first century. Screen images are always ‘re-presentations’ - shaped by genre conventions, and reflecting contemporary understandings of Jesus’s life and ministry. Perhaps inevitably, this series stands in the shadows of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2003). The Passion echoes its colour palette, especially in the dusty brown tones of the Jerusalem street-scenes and the blue mists of Gethsemene, where Jesus is arrested. Careful to avoid the charges of antisemitism that surrounded Gibson’s film, The Passion also goes to considerable lengths (sometimes labouring its point) to depict the Jewish authorities sympathetically. High Priest Caiaphas is shown as a dedicated family man, whose heavy burden of responsibility for the welfare of the Jewish people as a whole drives him to make compromises with the Roman authorities.  

Finally, the depiction of Jesus himself resonates with the priority that many Christians today give to issues of social justice. The Passion plays down Jesus’s reputation as a miracle worker and emphasises his teaching activity. Above all, it presents him as initiating a new egalitarian community: he calls his disciples to recognise sinners and the sick as ‘brothers and sisters’, and eats with women and men on the eve of his capture. There’s a strong degree of fit between this radical Jesus and the beliefs that lie behind the Bible Society’s new Poverty and Justice Bible, and the host of recent Christian campaigns against world debt.

The Passion, then, re-imagines the past in the image of the present, and it’s precisely for that reason that’s it’s been both interesting and entertaining.

Taking it further:

The Open University course AD 317: Religion Today: Tradition, Modernity, and Change, studies the presentation of Jesus in film.

Weblinks:

The Passion on bbc.co.uk/religion
The Poverty and Justice Bible

Blogging about

Ethics Bites

As the controversy about Dwain Chambers, a British sprinter who was found guilty of cheating by using illegal performance-enhancing drugs rumbles on, Ethics Bites considers a more basic question. Chambers was shown to be a cheat - he clearly broke the rules. But should we allow other kinds of performance enhancement in sport? Should we make genetic enhancement part of sport?

Biotechnology is opening up many possibilities. Athletes will soon be able to inject chemicals that will produce genetic modifications that will dramatically improve their performance; parents will be able to specify many genetically controlled qualities for their offspring. This is not the world our parents and grandparents inhabited. How should we treat these developments?

In his podcast for Ethics Bites, the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel comes out firmly against the pursuit of perfection by genetic enhancement. He explains why, for example, he thinks it would be wrong to permit genetically enhanced athletes to compete. He, of course, defends biotechnical solutions to medical problems. It is when we attempt to enhance ourselves that he objects.

Much of his argument turns on his notion of 'giftedness'. An athlete, for example, has a natural genetic endowment. According to Sandel, to go beyond this 'gift' is a kind of hubris on our part, a Promethean project that involves playing God. This sounds like a theological position. But Sandel believes his reasoning should have force with secularists too.

For Sandel there are three features of our moral landscape that will be transformed if we succumb to this desire to play God:

1. Humility. We will lose the sense of reverence that is appropriate to our fate. Instead we will end up acting with hubris towards our nature.
2. Responsibility. With increases in choice about what we are, responsibility explodes. The consequence will be burdensome.
3. Perhaps most important, though, is solidarity. Sandel believes that the price of enhancement would be a loss of human solidarity. Once we lose the sense that we are subject to contingencies of fate, the successful will, even more than now, see themselves as self-made. And this will be bad for all of us.

Sandel's message is clear:

Rather than employ our new genetic powers to straighten 'the crooked timber of humanity,' we should do what we can to create social and political arrangements more hospitable to the gifts and limitations of imperfect human beings

Much of Sandel's argument will appeal to religious believers, particularly those who seek humility before God's will. But for atheists and agnostics, this could be harder to stomach. Why not improve ourselves if we can? Think of how wonderful it would be if we could increase the number of geniuses per capita, particularly if we could give them a compassion gene and a desire to improve the lot of humanity...

In the area of sport much of Sandel's argument turns on his belief that watching bionic athletes slugging it out would become mere spectacle, and that part of what we value in sport is the limitations of the athletes. I'm not so sure about this. I'd like to watch a football match in which every player achieved the skill level of George Best or Maradonna. And watching the top marathon runners today is already like watching bionic athletes, but no less absorbing for us mere mortals.

Sandel's arguments are interesting and thought-provoking. For some of the arguments on the other side of the debate, try John Harris's book Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People. He presents an uncompromising defence of safe enhancement:

Enhancements are so obviously good for us that it is odd that the idea of enhancement has caused, and still occasions, so much suspicion, fear, and outright hostility.

