Oliver Kamm

Religious tests and public office

Liberals and left-wingers once instinctively sympathised with the position of Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, concerning religion and public policy (emphasis added): "As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all government, to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith."

How and why this axiom of progressive politics has lately been compromised is a convoluted story. The proposition that political Islam represents some sort of emancipatory force is on the face of it nonsensical. Its incursion into political debate has been assisted, however, by an increasing and unwarranted sensitivity about the bogus and question-begging phenomenon of "Islamophobia". Where Muslims suffer racism, that racism must be fought. Criticism of religion - including hostility towards it and blasphemy against it - is not racism. As one of the most formidable advocates of clear thinking on this issue, the French journalist Caroline Fourest, has nicely put it (in her excellent blog, which I have added to my links):

"Voilà pourtant des années que l’on met en garde contre le danger d’utiliser le mot «islamophobie» (littéralement phobie envers l’Islam) pour parler du racisme envers les Musulmans. Car si le racisme envers les Musulmans existe et doit être combattu, la critique de la religion ou d’une idéologie — elle — ne peut être confondue avec du racisme. À moins de considérer que toute critique d’une idéologie ou d’une religion est raciste. Et donc un délit."

My suspicion is that the feeble response of policymakers (Mme Fourest rightly takes to task President Sarkozy's tendentious equation of "Islamophobia" with racism and antisemitism) reflects an instinctive deference to the claims of religious interest groups. I was mildly interested that the new Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, professed his own unbelief this week in answer to a direct question. But I was incredulous that he appended it with the pragmatic observation that he had "enormous respect for people who have religious faith". I haven't. Why should a personal belief about first and last things merit any respect at all? The task of democratic politics is to defend freedom of thought on religious matters, not to take a stand on the content of that thought.

Yet even secularists get this principle wrong. Matthew Parris, in The Times today, maintains:

"We non-believers are always puzzled by protests that strong religious conviction could be without huge influence in the way a man lives his public as well as his private life. We read the Gospels (sometimes with more attention than believers seem to); we learn about Judaic beliefs in God's purpose for the Jews and for mankind; we hear and try to understand the claims of Islam; and it strikes us that these belief systems make enormous claims on their adherents, with the most profound practical consequences."

I'm a non-believer and I'm not at all puzzled at the notion that strong religious conviction might be without practical implication for a statesman's public conduct. Religious doctrine is consistent with any political position. Take Christianity alone, and consider the range of theological justification for everything from liberal Protestant social reform (e.g., the Social Gospel of the Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch) to slavery (why, in his Epistle to Philemon, did the Apostle Paul not urge that the runaway slave Onesimus be freed, rather than merely taken back by his master as "a brother beloved ... in the Lord"?).

I have no hesitation in describing Roman Catholic doctrine as unworthy of respect. Since the First Vatican Council of 1870, the defined dogmata of the Roman Catholic Church have included that God "can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason". Moreover, "all faithful Christians are forbidden to defend as the legitimate conclusions of science those opinions which are known to be contrary to the doctrine of faith" (emphasis added).

I should be surprised if these doctrines played any part in the instruction accompanying his conversion to Catholicism, but Tony Blair is now nominally committed to such anti-intellectual absurdities. That doesn't bother me; I adhere to the Jeffersonian principle that there must be no religious test for public office, and accept its implications. I'm happy to describe a Roman Catholic convert as a statesman who more closely expresses my own fundamental principles than any other politician of my adult lifetime. In this, I take also the position of one of my intellectual heroes, the late pragmatist philosopher and anti-totalitarian social democrat Sidney Hook. Many years ago (in an essay entitled "Religion and the Intellectuals", published in Partisan Review in 1950 and included in his book The Quest for Being, 1961, p. 100), Hook wrote:

"So long as religion is freed from authoritarian institutional forms, and conceived in personal terms, so long as overbeliefs are a source of innocent joy, a way of overcoming cosmic loneliness, a discipline of living with pain and evil, otherwise unendurable and irremediable, so long as what functions as a vital illusion or poetic myth is not represented as public truth to whose existence the once-born are blind, so long as religion does not paralyze the desire and the will to struggle against unnecessary cruelties of experience, it seems to me to fall in an area of choice in which rational criticism may be suspended. In this sense, a man's personal religion justifies itself to him in the way his love does. Why should he want to make a public cult of it? And why should we want him to prove that the object of his love is the most lovely creature in the world? Nonetheless it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability."

