To be right on intellectual matters is of limited importance and interest to the outside world.

I'm an atheist but … I won't try to deconvert anyone

New atheism won't tolerate the freedom to believe in God. But life's far more interesting if we admit we might be wrong, right?

Philosopher and 'new atheist' Daniel Dennett speaking at the Hay Festival. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

Last week I interviewed the philosopher Daniel Dennett about new atheism, (the interview will be up on this site soon). I haven't got the tape myself, so I can't swear to the verbatim accuracy of the quotes I remember, but at one stage I said something to the effect that new atheism seems to me to reproduce all the habits that made religion obnoxious, like heresy hunting. He asked what I meant, and I gave the example of "atheists but", a species of which he is particularly disdainful. They are the people who will say to him and his fellow zealots "I am an atheist, but I don't go along with your campaign." I'm one of them.

He accused me of a kind of intellectual snobbery – of believing that I am clever and brave and strong enough to understand that there is no God, but that this is a discovery too shattering for the common people who should be left in the comfort of their ignorance.

This was indeed the classic position of the anti-religious philosophers of the enlightenment. It is what Voltaire believed, and Gibbon, and Hume. So it's not as if you have to be an idiot to think that atheism is medicine too strong for most people. And when you see the relish with which some atheists dismiss their opponents as "morons" you might even suppose that even some atheists are attracted by the idea that they are of necessity cleverer than believers.

But that's not in fact my position at all. The reason that I don't go around trying to deconvert all my Christian friends is that they know the arguments against a belief in God so very much better than I do. I can entertain the possibility that Christianity is true. They have to take it seriously. I don't believe I ought to love my neighbour, however much patience and humility this takes. I know that prayers go unanswered: they know their own prayers do.

I am not the person who has to bury the tramps, to comfort the parents whose children have died, or to read the Bible in the hope that it will yield meaning. I don't even have to believe that the Holy Spirit works through the college of cardinals or General Synod, so that their deliberations are in some way connected with the redemption of the world.

Only the last of those duties is a mark of moral or intellectual weakness. In fact, since I like my friends to be admirable, which often means cleverer and nicer than I am, my Christian friends don't seem to me stupid or cowardly. I know lots of Christians who are both, of course. But that's true of atheists and Muslims as well.

There is a general point here about the inadequacy of all theological opinions. The "but" in "atheists but" is a mark of humility, to be worn with pride. To be right on intellectual matters is of limited importance and interest to the outside world. Assuming – rashly – that you are an intellectual, it is very much easier to be right about ideas than to work out their implications and act on them in real life. But that's the bit that matters more, if only because failure to act on your own beliefs involves lying to yourself, and this will over time corrupt the capacity for thought.

The "but" is a way of saying that the times when we are right are mostly less interesting than the times when we are wrong. They certainly demand our attention less. It's a way of saying that we might be wrong, and actually meaning it. It's a demand to try to listen to what the other person means, rather than dismiss what they say just because it makes no sense.

It is, in short, a rejection of all the values of online argument so it really can't be wrong. Discuss.

Oxford University won't take funding from tobacco companies. But Shell's OK

If scholars don't take an ethical stance against corporate money, where's the moral check on power?

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 14 May 2013

Those in the strongest position to challenge climate change are instead lending it their ‘moral prestige'. Illustration by Daniel Pudles

In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published a piercing attack on the intellectuals of his day. They should, he argued in La Trahison des Clercs (the treason of the scholars), act as a check on popular passions. Civilisation, he claimed, is possible only if intellectuals stand in opposition to the demands of political "realism" by upholding universal principles. "Thanks to the scholars," he said, "humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honoured good." Europe might have been lying in the gutter, but it was looking at the stars.

But those ideals, Benda argued, had been lost. Europe was now lying in the gutter, looking into the gutter. The "immense majority" of intellectuals, artists and clergy had joined "the chorus of hatreds": nationalism, racism, the worship of power and war. In doing so, they justified and magnified political passions. Across Europe, scholars on both the left and the right had become "ready to support in their own countries the most flagrant injustices", to abandon universal principles in favour of national exceptionalism and to proclaim "the supreme morality of violence". He quoted the French anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel, who eulogised "the superb blond beast wandering in search of prey and carnage".

