Once again, I am feeling annoyed by the religious (which seems to be my default position at the moment). There was a report in several papers yesterday about plans for the NHS to encourage the use of longer-lasting and possibly more effective forms of contraception (implants etc) (See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8122-1843486,00.html). It also reported the objections of LIFE (the anti-abortion group) on the grounds that this encouraged promiscuity. Once again, we see the enthusiasm of (some) Christians for trying to regulate women via fear of the consequences. (The same tone was visible in objections to possibly giving girls a vaccination against cervical cancer - see http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,1587040,00.html).

Why aren’t such groups speaking out against treatments for lung cancer (which may encourage people to take up the vice of smoking) or improved safety in cars (which may encourage reckless driving)? Because, I’m afraid, they’re obsessed about sexual behaviour and especially female sexual behaviour, which somehow leads them to think nostalgically about the days of bastardy and back-street abortions. If you are opposed to abortion, you should rationally encourage the use of reliable contraception. If you think children are better not brought up in single parent families or being unwanted, you should at least consider allowing some limited abortion. If you think sex is only permissible when it is open to procreation, you should tell the sterile or the post-menopausal to be celibate. (Andrew Sullivan has an interesting article on the contradictions of the Catholic views on this: http://www.andrewsullivan.com/homosexuality.php?artnum=19960318). [I once was at a Lent Group that was discussing AIDS and where the participants were nearly all Catholics - I was tempted to make some comment about the Pope’s opposition to condoms on the grounds that all intercourse should be open to the transmission of death. Fortunately, I resisted]. Christians should make a positive moral stand on why the good of sex should be kept inside marriage, not just be trying to exploit fears about disease and pregnancy. (And what does it say about the Christian attitude to children, if religious groups want them to be forced on women as harmful consequences, not positively wanted?) Christianity doesn’t say ‘you shouldn’t covet your neighbour’s possessions because the stress may lead you to a heart attack’; they should take a more spiritual view of why sex should be used properly.

In yesterday’s Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1598008,00.html) there is an interesting, but I think slightly confused article by the playwright David Edgar opposing censorship of the arts, particularly the performing arts. It seems to me that Edgar is arguing that art has (or should have) a moral effect, i.e. that it changes the way people feel (not just think intellectually) about particular issues. (He says near the end: ‘The awful truth is that the response most great writing about wickedness provokes in us is neither “Yes please,” nor “No thanks,”but “You too?”’). I’d agree with his seeing a moral purpose in art, but it’s then somewhat contradictory to object when people argue for censorship, since most of the calls for censorship he quotes are by people whose argument is that particular works do indeed have a moral effect, but a harmful moral effect. (There are a few cases he quotes where the emphasis of the complaint is more about offence then strictly effect (e.g. Jerry Springer the Opera and Behzti (a play which offended many Sikhs), but most of the opposition is about harmful moral effects. [Incidentally, one positive suggestion concerning the proposed religious hatred laws is that the law of blasphemy should be repealed at the same time, (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,1597360,00.html) since this is sometimes used as a backdoor way of protesting about the offence done to religious feelings].

Once you accept the premise that a text/piece of work has a moral effect, then even if you accept free speech, there is likely to be some point at which you feel that the harmful moral effect created outweighs this. For example, the Guardian itself imposes limits on how it reports suicides (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,973952,00.html), since there is evidence that detailed reports of suicides (in particularly descriptions of effective methods, may encourage this). Should a newspaper (or an author) just ignore these concerns, since this is not doing anything illegal? If a hypothetical play was written which glorified teenage suicide, which suggested it was noble and courageous to do this and that those who did not commit suicide were conformist cowards, which showed on stage details of how to commit suicide, would that be an acceptable use of free speech? If not, then the question becomes where the line is drawn. Similarly, I am unhappy that Edgar drags in Catherine McKinnon’s discussions of the effects of pornography. She may be wrong that watching a film about a gang-rape is exactly the same as watching an actual gang-rape, but it’s equally unrealistic to think that there are no similarities in the moral effect.