If you're a religious believer, don't ask me for respect; you don't have it. Call me an "Islamophobe" or a "Christianophobe" and I will accept these terms as compliments, much as the early Methodists appropriated for their own purposes a name that was intended to be abusive. If you seek legal protection for your religious beliefs (as opposed to the freedom to worship any god or none) then I will oppose you and accept no compromise. But leave me and (more important) my fellow citizens alone, and I will remain indifferent to whatever myths of origins and eschatology you espouse.

Thug of the Year

Time magazine's choice of Vladimir Putin as Person of the Year is in the first place absurd, because there was an obviously more important and benign candidate in General Petraeus. But it will have consequences as well. Note the observation of Putin's spokesman: "We treat it as an acknowledgement of the role that was played by President Putin in helping to pull Russia out of the social troubles and economic troubles of the 1990s."

Or to put it another way, a thuggish regime will treat it as endorsement of a programme you would expect from a former KGB officer. Anway, here are the accolades Time is acknowledging, or perhaps is not: meddling in Ukraine's elections; undermining Middle East peace negotiations by making unilateral overtures to Hamas; gross ineptitude in dealing with the administration in Georgia, and its breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia; intimidation and ballot rigging in Putin's own farcical election; encouraging Iran's serial nuclear deceptions; and the unspeakable murders - by, er, hands unknown - of opponents of Putin's actions and arbitrary rule. It is a record well worth marking, indeed; but not in this way.

Overrated and underrated works

The new issue of Prospect magazine carries a survey of contributors' opinions. The question is which aspects of culture - books, films, television shows, operas, plays, concerts - were respectively the most overrated and most underrated of 2007. This was my answer for the most overrated:

"Earlier volumes of Tony Benn’s diaries have contained much of political and human interest. More Time for Politics: Diaries 2001-2007 (Hutchinson), though, is a vainglorious and trivial document untempered by critical judgement or common sense. Benn’s account of his 2003 interview with Saddam Hussein—which for obsequiousness in the face of despotism would have put Robert Maxwell to shame—is exceeded in gullibility and tastelessness by the author’s reflections on the 9/11 “truth” campaign: “Probably, in their heart of hearts, most people think the attack was genuine, but I don’t rule anything out."

And this was my answer for the most underrated:

"As the messianic Holocaust denier holding the presidency of Iran might remind us, bizarre and atavistic ideas remain a potent force in world affairs. The most underrated book of 2007 is a model exposition of one such notion that has almost died out. Flat Earth by Christine Garwood (Macmillan) is an elegant and non-polemical study of a movement that is now a synonym for crankery, but whose methods of reasoning (consider the biblical literalism of “scientific creationism”) are with us always."

Books of the year

Here are some non-fiction titles I've read and enjoyed that were published this year (or in one case, published at the end of last year). I'll list half a dozen today and another half dozen later in the week.

It would surely be an understatement to describe Nick Cohen's What's Left? as book of the decade. I reviewed it here, and associated myself with its argument - oddly, not quite to universal acclaim among readers of the site - on "Comment is Free", here. Of the book, I said it was a cogent and impassioned essay on how ostensibly progressive movements had more than made their peace with political and even theocratic reaction. It's also blackly comic in parts. Don't miss the section on the corrupt rapist Gerry Healy, leader of the now defunct Workers' Revolutionary Party, and his fictional portrayal in Trevor Griffiths's once admired play The Party.

Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great is far superior in tone, style and range of reference to Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. I enjoyed it hugely. I also applauded its message, not only because I too find religious apologetic incredible but because Christopher's secularism is grounded in the Jeffersonian principle of pluralism and a rejection of the notion of religious tests for public office. Not all atheists exemplify that principle.

Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom and the Making of History by John Patrick Diggins is the best biography of a widely misunderstood President. Diggins properly contrasts Reagan's moralism with his failure to resist "the sins of power, the temptation to operate covertly and circumvent the laws of democracy". But the overriding message is that Reagan was an Emersonian figure who perceived the fragility of Communism, yet who cooled the Cold War down, often with the most saccharine of rhetoric and the most bizarre notions (total nuclear abolition being the central one). Reagan was a complex figure; this book is one of very few to do justice to the paradoxes of Reaganism.

