In the case of fear of fireworks, there might even be reason to think the opposite. Humans understand what fireworks are. Human children can be consoled with a verbal explanation: ‘It’s OK, darling, they’re only fireworks, they’re fun, nothing to worry about.’ You can’t do that with non-human animals.
Let’s not be killjoys. But fireworks are nearly as appealing if silent. And our present disregard of millions of sentient beings incapable of understanding what fireworks are but fully capable of dreading them, is utterly – albeit usually unwittingly – selfish.
AFTERWORD
I hope this essay doesn’t come across as too parochially British. It is only incidentally about Guy Fawkes’ Night. Fireworks pollute the sound waves of countries throughout the world, often in celebration of particular days such as America’s Fourth of July, or festivals such as the Hindu Diwali or Chinese New Year. And animals the world over are uncomprehending and terrorized.
* * *
*1 Non-British readers will need to know that the ‘gunpowder plot’ of 5 November 1605 was a Catholic plan to blow up Parliament and the Protestant King James I. A zealous Catholic convert, Guy Fawkes, was arrested guarding the barrels of gunpowder on the eve of the planned explosion. Every year on 5 November to this day, large bonfires are lit all over Britain, a ‘guy’ (a stuffed cloth effigy of a moustached man wearing a tall hat) is burned on top of each bonfire, and fireworks are let off. In the weeks before ‘Bonfire Night’ children traditionally parade their ‘guy’ around the streets, begging for money with which to buy fireworks: ‘Penny for the Guy, Mister?’ (although nowadays a penny wouldn’t buy many fireworks). Most British children are capable of reciting a nursery rhyme that begins, ‘Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot.’ I didn’t know the rest of the rhyme, so I looked it up. It includes the lines, ‘A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope; A penn’orth of cheese to choke him. A pint of beer to wash it down, And a jolly good fire to burn him.’ The Protestant enmity in the rhyme finds its echoes today in the slogans of the Orangemen of Northern Ireland, but nowadays we have to use the euphemisms Loyalists and Nationalists instead of Protestants and Catholics. Religion cannot be admitted as the motivation for murder. A version of this article was published in the Daily Mail on the eve of Guy Fawkes’ Day, 4 November 2014.
*2 I’m told that the same ‘spreading’ happens in America around the Fourth of July.
*3 Because the police couldn’t hear the difference between loud fireworks and bombs.
*4 As I argued in the previous article in this collection.
Who would rally against reason?*1
HOW HAVE WE come to the point where reason needs a rally to defend it? To base your life on reason means to base it on evidence and logic. Evidence is the only way we know to discover what’s true about the real world. Logic is how we deduce the consequences that follow from evidence. Who could be against either? Alas, plenty of people, which is why we need the Reason Rally.
Reason, as played out in the grand cooperative enterprise called science, makes me proud of Homo sapiens. Sapiens literally means ‘wise’, but we have deserved the accolade only since we crawled from the swamp of primitive superstition and supernatural gullibility and embraced reason, logic, science and evidence-based truth.
We now know the age of our universe (thirteen to fourteen billion years), the age of the Earth (four to five billion years), what we and all other objects are made of (atoms), where we come from (evolved from other species), why all species are so well adapted to their environments (natural selection of their DNA). We know why we have night and day (Earth spins like a top), why we have winter and summer (Earth is tilted), what is the maximum speed at which anything can travel (two-thirds of a billion miles per hour). We know what the sun is (one star among billions in the Milky Way galaxy), we know what the Milky Way is (one galaxy among billions in our universe). We understand what causes smallpox (a virus, which we have eradicated), polio (a virus, which we have nearly eradicated), malaria (a protozoan, still here but we’re working on it), syphilis, tuberculosis, gangrene, cholera (bacteria, and we know how to kill them). We have built planes that can cross the Atlantic in hours, rockets that safely land men on the moon and robot vehicles on Mars, and might one day save our planet by diverting a meteor of the kind that – we now understand – killed the dinosaurs.*2 Thanks to evidence-based reason we are blessedly liberated from ancient fears of ghosts and devils, evil spirits and djinns, magic spells and witches’ curses.
Who then would rally against reason? The following statements will sound all too familiar.
‘I don’t trust educated intellectuals, elitists who know more than I do. I’d prefer to vote for somebody like me, rather than somebody who is actually qualified to be President.’
What other than this mentality accounts for the popularity of Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, George W. Bush – politicians who flaunt their ignorance as a vote-winning virtue?*3 You want your airline pilot to be educated in aeronautics and navigation. You want your surgeon to be learned in anatomy. Yet when you vote for a President to lead a great country, you prefer somebody who is ignorant and proud of it, someone you’d enjoy having a drink with, rather than somebody qualified for high office? If you are such a voter, you will not join the Reason Rally.
‘Rather than have them learn modern science, I’d prefer my children to study a book written in 800 BC by unidentified authors whose knowledge and qualifications were of their time. If I can’t trust the school to shield them from science, I’ll home-school them instead.’