I think that an author could write a good play about teenage suicide (or gang rape) and that there shouldn’t be any taboo subject. However, it seems to me be arrogant for the author/creator to expect that they should have an absolute right to create anything. This would be justified only if they were infallible both about the moral effect they planned to create and the one the audience actually received (since there’s always this gap between intention, realisation and transmission of a message). And artists aren’t infallible. One of the examples of censorship he quotes is the artist Marcus Harvey, who did an artwork about Myra Hindley, the notorious child murderer. Harvey’s work shows the iconic image of Myra Hindley made up of children’s handprints. This seems to me to be a work that trivialises the issue of child murder without having any countervailing interesting moral effect. There are interesting things you can say about Myra Hindley, such as why that image is used in every discussion about her, (symbolically suggesting fixing her forever in her past crime), or why her crimes are thought to be so much worse than any other murders of children, but this picture doesn’t address them. It’s at the conceptual level of ‘here’s a picture of a dot made up of a lot of smaller dots’, but throwing in child murder to make it more exciting. (I may, of course, be wrong about the artist’s proposed moral effect, but if so, his art isn’t communicating it, which shows he’s not a good judge of that either).

Thus, while I think David Edgar is right to argue that there is an increasing tendency to censorship which should be opposed (particularly the view that no-one should touch some subjects), it seems to me that he needs to think rather harder about what the limits of censorship should be, and to make sure that he’s not just defending the right of mediocre artists to shock.

I don’t normally write about TV, but there was an episode of the drama ‘House’ I saw yesterday that raised an interesting point about gender. (The episode was Love Hurts - see http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show.cgi?show=151 for recaps). Cameron, who is House’s subordinate and in love with him, returns to her job on the condition that House gives her a date. He attempts to put her off any possible relationship during the date by telling her that she just sees him as a project, somebody to be fixed. (The episode thus manages the difficult task of suggesting that Cameron is not actually an idiot for wanting the relationship. It’s not that she wants a relationship with House when He’s Just Not That Into Her. Instead what she (and the viewer) learns is that a) House is not just smart but emotionally intelligent enough to realise the underlying psychology and b) by implication, has too much integrity to exploit a well-meaning woman for his own sexual and other benefits. [The alternative explanation to his refusal is that even in exchange for sex with a beautiful woman he is not prepared to put up with being surreptitiously psychoanalysed and improved, but that’s properly a pathology too extreme to seem likely to the viewer/Cameron]. So while House’s comments may put off Cameron in the short term, in the long term it confirms the basis for the whole Project, that there is something worthwhile in House, if it could just be brought out.)

The gendered point this got me thinking about is how much more common this idea of redeeming someone seems to be for women rather than men. (It’s not unknown for men - I think House is also his friend Wilson’s project (whether or not Wilson is gay). This gives parallels to what someone has plausibly suggested is the model for House: Sherlock Holmes. (In that case Wilson is Dr Watson, while incidentally Chase is probably Lestrade or one of the other policemen, always trying to compete unsuccessfully in his detective work with Holmes and never getting one over him).

But there are still relatively few stories about men trying to redeem initially unpromising women. (The only immediate exception I can think of is the Taming of the Shrew). What you do sometimes get is the Pygmalion myth (as taken up by George Bernard Shaw) of a man attempting to produce the ideal woman, but that normally focuses on the education of a woman as yet unformed, rather than the re-education of a morally disordered woman. (This training of girls has parallels as far back as Plutarch’s advice to husbands and wives, and is apparently also in one of Rousseau’s novels.)

On the other hand, women trying to redeem/reform/improve unpromising men are almost a whole genre (as Tom Lehrer showed when he parodies ‘Can’t Help Loving Dat Man’ with ‘She’s Just My Girl’). Beauty and the Beast, princesses kissing frogs, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights etc. There are an awful lot of real life examples as well. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe this has deep roots in motherhood. It is traditionally, after all, mothers who have to deal with the commonest and greatest Project: turning an anti-social baby/toddler (but one of enormous potential, which makes the whole job worthwhile) into a beautiful adult. This role of moral education was even stronger historically, before early education was more and more taken over by professionals. (It’s very clear, for example in Dhuoda’s Manual, which a Frankish noblewoman wrote for her son William, aged 16). So since there is a very strong cultural/social tradition (I wouldn’t want to go so far as say psychological/evolutionary) of this action by women, then it may get carried over into women’s relationships with adult men. I’d be interested in any thoughts on whether this theory holds up, or any other reasons why this pattern happens?

I’ve been interested since my trip to the US about the current arguments on the relationship between church and state there. Then I came across this article by Antonin Scalia (a Catholic Supreme Court judge) on the death penalty: God’s justice and ours.

My first response as a Christian was to think ‘with friends like this who needs enemies’? When a prominent Christian writes, the following, it’s hard not to start agreeing with the atheists that religion is intrinsically wicked:

Indeed it seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe and has least support in the church-going United States...Besides being less likely to regard death as an utterly cataclysmic punishment, the Christian is also more likely to regard punishment in general as deserved.

