Self-Deception

Are human beings especially prone to self-deception?

Arthur Schopenhauer – who alone of all philosophers, indeed almost alone among mankind, was
able to stare the truth about the human condition in the face. This, to be brief, is: you get older, and
sicker, and then you die. In the process you lose everything of value: first, the broad range of
possibilities that were open to you when young; then the love you so passionately felt, also when
young; then your slender waistline; then your sense of humour.

Life is like a false spring. The sun shines, it is warm, crocuses and daffodils bloom. Then suddenly it
gets freezing and wet again, and that foolish burst of delight at the thought that grey winter has
passed is shown for what it was. And yet: it is a rare individual, taking the figures in their due
proportion, who refuses to get out of bed in the morning (or does worse even than that) because of
these disappointments. The reason is: hope.

Ah, Hope! She was the last of the creatures to flutter from Pandora’s Box, preceded by all the evils
that afflict mankind. Was her presence there an act of kindness on the part of whoever filled that
box, or an act of additional malevolence? Either way, it is the eternal springing of hope, the crazy,
fact-denying, sustaining, deceiving, motivating impulse of hope, that keeps 95 per cent of the
world’s population believing that something better might yet happen, despite the slimmest of
evidence that it will.

Dr Johnson called second marriages ‘triumphs of hope over experience’. This, as we see, applies to
life itself. For my part, speaking as an optimist/idealist of the first water, I am glad that it is so. For
out of it come the music, literature, art and moments of ecstasy that make life worth living after all.
 Religion

There is an increasingly noisy and bad-tempered quarrel between religious people and non-religious
people in contemporary society. It has flared up in the last few years, and has quickly taken a bitter
turn.

In recent years all the major religions have again become more assertive, more vocal, more
demanding and therefore more salient in the public domain. Followers of Islam were the first to
push forward; protests against Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses were an early indication of what has
since become an insistent Islamic presence in the public square. Not willing to be left behind, other
faiths have followed suit. Sikhs closed a play in Birmingham, Hindus complained about Christmas
cards Christianising an Indian theme, evangelical Christians protested against Jerry Springer – the
Opera.

But it has not all been about protests. In Britain public funding has gone to Church of England and
Roman Catholic schools for a long time; now Muslims, Sikhs and Jews ask for public money for their
own faith-based schools, and receive it.

In the face of the growing volume and assertiveness of different religious bodies asking for
preferential treatment in the ways described, secular opinion has hardened.

There are two main reasons for the hardening of responses by non-religious folk. One is that any
increase in the influence of religious bodies in society threatens the de facto secular arrangement
that allows all views and none to coexist. History painfully shows that in societies where one
religious outlook becomes dominant, an uneasy situation ensues for other outlooks. At the extreme,
religious control of society can degenerate into Taliban-like rule, as has happened too often in
history.

The second reason why secular attitudes are hardening relates to the reflective non-religious
person’s attitude to religion itself. From the non-religious point of view, religious belief of all kinds
shares the same intellectual respectability, evidential base and rationality as belief in the existence
of fairies. This remark outrages the sensibilities of those who have deep religious convictions and
attachments, and they regard it as insulting. But the truth is that everyone takes this attitude about
all but one (or a very few) of the gods that have ever been claimed to exist. No reasonably orthodox
Christian believes in Aphrodite or the rest of the Olympian deities, or in Ganesh the Elephant God or
the rest of the Hindu pantheon, or in the Japanese emperor, and so endlessly on. The atheist adds
just one more deity to the list of those not believed in; namely, the one remaining on the Christian’s
or Jew’s or Muslim’s list. And he does so for the same reason as any of these do not believe in
Ganesh or Aphrodite.

And all this, it must be remembered, is happening against the background of atrocities committed by
religious fanatics, whose beliefs are not very different from the majority of others in their faith. The
absolute certainty, the unreflective credence given to ancient texts that relate to historically remote
conditions, the zealotry and bigotry that flow from their certainty, are profoundly dangerous: at
their extreme they result in mass murder, but long before then they issue in censorship, coercion to
conform, the control of women, the closing of hearts and minds.
Thus there is a continuum from the suicide bomber driven by religious zeal to the moral crusader
who wishes to stop everyone else from seeing or reading what he himself finds offensive. This fact
makes people of a secular disposition no longer prepared to be silent and concessive. Religion has
lost respectability as a result of the atrocities committed in its name, and because of its clamouring
for an undue slice of the pie, and for its efforts to impose its views on others.