Such a parent will not enjoy the Reason Rally. In 2008, at a conference of American science educators in Atlanta, Georgia, one teacher reported that students ‘burst into tears’ when told they would be studying evolution. Another teacher described how students repeatedly screamed ‘No!’ when he began talking about evolution in class.*4 If you are such a student, the Reason Rally is not for you – unless you take the precaution of stopping up your ears lest a word of unwelcome truth penetrate.
‘When I am faced with a mystery, with something I don’t understand, I don’t interrogate science for a solution, but jump to the conclusion that it must be supernatural and has no solution.’
This has been the lamentable but understandable first recourse of humanity for most of our history. We have grown out of it only during the past few centuries. Many people have never grown out of it, and if you are one of those the Reason Rally will have no appeal for you.
That is the fourth time in this essay I have said something like: ‘The Reason Rally is not for you.’ But let me end on a more positive note. Even if you are unaccustomed to living by reason, if you are one of those, perhaps, who actively distrust reason, why not give it a try? Cast aside the prejudices of upbringing and habit, and come along anyway. If you come with open ears and open curiosity you will learn something, will probably be entertained and may even change your mind. And that, you will find, is a liberating and refreshing experience.
A hundred years from now, there should be no need for a Reason Rally. Meanwhile, unfortunately, the need is all around us and may become increasingly apparent in this election year.*5 Please come to Washington and stand up for reason, science and truth.
* * *
*1 The Reason Rally, in the National Mall, Washington DC, was first held on 24 March 2012, and I published the original version of this essay in the Washington Post to encourage people to attend. The rally was a great success. An estimated thirty thousand people stood, in the pouring rain, to hear speakers and entertainers, scientists and musicians. Four years later there was a repeat performance in the same massively impressive venue. I unfortunately had to miss it for health reasons, but I published (on RichardDawkins.net, 31 May 2016) a revised version of my Washington Post rallying cry, and it is this updated version that is reproduced here.
*2 See my introduction to this volume.
*3 In the 2016 UK referendum, prominent politicians leading the Leave E
urope campaign fired off remarks such as ‘I think people in this country have had enough of experts’ and ‘There’s only one expert that matters, and that’s you, the voter.’ These examples were quoted by Michael Deacon (Telegraph, 10 June 2016), who went on in satirical vein: ‘The mathematical establishment have done very nicely, thank you, out of the notion that 2 + 2 = 4. Dare to suggest that 2 + 2 = 5, and you’ll be instantly shouted down. The level of group-think in the arithmetical community is really quite disturbing. The ordinary pupils of Britain, quite frankly, are tired of this kind of mathematical correctness.’
*4 American middle-school teachers (of ten- to fourteen-year-olds) are especially vulnerable to this kind of unpleasantness. Unlike high-school science teachers, most of them don’t have science degrees and they may know too little about the overwhelming evidence in favour of evolution. Understandably they feel ill-equipped to argue, and therefore often stint the teaching of evolution or even avoid it altogether. My charitable foundation created, as one of its flagship enterprises, the Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science (TIES). TIES exists to equip middle-school teachers with the confidence to teach evolution. It is directed by Bertha Vazquez, herself a middle-school teacher of truly outstanding qualities. She knows the problems her colleagues face and she knows her evolutionary science. At the time I write this (December 2016), she and her staff of TIES volunteers have already conducted twenty-seven workshops for middle-school teachers in states including Arkansas, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Florida and Oklahoma, and the numbers are increasing all the time. The participants emerge buttressed with the confidence of reliable knowledge and supplied with material teaching resources such as PowerPoint presentations prepared by Bertha and her staff.
*5 I little realized quite how prophetic that sentence would prove to be.
In praise of subtitles; or, a drubbing for dubbing*1
A LEGEND OF UNCERTAIN provenance has it that Winston Churchill, addressing a French audience about lessons learned from looking back on his own past, inadvertently raised a laugh: ‘Quand je regarde mon derrière, je vois qu’il est divisé en deux parties égales.’ Most Anglos know enough French to get the joke. But alas, our knowledge doesn’t go much further than Churchill’s own. Whatever languages we may have learned at school – French and German in my case (as well as classical Greek and Latin, which probably influenced the way I was taught modern languages*2) – we may be able to read a bit, but our spoken language performance should mantle us in shame.
When I visit universities in Scandinavia or the Netherlands it goes without saying that everybody there speaks English fluently, and actually rather better than most native speakers. The same applies to almost everyone I meet outside the university: shopkeepers, waiters, taxi drivers, bartenders, random people I stop in the street to ask the way. Can you imagine a visitor to England addressing a London cabbie in French or German? And you’d have little more luck with a Fellow of the Royal Society.
The conventional explanation goes like this, and there’s probably something in it. Precisely because English is so widely spoken, we don’t need to learn any other language. Biologists like me tend to be suspicious of ‘need’ as an explanation for anything. A long-discredited alternative to Darwinism, Lamarckism, invoked ‘need’ as the driver of evolution: ancestral giraffes needed to reach high foliage and their energetic striving to do so somehow called longer necks into existence. But for ‘need’ to translate itself into action there has to be another step in the argument. The ancestral giraffe mightily stretched its neck upwards and so the bones and muscles lengthened and…well, you know the rest, O my Best Beloved.*3 The true Darwinian mechanism, of course, is that those individual giraffes that succeeded in satisfying the need survived to pass on their genetic tendency to do so.