(Scalia’s views, of course, aren’t shared even by all Catholics: as he admits, the papacy is now against the death penalty. There are also other articles in First Things which take a different Catholic line: see e.g. http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0508/articles/bottum.html).

My second response is that Scalia seems to have contradictory views about the enduring values of the Constitution and the Bible. He says: ‘the Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead - or as I prefer to put it, enduring’. He thinks that the Constitution must be interpreted as it was in the eighteenth century. But he then goes on to justify capital punishment by quoting St Paul’s letter to the Romans 13: 1-5:

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: for he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.

Now the one thing you can be sure about in that passage is that Paul is not talking about Christians inflicting the death penalty. The concept of Christian temporal rulers or a Christian state was utterly alien to Paul (as to everyone pre-Constantine); it is pagan rulers who are talked about there. And there is no evidence that Paul wanted these kind of disciplinary powers for the one Christian ‘power’/‘authority’ there was at the time: the church. The only sanction/punishment he talks about is exclusion from the community of believers: nowhere in the New Testament is it said that the church should have the power to wield the sword, but is constrained at the moment since it is part of the Roman Empire. You can argue by analogy for Christian support of imprisonment from the New Testament (as an extension of social exclusion for wrongdoers), but I don’t see how you can argue from it (as opposed to the Old Testament), for capital punishment.

(Scalia is right, of course, that church views changed fairly early on. Augustine, for example, accepted the sinlessness of inflicting the death penalty: I’m not sure if earlier Fathers did. But for a strict constitutionalist such a later intepretation of Christianity is invalid. Incidentally, how on earth can a strict constitutionalist be a Catholic (rather than a Protestant)? The Catholic Church has clearly not adhered to such Biblical doctrines as episcopal marriage, for example).

My final thought is that even for a strict Catholic Scalia’s logical argument for the Christian acceptance of the death penalty is wrong. He says:

for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal: it is a grave sin, which causes one to lose his soul. But losing this life, in exchange for the next? The Christian attitude is reflected in the words Robert Bolt’s play has Thomas More saying to the headsman: “Friend, be not afraid of your office. You send me to God.” And when Cranmer asks whether he is sure of that, More replies, “He will not refuse one who is so blithe to go to Him.” For the nonbeliever, on the other hand, to deprive a man of his life is to end his existence. What a horrible act!

Let’s look a little harder at the logic of the various cases. There is a distinction between believers and non-believers (I’m adopting Scalia’s terminology, because he might not include all Christians in this) in what they think happens after death. Believers, presumably, know that there is a Heaven (to which believers go when they die and which is a place of eternal bliss) and a Hell (to which non-believers go when they die and which is a place of eternal torment). Non-believers, however, believe that after death there is non-existence.

How does this affect a Christian’s response to a murderer? A non-believer who has murdered someone has intended to send them to non-existence. If the non-believer is executed, however, he will go to Hell, which is worse than non-existence. By lex talionis (the Old Testament precept that an eye for an eye is the maximum penalty that can be inflicted), the Christian state or judge cannot inflict on him a worse injury than he inflicted on another. It can, however, imprison him for life. That would give him the fullest opportunity to repent, convert and thus ensure he went to Heaven. (By contrast, any imposing of the death penalty, however slowly it may come, unnecessarily increases the risk that he will die without conversion and thus his soul be lost).

What about the believer who murders someone? (Even believers are sinners and so may fall into sins). If he knew his victim was a believer he intended to send him to Heaven. If he knew his victim was an unbeliever, he intended to send him to Hell, or was reckless about sending him to Hell. In this case, the Christian state can justify using the death penalty. Once the believer has had a short period of time to put himself right with God (by confession, acknowledgement of God or the like), he is again redeemed and justified. [Scalia’s comment that murder cause one to lose one’s soul is ridiculous - the Christian message is that any sinner can be redeemed]. He will therefore go to Heaven when he dies and so by lex talionis the death penalty is not an excessive punishment against him. (He could of course choose not to put himself right with God before he died, but that would be his own free will decision and he would then voluntarily be accepting Hell).

By this argument the Christian State (or the Christian judge) is justified only in inflicting the death penalty on believers, not on unbelievers. (The practical objection to this, of course, is that all murderers would promptly claim that they are non-believers to avoid execution. However, almost by definition, any believer who renounces his eternal hopes for such temporal reasons cannot really have been a believer after all.) QED.