The result of this intellectual support for domination, Benda argued, was that there was now no moral check on the pursuit of self-interest. Rather than forming a bulwark against popular delusions, Europe's thinkers turned them into doctrines. With remarkable foresight, Benda predicted that this would lead inexorably to "the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world". This war would be genocidal in intent, and would not be stopped by any treaties or institutions. In 1927, these were bold claims.

I'm not suggesting an equivalence between those times and these. I'm summarising Benda to highlight a general principle: the need for a disinterested class of intellectuals which acts as a counterweight to prevailing mores. Racism, nationalism and war are only three of the many hazards to which society is exposed if that challenge should fail: if, that is, most scholars side with the soldiers or the sellers.

Today the dominant forces have changed. Now the weak state, not the strong state, is fetishised by those in power, who insist that its functions be devolved to "the market", meaning corporations and the very rich. Economic growth and the forces that drive it, whether they enhance or harm people's lives, are venerated. And too many scholars seem prepared to support the new dispensation.

Two weeks ago I castigated the new chief scientist, Sir Mark Walport, for misinforming the public about risk, making unscientific and emotionally manipulative claims and indulging in scaremongering and wild exaggeration in defence of the government's position. Since then I have seen his first speech in his new role and realised that the problem runs deeper than I thought.

Speaking at the Centre for Science and Policy at Cambridge University, Walport maintained that scientific advisers had five main functions, and the first of these was "ensuring that scientific knowledge translates to economic growth". No statement could more clearly reveal what Benda called the "assimilation" of the intellectual. As if to drive the point home, the press release summarising his speech revealed that the centre is sponsored, among others, by BAE Systems, BP and Lloyd's.

Last week, two days before CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million, Oxford University opened a new geoscience laboratory named after its sponsor, Shell. Among its roles is helping to find and develop new sources of fossil fuel.

This is one of many such collaborations. Last year, for instance, BP announced that it will spend £60m on research at Manchester University partly to help it drill deeper for oil. In the United States and Canada, universities go further: David Lynch, dean of engineering at the University of Alberta, appears in advertisements by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, whose purpose is to justify and normalise tar sands extraction.

As the campaign group People and Planet points out, universities help provide fossil fuel corporations not only with expertise but also with a "social licence to operate". Climate change is one of the great moral issues of our age, but the scholars in the strongest position to challenge the industry responsible are, instead, lending it what Benda calls their "moral prestige". Neoliberal economists, imperialist historians, war-mongering philosophers, pliable chief scientists, compromised energy researchers: all are propelling us into the arms of power.

In 1998, the vice-chancellors of the UK's universities decided that they would no longer take money for cancer research from tobacco firms. Over the past few days I have asked the Shell professor of earth sciences at Oxford, the university itself and the umbrella bodyUniversities UK to explain the ethical difference between taking tobacco money for cancer research and taking fossil fuel money for energy research. None of these great heads, despite my repeated attempts to engage them, were prepared even to attempt an answer.

So perhaps this is where hope lies: unlike Benda's scholars, these people have not yet developed a justifying ideology which permits them to excuse or glorify the compromises they have made with power. Perhaps we have not yet abandoned the redeeming hypocrisy of what Benda called "honouring good".

Who takes the harshest anti-welfare line? Those on state benefits

I talked to families directly affected by the cuts and many wanted benefits themselves – yet resented anyone else getting them

• 
• • Fern Brady
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 February 2013 16.57 GMT

'Many interviewees had internalised a Thatcherite every-man-for-himself mentality'. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

 

Recent polls indicate attitudes towards benefits recipients have softened as more information comes out about the impact of the changes to the welfare system. However, having just completed a project with the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust where I interviewed about 150 families who will be directly affected by the cuts, I found the majority held the kind of attitudes that make the Daily Mail's headlines look positively leftwing.

While the latest British Social Attitudes Survey reflected less support among the overall population for unemployment benefits, what it doesn't tell you is that these anti-welfare attitudes are often held by those most in need of a comprehensive welfare state.

At JRHT I was given the unenviable task of informing people how welfare changes would personally affect them. Often people on the housing scheme were due to lose several benefits – losing their out-of-work employment and support allowance (ESA) as well as having to pay extra money for unusable box rooms as part of the bedroom tax, for example.