Some years ago a scholar with the fine biblical name of Ronald Numbers wrote a superb book called The Creationists, in which, without polemic and with some human sympathy towards the personalities involved, he described the evolution (so to speak) of modern Creationism. Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood is a similar kind of historical and cultural study of a perverse movement that has become a synonym for crankery. Ms Garwood doesn't mock, and makes the essential point that the reasoning of flat-earthers and biblical creationists has clear points in common.

Le modèle anglais, une illusion française by Agnès Poirier is a splendid polemic and the best statement I've come across of the case for French exceptionalism. Agnès is an Anglophile who has lived in the UK for a dozen years; agree with her thesis or not, she is cogent and often very funny about our society's idiosyncrasies and attitude to Europe. As for writers on the Murdoch press: "Leur profession: calomnier jour après jour l'Europe et ses dirigeants «à l’accent bizarre»." I trust you recognise yourselves, comrades, for it is not I.

Janacek: Years of a Life: (1914-1928) by John Tyrrell is the second volume of a massive biography of the Czech composer, and covers much the most interesting years of his life. After the end of WWI, with the establishment of the Czech Republic and inspired by a passionate affair with a woman 40 years his junior, Janacek produced great works that were poetic but unadorned by romantic affectation. This is a definitive biography of one of the great figures of 20th-century music, and above all of opera.

The joy of enemies II

I noted the other day the welcome disappearance of one of my numerous crank correspondents, who calls himself (possibly accurately) Jonathan Burgess. I can't claim to have wondered what had happened to him, and you certainly won't be interested either, but a reader kindly draws my attention to what Burgess did next. As it involves another of my enemies, it provides material for another post on the seasonal theme I introduced yesterday.

Burgess is an admirer of the racist faker David Irving. He started writing to me variously and indignantly a couple of months ago, after Irving had urged readers of his website to write to me to complain about something or other. I identified Burgess, on the strength of his efforts, as a follower of Irving and, ex hypothesi, a racist. Burgess immediately wrote to me again. Here is what he said:

Do you not think that it is just a little bit disgusting to invent vicious and groundless charges against me, and then to publish these wilful and malicious lies on the internet?

I ask you publicly to withdraw the following:

1.) Your assertion that I am 'a follower' of David Irving, or one of his 'band'.

This is simply untrue: I have never met Mr Irving. I have never worked for (or with) him. I have never made any kind of donation to him. I have never attended any meeting, speech, or function organised by Mr Irving - or at which he has otherwise been present.

2.) Your assertion that I am a racist. This is not just untrue, it is a very serious libel.

You have no grounds for making this vile slur on my good name other than pure 'guilt by association' (i.e. he has read a couple of his books, therefore he must be a 'disciple' who sits at his feet and imbibes his whole world view.)

Do you think that this kind of facile logic would stand up in a libel court, Mr Kamm?

I have always abhorred racism in every form. If you do not withdraw these hurtful lies, I shall have to investigate what legal avenues are open to me. I say 'have to', because I simply cannot allow you to libel me as a racist.

I considered Burgess's complaints carefully and exhaustively for a couple of seconds. I sent him the name and address of my estimable libel lawyer, who has represented me with ferocious success against two previous complainants of equal whining absurdity. (Note that I have written about only one of these, the pro-Milosevic blogger and vulgar fraud Neil Clark, as the other had the comparative prudence to make himself invisible immediately on hearing from my legal representative.) I then extended to Burgess the courtesy of again describing him on this site as a follower of David Irving and a racist. I have heard nothing from him since apart from a piece of doggerel comparing me to a phallic sexual instrument.

That exchange took place on 4 October. I didn't note this at the time but David Irving made the following observation on his own website the same day (I won't provide a link to a racist's site, but you can take it that I'm quoting Irving accurately and in full):

October 4, 2007 (Thursday) Windsor (England)

Oliver Kamm has blithely libeled one of my fans in his online blog. The fan asks me for advice, and I advise him what protocol to follow. Kamm threatens him in his last lines: "I should give you due notice that if any costs are incurred by me as a result of your behaviour, then I shall immediately apply for an award of those costs against you."