Further Reading

• The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering by Michael Sandel, published by Belknap Press
• Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People by John Harris, published by Princeton University Press

About the author

Nigel Warburton is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the Open University. His podcasts, Philosophy: The Classics and Philosophy Bites, have proved surprisingly popular, regularly topping the iTunes podcast chart. Ethics Bites is his third podcast.

Blogging about

Ethics Bites

While working as a school teacher in 1926, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein hit an eleven year old child so hard that the child collapsed. This was undoubtedly a terrible thing to do, and there was an investigation in the school. But in 1926 it was commonplace to use corporal punishment as a teaching technique. Today in Britain, fortunately, it isn't. Indeed the NSPCC has mounted a campaign to protect children legally from physical punishment.

So is it wrong to judge teachers of the past by today's standards? An easy response is to appeal to ethical relativism. This is the idea that all our judgments of right and wrong, praise and blame, and so on, are relative to the time and place when the relevant acts were performed. On this view it may have been right to control a child by using physical punishment in the 1920s (within limits which Wittgenstein overstepped); whereas it would be morally abhorrent now. Ethical relativism is, however, deeply unsatisfactory and hard to sustain with consistency.

Miranda Fricker in her discussion of this topic for the podcast series Ethics Bites has some interesting things to say. She is surely right that it is a condition of blaming someone that we believe that they could have chosen to act differently. It is wrong to blame someone for something over which they have no control, such as their height.

In the case of Wittgenstein's act, we can rightly blame him: even by the standards of his day he was brutal. There would be nothing anachronistic in that. But if he had caned the child within the limits accepted in 1926, should we hold him blameworthy? Miranda points out that we do want to have some sort of negative attitude to people who did things like this in the past, even though they couldn't necessarily have known any better. Yet blame implies that they could have known better.

We need a richer moral vocabulary to account for our feelings here. Clearly some of Wittgenstein's contemporaries would have thought that all corporal punishment of children was wrong: these were exceptional people who could see beyond the dominant perspective. We appropriately feel moral disappointment at the child-hitters of the past. We are sad that people behaved that way, recognize that, though it would have been difficult, they might have thought differently and judge appropriately. We can't exactly blame them, because that implies that they might have done otherwise. But at the same time, we don't want to have a neutral attitude to them. We are disappointed in them.

About the author

Nigel Warburton is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the Open University. His podcasts, Philosophy: The Classics and Philosophy Bites, have proved surprisingly popular, regularly topping the iTunes podcast chart. Ethics Bites is his third podcast.

Here is a series of statements, arranged in order of ‘gravity’. Which do you believe?

1. Global warming is real, man-made phenomenon that threatens the future of the planet.
2. The spread of democracy is the only way, in the long run, to ensure a more stable and peaceful world.
3. It is inevitable that China will become the world’s next economic global superpower.
4. Obesity in the UK is set to reach epidemic proportions in the next couple of decades.
5. British international sporting teams (especially in football, cricket, and rugby) are suffering from a lack of talent because of increasing numbers of foreign players in professional club sport.

I hope you agree that what each assertion has in common with its neighbours is that it is, if not universally, then at least widely believed (in Britain, anyway) at present. Indeed, perhaps you agreed with all of them; certainly it’s likely that you believe some. And you would not be in the least stupid to do so: they all seem perfectly plausible. There is, though, a reasonable chance that at least one of them will be proved wanting in the future. I have no idea which, though I have serious doubts about at least two of them.

Now, since this blog is about the lessons of history, does that discipline offer any indications about the truth of our five cases? Or does it suggest appropriate ways in which humankind should respond to any of these? No, it doesn’t.

To begin with, there are really no comparable situations in history that can enlighten us about things like global warming or obesity in Western Europe. But, even if analogous circumstances had existed in the past, they would – as I said in the first part of this blog – surely tell us very little about the ‘right’ courses of action that should be taken in each of the above instances. And yet I insisted that history does offer its pupils lessons, and I’ll go so far as to say that these lessons can be applied to this whole series of paradigms. To explain why, I’m going to ask you to think like a sixteenth century Christian for a second. Okay…are you in a suitably renaissance frame of mind?