Logically, I'd expect those on the sharp end of things to be pro-welfare. But if anything, many interviewees had internalised a Thatcherite every-man-for-himself mentality, wanting benefits for themselves but resenting anyone else getting a handout.

There are almost too many examples to list but the kind of attitudes I heard daily went along these lines: the disabled man thinks it's wrong the drug user down the road gets methadone. The drug user is outraged that the large family next door gets a spare room and hopes they are hit by bedroom tax. The large family is sick of elderly people getting big houses they don't need. The elderly woman hopes these large families are forced to stop having kids once the money dries up. On and on it went in a circle, anger constantly directed at other victims of the coalition government's Welfare Reform Act instead of the politicians and policymakers responsible.

On being told of the cuts, one young mum exclaimed "Good! That means her down the road'll get her money taken away" referring to a resident with severe mental health issues (people with less visible disabilities like hers were all too frequently dismissed as "chancers").

Another tenant vented her frustration that her permanently disabled brother was having his support cut while in the same breath bitterly complaining about fraudulent disability living allowance (DLA) claimants (I contemplated having the comparatively low statistics for fraud tattooed on my face to save time repeating it).

One of the sentences I regularly heard – and was no less startled by each time – was "We're not on benefits." On a daily basis I spoke to people who were in receipt of tax credits, child benefit, ESA, DLA, income support and housing benefit yet still told me matter-of-factly "we don't claim benefits". Over time I understood that what this really meant was that they were striving to define themselves as something other than the endless media presentations of "scroungers".

The value of influencing attitudes towards social inequality is deeply underestimated. If you manage to persuade everyone that poverty is a moral condition and claiming benefits is the symptom, it's a guaranteed way to ensure those handing out the money treat recipients as guilty until proven innocent. Shame is being employed as an ingenious tool to ensure people feel constantly stigmatised. And if you feel undeserving you're hardly going to be forthcoming about what you're entitled to.
This isn't just about votes. The less people believe they're entitled to this money – and they are entitled – the less likely they are to maximise their income through benefits. It's ideal for the government because it fosters an environment in which people are less likely to appeal when their claim is rejected and less likely to support those around them who may be suffering as a result of the welfare changes.

In a way you have to marvel at it. How do you get people to accept a policy that's inexcusably prejudiced against the most vulnerable in society? Make sure they take on the same mean-spirited, self-serving attitude that influenced that policy in the first place. Genius.

Investment Banking - An organised Scam masquerading as a Business

Let's end this rotten culture that only rewards rogues

The Barclays rate-rigging scandal has once again exposed a world where men and women with little skill and no moral compass can become very rich very fast

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • guardian.co.uk, Saturday 30 June 2012 21.00 BST

Barclays boss Bob Diamond. Photograph: Dylan Martinez/Reuters

 

Investment banking is an organised scam masquerading as a business. It is defined by endemic conflicts of interest, systemic amoral behaviour and extreme avarice. Many of its senior figures should be serving prison sentences or disgraced – and would have been if British regulators had been weaned off the doctrine of " light touch" regulation earlier and if the Serious Fraud Office's budget had not been emasculated by Mr Osborne. It is a tax on wealth generation and an enemy of honest endeavour – the beast that is devouring British capitalism.

The £290m fine on Barclays for rigging the interest rates in the inter-bank market is a defining moment. Not just for Barclays but for every bank with which it colluded. Barclays had the wit to come clean first – the first of many banks to suffer political and moral opprobrium for illicitly inflating its profits. It was also trying to protect itself from "reputational damage" – not wanting other banks' assessment of its creditworthiness to become public .

In the light of what we now know, that seems laughable. But between autumn 2007 and spring 2009, Barclays was fighting for its life as an independent bank. Had the news surfaced that other banks harboured such doubts about its credit standing, Barclays might have ended up being owned by the British taxpayer like RBS and Lloyds.

As the FSA reports, senior treasurers and the corporate affairs department were both keenly aware of those risks and anxious they should be averted. It beggars belief that the top of Barclays did not know what measures it had to take to pull through. It had to lie about the rates it was paying to borrow money.