Kamm is wrong. His newspapers lawyers may well advise him to apologise ("make amends") before things get worse. His behaviour is truly odious.

My gratification at being described as odious by a Holocaust denier is alloyed only by my wonderment at (a) his belief that the site you're reading is an arm of a newspaper and that my lawyer is that newspaper's agent, and (b) the stupidity of his declared fan, Jonathan Burgess, who I had understood was objecting to my having identified him as such. There seems little more I can say except that Jonathan Burgess is a follower of David Irving and a racist, and I cordially advise him to disappear once more into that diseased intellectual milieu.

Brown's woes

The principal domestic political story of the day is that, as The Sunday Times puts it, "Gordon Brown’s ratings in freefall":

Today’s YouGov poll of almost 1,500 people for The Sunday Times shows that the Tories are in their strongest position for more than 15 years with a 13-point lead. They are on 45%, compared with 32% for Labour and 14% for the Liberal Democrats. A month ago the figures were 41% for the Tories, 35% for Labour and 13% for the Lib Dems.... The poll also shows an unprecedented drop in Brown’s personal ratings. At the height of the Brown “honeymoon”, in August, the prime minister had a net approval rating of 48%, the difference between those saying he was doing a good job and those saying he was doing badly. In October, when he was agonising over whether to call an early election, his approval rating was still a healthy 30%. But it dropped to minus 10% last month and is down to minus 26% this month.

In The Sunday Telegraph, Martin Bright of The New Statesman has an interesting piece on how the PM is losing the support of the Left:

At Westminster the sense of doom is growing, and no single analysis of the causes of Labour's troubles seems entirely satisfactory. At one departmental Christmas party, a senior minister was openly asking journalists why things had gone so badly wrong.

One Sunday correspondent suggested it was the "election that never was" and the minister just stood shaking her head. "It can't be just that," she said. "I don't know what it is, but it can't be just that."

She is right, of course. We in the media like to identify neat turning points in the political narrative, but it doesn't quite work like that. The reality is that each crisis since the autumn has eaten away at Brown.

But some PMs can withstand pressure. Mrs Thatcher was fortunate in her enemies - General Galtieri and Arthur Scargill - yet she weathered crises, notably the Westland affair, almost undaunted. Tony Blair incurred unpopularity over the Iraq War, yet remained the dominant figure not only in British politics but also in Europe. Brown is not a statesman of that type. The overwhelming impression is that, having pressed for the Labour succession for many years, he has no idea now what to do with it. Some of his decisions - making the Defence Secretary a part-time role, for example - scream incompetence regardless of external circumstances. He is a lame PM at the head of a weak parliamentary party. (It's always graceless to claim foresight, but I never thought Brown was a plausible alternative or successor to Tony Blair, whose departure from Downing Street I intensely regret.)

Brown has no route out of this from abandoning the "triangulation" of British politics, where Labour sweeps the centre ground and ensures it can't be outflanked on defence or crime. But note what Martin says:

One former Blairite cabinet member, speaking from self-imposed purdah, told me: "It was always thought that Blair was the man of compromise and Gordon the man of principle, but it was really the other way around."

The loyalist Blairites always believed Gordon Brown was essentially a man of straw. But the Left, even the hard Left of the party, reserved their judgment. Brown was mistaken, in my belief, not to return the compliment.

When John McDonnell ran against him for the leadership, Brown and his people were utterly dismissive. In fact, whatever you think of McDonnell's politics, he ran a good campaign. Grassroots meetings he held across the country were packed with activists from the Left of the Labour Party and also with campaigners on the environment, asylum and workers' rights.

Gordon Brown has all but lost these people now. Indeed, my understanding is that the coalition which gathered around McDonnell this year has effectively decided to give up on the Labour Party and the parliamentary route to change.

Brown is not the weighty figure his supporters, especially those at The New Statesman, maintained. There are uncanny parallels with John Major - who at least spent a few weeks as Foreign Secretary, and thereby had more experience of the top posts of government than Brown before becoming PM. But the measure of Brown's failure is that the strategy Martin recommends (and which would have shown people like me that our hopes for New Labour were unfounded) might have been available to him; you can imagine his adopting it, whereas to Tony Blair it would have been inconceivable. John McDonnell, as I noted here, is unfit even to be a member of a democratic political party, let alone its leader. A plausible Labour leader would not only have dismissed McDonnell and his supporters but also denounced him and everything he stands for. Brown won't take Martin's strategy or mine. There is no direction or ideological ballast to this PM, and no purpose to him either.

