It's time to tackle the myths in education

Tom Bennett in The Telegraph

Are you a visual learner or a kinaesthetic learner? Perhaps you are an auditory learner? Maybe you learn best when implementing a combination of these 'learning styles'.

Over the past 40 years, the 'learning style' theory has garnered support from professionals across the education community and has become a much-used teaching tool across the UK.

But does the longevity of 'learning styles' and its persistent presence in the classroom actually mean it has any educational value at all? The simple answer is, no one can be sure; because no one has categorically proved the theory one way or the other.

Tom Bennett, teacher, author and Director of researchED, says there are many such theories that fill classrooms across Britain that have little grounding in scientific research. According to Bennett, it's time teachers learnt to raise a "sceptical eyebrow".

“We have had all kinds of rubbish thrown at us over the last 10 to 20 years,” he says. “We’ve been told that kids only learn properly in groups. We’ve had people claiming that children learn using brain gym, people saying that kids only learn if you appeal to their learning style. There’s not a scrap of research that substantiates this, and, unfortunately, it is indicative of the really, really dysfunctional state of social science research that exists today.” 

One of the main problems in resolving this issue is the fact that educational theory, unlike the actual sciences, is very difficult to test. How do you find out if the assertion that ‘children learn best in groups’ is actually correct? How do you test the effectiveness of 'homework', when homework can consist of anything from essays to artwork?

A new fund, launched last year by the Wellcome Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), is seeking to answer some of these questions. Six university-led projects have been funded to research how neuroscience can help pupils learn more effectively in the classroom.

While Bennett welcomes the work of the EEF, he says teachers need to be weary of who is leading research projects.

“You hear people say that children must have iPads in order to be 21st century learners, but when you look at the research that tries to substantiate this claim, it’s normally written by iPad manufacturers and technology zealots, and that’s fine, but don’t pretend it’s research," he says. "Children don’t have the time to waste on that rubbish, especially poor children.”

Bennett isn’t the only one to voice these concerns. According to new research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), trillions of dollars are spent on education policies around the world, but just one in 10 are actually evaluated.

Commenting on the research, Andreas Schleicher, OECD director of education and skills, said: "If we want to improve educational outcomes we need to have a much more systematic and evidence-based approach.”

Speaking at the Education World Forum in London, Schleicher added: "We need to make education a lot more of a science."

It seems an obvious statement, but, clearly, not one that has been put into practice over the years. With many initiatives left unsubstantiated.

Bennett has been a vocal critic of such educational practices and founded researchED as a way to counter the myths in education and improve research literacy within the education community.

“There are two main things I am calling for here,” he says. “One is that I want to highlight to teachers the rubbish that is out there, so that when someone comes along and says, ‘you should do this to help children learn’ teachers can raise a sceptical eyebrow and say ‘what’s the evidence behind that?’, ‘why should I spend six extra hours a week doing this?’, ‘why should my school spend half a million pounds doing it?’

“These are really important questions; both for ministers looking at education policy, and for team leaders within a school environment.

“The second thing is I would like teachers to engage more with driving good research. At the moment, a lot of research is very distant from the classroom, it’s done by people who don’t understand children, it’s done by people who have never taught. I want teachers to engage more with good research and drive future research.”

One of Bennett’s goals with researchED is to give teachers the opportunity and courage to question research, to be sceptical about practices and to look at the provenance of research before wholly accepting assertions as fact.

The organisation has proved hugely successful since its launch in 2013, growing from an initial conference in Dulwich College, to launches in New York and Sydney this year.

It has also led to Bennett being nominated for the inaugural $1 million Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize, the largest prize of its kind given to one exceptional teacher in recognition of their contribution to education.

Along with Richard Spencer, a teacher at Middlesbrough College in Billingham, County Durham, Bennett is the only nomination from the UK.

“It’s very strange,” he says. “I certainly don’t feel like one of the top two teachers in the country. There are probably better teachers in my school.

“I like this award, not only because I’ve been nominated, but because it’s a celebration of teachers and raises their status nationally and internationally. All the people on the list – and I’m very honoured to be on the shortlist – have done lots of things outside of the classroom to try and make things better for teaching in general.”

“From my point of view, and to return to my main argument, I want teachers to be a lot more sceptical of what they read, because often the evidence is far less conclusive than people would like to have you believe.

“Really good science tells you when you’re wrong. I’m not saying that people don’t have learning styles, because there is no evidence that we don’t. But as Richard Dawkins highlighted, ‘you can’t prove a negative’”

Beware the politician who thinks a debate about ‘British values’ is the way to voters’ hearts

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent

Here we go round the mulberry bush repeating the same old verses – fine when you are a three-year-old, but really not for a PM. Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown crusaded for “British values”, and now David Cameron does the same, prompted, I suspect, by the looming Scottish referendum and the disquieting “Trojan Horse” confrontation.

The crisis at some Birmingham schools must be dealt with fairly and robustly. Academies and free schools give parents and governors too much power, and this is the result. The fanatically ideological and thoroughly incompetent Michael Gove created this mess. But, as ever, when in trouble of their own making, British politicians either blame immigrants or evoke Britishness, as if it is a magic spell that will get voters to love them again. It always turns out to be a hex.

Last week, once again, Britishness was talked up by some, knocked about by others and mocked by many. Watch Huffington Post’s Mehdi Hasan speaking for one minute on this – droll, wry and very British. Some nations push patriotism so relentlessly that it becomes oppressive and enforces conformism. I was on Sky News with the Telegraph journalist Andrew Gilligan, who believes we should emulate America’s brand of flag-waving, unexamined patriotism. I really can’t see that happening.

Contrariness is what I most admire about my fellow Brits, plus their instinctive scepticism and questioning of authority, which comes out of a particular history. Of course, the state and establishment know that everyday nonconformity diverts actual revolutionary movements or resistance. At a time of purposely engineered poverty and inequality, even the poor worship the royals and blame fellow citizens rather than their rulers. Yet, still, having lived under the controlling, undemocratic British Empire, one of my biggest and best surprises was to come and settle in this mischievous, quirky and open motherland.

The critical mind and voice should indeed be promoted among the young of all backgrounds. And personal autonomy, too. I was on the advisory group led by Sir Bernard Crick that, after much deliberation, introduced the citizenship curriculum in schools. Children were taught binding values, rights and responsibilities, and it proved a good way to create a sense of common purpose and emphasise commonalities between various peoples of the UK. Taught properly, pupils are enabled to question governmental obsessions, the economic system, ruling elites, each other’s faiths or cultures, and spun histories. Although Gove declared his support for this education in 2013, teachers tell me it is withering on the vine, pushed out by other core subjects.