It is conceivable that a student’s perceived career-need to learn English provided the causal mechanism of a redoubled effort in the classroom. And it is possible that we whose native language is English take a deliberate decision not to bother with other languages. As a young scientist I took remedial German lessons to help me participate in international conferences, and a colleague explicitly said, ‘Oh, you don’t want to do that. It’ll only encourage them.’ But I doubt that most of us are that cynical.
I think the following alternative explanation should be taken seriously if only because, unlike the ‘need’ hypothesis, it offers the possibility of doing something about it. Again we start with the premiss that English actually is much more widely spoken than any other European language. But the next stage in the argument is different. The world is continually bombarded by English (especially American) films, songs, TV shows and soap operas. All Europeans are daily exposed to English, and they pick up English in something like the way any child learns her native language. The infant doesn’t strive to satisfy a perceived ‘need’ to communicate. She effortlessly picks up her native language because it is there. Even adults can learn in something like the same way, although we lose part of our childhood ability to absorb language.*4 My point is that we Anglos are largely deprived of daily exposure to any language other than our own. Even when we travel abroad, we have a hard time improving our language skills because so many whom we meet are eager to speak English.
And the ‘immersion’ theory, unlike the ‘need’ theory, prompts a remedy for our monoglottish disgrace. We can change the policy of our television stations. Night after night on British TV we’ll see news footage of a foreign politician, football manager, police spokesman, tennis player, or random vox pop in the street. We are allowed a few seconds of French or German, say. But then the authentic voice fades and is drowned by that of an interpreter (technically not true dubbing but ‘lectoring’). I’ve even heard this happen when the original speaker is a great orator or statesman: General de Gaulle, say. That is lamentable for a reason over and above the main point of this article. In the case of a historic statesman, we want to hear the orator’s own voice – the cadences, the emphases, the dramatic pauses, the calculated switches from strong passion to confidential quiet. And we can get these though we may not understand the words. We do not want the expressionless voice of a technical interpreter, or even an interpreter who makes an effort towards a more dramatic rendering. A Laurence Olivier or Richard Burton might make a better orator than a General de Gaulle, but it is the statesman we want to hear. How sincere is he? Does he mean it, or is he just playing to the gallery? How is the audience reacting to his speech? And how well is he taking their reactions? Quite apart from all that, and returning to my main point, even when the speaker is no de Gaulle but an ordinary citizen interviewed in the street, we want the opportunity to learn French, or German, or Spanish or whatever it is, in something like the way so many Europeans pick up English every day from their television news.
The power of the ‘immersion effect’ is incidentally demonstrated by the memetic spread of American expressions to Britain. And the ‘upspeak’ of British and American youth, whereby statements sound like questions, can probably be traced to the popularity of Australian soap operas. I believe it is the same process, inflated to the level of language itself, which accounts for the proficiency in English of many European nations.
When it comes to the cinema, countries are divided into those that dub and those that subtitle. Germany, Spain and Italy have dubbing cultures. It’s been suggested that this is because the transition from silent films to talkies took place under dictatorships bombastically eager to promote the national language. The Scandinavians and Dutch, by contrast, use subtitles. I’m told that German audiences recognize the voice of ‘the German Sean Connery’, say, as readily as we recognize Connery’s own distinctive voice. True dubbing of this kind is a highly skilled and very expensive process, involving meticulous attention to lip-synched detail.*5
For feature films there may be respectable defences of dubbing, although I always prefer subtitles. But I’m in any case not talking about dubbing in the expensive, lip-synching world of feature
films and television drama. I’m talking about the daily ephemera of news broadcasting where the choice is between two cheap alternatives: subtitling on the one hand, or fade-out plus voiceover lectoring on the other. It is my contention that there is no decent defence of the voiceover policy. Subtitles are quite simply always better.
It’s ridiculous to doubt that there’s enough time to prepare subtitles for news stories. Almost all the news coverage we see is not live but rolling repeats, so there’s plenty of time to write subtitles. Even for live transmissions, and even setting aside (still imperfect) computer translation, speed of preparing subtitles is not a problem. The only remotely serious argument I have ever heard in favour of the voiceover is that blind people can’t read subtitles. But deaf people can’t hear voiceovers, and in any case modern technology offers serviceable solutions to both handicaps. I strongly suspect that if you ask TV executives to justify their policy you’ll get nothing better than, ‘We’ve always done it and it’s simply never occurred to us to use subtitles.’*6
There are those who say they ‘prefer’ voiceover to subtitles. My ‘General de Gaulle paragraph’ was, I suppose, an expression of personal preference the other way. But personal preferences vary and are often evenly balanced anyway. I want to make the case that frivolous personal preferences should be outweighed by serious educational advantages which go in only one direction. I strongly suspect that a change to a sustained subtitling policy would improve our language skills and go some way towards relieving our national shame.
Science in the Soul Page 32