Now: does our planet go round the sun, or does the sun go round the earth? If you said the former, then perhaps you’re not thinking hard enough. An ample majority of people – if they thought about it at all – believed the latter. Indeed, the heliocentric view of the heavens was considered to be heretical (as Galileo found to his cost in 1633), since it appeared to contradict Biblical scripture. Though Galileo was not the first to challenge the ascendant view, he was certainly the most famous and influential of those who sought to disprove geocentrism. But that did not mean that his theories were accepted quickly – in fact, the Catholic Church did not officially accept them until two centuries after his death. Nevertheless, he was instrumental in destroying a presumption that millions of people in the sixteenth century (and beyond) took for granted, and he is correctly held to be one of the founders of modern science in consequence.

Maybe renaissance Europe is too distant to picture – so let us move to late eighteenth century Britain. It was around this time that the established theory that explained the spread of disease (contagion: that is, that disease was passed from one person to another) began to be replaced by the notion that sickness was the product of polluted air. In a very simple sense, diseases came from ‘miasmas’: dirty environments, bad smells, and so forth. Admittedly, small numbers of contagionists remained, but by the 1830s the miasma hypothesis dominated scientific thinking: being happily repeated as established truth in the press, government reports, and all manner of media. But, as we now know, this belief was wrong. It was not until the work of sceptical pioneers like John Snow (who identified the water-pump that was dispensing neat cholera to the residents of Soho in the 1850s) and Louis Pasteur that germ theory began to overturn the prevailing paradigm.

Perhaps those two examples are too scientific, so let me give you an illustration in a socio-political vein. From the eighteenth through to the early twentieth century, it was commonplace for the residents of western European countries to assume that African societies were ‘naturally’ uncivilised and that there was practically no chance of Africans ever being able to govern themselves in a democratic manner. Though this view is, rightly, repugnant to today’s world, it was so obvious to those who lived barely a century ago that it was hardly challenged at the time. Even celebrated philanthropic reformers – William Wilberforce in 1807, say, or August Bebel in Germany almost a century later – would have unblinkingly accepted that African peoples were inferior and unlikely to be able to run their own affairs. They may have been concerned to diminish the shocking exploitation of Africans, and justly they are praised for their campaigns, but they were nonetheless confined in the mental prisons of their age.

I confess that the three cases above are little nuanced, having of necessity been boiled down to their rudiments, but nonetheless each hints at one of the most important lessons of history. What is it? I am claiming that people in the past were markedly more stupid than we are now and thus we are superior to them? Far from it. In fact, any pride in present day sophistication versus historical dim-wittedness is almost as much a capital sin in history as it is in Christianity. True, I have been trying to show that human beings have believed things in the past which we would now consider spectacularly mistaken. But what I hope I’ve also signalled is that such opinions were widely held – precisely as those ideas with which I started are believed now. Moreover, miasma theory, geocentrism, and assumptions about African inferiority were only overturned by a slow process of challenge and argument. And it is in this that one of the foremost lessons of history lies. For, unless we succumb to the arrogant idea that we have somehow become infallible in the early twenty-first century, it must surely be likely that some presently commonplace notions will prove unfounded. If that’s the case, history’s lesson must be that we should – individually and collectively – cultivate a frame of mind that encourages us to question generally accepted ‘truths’. This is not to advocate unbridled cynicism. Since, say, the reality of global warming is based on the best information that human beings currently possess it would be unwise not to calculate – for the time being – on the basis that it is true. Rather, it is to acknowledge that without a mindset of reasoned scepticism human beings have often been herded down blind passages, where they await directions from a John Snow or a Galileo Galilei. History reminds us to try to think like them. 

Taking it further:

If the above blog has intrigued you, you may also find the following courses from the Open University to be of interest:

Medicine and Society in Europe 1500 -1930
This course traces the development of medical knowledge and its application from the early modern period through to the twentieth century. It is not just a straightforward history of medicine. Instead, it shows how western medicine interacted with ideas from contemporary science and religion and demonstrates its deep impact on European societies.

Exploring history: medieval to modern 1400-1900
The problems and methodologies of history are well covered in this OU course, which gives students a very broad introduction to the study of history. It highlights three big historical themes - changing beliefs, producers and consumers, and state formation - and looks at how they altered from the medieval period through to the nineteenth century. Amongst the topics covered are slavery and the slave trade, the European Reformations, Imperialism, the French Revolution, and the Wars of the Roses. 