There has been a lot of recent interest in the media about a study which claimed to show that modern religious societies were more socially dysfunctional than non-religious ones. (See e.g. George Monbiot). The full text of the study (Gregory S. Paul, ‘Cross-national correlations of quantifiable societal health with popular religiosity and secularism in the prosperous democracies’, Journal of Religion and Society 7 (2005)) is available on the web (see http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html). I thought I’d had a look.

Bloggers have already been suggesting it’s a sloppy/flawed study (see e.g. http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/10/4/17430/4632). I’d go further. It’s a study with a lot of flaws, most of which mysteriously seem to help prop up Paul’s argument: in other words, it’s very biased. Here is a selection of the problems, as an example of how not to do research. Paul’s hypothesis (BTW) as set out in s9 is to investigate whether ‘faith in a creator or disbelief in evolution improves or degrades societal conditions’.

First of all, there’s the problem with the countries he chooses to look at. For example, he includes Japan, but it’s not at all clear that any of the measures of religiosity he uses are suitable for countries that have traditionally followed a non-Christian religion. One of them, ‘take the Bible literally’, is clearly not. Why does he take ‘England’ to mean ‘Great Britain excluding Northern Ireland’? Also, he includes one ‘second world European democracy’: Portugal. He doesn’t explain why Portugal is second world, (in contrast to Spain, for example), or even whether he thinks or he has evidence to believe it’s typical of second world countries. (The suspicion that Portugal has been included because it supports his thesis is high, since he doesn’t actually include data from it in most of the graphs, as far as I can make out).

Secondly, there’s the question of the measures he chooses to measure social dysfunction. These are: homicides (fig 2), youth suicide rates (fig 3), under-5 mortality (fig 4), life expectancy (fig 5), teen and adult gonorrhoea rates (fig 6), teen and adult syphilis rates (fig 7), teen abortions (fig 8) and teen pregnancies/births (fig 9). He doesn’t give any indications of why these particular measures have been chosen, which makes one suspicious that the choice was intended to provide him with good statistics. In particular, I don’t see the logic of having 2 indicators of STDs, while not including any on divorce rates or illegitimacy or children being brought up in one-parent families. Similarly, while the use of life expectancy as a measure might be justified by claims that being religious makes you live longer, why include child mortality statistics? That surely measures the effectiveness of health systems far more than social dysfunction. Is it widely claimed by religious leaders (even US ones) that if a nation becomes more Christian fewer children will die?

Thirdly, there’s the fact that he doesn’t actually do any regression analysis, or even provide the statistics so someone interested could do them themselves. (I suppose you could use non-parametric ranking if you were really keen). So his ideas of correlation often rely on the ‘eye of faith’, as it were. I would say myself that some of the figures in which he sees correlation look very weakly correlated at best: for example fig 2 (on homicide) (where the correlation is improved considerably by the inclusion of Portugal) and figs 6-7 on STDs.

Finally, some of the discussions in the article suggest a willingness to blur facts to suit his views. For example, at s15 he says: ‘A few hundred years ago rates of homicide were astronomical in Christian Europe and the American colonies. In all secular developed democracies a centuries long-term trend has seen homicide rates drop to historical lows.’ I don’t know the historical trends for other countries but that is very misleading as a description of the UK. One recent study of secularisation (Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain) argues convincingly that secularisation in Britain wasn’t a long process, but actually happened relatively rapidly (in the 1960s). If you look at UK historical statistics on homicide rates, (see http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf) they declined from 1990-1960 and have since then been largely climbing (and are now higher than in 1900). In other words, that data suggests a substantial fall while Britain was still a Christian country, followed by a substantial rise since.

Paul does manage to show that compared to other developed countries the US is unusually socially dysfunctional and also that the US is unusually religious. He also confirms that secularisation in Europe does not necessarily lead to social collapse. But his attempts to show any greater correlation between religion and social dysfunction are deeply flawed, and that isn’t mitigated by claims that it’s a just an initial study. He could have done a good initial study, which raised questions; he chose instead to botch together statistics to support his views. That doesn’t help anyone, except those who are opposed to high academic standards.