Politicians don’t want to encourage such dissent, this fundamental enacting of Britishness. Remember the draconian policing of student marches against university fee rises, and UK Uncut and trade union demos. And now Boris Johnson wants water cannon to be part of the arsenal against legitimate protests. Nothing about this is simple.

We should take proper pride in our arts and writers and the beautiful, most amazing language that everyone in the world wants to learn. However, many of the qualities that Cameron listed as British are global. We didn’t invent democracy and, when barely 35 per cent of people turn out to vote here, South Africa can be counted more democratic than us. The rule of law? It’s a universal desire. So, too, a craving for personal and political liberty. Tolerance cannot be owned by any one country, and this latest attempt by British politicians to claim it sounds terribly like propaganda when racism is, once more, stalking us people of colour and migrants.

Whose Britishness shall be deemed exemplary? Those proud brutes Rod Liddle and Richard Littlejohn? Shall we put on to the curriculum their nasty new books, lamenting the white, superior, sexist nation they grew up in? Or do we go for Danny Boyle and Suzanne Moore’s inclusive and ever-transforming, kaleidoscopic Britishness? Then there is Alan Bennett’s lovely, kind, left version. And Shami Chakrabarti’s, based on principles and powerful historical moments when liberty was enshrined in law. You could lock Simon Jenkins, Nigel Farage, Helena Kennedy and Lenny Henry in a castle for a month and still they would not agree on the defining characteristics of our nationhood.

If getting drunk is a typically British thing to do, I want no part of it. Hating incomers seems to be a British pastime. Sorry, can’t join in. And don’t expect me to despise those on benefits either. The Empire was not glorious for the ruled, and you can’t make us celebrate such a complex history. Britain holds itself up as a beacon of human rights and freedoms, but duplicitously undercuts all our basic rights and freedoms. We surely cannot exult Magna Carta when we now have secret courts, the state spying on us all and withholding information from us.

In 2007, when we went through another episode of evangelical, revivalist Britishness, an establishment newspaper asked its readers for a single sentence that defined it. The winning entry was this: “No motto, please, we’re British”. And no enforced patriotism either. Do we want to be like the French?

In praise of cynicism

It's claimed that at the age of 44 our cynicism starts to grow. But being cynical isn't necessarily a bad thing, argues Julian Baggini. It's at the heart of great satire and, perhaps more importantly, leads us to question what is wrong with the world – and strive to make it better
Test how cynical you are

• 
• • Julian Baggini
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 10 July 2013 18.27 BST

Bunch of cynics … Hislop, Brockovich, Bernstein, Snowden, Woodward and Tucker. Photograph: guardian.co.uk

If there's one thing that makes me cynical, it's optimists. They are just far too cynical about cynicism. If only they could see that cynics can be happy, constructive, even fun to hang out with, they might learn a thing or two.

Perhaps this is because I'm 44, which, according to a new survey, is the age at which cynicism starts to rise. But this survey itself merely illustrates the importance of being cynical. The cynic, after all, is inclined to question people's motives and assume that they are acting self-servingly unless proven otherwise. Which is just as well, as it turns out the "study" in question is just another bit of corporate PR to promote a brand whose pseudo-scientific stunt I won't reward by naming. Once again, cynicism proves its worth as one of our best defences against spin and manipulation.

I often feel that "cynical" is a term of abuse hurled at people who are judged to be insufficiently "positive" by those who believe that negativity is the real cause of almost all the world's ills. This allows them to breezily sweep aside sceptical doubts without having to go to the bother of checking if they are well-grounded. In this way, for example, Edward Snowden's leaks about the CIA's surveillance practices have been dismissed because they contribute to "the corrosive spread of cynicism".

In December 1999, Tony Blair hailed the hugely disappointing Millennium Dome as "a triumph of confidence over cynicism". All those legitimate concerns about the expense and vacuity of the end result were brushed off as examples of sheer, wilful negativity.

A more balanced definition of a cynic, courtesy of the trusty Oxford English Dictionary, is someone who is "distrustful or incredulous of human goodness and sincerity", sceptical of human merit, often mocking or sarcastic. Now what's not to love about that?

Of course, cynicism is neither wholly good nor bad. It's easy to see how you can be too cynical, but it's also possible to be not cynical enough. Indeed, although the word itself is now largely pejorative, you'll find almost everyone revels in a certain amount of cynicism. It's the lifeblood of the satirical comedy of the likes of Ian Hislop, Mark Steel and Jeremy Hardy. Great fictional cynics such as Malcolm Tucker are born of cynicism about politics. It can provide the impulse for the most important investigative journalism. If Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had been more trustful and credulous of human goodness and sincerity, they would never have broken the Watergate story.

It can provide the impulse for the most important investigative journalism. If we were all habitually trustful and credulous of human goodness and sincerity, then there would be no questioning of dubious foreign interventions, infringements of civil liberties or sharp business practices.

Perhaps the greatest slur against cynicism is that it nurtures a fatalistic pessimism, a belief that nothing can ever be improved. There are lazy forms of cynicism of which this is certainly true. But at its best, cynicism is a greater force for progress than optimism. The optimist underestimates how difficult it is to achieve real change, believing that anything is possible and it's possible now. Only by confronting head-on the reality that all progress is going to be obstructed by vested interests and corrupted by human venality can we create realistic programmes that actually have a chance of success. Progress is more of a challenge for the cynic but also more important and urgent, since for the optimist things aren't that bad and are bound to get better anyway.

This highlights the importance of distinguishing between thinking cynically and acting cynically. There is nothing good to be said for people who cynically deceive to further their own goals and get ahead of others. But that is not what a good cynic inevitably does. Whatever you make of Snowden, whistleblowers and campaigners such as Karen Silkwood and Erin Brockovich are both cynical about what they see and idealistic about what they can do about it. For many years, I too have tried to make sure that the cynicism in my outlook does not lead to cynicism in my behaviour.

That's not the only way in which a proper cynicism challenges the simplistic black-and-white of received opinion. The cynic would surely question the way in which the world is divided into optimists and pessimists. Optimism has various dimensions, and just because some people take a dim view of human nature and some future probabilities, that does not mean they are hardcore pessimists who believe things can only get worse. Cynics refuse to be typecast as Jeremiahs. They are realists who know that the world is not the sun-kissed fantasy peddled by positive-thinking gurus and shysters.