The Rise of Scientific Europe 1500 - 1800
Why did modern science develop solely in Europe, and then only in some parts rather than others? This module attempts to answer these fascinating questions with a survey of scientific development from the Renaissance through to the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Along the way, it looks also at the roots of European science in Arabic and Chinese scientific cultures.

You might also be interested in the programme 'Blame and historic injustice' from the podcast series Ethics Bites

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent fifteen years teaching history in higher education - the last thirteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he's a tutor on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university's academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

Our book of the month for March, written by Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, is entitled Kar (which translates into English as Snow). Stephanie Forward provides an introduction to the novel.

Turkish author Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006. He was hailed for making Istanbul "an indispensable literary territory, equal to Dostoevsky's St Petersburg, Joyce's Dublin or Proust's Paris".

Pamuk has caused controversy by tackling sensitive issues. In 2005 he was charged with "insulting Turkishness", after making remarks about the alleged genocide of Kurds and Armenians in Anatolia between 1915 and 1917.

Snow is set in an Anatolian city called Kars, and most of the action takes place in the early 1990s. Kars is cut off from the outside world for three days during a blizzard.

The hero, Ka, has spent years in exile in Germany, but has returned to write about the municipal elections and to investigate an alarming series of deaths. A number of local girls have killed themselves, seemingly because they have been ordered to take off their headscarves when they attend college.

However, Ka has an additional mission in mind: he hopes to win the love of a former schoolmate, Ipek. Ka is caught up in a coup, during which extreme Islamists threaten the secular state.

The novel presents conflicting views; however. It takes the reader beyond politics and religion to consider art itself. For years Ka has been unable to write poems, until his experiences in Kars inspire him. Snow is the key image throughout the text, and Ka’s poems seem to fit together in the geometric outline of a snowflake – "all part of a grand design".

Join in discussions of this book - and all other matters literary - in the forums.

Mixed feelings at the end of this run. The pressure of working on facilities like this is immense. The facility runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and costs thousands of pounds a day per experiment. You therefore have to squeeze as much out as you can in the short time available. Imagine the relief then when it’s all over and you can get back to a normal life.

Now the sadness. The SRS at Daresbury started work in 1981, and I did my first research here on molecular physics as a student four years later. I’ve had many programmes running here over the years on many topics, culminating in this work on Heritage Science. Sadly though, this will be my last time here. The SRS will be shut down for the last time later this year as many science programmes move to the new synchrotron radiation source, DIAMOND, near Oxford. It’s not all about the loss of a superb machine (which, frankly, is showing its age), but about the loss of community. Science is a human activity, and nowhere more so at places like Daresbury. I guess that’s what I, and many others, will miss most. No more chats over coffee, no more visiting other groups to “borrow” tools, tape, string or whatever, and perhaps worst of all, no more visits to the Ring ‘O’ Bells, the pub in Daresbury village!

In the Ring ‘O’ Bells – the Daresbury “watering hole”

Oh yes, Daresbury village – I haven’t told you anything about this yet! Well, to all outward appearances, it’s a normal small English village – a pub, a church, one main street and a handful of houses. Nothing remarkable until you look at the east window in the Church.

Part of the east window in All Saint’s Church, Daresbury

Recognise these characters? They are the Mad Hatter, the Mad March Hare and the Dormouse from Alice in Wonderland. Why here? In the mid nineteenth century, the vicar was one Charles Dodgson whose first son, also Charles became a respected mathematician at Oxford. This Charles is better known as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland! So here is Daresbury’s other claim to fame as the birthplace of arguably one of the most influential writers in English! Perhaps some of his ideas have rubbed off here? There frequently seems to be an “Alice in Wonderland” quality to some of the things that go on…

So one chapter is closing. I hope another will start soon, as we take our Heritage Science work to DIAMOND. There, we will be able to look even more closely at our materials, and get down to levels of detail not possible at the SRS. Another important aspect DIAMOND will give us – does all this analysis cause any lasting damage to the artefacts? Not just visible (cracks, melting, change in colour etc) but invisible – except under the microscope of synchrotron radiation.

We’re heading home now, but the hard work has just begun. Over my next few posts, I’ll take you through the distillation and analysis of our results, and hopefully give you a sneaky peek at some of the highlights.

Oh for a good night’s sleep now…  

Paul.

About the author

In late 2007, Paul Hatherly joined Physics and Astronomy at the Open University as a key member of the HEFCE-funded Physics Innovations Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (PCETL).