Calling Venezuela's referendum

I noted a fortnight ago that The Guardian had made an early and bad call on the result of the referendum in Venezuela that rejected President Chávez's constitutional proposals.

All credit to The Guardian, incidentally, for not having removed its report. I should in addition point out that the newspaper was almost certainly not to blame for its erroneous judgement. Index on Censorship has an illuminating and unfortunately unsurprising report on the official manipulation of information in Venezuela. Here is the story of that exit poll:

The most scandalous mix of censorship and outright lies came on election day. Even though filtering of any exit poll is strictly forbidden, Reuters received the results of three pro Chavez pollsters from governmental officials, and in a mad race for the scoop announced that the Si had won by up to six points. The Reuters report, promptly picked up by many newspapers, created a crisis in Venezuela as the CNE unnecessarily delayed announcement of the results until eight hours after polls closed, an incredible situation for an automated voting system. Eventually Reuters has been placed in the embarrassing situation of recognising that it made a mistake.

Finally, the secret ‘negotiations’ of election night while the government apparently pondered whether to recognize the results were leaked. This in turn generated quite a scandal through the week when a visibly upset Chavez tried to counter with a failed press conference where the No camp was compared to excrement. It was extremely worrisome to see the army commanders and the president of the Republic attack journalists such as Hernán Lugo Galicia, of the newspaper El Nacional for doing their job of reporting, while refusing to account for the inexcusable delays in publishing the results, let alone recognising the extraordinary abuses committed by the government during the electoral campaign.

The British press is thus more a victim than a functionary of this authoritarian and deceitful regime (and I've noted before how some fairminded and informed writers have been perplexingly prone to give Chávez a benefit of doubt that is not really present). There are two things it might usefully do in response: investigate and report more fully the abuses practised by Chávez's regime; and give proper credit to those campaigners for constitutional politics who have begun to assert themselves against this thuggish and verbally incontinent strongman. The New Statesman has been admirable and fair in its coverage; likewise the BBC and its reporter John Sweeney. The Guardian has in the recent past has been among the first to expose the depravities of supposedly progressive regimes, notably that of the genocidal xenophobe Slobodan Milosevic. I trust it will not be far behind in this case.

The joy of enemies

A relative of whom I'm inordinately fond said to me recently that, excepting a middle-aged couple by the names of Neil and Christine, he had never before had enemies. This happy state had altered, however, since and to the extent that his association with me had become known. I'm sorry for him but otherwise complacent. I've never been able to see the merit of blessing them that curse me, doing good to them that hate me, and (especially) praying for them that despitefully use me. I'm glad of my enemies, and at this time of year it seems to me particularly important to wish them ill.

How serendipitous, then, is the opportunity yielded by The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site. CIF has launched a (presumably light-hearted) straw poll on readers' choices for the best contributors to that site in 2007. One of the comments is by a reader signing himself Inayat. He makes a nomination in a category unspecified by the editors: "Worst: That warmongering bastard Oliver Kamm (sorry - I added that category myself)."

"Inayat" is Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain, a sinecurist whose talents were neatly encapsulated by Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair a few months ago: "A preposterous and sinister individual named Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain and a man with a public record of support for Osama bin Laden, was made a convener of Blair's task force on extremism despite his stated belief that the BBC and the rest of the media are 'Zionist controlled.'"

I've met Bunglawala just twice. The first occasion was on a public platform provided involuntarily by London council taxpayers. I was perhaps a little rough with him when he drew a risible analogy between the publication of the Danish cartoons and the Holocaust denial conference in Tehran. The second was at, of all places, the annual awards of the estimable campaigning organisation Index on Censorship. When Bunglawala rolled up, the journalist sitting next to me commented on the commendable latitudinarianism of an organisation that had resolved on inviting a supporter of censorship in addition to us who opposed it. I infer that recollection of the first such meeting stayed longer with Bunglawala than it did with me, in which case I am unfazed. Christopher's charges are so serious that you might suspect he exaggerates. Steel yourself, for he does not: Bunglawala has improvidently left a paper trail. Of such a man and at this season, as Hannah the mother of Samuel declaimed, my mouth is enlarged over mine enemies.