Indeed, the greatest irony of all is that many of the people promoting optimism are unwittingly feeding a view of human nature that is cynical in the very worst sense. Take psychologist and neuroscientist Elaine Fox, who is on Horizon tonight talking about her book Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain. Like many, she traces our tendency to make positive or negative judgments back to our brains and the ways in which they have been cast by our DNA and shaped by our experience. Her upbeat conclusion is that by understanding the neural basis of personality and mood, we can change it and so increase our optimism, health and happiness.

The deeply cynical result of this apparently cheerful viewpoint is that it encourages us to see what we think and believe as products of brain chemistry, rather than as rational responses to the world as it is. Rather than focus on our reasons for being optimistic or pessimistic about, say, the environment, we focus instead on what in our brains is causing us to be optimistic or pessimistic. And that means we seek a resolution of our anxieties not by changing the world, but by changing our minds. If that's not taking a cynical view of human merit and potential, I don't know what is.

So far, I have avoided the easiest way to defend cynicism, which is to point to its illustrious pedigree in the ancient Hellenic school of philosophy from which it gets its name. But I would be cynical about that too. Words change their meanings, and so you cannot dignify the cynicism of now by associating it with its distant ancestor.

Nonetheless, there are lessons for modern cynicism from the likes of Diogenes and Crates. What they show is that a proper cynicism is not a matter of personality but intellectual attitude. Their goal was to blow away the fog and confusion and see reality with lucidity and clarity. The contemporary cynic desires the same. The questioning and doubt is not an end in itself but a means of cutting through the crap and seeing things as they really are.

The ancient Cynics also advocated asceticism and self-sufficiency. There is something of this too in their modern-day counterparts, who are aware that we waste too much of our time and money on things we don't need, but that others require us to buy to make them rich. People who live rigorously by this cynicism are often seen as grumpy killjoys. To be light and joyful today means spending freely, without guilt, on whatever looks as if it will bring us pleasure. That merely shows how deeply our desires have been infected by the power of markets. It is the cynic who actually lives more lightly, unburdened by the pressure to always have more, not relying on purchases to provide happiness and contentment.

Finally, the Cynics were notorious for rejecting all social norms. Diogenes is said to have masturbated in public, while Crates lived on the streets, with only a tattered cloak. Whether anyone is advised to follow these specific examples is questionable, but it is surely true that we do not see enough challenging of tired conventions today. Isn't it astonishing, for example, how, once elected, MPs continue the daft traditions of jeering, guffawing and addressing their colleagues by ridiculous circumlocutory terms such as "the right honourable member"? It comes to something when the most controversial defiance of convention by a politician in recent years was Gordon Brown's refusal to wear a dinner jacket and bow tie. People would perhaps be less cynical about politicians if the politicians themselves would be more cynical.

Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become more cynical about many of the things we naively accepted when younger. But the result of this is to make us see more sharply the difference between what really matters and all the dross and nonsense that clutters up life. So as cynicism about many – perhaps most – things rises, so too does our appreciation and affection for what is good and true. Cynicism leads to more tender feelings towards what is truly lovable. Similarly, doubting the reality of much-professed sincerity is a way of showing that you respect and value the rare and precious real deal.

It's time, therefore, to reclaim cynicism for the forces of light and truth. Forget about the tired old dichotomies of positive and negative, optimistic and pessimistic. We can't make things better unless we see quite how bad they are. We can't do our best unless we guard against our worst. And it's only by being distrustful that we can distinguish between the trustworthy and the unreliable. To do all this we need intelligent cynicism, which is not so much a blanket negativity, but a searchlight for the truly positive.


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The test: how cynical are you?

Do you think your pet only wants you for food? Or that Clare Balding is an ambitious back-stabber?

• 
• • Tim Dowling
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 10 July 2013 18.24 BST

Clare Balding: self-obsessed back-stabber? Photograph: Richard Ansett

There are many ways to express one's cynicism – Diogenes the Cynic, for example, slept in a jar – but the true cynic knows he must be more cynical than anyone else, surprised by nothing but the boundless naivety of those around him. Use this handy checklist to see if you qualify: if you agree with seven or more of the following statements you may count yourself a super-cynic. Not that it means anything. I mean, who cares, right? We're all gonna die alone.

1 You believe that mankind has failed to achieve anything of interest or note since the moon landings were faked.

2 You can look upon the grinning face of George Osborne and still declare that all politicians are as bad as each other.

3 You feel the current cultural debate is missing nothing other than the widespread dissemination of your low opinion of Channel 4's output.

4 You remain convinced that they just throw all the recycling away at the other end.

5 You believe that the editor of the Daily Mail has a dangerously rose-tinted view of human nature.

6 You have a "tendency" to put "inverted commas" "around" "everything".

7 It is your firm conviction that professional wrestling is completely staged, with the outcome of every match determined beforehand, just like professional cricket and professional tennis.

8 You think your dog is only in it for the food.

9 You used to vote Tory out of naked self-interest, but it didn't work so now you don't vote.

10 You stopped watching the Olympics because you could no longer stand the sight of the ambitious, self-obsessed, back-stabbing Clare Balding.

Dogma will lead to Murder

by A C Grayling

Although defenders of religion like to portray faith as a source of peace and fellowship, and condemn those who commit atrocities in its name as untrue believers, the daily news media show how far this is from being invariably true. In fact, the relentless drip of bad news about religion-prompted violence in the world shows that the more zealous people are in their religious beliefs, the more likely they are to behave in non-rational, antisocial or violent ways.

The cold-blooded public murder of soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich this week is an example. Murders are committed for a variety of reasons, but one thing they have in common is that those who commit them have to be in an abnormal state of mind. From rage or jealousy, through the cold psychopathology of the professional hitman, to the soldier who must be rigorously schooled and disciplined so that he can kill other human beings in defined circumstances, a difference to the normal mindset is required. One potent way of achieving the required mindset is religious zealotry.

Belief in supernatural beings, miracles and the fantastical tales told in ancient scriptures is, at least, irrational and, at worst, pathological. The more earnest the belief, therefore, the less sane is it likely to be in its application to the real world. At the extreme, it not only prompts but also – from their own perspective – justifies believers in what they do. Unnatural lifestyles, self-harm, ritualistic repetitive behaviours, fantasy beliefs and the like – all of them the norm for religiously committed folk – might be harmless to others in most cases, but when they become annexed to hostility to others outside the faith, or to apostates within it, the result is dangerous.

