Screech atheists

This post, by guest blogger Fatima Lipschitz, is part of a series of reflections on chief rabbi Sacks’ “The Great Partnership”. “Fat Lips” (as “Sacksy” calls her) complements my “left-brain” academic criticisms (I, II, III, IV) with a note of “right-brain” personal support for the chief rabbi’s call for debate amongst people as reasoning and reflective as himself, one that by-passes those infantile screech atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens.

The Chief Rabbi and I, being much holier than thou, don’t like screech atheists. Sure we have had our differences—eating gefilte fish from the small end, not the large?—but on this we see eye to eye. We soar like eagles, aloft and aloof, above the hawkish din of Dawkins and Dennett and the squawkish harrying of Harris and Hitchens. Our eagle’s eye view affords us an expansiveness that lowly creatures of hemmed in horizons cannot know. And what we pineapples of politeness think is, screech atheists are as yesteryear as the dodo.

Now, some people, far lowlier than thou, dare to claim that the Chief Rabbi’s disdain for screech atheists amounts to ingratitude of the intellect. (Honestly, what word less befits that gentleman!) If it weren’t for screech atheists marking out one extreme of the debate, they claim, the middle ground, which he and I so effortlessly command, would not be so clearly discernible. To decry the vanguard whilst following in their path is close to hypocrisy.

But do we need reminding? The Rabbi is a shmatta mensh, a man of the cloth. He has a tradition to defend: mankind wakes up, one fine apple-ripened morning, and perceives how nicely his world meets his needs. He doesn’t start rootling around in the undergrowth, trying to figure out how things got to be that way. He looks G-d squarely in the eye, and says, “Thank you L-rd, for giving us noses because, without them, our glasses would fall off and then we wouldn’t be able to see your handiwork clearly.” Maybe Dawkers and Hitchers did something to pave the way for the Chief Rabbi’s philosophical triumph; like G-d, I won’t be drawn. But you can’t expect to the Chief Rabbi to worry about evolution, about who tilled the field in which he spills his seed.

In fact, I met that atheist, Ms Millicent Flabbergast, at confession the other day—or maybe it was the mikveh—and she said to me:

“If it weren’t for screech atheists, the chief rabbi would never have been goaded to give us what is”—and here I paraphrase—“the strongest possible defence of religion and faith”—and not as Ms Flabbergast put it, the greatest thing since sliced bacon. “He should acknowledge that.
“Besides, religions are bullies. Maybe not in today’s cosmopolis, where they’ve learned some manners. But go elsewhere, to Jerusalem, Jedda, or Jacksonville, or take cosmopolites back to their childhoods, and there is religion, big and bullying. And what do you do to bullies? You stand up to them! Catharsis for some, protection for others.
“If some atheists screech, it’s only because they’re forced to, to be heard above the bellowing bollocks that billow from pulpits.”

For the Chief Rabbi to merit temerity of this order! There’s just no way of responding to such criticisms.

Abuse of alphabets in Jonathan Sack’s The Great Partnership

Now that I’ve gotten over my shock and horror (I, II, III), here is a straightforward summary of the errors that underlie one of the central arguments of the chief rabbi’s attempt at a grand synthesis of spirituality with science.

Sacks’ argument runs that Hebrew (being written right-to-left and without vowels) engages the right hemisphere of the brain (and so engenders or conduces a right-brain worldview), whereas Greek (being written left-to-right and with vowels) engages the left hemisphere (and so engenders or conduces a left-brain worldview). Hence, Sacks asserts, removing the Hebraic (Judeo-Christian) element of our society makes it, and us, one-sided, unbalanced, unstable: wholesome societies are comprised of whole people who use the left and right hemispheres of their brains.

What follows is simply a list of three types of errors in his writing-systems-based argument: failures of fact, of unconsidered alternatives, and of “big picture” synthesis. I leave you draw your own conclusions.

But please don’t read this as: “Oh, Sacks got his linguistics wrong. Guess I’d better skip that bit and read the rest of the book.” The questions the list of errors raises are: How difficult would it have been to avoid these errors? How likely is that The Great Partnership really understands and values science and scholarship? Is it really qualified to offer “big picture” solutions concerning society, knowledge, and meaning?

You can’t fight off a locust swarm with a fly swat. So, if I concentrate on the abuse of alphabets, it’s not because there aren’t problems elsewhere. I’m just tending to my own backyard. (Not that I’m ruling out adding in another couple of cents’ worth later…)

Errors arising from failure to check or reflect on basic facts

1. Hebrew does not write without vowels.

EVIDENCE. If so, gamal (camel), gamul (weaned), gimel (letter ג), and gomel (benefactor)—and gmala, gmali, gmalo (her/my/his camel), etc.—would all be written identically. They aren’t.

2. Presence of vowels does not mean that Greek (English) is read letter by letter, as opposed to ‘big picture’-wise reading for “vowelless” Hebrew.

