Believing in Cliches

What Should I Believe? by Dorothy Rowe; Routledge, 2009, $34.95.

The author of this book was, according to Radio National, voted one of the fifty wisest people in the UK by Saga magazine in 2004 and was recently picked in another British poll as number seventy-two among the top 100 living geniuses in the world (Osama bin Laden came somewhat higher at forty-three).

Like many other basically anti-religious writers, the author, a well-known Australian-born psychologist and teacher of psychology who has written thirteen books, does not show great knowledge of church doctrine. She ventures, for example, into the area of theology known as theodicy without suggesting that she has heard of the term, which does not appear in the index.

The blurb claims: “It is possible to create a set of beliefs, expressed in the religious or philosophical metaphors most meaningful to us, which allow us to live in peace with ourselves and other people.” But is “creating a set of beliefs” so as to “live at peace with ourselves” actually the purpose of existence? There is a strain of thought, from Socrates to Solzhenitsyn, which actually holds truth to be important, even if sometimes leading to uncomfortable consequences.

Clichéd contemporary political and cultural mythology is confidently stated as fact: “The religion of most Australians continues to be sport. The greatest sin an Australian can commit is to fail to mow his lawn and to keep his car shiny clean, even when there is a drought.” This passage continues, with hectoring, mythologising, self-righteous whine:

By concentrating on how their team is faring, many Australians turn their minds away from the gigantic problem facing Australia right now—climate change … But none of this matters, does it, if you’re sure to go to Heaven when you die.

Still, when it comes to clichés, it’s hard to beat: “Jesus was a remarkable man.” (Certainly it seems he could carve loaves and fishes very delicately. Had he lived today he might have got his own celebrity chef program.) We are also told things hardly surprising, such as the fact that most people believe that their own values are in accordance with God’s, and at least one fact which I for one could have done quite well without knowing—that an institution exists called the Religious Experience Research Unit.

While the book is filled with sweeping judgments, this in no way inhibits the author from stating that: “The judgmental in all religions brings out the very worst in us.” We are informed that anti-evolutionary “fundamentalism” (correctly, I think, “literalism”) or “creationism” and belief in “Intelligent Design” are identical:

Christian Fundamentalists developed their own theory, Creationism, which states that the world was created by God a few thousand years ago … from 4000 years to around 6000 … In an attempt to avoid the derision that Creationism has attracted in the past, the name has been changed to Intelligent Design.

Actually, most believers in Intelligent Design accept that the universe is as old as modern astronomy indicates. What Intelligent Design holds is that this is not enough time for intelligent life to have evolved by chance, and also that the universe is too “finely tuned” to support intelligent life on Earth for this to be the product of chance. This cannot, I think, be called a scientific theory because it cannot be proved or disproved, but it is not literalist “Creationism”.

The Big Bang, incidentally, was first postulated accurately by an astronomer who was also a Catholic priest. This is not mentioned in this book and it seems implied or taken for granted that a monolith called “religion” and another called “science” are opponents, just as various simplistic anti-religious nineteenth-century texts had it.

Evangelical members of the Anglican Church, we are told, “regard homosexuality as the greatest of sins”. Actually, Christian doctrine holds spiritual pride as the greatest of sins.

While the author quotes Holocaust survivor Primo Levi at some length, she betrays little knowledge of the historical background: “Levi wrote about those who tried to survive in the Lager by being totally obedient. For some unknown reason they were called ‘muselmans’.” Actually the reason is not unknown at all: “muselman” means Muslim, that is, a follower of a religion whose name translates as “submission”, and which was supposed at the time, rightly or wrongly, to be predicated on fatalism: what happened was fate or God’s will. Further, those in concentration camps who “went muselman” did not try to survive by becoming totally obedient. On the contrary, they lost the will to live and became apathetic as to whether they survived or not. This is not exactly esoteric knowledge. Then we are told:

Weird stereotyping and the usual cultural self-hatred abound:

“Perhaps English speakers would prefer to deny that they ever experience glee and satisfaction when someone they know and perhaps envy suffers a reversal of fortune, whereas German speakers acknowledge this with their word Schadenfreude.”

Actually, English, which has a much larger vocabulary than any other language, has phrases like “malicious glee”, which means the same thing and takes the same number of letters to print.

For sheer ludicrousness it would be hard to go beyond: “Until the 1960’s Australian society was divided into Protestant and Catholic just as in Northern Ireland.” In Northern Ireland the death-toll from sectarian violence (with some KGB encouragement) was in the thousands. In Australia it was nil. In Northern Ireland Catholics and Protestants could not live in the same districts. In Australia Catholic and Protestant police would sometimes divide up the gaming and vice squads as their respective patches.

She doesn’t like psychiatrists, who practise “power-crazed cruelty”. As evidence of their badness she first quotes a description of a character in a biography in which the author claims:

Once, on the verandah, I saw his eyes wide with terror, his body trembling because he believed he could see a sheet of flame rise from the concrete and threaten to engulf both of us. He made wooden and iron crosses of wood to ward off evil spirits and, when he cut the bread, he first crossed it with a knife. He questioned me without respite about the meaning of almost everything I did—why I had put the fork, the matches, my shoes just there, why did I stand or sit here rather than there, why did I write or say or wear this rather than that, and so on, relentlessly.

Then, she says, this character “met psychiatrists who, like all psychiatrists then (and many now) thought he had a mental illness”. Good heavens! Why do you suppose they could possibly have thought that?

Then, ticking another box, we have her version of an episode in recent Australian history:

By then, racists had other objects for their hatred. [Australians] now could despise refugees from the Vietnam War and other world-wide conflicts which followed. The then Prime Minister, John Howard, did not extend his Christian charity to those who were not already Australian.

This is beyond mere inaccuracy. When Vietnamese refugees were arriving in Australia it was the Coalition government (and Malcolm Fraser, not John Howard, was Prime Minister) which admitted them. It was leading ALP and other Left figures—former Immigration Minister Clyde Cameron (who called the refugees “war criminals”), Labor immigration spokesman Senator Tony Mulvihill (who said they were brothel-keepers and black-marketeers), Brian Burke, Bob Hawke and of course Whitlam himself (“f***ing Vietnamese Balts with their political and religious hatreds against us!”)—who, with the various communist parties, the Darwin watersiders’ union and Nation Review, attacked them and attacked the government for admitting them. Australia’s refugee intake after Vietnam under a Liberal government happened to be one of the highest in the world. But perhaps this is part of creating a set of beliefs, expressed in the religious or philosophical metaphors most meaningful to us, which allow us to live in peace with ourselves.

The author was a speaker at the 2008 Melbourne Writers’ Festival. I am not surprised.