To the ordinarily sane mind, such acts as butchering a stranger in the street in broad daylight, and engineering a mass murder such as happened on 9/11, are in equal proportions lunatic and disgusting. Working backwards from that judgement, we must arrive at the conclusion that the people who do such things are neither ordinary nor sane. They exhibit a defining mark of psychopathology: the ability to proceed by perfectly rational steps from mad premises to horrible conclusions, while yet displaying in most of their surrounding behaviour the appearance of normality.

Consider: the 9/11 murderers engaged in a long period of flying training, planning, financing their activities and living among their victims – even queuing politely to get on the fatal planes with those they were about to kill – and all this takes self-control. But wedged into the outwardly normal behaviour, like a rusted medieval nail driven deep into their brains, was the lunatic belief that they were doing something meritorious, justified and moral.

“Faith,” someone once said, “is what I will die for; dogma is what I will kill for.” The border between preparedness to die and kill is so porous that it is easily crossed. As a result, history welters in the blood of religion-inspired mayhem. The problem is the complete and unshakeable assurance that religion gives its votaries that what they do in its name deserves praise. Agents of the Inquisition burned heretics to death to save them from the consequences of persisting in their sinfulness, so that they would spend less time in purgatory. So it was, they believed, an act of kindness to kill them. The current crop of terrorists do not bother to claim kindness towards their victims; hatred – or, at a poor best, revenge – is the frankly avowed motive. But here the justification is that unbelievers are worthless, deserving nothing but death.

It is a theme of recent critical attacks on religion that it is too often divisive, conflict-generating, atrocity-justifying and inflammatory – and this quite independently of whether any religious claims about supernatural beings or miraculous occurrences are true. Religious apologists are eager to point to the charitable and artistic outcomes of religion either as a palliation or an excuse, but non-religious people do charitable and artistic things, too, and it is hard to detach them from the kindness and creativity, respectively, that are a natural endowment of most human beings no matter what they believe.

In further defence of religion, its apologists haul out the weary canards about Hitler, Stalin and Mao as examples of secular committers of atrocity – the claim even being made that they did what they did in the cause of atheism as such. Apart from the fact that Hitler was not an atheist, the interesting point about ideologies that claim the One Great Truth and the One Right Way is that it does not matter whether it invokes gods or the dialectic of history as their justification; it is their monolithic and totalising character that does the work of making them murderous. The Inquisition of Torquemada and Stalinism are little different in their effects on their hapless victims.

The obvious point to note about the murders carried out in the name of a deity this week, whether Sunni car bomb attacks on Shia in Iraq or the murder of Lee Rigby, is that they were affairs of conviction. To do such things, you have to be convinced to the point of unreason that you are doing right. Note this contrast: in the careful estimations of a scientific world-view, nothing is so certain. The absence of question marks and their prompting of reflection, caution and the search for good evidence are not required when it comes to the eternal truths of faith.

Is there any way of combating the corrosive effects of unreasoning religious conviction that leads to so much murder in the world? Yes: stop making children think that they must implicitly accept and unquestioningly obey one or another supposed Great Truth. Encourage them to be sceptical, to ask for the reasons and the evidence, to see with a clear eye the consequences that might follow from believing an inherited picture of the world that wishes to be immune to challenge or revision, and is prepared to kill people who do challenge it.

Then, in a generation or two, what happened on a Woolwich street might become close to impossible. 

What matters: leadership, data analysis, culture

Three factors that can play an important role in a team's success

Ed Smith

May 15, 2013

 

	Rajasthan Royals are an example of a cricket team that underspends and overachieves © BCCI  Enlarge
Related Links Ed Smith : It's not about selection or tactics, silly

A writer yearns to have intelligent readers who engage with his ideas. Then you realise that they are examining your logic with an uncomfortably forensic eye.

Two weeks ago I argued that all students of sport need to understand randomness. That the familiar talking points of selection and tactics are lazily thrown around to explain events they often do not influence. That understanding the "causes" of why things happen in sport is very difficult.

Enter Kieran McMaster, a statistician and ESPNcricinfo reader. He asks how I can explain the evolution of the Spain football team and the All Blacks rugby squad, teams that not only win but also drive forward the evolution of their sport. Surely that is evidence of tactical supremacy? Moreover, his question gained added weight thanks to a random external event: the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson. How can I square my scepticism about the short-term influence of tactics and selection with the consistent and relentless success of Sir Alex, who manipulated the levers of management so shrewdly?

Here goes.

I certainly do believe in leadership. It is obviously true that some captains and coaches make a sustained difference. Warren Gatland has transformed the Welsh rugby team from romantic underachievers to pragmatic winners. Jose Mourinho wins something wherever he goes. The pattern of success is too consistent to be explained by randomness. One out of one might be dumb luck. But it is much more likely to be skill than luck if a coach has a long sequence of different winning teams.

It is equally true that there aren't many coaches and captains in this elite category, certainly fewer than there are teams that need managers. Great coaches are incredibly rare. So clubs that continually chop and change managers, searching for the right "chemistry" (usually a euphemism) are usually taking an ill-judged risk. It is a statistical fact that changing the manager, on average, makes no difference at all to the performance of the team. It is, however, always expensive and usually distracting. Most teams would be better advised to invest in youth coaching and infrastructure rather than another round of sackings at the top.

Consider the following logic. If every club sacked its coach on the basis that they were searching for Sir Alex Ferguson, at the end of the process there would still only be one club with Sir Alex Ferguson, and dozens of disappointed teams, because there can only ever be one manager who is the best in the world. Sometimes it's better to work with what you've got rather than chase fantasies.

Secondly, I acknowledge that teams can gain a competitive advantage through smarter, clearer use of data and statistics. We all know about Moneyball and the Oakland A's. Cricket has a more current example: the Rajasthan Royals. They underspend and overachieve. And, like the A's, they use data to study how games are really won, instead of just recycling clichés. According to Raghu Iyer, the Royals' CEO, their strategy is not to buy famous players but to "out-think the opposition" at the player auction.

Thirdly, I believe in the power of culture. The recurrent success of some national sides cannot be explained by random cycles of dominance. Some sporting cultures achieve success because they get more things right, from grass roots to World Cup final. The All Blacks play a wonderful brand of total rugby. They rely on skills developed throughout New Zealand's rugby culture. In Dunedin this March, during rain delays in the cricket Test match between England and New Zealand, I watched Otago practise on the adjacent rugby ground. Everyone can pass, everyone has awareness, there are no donkeys and no under-skilled thugs.