EVIDENCE. The closest we come to letter-by-letter reading is when we encounter unknown words, like isobutylparaben. Otherwise, we recognise words in a single glance. This is the basis of the common psycholinguistic/neurolinguistic experimental technique of ‘masked priming’, in which subjects read words that are flashed at them so quickly that they are not aware of having seen anything.

3. Reading in Greek (English) versus Hebrew (Arabic) does not show opposite lateralization.

EVIDENCE. See the left lateralization (left inferior fusiform gyrus and left middle fusiform gyrus) of brains reading Hebrew and English here. (Besides a lit review, I followed up with researchers in Jerusalem, London, Paris, and in the joint New York University – Abu Dhabi research team.)

4. Purported generalization. Voweled scripts run left-to-right. Vowelless run right-to-left.

COMMENT. The Great Partnership asserts that the opposing voweliness and direction of Greek and Hebrew cannot be coincidence. If this statement is meant to cover just Greek and Hebrew, then it is a basic error of reasoning: with only two data points, any correlation could be a coincidence. The statement only has content if taken as a generalization, in which case it is clearly false.

EVIDENCE. Voweled scripts not running left-to-right: Ladino, Meroitic, Mongolian, Sogdian, Sorani, Thaana (Maldives), Yiddish. Vowels are largely predictable in Iatmul, Kalam, Maltese, Yimas, yet these are not written right-to-left.

Errors arising from failure to consider alternative explanations.

5. Ancestry and ambient systems, not vowellessness, account for direction.

EVIDENCE. Hebrew and other Semitic scripts inherit right-left direction from Proto-Sinaitic, which inherited it from hieratic. Voweled right-left scripts with inherited/borrowed direc- tion: Ladino (from Hebrew), Meroitic (from Egyptian), Thaana (from Arabic), Yiddish (from Hebrew). Similarly, Iatmul, etc. inherit direction from Latin (or daughter systems). Vertical inheritance or borrowing from Chinese (or daughter systems): Japanese, Korean, Manchurian, Mongolian, Old Uyghur, ’Phags Pa, Sogdian.

6. Being an Afroasiatic (Semitic) language accounts for the capacity substantially to underrepresent vowels (what TGP misnames “vowellessness”).

EVIDENCE. In all of the following cases, parent scripts are used for Afroasiatic languages, daughter scripts for non-Afroasiatic ones: Greek (Hellenic) added vowels to the Phoeni- cian script; Ladino (Romance), to Hebrew; Meroitic (isolate), to Egyptian (hierogryphs and hieratic); Sogdian (Iranian) to Syriac; Sorani (Iranian), to Arabic; Yiddish (Germanic) to Hebrew.

7. Underrepresentation of vowels in Afroasiatic languages is derivative of a grammatical quirk (not of directionality, or other causes).

EVIDENCE. Afroasiatic languages have the property that prefixes/suffixes predict (to within a small margin of error) the vowels of the root. E.g., m (the present participial prefix; cf, English ing), prefixed to a verb determines the missing vowels (e.g., MSPR = mesaper; MTYL = metayel; MGMZ = megamez, etc.; or, if t is also present, e.g., MTPRD = mitpared; MTGDL = mitgadel; MTRSN = mitrasen; etc.).

COMPARISON I. Predictable material is generally omitted in writing systems. E.g., English does not represent the change in vowels triggered by ity in rapid ∼ rapidity (rapəd ∼ rəpid-ity), nor the stress shift (rápid ∼ rapíd-ity), nor the aspiration (rapid ∼ rap^hid-ity).

COMPARISON II. English, like most non-Afroasiatic languages, does not have affixes that deter- mine the vowels within the verb. Consider Wh’s dltng? The verbal suffix ng can only have its vowel filled in in one way, ing. But this tells us nothing about the vowels missing from the verb root: deleting, dilating, diluting, adulating, …?

Global, cumulative error

8. It is meaningless to compare Greek and Hebrew in point of vowels and direction.

REASON I. Hebrew direction is derivative of older systems. So, you should compare Greek with Proto-Sinaitic, or the Egyptian of Amenemhat III. Comparing Greek and Hebrew is as meaningful as comparing English/Yimas with Egyptian.

REASON II. There is no reason to believe that there is any significance to Greek direction. Where there is little or no pressure to preserve or adopt a given direction and/or the system is radically redesigned, there may be experimentation with alternative directions. Such experimentation may happen in the absence of vowels (e.g., Sabean).

REASON III. Presence/absence of vowels correlates with the grammatical properties of the linguistic families to which Greek and Hebrew belong.

The Great Partnership, or Titanic meets Iceberg: Why the chief rabbi’s alphabet soup has god spinning in his grave. Part I.

There are few things more exhilarating than seeing an argument that you disagree with put well. It’s been more than ten years since I first wrote about what atheists have that makes them atheist and what theists lack that gives them a gap for faith to fill (An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Atheism). Since then, atheism has become a hot topic, though one inclined at times to give off more heat than light.