UPDATE: I am mistaken on one point. When Inayat Bunglawala attended the Index on Censorship awards this year, he was the guest not of Index on Censorship but of The Guardian, which was sponsoring a table. My thanks to Padraig Reidy, News Editor of Index on Censorship, for correcting me on this. Doubtless The Guardian was engaged in a more subtle campaign than I'm capable of in introducing Bunglawala to the merits of free speech, and I hope it will bear fruit.

The exploitation of Antony Flew

The New York Times Magazine carries a long and saddening article, entitled "The Turning of An Atheist", about the English philosopher Antony Flew. It's a fascinating read and I encourage you to stick with it. (I was sent the article by an old friend, Werner Cohn, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Werner was a Jewish Berliner in the 1930s, and is an indefatigable analyst and opponent of political extremism; he has lately started an interesting blog on that subject.)

Flew, now well into his 80s, was in the last century one of the leading academic proponents of atheism. The author of the NYT profile, Mark Oppenheimer, writes:

[Flew's] greatest contribution remains his first, a short paper from 1950 called “Theology and Falsification.” Flew was a precocious 27 when he delivered the paper at a meeting of the Socratic Club, the Oxford salon presided over by C. S. Lewis. Reprinted in dozens of anthologies, “Theology and Falsification” has become a heroic tract for committed atheists. In a masterfully terse thousand words, Flew argues that “God” is too vague a concept to be meaningful. For if God’s greatness entails being invisible, intangible and inscrutable, then he can’t be disproved — but nor can he be proved. Such powerful but simply stated arguments made Flew popular on the campus speaking circuit; videos from debates in the 1970s show a lanky man, his black hair professorially unkempt, vivisecting religious belief with an English public-school accent perfect for the seduction of American ears. Before the current crop of atheist crusader-authors — Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens — there was Antony Flew.

I recall seeing one of those BBC television interviews in the 1970s. Flew was arguing against the notion of God as Designer. He gave the example of the liver fluke, and asked rhetorically whether the theist regarded the parasite as an instance of divine handiwork. I recall this partly because I was and remain flummoxed by the question, and also because I've never come across anyone else refer to a liver fluke in public debate. (I much later read Flew's book on Darwinian Evolution, which makes the same point.)

But the NYT profile continues:

Flew’s fame is about to spread beyond the atheists and philosophers. HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins, has just released “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind,” a book attributed to Flew and a co-author, the Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese. “There Is a God” is an intellectual’s bildungsroman written in simple language for a mass audience. It’s the first-person account of a preacher’s son who, away at Methodist boarding school, defied his father to become a teenage atheist, later wrote on atheism at Oxford, spent his life fighting for unbelief and then did an about-face in his old age, embracing the truth of a higher power. The book offers elegant, user-friendly descriptions of the arguments that persuaded Flew, arguments familiar to anyone who has heard evangelical Christians’ “scientific proof” of God. From the “fine tuning” argument that the laws of nature are too perfect to have been accidents to the “intelligent design” argument that human biology cannot be explained by evolution to various computations meant to show that probability favors a divine creator, “There Is a God” is perhaps the handiest primer ever written on the science (many would say pseudoscience) of religious belief.

I had previously read of Flew's apparent acceptance, not of formal religion, but of the notion that the Universe evinces an intelligence. He is a deist rather than a theist. Oppenheimer's account gives a background to that intellectual shift that I had not known. Flew is clearly of declining mental powers. Interviewed by Oppenheimer, he is unable to give an account of the book that names him as co-author. Oppenheimer writes a slightly feeble concluding paragraph, but the rest of the article is a model of journalistic inquiry. I would add three points.

Oppenheimer reveals that Flew - on his own admission - didn't write the book. Oppenheimer allows nonetheless that "the section on Flew’s childhood could hardly have been written without his cooperation". Well, it could have been. I haven't read this latest book attributed to Flew as co-author, and perhaps it does indeed contain previously unpublished recollections; but Flew has before now written an elegant autobiographical account of his intellectual development. It's called "A Philosopher's Apology"; it was written in 1996 and it forms an afterword (pp. 183-208) to Flew's Philosophical Essays, 1998. In it, Flew writes at length of his childhood in the 1930s and 1940s, his schooldays, and his teenage thoughts that first led him to atheist and "mortalist" conclusions.