	The serious analyst of sport runs into difficulties when he argues that "an Australian would never have dropped that catch because they're tougher over there", or "India lost the match because they should have picked X"

Something similar can be said about Spanish football. Only once have I succumbed to a satirical rant on Twitter. It was during the European Cup final of 2012. In the lead- up to the match, we had to endure ill-informed punditry about how Spain's refusal to pick "an outright striker" was a negative move, how they played a cautious game based on control of the ball rather than dynamic sweeping moves, how rival teams ought to do this and ought to do that, as though opponents hadn't already tried everything and simply lost. Basically there was a widespread reluctance to admit that Spain had developed a systemic solution to playing a better, more modern brand of football. This struck me as both insane and ungracious.

In the 14th minute, Cesc Fabregas, an attacking midfielder who was playing instead of the lamentably absent "outright striker", scored a typically classy goal. The goal revealed the interaction of control, technique, movement, intelligence and team work - a microcosm of Spanish footballing philosophy. Spain went on to win 4-0, and this columnist could not resist a series of sarcastic tweets about "boring Spain", "stupid selection", "wrong-headed tactics" and so on.

But I'm not certain, returning to our original question, that the influence of national sporting culture should be filed under the heading "tactics". It is more a case of philosophy culminating in elite expression. Put differently: if Spain had been instructed by their manager to play a violent, low-skill form of football in that final, I doubt they could have done so. So deeply ingrained is their approach that it has become second nature, not really a "tactic" at all.

I thrill to all three of these methods of gaining an edge in sport: through leadership, via analysis, and through culture.

However, and here is the crucial point, not everything that happens on the sports pitch can be explained in terms of leadership and strategy, or even culture (though the influence of culture is so subtle that it's impossible to measure).

This is especially true over the short term. The serious analyst of sport runs into difficulties when he argues that "an Australian would never have dropped that catch because they're tougher over there", or "India lost the match because they should have picked X", or "imagine how good we'd be if we changed the captain". Above all, my scepticism about causes kicks in when a match is lost and a media inquest begins into everything that immediately preceded the defeat, as though the former inevitably led to the latter.

In sport, as in life, I believe in the capacity of innovation, strategy and intelligence to make a difference over the long term. But that faith can coexist with the right to challenge the retrofitting of today's causes to suit yesterday's events.

You can be a short-term sceptic and still a long-term optimist.

Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks

Anonymous billionaires donated $120m to more than 100 anti-climate groups working to discredit climate change science 

• How Donors Trust distributed millions to anti-climate groups

• Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 February 2013 13.39 GMT

Climate sceptic groups are mobilising against Obama’s efforts to act on climate change in his second term. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120m (£77m) to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, the Guardian has learned.

The funds, doled out between 2002 and 2010, helped build a vast network of thinktanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarising "wedge issue" for hardcore conservatives.

The millions were routed through two trusts, Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund, operating out of a generic town house in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. Donors Capital caters to those making donations of $1m or more.

Whitney Ball, chief executive of the Donors Trust told the Guardian that her organisation assured wealthy donors that their funds would never by diverted to liberal causes.

 The funding stream far outstripped the support from more visible opponents of climate action such as the oil industry or the conservative billionaire Koch brothers. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

"We exist to help donors promote liberty which we understand to be limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise," she said in an interview.

By definition that means none of the money is going to end up with groups like Greenpeace, she said. "It won't be going to liberals."

Ball won't divulge names, but she said the stable of donors represents a wide range of opinion on the American right. Increasingly over the years, those conservative donors have been pushing funds towards organisations working to discredit climate science or block climate action.

Donors exhibit sharp differences of opinion on many issues, Ball said. They run the spectrum of conservative opinion, from social conservatives to libertarians. But in opposing mandatory cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, they found common ground.

"Are there both sides of an environmental issue? Probably not," she went on. "Here is the thing. If you look at libertarians, you tend to have a lot of differences on things like defence, immigration, drugs, the war, things like that compared to conservatives. When it comes to issues like the environment, if there are differences, they are not nearly as pronounced."

By 2010, the dark money amounted to $118m distributed to 102 thinktanks or action groups which have a record of denying the existence of a human factor in climate change, or opposing environmental regulations.

The money flowed to Washington thinktanks embedded in Republican party politics, obscure policy forums in Alaska and Tennessee, contrarian scientists at Harvard and lesser institutions, even to buy up DVDs of a film attacking Al Gore.

The ready stream of cash set off a conservative backlash against Barack Obama's environmental agenda that wrecked any chance of Congress taking action on climate change.

 Graphic: climate denial funding

Those same groups are now mobilising against Obama's efforts to act on climate change in his second term. A top recipient of the secret funds on Wednesday put out a point-by-point critique of the climate content in the president's state of the union address.

And it was all done with a guarantee of complete anonymity for the donors who wished to remain hidden.

"The funding of the denial machine is becoming increasingly invisible to public scrutiny. It's also growing. Budgets for all these different groups are growing," said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, which compiled the data on funding of the anti-climate groups using tax records.

"These groups are increasingly getting money from sources that are anonymous or untraceable. There is no transparency, no accountability for the money. There is no way to tell who is funding them," Davies said.

The trusts were established for the express purpose of managing donations to a host of conservative causes.

Such vehicles, called donor-advised funds, are not uncommon in America. They offer a number of advantages to wealthy donors. They are convenient, cheaper to run than a private foundation, offer tax breaks and are lawful.

That opposition hardened over the years, especially from the mid-2000s where the Greenpeace record shows a sharp spike in funds to the anti-climate cause.

In effect, the Donors Trust was bankrolling a movement, said Robert Brulle, a Drexel University sociologist who has extensively researched the networks of ultra-conservative donors.

"This is what I call the counter-movement, a large-scale effort that is an organised effort and that is part and parcel of the conservative movement in the United States " Brulle said. "We don't know where a lot of the money is coming from, but we do know that Donors Trust is just one example of the dark money flowing into this effort."

In his view, Brulle said: "Donors Trust is just the tip of a very big iceberg."

The rise of that movement is evident in the funding stream. In 2002, the two trusts raised less than $900,000 for the anti-climate cause. That was a fraction of what Exxon Mobil or the conservative oil billionaire Koch brothers donated to climate sceptic groups that year.