This came easily because the practice had become habitual. The London interbank offer rate is set each day at 11am in all the key currencies lent and borrowed in London. Each major bank submits the interest rate it is paying to the British Bankers' Association and the average becomes the benchmark rate for most of the world's loans and financial contracts. For example, there are some $554tn worth of so-called interest rate derivative contracts whose price is linked to Libor – manufactured products whose alleged purpose is to hedge the risk of unexpected interest rate changes in a world of floating exchange rates and free capital movements.

In fact, there is no way that these instruments can insure against system-wide movements. Some bank has to lose by being the sucker paying out, then becoming the weak link in the system which, in an extreme case, has to be bailed out by the taxpayer. Derivatives should rather be seen as economically purposeless constructs whose ease of manipulation in opaque markets makes the investment banks rich – while the rest of us take our chances.

Over the past few years, more and more light has been thrown on how banks profit by trading on their own account in so-called "proprietary trading" – dealing in derivatives, while another part of the bank makes a market for buyers and sellers in those self-same products. First of all, they can take positions on a vast scale because they are enormous banks with their deposits effectively guaranteed by the taxpayer. Next, they rig the benchmark interest rate on which the price of many derivatives are based, made easier still because so many derivatives are custom-made. This means that deep non-manipulable markets are hard to construct; it's also easier for derivatives to aid and abet tax avoidance. And lastly, as Goldman Sachs' "Fabulous" Fabrice Tourre revealed, the banks actively manage both the buyers and sellers. Thus they know which way the prices are likely to move from hour to hour.

Managements have little incentive to manage such a business because their own extravagant bonuses depend on its success. Even if they were minded to insist on proper behaviour, so much of the action takes place over hours and even minutes – hence they have to give phenomenal discretion to the teams running the trading desks. Managers cannot possibly monitor their real-time positions or second guess why they have been taken – the reason why rogue traders can lose banks billions, as one recently did at JP Morgan in London.

Much has been said about the rotten culture in investment banking – now from both the prime minister and the governor of the Bank of England. But the regulators, the British government and bank managements – all genuflecting to the wisdom of the age that free markets make no mistakes – allowed a business model to be created in which men and women with very little skill and no moral compass could make themselves millionaires in a very short time. They contributed zero wider economic value but created immense systemic risk for the rest of the economy.

A rotten culture does not emerge from thin air. It emerges from structures that encourage rotten behaviour – and Britain, following the false gods that free markets and financial services were its economic future, created such structures big time, cheered along by a cross-party alliance that extended from Boris Johnson to Gordon Brown. Now is a decisive moment for both the City and the economy. The City's reputation is at rock bottom. Meanwhile the economy acutely needs a financial system that backs wealth-generating innovation. We need a determined root and branch reform of British finance to restore international trust, develop the national economy and to bring an end to the mis-selling scandals. In RBS's case, the bank was even unable to discharge for a week its basic function – allowing its customers to transact financial business.

A start has been made with the promised implementation of the Vickers commission's recommendations to ringfence investment banking from commercial banking. The ringfence, weakened by George Osborne under intense pressure from the banks, should be strengthened to produce a de facto separation. In particular, "prop" trading desks should operate as fully separate units with their own boards, balance sheets and capital. The measures should be rolled out as soon as they become law rather than delayed until 2019.

That is only a start. The banks and the British Bankers' Association can no longer be allowed to set Libor: this task must now be done by the Financial Conduct Authority that is to succeed the FSA. London must also fall into line with international practice and require all derivative trades in the over-the-counter market to post appropriate collateral. London can no longer be the wild west of international finance where American and European law can be flouted. I would go further and require all financial instruments to be traded in organised exchanges.

There is also the question of ownership: shareholders exercised far too little influence over bank managements. Worse, their short-termist behaviour encouraged banks to look for sky-high fast returns to keep them happy. The Ownership Commission ( which I chaired) argued for the creation of new ownership mutuals that pooled the voting rights of institutional shareholders. This would both anchor ownership to set more reasonable profit expectations, and give owners real muscle in a dialogue with managements.

Banks need such better, engaged ownership – and fast. The British government, owning RBS and Lloyds, should give a lead in what it expects from banks. In particular, it should take a lead on remuneration.