Where politeness once restrained non-religious folk from expressing their true feelings about
religion, both politeness and restraint have been banished by the face that faith now turns to the
modern world, contradictorily using the computers and aeroplanes of modern science to assert its
ancient utter certainties.

This is why there is an acerbic quarrel going on between religion and nonreligion today, and it does
not look as if it will end soon.
Eccentricity

Some invention and novelty doubtless owe themselves to grey-suited men in committees, but the
pressures that generate conformism and conservatism in today’s intricately complex societies are
very great, not least because intricate complexity is so easily disrupted. That places a premium on
keeping the boat steady, on maintaining the status quo, on sticking to precedent.

In consequence, new ideas and practices, new things generally, tend to come from sources other
than grey-suited committees – from highly individual sources, from mavericks and eccentrics. And
that is why originality so often has a battle to be taken seriously; it has to break through conservative
barriers, overcome timidity, snobbery, uncertainty, and in most cases get itself a hearing and a
backer in a grey-suited committee before it can get what it needs – funding, usually – to fly.
Evil

The industrial murder of European Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War is an example of
evil; the crimes of Stalin against the kulaks, of Pol Pot in Cambodia, of the genocide, mass rape and
other crimes against humanity perpetrated in the Congo, are examples of evil. Alas, examples are
legion.
Progressive thought in the eighteenth century was far in advance of the social and political realities
of the time, but the thinkers who were in its vanguard were sure they were witnessing a new dawn
in human affairs. The revolutions in America and France, together with much that has happened in
Western history since then, have proved them right, even though fierce counter-Enlightenment
movements have contested its principles at every step.

As an historical phenomenon ‘The Enlightenment’ is the eighteenth-century movement of thought

that emphasised reliance on reason, sought to take a scientific approach to social and political
questions, was a champion of science itself, and opposed the clergy, the Church and all forms of
superstition as obstacles to human progress. Enlightenment thinkers promoted the idea of the rights
of man and correlatively opposed the tyranny of absolute monarchy and all unjust social systems
associated with it.

a key feature of Enlightenment thought, namely that it specifically opposed the monolithic
hegemonies of Church, state and ideology, arguing for pluralism and individual freedom in their
place. Monolithic hegemonies demand that everyone must believe the same thing, and must
conform and obey; the tyrannies of Nazism and Stalinism were precisely monolithic hegemonies in
this sense, and therefore were as far from being descendants of the Enlightenment as they could be.
Rather, Nazism’s roots lay in Romantic notions of race and its purity as the highest good to which all
must be subservient. And Stalinism was the same kind of juggernaut, using much the same kind of
methods – terror, oppression, show trials, execution – as the Inquisition in fifteenth-century Europe.

Today’s Enlightenment values take the form of a set of commitments to individual autonomy,
democracy, the rule of law, science, rationality, secularism, pluralism, a humanistic ethics, the
importance of education, and the promotion of human rights. These are not empty or abstract ideas
merely, because their realisation in individual lives makes a vast difference. If one thinks of what it
was like to live as an ordinary person in, say, the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and compares it
to the kind of life we can enjoy now, the impact of the Enlightenment on the structure and practice
of society can be fully appreciated – and, one is bound to say, admired.
Sport

What is so wrong about cheating in sport? Sport is just sport, after all, and why not use every means
to win?

The fundamental assumption of sport is that one person’s or one team’s natural endowments and
efforts are pitted against those of others, to determine who is swiftest, strongest or best in some
respect.

cheating in sport is a direct breach of faith with the assumption that competition is either or both of
two things: that it consists of unembellished nature pitted against unembellished nature, and that
the spirit of the game really matters. That is why cheating is so bad: it undermines true contest, so
that one does not really know who the real winner should be; and so it turns every result into a lie.

The prevalence of cheating has, in consequence, made sport a domain of suspicion. Regulatory
bodies have to test sportsmen and women for drugs, and sportsmen and women are under intense
pressure to perform: the race these days seems to be more between regulators and possible cheats
than between athletes on the field. And that is a great pity.