An article in the Guardian a few weeks ago caught my eye, discussing scientific research into the causes of homosexuality. (It doesn’t seem to be on the website now, but there is a version at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2005/08/14/what_makes_people_gay/?page=ful. I hadn't realised that there had been so much progress, beyond simplistic ideas of finding a 'gay gene'. There are obvious scientific/ethical issues: Eve Sedgwick (in Epistemology of the Closet) reckoned that the problem with 'nature' ideas of homosexuality is the lurking prospect that it might be possible to eliminate/prevent homosexuality. And if fetal environment is key, down the line I can see a range of alarmist newspaper articles about how if a pregnant mother does X,Y or Z their child is more likely to end up gay. (As an aside, it was only when I was pregnant that I realised how frequent pregnancy scare stories are and how deeply unhelpful, because so vague/impractical. The worst when I was pregnant was one about how too much worrying was bad for your unborn child (see http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2002/stressedmums.htm). So to the natural worries about pregnancy, you then have to feel guilty about worrying).

I'm not sure about the wider significance of these findings, if they are confirmed. I suspect that it won't make much difference to religions/denominations that condemn homosexual activity, even if they accept the science. The theologians can still argue that a genetic/environmental predisposition to particular behaviour doesn't make it morally right. Though it would be good if it knocked on the head the idea of 'curing' homosexuality and claiming that gay people could deliberately change their orientation (as opposed to remaining celibate). It would also be helpful if it lessened concerns that gay people could ‘convert’/’corrupt’ others. (The best comment on the possibility of gay teachers ‘promoting’ homosexuality, incidentally, was from the comedian Mark Steel. He points out that he had teachers who spent 5 years of secondary school promoting algebra to kids and it had almost no effect, so what chance did a few odd remarks about homosexuality have?)

As a historian, one of the things that interest me is how much this new research goes against the prevailing trend of research on the history of sexuality, which follows closely a social constructionist line. In particular, it seems to me possibly a belated justification for John Boswell and his much maligned 'essentialist' views of gay people. I think Boswell, whose breakthrough book was 'Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century' (see http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/index-bos.htmlfor longer bibliography and discussion) has suffered from a lot of unfair criticism for using 'gay' for the Middle Ages. His definition of gay people as 'those whose erotic interest is predominantly directed toward their own gender' seems to fit very well with these scientific ideas, by concentrating on orientation/desires rather than acts. Boswell's formulation sidesteps the problem that in the Middle Ages there are a lot of clergy and monks who weren't (that we know) sexually active, but do nevertheless seem to have had gay sensibilities. The problem it introduces in return is deciding what counts as erotic. (There is a separate issue of whether Boswell was right in his interpretation of particular pieces of evidence, and in some cases he seems quite clearly wrong (e.g. on underestimating the significance of penitentials). But even if a lot of the detail in the book has been discredited, it's still a very important work just for the questions it raises, about whether Christian theology and attitudes about homosexuality have always and everywhere been the same).

So where does this leave historians who hold to the social construction of sexuality? (I would include myself among that category). I think for moderate social constructionists, like myself, it isn’t really a major problem. I would make a distinction between sexual actions and desires, which are in principle almost universal, and the social meanings given to them. So a man who likes having sex with other men would be thought of in Ancient Greece as either a manly man or a degenerate (depending on what forms the same-sex sexual activity took), in the Middle Ages as a wicked sodomite and in modern liberal circles as someone expressing his natural sexuality.

The bigger problem is for the more hardline social constructionists, who see homosexuality as invented in the nineteenth century (as Michel Foucault, David Halperin etc do). You can certainly argue that that is the first time that word is used, and the invention of the word was closely tied up with a new medical/psychological discourse that pathologised the ‘homosexual’. But if the latest studies are right, even though the idea of sexual orientation as being a key facet of one’s sexual behaviour is a recent classification, and one that brings in all kinds of baggage, it may nevertheless be a relatively accurate representation of reality. (I’m an old-fashioned historian in that respect - I believe there is some reality out there).

This week’s big puzzle in child psychology: when does a child learn how to play Hide and Seek properly? L likes playing Hide and Seek, but at not quite 3, she is hopeless at it. Her inability to hide ineffectively is in a sense understandable. I suspect it’s down to not yet having developed a theory of mind. I believe that studies of children have shown that it’s only at 3+ they develop the ability to realise that people don’t automatically all know the same things. So when L tells me beforehand where she’s going to hide, or ‘hides’ in a extreme obvious place, because if she can't see me, then I can’t see her, it’s because she hasn’t yet properly understood the difference between what she knows and what I know.