By 2010, the two Donor Trusts between them were channelling just under $30m to a host of conservative organisations opposing climate action or science. That accounted to 46% of all their grants to conservative causes, according to the Greenpeace analysis.

The funding stream far outstripped the support from more visible opponents of climate action such as the oil industry or the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, the records show. When it came to blocking action on the climate crisis, the obscure charity in the suburbs was outspending the Koch brothers by a factor of six to one.

"There is plenty of money coming from elsewhere," said John Mashey, a retired computer executive who has researched funding for climate contrarians. "Focusing on the Kochs gets things confused. You can not ignore the Kochs. They have their fingers in too many things, but they are not the only ones."

It is also possible the Kochs continued to fund their favourite projects using the anonymity offered by Donor Trust.

But the records suggest many other wealthy conservatives opened up their wallets to the anti-climate cause – an impression Ball wishes to stick.

She argued the media had overblown the Kochs support for conservative causes like climate contrarianism over the years. "It's so funny that on the right we think George Soros funds everything, and on the left you guys think it is the evil Koch brothers who are behind everything. It's just not true. If the Koch brothers didn't exist we would still have a very healthy organisation," Ball said.

Spinoza, part 1: Philosophy as a way of life

For this 17th century outsider, philosophy is like a spiritual practice, whose goal is happiness and liberation

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Spinoza memorial at the New Church in the Hague Spinoza memorial at the New Church in The Hague. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

Although Baruch Spinoza is one of the great thinkers of the European philosophical tradition, he was not a professional scholar – he earned his modest living as a lens grinder. So, unlike many thinkers of his time, he was unconstrained by allegiance to a church, university or royal court. He was free to be faithful to the pursuit of truth. This gives his philosophy a remarkable originality and intellectual purity – and it also led to controversy and charges of heresy. In the 19th century, and perhaps even more recently, "Spinozist" was still a term of abuse among intellectuals.

In a sense, Spinoza was always an outsider – and this independence is precisely what enabled him to see through the confusions, prejudices and superstitions that prevailed in the 17th century, and to gain a fresh and radical perspective on various philosophical and religious issues. He was born, in 1632, to Jewish Portuguese parents who had fled to Amsterdam to escape persecution, so from the very beginning he was never quite a native, never completely at home. Although Spinoza was an excellent student in the Jewish schools he attended, he came to be regarded by the leaders of his community as a dangerous influence. At the age of 24 he was excluded from the Amsterdam synagogue for his "intolerable" views and practices.

Spinoza's most famous and provocative idea is that God is not the creator of the world, but that the world is part of God. This is often identified as pantheism, the doctrine that God and the world are the same thing – which conflicts with both Jewish and Christian teachings. Pantheism can be traced back to ancient Greek thought: it was probably advocated by some pre-Socratic philosophers, as well as by the Stoics. But although Spinoza – who admired many aspects of Stoicism – is regarded as the chief source of modern pantheism, he does, in fact, want to maintain the distinction between God and the world.

His originality lies in the nature of this distinction. God and the world are not two different entities, he argues, but two different aspects of a single reality. Over the next few weeks we will examine this view in more detail and consider its implications for human life. Since Spinoza presents a radical alternative to the Cartesian philosophy that has shaped our intellectual and cultural heritage, exploring his ideas may lead us to question some of our deepest assumptions.

One of the most important and distinctive features of Spinoza's philosophy is that it is practical through and through. His ideas are never merely intellectual constructions, but lead directly to a certain way of life. This is evidenced by the fact that his greatest work, which combines metaphysics, theology, epistemology, and human psychology, is called Ethics. In this book, Spinoza argues that the way to "blessedness" or "salvation" for each person involves an expansion of the mind towards an intuitive understanding of God, of the whole of nature and its laws. In other words, philosophy for Spinoza is like a spiritual practice, whose goal is happiness and liberation.

The ethical orientation of Spinoza's thought is also reflected in his own nature and conduct. Unlike most of the great philosophers, Spinoza has a reputation for living an exemplary, almost saintly life, characterised by modesty, gentleness, integrity, intellectual courage, disregard for wealth and a lack of worldly ambition. According to Bertrand Russell, Spinoza was "the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers". Although his ideas were despised by many of his contemporaries, he attracted a number of devoted followers who gathered regularly at his home in Amsterdam to discuss his philosophy. These friends made sure that Spinoza's Ethics was published soon after his death in 1677.

Spinoza, part 2: Miracles and God's will

Spinoza's belief that miracles were an unexplained act of nature, not proof of God, proved dangerous and controversial

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At the heart of Baruch Spinoza's philosophy is a challenge to the traditional Judeo-Christian view of the relationship between God and the world. While the Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures share a conception of God as the creator of the natural world and the director of human history, Spinoza argues that everything that exists is an aspect of God that expresses something of the divine nature. This idea that God is not separate from the world is expounded systematically in the Ethics, Spinoza's magnum opus. However, a more accessible introduction to Spinoza's view of the relationship between God and nature can be found in his discussion of miracles in an earlier text, the Theologico-Political Treatise. This book presents an innovative interpretation of the bible that undermines its authority as a source of truth, and questions the traditional understanding of prophecy, miracles and the divine law.

In chapter six of the Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza addresses the "confused ideas of the vulgar" on the subject of miracles. Ordinary people tend to regard apparently miraculous events – phenomena that seem to interrupt and conflict with the usual order of nature – as evidence of God's presence and activity. In fact, it is not just "the vulgar" who hold this view: throughout history, theologians have appealed to miracles to justify religious belief, and some continue to do so today.

For Spinoza, however, talk of miracles is evidence not of divine power, but of human ignorance. An event that appears to contravene the laws of nature is, he argues, simply a natural event whose cause is not yet understood. Underlying this view is the idea that God is not a transcendent being who can suspend nature's laws and intervene in its normal operations. On the contrary, "divine providence is identical with the course of nature". Spinoza argues that nature has a fixed and eternal order that cannot be contravened. What is usually, with a misguided anthropomorphism, called the will of God is in fact nothing other than this unchanging natural order.

From this it follows that God's presence and character is revealed not through apparently miraculous, supernatural events, but through nature itself. As Spinoza puts it: "God's nature and existence, and consequently His providence, cannot be known from miracles, but can all be much better perceived from the fixed and immutable order of nature."

