Last chance to vote for change at UCU

If you're a member of the University and College Union, you've only got a few days left in which to register your vote in the election for members of the National Executive Committee. Once again, if you want to end the dominance of the pro-boycott far left, and see genuine representation of the membership in the formation of policy, then please give your support to the candidates recommended here.

If you're in the South, you might want to consider voting for Dennis Hayes, founder of Academics for Academic Freedom, campaigner for free expression and outspoken opponent of the proposed boycott of Israeli universities. Dennis has also written about the 'therapeutic turn' in education, which I discussed here.

Any doubts about the need for a change in direction at UCU can be laid to rest by visiting its campaigns page. Naturally, there are some worthy and uncontentious names among the organisations supported by the union. But supporters of academic freedom might wonder how a higher education union, which ought to be fighting for freedom and pluralism in education, can endorse the pro-Castro Cuba Solidarity Campaign, or Hands Off Venezuela, which gives 'full support' to the Bolivarian revolution of demagogue Hugo Chavez. The UCU is also affiliated to the mis-named Stop the War Coalition, which recently sent a delegate to a pro-Hezbollah 'anti-imperialist' conference in Beirut.

To borrow a phrase: not in my name.

'Statesman' seeks to draft Miliband

I had a long train journey yesterday and, for the first time in ages, I actually bought a copy of the New Statesman. If you could overlook the odd bit of pilgering, there were one or two quite good things in it, including a reasonable feature on 'Red Tory' guru Philip Blond, whom I wrote about here. 

More significantly, the current issue carries a major interview with David Miliband, whom the NS seems (perhaps surprisingly, given the way he's been wrongly pigeonholed as a cardboard-cutout Blairite) to be endorsing as a candidate for the Labour leadership. With Gordon once again hitting a low in the opinion polls, can another round of leadership speculation be upon us?

Food for thought

I'm grateful to Bob for providing some excellent food for thought recently...

Firstly, for providing the link to this article by Roger Scruton on secularism, forgiveness, and irony.

And secondly for this post, drawing together a number of responses to the BNP's recent victory in Swanley.

When I get time, I'll try to post about both.

Giving science and secularism a bad name

One of the constant themes of this blog has been the misguided efforts of some religionists to construct a straw man, bearing labels such as 'militant atheism' and 'aggressive secularism', when much of the militancy and aggression in recent controversies has actually come from the faith camp. 

At the same time, I'm an admirer of neurobiologist Colin Blakemore, not only for his pioneering brain research and contributions to the public understanding of science, but also for his bravery in standing up to animal rights extremists. However, his article on science and religion in yesterday's Observer was a rather crude and superficial piece of polemic.

Arguing that religious faith may simply be a false model of reality, implanted in our brains, that has outgrown its evolutionary usefulness, Blakemore foresees a day when science makes religion redundant. He writes:

I'm dubious about those 'why' questions: why are we here? Why do we have a sense of right and wrong? Either they make no sense or they can be recast as the kind of 'how' questions that science answers so well.

Thus, in a couple of sentences, Blakemore not only abolishes religion, but does away with the need for philosophy, ethics, and probably the social sciences and humanities too. This kind of reductionism and determinism gives science - and secularism - a bad name.

More on this from Norm here.

From revolution to revelation

Because it's Friday, because they won the Outstanding Contribution to Music Award at the Brits the other night, and because the lyrics are kind of relevant to my recent posts about religion, the left, etc:

Lessons in terror

'Now children, for today's lesson on the Holocaust, I'd like you to put yourself in the position of a Nazi concentration camp guard and imagine his feelings as he sets off for another day's work in the gas chambers...'

Unthinkable? In the worst possible taste? I made it up, of course: but it's not much different from this, reported in today's Guardian:

Pupils are being asked to put themselves inside the minds of the 7/7 bombers to understand the motives of terrorists.

A government-endorsed teaching pack suggests the secondary schools ask pupils to do a presentation on the 7 July London terror attacks from the bombers' perspective.

The teaching pack, put together by the borough of Calderdale in West Yorkshire and displayed on the website of the Department for Children, Schools and Families, has now been withdrawn, thankfully. But what were they thinking?

Of course schools should encourage students to examine why historical events occur, but this exercise assumes that the 7/7 terrorists had motives that are susceptible to rational analysis. It seems designed to lead to the conclusion that there were 'understandable' reasons - whether poverty, discrimination or British foreign policy - behind their actions. It makes no allowance for the influence of irrational elements, such as fanatical devotion to a fundamentalist faith, or personal pathology, which will be outside the knowledge and understanding of most pupils.

The best response to being asked to 'understand' the feelings of fascists and terrorists remains that of air stewardess Gabriele von Lutzau (whom I quoted here), when asked if she would like to meet one of her former Baader-Meinhof captors:

I'm not interested in the background, in her history or in understanding her. This woman acted without a single moment of humanity. Her attitude was 'we are better than you. We're going the righteous way against Western imperialism.' Her distorted view of reality is not one I ever want to face again.

A matter of convention

You can read my cautious reservations about next week's Convention on Modern Liberty here. Olly and Will  are rather less tentative...