In my fair pay review for the government, I argued that private sector executives should put a proportion of their pay at risk to be earned back by doing their job properly; only then should they be eligible for an equivalent bonus. There would be no question of Bob Diamond trying to win brownie points by giving up his bonus. Under earnback it would be automatically forfeited.

The Financial Services Authority has begun to show how regulation could work: five years ago it would never have launched such a bold and revealing inquiry. George Osborne is breaking it up just when it should be backed and reinforced.

The £14m cut in the Serious Fraud Office's budget since 2008 should be restored in full. There should be arrests, trials and imprisonment. And there should be an independent Leveson-style inquiry into investment banking and the causes of the financial crisis.

So far, there has only been the whitewash report in 2009, co-chaired by Sir Win Bischoff and Alistair Darling, arguing that as little as possible should be done to regulate the City. It was a disgrace.
As far as possible, the underlying causes of the over-inflated size of finance should be addressed. If there were less exchange and interest rate volatility, there would be less underlying demand for instruments to protect against it. This is, of course, the case for a system of managed exchange rates and a European single currency.

Instead of deifying floating exchange rates as the magic bullet for all economic ills – the default position of the British economic establishment across the political spectrum — floating rates should be seen as another driver of our over-inflated financial sector.

Britain needs to rebalance and develop its economy – and it needs to start by reforming finance. This could be the moment the process begins, laying the basis for a remoralisation of our economy and a new industrial revolution. But it means confronting the biggest lobby of them all – big finance. Any takers?

This Cruel Austerity Experiment has Failed

The facts are clear. This cruel austerity experiment has failed

While the human cost of economic stupidity is all too visible, the world's leaders are paralysed by their dogma

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • guardian.co.uk, Saturday 2 June 2012 21.00 BST

A woman receives a free meal from a soup kitchen organised by a Greek humanitarian group in Athens’ main Syntagma Square. Photograph: Kostas Tsironis/AP

Last week was an awesome warning of where go-it-alone austerity can lead. It produced some brutal evidence of where we end up when we place finance above economy and society. The markets are now betting not just on the break-up of the euro but on the arrival of a new economic dark age. The world economy is edging nearer to the abyss, and policymakers, none more than in Britain, are paralysed by the stupidities of their home-spun economics. Yanis Varoufakis, ex-speechwriter for former Greek prime minister George Papandreou and now an economics professor in the US, said last week: "There is precisely zero chance of austerity working. It is the same as thinking you can escape from gravity by waving your arms up and down."

It could hardly be more sobering. Money has flooded out of Spain, Greece and the peripheral European economies. Signs of the crisis range from Athen's soup kitchens to Spain's crowds of indignados protesting in the streets against austerity and a broken capitalism. Youth unemployment is sky-high. Less visible is the avalanche of money flowing into hoped-for safe havens in the US, Germany and even Britain. The last time the British government could sell government bonds at interest rates as low as today's was in the early 1700s.

George Osborne and his acolytes proclaim this as a triumph of the government's economic policies. They are gravely mistaken. Rather it portends fears that the international economic order may collapse because if so many countries are simultaneously pursuing austerity, where's growth to come from?

Virtually everywhere you look there are signs of a weakening world economy. At home, manufacturing suffered its biggest plunge for three years, and this in an economy already suffering its longest depression since the 19th century. American jobs growth is petering out. Unemployment in Europe averages 11%. Even China witnessed a sharp fall away in factory activity in May.

Yet none of this should be a surprise. We live in the aftermath of one of the biggest financial and intellectual mistakes ever made. For a generation the world, with the London/New York financial axis at its heart, surrendered to the specious theory that lending and financial contracts could grow many times faster than the underlying economy. There was a blind belief that in a free market banks could not make mistakes. Free markets didn't make mistakes – only clumsy bureaucratic states made economic mistakes. Or so they said. Financial alchemists, guided by the maxims of free market fundamentalism, could make no such errors.

Except that they did. The result was the financial crisis of 2008. Had governments not underwritten their overstretched banks with trillions of dollars, euros and pounds, an even worse global slump would have ensued. But while the banks could continue trading, the hundreds of trillions of loans and financial contracts they had made did not go away.