Enter Jonathan Sacks, who weighed his Cambridge grounding in formal philosophy and found it wanting, who rose to become chief rabbi, and who now frequently runs the fevered gauntlet of the BBC’s Thought for the Day (in which a cleric must dowse a burning secular issue in the cooling balm of ancient creed).

With such qualifications, I fully expected him to emerge, like the biblical Daniel, unscalded and unscathed from the atheist inferno. I wasn’t awaiting conversion, but I did expect The Great Partnership, the result of his lifelong journey between philosophy and faith, to challenge ideas and arguments that satisfied me in my twenties.

Intending to write a review, I opened the book, sharp of mind and of pencil, filling the margins in my wake. Pretty soon, though, the marginalia ceased and the chief feeling I have on closing its covers is one of disappointment. The argument is largely concerned with reconciling science and religion. But Titanic’s problem wasn’t the tip of the iceberg but what lay beneath—which is why An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Atheism, from the start, plunged down to the worldviews that underpin science and religion, where Sacks, oblivious, skims along the surface.

The Great Partnership deserves Titanic’s fate. When he reviews arguments that others have made before him, Sacks is competent. But when his case demands originality of thought, whether to frame questions or offer answers, the result is not searing, but soggy. Not fireproof, but waterlogged. Platitudinous and complacent.

I won’t show this at length. I don’t think the book merits it. What I offer instead is a proxy-review, like those offered to Shmuley Boteach and Fred Reed. I’ll take just one part of the book and show that the high number of basic, easily avoidable errors disqualifies its author from the ranks of serious commentators.

Writing systems are central to how Sacks makes his case. Not only are they prominent in the book, but the difference between Hebrew and Greek was Sacks’ icebreaker on the BBC’s Start the Week. Doubtless, he could have opened otherwise (the book is, after all, mostly meandering and autobiographical, impressionistic and anecdotal). Yet, if aleph-beth versus alphabet is how he chooses to make his big splash, to prove he’s an intellectual supertanker, on national radio, on a Monday morning, then clearly this is not incidental to his thought. This proud prow of his case is thus a fair point for testing how seaworthy that thinking is.

But I must emphasize: this is not a review of the rabbi’s linguistics. Nor am I interested in what led him to make to errors so numerous, basic and avoidable (complacency? hubris? incompetence?). My point is that is if this is the intellectual prowess of this much praised salvo of newfangled anti-atheism—from an academically trained philosopher, a community leader, a veteran of public communication, a stalwart of interfaith dialogue—then it is a very sorry state of affairs. Little could do more to sink the idea that the religious voice will guide us through turbulent seas, or that it constitutes an intellectually defensible position, than this snapshot of (complacent? hubristic? incompetent?) analysis from The Great Partnership.

Big splash or damp squib?

Hebrew runs from right to left and is written without vowels. Greek runs from left to right and is written with vowels. This, Sacks claims, cannot possibly be coincidence. And, in the difference, he perceives deep cultural significance. To reconstitute the meaning of a vowelless text, you have to keep the big picture of the text in mind. Such synthesis is a very “right-brain” activity. To read a voweled script, you concentrate on the each individual sign. Such analytic assemblage is a very “left-brain” activity. Thus, the concerns of Jewish culture are about big picture issues of meaning—wholes and holiness—whereas Greek culture is about taking things apart and seeing how they function. More or less: Greeks are from Mars, Jews are from Venus, and you can see it in how they write.

Just this sliver of thought triggers three clarions of alarm bells: one for culture, another for neurology, and the last for the form and function of writing systems. Of course, the rabbi recognizes—or so he says—that his characterization of the two cultures, and of neurology, is a simplification. I’m not sure this is entirely fair to simplifications. It’s a slippery slope from simplification to oversimplification (or, perhaps more aptly, from dumbing down, down to dumb). Whenever the rabbi talks of left-brain cultures, or left brains, or brains, it feels to me we’re sailing in perilous propinquity to land of “Relativity says all things are relative”.

But many people founder on the logic of neuroscience, and thumbnails of cultures, so diffuse and sprawling, are easily misread, like reefs through water. Alphabets, by contrast, offer solid ground, concrete and familiar. The internet abounds with information for the curious (wikipedia, omniglot, ancientscripts). So, if you’re making claims about alphabets, directions, and voweliness, it’s easy to check your facts, encounter alternatives, and develop and test rival hypotheses.

How far and how successfully Sacks has done this speaks to the intellectual integrity of The Great Partnership, and possibly to that of the new anti-atheist enterprise (of which, to judge by the press, Sacks is something of a flagship). After all, if he can’t figure out how to collect facts and check hunches for such straightforward, well documented, hands-on things as ABC’s, what chance does he have of navigating his way, or his followers, through more abstract arguments, such as the relationship of science and religion, the nature of goodness, and the meaning of life?

Part II
Part III