Is the Power of Propaganda
the Deception of Dishonesty?
Is the Power of Propaganda
the Deception of Dishonesty?
At the time I first visited China in April 1982, there was a war underway in the South Atlantic. Argentina was at war with Britain over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands, which the Argentines called “Las Malvinas”. Everything I read about the conflict at the time came through the pages of the then newly-established ‘China Daily’, which followed the Chinese Government’s anti-colonial policy of supporting the Argentine claims for sovereignty over the islands.
It was only after I left China and read other newspapers that I learnt the real story - the whole story. Nothing I had read in the China Daily was factually incorrect. But by omitting certain key historical facts, the slant and balance of the rights-and-wrongs of the conflict had been shifted significantly. It was a powerful lesson for me that a partial truth is actually a lie. Indeed, this is an important lesson for any teacher to learn, as all teachers sadly find (and this is never covered in teacher training courses) that they must devote many hours of their professional career sifting through lies, partial lies, excuses, partial truths, deceptions, and other variations of accidentally or deliberately distorted and falsified realities.
Obscuring key points of information is perhaps the most effective form of propaganda. It is very subtle, and therefore highly effective.
Propaganda by omission can take many forms. Let me look at one very current example. In the UK during the past few weeks, the high-profile missionary of atheism, Richard Dawkins, has followed up his earlier attacks on religion with two new television programs on Channel 4. The new two-part series was called “The Enemies of Reason”, and comprised “Slaves to Superstition” on 13th August and “The Irrational Health Service” on 20th August. The subjects dealt with were quite diverse, ranging through alternative medical treatments, astrology, new-age mysticism, psychics, clairvoyance and superstitions. Both programs are widely available for download on the internet, and I have watched and enjoyed both programs. I found the new programs much more persuasive than his earlier programs attacking religion, but then again I probably know more about religion than the topics covered in “The Enemies of Reason”. In his programs attacking religion, I could easily see a pattern in what Dawkins was leaving out, and thus unlike “The Enemies of Reason”, his anti-religious arguments failed to persuade me - which is my point!
One of the people interviewed (some would say, targeted) by Richard Dawkins in “The Enemies of Reason” was Neil Spencer, who is the astrologer in London’s The Observer. Writing about his experience with Dawkins in that same publication, he wrote:
“Thanks to Richard Dawkins I have just acquired a new title. It’s official: I am an ‘Enemy of Reason’, a wily opponent of rationalism interviewed (in my capacity as The Observer magazine’s astrologer) by Dawkins for a new two-part TV documentary. In the first programme, he attempts to debunk alternative medicine, in the other to rubbish the ideas of astrologers, channellers and other so-called ‘New Age’ types.
Evidently hoping to prove astrologers are know-nothings, Dawkins’ interview started with a lengthy grilling about astronomy - the precession of the equinoxes, sidereal and tropical zodiacs, Kuiper Belt objects. There was the usual objection to astrology dividing people into 12 Sun signs, and my usual reply: that’s eight more than the Myers-Briggs personality test used by commerce. Actually, astrology’s basic personality types number 1,728.
On we went through genes versus soul, dark matter, forecasting ‘trivial’ horse races, astrology’s antiquity.
Dawkins thinks anything pre-Enlightenment is ‘primitive’. As primitive as a Gothic cathedral or a Plato text perhaps.”
Despite Spencer’s witty rebuttal of Dawkins, I actually agree with much of Dawkins’ also-witty assessment of new age mysticism as it was portrayed in “The Enemies of Reason”. The problem is that whether you agree with him or not, Dawkins is an intelligent and eloquent presenter, which is why many of his arguments seem seductive even when key points (the ones that might get in the way of his own arguments) are omitted. In his attacks on Christianity, for example, he tends to focus on esoteric, culturally-specific (and seemingly absurd) Old Testament legalisms, and he seems to have a particular fascination with obscure, often archaic traditions of the Catholic Church that are usually not shared by other Christian churches.
To take just one example, Dawkins’ attention-grabbing interpretation of the account of Abraham and his son, Isaac, may sound persuasive to people with no historical, religious or social context in which to understand his comments. Abraham is the great patriarch of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions, and followers of all three religions would be familiar with the story in which God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, as a sign of ultimate obedience. With a heavy heart, Abraham had agreed to kill his own son, getting right through to the stage of trussing up his son and getting out the knife. Once Abraham had demonstrated his faith and obedience, God granted Isaac a reprieve. To the amusement of audiences where he has recounted this story, Dawkins, somewhat macabrely, remarks that “this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships, and is the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence, ‘I was only obeying orders’.”
When examined seriously, the account of Abraham actually marks the important point in Middle Eastern history when human sacrifices (which had been an important part of the regional cultures up to that time) were forbidden. Rather than being an example of God’s cruelty, this dramatic account is actually the opposite - it represents the point in history when human sacrifices were to cease. And yet, in the absence of any social, cultural or historical background, Dawkins’ propaganda (or partial truth) could perhaps be very persuasive. When seen in its proper context, on the other hand, Dawkins’ claims are seen to be simplistic and naive. There are many more such examples, far more worthy of a detailed critique, or even a book, than a mere weblog!
The point I am trying to make is that a partial truth is actually a dangerous lie. Many people point to the popularity of missionary atheists such as Richard Dawkins as evidence of the conflict between science and religion. I see the relationship between science and religion somewhat differently. I actually do not see any conflict between science and religion, but I see a different conflict that is often confused as being between science and religion. The way I see it, there is a conflict between two mutually exclusive ways of discerning truth - reason and evidence on one hand, and blind faith and superstition on the other. And despite the protests of both scientists and theologians, both science and religion are capable of blind faith and superstition!
The Jewish agnostic philosopher, Stephen Jay Gould, also claimed that science and religion are not necessarily in conflict. Gould claimed that like like art and music, they are different non-overlapping magisteria (ways of knowing). He claimed that science deals with the factual and mechanistic questions of “how”, whereas religion deals with the bigger “why” questions of morality and purpose.
The defaced photograph of a Khmer Rouge leader at the Museum of Genocide in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Will we ever know the full story of the horrors and atrocities committed in Democratic Kampuchea?
Some physicists who study quantum mechanics now claim that the universe has 14 different dimensions. They have no observational proof of these dimensions, nor can they explain or even describe them, although there is a lot of complex mathematics that fits very nicely if the 14-dimensional universe is real. Some physicists see this complexity as pointers towards forms of matter, energy and time that we cannot even begin to conceptualise - perhaps even the hand of a timeless God that exists independently of the created universe. Others flatly deny even the possibility of a spiritual dimension, or that the universe could have had a timeless or eternal first cause - they eliminate the possibility at the level of a basic assumption. From my own readings of superstring theory, there seem to be at least as many faith claims in the realm of quantum physics as there are in most religions. Then again, maybe I am guilty of peddling a partial truth myself when I say this, because I cannot claim to understand everything about quantum physics or everything about all the world’s religions. Can anyone? Certainly not, I suspect, Richard Dawkins!
Good science requires reason and evidence. So does good religion. So does truth. Anything less than this is propaganda, or dishonesty, or superstition.
It follows from this that as humans, we all have a huge responsibility to master the facts and get the complete picture surrounding any matter where our decision or our wisdom may be required. It is not enough to accept just one perspective, or one point-of-view, or a partial truth. Societies that fall for such propaganda are those that are susceptible to totalitarianism.
Think North Korea. Think Fox News. Think Richard Dawkins.
Saturday, 1 September 2007
The bullet-ridden buildings of Srebrenica still provide hard evidence that a massacre occurred there in July 1995, despite the denials and the counter-claims.