What I’m less sure about is why she also finds it so hard to do the seeking bit. I can go and hide in some fairly obvious places and she still won’t find me. I suppose part of it is due to a lack of concentration/systemising tendency. She hasn’t yet worked out, for example, that if someone’s hiding upstairs, you need to look through one room at a time. Some of it may also be due to lack of experience: she doesn’t yet know the sort of places one might hide. She’s better at finding me in places where I have hidden in the past, but she’s not yet good at generalising this knowledge. She will look behind the specific door I’ve hidden behind before, but not necessarily other doors. The stranger thing, is that she doesn’t yet seem to be good at observing differences. If I hide under a duvet or behind a curtain, I may not be directly visible, but I’m still making a fairly prominent outline. But she doesn’t seem to recognise that. Is her normal observation of a room or her memory of it so limited that she can’t remember that it looked different before? I suppose I could check this by rearranging the furniture in her room and seeing if she noticed, but that seems a rather drastic experiment. Maybe I should try and find out at what stage children start to be able to do spot the difference puzzles.

I finally got my doctorate last week, after the best part of six years (part-time) study. So I was peculiarly irritated to read two recent articles in the Guardian (by Mary Midgley and Geoff Dyer) decrying experts and specifically those who had doctorates. The complaint was the old one, about expertise narrowing the mind. This is rubbish. In the years I’ve studied for the masters and then the PhD., I’ve learnt more not just about the early Middle Ages (and my specific interest of masculinity and morality), but about archaeology, theology, contemporary gender issues and the principle of the Panopticon, to name just a few things. Perhaps in philosophy (like Mary Midgley) a very narrow topic is necessary for a thesis, but in history, you can certainly choose a topic broad enough to get most of a society in, if you’re inventive. And the interactions you get with other researchers, the subjects you have to teach on (I’ve given tutorials on early Islamic history, about which I knew almost nothing before an intensive read up), the books you have time to read and the lectures you have time to go to, all give opportunities to learn more. As for expertise making people unwilling to look beyond their own little furrow, I’ve no idea where that comes from. Perhaps it’s a recollection of Sherlock Holmes’ utilitarian attitude to knowledge, because it doesn’t seem to reflect the scholars I know. (Did Geoff Dyer actually ask whether his jazz expert had read Roland Barthes, or did he just presume he hadn’t?) One of the things that most struck me when I went to Oxford as an undergraduate (more than 20 years ago), was how broad the interests of my fellow students were. At my school I’d been thought very strange for studying mathematics and German for ‘A’ level; here, it was taken for granted that a physicist might be fascinated by Schoenberg or a theologian by learning Old English in his spare time. In contrast, when I was later in a job surrounded by a lot of students from redbrick universities/polys, although there were a lot who were very intelligent, I didn’t often find people with that same kind of wide-ranging curiosity.

I think this breadth of interests tends to be one of the marks of the best scholars, but it’s also combined with a depth of knowledge of specifics: the ability to remember the details of specific texts, an article you read a few years ago. And for this the doctorate is useful. It teaches you how to work with a familiar text and extract something no-one’s ever seen before; how to keep going through sometimes unrewarding material to find the interesting nuggets. I’m not saying that every scholar has to do one, but it is good training to produce a ‘masterpiece’ in the sense that a medieval apprentice did one: a substantial piece of your own original work, made to professional standards. I don’t see an obviously better alternative to the current system.

I came across an article on US Biblical illiteracy (see http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=5606&R=C6ED872E), which also has an interesting discussion of the US (and also England) tradition of believing themselves to be the Chosen People. There is currently an argument in the US about the extent to which the founders of the Republic in the eighteenth-century were actually motivated by Christianity, as opposed to vague deism, (see e.g. http://www.theocracywatch.org/separation_church_state2.htm), but the idea of the Chosen People certainly has been influential in many periods of history. My question is: is this a good thing? On the positive side, this sense of specialness preserved the Jewish people during the Diaspora in an amazing way. I also don't object in principle to the vision of America as a 'city upon a hill' (as pronounced by John Winthrop and later Ronald Reagan), in the sense of the US being a positive example to the world. (There is a problem if people comes to think that the US way is the only way, but that's a different matter).

But there is a big problem in how the concept of being the Chosen People affects relations with other tribes/nations/states. The Franks in the early Middle Ages believed they were the Chosen People and conquered large parts of northern Europe in wars, that were at least partly religious. I have a British book from the 1930s which discusses the British Empire and claims 'God permitted her [Britain] to conquer many heathen countries to facilitate the preaching of the gospel.' The Old Testament attitude to the nations around the Chosen People varies between two main commands of God: Israel must be kept isolated from foreign nations, lest they contaminate her or the foreign nations must be conquered (and sometimes genocidally destroyed). Compromise with other nations is almost always condemned. As a method for preserving a small, newly emergent religion it may have been necessary; as a policy guide for powerful empires/states, it's a disastrous idea.