And because governments had guaranteed their deposits, as in Ireland, or had to inject capital into them as Spain has been doing all last week, this private bank debt has steadily become public debt. Here is a classic case where all the gains were privatised, and all the losses were socialised. It was the much-maligned state that had to step in and clear up the mess left behind by the private sector. The free market wasn't so free after all – in fact it proved astonishingly expensive for the public purse. People across Europe still pay the price.

This is no solution. Overstretched banks have become more cautious about lending new cash; and even strong banks are caught up in the backwash because if they step into the breach they could fall into a vortex of falling property prices and declining economic activity, becoming weak in turn. So as banks stand aside from their crucial function of generating credit, governments and central banks must step in to generate the demand that has now disappeared.

But they have not done so to a sufficient degree. Part of the problem is that the more bank debt that governments guarantee, the less room for manoeuvre they feel they have – especially as their stagnating economies forces up welfare spending and depresses tax revenues.

But the larger problem is intellectual. The dominant ideology of the day – from the same roots that delivered the crisis – forbids it. A consensus stretching from US Republicans through to Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats via George Osborne's Treasury continues to claim that the state is the source of economic bad. The state threatens enterprise, invites damaging taxation, and is the root cause of spreading inflation. The state must balance the books just as the private sector must.

This is not just an economic but a moral necessity, they argue. Living within one's means rather than "maxing" out on debt appeals to American, British and German individualistic Protestantism. Inflation is even more a sign of moral degradation: it means reneging on promises, rewarding spendthrifts and penalising savers. We had the good years. Now we must take our medicine. The public and private sectors must retrench simultaneously worldwide. Enterprise and free markets will do the rest. The "march of the makers" will step in to fill the void left by public austerity measures.

This is a first-order moral and economic mistake. Human beings need each other for mutual support. In economic terms this means that no individual, either as a person or a company, can manage existential risk by themselves. That risk needs to be shared and mitigated otherwise the risk is not accepted. There would be no enterprise or innovation – the risks of failure too great. That is why there is a role for both private and public sectors. It is governments who provide the means through which we express our social obligations and pool our risks.

This is the heart of Keynesian economics – a different set of moral and economic propositions than those which prevail. Today we can see an almost laboratory experiment on a global scale of why Keynes was right and his detractors wrong. There is no doubt what Keynes would advocate now: a government-sponsored increase in demand co-ordinated across as many countries as possible and an acceptance of a temporary but closely managed increase in inflation to reduce the real value of debt.
The enormous legacy of private debt – whether in Britain, Germany, Spain, the US or Greece – and the fiendishly complicated way so many of the loans have been organised and distributed around the world financial system cannot be easily unwound. Sir Philip Hampton, chair of RBS, warned this week it might take a generation for RBS investors to recover their money.

The choice is thus stark. To commit to decades of economic stagnation, the break-up of the eurozone, the risk of trade protection and autarchic economic policies, the dismantling of the west's social contracts, the imposition of high unemployment and the political fallout that will follow.

Or to change course.

The technical means are relatively simple. Governments must replace targets for inflation with targets for the growth of prices and growth of output combined. Central banks should inject money into their financial systems by offering to buy new bank loans made to support new investment, new innovation or new infrastructure – helped by partial government guarantees.

Governments also need to increase demand. They can do this directly – with targeted and time-limited tax cuts or spending increases. They can also move indirectly, taxing the rich more aggressively and re-allocating the proceeds in tax cuts to those on middle incomes and lower who tend to spend more – along the lines that both presidents Obama and Hollande have proposed. There is also a case for a financial transactions tax – both to raise crucial revenue and to cap the growth and frenetic speed of financial transactions. Finance has become too powerful. It needs constraining.

Will any of this happen? The west is at a cross-roads, and although such proposals will be fiercely opposed by the British, German and American right they need to be beaten back. After all, it is their ideas that have brought us to this pass. It is not too fanciful to argue that the future of western capitalism depends upon how this argument plays out – and how quickly, if at all, there is a change of course.