Of course, this view has serious consequences for the interpretation of scripture, since both the Old and New Testaments include many descriptions of miraculous events. Spinoza does not simply dismiss these biblical narratives, but he argues that educated modern readers must distinguish between the opinions and customs of those who witnessed and recorded miracles, and what actually happened. Challenging the literal interpretation of scripture that prevailed in his times, Spinoza insists that "many things are narrated in Scripture as real, and were believed to be real, which were in fact only symbolic and imaginary".

This may seem reasonable enough to many contemporary religious believers, but Spinoza's attitude to the Bible was far ahead of its time. Today we take for granted a certain degree of cultural relativism, and most of us are ready to accept that ancient peoples understood the world differently from us, and therefore had different ideas about natural and divine causation. When it was first published in 1670, however, the Theologico-Political Treatise provoked widespread protest and condemnation. In fact, it was this reaction that made Spinoza decide to delay publication of the Ethics until after his death, to avoid more trouble.

But what are we to make of Spinoza's claim that God's will and natural law are one and the same thing? There are different ways to interpret this idea, some more conducive to religious belief than others. On the one hand, if God and nature are identical then perhaps the concept of God becomes dispensable. Why not simply abandon the idea of God altogether, and focus on improving our understanding of nature through scientific enquiry? On the other hand, Spinoza seems to be suggesting that God's role in our everyday lives is more constant, immediate and direct than for those who rely on miraculous, out-of-the-ordinary events as signs of divine activity.

And of course, the idea that the order of nature reveals the existence and essence of God leads straight to the view that nature is divine, and should be valued and even revered as such. In this way, Spinoza was an important influence on the 19th-century Romantic poets. Indeed, Spinoza's philosophy seems to bring together the Romantic and scientific worldviews, since it gives us reason both to love the natural world, and to improve our understanding of its laws.

Spinoza, part 3: What God is not

In his Ethics, Spinoza wanted to liberate readers from the dangers of ascribing human traits to God

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Spinoza's Ethics is divided into five books, and the first of these presents an idiosyncratic philosophical argument about the existence and nature of God. We'll examine this in detail next week, but first we need to look more closely at how the Ethics challenges traditional Judeo-Christian belief in God.

The view that Spinoza wants to reject can be summed up in one word: anthropomorphism. This means attributing human characteristics to something non-human – typically, to plants or animals, or to God. There are several important implications of Spinoza's denial of anthropomorphism. First, he argues that it is wrong to think of God as possessing an intellect and a will. In fact, Spinoza's God is an entirely impersonal power, and this means that he cannot respond to human beings' requests, needs and demands. Such a God neither rewards nor punishes – and this insight rids religious belief of fear and moralism.

Second, God does not act according to reasons or purposes. In refusing this teleological conception of God, Spinoza challenged a fundamental tenet of western thought. The idea that a given phenomenon can be explained and understood with reference to a goal or purpose is a cornerstone of Aristotle's philosophy, and medieval theologians found this fitted very neatly with the biblical narrative of God's creation of the world. Aristotle's teleological account of nature was, then, adapted to the Christian doctrine of a God who made the world according to a certain plan, analogous to a human craftsman who makes artefacts to fulfil certain purposes. Typically, human values and aspirations played a prominent role in these interpretations of divine activity.

Spinoza concludes book one of the Ethics by dismissing this world view as mere "prejudice" and "superstition". Human beings, he suggests, "consider all natural things as means to their own advantage", and because of this they believe in "a ruler of nature, endowed with human freedom, who had taken care of all things for them, and made all things for their use". Moreover, people ascribe to this divine ruler their own characters and mental states, conceiving God as angry or loving, merciful or vengeful. "So it has happened that each person has thought up from his own temperament different ways of worshiping God, so that God might love him above all others, and direct the whole of nature according to the needs of his blind desire and insatiable greed," writes Spinoza.

It is interesting to compare this critique of religious "superstition" with the views of the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume challenges the popular belief in a creator God – and he also, elsewhere, undermines appeals to miracles as evidence of divine activity. Although Hume seems to echo Spinoza on these points, there is a crucial difference between the two philosophers. Hume thinks that many aspects of Christian belief are silly and incoherent, but his alternative to such "superstition" is a healthy scepticism, which recognises that religious doctrines cannot be justified by reason or by experience. His own position is rather ambiguous, but it involves a modest and pragmatic attitude to truth and seems to lead to agnosticism.

Spinoza, on the other hand, thinks that there is a true conception of God which is accessible to human intelligence. He argues that misguided religious beliefs are dangerous precisely because they obscure this truth, and thus prevent human beings from attaining genuine happiness, or "blessedness". There is, therefore, more at stake in Spinoza's critique of popular superstition than in Hume's. For Hume, religious believers are probably wrong, but the existential consequences of their foolishness might not be particularly serious. Spinoza, by contrast, wants to liberate his readers from their ignorance in order to bring them closer to salvation.

So Spinoza is not simply an atheist and a critic of religion, nor a sceptical agnostic. On the contrary, he places a certain conception of God at the heart of his philosophy, and he describes the ideal human life as one devoted to love of this God. Moreover, while Spinoza is critical of superstition, he is sympathetic to some aspects of Jewish and Christian teaching. In particular, he argues that Jesus had a singularly direct and immediate understanding of God, and that it is therefore right to see him as the embodiment of truth, and a role model for all human beings.

Spinoza, part 4: All there is, is God

Being infinite and eternal, God has no boundaries, argues Spinoza, and everything in the world must exist within this God

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So far in this series I've focused on Spinoza's critique of the religious and philosophical world view of his time. But what does he propose in place of anthropomorphic, anthropocentric belief in a transcendent creator God?

Spinoza begins his Ethics by defining some basic philosophical terms: substance, attribute, and mode. In offering these definitions, he is actually attempting a radical revision of the philosophical vocabulary used by Descartes, the leading thinker of his time, to conceptualise reality. When we understand these terms properly, argues Spinoza, we have to conclude that there exists only one substance – and that this is God.

Substance is a logical category that signifies independent existence: as Spinoza puts it, "by substance I understand what is conceived through itself". By contrast, attributes and modes are properties of a substance, and are therefore logically dependent on this substance. For example, we might regard a particular body as a substance, and this body is not conceptually dependent on anything else. But the body's properties, such as its weight and its colour and its shape, are qualities that cannot be conceived to exist in isolation: they must be the weight, colour and shape of a certain body.