Secondly, the article refers briefly to Flew's right-wing politics. I have never held any brief for these, but I'm particularly sorry to read that Flew has now embraced the xenophobia of the UK Independence Party. In the 1996 essay that I've referred to, he comments that he joined the Conservative Party after Mrs Thatcher became leader (i.e. sometime in the mid-1970s) but "shall certainly not continue a member unless the leadership takes an uncompromising stand against the project of making the UK one of the future United States of Europe". So it has clearly proved. As a political activist, Flew was always liable to overstate even when he had a point. (In the same essay, for example, he describes the historian E.P. Thompson - with whom he'd been at school - as "labour[ing] for the pro-Soviet 'peace' movement". Thompson was wrong on the issue of nuclear disarmament, and the neutralist course he urged was certainly in the strategic interests of the Soviet Union, but it's unfair and inaccurate to say he worked for the pro-Soviet wing of the peace movement.) But as a political philosopher, Flew had important things to say. (See, for example, a short essay on "Communism: The Philosophical Foundations", in his 1993 book Atheistic Humanism.) There is pathos in the spectacle of a noted scholar whose mental gifts are now severely impaired and who spends his declining years railing against immigration and Europe.

Thirdly, there is a dispiriting parallel with an earlier and very great thinker, whom Flew has written much about. In his last decade, Bertrand Russell devoted himself to the anti-war and anti-nuclear cause, with disastrous effects on the quality of his prose. As A.C. Grayling put it in a critical review of the second volume of Ray Monk's biography of Russell a few years ago:

To readers who remember Russell's last years it will come as no surprise to have it confirmed that his apparent nonagenarian metamorphosis into a revolutionary follower of Che Guevera was the result of his name being misused by his egregious "secretary" Ralph Schoenman, an intemperate supporter of fiery causes. Russell was bitterly opposed to the Vietnam war, but the crude propaganda about it that Schoenman had him sign was certainly not his.

I corresponded with Ray Monk at some length while he was writing this book - I couldn't and don't claim any expertise about Russell, but I gave some political background to the issues of international relations of that time - and was privy to one or two of the remarkable discoveries he made about this aspect of Russell's life as a public intellectual. I think the book is outstanding, and confirms what had long been believed about the Russell-Schoenman relationship. In his memoirs (Out of Step, 1987, p. 380), the late pragmatist philosopher and socialist Sidney Hook, a friend of both Flew and Russell, quotes a revealing story as recounted by the writer Ronald Clark:

Russell intervened in the Cuban crisis [of 1962] which threatened to bring America and Russia to the brink of nuclear war. As an American blockade of the island appeared imminent a statement was issued to the press from [Russell's home] Plas Penrhyn. As typed it began, "Mankind is faced tonight with a grave crisis." This was altered in Schoenman's hand to: "It seems likely that within a week you will all be dead to please American madmen." On Russell's suggestion, "a week" was altered to "a week or two", but otherwise the statement was issued as Schoenman had altered it.

At least one could say that Russell's intentions, if not his words and thoughts, were vaguely discernible in all this. The parallel is that Antony Flew's name appears to have been appropriated for the intellectually crude sentiments of others - but in his case, in the service of views that make a mockery of his life as a thinker and public intellectual. It's a crying shame.

Religion and the public square

Charles Krauthammer writes in The Washington Post of the surfeit of religion in the Presidential campaigns:

This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it's only going to get worse. I'd thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN-YouTube debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, "Do you believe every word of this book?" -- and not one candidate dared reply: None of your damn business.

Do read the whole thing. As Krauthammer says, it's not as if his statement of the obvious is novel. But it is alarmingly rare to come across a straightforward and uncompromising statement of the meaning and rationale of the constitutional requirement that there be no religious test for public office. The principle has been tested and reaffirmed. The Virginia initiative of 1788 proposed amending the wording to "no other religious test shall ever be required than a belief in the one only true God, who is the rewarder of the good, and the punisher of the evil". It failed, yet its pernicious and plainly false premise that a free society requires a religious foundation - as opposed to the inviolable freedom of citizens to believe in any god or none - is with us still.