Moral decay? Family life's the best it's been for 1,000 years

Conservatives' concerns about marriage seem to be based on a past that is fabricated from their own anxieties and obsessions


George Monbiot

guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 May 2012 20.30 BST 


'Throughout history and in virtually all human societies marriage has always been the union of a man and a woman." So says the Coalition for Marriage, whose petition against same-sex unions in the UK has so far attracted 500,000 signatures. It's a familiar claim, and it is wrong. Dozens of societies, across many centuries, have recognised same-sex marriage. In a few cases, before the 14th century, it was even celebrated in church.



This is an example of a widespread phenomenon: myth-making by cultural conservatives about past relationships. Scarcely challenged, family values campaigners have been able to construct a history that is almost entirely false.



The unbiblical and ahistorical nature of the modern Christian cult of the nuclear family is a marvel rare to behold. Those who promote it are followers of a man born out of wedlock and allegedly sired by someone other than his mother's partner. Jesus insisted that "if any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters … he cannot be my disciple". He issued no such injunction against homosexuality: the threat he perceived was heterosexual and familial love, which competed with the love of God.



This theme was aggressively pursued by the church for some 1,500 years. In his classic book A World of Their Own Making, Professor John Gillis points out that until the Reformation, the state of holiness was not matrimony but lifelong chastity. There were no married saints in the early medieval church. Godly families in this world were established not by men and women, united in bestial matrimony, but by the holy orders, whose members were the brothers or brides of Christ. Like most monotheistic religions (which developed among nomadic peoples), Christianity placed little value on the home. A Christian's true home belonged to another realm, and until he reached it, through death, he was considered an exile from the family of God.



The Reformation preachers created a new ideal of social organisation – the godly household – but this bore little relationship to the nuclear family. By their mid-teens, often much earlier, Gillis tells us, "virtually all young people lived and worked in another dwelling for shorter or longer periods". Across much of Europe, the majority belonged – as servants, apprentices and labourers – to houses other than those of their biological parents. The poor, by and large, did not form households; they joined them.



The father of the house, who described and treated his charges as his children, typically was unrelated to most of them. Family, prior to the 19th century, meant everyone who lived in the house. What the Reformation sanctified was the proto-industrial labour force, working and sleeping under one roof.



The belief that sex outside marriage was rare in previous centuries is also unfounded. The majority, who were too poor to marry formally, Gillis writes, "could love as they liked as long as they were discreet about it". Before the 19th century, those who intended to marry began to sleep together as soon as they had made their spousals (declared their intentions). This practice was sanctioned on the grounds that it allowed couples to discover whether or not they were compatible. If they were not, they could break it off. Premarital pregnancy was common and often uncontroversial, as long as provision was made for the children.



The nuclear family, as idealised today, was an invention of the Victorians, but it bore little relationship to the family life we are told to emulate. Its development was driven by economic rather than spiritual needs, as the industrial revolution made manufacturing in the household unviable. Much as the Victorians might extol their families, "it was simply assumed that men would have their extramarital affairs and women would also find intimacy, even passion, outside marriage" (often with other women). Gillis links the 20th-century attempt to find intimacy and passion only within marriage, and the impossible expectations this raises, to the rise in the rate of divorce.



Children's lives were characteristically wretched: farmed out to wet nurses, sometimes put to work in factories and mines, beaten, neglected, often abandoned as infants. In his book A History of Childhood, Colin Heywood reports that "the scale of abandonment in certain towns was simply staggering", reaching one third or a half of all the children born in some European cities. Street gangs of feral youths caused as much moral panic in late 19th-century England as they do today.



Conservatives often hark back to the golden age of the 1950s. But in the 1950s, John Gillis shows, people of the same persuasion believed they had suffered a great moral decline since the early 20th century. In the early 20th century, people fetishised the family lives of the Victorians. The Victorians invented this nostalgia, looking back with longing to imagined family lives before the industrial revolution.



In the Daily Telegraph today Cristina Odone maintained that "anyone who wants to improve lives in this country knows that the traditional family is key". But the tradition she invokes is imaginary. Far from this being, as cultural conservatives assert, a period of unique moral depravity, family life and the raising of children is, for most people, now surely better in the west than at any time in the past 1,000 years.



The conservatives' supposedly moral concerns turn out to be nothing but an example of the age-old custom of first idealising and then sanctifying one's own culture. The past they invoke is fabricated from their own anxieties and obsessions. It has nothing to offer us.