Descartes's world view draws on Aristotelian metaphysics and scholastic theology in conceiving individual entities as distinct substances. Human beings, for example, are finite substances, while God is a special substance which is infinite and eternal. In fact, Descartes thought that each human being was composed of two substances: a mind, which has the principal attribute of thought; and a body, which has the principal attribute of extension, or physicality. This view famously leads to the difficult question of how these different substances could interact, known as the "mind-body problem".

The philosophical terminology of substance, attribute and mode makes all this sound rather technical and abstract. But Cartesian metaphysics represents a way of thinking about the world, and also about ourselves, shared by most ordinary people. We see our world as populated by discrete objects, individual things – this person over here, that person over there; this computer on the table; that tree outside, and the squirrel climbing its trunk; and so on. These individual beings have their own characteristics, or properties: size, shape, colour, etc. They might be hot or cold, quiet or noisy, still or in motion, and such qualities can be more or less changeable. This way of conceptualising reality is reflected in the structure of language: nouns say what things are, adjectives describe how they are, and verbs indicate their actions, movements and changing states. The familiar distinction between nouns, adjectives and verbs provides an approximate guide to the philosophical concepts of substance, mode and attribute.

If, as Spinoza argues, there is only one substance – God – which is infinite, then there can be nothing outside or separate from this God. Precisely because God is a limitless, boundless totality, he must be an outsideless whole, and therefore everything else that exists must be within God. Of course, these finite beings can be distinguished from God, and also from one another – just as we can distinguish between a tree and its green colour, and between the colour green and the colour blue. But we are not dealing here with the distinction between separate substances that can be conceived to exist independently from one another.

Again, this is rather abstract. As Aristotle suggested, we cannot think without images, and I find it helpful to use the image of the sea to grasp Spinoza's metaphysics. The ocean stands for God, the sole substance, and individual beings are like waves – which are modes of the sea. Each wave has its own shape that it holds for a certain time, but the wave is not separate from the sea and cannot be conceived to exist independently of it. Of course, this is only a metaphor; unlike an infinite God, an ocean has boundaries, and moreover the image of the sea represents God only in the attribute of extension. But maybe we can also imagine the mind of God – that is to say, the infinite totality of thinking – as like the sea, and the thoughts of finite beings as like waves that arise and then pass away.

Spinoza's world view brings to the fore two features of life: dependence and connectedness. Each wave is dependent on the sea, and because it is part of the sea it is connected to every other wave. The movements of one wave will influence all the rest. Likewise, each being is dependent on God, and as a part of God it is connected to every other being. As we move about and act in the world, we affect others, and we are in turn affected by everything we come into contact with.

This basic insight gives Spinoza's philosophy its religious and ethical character. In traditional religion, dependence and connectedness are often expressed using the metaphor of the family: there is a holy father, and in some cases a holy mother; and members of the community describe themselves as brothers and sisters. This vocabulary is shared by traditions as culturally diverse as Christianity, Buddhism and Islam. For Spinoza, the familial metaphor communicates a truth that can also be conveyed philosophically – through reason rather than through an image.

Spinoza, part 5: On human nature

We are not autonomous individuals but part of a greater whole, says Spinoza, and there is no such thing as human free will

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Last week, we examined Spinoza's metaphysics, looking at how his radical reinterpretation of the philosophical terminology of substance, attribute and mode produces a new vision of reality. According to Spinoza, only God can be called a substance – that is to say, an independently existing being – and everything else is a mode of this single substance. But what does this mean for us?

One of the central questions of philosophy is: what is a human being? And this question can be posed in a more personal way: who am I? As we might by now expect, Spinoza's view of the human being challenges commonsense opinions as well as prevailing philosophical and religious ideas. We are probably inclined to think of ourselves as distinct individuals, separate from other beings. Of course, we know that we have relationships to people and objects in the world, but nevertheless we see ourselves as autonomous – a view that is reflected in the widelyheld belief that we have free will. This popular understanding of the human condition is reflected in Cartesian philosophy, which conceives human beings as substances. In fact, Descartes thought that human beings are composed of two distinct substances: a mind and a body.

For Spinoza, however, human beings are not substances, but finite modes. (Last week, I suggested that a mode is something like a wave on the sea, being a dependent, transient part of a far greater whole.) This mode has two aspects, or attributes: extension, or physical embodiment; and thought, or thinking. Crucially, Spinoza denies that there can be any causal or logical relationships across these attributes. Instead, he argues that each attribute constitutes a causal and logical order that fully expresses reality in a certain way. So a human body is a physical organism which expresses the essence of that particular being under the attribute of extension. And a human mind is an intellectual whole that expresses this same essence under the attribute of thinking.

But this is not to suggest that the mind and the body are separate entities – for this would be to fall back into the Cartesian view that they are substances. On the contrary, says Spinoza, mind and body are two aspects of a single reality, like two sides of a coin. "The mind and the body are one and the same individual, which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension," he writes in book two of the Ethics. And for this reason, there is an exact correspondence between them: "The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things." In fact, each human mind involves awareness of a human body.

This way of thinking has some important consequences. One of the most obvious is that it undermines dualistic and reductionist accounts of the human being. Descartes's mind-body dualism involves the claim that we are, in essence, thinking beings – that the intellectual should be privileged above the physical, reason above the body. Conversely, modern science often regards the human being as primarily a physical entity, and attempts to reduce mental activity to physical processes. In Spinoza's view, however, it is incoherent to attempt to explain the mental in terms of the physical, or vice versa, because thinking and extension are distinct explanatory orders. They offer two alternative ways of describing and understanding our world, and ourselves, which are equally complete and equally legitimate.

Another important consequence of Spinoza's account of the human being is his denial of free will. If we are modes rather than substances, then we cannot be self-determining. The human body is part of a network of physical causality, and the human mind is part of a network of logical relations. In other words, both our bodily movements and our thinking are constrained by certain laws. Just as we cannot defeat the law of gravity, so we cannot think that 2 + 2 = 5, or that a triangle has four sides.

Spinoza's criticism of the popular belief in free will is rather similar to his analysis of belief in miracles in the Theologico-Political Treatise, which we looked at a few weeks ago. There, we may recall, he argued that people regard events as miraculous and supernatural when they are ignorant of their natural causes. Likewise, human actions are attributed to free will when their causes are unknown: "That human freedom which all men boast of possessing … consists solely in this, that men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which they are determined." For Spinoza, belief in free will is just as much a sign of ignorance and superstition as belief in miracles worked by divine intervention.