Courage: a product of practice rather than faith

The question of moral courage – and whether you can get better at it – has stayed with me ever since I was shot at by Israelis

by Giles Fraser in The Guardian


OK, we all get it. Captain Francesco Schettino was a coward. Sinking the Costa Concordia was one thing – a mistake, even. The running away bit, though: that's a different order of moral failure. But how do we know what sort of person we would turn out to be in such circumstances? Hero or villain?



Years ago I was shot at by Israeli soldiers on the Gaza/Egypt border. Bullets kicked up a line of dust a few feet to my right. Despite being in the company of a dozen Palestinian children, I ran and hid. Sick with adrenaline, I cowered behind a block of flats for a good 10 minutes. To be fair on myself, we all did, and that may well have been the only thing to do. Nobody got hurt. But the question of moral courage has remained with me ever since: in particular, the question of how those who do this sort of thing, day in day out, build up the emotional resources to confront danger with bravery. Is courage something you are born with; or can you get better at it?



"Each of us has a bank of courage," explains Peter de la Billière, a former commander of the SAS. "Some have a significant credit balance, others little or nothing; but in war we are all able to make the balance last longer if we have training, discipline, patriotism and faith." This feels so much like the advice of a bygone age. For these are values whose stock has not fared well in the latter half of the 20th century and beyond. Indeed, those of us who at school learned by heart the war poem Dulce et Decorum Est have come to associate a whole cluster of courage-based values – valour, sacrifice, etc – with what Wilfred Owen called "The old Lie". For these were values so soaked in blood, so purloined for the purposes of militaristic propaganda, that their rehabilitation remains problematic, even now.



But the idea that courage requires discipline and training needs a fairer hearing. For at least since Aristotle there has been an important strain of moral thought that has recognised human virtue not as some innate given, but rather as something that one can prepare for, and indeed get better at. The reason the soldier strips and re-strips his weapon a thousand tedious times on the parade ground is so that he can do it, without thought, when he hasn't slept for days and the bullets are pinging about his ears. Over time, it becomes a matter of instinct. And the advice of the modern army is that the same is true of courage. If you rehearse "doing the right thing" enough, you are much more likely to do the right thing when terrified or confused.



This sort of advice is not peculiar to the army. Alcoholics Anonymous has the phrase: "Fake it till you make it." If you want to become a different sort of person, first act like you are, and the acting will eventually transform you. Pretend to be the person you want to be and you will end up becoming more like that person. This cuts right against the grain of familiar assumptions that moral change comes from within, that the most important thing is expressing who you really are – "To thine own self be true", as Polonius puts it in Hamlet. From this perspective, an honest confession of our own weakness – our lack of courage, for instance – becomes the only real expression of virtue. In other words, an emphasis on authenticity can easily become an alibi for a refusal of character development.



While awaiting execution in Flossenburg concentration camp for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote an extraordinary poem entitled Who Am I? that dramatised the gap between his outward display of courage and his inner fear. "I stepped from my cell's confinement … like a squire from his country house"; and yet inwardly he was "faint and ready to say farewell to it all". Which is the real me, he ponders. "Am I both at once?"



Courage isn't about not being afraid. Indeed, not being afraid in life-threatening situations is simply foolishness or foolhardiness. Rather, courage is being afraid and doing the right thing nonetheless. Which is why Bonhoeffer is remembered for his bravery and not for being the "contemptibly woebegone weakling" he so feared himself to be. Faith may have been a part of his moral construction. But, a propos Peter de la Billière's list of what boosts courage, I suspect faith itself is considerably less significant than the sort of moral formation that comes from inculcating certain habits of behaviour.



Yes, church itself can be a school of virtue, encouraging a set of practices that transform character. In the trade it is known as formation. But the faith bit may well be incidental. For we can be schooled in virtue by a whole range of institutional practices, the army and AA being two others. The Jesuits believed that the acting out of virtue as expressed in theatre could function in this way too.



All of which suggests that it's not the fear of our inner Captain Shettino that matters most. He lurks within us all. The real question is how we shape our behaviour. Which is why the issue of being true to oneself offers so little to the task of becoming the person we would want to be. Change requires practice.